Oatlands, July 5 1918
Dear Emma,
You ask me about the assault on Bellevue Spur in October of last year—yes, the ‘tally’ was high: two thousand and seven hundred men dead or wounded. Well, now that I am in England and less at the mercy of censors, I can tell you.
We all knew the attack would not go well. Ours was only a late attempt before the allied armies settled down to be shelled all winter. Perhaps we may have imagined that we—the Invincible Division—would succeed where others had failed. We might have believed that, if it was not for what we could see for ourselves.
I was running messages on the eleventh for Captain Green. The Dinks were laying cable in the forward areas, but, as usual, runners and carrier pigeons were out in force. While I awaited a reply to Green’s message, I spoke to an orderly at the Regimental Aid Post at Waterloo Farm. He told me that hundreds of wounded men from the East Lancashire Battalion had been discovered by the reconnoitring Rifle Brigade, left behind in No-Man’s-Land when their attack failed and the line withdrew five miles. He said, ‘We’re treating some in the shell holes where they fell, preparations for the attack just won’t let us get them back to the dressing stations. Some of them will still be out there tomorrow, when the attack begins.’…
(I ran back to my company—in reserve behind the Otagos—carrying a message that reiterated plans of coordinating our efforts in a leap-frog fashion with the other companies, and some remarks on what the barrage could be expected to do.
On the way I saw several guns caught in the mud, one surrounded by men piling wedge after wedge beneath its wheels, rocking it back and forth in an effort to free it. A little further along, the gunners were unloading shells from a tilting, half-submerged limber—setting off carrying them up the line, one at a time. Half-a-mile on another gun was being hauled out of the mud by twenty Maori Pioneers, several more of whom were trying to free the team of panicked, plunging mules.)
… The guns did not perform as hoped. Some never went into position, others, although in position, sank back into the mud after a few rounds, so their shells fell in the wrong range …
(The captains and lieutenants were standing under a sagging canvas awning outside the dugout. Green was holding a map clear of the drips falling from the rim of his helmet. He was saying, ‘Effective artillery support can’t be relied on in these conditions. The men will have to be twice as tenacious as usual.’ He glanced at me. I saluted and handed him the message. He scanned it, passed it to Captain Crawley and said, ‘That’s all, Thornton, return to your platoon.’)
… We walked to the jump-off point through rain and in complete darkness, falling into holes and hauling each other out. As we walked the enemy shelled us steadily. Most of the shells, even those that fell near us, buried themselves so deep at impact that, rather than scatter shrapnel, they showered us with mud …
(‘The barrage hasn’t touched the wire. Sergeant Travis had some men up there last night.’
‘I don’t want to know.’
Andy put his hand into his tunic and took out a letter. ‘Will you carry this?’
I took it from him.
‘Odds are—’ he said, and grimaced.)
… At the jump-off line we sat and waited, chewing on dry rations. Very Lights were going up continually from the ridges …
(Their radiance stuttering weirdly through the drifting bands of rain.)
… I wrote you a letter, Emma, and gave it to Corporal Price. It was the only letter I’d ever written directly before an engagement, but for once I couldn’t imagine myself emerging from the battle …
(‘I feel different from the other times,’ I said. Andy scrutinised my face. ‘You look different too.’)
… At Zero Hour (5:25 am) our artillery opened up and the first wave set off. After a time our barrage began to fall among us, instead of moving in a curtain before the advance …
(Calmly I listened to the shells whistling, and the sodden explosions—mud flexing and taking flight—realising these shells were our own.
Green appeared above us, striding along the line, his face mottled. He stopped opposite me and paced back and forth in a great rage. Although short-shooting was the cause of his fury, he seemed oblivious to any danger to himself. The Lieutenant came up beside him, equally exposed and unconcerned for himself—not infuriated, but gloomy and withdrawn. A strong wind picked up and the drizzle changed to a heavy rain.)
… Some officers ordered their men to fall back behind the curtain of shellfire, others told theirs to advance. Only some men received the orders; some retired, others went forward into the wire, the machine guns.
We met one of the wounded Otagos on his way back. He told us his officer had sent him with a message: ‘Men are dropping steadily, but our progress is satisfactory.’ …
(‘When did he tell you that?’
‘An hour back.’
‘And what about now?’
‘Now, I think, the ranks’ll be getting pretty thin up there, so you blokes had better hurry along.’)
… Emma, we knew Battalion HQ might make its decisions based on his report, which would be five hours old by the time it reached them. News after Z-Hour is always confused, conflicting and fragmentary—or just too late.
Towards noon I found myself alone in a shell hole with John Price. We had come up to the wire, thickets of it, yards deep, with only one visible gap in all the stretch we could see, apart from the huge beckoning gap of the Gravenstafel road …
(I heard Mac’s order from a shell hole several yards ahead and began to scramble up, but John seized hold of one of my legs. ‘There’s no need for us to get all congested, lad.’
‘Is that Blue Line past the wire, John? We’ll never get there!’
‘Then don’t be in such a hurry not to get there.’
We watched as Mac and a few others reached the gap and began to inch through. Machine gun fire sent mud up in fountains around them. One by one their bodies jerked into stillness.
