Whatever Happened to Corporal Cuckoo

By Gerald Kersh

Several thousand officers and privates of the U. S. Army who fought in Europe in World War II can bear witness to certain basic facts in this otherwise incredible story.
Let me refresh my witnesses’ memories:

The Cunard White Star liner Queen Mary sailed from Greenock, at the mouth of the river Clyde, on July 6th, 1945, bound for New York, packed tight with passengers.
No one who made that voyage can have forgotten it: there were fourteen thousand men aboard; a few ladies; and one dog. The dog was a gentle, intelligent German shepherd, saved from slow and painful death by a young American officer in Holland. I was told that this brave animal, exhausted, and weak with hunger, had tried to jump over a high barbed-wire fence, and had got caught in the barbs on the top strand, where it hung for days, unable to go forward or backward. The young officer helped it down, and so the dog fell in love with the man, and the man fell in love with the dog. Pets are not allowed on troopships. Still, the young officer managed to get his dog on board. Rumor has it that his entire com­pany swore that they would not return to the United States without the dog, so that the authorities were per­suaded to stretch a point, just for once; this is what Kipling meant when he referred to The Power Of The Dog. Everyone who sailed on the Queen Mary from Greenock on July 6th, 1954, remembers that dog. It came aboard in a deplorable state, arching its bedraggled back to ease its poor injured stomach, and when you stroked it, you felt its skeleton under the sickly, staring coat. After about three days of affectionate care—half a hundred strong hungry men begged or stole bits of meat for its sake—the dog began to recover. By July 11th, when the Queen Mary docked in New York, the dog was taking a dog’s interest in a soft rubber ball with which several officers were playing on the sun deck.

I bring all this back into memory to prove that I was there, as a war correspondent, on my way to the Pacific. Since I was wearing battledress and a beard, I also must have been conspicuous, that voyage. And the secret school of illicit crapshooters must remember me with nostalgic affection: I arrived in New York with exactly fifteen cents, and had to borrow five dollars from an amiable Congre­gationalist minister named John Smith, who also will testify to the fact that I was on board. If further evidence were needed, a lady nurse, Lieutenant Grace Dimichele, of Vermont, took my photograph as we came into port.
But in the excitement of that tremendous moment, when thousands of men were struggling and jostling, laughing and crying, and snapping cameras at the New York skyline, which is the most beautiful in the world, I lost Corporal Cuckoo. I have made exhaustive inquiries as to his whereabouts, but that extraordinary man had dis­appeared like a puff of smoke.

Surely, there must be scores of men who retain some memory of Cuckoo, whom they must have seen hundreds and hundreds of times on the Queen Mary between July 6th and July 11th, 1945?

He was a light-haired man of medium height, but he must have weighed at least a hundred and ninety pounds, for he was ponderously built, and had enormously heavy bones. I beg my fellow passengers to remember, if they can. He had watery eyes of greenish-gray, and limped a little on his right leg. His teeth were powerful—large, square and slightly protruding; but generally he kept them covered with his thick, curiously wrinkled lips. People in general are unobservant, I know, but no one who saw Corporal Cuckoo could fail to remember his scars. There was a frightful indentation in his skull, between his left eyebrow and his right ear. When I first noticed him, I remembered an ax murder at which I shuddered many years ago when I was a crime reporter. He must have an extraordinary constitution if he lives to walk around with a scar like that, I thought. His chin and throat were puckered scar tissue such as marks the place where flesh has been badly burned and well healed. Half of his right ear was missing and close by there was another scar, from cheekbone to mastoid. The back of his right hand appeared to have been hacked with a knife —I counted at least four formidable cuts, all old and white and deep. He conveyed this impression: that a long time ago, a number of people had got together to butcher him with hatchets, sabers, and knives, and that in spite of their most determined efforts he had survived. For all his scars were old. Yet the man was young—not more than thirty-five, as I guessed.

He filled me with a burning curiosity. One of you must remember him! He went about, surly and unsociable, smoking cigarettes which he never took out of his mouth—he smoked them down and spat the ends out only when the fire touched his lips. That, I thought, must be why his eyes are so watery. He moped about, thinking, or brooding. He was particularly addicted to loitering on the stairs and lurking in dark corners. I made tentative in­quiries about him around the decks; but just then everyone was passionately interested in an officer who looked like Spencer Tracy. But in the end I found out for myself.

Liquor, also, was prohibited on troopships. Having been warned of this, I took the precaution of smuggling some bottles of whiskey aboard. On the first day out I offered a drink to a captain of infantry. Before I knew where I was, I had made seventeen new friends who over­whelmed me with affability and asked for my autograph; so that on the second day, having thrown the last of the empty bottles out of the porthole, I was glad to sponge a drink off Mr. Charles Bennett, the Hollywood play­wright. (He, too, if his modesty permits, will bear witness that I am telling the truth.) He gave me a ginger-ale bottle full of good Scotch, which I concealed in the blouse of my battledress, not daring to let any of my friends know that I had it. Late in the evening of the third day, I withdrew to a quiet spot where there was a strong-enough diffusion of yellow light for me to read by. I intended to struggle again through some of the poems of Francois Villon, and to refresh myself at intervals with a spot of Mr. Bennett’s Scotch. It was hard to find an unoccupied place beyond locked doors on the Queen Mary at that time, but I found one. I was trying to read Villon’s Ballade of Good Counsel, which that great poet wrote in medieval underworld slang, which is all but incomprehensible even to erudite Frenchmen who have studied the argot of the period. I repeated the first two lines aloud, hoping to talk some new meaning into them:

Car ou soie porteur de bulles
Pipeur ou hasardeur de dez

Then a languid voice said: “Hello there! What do you know about it?”

I looked up and saw the somber, scarred face of the mysterious corporal half in and half out of the shadows. There was nothing to do but offer him a drink, for I had the bottle in my hand, and he was looking at it. He thanked me curtly, half emptied the little bottle in one gulp and returned it to me. “Pipeur ou hasardeur de dez,” he said, sighing. “That’s old stuff. Do you like it, sir?”
I said, “Very much indeed. What a great man Villon must have been. Who else could have used such debased language to such effect? Who else could have taken thieves’ patter—which is always ugly—and turned it into beautiful poetry?”
