Read Online The Long Green Shore by John Hepworth - Free Book Online Page B

through trying to buy a gutzer.’
    You could sit for hour after hour in the mechanic oblivion and mechanic excitement of the falling cards—even the cramped and aching muscles from uncomfortable positions became part of the pattern—you became reluctant to ease your aching back and legs because that meant leaving the security, the refuge, of this cave of cards—and outside the night is empty.
    Soldiers’ talk is casually blasphemous and obscene but there’s no real offence in it—it doesn’t mean what it says, mostly.
    They talk about women, of course. They tell lies about their conquests and amorous adventures in Alexandria and Athens—some rapacious Egyptian trollop can become a Cleopatra in retrospect, and an Athenian shop girl is touched with the immortal fire of Helen—or are you sure she was not your Helen? They sacked and plundered more than Troy to tear her from your arms, and she wept when you were leaving, and I doubt if Helen’s ancient tears made such bright and bitter rain.
    But the fierce sexual torments that the popular novelists attribute to the soldier on the tropic isle are not for us. You don’t find them so much in the infantry—not when there’s a blue brewing anyway. Those placid, safe and deadly monotonous base jobs are where such fiery worms breed in the brain and bowels.
    In the infantry there is the compensation of that strong comradeship that you never get in a base job. There is the simple animal necessity for subjugating all other desires and instincts to the track—the earth is our lover; its dangers and its refuge. There is the strong emotional and physical catharsis of fear and battle.
    We think of women, sure; we talk of women; we desire them; but of way back and of way ahead.
    The Laird spoke nearer the truth than the novelists when he stretched back from the lantern one night, tossed aside the letter he had been reading, and sighed prodigiously: ‘Ah, I wish I was back home with Mumma—I wouldn’t complain, even if she put her cold feet on my back.’
    There was the usual outburst of bawdy clichés and variations on the theme.
    â€˜It’s a great sport,’ said Whispering John, licking his lips in lascivious travesty. ‘The old indoor sport, the horizontal game.’
    â€˜Don’t tell me you still indulge, John?’ said Deacon.
    â€˜Why,’ said Fluffy with delight, ‘a good sweat and a green apple would just about finish you, John.’
    â€˜Don’t you worry,’ sniggered John confidentially. ‘I’ve had my days—I’ve done the stations of the cross in Paris and had my nose rubbed in the Bowery. I’ll warn you: if ever you get to the Bowery don’t go putting your head through any trapdoors you might see—you’ll get your nose rubbed if you do.’
    â€˜Were you ever married, John?’ asked Fluffy seriously. ‘If you don’t object to a personal question, like?’
    â€˜I’ve got an Irish wife in Liverpool,’ said John. ‘And that’s why I’ve never gone back. I’ve got a fat white wench in Panama who looks for me still. And I’d have married a brown girl in Manila—but her husband turned up first.’
    The Laird stretched back on his bed and boomed to the world at large: ‘Time for a brew! Who’s putting the brew on?’
    â€˜I’ll light the fire,’ said Bishie. He swung his feet down off the bed, tossed his paper-backed thriller, Death in the Dog House , into the appropriate trash box in the middle of the tent and yawned.
    â€˜Best go up and scrounge some petrol from transport,’ said the Laird. ‘Scorp will give you some—say I sent you.’
    â€˜Is there any wood?’ Bishie wanted to know.
    â€˜No wood,’ said the Laird. ‘We’ll get some petrol and make a dirt fire.’
    â€˜Someone get the water,’ said Bishie as he went out.