The Boy David

Nominated for a 2026 Pushcart Prize

This excerpt comes from Merely Players, a novel loosely based on the life of the author’s grandfather, Cuthbert Taylor. Cuthbert, an actor in civilian life, finds himself a British Army squad sergeant in the Machine Gun Corps on the Western Front in France. The Machine Gun Corps was known by the nicknames The Suicide Club and The Boy David (on account it was a small unit that punched well above its weight).

It was July 1916. We had been in the line for over a week and were heading to the rear for some rest. Our battalion was in at the start of the Somme; the big push towards Thiepval, a German stronghold perched above the Somme valley; one of ten machine gun teams ordered forward in darkness, dragging a million rounds between us. Just before dawn, the artillery stopped and the machine guns gave indirect fire, wearing the enemy down, “softening them up,” they said. Twelve hours non-stop we laid down a barrage. The guns got white hot. When the cooling-water ran out, we used our drinking water; when that ran out we tipped our piss-tins in to stop them seizing up. Then the piss ran out.

We came back with just two hundred and fifty rounds between the lot of us. Sgt Dean’s squad each got a five franc prize for firing the most: 120,000 rounds from one gun.

Gerry wasn’t softened up, of course, because their dugouts were much deeper and stronger than the brass had thought. He pushed back. Orders came to withdraw. We were last out, covering the retreat.

Next evening we were relieved by the West Surreys. We made our way back towards the village of Auchonvillers; Ocean Villas we used to call it. We were the walking dead. At least we were moving, not like the boys left up on that chalk down, slumped like they’re dozing, or draped like broken puppets on the wire. Or, in the case of one young Guards officer, sitting eerily erect against a shattered tree, a look of polite surprise on his face, his monocle still wedged in his eye socket.

We came into the village at two in the morning. The eastern sky was light, not yet with the dawn, but with the evil flicker of guns and a low grumbling rumble for all the world like a stage effect. The boys bedded down wrapped in the sweet apple smell of an old cider barn. After a brew and a smoke, most dropped off, but one or two of us were too tired, or vexed by the high-pitched whine in our battered eardrums to sleep.

We became aware of him, just beyond the firelight, silhouetted by the erratic glare of howitzers, like a figure in a moving picture. All around his head a manic halo flickered and flashed.

Brummy Wilson was the first to react. “Allay! Toot Sweet!” he shouted. “Boogger Off!”

But the lad just stood there. Staring. He took two steps towards us. He was about twelve years old, and thin.

“Here boy,” I said, “come nearer the fire.”

He didn’t move. I put a spoonful of warmed Maconochie into a mess tin and held it out .

“Hungry?”

At first he stood stock still.

“Come on,” I said, beckoning him. “Viande et veg, traybon.”

He glanced at the meat and veg concoction, the color of dog vomit. But hunger won.

He started towards me and was reaching for the dixie when his legs buckled. Ernie scrambled to his feet, scooped the boy up and wrapped him in a blanket.

“Good Lord, Sarge,” he said to me. “He’s nowt but skin and bone. The poor lad’s not et in weeks by the feel of ‘im.”

We spoon-fed the Maconochie into him, washed down with a cup of good army char. He ate slow and steady, eyes darting this way and that, keeping tabs on us, all the while.

“Parley vouze Longlais?” I asked.

He stared at me wordlessly.

“Ooze onk votre maman and papa? Et vouze perdoo?”

No response.

Ernie said, “Like as not, ‘e’ll find his tongue when e’s ‘ad a bit shut-eye, like. Me own bairns go like that, when they’re needing their kip. Come on, bonnie lad, let’s get you settled.” He carried the little mite and laid him gently on a pile of old tarpaulins.

