“The chaps don’t like a feather man,” I say half-heartedly.
“We’re all feather men at heart,” he replies. He extends his hand towards the candle that is burning before him. There’s not much life left in it and he hovers his index finger in the air, passing it through the flame quickly, then slower, then slower again.
“Stop it, Will,” I say.
“Why?” he asks, half smiling as he looks at me, his finger holding steady for longer and longer in the flame.
“You’ll burn yourself,” I say, but he shrugs it off.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Stop it!” I insist, grabbing his hand now, pulling it away from the candle, which flickers for a moment, casting shadows on our faces as I hold his hand in mine, feeling the rough, calloused skin that we’ve all developed. He looks down at my hand and then looks up, his eyes meeting mine. I notice that his face, which is filthy, is caked in mud beneath both eyes. He smiles slowly and the dimples appear—neither war nor trenches can do for them—and he pulls his hand back slowly, very slowly, leaving me unsettled, confused and, above all else, aroused.
“How are yours?” he asks, nodding at my hands. I place them flat in the air and every finger is motionless, as if they have been paralysed. It’s become something of a party piece for me now among the men; my record is eight minutes without a single movement. He laughs. “Still steady as a rock. I don’t know how you do it.”
“Nerves of steel,” I say, smiling at him.
“Do you believe in heaven, Tristan?” he asks in a quiet voice, and I shake my head.
“No.”
“Really?” he asks, surprised. “Why not?”
“Because it’s a human invention,” I tell him. “It astonishes me when people talk of heaven and hell and where they will end up when their lives are over. Nobody claims to understand why we are given life in the first place, that would be a heresy, and yet so many purport to be completely sure about what will happen after they die. It’s absurd.”
“Don’t let my father hear you say that,” he says, smiling.
“The vicar,” I say, remembering now.
“He’s a good man really,” says Will. “I believe in heaven, you know. I’m not sure why. Perhaps I just want to. I’m not particularly religious, but you can’t grow up with a father like mine and not have a little bit of it in your blood. Especially when your father is such a decent man.”
“I wouldn’t know about that,” I say.
“Ah yes, the Butcher of Brentford.”
“Chiswick.”
“Brentford’s close enough. And it sounds better.”
I nod and rub my eyes. I’m feeling tired now; perhaps it’s time to say goodnight and return to my foxhole for sleep.
“That night,” says Will, and I don’t turn my head or raise my eyes but sit still, as steady as my hands were a few moments before. “Before, I mean.”
“At Aldershot?” I say.
“Yes.” He hesitates before speaking again. “Funny thing, wasn’t it?”
I breathe heavily through my nose and consider it. “We were frightened, I suppose,” I tell him. “Of what was coming next, I mean. It wasn’t planned.”
“No,” he says. “No, of course not. I mean I’ve always thought that I might like to get married some day. Have a few little ones, that type of thing. Don’t you want that, Tristan?”
“Not really,” I say.
“I do. And I know it’s what my parents would want.”
“And they matter all that much, do they?” I ask bitterly.
“They do to me,” he says. “But that night—”
“Well, what of it?” I ask, frustrated.
“Had you ever thought of it before?” he asks, looking directly at me now, and in the candlelight I can see pools forming in his eyes and I want to reach out and hold him and tell him that if he will just be my friend again, then that is all I need; I can live without the rest if I have to.
“I had,” I say quietly, nodding my head. “Yes, I think it’s … well, it’s there, I mean. In my head. I’ve tried to rid myself of it, of course.” I hesitate and he stares at me, waiting for me to continue. “It’s no good, though,” I concede. “It was there before I even knew what it was.”
“One hears of men,” he says. “There are court cases, of course. One reads about them in the newspapers. But it all seems so … so vile, don’t you think? The secrecy involved. The subterfuge. The whole filthy sordid nature of it.”
“But that is not of their own volition,” I say, choosing my pronoun carefully. “They have no choice but to live secret lives. Their liberty depends on it.”
