A Time to Love

by Beryl Kingston

  They passed a line of dead mules, bloated and decomposing. It was impossible to see how many, but the smell of them was overpowering. Then the column was snaking down into the communication trenches and David realized that they were nearly there. They already knew what lay ahead of them: two days in the reserve trenches while the attack on the Messine Ridge began, and then it was their turn. Why do we do it? he thought, as he slithered into the trench. What is it for, all this pain and effort and destruction? But he knew these were questions he had to keep to himself.

  They marched blindly through the communication trenches, each man following the one in front, zig-zagging towards the line. The noise reverberated between the sandbags and the smell here was so dreadful that many of them were gagging as they marched. It was a combination of all the worst smells they had ever experienced, shit and piss and the sickly sharpness of the chloride of lime that was supposed to disguise it, mildew and slime and rotting vegetation and the appalling putrescence of decomposing bodies, a noisome mephitic stench almost as tangible as the noise of the bombardment. ‘The Lord is our refuge.’

  ‘I shall be glad of a spot a’ shut-eye,’ Evans shouted, when they finally arrived and were allowed to drop their kit.

  Thank God for Evans, David thought. He was always so phlegmatically normal.

  But sleep was a luxury at the front, as they were soon to discover. No sooner had they found a nice hole for their kit than David and the phlegmatic Evans were sent on sentry-go.

  ‘Oy! This is the life!’ David shouted to his mate above the tempest, taking his own peculiar refuge in sarcastic resignation. ‘Never a dull moment!’ But the sight he saw when he stood on the fire-step and looked over the parapet for the first time shocked him so much his sarcasm seemed very petty.

  For this was a ghostly, unearthly landscape they’d come to, a terrible combination of sinister darkness, unnatural silhouettes and an intermittent glow of lurid, artificial light. Above his head, star shells drew parabolas of searing brightness, and as he watched, two Very lights went up and the ground beneath was mottled with coiling shadows as their bright green signals slowly descended. Observation balloons tugged at their cables, drifting and shifting like long silver clouds. Despite himself, he could see a beauty in this fantastic sky and the artist in him knew it would be worth painting.

  But the earth beneath it was sheer horror, a picture of devastation far beyond anything even the most fevered artist could ever have imagined. Miles and miles of pitted earth stretched before him and every foot of it was marked by war. There was no grass at all, only a vast shell-pocked expanse of churned-up mud, and no living trees, only their pathetically broken remains, mere stumps, leafless and lifeless, winter trees in the middle of summer. It looked like an enormous rubbish dump littered with debris, coils of barbed wire silhouetted in the bright light from the flares, discarded guns, broken wagons, shell cases and he dared not imagine what else. Miles and miles and miles of wreckage. He was overawed and afraid and sickened. So much so, he was almost glad when a shell burst in front of the trench, because the shower of earth it threw into the air blotted out the vision. And as the earth pattered down, he remembered words from another Psalm, ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death’, and vowed that he would draw this place as soon as the attack allowed him the time to do it.

  The night and the bombardment continued endlessly. They snatched what little sleep they could huddled in funk holes in the side of the trench, and when morning came their backs ached, they were shattered by noise, crawling with lice and weary to the bone.

  It was a lovely summer’s day, warm and gentle, and the sky, where they could see it through the drifting pall of smoke, was the clear innocent blue of forget-me-nots. Now, the dreadful landscape of war was all too clearly revealed, and he saw that the misshapen lumps he’d glimpsed in the darkness were discarded greatcoats and helmets and respirators, and that some of the shell holes were so big they could have held a London bus. He thought of the men who had once worn those greatcoats and stood on the bare earth when the great shells exploded. And terrible images filled his mind, until his heart juddered with the terror of them, and he was glad when the corporal roared at him to join the digging party for repairs, because it recalled him to the trench and the ordinary normal faces of Evans and young Clifford. The full horror of what man had done to nature was too painful to contemplate.