Throughout the night our guns pounded the German positions. The day dawned with a clear sky. Somewhere to the West, the strains of the Seaforths’ regimental march, Cabar Feidh, drifted on the breeze, meandering among the riverside alders and willows, snaking along the sluggish dubs and pools of the Somme. The smoke of a thousand, thousand explosions clouded the ridge to the north. Half an hour after dawn, the rumble and crash of the big guns stopped in an instant. The world held its breath, until, minutes later, the silence was broken by the pop, pop, pop of trench mortars; the rattle of machine guns and rifles.

A thousand feet above Thiepval Ridge a trio of our spotter planes droned; dozy bumble bees dodging the flak that burst, orange and black, like deadly Marigold blossoms. Our crew looked at each other but said nothing. Another attack. Poor fuckers! I looked over to check on the boy, but he’d gone.

“Our little visitor’s done a bunk,” I said. “Gone to scrounge off another squad, no doubt.”

Cook fried up some bacon, and we breakfasted on butties and coffee. We were having a smoke when Ernie tapped me on the knee and nodded towards the open doorway. The boy stood in the low sunlight with the blanket slung around his shoulders. I felt a sense of comfort that he had not deserted us, that this feral creature valued something, even our savage company.

“Come on, boy. Veney,” I said.

He approached gingerly and took the offered mug. He gazed at us over the rim as he drank his coffee, perched on the edge of a cider press.

The orderly sergeant appeared with orders.

“We’ve to move two miles south: a farm will be our billet for a couple of weeks,” he told us.

“What about the lad, Sarge?” Ernie asked. “Canna leave ‘im ‘ere, like. That’d no be reet, surely.”

Wilson butted in: “Christ, what are we? Bleedin nursemaids? Send him over by, to the Alleymans and see ‘ow they treat him. Oy’ll wager the bloody barbarians stick ‘im on a spit and greell ‘im, not feed ‘im their own bloody rations.”

“That’s enough, Corporal Wilson,” I said. “He’s done no harm. He can bide with us until we find his parents.”

I lifted the boy onto the top of a limber. He stank! We’d burn his clothes and get him a bath when we’re settled; we’d enough lice of our own without importing more.

All the while as we marched south along the ramrod-straight road through waist-high golden wheat, by orchards dotted with small green apples, never a word did the boy utter; not in English, French, German, or pure Jabberwocky. Not ever one word.

“We’ll cry the loon Davie,” said George Buick, the ploughman from Brechin. “Cos we’re the Boy David, are we no? Of course we are: fechtin,’ aye wrastlin’ the giant Goliath. We’re no affy muckle, but we’re pouerfu.’ That’s us! MGC, the newest, and the brawest unit in the hale army.”

And Geordie, who was six foot three and strong as a bullock, hefted the lad in his arms like a babe. Tam was known as gentle Geordie in the squad—as placid as a Clydesdale plough horse. But the events in the last week had unsettled him. It was not that he was windy, he didn’t show any fear, but there was a bitter edge to him that was even more worrying. He whipped a hip flask from his back pocket and unscrewed the top with his teeth and splashed a drop onto the boy’s forehead.

“With this fine French brandy filched from a deid Bosche Kapitän—no he werna quite deid, truth to tell, I do fucking baptize thee, Dumb Davie, in the name of the hooring King and the cunting war cabinet and induct you into the illustrious company of the Suicide Club, otherwise known as ‘The Boy David,’ otherwise ‘Emma Gee,’ and for as long as we both shall live, you will protect us from the wrath of the Alleyman, in the name of Our Father who is in Leuven, Harold be Thy name.”

The boy stared at Geordie like he was the very devil. Geordie took a long swig from the flask and let the boy fall to the ground. Davie scuttled across the floor like a spider and hid beneath the table. Tam stood erect, held high the hip flask and declared, ‘To the death of all Germans and to the triumph of His Imperial fucking Majesty’s invincible army.” He held out the flask to the men standing in a knot around him, but they stuck their hands in their pockets and shuffled off in the direction of the estaminet.

