The last laugh

It was funny because, his fellows said, Frizzell had no sense of humour, that he should be the one who died laughing.

A little too short, a little too fat, to bear arms in less straitened times, he was of course plain Private Frizzell. But to the rest of the platoon he was known as The Captain.

This was because, when they first met up in the training camp in Kent , he at once identified himself as "a captain of industry". It was fairly soon known that his captaincy extended as far as six men employed by him at his farm implements workshop in a small coastal town in Suffolk . Hence the irony of "Captain" - though this was no doubt better than Frizzy or, worse, Fritz, which might otherwise have been his misfortune. He would not have been amused, for he was a man who would not be laughed at, least of all by himself. Until that last day of his one short tour of duty.

He was not a naturally fit man, nor a physically alert one. Even his comrades in the ranks felt it was a mistake putting him rather pointlessly to fight when his practical creativity might have been of far greater use to the war effort. It was said he had invented a steam-powered mower and an automatic device for sharpening blades, so who knew what weaponry he might have devised if given the chance?

Instead, here he was, needlessly and thoughtlessly exposing himself to danger on what should have been just another day of dull routine, a day of building rubble roads into the baking hills.

It had seemed curious, and somehow disappointing, from the first to Frizzell that he should be sent here to fight. As if someone at the War Office had known of his Jewish origin - another thing that might have led to a ribald nickname, if the other soldiers had known of it - and decided to "send him home". Not that anyone in his family had seen Palestine for centuries, as far as he was aware. Not until now when he, Jacob, came "home" to die. For he was as certain of that as he was of his various aches and pains - a gut feeling.

He had expected, somehow, to be part of a glorious English tradition, a campaign in France. Even that word, "campaign", was French, redolent of rolling countryside, camps of colourful tents with penants fluttering in the breeze, Agincourt, Harfleur, the field-of-cloth-of-gold, that sort of thing. He had not expected to be sent on a khaki crusade to the Holy Land.

And though he expected death, he did not expect to meet it while leaning on a shovel and mopping his brow.

It began, strangely, as a feeling that he wanted to fart. Indeed, it felt as if his belly was suddenly hugely inflated and desperately in need of that comforting relief. And then he felt something warm and moist running down his legs, out of his shorts and into the clammy creases at the backs of his knees. "Oh, shit," he thought, then wrily and ruefully smiled.

And then he felt the release of pressure in his abdomen, and looked down to see that the front of his shirt had burst open and his guts were spilling out of him onto the ground. And that was when he began to laugh out loud.