The New Confessions

4 New Geometries, New Worlds

We missed the Battle of Messines Ridge by a few days. The huge mines were exploded beneath it on the seventh of June, and thus was initiated the Third Battle of Ypres, which lasted, in fits and starts, until mid-November. In fact everything stopped shortly after Messines for a couple of months until the offensive was renewed again at the end of July. Meanwhile the 13th (Public School) Service Battalion of the Duke of Clarence’s Own South Oxford Light Infantry moved into the Ypres Salient.

We had hoped, indeed Colonel O’Dell had assured us, that we were to be reunited with the regiment, but this was not to be. On June 17 we found ourselves posted to corps reserve behind Bailleul, some dozen miles from Ypres. We were billeted in a farm across the road from a battalion of Australian pioneers. The bombing section of D Company pitched its tent and thus began the familiar round of equipment cleaning, fatigue parties and sports. My God, I was sick of sports by then! Football, badminton, rugby, cricket, everything — even battalion-sized games of British bulldog.

We could hear the guns on the front clearly. Somehow they sounded different from the long-range boom of the siege artillery at Nieuport — like the small thunder of a skittle ball, more sinister and dangerous, knocking things down. One week we laid a corduroy road of raw sappy elm planks for the use of a battery of heavy howitzers — squat, muscle-bound guns with fist-sized rivets — that fired a fat shell a foot in diameter. These guns were towed into place — hence the road — by traction engines. Standing back fifty yards, fingers in our ears, we watched their first salvo. The earth shivered; the guns disappeared in smoke. It took five minutes to load them; the shells were trundled up on light railways and then, with some difficulty, winched into the breech with primitive-looking block and tackle rigged beneath wooden tripods.

Boredom set in again, but it was of a slightly different order: beneath it lay a seam of excitement. An offensive was on; fairly soon, surely, it would be our turn for a “stunt.” There was real enthusiasm in our tent, shared by everyone with the exception of Pawsey and myself. Even Noel Kite said he was keen to “have a go at the Teutons.” Ralph the dog, which we had brought from Nieuport, became the bombing section mascot. I have a photograph of us all, taken with Somerville-Start’s box camera. There they sit — Kite, Bookbinder, Somerville-Start (Ralph panting between his knees), Druce, Teague, Pawsey and the others whose names I cannot recall — grinning, fags in mouths, caps pushed back, shirt-sleeved, collars open, Teague clutching a Mills bomb in each hand. We look like a typically close bunch of “mates,” cheery and convivial. It is an entirely illusory impression. The months at Nieuport had forged few bonds. If truth be told, we all rather grated on each other’s nerves. We were like schoolboys at the end of term, needing some respite from the close proximity.

At the end of June we marched from Bailleul through Locre and Dickebusch to Ypres. The countryside had a look of certain parts of England. Gentle hills, red-tiled cottages and farms, scattered woods and along the lane sides a profusion of lilac, may and laburnum bushes. We skirted the shattered town and went into reserve trenches on the left bank of the Ypres-Comines canal. This was the first time the battalion came under fire, from a few stray shells. We all thought we were blasé about shelling after the artillery duels at Nieuport, but this was our first experience of real explosions. I remember seeing the puffs of dirt erupt and collapse in the fields across the canal and thought they possessed a fragile transient beauty—“earth trees that live a split second,” I wrote in my diary. A few landed in the reserve lines, knocking down a couple of poplars, but I registered no alarm. There seemed nothing inherently dangerous in them — as threatening as the puffs of smoke that drifted harmlessly in the sunlit air after the clods of earth had thumped to the ground.

A and B companies went into the front line to relieve a battalion of the Royal Sussex Regiment. Two days later I went up myself as part of a ration party, carrying four gallons of tea in a couple of petrol cans.

What can I tell you about the Ypres front in early July 1917? Later, I used to explain it to people like this:

Take an idealized image of the English countryside — I always think of the Cotswolds in this connection (in fact, to be precise, I always think of Oxfordshire around Charlbury, for obvious reasons). Imagine you are walking along a country road. You come to the crest of a gentle rise and there before you is a modest valley. You know exactly the sort of view it provides. A road, some hedgerowed lanes, a patchwork of fields, a couple of small villages — cottages, a post office, a pub, a church — there a dovecote, there a farm and an old mill; here an embankment and a railway line; a wood to the left, copses and spinneys scattered randomly about. The eye sweeps over these benign and neutral features unquestioningly.

Now, place two armies on either side of this valley. Have them dig in and construct a trench system. Everything in between is suddenly invested with new sinister potential: that neat farm, the obliging drainage ditch, the village at the crossroads, become key factors in strategy and survival. Imagine running across those intervening fields in an attempt to capture positions on that gentle slope opposite you so that you may advance one step into the valley beyond. Which way will you go? What cover will you seek? How swiftly will your legs carry you up that sudden gradient? Will that culvert provide shelter from enfilading fire? Is there an observation post in that barn? Try it the next time you are on a country stroll and see how the most tranquil scene can become instinct with violence. It requires only a change in point of view.

