The New Confessions

by William Boyd

  The happy return of Ralph prevented the others from noticing my distress. The movement order had come through. We were to entrain at Coxyde-Bains at 0600 hours the next day.

  “Where are we going?” I asked Leo Druce.

  “A place called Ypres,” he said.

  VILLA LUXE, May 27, 1972

  Emilia’s day off. I wander up to the village for a bite of lunch. The café-bar is simple: crudely and entirely successful. A dark interior room, tiled and shuttered, with minimal lighting. Outside, a large L-shaped terrace. Vines and bougainvillea grow above on trellises. Many well-watered pots boast flowers—zinnias and geraniums. If there’s a breeze, sit outside. If you seek cool shade, sit indoors. Your eyes will soon grow accustomed to the limpid gloom.

  The bar is owned by Ernesto, a swarthy amiable lout of a man, but it is run by his aged parents. Days can go by with no sign of Ernesto—he drives off to town in his ancient Simca whenever he feels like it. The old man, Feliz, and his wife, Concepción, work on with placid patience. They greet me as a respected client. I have seen their son grow from an eager slim youth into this parody Lothario (he is always growing and shaving off a thin moustache). They know I know what they suffer. We smile and shrug. The children: what can we do? There is a benign freemasonry of old folk—we help each other get by.

  I order a beer and a plate of olives. Feliz shuffles into the kitchen to cook me a tough steak. I look forward to an afternoon’s pleasant mining of my dental cavities for meat fibers.

  I am halfway through my steak when the two German girls come in. These are the twins, Günther’s daughters. They must be in their early twenties. They wear shorts and T-shirts. Their legs are already pink with a few days’ suntanning. They are pretty girls, these twins, with square strong faces. They are well built, like swimmers, with broad shoulders and thick blondish hair. One twin, the slightly prettier, has streaked her hair with a whiter blond color.

  They sit outside with their drinks and a plate of pistachios, and light up cigarettes. I munch on, chewing my steak—Feliz has excelled himself; my jaw aches with the effort of mastication.

  The girls keep looking at me. Then the less pretty one comes inside to buy more drinks. She puts on a pair of spectacles and pretends to look at one of the gaudy calendars Ernesto’s suppliers have pressed upon him and with which he decorates the otherwise bare walls of the bar. I know she really wants to have a closer look at me.

  Feliz’s potatoes ooze oil. I mop it up with a piece of bread.

  “Guten Tag.”

  “Tag,” I say unreflectingly.

  “Do you speak German?”

  “A little.… I used to—that’s to say, a long time ago. But I’m forgetting it, ah …”

  “English?”

  “Yes, that’s easier.”

  “We didn’t know. We thought maybe you were Italian or Spanish.”

  “I’ve lived here for years.”

  “Are you English?… May I sit down?”

  “Scottish.… Please.”

  “Would you like a cigarette?” She sits down. She has a crumpled soft pack tucked in the sleeve of her pea-green T-shirt. Her breasts shudder briefly beneath the verdant cotton as she sits.

  “No, thanks.”

  She still has her spectacles on. Tortoiseshell. Modishly rearranged rectangles.

  “My name is Ulrike Günther.” She lights her cigarette. Her sister comes in. “This is my sister, Anneliese.”

  We shake hands. “Todd,” I say. “John James Todd.”

  Ulrike Günther frowns. “Todd?”

  “Yes,” I say.

  We talk about our villas, problems of water supply, staff, electricity. I tell them my pool is empty this summer. You must swim in ours, they insist. They talk good English, these fair strong girls. My irritation subsides, marginally.

  Anneliese breaks a nail on a recalcitrant pistachio. I show her how to open the nuts using a discarded half shell as a lever. They are full of admiration. Did I invent this infallible method of opening pistachio nuts—the best nut in the world? You need never break another nail on them—you need never be frustrated by those nuts with their thin maddening smiles, never leave them unopened in the bottom of the bowl any longer.

  Ulrike is enchanted by the simple efficiency of my device.

  “Oh yes,” she says. “It’s like—how do you say? The same with Muscheln.”

