Lord of the Nutcracker Men (6 page)

I looked down and saw that the fire was right between my feet. It had dwindled already to ashes and embers.

“Get away from there,” snapped Auntie.

I stepped back, and tripped over the guy's dangling leg. I fell in a heap on top of him, and the prickly thorns of Mr. Tuttle's roses stabbed me through the burlap body.

Auntie Ivy laughed. I heard her voice rising shrill and cackly, and I stared between my feet at my sick little fire, at the tattered pink remains of my precious whizz-bangs. Beyond them, over the black bulk of the stone wall, a fizz of sparks gleamed from a distant bonfire. A rocket shot up and exploded, and a flower of red light opened in the sky. A faint howl of voices came over the fields from Cliffe.

I thought of all the wonderful Guy Fawkes Days I'd spent in London, the shrieking and the laughter as a dozen boys danced our guys around fires so high that they towered above us. I remembered the heat and the roar of the flames. Far away, another rocket blossomed into orange.

“Auntie?” I said. “Can we go to Cliffe? Can I take my guy to the fire?”

“Certainly not,” she said. “I'm not walking all the way to Cliffe to see a lot of hooligans.”

“Please?” I said.

“You can go yourself,” she told me.

I stamped out my little fire, the worst I'd ever seen,
and went off alone to Cliffe. I carried my guy for half a mile, dragged him a bit, then carried him again. The night was very black, and the fireworks flared in red and yellow and silver. Whizz-bangs exploded, and jumping-crackers rattled like gunshots, and I thought of myself trudging up to the front. The sound of the crackers, the faint smell of powder, made me think of my father, and how he'd seen the guns blazing in the distance.

I had left the farm behind me, and was passing the woods. In the flashes of the rockets I could see the bare branches of the trees tangled against the sky. Across my shoulders, the guy lay like a wounded man. And I carried him all the way to the village, to the old stone church at its center.

There the bonfire raged. Its flames soared up from an enormous pile of wood and branches, licking with yellow tongues at a great cloud of shimmering sparks. Around it ran the boys, their guys leaping and tumbling like gangly creatures that chased them through the heat and roar. The adults and the girls stood in a ring facing the fire, and the light made their cheeks a dazzling red, their eyes as black as voids. In their dark clothes, standing absolutely still, they looked a village of dead people, their faces only skulls.

“Guy, guy, guy,” the boys chanted. “Stick 'im in the eye.”

They circled the fire as embers exploded into bursts of sparks. The roar and the popping, the sharp cracks of whizz-bangs, made me think again of the war. The boys were like soldiers running through shell bursts.

“Guy, guy, guy. Stick 'im in the eye.”

They shrieked and laughed. The fire raged.

“Hang him on a lamppost. And there let 'im die.

” One by one, the guys went soaring up, flung by the boys to the top of the bonfire. Their stuffed legs seemed to kick at the wood and the flames. Their arms groped through the sparks, and their masked faces grinned as the fire swept over them. They sprawled on the wood and burst into fire themselves. Their bodies tore open, spilling out smoke. One came hurtling down, wrapped all in flames, rolling over and over as his arms beat at the fire in his burlap body. I dragged my own guy forward and heaved him up with the rest.

He seemed to sit for a moment at the very top, his huge head flopping forward. His arms seemed to lift and beckon to me, to all of us. Then the fire took hold of his ankles and crept up his legs. Smoke welled from the body, thick coils of gray that swirled around his monstrous head, around his tiny little cap. The boys laughed to see him, my poor sad guy. But I looked at him almost with horror as the clothes my father once had worn blackened and twisted, then burst into flames. The smoke thickened. My guy's body split open and Mr. Tuttle's rosebushes tumbled down into the heart of the bonfire. His head tipped back, and a split appeared for his mouth, holes for his eyes. They jetted smoke, then turned to fiery red from the blaze of twigs inside. He seemed to glare at me, to shout in the roar of the fire. Then his strings dissolved and he collapsed into pieces, and only his head was left, smoldering into ashes that drifted up with the sparks.

There was silence for a moment; then the boys all shrieked and hollered. They jostled against me, pushing me sideways. I stumbled back against one, who shoved me on to the next. The firelight swept over them, flickering on their clothes and faces. It made them strange and savagelike, and they laughed and chanted.

“Guy, guy, guy. Stick 'im in the eye.”

They pushed harder. I reeled from boy to boy. Sparks burst from the fire, exploding at my feet.

“Hang him on a lamppost. And there let 'im die.

” The ring of watching skulls gaped at me. The boys pushed me closer to the fire. What had started as a game, I thought, had turned to a wildness they couldn't control. Their hands pressed and shoved.

I felt the whole heat of the bonfire scorching at my back, and I feared the boys would throw me on it. They would pitch me up—I was certain they would—and my arms would flail like those of the guys as I fell, spread-eagled, on the wood.

Then Sarah was there, swirling in among the boys, and I thought she had come to pull me away. But when she took my hands she pushed me instead, and I spun around to find more hands waiting. I slipped into the rhythm then, into a mad sort of dance, a Red Indian dance of stamping feet and whoops and shouts. We flew round and round, under the sparks and the whirls of smoke, round and round the watching faces.

I was sad when it ended. The boys went off in pairs and little groups, and the great fire dwindled to a heap of coals. Soon Sarah and I were the only ones left, and we walked together to the edge of the village. I didn't
mind her being there. Her hair had a particular smell that I liked very much, a lovely mix of smoke and gunpowder.

It wasn't so bad, I thought, to have a girl for a friend. After all, she was almost like a boy. Except for her clothes and her hair, and her voice and her shape, she was
exactly
the same as a boy.

