Black August (33 page)

Obviously there was only one thing for it; but he warned his
men to fire high, and a volley shattered the silence of the sleepy street. For a moment turmoil reigned and the eighty or more people who composed the crowd fled in all directions, but with the sudden realisation that no one had been hurt they regained their courage, and under the leadership of the angry farmer made another rush.

Kenyon knew that his dozen men would be overwhelmed in two minutes if he hesitated any longer and that, hate it as he might, the outcome depended upon himself, so he drew his pistol and shot the farmer neatly in the thigh.

With a yelp of pain the man rolled over in the gutter, while the crowd stopped dead, overawed by this sudden display of determination. Swiftly Kenyon seized upon the ensuing silence.

‘Take warning!' he shouted, ‘or my men will put a volley in the middle of you. Up against that wall, quick now!'

In a rapid shuffle they obeyed, pressing near each other for shelter as they huddled against the barn he indicated.

He ordered down his troops and lined them up with rifles at the ready: ‘If any of you move a step, you're for it,' he announced tersely to the cowering crowd, then, determined to punish the villagers for their attack rather than loot any more of the miserable scattered farm dwellings, he sent his half-dozen Shingle Street handy-men into every house in the place to commandeer all that they could lay their hands on.

Two more carts had to be requisitioned for the extra load, which consisted of a fine miscellaneous haul including the entire supply of drinks from the village pub, which were discovered to have been hidden in a hen house, and a most welcome find of some three thousand cigarettes.

With a parting threat, that if any of the wretched inhabitants moved a foot before his last wagon was out of sight they would still get a volley, Kenyon turned his convoy about and headed once more for Shingle Street.

Silas was sent out on a similar errand the following day, but Gregory, suspicious that his Lieutenants were too soft-hearted for the business, set out himself on Saturday with a squad of twenty men.

Just before midday Silas abandoned his herculean labours on the Redoubt and went in search of Veronica. He found her, dressed in a suit of borrowed overalls, busy painting three enormous notice boards in the garden behind the inn. They bore the
legend, WAR DEPARTMENT—ENTRANCE FORBIDDEN, and were being made at Gregory's orders for erection, one about a mile inland on the road up into the hills and the others on the foreshore half a mile or so to the north and south of the village. In his view, the English being such a law-abiding people, the sight of them with a sentry pacing up and down nearby would be quite sufficient to prevent isolated tramps, or even small parties of fugitives, from advancing nearer to Shingle Street.

‘Would you do me the honour to have a little lunch with me today?' Silas inquired blandly.

‘My good man,' Veronica jammed her paint brush back into the pot, ‘don't we always feed together in this infernal pub, and it looks as though we shall until I'm grey.'

‘No, this is a little private party I'm throwing at the Ritz-Carlton, Shingle Street; do come.'

‘O.K.,' she said a little mystified. ‘Lead me to it,' and pulling off her overalls which concealed her long slim legs in a pair of borrowed shorts, she strolled along beside him to the Redoubt.

Rudd greeted them in the big dug-out which Silas had constructed for himself; it seemed that he had been borrowed for the occasion, and he was busy arranging a mass of cottage-garden flowers on a carefully-laid table.

Veronica sniffed an appetising smell. ‘Don't that make yer hungry, miss?' grinned Rudd.

‘It certainly does! Produce the ortolans, friend.'

Silas settled her comfortably in a chair and the meal began. Fresh lobster, roast duckling and green peas, followed by a dish of nectarines and washed down with a bottle of Moselle.

‘How did you do it?' she laughed as Rudd served the coffee and Silas produced fresh boxes of cigars and cigarettes. ‘That's the best lunch I've had in the hell of a time.'

His round face broke into a puckish smile. ‘There are plenty of lobsters on the coast and if you treat the fishermen right they're first-class boys. As for the rest, didn't Gregory send me out raiding yesterday? This party occurred to me when I struck a good-sized private house.'

‘Well, I give you full marks, Silas.' She stretched out a hand across the narrow table, and he laid his own great paw gently on it.

‘It's comforting, somehow, to eat a Christian meal again, but what wouldn't I do with you if I had you in New York.'