Yes, I should have reported Geordie for his traitorous, blasphemous rant, but something made me believe in Tam’s perverse blessing on the boy; as if there was some outrageous virtue in it that might just bring us good, when all our planning, training, obedience and devotion could be blown away by a six-ounce bullet, or half a pound of high explosive hurled into the void by an enemy who was as ardent an adherent of his own creed as revealed by his masters as we were to our own.

Keesh

Anyhow, we christened the laddie “dumb Davie.” Davie for short. Pretty soon he began to make himself useful. He’d polish the boys” buttons, mend torn uniforms, fetch water and firewood, or brush down the horses. At night he’d curl up beneath the gun limber. Time, in war, is either squashed into the smallest space you could imagine or drawn out beyond human endurance. After a couple of days, it seemed that there’d never been a time Davie hadn’t been around. He was part of the furniture. The officers turned a blind eye, and he was cute enough to make himself scarce if top brass put in an appearance, though that didn’t happen often.

When Wilson came back from three days leave, he brought Davie a little khaki cap. “If youm goin to stick around, youm might as well look the part,” he said, and jammed the hat on his head. With his cut-down army breeches, an old singlet, and the cap perched on his cropped head, he was as proud as punch. Ernie found a spare MGC badge—the crossed Vickers guns with the crown atop—pinned it on the cap, and saluted Davie. The boy pulled back his shoulders and tears streamed down his face. And a couple of the lads had a little cough and found they had something in their eye. The next morning Davie presented Wilson with a little paper parcel. Inside was a silk handkerchief embroidered with Souvenir de France and the crossed Union Jack and the French Tricolor. Where he had filched that from, I neither knew nor cared.

Our billet was on the edge of the farm belonging to a Madame Calvert. She ran it with her teenage daughter and an old man—her father-in-law, I think. The younger men were all at the front, of course. She was a good enough sort and didn’t take the mickey when it came to charging us for bread and eggs. And she kept some decent “van blang” that we drank in the estaminet she knocked up, with tree stumps for seats and barrels for tables. But the best was her cider; strawberry blond and beautiful, like bottled sunshine. She kept it fresh and cool in her cellar.

“Le plus bon cidre, du terroir,” she’d tell us, and Lieutenant Black would toast her and say: “Bien sur, Madame.” He’d send his orderlies down before dinner from the officers’ billet in the old manor house for half a dozen jars of the stuff plus four bottles of Calvados for good measure.

Now, Davie was looked after pretty well by our lads, even though a soldier guards his scran pretty close, being as he doesn’t know where the next bite is coming from. Like most boys his age, Davie’s belly was always empty. One morning I was passing the farmyard headed down to the little stream to catch a glimpse of the kingfisher by the willows. As I passed the farmhouse there was a monstrous scream followed by a torrent of French. I didn’t need to be told Mme Calvert was not a happy lady.

“Where ees ce mechant garcon?” she demanded of me. “’E ‘ave took my beautiful keesh from the kitchen table since just one minute. And now”—she threw her hands in the air—“disparu!”

Now, I had no idea what a “keesh” is, but I got the picture. “The laddie’s aye hungry, Missus,” I said.

“We are all ‘ungry,” she wails, “tous les jours, j’ai faim. He must be punished. Bring ‘im to me!”

I reckoned that we needed to keep Madame sweet, on account we were on her land and she treated us decent. So, I went on the hunt for Davie. I found him perched on an up-turned milk churn. He had a platoon’s worth of paired boots ranged on a tarpaulin before him, and he cuffed away at one clasped between his scrawny knees. Wilson was sat on the edge of the horse trough, cooling his feet in the water. Davie didn’t raise his head. Clearly, his polishing needed his full attention.

“What’s up, Sarge?” asked Wilson.

I looked at Davie and said, “Well, Corporal, there’s been a theft from the kitchen, and I’m thinking I’m looking at the prime suspect.”

“The lad’s been here the whole morning, Sarge. Look at all them boots ‘ees cleaned. I’ll tell youm, ‘e’s never your culprit.”

