Sergeant Nelson of the Guards Read Online Free Page B

there is a rough oval of white indentations. Tooth marks! Where he comes from, men fightwith fangs and claws and hoofs. His forehead is marked with two depressions, circular in outline, equal in depth and size. You may make scars like that by hitting soft wood with a carpenter’s hammer—and that is what somebody did to Thurstan, only there is nothing soft about his ferocious little skull. You would hate to receive such blows. You would hate, still more, to be the man who dealt them, if Thurstan lay under your hammer.
    Life has beaten him like iron on an anvil.
    He comes from the region of Durham City. That is, he lived there before he came here. His origins lie a little farther north. His is the wild blood of the Border. He was a collier, once. He knows what it is to lie in the hot darkness pecking tons of hard coal out of the seam. He doesn’t have to tell you this: he wears the miner’s trade-mark—blue freckles of buried coal in his face. He talks a dialect difficult to comprehend . Since the moment of his arrival, three hours ago, he has spoken only three words. A harmless old man, a Scripture Reader, called, and asked the recruits to gather in a far corner of the room. Thurstan said: “Ah no gang,” meaning, “I will not go.” He is a dangerous man, a rebel, inflammable as firedamp, touchy as a half-broken pit pony and equally willing to kick or bite—obstinate, morose, savage as a caracal, quick as a lynx, courageous as a wild pig and twice as hard to stop. He has a wife, somewhere in the stormy north, whom he has forgotten like a parcel in a bus. There will be trouble with Thurstan. We can smell it, like something smouldering.
    There always was trouble with Thurstan. Hadrian built a wall to keep him out, but he came right in and thumbed his busted nose at the iron might of Rome. He was always something of a rebel and a raider. A Thurstan drew a wicked bow alongside Robin Hood in the black age of the Robber Barons. He is unblended firewater; a patch of unmixed hot stuff, here because he wants a fight. He comes to war as his grandfathers went to feud. He can’t live without the thrill of the pounding heart and the slamming fist. He itches for the mad moment of the bayonet charge. When this moment comes, “controlled charge” will notinclude Thurstan. He will swell. He will yell. He will rush forward in front of everybody else, a live projectile, a horror, a bloodthirsty nightmare; the kind of fight-mad killer that panics an army. Whichever way he turns out, he’ll be dangerous. Thurstan would butt against a bull, gore against a boar, trade bites with a leopard, impervious to pain or fear.
    Disciplined, that force of his will be overwhelming. Discipline to him will be the brass shell round the packed explosive. But to discipline Thurstan, you must make him like you. God help the sergeant that has to break in Thurstan. But God pity the Nazi that comes up against Thurstan let loose. He is the old, old wildfire of ancient Britain.
    *
    In this room also sits John Hodge, a giant, reading a small black book which, under his huge thumb, looks no bigger than a playing card. His left arm hangs over the bedrail. It has hung like that for fifteen minutes, during which time he has pored, motionless, over the same page. His great square-blocked head droops, pressing his massive chin into folds against his chest. Hodge sits astride the bed, dwarfing everything ; still as a man carved out of one mighty chunk of ruddy brown rock. You look twice at his back before you notice the rise and fall which indicates that he breathes.
    Suddenly he moves. He closes the book. A grave suspicion has been whispered, that this book is a Bible: this is not the kind of accusation one shouts round the place, for fear of slander; but it has been whispered . It has black, shiny covers. Perhaps he promised his mother that he would read a page or two every day; in which case, of course, one may say that there are extenuating circumstances. Hodge