Casca 21: The Trench Soldier Read online

  CHAPTER TWO

  The shouted name of the station roused Casca reluctantly from dreams of beef and beer and Briton maids. He tumbled out onto the platform just as the train blew its whistle to depart.

  Outside the station he looked around at the depressing, ugly, dirty little town. A grimy soot had applied a gray film to everything in sight. Narrow-fronted little houses straggled up a winding road to a giant wheel that turned slowly at the pithead of a coal mine. A single cable turned around the wheel, and Casca guessed that this was the mechanism that lowered miners into the pit.

  Of the quaint Briton village of his memory there was no trace. Perhaps the distant green hills were the same.

  In the cafe where he breakfasted he learned that the mine was hiring workers due to a recent cave-in which had killed and injured scores of men.

  It was work for which Casca had little taste, but it was work. More than once he had been a slave in a mine, so perhaps working in one as a free man might not be so bad.

  He quickly found himself a room in the house of a widow and presented himself at the pithead at the start of the next shift.

  He was shocked to find that he had to rent his tools and even his lamp from the mine company. They expected him to pay this rent in advance but agreed to take it out of his first pay as they were in urgent need of labor.

  The descent was terrifying.

  The pit cage dropped unrestrained on the single cable, and Casca felt his balls and his stomach leap upward. Then he almost crashed to the floor as the brake was applied, slowing the cage before setting it down on the bottom of the shaft. A tenth-of-a-second miscalculation by the brakeman, Casca realized, would slam the cage into the bottom at full speed. And the brakeman was at the surface, half a mile above, and operating entirely by guesswork and experience.

  The miners immediately set off at a trot and Casca ran to catch up. They were running down a dark, sloping tunnel, all the men shambling, head down, shoulders stooped like apes as they trotted on the crossties of the tramway.

  There was no light as the miners had to pay for their oil. Casca struck his head hard on an overhead beam and quickly stooped to bring his height down to the level of the other miners.

  They ran for half an hour without slackening their pace, except where subsidence had brought down the tunnel roof to an even lower level. And even at those places that it seemed they knew or sensed like bats, they scarcely slowed, bending their knees to shuffle forward in a squatting position. They also jumped aside from time to time to make way for the skips full of coal being hauled by tiny young girls yoked to the tramway cars by a headband. This child labor had recently been made illegal, but here the pit owners maintained the practice since replacing the little girls with pit ponies would necessitate raising all the tunnel subsidences that the girls were able to wriggle beneath.

  By the time they arrived at the coalface, Casca was on the brink of exhaustion. Naked except for his shorts, he was lathered with sweat, panting the hot air in painful gasps. His calves, the backs of his thighs, and the muscles of his back seemed to be on fire.

  All around him men were lighting their lamps and getting down on their knees in front of the coal. The face of the coal seam rose only three feet above the floor, and the miners were quickly at work on it with their picks. They were not paid for the time it took to ride down in the cage or for the long run to the coalface. It was almost half an hour since Casca considered he had started work, and so far he was still behind for the tool rent.

  He dropped to his knees and set to with a will. The coal was surprisingly hard, and a considerable effort was needed to force the pick to penetrate far enough to be able to lever off a chunk of the black stone.

  When Casca felt that his aching arms could not wield another stroke, he paused and looked around him. The other miners were hard at it, working at a methodical rhythm, each stroke adding to their piles of coal. Casca realized with a start that theirs were already much larger than his.

  He paused a moment longer to study these small Welshmen, any two of whom he could have easily lifted in one arm. In the dim lantern light he could see that their bodies rippled with well-toned muscle, but for all that they were the merest lightweights.

  Casca set to again, determined to increase his tally to match that of his workmates. Knowing that overexertion would tire him quickly, he set himself just to match his neighbor stroke for stroke, counting on his extra size to win the extra coal needed for him to catch up.

  But when he paused to rest again, he saw that, in fact, his blows were less effectual than those of the small Britons, and that the Welshmen's piles of coal were almost double his. Nor had any of the other miners even paused for so much as a second.