Now there were a lot of liars in the army, and Wilson was one of the best. So, I ignored him, allowing for the fact that he was acting out of kindness.

“Come here, young Davie,” I said.

He carried on, swiping the brush to and fro.

I raised my voice. “Here! Now!”

He slowly put down the boot and brush and walked towards me.

“A little bird tells me you’ve got sticky fingers, Davie, my lad.”

The boy looks at his hand, with a puzzled look. Oh, he knew a few words of English alright.

“Vous avez volant something from Madame,” I say. “Oo…eh… le…keesh?”

He stared at the ground.

“One last chance, laddie. Where’s it gone, or you’ll get your marching orders.” But where we’d send him, God alone knew.

“Give the lad a break,” said Wilson. “Which on us an’t swiped ummat out our Ma’s kitchen before now?”

“You’ve changed your tune, Corporal,” I said, taking hold of the boy’s collar. “Madame’s not his Ma, and we’re here because of her good will. I’ll not have him shitting in our nest, no matter how much he thinks he’s one of us now.”

When I arrived with the miscreant, Madame was leaning against the farmhouse door jamb, a long wooden spoon in her grasp.

“Où est mon quiche?” she asked without preamble.

Davie stared at the ground and pointed to his belly.

“The boy’s very sorry, Madame…Desollay.”

“Ow would you know?” she said. “This one says nothing. Rien! So he cannot be blamed. I know his sort.” Turning to Davie she said: “Laisse tomber votre culotte.” He dropped his britches and bent over as though it were a matter of routine.

She threw the wooden spoon into the sink and took a carpet beater from its hook on the wall.

There was no holding Madame. She let fly with the beater, not letting up until his ass was as red as her prize cockerel’s comb. And all the while there was not a sound from Davie; not a single tear shed.

I took him back to the billet. He could barely walk, his lip a-tremble. Wilson filled a bucket from the pump, soaked a bandage and offered it to the boy who slid it down the back of his shorts.

Ernie produced two bottles of Cognac, and we sat and had a smoke and a drink as the sun set over the cornfield. Davie slunk off towards the hut where we stored our equipment. I heard a loud clatter and knew too well that it was the sound of a stack of rifles collapsing. Wilson was ahead of me. He leaped up and ran towards the hut.

“Him ‘as took a rifle,” he shouted. We all looked up to catch a glimpse of Davie trotting towards the farmhouse, a Lee-Enfield clutched diagonally across his chest. Davie disappeared around the corner of the barn. Wilson sprinted to the corner, grabbed a lump of firewood from the log pile and launched it in one smooth movement after Davie. There was a yell like an angry seagull.

Wilson returned with Davie’s neck gripped in his right hand, and the other holding the rifle.

“Ee didn’t reckon with me being champion bowler for Warwickshire, three seasons straight,” he said with a grin. “No ‘arm done, I landed him one between the shoulder blades. “Ee won’t be bugging Madame anymore. This rifle landed in the midden. Youm can bloody clean it ya little thieving bastard.”

So, that was Davie well and truly chastened. Or, so I thought.

The next day we got orders to move East through Albert towards Gonnecourt. We spent most of the day packing up and, although he was moving gingerly, Davie did his bit loading the ammo carts and limbers. As the light faded, we got into order for the march.

“All present and correct,” I reported to Lt Black.

“Where’s that young mascot of yours?” Black asked.

He was right, Davie was nowhere to be seen.

“We move out in an hour,” said the Lieutenant.

Just time for a quick brew, so Wilson set to. Next thing, there was a god-almighty racket from the farmhouse. I headed over to investigate. What’s the little rascal done this time?

“Sale mechant enfant impie!”

“Not another keesh?” I asked.

“Regardez, regardez,” she shouted, and pulled me towards the cellar steps. “Descendez.”