‘Well—’ John said, morosely, then turned to me and kissed me on the cheek. ‘See how I do before you follow me, eh Mark?’ He clambered over the rim of the hole and was instantly blown back on top of me by a nearby explosion. He lay, with blood leaking from his ears and nose and the whites of his open eyes suffused red.)
… Most of our officers were killed or injured. Remnants of the Division lay scattered, hiding in shell holes. We had little clean water, no food. We lay low all day …
(I saw some men charge the gap where the road ran. Caught in the crossfire their bodies didn’t fall but, dead, were held a moment in the air by the vitality of bullets.
Later, John began to have convulsions, his legs kicking and arms drumming on the ground. I threw myself over him, listening to his grunts, and the breath hissing through his locked teeth. A warm stink rose from his body and he became limp. I put my hand to his mouth and felt a moist flutter of breath. I pressed my water bottle to his lips. Perhaps a little seeped past his thick tongue, but most of it ran out the sides of his mouth.
Rain was leaching the heat out of my body. My rifle was clogged with mud. A little sun in the centre of my chest kept burning coolly and steadily, like a light beneath the sea.
When I checked John some fifteen minutes later, I discovered he was dead.)
… I had to try the wire myself, Emma, but I didn’t get very far before something slammed into my helmet and I found myself suspended upside down in a shell hole, one foot entangled. There were two Otago men in the hole; one was nursing a broken forearm, the other had lost an ear. Their names were Patterson and Jones. I remember after they set me on my feet, I took out my journal and wrote another letter to you. I gave it to one of them, I can’t recall now which one—
The following day the Jaegers in the fortresses let us pick up our dead and wounded and walk off the field …
(A voice invaded my fever and thirst saying something about stretcher-bearers. I opened my eyes. Above me the sky swooped and bobbed
like a kite before the wind catches it and carries it upward.
I slithered up to the rim of the hole and surveyed the land. Either side of the wire stretcher-bearers were at work. Men were getting up out of shell holes to walk off the field. There were six stumbling soldiers for each available stretcher. I watched their faraway figures, sinking to the thigh at every step.
I drew back and looked at the two Otagos, who peered at me out of muddied white faces, unable to say anything intelligible.
A gust of sunlight swept across the land. By it I saw the fortifications on the ridge, row after row of ferroconcrete pillboxes, and the whole hillside swathed in wire. Impossible.)
… Patterson, Jones and I floundered back the way we’d come. I gave them a shoulder each, being by far the fittest man. It took us hours to move a quarter of a mile …
(Again we entered a wilderness of rain and hail. I had lost my helmet and every drop sent a shock of cold through my skull. My lower legs and forearms were numb as though severed by sheets of ice at knee and elbow.
Patterson’s mud-caked head lolled on my shoulder. Once I fell sideways, dragged down by his weight as he collapsed. Jones and I crouched over his body, a heap of man-shaped mud.
‘You take his other arm—’ We hauled him up. He stared at us with the hopeless, uninterested gaze of a sick animal, said thickly, ‘The stupid bugger—built it on the edge of the marsh—where the water was lying not two feet underground—’
‘What?’
‘The—cowshed—’ He shook us off, whirling around to search for something in the curdling grey clouds—the shape or shadow of a sinking cowshed. Then he fell again, and again we wrestled him up and walked him on.
It cleared a little. We found a track with other men shuffling along it, and the stretcher-bearers, their faces white with effort, wading step by lurching step. We had gone nearly a mile.
Then I was walking by myself—Patterson and Jones had disappeared—jostled by a man at whom I peered trying to recognise the drooping body and languid face. He looked through me, then at me, croaked, ‘Mark!’
‘Andy.’
We staggered on. He was smirking at me, his free hand fumbling up my arm to grip my shoulder. His other arm encircled the back of a smaller, wiry man with blood clotted in his thick hair and leaking in watery rivulets down his neck. I pulled away from Andy and, moving around the other side of the Lieutenant, I tucked my arm under his.
‘We didn’t get to the wire,’ Andy said. ‘I found him in a shell hole on the way out, unconscious and half underwater. So I pulled him out and stayed there all night. I got him to walk this morning.’
The Lieutenant lifted his head and looked at me, then at Andy. ‘McCauley—this is Mark Thornton.’
‘Yes, Sir.’
He stared at me and nodded slowly. ‘I knew—’
‘Just a wee bit further, Sir,’ Andy coaxed.
‘—I knew the attack would fail.’ He waited for me to make some connection, then looked at Andy. ‘Because Thornton didn’t get—radiant.’
Andy nodded assent.)
… A body of men appeared out of the haze, moving vigorously through the mire, coming among us like warmth and strength themselves—the Maori Pioneers. Some relieved the stretcher-bearers, others hoisted into their arms the frailer of the walking wounded …
(He stopped before us and spread his arms. ‘Can I take this fella off you?’ Andy and I stepped aside and the Maori caught Given and lifted him, cradled like a child, then turned his broad back on us and moved quickly away.)