“You understand it, eh?” he asked, with a half laugh.
“I can’t say that I do,” I said, “but it certainly makes poetry.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Pipeur ou hasardeur de dez. You might as well try to make poetry out of something like this, `I don’t care if you run some Come-to-Jesus racket, or shoot craps … I’
Who are you? What’s the idea? It’s a hell of a long time since they allowed you to wear a beard in the army.”
“War correspondent,” I said. “My name is Kersh. You might as well finish this.”
He emptied the little bottle and said, “Thanks, Mr. Kersh. My name is Cuckoo.”
He threw himself down beside me, striking the deck like a sack of wet sand. “Yeahp … I think I will sit down,” he said. Then he took my little book in his frightfully scarred right hand, flapped it against his knee, and then gave it back to me. “Hasardeur de dez!” he said, in an out­landish accent.
“You read Villon, I see,” I said.
“No, I don’t. I’m not much of a reader.”
“But you speak French? Where did you learn it?” I asked.
“In France.”
“On your way home now?”
“I guess so.”
“You’re not sorry, I daresay.”
“No, I guess not.”
“You were in France?”
“Holland.”
“In the army long?”
“Quite a while.”
“Do you like it?”
“Sure. It’s all right, I guess. Where are you from?”
“London,” I said.
He said, “I’ve been there.”
“And where do you come from?” I asked.
“What? . . . Me? . . . Oh, from New York, I guess.”
“And how did you like London?” I asked.
“It’s improved.”
“Improved? I was afraid you’d seen it at a disadvan­tage, what with the bombing, and all that,” I said.
“Oh, London’s all right. I guess.”
“You should have been there before the war, Corporal Cuckoo.”
“I was there before the war.”
“You must have been very young then,” I said.
Corporal Cuckoo replied, “Not so damn young.”
I said, “I’m a war correspondent, and newspaperman, and so I have the right to ask impertinent questions. I might, you know, write a piece about you for my paper. What sort of name is Cuckoo? I’ve never heard it before.”
For the sake of appearances I had taken out a notebook and pencil. The corporal said, “My name isn’t really Cuckoo. It’s a French name, originally—Lecocu. You know what that means, don’t you?”
Somewhat embarrassed, I replied, “Well, if I remember rightly, a man who is cocu is a man whose wife has been unfaithful to him.”
“That’s right.”
“Have you any family?”
“No.”
“But you have been married?” I asked.
“Plenty.”
“What do you intend to do when you get back to the States, Corporal Cuckoo?”
He said, “Grow flowers, and keep bees and chickens.”
“All alone?”
“That’s right,” said Corporal Cuckoo.
“Flowers, bees and chickens! . . . What kind of flowers?”
I asked.
“Roses,” he said, without hesitation. Then he added, “Maybe a little later on I’ll go south.”
“What on earth for?” I asked.
“Turpentine.”
Corporal Cuckoo, I thought, must be insane. Thinking of this, it occurred to me that his brain might have been deranged by the wound that had left that awful scar on his head. I said, “They seem to have cut you up a bit, Corporal Cuckoo.”
“Yes, sir, a little bit here and there,” he said, chuckling. “Yeahp, I’ve taken plenty in my time.”
“So I should think, Corporal. The first time I saw you I was under the impression that you’d got caught up in some machinery, or something of the sort.”
“What do you mean, machinery?”
“Oh, no offense, Corporal, but those wounds on your head and face and neck haven’t the appearance of wounds such as you might get from any weapon of modern warfare…”
“Who said they were?” said Corporal Cuckoo, roughly. Then he filled his lungs with air, and blew out a great breath which ended in an exclamation: “Phoo-wow! What was that stuff you gave me to drink?”
“Good Scotch. Why?”
“It’s good all right. I didn’t ought to drink it. I’ve laid off the hard stuff for God knows how many years. It goes to my head. I didn’t ought to touch it.”
“Nobody asked you to empty a twelve-ounce ginger-ale bottle full of Scotch in two drinks,” I said resentfully.
“I’m sorry, mister. When we get to New York, I’ll buy you a whole bottle, if you like,” said Corporal Cuckoo, squinting as if his eyes hurt and running his fingers along the awful crevasse of that scar in his head.
I said, “That was a nasty one you got, up there.”
“What? This?” he said, carelessly striking the scar with the flat of a hard hand. “This? Nasty one? I’ll say it was a nasty one. Why, some of my brains came out. And look here—” He unbuttoned his shirt and pulled up his undershirt with his left hand, while he opened and lit a battered Zippo with his right. “Take a look at that.”
I cried out in astonishment. I had never seen a living body so incredibly mauled and mutilated. In the vacillat­ing light of the flame I saw black shadows bobbing and weaving in a sort of blasted wilderness of crags, chasms, canyons and pits. His torso was like a place laid waste by the wrath of God—burst asunder from below, scorched from above, shattered by thunderbolts, crushed by landslides, ravaged by hurricanes. Most of his ribs, on the left-hand side, must have been smashed into fragments no bigger than the last joint of a finger by some tremen­dously heavy object. The bones, miraculously, had knit to­gether again, so that there was a circle of hard, bony knobs rimming a deep indentation; in that light it reminded me of one of the dead volcanoes on the moon. Just under the sternum there was a dark hole, nearly three inches long, about half an inch wide, and hideously deep. I have seen such scars in the big muscles of a man’s thigh—but never in the region of the breastbone. “Good God, man, you must have been torn in two and put together again!” I said. Corporal Cuckoo merely laughed, and held his lighter so that I could see his body from stomach to hips. Between the strong muscles, just under the liver, there was an old scar into which, old and healed though it was, you might have laid three fingers. Cutting across this, another scar, more than half as deep but more than twelve inches long, curved away downward toward the groin on the left. Another appalling scar came up from somewhere below the buckle of his belt and ended in a deep triangular hole in the region of the diaphragm. And there were other scars—but the lighter went out, and Corporal Cuckoo buttoned up his shirt.
“Is that something?” he asked.
“Is that something!” I cried. “Why, good God, I’m no medical man, but I can see that the least of those wounds you’ve got down there ought to be enough to kill any man. How do you manage to be alive, Cuckoo? How is it possible?”
“You think you’ve seen something? Listen, you’ve seen nothing till you see my back. But never mind about that now.”