  Breakfast, which consisted of cold porridge and a muddy liquid that was probably tea, was accompanied by the rumour that the attack on the Messine Ridge was due to start at dawn the next day.

  ‘We shall see it all from ’ere,’ Clifford said, quite cheered by the thought of such vicarious excitment.

  ‘We should be so lucky!’ David said. But Clifford couldn’t understand him.

  ‘They got the ridge mined,’ their corporal told them. ‘Seventeen mines, so they say, all goin’ up the same time.’

  ‘Cor!’ Clifford said. ‘That’ll be worth seeing. Sommink ter write home about, eh?’

  But then the lull was over and the bombardment began again and talk was impossible.

  That day they were kept on the run from the moment they opened their eyes until long after they needed to close them again, bringing up endless ammunition, repairing trenches, digging latrines, collecting stores. The night was divided into watches, and the bombardment continued.

  But at three o’clock in the morning there was an abrupt, terrifying silence. Suddenly they could hear the rats squealing out in no-man’s land and people coughing and talking and shuffling their feet. David and Joe Evans were bringing up trench mortars, which were like great metal footballs on a stalk and had to be carried over the shoulder, so they were stooped under the weight and couldn’t see anything except the yard of ridged mud immediately under their feet. But by common consent the entire squad stopped moving and put their burdens down and looked up. And what they saw then was so extraordinary they couldn’t believe their eyes.

  Below them, to the south, huge sections of the hillside were rising slowly into the air, projected upwards by glowing red columns of fire and expanding like black sponges to blot out the skyline.

  Uncannily, the mines had exploded before they heard them, and when the detonations came, they were so enormous they were like something out of a nightmare.

  ‘Cripes!’ Evans said, his eyes bolting.

  ‘Gevalt!’ David echoed. We will not fear, though the earth be removed and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea.

  And then there were men rising out of the trenches below them, helmet rims and bayonet edges reflecting the red light. Small black vulnerable figures crawling up the distant hillside under the thick rain of that falling earth. And some fell, arms flung upwards, and some dropped suddenly like stones. And David shuddered with the terrible knowledge that he was watching men die. But then the sergeant was chivvying them into action again. ‘Come on, lads. Look lively. We ain’t got all night.’ And their labours took them away.

  The attack continued all through the day, but they were kept too busy to be able to see any more of it, and by now the enemy shells were falling uncomfortably close to their own trenches, and they’d had several casualties. But at nightfall the message came down the line that the attack had been a success and that three miles of the ridge had been captured.

  ‘Our turn next, lads,’ the corporal said cheerfully. ‘Make the most a’ that stew. Could be yer last ‘ot meal fer quite a while.’

  The following evening they were issued with extra trenching tools, sacks for bagging, rolls of barbed wire, boxes of ammunition, grenades and mortars, and the regulation six tins of cigarettes to keep them going during their six-day stint on the new front line. They toiled away from the support trench, staggering under a load nearly equal to their own weight.

  ‘Beasts a’ burden, that’s all we are,’ Evans said, shifting his cigarette into the corner of his mouth.

  ‘Give us any more ter carry an’ we shal
l be breakin’ into a trot,’ David said, his sarcasm as heavy as his pack, for he was mortally afraid of what he would see and hear once they reached the front.

  The first mile they covered was a morass of shell holes and mud-spattered debris. Then they began to pass the corpses, huddled and distorted and grotesque, some already swelling and decomposing in the heat, or streaked with congealed blood or thickly speckled with a crawling mass of flies and bluebottles, buzzing obscenely. They were so hideous that it was hard to realize they had once been men, and so terrifying that David wondered whether it would be within his competence to draw them truthfully. But he knew they must be drawn, for this truth had to be told in its entirety. It was no good looking away.

  The sergeant urged them past at speed, because there was a lot of sniping and they were far too exposed out in the open even at night. ‘Look lively,’ he said, and David wondered whether he was the only one who could see how inappropriate the words were. Or perhaps they all did, and none of them had the breath or the energy to say so. Then, quite precipitately, they arrived at a German strongpoint.

