I peered through the chink. A woman was scrubbing her doorstep, far enough away that she could ignore the shouts and whistles. She looked up, shaded her eyes, and waved her scrubbing brush as if she was shooing away flies. I licked my finger to pick up the last crumbs of chocolate from a bar of Five Boys. I was always hungry then. I suppose I was still growing.
We’d all heard about the Bullring, and that the instructors were fucking bastards who would drill a man until he fell down unconscious, so there was a groan when we learned we were going to Étaples. As it turned out, we didn’t stay there long. The camp was jammed. The latrines overflowed on to the concrete floors because of an outbreak of dysentery. They were trying to clear the camp, not put more men into it. We drew our weapons there, and then we were put on to yet another train, that jerked and stopped and jolted us to the front: or at least we thought, in our ignorance, that it was taking us up the line with our brand-new rifles. The thing I remember most about that train is that someone had got hold of a bag of oranges, and we made false teeth out of the peel. Then we were in another base camp well behind the line for more courses on gas and assault training, and training for night work.
We paid attention when it sounded like something that could get you killed if you didn’t. Most of it was the usual: drill and bull, hours of it, but no one fell down or died of sunstroke as we’d been told. It wasn’t a bad life.
As soon as I’d been at the camp a day, I knew I should have had a trade. The carpenters and joiners were put into workshops to make box loopholes, knife rests, floor gratings and all the rest of it. They made signboards, too. The camp was like a town, with all the streets marked. Everybody except us seemed to know what they were meant to be doing. You had to look sharp.
If you got into a brigade workshop, you were a made man. Blacksmiths and farriers had more work than they had at home, what with all the pack animals. Then there was laying telephone wires, driving the brass to and fro behind the lines, cooking the rations. Skilled men had their hands full, and weren’t likely to find themselves in the fire-trench. But there wasn’t any call for a gardener. You’d be marched through a village which had been knocked to bits by shelling, and all there’d be left of a hundred gardens was a bit of green straggling out of a gash in a wall. The fields hadn’t any hedges, most of the time. At first, when the word ‘wood’ was mentioned, I expected to see trees, but I soon learned that it meant a place where a wood had been, and that there might be a few stumps left, or not.
I’d heard a lot of stuff about the fields we were fighting for, before ever I saw them. For me, fields were small and sharply green, with stone hedges around them and cattle plotting how to scramble a way out of them. Once you got up near the line, there wasn’t much you could recognise as a field, any more than the woods were woods. It was all a jumble. It took a while to make sense of it. There’d be patches where everything was going on as normal. We’d be marching and the French would be ploughing. Other parts, there was only the war.
Everybody else seemed to know where they were going and what they were doing, and so we kept our mouths shut. Half of what was being said, I couldn’t even understand at first. I thought it was French, but it was mostly what the regular soldiers learned out in India. You soon picked it up. I was always quick with words.
There wasn’t any gardening, but there was plenty of digging. We were always at it. Trenches, pits, dugouts, latrines, graves. We were more like navvies than soldiers, with our picks and shovels, sandbags and rabbit netting. The first time we went up the line it was wiring parties every night, because they were expecting another German offensive. We never stopped having to repair the wire, or lay down new wire, or get things off the wire that oughtn’t to have been on it, or cut the wire where a patrol was going out. The worst bit was fixing the corkscrews in silence while the wire leapt about in the dark, sweating, heaving, knowing that if you could see what you were doing, then so could the Germans. They were waiting. They only had to get lucky once, while we had to be lucky all the time.
I could have been sent to Army School. Sergeant Mills was right about that, back in Boxall. It would have been a trade, but it had drawbacks. Fritz might be trying to kill blacksmiths, chefs and mechanics and farriers and all the rest of us – but not always very hard, and only in a general way, just as we weren’t always trying very hard to kill them. However, they were always trying very hard and in a very particular way to kill any sniper they could. Just as we were. I was in the Riflemen section of my platoon and took my turn at sniping, but that wasn’t the same as creeping out into no-man’s-land and hiding in a fake tree trunk in full sight of the guns.
Fritz might bob up, careless, as any of us might even though it was drilled into us to keep our heads down. He might be caught short, hurrying to the latrine, or he might be thinking about a letter he’d just had, telling him his best girl was off with someone else. That was your chance. They’d do the same for us, we knew that. Sometimes, for no reason, we’d hold back. Other times, we wouldn’t. I was the best. Everyone knew it. I’d get the nudge: One for Danny over there. The company didn’t want me in a sniper detachment any more than I did. I was more use where I was.
It was Frederick’s coming that mucked it up. The months I’d spent head down, part of it. We moved and ate and drilled, nursed up our jokes, sweated and ached and itched and shat, all the same. We were all different and we were all the same. I’d never been part of anything before, not like that. If you had a new pair of socks sent to you, and your mate’s socks had holes, that was it. He had the socks. You didn’t think about it. We were paired up to look after each other’s feet. Looking after your own feet wasn’t sufficient incentive. You’d think selfishness would be the stronger force, but it turns out that isn’t so. Tell a man to unwrap his puttees, take off his boots, dry each toe individually, examine his feet for sores and rub them all over with whale oil, and tell him that if he doesn’t he’ll get trench foot which will cause his feet to go black and stink and maybe even have to be cut off – well, you’d think he’d do it. But he doesn’t. He’s cold and wet and dead beat and all he wants is to get some kip. Tell him he’s responsible for the feet of the man next to him, and he does it.