Of course as the weeks go by the valley is slowly changed: the features disappear with the topsoil; buildings retreat to their foundations; trees become stumps. The colors fade beneath the battering until all you have is a homogenous brown dip in the land between two ridges.

But I thought only of my idyllic prospect as I peered out through a thin embrasure in the sandbags as our tea was issued in the trenches. Admittedly the landscape in that part of Belgium is flatter and there are no real hedgerows, but as I looked out through our wire across a grassy meadow that ascended a gentle slope to the ridge opposite, I thought I might as well be in a valley of Oxfordshire. There were hawthorn bushes and scrubby hedges marking the intersections of field boundaries. I saw an unpaved road, small clumps of trees (somewhat knocked about), a group of farm buildings (ditto), but essentially it was no more than a section of run-of-the-mill countryside. If it had not been for the enemy wire and the dark outline of the earthworks of their trench system, I might not have been able to stifle a yawn. The evening sun was pleasantly warm and I could see wisps of smoke rising from their lines. No-man’s-land. It was unimpressive.

We spent a week on the canal bank, during which we had two days and two nights in the line. There, I was gratified to discover — despite the occasional barrages — that I was not panic stricken. It was still close enough to my experience of the trenches at Nieuport not to be too unnerving.

The most irritating consequence of our first visit to the trenches at the salient was that we became lousy. I tried all the usual remedies — powder; hours of diligent nit picking, like an ape; a candle flame run up and down the seams — but nothing worked. Eventually I used to turn my shirt inside out, wear it that way for a couple of days, then turn it back again, and so on. It seemed to regulate the itching at least. I was always scratching, but it no longer rose to peaks of intolerance.

After our time at the front we duly marched back to Bailleul and routine reestablished itself. Cleaning, drilling, sports, working parties and occasional visits to cafés in the town. I gained a real impression too of the vast organism that is an army: all those separate units that allow the whole to function — ordnance, transport, clothing, feeding, animals, signals, engineering, road building, policing, communications, health and sanitation … There was an invisible city camped in the fields round Ypres and it required its civil servants, paymasters, administrators, labor force and undertakers to make it function. The part the 13th Battalion played in its organization was to dig cable ditches for the signalers, muck out open-air stables in the brigade transport lines, help lay tracks for light railways, stand guard over vast supply dumps, dig graves and latrines at a field hospital. We were no more than ants in an ant heap. But at the same time in those weeks of waiting I played atrociously in goal for the D Company soccer team (we lost 11–2 against the Australian pioneers); came down with a dose of influenza; wrote a letter to my father and three to Hamish; almost had a fist fight with Teague when he accused me of stealing; felt bored, sexually frustrated, tired and occasionally miserable and one night dreamed vividly of my death — eviscerated by a German with an entrenching tool. I oscillated between the roles of soulless functionary and uniquely precious individual human being; from the disposable to the sine qua non.

It all came to an end on July 16 when the guns started up again in earnest. Then the one-week barrage preliminary to the attack was extended to two as the renewed offensive was continually delayed. For the first few nights the fireworks display on the horizon was tremendous, but as it continued night after night it became only another source of grumbles. The 13th was not even in reserve for the big push of July 31. The day the battle proper began, we were marched to a sugar beet factory near Locre for delousing.

We marched back to our billets that evening in heavy rain. It rained constantly for the next four days and nights. Suddenly the dark damp countryside seemed to ooze foreboding. Rumor abounded about the attack — all of it baleful. A company of the Australians, out rewiring one night, took heavy casualties (“heavy casualties”—a bland, soft phrase). I asked one man what it had been like. “Fuckin’ shambles,” he said.

On August 7 we were moved back up to brigade reserve on the canal bank. Before we occupied the trenches we were paraded in a field where Colonel O’Dell addressed us. The battalion, he said, had been ordered to provide reinforcements for other units in the brigade. I do not remember the details; two companies were going to the Royal Welch, I think. D Company was to be attached to a battalion of the Grampian Highlanders.

I already thought of us as the “unlucky” 13th and this latest move seemed to me yet another turn for the worse. Teague and Somerville-Start, however, rejoiced. There was much excited talk about the “Jocks” and their fighting spirit, and ill-informed speculation about this venerable regiment’s battle honors.

The next night we set off, having left most of our kit at the battalion dump. Ralph was entrusted to the quartermaster. The bombers made a great fuss of their farewells; you would have thought they were saying good-bye to their grandmothers. I had nothing to do with it — I was glad to be rid of the animal at last.

It took hours to join our new unit. There was immense toing and froing behind the front. We followed duckboard and fascine paths across black fields and were often redirected back down them. Once we eventually gained the trench system, we were continually halted to allow a passage of ration and ordnance parties, engineers and signalers. Eventually we found the right communication trench. We toiled up this. Ahead I heard Louise reporting to an officer in the Grampians. Soon we were deployed in the support lines.

