In the lull, I ordered the survivors down the hill and off they went, spryly, happy to be sprung from Little Round Top’s death trap. I must say that however much our arms failed on the battleground that day, no man of Company E, 66th Foot, retreated before being ordered to do so, and when ordered, did so in good order, keeping fire discipline throughout the whole process and applying bayonet where necessary. What superb soldiers they were, and how privileged I was to command them!
As for me, I could not leave Mattuwes to the fate of the Afghan women and their cruel knives. Lord Jesus, how I hated what those vicious harpies did to our wounded boys, as I had seen far too much of it. I managed to get Mattuwes up and, with him leaning on me, the two of us made it down the hill. At one point, three more Pathans joined the scrap and I was forced to send them to their happy warrior’s paradise, although I took a bad cut on my arm. The last fighter was on me with his dagger when I managed to get the bayonet, grabbed off the desert floor where a retreating fellow had dropped it, thank heavens, into him. I saw no other place to enter but his neck, cutting arteries and veins and producing torrents of a blood as red as my own. To see a man die at such close range, nose to nose as it were, is a terrible thing, no matter how fiercely one hates the enemy. Somehow I got the sergeant back to our redoubt and immediately issued orders for a retreat under fire.
Game little bastard, our Huw, eh? He charges up the bloody hill, kills three men with pistol and three more with sword, commands a last volley to drive the beggars back, sends the other men off the hill in the lull, and then drags his wounded sergeant down the slope to safety. Halfway there, three brigands jump him, but he’s swift enough to cut them all down—I’ll bet that was, as we say in Ireland, one hell of a donnybrook—while nearly getting his arm chopped off. Having sent the enthusiasts with the scimitars straight to hell, he continues to drag the sergeant, who, though I don’t know because further adventures were contained on pages I did not have, I dearly hope survived. You may hate the soldier’s cause, but it is hard to hate the soldier.
Yet that is not why I was there, not to admire the guts of one Huw Pickering Woodruff, but instead to check his spelling. And so I looked carefully, hoping there would be no anomalies, and for a time, so it seemed. But then: for henceforth, “huenceforth.” And for Matthews “Mattuwes.” And “simueltaneously” from simultaneously. Under certain circumstances, perhaps fear, fatigue, confusion, or other battle pressures, he insisted upon inserting a “u” for “e” and moving the “e” into the next available vowel position, or if none was available, sticking it in or forgetting it altogether. What would make such a thing happen? He couldn’t even see it. It was some bizarre crick in the mind, brought on by who knew what, meaningless except as an identifier.
And the rest: the hatred of the Afghan woman, easily generalized. The calmness in the face of the close-by cut to throat and the gush of crimson it produced. It was all there.
“And what have we learned?” asked the colonel.
“Nothing of note,” I lied. “He is indeed a brave man. Do you know much of his background, may I inquire?”
“Welsh-born, Sandhurst grad, third son of a Methodist minister, not much money in the family but a strain, clearly visible in the colonel, of brilliance. Now doing nothing but dictionary work, whereas in a sane world he’d be a cabinet minister.”
I nodded, though tried to hide how disturbed I was by the unassailable logic I had uncovered that the bravest of the brave was indeed Jack the Ripper.
“Now I shall be off, Mr. Jeb. Jeb, what kind of name is that, by the way? It seems I’ve given up some confidential information to a man whose name I do not even know. Come now, sir, at least explain yourself.”
“It’s a journalistic trope,” I said. “I was called as a youth various things, sometimes even Sonny. But I was in the register as a junior, even if my father was a drunkard and I cared not to be known by his name, so to some I went forth by his initials, which were G.B. My sister, a wonderful girl, could not keep the two letters apart, and in her mouth they elided into Jeb. So that is me, and for the record, sir, since you have asked, the moniker would be Shaw, George Bernard Shaw.”
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
The Diary
Undated
Egress
I slipped out of the court, down the narrow passageway
and took my right to whatever street it was.
I cannot remember
though it was but hours ago. Had a plague come
as I was to work, and had it taken the rest of humanity?
It seemed I walked for days through the gray drift of the inclement,
my eyes squinted against the sting of the dagger-like drops,
a shiver running through my body as it tried to adjust to the cold.
Emptiness and echo everywhere, bits of paper blowing loose and tattered,
a dog with slattern ribs and no hope in its rheumy eyes, the smell
of garbage, shit, piss, and of course blood riding the cold breeze.
But in time, I saw them. One, then two, then three or four,
humans, that is, gradually assembling to face the day and whatever hell that meant.
I saw a teamster drive six mighty steeds down the street to deliver barrels of whatever,
I saw a copper standing vigilant, on duty however ineffectual, I saw a scatter of children,
full of energy and long and fast of leg, perhaps off to school or mischief,
I saw a mum or two, in a hansom carriage I saw a gentleman, maybe that was a Judy off the next block, maybe the small hunched gentleman a barrister or a barrister’s clerk,
a butcher, a baker, a candlestick maker, a tinker, a tailor, a beggarman, a thief.
None of them so much as acknowledged me.
And why should they? After all, I was one of them.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Jeb’s Memoir
I told Professor Dare about my confirmation that the colonel had shown signs of the dyslexia condition that was the primal clue in his quest and that, as predicted, he had emerged from a morally nourishing humanitarian background.