by William Boyd
“But what if it had been gas, sir?”
“But it wasn’t, so your observation is irrelevant. What school did you go to, Todd? Harrow? Charterhouse?”
“Minto Academy.”
“Stands to reason then.” He dismissed me.
The only tangible result of my false alarm was the prompt issuing of the new box respirators two days later. But I received no thanks for this.
One day during my field punishment I was walking back to Coxyde-Bains—shovel and pick over my shoulder—with the orderly sergeant who had been supervising my latrine digging. He was an agreeable enough man, a nearsighted twenty-year-old who had done a term at Cambridge and who had an interest in photography. We were discussing the relative merits of plate over roll film, I rather listlessly—I was filthy and my back and shoulders ached. We walked through a tiny hamlet, quite ruined from the 1914 advance, on the La Panne-Oostduinkerke road, when we passed a broken-down Fiat lorry full of nurses. A driver busied himself with the engine while some of the nurses waited by the side of the road in the mild late-afternoon sun.
“Mr. Todd.”
I turned. Dagmar. I introduced the orderly sergeant, who discreetly, and decently, took himself off a few paces.
“Miss Fjermeros …” I felt an irritating blush grow. I took off my trench cap, set down my clinking tools. The dim peasant greets lady of the manor.
“Fee-ermeros. The J is silent.”
“Sorry. Of course. How are you?”
“What’re you doing? You’re so dirty. Are you in trouble?”
“No, no. I’ve been digging latrines. Nothing serious.” I needlessly ran my fingers through my short hair, touched my moustache as if it were false and coming unstuck.
“Where are you going?” I asked. The soft sun on her face at that moment made her almost unbearably beautiful. I felt like weeping. I wanted to lay my head on that starched apron and weep.
“We’re being transferred.”
I nodded. She mentioned a name. I suppose I should have remembered it, but my head was full of a drumming sound, like heavy rain on a tin roof.
“I’m sorry we didn’t have our chance of a walk on the beach.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Thank you for bringing my watch that day. It was kind.”
“Don’t mention it.” My sergeant cleared his throat. “I’d better be off. I hope he fixes your lorry soon.”
“Oh, it doesn’t matter. It’s agreeable to be in the sun.” She lifted her calm face to the oblique rays and closed her eyes. I saw the iridescent golden eyelashes, the fine blue veins pulsing on her lids.
“Isn’t it.… Well, good-bye.”
She opened her eyes. “Remember what I told you, Mr. Todd.”
The walk back to camp at Coxyde-Bains might have taken place underwater, so blurred and streaming were my eyes. I sneezed and honked into my handkerchief all the way back, unable to control myself.
“Hay fever,” I said to the skeptical sergeant.
That night I wrote in my diary:
Dagmar has gone, and with her, what wonderful opportunities? Living, it seems to me, is really no more than a long process of steady embitterment.
May 23, 1917. Back in Wormstroedt at brigade reserve. All my lust for Huguette has returned, enhanced and fortified by the loss of Dagmar. I spend all my time in the estaminet.
It is curious how the enamored eye transforms. Huguette now seemed to me the very image of pulchritude. Every detail contributed to the harmonious impact of the whole. The dark downy hairs on her lip, the thick fleshiness of her upper arms, her plump cheeks, the three or four creases round her neck. All this made me love her more.
She greeted me as always—curtly—but at least she knew who I was. She was manifestly fatter since our last time at Wormstroedt, but in my inflamed state the idea of fat round soft thighs, round fat soft belly and fat soft round breasts seemed far more attractive than anything more svelte and lissome. And there is, is there not, something enticing about youthful obesity, where the extra weight has bounce and firmness and nothing has turned loose or slack?
In my preoccupation I only half-noticed the increased traffic in Wormstroedt. The big guns and their limber constantly moving through the town, the lines of lorries, the increase in staff officers in sputtering motors, the military police, the frequent arrival of new units. In the tobacco factory we had doubled up to provide space for others, and for the first time the reek of tobacco was overwhelmed by the smells of hot, tightly pressed human bodies.