It was immediately clear that these trenches were not what we were used to: no dugouts, not even ledges cut for sleeping. I put my waterproof cape on the ground and sat down, my back against the rear wall. Druce passed among us, checking that all was well. I tipped my helmet forward and tried to sleep. My nostrils were full of the smell of wet earth and from the right came Bookbinder’s body odor — truly appalling, a vile hogo. On my left Pawsey was having a shit in his helmet — he was too scared to go to the latrine sap.

From my diary:

August 9, 1917. Our first morning with the Grampians. Woken by random shelling. Stand to. Misty dawn. Up ahead, beyond our wire, a low ridge and two obliterated farms. Over to our right, according to Druce, the Frezenburg-Zonnebecke road. I can see no sign of it.

It is not very evocative, I admit. The biggest shock for me was not the shelling but the transformation in the landscape. All the ground as far up as the ridge looked as though it had been badly plowed. Almost all the long grass and shrubs that I had seen five weeks earlier had disappeared. I could not see behind me, nor much to either side, but the countryside we occupied was a more or less uniform dark brown. It was hard to believe we were in high summer. I was also — curiously, for I am not particularly fastidious — somewhat offended at the mess everywhere. The trench was full of litter — empty tins, discarded equipment, boxes and fragments of boxes — and through slits in the parapet of sandbags, no-man’s-land seemed to be scattered with heaps of burst mattresses. I swear it was five minutes before I realized they were dead bodies.

Druce sent me, Kite and Somerville-Start into the Grampians’ trenches to draw our water ration for the section. We passed along the support line through our company looking for the lead-off trench to the battalion ration store. We turned the corner of a firebay.

“Where are the Grampians?” Kite asked.

“Another ten yards.”

We came out of the firebay. Five very small men — very small men indeed — sat around a tommy-cooker brewing tea. They looked at us with candid hostility. They wore kilts covered with canvas aprons. Their faces were black with mud, grime and a five-day growth of beard. Two of them stood up. The tops of their heads came up to my chest. Neither of them could have been more than five feet tall. Bantams … These were the 17th/3 Grampians, a bantam battalion, every man under the army’s minimum height of five feet three inches. Kite and Somerville-Start were both taller than six feet.

“What the fuck are youse cunts looking at?” One of the men said in a powerful Scottish accent.

“What?” Kite said, unable to conceal his astonishment.

“Rations,” I said. At least I could understand. He told me where to go.

We made our way diffidently along the support trench until we found the supplies sap. There, a dozen bantams were collecting rations. We waited our turn uneasily, like lanky anthropologists among a pygmy tribe. We stood head and shoulders above these tiny dirty men. They seemed more like goblins or trolls than members of the same race as ourselves. The bantams appeared indifferent to our presence, but we were all ill at ease, full of bogus smiles, as if we suspected some elaborate practical joke was being played on us and had not quite divined its ultimate purpose. We gladly picked up our petrol cans of water and headed back.

The bantams did not like us. It cannot just have been because of our height, though it has to be said that as ex-public-school boys we were on average taller than the other ranks in most regiments. I suspect it was a combination of our stature, our voices, our bearing and our Englishness that let us down. It did not help when, on our way back that first day, Kite said loudly, “I think they’re rather sweet little chaps. Is it true they’ve been specially bred?” In any event, there swiftly grew up an invisible barrier between our company flanks and the bantams on either side. It was so uncomfortable that we demanded our own ration parties, which, somehow, Louise managed to arrange for us. The company’s first deaths in action were sustained in this way. The pipe band were carrying up pots of hot stew when they “got a shell all to themselves,” as the saying had it. Four were killed and three were wounded. It shocked us all profoundly: the pipe band had seemed indestructible. Louise, I recall, took it particularly badly.

Trench routine continued as normal for the next few days. My diary records the daily round:

Sentry duty, 4 A.M.–6 A.M. Stand to. B’fast — tea, pickled mackerel, biscuit. Repaired trenches. Ration carrying. Lunch: beef stew, biscuits. Slept. Sentry duty, 6 P.M.–8 P.M.

It rained from time to time and I grew steadily dirtier. I watched my uniform take on that particular look common to heavily soiled clothes — one sees it on tramps and refugees, for example. The fibers of the material seem to become bulked out with dirt so that jacket and trousers look as if they have been cut from a thick coarse felt. Creases at armpits, elbows and backs of knees develop a permanent concertinaed effect — rigid and fixed. Your hair dulls, then becomes oily, and then transforms into a matted, clotted rope-end. Fingernails are rimmed with earth, your hands hard and calloused as a peasant’s. Your beard grows. Your head itches, itches all day long.