“Tell me,” I said, “how the devil did you come by all that? They’re old scars. You couldn’t have got them in this war—“
He slid down the knot of his tie, unbuttoned his collar, pulled his shirt aside, and said, dispassionately, “No. Look—this is all I got this time.” He pointed noncha­lantly to his throat. I counted five bullet scars in a cluster, spaced like the fingertips of a half-opened hand, at the base of the throat. “Light machine-gun,” he said.
“But this is impossible!” I said, while he readjusted his tie. “That little packet there must have cut one or two big arteries and smashed your spine to smithereens.”
“Sure it did,” said Corporal Cuckoo.
“And how old did you say you were?” I asked. Corporal Cuckoo replied, “Round about four hundred and thirty-eight.”
“Thirty-eight?”
“I said four hundred and thirty-eight.”
The man is mad, I thought. “Born 1907?” I asked.
“1507,” said Corporal Cuckoo, fingering the dent in his skull. Then he went on, half-dreamily. (How am I to describe his manner? It was repulsively compounded of thick stupidity, low cunning, anxiety, suspicion and sordid cal­culation—it made me remember a certain peasant who tried to sell me an American wristwatch near Saint Jacques in 1944. But Corporal Cuckoo talked American, at first leering at me in the dim light, and feeling his shirt as if to assure himself that all his scars were safely buttoned away.) He said, slowly, “Look . . . I’ll give you the outline. It’s no use you trying to sell the outline, see? You’re a newspaperman. Though you might know what the whole story would be worth, there’s no use you trying to sell what I’m giving you now, because you haven’t got a hope in hell. But I’ve got to get back to work, see? I want some dough.”
I said, “For roses, chickens, bees and turpentine?”
He hesitated, and then said, “Well, yes,” and rubbed his head again.
“Does it bother you?” I asked.
“Not if I don’t touch that stuff you gave me,” he replied, dreamily resentful.
“Where did you get that scar?” I asked.
“Battle of Turin,” he said.
“I don’t remember any Battle of Turin, Corporal Cuckoo. When was that?”
“Why, the Battle of Turin. I got this in the Pass of Suze.”
“You were wounded in the Pass of Suze at the Battle of Turin, is that right? When was that?” I asked. “In 1536 or 1537. King Francois sent us up against the Marquess de Guast. The enemy was holding the pass, but we broke through. That was my first smell of gunpowder.”
“You were there of course, Corporal Cuckoo?”
“Sure I was there. But I wasn’t a corporal then, and my name was not Cuckoo. They called me Lecocu. My real name was Lecoq. I came from Yvetot. I used to work for a man who made linen—Nicolas, the—”
Two or three minutes passed, while the corporal told me what he thought of Nicolas. Then, having come down curse by curse out of a red cloud of passion, he con­tinued: “… To cut it short, Denise ran off, and all the kids in the town were singing:
Lecoq, lecoq, lecoq,
Lecoq, lecoq, lecocu.
I got the hell out of it and joined the army…. I’m not giving you anything you can make anything of, see? This is the layout, see? . . . Okay. I was about thirty, then, and in pretty good shape. Well, so when King Francois sent us to Turin—Monsieur de Montagan was Colonel-General of Infantry—my Commander, Captain Le Rat, led us up a hill to a position, and we sure had a hot five minutes! It was anybody’s battle until the rest cut through, and then we advanced, and I got this.”
The Corporal touched his head. I asked, “How?”
“From a halberdier. You know what a halberd is, don’t you? It’s sort of heavy ax on the end of a ten-foot pole. You can split a man down to the waist with a halberd, if you know how to handle it. See? If it had landed straight well, I guess I wouldn’t be here right now. But I saw it coming, see, and I ducked, and just as I ducked my foot slipped in some blood, and I fell sideways. But all the same that halberdier got me. Right here, just where the scar is. See? Then everything went sort of black-and-white, and black, and I passed out. But I wasn’t dead, see? I woke up, and there was the army doctor, with a cheap steel breast-plate on—no helmet—soaked with blood up to the elbows. Our blood, you can bet your life—you know what medical officers are?”
I said soothingly, “Oh yes, I know, I know. And this, you say, was in 1537?”
“Maybe 1536, I don’t remember exactly. As I was saying, I woke up, and I saw the doctor, and he was talking to some other doctor that I couldn’t see; and all around men were shouting their heads off—asking their friends to cut their throats and put them out of their misery … asking for priests … I thought I was in hell. My head was split wide open, and I could feel a sort of draft playing through my brains, and everything was going bump-bump, bumpety-bump, bump-bump-bump. But although I couldn’t move or speak I could see and hear what was going on. The doctor looked at me and said …”
Corporal Cuckoo paused. “He said?” I asked, gently.
“Well,” said Corporal Cuckoo, with scorn, “you don’t even know the meaning of what you were reading in your little book—Pipeur ou hasardeur de dez, and all that—even when it’s put down in cold print. I’ll put it so that you’ll understand. The doctor said something like this: `Come here and look, sir, come and see! This fellow’s brains were bursting out of his head. If I had applied Theriac, he would be buried and forgotten by now. Instead, having no Theriac, for want of something better, I applied my Digestive. And see what has happened. His eyes have opened! Observe, also that the bones are creeping together and over this beating brain a sort of skin is forming. My treatment must be right, because God is healing him!’ Then the one I couldn’t see said something like: `Don’t be a fool, Ambroise. You’re wasting your time and your medicine on a corpse.’ Well, the doctor looked down at me, and touched my eyes with the ends of his fingers—like this—and I blinked. But the one I couldn’t see said: `Must you waste time and medicine on the dead?’
“After I blinked my eyes, I couldn’t open them again. I couldn’t see. But I could still hear, and when I heard that, I was as scared as hell they were going to bury me alive. And I couldn’t move. But the doctor I’d seen said: `After five days this poor soldier’s flesh is still sweet, and, weary as I am, I have my wits about me, and I swear to you that I saw his eyes open.’ Then he called out: ‘Jehan! Bring the Digestive! . . . By your leave, sir, I will keep this man until he comes back to life, or begins to stink.
And into this wound I am going to pour some more of my Digestive.’
