The Ghost Road

by Pat Barker

  I’ve got a permanent feeling of wrongness at the nape of my neck. Exposure’s the right word, I suppose, and for once the army’s bad joke of a haircut isn’t to blame. We’re out in the open all the time and I’m used to a war where one scurries about below ground like a mole or a rat. (Rats thrived on us – literally. We must have devastated the moles.) It occurred to me last night that Rivers’s idea of my using myself as a test case – the football he told me to dribble across – has one fundamental flaw in it. Same loony – different war. As far as I can make out, Rivers’s theory is that the crucial factor in accounting for the vast number of breakdowns this war has produced is not the horrors – war’s always produced plenty of those – but the fact that the strain has to be borne in conditions of immobility, passivity and helplessness. Cramped in holes in the ground waiting for the next random shell to put you out. If that is the crucial factor, then the test’s invalid – because every exercise we do now is designed to prepare for open, mobile warfare. And that’s what’s happening – it’s all different.

  I told Rivers once that the sensation of going over the top was sexy. I don’t think he believed me, but actually there was something in common – racing blood, risk, physical exposure, a kind of awful daring about it. (Obviously I’m not talking about sex in bed.) But I don’t feel anything like that now. There’s, for me, a nagging, constant apprehension, because I’m out in the open and I know I shouldn’t be. New kind of war. The trouble is my nerves are the same old nerves. I’d be happier with a ton or two of France on top of my head.

  Day was spent on general clean-up. The men’s reward was compulsory games. I stood obediently on the touchline and yelled and waved. A cold grey day. The ball seemed to fly across the lowering sky like a drenched, heavy, reluctant bird. The men were coated in mud, plumes of steam rising from their mouths. All tremendously competitive, of course – ‘C’ against ‘D’ – and curiously unreal. Street-corner football played in the spirit of public-school rugby. I stood and watched my red-faced, red-kneed compatriots charging up and down a social No Man’s Land. But at least officers and men play together – it’s the only informal contact there is outside the line.

  At half-time some of them stripped off their shirts and the steam rose from their bodies, red and white, chapped hands and faces, as they stood panting. Jenkins waved at somebody off the pitch and for a moment his face was turned towards me, greenish eyes, red hair, milky white skin blotched with freckles, I had to make an effort to look away. Mustn’t get the reputation of ‘having an eye for Tommy’. Bad for discipline. Though I don’t know what the fuck else there is to look at.

  That’s the other change: the men’s expressions. That look on Jenkins’s face as he turned to wave. Before, there were basically two expressions. One you saw at Étaples, the rabbit-locked-up-with-a-stoat look. I’ve only ever seen that expression in one other place, and that was the Royces’ house. Family of four boys in the next street to us. Their father used to make them line up every night after he’d had a few pints, and lift their shirt-tails. Then he’d thrash them with a ruler on their bare bums. Every night without fail. One of them asked once, ‘What’s it for, Dad?’ And he said, ‘It’s for whatever you’ve done that you think you’ve got away with.’ But my God they could fight. One of them was the bane of my life at school.

  The other expression was the trench expression. It looks quite daunting if you don’t know what it is. Any one of my platoon could have posed for a propaganda poster of the Brutal Hun, but it wasn’t brutality or anything like that. It was a sort of morose disgust, and it came from living in trenches that had bits of human bone sticking out of the walls, in freezing weather corpses propped up on the fire step, flooded latrines.

  Whatever happens to us it can’t be as bad as that.

  Wednesday, 18 September

  Today we went to the divisional baths, which are in a huge, low barn. For once it was sunny and dry and the march, though long, was not too tiring. They weren’t ready for us and the men sat on the grass outside and waited, leaning on each other’s knees or stretched out on the grass with their arms behind their heads. Then it was their turn.

  The usual rows of rain butts, wine barrels, a couple of old baths (proper baths). The water any temperature from boiling to tepid depending on where you were in the queue. They take off their clothes, leave them in piles, line up naked, larking about, jostling, a lot of jokes, a few songs, everybody happy because it’s not the dreary routine of drills and training. Inside the barn, hundreds of tiny chinks of sunlight from gaps in the walls and roof, so the light shimmers like shot silk, and these gleams dance over everything, brown faces and necks, white bodies, the dividing line round the throat sharp as a guillotine.

  One of my problems with the baths is that I’m always dressed. Officers bathe separately. And … Well, it’s odd. One of the things I like sexually, one of the things I fantasize about, is simply being fully dressed with a naked lover, holding him or her from behind. And what I feel (apart from the obvious) is great tenderness – the sort of tenderness that depends on being more powerful, and that is really, I suppose, just the acceptable face of sadism.

  This doesn’t matter with a lover, where it’s just a game, but here the disproportion of power is real and the nakedness involuntary. Nothing to be done about it. I mean, I can scarcely trip about with downcast eyes like a maiden aunt at a leek show. But I feel uncomfortable, and I suspect most of the other officers don’t.