‘You never know,' mused Veronica.

‘No, I guess you never know,' he repeated and they smiled quickly at each other.

Silas went out to set his men to work after their midday spell and then returned to keep Veronica company, declaring that in the last six days he'd done enough work for a dozen men, which justified him in taking a holiday.

They laughed a lot, finding immense amusement in their different lives and the strange fate that had brought them together on this undreamed-of-shore.

The afternoon sped by all too quickly, and they were still together when Gregory returned from his foray. His men were grim and silent, evidently hating the work which he had imposed upon them, but his haul was far larger than that made on either of the two previous days and told the tale of many a ravished farmstead.

Not yet content he sallied forth again on the Sunday, this time with a different squad of men, and returned once more in the evening, tired, morose, and poker-faced, but with a long line of loaded wagons. Between them in the four days the countryside for miles around had been swept bare of every living thing except the starving humans whom he now reported to be living on their cats and dogs; but Shingle Street was provisioned against an indefinite siege. With fish, meat and poultry in plenty the inhabitants could survive the most rigorous winter almost in luxury.

All he required now was fruit and fresh vegetables, so on Monday, having carried out a rapid inspection of the fortifications which were growing apace on the lines he had laid down, he set out as his own ambassador to Hollesley.

Mr. Merrilees, the elected representative at the Labour Colony, received him a little suspiciously at first, but soon became friendly. He was a small, nervous, bearded man, and his somewhat bigoted enthusiasms provided much material for Gregory's cynical sense of humour, yet Gregory took care to conceal his amusement with that urbane manner of which he was such a master.

The labour movement, the Wesleyan Church, and the British Empire were the trinity of gods which governed Mr. Merrilees's
existence, but he was not above killing a chicken and cooking it for a Brigadier-General.

‘Not that I approve of the Military,' he hastened to say. ‘I'm a pacifist myself, for the burden of war ever falls heaviest on the working man, but all soldiers are the servants of the Government and represent the King, who is a fine man if ever there was one—long may he be spared to us!'

‘Amen,' said Gregory, marvelling at the quaint philosophy by which his host had arrived at this loyal wish. Then after the fashion of all potentates, whatever the manner of their arising, they fed first and got down to business afterwards.

In Merrilees, when he had explained his project, Gregory found a willing trader, but one who knew how to drive a hard bargain. An agreement for the exchange of commodities proved a simple matter, but with all the tenacity with which he had fought against wage cuts in the past, Merrilees now demanded shelter for his people within the Shingle Street fortifications in the event of a concerted attack by the starving workers from the towns.

This Gregory was loath to concede since in a time of crisis it would mean his having to support a number of useless mouths who could no longer make a return for their keep, but eventually a compromise was reached. Merrilees was to place thirty of the fittest men in his community permanently at Gregory's disposal forthwith, to be trained in the use of arms and apprenticed to the fishermen's craft, so that they would be a present help and an additional support, in case it should become necessary to receive the whole Labour Colony into the sanctuary of Shingle Street.

When the treaty was concluded, Merrilees puffed thoughtfully at his pipe, filled with dried herbs, with which he was already experimenting and looked across at Gregory from beneath his bushy eyebrows.

‘What's your opinion of the trend of things, General?'

The corners of Gregory's mouth drew down into an ugly bow. ‘Pretty black,' he confessed. ‘It seems to me that the present civilisation is doomed utterly. Railways, planes, motor-cars, newspapers, are only words now; for all practical purposes they have ceased to exist. Even the wireless which might have kept us in touch with things, has broken down. It's ten days now since the broadcasting stations have been silent, which means beyond
any shadow of doubt that the mob have triumphed over any form of organised Government. It means the survival of the fittest, and for those who do survive, back to the land in almost primitive conditions.'

‘I'll not agree to that,' Merrilees protested. ‘We're passing through a terrible upheaval, I'll grant you, but the people will adjust themselves to changing conditions and the innate sanity of the British working man will prove the ultimate salvation of the country.'

‘Perhaps—he's a fine fellow, but it's difficult to keep sane on an empty tummy. I see no remedy short of a divine manifestation, and I think we can count that out.'

