The Vintage Book of War Stories

by Sebastian Faulks

  But at Armentières, on that first occasion, you came to the war from the centre of town. Crossing Half-past Eleven Square (it was called that because the Town Hall clock had stopped at that hour during an early bombardment; everything here had been renamed and then named again, as places and streets, a copse, a farmhouse, yielded up their old history and entered the new) you turned left and went on across Barbed-wire Square till you came to a big red building called the Gum-boot Store. There, after being fitted out with rubber boots that went all the way to mid-thigh, and tramping about for a few minutes to get used to the things, you were led away into the grounds of another, larger building, this time of brick, that was an Asylum; and from there, via Lunatic Lane, into the lines. Lunatic Lane began as a cobbled street, then became dirt, and before you quite knew it you were on planks. From this point the duckboards, for all their twisting and turning, led straight to the war.

  They began to move up just at dusk, and by the time night fell and the first flares became visible, throwing their yellow glare on the underside of clouds and falling at times in a shower of brilliant stars, they were in the support line, stumbling in the dark through a maze of communication trenches, round firebays and traverses, jostling water-bottles, messtins, entrenching tools, grunting with the effort of trying to keep up, and quite blind except for the warning passed back from man to man of a hole up ahead in the greasy duckboards – But where? How far? Am I almost on it? – or a wire obstacle overhead.

  The deeper they went the worse it got. In places where seepage was bad the duckboards were a foot under water. Once a whole earthwall had fallen and the passage was so narrow they could barely squeeze through: the place had been hit by a ‘minnie’. They met two stretcher bearers moving in the opposite direction with a man who screamed, and some of the moisture, Jim thought, as they brushed in passing, must be blood. They hurried to keep up with the man in front and were soon breathless and sweating, partly because of the cracking pace that was being set – the men up front must actually have been running – but also because they were so keyed-up and eager to get there at last and see what it was. Everything here was so new, and they didn’t know what might happen next, and when it did happen, how they would meet it. There was no stopping. If a man paused to adjust his pack or got his rifle caught in an overhead entanglement the whole troop might take a wrong turning and be lost in the dark.

  The smell too got worse as they pushed further towards it. It was the smell of damp earthwalls and rotting planks, of mud impregnated with gas, of decaying corpses that had fallen in earlier battles and been incorporated now into the system itself, occasionally pushing out a hand or a booted foot, all ragged and black, not quite ingested; of rat-droppings, and piss, and the unwashed bodies of the men they were relieving, who also smelled like corpses, and were, in their heavy-eyed weariness as they came out, quite unrecognizable, though many of them were known to Jim by sight and some of them even by name; the war seemed immediately to have transformed them. They had occupied these trenches for eleven days. ‘It’s not so bad,’ some of them mumbled, and others, with more bravado, claimed it was a cake-walk. But they looked beaten just the same.

  They stayed eleven days themselves, and though the smell did not lessen, they ceased to notice it; it was their own. They were no longer the ‘Eggs a-cook’ of the easy taunt: ‘Verra nice, verra sweet, verra clean. Two for one.’ They were soldiers like the rest. They were men.

  For eleven days they dug in and maintained the position. That is, they bailed out foul water, relaid duckboards, filled and carried sandbags to repair the parapet, stood to for a few minutes just before dawn with their rifles at the ready, crouched on the firestep, waiting – the day’s one recognition of the reality of battle – then stood down again and had breakfast. Some days it rained and they simply sat in the rain and slept afterwards in mud. Other days it was fine. Men dozed on the firestep, read, played pontoon, or hunted for lice in their shirts. They were always cold and they never got enough sleep. They saw planes passing over in twos and threes, and occasionally caught the edge of a dogfight. Big black cannisters appeared in the sky overhead, rolling over and over, very slowly, then taking a downward path; the earth shook. You got used to that, and to the din.

