The Absolutist

SQUINTING IN THE SUNLIGHT France, July–September 1916

ACRY OF DESPAIR and weariness emanates from the pit of my stomach as the wall behind me begins to crumble and dissolve into a slow-moving river of thick, black, rat-infused mud that slides down my back and slips into the gaps at the top of my boots. I feel the sludge seeping its way into my already sodden socks and throw myself against the tide, desperate to push the barricade back into place before I am submerged beneath it. A tail passes quickly across my hands, whipping me sharply, then another; next, a sharp bite.

“Sadler!” cries Henley, his voice hoarse, his breathing laboured. He’s standing only a few feet away from me with Unsworth, I think, by his side and Corporal Wells next along the line. The rain is falling in such heavy sheets that I’m spitting it from my lips along with mouthfuls of foul dirt and it’s difficult to make any of them out. “The sandbags—look, they’re over here—pile them as high as you can.”

I make my way forward, trying to pull my boots out of three feet of mud. The terrible sucking sound they make as they emerge reminds me of the echo of a man’s last breath, deep and frantic, gasping for air, failing.

Instinctively I open my arms as a sandbag filled with excavated earth comes at me, almost knocking me off my feet when it hits me in the chest, but although I am winded I am equally quick to turn back to the wall, slamming the sandbag where I think the base must be, turning for another, catching it, padding the wall again, and another and another and another. Now there are five or six of us all doing the same thing, piling the sandbags high, crying out for more before the whole bloody place collapses about us, and it feels like a fool’s errand, but somehow it works and it is over and we forget that we have very nearly died today as we wait to die again tomorrow.

The Germans use concrete; we use wood and sand.

It’s been raining for days, an endless torrent that makes the trenches feel like troughs for the pigs rather than defences in which our regiment can take cover as we launch our sporadic attacks. When we arrived, I was told that the chalky ground of Picardy, through which we have been advancing for days now, is less liable to crumble than that of other parts of the line, particularly those miserable fields towards Belgium, where the high wetlands make entrenchment almost impossible. I can scarcely imagine any place worse than where we are. I have only these whispers and rumours to take for comparison.

All around me, what was this morning a clear pathway is now a river of mud. Pumps arrive and three of the men have a go at them. Wells shouts something at all of us, his voice gravelly, lost in the conquering environment, and I stare at him, feeling close to laughter, a sort of disbelieving hysteria.

“For fuck’s sake, Sadler!” he screams, and I shake my head, trying to make it clear that I didn’t hear the order. “Do it!” he roars at me. “Do it or I’ll fucking bury you in the mud!”

Above my head, over the parapet, I can hear the shelling beginning again, a prologue of sorts, for it isn’t heavy yet, nowhere near as heavy as it has been over the last few days, anyway. The German trenches are about three hundred yards north of ours. On quiet evenings we can hear an echo of their conversation, occasional singing, laughter, cries of anguish. We’re not that different, them and us. If both armies drown in the mud, then who’ll be left to fight the war?

“Over there, over there!” shouts Wells, grabbing me by the arm and dragging me over to where Parks, Hobbs and Denchley are attacking their pumps. “There’s buckets, man!” he yells. “This whole area must be drained!”

I nod quickly and look around. To my right, I’m surprised to see two grey tin buckets, the type that normally stand behind the reverse line, close to the latrines. Yates makes it his business to keep them as sanitary as possible. His obsession with maintaining hygiene in this place borders on the psychotic. What the hell are they doing here, I wonder as I stare at them? Yates will lose his mind if he sees them lying around like this. They can’t possibly have rolled over in the rain and landfall, for the supervision trench stands between the reverse and the front and each is about eight feet deep. Someone returning them to where they belong must have been picked off along the way. If the buckets are at my feet, then the carrying-soldier is a few feet above me, lying on his back, staring up at the dark sky over northern France, his eyes glazed over, his body growing cold and hard and free. And it’s Yates, I realize then. Of course it is. Yates is dead and we’ll have filthy latrines for the foreseeable.

“What’s the matter with you, Sadler?” shouts Wells, and I turn to him, apologizing quickly as I reach down to pick up the buckets, my hands covered in shit the moment I take their handles, but what matter, I think, what matter at all? Placing one at my feet I hold the other by top and base and scoop up a quarter-gallon of water and, looking up and checking the air, toss the great sodden mess north-east, towards Berlin, in the direction that the wind blows, watching as the murky effluent flies through the air and falls to the ground atop. Is it falling on him, I wonder? Is it falling on Yates? Obsessively clean Yates? Am I throwing shit all over his corpse?

“Keep at it, man!” shouts a voice to my left and whoever it is—Hobbs?—pumps more water away as I drive my bucket deep and deeper again, lifting the water out, sending it on its way, reaching down for more. And then a heavy body, running too fast and slipping in the mud, curses, rights himself and pushes past me and I fall, knocked head over feet, my face in the sludge and the water and the shit, and I spit out the noxious earth as I place a hand down to lever myself up, but my hand seems to just sink deeper and deeper into the mud and I think, How can this be, how can my life have descended into such filth and squalor? I used to go swimming on warm afternoons at the public baths with my friends. I would play conkers with the fallen horse chestnuts in Kew Gardens, boiling them in vinegar for a better chance of victory.

A hand reaches down to help me up.

There’s a lot of shouting now, none of it making any sense, then a great rush of water in my face, and where did that come from, I wonder? Is the wind rising and taking the rain with it? My bucket is thrust hard back into my hands and I turn to see who has helped me; his face is dark and filthy, almost unrecognizable, but I catch his eye for a moment, the man who lifted me, the man who helped me, and we stare at each other, Will Bancroft and I, and say not a word before he turns away and presses on, going I know not where, sent not to help us but to make his way further along the trench and into who knows what type of dreadfulness ten, twenty, a hundred feet away.

“It’s getting heavier,” cries Denchley, looking up for a moment at the heavens, and I do the same, closing my eyes and letting the rain fall on my face, washing the shit away, and I know that I have only a few seconds to enjoy it before Wells screams at me again to fill my bucket and drain the area, to drain the fucking area before every one of us is buried here in these filthy fucking French fields.

And I go back to work, as I always do. I focus. I fill my bucket. I throw it over the side. I fill my bucket again. And I believe that if I keep doing it, then time will pass and I will wake up at home, with my father throwing his arms around me and telling me that I am forgiven. I turn to my right and make for a deeper pool, glancing down the trench, the twenty or thirty feet of it that I can see—trying to see where Will has vanished to, wanting to make sure that he is all right, and I wonder, as I always wonder at these moments, whether I will ever see him alive again.

Another day.

