How I Won the War Page 7

  “With a pin, sir. It don’t make no difference who I have for prisoner’s friend. With that summary and my record, Norman Birkett couldn’t get me off the hook.”

  I had hoped that he had heard of the forensic skill I had shown in dealing with such Twelve Platoon problems as Clapper’s insurance difficulty, but resolved not to allow the manner of my selection to deflect me from my duty.

  “That’s no way to look at it, Juniper. Must keep our pecker up, you know. All prisoners are innocent until proven guilty.”

  “Not in the Army, they ain’t.”

  “Indeed they are, I assure you. It says so right here in the Manual of Military Law. Now what would be our best line of defence?”

  “What about suicide?”

  “I see you are charged with being absent without leave in Runcorn for sixty-seven days. Why did you go there?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Your record shows you’ve been guilty of absence without leave on eleven other occasions in the last two and a half years, and always in Runcorn. Why do you keep going back to Runcorn?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You must know. Does your wife live there?”

  “I’m not married.”

  “Your girl friend?”

  “Haven’t got one.”

  “Then what on earth keeps calling you back to Runcorn? Is there something wrong with you?”

  Juniper peered apprehensively at me like a man being followed, gazed up at the whitewashed ceiling, then down at his own reflection in the bottom of the bucket he was burnishing.

  “It’s me head, sir!”

  “Your head?”

  “Yes, sir. Inside the skull, like. Blackouts, that’s what I get, blackouts.” He banged his temples with a tortured palm. “Horrible…. I’m sitting down somewhere, just like I’m sitting down here with you, sir, when suddenly all the inside of me head goes black. I get this feeling that I got to get out of the barrack room. I got to roam, if you know what I mean. I feel all sort of … sort of …”

  “Nomadic?” I suggested.

  “That’s it, sir. I come all over sort of nomadic.” The traumatic barrier having been broken, he opened his heart to me. “Plop! Something goes plop between me ears and I’m all blacked-out and nomadic. Everything seems to close in around me. The barrack blocks, the cookhouse, the windows and the walls, they all come marching in on me and I just got to get out in the fresh air …” His black button eyes popped hysterically and his arms flailed about like a man locked in a submarine. “I just got to go off travelling…. I don’t know what I’m doing…. I don’t know where I’m going…. I just wander in a trance, helpless as a sleepwalker, maybe for hours, maybe for days, until the attack wears off and I wake up in Runcorn.”

  “Always in Runcorn?”

  “Yes.” He spread his hands in resignation. “Always in Runcorn.”

  “And how often do you have these nomadic blackouts?”

  “All the time, sir. I never know when I’m going to be took.”

  He buried his face in his hands.

  “Oh! Gawd! Will it never end!”

  Fortunately, I knew a little about psychiatry as well as insurance. Not, mark you, any of that Freudian stuff about sex and all that, but enough for me to recognize that I might well have before me a case of obsessive nomadism.

  “Now, bear up, Juniper,” I said, inclining one shoulder towards him so that he might take confidence from the seniority of my second pip. “I’m here to defend you. Never fear but that the truth shall out. I will study the papers and see you again tomorrow.”

  A brilliant idea was brewing at the back of my mind, just a glimpse of the foundation upon which the edifice of defence might be built. I’ve no doubt Perry Mason often had the same sensation. I had, of course, filed with my War Memoirs material a copy of the battalion orders in which my promotion had been published. Down at the bottom of the second page was a reminder to all medical officers about the importance of the latest Army Council Instruction which bade them keep an eye out for any cases of porcyliocosis. Any cases found had to be reported immediately to the Director General. I had read up the A. C. I., just in case there might be an outbreak of the disease in Twelve Platoon. Porcyliocosis afflicted people who had eaten diseased pork over a long period and was therefore occasionally to be found among soldiers who had served in India where the pigmeat tends towards the putrid. The symptoms visited on the sufferer, many years after he had digested the pork and forgotten it, consisted of unheralded mental blackouts, loss of memory and wandering somnambulism.

  I took the A. C. I. to the guard room and explained it to Juniper.

