Jerusalem

Jerusalem
Author

Edgar Nkosi White

Release Date

Tuesday, August 16, 2016

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Peters was my uncle. They called him Charlie Chaplin sometimes, though I never did. They said he was funny because you could never tell if he was walking or dancing. Peters, he wanted more than to follow behind goats and sheep or to be ruled either by cotton or run by lime.

So, because he wanted more than this island could give him, he climbed himself aboard a ship bound for Panama. Out finally from under the Pyramid. He didn’t know then that the time had passed and that now they had more hands than work in Panama. Peters was my uncle and there were things he didn’t know.

If he would have come earlier, even a year, it could have been different and maybe changed his fate. He could have found work then, even though he might have had to work for silver while whites worked for gold. Still he could have made do with that.

“All the sail me a sail a sea
Sal water a do for me
All the sail me a sail a sea
Sal water a do for me.”

Now there was nothing left. The canal was already open and the work finished. Men stood about street corners, questions on their faces, hands in pockets. He’d come on a one-way ticket and stepped out into the unknown. You didn’t need passports then. Only hands of leather to climb a mast or pull a line.

Now he found himself stranded with nothing in his belly but God and rum and with the rainy season coming on, he had to find something quick. It was then he ran into Clifford who he knew from back home. Seeing him, he told himself, was a sign that his luck was changing. Clifford had made a baby with their cousin Tonya and so now was family. He had run away some time before but now here they both were together walking. He felt calm now.

“You get through?” Clifford shook his head. They thought about mining gold but you needed money to do that. Tools to dig and mules to carry you.

“You need money to make money. Is true that.”

Clifford talked about signing up, and because something was better than nothing, Peters followed him. Signing up for what didn’t matter. They walked together to the recruitment centre where he saw the big poster of Lord Kitchener pointing. ‘England needs you,’ it said. Kitchener thought if he could get the blacks to agree to fight on his side they would beat anybody. He got the Caribbean to contribute; first money and then manpower.

“Is war you want to sign up for? Boy, me no really know about that, you know. Just have this bad feeling,” said Peters, staring at the poster.

“What’s the difference?” Clifford asked. “Every day is war, one way or another. ‘Least, this way they pay you and give you uniform and them must feed you. We do this quick and come home with money and things to talk about when night fall.”

“You life long but you careless with um. Where they would send we?”

“Jerusalem, in Palestine.”

And because it sounded far and biblical, Peters found himself signing on too.

The next day they found themselves aboard ship in a hurried heap. For three weeks they were packed together and shipped across a broken sea but there was no Jerusalem, only Dover where they changed ships. And because it had been a rough crossing at the channel, they missed the connecting ship which was to take them to Palestine and the West India Corp. Now because they said it was too dangerous crossing with the U boats watching, they had to serve in Europe instead. Ten weeks training at the camp and they didn’t even trust them enough to give a rifle because these were too precious to be wasted on them.

The lights which were Paris were liquid in the night and the women smiled at them but they didn’t let them stay long. And on the train that took them to the front with the young boys singing:

Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag and smile smile smile

What’s the use of worrying, boys?

It never was worthwhile

So pack up your troubles in your old kit bag and smile smile smile.”

They sang loudly to drive the fear away but already they looked sickly and the battle hadn’t even started yet. Still they assured themselves the war would be over by Christmas and then they’d go home with their uniforms. So the English boys ate their pork pies that their mothers had packed for them along with extra socks and stared at these two blacks who were riding the train with them.

Finally, they reached the barracks but they didn’t train them long. Six weeks. Long enough to deploy and make them stand and march and shoot. But soon they learned that this wasn’t what they wanted them for. Not to shoot but to carry, bear and bury. Call them natives and let them play soldiers.

“I thought they brought us to fight the Germans?”

