Titus Awakes

16

Still Among the Soldiers

THE FOOLISH YOUNG men wended their way quickly. Out of their commander’s earshot, they tripped and swore. The slightly stronger of the two repeated the commands they had heard issued so recently, but his word didn’t carry authority. They both knew that speed and the return with their undoubtedly inebriated seniors was crucial.

Poor young men, with so little experience, except perhaps of rather innocent debauchery, they stumbled and they sang, and they swore, and they gavotted towards the dying embers of a fire, around which they knew they would have to bring the immigrants or intruders to their camp.

In disarray, with no presiding genius to instruct them on how to assemble a stretcher from the rough materials at their command, they swayed and swirled towards long lengths of poles, which could form the handles on which to bear the body towards sanctuary.

A roughly made stretcher grew precariously and amateurishly, and with capes stretched across and lashed together with lianas it appeared to be strong enough to take a human body. The silliness and facetiousness of the young soldiers increased as they performed their task, and the one who had taken command with so little effect issued a giggling order to advance, which so infuriated the one to whom it had been addressed that he raised the cape stretcher and brought it down on the head of his non-commanding officer, who appeared to go through it, as a dog through a covered hoop in a circus. No applause accompanied the spectacle.

While this pathetic charade was being enacted, Titus still lay sprawled, neither knowing nor caring whether he lived or died, but Dog lay on the bank knowing and caring. The commander, frustrated by having no one to direct, save an unknown male of no known place of origin, paced the uneven ground with energy and petulance more suitable to a frustrated schoolmistress than a leader of men.

A light appeared to the south – only a tiny halo as glimpsed on the head of an Italian Baby Jesus, it couldn’t throw any light on the surroundings, but it was sign enough for the hungry man of action awaiting the return of his men to the river bank.

As the halo hovered and made its way, lingeringly as a lover’s kiss, towards the darkness, the sounds that accompanied it also made themselves heard. There was not the same religious calm about the sounds as the sight. Indeed, there was a degree of instability in the sound. When two young men given authority for the first time come to use it, they must be forgiven for a certain amount of misuse. They had managed between them to seduce four more inebriated young huskies, who had been lolling in the firelight with nothing to do, to act as stretcher-bearers by the promise of illicit traffic in women, drugs and gold.

It was the sound of these six voices that the man among men heard and he cried out at the thought of action. But it was too soon, for the only sound the bearers could hear was the cracking dry undergrowth and an expletive of rage when an overhanging branch snapped back into an eye or an arm or a chest of a fellow soldier.

But as men digging a tunnel for years from opposing directions know that at some time they will meet, so with the same intensity of feeling did the seven men concerned in this rescue operation know that the light would glimmer in the darkness on the unknown wanderer and their own commanding officer.

As the time of fusion came there was no excitement, no sense of achievement, just ennui that there was only a vagrant and his dog as reward. Nevertheless, the stern voice of command acted upon the four stretcher-bearers and their two puerile leaders with the intensity of a rainstorm after a month of drought. Any inebriation they might have felt was quickly dispelled, and at the sound of ‘Well, come on then, look to it, you curs’ they ran to attention, as though being chased by an infuriated cockerel.

The two young officers held the flares which lit up Titus’s body, and the stretcher-bearers laid the roughly made haven on the ground by the exhausted man. Dog whined but seemed to sense that there was no harm intended at that moment. Orders were issued to deal gently but expediently with the body of the exhausted man and he was lifted with rigid care on to the roughly made bed by the four young recruits who had no knowledge of the gentle arts and displayed very little consideration for the wellbeing of the stricken and foreign wanderer.

By dint of youth and strength they lifted him on to the stretcher, and a sigh that would have shattered more sensitive mortals vibrated against the undergrowth. The man among men raised his voice for the stretcher party to advance, and Dog yelped in thanksgiving for his master’s deliverance.

The flares were raised overhead and an uncanny light led the procession onwards and away and back. The return journey was slow and stumbling, interspersed by crude expletives, while Dog faithfully brought up the rear.