John Masters (42 page)

"I know," Chaddock said. "I was thinking of something else."

"It's better to concentrate on the work in hand," the major said, "and safer, too."

"Yes, sir," Chaddock answered formally. Hughes was Welsh, a colliery manager in peacetime, careful, anxious to please owners or seniors. He said, "By the way, Tunneling H.Q. Mess is inviting all the army nurses to drinks tomorrow." He nodded and hurried off.

Chaddock began to walk back toward the face. The drills were making a lot of dust, yet they were drilling dry. Limestone was much safer than silicas, but he must find out whether X-rays were being taken and how often. Surely they could wet-drill here, using seawater? Safety was poor all round. No one wore miner's helmets except the drillers. The infantry muckers didn't even wear their steel helmets.

The section sergeant fell in beside him, and he remembered the name—"Gaffer" Farley, small, fiftyish, a coal-mine foreman in peace. Chaddock started asking questions ... were they using hole directors for the easers? What about the dry drilling? The helmets? How much air was reaching the face? What was the maximum capacity of the pump? How about exhaustion of fumes? The little sergeant answered patiently in an accent Chaddock could barely understand.

The blast master came and asked permission to blow the round. Chaddock walked back behind the safety line, his brow furrowed. "Four hundred and forty cubic yards a week is a lot, sergeant," he said. "There's no allowance there for little errors. Comers are being cut, safety precautions are not being observed, in order to reach that figure, whereas we ought to be tightening up and..."

The sergeant said, "It's not easy, sir, but ... Look, the army's a game, see, and it's best to play the bloody game. It's not like trying to earn a living in Dipton in the depression. That's serious, see."

Chaddock said, "We've got to win the war, sergeant."

"Aye, we will, but it'll be a long tram. For drills we're using these twenty-five-pound jackhammers that the oldest colliery in County Durham would 'a thrown out twenty years back. Half a dozen portable hundred-cubic-foot compressors that sound like my Aunt Jane dying of the pneumony. Then the bloody Eyeties drop a bomb slap on the R.E. stores depot and bang goes half our steels, cable, pulleys, clamps.... You have to take it easy, captain, or they'll carry you out in a straitjacket."

The sharp regular cracks of the exploding round echoed down the shaft.

In the saloon bar of the Star & Garter the flight sergeant had a large audience of army corporals and sergeants. His RAF Harrow-and-Stepney accent filled the room. "This Jewish fellow goes to the magistrate and says he wants to have his name changed, see. The beak fixes him up and out he goes, Clarence Fauntleroy, Esquire, instead of Joe Levy. A couple of months later, back he comes and says he wants to change his name to Thompson. The beak scratches his head and says, aren't you the chap was in here a few weeks ago, changing his name to Fauntleroy? Don't you know who you are? Yes, your honner, the Jew says. Then why do you want to change your name again? And the Jew answers, Vell, your Honner, ven someone asks my name I say Thompson, and they vill look at me and my nose—he has a real Jewish conk, see—and they vill say, Ah, but vat vas your name
before
it was Thompson, and I shall say, Fauntleroy!"

The soldiers laughed, the ape corporal frowned. Mr. Wardrop and old Sergeant Tamlyn stared into their glasses without expression. Chaddock took a draft from his glass. It was a filthy hot muggy Levanter day, and the beer was heavy and livery, but that was what they had at the Star & Garter, and that's what you had to drink.

A naval petty officer said, "And now we're fighting for the Jews."

Joe Morello behind the bar spoke, half aside, to the ape corporal. "They not fighting for Gibraltar,
claro.
Sometimes, before war,
sometimes,
maybe they ask us what we want, ask whether they can take this, blow down that. Not now. Just take. War on, they say. And no bloody civilian allowed into a service concert. They think we don't need amusement, too?" He murmured a Spanish obscenity.

Mr. Wardrop said, "You scorpions would be on a better wicket about the service concerts if you'd ever raised a finger for the redcoats in the old days. You kept 'em out of
your
dances and bunfights, didn't you?"

The petty officer said, "I'm not fighting for no fucking Jews, I tell you straight. I'm fighting for fucking England." Mr. Wardrop raised his gin glass. "That's what I like to hear—patriotism Talking of which, listen to this. This'll bring a lump to your throat, friends. Silence for Mr. Disney-Roebuck's poem, which many connoisseurs consider the worst ever written:

'Watchful and silent, wakeful and stem

Frowns the great fortress...

