by William Boyd
“Are you feeding Ralph secretly, Todd?” Pawsey demanded.
“Come here, boy, here, here,” Teague would call. The dog never budged.
“I think Todd must have some special dog-smell,” Kite said. “See how Ralph is always trying to snuffle at his balls?” Much laughter at this.
“Some sort of Scotch affinity with the beasts of the field,” Bookbinder said.
“Scots or Scottish. Scotch is whiskey,” Druce said.
“Thank you, Druce,” I said. “Look, I want to kill the damn thing. I hate it.”
“Och aye! The fury of the Pict when roused,” Somerville-Start said. “Perhaps we should see how Ralph reacts to the pipe band. Here, Ralph. Here, Ralphie boy. Biscuit.”
Ralph went to him. He was always lured by food.
There was a certain amount of tedious, though good-natured, mockery of my accent, which at that time was quite marked and in strong contrast to the others in the tent. I was something of the odd man out in more ways than this. Teague and Somerville-Start had been to the same school. Most people in the battalion came from schools in the South of England. Most knew of each other’s schools, had friends at them, had played sports against them. No one had ever heard of Minto Academy. I kept my answers to their questions vague. Also, they were all older than me. Pawsey, the next youngest, was nineteen. Druce and Teague were the oldest, both twenty-four. They were all English too, and at first, to my untutored ears, they all seemed to speak with one voice, like a gang of Chinese.
Howard Pawsey was tall, thin, with straight hair parted in the middle. Every time he bent his head, two wings would fall across his brow. To my increasing annoyance he had developed a habit of sweeping only one back and leaving the other dangling. He had a weak chin.
Tim Somerville-Start was fair, fresh-faced, broad-shouldered and incredibly stupid. He and Julian Teague were longing to fight the enemy. They were the self-appointed warriors among us. Teague was more complex in his zeal, though. He had very curly hair forced back over his head to form regular waves, as if they had been created by curling tongs. He had a square face, a thick neck, a small moustache and small restless eyes. He was most unhappy that we had been posted to a quiet sector.
Noel Kite had blond thinning hair and a handsome lean face. He had the easy insouciance of the very rich. The material problems of his life having been taken care of, he cultivated a languid incuriosity about everything. Cynicism seemed to be the most vehement emotion in his repertoire.
Maitland Bookbinder was a curiosity: plump, lazy, genial, an old Etonian—one felt he should have been in the Guards. When asked what he was doing in the 13th, he said merely that he had wanted a change.
Leo Druce was the only one I instinctively liked, and at the same time was the most enigmatic. He wore his toffee-brown hair brushed straight back, glossy with a specially prepared, scented pomade. He had fine, almost delicate features, which sat oddly with his deep bass voice. He was clever, cleverer than all of us, and this was why I was drawn to him. Druce was a lance corporal, in charge of the section. The rest of us were privates. We were distinguished from all the other enlisted men in the British Army by possessing two letters in front of our army serial number. PS: Public School. I was PS 300712.
“Where are you going, Todd?”
It was Louise.
“Down to the beach.”
“Maike sure you’re bick by six.”
“Could you hang on to Ralph for five minutes, please, Louise? Just till I’m out of sight.”
Louise took hold of Ralph’s collar.
“For God’s sake, min, you mustn’t call me Louise!”
He looked hurt, as he crouched holding a straining, panting Ralph.
“What if the colonel heard? Don’t be so bliddy selfish.”
“Sorry, sir.”
“Right, that’s bitter. Off you go. Ah’ve got the dog.”
It was the end of March 1917. It was a cold, windy, but clear day. The trees were bare; only the hedges were in bud as I walked down the lane towards the dunes. We had been based at Coxyde-Bains for over five months. Almost a year had passed since that dire weekend at Charlbury. My eighteenth birthday had come and gone, unacknowledged by everybody, a week since. The war seemed as if it would go on forever, and as far as I was concerned it seemed we would be at Coxyde forever too, guarding our stretch of dunes.
