Marshall, Smiler

I slam the car door and swing my leather jacket over my shoulder. I
hate these 'human interest' stories. Let's see how long this one takes,
I think, skipping up the steps two at a time. Pushing the buzzer, I
remember my chewing gum and send it arcing into a flowerbed.

A nurse opens the door and I explain who I am. She smiles, 'Oh yes. Do
come in,' and bustles crisply ahead of me to the Day Room. Smells hang
in the air - fried food, detergent, dust. It stinks of old people: talc
and mattresses. A few scattered chairs float in washed-out wintry light
that pours through French windows and reflects off shiny parquet. At
first I think the room is empty, but then I see him. He sits absolutely
still, folded into his armchair, a tiny figure in a loose suit and
striped tie with a sheen on the knot, staring away. As I approach he
looks up and smiles, face lined and patched with liver spots and dotted
with occasional tufts of grey bristle. Bright, wet eyes meet mine. I
feel a steady strength in the handshake, muscles moving under parchment
skin.

'Thank you for seeing me, Mr. Marshall,' I say, pulling the tape
recorder from my pocket and putting it on the coffee table between us.
'Do you mind?' I ask, gesturing at the machine. He shrugs, tortoise
neck moving within his shirt collar.

'So. Where do you want me so start?' he asks.

'Well.' I don't know. 'Wherever you want.' Just get on with it, I am
thinking.

He pauses and looks out of the window. Then he starts.

'My name is Albert Marshall. I am 105 years old and the last surviving
Englishman to have drawn his sword in a cavalry charge. I saw a
generation butchered in muddy fields in Belgium.' He leans forward,
towards the tape recorder. 'And this is my story if you want to hear
it.'

He pauses again and closes his eyes. Swallows. I wait, watching the
slow rise and fall of his breathing, and listening to the silk rustle
of breath in his chest. I look through French windows to the baize lawn
stretching down to woods behind a wire fence. Somewhere a dog
barks.

'I grew up on a farm near Colchester. Me and my brother Arthur didn't
pay too much attention to schooling. Besides, our Dad needed us to help
out. We was always around horses. I learned to ride at four and Dad
soon had me and Arthur doing jobs on the farm; raking and mucking out
and what have you. I suppose he always wanted to pass the farm to us.
Keep it in the family.

A nurse brings us a cup of tea, which he grasps with bony fingers and
draws shakily to pursed lips. He winces at the hot liquid, and
stretches to place the cup in its saucer. Down the corridor a clock
ticks, steps come and go.

'In the village we played football along the street, using bins for
goal posts. Sometimes eleven a side, but more often fifteen or twenty.
It didn't matter, really. My best mate Billy and me took turns playing
in goal. I can see him now, sat on his arse, clutching the ball to his
belly after making a save, the look of shock on his face. We played
until it got dark and a man came along with his pole to turn up the
street lamps. The game died away as each boy was called in for his tea.
The score would be 27 - 31, or something like that. Then we went in,
red-faced and sweaty, to ham and taters and to tell Mum and Dad about
the game. Our Arthur didn't play, because of his asthma, Mum said. Just
stood at the side and watched, his face pale under thick black
hair.

'Best of all was when we played on the marshes. When they made hay, we
ran out after school and built grass forts to fight mock battles among
the bales. Years later we did battle for real.'

He stops and I want to suggest we take a break. I think about the
cigarettes in my pocket and snatch a look at my watch. He sees me
fidgeting and gives me a look as if to say, All right, son, I'll finish
in my own time.

He straightens up and goes on.

'On the far side of the marshes the Volunteers used a long brushwood
sort of building - we called it the Butts - for musketry practice. When
they marched through town we stopped what we were doing and watched,
then fell in behind, taking long strides to keep in step. Trying not to
giggle. One night some lads set fire to the Butts and we all came out
to watch as the building crackled and roared. Orange flames reflected
off water puddled on the marsh. Lit up the night sky bright as day, it
did.

'In winter the marsh flooded to a couple of inches deep, and when it
froze - which it did every year then - it was like sheet glass, with
tufts of stubble breaking through here and there. Billy and me used to
skate across it, whooping and hollering like fools.' His face splits
into a gummy smile at the memory and he emits a tiny, wheezy chuckle.
'Daft, we was.'

'At first the war didn't touch us at all. The 'Great' War, they called
it later. Great! Anyway, it just seemed a long way away. France.
Belgium. A bloody long way away. But when people started talking about
volunteering, all the lads in the village wanted to do it. What do you
call it? Bravado? Bloody fools, more like. Then one Christmas - must
have been 1914 - they come and set up a Recruiting Station on the
green. All the older lads went to sign up. Dad looked at me across the
table, 'You stop where you are,' he pointed with his fork and went back
to his tea. 'Course, I went straight out. Met Billy and we went down to
the green together. The man in khaki looked up at me, 'Forget it, son'
he says and turns back to his papers. I stand my ground, 'I want to
join the cavalry, sir. I can ride horses.' He looks hard at me for a
second or two, then points over at a horse being held by a soldier.
'Let's see what you can do, then.'

'That was it. I signed up there and then. I was sixteen. We was all
just boys, really.'

He pinches the bridge of his nose and pushes himself upright, gathering
himself with his elbows on the arms of the chair. It seems a mighty
effort, but I want him to go on. It will be getting dark soon.
Cigarettes can wait.

'I joined the Essex Yeomanry as a trooper. All the lads from the
village did the same. My brother Arthur, Billy, everyone. No-one wanted
to miss the fun, they said. They put us all together in the same
company. Our first drill sergeant called me 'Smiler' - because of my
stupid grin, I suppose - and the name stuck. People still call me
Smiler.

