by Dan Simmons
I was challenged out of the darkness to advance and be recognized or to give the code word. I could do none of these things, lying as I was exhausted and bleeding within the coils of my own wires. I felt the muzzle of the rifle aiming at me in the dark and could feel the unseen sentry’s concentration as he prepared to fire at the sound of my croaking.
With my last strength then I could have rasped out my name and unit, perhaps a stirring “God Save the King,” but none of these, I think, would have been understandable through my cracked lips and parched throat. So, inexplicably, absurdly, I began singing. The tune somewhat resembled “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush”:
We don’t want a girl from Givenchy-le-Noble,
From Givenchy-le-Noble,
From Givenchy-le Noble,
If you go for a walk she will get into trouble.
So we don’t want a girl from Givenchy-le-Noble.
We don’t want a girl who comes from les Comptes,
Who comes from les Comptes,
Who comes from les Comptes,
For they all eat onions, and their breath rather haunts,
So we don’t want a girl who comes from les Comptes.7
I lowered my face to the mud and waited.
“Sweet baby Jesus,” came the sentry’s voice. “It’s someone from The Rifle Brigade. Pull him out of there, lads.”
They covered my semi-nakedness with a blanket, carried me back through communication trenches, and left me at what they thought was a dressing station behind the lines.
The bells have started up again, either to celebrate the end of the last mass or to drag people in to the next. Either way, I cannot concentrate. Some mule driver is cursing at his team just outside the window as they try to pull a cart out of the mud while an entire brigade waits.
I cannot concentrate. I hurt. I will write more later.
Monday, 17 July, 2.00 P.M.—
I awoke to the Lady’s scent last night, but the ward was empty except for the doomed, the dying, and me. I feel certain that she had been there only seconds before.
The long needle extracted only thimblesful of fluid this morning, I was able to stagger to the latrine with the aid of two canes, and Sister Paul Marie tells me that I will be pronounced cured within a day or two to make way for more seriously injured chaps. Several of my previous wardmates have died—the Major was found this morning, staring as fixedly at the ceiling in death as he had in his last days of life—and the new fellows seem to be from the 33rd Division. As I imagined when I heard of the fighting over the weekend, the Church Lads’ Brigade seems to have met the same fate as our Brigade.
Sister tells me that Colonel Pretor-Pinney was finally shipped back to Base Hospital. There is hope that he will live. Sergeant Rowlands stopped by to see me yesterday afternoon. Rowlands had been a good man, but had been ordered back here to Albert just before our 10 July attack so that he could serve Headquarters Detail as orderly sergeant. He is bitter about missing the show, but the reassignment almost certainly saved his life.
Rowlands told me that when they took roll-call of the Brigade on the 12th, more than three hundred names carried an “M.” {Ed. note—“M” stood for “Missing.”} Of course no one at Headquarters knew if these men were dead, dead and buried, dead and still unburied, dead and blown to atoms, captured, wounded, wounded and evacuated, wounded and lying out in No Man’s Land, at dressing stations, or already sent back to hospital. According to Rowlands, no one at Headquarters was very interested in finding out. So the Sergeant himself has used most of the past week in bicycling around every field hospital and dressing station asking after our Rifle Brigade chaps. On Friday he brought his own list to the Colonel here at the big dressing station and Pretor-Pinney wept openly, which is almost unimaginable. According to Rowlands, all the Colonel could say, again and again, was, “What a mess they’ve made of my Battalion. What a mess they’ve made of my Battalion.”
Rowlands would not have found me at a dressing station had he sought me out last Wednesday, The lads who found me at the Front had commandeered a motorcycle with sidecar and brought me back almost to Albert, dropping me off at what they were sure was a dressing station. There was a huge tent filled with casualties on stretchers, a few workers moving around under lights on the far side, and rows of overflow stretchers and blanketed wounded on the yard outside the tent. It was a warm night; the stars were clear. The sentry and his chum lifted me out of the sidecar, found me an empty stretcher, tucked a blanket to my chin, wished me luck, and returned to their duties on the line.
