by William Boyd
After this excitement life returned to normal. The only event of note was a battalion parade where we were required to hand in our old phenate-hexane gas respirators. These were horrible objects, like a canvas sack with glass eye-holes, and which had to be tucked beneath the collar of one’s jacket. New box respirators, we were informed, would be issued to us in the next few days. Meanwhile, in preparation, Captain Tuck, the adjutant, would give us a lecture later that morning on antigas precautions and the best use of the box-respirator gas mask.
At half past twelve, D Company was mustered for Captain Tuck’s gas lecture. As we filed into the tent we were each handed what looked like a rectangular pad of cotton with two tapes, eighteen inches long, attached at either end, and a pair of rubber goggles.
Captain Tuck, a Wykehamist, was a brisk jolly man who spent most of his time looking at birds through his field glasses. He had an odd pursed look to his face, as if he were playing an invisible musical instrument—a spectral oboe or clarinet, say. First, he told us about the various types of gases—phosgene, chlorine and mustard—and their effects. Chlorine turned your face blue and you drowned in the water produced by your own tormented lungs. Phosgene caused your lungs to discharge four pints of yellow water every hour. Mustard made your eyelids swell and close, burned and blistered your skin, made you cough up your mucous membranes. Tuck read out other ghastly symptoms—congested larynx, collapsed lungs, swollen liver. I was very shocked.
A box respirator was circulated among us and we tried it on. Tuck explained how it worked. He informed us that the entire battalion would be issued with these in a matter of days.
“In the meantime,” he said, “we will be relying on the temporary respirator handed to you as you came in.”
I looked at the cotton pad in my hand. I wondered how it would stop me from coughing up four pints of yellow liquid in an hour. Suddenly I felt an acute, rotting fear. I saw the dead men on the beach. I glanced right and left. Everyone seemed to be smiling; even Tuck had a grin on his face.
“In the very unlikely event of a gas attack in this sector, this is what—it says here—you must do.” He opened a pamphlet and read from it. “ ‘When the gas alarm goes, first put on the goggles. Then soak the cheesecloth pad, or a handkerchief or a sock, in fresh urine before applying it to the face, making sure both mouth and nostrils are covered.’ ”
He paused for effect. His audience took this in for a second in silence before baying hoots of skeptical laughter and cries of disgust erupted.
“Gentlemen, please!” Tuck shouted above the din. “A final word of advice.… According to this document, the urine of older men is particularly efficacious! Dismiss.” Tuck strode out of the tent very pleased with his performance. D Company were most amused.
The next day I went in search of Louise and asked if I might cycle over to the field hospital to return Nurse Fjermeros’s watch. He agreed reluctantly, signed a chit and I drew one bicycle from the quartermaster’s stores. I pedaled off down the drab lanes in a fine drizzle. I noticed a curious fizzing sensation at the back of my head. I recognized the symptoms of mild euphoria.
It took me twenty minutes to get to St. Idesbalde. A Belgian sentry directed me to an office in a wooden shack where I waited for Dagmar. She arrived wearing full uniform. I handed over the watch.
“It’s very kind of you.”
“Not at all.… I wondered if the men—if you knew.”
“We think they are Dutch. A fishing boat, perhaps hitting a mine.” She shrugged, then smiled. “Can I offer you something to eat, Mr.… ?”
“Todd. John James. Yes, please.”
We walked through the hospital. It had originally been a rather grand farmhouse with numerous outbuildings. Large tents had been pitched in every available space and duckboard walkways laid between them. Looking inside one tent I could see neat rows of patients in low camp beds. We crossed the lawn of a small walled garden and emerged from it onto the graveled driveway of the main house. Three motor ambulances were pulled up at the door. Some men, in filthy uniforms and stark, almost indecently white bandages, were being helped inside.
“We’re very quiet at the moment,” she said. “Waiting for spring offensives.”
I nodded and followed her across the driveway and into a stable block. There was a row of loose stalls and for an instant I was back in Minto Academy. I had paused involuntarily, and now Dagmar stood at the door of an old barn waiting for me. I followed her in.