I wake and step out of the foxhole where I have tried to sleep for three or four hours and gather my marching order about me, my rifle and bayonet, the ammunition that slips into my pockets front and rear, my trowel, a depleted bottle of liquid that goes by the name of water but tastes of chloride of lime and which provokes sporadic attacks of diarrhoea, but if it’s a choice between dehydration and the shits, I’ll take the shits any day. My greatcoat is wrapped around me, the curved plates beneath my shirt digging into my skin, for they’re an unhappy fit meant for a smaller man, but damn it, Sadler, they tell me, we’re not running a department store here, it’ll have to do. I tell myself that it is a Tuesday, although I have nothing to base that on. Naming the day offers some dull pretence of normality.

Mercifully, the rain has stopped and the sides of the trenches are holding fast and solidifying once again, the sandbags piled up against each other, black and muddy from the previous day’s packing. I’m on top-duty in twenty minutes and, if I’m quick, I can make it to mess for tea and bully beef before returning to take up my position. Walking along, I fall into line with Shields, who looks the worse for wear. His right eye is blackened and half shut; there’s a trail of hardened blood running along his temple. It’s shaped like the Thames, twisting south towards Greenwich Pier at his eyebrow, then north to London Bridge at his forehead and disappearing into the depths of Blackfriars amid the untidiness of his lice-infested hair. I make no remarks; we are none of us as we should be.

“You up, Sadler?” he asks me.

“Twenty minutes.”

“Just finished. Food and sleep, that’s what I need.”

“I’m thinking of going to the pub later,” I tell him. “A few pints of mild and a game of feathers, if you’re interested?”

He says nothing, doesn’t even acknowledge the joke. We all say things like this from time to time and sometimes there’s fun to be had in it but Shields shows no interest in banter right now. He leaves me as we reach Glover’s Alley, which leads to Pleasant Way, which in turn splits off at the top left and turns right into Pilgrim’s Repose. We live here, beneath the ground like cadavers, and carve streets into the terrain, then we name them and erect signposts to give us the illusion that we remain part of a common humanity. It’s a maze down here, the entrenchment splitting off in so many directions before it links with one path, snubs another, provides a safe passageway to a third. It’s easy to get lost if you don’t know where you’re going, and God help the man who is not where he is supposed to be when he is supposed to be there.

I make my way out of the front trench and into the supervision, where our support lies, those small amounts of medical help we can muster together and some cots for the officers. Beyond here I can smell the food cooking and I make my way towards it eagerly, looking around the ill-kept mess row along the south-west-facing alley of the third line and see mostly familiar faces, some who are new, some who don’t speak, some who never stop, some who are brave, some who are foolhardy, some who are falling mad. Some from Aldershot, before us and after. Some with Scottish accents, some with English, some with Irish. As I make my way along there is a low murmur of conversation, the suggestion of a greeting perhaps, and I take my helmet off as I reach the mess and scratch my head, not bothering to look at what this leaves under my fingernails, for my scalp is covered in lice, and my armpits, too, and my crotch. Everywhere that they can nest and breed. It repulsed me once but now I think nothing of it. I am a charitable host and we live peacefully together, them feeding off my filthy skin, me occasionally plucking them away and ending them between the pincer-nails of thumb and forefinger.

I take what I can find and eat quickly. The tea is startlingly good; it must have been made fresh only minutes before and it summons up a memory, something from boyhood, and if I work at it I dare say I could bring it to life, but I have neither the energy nor the interest. The bully beef, on the other hand, is atrocious. God only knows what is forced into these tins; it might be badger or rat or some unknown vermin that has the audacity to continue to exist here, but we call it beef and let that be good enough for it.

I force myself not to look around, not to search for him, because in that direction only pain lies. If I see him, I will be too afraid of his rejection to approach, and there is every possibility that in my anger I will simply launch myself over the top later, directly into no-man’s-land, and take whatever is due to me. And if I don’t see him, I will convince myself that he has been picked off in the last few hours and I will throw myself over anyway, an easy potshot for the snipers, for what is the purpose of continuing if he does not?

In the end, food in my stomach, the taste of tea in my mouth, I stand up and make my way back to where I started, congratulating myself on how well I have done; how I never searched for him, not once. From such moments, half-happy hours can be strung together.

Climbing back into the front trench I hear a commotion ahead and, although I have little interest in arguments, I have to pass it to get where I am going, so I stop for a while and watch as Sergeant Clayton, who has grown bone thin in these few short weeks since we arrived, is screaming at Potter, an exceptionally tall soldier who was popular back at Aldershot for his abilities as a mimic. In good times he can do a fine imitation not only of our leader but also of his two apostles, Wells and Moody, and once, in a surprisingly buoyant mood, Clayton asked him to perform his sketches for the entire regiment, which he did and it went off well. There was no malice to it although there was, I thought, an edge. But Clayton lapped it up.

The argument appears to concern Potter’s height. He stands above us all at six feet and six inches in his stockinged feet, but add a pair of boots and a helmet atop his high-domed forehead and then he’s rearing closer to six feet eight. We’re all accustomed to him, of course, but it doesn’t make his life any easier, for the trenches are no more than about eight feet deep and less than four feet wide at their northernmost part. The poor man can’t walk tall with his head above the parapet or he’ll lose his brains to a German bullet. It’s hard on him, although we haven’t time to care, but Clayton is screaming in his face.

“You make yourself a standing target!” he cries. “And when you do that, you endanger everyone in your regiment. How many times have I told you, Potter, not to stand tall?”

“But I can’t do it, sir,” comes the desperate reply. “I try to bend over but my body won’t let me for long. My back aches something rotten on account of it.”

“And you don’t think an injured back is a small price for a head?”

“I can’t crouch all day, sir,” complains Potter. “I try. I promise I do.”

And then Clayton screams a few random obscenities at him and rushes towards him, pushing him back against the wall, and I think, That’s the spirit. Just unsettle all those sandbags, why don’t you, and put us all in even more danger? Why not throw all our artillery away while you’re at it?

The argument is still ringing in my ears as I turn away from the matinee performance and make my way back to my post, where Tell looks around anxiously, waiting for me, hoping that I’ll appear, for if I don’t, then I’ve probably been stupid enough to let myself get killed in the night and he will have to stay where he is until Clayton, Wells or Moody comes along and agrees to find someone to relieve him. Which might be hours and he can’t leave his post, for that would be desertion and the punishment is a line of soldiers standing before you, their rifles raised, each one aimed at the patch of fabric pinned above your heart.

“Christ, Sadler, I thought you’d never get here,” he cries, breaking away now and tapping me on the arm for good luck. “Everything all right beyond?”

“Fine, Bill,” I reply—Tell is another who prefers to be addressed by his Christian name; perhaps it makes him feel that he is his own man still—and then step forward to dig my feet into position and pull the box-periscope down to eye level. I’m about to ask him whether he has anything to report but he’s already gone and I sigh, narrowing my eyes as I look through the muddy glass, trying to distinguish between the horizon, the fields of battle and the dark clouds up ahead, and do everything in my power to remember what the fuck it is that I’m supposed to be looking out for anyway.

I try to count the days since I left England and decide that it is twenty-four.

