WARRIORS

He had not expected frozen peas. Of course, his logical mind should have told him when he saw the neatly printed menu that no other kind would have been available for the Christmas dinner - what were they supposed to do? fly them in from the Falklands? - but it somehow struck him as being against regimental tradition. Though maybe it was culinary militarism that made the little green things so bullet-like. He thought of sharing this insight with Waring, the M.O., his friend from medical school who had invited him as a guest to the officers' mess for the grand ceremonial meal, but any such communication would have been intercepted by the bright young fellow on his right, who had obviously not had quite enough dress sense to go in for marketing, or by the dozy old buffer on his left, whose defective hearing was still sharp enough to tell him he'd missed something even when it was being whispered.

Not a distinguished gathering, thought Warnby. As much of a myth as High Table - though at least the food was better in colleges. The catering corps might have risen to the level of unfreezing pizzas to serve them with chips and peas, and even be capable of putting 'canard à l'orange' on the menu card (a broader grasp of a foreign language than had ever been displayed by British troops before, in the First or Second World Wars), but the Christmas Pudding showed that the spirit of the artillery had not deserted them: cannonball-like, it lay on its plate, till it was shredded into shrapnel for consumption, the fragments lodging fatally under the breastbone.

'Good evening, eh?' said the lieutenant on his right, all after-shave and eager nods. 'Pity there are no girls, though. Colonel doesn't allow it.'

Warnby smiled ruefully in sympathy. He was finding it hard to decide which he disliked most: the new democratic army, that let a lad with passable A-levels and not too many spots become an officer - an officer, moreover, with the manner of a bank-clerk who hasn't the authority to make any decisions, but is sure the manager wouldn't allow it and isn't prepared to ask him at the moment because he's hoping he'll sponsor him for the golf-club and doesn't want to appear too much of a nuisance --- or the old-fashioned educational and hereditary élite, where it was breeding and not brains that counted in the run-of-the mill commissions. He looked at the captain on his left, balding, superannuated, piggy-eyed, short-breathed, with a cliché always hanging from his lower lip like a soggy roll-your-own that had gone out.

'Cheers,' he said, keeping the irony confined to his twinkling eyes.

'Yes, yes, yes,' the captain responded, like a clockwork doll that was running down and only worked in fits and starts. 'Yes.'

Were they all caricatures? Or was he just prejudiced? Waring on the far side of the table seemed to be having a fine old time with a pair of fresh-faced, tousle-headed lads - twins, in fact, and a fine pair of prop forwards, the bulging shoulders actually doing justice to Army tailoring and raising their pips into public view. It was rugby talk - Waring's other great enthusiasm besides archaeology. Medicine scarcely seemed to interest him. When he treated patients it was with the gruff cheeriness of a coach wringing out a sponge of freezing cold water down the neck of some hapless fly-half with a broken collar-bone. Warnby always claimed Waring had punctured some poor devil's lung by slapping him on the back when he had a broken rib. But Waring always countered with the tale of Warnby trying to treat someone who was double-jointed for a dislocated big toe.

Waring's delicacy and sensitivity (such as it was) was saved for his archaeology. He blew the dust away from his finds as if he were waking up a lover, and lavished a lot more tenderness on a detached and ownerless vertebra than he ever did on a group of them combined to form someone's backbone.

Warnby emerged from his little reverie - at least the drink was up to standard in quality and quantity - to the awareness that the servants were shuffling about, clearing plates, moving glasses, opening boxes of cigars and cigarettes. A decanter appeared at his elbow. He filled an empty glass and passed it on. The old rituals. Eating. Drinking. To excess. The very old rituals. Why not? It was Christmas. More than that: these people were entitled to a bit of pleasure. Didn't they risk their lives to preserve the peace? Well...Waring had been telling him the other week about the tank that turned over with someone half and half out of the turret. The week before that, they'd taken tanks out on transporters and all three had crashed, but only one especially dangerously. The other two had just blocked village streets and demolished front walls. What happened if they misjudged a bend with a Cruise missile on board and its warhead fitted? Did the duck-pond glow in the dark?

