‘Get back there, you pigs.’ Victor was striking out with his fists. He appeared perfectly sober. ‘Sergeant, move these men along. Let’s have a little discipline. – Alexander,’ he called, catching sight of him, ‘fetch Major Yakir.’
Major Yakir, as it proved, was already on his way, in shirt, undress trousers and slippers, hatless, hurrying down the slope on his short legs.
‘Well?’
‘Leo’s been shot, sir.’
‘Shot? By whom?’
‘I don’t know, sir.’
‘How bad is it?’
‘I don’t know, sir.’
Officers and NCOs had begun to drive the protesting troopers back to their quarters. Leo’s screams came now from the small one-storeyed building next to the place where he had been struck, a store-house full of tents, flags and festive decorations. He lay writhing about on a roll of bunting, not perhaps much better off than where he had been before. A blanket, already soaked with blood, had been thrown over him and a grimy pillow put under his head. He seemed altogether unaware of the others’ presence and indeed of anything in his surroundings. Regularly, he drew in his breath with a lugubrious moaning noise and let it out again at what must have been the loudest pitch of which he was capable. Now and then he put his hands over his mouth and muffled his cries somewhat, but each time after a few seconds moved them down again and pressed them against his middle; the lower part of his face was smeared with blood he had brought there from his wound. During one of these intervals Major Yakir drew back the blanket. From a point just below the breast-bone to the lower part of the belly the front of the light-grey uniform was soaked with blood – with other fluids too, Alexander was to say when he told the story. Blood was still flowing – Alexander could see it flowing – out of a hole in the material. The major restored the blanket, moved to a point where Leo could not have seen him without altering his whole position, and beckoned and then held out his hand to Victor; without delay Victor put his revolver in it. After the briefest of glances the major held the revolver a few centimetres from the top of Leo’s head and fired. There were two sounds, one a kind of percussive sigh, the other that of the smashing of bone, and Leo just stopped.
Major Yakir’s rather fine dark-brown eyes were usually most expressive, but at the moment they offered no clue to what he was feeling or thinking. He gave Victor his revolver back; he pulled the blanket up over Leo’s face. Then he went to the intercom that stood on a packing-case in the corner and made three short calls. Finally he gave the other three a look that was also an order and led the way out of the room. He had said nothing to them, nor they anything to him, since entering it.
There was no great flood of talk back in the ante-room either. It was soon clear that the major would not be the one to start. Boris looked too stunned to speak, Dmitri (curly-haired, smooth-cheeked) too frightened. Victor’s head was bowed so that his face could not be seen. Alexander said in a shaky voice,
‘Those screams. Think of the pain he must have been suffering.’
‘He was in pain all right,’ said the major, his voice and manner perfectly prosaic, ‘but that wasn’t why he was screaming. If it had just been the pain he’d have been moaning, not screaming. No, he knew exactly what had hit him and where and what that would mean. He was screaming with fear.’
‘But that’s no better.’
‘No,’ agreed the major, and added curtly, ‘come on, one of you.’
Still not looking up, Victor said, ‘Leo suggested it – the others will confirm that. He always did.’
‘Always?’
‘Yes, sir. We’ve played this… we’ve done this I suppose twenty times.’
‘This being…?’
‘We take it in turns to call out and be shot at by the others. They fire at the voice. Leo invented it.’
The major laughed through his nose. ‘It’s a hundred and fifty years old at least, in our army anyway. Have any of you any idea whose bullet hit him?’
No one had. Alexander, who had been included in the question, said with great meekness,
‘It couldn’t have been mine, sir, because I took no part. I was in here. The others will-’
‘Why didn’t you inform me of what was going on, tonight or on a previous occasion?’
‘I was on my honour to say nothing.’
‘Military necessity take precedence over private arrangement, as you know. However. Your powers of recall are deficient, like the others’. It must be the shock of losing your friend. Allow me to run over what has really taken place in the last half-hour. The victim had been drinking to excess and had become boastful and offensive. He laid claim to courage; the rest of you were spineless, cowardly, not men at all. That was his contention. You would not dare, he said, to undergo mortal danger voluntarily, for instance by submitting to being shot at in the course of a mere game, as it might be then and there in the park. In vain the four of you pointed out the illicit nature and indeed the foolishness of such a course of action; he would not desist from his taunts. At last, stung by the continuing assaults on your integrity, you took a collective decision you now bitterly regret and strongly deprecate but which you believe your judges will comprehend, each of you vowing to aim wide and to end matters after the first round. The victim had behaved aggressively before but never to anything approaching the same effect. You will throw yourselves upon the mercy of the court. Are there any questions?’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Alexander. ‘You mentioned the four of us as having taken part in this affray.’
‘Well?’
‘Well… my revolver hasn’t been fired, sir. The investigators-’
‘Fire it. Anything else? So. Even stupid troops conduct themselves better when told something of the reasons for their orders. The amended version of these improper events, then, is likely to bring you less displeasure from authority than the tale I heard earlier, but be advised that that in itself interests me not at all. If my officers were seen to be at such a low level of training, morale and esprit de corps as to risk their lives habitually in a fatuous prank, or to think that a thing like that is too ordinary to be worth mentioning,’ – here Major Yakir stared grimly at Alexander – ‘I should rightly be charged with unfitness to be their leader. This I naturally mean to avoid. Good night, gentlemen. I hope by all the saints I never have to command you in war.’
15
‘Repent ye, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand! St Matthew, chapter three, verse two.
‘I will arise, and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against Heaven, and before thee, and am no longer worthy to be called thy son; St Luke, chapter fifteen, verses eighteen and nineteen.
‘Enter not into judgement with thy servant, 0 Lord; for in thy sight shall no man living be justified; Psalm 143, the second verse.
These words had not been heard for considerably more than the fifty years since the Pacification, neither where they had just been spoken nor in most other places of significance. It was of course unknown to Commissioner Mets or to any of his advisers that about the middle of the previous century various amended forms of prayer, supposedly more accessible to the congregation of the day and certainly disencumbered by hard words like ‘ye’ and ‘unto’ and ‘thee’, had begun to be used in English churches. The choice between one or other of these and the 1662 text had therefore fallen to the Rev. Simon Glover. He had scarcely hesitated. His best-loved uncle, an archdeacon of honoured memory, had never countenanced the smallest deviation from the old style, on the argument that any slight gain in literal intelligibility would be much more than offset by a loss in the power to win and enhance faith or even (as it must often be) merely to engage attention. Such an argument had gained force over the years. Glover knew too that he could bring to the wording he had learned in childhood a naturalness and warmth impossible to attach to the brisk, cheeky assertions and admonitions of the modern paraphrases. And, not very clearly, he felt he was offering the Commissioner a kind of defiance in spirit by going against what he would undoubtedly have preferred if he had known it was there to prefer.