I had seen the enemy through binoculars, strolling around the parapets of their trenches in the evening. Nobody took cover in this quiet sector. Our trenches were immaculate: clean, strong, with beautifully carpentered fire steps and paneled dugouts. At every firebay stood red buckets of sand and water, and all our equipment was oiled and greased against the corrosive effects of salt in the wind off the sea. We, the troops, were sleek, well fed, and well rested. Only Teague and Somerville-Start fretted. Indeed, Teague seemed almost unhinged with frustration. He repeatedly asked Colonel O’Dell to put him up for a commission in another regiment, but O’Dell always regretfully refused. He had seen the battalion’s ranks casually plundered for years and was not prepared to allow further privations.
I myself was happy enough. I seemed to be in a kind of agreeable limbo, stuck in a society and a place that made few inconvenient demands on me. I had no idea what the future held and at the time I did not care. I had even seen my first dead man, a sergeant in A Company who had been run over by a Commer truck bringing in two tons of potatoes to the cookhouse. I had changed physically too. I had reached what I later discovered was to be my full height—five feet nine inches, I had filled out and was now thickish set with a solid, well-muscled body. The moustache I had started growing the weekend I left Charlbury was a familiar feature in my shaving mirror each morning: thick, dense, neatly clipped, glossy. I looked older than my years. The main bugbear in my life was the dog, Ralph, which as the weeks passed seemed to become perversely more fond of me. Never had a man shown less feeling for an animal than I, but my very indifference seemed to act as a goad. Even while eating bread and jam from Teague’s fingers, the dog would pause—munching—and glance round to confirm I was in the company.
I walked down the lane towards the dunes. Behind me I heard a rattle of pebbles and a familiar hoarse panting. I looked round. That blunt terrier’s snout, those moist idiot eyes. Louise must have let him go too soon. I picked up some stones and threw them at him. One hit his rump and he squealed. His tail wagged with masochistic pleasure. I set off. He trotted three yards behind me.
I climbed up a sand path that led to the crest of the dunes. It was a cloudy day, shadowless, with a diffused silver light. The tide was out. I sat down, lit a cigarette and stared at the pewter sea. Life was settled, routine, ordered—but I was in turmoil. I was in love again. In love with a girl called Huguette.
In our first stint in the Nieuport trenches we had been called back twice to brigade reserve at Wormstroedt. Wormstroedt was a large village, or a small town, some twenty miles behind the front line. Before the war it had enjoyed modest prosperity owing to the siting there of a tobacco factory. This was now empty, one wing of it destroyed by bombardment during the German advance of 1914. Here, we were billeted in tall airless rooms smelling strongly of tobacco. We slept in low wooden beds, sixty to a room like a vast dormitory. Leave in Wormstroedt was perferable to our off-duty hours in St. Idesbalde, if only because we were freer to roam around. There was a cinema set up in a tent in the shattered main square and a good dozen cafés and restaurants. Men of the 13th tended to patronize a large estaminet conveniently close to the factory. It was run by an extended Belgian family who were doing well out of the war. They had been swift to adapt to the tastes of the British soldier. Fried eggs and chipped potatoes were the staple diet, and it was not unusual for us to order up to six fried eggs at a time. You could also eat bread and pickled mackerel, or bacon, or brawn, bread and margarine with jam or cheese, rice pudding or sponge pudding with jam. They even made tea—and this was Huguette’s job. The tea was brewed in large copper vats and lib
erally sweetened. Milk was added by punching holes in several tins of condensed milk and dropping them into the stewing tea. The paper labels floated off the tins to form an unusual, brightly colored scum on the surface.
Huguette was the daughter, or cousin, or niece of the owner. I think she was sixteen or seventeen. She was plump; even at that age a tender double chin hung damply below her jaw. She was dark-haired and had a distinct moustache of tiny fine hairs on her top lip. But she was pretty in a sulky, spoiled way. I can see her now, impassively puncturing condensed milk tins with something that looked like a steel marlinespike and tossing them over her shoulder into the sandy pool of simmering tea without a backward glance.
