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fiction
The Barnstormer at Goofy's Wiseacre Farm
By A
M GATWARD
There is
considerably more to the life of an infantryman or
foot-soldier than getting up at the crack of dawn, rigging
up explosive devices, jumping out of aircraft, being shot at
by strangers and blowing off heads. I have survived two
tours of duty, trapped on giant overseas tectonic plates,
mountains, veldts and I have been shot at, wounded,
choppered out in a poppy sopor and left alone in a hospital,
only to be sent back again for more of the same yowling
mayhem and medicine months later. I'm fine, thanks. I could
spin you endless yarns and half baked observations about the
vicissitudes of duty, conscience and patriotism, of being
behind enemy lines, of the symmetries and parallels,
contrasts and transitivities between the bedlam of
battlefields and the quieter mayhem of everyday things, but
in the end I think that all this has been done better by
movies and by better writers, and in any case what I really
want to do is to tell you a story about the man we called Duckface,
who was the sergeant-major when I was square-bashing.
Earlier in
his career, Duckface had also been known as The Barnstormer
on his tours of duty because of the unprecedented, endless
elegance, style and artistry with which he always directed
his aggression into creating carnage, initiating destruction
and despatching enemy foe. His comrades were often amazed,
according to Blunt, by his "insouciant extremes", by the
"interminable insistency" of his allegiance to his theories
and by his extraordinary willingness to put himself and
others in “extreme physical jeopardy” for the sake of what
Duckface called "the total artistic effect", what (according
to Bloom) he had termed in his mind after reading Kant “the
mathematically sublime occurrences when art meets
anarchy". Duckface once, according to Bell, put himself in
mortal peril when ordered to plant explosives around a
bridge they were supposed to destroy because he was
convinced that the explosion would "not be sufficiently
Byzantine for a mission of this magnitude and significance"
and so he scaled the bridge wall in broad daylight,
clambering up scaffolding all the time "under heavy fire",
according to Blunt, in order to line it with extra packages
of dynamite and semtex and gunpowder and god knows what
else, "vast quantities of explosives" as he himself later
admitted, so that the whole thing (“the entire
construction”) would go up "in the most baroque and
incredible fireball you could imagine". The conflagration
had not gone off with the dazzling extravagance he
had intended, and for days afterwards Duckface
was "agitated, frenzied, distressed", according to Bloom,
"lachrymose, inconsolable for days", according to Blunt over
what Duckface called "that failed catastrophe of the
bonfire" and “the heartbreaking calamity of that unspeakable
detonation”. He was also a crack-shot with guns and could
probably have made it as a sniper or so-called sharp
shooter, but Duckface had no interest in “brainlessly
killing time” by waiting for hours in some foxhole or on a
rooftop, preferring the “adrenal ferocity of open warfare”
and also “killing other people at the closest possible
range”. He believed he had perfected the art of shooting
enemy combatants so that they would fall to the ground "in a
way maximally pleasing to the eye", according to Blunt, and
further "with the most perfect balletic grace imaginable"
and according to some of his comrades, said Bell, he
considered this special ability to be one of his finest
accomplishments, his “great contribution to human science
and endeavour”. Duckface’s superiors suspected however that
"something wasn't quite right" in the mind or head of Duckface,
and put disparaging comments in their documents and
performance reviews of his work, citing "manic,
incomprehensible behaviour", his "ill-favoured eyes" and the
"intolerable perfectionism" that characterised his missions,
professional attitude and demeanour. The doctors who were
employed to assess his psychological makeup after he
launched a colossal rocket attack on a "quite intolerable
structure" in Liberia, thus Blunt, "an edifice of profound
hideousness" thus Bell, a rocket attack moreover which had
no military objective whatsoever and which may even have
alerted the enemy to their presence, these doctors diagnosed
that he suffered from "an unclassifiable array of
personality disorders and syndromes", a “generalised
malignancy of the soul and brains” and recommended that his
considerable discipline, intensity and resourcefulness be
put somewhere else, “somewhere he can’t cause harm to the
living”. And so Duckface, “unfit for human consumption”
according to the Colonel, was moved to Sergeant-Major and
given the role of overseeing the basic physical training
of new army recruits, far away from the nerve-racking
imbroglios of global hostilities and the sheer blind terror
of foreign military campaigning, far away from what he
called “the blank canvass where anything goes”. There was a
footnote on his medical file, written in red. "On no account
must be allowed to use live ammunition", it said.
