The New Confessions

by William Boyd

We came out of the firebay. Five very small men—very small men indeed—sat around a tommy-cooker brewing tea. They looked at us with candid hostility. They wore kilts covered with canvas aprons. Their faces were black with mud, grime and a five-day growth of beard. Two of them stood up. The tops of their heads came up to my chest. Neither of them could have been more than five feet tall. Bantams … These were the 17th/3 Grampians, a bantam battalion, every man under the army’s minimum height of five feet three inches. Kite and Somerville-Start were both taller than six feet.

  “What the fuck are youse cunts looking at?” One of the men said in a powerful Scottish accent.

  “What?” Kite said, unable to conceal his astonishment.

  “Rations,” I said. At least I could understand. He told me where to go.

  We made our way diffidently along the support trench until we found the supplies sap. There, a dozen bantams were collecting rations. We waited our turn uneasily, like lanky anthropologists among a pygmy tribe. We stood head and shoulders above these tiny dirty men. They seemed more like goblins or trolls than members of the same race as ourselves. The bantams appeared indifferent to our presence, but we were all ill at ease, full of bogus smiles, as if we suspected some elaborate practical joke was being played on us and had not quite divined its ultimate purpose. We gladly picked up our petrol cans of water and headed back.

  The bantams did not like us. It cannot just have been because of our height, though it has to be said that as ex-public-school boys we were on average taller than the other ranks in most regiments. I suspect it was a combination of our stature, our voices, our bearing and our Englishness that let us down. It did not help when, on our way back that first day, Kite said loudly, “I think they’re rather sweet little chaps. Is it true they’ve been specially bred?” In any event, there swiftly grew up an invisible barrier between our company flanks and the bantams on either side. It was so uncomfortable that we demanded our own ration parties, which, somehow, Louise managed to arrange for us. The company’s first deaths in action were sustained in this way. The pipe band were carrying up pots of hot stew when they “got a shell all to themselves,” as the saying had it. Four were killed and three were wounded. It shocked us all profoundly: the pipe band had seemed indestructible. Louise, I recall, took it particularly badly.

  Trench routine continued as normal for the next few days. My diary records the daily round:

  Sentry duty, 4 A.M.–6 A.M. Stand to. B’fast—tea, pickled mackerel, biscuit. Repaired trenches. Ration carrying. Lunch: beef stew, biscuits. Slept. Sentry duty, 6 P.M.–8 P.M.

  It rained from time to time and I grew steadily dirtier. I watched my uniform take on that particular look common to heavily soiled clothes—one sees it on tramps and refugees, for example. The fibers of the material seem to become bulked out with dirt so that jacket and trousers look as if they have been cut from a thick coarse felt. Creases at armpits, elbows and backs of knees develop a permanent concertinaed effect—rigid and fixed. Your hair dulls, then becomes oily, and then transforms into a matted, clotted rope-end. Fingernails are rimmed with earth, your hands hard and calloused as a peasant’s. Your beard grows. Your head itches, itches all day long.

  We knew our “stunt” was approaching as the ridge in front of us steadily took more shelling. Tension increased, and the routine wariness that had characterized our waking moments was replaced by neurotic edgy alarm. We kept expecting to be pulled out of the line for a period of rest before the attack, but we appeared to have been forgotten. Even Teague and Somerville-Start were subdued. As for myself, I had evolved a new approach. I decided to be logical. I was going, as far as possible, to think my way to survival, even if it meant disobeying orders.

  We stood to at half past four, an hour before dawn. Our objectives were the two ruined farms. D Company was going for the right-hand one, along with the bantams on our right flank. We were to capture the farm, secure it and repel and counterattack until the second wave passed us. All night the ridge had been pounded by our guns. As we lined up in the fire trench the bombardment was still going on. Louise passed among us, white-faced and muttering what I suppose were words of encouragement. I could not hear him above the noise of the shells. Beside me stood Pawsey. On the other side was Somerville-Start. He held a ladder; so did I. I was as ready as I would ever be.

