Lord of the Nutcracker Men (3 page)

“You're off your head,” said the man in black. And a woman beside him said, “He's daft.”

The Highlander laughed. “Aye, there's some that call it daft. I call it common sense.” He winked and twitched at the faces. “Well, I'm no going back,” he roared. “Och, I'll never go back to there.”

“You're a coward, then,” said the angry man.

Again the Highlander laughed. “Why aren't you at the front?”

The angry man blushed. The whole compartment was suddenly staring at
him,
and he seemed to shake in his seat as the train swayed along the tracks. “I've got a family,” he said. “A wife and children.”

“Och, so do I,” said the Highlander. “I've got a laddie just like this one here.” He touched my back. “He'll be an old man before this war is done. An old, gray man he'll be.”

There was a woman sitting beside him, and she got up then and moved away. A man slid out from the opposite seat; another woman followed him. Suddenly there was a big, empty space around the Highlander and me. And someone came and plucked me out, until only the Highlander was left, like a little island.

“I was there.” He sat winking and twitching, staring ahead. “I tell you, I was there.”

The letter was waiting at Auntie's when I came in from my first day at school. There was another from Mum, and Auntie Ivy had opened them both.

“Will you read them?” I asked.

“Aloud?” said Auntie. “Can't you read for yourself?”

“Not these,” I said.

Dad wrote in slanted letters full of little curls and loops. They looked like rows of fancy birds perched on invisible wires. Mum's were even worse; they didn't even look like letters at all. They were more like bits of string tangled into coils and tiny knots.

“Well, honestly,” said Auntie. She put on the daintiest spectacles I'd ever seen, just circles of glass joined by a wire. They pinched across her sharp little nose, fitting perfectly into little red dents that seemed to be there just to hold her specs. “Which one first?”

“Mum's,” I said.

Auntie started reading. I closed my eyes.

“‘The place seems empty without you,’” read Auntie. “‘I miss seeing you and hearing you, and I even miss your little soldiers being scattered all about. But I'm so glad you're in Cliffe, Johnny, because London isn't a place for a boy anymore. At night it's blacked out, and it feels scary and wild. Every time I hear a motorcar go by I look up, sure that it's a zeppelin.’”

Auntie Ivy shook her head. “Imagine,” she said, and started reading again.

“Men are still signing up in hordes,” wrote Mum. “But no one is hiring women to fill their posts. It's very maddening, as there is so much that I could do to help. Unless something changes, I may have to go back to my
old job at the arsenal in Woolwich. It's a dreadful place, but at least I would be closer to you.”

I sat in my school clothes—or most of them—still sodden from the rain. Auntie Ivy folded up my mother's letter and read the one from my father. I waited until she finished before I unwrapped my soldiers.

“Oh, look!” I cried.

The general was stiff and proper, with a little swagger stick clamped under his arm. The drill sergeant was nearly his opposite, short and stout, his chest barreling like a strongman's. He wore a tiny cap atop a huge head that was nearly entirely an open, bellowing mouth. I could look right down his throat at little tonsils painted like pink hearts.

Auntie laughed, and that took me by surprise. I knew she could shout, and I knew she could look daggers with her little dark eyes, but I didn't know that she could laugh.

“I'll call the general Cedric,” I said.

“That's lovely,” she said. “He looks like a Cedric. Now take them outside.”

“It's raining,” I said.

“A little rain never hurt a boy.” She took off her specs and rubbed her nose. “You're not made of sugar, are you?”

“No, Auntie,” I said.

“Then don't be so silly. You know the rules.”

She didn't let me play soldiers in the house. It wasn't right, she said—it wasn't “fitting”—to bring war inside a house. But there were a lot of things that Auntie Ivy didn't like: sudden noises, elbows on the table, the banging of doors, and mindless chatter. “I can't
abide
mindless chatter,” she'd told me.

Now she stood up. “Well, off you go,” she said. “I've got Christmas socks to knit for the boys at the front.”

She wore big black shoes that thunked when she walked, and purple dresses that touched the floor. Forever after, I would think of Auntie Ivy as a sound, as the thunk of her shoes and the swish of her legs in the heavy cloth.

“Go on now,” she said as she passed.

“Yes, Auntie,” I said.

I hated her rules—and her house that was drafty and cold. I hated the school, and I hated the teacher, and I hated the boys most of all. They had teased me because I'd carried my things in a satchel, because I'd worn my blazer and flannel shorts. They'd called me Johnny Pigs instead of Briggs, and they'd pushed me down and sat on my head. The teacher—ugly old Mr. Tuttle—had only looked toward us, then looked away. The only person who was nice to me was a girl, and that was almost as bad as not having a friend at all.

Well, I wasn't going back. Auntie Ivy didn't know it, but I'd never go back. “Oh, there's some that call it daft,” I muttered to myself. “But
I
call it common sense.”

I hated almost
everything
about Cliffe: the mile-long walk to the village; the flatness without any buildings. I felt lonely without my mother and my father. I missed my pals from London: even the soldiers at their guns.

But then there was Auntie Ivy's garden, nearly the size of our whole London home. It sloped up at the back, toward a stone wall and a huge beech tree that poked its roots right through the stones. All the leaves had fallen long ago, but the bare branches were enough to stop most of the rain. And in the mud below them, I scraped out
trenches in the sloping ground. I put the British in one, the Frenchmen on their right, and in the other I put the Germans. I crowded them together, all my lovely nut-cracker men. I still had many more Germans than anything else.

I arranged them carefully. And when the ground was covered with soldiers I heard a voice behind me. “Hello, Johnny.”

It was Sarah, the girl from school. She was carrying my satchel, and beside her stood a tall lieutenant in a Burberry coat. “This is my father,” she said. “He's on his way to the station. He's leaving for France.”