  Jim never saw a German, though they were there alright. Snipers. One fellow, too cocky, had looked over the parapet twice, being dared, and had his head shot off. His name was Stan Mackay, and it worried Jim that he couldn’t fit a face to the name even when Clancy described the man. He felt he ought to be able to do that at least. A fellow he had talked to more than once oughtn’t to just go out like that without a face.

  Snipers. Also machine-gunners.

  One of them, who must have had a sense of humour, could produce all sorts of jazz rhythms and odd syncopations as he ‘played’ the parapet. They got to know his touch. Parapet Joe he was called. He had managed, that fellow, to break through and establish himself as something more than the enemy. He had become an individual, who had then of course to have a name. Did he know he was called Parapet Joe? Jim wondered about this, and wondered, because of the name, what the fellow looked like. But it would have been fatal to try and find out.

  One night, for several hours, there was a bombardment that had them all huddled together with their arms around their heads, not just trying to stop the noise but pretending, as children might, to be invisible.

  But the real enemy, the one that challenged them day and night and kept them permanently weary, was the stinking water that seeped endlessly out of the walls and rose up round their boots as if the whole trench system in this part of the country were slowly going under. Occasionally it created cave-ins, bringing old horrors back into the light. The dead seemed close then; they had to stop their noses. Once, in heavy rain, a hand reached out and touched Jim on the back of the neck. ‘Cut it out, Clancy,’ he had protested, hunching closer to the wall; and was touched again. It was the earth behind him, quietly moving. Suddenly it collapsed, and a whole corpse lurched out of the wall and hurled itself upon him. He had to disguise his tendency to shake then, though the other fellows made a joke of it; and two or three times afterwards, when he dozed off, even in sunlight, he felt the same hand brush his neck with its long curling nail, and his scalp bristled. Once again the dead man turned in his sleep.

  Water was the real enemy, endlessly sweating from the walls and gleaming between the duckboard-slats, or falling steadily as rain. It rotted and dislodged A-frames, it made the trench a muddy trough. They fought the water that made their feet rot, and the earth that refused to keep its shape or stay still, each day destroying what they had just repaired; they fought sleeplessness and the dull despair that came from that, and from their being, for the first time, grimily unwashed, and having body lice that bred in the seams of their clothes, and bit and itched and infected when you scratched; and rats in the same field-grey as the invisible enemy, that were as big as cats and utterly fearless, skittering over your face in the dark, leaping out of knapsacks, darting in to take the very crusts from under your nose. The rats were fat because they fed on corpses, burrowing right into a man’s guts or tumbling about in dozens in the bellies of horses. They fed. Then they skittered over your face in the dark. The guns, Jim felt, he would get used to; and the snipers’ bullets that buried themselves regularly in the mud of the parapet walls. They meant you were opposed to other men, much like yourself, and suffering the same hardships. But the rats were another species. And for him they were familiars of death, creatures of the underworld, as birds were of life and the air. To come to terms with the rats, and his deep disgust for them, he would have had to turn his whole world upside down.

  All that first time up the line was like some crazy camping trip under nightmare conditions, not like a war. There was no fight. They weren’t called upon in any way to have a go.

  But even an invisible enemy could kill.

  It happened out of the lines, when they went back into support. Their section of D company
had spent a long afternoon unloading ammunition-boxes and carrying them up. They had removed their tunics, despite the cold, and scattered about in groups in the thin sunlight, relaxed in their shirtsleeves, were preparing for tea. Jim sat astride a blasted trunk and was buttering slabs of bread, dreamily spreading them thick with golden-green melon and lemon jam. His favourite. He was waiting for Clancy to come up with water, and had just glanced up and seen Clancy, with the billy in one hand and a couple of mugs hooked from the other, dancing along in his bow-legged way about ten yards off. Jim dipped his knife in the tin and dreamily spread jam, enjoying the way it went over the butter, almost transparent, and the promise of thick, golden-green sweetness.