He'd mentioned it all to Waring while they were dressing for dinner, but Waring had said: 'It's a technical army nowadays - you expect industrial accidents. When they used to fight with swords, don't you imagine some poor devil got his hand cut off by mistake when they were practising? Or had a foil through his ribs when they were fencing? Or got trampled by his horse? It's not new, you know!'

'No, I know it isn't new - but - don't you see it's more like ordinary life nowadays? You don't expect the average lorry-driver to have a hundred percent record of jack-knifing his artic. It's a matter of competence - and the consequences of incompetence.'

'Look,' Waring had replied, 'those people are taking risks in order to defend us all.'

'Apart from the fact that I'd feel happier defending myself, because then I'd at least know who my enemies were,' said Warnby, ' - the come-on they use for getting people into the Army has nothing to do with Queen and Country. You take the Queen's shilling because you want to learn how to mend television-sets and go water-skiing.'

'Or play rugby,' admitted Waring. 'But they're very good at it. And nothing like as brutal as the police. If you bite off somebody's ear in the scrum you're on a charge, and no mistake. Unless, of course, it's a match against the Navy. And then you get a medal.'

No, it hadn't taken Waring's sense of humour away from him. Even the Colonel's speech had been fairly witty - provided you shared some of his assumptions. And if you didn't, you really had no business being there to listen to him. There was a veneer of the rational over it all, no doubt, but in the long run it had to be some kind of elitist mystical calling. He knew that Waring would dismiss the notion at once, because he preferred the rational; but to Warnby there had to be something deeper in the whole business than cheap housing, a guaranteed pension and a formality of existence which saved most people the trouble of thinking.

'I'll always regret not having been involved in the Falklands,' said the lieutenant on his right, out of nowhere. 'It's so much harder to keep a grip on what you're doing and why if you've never been in a war.'

Warnby nodded agreement in surprise. Could the lad really think that deeply? Feel that deeply? He'd not have thought it of him. The sort of person to ring up the vicar and apologise because the guns had fired on a back-bearing and landed a couple of shells in his church-yard. And here he was, worrying about a purpose to his life - not just the mortgage, and the kids, and the car, and the holiday in Spain, but something positively metaphysical.

'The testing under fire, you mean? To know how you'll react?'

'And the dying. Not caring about it.'

How was he supposed to go on? Even in the most impolite society you didn't just come right out and quiz people on their religious views. And the only person who'd ever asked him what he thought would happen to him after death had been a Jehovah's Witness. His reply had been that he didn't know, but he hoped that wherever he ended up there wouldn't be people coming round to his door to flog The Watchtower.

'I suppose you see a lot of death, being a doctor?'

'As little as I can, if I can help it.'

'Ah - I see what you mean! But surely --'

'Accidents, mostly. Heart-attacks. Strokes. Even so, in most cases we get the victim to hospital, and they die there. I'm a G.P. My concern is with the living.'

'And with the longtime dead,' broke in Waring, who, like the others on the long table, had suddenly latched on to an interesting conversation during a lull in the general talk. 'The longer dead, the better, as far as Warnby's concerned.'

'Maybe, but I leave it you to dig 'em up!'

'He does, too. Like some bloody terrier, finding bones,' mumbled the Captain to Warnby's left. 'Tell him about it, Waring - it's all right, the Colonel's gone. Have to be careful, see,' he added in a conspiratorial manner, 'stickler for order, the Colonel, he'd have wanted to report it.'

'I still don't think we should spread it around too much, Captain,' urged Waring in a tone which implied that drink had loosened the Captain's tongue a couple of notches too much.

'Good story, though, dam' good story,' he persisted.

'I'll tell him later, don't worry,' Waring assuaged him.

'Funny, you know,' the lieutenant continued, as if his train of thought had never been interrupted, 'I don't want a war, of course, but I shall feel incomplete if I never experience one. I mean, I know it's horrible, but somehow there's the intensity --- '

'Yes,' agreed Warnby, trying to steer the conversation, 'I heard something similar from my mother about the last war - you know, the civilians felt it, too, - fuller sense of life, I think she said - need to enjoy things while they lasted - '

'Oh, yes, that too, but for me it would be ---- a sense of --- of purpose.'