  Through the barn, out into the open air, dressing in clean clothes, a variety of drawers and vests, most of them too big. The army orders these things to fit the Sons of Empire, but some of the Sons of Empire didn’t get much to eat when they were kids. One of the men in my platoon, barely regulation height, got a pair of drawers he could pull up to his chin. He paraded around, laughing at himself, not minding in the least when everybody else laughed too.

  Watching him, it suddenly struck me that soldiers’ nakedness has a quality of pathos, not merely because the body is so obviously vulnerable, but because they put on indignity and anonymity with their clothes, and for most people, civilians, most of the time, the reverse is true.

  March back very cheerful, everybody singing, lice eggs popping in the seams of the clean clothes as soon as the bodies warm them through. But we’re used to that. And I started thinking – there’s a lot of time to think on marches – about Father Mackenzie’s church, the huge shadowy crucifix on the rood screen dominating everything, a sheaf of hollyhocks lying in the chancel waiting to be arranged, their long stems scrawling wet across the floor. And behind every altar, blood, torture, death. St John’s head on a platter, Salome offering it to Herodias, the women’s white arms a sort of cage around the severed head with its glazed eyes. Christ at the whipping block, his expression distinctly familiar. St Sebastian hamming it up and my old friend St Lawrence on his grid. Father Mackenzie’s voice booming from the vestry. He loved me, the poor sod, I really think he did.

  And I thought about the rows of bare bodies lining up for the baths, and I thought it isn’t just me. Whole bloody western front’s a wanker’s paradise. This is what they’ve been praying for, this is what they’ve been longing for, for years. Rivers would say something sane and humorous and sensible at this point, but I stand by it and anyway Rivers isn’t here. Whenever a man with a fuckable arse hoves into view you can be quite certain something perfectly dreadful’s going to happen.

  But then, something perfectly dreadful is going to happen. So that’s all right.

  Sunday, 22 September

  Morning – about the nearest we ever get to a lie-in (I’ve been up and on the go by 5.30 every day this week). Wyatt’s shaving and there’s a voluntary service starting just outside. Smell of bacon frying, sound of pots and pans clattering about and Longstaffe whistling as he cleans my boots. Hallet’s on the other side of the table writing to his fiancée, something that always takes hours and hours. And the rain’s stopped and there’s a shaft of sunlight on
the ground and the straw looks like gold. The razor rattling against the side of the bowl makes a pleasant sound. The ghost of Sunday Morning at home – roast beef and gravy, the windows steamed up, the News of the World rustling as Dad drops half of it, the Sally Army tuning up outside.

  Onward, Christian soldiers,

  Marching as to war,

  With the cross of Jesus

  Going on before.

  Twenty — perhaps a few more — male voices in unison. Longstaffe’s singing the alternative version:

  Forward Joe Soap’s army

  Marching without fear

  With your brave commander

  Safely in the rear.

  He boasts and skites

  From morn till night

  And thinks he’s very brave,

  But the men who really did the job

  Are dead and in their grave.

  Sung very cheerfully with great good humour. We’re all looking forward to Sunday dinner, which is roast beef and roast potatoes. I’m famished. And there is not going to be a gas drill during this meal. I know.

  Tuesday, 24 September

  Bussed forward. Men sang all the way, in high spirits, mainly I think because they didn’t have to march.

  Thursday, 26 September

  The nearest village is in ruins. Extraordinary jagged shapes of broken walls in moonlight, silver mountains and chasms, with here and there black pits of craters thronged with weeds.

  Some of the other villages aren’t even ruins. You’re not supposed to mention the effects of enemy fire, but a lot of this is the effect of British fire so perhaps I can mention it. Nothing’s left. We passed through one village that hadn’t a single wall above knee height. Old trenches everywhere, tangles of rusting barbed-wire, rib-cages of horses that rotted where they fell. And worse and worse.

  The men, except for the one or two I remember from last year, are still reserved. Sometimes when they’re alone at night you hear laughter. Not often. They guard the little privacy they have jealously. Most of the ‘devotion’ people talk about is from officers – some of the officers – to the men. I don’t myself see much sign that it’s reciprocated. If they trust anybody they trust the NCOs, who’re older, for the most part, and come from the same background. But then I wasn’t born to the delusion that I’m responsible for them.

  What I am responsible for is GAS. Either the Adjutant wasn’t joking or if he was it’s a continuing joke. My old nickname – the Canary – has been revived. Owen for some reason is known as the Ghost. Evidently when he disappeared into Craiglockhart – and I suspect didn’t write to anybody because he was ashamed (I didn’t either) – they concluded he was dead.

  Gas drill happens several times a day. The routine lectures aren’t resented too much (except by me – I have to give them), but the random drills are hated by everybody. You’re settling down for the night, or about to score a goal, or raising the first forkful of hot food to your lips, and wham! Rattles whirl, masks are pulled on, arms and fists pumped, and then the muffled hollow shout GAS! GAS! GAS! Creatures with huge eyes like insects flicker between the trees. What they hate – what I hate – is the gas drill that comes while you’re marching or doing PT or bayonet training, because then you have to go on, flailing about in green light, with the sound of your breathing – In. Out. In. Out. – drowning all other sounds. And every movement leeches energy away.