  “This may be the cause of all this Runcorn trouble,” I said. “You may be a porcyliocosis sufferer. Tell me, now, did you ever eat diseased pork during your service in India?”

  His face lit up. I had clearly struck chords in his memory.

  “All the time, sir. The cook sergeant in India was a dead villian. Never served us nothing but diseased pork every day. I remember it well, now you come to remind me. It was the midday sun as curdled it. All greenlooking and crawling with maggots, it was. Done up nauseating day after day with gravy thick and sweet potatoes. Fair turns me up to think of it…. Ugh! … Quetta, Peshawar, Jellybad … everywhere we soldiered, never nothing for dinner but diseased pork.”

  Captain Truffle, M.B., Medical Officer to the Fourth Musketeers was young, tubby, and bursting with surgical ambition. His eyes glistened as I described my client’s service, symptoms, and Indian pork consumption.

  “By George!” he said, “but it all checks with the A.C.I. Special report to be made to the Director General, too. Very rare, you know, cases of porcyliocosis. Wonderful thing if we had one in the regiment.”

  On the way to the cells I told him that Captain Tablet would be prosecuting the case. Truffle and the adjutant were daggers drawn, a relationship which had its base in the doctor’s belief that the excessive stamping softened the brain and overexposure to whitewash hardened the arteries.

  “Tablet is it?” he said. “Just the sort of thing he’d enjoy doing—hounding a chap who’s not medically responsible for his actions.”

  He questioned Juniper for an hour or so and jabbed him in all sorts of unusual places in search of reflexes. Juniper had asked me the previous day for a copy of the A.C.I. so that he could check his symptoms against the official description and all his answers seemed sadly satisfying to Captain Truffle. He finally closed his notebook, gave the elastic a triumphant snap and took me with him into the corridor for specialist consultation.

  “That man certainly fits the bill. On all the counts given in the instruction he’s a porcyliocosis suspect. I’ll start on my report right away. I’ll write a letter to the Lancet, too. Maybe to The Times as well. A paper on porcyliocosis could really put the Musketeers on the medical map.”

  I broke the news of his plight to Juniper and he took it very bravely. There were four days left before the court-martial and I spent many hours with him going over the details of our defence, which claimed that his absences were due to mental blackouts and nomadic somnambulism caused by pig poisoning.

  He was a natural actor and a perfectionist at rehearsal. I don’t know what line of business Juniper went into after the war but the Method school of acting could well have had its genesis behind the guard room of the Fourth Musketeers. Since neither of us had yet seen another case of porcyliocosis, he was uninhibited in his display of outward symptoms.

  “I’ll wear my Army glasses on the day, sir,” he decided. “They always seem to give people a dodgy look.” He put on his flat-sided aluminium spectacles and the pebble lenses focused his beady, black eyeballs as eerily as any vulture. I supposed it was the strain of waiting for the trial which developed the nervous tic in his neck muscles. Every fifteen seconds his left eye would wink, the sinister side of his mouth twitch, and his head jerk sideways like an ageing importuner pressed for time.

  On the morning of the court-mar
tial he loped in between his escorts with the leg action of Groucho Marx and the head roll of Fagin. He had put on his makeup for the occasion, whitening his face with scouring powder and darkening his eye pouches with laundry bluing. He sat down on the extreme edge of his chair, his knees tightly closed as a desperate virgin, arms folded Sioux fashion across his chest, withdrawn and silent as a zombie in battle dress, his brooding immobility broken only by the regular grimace of his quarter-minute tic.

  Even I, who had watched him in rehearsal, was shaken by the quality of his first-night performance. And the three members of the court were visibly affected. The president, Major Cutts-Bodlin, surveyed his defendant through a startled monocle and the down turning of his moustache indicated his conviction that he had caught a right one here. Captain Pebble from the Lancers came bolt upright in his chair and set to nodding like a slack-jawed metronome in time to the twitch. Lieutenant Comb, the junior member, opposite whom the spectre was seated, edged nervously back from the table and when Juniper looked up at him and groaned miserably, I thought he was going to run away.

  “Well,” said the major, turning his gaze steadfastly away from the prisoner, “we’d better get started.”