  Casca flailed his pick at the coalface, tearing out great pieces of the black stuff, digging like one demented until his arms were trembling with exertion, and his breath was rasping in his dry throat.

  He would pay, he knew, for this overexertion when the work ceased and the overstrained muscles tautened against the damage he had inflicted on them.

  But he had caught up. His pile of coal was now a fair match for any of the others. He smiled grimly to himself as he realized that in this one small matter the curse of the Jewish prophet worked for him. Tonight the tortured muscles would give him hell, but by morning the curse that had kept him alive for two thousand years would have worked to repair all the damaged tissue, and his body would perform tomorrow as if it had worked at a coalface for twenty years.

  He had just recommenced digging when he stopped; he didn't know why.

  All along the face the other miners had stopped too. They all crouched expectantly, pick in hand, as if listening for something.

  They all heard it in the same instant. Their picks dropped to the floor, and the miners scurried on all fours out of their workspace, then got to their feet and ran.

  Casca was with them. He had felt, rather than heard, the tiny sound just as he had first heard it in the copper mines of Achaea more than a thousand years before. The earth above them had shifted.

  Another sound followed, louder, an ominous, crunching noise. And then a thunderous crash as the ceiling of the tunnel fell in behind them.

  They retreated farther along the tunnel and waited. A few more pebbles fell here and there, and then there was silence.

  Cautiously they returned to where the tunnel was blocked by fallen rubble. They began to pick at it with their bare hands, clearing the way to their buried tools.

  A foreman arrived, alerted by the noise and the sudden draft of air that the fall had pushed before it. Behind him came a team of timberers carrying stout beams which they quickly rigged into position to support the ceiling. Another team arrived with shovels, and the clearing of the fallen material went faster.

  The fall had been a small one, and within an hour Casca and his workmates were again kneeling before the coal seam.

  And now they worked even faster. The fall had cost them an hour's coal-winning. There was no pay for idle time.

  While the timbering team worked, Casca had reflected on his circumstances and concluded that he was scarcely any better off as an employee in this English coal mine than he once had been as a slave in an Aegean copper mine.

  To be sure, there were no chains, and the British miners did not go in fear of the whip. But in these cramped mine tunnels there was no room to wield one, especially at the coalface where a slave master would have had to kneel alongside the miners.

  Besides, Casca had experienced both ends of the whip, and he knew its limits. Neither men nor animals could be whipped to work beyond their capacity without provoking either collapse or rebellion.

  It was sheer economic necessity that drove these British miners harder than any whip-hand could hope to do. The mine owner could increase that pressure whenever he wished by charging more rent for the tools or for the miners' cottages. And by increasing the storekeepers' rents, the mine company could even increase the cost of the miners' food and cloth
ing.

  At the end of the day Casca was as weary as he could ever remember being in his life. From force of habit the men ran from their work as they had run to it. The ascent in the cage was not as bad as the descent had been. The cage rose slowly, hauled up by a steam winch at the pithead.

  On the surface the miners quickly dispersed to their homes where the only real meal of their day awaited them. Most miners avoided eating before they started work and had a single sandwich at the coalface for lunch.

  Casca found himself alone. And worse, feeling lonely. At times like these the curse of the Nazarene hurt him deeply. For him there was no wife waiting in a cramped cottage to help him out of his pit gear, to wash the coal grime from his body, and set a steaming bowl of soup before him. No kids playing on the floor before the cheery coal fire in the stove.

  Not tonight nor any other night. More often than not it suited Casca to be wifeless and childless, but this bleak little village in the lowlands of Wales was not adapted to the needs of single men.

  He made his way to the room he had rented. It occupied the back corner of the widow's house and had to be entered from outside like the privy that was next to it. It was cheap because this village was full of widows with rooms to rent. The inevitable accidents in the mine saw to it that there was never a shortage of widows.