We took the train from Aldershot to Southampton the morning after passing out and marched along the roads towards the docks at Portsmouth, families coming out on to the pavements to cheer us on to war. Most of the men revelled in the attention, particularly when some of the girls in the crowd jumped forward to plant kisses on their cheeks, but I found it difficult to concentrate when my mind was still so focused on the events of the previous night.

Afterwards, Will had dressed quickly and stared at me with an expression unlike any I had ever seen before. A mixture of surprise at what we had done, tainted by an inability to deny that he had been not only a willing participant but the prime mover. He wanted to blame me, I could see that, but it was no good. We both knew how it had begun.

“Will,” I began, but he shook his head and tried to climb the bank that surrounded us, tripping over in his eagerness to get away and sliding back down before he could get a stronger foothold. “Will,” I repeated, reaching out for him, but he shrugged me off impatiently and spun around, glaring at me, teeth bared, a wolf ready to attack.

“No,” he hissed, disappearing over the top and into the night.

When I returned to my bunk, he was already in his bed, his back turned towards me, but I knew that he was still awake. His body was rising and falling in a controlled way, his breathing heavier than normal; it was the movement and respiration of a man who wants to give the impression of sleep but does not have the acting skill to be entirely convincing.

And so I went to sleep myself, sure that we would talk in the morning, but when I awoke, he was already gone before Wells or Moody had even sounded the bell. Outside, after roll call, he took his place in the final march far ahead of me, in the centre of the pack, that claustrophobic spot he usually hated, surrounded by newly anointed soldiers to his left, right, fore and rear, each one providing a defence, if one were needed, against me.

There was no chance to talk to him on the train either, for he made sure to sequester himself by a window in the heart of a noisy rabble and I was some distance away, confused and agitated by this clear rejection. It was only later that night as we sailed towards Calais that I found him alone by the railings of the boat, his hands gripping the metal tightly, his head bowed as if deep in thought, and I watched from a distance, sensing his torment. I might not have approached him at all had I not been convinced that we might never get another chance to talk, for once we stepped off the boat, who knew what horrors lay ahead of us?

My footsteps on the deck alerted him to my presence and he lifted his head a little, his eyes open now, but he didn’t turn around. I could tell that he knew it was me. I kept some distance between us, looked out in the direction of France, took a cigarette from my pocket and lit it before offering the half-filled case to him.

He shook his head at first, then changed his mind and took one. As he put it to his lips I handed mine across, thinking that he could take the light, but he shook his head once again, abruptly, and dug in his pockets for a match instead.

“Are you frightened?” I asked after a long silence.

“Of course I am,” he said. “Aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

We smoked our cigarettes, grateful that we had them so we wouldn’t be obliged to talk. Finally he turned to me, his expression sorrowful, apologetic, then looked down at his boots, swallowing nervously, his eyebrows and forehead knitted together in despair.

“Look, Sadler,” he said. “It’s no good. You know that, don’t you?”

“Of course.”

“It couldn’t…” He hesitated and tried again. “We’re none of us thinking straight, that’s the problem. This bloody war. I wish it was all behind us. We haven’t even got there yet and I’m wishing it was over.”

“Do you regret it?” I asked quietly, and he turned, his expression more aggressive than before.

“Do I regret what?”

“You know what.”

“I’ve said, haven’t I? It’s no good. Let’s just act as if none of it ever happened. It didn’t really, if you think about it. It doesn’t count unless it’s, you know… unless it’s with a girl.”

I laughed; a quick, involuntary snort. “Of course it counts, Will,” I said, taking a step towards him. “And why are you calling me Sadler all of a sudden?”

“Well, it’s your name, isn’t it?”

“My name’s Tristan. You’re the one who always says how much you hate the way we’re referred to by our surnames. You said it dehumanizes us.”

“And so it does,” he replied gruffly. “We’re not men any more.”

“Of course we are!”

“No,” he said, shaking his head quickly. “I didn’t mean that. I meant we can’t think that we’re regular men now; we’re soldiers, that’s all. We have a war to fight. You’re Private Sadler and I’m Private Bancroft and there we are and that’s an end to it.”

“Back there,” I said, lowering my voice and nodding in the direction from which we had come, the direction of England, “our friendship meant a lot to me. At Aldershot, I mean. I’ve never been good with friends and—”

“Oh, for pity’s sake, Tristan,” he hissed, flicking the end of his cigarette overboard now and turning on me furiously. “Don’t speak to me like I’m your sweetheart, all right? It sickens me, that’s all. I won’t stand for it.”

“Will,” I said, reaching out to him again, meaning nothing by it, simply hoping to stop him marching away from me, but he slapped my arm aside in a rough fashion, rather more violently than he had intended perhaps, for as I stumbled he looked back at me with a mixture of regret and self-hatred. Then he pulled himself together and continued to walk back towards the deck, where most of our fellows were gathered.

“I’ll see you over there,” he said. “None of the rest of it matters.”

He hesitated for a moment, though, turned around, and seeing the expression of pain and confusion on my face, relented a little. “I’m sorry, all right?” he said. “I just can’t, Tristan.”

Since then we have barely spoken. Neither on the march to Amiens, when he kept a clear distance between us, nor as we advanced towards Montauban-de-Picardie, which, Corporal Moody reliably informs us, is the desecrated region where I stand with my eyes to the mud-smeared glass of my box-periscope. And I have tried to forget him, I have tried to convince myself that it was just one of those things, but it’s difficult to do that when my body is standing here, eight feet deep in the earth of northern France, while my heart remains by a stream in a clearing in England where I left it weeks ago.

Rich is dead. Parks and Denchley, too. I watch as their bodies are taken out of the trenches and as much as I want to turn away, I can’t. They were sent on a wiring party last night, over the top, to lay thick reams of barbed wire in front of our defences before the next spate of shelling began, and were picked off one by one by German snipers.

Corporal Moody is signing the paperwork that will be needed to transport the bodies out of here and he turns around at the sound of my footsteps, surprised to see me there.

“Oh, Sadler,” he says. “What do you need?”

“Nothing, sir,” I reply, staring at the corpses.

“Then don’t stand around all day like a bloody idiot. You’re off duty?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. The trucks will be here shortly.”

“Trucks, sir?” I ask. “What trucks?”

“We ordered replacement timbers for the new trenches and to repair some of the old,” he tells me. “We can take most of the sandbags away once they get here. Reinforce the streets. Go up top and help with that, Sadler.”

“I was just about to get some sleep, sir,” I say.

“You can sleep any time,” he replies, and there isn’t even a hint of sarcasm in his tone; I think he actually means it. “But the sooner we get this done the more secure we’ll all be. Go on, Sadler, look lively, they’ll be arriving soon.”