  It was his first court-martial presidency and he was a long time working through the formal preliminaries.

  “Now,” he said. “Private Juniper, you’ve heard the charge made against you. How do you plead? Guilty or not guilty?”

  I stood up.

  “The defence wishes, sir, to put forward a plea in bar of trial.”

  “Oh! You do, do you? … Plea in bar of trial, eh?”

  He had clearly not met such an opening gambit before and went scurrying through the pages of his little green book, the Child’s Guide to Court-Martial Procedure. After a whispered conference with Captain Pebble he found the right paragraph.

  “Ah … yes … In bar of trial…. And on what grounds does the defence raise such a plea?”

  “On the grounds, sir, that due to infirmities occasioned while on active service the prisoner was not responsible for the actions leading to the charges made against him and is medically unfit for trial.”

  “Medically unfit? What’s wrong with him?”

  “He has, sir, the dreaded porcyliocosis.”

  “Porcyliocosis?” He looked at his fellow members, at Captain Tablet, at the escort; but no one could help him.

  “What’s porcylio-what’s-its-name?”

  “As you will recall, sir, it is the disease described in Army Council Instruction 903 of 1942 which causes mental blackouts and nomadic somnambulism.”

  “Is it? And how’d he get it?”

  I drew myself to my full height.

  “By eating diseased pork in India.”

  “Eating what?” His monocle clattered to the table from his unsprung face.

  “Diseased pork.” I breathed on my fingernails and polished them nonchalantly on my lapel. “It’s all in the A.C.I., sir.”

  That had him right over the legal barrel. To have the Army Council backing the defence with an edict they’d never even read put the court in a rare tizzy. Finally, after much puffing and blowing, the major adjourned the proceedings while Captain Tablet, swearing sibilantly, went off to get him a copy of A.C.I. 903/42. And by the time he’d found it, the court had read it, and I had dilated upon its relevance, it was time for lunch.

  Opening the afternoon session, the president announced that the court noted the content of the A.C.I. and desired to know what evidence there was to prove that the prisoner suffered from the relevant disease.

  “Damned sprucer!” snorted Captain Tablet who was accustomed to his courts-martial finishing before lunch. “Malingering, that’s what it is. Wasting everybody’s time with a cock-and-bull story. Ought to have him medically examined.”

  “Which,” I said, “the defence has already done. My first witness is the medical officer.”

  Captain Truffle didn’t help the adjutant’s composure by refusing to take the oath.

  “What’s your objection?” asked the president. “Are you Mohammedan or something?”

  “Give him a plate to break,” muttered the prosecutor.

  “I am here to offer medical opinion, not to state facts. Such expert evidence is normally given without oath.”

  “Never heard anything like it in my life,” fumed Tablet. “Everybody has to take the oath.”

  “If you’re an adjutant,” said Truffle, “you should read the Manual.”

  Their animosity sparked back and forth until Major Cutts-Bodlin asserted his authority and sent them to their corners. He riffled wearily through his books and finally pronounced that the doctor was perfectly right.

  Pompous in victory, Truffle settled down to read a five thousand word paper on porcyliocosis, his letter to the Lancet, his case notes on Private Juniper, and the second draft of his report to the Director General. After two and a half hours of medical droning he closed with his opinion “that the court should not rule out the possibility that the prisoner has contracted porcyliocosis and that his absences were committed during mental blackouts resulting from that disease.”

  This ended the first day and I felt pardonable satisfaction with the progress of the defence. My client was somewhat put out, however, because Truffle and I had taken all the verbal limelight.

  “When am I going to get my chance,” he demanded. “I’m getting browned off just sitting there like a stone-deaf Buddha.”

  He got his chance next day and took it with both hands. After a morning of Tablet-Truffle bickering, in which the adjutant kept throwing up his hands and demanding of the heavens, “But why Runcorn every time? Just tell me that. Why always Runcorn?” and the doctor kept doggedly repeating his expert opinion in reply, I sent Juniper into action.

  “Now tell the court,” I said, “in your own words, the details of your service.”

