Josh Thomas

1944 Field Artillery Gun
On the way into town I saw a couple of guys taking delivery of a 1944 field artillery gun.  It was huge and green and rusted and was sitting, like a troll, in their front garden.

The two guys were arguing with the delivery man because they hadn’t ordered the 1944 field artillery gun.  They’d never asked for such a thing in their lives and they didn’t want it.

The delivery man didn’t care.  No way was he going to haul that artillery piece back to the depot.  He’d had enough trouble getting it out to those two guys in the first place.  All he had to do was to get one of them to sign for the thing and he could forget all about it.  Doing the delivery rounds with a 1944 field artillery gun had made it one of the hardest mornings’ work he’d ever done.

Apart from being really heavy and awkward, the field artillery gun had drawn stares from almost everybody that had seen it.  The delivery man hated to draw attention to himself and didn’t like people staring.  He spent most of the morning feeling very embarrassed indeed.  He stood there, in those two guys’ front garden, trying to get them to take the gun so that he could get on.  He wanted them to see that it was easier just to accept it.  The two guys, however, were adamant.  They didn’t want it.  Their garden was full of mostly empty flower-pots.  Apart from anything else, there wasn’t enough room.

All this time, the 1944 field artillery gun just sat there looking useless.  It hadn’t been used once since the end of the war – and it showed.  There aren’t many uses for a 1944 field artillery gun that don’t involve war in some way.  The two men and the delivery guy were arguing, it was true, but it wasn’t a war.  Even if it had been, I thought, the gun would still have been no good.  You can’t use a 1944 field artillery gun against a delivery man who’s standing in your own front garden.  That would have been so stupid.  They’d have had to ask him to go somewhere else – somewhere further away from the house - for it to work properly.

The gun looked sad, I thought.  It hadn’t known, when it had been made, just what a useless life it was going to lead.  Maybe, if it was lucky, the men would let it stay.  The delivery man would win the argument because the men in the front garden were reasonable men who, even though they didn’t necessarily want or need a 1944 field artillery gun, would never make another person carry it around for a whole afternoon, which is what the delivery man said would happen if they didn’t sign for it.

This is what I hoped would happen.  The field gun would be able to stay on the condition that it made friends with the plant pots that already lived there. 

The argument already looked to be swinging that way by the time I moved on.
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josh thomas is a WWIII veteran.

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