A waft of cider greeted me. I reached the bottom in darkness and stepped in, ankle-deep in a softly hissing liquid. I unclipped my torch and swung the beam around. The three barrels were set on their trestles, as before, but each of the taps was open and a stream of cider trickled into an amber pool. Davie!

I climbed back up to where Madame leant against the wall, face buried in her meaty forearm, her chest heaving. “Ah, merde,” she sobbed.

This was serious. I knew how little the French farmers had. Some made a reasonable amount from the Tommies, but who knew when Gerry was going to advance and destroy the work of a lifetime. Couldn’t blame them for putting a bit by against that dreaded day.

“Madame, Madame. I am so sorry. I will repay; we will repay. Sava?”

I organized a quick whip round, but it was nowhere near enough. So, our section cook dug out some dixies, a carving knife with a broken handle, and three tins of plum and apple jam as part of the peace offering.

This calmed her down and stopped her reporting Davie to the Battalion Commander. Anyway, the cook would get replacements by filing a claim for loss of the items through enemy action. One thing about this war, everything was properly accounted for. Even when men were losing their heads, or their limbs, the army could keep track of every mess kit pot, tin of jam, uniform, bayonet and rifle. When we were pinned down under fire for thirty-six hours in a salient south of Ypres, about to expire from fear and exhaustion, before we could withdraw, the relief company had to sign a chitty to take responsibility for the remaining ammo.

Although Davie had seriously blotted his copybook with Mme Clavert and put us to a lot of bother, he was our rascal and we allowed him to stay after he made it up by taking on extra fatigues. As for Madam, we were soon out of her hair as we were ordered north-west back towards the front.

The rain fell for three days solid, turning the road into a soup of mud. We stared gloomily at the hypnotic motion of the mules’ backsides, up to their fetlocks in brown slurry, hauling the limbers on and on. The wheels sloshed through the mud, now and then tilting in a sickening lurch, as they plumbed a seemingly bottomless pothole. Davie clung like a monkey on top of an ammo box, his clothes plastered to his skin. Then, crash! The nearside wheel sank, and he skited off. He flailed around frantically feeling for a foothold in the cloying gloop. Wilson, who was driving, called out: “Davie!”

A motor ambulance had been following closely behind our unit for five miles. The driver, half asleep, failed to react when Davie landed right in front of his left wheel. Davie tried to regain his footing, but the mud sucked at his calves, sapping his strength. Felled by the vehicle’s front mud-guard, the lad was enveloped by the greenish slime, and the wheel rode over his submerged body.

The column stopped, triggering an unholy din of honking horns and curses. Wilson leapt down and hauled the boy from beneath the wheels, slung his limp body over his shoulder, and laid him on the grass verge. He pulled his souvenir handkerchief from his pocket and set about wiping mud from the laddie’s eyes, his mouth, his nose; but there was no breath. Davie’s rib-cage was crushed like an empty tin can. Our squad had doubled back and formed a circle around the squatting Wilson. Davie was reduced to a bag of bones, so small, so small; his broken body, skinny arms a akimbo, splayed across Wilson’s beefy thighs.

“That warn’t fair, that warn’t. The poor lad ain’t done nothing. That warn’t fair.” Tears streaked the mud-spattered cheeks of the six-foot-five leg-spinner.

A Military Police corporal appeared from our rear blowing his whistle fit to burst. “Get that fucking limber moving!” he bellowed, “You’re holding up the whole fucking column.”

Wilson grabbed the halter of the leading mule and backed the team a couple of yards clear of Davie’s corpse. I grabbed the boy under the armpits, Wilson grabbed the ankles, and we swung him onto the top of the limber. The “Jack” Corporal saw what was going on, removed his whistle from his mouth and stepped back in embarrassment.

“Alright, I see your problem. Take your time, lads. We’ll get things moving once you’re done.” He walked back towards the rear of the column, and the blaring horns gradually subsided.