  He was superb. Irving and his Bells, Chaliapin and his Flea, Olivier and Crookback, all paled to parish hall charades against Juniper and the deadly pork. He leaned forward, lowered his crouch and held out his arms to gather the court’s attention. He took them sadly through his childhood as the ninth infant of a bibulous glassblower in Stalybridge whose working life was mainly unemployed because the drink affected his puff and his intended jeroboams kept turning out gills. Driven to the Colours by equal portions of hunger and patriotism, he took service as a drummer boy and shifted uneasily on his seat as he recalled the impact on his young mind of his friendship with a corporal trombonist of oriental tastes.

  “… when I was nineteen the battalion sailed for India and went into action up on the Northwest Frontier. Up against the wily Pathan, we was, sir, dead cruel, no mercy and the sun beating down all the time on the rocks and the back of your head and them vast, stony wastes …” He gasped for water, dry-mouthed as an Afghan beggar, and held up pitiful hands to protect his head from the brazen sun.

  “All over the mountains we marched, Quetta to Peshawar, Kashmir to Jellybad, fighting and camping, camping and fighting, all the time eating that horrible pork … day in, day out…. Pork … pork … pork … nothing else but pork. All that heat and flies and nowhere for the cooks to wash their hands and pigs everywhere going down like ninepins with the infectious Indian swine-plague. A-crawling with grubs, a loin of pork could move off while you watched it. You could smell your way to the cook house by day and at night you could pick it out by the pigmeat’s luminous glow…. Ugh! It was horrible … but it was all we had…. It was eat that diseased pork or starve…. I can taste it now, like cannibal’s gorgonzola.”

  Lieutenant Comb turned a delicate green and dusted a handkerchief over his mouth.

  “And after a while it began to affect me up here.” Juniper knocked his head with his knuckles and cast up the whites of his eyes like a corpse. “I began to get them wandering blackouts. I’d be sitting there in the camp and the night’d just be coming down and getting all misty and shadowy. And then everything would start closing in on me. Th
e hills would come marching down, the tents’d start moving in …” He crouched deep into his shoulders for protection and his hypnotized audience crouched with him. “The canvas’d come flapping closer and closer … nearer and nearer … everything crowding down on me … squeezing me tighter and tighter…. Them drums’d start beating inside me head … boom, boom, boom, boom …”

  His fist thudded tom-toms on the arm of his chair and every head jerked in obedience to the rhythm. His breathing grew heavy as a medium, his voice a-tremble with tension.

  “Everything trying to smother me … choking me … suffocating me. Drums getting louder and louder … busting out the bones of me skull…. I got to escape … I got to get away before it’s too late … before I go mad! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! And then just when flesh and blood can’t stand no more there’s that great yellow and red explosion behind me eyes … ker-ploish! … And then everything goes silent and black and I’d wake up hours later, days later, weeks later, sitting in some Wog village miles and miles away and me feet cut to ribbons …”

  He caressed the soles of his boots tenderly and held them out for sympathetic inspection.

  “And it kept on happening to me. Every now and then I’d have a blackout and wake up somewhere in the jungle. And all the time nothing to eat but that mouldy pork … pork chops, salt pork, leg of pork, sausages and all the lot dead crawling and rotten. When we went into cantonments it got worse. All the huts’d come marching in on me … then there’d be the old rainbow explosion and they’d find me Gawd knows how long later sitting in a trance in some distant bazaar. And back in England it’s been just the same…. I’d be sitting there in the barrack room of an evening doing domestic economy when suddenly the barrack blocks started marching in on me … the walls start closing down … the beds come round and pen me up … I can’t move … I can’t breathe …” He screwed himself up like a hedgehog and clawed despairingly at his throat. “I can’t hear … I can’t see…. And then everything bursts up in the air again…. Me legs work but I can’t control them … I have to wander. I can’t stop. I’m driven on and on, this way, that way, walking, walking, walking, until at last I wake up again … deadbeat … done up … in Runcorn.” At the name of the fateful town he collapsed in a dead faint, lifeless but for his shuddering twitch, an artist to the end, limp, exhausted, and streaming with thespian sweat.