  “Mussels,” I say. “The same word.”

  “I should know,” she says. She tells me she is a marine biologist writing a thesis on molluscs.

  After our drinks we walk back down the track to our villas, neighbors now. At their gate Ulrike pauses, frowning.

  “Were you ever in Germany, Mr. Todd?”

  I’m already backing off—easy to pretend I didn’t hear her.

  “You must all come round for a drink. Very soon,” I call. “Bye now.”

  4

  New Geometries, New Worlds

  We missed the Battle of Messines Ridge by a few days. The huge mines were exploded beneath it on the seventh of June, and thus was initiated the Third Battle of Ypres, which lasted, in fits and starts, until mid-November. In fact everything stopped shortly after Messines for a couple of months until the offensive was renewed again at the end of July. Meanwhile the 13th (Public School) Service Battalion of the Duke of Clarence’s Own South Oxford Light Infantry moved into the Ypres Salient.

  We had hoped, indeed Colonel O’Dell had assured us, that we were to be reunited with the regiment, but this was not to be. On June 17 we found ourselves posted to corps reserve behind Bailleul, some dozen miles from Ypres. We were billeted in a farm across the road from a battalion of Australian pioneers. The bombing section of D Company pitched its tent and thus began the familiar round of equipment cleaning, fatigue parties and sports. My God, I was sick of sports by then! Football, badminton, rugby, cricket, everything—even battalion-sized games of British bulldog.

  We could hear the guns on the front clearly. Somehow they sounded different from the long-range boom of the siege artillery at Nieuport—like the small thunder of a skittle ball, more sinister and dangerous, knocking things down. One week we laid a corduroy road of raw sappy elm planks for the use of a battery of heavy howitzers—squat, muscle-bound guns with fist-sized rivets—that fired a fat shell a foot in diameter. These guns were towed into place—hence the road—by traction engines. Standing back fifty yards, fingers in our ears, we watched their first salvo. The earth shivered; the guns disappeared in smoke. It took five minutes to load them; the shells were trundled up on light railways and then, with some difficulty, winched into the breech with primitive-looking block and tackle rigged beneath wooden tripods.

  Boredom set in again, but it was of a slightly different order: beneath it lay a seam of excitement. An offensive was on; fairly soon, surely, it would be our turn for a “stunt.” There was real enthusiasm in our tent, shared by everyone with the exception of Pawsey and myself. Even Noel Kite said he was keen to “have a go at the Teutons.” Ralph the dog, which we had brought from Nieuport, became the bombing section mascot. I have a photograph of us all, taken with Somerville-Start’s box camera. There they sit—Kite, Bookbinder, Somerville-Start (Ralph panting between his knees), Druce, Teague, Pawsey and the others whose names I cannot recall—grinning, fags in mouths, caps pushed back, shirt-sleeved, collars open, Teague clutching a Mills bomb in each hand. We look like a typically close bunch of “mates,” cheery and convivial. It is an entirely illusory impression. The months at Nieuport had forged few bonds. If truth be told, we all rather grated on each other’s nerves. We were like schoolboys at the end of term, needing some respite from the close proximity.

  At the end of June we marched from Bailleul through Locre and Dickebusch to Ypres. The countryside had a look of certain parts of England. Gentle hills, red-tiled cottages and farms, scattered woods and along the lane sides a profusion of lilac, may and laburnum bushes. We skirted the shattered town and went into reserve trenches on the left b
ank of the Ypres-Comines canal. This was the first time the battalion came under fire, from a few stray shells. We all thought we were blasé about shelling after the artillery duels at Nieuport, but this was our first experience of real explosions. I remember seeing the puffs of dirt erupt and collapse in the fields across the canal and thought they possessed a fragile transient beauty—“earth trees that live a split second,” I wrote in my diary. A few landed in the reserve lines, knocking down a couple of poplars, but I registered no alarm. There seemed nothing inherently dangerous in them—as threatening as the puffs of smoke that drifted harmlessly in the sunlit air after the clods of earth had thumped to the ground.

