Amongst the Dead Read Online Free Page B

stations, their windows writhing with the vermicelli of excited soldiers waving and smiling, and their carriages graffitied with names and clumsy sketches. The train we found ourselves on, bound for Sydney, was a sad disappointment. It was crowded, noisy, and noisome. We were crammed into a carriage with a group of soldiers, none of whom could have been older than twenty, and their demeanour and conversation was unappealing to say the least. After a few hours of their pointless, witless larrikinism, I wasn’t entirely certain that they and I belonged to the same species.
    Corporal Pyers, however, saw this as an opportunity to relieve these raw recruits of what little money they had about their persons by demonstrating, and taking bets on, sleights of hand that were remarkable. He was able to make coins and notes appear and vanish with unpredictable and astonishing dexterity. The fingers that closed over a coin in the left hand opened a moment later on an empty palm, and the foolish soldier who’d laid a whole pound on its whereabouts found himself a poorer man. Pyers was able to undo a watch without the wearer knowing, and spirit it into the pocket of a baffled companion. He produced cigarettes out of nowhere, one after the other, until every man in the crowded compartment had one. I was sitting beside him, and I didn’t detect the mechanism of any of his tricks. Corporal Glen Pyers went up in my estimation.
    Apart from Glen’s entertainments, the journey to Sydney was tedious and uncomfortable. When we arrived we were directed, like so much livestock, onto trucks, and driven west towards Ingleburn and an army camp that had been set up there in 1939. If the facilities were primitive, I thought, they would at least have the advantage of being relatively new.
    We arrived late at night and, to my surprise, Corporal Pyers, Brian, and I were separated from the mob and taken to a wooden hut some distance from the long barracks that housed most of Ingleburn’s recruits. There were three cots set up, and I fell soundly asleep moments after stretching out on the one I’d claimed as mine.
    I woke next morning to the sweet and cloying smell of clove tobacco, an odour new to me at the time, and which I came to associate indelibly with the man who was sitting with his back to us in the open doorway of our hut. He sucked deeply on his exotic kretiek, flicked the butt end away from him, and entered the hut. By this time I was up on my elbows, and thought from the man’s confident stance that he was about to bellow an order like some ghastly caricature of a pissed-off sergeant major. Instead he said, in a rather beautiful, mellifluous voice — every vowel round and every consonant acknowledged — ‘Good morning. I hope it wasn’t the pong of my kretiek that woke you.’
    ‘No,’ I lied, reacting with an instinctive reluctance to offend him.
    He leaned towards me and extended his hand.
    ‘Major Archibald Warmington. But I think Archie will just about cover it.’
    ‘William Power. Will, please.’
    ‘One of these recumbent fellows must be your brother Brian, and the other, Glen, who is, I believe, a prestidigitator of some renown. As you see, I’m quite well informed.’
    ‘I’m Brian.’
    ‘I see a family resemblance.’
    Corporal Pyers had by now stood up and, in the harsh light of the morning, exposed as he was in his underwear, looked emaciated and more in need of medical attention than whatever Archie Warmington had in store for him.
    ‘We’ll have to look after your hands,’ Archie said, ‘and I’ll get some fruit into your diet.’
    He swept his eyes over each of us.
    ‘My instructions, gentlemen, are to do no more than teach you three things — how to shoot, how to ride, and the rudiments of signalling. There’ll be no square-bashing, no six-mile hikes or runs, no gruesome exertions of any kind. The four of us are temporarily in a little bubble of privilege, and I’ve never been one to moan about