  It was a deep square dug-out, with thick concrete walls and a wide entrance which was now facing in quite the wrong direction for their purpose, straight at the new enemy lines above them. The occupants were all gone, but they’d left their bunks behind and most of their equipment, which was littered in the doorway and blocked the passage trench.

  ‘Right, you lot,’ the corporal said, ‘this ‘as all gotta be clear by daybreak.’

  ‘Where’s Jerry, Corp?’ Clifford asked.

  ‘Don’t ask me,’ the corporal said. ‘In them woods up there, I ‘spect. Leastways that’s where I’d be if I was a Jerry.’

  The woods were a dark shadow about six hundred yards away. Gevalt! David thought. So close! He lit a cigarette to steady his nerves, wishing they could dig another opening to their new quarters. But there was no digging through four feet of concrete. So they set to and cleared the rubbish.

  The British guns were still pounding away behind them and as they were plainly aiming at the wood it looked as though the corporal was right. They were horribly exposed in their isolated gun emplacement and facing the wrong way, wide open to counter-attack. But the counter-attack didn’t begin that night, although the firing was continuous. When morning came the barrage died down and, odd though it seemed, the ridge was relatively calm. A very young man in an officer’s uniform and splendid thigh boots strolled into the strongpoint just after dawn and informed them that they were to lie low by day and keep very very quiet, and when it was dark they were to get the Lewis gun out into the passage trench and up into the next communication trench along the line, where, so he said, ‘you should have a jolly good field of fire’.

  So they took it in turns to cat-nap all through the next jittery day, waking to listen out or stand guard. The latrine was already very well used and extremely foul, there was no food and precious little water, for supplies couldn’t be brought up until dusk, so they were horribly uncomfortable, cramped together in their concrete cell. But at least the shells fell short of them, and they had no casualties and a certain amount of cover. When darkness fell and they emerged to haul the Lewis gun into position, they felt they were making progress. Now if the counter-attack began they would be ready for it.

  But the counter-attack didn’t come. Supplies trickled through, there was a heavy barrage, and towards midnight a sinister line of flickering lights went snaking down the ridge towards the old front line, but there was no attack. They smoked incessantly, in a state of continuous, nerve-wracking alert, shifting about in the communication trenches, cramped and tense. But when daylight brought the possibility of sleep they were too fatigued to take advantage of it.

  ‘How long we been ’ere?’ Clifford wanted to know, easing himself down from the middle bunk as the sun went down for the fourth or was it the fifth time. “Bout time we was sent back ter base.’

  ‘Six days, old son,’ the corporal said. ‘Anyone got a fag?’

  ‘I reckon they’ve fergot us,’ Clifford grumbled. ‘Stuck out ’ere in the middle a’ nowhere. We shall be ’ere months.’

  But at last the order came. They were being sent to Westoutre for rest and retraining. It was 13 June and they’d been in the trenches for ten days. It felt like a lifetime.

  Oh, the relief to be trudging away from that awful place, leaving the smell of death behind, heading towards green grass and dry tents and the chance of a wash and the possibility of some food that would at least be hot. Their heavy packs grew lighter with every mile.

  Skylarks were carolling into the air as they settled into their tents, and the fields were greening in the early morning light. They removed their mud-caked boots and puttees, took off their tin hats, fell onto their palliasses, and slept like drunkards.

  Two hours later they were all woken up again to be de-loused and given a hot bath, which David thought was just as well, because they were all crawling. It seemed unreal to be marching along such an ordinary village street, between ordinary whitewashed houses with windows framed by ordinary wooden shutters over roads smeared with nothing more dreadful than ordinary pungent horse dung. They sang as they marched, because the sun was shining and nobody was shooting at them. ‘What do we want with eggs and ham, when we got plum and apple jam? Form fours, right turn, how shall we spend the money we earn? O, O, O, it’s a lovely war!’

