Barton told him to wait inside the front room of the house where most of his platoon lay sleeping, and continued on, in the darkness, up the next two flights of stairs. He was more than half-way there, because he felt his foot come up against the broken section and made a note to take care, when the shell came and the blast of it threw him backwards down the flight. He threw his arms up over his head to shut out the appalling noise.
At the foot of his report to Brigade Headquarters on the incident of the night of September 19/20, Col. G. T. C. Garrett commanding 2nd Battalion at Feuvry, gave it as his opinion that the town was unsuitable for billeting purposes. The lives of nine of his men had been lost. Those of other regiments to be billeted in the town in future would be unnecessarily at risk. Overnight halts might more safely be made at Beauterre, two miles further south.
STANDING ORDER No. 107. Major General Tebbits. Commanding 1st Division. 1.8.1915.
The village of BEAUTERRE (Ref. Ordnance Map 48, 4 Miles S.E. of ARTUN) will not be used for the purpose of overnight halts by infantry troops. Billets are to be found in FEUVRY (Ref. Ordnance Map 47).
‘David …’
‘If I’d left him in the cellar and taken the brandy down to him. If we’d all just left him.’
‘If we’d left him he would have stayed there until tomorrow morning, we would have had to fetch Franklin who would have ordered him out, and if he hadn’t moved then, he would have been court martialled.’
‘He’d have been alive, Hilliard, he’d still have still been alive.’
‘For that matter, if you’d stayed with him yourself for a couple of minutes longer in that room you would have been killed as well. And that is true of hundreds of men everywhere in this war every single day – if, if, if, might, might, might.’
‘For Christ’s sake you sound like one of our politicians! Have you heard yourself?’
Hilliard came across the room and stood beside him at the boarded-up window. The sky showed through the gaps, grey, as the dawn came up.
He said, ‘I’m only telling you the truth because that’s how it is out here.’
He had been terrified that Barton had been killed when he had heard the noise. ‘Look, David, I know perfectly well how you feel …’
‘Do you?’
‘Yes.’
Barton was silent. In his head he still heard the noise of the shell, he could still feel himself being flung down the stairs. He still saw Harris’s face.
‘You cannot and you must not spend any more time blaming yourself, saying if only this and if only that. It’s useless.’
‘Yes.’
‘If you go on doing it, you will be useless.’
‘Yes.’
But then Barton thought, he is one of them, he thinks the way they think after all, he sees the things they see. He tells me that I know nothing. I have seen nothing, but that is no longer true. Already, he has put Harris out of his mind, the night of September 19/20 is an incident, a report will be made on it, one man has gone from the platoon. That is all.
In fact, seven out of the nine men killed had been from their platoon. The shell had hit the front of the house, coming down into the corner of the room in which they slept and close beside where Harris had been standing, waiting for Barton to come back with the brandy. Four other men had been wounded by shrapnel and falling masonry.
But wasn’t Harris better off? For would he not have gone through terror after terror in the front line, only to meet with a death less sudden, more painful, more clearly foreseen? He had been spared all that. He had been alive – and then dead.
Or else he might have lived, to see the end of this war. which everyone in England told them was imminent, would be before Christmas. If, if, if. Might, might, might.
Garrett had asked Hilliard to write to the men’s relatives, as soon as they got into the support line the following day. He had been told nothing about the business with Harris in the cellar.
‘You could write the letter about Harris,’ John Hilliard had said, as they came out and made their way back to the shattered house and the remaining men of the platoon who were clearing up with grey, cynical faces, who had been so abruptly reminded of where they were, that it had all begun again. ‘You can write to his parents.’
‘Yes, I want to do that.’
‘You needn’t tell them anything about the fact that he …’
‘Oh, for Christ’s shake, John, what do you take me for?’
The light was getting paler. They had had no sleep at all. Around them, the shadows of their luggage, boots, rifles. The conversation with Harris repeated itself over and over in Barton’s head, there were his own, meaningless, comforting words, used to get the soldier out of the cellar and up the stairs, to his death.