‘You're wrong there, General. The Lord shows His will in strange ways at times, and like as not it will be in a movement of the common people.'

Gregory nodded silently, forbearing to voice his own conviction that race movements and mass urges, either to sound policies or madness, had for their inception fundamental reasons which allowed no place for a benign or angry God.

‘Besides,' Mr. Merrilees went on, ‘there must be other groups like ours scattered all over the country, whose leaders are getting into touch for the general benefit like you and I today.'

‘Here and there,' Gregory agreed, ‘but you forget the great industrial centres. I can do with vegetables and you can do with fish, but neither of us would swap a rabbit for a railway train, so the poor devils in the towns stand no chance, and the trouble is that they are in the great majority. Tell me what do your people do if they fall sick, ordinarily?'

‘There's the hospital at Ipswich.'

‘True, but from all reports nobody's life is safe there any more. What do you intend to do with them in the future?'

‘I hadn't thought, but why do you ask me this?'

‘Because it is our greatest danger. People are killing each other in the towns already, some are dying as we sit here, in attempts to loot; others in trying to defend their property. Soon there will be thousands dropping by the wayside from sheer starvation. It is too much to hope that even a tenth of them will receive proper burial, and it is August, remember. Their bodies will decay in the hot sun.'

‘Yes, I take your meaning.'

‘Disease will spread like wildfire, perhaps even plague will develop
and sweep the country like the Black Death in 1348. What do you mean to do if some of your people begin to sicken?'

Merrilees bowed his grey head. ‘It is a terrible picture that you paint, General. What can one do but try to nurse them back to health?'

‘I'm sorry,' Gregory leant over the deal table, ‘perhaps I'm looking on the black side.'

‘No, we must face facts and you have spoken of a terrible possibility.'

‘Then to save the majority we must sacrifice the unfortunate, you see that, don't you?'

‘What is it that you would have me do?'

‘Isolate ruthlessly. It sounds brutal, I know, but we've got to do it for the sake of our respective people. Select a house a good mile from your Colony. I will do the same. The sick must be sent there to fend for themselves; if their relations care to accompany them, that is their look out, but there must be no communication and no exception to the rule.'

‘But they'd die there without aid or comfort, man!'

‘Maybe, but if you were sick yourself, which would you rather do; stay and endanger your companions, or take a chance of pulling through alone?'

The elderly man regarded him out of sad eyes. ‘Why that's a simple problem, General, as you know yourself. It's these others that I'm thinking of.'

‘Well, we ask no more of them than we would be willing to give, and as leaders we should be prepared to enforce our judgment; otherwise we are not fitted to be leaders.'

‘Ah, it's a hard thing you ask, but you are right.'

‘Then from tomorrow I think each of us should hold a morning inspection. Every man, woman, and child should be present; and if any are sick they should be given rations, but they must go. Is that agreed?'

‘Yes, it shall be as you say; and may the Lord have mercy upon us all.'

A quarter of an hour later Gregory took his leave, and with a puzzled look upon his careworn face, the ageing fighter of many battles in the good cause of a fair wage for a fair day's labour, watched his retreating figure as, lean and panther-like, his shoulders curiously hunched, he swung away into the distance.

On his homeward journey Gregory encountered two incidents
which seemed to bear out his gloomy prophecy. First a dead horse lying at the roadside. Obviously the poor beast had recently been hamstrung, and from its still steaming haunches neat strips of flesh had been removed, while from the bracken a hundred yards away a thin spiral of smoke ascended. He did not doubt that certain very hungry persons were there gleefully awaiting an impromptu meal. The second might have proved his undoing had he been less well prepared. Three men with gaunt, strained faces, from which the eyes bulged large and unnaturally bright, leapt from the bushes at a turning in the lane and set upon him with silent animal ferocity. He felled the first with his loaded crop and flinging himself back against the bank covered the others with his automatic. They fell into a miserable whining about their ravenous hunger, and in a sudden access of pity he flung them the emergency lunch which he had carried with him to Hollesley; yet, turning from them as they fought for the parcel in the road, his clear intellect, rejecting compromise, told him that he would have done them a better service had he put a bullet through their brains.