Fading in and out of consciousness as I was, so giddy at being alive and out of No Man’s Land, it was an hour or two before I noticed that no one was checking on me. Not a doctor. Not a nurse. Not even an enlisted man taking temperatures or carrying out triage.
I also noticed the silence. For the first time in three days, the chorus of wounded men did not grate on my nerves and sanity. This group made no noise at all.
It was, of course, a burial station, not a dressing station, and it seemed that the enlisted men in charge of the detail had knocked off for the night just as my friends from the Front had left me to their tender mercies. I lay outside, alone, with the noble dead. My legs did not work, but I was able to sit up and look around. Many of the bodies had not been covered with blankets. Starlight gleamed from exposed bone and still-open eyes. I actually recognized a few of the lads from 13th Platoon.
Shouting did no good, as my lungs were already so congested that I could only cough hollowly. I lay back, sure that someone would come along. From time to time horses or motorcars came along the road no more than ten meters away, but a small rise separated the rows of dead from the thoroughfare, and my gasping coughs would not have been heard at any rate.
I considered crawling for help, but now, three and a half days after my last meal—and I had eaten little breakfast the morning of the attack, not only out of nervousness but due to the soldier’s fear of a stomach or intestinal wound after eating—I had no strength left in my upper body. I was quite sure that I would die of thirst or my wounds before morning.
It rained sometime before dawn. The soft mist awakened me and I pitched my head back, opened my mouth, and swallowed what I could. It was not enough. I tried cupping my hands to catch the blessed moisture, but my hands were shaking too fiercely to serve me. Knowing that the soft rain would end soon, I peered around madly in the darkness trying to find some vessel with which to capture the water and save my life—a tossed-aside canteen, a jerry can, a helmet, anything. There was nothing. Then I noticed the water pooling in the folds and wrinkles of uniforms on the uncovered corpses nearby. I admit that I crawled where I could, lapping up these minuscule pools of water before they soaked in or evaporated. I remember using my tongue like a cat at a saucer of cream as I drank water pooled in the cold hollow of a young man’s throat. I had no shame then and I feel none now. The gods had abandoned me and I defied them to do their worst. I would survive to spite the Fates.
She came then.
She walked between the rows of silent forms, treading lightly. I do not know if she was barefoot or in soft slippers. Her gown was the same as the previous night’s—gauzy but not diaphanous, draped in Pre-Raphaelite folds which rearranged themselves in the starlight. I lay back on my stretcher then, pulling the rough blanket up around me, my thirst forgotten. I was afraid that she was searching for me in the darkness and more afraid that she was not.
I do not pretend that I did not know who she might be, must be. It did not matter. Her hair, when she bent over me, unfolded itself around us like a curtain. The scent of her neck was the hint of violets, a trace of jasmine, and all woman’s warmth.
I wanted to say no, that my lips were cracked and caked, that my breath must be rank, but she touched my mouth with her cool finger to silence me. A second later she placed her lips where her finger had been. Her kiss was both firm and soft, endless and too brief. The stars seemed to circle in my vertigo. When she pulled back, I
could sense the soft form of her left breast through the material.
“Wait,” I rasped, but she was already stepping away, lifting the hem of her gown so that it did not touch the curled fingers or raised faces of the others lying there in the damp.
“Wait,” I whispered again, but already sleep was coming. Shivering, knowing that I would have followed her at that moment if strength and the proper time had been mine, I managed to pull the sodden blanket higher as I slipped off into a sleep as dreamless as that of the dead around me.
Tuesday, 18 July, 3.30 P.M.—
A dreadful day. They make ready to discharge me but a bad night of fever and coughing kept me in bed one last day. My legs feel as if they are attached by sutures and not my own to control, but I can stand on them now with the aid of only one cane.
Fit to serve in Kitchener’s Army again.
