But this morning I saw a woman in the village with sunlight on her hair and one of those long loaves of bread in her arms and there was more sensuality in that moment than in all Wyatt’s humping and pumping. Out of bounds, of course. Perfectly respectable housewife doing the shopping.
26 October
This morning I went to one of the local farms to sort out a billeting problem. The woman who runs the farm had accused some of the men in ‘C’ company of stealing eggs. They denied it vociferously, but I’m sure she’s right. After calming her down and paying her more for the eggs than they were worth, I noticed a boy with red hair staring at me. Not staring exactly, but his eyes met mine longer than was strictly necessary. About sixteen, I suppose. Perhaps a bit older. He was walking across the yard clanking a bucket of pig swill, and after I’d taken leave of Madame (his mother, I think) I followed him into the fetid darkness, full of snuffling and munching, pigs rooting round with moist quivering nostrils, trotting towards him on delicate pink feet. After he poured the swill in they squealed and guzzled for a bit, then raised their heads, watching us calmly from under long fine white eyelashes as they munched. I scratched their backs and tried to talk to him. Chinks of sunlight came in through gaps in the tiles, a smelly greenish wetness under foot. He spoke rapidly and I got very little of it – schoolboy French no use at all. I spun back-scratching out as long as I could, then departed, wondering how much of that initial look I’d imagined.
Nothing particularly attractive about him – dead white skin, splodgy freckles, curious flat golden brown eyes – not that it bothered me. After two months without sex I’d have settled for the pigs.
I met him again later, near the church. There’s a lane runs past the churchyard, a low stone wall on one side, a canal on the other, one of the many canals that run through this area. A rather dank gloomy stretch of water, listlessly reflecting a dense white sky, fringed by willows with limp yellow leaves. He was sitting with his big, red, raw-knuckled hands clasped between his knees. The red hair glowed in the greyish light, not bright red, not auburn, a dark, flat, burnt-looking colour.
He was very obviously lingering. He greeted me with a smile and tapped his mouth, making smoking movements. I gave him a Woodbine and stood by the canal, a few feet away, looking up and down to make sure we weren’t being observed. He made smoking movements again and pointed to the packet. When I didn’t immediately respond, he pointed again and said something in German. I thought, My God. Have you really got your head stuck so deep in the fucking pig bucket you don’t know which army’s up the other end? I suppose it should have disgusted me, but it didn’t. In fact it had the opposite effect – I’d have given him every packet I possessed. I handed them over and he got up and led me into the trees. It took a while finding somewhere sufficiently screened. I showed him what I wanted. He leant against the tree trunk, bracing himself on his hands. I pulled down his trousers and drawers and started nosing and tonguing round his arse, worrying at the crack to get in because the position hardened the muscles. A smell of chrysanths left too long in water, then a deeper friendlier smell, prim, pursed hole glistening with spit and, on the other side of that tight French sphincter, German spunk. Not literally – they left a bit longer ago than that – but there nevertheless, the shadowy figures one used to glimpse through periscopes in the trenches, and my tongue reaching out for them. I thought,
Oh ye millions I embrace you,
This kiss is for the whole world …
Suddenly it struck me as funny, and my breath made a farting noise between his buttocks and he tried to pull away, but I held on, and fucked him, and then turned him round and sucked off his quite small stubby very purple cock.
And then we parted. And I’ve been neurotically running my tongue round my lips feeling for sores ever since.
27 October
Everybody finds these marches gruelling. I spend a lot of my time on foot inspections. Some of the men have blisters the size of eggs. And my own feet, which were not good this morning, are now very not good.
But we’re in decent billets tonight. I’ve actually got a bed in a room with roses on the wallpaper, and a few left in the garden too. Went out and picked some and put them in a bowl on the kitchen table in memory of Amiens. Big blowsy roses well past their best, but we move on again today so I won’t be here to see the petals fall.
29 October
Arrived here under cover of darkness. Village wretched, people unsmiling, dazed-looking, not surprising when you think we were bombing them to buggery not long ago.