  To his surprise, his landlady had a tin bath full of steaming hot water waiting for him in his room with soap and a scrub brush.

  Casca read in her eyes the mirror of his own loneliness, and through her shyness he saw clearly that she would be happy to scrub his back for him. Or to do anything else for him that he wanted just to be able to feel once more that she was a woman and could play her part in the life of a man.

  Casca enjoyed his bath and the boiled mutton that the widow served him in her kitchen. But he evaded the invitation in her eyes, patted the two tiny, fatherless children on the head, and left for the pub.

  The Miners' Arms was tiny, too, barely big enough for the half dozen men and dogs who were in it when he arrived.

  Casca's life settled into a routine of the day's hard work, hot bath, supper, a few beers, and a game of darts, then home to bed so he'd be ready for the same the next day. Only Sundays differed.

  CHAPTER THREE

  One Sunday—he hardly knew what made him do it and blamed it on the first summer weather—he invited his landlady and her children to spend the day with him at the beach.

  The hour-long ride in the train was the first time ever outside the village for the children, and the beach was an undreamed of experience for Gwyneth.

  They walked the length of the pier and ate ices while they watched a Punch and Judy show. The children paddled in the shallows, shrieking whenever they splashed themselves. Casca stood with Gwyneth on the pebbles of the beach and watched and thought of other beaches with golden sands and golden-skinned, naked women.

  He took the little family to a restaurant and treated them all to fish and chips and persuaded Gwyneth to join him in a glass of bitter.

  That night he went to bed as usual but was awakened after a few minutes by a knock at his door. Wrapping himself in a towel, he opened it to the outside darkness, but by the starlight he could just see Gwyneth wearing a nightdress. She walked into the room and over to his bed. "Do close that door and come to bed," she said matter-of-factly. And as he joined her she added, "I'm not going to make a habit of this, and I don't expect you to marry me, but I need a man, and I think maybe you could use a woman."

  Casca didn't argue. She never did mention marriage again, but she came to sleep in his bed every night.

  Casca's routine was very much improved. By day he admired the cheerful fatalism of his workmates, and by night he enjoyed their company over darts and beer and politics.

  Hugh Edwards, a straw-headed giant, was one of his favorites. The big Welshman had educated himself by countless nights in the Mechanics' Institute Library and was an entertaining source of invective in the cause of Welsh nationalism.

  Hugh wanted a free Welsh state with its own parliament, taxes, and customs. He also argued that Wales should have its own army but was agreeable to it being always available to British command in time of war.

  He also insisted that Wales should have its own king. "There's plenty of the old noble blood," Edwards insisted. "We don't need to import inbred German princelings. We'll have a Welshman for King of Wales—the first true Briton to sit on an English throne since Henry the Eighth." Casca ordered a pint of bitter and smiled into it as he remembered the mixture of Italian blood that the Romans had contributed to the Briton strain. He was sipping at it slowly when he heard a cheerful voice at his ear. A widely grinning face appeared behind another pint pot at the other side of the table. "Wot'cha cock? Down the mine ain't cha?"

  "Yeah." Casca looked at the Cockney stranger.

  "Me too. Saw yer in the cage when I was signin' on at the pit 'ed this mornin'. Me first day down a mine. Bleedin' 'orrible ain't it?"

  "It sure is," Casca smiled.

  "Dave's me name,” the Cockney went on. "Dave Prince, but I ain't Welsh. Straight Lunnoner. You're not from here either?”

  “I sure am not, mate. I'm an American. My name's Rufus Casterton. Friends call me Cass.” He appraised the lightly built Cockney. “You a miner?”

  “No way, mate. Jes bein’ down there’s enough fer me. I’m a tally clerk. Heaviest thing I lift is me pencil – and it’s still it's the worst job I've ever had—or even heard of—in me life. But it is a job, and there ain't none in Lunnon.