  Suddenly the breath was knocked out of him. He was lifted bodily into the air, as if the stump he was astride had bucked like an angry steer, and flung hard upon the earth. Wet clods and buttered bread rained all about him. He had seen and heard nothing. When he managed at last to sit up, drawing new breath into his lungs, his skin burned and the effect in his eardrums was intolerable. He might have been halfway down a giant pipe that some fellow, some maniac, was belting over and over with a sledge hammer. Thung. Thung. Thung.

  The ringing died away in time and he heard, from far off, but from very far off, a sound of screaming, and was surprised to see Eric Sawney, who had been nowhere in sight the moment before, not three yards away. His mouth was open and both his legs were off, one just above the knee, the other not far above the boot, which was lying on its own a little to the left. A pale fellow at any time, Eric was now the colour of butcher’s paper, and the screams Jim could hear were coming from the hole of his mouth.

  He became aware then of blood. He was lying in a pool of it. It must, he thought, be Eric’s. It was very red, and when he put his hands down to raise himself from his half-sitting position, very sticky and warm.

  Screams continued to come out of Eric, and when Jim got to his feet at last, unsteady but whole (his first thought was to stop Eric making that noise; only a second later did it occur to him that he should go to the boy’s aid) he found that he was entirely covered with blood – his uniform, his face, his hair – he was drenched in it, it couldn’t all be Eric’s; and if it was his own he must be dead, and this standing up whole an illusion or the beginning of another life. The body’s wholeness, he saw, was an image a man carried in his head. It might persist after the fact. He couldn’t, in his stunned condition, puzzle this out. If it was the next life why could he hear Eric screaming out of the last one? And where was Clancy?

  The truth hit him then with a force that was greater even than the breath from the ‘minnie’. He tried to cry out but no sound came. It was hammered right back into his lungs and he thought he might choke on it.

  Clancy had been blasted out of existence. It was Clancy’s blood that covered him, and the strange slime that was all over him had nothing to do with being born into another life but was what had been scattered when Clancy was turned inside out.

  He fell to his knees in the dirt and his screams came up without sound as a rush of vomit, and through it all he kept trying to cry out, till at last, after a few bubbly failures, his voice returned. He was still screaming when the others ran up.

  He was ashamed then to have it revealed that he was quite unharmed, while Eric, who was merely dead white now and whimpering, had lost both his legs.

  That was how the war first touched him. It was a month after they came over, a Saturday in February. He could never speak of it. And the hosing off never, in his own mind, left him clean. He woke from nightmares drenched in a wetness that dried and stuck and was more than his own sweat.

  A few days later he went to sit with Eric at the hospital. He had never thought of Eric as anything but a nuisance, and remembered, a little regretfully now, how he and Clancy had tried to shake him off and how persistent he had been. But Clancy, behind a show of tolerant exasperation, had been fond of the boy, and Jim decided he ought, for Clancy’s sake, to pay him a visit. He took a bar of chocolate. Eric accepted it meekly but without enthusiasm and hid it away under his pillow.

  They talked about Clancy – there was nothing else – and he tried not to look at the place under the blanket where Eric’s feet should have been, or at his pinched face. Eric looked scared, as if he were afraid of what might be done to him. Isn’t it done already? Jim asked himself. What more?

  ‘One thing I’m sorry about,’ Eric said plaintively. ‘I never learned to ride a bike.’ He lay still with the pale sweat gathering on his upper lip. Then said abruptly: ‘Listen, Jim, who’s gunna look after me?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘When I get outa here. At home ‘n all. I got no one. Just the fellers in the company, and none of ’em ’ave come to see me except you. I got nobody, not even an auntie. I’m an orfing. Who’s gonna look after me, back there?’