“
My
dad's already left for France,” I said.

“Well,
mine's
been there and back,” said Sarah, gloating. “He's home on leave, that's all.”

The lieutenant said, “Hello. Johnny, is it?” He smiled at me, then looked down at my soldiers.

“I brought you this,” said Sarah, holding out my satchel. “You forgot it at school.”

I hadn't forgotten it. I had stuffed it down behind the steps, too embarrassed to ever use it again. “I don't want it,” I said.

“Can I have it?” she asked.

I shrugged. “All right.”

The lieutenant was crouched over my nutcracker men. “Look at these, Sarah,” he said. “They're beautiful soldiers.”

“They look so fierce,” she said.

“That's because they're Huns,” I told her.

The lieutenant's coat was unbuttoned, spreading behind him across the mud. “Your trenches are too far
apart, Johnny,” he said. “You've got the Germans running across a mile of ground.” He waved his hand above the soldiers. “It should be less than a hundred yards; perhaps just twenty-five.”

I looked down at my trenches, already filling with rain. One of the wooden Pierres was floating on his side.

“Move them closer,” said Sarah's dad. “Move your Tommies forward.”

“They'll be right on top of my Germans,” I said.

“Yes. That's the idea. They should be close enough that they can sometimes hear the Germans talking.” He sketched a line through the mud of my no-man's-land. “Dig a new trench here, and leave the old one behind it, so your Tommies have somewhere to hide when they're driven back.”

“They won't be driven back,” I said.

“Oh, yes they will,” he told me.

I scraped out a new trench, and Sarah helped me move the soldiers. With her left hand holding her dress, she bent down and lifted the men one at a time, like flowers she was picking. No girl had ever touched my soldiers, and it didn't seem right. A boy would have made them fight, but Sarah only moved them around like so many dolls. Then her father joined us, and we worked together below the great umbrella of the beech tree.

When all the soldiers were in their places, the lieutenant studied my battlefield. “You'll have to build communication trenches so your men can move up to the front,” he said. “Otherwise your Germans will pick them off as they cross the top. You want your Tommies to live in the earth.”

“Like moles?” I asked.

“Exactly.” He squinted at the trenches. “Your general, now. That won't do where you've got him.”

I stared down at little Cedric standing with the rest of the Tommies. “He's right at the front,” I said.

“That's what I mean. He's in the wrong place altogether.” The lieutenant stood up. “You should move him back. That's where he'd really be.”

I picked up the little man and set him in the rear trench.

“Farther,” said the lieutenant. “You have to move him back so far that he can't see the battles. Then move him a little more, so he can think he's winning them when he's not.”

Sarah giggled. “That's silly,” she said.

“It's the way it is,” said her father with a shrug. “Well, I've got a train to catch. Sarah, would you like to stay here with your chum?”

I looked at Sarah, to see that she was looking at me. I didn't mind her being in the garden; I didn't even mind her touching my soldiers. But I didn't ask her to stay, and both of us looked down at the ground.

The lieutenant laughed. “Perhaps you'd rather see me off at the station.”

Sarah went with him, into the mist of rain. I felt a pang of jealousy to see her walking at his side, with my satchel on her shoulder. She called back from the house: “I'll see you at school.”

I didn't tell her I was finished with school.

In the morning Auntie Ivy sent me off in my boots and macintosh. I trudged up the road to Cliffe, past an orchard and a farm, past a cottage and a field. When I
saw the big, square steeple of the village church I turned off the road, skirting the houses and the school to reach the marshes by the Thames.

I spent all morning there. I watched a Bristol aero-plane and an Albatros in British colors flying down the river to Grain. I ran through the long grass, scaring up herons that squawked into the air like clumsy old Bleriots. And I pretended to dogfight with them, running across the humps of ground with my arms stretched out like wings.

In the afternoon I went exploring along footpaths as the rain pattered down on my mac. I gathered sticks as I went along, because it was already the third of November, and the fifth was Guy Fawkes Day. I wished more than ever that I was back in London, for all my pals would be making their guys, stuffing sacks full of leaves and twigs, shaping them into arms and legs and bodies, dressing the figures in old clothes. They would wheel them through the city, collecting pennies to buy their fire-works. On Guy Fawkes Day they would light a huge bonfire and dance around it, then toss the sad old guys onto the flames. Except for Christmas, that was my favorite day of the year.

But the rain had fallen for so long in Kent that all the leaves were rotting and all the sticks were too wet to burn. I searched along the footpaths until I found a rabbit's tunnel through a hedge and squirmed along it, into a wonderful, secret garden.

Against the walls of a thatched-roof cottage lay piles of thorny branches, all clipped and dry. In a little greenhouse were empty sacks and a great bag of mulch just waiting for a boy to come along and take. At the back of
the garden, beside a stack of planks at a short bit of wall, grew a wild tangle of bushes that were thorny at the top but smooth at the bottom. I tore whole branches away.

I was hardly able to squeeze through the hedge with all I'd found. It was enough to make the biggest guy in Cliffe; the biggest guy in the whole world. The boys would like me then, I thought.

But I had to be crafty about it. I dragged the sacks along the footpaths and hid them behind the wall at Auntie's garden. I waited for the sounds of school ending for the day—the bell and the shrieks of children. Then I waited a bit longer before I went home.

Poor Auntie Ivy felt so sorry for me that she gave me cocoa with a spoonful of Horlicks. “Honestly,” she said. “I don't understand how a boy can get so wet and so muddy just walking home from school.”

“It was raining awfully hard in the village,” I said, sly as a fox.

“A parcel came,” she said. “Something from your father.”