There’s a rumour going round that the Austrians have signed a peace treaty. The men cheered up when they heard it, and they need cheering when you look at their feet. Nobody here can understand why it’s still going on.
I lay in bed last night and listened to them in the barn singing. I wish I didn’t feel they’re being sacrificed to the subclauses and the small print. But I think they are.
Thursday, 31 October
And here for a while we shall stay. The Germans are dug in on the other side of the Sambre-Oise Canal, and seem to be preparing to make a stand.
The village is still occupied, but houses in the forward area have been evacuated and we’re crammed into the cellar of one of them. Now and then we venture upstairs into the furnished rooms, feeling like rats or mice, and then we scurry back into our hole again. But it’s warm, it feels safe, though the whole house shakes with the impact of exploding shells, and it’s not good to think what a direct hit would do. Above ground the Germans have chopped down all the trees, but there’s a great tangle of undergrowth, brambles that catch at your legs as you walk past, dead bracken the exact shade, or one of the shades, of Sarah’s hair. No possibility of exercises or drill or anything. We lie low by day, and patrol at night, for of course they’ve left alarm posts on this side of the canal, a sort of human trip-wire to warn of an impending attack. Cleaning them out’s a nasty job since it has to be silent. Knives and knobkerries in other words.
1 November
My turn to go out last night. One alarm post ‘exterminated’. I hope it’s the last. We crawled almost to the edge of the canal, and lay looking at it. There was just enough starlight to see by. A strong sense of the Germans on the other side, peering into the darkness as we were, silent, watchful. I had the sense that somewhere out there was a pair of eyes looking directly into mine.
The canal’s raised about four feet above the surrounding fields, with drainage ditches on either side (the Germans have very sensibly flooded them). It’s forty feet wide. Too wide to be easily bridged, too narrow from the point of view of a successful bombardment. There’s no safety margin to allow for shells falling short, so men and equipment will have to be kept quite a long way back. Which means that when the barrage lifts, as it’s supposed to do, and sweeps forward three hundred yards, there’ll be about five minutes in which to get across the swampy fields, across the drainage ditches, and reach even our side of the canal. Plenty of time for them to get their breath and man the guns – though officially, of course, they’ll all have been wiped out.
The field opposite’s partially flooded already, and it’s still raining. Not just rain, they’ve also flooded the drainage ditches on their side. From the canal the ground rises steeply to La Motte Farm, which is our objective in the attack. Uphill all the way. Not a scrap of cover. Machine-gunners behind every clump of grass.
Looking at the ground, even like that in semi-darkness, the problem became dreadfully apparent. Far clearer than it is on any of the maps, though we spend hours of every day bent over them. There are two possibilities. Either you bombard the opposite bank so heavily that no machine-gunner can possibly survive, in which case the ditches and quite possibly even the canal bank will burst, and the field on the other side will become a nightmare of weltering mud ten feet deep, as bad as anything at Passchendaele. Or you keep the bombardment light, move it on quickly, and wait for the infantry to catch up. In that case you take the risk that unscathed machine-gunners wi
ll pop up all over the place, and settle down for a nice bit of concentrated target practice.
It’s a choice between Passchendaele and the Somme. Only a miniature version of each, but then that’s not much consolation. It only takes one bullet per man.
They’ve chosen the Somme. This afternoon we had a joint briefing with the Lancashire Fusiliers on our left. Marshall-of-the-Ten-Wounds was there, surprisingly outspoken I thought, though you can afford to be when you’re so covered in wound stripes and medals it’s starting to look like an eccentric form of camouflage. He said his men stand no chance of getting up the slope with machine-guns still intact above them and no cover. Building a bridge in the open under the sort of fire we’re likely to encounter is impossible. The whole operation’s insane. The chances of success are zero.
Nobody argued with him, I mean nobody discussed it. We were just told flatly, a simple, unsupported assertion, that the weight of the artillery would overcome all opposition. I think those words sent a chill down the spine of every man there who remembered the Somme. Marshall threw his pencil down and sat with his arms folded, silent, for the rest of the briefing.