I climb out, marching back towards the reverse line without fear of being shot; the distance is too far for the German guns to reach us here. Up ahead, I see Sergeant Clayton gesticulating wildly with three men and when I get closer I realize that one of them is Will, one Turner and the other a slightly older man, perhaps in his mid twenties, whom I’ve never laid eyes on before. He has a mop of red hair that’s been shorn close to the scalp and his skin looks raw and aged. All four turn as they hear me approach and I try not to look at Will, not wanting to know whether his initial reaction will be one of pleasure or irritation.

“Sadler,” snaps Sergeant Clayton, looking at me with contempt, “what in hell do you want?”

“Corporal Moody sent me over, sir,” I tell him. “He said you might need a hand with the trucks.”

“Of course we do,” he says, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “What’s keeping them, anyway?” He looks down the rough path that has been carved into the terrain and shakes his head, then glances at his watch. “I’ll be at supervision,” he mutters, turning away from us. “Bancroft, make sure you come and find me when they get here, all right?”

“Sir,” says Will, a brief acknowledgement before he turns away and looks down the road himself. I want to talk to him but it’s awkward here, with Turner and the unknown redhead standing between us.

“I’m Rigby,” announces the stranger, nodding in my direction but not extending his hand.

“Sadler,” I say. “Where have you sprung from, then?”

“Rigby’s a feather man,” says Turner but without any aggression in his tone. Indeed, he says it as if it’s a perfectly natural thing.

“Really?” I say. “And yet here you are all the same.”

“GHQ keep moving me around,” he tells me. “I expect they’re hoping I’ll get picked off one of these days. A German bullet rather than a British one, to save them the cost of the gunpowder. I’ve done six nights of stretcher-duty in a row, if you can believe it, and I’m still alive, which I suspect is something of a record. Unless I’m dead and so are you and this is hell.” He sounds remarkably cheerful about the whole thing and is, I assume, therefore, completely mad.

I look down at the ground as the three men continue talking, tipping the toe of my boot hard against the earth, separating dirt from stone, and watching as some of the dried mud flakes off into the ground. There’s no aggression towards the objectors any more, at least not towards those who have agreed to serve but not to fight. There would probably be a lot less sympathy towards those on the farms or in prison except, of course, we never see any of them. The fact is that everyone who is over here is at risk. It was different back at Aldershot. There we could play politics and stir ourselves up into fits of outraged patriotism. We could make Wolf’s life a bloody hell and never feel the worse for it. We could drag him from his bed in the middle of the night and cave his head in with a rock. None of us will survive here anyway, that’s the general belief.

Will is walking around in circles, keeping a fine distance from me, and it’s all that I can do not to run towards him, shake him by the shoulders and tell him to stop all this nonsense.

“Rigby’s a Londoner, like you,” says Turner, and I look up to see that he’s addressing me; I get the impression that Rigby’s already said this and Turner’s been forced to repeat it as all three of them are staring at me now.

“Oh yes?” I reply. “Where from?”

“Brentford,” he tells me. “Do you know it?”

“Yes, of course. My family lives not far from there.”

“Really? Anyone I might know?”

“Sadler’s Butchers,” I say. “Chiswick High Street.”

He looks at me in surprise. “Are you serious?” he asks, and I frown, wondering why on earth I wouldn’t be. I notice Will turning around now at the unexpected question and drifting carefully back towards our company.

“Of course I am,” I tell him.

“You’re not Catherine Sadler’s son, are you?” he asks me then, and I feel a little light-headed to hear her name. All the way over here. In a field in France. With the bodies of Rich and Parks and Denchley decomposing a few hundred feet from where I stand.

“That’s right,” I say carefully, trying hard to maintain my composure. “How do you know my mother?”

“Well, I don’t know her, not really,” he says. “No, it’s my own mother who’s friends with her. Alison Rigby. You must have heard your mother talk of her?”

I think about it and shrug my shoulders. It rings a bell somewhere but then my mother has a network of female friends around the town and I have never taken the slightest interest in any of them.

“Yes, I think so,” I say. “I’ve heard the name, anyway.”

“What a piece of luck! What about Margaret Hadley? You must know Margaret.”

“No,” I say, shaking my head. “Should I?”

“Works in Croft’s Café?”

“I know Croft’s. But it’s been a few years. Why? Who is she?”

“She’s my girl,” he replies, smiling brightly. “Thought you might have run into her, that’s all. You see, her mother, Mrs. Hadley, who I expect will be my mother-in-law one day, runs fund-raisers for the war effort with my mother and yours. They’re thick as thieves these days, the three of them. I can’t believe you don’t know Margaret. Pretty girl, dark hair. Your mother thinks very highly of her, I know that for a fact.”

“I haven’t been back in a while,” I tell him. “I don’t… well, my family and I, we’re not close.”

“Oh,” he says, sensing perhaps that he might have fallen into difficult territory. “I’m sorry to hear that. Gosh, Sadler, I was terribly sorry to hear about your—”

“It’s quite all right,” I say, unsure how best to pursue this conversation but I don’t need to, because Will is beside us now, separated from me only by Turner, and I’m surprised to see him there, surprised to realize that he is taking such an interest.

“She’s all right, is she, Mrs. Sadler?” asks Will, and Rigby turns and nods at him.

“Last I heard she was,” he replies. “Why? Do you know her, too?”

“No,” says Will, shaking his head. “Only I suppose Tristan would like to hear that his mother’s doing well, that’s all.”

“Pink of health, as far as I know,” he says, turning back to me. “Margaret, my girl, well, she writes to me fairly often. Tells me all the news from home.”

“That must be nice,” I say, glancing across at Will, grateful for his intervention.

“It’s been bloody awful for them, of course,” he continues. “Margaret’s brothers were both lost early on, in the first few weeks, in fact. Their mother was a wreck over it, still is really, and she’s a wonderful lady. Of course, none of them were happy when I lodged my objections to the MTB but I had to stick to my principles, that’s the truth of it.”

“Wasn’t it hard, though?” asks Will, leaning forward, taking a keen interest now. “Making your mind up to go ahead with it after all that?”

“Damned hard,” he says through gritted teeth. “Still don’t know if I’ve done the right thing, if I’m honest. All I know is that it makes sense to me somehow. I know I’d feel as if I was letting the side down if I stayed at home or whiled the years away in prison. At least here, bearing stretchers and doing whatever is asked of me, I feel I’m of some use. Even if I’m not willing to pick up a gun.”

All three of us nod but make no comment. In a larger gathering, this man might feel more awkward telling us these things, but here, in such an intimate group, it isn’t so difficult. We have no intention of arguing with him about it.

“They’ve had a hard run of it all the same back home,” he continues, turning to me. “I expect your mother has told you all about it.”

“Not much,” I reply.

“Yes, hundreds of boys from home have fallen. Did you know Edward Mullins?”

I nod. A boy from the year ahead of mine in school. “Yes,” I say, recalling a rather plump chap with bad skin. “Yes, I remember him.”

“Festubert,” says Rigby. “Gassed to death. And Sebastian Carter?”

“Yes,” I say.