The estaminet was capacious and always crowded. Over a hundred people could fit into it without difficulty. On my first visit I waited at the head of the queue while Huguette milked a new batch of tea. She had been working all day. Her shapeless lime-green dress, tight in the armpits, was damp with fresh sweat I could smell it, clear and thin, through the strata of odors—smoke, grease, egg, tea—that suffused the atmosphere. I stood beside her, estimating the size of her breasts, inhaling it. Her sharp smell seemed to prod at my lungs like a stick. She stirred the tea vat with a three-foot wooden ladle. The condensed milk cans clanked dully in the dun liquid.
“C’est formidable …” I said. “Le thé. Pour le soif”
She looked at me incredulously.
“Vous pensez?” she said. “C’est pas vrai.”
“Oh, yes—oui,” I said. “Votre thé …” I kissed my bunched fingertips, a parody gourmand.
She turned and said something to her father or uncle and they both laughed. I laughed with them. But as a result of that exchange she remembered me. I ate there every day—fried eggs and chipped potatoes washed down with gallons of her disgusting tea.
“Oh, voilà Monsieur Thé,” she said as I came round for my third refill. “Tea. Ver’ good. You like.” She laughed.
“John. John James Todd. My name …” I paused. “Votre nom?”
“Huguette,” she said, turning the spigot on the vat. Tawny tea frothed into my enamel mug.
I thought of her now as I looked out over the tea-colored sand. I would not be back in Wormstroedt for getting on two months. I wondered if I could last that long; if my carefully hoarded store of images would sustain me through two months of masturbation. Perhaps I could persuade Louise to send me to brigade reserve on some specious mission.… Perhaps … To my surprise I found I had my hand on the scruff of Ralph’s neck and had been absentmindedly scratching behind his ears for God knows how many minutes. His humid eyes gazed at me. A loop of saliva hung from his jowl. I gave him a mighty shove and he went tumbling down the dune slope onto the beach. He got to his feet and shook the sand from his coat.
“Bugger off!” I shouted. I slithered down to the beach and walked down towards the distant water’s edge. I looked down at my boots and puttees, felt the rough serge of the khaki trousers chafe my inner thighs. I took a rather bent cigarette from one of my breast pockets and turned away from the wind to light it. I walked on. Flat sky, flat sand, flat sea. I was the only vertical thing in my universe. I felt surprisingly good. I felt strong, all of a sudden. I was an adult at last, a soldier, with my big moustache, and dreams of my girl, Huguette. I grinned.… Where was that bloody dog? I looked round for a pebble to throw.
Ralph was not his obligatory three paces behind me. I saw him, two hundred yards off, loping towards the front and the German line, running along the water’s edge, his reflection merging with and separating from his body, bounding back to wherever he had come from.
“Go on!” I shouted after him. “Traitor! I knew it. I bloody knew it!”
Good riddance, I thought, finally got the message. I reached the sea’s edge. It was a calm day, a small surf turned over on the ridged gleaming sand. I turned my back on Ralph and the east and headed west towards the tiny distant shapes of the ruined villas and bathing huts of Oostduinkerke.
I must have walked nearly a mile before I saw them. I was on the point of turning back, the evening was drawing in, when I noticed what at first looked like a cluster of smooth pale rocks upon which the waves were breaking. But then I saw that the waves moved and shifted them to and fro. I walked closer. A strange minatory weight seemed to press on me.… Some sort of cargo? Washed overboard in a storm? In the nacreous late-afternoon light, I approached full of dread curiosity.
There were several drowned men, huddled together as if for comfort by the advancing tide. Most of them were naked, or almost so. One man wore a shirt; one man still had his boots on. I was struck by their inert tranquillity. I felt no lasting shock. I counted them. Eight. They looked like deep sleepers: expressionless, untouched, unblemished by whatever tremendous experience had washed them up on this shore. I saw a tattooed forearm, creases in a belly, the dark print of pubic hair on blue-white loins. The wavelets rolled one over, who flung an arm on the sand as if seeking purchase.
“Jesus,” I said out loud. I looked up and down the deserted beach. I was equidistant from the villas of Oostduinkerke and the mouth of the Yser. The packed grayness of the late afternoon seemed to thicken and condense around me. The tangle of bleached bodies surged as if one, and crept a few inches up the sand.