  A and B companies went into the front line to relieve a battalion of the Royal Sussex Regiment. Two days later I went up myself as part of a ration party, carrying four gallons of tea in a couple of petrol cans.

  What can I tell you about the Ypres front in early July 1917? Later, I used to explain it to people like this:

  Take an idealized image of the English countryside—I always think of the Cotswolds in this connection (in fact, to be precise, I always think of Oxfordshire around Charlbury, for obvious reasons). Imagine you are walking along a country road. You come to the crest of a gentle rise and there before you is a modest valley. You know exactly the sort of view it provides. A road, some hedgerowed lanes, a patchwork of fields, a couple of small villages—cottages, a post office, a pub, a church—there a dovecote, there a farm and an old mill; here an embankment and a railway line; a wood to the left, copses and spinneys scattered randomly about. The eye sweeps over these benign and neutral features unquestioningly.

  Now, place two armies on either side of this valley. Have them dig in and construct a trench system. Everything in between is suddenly invested with new sinister potential: that neat farm, the obliging drainage ditch, the village at the crossroads, become key factors in strategy and survival. Imagine running across those intervening fields in an attempt to capture positions on that gentle slope opposite you so that you may advance one step into the valley beyond. Which way will you go? What cover will you seek? How swiftly will your legs carry you up that sudden gradient? Will that culvert provide shelter from enfilading fire? Is there an observation post in that barn? Try it the next time you are on a country stroll and see how the most tranquil scene can become instinct with violence. It requires only a change in point of view.

  Of course as the weeks go by the valley is slowly changed: the features disappear with the topsoil; buildings retreat to their foundations; trees become stumps. The colors fade beneath the battering until all you have is a homogenous brown dip in the land between two ridges.

  But I thought only of my idyllic prospect as I peered out through a thin embrasure in the sandbags as our tea was issued in the trenches. Admittedly the landscape in that part of Belgium is flatter and there are no real hedgerows, but as I looked out through our wire across a grassy meadow that ascended a gentle slope to the ridge opposite, I thought I might as well be in a valley of Oxfordshire. There were hawthorn bushes and scrubby hedges marking the intersections of field boundaries. I saw an unpaved road, small clumps of trees (somewhat knocked about), a group of farm buildings (ditto), but essentially it was no more than a section of run-of-the-mill countryside. If it had not been for the enemy wire and the dark outline of the earthworks of their trench system, I might not have been able to stifle a yawn. The evening sun was pleasantly warm and I could see wisps of smoke rising from their lines. No-man’s-land. It was unimpressive.

  We spent a week on the canal bank, during which we had two days and two nights in the line. There, I was gratified to discover—despite the occasional barrages—that I was not panic stricken. It was still close enough to my experience of the trenches at Nieuport not to be too unnerving.

  The most irritating consequence of our first visit to the trenches at the salient was that we became lousy. I tried all the usual remedies—powder; hours of diligent nit picking, like an ape; a candle flame run up and down the seams—but nothing worked. Eventually I used to turn my shirt inside out, wear it that way for a couple of days, then turn it back again, and so on. It seemed to regulate the itching at least. I was always scratching, but it no longer rose to peaks of intolerance.

  After our time at the front we duly marched back to Bailleul and routine reestablished itself. Cleaning, drilling, sports, working parties and occasional visits to cafés in the town. I gained a real impression too of the vast organism that is an army: all those separate units that allow the whole to function—ordnance, transport, clothing, feeding, animals, signals, engineering, road building, policing, communications, health and sanitation … There was an invisible city camped in the fields round Ypres and it required its civil servants, paymasters, administrators, labor force and undertakers to make it function. The part the 13th Battalion played in its organization was to dig cable ditches for the signalers, muck out open-air stables in the brigade transport lines, help lay tracks for light railways, stand guard over vast supply dumps, dig graves and latrines at a field hospital. We were no more than ants in an ant heap. But at the same time in those weeks of waiting I played atrociously in goal for the D Company soccer team (we lost 11–2 against the Australian pioneers); came down with a dose of influenza; wrote a letter to my father and three to Hamish; almost had a fist fight with Teague when he accused me of stealing; felt bored, sexually frustrated, tired and occasionally miserable and one night dreamed vividly of my death—eviscerated by a German with an entrenching tool. I oscillated between the roles of soulless functionary and uniquely precious individual human being; from the disposable to the sine qua non.

