Fly Away Peter by David Malouf

Author:David Malouf [David Malouf]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781409029861
Publisher: Random House
Published: 1982-10-07T04:00:00+00:00

11

IT WAS A quiet section of the front. They were billeted in an abandoned cotton mill close to the centre of town. Though Armentières by then had been fought over and taken and then retaken, and was frequently bombarded, it still retained a measure of normality; it hadn’t as yet been gas-shelled and was not deserted. Girls appeared at the factory gate each morning with trays of buns and coffee; there were half a dozen good estaminets and several brothels; peasants on the outskirts of the town were still growing cabbages or trying to raise a wheatcrop right up to where the trenches began.

They were the local people whose farms had been where the war now was. They hadn’t all left and they weren’t all grateful that their land was being defended against invaders. Mostly they just wanted the war to move away. They were grim, wooden-faced people in clothes as muddy and ragged as the soldiers’, their feet sometimes in clogs but more often in bundles of rags. They stood about on the doorsteps of shattered houses, defending their property – a few chickens, a cow, a cellar full of dusty bottles – against the defenders, who were always on the lookout for something to eat or steal, or for a woman who could be induced into one of the dirty barns, or for any sort of mischief that would kill boredom and take their minds off what lay ahead.

There were several wars going on here, and different areas of hostility, not all of them official.

As for the townspeople, they were like townspeople everywhere. The war was good business. The girls who sold cakes outside the cotton factory were pretty. Their mothers kept bars. Their younger brothers, in the afternoon, went up through the support lines to sell papers.

On the last night before they went into the line (they were to go up on December 23rd and spend Christmas there) Clancy prevailed on Jim to break bounds and go to a village just out of town. It was two miles off over the snow. It wasn’t much of a place now, and probably never had been, but a woman kept a good estaminet there, in the shell of a bombed out farm-house, with eggs and sometimes cognac, and Clancy was on close terms with her. Though they had only been here a couple of weeks she was already on the List. Her name was Monique.

‘Come on, mate, be a devil,’ Clancy urged. ‘We might all be dead by Christmas.’

Teasing Jim amused him. After all these months of raw camp life Jim still existed in a world of his own, not withdrawn exactly but impenetrably private. He did everything with meticulous care and according to the strict order of the book as if there were some peculiar safety in it, cleaning and swaddling his rifle, polishing his boots, laying out his kit. The odd thing was that Clancy respected this. It was what he saw in Jim that was most likeable and attractive.

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