  The question was monstrous. Its largeness in the cramped space behind the screen, the way it lowered and made Eric sweat, the smallness of the boy’s voice, as if even daring to ask might call down the wrath of unseen powers, put Jim into a panic. He didn’t know the answer any more than Eric did and the question scared him. Faced with his losses, Eric had hit upon something fundamental. It was a question about the structure of the world they lived in and where they belonged in it, about who had power over them and what responsibility those agencies could be expected to assume. For all his childish petulance Eric had never been as helpless as he looked. His whining had been a weapon, and he had known how to make use of it. It was true that nobody paid any attention to him unless he wheedled and insisted and made a nuisance of himself, but the orphan had learned how to get what he needed: if not affection then at least a measure of tolerant regard. What scared him now was that people might simply walk off and forget him altogether. His view of things had been limited to those who stood in immediate relation to him, the matron at the orphanage, the sergeant and sergeant major, the sisters who ran the ward according to their own or the army’s rules. Now he wanted to know what lay beyond.

  ‘Who?’ he insisted. The tip of his tongue appeared and passed very quickly over the dry lips.

  Jim made a gesture. It was vague. ‘Oh, they’ll look after you alright Eric. They’re bound to.’

  But Eric was not convinced and Jim knew that his own hot panic had invaded the room. He wished Clancy was here. It was the sort of question Clancy might have been able to tackle; he had knocked about in the world and would have been bold enough to ask, and Jim saw that it was this capacity in Clancy that had constituted for Eric, as it had for him, the man’s chief attraction: he knew his rights, he knew the ropes.

  ‘I can’t even stand up to take a piss,’ Eric was telling him. The problem in Eric’s mind was the number of years that might lie before him – sixty even. All those mornings when he would have to be helped into a chair.

  ‘No,’ Jim asserted, speaking now for the charity of their people, ‘they’ll look after you alright.’ He stood, preparing to leave.

  ‘Y’ reckon?’

  ‘Of course they will.’

  Eric shook his head. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Wilya come again, Jim?’ A fine line of sweat drops on the boy’s upper lip gave him a phantom moustache. ‘Wilya, Jim?’ His voice sounded thin and far away.

  Jim promised he would and meant it, but knew guiltily that he would not. It was Eric’s questions he would be unable to face.

  As he walked away the voice continued to call after him, aggrieved, insistent, ‘Wilya, Jim?’ It was at first the voice of a child, and then, with hardly a change of tone, it was the voice of a querulous old man, who had asked for little and been given less and spent his whole life demanding his due.

  Outside, for the first time since he was a kid, Jim cried, pushing his fists hard into his eye-sockets and trying to control his breath, and being startled – it was as if he had been taken over by some impersonal force that was weeping through him – by the harshness of his own sobs.

  Erich Ma
ria Remarque

  HOW LONG IT TAKES FOR A MAN TO DIE!

  Published in 1929, All Quiet on the Western Front is arguably the most famous war novel of the century. Its impact is mainly due to the fact that it crossed the national boundaries of friend and foe and described the universal human tragedy of war. Through the eyes of the nineteen-year-old German soldier Paul Bäumer, Erich Maria Remarque portrays a ‘generation that was destroyed by the war – even those of it who survived the shelling’. In the following extract, Bäumer is sent on reconnaissance patrol into no man’s land where, for the first time, he encounters the enemy at close quarters.

  I SLIP WARILY over the edge, and snake forwards. I creep along on all fours; things are going well, I fix the direction, look about me and take note of the pattern of artillery fire so that I can find my way back. Then I try to make contact with the others.

  I am still afraid, but now it is a rational fear, which is just an extraordinarily enhanced cautiousness. It is a windy night, and the shadows move back and forth in the sudden flashes from the gunfire. By this light you can see too much and too little. Often I freeze suddenly, but there is never anything there. In this way I get quite a long distance forward, and then turn back in a curve. I haven’t made contact. Every few feet closer to our trench makes me more confident, but I still move as fast as I can. It wouldn’t be too good to stop one just at this moment.

  And then I get another shock. I’m no longer able to make out the exact direction. Silently I crouch in a shell hole and try and get my bearings. It has happened more than once that a man has jumped cheerfully into a trench, and only then found out that it was the wrong side.