Hilliard was looking at him.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘I don’t know. You …’ Hilliard wondered how he could tell him. That his face had changed, in the space of a day and a night, that his eyes had taken on the common look of shock and misery and exhaustion, that the texture of his flesh was altered, was grained and worn.
‘It had to start somewhere, didn’t it? But could it have started worse?’
Hilliard said, ‘When the shell came I’d heard you on the stairs just before it … I thought you were dead. When the noise stopped, I could hear a man calling out. I thought it was you. I was sure you were dying or dead.’
Barton turned his head and smiled, and then his face changed again, the old, self-deprecating expression over it, and mixed with that, concern for what Hilliard had been feeling. He said, ‘I never thought I might have been dead.’ Though that was not true.
‘No. It’s only when you see it happen to someone you’ve just been talking to, or think about it in the middle of doing an ordinary job in a safe place.’
‘Dread.’
‘Yes. But you can get another feeling, too – a peculiar sense of detachment, immunity. None of this has anything to do with you, only with the others.’
‘Harris didn’t have that feeling, down in the cellar.’
‘No. He was afraid.’
‘Does it often happen? Do men often simply break down at the thought of it?’
‘No. I’ve only seen one man in Harris’s state before – he was worse than Harris. But it was in the middle of a particularly bad attack and he’d just lost his brother, he’d seen him killed by a mine.’
‘I said things to Harris that wouldn’t have given hope or comfort to a dog.’
‘Yet they did.’
‘Did they?’
‘They must have done. You persuaded him to come out.’
‘Oh yes. I suppose that was some sort of achievement, John!’
‘Stop that!’
‘Why did you come upstairs for me? Why couldn’t you have stayed and talked to him yourself?’
‘It was pointless, I wasn’t getting through to him, I wasn’t even getting him to listen. I don’t think he so much as realized that I was there. I knew it would be different with you, that you’d succeed where I couldn’t.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. Does it matter? I was right, that’s the point.’
‘I touched him, I held on to him. That’s what he needed. That was all he needed. It wasn’t what I said to him.’
‘You could do it for him,’ Hilliard said slowly, ‘and I could not. It’s what you do for me. You listen and you’re there. That’s all. It’s the same thing.’
Barton lifted his head. The skin beneath his eyes was chalk white and crossed finely, like tissue paper. He looked exhausted. ‘You’re still alive. That’s the difference,’ he said. ‘Harris isn’t.’
Hilliard wanted to put his hand out and touch him. And could not.
Coulter came up the stairs to wake them.
And so we came on here and now we are in support trenches behind the front line. After what happened last night I don’t believe that I can ever be badly shaken again. I have, for instance, been qui
te unmoved by the sight of unburied bodies lying about here, just as they lay about in Feuvry. They are all along the sides of the road, and out in the fields, in shell craters, and piled up on top of the trenches like sandbags. Some of the ones in the craters are Germans. Doesn’t the enemy have the right to a decent burial either? But why ask that, since so few people have any sort of burial at all during the offensive – scarcely during the whole war, it seems. No time, no time. And yet some of the men say there is all the time in the world, the days drag along. But I have been ashamed of myself for getting so thoroughly hardened so quickly. John says I am not, that this is just a sort of numbness after shock, everyone gets it at first. I wonder. Perhaps I do not know myself at all. I was so appalled at the broken buildings and so little worried by the broken bodies. That cannot be good.
I have been reading Sir Thomas Browne, who comforts me, because I learn great truths, which I have read and passed over before, simply because I had nothing to relate them to, in my own experience. ‘Christians have handsomely glossed over the deformity of death by careful considerations of the body, and the civil rites which take off brutal terminations.’
Well, that is not true here.
I have never in my life been so tired as I am today, and the difference seems to be that it is not a healthy tiredness. John feels it too. We both look at one another’s faces and remark and change and know. We don’t bother to say anything about it. The rest camp, the orchards and the quiet lane and the path alongside the stream, all have receded far away, they seem like some dream country which we inhabited long ago: though I cannot truly believe that we were ever there, and that we were so contented and had no quarrels with anyone, and that the sun shone so kindly.