There was some talk of a transfer away from Nieuport. Teague and Somerville-Start indulged in eager speculation about potential postings. Such guesswork that reached my ears only turned my thoughts more towards Huguette. One fact now dominated my thinking: I must not die without the experience of sex. I played in a few football matches; I visited the bathhouses, drew new equipment, went on a bombing course; I drilled as if I were some sort of automaton. During off-duty hours I sat in the estaminet, drinking Huguette’s abominable tea, eating eggs and chipped potatoes, watching her punch holes in condensed milk tins or move sullenly through the tables collecting plates and cutlery on a tray wedged against her yielding thigh.
On the third of June we received orders to return to Nieuport, where the 13th was to await further instructions. Our days in the quiet sector were all but over. Teague’s face was round with glee. I realized we might never be in Wormstroedt again. That last evening I stayed on as late as I could in the estaminet. Most of the 13th had left. There were a noisy three tables of Australian engineers drinking beer. There was little demand for tea. Huguette stood by the dull copper urn, head down, preoccupied, as she picked at a callus on her finger. The late-evening sun shone through the small windows turning the room’s smokehaze milky, basting the chipped tables and curved chair backs with a rare polished gleam. I moved through a wand of light towards her. She looked up.
“Voilà, Tommy; encore du thé?”
“No, no thanks.” I gestured outside. “Une minute. Parler?”
She glanced at me quizzically. Then looked round the room, her top lip held between her teeth. It made her look faintly simian.
“Pourquoi pas?”
We went out through a side door into a small sad courtyard. Some lank hens scratched. We turned a corner and found ourselves in a narrow sunny lane, unused, weedy. Over a brick wall I could see the slab back of the tobacco factory and its rows of grimy windows. Huguette led me down the lane to a shed and we went in. I saw an old machine, a turnip mincer, rusted and useless. A clean scythe hung on the wall. At the back was a dank hump of turnips. A pile of jute sacks was on the floor. An earthy root-vegetable smell in the air—wet, organic, dark.
Huguette leaned against the wall. I tried to kiss her. I was trembling and sweating. She pushed me away.
“Baiser, c’est dix francs!”
I emptied my pockets and gave her ten francs. I held her big face between my hands. Slowly, tenderly, I touched my lips to hers.
Her squirming agile tongue almost made me shout with shock. It was like a live leaping eel in my mouth. I felt I had a piston in my chest compressing the air of my lungs. It was astonishing. Then she pushed me away again.
I had six francs and a few sous left. All my money had gone on her filthy tea and eggs and chipped potatoes. I held the money out on a slick and jittery palm. She scooped the coins up.
“C’est pas beaucoup,” she said, counting, somewhat sulkily. She put the money in a pocket, shrugged, took my hand and thrust it up under her skirt. I felt her thighs—warm, soft—and moved my hand upwards. Fingertips touched hair—curled, springy, dry—just like my own. I gently cupped her groin. I seemed to have stopped breathing. I will show you fear in a handful of fuzz. My eyes were fixed on a knot in the wood of the plank wall before me. Huguette shifted slightly.
“Fini?”
“Yes. Oui.”
I stepped back. She looked faintly surprised.
“I love you, Huguette,” I said,
hoarse.
“Oh, pouf, oui.… ‘I loave you,’ ça marche pas!” She shook her finger grimly. “C’est une question d’argent.”
She opened the door. I walked out into the palpitating dusk. The sun hit the tall windows of the tobacco factory, turning them to fabulous golden mirrors.
At least I had said it. A man to a woman. I had kissed. I had touched that secret place. I felt buoyant, strangely calm. On the train back to the railhead at Coxyde I sat on the floor of the truck beside Leo Druce. He had his cap off; it was sitting balanced on one of his knees. A faint sweet smell came from the oil on his hair. His kind, delicate features seemed at odds with the crude cut and serge of his battle-dress coat. He twirled his cap on his knee.
“Where do you think we’ll be going?” I asked.
“Don’t know. The Somme? Arras? Louise hasn’t told me.”
“Is there a push on?”