News so bad today that I can only laugh at whatever god of irony rules the universe. With The Rifle Brigade down to half strength and less, I knew that it is finished as a fighting unit. At least for some while. That meant that when I returned to the Battalion it would be to some “cushy” duty in a quiet section of the Front…or more probably in reserve behind the Front. Sergeant Rowlands had said yesterday that he had seen orders sending the Battalion to Bresle today, and then on to relatively comfortable duty near Calonne. He says that the billets are in houses there and that it is away from the fighting and the Somme.
I was beginning to think that I might live to see Christmas. Today my transfer papers arrived.
I had put in for a transfer last Christmas when the Brigade was in Hannescamps and I was feeling left out and rather low. I’ve never got along with the common sort well, and the other officers in the Brigade did not seem like gentlemen. I’d approached the Colonel and filled out forms for a transfer to 34th Division, rather hoping that I might end up with Dickie, John, Siegfried {Ed. note—Siegfried Sassoon}, or some of the other chaps I’d known at Cambridge. The Colonel had told me how unlikely it was that any such transfer would be approved, but I sent the papers through, heard nothing, and had forgotten about it. Today I find that I have been transferred—to the 1st Battalion of the 1st Rifle Brigade of the 14th Division.
Wonderful. Fucking bloody wonderful. I’ve been in three Divisions during my short time in this fucking army: The Rifle Brigade was trained as part of the 37th, we were told that we had been moved to the 34th when we joined the line less than two weeks ago (less than two weeks?), and now I am to pack up and join the bloody fucking 14th. I know no one in the 14th. Worse than that, Sergeant Rowlands tells me that the 14th is moving into position on the line even while my old Brigade is leaving it.
If I had not lost my pistol in No Man’s Land, I would put it in my mouth and pull the bloody fucking trigger.
Wednesday, 19 July, 7.00 P.M.—
Earlier I went outside to watch The Rifle Brigade march out of Albert. A beautiful evening. The air was actually cool and crisp, as if autumn were approaching despite the fact that it is high summer. There was only a hint of dust and cordite and the smell of decaying bodies in the air. The Golden Virgin and her child caught the light as the Battalion marched away under her.
I did not recognize many of the faces. Hundreds of new men have been incorporated into the ranks here in Albert so that the Battalion looks a bit like a battalion. Those faces I did recognize looked years older than when I last saw them nine days ago. An eternity ago. I stood on the hill outside the old convent here and waved, but many of the chaps I’d known from the old Brigade stared straight ahead, seeing nothing. Many wept. After they marched out of sight I came inside, expecting to sleep or perhaps write a letter to my sister, but there was a delegation if important ladies from Blighty here and we had to all be on our best behaviour. The nuns had put screens around the lads in worst condition—the new gas case, the Church Lad who’s lost both legs, his right arm, and at least one eye, two or three others—so that our visitors would not be offended. I was simply not up to speaking to them, so I feigned sleep. One of them commented to another what a handsome lad I was. The brusque sister said that I was all well and would soon be returning to the Front. The Blighty lady, some old crone with her hair done up in a Gibson Girl bun—I peeked through lowered lids—said how wonderful it was that I was going back to give it another go.
I would like to give her another go.
THE GLORY OF WOMEN
You love us when we’re heroes, home on leave,
Or wounded in a mentionable place.
You worship decorations; you believe
That chivalry redeems the war’s disgrace.
You make us shells. You listen with delight,
By tales of dirt and danger fondly thrilled.
You crown our distant ardours while we fight,
And mourn our laurelled memories when we’re killed.
You can’t believe that British troops “retire”
When hell’s last horror breaks them, and they run,
Trampling the terrible corpses—blind with blood.
0 German mother dreaming by the fire,
While you are knitting socks to send your son
His face is trodden deeper in the mud.8
I do not think that she will come tonight. I wish to God that she would.
Still, 1 do not think that she has abandoned me. We will meet again soon enough.
To sleep now. My last night in hospital. Perhaps my last night ever between clean sheets.
Saturday, 22 July—
I was wrong about the clean sheets. I have slept between sheets—although not quite so clean as in hospital—each night since coming back to Amiens to join up with my new Rifle Brigade in the 14th Division.