Though it has been shining here again today, there seems to be no sign of any move into real autumn weather. The men are glad of that, they tell me about the horrors of rain which brings the mud, and I listen and believe them, so I’m glad that it is dry, even though this means water rationing. And everything smells so much worse, too, under the sun.
Since we got here we have done nothing but work. Until this evening, at least. And now I have to write that letter to Harris’s parents. They live in Devon. I am putting it off. John is sitting opposite me making his way slowly through the other letters about the dead men. Captain Franklin came in to see how we were getting on – I could see (and feel) John bristle the moment he came through the curtain. He really is not so bad, though, just a cold fish. John’s face gives nothing away except his own tiredness. But how angry it makes me that we should be sitting here doing this at all, because the whole accident was so pointless, the men were doing nothing except sleeping and waiting for today. I am glad there has been so little trouble for you with bombing, after the early scares, because shells are frightening, and they make the most shocking noise. But I suppose one would rather be catapulted out of sleep into death than to have to sit and watch it creeping up on one. Though one or two of those men did not, in fact, die at once, they were half blown to bits but lasted various lengths of time, waiting for the ambulances to come. I’m sorry to pile on these agonies but I need to tell you. I shall only keep back what might worry you unduly. But then, in your heart of hearts you will know, all of you, and we have never kept even unpleasant truths from one another.
We have a reasonably comfortable dugout in this trench. John says it is more than ‘reasonably comfortable’ which shows only how much I have yet to find out! You come along the trench, which is quite narrow and zig-zags crazily, so that you lose your way after a yard or so, in all the right angles – and the dugout is cut into the bank. We have a corrugated tin roof, and sacking in front of the door. Someone kindly labelled it, years ago, with ‘Chez Nous’ written on a broken bit of wood, and nailed up. It remains. Inside, it’s surprisingly spacious, we can both stand up and stretch our arms out without quite touching! There are two bunks (hard) and a table of sorts. And all the paraphernalia we brought with us, of course. You’ve no idea how much one has to carry with one in the army. Not to mention all the clothes one wears and the bits and pieces strapped about one’s person. Still, one thing we do have here is a gramophone. There is another at Battalion H.Q. which the C.O. uses to play drawing room ballads, sung by bass baritones. But this was quite unexpected treasure – nobody knows who originally owned it, but now it goes with the other fixtures and fittings. I suppose someone brought it down and then was killed and it was never returned or auctioned off. There is a small and very curious selection of records. I wonder if you could manage to send some of mine out? Only a few, and I shall have to think about exactly what, because they’ll be heavy and I don’t want us to be even more loaded. I’d like to take the gram. into the front line trench but John laughs a hollow laugh and points out that we’d never manage to hear a thing. Also that it does belong here. I take the last point, but one of our Lewis guns sends cheery salvoes over every few minutes and I have proved that there is only one point, as they actually fire, at which you simply cannot hear the music at all!
Now – I seem to have written myself out of the awful depression I felt when I sat down. Reading the last paragraph, I sound almost cheerful. Well, and Coulter has just come in and he is always enough to make anyone perk up. We’re still sharing him, especially after the losses of yesterday. One of those men was to have been my batman here. I wonder when we shall get replacements. John says one of the hardest things is having to get used to new faces, new faces. Some you never get to know at all, they don’t manage to impress themselves on you. Nobody could say that of Coulter though. But he isn’t ‘a card’. The platoon does have one of those, a man called Fyson, who is not bad if he’s kept under, but he becomes rather tedious, especially as his stories and jokes are both fearfully obscene and very un-funny – unpardonable combination!
As I have worked myself into this better frame of mind, I must write to the parents of Private Harris and get it over. And I really do want to write. Only it will be such a deceit. I have learned a great deal about deceit, since coming to this war.
Then it will be the beginning of my first night in a trench. There won’t be much to do. We were to have begun with carrying parties to bring up all the stuff we need to mend our wire and get the trench cleared up and the sides strengthened, but because of last night’s loss of sleep, all that has been put off until tomorrow. It makes me wonder how long we are all intended to be here. Rebuilding trenches will be rather like repairing a house – presumably people are going to be staying in it. I should have thought the object was to get out as quickly as possible and move into the enemy trenches ahead. It doesn’t look as though anyone expects us to move for the rest of our lives. But really there is no telling what is supposed to be going on.