I ran for the dunes. A naval battle? A mine? A ship rent in two, a wardroom of sleeping men tossed into the North Sea? I felt a kind of clawing in my gorge. I raked my throat and spat.
There was wire on these dunes. I found the zigzag path and stumbled up it to the dune crest. I ran down through the gorse and broom brushes and along the muddy edge of a cabbage field. The kitchen smell of cabbage nauseated me. I suddenly associated the reek with those washed, clean dead men.… Through a hawthorn hedge and onto a cart track. I ran on. An old man sat in the doorway of a half-demolished cottage. I stopped. What was the French for drowned?
“Mort,” I said, panting heavily. “Eight, huit morts.”
“L’hôpital.” He gestured up the road. He had a lazy eye. It seemed to be trapped in the middle of an interminable wink.
I remembered. The field hospital at St. Idesbalde. I turned and ran on.
I entered the hospital precincts from the side somewhere. I saw the back of what looked like a row of loose boxes, rounded them and came upon a neat square of a dozen large olive-green tents. A nurse was coming out of the first one.
“Huit morts … dans la mer!”
“I speak English,” she said in a cool, perfect but somehow instantly foreign accent.
“Eight drowned men,” I said. “On the seashore.” It sounded like a nursery rhyme.
I led this nurse and three nuns back down to the beach. An ambulance was following with orderlies and stretchers. The tide was further in but our group still clung together. The evening light shone lemon through gaps in charcoal clouds. The sand seemed shot with blue and green. We walked down the beach, the nuns muttering some prayer or heavenly invocation.
“We’d better get them out,” the nurse said. She took off her watch. She had not brought her coat. “Can you keep this dry for me?” she asked. I put it in a pocket and watched with some astonishment as she waded strongly into the sea, the waves soaking her to the waist, and she began to haul a man out. The nuns joined in. I registered the incongruity of the dark surplices and the absurd meringue hats as they stooped and tugged at the naked men. Naked men … nothing to what they saw in that field hospital. I sloshed into the water with them. The bodies shifted out of focus beneath my sensitive gaze. To grasp an ankle or a wrist? I saw a hand, limp, elegant—like something on a classical statue—and took hold of it. Very cold. But no more rebarbative than picking up a leg of lamb or a plucked chicken. I pulled him onto the beach. I took his other wrist. He was heavier on the sand, heels furrowing. The nuns were working two to a body. I heard shouts and saw the orderlies come running down the beach with their stretchers.
It was almost dark by the time the beach was clear. I stood with the nurse. She had
a wide round face, a slightly large nose, covered in coarse prominent freckles. I could not see her hair as it was hidden beneath her neat headdress.
“What do you think it was?” I asked.
“Who can say? At least they looked peaceful. They didn’t seem to be hurt.” She looked at me. “I didn’t know there were English troops here.”
I explained about the Royal Marine gunners.
“Have you got a cigarette?”
I gave her one and lit it for her. She inhaled avidly.
“The nuns don’t approve. I have to take my moments carefully.” She blew smoke through her nose. “Wonderful. English tobacco!”
I suddenly remembered the time. “God! I’m going to get merry hell. Look, can I give your name?”
“Of course. I’m a sister at the field hospital. Dagmar Fjermeros.”
I got her to repeat it a couple of times.
“Can we give you a lift?”
“It’ll be quicker along the beach.” I said good-bye and left her.
Louise was furious, and put me on company report. Two hours later my story was confirmed after a few telephone calls. I was perturbed and unsettled by the whole experience. It was the tangle of bodies that bothered me and their untroubled expressions. They seemed docile and compliant in death, perfectly at ease. But for the first time since joining the army I felt frightened. I feared for my skin. That day I resolved to do anything not to get hurt. Not to die like those men.
While my alarm deepened, and self-preservation occupied the key position in my mind, I found another image began slowly to claim my attention. Dagmar, the nurse … her round placid face highlit by the flare of the match I applied to her cigarette. The full pout of her lips as she inhaled … I had written down her name on my return. Dagmar Fjermeros. A Scandinavian of some sort. I still had her wristwatch in my pocket.