William Boyd - An Ice-Cream War

Gabriel suddenly realized they were standing in what was meant to be the middle of a battlefield. He looked over to the mound and saw the troops who had been manning the machine gun wildly striking out as if they had been attacked by invisible assailants. Across the railway cutting he could just make out a few German askaris fleeing for shelter in the railway workshops. He looked back at Gleeson who was whimpering in agony over his ravaged hands which now resembled a pair of well-padded cricket gloves. Then little clouds of dust began to kick up out of the grass.

“Come on, Gleeson,” Gabriel said. “Into the ditch.” They rushed the remaining few yards and leapt into the ditch, which was about four feet deep. Gabriel sank up to his ankles into the brackish slimy water which lay in its bottom. With a moan of relief Gleeson plunged his boiling hands deep into the mud. “Put mud on my neck!” he cried, and Gabriel slapped handfuls of the foul-smelling stuff on his cheeks and neck. His own sting was throbbing painfully but he seemed to have escaped lightly.

While Gleeson soothed his hands Gabriel inched up the wall of the ditch and peered back to the maize field. Not a sign of his men. He noticed that the machine gun on the mound had started firing again.

“No trace of them,” he said to Gleeson.

“The swine,” Gleeson swore bitterly. “The cowardly swine!”

“Feel you can move on?” Gabriel asked. “Let’s go on down the ditch. We’ll never cross the cutting here.”

Gleeson nodded his assent, his eyes shut, his bottom lip caught between his yellow teeth.

Bent double, they made their way along the ditch in the direction of the sea, stepping gingerly over the few dead bodies they encountered or rolling them out of the way. Gleeson held his mud caked hands in front of him as if he’d just made them out of clay and they were still fragile. Soon they came to a place where bushes and thorn trees lined the parapet of the ditch and Gabriel took the chance to peer out and get their hearings.

Cautiously, he raised his head. From this position he had a better view of the town. He saw a large stone building with steep tiled roofs and the words ‘Deutscher Kaiser Hotel’ written on it. As he watched, the German flag which was flying from the flagpole was lowered.

“We’re in the town, I think,” he called to Gleeson. “What time do you make it?” Somehow, somewhere, he’d lost his watch.

“Almost four, I think,” Gleeson said. “I can’t see my watch face. It’s covered in mud.”

Gabriel scraped it off. Gleeson’s watch had stopped at ten past three. “I’m afraid your watch has stopped,” he said.

Gabriel looked to his left. He saw white troops moving beyond the railway cutting, dashing from house to house. “The North Lancs are across the cutting,” he reported. Gleeson elbowed himself up to join him.

“What should we do?” Gleeson said. He held his enormous hands before his face, like some grotesque surgeon waiting for his rubber gloves.

“Let’s go on in,” Gabriel said. He couldn’t think of anything else.

“Right.”

They scurried across the patch of ground to the railway cutting and slithered down one side, then stepped across the rails and toiled up the opposite thirty-foot incline, Gabriel with an arm locked in Gleeson’s elbow. Once at the top they ran on through some vegetable plots and fell to the ground heavily in the shelter of a mud-brick house.

“Hoi!” they heard someone shout. “You!” They looked up.

Crouched behind a stone wall up ahead were half a dozen men of the North Lancs.

“You speak Indian?” a corporal was shouting in a thick Lancashire accent. Gabriel and Gleeson crawled over to join them.

“Oh. Sorry, sir. It’s, er, them fooking niggers in t’ Kashmir Rifles. Just down road there. Every time we shows our faces they bloody shoot at us.”

“I speak Hindi,” Gleeson offered. He looked most odd, Gabriel thought, with half his face covered in mud. Gleeson crawled into a nearby house with the corporal and soon Gabriel heard him shouting instructions. Gabriel peered over the wall. He found he was looking up a pleasant street of single-storey, white mud and stone houses. Dead bodies, with their already familiar indecent splay-legged posture, lay in the middle of the road. He couldn’t tell if they were friend or foe.

“Quite a fight here,” he said.

“Yes, sir. We had the signal to fall back. They got jerries in every bloody house. But those daft monkeys keep shootin’ at us. They’re guarding the bridge back across the cutting. None of them speaks English,” he paused. “What happened to the lieutenant, sir? If you’ll excuse me asking.”

“He was stung by bees. My whole company was attacked and driven off.”

“By bees?”

“Yes, millions of them.”

The man shook his head in admiration. “Squareheads, eh? Amazing. They think of everything.”

Gabriel looked over the wall again. The afternoon sun was low in the sky and strong shadows were being cast across the road. Then he saw figures slipping in and out of the houses, moving down the street towards them: three Europeans and about thirty askaris with bayonets fixed to their rifles.

He saw one of the officers — who seemed unaware of their presence — stand for a moment in front of the gable end of a house. Without thinking further, Gabriel levelled his revolver and fired. He saw a big chunk of plaster fall off the wall behind the officer’s head before the man flung himself into a doorway. In immediate response there was a great fusillade of shots and Gabriel ducked down under cover. He cursed his feeble aim: he had had a splendid target. He found himself trembling with excitement, his heart seemed lodged somewhere in his throat. He heard the whup of bullets passing over his head and the charter of a machine gun. Ricochets hummed and pinged off the stonework.

“We want to get out of here, sir,” one of the North Lancs said. “Don’t want to get caught by them jerry niggers.” All the men kept their heads well down.

The corporal scuttled out of the house. “It’s clear now, sir. We can go.”

“Hold on,” Gabriel said. “Where’s Lieutenant Gleeson?”

“He’s been hit, sir. Got him with that last volley.”

“Wait here,” Gabriel ordered and darted into the house. He peered into a couple of rooms. He saw a brass bedstead, cheap wooden furniture. In an end room he found Gleeson lying face down beneath the window from where he’d been shouting to the Kashmir Rifles. The wall behind was pitted with bullet holes. Gabriel was suddenly appalled by the thought that he might have been responsible. If he hadn’t shot at that German…Keeping his head down Gabriel carefully turned Gleeson over and almost collapsed in a faint. One or several bullets had removed Gleeson’s lower jawbone in its entirety, but somehow his tongue had been untouched. It now lolled, uncontained, at his throat like a thick fleshy cravat, pink and purple. Gleeson’s upper lip was drawn back revealing his top row of yellow teeth, his fair moustache was spattered with dried mud and blood. What was most horrifying was the way his eyes boggled and rolled, and his tongue twitched feebly at his neck. With a little moan Gabriel realized Gleeson was still alive, blood welling and pumping gently from the back of his throat. It was extraordinary, Gabriel thought in a daze, how large the human tongue actually was, when its entire length was revealed. He crawled out of the room on his hands and knees and was sick in the passageway. Poor Gleeson, he thought, poor old Gleeson.

After a few moments, Gabriel got to his feet and went back to the side door. There was no sign of the North Lancs. They had all gone without waiting for him. He wondered where the Germans were. He went back inside to the end room, trying not to look at Gleeson. Gabriel lowered himself out of the window. He crossed the back yard and eased himself through the garden hedge. An immense noise of gunfire was coming from the direction of the wharves, but as far as he could see he was alone again. He ran across a dirt road and slid down into the railway cutting. Here and there lay the bodies of sepoys, not all of them dead, as he could hear moans and cries coming from some of them.