“Then I felt something running into my head. It hurt like hell. It was like ice water dripped into your brains. I thought This is it!—and then I went numb all over, and then I went dead again, until I woke up later in another place. The young doctor was there, without his armor this time, but he had a sort of soft hat on. This time I could move and talk, and I asked for something to drink. When he heard me talk, the doctor opened his mouth to let out a shout, but stopped himself, and gave me some wine out of a cup. But his hands were shaking so that I got more wine in my beard than in my mouth. I used to wear a beard in those days, just like you—only a bigger one, all over my face. I heard somebody come running from the other end of the room. I saw a boy—maybe fifteen or sixteen years old. This kid opened his mouth and started to say something, but the doctor got him by the throat and said . . . put it like this: `For your life, Jehan, be quiet!’
“The kid said: `Master! You have brought him back from the dead!’
“Then the doctor said: `Silence, for your life, or do you want to smell burning faggots?’
“Then I went to sleep again, and when I woke up I was in a little room with all the windows shut and a big fire burning so that it was hotter than hell. The doctor was there, and his name was Ambroise Pare. Maybe you have read about Ambroise Pare?”
“Do you mean the Ambroise Pare who became an army surgeon under Anne de Montmorency in the army of Francis the First?”
Corporal Cuckoo said, “That’s what I was saying, wasn’t it? Francois Premier, Francis the First. De Mont­morency was our Lieutenant-General, when we got mixed up with Charles V. The whole thing started between France and Italy, and that’s how I came to get my head cracked when we went down the hill near Turin. I told you, didn’t I?”
“Corporal Cuckoo,” I said, “you have told me that you are four hundred and thirty-eight years old. You were born in 1507, and left Yvetot to join the army after your wife made a fool of you with a linen merchant named Nicolas. Your name was Lecoq, and the children called you Lecocu. You fought at the Battle of Turin, and were wounded in the Pass of Suze about 1537. Your head was cut open with a halberd, or poleax, and some of your brains came out. A surgeon named Ambroise Pare poured into the wound in your head what you called a Digestive. So you came back to life—more than four hundred years ago! Is this right?”
“You’ve got it,” said Corporal Cuckoo, nodding. “I knew you’d get it.”
I was stupefied by the preposterousness of it all, and could only say, with what must have been a silly giggle, “Well, my venerable friend; by all accounts, after four hundred and thirty-odd years of life you ought to be tremendously wise—as full of wisdom, learning, and ex­perience as the British Museum Library.”
“Why?” asked Corporal Cuckoo.
“Why? Well,” I said, “it’s an old story. A philosopher, let us say, or a scientist, doesn’t really begin to learn anything until his life is almost ended. What wouldn’t he give for five hundred extra years of life? For five hundred years of life he’d sell his soul, because given that much time, knowledge being power, he could be master of the whole world.”
Corporal Cuckoo said, “Baloney! What you say might go for philosophers, and all that. They’d just go on doing what they were interested in, and they might—well—learn how to turn iron into gold, or something. But what about a baseball player, for instance, or a boxer? What would they do with five hundred years? What they were fit to do —swing bats or throw leather! What would you do?”
“Why, of course, you’re right, Corporal Cuckoo,” I said. “I’d just go on and on banging a typewriter and chucking my money down the drain, so that in five hundred years from now I’d be no wiser and no richer than I am at this moment.”
“No, wait a minute,” he said, tapping my arm with a finger that felt like a rod of iron, and leering at me shrewdly. “You’d go on writing books and things. You’re paid on a percentage basis, so in five hundred years you’d have more than you could spend. But how about me? All I’m fit for is to be in the army. I don’t give a damn for philosophy, and all that stuff. It don’t mean a thing to me. I’m no wiser now than I was when I was thirty. I never did go in for reading, and all that stuff, and I never will. My ambition is to get me a place like Jack Dempsey’s on Broadway.”
“I thought you said you wanted to grow roses, and chickens, and bees, and turpentine trees and whatnot,” I said.
“Yeahp, that’s right.”
“How do you reconcile the two? . . . I mean, how does a restaurant on Broadway fit in with the bees and roses et cetera?”
“Well, it’s like this …” said Corporal Cuckoo.

“… I told you about how Doctor Pare healed up my head when it was split open so that my brains were coming out. Well, after I could walk about a bit he let me stay in his house, and I can tell you, he fed me on the fat of the land, though he didn’t live any too damn well himself. Yeahp, he looked after me like a son—a hell of lot better than my old man ever looked after me: chickens, eggs in wine, anything I wanted. If I said, `I guess I’d like a pie made with skylarks for dinner,’ I had it. If I said, `Doc, this wine is kind of sour,’ up came a bottle of Alicante or something. Inside two or three weeks, I was fitter and stronger than I’d ever been before. So then I got kind of restless and said I wanted to go. Well, Doctor Pare said he wanted me to stay. I said to him, `I’m an active man, Doc, and I’ve got my living to get; and before I got this little crack on the head I heard that there was money to be made in one army or another right now.’
“Well, then Doctor Pare offered me a couple of pieces of gold to stay in his house for another month. I took the money, but I knew then that he was up to something, and I went out of my way to find out. I mean, he was Army Surgeon, and I was nothing but a lousy infantryman. There was a catch in it somewhere, see? So I acted dumb, but I kept my eyes open, and made friends with Jehan, the kid that helped around the doctor’s office. This Jehan was a big-eyed, skinny kid, with one leg a bit shorter than the other, and he thought I was a hell of a fellow when I cracked a walnut between two fingers, and lifted up the big table, that must have weighed about five hundred pounds, on my back. This Jehan, he told me he’d always wanted to be a powerful guy like me. But he’d been sick since before he was born, and might not have lived at all if Doctor Pare hadn’t saved his life. Well, so I went to work on Jehan, and I found out what the doctor’s game was. You know doctors, eh?”
Corporal Cuckoo nudged me, and I said, “Uh uh, go on.”
“Well it seems that up to the time when we got through the Pass of Suze, they’d treated what they called `poisoned wounds’ with boiling oil of elder with a dash of what they called Theriac. Theriac was nothing much more than honey and herbs. Well, so it seems that by the time we went up the hill, Doctor Pare had run out of the oil of elder and Theriac, and so, for want of something better, he mixed up what he called a Digestive.