I was setting up the sniper when Sarah came by. She arrived on the footpath, hopping over the wall by the beech tree. “What are you doing?” she asked.

“There's going to be a battle.” I pointed at my nut-cracker men lined up in their trench. “The Huns are going to attack.”

“They shouldn't do that,” said Sarah.

“Why not?”

“Because they don't.” She put her hands on her hips. “That's what my dad says. They like to wait in the trenches for the British to come, then shoot them down with machine guns.”

I didn't like being told by a girl how to fight my battles. “They can attack if I want,” I said.

“You should have a raid instead,” she told me. “Raids happen all the time.”

“I know,” I said. “My dad says he's seen them.”

“Well,
my
dad leads them,” said Sarah. “He gets volunteers, and he takes them out into no-man's-land, right across to the German trenches.”

“And then what?” I asked.

“Different things.” She acted them out with her hands. “Sometimes they throw bombs in the trench. Sometimes they go rushing in themselves, and they grab a German and haul him out.” She cupped a hand to her ear. “Sometimes they just lie there and listen.”

“All right.” I showed her the little lieutenant with his long coat and his whistle. “This can be your dad,” I said.

Sarah took it from me. I thought she would marvel at the perfect little man, but she only sniffed and curled her lip. “I suppose it will
do,
” she said. “He wouldn't
really
wear his trench coat on a raid, but that's all right.”

“Make him ask for volunteers, and my dad will go.” I picked up the whittled model of my father. “They can crawl across no-man's-land right here, and—”

“
You
can't make the orders,” said Sarah. “
I'm
the officer,
you're
just the soldier.”

We put our wooden men in their places. The lieutenant shouted, “I need volunteers!”

Up popped my little dad. “Me, sir!” he cried.

The lieutenant nodded, his whole body tipping. “Who else?”

“Just me,” said my dad.

Sarah breathed hard through her nose. “Johnny, there
has
to be another one. You can't have a proper raid with just one soldier.”

I chose the sergeant. “I suppose I'll go,” he grumbled. Sarah knelt by the trench. In her hand, the lieutenant squirmed over the top, onto the muddy slope of noman's-land. “It's very dark,” she said, in the gruff voice of the wooden lieutenant. “It's the middle of the night. So stay close behind me, and keep low to the ground.”

My little man with his little rifle went out next, and then the sergeant. They squirmed across the mud.

“Get down!” said Sarah's lieutenant. She pressed him into the ground. “The Huns have fired a star shell, and I think they might have seen us.”

She punched the ground. Mud splashed up through her knuckles. “Boom!” she shouted.

I pecked out machine-gun bullets. “Ratta-tatta-tat.” My fist hurtled down like a shell. “Whizz … boom!” My dad started moving. He slithered past a twig, around a stone, and crept toward my dead man.

“Bang, bang, bang!” shouted Sarah. She hurled a handful of mud. “Boom!”

Bullets sprayed around my dad, around the dead man on the ground. The lieutenant got up and scuttled forward.

It was too hard to move both of my men and fire bullets at the same time. “The sergeant's scared,” I shouted, and sent him scampering back to the trenches. “We'll have to go on by ourselves.”

“Follow me!” cried the lieutenant.

Bullets whizzed around the little men. The ground heaved where I punched at the garden. But my father crept closer to the German trenches. “Ratta-tatta-tat!” He lay flat for a moment, then got up and dashed forward, leaping into the trench before the lieutenant could get there. He battled with my nutcracker men, and they toppled all around him. Then he grabbed the last one and scampered back.

General Cedric ran up from his place behind the lines. “Splendid work,” he said. “You'll get a Victoria Cross for this, Private Briggs.”

The wooden lieutenant crawled back through shell bursts and bullets, dragging the sleeping man—the dead man—behind him. “Wounded,” he said. “The chap's only wounded.”

I wished I had thought of that for myself. It made the lieutenant look brave and heroic.

“I got right to the trench,” said Sarah, in the lieu-tenant's voice. He stood up again. “I heard the Germans talking, and they're going to start a barrage. Look how angry they are.”

The evening sun slanted into the German trench, shining on my nutcracker men, gleaming on their teeth and their bayonets. They looked fiercer than ever.

We collected stones and balls of mud, heaping them against the wall. But General Cedric canceled the barrage, because Auntie called me in for tea.

That night, a Friday, she dragged her big tin basin into the kitchen, and I had a bath in front of the stove, behind a barricade of quilts and blankets. She found my grandfather's old dressing gown, and I sat bundled inside it as I wrote to Mum and Dad. It would become a ritual on Friday nights: a bath, a cup of Horlicks, letters to my parents.

I shivered through the chore that first time, turning out two letters exactly the same, except one started Dear Mum and the other Dear Dad. “I am fine. How are you?” I wrote. “Auntie Ivy is fine. Tomorrow I have to go and see Mr. Turtle.” I crossed that out. “Mr. Tuttle.”

His house was just a ten-minute walk down the road. On the outside, it was simple and thatched. But inside, it was full of things, of little plates and frilly doilies, of photographs and keepsakes. On a shelf was a picture in a
black frame, the portrait of a lady with long hair coiled in tight little turns, as though a hundred watch springs had exploded from her dark-colored bonnet. “Is that your daughter?” I asked.

“No, Johnny.” He took out a handkerchief and dusted the glass, though it already sparkled. “That was Mrs. Tuttle. Rest her soul.”

The handkerchief dabbed at the frame, then at his eyes. But when he turned around, he was smiling. “We'd best get started with our lessons.”

Two enormous chairs faced the fire, with a table between them where he'd set a copy of the
Iliad,
a plate of biscuits and two glasses of milk slicked with cream. The chair swallowed me up; it was soft as meringue. Mr. Tuttle picked up his book.