But that wasn’t what they wanted, a black man shooting a white, even if he was a German or Hun as they called them. Build trenches and latrines and transport explosives, that’s all they were for. They were there to be labourers, not soldiers. But then things didn’t go to plan. The world went mad and the war became ‘the great war’ because everybody kept dying on top of each other. Men from everywhere. They kept dying too quick to bury. At first, they ran at each other in their thousands across wide open fields of grass but this only made murder more obvious. So armies began to live in trenches with their dead and pitched them out at night for quick burial. But the rain was too thick for bodies to stay buried for long. So now began the slow war of the trenches. A snipers war.

There was a man and his name was Poole. He was their Sergeant Major. Manchester he came from and all he knew was mills and wool and ships. He was the other end of the triangle trade. Whereas they knew about growing the cotton, Poole knew where the cotton went. He made their lives hell. The only black faces he’d ever seen were merchant seamen who were on their way to Liverpool or Welch coal miners who only bathed on Saturday nights. He joked about it. All he wanted to hear from them was “Yes, Sir.”

“Sir, we were supposed to serve in Jerusalem not here.”

“You silly bugger. You don’t choose where you want to go. We tell you where you’re needed, understand? That’s how it works.”

It was only after six months and so many had died that they had no choice that Poole gave the order to issue them the Lee Enfield rifles and said, “Okay you can fight now.”

They’d been transporting fuel wagons and bearing stretchers. You got used to rats that would live inside your clothes if you ever fell asleep. You even got used to the dead who shared the trenches with you. And you thanked God for the winter because in winter nothing moved and the attacks ceased for a time but then snow began to melt and the order came to attack. Come out of your graves and die again. Peters and Clifford had kept themselves going by laughing at these crazy Englishmen and Germans who were killing each other for a few feet of earth gained and lost daily. If the bullets didn’t kill you, the poison mustard gas did but you didn’t even know it was there until you saw others dropping beside you.

High above him a balloon flies so easily across the sky. So peaceful it seems that he wishes it would take him up too. Then he realizes that it’s a Zeppelin, spying on their location. Everything is deadly.

“So, Clifford, where’s Jerusalem?”

“Don’t worry, we going soon see Jerusalem.”

It was when dawn came with just enough light to make out a yard fowl walking there between the no man’s land which was between the two camps. Peters couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He tried to wake Clifford who was asleep beside him, his head resting on his knees. More than anything, Peters wanted to catch it. How long had it been since he’d eaten yard-fowl. He wondered if he had time enough to crawl out. He looked out again. Yard fowl still prancing. Peters reached for his swag bag which was really a crocus sack he made from a flour bag and put a string through its mouth to keep all the things he didn’t want the rats to claim although they would eat through it anyway. He pounces. The bird tries to flee but one hand has its feathers. It can’t escape. Suddenly bullets fly past Peters’ head. The bird tries again and again to take off but Peters hold on although the bird pecks desperately at his hands. Peters, leaping headfirst back into the trench, falls on to Clifford who springs awake.

“But what the fart! Bad Bush? What wrong with you? Is mad you mad or what? Ley e go, man.”

“Let e go, you crazy? Watch me cook e.”

“Cook e where, you don’t see how they grudge we?”

Peters looked into the desperate faces about him. He realized that Clifford was right. The faces were haunted. They sat inches apart in the mud. It was hard to tell the living from the dead. They slept where they could until it was their turn to keep watch. There would be no forgiveness here if they tried to cook a chicken which couldn’t be shared. As it was, Poole had seen to it that they no longer could work with the hospital as stretcher bearers. He wanted them just to have the most dangerous work. As if being out in no man’s land carrying the wounded wasn’t dangerous enough. He tried to save this for his English favourites, like driving the supply wagon. What was it that made Poole hate them so? Peters wondered.

It was funny because at first Peters was so eager to prove his bravery. As if there was some point to it. That they two had to somehow represent the race and show what they could do. Gain respect. Finally, it became clear that whatever they did, it would still not ever be enough. That nothing less than their lives would do as proof of sacrifice.