“He was done for at Verdun,” says Rigby. “And what about Alex Mortimer? Did you know him?”

I consider the name for a moment and then shake my head. “No,” I say. “No, I don’t think so. Are you sure he was from my neck of the woods?”

“He was a blow-in. Originally from Newcastle, I think. Moved to London about three years ago with his family. Knocked about with Peter Wallis all the time.”

“Peter?” I say, looking up in surprise. “I know Peter.”

“Battle of Jutland,” he says, shrugging his shoulders as if this is just another casualty, nothing significant, nothing to write home about. “Went down with the Nestor. Mortimer, on the other hand, survived it out there but the last I heard he was holed up in an army hospital somewhere outside Sussex. Lost both his legs, the poor bastard. Got his balls blown off, too, so that’s him singing soprano in the church choir ever after.”

I stare at him. “Peter Wallis,” I say, careful to control the tremor in my voice. “What exactly happened to him?”

“Well, I’m not sure I remember all the details,” he says, scratching his chin. “Didn’t the Nestor get hit by the German cruisers? Yes, that’s it. They got the Nomad first, then the Nestor. Bang, bang, sunk, one after the other. Not everyone was killed, thankfully. Mortimer survived it, as I say. But Wallis was one of the unlucky ones. Sorry, Sadler. Was he a friend of yours, then?”

I look away and feel as if I might collapse with grief. So we are never to be reconciled. I am never to be forgiven. “Yes,” I say quietly. “Yes, he was.”

“At long bloody last,” says Turner suddenly, pointing ahead. “Here’s the trucks. Want me to go and get the old man for you, Bancroft?”

“Please,” says Will, and I can feel his eyes on me now as I turn to him. “A good friend?” he asks me.

“Once,” I say, unsure how to describe him, unwilling to dishonour him in death. “We grew up together. Knew each other from the crib. We were neighbours, you see. He was the only… well, the best friend I had, I suppose.”

“Rigby,” says Will, “why don’t you run over and ask the driver how much timber there is? Then at least we can tell Sergeant Clayton when he gets here. We’ll have a better idea of how long it will take to unload.”

Rigby looks at both of us and then, sensing the awkwardness of the moment, nods and moves away. Only when he’s out of sight does Will step closer to me, and by now I am trembling, wanting to run away, wanting to be anywhere but here.

“Keep it together, Tristan,” he tells me quietly, placing a hand on my shoulder as his eyes search to make and hold a connection with my own, his fingers pressing tightly around my flesh, sending a current of electricity through me despite my grief; it’s only the second time he’s touched me since England—the first was when he helped to lift me off the floor of the deluged trench—and the only time he’s spoken to me since the boat. “Keep it together, yes? For all our sakes.”

I step closer to him and he pats my arm in consolation, leaving his hand there longer than is necessary.

“What did Rigby mean when he said he was sorry to hear about… well, he didn’t finish his sentence.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I say, moving forward in my grief to put my head on his shoulder, and he pulls me to him for a moment, his hand at the back of my head, and I am almost certain that his lips brush the top of my hair, but then Turner and Sergeant Clayton come into sight, the loud voice of the latter complaining about some new disaster, and we separate once again. I wipe the tears from my eyes and look at him but he’s turned away and my thoughts return to my oldest friend, dead like so many others. I wonder why in God’s name I ever went to look at Rich, Parks and Denchley’s bodies when I could have been in my foxhole all this time, grabbing a few minutes’ sleep, and knowing nothing about any of this, nothing about home or Chiswick High Street, my mother, my father, Peter or the whole bloody lot of them.

We advance further north, taking a long, narrow row of German trenches with minimal casualties—on our side at least—and news of our success prompts a visit from General Fielding.

Sergeant Clayton is beside himself with anxiety all morning and insists on personal inspections of all the men to ensure that we strike the right balance between the cleanliness that hygiene regulations demand and the filth that confirms we are doing our jobs. He tells Wells and Moody to follow him as he works his way down the line, one with a bucket of water, the other with a bucket of mud, and personally scrubs or soils the face of any man he thinks does not reach his exacting standards. It is the most extraordinary scene. Of course he shouts and screams as he goes, a litany of abuse or exaggerated praise, and I fear for his sanity. Williams has told me that Clayton is one of triplets and that both his brothers were killed in the opening weeks of the war by hand grenades that exploded too soon as the pins were pulled out. I don’t know if this is true or not but it certainly adds to the mythology of the man.

Later, when the general arrives, more than two hours late, the sergeant cannot be found and it turns out that he’s in the latrine. His timing is almost comical. Robinson is sent to look for him and it’s another ten minutes before Clayton reappears, red-faced and furious, staring at every soldier he passes as if somehow it is our fault that he chose that moment to take a shit. It’s difficult not to laugh but somehow we control ourselves; the punishment would be membership of an after-dark wiring party.

Unlike Clayton, General Fielding seems a pleasant enough fellow, even rational, and shows concern for the welfare of the troops under his command, an interest in our continued survival. He makes an inspection of the trenches and the foxholes, speaking to men along the way. We line up as if he’s visiting royalty, which he is in a way, and he pauses at every third or fourth man with a “Treating you all right, are they?” or a “Giving it your best foot forward, I hear” but when he reaches me he merely smiles a little and nods. He talks to Henley, who’s from the same neck of the woods as he is, and within a minute or two they’re exchanging gossip about the glories of the First XI cricket team from some public house in Elephant & Castle. Sergeant Clayton, hovering by Fielding’s right shoulder, listens on and appears rather jumpy, as if he would prefer to control everything that is said to the general.

Later that night, after General Fielding has left us for the safety of GHQ, there comes the brittle sound of sustained shelling from about thirty or forty miles to the south-west of us. I break with my orders for a moment and turn my box-periscope towards the sky, watching as the sudden bursts of electric sparks signify the dropping of bombs on the heads of German or English or French soldiers—it scarcely matters who. The sooner everyone’s killed, the sooner it’s all over.

There’s a sense of fireworks about the planes’ shelling and I think back five years ago to the only time I ever saw such a display in real life. It was June of 1911, the evening of George V’s coronation. My sister, Laura, was ill at the time, laid low by a fever of some description, so my mother was forced to stay at home and tend her while my father and I walked through London towards Buckingham Palace, waiting in the heart of the crowds for the King and Queen Mary to drive past on their return from Westminster Abbey. I didn’t like it there. I was still shy of my twelfth birthday and small for my age, and stuck as I was in the centre of the throng I couldn’t see anything except the overcoats of men and women pushing me on either side. I found it hard to breathe and tried to explain this to my father, but he let go of my hand when he started a conversation with whoever was standing next to him. The carriages began to pass and I ran after them in my excitement at seeing the royal couple, and soon I was lost entirely and unable to find my way back.

