by John Boyne
“All right,” I said, trying to calm her. “I’m sorry. I can see it now.”
“People behave as though we are disgraced. Can you understand that?” she said, quieter now. Tears sprung into her eyes as she spoke to me. “Look at that couple in the café. Their brazen rudeness. Their insensitivity. Oh, Tristan, don’t look at me like that. Don’t pretend you didn’t notice.”
I frowned, remembering only the couple who had sat a few tables away from us before moving to a more secluded area to continue their assignation.
“They moved because of me,” she cried. “When I came back from the Ladies and they saw who was sitting near them, they upped sticks and got as far away from me as possible. This is what I have to put up with every day. It’s not as bad as it once was, that’s true, it used to be horrendous, but in a way it’s even worse now that people are talking to me again. It says that they’ve entirely forgotten Will. Which I never shall. They treat my parents, they treat me, like they want to say that they forgive us, as if they think we have something to be forgiven for. But it’s we who should be forgiving them for how they treated us and how they treated Will. And yet I don’t say anything. I’m full of fine ideas, Tristan; you’d learn that about me if you were fool enough to stick around here any longer. But that’s all they are. Fine ideas. In my heart, I’m just as much a coward as they all think my brother was. I want to defend him, but can’t.”
“Your brother was not a coward,” I insisted. “You must believe that, Marian.”
“Of course I believe it,” she snapped. “I don’t think it for a moment. How could I? I who knew him best. He was the bravest one of all. But try telling that to the people here and see how far it gets you. They’re ashamed of him, you see. The only boy from the entire county during the whole war ever to be lined up in front of a firing squad and executed for cowardice. They’re ashamed of him. They don’t understand who he is. Who he was. They never have. But you do, Tristan, don’t you? You know who he was.”
SQUINTING IN THE
SUNLIGHT
France, July–September 1916
ACRY OF DESPAIR and weariness emanates from the pit of my stomach as the wall behind me begins to crumble and dissolve into a slow-moving river of thick, black, rat-infused mud that slides down my back and slips into the gaps at the top of my boots. I feel the sludge seeping its way into my already sodden socks and throw myself against the tide, desperate to push the barricade back into place before I am submerged beneath it. A tail passes quickly across my hands, whipping me sharply, then another; next, a sharp bite.
“Sadler!” cries Henley, his voice hoarse, his breathing laboured. He’s standing only a few feet away from me with Unsworth, I think, by his side and Corporal Wells next along the line. The rain is falling in such heavy sheets that I’m spitting it from my lips along with mouthfuls of foul dirt and it’s difficult to make any of them out. “The sandbags—look, they’re over here—pile them as high as you can.”
I make my way forward, trying to pull my boots out of three feet of mud. The terrible sucking sound they make as they emerge reminds me of the echo of a man’s last breath, deep and frantic, gasping for air, failing.
Instinctively I open my arms as a sandbag filled with excavated earth comes at me, almost knocking me off my feet when it hits me in the chest, but although I am winded I am equally quick to turn back to the wall, slamming the sandbag where I think the base must be, turning for another, catching it, padding the wall again, and another and another and another. Now there are five or six of us all doing the same thing, piling the sandbags high, crying out for more before the whole bloody place collapses about us, and it feels like a fool’s errand, but somehow it works and it is over and we forget that we have very nearly died today as we wait to die again tomorrow.
The Germans use concrete; we use wood and sand.
It’s been raining for days, an endless torrent that makes the trenches feel like troughs for the pigs rather than defences in which our regiment can take cover as we launch our sporadic attacks. When we arrived, I was told that the chalky ground of Picardy, through which we have been advancing for days now, is less liable to crumble than that of other parts of the line, particularly those miserable fields towards Belgium, where the high wetlands make entrenchment almost impossible. I can scarcely imagine any place worse than where we are. I have only these whispers and rumours to take for comparison.
All around me, what was this morning a clear pathway is now a river of mud. Pumps arrive and three of the men have a go at them. Wells shouts something at all of us, his voice gravelly, lost in the conquering environment, and I stare at him, feeling close to laughter, a sort of disbelieving hysteria.
“For fuck’s sake, Sadler!” he screams, and I shake my head, trying to make it clear that I didn’t hear the order. “Do it!” he roars at me. “Do it or I’ll fucking bury you in the mud!”
Above my head, over the parapet, I can hear the shelling beginning again, a prologue of sorts, for it isn’t heavy yet, nowhere near as heavy as it has been over the last few days, anyway. The German trenches are about three hundred yards north of ours. On quiet evenings we can hear an echo of their conversation, occasional singing, laughter, cries of anguish. We’re not that different, them and us. If both armies drown in the mud, then who’ll be left to fight the war?
“Over there, over there!” shouts Wells, grabbing me by the arm and dragging me over to where Parks, Hobbs and Denchley are attacking their pumps. “There’s buckets, man!” he yells. “This whole area must be drained!”