“Looks like it.”
I felt a stomach-churn of alarm.
“I shouldn’t worry, Todd old fellow. They’ll probably forget about us.”
I was grateful for his words of reassurance, however unrealistic they might be. I wanted to tell him why I was so apprehensive, indicate the true nature of my fears.
“I’m just worried that I—you know—haven’t done enough.” I smiled faintly. “In life, as it were.” I paused. “I mean I’ve never really even been in love. Properly.”
“Well, imagine if you were. You might feel worse.”
“I suppose so. I …”
“What?”
“You know that girl in the estaminet?”
“The one that serves the tea or the one that washes up?”
“The tea one.”
“What about her?”
“What do you think of her?”
“I don’t know … obliging enough. Pretty cheap. Thirty francs isn’t bad for a roger.”
“Huguette?”
“Is that her name?” He turned to Kite. “Hey, Noel, that bint in the estaminet, Todd says she’s called Huguette.”
“Ah … Huguette,” Kite said, tasting the name. “Did you shaft her, Todd?”
“Yes … oh yes.”
“She’s Bookbinder’s favorite,” Druce said. “Noel and I prefer the washer-up.”
“Ah.”
“I should give her a go if we ever get back there.”
“Good idea. I will.”
* * *
I think my health began to give way round about then. Suddenly I felt ill all the time, laden with apathy. It was not so much my health declining, perhaps, as my well-being. I held myself in low esteem, disgusted at my naïveté, not so much because I had made such a banal romantic error, but for what it revealed to me about my own conceit. This made me even less prepared for our transfer, and more fearful of this “push” that everyone was discussing. I was determined somehow to get out of the front line.… If I could just get sent back to reserve, back to Dunkirk even. I would happily work in fatigue parties for the duration.
I began to think wildly of desertion, or even a self-inflicted wound, but I knew I had not the courage for such a course of action. This was the source of my apathy. I wanted to act but had no guts for the effort required.
It was Pawsey who gave me the idea. Ever since he had vomited during the false gas attack, he had looked wan and peaky. The alarm had unsettled him. He claimed the urine made him sick, but it was the fear. He was generally regarded as a malingerer, especially by Teague and Somerville-Start. I watched Pawsey closely, and after a while I began to suspect that he was half-trying to poison himself. Whenever we were outside he chewed grass constantly and I never saw him spit out the pulp. He looked anemic and thin and was never out of the latrines.
Then we heard that our move was to be three days hence—destination a secret. More importantly, for my purposes, the entire battalion was to parade in companies for an inspection by the brigade medical officer the day before our departure. From somewhere in the back of my mind I recalled an old goldbrick’s trick (I cannot remember who told me this—possibly Hamish), the gist of which was that heavy smoking on an empty stomach forced the heartbeat up dangerously high. I reduced my eating to a minimum and started smoking as much as I could bear.
This regime did indeed have a curious effect on me. At first I experienced a palpable euphoria. I felt light-headed, strangely taller. After forty cigarettes a dull headache set in and I began to feel queasy. The morning of the inspection found me etiolated and bilious. I lit a cigarette immediately on waking and managed to smoke three more before my rising gorge demanded a cup of tea.
Druce remarked on my addiction to tobacco.
“Relax,” he said. “I’m sure we’ll be going back to reserve. We’re quiet-sector material.”
I smiled weakly and set fire to another cigarette.
D Company were called for inspection at 11 A.M. As we filed into the tent I noticed a sign saying FFI INSPECTION. I asked Druce what the letters stood for.
“Free from Infection,” he said.
“But what exactly does that mean?”
He said he had no idea.
A morose-looking, sallow-faced doctor confronted us. He had a swagger stick under one arm. I put my hand on my heart. It certainly seemed to be beating unusually fiercely. My headache keened thinly at my temples too. I was pasty and a film of perspiration covered my face. My hair was damp on my brow. Surely, I said to myself, they cannot send a man in my condition into battle. Along the line I saw Pawsey, jade-green, his jaws working relentlessly.