Even the messenger dogs sent out to cross into no man’s land were better looked after than they. When none of these were left alive, it was then, they, the blacks were called on to deliver the messages as runners between the trenches. The thinking being that at night they couldn’t be as easily seen.

So Peters let the bird go. He thought maybe if he showed mercy some might come to him.

“Well looks like I won’t be eating you today, friend.”

That night as he ate the wormy bully beef from his tin pot, he tried to pretend it was chicken and laughed.

“Long time gal me never see you, come let me hold you hand

Long time gal, me never see you

Come let we turn and prance.”

Peters played the fife and Clifford had three spoons he’d tied together with string and struck against his leg to keep the rhythm and for a time they left the war. Like that Christmas Eve night when the soldiers sang from their trenches and hypnotised themselves away from the slaughter long enough to come out and exchange cigarettes under a flag of peace and a star filled sky.

But Sergeant Poole, he didn’t like it and so with the dawn light, he shot the first German soldier he saw. Flag or no flag. He didn’t know what to make of peace. It confused him. Anyway it wasn’t the business of soldiers.

And then it started. As if by agreement. As if someone blew a whistle. The big guns boomed. The bombardment without end for three days. Big Bertha they called her. The German Krupp gun. Then finally, after the third day when night fell, a silence came and the searchlights to see if anything still moved. The two, they were still alive. They had to now call themselves veterans. Whereas the majority of the others were shell shocked and talked of deserting, they had no place to desert to. Any direction which they might find themselves wandering would mean certain death. They had to accept the fact that they had already died. One thing that they knew for certain was that no one would accept them as prisoners of war. They had no choice but to fight on until the end.

“One to watch and one to pray, right Clifford?”

“What’s this is under my arm?” Clifford asks.

He lifts the candle and looks closely and sees the white lice moving. Peters helps pick them from him. One to watch and one to pray.

They had got used to their aloneness now. They had withstood three days of attack and now it was their turn. If you lay still for three days, rigor mortis sets in. The trench walls crumble from the mortar fire and with each explosion, the earth keeps trying to eat you and you can’t even lift your head and so you feel dead anyway, buried alive.

When at last with the coming of dawn the order was given to fix bayonets and attack, it was welcomed. Peters knows, (they both know) that refusal would merely result in a bullet in the back anyway, so they run forward into whatever it is that’s waiting. Clifford was on his left. Just as long as they can keep sight of each other they’ll be all right. Clifford, who had asked him to write a letter to a man back on the estate for the right to love his daughter and help him work the land. “As long as we keep moving forward, Clifford. The enemy’s trench warmer and dry. Let’s take it from him.” But a shell lands between them and lifts them into space. The last thing he remembers hearing is the sound of an explosion and then the world went silent. All terror, all fear leaves him replaced now with the calm pantomime of silence.

He woke up in the hospital and when he realized that he was alive but Clifford wasn’t, he couldn’t understand why. Couldn’t make sense of it. Was it because he was on the right? He couldn’t figure any of it out. The whole thing was madness. The war had started on horses and ended behind tanks. This war of confusion and funny ways.

And when I asked my uncle, “Did you know that you were in The Great War?” he just sucked his teeth.

“Great what?” He didn’t care what they called it. No one asked his opinion. It was big, yes. Bigger than him. And only when he reached back home to the beginning that he knew. Glad now to follow behind sheep and goats again.

And was he angry at all he'd seen? Why bother? When you turn the noise off, the anger leaves. It’s all a silent film now. He can laugh at those who would laugh at him. Let them call him Charlie Chaplin, with the little skip and hop to his walk. Because only he and God knows what he’s seen.

This thing that took away pieces of people and died them in distant lands and called it glory. The cost of sugar and the cost of cotton still rules. Friend follows friend but banks only follow banks. And so the world had itself a war.

He was glad to return at least to the casual cruelty of Montserrat and call it Jerusalem.

“All the sail me a sail a sea

Sal water do for me

All the sail me a sail a sea

Sal water do for me.”

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