by John Boyne
“Here,” says Will a few moments later, looking directly at me, his expression growing more perturbed. “What did you make of friend Wolf, then? Pretty brave of him, wouldn’t you say?”
“Pretty stupid,” I reply. “Annoying the sergeant on his first day here. Not a good way to make friends with the men, either, is it?”
“Probably not,” says Will. “Still, you have to admire his balls. Standing up to the old man like that, knowing that he’ll probably get a pasting on account of it. Have you ever known any of those fellows? Those … what do you call them … conscientious objectors?”
“No,” I say, shaking my head. “Why, have you?”
“Only one,” he replies. “The older brother of a chap I went to school with. Larson was his name. Can’t remember his Christian name. Mark or Martin, something like that. Refused to take up arms. Said it was on religious grounds and old Derby and Kitchener needed to read their Bible a little more and their rules of engagement a little less, and it didn’t matter what they did to him, he wouldn’t point a rifle at another of God’s creatures even if they locked him up on account of it.”
I hiss and shake my head in disgust, assuming that he, like me, thinks the man a coward. I don’t object to those who are opposed to the war on principle or wish for its speedy conclusion—that’s natural enough—but I am of the belief that while it’s still going on, it remains the responsibility of all of us to join in and do our bit. I’m young, of course. I’m stupid.
“Well, what happened to him?” I ask. “This Larson fellow. Did they pack him off to Strangeways?”
“No,” he replies, shaking his head. “No, they sent him to the Front to act as a stretcher-bearer. They do that, you know. If you refuse to fight they say the least you can do is be of assistance to those who will. Some are sent to work on the farms—work of national importance, they call it—they’re the lucky ones. Some go to prison, they’re not so lucky. But most of them, well, they end up here anyway.”
“That seems fair,” I say.
“Only until you realize that a stretcher-bearer at the Front has a life expectancy of about ten minutes. They send them over the trenches and out into no-man’s-land to pick up the bodies of the dead and the wounded and that’s the end of them. Snipers pick them off quite easily. It’s a sort of public execution really. Doesn’t seem quite so fair now, does it?” I frown and consider it. I want to reply carefully, for I already know that it’s important to me that Will Bancroft thinks well of me and adopts me as his friend. “Of course I could have tried that myself, the whole religious thing,” he adds, thinking about it. “The pater’s a vicar, you see. Up in Norwich. He wanted me to go into the Church, too. I suppose that would have spared me the draft.”
“And you didn’t fancy it?”
“No,” he says, shaking his head. “Not for me all that malarkey. I don’t mind soldiering. At least, I don’t think I’ll mind it. Ask me again in six months. My grandfather fought in the Transvaal, you know. Was something of a hero out there before he was killed. I like the idea of proving myself as brave as he was. My mother, she’s always kept a— Watch out now, here we are.”
We step inside the medical hut, where Moody splits us into groups. Half a dozen take their seats on a group of bunks behind a row of curtains while the others stand nearby and wait their turn.
Will and I are among the first to be examined; he has chosen the last bed again and I take the one next to his. I wonder why he seems to have such a disdain for being in the centre of the room. For my part, I rather like being in the middle: it makes me feel part of something and somehow less conspicuous. I have an idea in my head that factions will develop soon among our number and those on the outskirts will be among the first to be picked off.
The doctor, a thin, middle-aged man wearing a pair of thick-rimmed spectacles and a white coat that has seen better days, indicates that Will should strip out of his clothes and he does so without embarrassment, pulling his vest over his head and tossing it carelessly on to the bed beside him, then dropping his shorts on the ground as if they matter not a jot. I look away, embarrassed, but it doesn’t do much good, for everywhere I look, the other members of my troop, those sitting on the beds at least, have also stripped down to the altogether, revealing a set of malformed, misshapen and startlingly unattractive bodies. These are young men of no less than eighteen and no more than twenty, and it surprises me that they are for the most part so undernourished and pale. Sparrow chests, thin bellies, loose buttocks are on display wherever I look, except for one or two chaps who are at the other end of the extreme, overweight and corpulent, thick flabs of fat hanging around their chests like breasts. As I undress, too, I quietly thank the construction firm where I worked for the past eighteen months as a labourer for how it fed my muscle, before wondering whether my relative strength and fitness might see me called up for active duty sooner than is healthy.