I didn’t lose heart but searched for my father and called his name, and when he finally found me an hour later, he slapped me so hard and so unexpectedly across the face that I didn’t even have the wherewithal to cry. Instead, I simply stood blinking at him as a woman leaped forward, shouting at my father and punching him in the arm in retaliation, a blow he ignored as he dragged me through the gathering, all the while telling me that I was never to run off on him again or there’d be worse in store for me. Soon we were standing near the Victoria memorial and as the light grew dark and the fireworks began, and the tenderness on my cheek began to rise into a purple bruise, my father took me quite by surprise, lifting me on to his shoulders and holding me there so that I was above the crowd for once, staring down at the heads of the other revellers. The sparks, rockets and colours exploded in the sky, and I looked around at the sea of men and women that stretched as far as my eyes could see and at all the other children perched on the shoulders of their fathers, looking at each other, grinning in the ecstasy of the moment.

“Sadler!” shouts Potter, six-foot-eight-in-his-boots-and-helmet Potter, pulling at my shoulder and dragging me down deeper into the trench. “What the hell’s the matter with you? Get your fucking head out of the clouds.”

“Sorry,” I say, returning my box-periscope to its proper position and scanning the terrain ahead. I have a panic that, having lost my concentration for a few minutes, I will be suddenly faced with a group of twenty Germans on their bellies advancing towards me like snakes and it will be too late for me to raise the alarm, but no, it’s peaceful out there, even if it is hellish in the heavens, and the gulf of terrain that separates two groups of terrified young men from opposite sides of the North Sea remains empty.

“Don’t let the old man catch you daydreaming,” Potter says, lighting a tab and taking a deep drag before rubbing his arms against the cold. “And poke your head out there like that one more time and I promise you that Fritz will have no hesitation in blowing it off.”

“They couldn’t get me from this distance.”

“Want to test that theory, do you?”

I let out an exasperated sigh. Potter and I are not close; his popularity expanded as his mimicry became more accomplished and now he never listens to any voice but his own. He doesn’t outrank me but seems to think he does on account of having some displaced duke somewhere on his family tree while mine, as he mentions often, are in trade.

“All right, Potter,” I say. “I’ll keep my head down, but your infernal shouting isn’t helping matters either, is it?”

I turn back to scan the horizon, sure that I can hear something out there, but all seems to be still. I have a sense of unease, though; it doesn’t feel right even if it looks clean.

“I’ll speak when I want to speak, Sadler,” Potter snaps. “And won’t be told not to by the likes of you.”

“The likes of me?” I ask, turning on him, for I am in no humour for this nonsense tonight.

“Well, you’re all the same, aren’t you? Haven’t got the sense you were born with, any of you.”

“Your father’s a carpenter, Potter,” I say, for I heard somewhere that he ran his own lumberyard in Hammersmith. “That doesn’t make you Jesus Christ.”

“Watch your blasphemy, Sadler,” he says angrily, standing to his full height now so his own head is peeping out over the top, exactly as he told me not to. He holds his cigarette in the air as he does so, the red-flamed tip just visible above the parapet, and I gasp in horror.

“Potter, your tab—”

He turns, notices what he’s doing, and I am immediately rendered blind by what feels like a bucket of hot mucus being chucked in my face. I spit and blink, retching against the side of the trench as I throw myself to the ground, wiping whatever filth this is away from my eyes, and look across to see Potter’s body lying at my feet, a great hole in his head from where the bullet entered, one eye completely gone—somewhere on my person, I suspect—the other hanging uselessly from its socket.

The sound of the shelling thirty miles away appears to grow louder, and for a moment I close my eyes, imagining myself elsewhere, and then I hear the voice of the woman who remonstrated with my father for hitting me, five years ago on the night of the coronation. “The lad’s done nothing wrong,” she’d said. “You should learn to show a little kindness towards the boy.”

The weeks pass, we advance, we stop, we entrench, we fire our Smilers and throw our grenades, and nothing ever seems to change. One day we are told that the line across Europe is pressing forward and it won’t be long now, and the next we hear that things look grim and we should prepare for the worst. My body is not my own any more: the lice have offered joint tenancy to the rats and vermin, for whom I am a chew-toy. I console myself by thinking that this is their natural terrain, after all, and I am the intruder. When I wake now to find a parasite nibbling at my upper body, its nose and whiskers twitching as it considers an attack, I no longer jump about and shout but merely brush it away with the palm of my hand, the way I would a fly buzzing around my head in St James’s Park. These are the new normalities and I give them little thought, but follow instead my routine of standing at my post, holding the line, going over the top when it is my turn to risk death, eating when I can, closing my eyes and trying to sleep, letting the days pass, believing that one day either it will all be over or I will.

It is weeks now since Potter’s brains were spattered over my uniform and it has been washed since, of course, but the dark red and grey stains around the lapels bother me. I’ve asked others about them but they shake their heads and tell me there’s nothing there. They’re wrong, of course. The marks are most definitely there. I can smell them.

I finish a shift of more than ten hours and am dead on my feet when I make my way to the reverse. It’s late and we expect to be shelled later tonight; on account of this the candles are mostly out, but I see someone sitting alone in the corner of the mess and advance towards him, eager for a little conversation before sleep. But I hesitate when, upon getting closer, I see that it’s Will. He’s hunched over some sheets of paper, a pen twisted in an unusual way in his fist, and for the first time I realize that he is left-handed. I stare at him, desperate to speak, but turn around, my boots sounding in the dirt as I walk away, and then he says my name quietly.

“Tristan.”

“Sorry,” I say, turning back but not stepping forward. “I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

“You’re not,” he says, smiling. “Off duty, then?”

“Just this minute. I’d better get some sleep, I suppose.”

“Sleep is that way,” he says, indicating the direction from which I have come. “What are you doing over here?”

I open my mouth to respond but can’t think of an answer. I don’t want to tell him that I needed company. He smiles at me again and nods at the seat next to his. “Why don’t you sit down for a few minutes?” he asks me. “It’s ages since we’ve talked.”

I walk over, trying not to feel irritated by his implication that this has been a mutual decision. There’s no point in being angry with him, though; he’s offered me the gift of his company and there’s not much more that I want from life. Perhaps there will be an end to hostilities after all.

“Writing home?” I ask, nodding at the papers set out before him.

“Trying to,” he says, gathering them up and shuffling them on the table before stuffing them into his pocket. “My sister, Marian. I’m always uncertain about what to say, though, aren’t you? If I tell her the truth about how things are going out here, she’ll only worry. And if I lie, then there seems to be no point in writing at all. It’s a bit of a puzzle, isn’t it?”

“So what do you do?” I ask.

“I talk about other things. I ask questions about home. It’s small talk but it fills the pages and she always replies to me. I’d go bloody mad if I didn’t have her letters to look forward to.”

I nod and look away. The mess tent is completely empty, which surprises me. There are almost always people here, eating, drinking tea, their heads bowed over their settings.

“You don’t write home?” he asks me.

“How do you know I don’t?”