  The bath-house was a converted brewery which had been cleared of everything except twelve huge tubs full of hot water and six foot troughs. They stripped in the outhouse, leaving their filthy clothes in a mud-stained pile below the number they’d been given, and then ran into the brewery, free and giggling, their mud-smeared bodies as naked as white grubs. The contrast between their brown hands and faces and the innocent pallor of their bodies was so extreme it quite startled David. Dirt darkened the lines around their eyes and mouths, increasing their look of anxiety and exhaustion, and their fingers were black-rimmed workers’ fingers, broken-nailed, calloused and scarred, yet, in between, their flesh was pale and vulnerable and soft as the newborn.

  ‘Oh my fuckin’ life! Jest look at you lot!’ a voice jeered cheerfully. ‘Bollock-naked the lot a’ yer. Where’s yer towels? Towels on the ‘ooks first if yer don’t mind.’

  It was a private in the R.A.M.C. come to collect their dirty uniforms.

  ‘Shut yer cake-’ole,’ they shouted back. ‘Bring on the dancing girls. Show you a thing or two then!’

  David was already standing in one of the troughs, lathering himself very thoroughly with a huge bar of soft soap. The luxury of feeling he would soon be clean was absorbing him almost to the exclusion of their ridiculous jokes. But he glanced up idly at the private, ready to join in, and found himself looking at the tomcat face of Alfie Miller. ‘Well, I’ll be darned!’ he said. ‘What you doin’ in the Medical Corps?’

  ‘Who wants ter know?’ Alfie said, squinting at him.

  ‘Cheifitz. We was at school tergether.’

  ‘Well, I’ll go ter Jericho! Whatcher doing in the Army?’

  ‘De-lousing.’

  ‘There y’are!’ Alfie said, producing a thick clean towel from the pile hanging across his arm. ‘Jest fer you. Seein’ ’as ’ow you’re a friend a’ mine.’

  They swapped news as David wallowed in the second tub, enjoying the clean smell of soap and disinfectant. It didn’t surprise him to learn that his artful friend had found a way to keep out of trouble.

  ‘Got mesself a nice cushy number ’ere,’ Alfie said. ‘Copped a Blighty one early on, you see. Leg wound. Jest enough, as you might say. You oughter see me limp when I come up before the Tribunal. Would a’ brought tears to yer eyes. So now I got a cushy billet, little mademoiselle, plenty a grub, one or two odd jobs on the side. You take my tip, Davey Cheifitz, get yerself a Blighty one. It’s a mug’s game out there.’

  When he was clean and clothed again, David sat on the low wall beside the brewery and drew a quick sketch of his old friend
, soft cap rakishly askew, cigarette in the corner of his mouth, thick hair tumbling over his forehead, a handsome, well-fed, prosperous soldier of fortune.

  ‘Yerse,’ Alfie said, approving of it, when it was done. ‘That’s me.’

  For the rest of his stay at Westoutre, David spent every spare moment he could scrounge scratching his remembered images onto paper, quickly and blackly before they faded. There wasn’t much time left over after the marches and the endless drill and all the other exhausting occupations the War Office had so kindly designed for soldiers returning from the front, but he worked at speed, feverishly, sitting up at night long after his friends had fallen asleep, to draw by candlelight in the corner of the hut.

  ‘There is so much I want to say about this war,’ he wrote to Ellen. ‘Keep my sketches, no matter how messy they are. I will work on them when I come home. There is a picture of Alfie Miller in this batch. Tell Mrs Miller he is alive and well and nowhere near the front. My love to the kids. Keep smiling. Maybe we shall get some home leave for Christmas! I.L.Y. David.’

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Fred Morrison was in a dilemma. One minute he was feeling really quite proud of himself, and amazed and gratified at his good fortune, and the next he was twitching with nervousness and wondering how on earth he would ever find the words to express his emotions or make his intentions clear. And it was so important that his intentions should be quite quite clear. For he was going to ask his dear Dumpling to marry him.