The regimental clock struck. If he had not been told to expect it, Warnby might have been very shocked by the way that everything stopped dead. Like mechanical figures, everyone held stock-still. Then they rose, greeted ceremonially with raised glasses the regimental shield, and began filing out in strict and silent order.

He caught up with Waring in the corridor where he was saying good-night to the terrible twins. The brash neon lighting took the sheen off everything which the candles at dinner had given, and it was clear that they were drunk. The right-hand one was swaying and giggling, the left-hand one's eyes had begun to pop and go glazed and he was starting to sweat as though he was likely to vomit before long. Warnby bade them goodnight over his shoulder as he walked past them up to Waring, and they took the hint and staggered off with their arms over each other's shoulders, as if they were looking for a hooker to fit in between them and a scrum to hold them up.

'Thanks for the timely intervention,' said Waring, straightening his tie. 'I find drunkenness contagious. Do you want to go into the smoking-room?'

'Hardly,' replied Warnby.

'No, indeed. The port isn't bad, but they don't serve it with Stilton, and the conversation is a bit like very old back-numbers of Punch.'

'Let's walk back to your place, and on the way you can tell me what you weren't willing to talk about in there.'

The air outside was a release. He was happier still when the wedge of light from the open door was pared down and extinguished like an eaten cheese or a crescent moon fading into darkness. The world that had been too close to him receded and the intrusions of brightness were withdrawn.

'They yap, don't they?' said Waring, breathing in slowly. Over their heads, moon-silvered scud flickered by, but it was only up there that the wind blew so hard. The lattice-work of winter-trees beside them was still.

'Everybody yaps,' said Warnby. 'At least you can put them on a charge for malingering or time-wasting. I have to try and sort their bloody problems out for them.'

'Don't you think I have to try and do the same? What am I supposed to do? Prescribe them combat?'

'Who do they take it out on?'

'The children, usually. Sometimes the wives. It all depends. If a wife finds herself being knocked about too regularly, she may acquire a friend who'll stop it.'

'So there are fights about women?'

'There are fights. I'm not sure the causes matter much. I patch up the left-overs.'

'And report it?'

'I'm trusting. I believe what they tell me. We have some very aggressive cupboard-doors round here, and garden-rakes you wouldn't like to be left in a room alone with.'

There was a noise from the building behind them, and a rattled fumbling at the door. Before the slice of light cut into their darkness they walked out of its reach, round to the back of the squat red-brick block, where the metal lungs of the kitchens breathed out sweaty, smell-laden air. Suddenly, the low vibration stopped and the last odour of fat eddied away on the cool breeze. They stood in the stillness, looking out into the dark.

'What's over there?' asked Warnby.

'Just the Plain. A very few farms. A very few roads. Quite a lot of unexploded shells, I imagine, though nobody's trod on one recently. And a dead village.'

'The one they took away during the war, just for practice?'

'And never gave back. Oh - and lots of dead bodies, in fascinatingly shaped barrows.'

'Tell me more.'

'There speaks the pathologist. You always loved post-mortems.'

'I like finding out. Nowadays, I never discover if I was right - for all I know, the patients who don't come back have either died or insisted on seeing someone else in the group practice because they don't like the colour of my socks.'

'Shouldn't put your feet up on the desk. Creates a bad impression.'

'Haven't they all been dug up, these barrows? By Pitt-Rivers, or some spade-happy vicar with nothing better to do, anxious to increase his stipend by selling bronze-age trinkets to collectors?'

'There are too many of them. And that's only the ones you can see. Every now and then, they go out to check on a shell and come home with bits of body for me.'

'Isn't it a bit barbarous, letting 'em use the biggest high-class cemetery in the world as a shooting-gallery?'

'Depends on your attitude to death, doesn't it? I mean, as an archaeologist I'm appalled, but there's nothing I can do about it. As a medical man, I'm very interested in their reactions.'

'How?'