The noise of conversation was colossal. The barn had been converted into a canteen and was filled with trestle tables around which sat dozens of injured soldiers, some in uniform, some in pajamas and dressing gowns, eating, drinking, playing cards, and all—as far as I could hear—talking at the top of their voices. Smoke from their cigarettes drifted up into the exposed rafters. A big fat iron stove stood in the center of the room and at the far end was a makeshift kitchen and serving area staffed by nuns. There I was given a plate of stew, three slices of coarse grayish soda bread and a tin mug of coffee.
Dagmar and I found two unoccupied seats and sat down. Here and there among the groups of soldiers were nurses and nuns. I suddenly felt a shaft of envy for these wounded Belgians, with their loud conviviality, their plentiful food and their female company. I looked at Dagmar—she was tucking stray hair back under her cap. Her hair was a fine reddish blond.
“Not eating?”
“No,” she said. “I already finished. Please, don’t mind me.”
I ate the stew. A curious-tasting meat—half pork, half venison (it was mule, I learned later). We chatted about something or other. She told me she was Norwegian and had joined the Red Cross in 1915. I let her know something of my past, lying blatantly only when I said I had abandoned a place at university to enlist.
“I think you were better to stay at university.”
“I think you’re right,” I said spontaneously, my new mood of apprehension prompting me. I smoothed my moustache with thumb and forefinger. I took out a tin of cigarettes—Trumpeters—offered her one and received a wry refusal. I lit mine and passed the tin across the table to her.
“Have it,” I said. “I’ve got tons.”
She smiled and quickly slipped the tin into a pocket in her uniform. This mild illicit act joined us as fellow conspirators. I felt my face hot and a curious sense of disequilibrium afflicted me for an instant. I looked at her round face, her random freckles … Her hands were on the table, one nail tapping gently. I saw fine red-gold hairs at her wrist. I wanted to ask her if we could meet again, but the words seemed to form in my stomach rather than my throat, as if only vomiting would release them.
“I keep thinking about those drowned men,” I blurted out. “They’re the first actual dead … I mean, like that—casualties.”
“You should stay here for a day. We filled two cemeteries since I’m at St. Idesbalde.”
“Of course. I see. It’s just that, for the first time …” I gave a weak smile. “This quiet sector, it’s very misleading.”
She met my gaze. “I know you’ll be all right,” she said seriously. “I get these sensations about people.” She smiled. “I’m almays right.”
“Sorry?”
“I’m almays right.”
“Oh. Good, good.”
That was what it sounded like to me. “Almays.” Was it a speech defect? Did she think it was an actual English word: a conflation of “almost always”? Did she mean “almost” or “always”? I decided to take it for the latter. I felt a benign sense of release spread upwards through my body from my bowels, a kind of erotic fatigue. I felt I had her word for it. I was going to come through.
“I hope you are,” I said. “Right, I mean.”
She looked at her watch. “I should go.”
She walked me to the camp gate. I put on my cap and climbed on my bicycle. She leaned towards me.
“Thanks for the cigarettes,” she said in a low voice. Her sweet breath hit the side of my face.
; “Do you ever go walking on the beach,” I asked, “at Coxyde-Bains?”
“Me? No.…”
“I do, as often as I can.”
“Maybe I’ll see you one day.”
“Yes. Fine.… Well, good-bye.”
It was the best I could do. I cycled back to camp in a dull, vexed mood; too dull even to be angry with myself. At the camp, teams from A and D companies were playing soccer with each other, thirty a side.
I went into our tent. Teague was there, his foot up—sockless—on a pile of blankets.
“Twisted my bloody ankle,” he said, “playing bloody footer.” His thick face was red and sweaty. The normally immaculate ridges of his hair were mussed.
“Where the hell have you been?”
I told him. And recounted how I had met Dagmar.
“Bloody marvelous,” he said. “Here we are, meant to be fighting the Hun. One lot plays football, another goes to have lunch with his girlfriend. ‘What did you do in the war, Daddy?’ ‘Me? Oh, I twisted my ankle in a match against A Company.’ Makes me sick.”
He was genuinely angry. But I had seen him often enough in this mood not to be perturbed.
“You should visit that hospital. You wouldn’t be quite so keen then.”
“What do you know, Pictish lout?”