We knew our “stunt” was approaching as the ridge in front of us steadily took more shelling. Tension increased, and the routine wariness that had characterized our waking moments was replaced by neurotic edgy alarm. We kept expecting to be pulled out of the line for a period of rest before the attack, but we appeared to have been forgotten. Even Teague and Somerville-Start were subdued. As for myself, I had evolved a new approach. I decided to be logical. I was going, as far as possible, to think my way to survival, even if it meant disobeying orders.

We stood to at half past four, an hour before dawn. Our objectives were the two ruined farms. D Company was going for the right-hand one, along with the bantams on our right flank. We were to capture the farm, secure it and repel and counterattack until the second wave passed us. All night the ridge had been pounded by our guns. As we lined up in the fire trench the bombardment was still going on. Louise passed among us, white-faced and muttering what I suppose were words of encouragement. I could not hear him above the noise of the shells. Beside me stood Pawsey. On the other side was Somerville-Start. He held a ladder; so did I. I was as ready as I would ever be.

But I had forgotten about the rum. The quartermaster sergeant passed among us, pouring out the tots from the big ceramic bottle. The rum looked black, evil, thick as molasses. I drank my allocation — half a wineglass, I suppose — in two gulps, and I was seriously drunk within a minute. I saw Pawsey vomit his issue and lean gagging against the trench wall. Somerville-Start’s face wore a kind of fixed, zealous grimace — he was breathing fiercely through his nose, both hands on his ladder.

Then everyone urinated. I suppose an order must have been given. The trench filled with vinegary urine steam. I was giddy. I felt the trench had acquired a steep, dipping gradient to the left, down which I might at any moment slide. I held on to my ladder, and adjusted the weight of my sack of bombs. I never heard the whistle go, but suddenly I saw people begin to climb their ladders. Somerville-Start and I set off simultaneously.

I do not remember my first unprotected view of no-man’s-land — that initial astonishing second — because Somerville-Start got shot in the mouth. The moment his face cleared the parapet I saw his teeth shatter as they were hit by the bullet, and a plume of blood, like a ponytail, issued from the nape of his neck. Several teeth, or teeth fragments, hit me in the face, stinging me like thrown gravel, and one piece cut me badly above my right eye. My eye filled with warm blood and I blundered over the sandbags blindly, wiping my eye with my sleeve. I sensed Pawsey going by me. My vision cleared and I saw him running off in the direction of the ridge. There was no sign of the ridge itself — the creeping barrage some fifty yards in front of us obscured everything.

“Think!” I said out loud. I crouched down and scampered forward, almost on all fours, like a baboon.

“Stand up, that man!” somebody bellowed.

I ignored him.

We were now, I realized, being shelled in our turn, and I suppose there must have been machine-gun fire from somewhere because I saw some bantams on my right gently falling over. I scrabbled after the creeping barrage, dragging my rifle on the ground. As far as I was concerned the world was still canted over towards the left and I kept falling over heavily on my left side, bruising my left knee. I moved like some demented cripple.

Then a shell exploded near me and the blast of air snatched my rifle from my grasp and whipped my helmet from my head. Warm earth hit my face and I felt the weal of the chin strap hot on my throat I was stunned immobile for some seconds. Then, crablike, I scuttled into the fuming crater.

Kite was already there, on his back, wounded. He held up the stump of his right arm, fringed like a brush, not bleeding but clotted with earth.

“Somebody’s gone and shot my bloody arm off!” he shouted.

I blinked. I screwed up my eyes to adjust focus.

“Damn nuisance,” Kite said. He seemed wholly unperturbed.

I wondered if I should help him.

“D’you want a hand?” I yelled, in all innocence.

“Very funny, Todd,” he said petulantly. “Hardly the time or place.” He began to move. “I can make it on my own.” He crawled back towards our lines.

I looked round. I could not see a soul. The din was so general it seemed quite normal, like the factory floor of an iron foundry.… I still had my sack of bombs. I wondered where I should throw them. I slithered forward, past some small dead bantams. I saw what looked like a horrifically mangled side of beef, flayed by a maniac butcher with an ax. The melancholy of anatomy. At the top there was an ear, some hair and part of a cheek. At the bottom, a bare knee with a smudge of dirt on it.

I crawled on until I reached some tangled wire. The German line? I glanced back. I could make out nothing. I turned: was that the farmhouse up ahead? It should have been easy for me to determine — we were meant to run uphill, after all — but my dipping, left-biased world had made me immune to gradients. I had the disarming impression, all at once, that I was in fact moving parallel to our front line. So I turned, with some difficulty, right, leaning into the slope, and felt I was falling. I immediately ran across Pawsey and Louise. Pawsey was shot through the chest. He had dry cherry foam on his lips. He was trying to speak but only pink bubbles formed and popped in his mouth. Louise, I guessed, had gone to help him and — so it seemed — had been caught by a concentrated burst of machine-gun fire in the throat, which was badly torn. He was quite dead. One bullet had taken off his nose with the neatness of a razor.

