Bertram produced the whiskey, but raised his eyebrows when Digby poured out half a glass and drank it like water.
“I say! That’s a stiff dose, isn’t it?”
The boy said it was nothing. He had got into the habit of it. Everybody drank like a fish in his crowd. Nothing else to do in the old barracks. It was rather encouraged by the “Officer commanding.” Even the men could drink as much as they liked before going out on search parties and raids. It made ’em a bit fierce and kept up their spirits. Otherwise they would be too easy with the Irish, especially the Irish girls, who were damn pretty, many of them.
It wasn’t a pleasant thing to search girls’ bedrooms at night. At night? Yes, of course. All search parties went out at night, drew a cordon round certain streets, then banged at the doors, or bashed them in, while an officer, with a sergeant and five men or so, went through the house looking for rebels, and fellows on the run, concealed arms, and all that.
A rotten job for a gentleman.
One night he had a lot of trouble with his men. They routed out three girls in their night-shirts—ladies, too, and amazingly pretty—and started mucking about with them. One girl had her night-shirt torn off, and screamed enough to pull the house down. It was the sergeant’s fault. He was drunk that night, and beastly amorous. Digby had threatened to shoot him, and did actually knock down one of the men. That sobered them up, and they left the girls alone, but it made them savage, and in the next house they shot a young boy—just a kid—who tried to shut a door in their faces.
“Killed him?” asked Bertram in a strangled voice. This narrative made his blood feel like boiling lead. Hot and cold waves passed up his spine to the top of his scalp.
“Oh, Lord, yes! Plugged through the head.”
On another night there had been a hell of a scene. They had run to earth a young rebel in Collin’s command. He had been in the ambush at Black Rock where five Scotties had been killed. O’Callaghan by name. His mother and sister had hidden him in a linen cupboard. Of course, they found that pretty quick, but the sister stood between his men and the cupboard, with a red-hot poker, and threatened to burn the eyes out of the first man who tried to pass her. The sergeant drew his revolver, but the mother flung herself at him and he had to shoot her. Then the sister attacked, and one of his fellows ran her through with a bayonet, to save himself from the red-hot poker. What else could he do?
It was worse when the women started screaming and praying round their men folk. It put the fellows’ nerves on edge. Their nerves were always on edge. They couldn’t walk a yard without the chance of getting a sniper’s bullet in the brain, or being plugged in the back of the head by some fellow who had just passed, in a busy street, or a lonely lane. That sort of thing gave a man the jim-jams. It was worse than real war, he imagined.