  It all came to an end on July 16 when the guns started up again in earnest. Then the one-week barrage preliminary to the attack was extended to two as the renewed offensive was continually delayed. For the first few nights the fireworks display on the horizon was tremendous, but as it continued night after night it became only another source of grumbles. The 13th was not even in reserve for the big push of July 31. The day the battle proper began, we were marched to a sugar beet factory near Locre for delousing.

  We marched back to our billets that evening in heavy rain. It rained constantly for the next four days and nights. Suddenly the dark damp countryside seemed to ooze foreboding. Rumor abounded about the attack—all of it baleful. A company of the Australians, out rewiring one night, took heavy casualties (“heavy casualties”—a bland, soft phrase). I asked one man what it had been like. “Fuckin’ shambles,” he said.

  On August 7 we were moved back up to brigade reserve on the canal bank. Before we occupied the trenches we were paraded in a field where Colonel O’Dell addressed us. The battalion, he said, had been ordered to provide reinforcements for other units in the brigade. I do not remember the details; two companies were going to the Royal Welch, I think. D Company was to be attached to a battalion of the Grampian Highlanders.

  I already thought of us as the “unlucky” 13th and this latest move seemed to me yet another turn for the worse. Teague and Somerville-Start, however, rejoiced. There was much excited talk about the “Jocks” and their fighting spirit, and ill-informed speculation about this venerable regiment’s battle honors.

  The next night we set off, having left most of our kit at the battalion dump. Ralph was entrusted to the quartermaster. The bombers made a great fuss of their farewells; you would have thought they were saying good-bye to their grandmothers. I had nothing to do with it—I was glad to be rid of the animal at last.

  It took hours to join our new unit. There was immense toing and froing behind the front. We followed duckboard and fascine paths across black fields and were often redirected back down them. Once we eventually gained the trench system, we were continually halted to allow a passage of ration and ordnance parties, engineers and signalers. Eventually we found the right communication trench. We toiled up this. Ahead I heard Louise reporting to an officer in the Grampians. Soon we were deployed in the support lines. />
  It was immediately clear that these trenches were not what we were used to: no dugouts, not even ledges cut for sleeping. I put my waterproof cape on the ground and sat down, my back against the rear wall. Druce passed among us, checking that all was well. I tipped my helmet forward and tried to sleep. My nostrils were full of the smell of wet earth and from the right came Bookbinder’s body odor—truly appalling, a vile hogo. On my left Pawsey was having a shit in his helmet—he was too scared to go to the latrine sap.

  From my diary:

  August 9, 1917. Our first morning with the Grampians. Woken by random shelling. Stand to. Misty dawn. Up ahead, beyond our wire, a low ridge and two obliterated farms. Over to our right, according to Druce, the Frezenburg-Zonnebecke road. I can see no sign of it.

  It is not very evocative, I admit. The biggest shock for me was not the shelling but the transformation in the landscape. All the ground as far up as the ridge looked as though it had been badly plowed. Almost all the long grass and shrubs that I had seen five weeks earlier had disappeared. I could not see behind me, nor much to either side, but the countryside we occupied was a more or less uniform dark brown. It was hard to believe we were in high summer. I was also—curiously, for I am not particularly fastidious—somewhat offended at the mess everywhere. The trench was full of litter—empty tins, discarded equipment, boxes and fragments of boxes—and through slits in the parapet of sandbags, no-man’s-land seemed to be scattered with heaps of burst mattresses. I swear it was five minutes before I realized they were dead bodies.

  Druce sent me, Kite and Somerville-Start into the Grampians’ trenches to draw our water ration for the section. We passed along the support line through our company looking for the lead-off trench to the battalion ration store. We turned the corner of a firebay.

  “Where are the Grampians?” Kite asked.

  “Another ten yards.”