“Right,” the doctor said. “Drop your trousers. And your drawers.”
Baffled, hesitantly, some of us grinning lewdly, we complied. Our shirttails, fore and aft, preserved our modesty. The doctor approached the first file of men. With his swagger stick he lifted the front of the first man’s shirt, glanced down and asked, “Are you all right?”
“Yes, sir.”
He did this to everyone, moving quickly down the line. He reached me and lifted my shirt.
“Are you all right?”
“Well, sir, my heart—”
He was on to the next man. Louise, following, glared at me. I felt sharp tears of anger. I glanced at Pawsey. He looked shocked at my peremptory treatment.
The doctor reached him. Lifted his shirt.
“Are you all right?”
“No, sir,” Pawsey said boldly, swallowing his cud.
The doctor moved on to the next man.
It took him less than an hour to inspect the entire battalion and we were to a man passed Free from Infection. Free to go and get killed and not contaminate the battlefield, Pawsey said bitterly, when we compared our outrage later.
“I feel dreadful,” Pawsey said. “Truly dreadful. I’m ill, for God’s sake. That bloody quack …” His chin buckled slightly as he tried to control his tears.
For my part, I felt only sullen and resigned. I seemed to stand before a high looming cliff of despair. That afternoon, I slipped away from yet another soccer match and walked down the lane through the dunes towards the seawall.
It was a day of high gray solid clouds, dense and packed like cobbles. There was a distant mist far out to sea that blended the water with the sky at the horizon. The light cast was even, drab, monochrome. The tide was going out and the vast beach gleamed with a dull wet iridescence.
I went through a gap in the wire and down the steps of the wall onto the sand, turned east and walked gloomily along for a good while, lost in my thoughts. I was trying to revive my innate, natural optimism, trying to regenerate a sense of my own special worth. Without self-esteem you can accomplish nothing, and I knew that I had to overcome the twin disappointments of Dagmar and Huguette.… Dagmar, I told myself, if only I had been bolder there. Remember her name: Dagmar Fjermeros. After the war you can go to Norway, find her, marry her, start a family. What had she said to me? “You will survive. I’m almays right.” Almays. If only she had said “always” …
I stopped. In the distanc
e I could see Nieuport-Bains and beyond its two piers I thought I could make out the shattered base of the lighthouse behind the trench line on the right bank of the Yser. I felt—surprisingly—suddenly proprietorial. That was my position: l’homme de l’extrême gauche. A special post. The first man on the Western Front. Others had occupied it; doubtless someone was occupying it now, but I felt as if I were leasing it to him. I remembered Teague’s sneer: “What did you do in the war?” It was quite a claim I could make. I turned and began to walk back. I was l’homme de l’extrême gauche. The more I thought about it, the more pleased I was with the image. It seemed apt, portentous. That, I now saw, was to be my role in life.
A powerful blow in the small of my back knocked me heavily to the ground. Sand was kicked in my face. Winded, on all fours, I gasped for breath, trying to pick grains from my smarting, weeping eyes. I heard a depressingly familiar bark. Ralph.
The stupid brute capered and leaped about me like a lamb. He went into a semicrouch, rump up, tail wagging, front legs flat on the sand.
“Stop it!” I screamed. “Leave me alone!”
I felt an irrational fear at the dog’s return. Ralph was, to me at least, a bad omen: at best a powerful irritant, at worst some kind of malign harbinger. I walked back along the beach, quickening my pace. I had not intended to come so far. Ahead the wet beach shone a lustrous scaly silver like a fish. I looked round. Ralph loped behind me.
“Go away!” I shouted. He pricked up his ears and came closer. I scooped a handful of sand and flung it at him. He barked with pleasure at this new game. I turned and started to run. I felt a sort of hot, mazy confusion descend on me. My self-imposed fast and huge intake of tobacco were still affecting my system. I stopped, suddenly exhausted, bile in my throat. I lowered myself to my haunches. Ralph panted idiotically beside me on the enormous beach. My solitude overwhelmed me—a reluctant actor on a vast deserted stage, giddy with fear and apprehension.