I hope we manage to get some sleep. I seem to have gone beyond tiredness, into a kind of daze. I need to sleep.
Glazier is doing tonight’s duty because he was in a different billet last night and they missed the direct shelling.
But it was after all, an easy beginning. For two weeks, they stayed mainly in the support trenches, and fell into some sort of routine, they were getting used to things, it was quiet enough: there was time to play the gramophone.
‘Boring,’ Barton said once.
Hilliard raised his eyes from the pile of ration returns. ‘I’d rather that. So would you if you’ve got any sense.’
‘Come on, John! Where’s your yearning for excitement? The sound of battle “where ignorant armies clash by night”. Doesn’t that stir your blood?’
‘No. And that isn’t especially funny either …’
‘You know, you haven’t much sense of humour, have you?’
Hilliard considered for a moment. A man went past the flap of the dugout, whistling. No, he thought, no, I have not, and David has, it is one of the things I most envy in him. Once, he himself had simply been called ‘a bloody prig’. He had a glimpse of himself down all the years of the past, stiff and reserved, anxious to please – but humourless. Bart
on burst out laughing. ‘All right, all right – don’t look so stricken!’
Hilliard smiled, went back to the ration returns. And felt, as he was writing, a sudden, warm pleasure, a sensation of being comfortable here, at home and in comparative peace, doing dull, easy jobs in Barton’s company. He was happy. Barton was still reading Sir Thomas Browne.
For some time longer it went on like that, and the weather, too. September passed and there was still sunshine, hot in the middle of the day and with the smell of autumn on the damp, misty mornings. The men were in good spirits.
‘Cushy trenches,’ Hilliard overheard one of them say – Hemp, the pastry-cook from Brighton. Hilliard repeated the phrase to Coulter as he stood outside the dugout one morning shaving from a tin mug of lukewarm water, looking at himself in the mirror he had propped up against a sandbag. The sky was a thin, flat blue and high overhead a lark hovered and trembled, singing.
‘Cushy trenches!’
Coulter looked troubled.
‘Well – aren’t they?’
‘Maybe, sir.’
‘I think they’ve passed us over, forgotten us.’
‘They’re getting it badly up at Chimpers, sir.’ Chimpers – the village of Chimpres, not more than five miles away. Hilliard remembered it from the early days of June. There had been very little left of it even then.
‘Again?’
‘So I hear, sir.’
‘You do manage to hear a lot, Coulter!’
For once, his batman did not return the smile.
‘What’s up?’
‘I don’t know, sir. Just a feeling.’
Hilliard glanced at him and was alarmed. It was not like Coulter, who was a cheerful man and usually grew more cheerful, at least on the surface, the more immediate the danger. But he himself had come to respect these forebodings, to know what they might mean, and it was not only Coulter who had them. All through the spring and summer he had come across men who were experiencing ‘just a feeling’ – that today it had their number on it, they would not come through. He remembered Armstrong urgently telling him about a letter which he carried in his breast pocket. If he was killed he wanted Hilliard to be sure and take the envelope and send it home as soon as he could, it had ‘something special’ in it. Armstrong had been in France since the beginning, had gone, with Garrett’s Battalion, through the early battles, Ypres, Loos, and then the whole of the Somme, and had remained quite unscathed. He led a charmed life, the others said, bombs fell within inches of Armstrong and missed. Once he had stuck his head recklessly over the parapet and been rewarded with a sniper’s bullet, which had whistled through his hair and stuck in the earth of the trench behind him. He had volunteered for night raid after night raid, three times he had been one of only a handful of men who had returned safely. He survived and a superstition had grown up around him. If you stuck with Armstrong you would be all right. But on the morning they were waiting for a barrage that began their attack on Belle-Maison, he had been beside himself with trying to impress upon Hilliard the urgency of the letter which he carried. He had ‘had a feeling’. Hilliard had taken little notice though he had promised to take and send home the letter if the time came. Armstrong went over the top with the first wave and was hit almost at once, Hilliard had seen him crumple after no more than thirty yards.