High o'er the sea in the midst of the Rock

Gray guns point threateningly over the bay

Keen eyes peer into the fringe of the night

Gunners are patiently awaiting the day.' "

"What the hell is this?" the petty officer muttered.

"Poem," Joe behind the bar said. "Mr. Wardrop often speak it. It's about when Devil's Gap Battery fired at a German submarine, 1917 or 1918, about then."

"Did they sink it?"

Mr. Wardrop paused in his declamation and said, "No. But they did at least try to, which is more than the navy did when the French fleet passed through the straits in 'forty.' The petty officer sprang to his feet. "Now, look 'ere...."

But Mr. Wardrop was off again:

" 'Governor's Lookout with a shattering roar Hurls its vast projectiles into the black:

Shrieking they rush on their way overhead Woe to the target they meet in their track.' "

"Sit down, chief," Joe said. "Mr. Wardrop don't mean any harm. He not sure what he say this time morning." Morning, Chaddock thought. What morning? How could anyone tell? He must be on the first shift, then.

"We're the only people doing any fighting now," the petty officer said belligerently. "Us and the R.A.F."

"It's going badly at sea," Flight said, shaking his head. "The shipping losses are much worse than we're being told, you mark my words."

"It's going badly everywhere," Mr. Wardrop intoned, speaking with the unnatural precision of the permanently drunk. "On land, on sea, and in the air we are being thoroughly defeated.... You were arguing just now about this war being fought for the Jews. Well, Corporal Pember here will tell you that's a damned lie. The war is being fought for the apes."

"You will have your little joke," the corporal said sullenly. "But everyone in the world knows about that prophecy, about when the apes go, we'll lose Gib. The pack's down to ten now, and still the fucking civilians complain about them. There's this fellow..."

"Some fucking civilians think they have more rights than fucking monkeys," Joe the owner muttered.

The Ape Corporal swept on: …Pasarelli on Lopez's Ramp. An ape on his roof, he reports, and will we get it off because it's making messes on the roof where he collects his drinking water. So I go. To see on the roof they has to open a trapdoor and I stand on a toilet. The ape's there, it's Tony, one of the young males who's been kept off the females by Monty...."

"Don't talk to me about females," Flight groaned. "How many are there on this bloody Rock, not counting the senoritas? Twenty-seven, to twenty thousand men. All nurses, all look like the north end of a tram going south, and all bloody military. And even with that, every time I see one I get a hard-on you could hang your hat on."

Joe said, "Our women all sent away 1940—two years. You go back England this year, next year. Not us."

"So Pasarelli claims I broke his toilet bowl with my hobnail boots, but I was wearing P.T. shoes, see?"

"Wouldn't matter what Pasarelli say," Joe said. "He only bloody Gibraltarian."

"Rock scorpion," Mr. Wardrop said. "Great name. Be proud of it. Sting!"

The petty officer said, "You bloody Brylcreem boys don't have much to boast about, come to that. The Jerries are dropping bombs on England just where they fucking like, and…."

"... so the Governor replies, no, in principle he has no objection to the next male apelet which is born to be called Anthony, after Anthony Eden. But the C.R.A. says..."

1942

"... never saw so many ruddy airplanes in one place in all my bleeding life. The ruddy airfield's full of them. You couldn't fit another in with a shoehorn." The infantry sergeant drank thirstily.

"You're not supposed to see them," Flight said, brushing up his gingerish R.A.F. mustache.

"I'd have to be blind, man! My platoon's on the Upper Galleries, and we're looking straight down on them. They've been flying off all day today."

"No Spanish laborers in town. First time that happen, ever."

"What! No senoritas, either? Christ. I've been saving up for a month to carry a bag tonight! Christ, I was going to fill one of them senoritas up to the brim tonight!"

"It's the invasion of North Africa," Mr. Wardrop said.

"Here, here,
cuidado,"
Joe said, pointing to a sign tacked up behind the bar:
Loose talk costs lives.

The Ape Corporal said, "I knew it was coming. Had a Yank general up day before yesterday to inspect the apes. Didn't look too much different from one himself, if you ask me."