“Yes,” he agrees. “Yes, I’ve thought of that. Still, I have always thought that it would be nice to be married, haven’t you? To a decent girl from a good family. Someone who wants a happy home.”
“Someone conventional,” I say.
“Ah, Tristan,” he sighs, moving closer to me—the third time he’s used these words—and before I can reply, his mouth is already on mine, urgently, and I almost fall backwards in surprise but manage to steady myself and allow it to happen, wondering at what point I’m allowed to let myself go and simply enjoy the embrace.
“Wait,” he says, pulling away and shaking his head, and I think that he is about to change his mind, but the combined look of desire and urgency in his face suggests otherwise. “Not here,” he says. “Anyone could come in. Follow me.”
I stand as he leaves the tent and walk after him, practically running in case I lose him in the darkness of the night, away from the trenches, moving so fast and to such a distance that a part of me worries whether this might be considered desertion; another part is curious about how easily he finds this patch of hidden ground. Has he been here before? With someone else? Milton or Sparks, perhaps? Or one of the newer boys? Finally, however, he appears to feel safe, and he turns to me and we lie down and as much as I want this, as much as I want him, I remember that night at Aldershot and the way he looked at me afterwards. The way he has barely spoken to me between then and now.
“It will be all right this time, won’t it?” I ask, pulling free for a moment, and he looks down at me, a dazed expression on his face and nods quickly.
“Yes, yes,” he says, then moves down my body, touching every part of me as he goes, and this time I tell myself to ignore the voice in my head that says that this is simply a few minutes of pleasure in exchange for who knows how long of antipathy on his part because it doesn’t matter; at least for these few minutes I can believe that we are no longer at war.
I scramble forward and raise myself to a half-crouch, then trip and fall over a body, someone I half recognize, a new boy, and I land with a crash in the mud. Digging my heels into the soil, I raise myself up, spitting dirt and grit from my lips, ignoring him, pressing on. It’s pointless to wipe the filth away; I haven’t been clean in months.
Launching myself out into no-man’s-land gets more terrifying every time. It’s Russian roulette: with every pull of the trigger the chances of your surviving the next shot diminish.
I can hear Wells or Moody, one of them, issuing orders further down the line but it’s difficult to make out exactly what he’s saying; the combination of strong winds and sleeting rain render it impossible to act on anything other than pure instinct. It’s madness to go over in conditions like this but the orders came through from GHQ and are not to be questioned. Unsworth, petulant as ever, queried the wisdom of the move and I thought that Clayton was going to strike him down for it but he quickly apologized and made for the ladders, apparently fearing the enemy’s guns less than our sergeant’s wrath. Clayton seems to have completely lost control of whatever senses were left to him since General Fielding’s visit. He doesn’t sleep much and looks like death. The sound of his roaring can be heard from wherever one is positioned. I wonder that Wells or Moody don’t do something about him; he needs to be relieved of his command before he does something that endangers us all.
/> I crawl forward on my belly, holding my rifle before me, my left eye firmly closed as I look down the viewfinder for anyone advancing in my direction. I picture myself locking eyes with a boy of my own age, both of us terrified, in the instant before we shoot each other dead. Above us the sky is lousy with aircraft and the dark blue that forces its way through the grey clouds holds a certain beauty, but it’s dangerous to look up so I keep moving, my heart pounding in my chest, my breath escaping my body in staccato gasps.
Will and Hobbs were sent forward last night on a recce that took so long I became convinced we would never see either of them alive again. When they finally reappeared they reported to Corporal Wells that the German trenches were located about three-quarters of a mile north of ours but they had been built in separate runs, not connected to each other as they had been elsewhere. We could take them one at a time if we were careful about it, Hobbs said. Will remained silent and when Sergeant Clayton screeched, “And what about you, Bancroft, you stupid son of a bitch? What do you say?” he simply nodded and said that he agreed with Private Hobbs.