“My commander, Captain Le Rat, the one that got the bullet that smashed up his ankle, was the first one to be dosed with the Digestive. His ankle got better,” said Corporal Cuckoo, snapping his fingers, “like that. I was the third or fourth soldier to get a dose of Doctor Pares Digestive. The doc was looking over the battlefield, because he wanted a dead body to cut up on the side. You know what doctors are. This kid Jehan told me he wanted a brain to play around with. Well, there was I, see, with my brains showing. All the doctor had to do was, reach down and help himself. Well, to cut it short, he saw that I was breathing, and wondered how the hell a man could be breathing after he’d got what I had. So he poured some of his Digestive into the hole in my head, tied it up, and watched for developments. I told you what happened then. I came back to life. More than that, the bones in my head grew together. Doctor Ambroise Pare believed he’d got something. So he was keeping me sort of under observation, and making notes.
“I know doctors. Well, anyway, I went to work on Jehan. I said, `Be a good fellow, Jehan, tell a pal what is this Digestive, or whatever your master calls it?’
“Jehan said, `Why, sir, my master makes no secret of it. It is nothing but a mixture of egg yolks, oil of roses, and turpentine.’ (I don’t mind telling you that, bub, because it’s already been printed.)”
I said to Corporal Cuckoo, “I don’t know how the devil you come by these curious facts, but I happen to know that they’re true. They are available in several histories of medicine. Ambroise Pares Digestive, with which he treated the wounded after the Battle of Turin, was, as you say, nothing but a mixture of oil of roses, egg yolks, and turpentine. And it is also a fact that the first wounded man upon whom he tried it really was Captain Le Rat, in 1537. Pare said at the time, `I dressed his wounds and God healed him.’ … Well?”
“Yeahp,” said Corporal Cuckoo, with a sneer. “Sure. Turpentine, oil of roses, egg. That’s right. You know the proportions?”
“No, I don’t,” I said.
“I know you don’t, bub. Well, I do. See? And I’ll tell you something else. It’s not just oil of roses, eggs and turpentine—there was one other thing Doc Pare slipped in in my case, for an experiment—see? And I know what it is.”
I said, “Well, go on.”
“Well, I could see that this Doctor Ambroise Pare was going to make something out of me, see? So I kept my eyes open, and I waited, and I worked on Jehan, until I found out just where the doctor kept his notebook. I mean, in those days you could get sixty or seventy thousand dollars for a bit of bone they called a `unicorn’s horn.’ Hell, I mean, if I had something that could just about bring a man back from the dead—draw his bones together and put him on his feet in a week or two, even if his brains were coming out hell, everybody was hav­ing a war then, and I could have been rich in a few minutes.”
I said, “No doubt about that. What—“
“What the hell—” said Corporal Cuckoo, “what the hell right did he have to use me for a guinea pig? Where would he have been if it hadn’t been for me? And where do you think I’d have been after? Out on my neck with two or three gold pieces, while the doctor grabbed the credit and made millions out of it. I wanted to open a place in Paris—girls and everything, see? Could I do that on two or three gold pieces? I ask you! Okay; one night when Doctor Pare and Jehan were out, I took his notebook, slipped out of a window, and got the hell out of it.
“As soon as I thought I was safe, I went into a saloon, and drank some wine, and got into conversation with a girl. It seems somebody else was interested in this girl, and there was a fight. The other guy cut me in the face with a knife. I had a knife too. You know how it is—all of a sudden I felt something puffing my knife out of my hand, and I saw that I’d pushed it between this man’s ribs. He was one of those mean little guys, about a hundred and twenty pounds, with a screwed-up face. (She was a great big girl with yellow hair.) I could see that I’d killed him, so I ran for my life, and I left my knife where it was—stuck tight between his ribs. I hid out, expecting trouble. But they never found me. Most of that night I lay under a hedge. I was pretty sick. I mean, he’d cut me from just under the eye to the back of my head—and cut me deep. He’d cut the top of my right ear off, clean. It wasn’t only that it hurt like hell, but I knew I could be identified by that cut. I’d left half an ear behind me. It was me for the gallows, see? So I kept as quiet as I could, in a ditch, and went to sleep for a few hours before dawn. And then, when I woke up, that cut didn’t hurt at all, not even my ear—and I can tell you that a cut ear sure does hurt. I went and washed my face in a pond, and when the water got still enough so I could see myself, I saw that cut and this ear had healed right up so that the marks looked five years old. All that in half a night! So I went on my way. About two days later, a farmer’s dog bit me in the leg—took a piece out. Well, a bite like that ought to take weeks to heal up. But mine didn’t. It was all healed over by next day, and there was hardly a scar. That stuff Pare poured on my head had made me so that any wound I might get, anywhere, anytime, would just heal right up—like magic. I knew I had something when I grabbed those papers of Pare’s. But this was terrific!”
“You had them still, Corporal Cuckoo?”
“What do you think? Sure I had them, wrapped up in a bit of linen and tied round my waist, four pieces of it … not paper, the other stuff, parchment. That’s it, parch­ment. Folded across, and sewn up along the fold. The outside bit was blank, like a cover. But the six pages inside were all written over. The hell of it was, I couldn’t read. I’d never been learned. See? Well, I had the best part of my two gold pieces left, and I pushed on to Paris.”
I asked, “Didn’t Ambroise Pare say anything?”
Corporal Cuckoo sneered again. “What the hell could he say?” he asked. “Say what? Say he’d resurrected the dead with his Digestive? That would have finished him for sure. Where was his evidence? And you can bet your life that kid Jehan kept his mouth shut; he wouldn’t want the doctor to know he’d squealed. See? No, nobody said a word. I got into Paris okay.”
“What did you do there?” I asked.
“My idea was to find somebody I could trust to read those papers for me, see? If you want to know how I got my living, well, I did the best I could—never mind what. Well, one night, in a place where I was, I came across a student, mooching drinks, an educated man with no place to sleep. I showed him the doctor’s papers, and asked him what they meant. They made him think a bit, but he got the hang of them. The doctor had written down just how he’d mixed that Digestive of his, and that only filled up one page. Four of the other pages were full of figures, and the only other writing was on the last page. It was all about me. And how he’d cured me.”
I said, “With the yolks of eggs, oil of roses, and tur­pentine?”
Corporal Cuckoo nodded, and said, “Yeahp. Them three and something else.”
I said, “I’ll bet you anything you like I know what the fourth ingredient is, in this Digestive.”
