Robber Bride - Margaret Atwood [11]
On the opposite wall she’s hung an amateurish pen-and-ink cartoon entitled “Wolfe Taking a Leak.” The general is shown turned away from the viewer, with only his weak-chinned profile showing. He’s wearing a peevish expression, and the balloon coming out of his mouth says, “Fuck These Buttons.” This cartoon was drawn by one of her students, two years ago, and was presented to her by the whole class at the end of term. As a rule her students are mostly men: not a lot of women find themselves deeply attracted to such courses as Late Medieval Tactical Blunders or Military History as Artefact, which is what her graduate courses are entitled, this time around.
As she’d unwrapped the package, they’d all eyed her to see how she’d respond to the word fuck. Men of their age seem to think that women of her age have never heard such words before. She finds this touching. She has to make a conscious effort to stop herself from calling her students “my boys.” If she doesn’t watch it, she’ll turn into a hearty, jocular den mother; or worse, a knowing, whimsical old biddy. She’ll start winking, and pinching cheeks.
The cartoon itself is in honour of her lecture on the technology of fly-front fastenings, which – she’s heard – has been dubbed “Tender Buttons,” and which usually attracts an overflow crowd. Writers on war – she begins – have tended to concentrate on the kings and the generals, on their decisions, on their strategy, and have overlooked more lowly, but equally important factors, which can, and have, put the actual soldiers – those on the sharp edge – at risk. Disease-carrying lice and fleas, for instance. Faulty boots. Mud. Germs. Undershirts. And fly-front fastenings. The drawstring, the overlap, the buttoned flap, the zipper, have all played their part in military history through the ages; not to mention the kilt, for which, from a certain point of view, there is much to be said. Don’t laugh, she tells them. Instead, picture yourself on the battlefield, with nature calling, as it frequently does in times of stress. Now picture yourselves trying to undo these buttons.
She holds up a sketch of the buttons in question, a nineteenth-century set that would surely have required at least ten fingers and ten minutes each.
Now picture a sniper. Less funny?
An army marches on its stomach, but also on its fly-front fastenings. Not that the zipper – although improving the speed of opening – has been entirely blameless. Why not? Use your heads – zippers get stuck. And they’re noisy! And men have developed the dangerous habit of striking matches on them. In the dark! You might as well set a flare.
Many have been the crimes committed – she continues – on helpless enlisted men by the designers of military clothing. How many British soldiers died needlessly because of the redness of their uniforms? And don’t think that sort of thoughtlessness went out with the nineteenth century. Mussolini’s criminal failure to provide shoes – shoes! – for his own troops was just one case in point. And, in Tony’s opinion, whoever dreamed up those nylon pants for North Korea should have been court-martialled. You could hear the legs whisking together a mile away. And the sleeping bags – they rustled too, and you couldn’t undo them easily from inside, and they froze shut! During night raids by the enemy, those men got butchered like kittens in a sack.
Murder by designer! She can get quite worked up about it.
All of which, in a more sedate and footnoted form, will be good for at least one chapter of her book-in-progress: Deadly Vestments: A History of Inept Military Couture.
Charis says it’s bad for Tony to spend so much of her time on something