From his
apprentices, Duckface demanded unqualified discipline and he
had a keen eye for the slightest signs of insubordination in
his recruits, "a human barometer for signs of mutiny", as he
described himself one day when the slashing rain came down,
hurled at us like great fistfuls of dry rice. He told us he
expected us to follow orders “without the slightest
vacillation” he said, “no shilly-shallying on my watch!”
and that the non-compliant and rebellious would be punished
“immoderately” he said, "and by the most radical conceits
and methods" and it is of course a testament to the pungency
of these threats and also to the general allure of his
persona ("my force majeure!" he called it) that in
practise his threats to "excoriate publically with the
ultimate reprovals" were rarely put into force, and never a
single time during the time that I received teachings and
training from him. Nobody ever wavered in their obedience,
their absolute unqualified deference to his command (“an
atmosphere of total compliance and acquiesence”, he said)
and, according to Blunt, Duckface believed fully in the
“earth shattering correctness of my ideas” and “the
epoch-making rightness of my thinking”. The few people that
he had penalised in the past had "deserted the army
immediately", according to Bell "radically frightened" by
what Blunt calls this "outrageous contumely and fanaticism".
Duckface also liked classical music, and often demanded that
we listen (in absolute silence, “quite naturally in the
absoluteness of quiet”) to the musical compositions of
Stockhausen, Sorabji and Cage, as well as Schoenberg (“only
at his least euphonic”), Schnitke and Birtwhistle. He liked
in particular to play the whole of the Opus
Clavicembalisticum of Sorabji repeatedly, sometimes for
days, a work whose “nitric counterpoint grinds like the
mills of God”, thus Duckface quoting Sorabji, an aggressive
work of music that “I absolutely loath, and which is full of
sounds that are almost completely unbearable” Whenever he
played it to us he would stand to attention on a chair,
motionless and transported (“spiritually concluded” he said)
as we stood stiff as cadavers in our socks by our bunks with
the music blasting from his giant stereo speakers at top
volume. And if somebody so much as sneezed or let out a
squeak he would scream at the top of his lungs ("kill it!
kill the music!") and would then peer right into their faces
with the most vicious imaginable insults and expressions of
opprobrium, insisting that the whole record be started again
from the beginning so that we would listen to the whole
piece in its entirety "without missing the slightest detail
of the complexities, textures and structure". During our
second week of training, Duckface disseminated amongst the
men pamphlets about anarchy, favouring in particular
publications by the so-called Anarchist Collective, quoting
at length in his little booklets from volumes such as
Days of War, Nights of
Love,
and
Expect Resistance!,
and Kropotkin's The
Conquest of Bread, "an epoch-making set of ideas
and principles", he said. According to Bell, somebody once
asked him why an anarchist would ever join the military, and
willingly submit to its stern rules, disciplines and
procedures. “Because they are anarchists, quite naturally”
said Duckface immediately. “Because they have nothing but
the most extreme form of contempt for everything normative,
which logically must include all known Anarchist norms and
principles”, he said.
One day he
told us he wanted to demonstrate and “to put to the test” an
idea that he had just come up with, a brainchild that came
to him “just lying in my bed”, he said, “an idea forged
fresh in the living fire of thought”. He ordered us to do
our jogging exercises and our marching practises and our
weapons routines, and he supervised and inspected us
intently, with the utmost scrutiny and intensity, as we
polished our boots, made our beds, mopped our floors, shaved
our heads. He fervently examined the lapels of our uniforms
for the slightest signs of creasing and discolouration,
ransacked our chests of drawers for the smallest signs of
“parasites and things I can’t hear about” and even when he
pronounced himself satisfied with all of our hard work and
our perfectionism, he ordered us to do it all over again
“just because I can”, he said, “just to show you a thing or
two about what’s really involved”. Several hours later, he
took us to the firing range and I noticed that he had been
even more demanding in his expectations than usual, making
us perform absurd forfeits if we didn’t hit our targets in
exactly the way he considered artful and proper, and
fervently insisting that the sound of the gunfire be heard
in a tarantella rhythm so that he could think about the idea
of “death chasing everything down”; several days before, he
had insisted that we revert to calling him by the name
Barnstormer (“Are you nothing but a squirly maggot, son?”,
“Yes I am Sir! Barnstormer, Sir!” etc) After shooting
practise, we went to the mess hall where he ordered us all
to clean our rifles, re-load them and then stand to
attention so he could “peer down the barrels to check for
signs”. He went down the line inspecting each one (“Clean!”
“Not clean!” “Disaster!” “Exquisite!” etc) and upon reaching
the final soldier in the line he put his eye to the barrel
as he had to all the others and immediately ordered the
solider without the slightest hesitation “to get on with it
and pull the trigger”.
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