“What’ll you bet?” asked Corporal Cuckoo.
I said, “I’ll bet you a beehive.”
“What do you mean?”
“Why, Corporal, it stands to reason. You said you wanted to raise chickens, roses, and bees. You said you wanted to go south for turpentine. You accounted for egg yolks, oil of roses, and turpentine in Doctor Pare’s for­mula. What would a man like you want with bees? Ob­viously the fourth ingredient is honey.”
“Yeahp,” said Corporal Cuckoo. “You’re right, but’. The doctor slipped in some honey.” He opened a jack-knife, looked at me narrowly, then snapped the blade back again and pocketed the knife, saying, “You don’t know the proportions. You don’t know how to mix the stuff. You don’t know how hot it ought to be, or how slow you’ve got to let it cool.”
“So you have the Secret of Life?” I said. “You’re four hundred years old, and wounds can’t kill you. It only takes a certain mixture of egg yolks, oil of roses, turpen­tine and honey. Is that right?”
“That’s right,” said Corporal Cuckoo.
“Well, didn’t you think of buying the ingredients and mixing them yourself?”
“Well, yes, I did. The doctor had said in his notes how the Digestive he’d given to me and Captain Le Rat had been kept in a bottle in the dark for two years. So I made a wine bottle full of the stuff and kept it covered up away from the light for two years, wherever I went. Then me and some friends of mine got into a bit of trouble, and one of my friends, a guy called Pierre Solitude, got a pistol bullet in the chest. I tried the stuff on him, but he died. At the same time I got a sword cut in the side. Believe me or not, that healed up in nine hours, inside and out, of its own accord. You can make what you like of that. It all came out of something to do with robbing a church.
“I got out of France, and lived as best I could for about a year until I found myself in Salzburg. That was about four years after the battle of the Pass of Suze. Well, in Salzburg I came across some guy who told me that the greatest doctor in the world was in town. I remember this doctor’s name, because, well, who wouldn’t? It was Au­reolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim. He’d been a big shot in Basle a few years before. He was otherwise known as Paracelsus. He wasn’t doing much then. He hung around, most of the time, drinking himself crazy in a wine cellar called The Three Doves. I met him there one, night—it must have been in 1541—and said my piece when nobody else was listening.” Corporal. Cuckoo laughed harshly.
I said, “Paracelsus was a very great man. He was one of the great doctors of the world.”
“Oh, hell, he was only a fat old drunk. Certainly was higher than a kite when I saw him. Yelling his head off, banging on the table with an empty can. When I told him about this stuff, in strict confidence, he got madder than ever, called me everything he could think of—and believe me, he could think of plenty—and bent the can over my head. Broke the skin just where the hair starts. I was going to take a poke at him but then he calmed down a bit and said in Swiss-German, I think it was, `Experiment, experiment! A demonstration! A demonstration! If you come back tomorrow and show me that cut perfectly healed, charlatan, I’ll listen to you.’ Then he burst out laughing, and I thought to myself, I’ll give you something to laugh at, bub. So I took a walk, and that little cut healed up and was gone inside an hour. Then I went back to show him. I’d sort of taken a liking to the old soak, see? Well, when I get back to this tavern there’s doctor Von Hohenheim, or Paracelsus, if you like, lying on his back dying of a dagger stab. He’d gotten into a fight with a woodcarver, and this woodcarver was as soused as he was, see? And so he let this Paracelsus have it. I never did have no luck, and I never will. We might have got along together, me and him, I only talked to him for half an hour, but so help me, you knew who was the boss when he was there, all right! Oh well, that was that.”
“And then?” I asked.
“I’m just giving you the outline, see? If you want the whole story it’s going to cost you plenty,” said Corporal Cuckoo. “I bummed around Salzburg for a year, got whipped out of town for being a beggar, got the hell out of it to Switzerland, and signed on with a bunch of paid soldiers, what they called Condottieri, under a Swiss colo­nel, and did a bit of fighting in Italy. There was supposed to be good pickings there. But somebody stole my little bit of loot, and we never even got half our pay in the end. Then I went to France, and met a sea captain by the name of Bordelais who was carrying brandy to England and was short of a man. A fast little English pirate boat stopped us in the Channel, and grabbed the cargo, cut Bordelais’ throat and slung the crew overboard—all ex­cept me. The Limey captain, Hawker, liked the look of me. I joined the crew, but I never was much of a sailor. That hooker—hell, she wasn’t bigger than one of the lifeboats on this ship—was called the Harry, after the King of England, Henry VIII, the one they made a movie about. Still, we did all right. We specialized in French brandy: stopped the Froggy boats in mid-channel, grabbed the cargo, shoved the captain and crew overboard. `Dead men tell no tales,’ old Hawker always said. Well, I jumped the ship somewhere near Rommey, with money in my pocket—I didn’t like the sea, see? I’d had half a dozen nasty wounds, but they couldn’t kill me. I was worried about what’d happen if I went overboard. You could shoot me through the head and not kill me, though it’d hurt like hell for a few days while the wound healed itself. But I just hated to think of what would happen if somebody tried to drown me. Get it? I’d have to wait under water till the fishes ate me, or till I just sort of naturally rotted away—alive all the time. And that’s not nice.
“Well, as I was saying, I quit at Rommey and got to London. There was an oldish widow with a linen-draper’s business near London Bridge. She had a bit of dough, and she took a fancy to me. Well, what the hell? I got married to her. Lived with her about thirteen years. She was a holy terror, at first, but I corrected her. Her name was Rose, and she died just about when Queen Elizabeth got to be Queen of England. That was around 1558, I guess. She was scared of me—Rose, I mean, not Queen Elizabeth, because I was always playing around with honey, and eggs, and turpentine, and oil of roses. She got older and older, and I stayed exactly the same as I was when I married her, and she didn’t like that one little bit. She thought I was a witch. Said I had the Philosophers’ Stone, and knew the secret of perpetual youth. Hah, so help me, she wasn’t so damn far wrong. She wanted me to let her in on it. But, as I was saying, I kept working on those notes of Doctor Pare’s, and I mixed honey, tur­pentine, oil of roses, and the yolks of eggs, just as he’d done, in the right proportions, at the proper temperature, and kept the mixture bottled in the dark for the right length of time—and still it didn’t work.”