I turn my attention back to Will, who is standing straight as a rod, both arms extended before him as the doctor peers inside his mouth, then runs a measuring tape across the expanse of his chest. Without thinking how it might look, I take him all in with a glance and am struck once again by how good-looking he is. Out of nowhere I have a sudden flashback to that afternoon at my former school, the day of my expulsion, a memory still buried deep inside me.
I close my eyes for a moment and when I open them I find that I am looking straight into Will’s eyes. He’s turned his head to look at me; it’s another curious moment. I wonder, Why isn’t he looking away? And then, Why aren’t I? And the look lasts for three, four, five seconds before the corners of his mouth turn up into a slight smile and he looks away at last, staring directly ahead once again, exhaling three times, long and deep, the response, I realize, to the doctor holding a stethoscope to his back and asking him to breathe in deeply and out again.
“Thank you,” says the doctor in a disinterested tone as he comes around to the front and tells Will that he can put his clothes back on. “Now,” he says, turning his attention towards me. “Next.”
I endure a similar examination, the same measuring of heart rate and blood pressure, height, weight and pulmonary ability. He grabs my balls and tells me to cough; I do so quickly, willing him to let go, then he orders me to extend both hands in front of my body and hold them there, as still as I can. I do as he asks and he seems pleased by what he observes. “Steady as a rock,” he says, nodding and ticking off a box on his paperwork.
Later, after a terrible breakfast of cold scrambled eggs and fatty bacon, I find myself back in our barracks once again and kill a few minutes by taking in the lie of the land. The screened-off area at the opposite end from Will and me is where Wells and Moody sleep, their bunks offering a small degree of privacy from their useless charges. The latrine is outside, a single hut that contains a few pisspots and something worse, far more foul-smelling, and which we are informed we will be taking it in turns to empty every evening, starting that night, of course, with Wolf.
“You don’t think they might have let us digest our breakfast first?” asks Will as we make our way to the drill ground, walking alongside each other again but this time more to the centre of the pack. “What do you think, Tristan? I feel as if I’m going to throw that whole mess up at any moment. Still, we are at war, I suppose. It’s not a holiday camp.”
Sergeant Clayton is waiting for us, standing erect in a freshly pressed uniform, and he doesn’t move or even appear to breathe as we fall into line before him and his two apostles take their positions on either side.
“Men,” he says finally, “the idea of seeing you engaging in exercise while wearing the colours of the regiment is abhorrent to me. For that reason, until I deem otherwise, you shall train and drill in your civvies.”
A low murmur of disappointment rings out across the ranks; it’s clear that many of the boys want nothing more than to put on the longed-for khaki fatigues here and now, as if the clothes themselves might turn us into soldiers immediately.
Those of us who have waited a long time to be accepted into the army have no desire to wear the cheap, dirty clothes we arrived in for a moment longer than is necessary.
“Load of tosh,” whispers Will to me. “The bloody army can’t afford any more uniforms, that’s all it is. It’ll be weeks before we’re kitted out.”
I don’t reply, nervous of getting caught talking, but I believe him. For as long as the war has been going on I’ve been following it in the newspapers and there are constant complaints that the army doesn’t have enough uniforms or rifles for every soldier. The downside is that we will be stuck in our civvies for the foreseeable future; the upside is that we can’t be called to France until we have a suitable kit to fight in. There’s already uproar in Parliament about men sacrificing themselves without even having the proper uniform.