Shells were raining down on Albert as I left on Thursday. German 5.9s were rearranging the rubble of the town centre and falling perilously close to the large field hospital and the convent hospital where I had recovered. I suspect that I look rather romantic with my limp, my cane, and my haggard expression contrasting with my new uniform; certainly the salutes I have been receiving from new troops heading toward the Front have been snappier and more respectful than I was used to. I also have begun growing a mustache. I notice grey hairs that were not there two week ago.
Amiens is some fifteen miles behind the lines, but it might as well be fifteen hundred. There is a real world here: a bookshop run by a certain Madame Carpentier whose daughter flirts with officers, restaurants with names such as Rue du Corps Nu sans Tête, la Cathédrale, Josephine’s Oyster Bar, the wonderful Godebert, and one merely called “Officers Dining Room” where a veritable covey of subalterns hang out, not to mention such other Amiens wonders such as the barbershop in Rue des Trois Cailloux where one can, after a haircut, shave, and session with hot towels, receive a friction d’eau de quinine which makes one’s scalp tingle for hours afterward.
It is a cruel respite. The 14th moves up to the line on Monday and this reminder of what human life is like will make the Front all the more unbearable.
I had the Devil’s own time of trying to find the 14th—Amiens is full of billeted troops arriving and departing and the outskirts of town looks as if a thousand circuses were setting up tents—but I finally reported to an arrogant colonel whom I did not care for at all, and then to a certain Captain Brown who seemed a pleasant enough chap. Brown introduced me to my platoon sergeants and explained that the 1st Brigade was being built back up to strength because of all the “loans” they had made to more active units. I am beginning to see this entire war as one giant game of musical chairs, where the loser dies due to being in the wrong place at the wrong time when the music stops.
I think of the Lady every night, but I know that she will not visit me here. The thought of seeing her once more is the only thing attractive about moving northeast to the Front once again.
Sunday, 23 July, noon—
Word is that Australian and New Zealand troops attacked against Pozieres sometime after midnight. Captain Brown says that desp
ite the usual rosy reports from Headquarters and the patriotic babble from the journalists, the result will probably turn out to be much the same as with the 34th on July 1st and my own Rifle Brigade on the 10th: i.e. thousands dead in the mud for nothing.
We will be heading up to Albert tomorrow, then into the Line.
The other big news today concerns the death of Major-General Ingouville-Williams, commander of the 34th Division. I remember Dickie and Siegfried telling me that the men called him “Inky Bill.” It seems that he was killed yesterday by an exploding shell while hunting for souvenirs in Mametz Wood. The officers are all sombre about the loss, but I heard Corporal Cooper say to another enlisted man that “it serves him bloody right for leaving his cushy bloody dugout to go pokin’ around for souvenirs where the rest of us have to fight a bloody war.” At any rate, there was quite a commotion behind the lines to find a set of four matching black horses to pull the caisson carrying his body back down the line. Captain Brown says that a suitable team was found at C Battery of the 152nd Brigade.
I suppose these things are important.
On, marching men, on
To the gates of death with a song.
Sow your gladness for earth’s reaping.
So you may be glad, though sleeping.
Strew your gladness on earth’s bed,
So be merry, so be dead,9
The four thousand men of our brigade march toward the Front tomorrow. I suspect that there will be no black horses to carry home the thousands who do not march back this way again.
Tuesday, 25 July, 10.00 P.M.—
The Golden Virgin and her child hung over the road as we marched back through Albert yesterday and the cloud of dust our Brigade had raised set a sort of orange halo around Madonna and Child. Our way to the Front was not quite the same as when I visited the 34th for the Big Push on the 1st or where The Rifle Brigade went into line to die as a Brigade on the 10th. Our Brigade marched through Fricourt, but instead of taking either the road toward Pozieres or Contalmaison, we went by way of Sausage Valley to the right of la Boisselle and reached the new line in front of Pozieres without exposing the men to much in the way of enemy fire. The Germans know that huge numbers of men are using Sausage Valley, but they have no direct fire so we had hoped that our only worry was the occasional 5.9 dropping in blindly to welcome us.