I asked Corporal Cuckoo, “How did you find out that your mixture didn’t work?”
“Well, I tried it on Rose. She kept on at me till I did. Every now and again we had kind of a lovers’ quarrel, and I tried the Digestive on her afterward. But she took as long to heal as any ordinary person would have taken. The interesting thing was that I not only couldn’t be killed by a wound, I couldn’t get any older! I couldn’t catch any diseases! I couldn’t die! And you can figure this for yourself : if some stuff that cured any sort of wound was worth a fortune, what would it be worth to me if I had something that would make people stay young and healthy forever? Eh?” He paused.
I said, “Interesting speculation. You might have given some of the stuff, for example, to Shakespeare. He got better and better as he went on. I wonder what he would have arrived at by now? I don’t know, though. If Shake­speare had swallowed an elixir of life and perpetual youth when he was very young, he would have remained as he was, young and undeveloped. Maybe he might still be holding horses outside theatres—or whistling for taxis, a stage-struck country boy of undeveloped genius.
“lf, on the other hand, he had taken the stuff when he wrote, say, The Tempest—there he’d be still, burnt up, worn out, world-weary, tired to death and unable to die. On the other hand, of course, some debauched rake of the Elizabethan period could go on being a debauched rake at high pressure, for centuries and centuries. But, oh my God, how bored he would get after a hundred years or so, and how he’d long for death! That would be dangerous stuff, that stuff of yours, Corporal Cuckoo!”
“Shakespeare?” he said. “Shakespeare? William Shake­speare. I met him. I met a buddy of his when I was fighting in the Netherlands, and he introduced us when we got back to London. William Shakespeare—puffy-faced man, bald on top; used to wave his hands about when he talked. He took an interest in me. We talked a whole lot together.”
“What did he say?” I asked.
Corporal Cuckoo replied, “Oh, hell, how can I remem­ber every goddam word? He just asked questions, the same as you do. We just talked.”
“And how did he strike you?” I asked.
Corporal Cuckoo considered, and then said, slowly, “The kind of man who counts his change and leaves a nickel tip. …One of these days I’m going to read his books, but I’ve never had much time for reading.”
I said, “So, I take it that your only interest in Pare’s Digestive has been a financial interest. You merely wanted to make money out of it. Is that so?”
“Why, sure,” said Corporal Cuckoo. “I’ve had my shot of the stuff. I’m all right.”
“Corporal Cuckoo, has it occurred to you that what you are after is next door to impossible?”
“How’s that?”
“Well,” I said, “your Pare’s Digestive is made of egg yolk, oil of roses, turpentine and honey. Isn’t that so?”
“Well, yes. So what? What’s impossible about that?”
I said, “You know how a chicken’s diet alters the taste of an egg, don’t you?”
“Well?”
“What a chicken eats changes not only the taste, but the color of an egg. Any chicken farmer can tell you that. Isn’t that so?”
“Well?”
“Well, what a chicken eats goes into the egg, doesn’t it—just as the fodder that you feed a cow comes out in the milk? Have you stopped to consider how many different sorts of chickens there have been in the world since the Battle of Turin in 1537, and the varieties of chicken feed they might have pecked up in order to lay their eggs? Have you thought that the egg yolk is only one of four in­gredients mixed in Ambroise Pare’s Digestive? Is it possible that it has not occurred to you that this one ingredient involves permutations and combinations of several millions of other ingredients?”
Corporal Cuckoo was silent. I went on, “Then take roses. If no two eggs are exactly alike, what about roses? You come from wine-growing country, you say: then you must know that the mere thickness of a wall can separate two entirely different kinds of wine—that a noble vintage may be crushed out of grapes grown less than two feet away from a vine that is good for nothing. The same applies to tobacco. Have you stopped to think of your roses? Roses are pollinated by bees, bees go from flower to flower, making them fertile. Your oil of roses, therefore, embodies an infinity of possible ingredients. Does it not?”
Corporal Cuckoo was still silent. I continued, with a kind of malicious enthusiasm. “You must reflect on these things, Corporal. Take turpentine. It comes out of trees. Even in the sixteenth century there were many known varieties of turpentine—Chian Terebinthine, and what not. But above all, my dear fellow, consider honey! There are more kinds of honey in the world than have ever been categorized. Every honeycomb yields a slightly different honey. You must know that bees living in heather gather and store one kind of honey, while bees living in an apple orchard give us something quite different. It is all honey, of course, but its flavor and quality are variable beyond calculation. Honey varies from hive to hive, Corporal Cuckoo. I say nothing of wild bees’ honey.”
“Well?” he said, glumly.
“Well. All this is relatively simple, Corporal, in relation to what comes next. I don’t know how many beehives there are in the world. Assume that in every hive there are—let us be moderate—one thousand bees. (There are more than that, of course, but I am trying to simplify.) You must realize that every one of these bees brings home a slightly different drop of honey. Every one of these bees may, in its travels, take honey from fifty different flowers. The honey accumulated by all the bees in the hive is mixed together. Any single cell in any honeycomb out of any hive contains scores of subtly different ele­ments! I say nothing of the time element; honey six months old is very different from honey out of the same hive, left for ten years. From day to day, honey changes. Now taking all possible combinations of eggs, roses, tur­pentine and honey—where are you? Answer me that, Corporal Cuckoo.”
Corporal Cuckoo struggled with this for a few seconds, and then said, “I don’t get it. You think I’m nuts, don’t you?”
“I never said so,” I said uneasily.
“No, you never said so. Well, listen. Don’t give me all that double talk. I’m doing you a favor. Look—“
He took out and opened his jackknife, and scrutinized his left hand, looking for an unscarred area of skin. “No!” I shouted, and gripped his knife-hand. I might have been trying to hold back the piston rod of a great locomotive. My grip and my weight were nothing to Corporal Cuckoo.
“Look,” he said, calmly, and cut through the soft flesh between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand until the knifeblade stopped on the bone, and the thumb fell back until it touched the forearm. “See that?”
I saw it through a mist. The great ship seemed, sud­denly, to roll and plunge. “Are you crazy?” I said, as soon as I could.
“No,” said Corporal Cuckoo. “I’m showing you I’m not, see?” He held his mutilated hand close to my face. “Take it away,” I said.