I nod quickly and look around. To my right, I’m surprised to see two grey tin buckets, the type that normally stand behind the reverse line, close to the latrines. Yates makes it his business to keep them as sanitary as possible. His obsession with maintaining hygiene in this place borders on the psychotic. What the hell are they doing here, I wonder as I stare at them? Yates will lose his mind if he sees them lying around like this. They can’t possibly have rolled over in the rain and landfall, for the supervision trench stands between the reverse and the front and each is about eight feet deep. Someone returning them to where they belong must have been picked off along the way. If the buckets are at my feet, then the carrying-soldier is a few feet above me, lying on his back, staring up at the dark sky over northern France, his eyes glazed over, his body growing cold and hard and free. And it’s Yates, I realize then. Of course it is. Yates is dead and we’ll have filthy latrines for the foreseeable.
“What’s the matter with you, Sadler?” shouts Wells, and I turn to him, apologizing quickly as I reach down to pick up the buckets, my hands covered in shit the moment I take their handles, but what matter, I think, what matter at all? Placing one at my feet I hold the other by top and base and scoop up a quarter-gallon of water and, looking up and checking the air, toss the great sodden mess north-east, towards Berlin, in the direction that the wind blows, watching as the murky effluent flies through the air and falls to the ground atop. Is it falling on him, I wonder? Is it falling on Yates? Obsessively clean Yates? Am I throwing shit all over his corpse?
“Keep at it, man!” shouts a voice to my left and whoever it is—Hobbs?—pumps more water away as I drive my bucket deep and deeper again, lifting the water out, sending it on its way, reaching down for more. And then a heavy body, running too fast and slipping in the mud, curses, rights himself and pushes past me and I fall, knocked head over feet, my face in the sludge and the water and the shit, and I spit out the noxious earth as I place a hand down to lever myself up, but my hand seems to just sink deeper and deeper into the mud and I think, How can this be, how can my life have descended into such filth and squalor? I used to go swimming on warm afternoons at the public baths with my friends. I would play conkers with the fallen horse chestnuts in Kew Gardens, boiling them in vinegar for a better chance of victory.
A hand reaches down to help me up.
There’s a lot of shouting now, none of it making any sense, then a great rush of w
ater in my face, and where did that come from, I wonder? Is the wind rising and taking the rain with it? My bucket is thrust hard back into my hands and I turn to see who has helped me; his face is dark and filthy, almost unrecognizable, but I catch his eye for a moment, the man who lifted me, the man who helped me, and we stare at each other, Will Bancroft and I, and say not a word before he turns away and presses on, going I know not where, sent not to help us but to make his way further along the trench and into who knows what type of dreadfulness ten, twenty, a hundred feet away.
“It’s getting heavier,” cries Denchley, looking up for a moment at the heavens, and I do the same, closing my eyes and letting the rain fall on my face, washing the shit away, and I know that I have only a few seconds to enjoy it before Wells screams at me again to fill my bucket and drain the area, to drain the fucking area before every one of us is buried here in these filthy fucking French fields.
And I go back to work, as I always do. I focus. I fill my bucket. I throw it over the side. I fill my bucket again. And I believe that if I keep doing it, then time will pass and I will wake up at home, with my father throwing his arms around me and telling me that I am forgiven. I turn to my right and make for a deeper pool, glancing down the trench, the twenty or thirty feet of it that I can see—trying to see where Will has vanished to, wanting to make sure that he is all right, and I wonder, as I always wonder at these moments, whether I will ever see him alive again.
Another day.
I wake and step out of the foxhole where I have tried to sleep for three or four hours and gather my marching order about me, my rifle and bayonet, the ammunition that slips into my pockets front and rear, my trowel, a depleted bottle of liquid that goes by the name of water but tastes of chloride of lime and which provokes sporadic attacks of diarrhoea, but if it’s a choice between dehydration and the shits, I’ll take the shits any day. My greatcoat is wrapped around me, the curved plates beneath my shirt digging into my skin, for they’re an unhappy fit meant for a smaller man, but damn it, Sadler, they tell me, we’re not running a department store here, it’ll have to do. I tell myself that it is a Tuesday, although I have nothing to base that on. Naming the day offers some dull pretence of normality.
Mercifully, the rain has stopped and the sides of the trenches are holding fast and solidifying once again, the sandbags piled up against each other, black and muddy from the previous day’s packing. I’m on top-duty in twenty minutes and, if I’m quick, I can make it to mess for tea and bully beef before returning to take up my position. Walking along, I fall into line with Shields, who looks the worse for wear. His right eye is blackened and half shut; there’s a trail of hardened blood running along his temple. It’s shaped like the Thames, twisting south towards Greenwich Pier at his eyebrow, then north to London Bridge at his forehead and disappearing into the depths of Blackfriars amid the untidiness of his lice-infested hair. I make no remarks; we are none of us as we should be.
“You up, Sadler?” he asks me.
“Twenty minutes.”
“Just finished. Food and sleep, that’s what I need.”
“I’m thinking of going to the pub later,” I tell him. “A few pints of mild and a game of feathers, if you’re interested?”