  But I had forgotten about the rum. The quartermaster sergeant passed among us, pouring out the tots from the big ceramic bottle. The rum looked black, evil, thick as molasses. I drank my allocation—half a wineglass, I suppose—in two gulps, and I was seriously drunk within a minute. I saw Pawsey vomit his issue and lean gagging against the trench wall. Somerville-Start’s face wore a kind of fixed, zealous grimace—he was breathing fiercely through his nose, both hands on his ladder.

  Then everyone urinated. I suppose an order must have been given. The trench filled with vinegary urine steam. I was giddy. I felt the trench had acquired a steep, dipping gradient to the left, down which I might at any moment slide. I held on to my ladder, and adjusted the weight of my sack of bombs. I never heard the whistle go, but suddenly I saw people begin to climb their ladders. Somerville-Start and I set off simultaneously.

  I do not remember my first unprotected view of no-man’s-land—that initial astonishing second—because Somerville-Start got shot in the mouth. The moment his face cleared the parapet I saw his teeth shatter as they were hit by the bullet, and a plume of blood, like a ponytail, issued from the nape of his neck. Several teeth, or teeth fragments, hit me in the face, stinging me like thrown gravel, and one piece cut me badly above my right eye. My eye filled with warm blood and I blundered over the sandbags blindly, wiping my eye with my sleeve. I sensed Pawsey going by me. My vision cleared and I saw him running off in the direction of the ridge. There was no sign of the ridge itself—the creeping barrage some fifty yards in front of us obscured everything.

  “Think!” I said out loud. I crouched down and scampered forward, almost on all fours, like a baboon.

  “Stand up, that man!” somebody bellowed.

  I ignored him.

  We were now, I realized, being shelled in our turn, and I suppose there must have been machine-gun fire from somewhere because I saw some bantams on my right gently falling over. I scrabbled after the creeping barrage, dragging my rifle on the ground. As far as I was concerned the world was still canted over towards the left and I kept falling over heavily on my left side, bruising my left knee. I moved like some demented cripple.

  Then a shell exploded near me and the blast of air snatched my rifle from my grasp and whipped my helmet from my head. Warm earth hit my face and I felt the weal of the chin strap hot on my throat I was stunned immobile for some seconds. Then, crablike, I scuttled into the fuming crater.

  Kite was already there, on his back, wounded. He held up the stump of his right arm, fringed like a brush, not bleeding but clotted with earth.

  “Somebody’s gone and shot my bloody arm off!” he shouted.

  I blinked. I screwed up my eyes to adjust focus.

  “Damn nuisance,” Kite said. He seemed wholly unperturbed.

  I wondered if I should help him.

  “D’you want a hand?” I yelled, in all innocence.

  “Very funny, Todd,” he said petulantly. “Hardly the time or place.” He began to move. “I can make it on my own.” He crawled back towards our lines.

  I looked round. I could not see a soul. The din was so general it seemed quite normal, like the factory floor of an iron foundry.… I still had my sack of bombs. I wondered where I should throw them. I slithered forward, past some small dead bantams. I saw what looked like a horrifically mangled side of beef, flayed by a maniac butcher with an ax. The melancholy of anatomy. At the top there was an ear, some hair and part of a cheek. At the bottom, a bare knee with a smudge of dirt on it.

  I crawled on until I reached some tangled wire. The German line? I glanced back. I could make out nothing. I turned: was that the farmhouse up ahead? It s
hould have been easy for me to determine—we were meant to run uphill, after all—but my dipping, left-biased world had made me immune to gradients. I had the disarming impression, all at once, that I was in fact moving parallel to our front line. So I turned, with some difficulty, right, leaning into the slope, and felt I was falling. I immediately ran across Pawsey and Louise. Pawsey was shot through the chest. He had dry cherry foam on his lips. He was trying to speak but only pink bubbles formed and popped in his mouth. Louise, I guessed, had gone to help him and—so it seemed—had been caught by a concentrated burst of machine-gun fire in the throat, which was badly torn. He was quite dead. One bullet had taken off his nose with the neatness of a razor.

  I looked up. The barrage had lifted. I could now hear the dreary clatter of machine-gun fire. I saw bantams running back to our lines. More bubbles popped between Pawsey’s lips. I grabbed him under the arms and began to drag him back to safety. I had not gone ten yards when he died. There is an unmistakable limpness about a dead person that no living being can imitate. Instinct tells you when it has arrived. But I needed no instinct, remember: I had dragged dead men from the surf at Coxyde-Bains. Poor Pawsey felt the same.