So here we sit writing letters. Supplies take a long time to get here, because the Germans blocked the roads and blew up the bridges as they withdrew. Nobody’s been inside a proper shop for six weeks, so I keep tearing pages out of the back of this book and giving them to people.
Not many left now. But enough.
2 November 1918
2nd Manchester Regt. France
My dear Rivers,
As you’ll have realized from my last letter, I’m still intact. Should this happy state of affairs not continue, I would be grateful if you would try to see my mother. She took quite a fancy to you when you met last year at Craiglockhart and you, more than most people, would know what to say. Or have the sense to say nothing, which was always rather your forte, wasn’t it?
My nerves are in perfect working order. By which I mean that in my present situation the only sane thing to do is to run away, and I will not do it. Test passed?
Yours
Billy Prior
A chilly little note to send to someone who’s done so much for me. Wrong tone completely, but there isn’t time to get it right.
I daren’t think about Sarah.
3 November
We’re packed so tight in this cellar my elbow’s constantly being jogged by people on either side. Cigarette smoke stings my eyes, I honestly believe if you ran out of fags here you’d just need to breathe deeply. But I’ve got enough to last, even after my spasm of generosity on the canal bank. Which this morning I reread, tore out and burned. Another canal bank meeting awaits – but this time the sort people approve of.
Curious day – it seems to have gone on for ever. We had another briefing at a farmhouse further along the lane. We were greeted by a little yapping terrier, still a puppy, black and white and full of himself, tucking one of his legs up as he ran so that at first I thought he was crippled, but the children in the house said no, he always runs like that. He quietened down a bit, but then got excited and started yapping again. Winterton nodded at me, and said, ‘We can’t have that.’
I shot it myself. I’m proud of that. In the trenches sometimes you’d be watching through a periscope and you’d see a German soldier – generally well back in the support lines – walking along believing himself to be safe, and he’d drop his breeches and settle down for a nice contented crap. You don’t want to shoot him because there’s something about the vulnerability of that bare arse, you feel the draught up your own crack, a moment of basic human empathy. So you point him out to the sentry and order the sentry to shoot him. That lets everybody off the hook – you haven’t shot him, the sentry has, but only under orders.
But I shot the dog myself. I took him into the barn holding on to his collar. He knew something bad was going to happen, and he rolled over on to his back and showed me his puppy-pink tummy and widdled a bit, quite certain these devices for deflecting aggression would work. I tickled him behind his ear and said, ‘Sorry, old son. I’m human – we’re not like that.’
And I’m glad of the fug of human warmth in here, and not just because it keeps out the wind and rain. Those who’ve bagged themselves seats by the fire have steam rising from their boots and puttees. The rest of us just wiggle our toes and make do.
Having said I daren’t think about Sarah, I think about her all the time. I remember the first time we met – that ludicrous wrestling match on a tombstone which in retrospect seems a rather appropriate start for a relationship so hedged in by death. And before that in the pub, plying her with port to get her knickers off, and she wanted to talk about Johnny’s death and I didn’t want to listen. Loos, she said. I remember standing by the bar and thinking that words didn’t mean anything any more. Patriotism honour courage vomit vomit vomit. Only the names meant anything. Mons, Loos, the Somme, Arras, Verdun, Ypres.
But now I look round this cellar with the candles burning on the tables and our linked shadows leaping on the walls, and I realize there’s another group of words that still mean something. Little words that trip through sentences unregarded: us, them, we, they, here, there. These are the words of power, and long after we’re gone, they’ll lie about in the language, like the unexploded grenades in these fields, and any one of them’ll take your hand off.