We begin with fairly rudimentary drilling techniques: ten minutes of stretching, followed by running on the spot while we build up a good perspiration. Then, quite suddenly, Sergeant Clayton decides that our file of five by four men is quite disordered and charges between us, pulling one man a step forward, pushing another a fraction back, dragging some poor unsuspecting lad to his right while kicking another further to the left. By the time he has finished—and I’ve received my own share of pushes and shoves during his manoeuvres—the lines don’t look any more ordered or disordered than they did ten minutes earlier, but he seems more satisfied with them and I’m willing to believe that what is not obvious to my untrained eye is a glaring offence to his more experienced one.
Through it all, Sergeant Clayton complains loudly about our inability to hold formation, and his voice becomes so strained and his face so angry that I genuinely believe he might do himself an injury if he does not take care. And yet, to my surprise, when we are finished and dismissed, sent back to the wash house to scrub ourselves clean, he seems as composed and unflappable as he did when we first encountered him.
There’s only one order left for him to give. Wolf, he decrees, has let the side down badly by not lifting his knees high enough as he marched.
“Another hour for Wolf, I think,” he says, turning his head to Moody, who responds with a firm “Yes, sir” before Wells leads us back to where we started, our colleague standing alone in the middle of the parade ground, marching in a perfect formation of one as the rest of us leave him to it, apparently unconcerned for his welfare.
“The old man rather has it in for Wolf, doesn’t he?” Will says as we lie on our bunks later that day, having been granted a thirty-minute reprieve before we are to report back for an evening march over some wild terrain, even the thought of which makes me want to groan out loud.
“It’s to be expected,” I say.
“Yes, of course. All the same, it’s not very sporting, is it?”
I turn to him and smile, surprised. There’s a bit of the toff in the way he speaks and I imagine that his upbringing as the son of a Norfolk vicar was perhaps a little more salubrious than mine. His language is refined and he seems to care about others. His kindness impresses me. It gathers me in.
“Was your father upset when you were drafted?” I ask him.
“Terribly,” he replies. “But he would have been worse if I’d refused to fight. King and country mean an awful lot to him. What about yours?”
I shrug. “He didn’t care very much.”
Will nods and breathes heavily through his nose, sitting up and folding his pillow in two behind his back as he lights a tab and smokes it thoughtfully.
“Here,” he says after a few moments, his voice growing quieter now so that no one else can hear him. “What did you think of that doctor chap earlier, then?”
“Think of him?” I reply, confused by the question. “I didn’t think anything of him. Why do you ask?”
“No reason,” he says. “Only I thought you seemed very interested in what he was doing, that’s all. Not planning on running off to join the Medical Corps, are you?”
I feel my face begin to blush again—he had caught me staring at him after all—and turn over on the bed so he won’t notice it. “No, no, Bancroft,” I say. “I’m sticking with the regiment.”
“Glad to hear it, Tristan,” he says, leaning near enough towards me for me to smell a faint scent of perspiration coming my way. It feels as if his entire spirit is about to press down upon me. “Only we’re stuck with a right group of no-hopers here, I think. Corporal Moody might have a point about that. It’s good to have made a friend.” I smile but say nothing; I can feel a sort of sting running through my body at his words, like a knife placing itself in the centre of my chest and pressing forward, hinting at the pain that is sure to follow. I close my eyes and try not to think about it too deeply. “And for God’s sake, Tristan, stop calling me Bancroft, would you?” he adds, collapsing back on his own bunk now, the weight of his body throwing itself down so enthusiastically that it causes the springs to cry out as if they’re in pain. “My name’s Will. I know every bugger here calls each other by their surname but we’re different, I think. Let’s not let them break us, all right?”
Over the weeks that follow we endure such torturous training that I can’t believe this is something I had wanted to be a part of for so long. Our reveille comes most mornings at five o’clock when, with no more than three minutes’ warning by Wells or Moody, we’re expected to wake, jump from our beds, dress, pull our boots on and line up in formation outside the barracks. Most days we stand there in a sort of daze, and as we begin to march out of the camp for the four-hour hike ahead our bodies cry out in pain. On these mornings I imagine that nothing could be worse than basic training; soon I will learn that I was wrong about that, too.