'Whether they're scared by dead bodies. Whether it makes them think of their own death. How it all fits in with soldiering.'

'Come on, Waring, you're never a soldier yourself.'

'No. But I'm not leaving the Army till I've learned to water-ski.'

'And got enough saved for a practice of your own.'

'Who do you think they buried in these barrows?'

'When?'

'Good point. The early ones, then?'

'Warriors, I suppose. Warrior aristocracy, wasn't it?'

'So what did they die of?'

'Wounds?'

'I assume so. So there's something else for the squaddy to think of when he picks up the smashed-in skull and brings it home to Daddy.'

'What do you do? Operate a black market in bones?'

'In some ways. The Army doesn't want civilian archaeologists getting their feet blown off and disrupting the artillery exercises - so I have quite a collection of little things - and not all of them from out there.' He gestured at the darkness.

'You've found things in the camp?'

'Yes. I could probably even show you where.'

'From up here?'

'Yes. Look.'

They turned, and left the dark behind them. In front was a net-work of yellow street-lamps, a simple and unvaried grid-pattern, like a wire fence.

'The military mind,' said Warnby. 'Everything nice and orderly, in dead straight rows. Sometimes I wonder if the battle formation isn't just an excuse for a neurotic obsession with lining things up just so...'

'And our earlier brothers did the same with stones, didn't they? The warriors that caused Stonehenge to be built, and Avebury - great lines of stones marching across the countryside.'

'It's not quite the same as that labyrinth down there! How many hundred houses, all the same - did you know that in Dagenham, where the streets are all called First Avenue, Second Avenue and so on, it was a recognized defence against a charge of adultery to say that you'd made a mistake in the house?'

'What a good idea,' said Waring, 'I must pass it on, see if it works here.'

'So where's the barrow?'

'See the third line from the left, how it wriggles slightly? There's a kind of hummock in the ground that they couldn't be bothered to flatten out completely - see the way the lights aren't quite in line, because the middle two are higher? When it rains, there's always a water-splash round there, because of the drainage. They obviously didn't survey it properly.'

'Army surveyors must be more concerned with where the shell's going to land than the country it's passing over.'

'I think you could really leave the snide cracks to me.'

'By all means - if only out of respect for your collection of bones.'

Waring looked at Warnby for a moment.

'Yes,' he said slowly, 'it must seem rather odd.'

'Collector's mania,' said Warnby, trying to brush his own remark off, as if it did not matter. He could feel a seriousness in Waring he had not looked for, and did not want. They had been students together. They should stay students together. It was bad enough that he had entered the Army, that he had developed a serious streak was unthinkable and indeed unforgiveable.

'I think,' continued Waring, looking out at the regimented camp, the little squares of yellow lights reflected in his eyes, 'that I want to be able to touch the past. It was all a lot clearer, then. I want to get my hands on it.'

'And just what did you get your hands on, down at the slight irregularity?'

'A body. A warrior. Full trappings. Rotted, but the full trappings. Of course, there may have been things missing or destroyed, I have no way of knowing. Jenkins was digging his garden - not much else he's good for, honestly - he was in the Falklands, more than a little shaken up, has to go away for treatment every now and then - away at the moment, as it happens - and he put his fork clean through the rib-cage. That wasn't what he saw at first, though. It was a bayonet, a bit rusty, and he hoicked it out of the earth, and then he realised it was stuck through some ribs, so he got his wife to send for me.'

'And you dug it up.'

'Gently. Very gently. Come home and I'll show you.'

'What? Have you got it in the bath?'

'No. Spare bedroom. You'll be okay. He doesn't take up much space in the bed. Doesn't snore, either.'

'He'll rattle when he turns over, though.'

Waring's quarters were as impersonal as the term suggested: a place occupied by him for the time being, which others had occupied before and others would occupy afterwards. Even occupy wasn't quite the right word: it suggested subject peoples with their life resentfully continuing. This place had no life of its own: it was a piece of equipment, issued to its user and then taken back. It had all the marks of use and none of the signs of affection. The bare bulb in the hall swung in the draught from the open door and the walls lurched drunkenly as the shadows slipped and slid.