  Nobody likes the mask. But what I have to do is watch out for the occasional man who just can’t cope with it at all, who panics as soon as it comes down over his head. And unfortunately I think I’ve found one, though he’s in my company which means I can keep an eye on him.

  The attitude to gas has changed. It’s used more and feared less. A few of the men are positively gas happy. OK, they think, if a whiff or two gets you back to base and doesn’t kill you, why not? It’s become the equivalent of shooting yourself in the foot and a lot harder to detect.

  At dinner I told Hallet and Potts that four years ago we were told to protect ourselves from gas by pissing on our socks. You folded one sock into a pad and used the other to tie it over your mouth and nose. They gaped at me, not sure if I was serious or not. ‘Did it work?’ asked Hallet. ‘No,’ I said. ‘But it didn’t half take your mind off it.’ And they both laughed, quite relieved, I think, to know I was only having them on.

  It used to give you spots round your mouth. Not that that was our main worry at the time.

  And today was pay day. After an afternoon spent crawling running falling crawling again across wet fields, the men were so caked in mud they looked as if they were made of it. Tired, but pay day’s always good, even if you’ve nothing to spend it on, and they were chattering, jostling, laughing as they queued. Then the rattles whirred. A groan went up – (with the real thing there isn’t time to groan – more practice needed) and then the usual routine: clenched fists, pumping arms, GAS! GAS! GAS!

  They went on queuing. Mud-brown men standing in mud, the slanting rays of the sun gilding the backs of their hands, the only flesh now visible. I was sitting next to Hardwick, ticking off names on the list. One man, waiting immediately behind the man who was being paid, turned his face a little to one side, and I saw, in those huge insect eyes, not one but two setting suns.

  Friday, 28 September

  Since yesterday evening there’s been a continuous bombardment. All the roads forward are choked, drivers stuck in the mud, swearing at each other, a flickering greenish-yellow light in the sky and every now and then the whine and thud of a shell. A constant drone of planes overhead, all going one way.

  We move forward tonight.

  Twelve

  Rivers walked along the path between the tent and Narovo village, the full moon casting his shadow ahead of him. All around were the scuffles and squeals of the bush, the scream of some bird that turned into a laugh, then silence for a moment, more scuffles, more squeals, the night-long frenzy of killing and eating.

  Once in the village he went straight to Ngea’s hall, stooped and went in. The scare ghost shivered at his approach.

  The women were asleep, the widows who tended Emele. He tiptoed past them, and knelt down, calling, ‘Emele! Emele!’, an urgent whisper that caused one of the widows to stir and mutter in her sleep. He waited till she settled before he called the name again. When there was no reply he pushed the door open and there, curled up in the prescribed position, back bent, hands resting on her feet, was Kath.

  ‘Kath, Kath,’ he said. ‘What on earth are you doing here?’ And the movement of his lips woke him up.

  He sat on the edge of the bed, peering at his watch. Four o’clock, never a good time to wake. His throat was very sore. He swallowed several times, and decided what was needed was that good old medical stand-by, a glass of water.

  In the bathroom he blinked in the white light, caught a glimpse of himself in the looking-glass and thought, My God, is this really what you’ve done to yourself? He took a moment to contemplate baggy eyes and thinning hair, but he wasn’t sunk so deep in neurosis or narcissism as to believe an overhead light at four a.m. lays bare the soul. He drank a glass of water and went back to bed.

  Despite the hour the curtains let in a little light, starlight, he supposed, there was no moon tonight. It was curiously reminiscent of the light in the tent on Eddystone. He beat the pillows into a more comfortable shape, and tried to get back to sleep.

  ‘Leave the flap open,’ Rivers said.

  It had been hotter than usual, an oven of a day in which people and trees had shimmered like reflections in water. The earth outside the tent was baked hard. He watched a line of red ants struggle across the immensity, a group at the rear carrying a dead beetle many times their own size.

  Hocart emerged from the tent. ‘I don’t think I can face sleeping in there tonight.’

  ‘We can sleep out here if you like. As long as you’re careful with the net.’

  The remains of their evening meal lay on the table. Neither of them had felt like eatin
g much.

  ‘What do we do?’ Hocart said, sitting cross-legged on the ground beside Rivers. ‘What do we do if they come back with a head? Or heads, God help us.’

  Rivers said slowly, ‘Logically, we don’t intervene.’

  ‘Logically, we’re dead. Even if we decide we won’t tell the authorities, how do they know we won’t? From their point of view, the only safe thing to do is –’

  ‘Obey the law.’

  ‘Get rid of us.’

  ‘I don’t think they’ll do that.’

  ‘Could they?’

  ‘Well, yes, probably. The point is, it won’t happen, there isn’t going to be a head.’

  ‘But if –’

  ‘If there is we’ll deal with it.’

  A long, stubborn, unconvinced silence from Hocart.

  ‘Look, you know what the penalties are. If they go on a raid there’s no way the British Commissioner isn’t going to hear about it. And then you’ve got a gunboat off the coast, villages on fire, trees cut down, crops destroyed, pigs killed. Screaming women and children driven into the bush. You know what happens.’

  ‘Makes you proud to be British, doesn’t it?’