“Carry on, we can get off the road at that farmyard,” I said, pointing to the buildings a quarter of a mile ahead. Wilson flicked the reins and the mule team dragged the limber forward, with another stomach-churning lurch into the pot-hole. I stretched out my hand and just managed to catch Davie’s tunic, stopping him slipping off and into the path of a motorcycle that was edging gingerly past us.

We turned into the farmyard, leaving the column to creep on towards the front. The roofless barn offered some shelter from the nagging wind. Three of the farmhouse walls had been taken out by a shell, and the roof sagged precariously above the drunkenly leaning remaining wall. I detailed Buick and Catchpole to find a bit of ground out of sight of the road for a grave, while Wilson and I cut up a bit of tarpaulin to wrap him in. Ernie clambered into the ruined house, returning with two pieces of skirting board which he nailed together to make a cross. Someone made a brew and we ate bread that we had saved from breakfast.

“Alright lads,” I said rising and swilling the dregs of my tea, “let’s get it done.”

We had buried comrades in the past year or so on a regular basis, and always it was sad, of course. But this, this was the worst. That skinny little lad had become our talisman. Even though he couldn’t speak, his untold story was imagined differently by each member of our little band of men, slaves to our Vickers gun, the “queen of the battlefield,” which we had to care for and nurture and cosset more than you would a babe in arms. And in the war diaries when a gun was lost or damaged, that would be recorded alongside the Officers and Other Ranks that were noted down and added to the great tally without end. The Vickers protected us from waves of feldgrau figures trying to overrun us and take our lives; and they’d do this by ending the lives of other men; other sons, brothers, husbands and fathers.

Davie lay inert on the limber. He had been living proof that the human spirit could and would survive, kick back even through unspeakable horror and pain. What was he to us? The son left behind, or your own youthful self, lost the day you stood on the firing step and shat your breeks, or looked on your first corpse and passed on by, or when you looked in the eyes of another boy in a different colored uniform and knew you had to bring about his end; to others, Davie was the ghost of a future yet unlived, a future that might never be lived. For me, he was someone to care for, even in our haphazard, partial way, not knowing anything of his past, only an imagining of what he might have been through. And maybe your feeling for this speechless and nameless little French boy stood for feelings denied; feelings for the tiny figures in grey you watched tumble like tinplate cut-outs in the fairground shooting gallery; or our own chaps in long wavey lines stretching as far as you could see: a khaki wave undulating across the killing fields that would be forever stained with their blood.

Ernie and Tam carried their light burden around the corner of the farmhouse to a deserted chicken run. The ground was so wet that spades cleaved the mud like parting a plate of porridge, whenever there was something like a hole, the saturated soil would inundate it. In the end they laid the tarpaulin down on the mud and pushed it below the surface with a trenching tool. Wilson spread a spade-full of cement-like slurry on top of the slight hump that was Davie. A sump, stinking of chicken shit, not a grave.

“Mind if I say a few words Sarge? I were fond of the lad,” said Wilson.

“Be my guest, Corporal.”

Wilson cleared his throat and looked around the little burial party. He started to speak with a croak, then cleared his throat, and started again with more projection to get over the rumble and swish of the column, still grinding on a hundred yards to our rear, and the patter of the rain dripping from our slick ponchos into ankle-deep pools.

“We none of us knew where this lad come from. We none of us knew ‘is name. But we took ‘im in ‘cos we seen summat of us in ‘im. Ee hadna the words to tell us what he seen, or what ‘e thought, and we understood that, ‘cos neither could we tell what we’ve been through, nor, as like, ever will. But Davie—as we called him, though like as not weren’t his given name—give us ‘ope. ‘Ope that no matter how bad it gets, yer can still get on. Yeah, still get on…”

A strange, strangled hiccup came from Wilson’s gullet, so I stepped forward and said, “Well done, Corporal. Well said, man.”

I placed my hand on his shoulder. Wilson tossed Davie’s cap, with its MGC badge onto the mud where his little body lay.

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