I was not frightened of Teague, especially as he was immobile.
“I know I’d watch my lip if I were you, Teague. Or I might just twist your other ankle.”
“Shag off.”
“Shag off yourself, fat face.”
It carried on like this for a minute or so before I left to watch the end of the match. It sounds depressingly puerile, I know, but remember we were most of us just out of the sixth form and we often bickered this way. Our profanities coarsened steadily as time went by. We took our lead from the pipe band, cheerful foul-mouthed fellows, with a colorful line in invective.
Two days later we went up the line to relieve B and C companies. I looked at the immaculate trenches with different eyes. There was something sinister, almost insulting about their order and rectitude. My encounter with the drowned men had made me preternaturally wary. I no longer strolled along the parapet at dusk, as I used to. I never even exposed my head above the sandbags. I surveyed the distant German lines through a periscope. I saw the small figures of the enemy quite clearly, as indifferent to our presence as we were to theirs. For the first time I completed the equation of myself, my rifle and the target a thousand yards away. Then I transposed it. Congruence. My alarm deepened.
One evening in the section dugout Teague and Somerville-Start asked Druce to persuade Louise to let them form a raiding party.
“What on earth for?” he said. We all listened intently.
“To do something for once,” Teague said.
“We’re going mad with boredom. Let’s take a prisoner. Interrogate him.” Somerville-Start grinned, showing his big teeth. “Have some fun.”
“No,” I said, suddenly terrified. “It’s the most stupid idea I’ve ever heard.”
“Does sound a bit on the keen side,” Bookbinder said. “I’m not complaining.”
“Anything for a quiet life,” Kite said. “Who wants to go prowling around in the dark?”
“You might get hurt,” Bookbinder said.
“Bloody funk,” Teague said to me.
“It’s not funk, it’s sense.”
“Louise’ll never agree, anyway,” Druce said calmly. “He’ll ask O’Dell and O’Dell will say no. This is Belgian line, you know, not ours.”
“They’re mad,” I said to Druce when the others had gone. “Raving mad.”
Druce smiled. “Raiding party. Don’t know what they’re talking about.” He slapped me on the shoulder. “Keep it up, Jock, you’ll save our necks yet.”
I liked Druce for that. He seemed so much older than the rest of us: calmer, more skeptical, less ruffled by events.
However, despite Druce’s presence, as our sixth month in the Nieuport sector wore on, my own worries steadily increased. The drowned men had thrown me off balance. The unreal routine and the tolerable nature of our life at the front had been exposed for the temporary haven it was. We would not be left in a quiet sector forever. As each day passed it brought a possible posting closer. I began to speculate about the nature of my death, all the horrible versions that were available. And behind this fear another deep disquiet was nurtured. I was still a virgin, and, Oonagh apart, I had never even kissed a girl. The thought of dying with life so unlived, so little experienced, seemed outrageously unfair. My encounter with Dagmar had naturally exacerbated this emptiness at the center of myself. Dagmar or Huguette? Huguette or Dagmar? Which one would I choose? In such bouts of vain self-deception did I while away my time. It was doubly galling as it was difficult to masturbate discreetly in the trenches. I used to wait until I was on sentry duty in a small observation sap pushed forward some ten or fifteen yards into no-man’s-land where for four futile hours I was meant to guard against a German attack. (As it happened, one did occur in July of that year—1917—but by then we were long gone.)
From my diary:
April 23, 1917. Druce has just told me that I am on sentry duty from 2 A.M. to 6 A.M. Tried to sleep in dugout but had serious row with Teague and S.-Start about the “thrill of battle.” Teague openly accused me of killing Ralph. Even Bookbinder and Kite seemed not to accept my story. Eight days to go and then back to Wormstroedt and Huguette.
I remember that date vividly. All through that night of sentry duty the German batteries at Wilskerke shelled the bridge across the canal at Wulpen. I could see across the sand hills the distant muzzle flash of the guns, but I could not see or hear the shells land. The irregular flickering and the faint reports kept me alert and edgy. Around five o’clock I began to see the shape of the ruined lighthouse at the mouth of the Yser emerge from the darkness. It had been a warm night, the warmest of the year so far.