'In six weeks we were in Belgium, sitting in a trench and that's where
we stayed for the best part of a year. In winter it was terrible cold.
Rats everywhere. No trees. Just black splintered stumps. Muddy craters.
When the big guns started up the earth shook so as you couldn't sleep,
and muzzle flash lit the sky. Smashes of blue-white flame reflected in
puddles. Sharp shadows across frozen mud.'
He stares at the window, distant again. I shift in my seat, leaning
closer. He looks at me and goes on.

'In the dugout we ran the seams of our clothes over a candle to kill
the lice. Didn't do any good, mind, 'cos I was lousy the whole time. As
I say, in my first year in Belgium I had one bath. One! The grime would
get so as you didn't know where your skin ended and mud began.

'One time me and Billy was having a smoke by the forward parapet when
a shell went off a few yards away. It felt like I had been yanked off
the ground by giant hands and slapped back to earth. Like a cricket bat
blow to the chest, it was. At first, I couldn't see or hear anything -
just a roaring noise in my ears. Then I realised I'd been blown out the
trench into no-man's land. I was buried up to my waist in mud and
couldn't move or see anything for smoke. No-one knew I was there. And I
couldn't shout out in case a German sniper fancied a pop. So I started
singing a hymn - 'Nearer My God to Thee' - quiet at first. And after a
while a couple of our blokes must have heard. They come and pulled me
out. I was looking for Billy as they dragged me over the lip of the
trench. He was propped against boards, mouth open, arms cradling guts
piled in his lap like bloody laundry.'

He stops again and seems lost in memory, shrunk by the effort of
recall. His eyeballs shift behind closed lids. I wonder if I should go
- if this has been too much. I touch the back of his hand and he looks
at me as though waking from a dream. Blank eyes. Frightened. I place my
hand on the back of his, 'Will you go on?'

He pauses, 'How old are you, son?'

'Me? Twenty two, Mr. Marshall.'

He nods and draws breath. Smiles a little smile. 'At Cambrai we went
over the top at dawn. They brought in some new blokes from the Ox and
Bucks Light Infantry. By mid-morning most of them were dead in the mud
in no-man's land. We never even got to know their names. The medics
hoisted a white flag and the Germans stopped shooting. We went out and
brought back the bodies to bury them. There must have been three
hundred of them. We just rolled ones and twos into shellholes and put
dirt over them. It was all just awful. They were so young, clean and
smart. I still see their faces.

'The first Christmas we was out there, we met some Germans, I suppose
you could say. It was bitter cold - nothing you could do to get warm.
Then a voice came across no-man's land - a German voice, speaking
English: 'Hey, Tommy! You want to play?' And one of their lot booted a
soccer ball from their trenches towards ours. We were maybe a hundred
yards apart. Well, at first no-one moved. Not me, that's for sure. We
was waiting to see what happened. Then we saw two grey shadows striding
clear across the snow towards us. Hands up, walking towards the ball. A
couple of our lads followed suit. Then more. Until there was maybe
forty or fifty English and Germans, milling around in no-man's land.
Clouds of steam rising above them in the moonlight as they gabbled at
each other. Well, I joined them and we swapped chocolate and cigarettes
- what we had - and one of them held out a tiny crumpled photo of a
girl in a party dress. His hand, black and shaking with cold, took his
cigarette from his mouth. He pointed to his chest, then the photo, and
smiled. We booted a ball around for a bit until we got bored and it
started to get dark. Funny, really. They was just boys, like us. Like I
say, boys - young and dirty and scared. And - you know what? - the next
day we went back to trying to shoot each other.'

He shakes his head. 'People talk about that football game like it
meant something. Didn't mean anything. All it meant was we stopped
shooting for a couple of hours. Played football for a bit. Then went
back to the killing. Doesn't mean a bloody thing. Waste, that's all.
Stupid bloody waste, the whole thing.'

He drinks his tea now, hands clasping the cup as he inhales steam
between gulps, staring at the wall. Through the wall.
'They carried Arthur through the trench. He had died of cold in the
night, standing watch. I saw his face as they carried him past, eyes
froze open in a blue face. Black hair and lashes dusted with frost,
like icing. I never told our Mum about that. Never could bring myself
to do it. Our Artie, she called him.

'All these years later, they're still with me. At night. I see their
faces at night. Fresh. Like it was yesterday. That German holding a
cigarette, breath steaming in the cold. Billy slumped against the
timber, that look on his face, holding his guts in. Arthur's snow
frosted face in the moonlight. Not a day goes by that I don't think of
them. Ninety years later, I still wake up screaming in the night. Can't
make it stop.'

He rubs a dry hand across his mouth and shakes his head.

'We went to a ceremony in Thiepval about a couple of years ago. My
grandson drove me over in his Volvo. We stood in a windy field and
remembered. There was two hundred of us then. There's eighty now. How
long before we're all gone? Then the screaming will stop.'

The tape runs out and the machine clicks off. The room is dead silent,
apart from an electric hum from down the corridor and the steady tick
of the clock. I watch as he closes his eyes and swallows. I press his
hand and whisper, 'Mr. Marshall, I can stay for a bit if you want.' He
shakes his head and says, 'No. You get on, son.'

I push the tape recorder into my pocket and walk to the car. It's cold
now and the light is thinning behind the trees. I stand a second and
look down the field, shoulders hunched, fists pressed into my pockets.
A crow is standing on a fence post looking at me. I look back,
unblinking.

THE END

Note:
This piece was based on an article that appeared in The Daily Telegraph
on 2nd July 2002, written by David Graves, a twenty-year veteran
Telegraph news reporter. Albert Marshall telephoned later to compliment
Graves on 'the very best article ever written about me'.
David Graves died, aged 50, in a diving accident on 17 July 2002. The
'Smiler' piece was the last thing he wrote.