“After I blinked my eyes, I couldn’t open them again. I couldn’t see. But I could still hear, and when I heard that I was as scared as hell they were going to bury me alive. And I couldn’t move. But the doctor I’d seen said: ‘After five days this poor soldier’s flesh is still sweet, and, weary as I am, I have my wits about me, and I swear to you that I saw his eyes open.’ Then he called out: ‘Jehan! Bring the digestive! . . . By your leave, sir, I will keep this man, until he comes back to life, or begins to stink. And into this wound I am going to pour some more of my digestive.’
“Then I felt something running into my head. It hurt like hell. It was like ice water dripped into your brains. I thought This is it!—and then I went numb all over, and then I went dead again, until I woke up later in another place. The young doctor was there, without his armor this time, but he had a sort of soft hat on. This time I could move and talk, and I asked for something to drink. When he heard me talk, the doctor opened his mouth to let out a shout, but stopped himself, and gave me some wine out of a cup. But his hands were shaking so that I got more wine in my beard than in my mouth. I used to wear a beard in those days, just like you—only a bigger one, all over my face. I heard somebody come running from the other end of the room. I saw a boy—maybe fifteen or sixteen years old. This kid opened his mouth and started to say something, but the doctor got him by the throat and said . . . put it like this: ‘For your life, Jehan, be quiet!’
“The kid said: ‘Master! You have brought him back from the dead!’
“Then the doctor said: ‘Silence, for your life, or do you want to smell burning faggots?’
“Then I went to sleep again, and when I woke up I was in a little room, with all the windows shut, and a big fire burning so that it was hotter than hell. The doctor was there, and his name was Ambroise Paré. Maybe you have read about Ambroise Paré?”
“Do you mean the Ambroise Paré who became an army surgeon under Anne de Montmorency in the army of Francis I?”
Corporal Cuckoo said: “That’s what I was saying, wasn’t it? François Premier, Francis I de Montmorency was our Lieutenant-General, when we got mixed up with Charles V. The whole thing started between France and Italy, and that is how I came to get my head cracked when we went down the hill near Turin. I told you, didn’t I?”
“Corporal Cuckoo,” I said, “you have told me that you are four hundred and thirty-eight years old. You were born in 1507, and left Yvetot to join the army after your wife made a fool of you with a linen merchant named Nicholas. Your name was Lecoq, and the children called you ‘Le Cocu.’ You fought at the Battle of Turin, and were wounded in the Pass of Suze about 1537. Your head was cut open with a halberd, or pole-axe, and your brains came out. A surgeon named Ambroise Paré poured into the wound in your head what you call a digestive. So you came back to life—more than four hundred years ago! Is this right?”
“You’ve got it,” said Corporal Cuckoo, nodding. “I knew you’d get it.”
I was stupefied by the preposterousness of it all, and could only say, with what must have been a silly giggle: “Well, my venerable friend, by all accounts, after four hundred and thirty odd years of life you ought to be tremendously wise—as full of wisdom, learning, and experience as the British Museum Library.”
“Why?” asked Corporal Cuckoo.
“Why? Well,” I said, “it’s an old story. A philosopher, let us say, or a scientist, doesn’t really begin to learn anything until his life is almost ended. What wouldn’t he give for five hundred extra years of life? For five hundred years of life he’d sell his soul, because given that much time, knowledge being power, he could be master of the whole world.”
Corporal Cuckoo said: “Baloney! You can take it from me, bub, because I know, see? What you say might go for philosophers, and all that. They’d just go on doing what they were interested in, and they might . . . well, learn how to turn iron into gold, or something. But what about, well, for instance a baseball player, or a boxer. What would they do with five hundred years? What they were fit to do—swing bats or throw leather! What would you do?”
“Why, of course, you’re right, Corporal Cuckoo,” I said. “I’d just go on and on banging on a typewriter and chucking my money down the drain, so that in five hundred years from now I’d be no wiser and no richer than I am at this moment.”
“No, wait a minute,” he said, tapping my arm with a finger that felt like a rod of iron, and leering at me shrewdly. “You’d go on writing books and things. You’re paid on a percentage basis, so in five hundred years you’d have more than you could spend. But how about me? All I’m fit for is to be in the army. I don’t give a damn for philosophy, and all that stuff. It don’t mean a thing to me. I’m no wiser now than I was when I was thirty. I never did go in for reading, and all that stuff, and I never will. My ambition is to get me a place like Jack Dempsey’s on Broadway.”
“I thought you said you wanted to grow roses, and chickens, and bees, and turpentine trees, and whatnot,” I said.
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“How do you reconcile the two? . . . I mean, how does a restaurant on Broadway fit in with bees and roses, etcetera?”
“Well, it’s like this . . .” said Corporal Cuckoo.
“. . . I told you about how Doctor Paré healed up my head when it was split open so that my brains were coming out. Well, after I could walk about a bit he let me stay in his house, and I can tell you, he fed me on the fat of the land, though he didn’t live any too damn well himself. Yeahp, he looked after me like a son—a hell of a lot better than my old man ever looked after me . . . chickens, eggs in wine, anything I wanted. If I said ‘I guess I’d like a pie made with skylarks for dinner,’ I had it. If I said: ‘Doc, this wine is kind of sour,’ up came a bottle of Alicante, or something. Inside two or three weeks, I was fitter and stronger than I’d ever been before. So then I got kind of restless and said I wanted to go. Well, Doctor Paré said he wanted me to stay. I said to him: ‘I’m an active man, Doc, and I’ve got my living to get; and before I got this little crack on the head I heard that there was money to be made in one army or another right now.’
“Well, then Doctor Paré offered me a couple of pieces of gold to stay in his house for another month. I took the money, but I knew then that he was up to something, and I went out of my way to find out. I mean, he was an army surgeon, and I was nothing but a lousy infantryman. There was a catch in it somewhere, see? So I acted dumb, but I kept my eyes open, and made friends with Jehan, the kid that helped around the doctor’s office. This Jehan was a big-eyed, skinny kid, with one leg a bit shorter than the other, and he thought I was a hell of a fellow when I cracked a walnut between two fingers, and lifted up the big table, that must have weighed about five hundred pounds, on my back. This Jehan, he told me he’d always wanted to be a powerful guy like me. But he’d been sick since before he was born, and might not have lived at all if Doctor Paré hadn’t saved his life. Well, so I went to work on Jehan, and I found out what the doctor’s game was. You know doctors, eh?”
Corporal Cuckoo nudged me, and I said: “Uhuh, go on.”
“Well it seems that up to the time when we got through the Pass of Suze, they’d treated what they called ‘poisoned wounds’ with boiling oil of elder with a dash of what they called theriac. Theriac was nothing much more than honey and herbs. Well, so it seems that by the time we went up the hill, Doctor Paré had run out of the oil of elder and theriac, and so, for want of something better, he mixed up what he called a digestive.