Chaddock drank up. The first ten minutes every day in the Star & Garter were like a foreign holiday, a breath of fresh air, a dramatic change from the harsh tunnel and his barren quarters. But soon a sense of unease would begin to possess him, and then it was time to drink up and get out. Whatever it was they talked or fought about here was unreal; the people themselves were unreal—they didn't exist, and being among them made him wonder whether he did. Only rock was real. He lit another cigarette, paid, and went out. He was smoking too much. God, how long, how long?

Inside the Rock he tramped along the drive under the lights. Gradually the pub and its sounds faded into dream. A little diesel loco puttered past on its way to the spoil box with half a dozen tubs. Lieutenant Glass passed on his way out. "We made eight feet on the shift," he said triumphantly.

Major Hughes was watching the shifts hand over at the face. He came back to Chaddock and said, "Glass's lot made eight feet."

"I know," Chaddock said curtly. "He just told me." Hughes said, "You've got to increase your yardage overall, Chaddock. Tunneling H.Q.'s on my back all the time. We've given you the loaders, and the yardage ought to go on up fifty percent, but you're only up twenty-three percent."

Chaddock's head ached, and he wanted to shout in the other's face, but he controlled himself and said, "I'll improve the figures."

"For all our sakes," Hughes said, a little more gently. "The C.E.'s biting Tunneling H.Q., and the Governor's biting the C.E., and Winston's probably biting the Governor. You're just the chap at the bottom of the pile." He left, and Chaddock went to look at the men working on development head No. 42, Black Watch Raise. What the hell could he do to increase the yardage? ... Train the men to work the new loaders more efficiently. Keep the drills sharper. Place and fire the charges more quickly. Hughes had said he was at the bottom of the pile, but he wasn't—that man there was, the man with the drill at the face, the mucker, the loco driver.... Those diesels cleaned their own exhausts of everything except carbon monoxide. That was okay for the face men as long as the ventilation, natural or artificial, was working well; but for the loco drivers, sitting right beyond the exhaust, it must be different. And the ventilation
wasn't
working well, especially in the development heads. The metal ducts were not doing the job, and how the hell could man or machine work without air? At 300 feet from the air pump, rubberized canvas increased ventilation by 400 percent. Quite apart from that, it could be taken down before blasting and put together again afterward in a quarter the time of metal. How long since he had put all this in his report? Four months, three months? And still no canvas ducting.

"You look as though you just swallowed a dose of paregoric, captain."

Sergeant Farley's face was dim under the helmet lamp. "We had two men go to hospital yesterday," Chaddock said, "and the medical reports says bronchitis for both of them."

The sergeant said, "It's just a chill on their chests."

"Are you sure the doctors aren't lying?"

"Captain, what are you saying?"

"I'm saying they're so bloody keen to win their bloody K.C.B.'s that they may have told any doctor who finds a trace of silicosis in our men to say it's something else so they won't have to start wet-drilling."

The sergeant chuckled. "Ee, that's a booger of a notion! ... P'raps ye'd better be taking a holiday, sir."

Chaddock said, "We've got to increase our yardage, sergeant. Come to my office after shift." He walked back to the main drive. Some rails needed replacing before a loco got derailed. The concrete floor of the spoil box was getting damaged. It ought to be relaid before the rails came loose and caught a tub load, or they'd have hell's own job freeing it.

At the end of the drive he turned left, strode into the company offices, knocked on Major Hughes' door, and walked in without waiting. "When are we going to get the Meco rubberized ducting?" he snapped.

Major Hughes looked up frowning from a pile of papers on his table. He took off his glasses, and his Welsh accent was strong. "When we are sent it from U.K.," he said. "And, Chaddock, it is customary to call your company commander 'sir.' "

"Fuck that," Chaddock said. "The C.E. told me to investigate the rubber ducting. I did. You saw my report. You saw the Tunneling H.Q.'s forwarding letter saying we must have the Meco at once. Why haven't we got it?"

"Because there isn't any for us, yet," Hughes said. "We have been allotted a priority below..."

"Below what, for Christ's sake? Are they tunneling in the desert? ... Another thing, here we are trying to improve our yardage a few percent by cutting safety comers, fiddling about with old-fashioned methods. Is anyone investigating what we could do with diamond-drill techniques?"