The result of such activity, however, is that our young bodies begin to develop, the muscle forming in hard packs around our calves and chests, a tightness appearing at our abdominal muscles, and we begin to look like soldiers at last. Even those few members of our troop who arrived at Aldershot overweight—Turner, Hobbs, Milton, the practically obese Denchley—begin to shed their excess pounds and take on a more healthy aspect.
We’re not obliged to march in silence and usually keep up low, grumbling conversations. I form good relations with most of the men in our troop but it’s to Will that I cleave most mornings and he appears content to spend his time with me, too. I haven’t experienced much friendship in my life. The only one who ever mattered to me was Peter, but he abandoned me for Sylvia and then, after the incident at school, my subsequent disgrace ensured that I would never lay eyes on him again.
And then, one afternoon on a rare hour’s break in the barracks, Will comes inside to find me alone, my back turned to him, and he leaps upon me in a fit of enthusiasm, screeching and squawking like a child at play. I wrestle him off me and we roll around on the floor, grabbing and jostling, laughing at nothing. When he has me in a clinch, pinned to the floor, his knees on either side of my torso, he looks down at me and smiles, his dark hair falling in his eyes, and I am sure that he looks at my lips for moment, turns his head a little and stares at them, his body arcing forward just a touch, and I raise my knee slightly and risk a smile. We look each other—“Ah, Tristan,” he says mournfully, his voice soft—and then we hear someone at the door and he jumps up, turning away from me, and when he looks back as Robinson enters the barracks I notice that he cannot, just now, catch my eye.
Perhaps it’s not unusual, then, that I find myself seething with jealousy on an early-morning march when, having stopped to retie my bootlaces as I leave camp, I find that I have lost Will in the pack of men and, brushing my way through them quickly, careful not to appear too obvious in my intentions, I discover him walking ahead of the others with none other than Wolf, our conscientious objector, as his boon companion. I stare at them in surprise, for no one ever walks or talks with Wolf, on whose bed small white feathers appear every night from our pillows to such an extent that Moody, who has no liking for Wolf any more than the rest of us do, tells us to pack it in or our pillows will be st
ripped bare and we’ll develop neck ache from stretching flat out on our mattresses with nothing to cushion our heads. I glance around, wondering whether anyone else has noticed this unusual pairing, but most of my fellow recruits are too focused on putting one foot in front of the other as they march along, heads bowed, eyes half closed, thinking about nothing other than getting back to base as quickly as possible and the dubious pleasures of breakfast.
Determined not to be left out of whatever they’re discussing, I pick up the pace a little until I am alongside them both, falling into line next to Will, looking anxiously across at him as Wolf leans forward and smiles at me. I get the impression that he has been in the middle of a speech about something—it’s never a conversation with Wolf, it’s always a speech—but he grows silent now and Will turns to look at me, offering an expression which suggests that although he’s surprised to see me he’s pleased nonetheless.
Of course, one of the things that I like most about Will is the notion—completely real, at least in my head—that he genuinely enjoys my company. He laughs at my jokes, which come more freely and wittily whenever I am around him than they do in anyone else’s company. He makes me feel as if I am just as good as him, just as clever, just as relaxed with other people, and the truth is that I feel anything but. And there is the sense, the ongoing sense, that he feels something for me.
“Tristan,” he says cheerfully, “I wondered what had happened to you. I thought perhaps you’d gone back to bed. Arthur and I got talking. He was telling me about his plans for the future.”
“Oh yes?” I ask, looking across at Wolf. “And what are they? Planning on making a run for the papacy, are you?”
“Steady on, Tristan,” says Will, a note of criticism in his tone. “You know the pater’s a vicar. Nothing wrong with the Church, you know, if it’s the right thing for you. Couldn’t manage it myself, of course, but still.”