… Andy and I spent that night under a tarpaulin among the stretcher-cases in rows around Waterloo farm, wrapped in a blanket each, eating damp bread and sipping tepid tea …
(Rain was levelling everything. It was a recommendation to keep away. Cooling a world where men did not belong out-of-doors, swarming over the broken heaps of minuscule hills, over smashed veins of drainage systems and deep marsh water welling up.
My eyes fixed on the cracks of yellow lamplight around the sackcloth-covered entries of the dugouts—like rents in a wasteland backdrop of night, water, and algid, smothering mud—a torn scenery through which I could look into a world of yellow fire.
Two thousand and seven hundred men. A defeat. Impossible. Inevitable.)
… And, as you know, the Canadians finally took Bellevue Ridge—then lost it again four months later.
Green came walking across the lawn of Oatlands, his arm in a sling. I was astonished to see him here among the nurses, neat uniforms, hospital blues, and warm red dressing gowns, in the thick sunlight of a safe English summer.
He stopped above me and his smile compressed as I turned the pages of my letter to Emma face down on my knees.
‘Hello, Thornton.’
‘Sir.’
We shook hands. I looked at his lame arm.
‘I got this at Bapaume. It swelled up, all nasty with pus—but it’s on the mend now. How are you faring?’
‘Much improved. I’m to be transferred to Hornchurch next week.’
‘What luck.’
I studied his face—as though I was looking into the eyes of a young child, and it would cost me nothing of myself to do so. He flushed and looked away. I wondered why he was visiting me, what his purpose was.
‘Now tell me, Thornton, did you hear what happened to Given?’ he asked briskly, as though he was making an official enquiry.
‘Sergeant McCauley wrote to me about it.’
‘Such a shame.’ He spoke with more composure than might Gordon MacVey over a ewe found dead at lambing time. ‘I’ve known Given for some time, he was a junior at Christ’s College in my last year, and he was my solicitor before the war.’
‘Really? I didn’t know that.’
‘He has some relatives here, I believe, including his grandmother—a Lady Jocelyn. So he’ll be well taken care of for the time being.’
‘Where is he?’
‘Balmerlawn.’
‘Did you write to his wife?’
He cleared his throat and turned his gaze upward.
‘Yes, both Major Miller and I wrote.’ I watched his face, his throat flexing as he swallowed. Out of his power, yet in his presence, at last permitting myself to acknowledge how much I hated him.
I had disliked him from the beginning, and I suppose he sensed my dislike.
Shortly after we arrived at Sling, MacLean told us our new CO was making a kit inspection. The platoon threw itself into spit-and-polishing. At the appointed hour we lined up by our bunks, staring up and out into the middle distance, like statues lining a road.
As he came along the ranks with Mac and the Lieutenant, Green asked the occasional question and made the occasional remark. His voice was sharp, cool, narrow—a utilitarian blade of a voice. When opposite me he turned to address some comment to Given and, curious, my gaze moved down to his face. He was turning back to scrutinise me, as though I were a picture, fixed and lifeless. He was not expecting to be looked at. Of course meeting an officer’s eyes while at attention is always irregular and insolent—I expected him to be displeased, and should have turned my eyes up again instantly and submitted to the disapproval. But I was arrested by his face and forgot he could see me as, for a long moment, I searched curiously for what it was that was not right about his appearance. It wasn’t an ugly face, even with its arched lower lip pressing the top lip into a perpetual sneer. No, there was something troubling and unforgettable about that face.
Too late I recalled proper conduct and looked up into the air above his head. Too late, because I believe he knew I had seen right into his deficiency—that oddity in his eyes—that entity which was the soul inside his body: something small, insensitive and envious, like a wary, trespassing animal peering out the window of a house.
I saw all this without formulating it. All I knew was he was odd and deficient somehow, and that he suspected I had seen this. However, he didn’t say anything about my insolence, but went on along the row.
Gree
n turned out to be a careful, level-headed officer, who tried to assuage problems created for the company by the inept Major Miller. But he never cared for any of us, and he was always hard on me. Because of him some of my letters arrived home so censored that their sense was in tatters, like a voice over a bad telephone connection, remote and broken. And, of course, before very long in France I was writing to stay sane, redeeming what I saw by saying it, and sending myself home with my words.
Though I have no evidence, I believe there were confrontations between Green and the Lieutenant about his treatment of me. Sometimes, when they were together in my presence, I could feel Given warning Green.
One night after Alan’s death, when I was sitting on the fire-step next to the sleeping Palmer, writing by moonlight on a small folded scrap of paper, Andy came and sat with me and I read him a poem, whispering its end:
… A voice says:
‘You know this place,
You have been here before many times,
Walking freely in and out again.
You know this circle,
This treadmill highway of flints and ashes,
These no-colour low skies,
This territory of despair.
Your own old footprints, crumbling at the edges,
Set and lifeless, lead you on.
Lead you out. For as always,
You will leave here.’
I say:
‘This time I stay.’
Then flare up at the laughter,
Like flame against a wall.
This poem is for you—
I walked out of the moment of your death,
A two-tongued liar singing:
After Z-Hour Page 19