  "Shouldn't be here, really," he went on, "drinkin' money I ain't really got. But me landlady made it plain she fancies me. She's a mine widder—the mine company allows her to keep renting her cottage so long as she takes in single mine company workers like me. She's nice enough, but blimey, I don' want to get settled in this burg. Nor would I want to knock 'er up and shoot through on 'er. She's got two brats already from her miner."

  Casca found that he was nodding in agreement.

  "The mines is tough enough on men," Dave said, "but they're bloody 'ell for women. Town's full of widder women."

  "There were nearly some more today."

  "So I 'eard. Were you in that lot?"

  "Yeah. Don't know what happened. Some sort of gas explosion and then a fire. We all got clear—this time."

  "Yeah, well," Dave's voice was suddenly quiet and serious, "that 'ole is a damned dangerous place. A man'll be safer at the war."

  "War? What war?"

  "You 'aven't 'eard? The Serbs done in an archduke, and Austria and Serbia are goin' to war over it. The Germans want to be in it too, and Russia will likely back the Serbs."

  Another man spoke up from a corner. "And the French and the Russians are allies so the Frogs will be in it too."

  "Well," said another, "the German Kaiser Wilhelm is our King George's cousin, so I suppose we'll be with Germany against the Frogs and the Russkis."

  "Good thing too," came from another miner. "Time we taught the Frogs another lesson. They've been getting real uppity in Morocco."

  "But we supported them when they seized Morocco." "Yeah, but we had to, to keep Germany out." "Well, it's time we bloodied the Czar's nose anyway. He's blocked us in Persia, in Afghanistan, and in Tibet, and all of them are rightly British."

  "No," a miner with a newspaper asserted positively, "it says here that we're a party to that Russian alliance with the French, so we'll be with them against the Germans."

  "What?" "Are you crazy?" "Us fight alongside frogs?" The shouts came from all over the room. "Us with the Russians—impossible!" "Didn't we just close the Dardanelles to keep the Russians out of the Mediterranean?" "The Russians want Afghanistan so they can push us out of India—how can we side with 'em in Europe?" "How can we side with France?" "They're confronting us in Africa and in Egypt." The conversation became a babble of shouts, and Casca borrowed the newspaper and sat among the arguing miners to read it.

  The dateline was June 28, 1914. In Serb
ia the Premier, Pasic, had discovered a plot by his head of military intelligence, Colonel Dimitrievic, who had set up a secret society called Union or Death with the avowed aim of creating a pan-Serb nation and liberating all Serbs from the yoke of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Pasic alerted the Austrian Emperor, Franz Josef, in a message so cautiously worded that it could not be understood and so was ignored. Austria sent the Archduke Ferdinand to visit Bosnia which Austria had annexed in 1908, on a tour of military inspections, and at Sarajevo a Bosnian Serb, one Gavrilo Princip, had shot the plump Archduke and his wife, the Duchess of Hohenberg.

  Serbia? Casca pondered. Who would go to war over Serbia? Or over an archduke. Must be a rumor. Aloud he asked: "Who is this archduke anyway?"

  "Nobody knows. Europe's full of archdukes, I believe. Some sort of cousin or nephew of the Austrian Emperor and of the old Queen of course." Well, for sure, Casca thought, there can't be a war over that. He put the matter out of his mind and offered to buy the likeable Cockney a drink.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Over the next few days Casca's view of the European situation became more and more confused. Austria seemed to be reconciled to the loss of its archduke, and Premier Pasic's warning to Austria had cleared Serbia of any guilt. The assassin was in prison awaiting trial, and both the Serbian nation and the leaders of Bosnia's Serbian population had expressed their regrets, and it seemed Austria would accept. The matter seemed to be at an end.

  But Germany – it was not clear why – was determined to become involved and, for no discernible reason, was threatening to invade France although neither the French nation nor a single Frenchman had been involved in the assassination.

  The lowlands of Belgium provided a level pathway from Germany to France with highways, railroads, and canals all leading directly into northern France. So Germany delivered a formal ultimatum demanding free passage for its armies. It was a demand no country could possibly accept.