  I laid him down. There was no point in dragging back a dead man. Heavy firing was coming from further up the line, and a few shells were now bursting on the ridge, more an acknowledgment of the attack’s failure than an attempt to silence the German guns. My section of no-man’s-land was now strangely quiet. All the same I zigzagged back to the lines, moving carefully from shell hole to shell hole. In one particularly large hole I saw a couple of bantams searching corpses for loot. I passed by on the other side.

  I was helped into the trench by men I did not recognize. This must be the second wave of the attack, I guessed, whose presence had not been required. I was passed down the line into the support trenches. Eventually I found my bits and pieces and sat down. I felt terrible. My brain was tender and bruised. I was nauseous. My mouth was dry and rank. My legs were visibly shaking and my joints ached. So this is battle fatigue, I thought. I know now I was suffering from a massive hangover. My first.

  After a while I managed to light a cigarette. I put my trench cap on and waited for the others. Then I began to remember, piecemeal. Kite, with no hand. Louise and Pawsey, dead.…

  A corporal from another platoon came over. He looked very tired.

  “Any sign of Lieutenant McNiece?”

  I told him about Louise. And Kite and Pawsey. I wondered if the others were all right.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t find a soul from my platoon.”

  “You haven’t seen any of my lot, have you?”

  “I saw someone … well, explode. Must have been a bomber. Whole sack of bombs went up. Took about five chaps with him.”

  “Good God!”

  “Are you all right?” he asked. “You’ve got blood all over your face.”

  “Just a scratch,” I said reflexively, followed by a warm spurt of pride at my nonchalance. I put my hand up to my forehead. I felt a curious lump embedded above my eyebrow. It moved. I plucked it out with a wince. It was a tooth. One of Somerville-Start’s incisors. I still have the scar.

  The delayed shock arrived about an hour later. It was not so much what I had witnessed that overwhelmed me as the retrospective sense of awful peril I had been in. I saw myself running foolishly here and there about the battlefield, somehow avoiding the multitudinous trajectories of thousands of pieces of whizzing hot metal. I was not grateful for my luck. I was horrified, if you like, that I had used up so much. We all have narrow escapes in life, some of which we are entirely unaware. What upset me was the hundreds of thousands of narrow escapes I must have had during my few hectic minutes in no-man’s-land. I was convinced I had overdrawn my balance of good fortune; that whatever haphazard benevolence the impassive universe might hold towards me was all but gone.

  We went back into reserve, were given something to eat and then paraded in a field for roll call. D Company’s casualties were dreadful, well over 50 percent, and the bantams had fared little better. Of the bombing section, only Teague and myself were present on parade. Louise was dead; so were Pawsey, Somerville-Start and Bookbinder. It was Bookbinder who had atomized when his sack of bombs exploded, and the blast had accounted for two other bombers dead and one wounded (Lloyd). Also wounded were Kite and, I learned, Druce.

  That evening I went down to the field dressing station to have the cut above my eye stitched. The dressing station was a bizarre place dominated by the twin emotions of intense relief and intense pain. It was established in a small quarry some four hundred yards behind the canal. To my surprise the ground was littered with discarded boots, and everywhere was the powerful contrast of filthy blackened men and new, very white bandages. Walking wounded sat in groups waiting to be driven to the field hospital. Rows of stretcher cases lay docilely in the soft evening sun. I had my cut dressed and went in search of Druce. I heard my name called. It was Kite.

  He was sitting with a group of amputees and head wounds. A blunt club-shaped bandage covered his stump. He looked dark-eyed and his face was tense. I lit a cigarette and gave it to him. He seemed depressed, not nearly as jaunty as on the battlefield. I told him about our casualties.

  “At least you’ll be out of it,” I said.

  He looked at his stump. “I’m finding it a bit hard keeping the old famous unconcern going,” he said, his voice shaking. He started to cry. “I just think it’s a bloody shame. I need my hand.” His voice was raised; other men looked round.

  “Steady, Noel,” I said, and patted his shoulder. “Here, have some fags.” I stuffed half a dozen into a pocket. “Be back in a second. Have a word with Leo.”