'I spend more time in the surgery next door, or up at the mess,' apologised Waring.

It was like a student's room in its furniture and decorations: they were sturdy, made to withstand misuse, and to teach the occupant the value of discomfort as a mental stimulus.

'You could hire it out for before shots in the furniture catalogues,' said Warnby, sitting on the broad and threadbare arm of the settee. 'Where's the body?'

He followed the silent Waring through the kitchen that had the gloss-paint and chill of an outside lavatory into a built-on outhouse that had a warmer darkness, like a potato-clamp, and an earth-smell. The overhead light was ridiculously inadequate: its glow made the darkness worse; but you could see a long work-bench against the far wall, with a crumpled and muddy sheet on it. As Warnby was trying to sort out the form in the folds, Waring let the anglepoise at the end of the bench shift the scene from shabbiness to Rembrandt, filling the sheet's hollows with a deeper darkness and washing the peaks of its cordillera with a snowy white. As he advanced to turn back the cloth, his body cut off the light. Then he stepped back, to let it work its magic again.

There was a defiance in the skull's jutting jaw, but vulnerability in its noselessness. The knotted boniness of the arms conveyed the illusion of strength and effort. The ribs looked like stylised armour. Warnby had seen all kinds of ancient bodies, been alone with them in scrubbed white laboratories and still felt their power - perhaps, he thought, because they die without benefit of doctors, with none of the usual lies, comfort and prevarication. He had seen the crouched ones, the ones lying fetally on their sides as if they were asleep and didn't want to put their legs down into the colder reaches of the bed - he had seen the Egyptian mummies in their gold deception-cases, with the shrivelled figures inside: reverse butterflies, the empty shell more glorious and splendid than the dead reality. This body was simply stretched out plain, to show people he was dead: a warrior with no shame and no conceit.

'How did he die?'

'You're the one for post-mortems.'

'Not at Christmas. Let him be. There's plenty of scars on his skull, and Jenkins' fork doesn't seem to have dealt too kindly with his ribs. A hard life and a short one, I'd have said.'

'And you're not interested in raising the dead. It is the season.'

'And you know the recipe?'

'You pour a libation - whatever they drank in life, wine, beer, - make sure the atmosphere's congenial - and up they jump.'

'I prefer my communication one-sided.'

'Look at the sword.' Like a bough that grew from his twiggy arm, it lay stretched out by his side, smoothly shaped; a convex pommel jutted above the wire-bound grip and echoed the larger convex hilt, whose green-bronze semi-globular solidity tapered away into a four-faced blade that gradually flattened to a leaf-like double-edge.

'What's a warrior without his weapon?' said Waring.

'It's beautiful,' said Warnby, startled at the strength of his own reaction.

'So - what do you think? The warrior aristocracy held power because the plebs fancied the look of their swords? Or because they didn't like the look of them?'

'Why do the many obey the few, when they could always get rid of them?'

'Because the few know better. Because the many, who may not know much, know that at least.'

'And you speak from personal experience?'

'Certainly. I'm a member of the officer class. We don't always make the right decisions, but we do make decisions. Sometimes that's enough. Even if there are private soldiers who're cleverer than we are, they'd never be able to persuade their fellows of it. You need distance in order to command. And it's consoling to be commanded. If you keep far enough away from the commanders, you can usually believe they're doing their best.'

'But not always. Hey, you never told me about the lesion.'

'The sword? No. But it's certainly something for you.'

On the lower edge of the blade a jagged fragment some two inches long was missing. The gap it left was like a gap in teeth, or a Chinese character.

'In what way? You want me on my knees with a sieve in Jenkins' garden?'

'Done it. I want you to find the body the missing bit's embedded in. Don't forget, the dead can't contradict your diagnosis.'

'Cover him up. And turn off the light. I'm dazzled. He died young.'

'Didn't they all? And wasn't that the attraction? A short life and a merry one - first the glory, then the grave. That's what the peasants admired, but could never imitate.'

'I think I'm on the side of the peasants.'