He says nothing, doesn’t even acknowledge the joke. We all say things like this from time to time and sometimes there’s fun to be had in it but Shields shows no interest in banter right now. He leaves me as we reach Glover’s Alley, which leads to Pleasant Way, which in turn splits off at the top left and turns right into Pilgrim’s Repose. We live here, beneath the ground like cadavers, and carve streets into the terrain, then we name them and erect signposts to give us the illusion that we remain part of a common humanity. It’s a maze down here, the entrenchment splitting off in so many directions before it links with one path, snubs another, provides a safe passageway to a third. It’s easy to get lost if you don’t know where you’re going, and God help the man who is not where he is supposed to be when he is supposed to be there.
I make my way out of the front trench and into the supervision, where our support lies, those small amounts of medical help we can muster together and some cots for the officers. Beyond here I can smell the food cooking and I make my way towards it eagerly, looking around the ill-kept mess row along the south-west-facing alley of the third line and see mostly familiar faces, some who are new, some who don’t speak, some who never stop, some who are brave, some who are foolhardy, some who are falling mad. Some from Aldershot, before us and after. Some with Scottish accents, some with English, some with Irish. As I make my way along there is a low murmur of conversation, the suggestion of a greeting perhaps, and I take my helmet off as I reach the mess and scratch my head, not bothering to look at what this leaves under my fingernails, for my scalp is covered in lice, and my armpits, too, and my crotch. Everywhere that they can nest and breed. It repulsed me once but now I think nothing of it. I am a charitable host and we live peacefully together, them feeding off my filthy skin, me occasionally plucking them away and ending them between the pincer-nails of thumb and forefinger.
I take what I can find and eat quickly. The tea is startlingly good; it must have been made fresh only minutes before and it summons up a memory, something from boyhood, and if I work at it I dare say I could bring it to life, but I have neither the energy nor the interest. The bully beef, on the other hand, is atrocious. God only knows what is forced into these tins; it might be badger or rat or some unknown vermin that has the audacity to continue to exist here, but we call it beef and let that be good enough for it.
I force myself not to look around, not to search for him, because in that direction only pain lies. If I see him, I will be too afraid of his rejection to approach, and there is every possibility that in my anger I will simply launch myself over the top later, directly into no-man’s-land, and take whatever is due to me. And if I don’t see him, I will convince myself that he has been picked off in the last few hours and I will throw myself over anyway, an easy potshot for the snipers, for what is the purpose of continuing if he does not?
In the end, food in my stomach, the taste of tea in my mouth, I stand up and make my way back to where I started, congratulating myself on how well I have done; how I never searched for him, not once. From such moments, half-happy hours can be strung together.
Climbing back into the front trench I hear a commotion ahead and, although I have little interest in arguments, I have to pass it to get where I am going, so I stop for a while and watch as Sergeant Clayton, who has grown bone thin in these few short weeks since we arrived, is screaming at Potter, an exceptionally tall soldier who was popular back at Aldershot for his abilities as a mimic. In good times he can do a fine imitation not only of our leader but also of his two apostles, Wells and Moody, and once, in a surprisingly buoyant mood, Clayton asked him to perform his sketches for the entire regiment, which he did and it went off well. There was no malice to it although there was, I thought, an edge. But Clayton lapped it up.
The argument appears to concern Potter’s height. He stands above us all at six feet and six inches in his stockinged feet, but add a pair of boots and a helmet atop his high-domed forehead and then he’s rearing closer to six feet eight. We’re all accustomed to him, of course, but it doesn’t make his life any easier, for the trenches are no more than about eight feet deep and less than four feet wide at their northernmost part. The poor man can’t walk tall with his head above the parapet or he’ll lose his brains to a German bullet. It’s hard on him, although we haven’t time to care, but Clayton is screaming in his face.
“You make yourself a standing target!” he cries. “And when you do that, you endanger everyone in your regiment. How many times have I told you, Potter, not to stand tall?”
“But I can’t do it, sir,” comes the desperate reply. “I try to bend over but my body won’t let me for long. My back aches something rotten on account of it.”
“And you don’t think an injured back is a sm
all price for a head?”
“I can’t crouch all day, sir,” complains Potter. “I try. I promise I do.”
And then Clayton screams a few random obscenities at him and rushes towards him, pushing him back against the wall, and I think, That’s the spirit. Just unsettle all those sandbags, why don’t you, and put us all in even more danger? Why not throw all our artillery away while you’re at it?
The argument is still ringing in my ears as I turn away from the matinee performance and make my way back to my post, where Tell looks around anxiously, waiting for me, hoping that I’ll appear, for if I don’t, then I’ve probably been stupid enough to let myself get killed in the night and he will have to stay where he is until Clayton, Wells or Moody comes along and agrees to find someone to relieve him. Which might be hours and he can’t leave his post, for that would be desertion and the punishment is a line of soldiers standing before you, their rifles raised, each one aimed at the patch of fabric pinned above your heart.