Wyatt sleeps like a baby, except that no baby ever snored like that. Hoggart’s peeling potatoes. Mugs of chlorine-tasting tea stand round. And somebody’s chopping wood and feeding it to the fire, though it’s so damp every fresh stick produces darkness, sizzling, a temporary shadowing of faces and eyes and then the flames lick round it, and the fire blazes up again. We need a good fire. Everybody’s coughing and wheezing, a nasty cold going the rounds. I’m starting to feel a tickle in my throat, hot and shivery at the same time. I think of rats on the canal bank with long naked tails and the thought of that cold water is definitely not inviting. But we sing, we tell jokes and every joke told here is funny. Everybody’s amazingly cheerful. The word I’m trying not to use is fey. There is an element of that. We all know what the chances are.
And soon I shall turf Wyatt out of that bunk and try to get some sleep.
Five months ago Charles Manning offered me a job at the Ministry of Munitions and I turned it down, and said if I was sent back to France … ‘If if if if – I shall sit in a dug-out and look back to this afternoon, and I shall think, “You bloody fool.” ’
I remember sitting on the stiff brocade sofa in his drawing-room as I said it.
Well, here I am, in what passes for a dug-out. And I look round me at all these faces and all I can think is: What an utter bloody fool I would have been not to come back.
Eighteen
Brown fog enveloped the hospital. Coils of sulphurous vapour hung in the entrance hall, static, whirled into different patterns whenever somebody entered or left the building. He’d gone out himself earlier in the evening to buy a paper from the stand outside Victoria Station, a brisk ten-minute walk there and back, a chance to get some air into his lungs, though air these days scorched the throat. The news was good. At any moment now, one felt, the guns would stop and they would all be released into their private lives. They all felt it – and yet it almost seemed not to matter. The end that everybody had longed for was overshadowed by the Spanish influenza epidemic that had the hospital in its grip. If somebody had rushed along the corridor now opening doors and shouting, ‘The war’s over,’ he’d have said, ‘Oh, really?’ and gone back to writing up notes.
He looked at his watch and stood up. Time to go up to the ward.
Marsden was trying to catch his eye. He’d had the impression that morning, during his ward round, that Marsden wanted to ask something, but had been deterred by the formality of the occasion. Rivers had a quick word with Sister Roberts – the staffing situation for this duty was particularly bad – and then went and sat by Marsden’s bed, chatting about this and that while he wor
ked himself up to say whatever it was he wanted to say. It was quite simple. He’d overheard a junior doctor talking to a colleague at the foot of his bed and had caught the phrase ‘elicited the coital reflex’. Did this mean, Marsden wanted to know, that he would eventually, he stressed, hedging his bets, not now obviously, eventually, be able to have sex again? ‘Have sex’ was produced in a flat, no nonsense, all-chaps-together tone. He meant ‘make love’. He meant ‘have Children’. His wife’s photograph stood on his locker. Rivers’s neck muscles tensed with the effort of not looking at it. No, he said slowly, it didn’t mean that. He explained what it meant. Marsden wasn’t listening, but he needed a smoke-screen of words behind which to prepare his reaction. He was pleating the hem of the sheet between his fingertips. ‘Well,’ he said casually, when Rivers had finished. ‘I didn’t really think it meant that. Just thought I’d ask.’
One incident; one day.
Faces shadowed by steel helmets, they would hardly have recognized each other, even if the faint starlight had enabled them to see clearly. Prior, crouching in a ditch beside the crossroads, kept looking at the inside of his left wrist where normally his watch would have been. It had been taken away from him twenty minutes ago to be synchronized. The usual symptoms: dry mouth, sweaty palms, pounding heart, irritable bladder, cold feet. What a brutally accurate term ‘cold feet’ was. Though ‘shitting yourself’ – the other brutally accurate term – did not apply. He’d been glugging Tincture of Opium all day, as had several others of the old hands. He’d be shitting bricks for a fortnight when this was over, but at least he wouldn’t be shitting himself tonight.
He looked again at his wrist, caught Owen doing the same, smiled with shared irritation, said nothing. He stared at the stars, trying to locate the plough, but couldn’t concentrate. Rain clouds were massing. All we need. A few minutes later a runner came back with his watch and with a tremendous sense – delusional, of course – of being in control again he strapped it on.