It was strange for me, since I’d always been separate all my life, off by myself. Here, I could forget about that. I had to, and it felt easy. I’d hear myself roaring out songs some nights in the estaminet when we were on rest, while a weaselly little boy ran about with glasses and we all despised him together. We’d drink their rat’s-piss vin blanc because the beer was such that even we couldn’t drink it, until we could fool ourselves we were drunk enough, and stagger back arm in arm. We hated the French a hundred times worse than the Germans, because they spent their lives dunning us while we were supposedly fighting for them. If they had as much as a bad egg, they’d haggle you into paying twice what a good egg was worth. The French bints were dirty, or that was what Sergeant Morris told us. We had talks about diseases but usually the lecturer couldn’t make himself heard over the shouting and whistling.
Frederick was posted to A Company, to command our platoon, after Mr Tremough was killed. Frederick turned me back into what I used to be, even though he didn’t know he was doing it. He’d been in the Third Battalion since he got his commission, until his company was smashed up at Fellancourt Wood. They were trying to retake a salient near the Soutines Ridge, which the Germans had taken from us three months previously. Frederick explained the plan of attack to me later. Our heavy artillery was to have knocked out the German heavy artillery position with gas shells, and then they were to shell the two machine-gun emplacements that had been identified. Our light artillery would pin their men in their trenches. The Third would then advance behind a creeping barrage. It was a good plan of attack, he thought, or would have been if they hadn’t thrown in a smokescreen as well. Frederick’s platoon must have got ahead of itself. Timing was everything. For a few seconds they might have thought they were being hit by short-falling sh
ells, then they must have known that they were ahead of the timetable and up in the barrage. Frederick was knocked out by shell-blast.
‘The smoke was clearing,’ he told me later. ‘I didn’t know where I was and something was on top of me, pinning me down. It seemed to take hours to work out what it was. I was on my back and the thing across my face was a hand. Not my hand. Do you know, I had a queer idea that it was yours. And the body that belonged to the hand was crushing me. I was squinting through someone else’s fingers. I had some sort of idea that he was pushing me down into the earth. Burying me. I’d forgotten about the war. I started fighting with him, trying to get him off me. I pushed and shoved in a most awful panic but he wouldn’t budge, and I couldn’t get an arm free to pick his fingers off my face. I twisted my head round and that got his hand off me, and then I could see that he couldn’t stir because there was another man lying across his legs.
‘There were six of them. All from my platoon, but I didn’t know that then. All I wanted was to get them off me. You’ve no idea how heavy they were. I would have done anything to get them off me.
‘There was such a mess everywhere. Everything was jumbled up, you couldn’t recognise it. I did know Hicks, because his face wasn’t touched. He was covered in earth up to the waist and he had his arms flung up beside his head as if he was sleeping, but he was dead too. You remember Pip Lily – how Felicia used to throw her across the room? She’d land anyhow, wouldn’t she? – legs folded up behind her so it didn’t look as if she had any. They looked like Pip Lily, all of them. Doubled over, heads down. Helmets still on. Like some awful game. I picked up a rifle – mine had gone. The firing was only sporadic by then. When I crawled out there was mess all over the place and a few men stumbling back to our line. The barrage had stopped. I knew something had gone most awfully wrong.’
Seventeen men from Frederick’s platoon were killed, and six more seriously wounded. It wasn’t only his platoon but most of B Company. In all, more than a third of the battalion was killed, and another two hundred men out of action. It shouldn’t have happened, Frederick said. He kept repeating that it was a good plan of attack, even though the outcome was a disaster. Losses like that were exactly the kind of thing the new tactics were designed to prevent. There were pockmarks on his forehead, where bits of shrapnel had been blown in, and the muscle under his right cheekbone jumped when he spoke.
Frederick was posted to the Second, given how many men they’d need to bring the Third back up to strength and the time it would take. The sniper had got Mr Tremough, so we needed another officer. We’d heard about Soutines and thanked Christ we’d been out of it. Frederick seemed to bring some of that disaster with him. Nobody talked about it but everyone thought of it.
He’d always been Frederick. Now he was Mr Dennis, in command of our platoon. He was watching me. I was watching him. I felt as if the skin had been taken off me. I was back on my own, the way I’d always been, fighting my own corner, walking the high road, saying my poems aloud. But there were men around me day and night and their feet were my feet.
I kept my head down. I didn’t catch Frederick’s eye if I could avoid it. I thought he would appreciate the reasons. Ours was a good platoon, one of the best, not sloppy. I said Frederick and I were from the same town, because it was clear that we knew each other. Everyone understood that with him an officer and me a private, being from the same town didn’t mean much. As soon as he opened his mouth you could tell he wasn’t my kind. His kind and mine lived parallel, not together. Why that wasn’t true of me and Frederick, nobody knew, or needed to.