I looked up. The barrage had lifted. I could now hear the dreary clatter of machine-gun fire. I saw bantams running back to our lines. More bubbles popped between Pawsey’s lips. I grabbed him under the arms and began to drag him back to safety. I had not gone ten yards when he died. There is an unmistakable limpness about a dead person that no living being can imitate. Instinct tells you when it has arrived. But I needed no instinct, remember: I had dragged dead men from the surf at Coxyde-Bains. Poor Pawsey felt the same.

I laid him down. There was no point in dragging back a dead man. Heavy firing was coming from further up the line, and a few shells were now bursting on the ridge, more an acknowledgment of the attack’s failure than an attempt to silence the German guns. My section of no-man’s-land was now strangely quiet. All the same I zigzagged back to the lines, moving carefully from shell hole to shell hole. In one particularly large hole I saw a couple of bantams searching corpses for loot. I passed by on the other side.

I was helped into the trench by men I did not recognize. This must be the second wave of the attack, I guessed, whose presence had not been required. I was passed down the line into the support trenches. Eventually I found my bits and pieces and sat down. I felt terrible. My brain was tender and bruised. I was nauseous. My mouth was dry and rank. My legs were visibly shaking and my joints ached. So this is battle fatigue, I thought. I know now I was suffering from a massive hangover. My first.

After a while I managed to light a cigarette. I put my trench cap on and waited for the others. Then I began to remember, piecemeal. Kite, with no hand. Louise and Pawsey, dead.…

A corporal from another platoon came over. He looked very tired.

“Any sign of Lieutenant McNiece?”

I told him about Louise. And Kite and Pawsey. I wondered if the others were all right.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t find a soul from my platoon.”

“You haven’t seen any of my lot, have you?”

“I saw someone … well, explode. Must have been a bomber. Whole sack of bombs went up. Took about five chaps with him.”

“Good God!”

“Are you all right?” he asked. “You’ve got blood all over your face.”

“Just a scratch,” I said reflexively, followed by a warm spurt of pride at my nonchalance. I put my hand up to my forehead. I felt a curious lump embedded above my eyebrow. It moved. I plucked it out with a wince. It was a tooth. One of Somerville-Start’s incisors. I still have the scar.

The delayed shock arrived about an hour later. It was not so much what I had witnessed that overwhelmed me as the retrospective sense of awful peril I had been in. I saw myself running foolishly here and there about the battlefield, somehow avoiding the multitudinous trajectories of thousands of pieces of whizzing hot metal. I was not grateful for my luck. I was horrified, if you like, that I had used up so much. We all have narrow escapes in life, some of which we are entirely unaware. What upset me was the hundreds of thousands of narrow escapes I must have had during my few hectic minutes in no-man’s-land. I was convinced I had overdrawn my balance of good fortune; that whatever haphazard benevolence the impassive universe might hold towards me was all but gone.

We went back into reserve, were given something to eat and then paraded in a field for roll call. D Company’s casualties were dreadful, well over 50 percent, and the bantams had fared little better. Of the bombing section, only Teague and myself were present on parade. Louise was dead; so were Pawsey, Somerville-Start and Bookbinder. It was Bookbinder who had atomized when his sack of bombs exploded, and the blast had accounted for two other bombers dead and one wounded (Lloyd). Also wounded were Kite and, I learned, Druce.

That evening I went down to the field dressing station to have the cut above my eye stitched. The dressing station was a bizarre place dominated by the twin emotions of intense relief and intense pain. It was established in a small quarry some four hundred yards behind the canal. To my surprise the ground was littered with discarded boots, and everywhere was the powerful contrast of filthy blackened men and new, very white bandages. Walking wounded sat in groups waiting to be driven to the field hospital. Rows of stretcher cases lay docilely in the soft evening sun. I had my cut dressed and went in search of Druce. I heard my name called. It was Kite.

He was sitting with a group of amputees and head wounds. A blunt club-shaped bandage covered his stump. He looked dark-eyed and his face was tense. I lit a cigarette and gave it to him. He seemed depressed, not nearly as jaunty as on the battlefield. I told him about our casualties.

“At least you’ll be out of it,” I said.

He looked at his stump. “I’m finding it a bit hard keeping the old famous unconcern going,” he said, his voice shaking. He started to cry. “I just think it’s a bloody shame. I need my hand.” His voice was raised; other men looked round.

“Steady, Noel,” I said, and patted his shoulder. “Here, have some fags.” I stuffed half a dozen into a pocket. “Be back in a second. Have a word with Leo.”

Druce was lying some yards away, a leg bandaged. I told him the appalling news about the section.

“Kite’s a bit shaken up,” I said. “What happened to you?”

“I climbed up the ladder, took a couple of steps and got a piece of shrapnel through my calf muscle. I went down and was dragged back into the trench. Must have been out there for all of five seconds. Never saw a thing.” He paused. “What about you?… I mean, what was it like?”