'What? And miss the chance of a fine barrow on a hill that everyone'll see for the next three thousand years?'

'I begin to see why you joined the Army.'

'You don't have to take me seriously.'

'That's the awful thing. I do. Under a sheet, and with the light off, old Boney still has more presence than the bottle of paraquat on the shelf above him, even though he'd probably not be able to kill as many people.'

'Don't underestimate him.'

'You really do seem to have called up the dead for me. And how do you get rid of them again?'

'Cold steel - or cold iron - they were from the bronze age.'

Grim as the kitchen was, its extra light felt welcoming after the descent into the grave - into a past that was also everyone's future.

'And this is what you peel the potatoes with?' asked Warnby, in an attempt to dispel the atmosphere that clung round him like cobwebs. He had picked up a rather rusty bayonet from one of the kitchen work-tops.

'That's what we found with him. Soldier's best friend - though there is a dirty joke to do with the length. I keep on meaning to check the issue number, see just who's been digging in Jenkins' garden without his knowing.'

'And is that a dirty joke, too?' asked Warnby, still hefting the bayonet in his hand.

'Secret of the confessional. But use your common sense. As I said, he's not been very much good for anything since the Falklands.'

Waring caught sight of the kitchen clock with surprise.

'Night-cap?' he said. 'I have church-parade tomorrow - a duty which is far from being as unpleasant as the other duties I swopped for it.'

'No thanks. But leave the bottle out. I'll have some when I get in.'

'Where're you off to?'

'I need to walk the warrior chief out of my system. You know what I'm like.'

'And church parade?'

'If I'm awake. I always find Christmas a very pagan time.'

'Look - if the guards start seeing a civilian wandering round camp at this time of night, they may come over all funny - take my coat and cap and they'll never bother you.'

'So the authority's in the cap badge?'

'Absolutely. And don't go peering in at windows. Take the key from the hook by the door. Your room's first on the right. And don't wake me up.'

In the hall, Warnby slipped on his friend's great-coat and topped it with the peaked cap, which he tried at several angles in the mirror, eventually going for one which concealed his eyes but left him free to survey the world. Even after the decision, he continued to inspect himself in the mirror, as if he couldn't quite believe what he saw.

'The full trappings,' he said to himself, then eased back the lock and slipped out.

The yellow lighting on the streets made the houses seem unreal, like façades in a film studio, but the chill air gave him a sense of freedom and purpose - the purpose to walk fast enough to keep warm. In odd windows there were Christmas trees glinting with their little lights. One flashed monotonously, as if it was warning you of an accident or a hole in the road. The clouds overhead grew tinged with the yellow light which they reflected back downwards. Empty street after empty street - he assumed the last buses back from the pubs had long since arrived and shed their loads. Only his own feet on the pavement - the loneliest of sounds in a world without stars, where he was half afraid he had lost himself.

It was because he was looking so keenly for a street-name that he missed the broad puddle until he splashed into it, stopped, and swore. There'd been no rain for four or five days; even in winter the streets should have been dry. But as he looked round, he realised he was at the bottom of a dip, which, but for the puddle, he would have dismissed as optical illusion. Around him lay the ranks of comatose houses, some quite dead and dark, others with the parodistic stellar twinkle of fairy-lights through withering and tumbling needles, and others where the flicker of televisions danced on the ceilings of darkened rooms like midges over a stagnant pool. He was suddenly aware of a great stillness and expectancy, which was just as suddenly shattered by a noise of breaking glass and confused shouting. The front door of the house nearest to him was flung open, creating a gap in the closed world in which he had found himself. The hallway was dark - why? he wondered - and the figure of a woman who had appeared on the front step, looking anxiously out into the night, was washed into greyness by the street-lamps. Her frantically seeking gaze caught him, and she raced down the concrete path between the communal lawns and grasped him by the uniformed sleeve.

'Doctor - ' she began, but halted as she looked up into his face.

'I'm deputising for Dr Waring, over Christmas,' Warnby reassured her. It was a lie which seemed to be about to come true. Despite her hesitation, the grip on his sleeve did not slacken. She was very scared. Without a word, she drew him up the path into the house, and its dark hall swallowed him as he reflexively closed the door. Whatever had happened was not for the public.