I had a piss in the corner of the sap. As I did so I looked up at the lightening sky and saw the faint stars still sparkling in an immense field of lightest bluey-gray. I rubbed my face and looked at my watch. Half an hour to go. A breakfast of tea, a tin of sardines, and bread and margarine waited. I sniffed, spat, yawned, flexed my fingers and allowed my gaze to wander out over no-man’s-land.
I saw the gas instantly, as it rolled thick, white and heavy down through the dunes from Lombartzyde. A breeze on the seaward side swung a flank round faster on the left, hooking in towards me. It seemed dense and solid as smoke from burning green leaves, obliterating everything as it advanced. I turned and ran back down the sap to the trench. There a large, highly polished section of girder hung from a bracket, and beside it an iron bar.
I seized the bar and beat furiously on the girder, numbing my fingers cruelly with the blows. The clear harsh sound of metal on metal clattered down the trench line.
“Gas!” I screamed. “GAS ATTACK!”
I heard other gas alarms being sounded—sirens, gongs and rattles—shouts of frantic inquiry. I tore my goggles from a pocket and put them on. I fumbled for my cotton pad. Not there! I re-searched my pockets. Nothing. Nothing. I thought of pints of yellow fluid, foam-filled rotting lungs, searing mustard burns … I hurled myself into the dugout. Blurred faces shouted nonsense at me.
“Gas!” I bellowed. “Gas!”
I scrabbled among my kit, found my cotton pad and stumbled back outside. The gas was fifty yards away. Our platoon crawled out of dugouts. The air was filled with alarms, loud with meaningless panic. I saw a baffled Noel Kite, who had also been on sentry duty, trying on his cotton pad. Dry.
“Urine, Kite!” I yelled at him, and at the others who now piled haphazardly out of the dugout entrance, tin helmets on, rifles ready.
“Wet the pad. Quickly!”
Violent fear galvanized them. Full early-morning bladders were emptied steaming onto the cotton. I laid my own pad on the fire step and snatched at the buttons of my fly with blunt agitated fingers. I s
aw Teague wrap a sopping mask around his face, saw the more fastidious Kite wring his out before applying it. Somerville-Start crouched behind the sandbagged parapet on the fire step, fixing his bayonet, his hanging cock luminously white against the khaki of his battle dress. I strained desperately to urinate, but I had emptied my bladder minutes before. Nothing. Not a drop. I could smell the gas above the acid reek of urine, which filled the trench. The whole section was now masked and ready except for me and Pawsey, who had raised his sodden pad to vomit. I saw Louise, half-dressed, stumbling along from his dugout.
“What’s going on?” he shouted. “Who gave that alarm?”
“Gas, Louise!” I shrieked at him.
“Don’t call me Louise!” he bellowed back.
I remembered Tuck’s lecture. An old man’s urine is particularly efficacious.
“I can’t piss!” I shouted. I grabbed at his fly buttons.
Louise saw his masked men and panicked. He laid his square of cotton beside mine on the fire step, ripped open his trousers and sprayed the two pads with wild arcs of urine.
“Quickly,” I yelled, pounding his kidneys with my fists. “Faster!”
It was too late. The gas was on us, sweeping thick and white over the breastwork of sandbags. Cool, moist, almost refreshing and faintly salt. The first sea mist of the spring.
Luckily, no one in real authority knew who started the panic. I myself claimed I had heard an earlier alarm from the Belgian lines to our right. We had many cuts and bruises among us, but in A Company there were two broken arms and a fractured pelvis, Louise was furious and sent me back to Coxyde-Bains on field punishment. Single-handedly I dug latrines for an entire company of amused Royal Marines at La Panne. Then I joined a working party from C Company filling sandbags for three days. My charge was unsoldierly conduct: unacceptable and unseemly behavior that had caused confusion and indiscipline in the ranks. You can imagine how popular I was with the bombers, who had not welcomed the close contact with their own excreta. It was hard to convince them it was not a practical joke. Captain Tuck, who was orderly officer the day I reported back to Coxyde-Bains, severely rebuked me for my behavior, adding that I had not only let down the 13th Battalion but also the public-school boys of Britain.