  Druce was lying some yards away, a leg bandaged. I told him the appalling news about the section.

  “Kite’s a bit shaken up,” I said. “What happened to you?”

  “I climbed up the ladder, took a couple of steps and got a piece of shrapnel through my calf muscle. I went down and was dragged back into the trench. Must have been out there for all of five seconds. Never saw a thing.” He paused. “What about you?… I mean, what was it like?”

  I thought. “Very strange.” And then, “Horrible.” I told him in more detail about Pawsey and Louise. I tried to express myself better.

  “It’s like … nothing or nowhere else.…” I had no vocabulary. “It’s just mad.”

  “I’m not sure if I should have thrown the whole sackful down.… I mean, in a dugout, you’d think one or two bombs would be enough. Damn! I should have held on to some. Think what—”

  “Suffering Christ, shut up!” I said. We were stacking railway sleepers. During the attack Teague had in fact reached the German line. He had emptied his sack of bombs down a dugout stairwell and thrown in two after them. Apparently he had killed eighteen Germans and had been recommended for a decoration. On the way back to our lines he had sniped at a machine-gun crew and claimed to have hit two of them. He talked about the battle constantly to me. I was deeply bored.

  “Where exactly did you get to? You said you got to the wire.…”

  “Yes. No.… I think so. I got to some wire. Look, I don’t know. I told you I hadn’t a clue what was going on.”

  “Less fuckin’ natter, more work, youse two English bastards!”

  These words came from Platoon Sergeant Tanqueray, a bantam, supervising our working party. The top of his head reached my armpit. Teague and I had been seconded to a Grampian company in the reforming of the battalion after the attack on Frezenburg Ridge. D Company could barely muster two full-strength platoons, so the rest of us were temporarily attached to the bantams to fill gaps in their ranks. By this stage of the war the bantam battalions had more than their fair share of half-grown lads and degenerates. My kit was pilfered almost daily. Anything precious I kept on my person.

  Tanqueray watched us heft the sleepers. He hated Teague and me, as did the rest of his men. He was five feet two inches, just under the
army minimum. He was bitter enough as it was, missing out on the chance of a regular battalion by one inch, but having two tall ex-public-school boys in his platoon seemed almost to have deranged him. Tanqueray had a weak chin, a ginger moustache and pink watery eyes. He was a fisherman from Stonehaven and I fancied he still smelled of fish. The fact that I was Scottish also incensed him, paradoxically. He insisted I was English and I was tired of remonstrating. I became a symbol of the dark genetic conspiracy that had contrived to render him small.

  “You’re dogshite, Todd,” he used to say to me. “You and all your kind. Dogshite.”

  I was not clear what he meant by my “kind” but I did not care. My mood since the day of the attack on the ridge had vacillated between taciturn depression and a brand of fretful neurotic terror that I could barely suppress.

  My diary:

  Monday. Battalion reserve, Dickebusch. This morning I found three members of my platoon going through my kit. Two ran off. I attacked the third, a man called MacKanness, with a harelip. He is barely five foot but quite strong. I held him down and punched his face. He says he will shoot me during the next attack. Tanqueray reported me to the orderly officer—who happened to be Lieutenant Stampe—who seemed sympathetic but had no alternative. I filled sandbags for two days. These are my fellow countrymen but I have nothing but contempt for them. Teague says you can expect nothing else from the laboring classes.

  Since the attack on Frezenburg Ridge we had had one other period—uneventful, as it turned out—in the line. New drafts of recruits had come into the battalion and our rest periods were taken up with reorganization and retraining. Teague and I, perforce, were thrust closer together. We tried to spend as much time as possible with the other members of D Company, but as far as Tanqueray was concerned that was tantamount to fraternizing with the enemy.

  After a couple of weeks it was clear that the 13th was being brought up to full strength again and a new D Company beginning to take shape. Some of the original members were recalled from the Grampians, but no movement order came for Teague or me. I began to worry that we had been forgotten. I spoke to Captain Tuck, reminding him of our existence. He said matters were still in a state of disarray, but assured me that when the battalion re-formed Teague and I would be part of its number. Until then, D Company of the 13th Battalion. SOLI was still attached to the Grampians. I should stop worrying and be patient.