I thought. “Very strange.” And then, “Horrible.” I told him in more detail about Pawsey and Louise. I tried to express myself better.

“It’s like … nothing or nowhere else.…” I had no vocabulary. “It’s just mad.”

“I’m not sure if I should have thrown the whole sackful down.… I mean, in a dugout, you’d think one or two bombs would be enough. Damn! I should have held on to some. Think what—”

“Suffering Christ, shut up!” I said. We were stacking railway sleepers. During the attack Teague had in fact reached the German line. He had emptied his sack of bombs down a dugout stairwell and thrown in two after them. Apparently he had killed eighteen Germans and had been recommended for a decoration. On the way back to our lines he had sniped at a machine-gun crew and claimed to have hit two of them. He talked about the battle constantly to me. I was deeply bored.

“Where exactly did you get to? You said you got to the wire.…”

“Yes. No.… I think so. I got to some wire. Look, I don’t know. I told you I hadn’t a clue what was going on.”

“Less fuckin’ natter, more work, youse two English bastards!”

These words came from Platoon Sergeant Tanqueray, a bantam, supervising our working party. The top of his head reached my armpit. Teague and I had been seconded to a Grampian company in the reforming of the battalion after the attack on Frezenburg Ridge. D Company could barely muster two full-strength platoons, so the rest of us were temporarily attached to the bantams to fill gaps in their ranks. By this stage of the war the bantam battalions had more than their fair share of half-grown lads and degenerates. My kit was pilfered almost daily. Anything precious I kept on my person.

Tanqueray watched us heft the sleepers. He hated Teague and me, as did the rest of his men. He was five feet two inches, just under the army minimum. He was bitter enough as it was, missing out on the chance of a regular battalion by one inch, but having two tall ex-public-school boys in his platoon seemed almost to have deranged him. Tanqueray had a weak chin, a ginger moustache and pink watery eyes. He was a fisherman from Stonehaven and I fancied he still smelled of fish. The fact that I was Scottish also incensed him, paradoxically. He insisted I was English and I was tired of remonstrating. I became a symbol of the dark genetic conspiracy that had contrived to render him small.

“You’re dogshite, Todd,” he used to say to me. “You and all your kind. Dogshite.”

I was not clear what he meant by my “kind” but I did not care. My mood since the day of the attack on the ridge had vacillated between taciturn depression and a brand of fretful neurotic terror that I could barely suppress.

My diary:

Monday. Battalion reserve, Dickebusch. This morning I found three members of my platoon going through my kit. Two ran off. I attacked the third, a man called MacKanness, with a harelip. He is barely five foot but quite strong. I held him down and punched his face. He says he will shoot me during the next attack. Tanqueray reported me to the orderly officer — who happened to be Lieutenant Stampe — who seemed sympathetic but had no alternative. I filled sandbags for two days. These are my fellow countrymen but I have nothing but contempt for them. Teague says you can expect nothing else from the laboring classes.

Since the attack on Frezenburg Ridge we had had one other period — uneventful, as it turned out — in the line. New drafts of recruits had come into the battalion and our rest periods were taken up with reorganization and retraining. Teague and I, perforce, were thrust closer together. We tried to spend as much time as possible with the other members of D Company, but as far as Tanqueray was concerned that was tantamount to fraternizing with the enemy.

After a couple of weeks it was clear that the 13th was being brought up to full strength again and a new D Company beginning to take shape. Some of the original members were recalled from the Grampians, but no movement order came for Teague or me. I began to worry that we had been forgotten. I spoke to Captain Tuck, reminding him of our existence. He said matters were still in a state of disarray, but assured me that when the battalion re-formed Teague and I would be part of its number. Until then, D Company of the 13th Battalion. SOLI was still attached to the Grampians. I should stop worrying and be patient.

We went back up to the front towards the end of August. Guns had been firing for days. It was clear we were about to enter a new phase of the offensive on the Salient. I felt ill with ghastly premonitions. I was so convinced of my impending death that the filthy squalor of the trenches and the sullen hate of my comrades-in-arms seemed mere irritants. But Teague — literally — had the light of battle in his eye. He seemed distant, preoccupied, as if inspired by some visionary impulse. I was baffled at his zeal. I felt meek and terrified; Teague looked forward to the prospect of fighting. I told him of MacKanness’s threat (which was often repeated: “Gonnae get youse, cunt, see’f ah doan’t, right inna fuckin’ spine. Palaryze yu. Die in paaaaayne!” That sort of thing). Teague was untroubled.

“Stick with me, Todd,” he said. “We’ll be all right. Look how we got through Frezenburg — barely a scratch.”

I looked at his square face and his small eyes. He was the second person, after Dagmar, who had assured me I would survive. We were sitting in support lines, the night before the attack.