The doors off the hall were open. In the front room, yellow light from the street glinted on the tinsel of the tree, a dark shape at the window. There was a cairn of presents at its foot. The kitchen's metal gleamed quietly and expectantly. The fridge began to hum, then thought better of it with a soft click. The upstairs landing was dim, but the corner of a nursery night-light was visible in a room beyond, and there was the mutter of a child dreaming.

The door at the end of the hall was closed. From it there came the noise of a television. It was a war-film. You could hear the shooting, the explosions, the racket of aircraft-, lorry-, tank-engines, the roar of men trying to make themselves heard. Whenever the volume dropped a little, there was the sound of a man sobbing and the low voice of another man trying to comfort him. The woman stood still, obviously unwilling to step back into a horror which she had left behind. As the door-handle moved, she turned to Warnby, burying her face against his chest, trembling uncontrollably.

Through the door came an ordinary soldier, his uniform a little disordered, some dark stains around his wrists and on one knee.

'The bleeding's stopped,' he began. Then he realised there was someone else present. 'Captain?' he said in a questioning tone, not sure what was going on.

'I'm Doctor Waring's deputy.'

He seemed reassured. 'Yes, sir. I was just telling Eileen - Mrs Jenkins - there's been a bit of an accident, and - well, I'm supposed to be on guard duty in three quarters of an hour's time, and I can't really stay much longer - '

'Why don't I go through and see for myself what's happened?' asked Warnby, sliding past the soldier. Mrs Jenkins somehow detached herself from his arm as he went through the door. From behind, the soldier's voice continued, 'As I was saying, sir, the bleeding's stopped, but there seems to be something in the wound. I can't get it out.'

Warnby looked around the room. A tasteless table-lamp lit one end of it, where there was a kind of bar, stocked with the flashier and cheaper liqueurs, British sherry, cans of lager and some diet soft-drinks. The white rum bottle was out and nearly empty. The plastic holders from at least three four-packs were draped over the bar as well, and discarded cans nestled beside the settee. On the settee itself there was another soldier, with his back to Warnby, a hefty, greasily dark-haired man, clutching his stained left arm and rocking to and fro in a state of shock, his head bowed. In front of him, the television unrolled its images of noisy destruction. Aeroplanes screamed through the sky. Bullets spat out puffs of dust. People fell. Buildings exploded. Dirt- and blood-caked faces filled the screen, glimpsed through barbed wire and rubble. To the right, one door of the french windows was open, with three or four of the small panes smashed and glass on the carpet. On the settee beside the rocking soldier there was a polaroid camera and various pictures taken by it that very evening, Warnby assumed. Nothing terrible, he thought as he glanced at them. Just healthily sexual - ordinary horseplay, to judge by the ones he could see, though there was one by the camera face down.

'Let me have a look at it,' he said. 'I'm a doctor.'

Automatically, somnambulistically, with complete trust, the wounded soldier put out his arm. Warnby parted the ripped cloth and inspected the torn flesh.

'You're right,' he said to the man who had appeared behind him, and had his arm round Eileen Jenkins to comfort her. 'There is something in here. You did well to stop the bleeding.'

'I did the First Aid course last year.'

Warnby was wondering how on earth he was going to get out whatever it was in the wound. Ask for the eyebrow tweezers? he thought. Then he was aware of the weight in the pocket of his great-coat. A little pouch of instruments - what's a doctor without his instruments? - Waring had earnt himself a good dinner by that bit of thoughtfulness.

'Come and get hold of him, would you? It may hurt when I get this out, and I don't want him jumping around.' The woman, obviously still in shock, cuddled herself with passionate and shuddering intensity.

'How did it happen?' asked Warnby as he sorted through the little pouch for what he wanted. 'Put his hand through the door, did he, after one too many?'

'No. No, it was nothing like that.'