I turned away at the sound of his voice. I feel as if I would be happy never to hear it again.
It has been three weeks since our second encounter and he has neither spoken to me nor answered when I have addressed him. When he sees me approaching—walking in his direction, I mean, not seeking him out—he turns and walks the opposite way. If he enters the mess tent when I am eating, he changes his mind and returns to his own private inferno. No, he spoke to me once, when we turned a corner, ran into each other and found ourselves alone. I opened my mouth to say something and he simply shook his head quickly, raised the palms of his hands to create a barrier between us, and said, “Just fuck off, yes?” and that was the end of that.
There’s a sound of artillery fire up ahead. Hold the line, comes the word from man to man, nineteen or twenty of us in an uneven row as we get closer to the enemy trench. The firing stops; a dim light can be seen, probably a candle or two, then muffled voices. What’s the matter with them? I wonder. Why don’t they see us coming and pick us off one by one? Why don’t they just fucking end us?
But it is in such ways that wars are won, I suppose. One side lets down its guard momentarily, another takes advantage of it. And on this particular night it is our turn to be lucky. Another minute, no more, and we are all on our feet, our rifles raised and primed, hand grenades at the ready, and now there is a constant sound of gunfire and the explosive light of our bullets shooting through the night and down into the trenches below. There’s shouting from beneath us, heavy sounds of timber being thrown to one side—I picture a group of German boys forgetting their duty and playing cards to relieve the tension—and then they swarm like ants below us, raising their guns too late, for we have the advantage of the higher ground and the element of surprise, and we continue to shoot and reload, shoot and reload, shoot and reload, the line breaking a little as we work our way down to cover the length of the trench, which Will and Hobbs have promised us is five hundred yards long, no more than that.
A buzzing sound races past my ear and I feel a sting and think I have been hit, but when I press my hand to the side of my head it comes away without any blood and in my confusion my anger rises and I lift my Smiler and point it indiscriminately at the men beneath me, pulling the trigger again and again and again.
A sound like a balloon being burst and the man next to me falls with a cry of anguish and I can’t stop to help him but it flashes through my mind that this is Turner who has just fallen, Turner who once bested me at chess three times in a row and was the most ungracious of champions. Ten gone, ten left.
I rush forward, to the side, trip, fall over another body and I think, Please God, let it not be Will, but no, when I look down, unable to stop myself, I see Unsworth lying with his mouth wide open and an expression of anguish on his face, Unsworth who had the audacity to question the wisdom of the strategy. He’s already dead. Two weeks ago I found myself on duty with him, alone for several hours, and although we were not particular friends he told me that his girl back home had found herself in the family way and I congratulated him and said that I hadn’t even realized he was married.
“I’m not,” he said, spitting on the ground.
“Ah,” I replied. “Well, these things happen, I suppose.”
“Are you stupid, Sadler?” he said. “I’ve not been home in six months. It’s got nothing to do with me, has it? The dirty whore.”
“Well, that’s all right then, isn’t it?” I said. “You don’t have to worry.”
“But I wanted to marry her,” he cried, his face red with humiliation and pain. “I love the bones of her. And I’m not five minutes out of the country and this happens.”
Eleven-nine.
Forward again and we jump down, my first time in a German trench, screaming as if our lives depend on it as we race through unfamiliar lanes, and I find myself shooting indiscriminately as I go, turning at one point and felling an older man with the butt of my rifle, hearing the sound of his nose or his jaw breaking as he collapses.
We’re there for how long I don’t know, and soon we have taken it. We’ve taken the German trench. They’re all dead around us, every last one of them, and Sergeant Clayton rises like Lucifer from the bowels of hell, gathers us together and tells us that we’re good men, we’ve done our duty as he trained us to do, that this is an important victory for Good over Evil but we have to continue tonight, we have to press on, that there’s a lesser trench another mile north-west of our position and we have to make our way there immediately or lose our advantage.
