Edward Whittemore - Nile Shadows

What's the matter? asked Bletchley.

I was going to ask you the same thing. You seem to be moving very slowly today.

Bletchley put his hand on Joe's forehead.

You're running a bad fever, he said. I wouldn't be surprised if it was the change in the water. It happens fairly frequently.

Time and change and the water, thought Joe. Not exactly the trouble you'd expect to find out here where there is no water, but it's best never to rely on appearances. And sand and more sand and utter desolation, just as Liffy said. So it's not all green hillsides on the journey to the East, ah no. There are wastelands to cross, my child, before you sleep. Wastelands, bright and deep. .

***

They were driving again, Bletchley shifting gears, the glare off the sand intense. And for Joe, sinking more deeply into his fever, the sky and the desert had lost whatever boundaries they might once have had.

I've known men who've followed the desert, Bletchley was saying, adventurers who see it as a primeval force, like the sea. But there are dangers in the desert that a seagoing man doesn't have to face. The sea, with its overall evenness, tends to moderate men by suggesting an essential balance to all things. But the desert, with its harsh extremes, can have just the opposite effect by making things seem clearer than they are, so you always have to beware the temptation of idealism. God knows human affairs are murky enough, but out here there's the danger of forgetting that, because everything is so stark, so much itself.

Appears to be, that is.

Bletchley shifted gears. They left the paved road for a rougher track.

The fact is, he continued, we're apt to romanticize things we don't understand, what we were talking about earlier. Take that old expression, to follow the desert. It gives an impression of adventure and makes one sound like a wanderer, but the bedouin aren't really wanderers. They always have their home with them, their tent, and their country is always with them, the desert. An outsider, a northern European, will view it differently. But that's because a northern European is accustomed to seeing his home and his country in a different light. Less of it.

Joe nodded. Puffs of smoke had appeared on the horizon, followed by a spatter of dull muffled booms.

In another moment they had rounded a dune and Joe could make out a battery of British howitzers parked off in the wastes, raising great clouds of sand as they methodically fired into the desert. The front lines, he knew, were many miles away.

What are they doing?

Bletchley turned his head to get his eye on the battery.

Shelling the desert, he yelled above the booming salvos

The empty desert?

Looks that way.

But why?

Who knows, maybe they thought they saw the enemy. It's impossible of course, but they might have thought they saw something.

Just thought they did? wondered Joe. Well why not. It could be a case of right you are if you think you are, the desert as you like it.

But as they drove along above the camouflaged battery, Joe sensed there was something even more out of place than the vast stretches of barren desert separating the howitzers from the nearest German units.

He concentrated as best he could and at last it came to him.

They're facing east, he shouted. Isn't that the wrong way for them to be fighting the war? The Germans are to the west.

Bletchley snorted, yelled.

The wrong way? But how can there be a right way to slaughter people? And anyway, mirages are common enough in the desert. I don't have to tell you that.

Correct, thought Joe, you don't. But all the same it still seemed strange to him as he gazed down on the howitzers, watching them fire and recoil, fire and recoil. The cannon crews were moving quickly, hurrying back and forth as if they had a certain number of rounds to fire off that day.

What do you think? he shouted. Are they working against a quota of rounds they're supposed to expend?

Very likely, yelled Bletchley. Supplies have to be regulated for maximum effect in wartime, so naturally quotas and rationing are the order of the day.

Joe nodded, still groping in his mind for a rational explanation to this furious and relentless artillery barrage, aimed at nothing.

But aren't they wasting a lot of valuable ammunition? he shouted. Just firing off into the empty desert like that?

So it seems, yelled Bletchley, but no one has ever claimed war is a force for conservation. It spends and consumes and destroys, that's all. The only reason we seem to have it around is because there's a streak in man that finds it exhilarating. Or more accurately, the idea of it. Not one of our nobler streaks, but there you are. And I think it would also be safe to say the nature of that exhilaration won't bear very close scrutiny.

Agreed, thought Joe. It won't and doesn't. Because that streak is the killing of people and the exhilaration in that is just plain unspeakable, a blackness at the bottom of the soul. Very deep is the blackness, may we not call it bottomless?

Better try again, thought Joe, put it some other way to Bletchley. There has to be some explanation for behavior, even when it's idiotic. It may be human nature to want to bombard an empty desert, but someone as smart as Bletchley would have to have some kind of reasonable reason for it. The greater good? The grand design? The missing link and the unknowable universe?

Listen, shouted Joe. If you feel that way about it, the uselessness of war and so forth, why did you want to make the army a career? Family tradition aside.

I suppose because the army provides a form and a structure, yelled Bletchley. A regulation for everything. Not a reason for doing something, but a clear order that it's to be done. As human beings, we like that. Gods provide the orders for some people, political systems for others. But without orders and commands and regulations, the chaos of being is simply that. Chaotic. And that tends to be too hot a situation for most people to handle.

Too hot to handle, hummed Joe, recalling a bawdy line from one of Liffy's music-hall tunes, watching the artillerymen slam home shells and slam closed breechblocks as the howitzers puffed and recoiled, the air crackling and the dust billowing in the unending cannonade.

Hold on, yelled Bletchley. There's rough going here.

Joe lurched forward and grabbed hold of the handle in front of him. Rough going here, he hummed, recalling another line from one of Liffy's bawdy tunes. Off in the desert ahead he spied what appeared to be a railway boxcar coming into view. The boxcar was undersized and lying on its back, its wheels in the air with no railway tracks in sight.

How did that get out here? he shouted.

Bletchley was staring straight ahead, concentrating on the driving, unable to take his eye off the rough roadbed.

What is it? One of those old Forty and Eights?

Looks like it, shouted Joe, remembering the term that had been used in the last war for a small French freight car, so named because it had been able to carry forty men or eight horses to the slaughter at the front. But of course the French hadn't been fighting in the Egyptian desert then, they'd been dying back home in muddy trenches. Joe hummed, It's a long way to Tipperary.

Wouldn't it have been more logical to call those boxcars Forty or Eights? he shouted. After all, that's what they were.

Nothing very logical about war, Bletchley grimly yelled back.

All true, thought Joe. No arguing with that one.

In fact when you look back at the last war, yelled Bletchley, the whole thing seems utterly senseless.

Joe nodded and looked back at the endless barren wastelands. The overturned French boxcar had dropped out of sight, but now there was an overturned chariot standing on the horizon. It was of a heavy primitive design, its huge wooden wheels capped with iron that had rusted very little in the dry desert air.