“Sure,” said Corporal Cuckoo. “Watch this.” He pushed the almost-severed thumb back into place, and held it down with his right hand. “It’s okay,” he said, “there’s no need to look sick. I’m showing you, see? Don’t go—sit down. I’m not kidding. I can give you a hell of a story, a fact-story. I can show you Pares little notebook and everything. You saw what I showed you when I pulled up my shirt? You saw what I’ve got right here, on the left side?”
I said, “Yes”
“Well, that’s where I got hit by a nine-pound cannon-ball when I was on the Mary Ambree, fighting against the Spanish Armada—it smashed my chest so that the ribs went through my heart—and I was walking about in two weeks. And this other one on the right, under the ribs—tomorrow I’ll show you what it looks like from the back—I got that one at the Battle of Fontenoy; and there’s a hell of a good story there. A French cannonball came down and hit a broken sword that a dead officer had dropped, and it sent that sword flying right through me, lungs and liver and all. So help me, it came out through my right shoulderblade. The other one lower down was a bit of bombshell at the Battle of Waterloo—I was opened up like a pig—it wasn’t worth the surgeon’s while to do anything about it. But I was on my feet in six days, while men with broken legs were dying like flies. I can prove it, I tell you! And listen—I marched to Quebec with Benedict Arnold. Sit still and listen—my right leg was smashed to pulp all the way down from the hip to the ankle at Balaklava. It knitted together before the surgeon had a chance to get around to me; he couldn’t believe his eyes—he thought he was dreaming. I can tell you a hell of a story! But it’s worth dough, see? Now, this is my proposition: I’ll tell it, you write it, and we’ll split fifty-fifty, and I’ll start my farm. What d’you say?”
I heard myself saying, in a sickly, stupid voice, “Why didn’t you save some of your pay, all those years?”
Corporal Cuckoo replied, with scorn, “Why didn’t I save my pay! Because I’m what I am, you mug! Hell, once upon a time, if I’d kept away from cards, I could’ve bought Manhattan Island for less than what I lost to a Dutchman called Bruncker, drawing ace-high for English guineas! Save my pay! If it wasn’t one thing it was another. I lay off liquor. Okay. So if it’s not liquor it’s a woman. I lay off women. Okay. Then it’s cards or dice. I always meant to save my pay; but I never had it in me to save my goddam pay! Doctor Pares stuff fixed me—and when I say it fixed me, I mean, it fixed me, just like I was, and am, and always will be. See? A foot-soldier, ig­norant as dirt. It took me nearly a hundred years to learn to write my name, and four hundred years to get to be a corporal. How d’you like that? And it took will power, at that! Now here’s my proposition: fifty-fifty on the story. Once I get proper publicity in a magazine, I’ll be able to let the Digestive out of my hands with an easy mind,see? because nobody’d dare to try any funny business with a man with nationwide publicity. Eh?”
“No, of course not,” I said.
“Eh?”
“Sure, sure, Corporal.”
“Good,” said Corporal Cuckoo. “Now in case you think I’m kidding, take a look at this. You saw what I done?”
“I saw, Corporal.”
“Look,” he said, thrusting his left hand under my nose. It was covered with blood. His shirt cuff was red and wet. Fascinated, I saw one thick, sluggish drop crawl out of the cloth near the buttonhole, and hang, quivering, before it fell on my knee. The mark of it is in the cloth of my trousers to this day.
“See?” said Corporal Cuckoo, and he licked the place between his fingers where his knife had cut down. A pale area appeared. “Where did I cut myself?” he asked.
I shook my head; there was no wound—only a white scar. He wiped his knife on the palm of his hand—it left a red smear—and let the blade fall with a sharp click. Then he wiped his left hand on his right, rubbed both hands clean upon the backs of his trouser legs, and said: “Am I kidding?”
“Well!” I said, somewhat breathlessly. “Well”
“Oh, what the hell!” groaned Corporal Cuckoo, weary beyond words, exhausted, worn out by his endeavors to explain the inexplicable and make the incredible sound reasonable. “… Look. You think this is a trick? Have you got a knife?”
“Yes. Why?”
“A big knife?”
“Moderately big.”
“Okay. Cut my throat with it, and see what happens. Stick it in me wherever you like. And I’ll bet you a thousand dollars I’ll be all right inside two or three hours. Go on. Man to man, it’s a bet. Or go borrow an ax if you like; hit me over the head with it.”
“Be damned if I do,” I said, shuddering.
“And that’s how it is,” said Corporal Cuckoo, in despair. “And that’s how it is every time. There they are, making fortunes out of soap and toothpaste, and here I am, with something in my pocket to keep you young and healthy forever—ah, go chase yourself! I never ought to’ve drunk your rotten Scotch. This is the way it always is. You wear a beard just like I used to wear before I got a gunpowder burn in the chin at Zutphen, when Sir Philip Sidney got his; or I wouldn’t have talked to you. Oh, you dope! I could murder you, so help me I could! Go to hell.”
Corporal Cuckoo leaped to his feet and darted away so swiftly that before I found my feet he had disappeared. There was blood on the deck close to where I had been sitting—a tiny pool of blood, no larger than a coffee sau­cer, broken at one edge by the imprint of a heel. About a yard and a half away I saw another heel mark in blood, considerably less noticeable. Then there was a dull smear, as if one of the bloody rubber heels had spun around and impelled its owner toward the left. “Cuckoo! Cuckoo!” I shouted. “Oh, Cuckoo! Cuckoo!”
But I never saw Corporal Cuckoo again, and I wonder where he can be. It may be that he gave me a false name. But what I heard I heard, and what I saw I saw; and I have five hundred dollars here in an envelope for the man who will put me in touch with him. Honey and oil of roses, eggs and turpentine; these involve, as I said, infinite permutations and combinations. So does any comparable mixture. Still, it might be worth investigating. Why not? Fleming got penicillin out of mildew. Only God knows the glorious mysteries of the dust, out of which come trees and bees, and life in every form, from mildew to man.
I lost Corporal Cuckoo before we landed in New York on July 11th, 1945. Somewhere in the United States, I believe, there is a man tremendously strong in the arms and covered with terrible scars who has the dreadfully dangerous secret of perpetual youth and life. He appears to be about thirty-odd years of age, and has watery, green­ish eyes.