“Four of you will stay here to defend this land,” he says and we each silently pray that we will be selected. “Milton, Bancroft, Attling, Sadler, you four, all right? It should be all clear now but keep your wits about you. Milton, take my pistol, all right? And take the lead, too. The rest of you will have to rely on your rifles if there’s any trouble. Another regiment might advance on you from the east.”
“And if they do, sir,” asks Milton, unwisely, “how are we to defend ourselves?”
“Use your wits, man,” Clayton says. “That’s what you’ve been trained to do. But if I come back later and find that Fritz has retaken this trench, I’ll shoot every last one of you myself.”
And in the madness of the moment I burst out laughing, for his threats are utterly pointless; in such an eventuality we will have long since passed from this world into the next.
“I’m going to take a look around,” says Will, disappearing around a corner with his rifle hanging lazily over his shoulder.
“Couldn’t believe it when the old man said we were to stay behind,” says Milton, grinning at me. “What a stroke of luck, eh?”
“I don’t think so,” says Attling, a skinny lad with huge eyes and an amphibian aspect. “I’d have been happy to go on.”
“Easy to say,” replies Milton scornfully, “when you know you don’t have to. What do you think, Sadler?”
“Easy to say,” I agree, nodding and looking around. The wood that the Germans have used for their fire steps is better than ours. The walls are made of rough-laid concrete and I wonder whether they had an engineer among their number when they entrenched here. There are dead bodies all around us but I’ve lost any revulsion for corpses.
“Look at these foxholes,” says Milton. “They’ve done all right for themselves, haven’t they? It’s like luxury compared to ours. Stupid bloody bastards, letting us take them like this.”
“Cards,” says Attling, reaching down and picking up an eight of spades and a four of diamonds; my earlier idea about what was going on down here has proved strangely correct.
“How long do you think it will take them to take the next trench?” asks Milton, turning to me, and I shrug my shoulders and pull a cigarette from my front pouch.
“I don’t know,” I say, lighting up. “A couple of hours, perhaps? Assuming they can take it at all.”
“Don’t say that
, Sadler,” he replies aggressively. “Of course they’ll take it.”
I nod and look away, wondering what’s keeping Will, and just at that moment I hear the sound of boots marching through the mud and he reappears from around the corner. Only this time he is not alone.
“Bloody hell,” says Milton, turning around, the delighted expression on his face suggesting that he can’t quite believe what he sees. “What have you got there, then, Bancroft?”
“Found him hiding in one of the shelters around the rear,” says Will, pushing forward a young boy, who looks at each one of us in turn with an expression of pure terror on his face. He’s extremely skinny, this lad, with a mop of blond hair and a fringe that looks as though someone recently took a pair of scissors to it and simply cut in a horizontal line to keep it out of his eyes. He’s trembling but attempting to look courageous. Under the mud and the dirt, he has a pleasant, childlike face.
“Who are you, then, Fritzy?” asks Milton, speaking as though the boy is a halfwit, his voice loud and terrifying as he walks forward, hulking over him now, making the boy lean back in fear.
“Bitte tut mir nichts,” he says, the words coming out fast, tripping over each other.
“What’s he saying?” asks Milton, turning to look at Attling as if he might know the answer.
“I haven’t got a fucking clue,” says Attling irritably.
“Sod all use to me, then, aren’t you?” says Milton.
“Ich will nach Hause,” says the boy now. “Bitte, ich will nach Hause.”
“Shut the fuck up,” snarls Milton. “No one understands a word you’re saying. He the only one, then?” he asks, addressing Will.
“I think so, yes,” replies Will. “It tails off around there. There are a lot of bodies, of course. But he’s the only one left alive.”
“Better tie him up, I suppose,” I say. “We can take him with us when we move on.”
“Take him with us?” asks Milton. “Why the hell would we do that?”