“I’m going to die,” I said. “I know. Just because I made it once doesn’t mean a thing.”

“You’ll be fine. You’re like me, Todd. We’re special, different.”

I could not think of anyone I was less like, except, perhaps Tanqueray and MacKanness.

“You really think you’re not going to …?” I left the question deliberately unfinished.

“I don’t care. I’m just going to go in there and have the fight of my life.”

I looked away. For some reason Teague’s attitude rather disgusted me. We had eaten well that evening: pea soup, fried corned beef, sardines. In my hand I had a piece of sponge cake covered in jam. I threw it over the parapet for the rats.

August 22, 1917. I stand in the front-line trench waiting for the barrage to lift. Teague is on my right by the ladder. Standing on its bottom step is Lieutenant Stampe, our company commander. Stampe is six months younger than me, just eighteen, a pleasant fair-haired person. Tanqueray refers to him as a “pup.” Tanqueray himself comes down the trench issuing rum. I decline.

“I’ll be watching you, Todd,” he says. “Very closely.” I have a stupid song in my head. I cannot rid myself of the tune.

Whiter than the snow, whiter than the snow,

Wash me in the water

Where you wash your dirty daughter

And I shall be whiter than the snow, Holy Joe.

The catchy tune keeps my mind off other subjects. This time we are to attack some long-ruined château, take the remains of a wood and advance through open country to the crossroads at S—. I have only the vaguest idea of our objectives. In any case, they will mean nothing once the whistle blows. There is no château, no wood, no open country, no crossroads at S—.

Teague turns towards me. Suddenly the barrage lifts for a second or two.

“Here we go, Todd,” he says. A whistle goes somewhere. Stampe puts his own to his mouth and blows fiercely. The pea jams. Silence. He smiles guiltily and climbs up the ladder onto the parapet, waving us up and on. I go up the ladder, sober this time, the world flat and fixed. Ahead a cliff of smoke and explosions mark the German line. I crouch and head off, following the backs of others through the gaps cleared in our wire. Within yards my boots are heavy with a thick rind of mud and clay. I have lost Teague. I keep my head down, watching for mud pools. I walk in as straight a line as possible. Some shells start to burst round us. I skirt an icy lagoon forty feet across. I slip and fall. I look up; Stampe stands ahead.

“All right?” he yells.

I struggle to my feet. He moves on. Twenty yards to my left a British soldier levels his rifle at Stampe and shoots him in the back. Stampe falls. The soldier glances round. MacKanness. I crumple to the ground as if hit. I wait a minute, then (there is no sign of MacKanness) cautiously get up and go and look for Stampe. He is face down in the mud. I pull him up and unplug the dirt from his mouth and nose. He is still alive. Stampe is almost the same height as me. To a bantam all tall men must be indistinguishably high.

“Go on,” Stampe says. He pushes me away.

Teague is suddenly behind me. “Come on,” he says. We run off.

“Where are we?” I shout.

“Nearly at the wood!”

Where was the château? I wonder. Through the drifting smoke I see some stumps and shattered trunks of trees. Chunks of wood fly up, spinning off them. Teague and I fall to the ground. Teague starts firing his rifle. I do the same. I can see nothing. Teague takes a Mills bomb from his bag and throws it. It explodes — yellow and orange, white smoke, erupting earth. He takes out another and slithers forward a few yards through the black trunks. He throws again. This time the bomb seems to detonate almost immediately after it has left his hand. I hear him scream.

Then, seconds later, “Todd! Todd!”

I crawl over to him.

Teague has lost two fingers on his throwing hand and his face has taken a lot of flash from the defective bomb. Most of his hair is burned away, as is the first layer of skin, some of which hangs in long fragile shreds from his cheeks like stiff rice paper. He has no top lip and, as far as I can see, no eyelids left. His eyes are bleeding from the perforated whites, filling the sockets.

I help him to his feet and we stumble off. Blood tears an inch wide track his face. We are suddenly free of the black stumps, but I have absolutely no idea which way to go. I seem to be in a circle of infernal noise. Distant shapes of men scurry and creep in every possible direction. I do not know if we are being shot at.

Teague sinks to his knees. He is moaning now. His face seems to be effervescing, forming a creamy brown froth like the head on a glass of stout. “Whiter than the snow, whiter than the snow” hums in my head.

“I’ll get a stretcher-bearer,” I say faintly. I notice there are traces of tangled grass among the mud and upturned clods of earth. We must have come quite far.

I stand up. The noise of explosions has moved off a way. There is still no one firing at me. I lay Teague down and run off in what I think is the right direction. Stretcher-bearers should be following the second wave. I run on.

Then I hear the noise of an immense motor. To my left, bucking and heaving through and over the tree stumps, is a tank, a huge three-dimensional metal parallelogram, eight feet tall, its tracks hurling up a heavy spray of clods and mud. There is a name painted on the front: Oh, I say! The machine gun in the forward turret traverses and begins firing at me.