'He went outside,' said Mrs Jenkins, coming closer, ' just for a moment, he was very keen on watching the film, you know, a war-film and that, only the cans were a bit lively and I said I wasn't going to have any more mess on the walls and curtains, so he went outside to open the next one, and just as well he did, because it sprayed up in a big fountain, all over the garden.'

Would it come, would it come? No, it would not.

'Grit your teeth, old lad, I'm going to squeeze a little, just to ease it out. So what happened then?'

'He came back in and sat down. I was over at the bar with Eileen - Mrs Jenkins - and then we all saw something at the french windows. I - I took a photo of it, seeing as I had the camera to hand.'

'Really?' Warnby was scarcely listening, his mind and muscles absorbed in the removal of this tenacious fragment. He was very grateful his patient had had so much to drink, since otherwise his roars would have had the bobbles off the Christmas trees up and down the street. 'I'll have a look in a second,' he said, as he felt the tweezers close on something hard. Gingerly he pulled at it, ignoring the oozing blood that was slowly seeping up.

'Well, whatever it was broke in, and seemed to go for Brian here, but he put up one arm and got him with his bayonet.'

'What?' queried Warnby, still desperate to maintain contact with the elusive something hidden in the tissue of the arm.

'Yes, well, he's always been very, very quick, Brian, at combat - and, well, he had the bayonet with him, of course, because we were going on duty - '

'Bayonet. Where's my bayonet?'

These were the first words he had spoken. They had the dull obsessiveness of drunken utterance. He kept on repeating them, not urgently but regularly, as if, in the mists of pain and drink, he had to have something to cling on to.

'He's got to get it back, see, because otherwise he'll be on a charge.'

'Well, he won't be on guard tonight, that's for sure.' Warnby had it now, the thin sliver caught between the probing fingers of the tweezers. Slowly he eased it up through the layers of flesh which subsided away from it. Then it was out, still disguised by the tweezers' clutch.

'Just put some antiseptic on the wound, will you? Anything'll do. Then bandage him up and get him off to bed. He'll have a stiff arm for a week or so, but there's no real damage done, beyond bruising.' Warnby walked over to the light and held his hands out under it, as if washing them in a flow of luminescence. He relaxed his grip on the tweezers and a greenish sliver of bronze, some two inches long, dropped into his open left palm.

'Do you want to see the photo?' The soldier was at his shoulder, leaning towards the light, obviously curious, but reticent. He had left out the 'sir' as if there were comradeship between them now.

'Yes,' said Warnby, pocketing what had come out of the wound, and looking round for something to wipe the tweezers on before he put them away. On the television, the credits were rolling over a striding military march. A fluttering flag filled the screen.

The photograph was badly blurred with movement, but it showed the sword, and a kind of leather helmet that must have long since rotted away. The face was still skull-like in its leanness. The aggression and the vulnerability belonged to life as well as death.

'My bayonet. I want my bayonet,' came Brian's voice from the settee, where Mrs Jenkins was still calming and binding him. A wind from the garden moved the open french window slightly, and they all looked at it in anticipation.

'Shut it,' said Warnby, ' and keep him warm. He's in shock.' He had a great longing to get away from the house, to get out into the open darkness. He rattled the tweezers back into the pouch and slipped it into his pocket.

'I'll be off now. Happy Christmas. Tell him to go to the M.O. in the morning - after church parade would be a good time.' He nodded curtly and made his way along the darkened hall. Upstairs, the child was sound asleep again, and the illuminated nursery characters peeped round the edge of the landing with their illusory comfort and promise of an ordered world. He paused at the front door, feeling he had to say something else, but not sure what. Mrs Jenkins and the soldier were together behind him, waiting for some reassurance to emerge from his uniformed authority. This time, the door at the far end of the corridor was ajar, and from it there came the distant plea: 'I want my bayonet.' Warnby backed out on to the front step, where he knew they would not be able to see into his eyes.

'Tell him - he can pick up a bayonet tomorrow from the M.O. - After all - what's a warrior without his weapon?'

He turned on his heel, with what he assumed to be a military bearing, and marched stiffly away along the line of yellow street-lamps, flickering in and out of light and shade, until the darkness took him.

Mike Rogers 21st August 1987

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