“No, I only meant I’ve never seen you write. Your parents, surely they’d like to hear from you?”

I shake my head. “I don’t think they would,” I tell him. “I got thrown out, you see.”

“Yes, I know. But you’ve never told me why.”

“Haven’t I?” I ask, and leave it at that.

He says nothing more for a few minutes, takes a sip of his tea, then looks up again as if he’s just remembered something. “What about your sister?” he asks. “Laura, isn’t it?”

I shake my head again and look down, closing my eyes for a moment, wanting to tell him about Laura but unable to; it would require longer than we probably have.

“You’ve heard about Rigby, I suppose?” he asks after a while, and I nod.

“Yes,” I say. “I was sorry to hear it.”

“He was a sound chap,” says Will gravely. “But really, every time they send a feather man out into no-man’s-land, they’re just praying that he’ll be picked off. They don’t care about the poor bastard they’ve gone out to retrieve, either.”

“Who was that, anyway?” I ask, turning to him. “I never heard.”

“Not sure,” he replies. “Tell, I think? Shields? One of those.”

“Another one of ours,” I say, picturing the boys in their beds in Aldershot barrack.

“Yes. Only eleven of us left now. Nine gone.”

“Nine?” I ask, looking up and frowning. “I counted eight.”

“You heard about Henley?”

“Yes, but I included him,” I reply, my heart sinking at the idea that another one has gone; I keep a close track of the boys from the barracks, of who is still with us and who has been killed. “Yates and Potter. Tell, Shields and Parks.”

“Denchley,” says Will.

“Yes, Denchley, that makes six. Rich and Henley. That’s eight.”

“You’re forgetting Wolf,” says Will quietly.

“Oh yes,” I say, feeling my face flush a little. “Of course. Wolf.”

“Wolf makes nine.”

“He does, yes,” I agree. “Sorry.”

“Anyway, Rigby is still out there, I think. They might send a team out later tonight to collect him, although they probably won’t. What a waste of bloody time, eh? Sending a stretcher-bearer to collect a stretcher-bearer. Then he most likely gets killed and we have to send another out to retrieve him. It’s an endless bloody cycle, isn’t it?”

“Corporal Moody says there are eighty more men marching our way so we should have reinforcements in a day or two.”

“For all the good they’ll do,” he says grimly. “Bloody Clayton. And I mean that literally, Tris. Bloody Sergeant James Bloody Clayton.”

Tris. One single syllable of intimacy and the world is put to rights.

“It’s hardly his fault,” I say. “He’s only following orders.”

“Ha!” He snorts, shaking his head. “Don’t you see how he sends the ones he doesn’t like over the sandbags? Poor Rigby, I don’t know how he survived as long as he did, the number of times he went out there. Clayton had it in for him from the start.”

“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?”

“Because he’s a prisoner of war,” says Will. “What do you suggest we do. Let him go?”

“No, of course I don’t bloody suggest we let him go,” says Milton sarcastically. “But we don’t need a weight like him around our necks. Let’s just get rid of him now and be done with it.”

“You know we can’t do that,” says Will sharply. “We’re not murderers.”

Milton laughs and looks around, indicating the number of dead Germans at our feet; there must be dozens of them. As he does so, I see the German boy looking, too, and I can tell from his eyes that he recognizes all of them, that some were his friends, that he feels lost without them. He is willing them back to life to protect him.

“Was habt ihr getan?” asks the boy, turning and looking at Will, who—perhaps he suspects it—will be his protector, since he was the one who discovered him.

“Be quiet,” says Will, shaking his head. “Sadler, can you take a look around and find some rope?”

“We’re not tying him up, Bancroft,” insists Milton. “Stop playing the bloody saint, all right? It’s tedious.”

“It’s not up to you,” replies Will, raising his voice. “He’s my prisoner, all right? I found him. So I’ll decide what’s to be done with him.”

“Mein Vater ist in London zur Schule gegangen,” says the boy, and I look at him, willing him to stay quiet, since his appeals are only adding to the danger of the moment. “Piccadilly Circus!” he adds with fake cheer. “Trafalgar Square! Buckingham Palace!”

“Piccadilly Circus?” asks Milton, turning on him in bewilderment. “Trafalgar fucking Square? What’s he talking about?” Without warning, he slaps him hard across the side of his face with the back of his hand, so hard that one of his rotten teeth—we all have rotten teeth—flies out and lands on one of the bodies.

“Jesus Christ, Milton,” says Will, advancing on him. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“He’s a German, isn’t he?” asks Milton. “He’s the bloody enemy. You know what our orders are. We kill the enemy.”

“Not the ones we’ve captured, we don’t,” insists Will. “That’s what separates us, or it’s supposed to. We treat others with respect. We treat human life with—”

“Oh, of course,” cries Attling, joining in now. “I forgot, your old man’s a vicar, isn’t he? You been drinking from the altar wine too long, then, Bancroft?”

“Shut your mouth, Attling,” snaps Will, and Attling, a coward, does that very thing.

“Look, Bancroft,” says Milton. “I’m not going to argue with you. But there’s only one way out of this.”

“Will is right,” I say. “We tie him up now, we hand him over to Sergeant Clayton later and let him decide what’s to be done with him after that.”

“Who bloody asked you, Sadler?” asks Milton, sneering at me. “Of course you’re going to say that. Bloody Bancroft says the moon is made of cheese and you say pass me the crackers, someone.”

“Shut your fucking mouth, Milton,” says Will, advancing on him.

“I’ll not shut my fucking mouth,” he replies angrily, looking at the two of us as if we are so inconsequential that he might swat us away with as little concern as when he hit the German boy.

“Bitte, ich will nach Hause,” repeats the boy now, his voice breaking with emotion, and all three of us turn to him as he very slowly, very carefully, moves one hand towards the top pocket of his jacket. We watch him, intrigued. The pocket is so small and thin that it’s hard to imagine there could be anything in there, but a moment later he removes a small card and holds it out to us, his hand trembling as he does so. I take it first and look at it. A middle-aged couple smiling at a camera and a small blond boy, standing between them, squinting in the sunlight. It’s difficult to make out the faces as the photograph is rather grainy; it’s obviously been in his pocket for a long time.

“Mutter!” he says, pointing at the woman in the picture. “Und Vater,” he adds, pointing at the man. I look at them and then at him as he stares up at us beseechingly.

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” says Milton, grabbing him now by the shoulder and pulling him back towards him, taking a few steps back in the mud so that Will, Attling and I are standing on the opposite side of the trench to him. He pulls the pistol that Sergeant Clayton gave him from his belt and flicks it forward, checking that it’s loaded.

“Nein!” cries the boy loudly, his voice breaking in terror. “Nein, bitte!”

I stare at him desperately. He can’t be more than seventeen or eighteen years old. My age.

“Put that away, Milton,” says Will, reaching for his rifle now, too. “I mean it. Put it away.”