I didn’t know what to do. I was hypnotised by the sight of that muscle jumping under his cheekbone. He was drinking, I knew that, but nothing out of the way. All the officers drank whisky. I looked at him and saw how different from the rest of us he looked. His skin. His uniform. The way his hair was cut, and the way he stood. I saw all those things as if I’d never seen them before. As if someone was pointing them out in a lecture.
I didn’t know how to be all the things I was meant to be, to Frederick, to the others, to the war. It brought me back to myself, and I didn’t want that. I talked like the others, wrote my letter on my knee like the others and gave it to him to be censored, drank my tea thick with sugar to hide the taint of petrol or worse, and swilled out the latrine bucket which was full of our shared piss and shit. It was the others I needed, not Frederick. Or so I believed. I wanted him away from me, where I could write him letters. He’d still be Frederick and I’d be Daniel, the way we used to be, with no divisions between us.
He didn’t get on with Captain Morton-Smith. They grated on each other and that grated on all of us. Mr Tremough, before the sniper got him, was a man with the same kind of easiness Andrew Sennen had, and so all the men liked him. Even the captain couldn’t manage to quarrel with him. Also, Mr Tremough would play Twenty-one with him. Captain Morton-Smith never niggled us, and had the sense never to say a wrong word to Sergeant Morris. He prided himself on the way he got on with the men. But he niggled his junior officers. It’s bad when officers don’t get along.
The first time Frederick and I talked properly was when we were billeted at Estancourt, for five days’ rest. I was in the Cat Fur with the others, and we’d settled in to make a night of it. The place was packed out, fugged with smoke and frying fat. I’d had my egg and chips and then gone out for a piss. For some reason I wandered off round the corner and there was a door in the wall. Nothing new there: there’d been the same wooden door in that wall two days ago, when we marched past, but it had been shut and locked. Tonight it was ajar, and I couldn’t help being curious to look inside.
It was a garden. Not much of one, but still a garden. There were gravel paths, espaliered pear trees, a big quince. There were no leaves in that season, of course, but I knew them all by their shapes. The garden wasn’t well kept; in fact it was knocked about a bit, but it had things growing in it, and it smelled of earth from the beds that had been dug over, by the wall. Not mud: earth.
There was a crunching on the gravel, and I saw that down by the end of the garden there was a man walking, and then that the man was Frederick. He saw me too. I saluted, and he came over and said, ‘Don’t be such a fatuous ape. There’s no one else here.’
I didn’t dispute that, although I could have said that it was as well to keep to habit in case you forgot yourself later on. It was still and quiet, as if the garden was its own little world. I didn’t want to disturb it.
‘All right,’ I said.
‘So we’re still friends,’ said Frederick, like a child, with laughter bubbling in his voice. He sounded so like the old Frederick that my heart leapt up, and I said, ‘Of course we are.’
‘Dear old boy,’ said Frederick. I had never heard him say anything like that, not since he once said, ‘My blessed Felicia.’ I wasn’t used to soft words, not from him nor anyone. They melted me so that I could have fallen down there on the gravel path. I was glad it was dark, to hide my face. Then he said, clearing his throat, ‘Felicia’s married, did you know that?’
‘Yes. My mother told me in a letter.’ I didn’t tell him that he’d written to me himself, about the marriage. I supposed he’d forgotten. Shell-blast could knock memory out of a man, I knew that.
‘I don’t know what kind of man he is. But I suppose Felicia knows what she’s doing.’
‘I suppose she does.’
There was a long pause, then: ‘Tell me one of your poems, why don’t you?’ he asked suddenly.
I could have resisted him, but I didn’t. I nodded, although I’m not sure that he saw it in the dark. I felt softened and sleepy and wide awake, all at the same time. There was only a sliver of moon. I waited, to see which poem would rise in my mind. All my poems lay deep down. That was the way they kept themselves whole. And then these lines did rise, I don’t know why. Because it was night, maybe, and we were both of us soldiers in France:
‘The sea is calm tonight,
The tide is fu
ll, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone . . .’
I stopped, and cleared my throat. It would take too long to say the whole poem. Frederick would get bored.
‘Go on,’ he said.
‘It’s too long. I’ll give you the last lines.’
The dark was soft all around me, touching my eyes and lips, getting into my throat.
‘Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.’
Frederick listened intently. ‘Ignorant armies . . .’ he said. ‘That’s very good, isn’t it?’
He spoke as if he really wanted to know.
‘I think it’s very good,’ I said. But it was another line that echoed over and over in me.
‘Who wrote it?’
‘Matthew Arnold. It’s on your father’s shelves.’
‘If you haven’t chucked it over a cliff.’
We both laughed.
‘It beats me how you can spout reams of it, just like that.’
‘It’s just a knack.’
‘The guns cut across the lines rather, don’t they?’ I hadn’t noticed. His clipped voice was carrying us further and further from the poem. ‘I can’t say that Estancourt is much like the land of dreams,’ he went on. ‘Although this isn’t a bad billet, is it? Are you comfortable?’
The Lie Page 14