“Or what?” he asks. “What are you going to do, Vicar Bancroft? You going to shoot me?”

“Just put the gun down and let the boy go,” he replies calmly. “For God’s sake, man, just think about what you’re doing. He’s a child.”

Milton hesitates and looks at the boy and I can see that for a moment there is a degree of compassion in his expression, as if he is remembering the person he used to be before all this started, before he became the person standing before us now. But the German boy picks this moment to lose control of his bladder and a heavy stream of piss darkens the leg of his trousers, the leg pressed closest to Milton, who looks down and shakes his head in disgust.

“Oh for fuck’s sake!” he cries again, and before any of us can do or say another thing, he lifts his pistol to the boy’s head, cocks the trigger—“Mutter!” cries the boy again—and blows his brains over the walls of the trench, splattering red across a sign that points eastwards and says FRANKFURT, 380 MEILEN.

It’s the following night before Will approaches me again. I’m exhausted. I haven’t slept in forty-eight hours. I must have eaten something rotten, too, because my stomach cramps are growing more severe by the hour. For once, when I see him, I don’t feel any excitement or hope, just tension.

“Tristan,” he says, ignoring the three other men sitting near me. “Can we talk?”

“I’m not well,” I say. “I’m resting.”

“It’ll only take a minute.”

“I said I’m resting.”

He looks at me and his face grows a little kinder. “Please, Tristan,” he says quietly. “It’s important.”

I sigh and pull myself to my feet. I wish to Christ I could resist him. “What is it?” I ask.

“Not here. Come with me, will you?”

He doesn’t wait for an answer, simply turns around and walks away, which irritates me in the extreme but of course I follow him. He doesn’t walk in the direction of the new reverse trench but further down the line to where a row of stretchers lie next to each other, the bodies atop them covered with the jackets of the fallen men.

Taylor is under one of those coats; twelve-eight.

“What?” I ask, when he stares back at me. “What’s the matter with you?”

“I’ve spoken to the old man,” he tells me.

“Sergeant Clayton?”

“Yes.”

“About what?”

“You know bloody well about what.”

I look at him, unsure for a moment what he means. He can’t have told him what we have done together, surely; we would both be court-martialled. Unless he’s trying to blame me for it, have me removed from the regiment? He sees the disbelief on my face, though, and flushes slightly, shaking his head quickly to disabuse me of the notion.

“About the German boy,” he says. “About what Milton did to him.”

“Oh,” I say, nodding slowly. “That.”

“Yes, that. It was cold-blooded murder, you know it was. You saw it.”

I sigh again. I’m surprised he wants to bring this up. I thought it was all over with. “I don’t know,” I say finally. “Yes, I suppose it was.”

“Oh come on, there’s no suppose about it. That boy, that child, he was a prisoner of war. And Milton shot him dead. He wasn’t a threat in any way.”

“It wasn’t right, Will, of course it wasn’t. But these things happen. I’ve seen worse. You’ve seen worse.” I offer him a brief, bitter laugh and look at the stretchers that surround us. “Look around, for pity’s sake. What does one more matter?”

“You know why it matters,” he insists. “I know you, Tristan. You know the difference between right and wrong, don’t you?”

I set my face like stone and stare at him, feeling angry that he dares to presume to know me at all after how he has behaved towards me. “What do you want from me, Will?” I ask him eventually, running the back of my hand across my tired eyes, my voice filled with exhaustion. “Just tell me, all right?”

“I want you to back up my story,” he says. “No, that’s wrong. I want you to simply tell Sergeant Clayton what happened. I want you to tell him the truth.”

“Why would I do that?” I ask, confused. “You just told me that you already have.”

“He refuses to believe me. He says that no English soldier would behave in such a fashion. He brought Milton and Attling in and they both deny it. They agree that there was a German boy alive when they left us there but they claim that he tried to attack us and that Milton had no choice but to shoot him in self-defence.”

“They say that?” I ask, both surprised and not surprised at the same time.

“I’m for going to General Fielding about it,” continues Will. “But the old man says that’s out of the question without anyone else to corroborate my story. I’ve said that you saw it all.”

“Jesus Christ, Will,” I hiss. “Why are you dragging me into this?”

“Because you were there,” he cries. “My God, man, why am I even having to explain it to you? Now, will you back me up or won’t you?”

I consider it for a moment and shake my head. “I don’t want to get involved,” I say.

“You already are involved.”

“Well, just leave me out of it then, all right? You’ve got some bloody nerve, Will, I’ll give you that. You’ve got some bloody nerve.”

He frowns and looks at me, cocking his head a little to the side as he takes me in. “And what’s that supposed to mean?” he asks.

“You know precisely what it means,” I say.

“Jesus Christ, Tristan. Are you telling me that because your feelings are bent out of shape, you’re going to lie to protect Milton? You’re going to do this to get back at me, are you?”

“No,” I say, shaking my head. “That’s not what I’m saying at all. Why must you continually distort what I say? I’m saying that on the one hand I don’t want to get involved in this business because there’s too much going on and I can’t see what one extra dead soldier matters in the great scheme of things. And on the other hand—”

“One extra—?” he begins, sounding amazed at the casual nature of my phrase, although no more appalled than I am to hear myself say it.

“And on the other hand, since you’re finally deigning to speak to me, I want nothing to do with you, Will. Can you understand that? I want you to leave me alone, all right?”

Neither of us says anything for a few moments and I know that this can go one of two ways now. He can grow aggressive with me or he can repent. To my surprise, he chooses the latter.

“I’m sorry,” he says. Then, louder: “I’m sorry, all right?”

“You’re sorry,” I repeat.

“Tristan, can’t you see how difficult this is for me? Why do you always have to be so bloody dramatic about everything? Can’t we just… you know… can’t we just be friends when we’re lonely and soldiers the rest of the time?”

“‘Friends’?” I ask, almost ready to laugh. “That’s your word for it, is it?”

“For God’s sake, man,” he snaps, looking around nervously. “Keep your voice down. Anyone might hear.”

I can tell that I have unsettled him. He looks as if he wants to say something to me in return and takes a step towards me, a hand lifting slightly towards my face, then changes his mind, and retreats as if we barely know each other.

“I want you to come with me,” he says. “I want us to go to Sergeant Clayton right now where you will tell him exactly what happened with the German boy. We will report it and insist that the matter be referred to General Fielding.”

“I won’t do it, Will,” I say unequivocally.

“You realize that if you don’t, then the matter is at an end and Milton will have got away with it?”

“Yes,” I say. “But I don’t care.”

He stares at me long and hard, swallows, and when he finally speaks again his voice is quiet and exhausted. “And that’s your last word on the matter?” he asks.

“Yes,” I tell him.

“Fine,” he says, nodding his head in resignation. “Then you leave me with no choice.”

And with that, he takes his rifle off his shoulder, opens the magazine, empties the bullets into the mud, and places the gun on the ground before him.

Then he turns around and walks away.