I fling up my arms, fall down and pretend to be dead for the second time that day. The tank churns on. I get up and, ridiculously, shake my fist and swear at it. Then I run off on my way again, looking for stretcher-bearers.

I stop suddenly, a horrifying image forming in my mind. I feel a bolus of acid nausea rise in my throat. I turn and run back towards Teague. I hear the engine of Oh, I say! ahead in the drifting smoke, straining, grinding.

Wash me in the water

Where you wash your dirty daughter.…

The tank has run over Teague’s legs. He is alive but unconscious. His legs are oddly shapeless now, like partially filled kit bags. One boot is pointed delicately, like a ballet dancer’s shoe.

I chase after the tank. I can see its tracks clearly in the muddy grass. I come over a small rise and stop, staring in astonishment. Ahead of me, fresh in the morning sun, stretches the Belgian countryside. Roads, trees, fields, villages, a steeple, smoke from chimneys. About a mile off I see the fortifications of the German third line and a column of troops being marched towards me. Reinforcements.

“Oil You the British Army then?”

I turn round. The tank has stopped about fifty yards away. One of its crew is urinating against its side. I bite my bottom lip to stop myself from bursting into tears. I walk over. The man shudders and starts to do up his flies. He comes to meet me. He is small, almost as small as a bantam.

“I reckons as we’ve gone a touch too far, mate.” He walks round the front of the tank. “Right through the bloody middle, a hot knife through butter.”

I follow him round.

“No trenches here, see. Only blockhouses.”

On the other side of the tank the crew sit in the sun, in shirt sleeves. They are drinking whiskey — Johnny Walker — from the bottle, and eating bread and ham. One man carves from a joint.

“Here’s the British Army,” my man says, introducing me. “Better late than never.”

“Hello, hello,” says another. “Feeling peckish, I’ll warrant.”

“You people,” I say, unable to control the tremble in my voice, “you people have just run over my friend.”

“No chance,” says one. “Not us, mate.”

“A wounded man,” I say slowly. “You crushed his legs with your tracks.”

“No, no,” says the urinator. “I’d have known. I’m the driver, see. You didn’t spot no one, did yah?” he asks another.

“Nah. Couldn’t have been us, old son. We don’t make that sort of mistake. We run over Huns. Not our lads.”

“His legs are flattened!”

“Ow … nasty. Probably a shell, though. Do funny things, those shells.”

“Damn right. I saw this man once. Dead. Flat as a pancake. Could have rolled him up like a carpet.”

“Bound to be a shell, yeah.”

“Bastards! I’m going to report you. Bloody bastards!”

“Steady on, sunshine. George told you he didn’t run over no one.”

“And I should know as I’m the bloody driver, Jock.”

“Yeah, and watch who you’re calling names, you Scottish berk.”

I leave them to their ham and Johnny Walker and run back. I see that, as the driver told me, there is no German trench line here. Just mangled wire and ruined blockhouses. Somehow we have come through a temporary gap in their defenses. Where I left Teague at the edge of the so-called wood is a small group of men from the Durham Light Infantry, black, exhausted, making some attempt to dig in. They tell me Teague has been carried back, still alive but in a bad way. I ask them if they have seen the Grampians. No one knows.

Shells begin to explode again in the wood. Large pieces of tree trunk are hurled tumbling into the air. A counterattack. I go back with a runner from the Durhams. He points me in the right direction and we separate. I come over the lip of a small rise and I see the undulating mess of no-man’s-land in front of me and — just distinguishable — the thin humped sprawl of the British trench line with its scribble of barbed wire three or four hundred yards away. I recognize nothing. I pause for a second. We must be in some kind of lull. The crash and rumble of guns continues and a ridge a mile away is being pelted with barrage after barrage. This strip of sodden clogged acres on either side of me is full of little figures crawling, hopping, shambling, being carried. Four-man teams of stretcher-bearers search the rims of foul mud pools for wounded. The sun still shines through gaps in the clouds and warms my back and shoulders. I sit down for a minute. Fifty yards away an officer limp-hops back to the lines, using a rifle as a stick. He pays me no attention.

I set off again, sticking to rough plowed-field mud and avoiding the stuff that looks like runny porridge. I make slow progress. I pass a confetti of discarded equipment, a group of about twenty bloodless dead men, people huddling miserably in shell craters waiting for stretchers. I have lost sight of our trenches now. The view changes entirely in a ten-yard journey. I come across a well-organized machine-gun pit, ammunition boxes stacked tidily, a taut tarpaulin shelter against possible rain. The men in it are alert, ready to repel a counterattack. They look surprised to see me. I trudge past.

“Hoy!” the officer, a lieutenant, shouts. “Where are you from?”

“German line.”

“Is it far away?”

“I should say so.”

“Drat! All right you men, pack up. Sorry chaps, wrong place.”

I leave them to dismantle their neat pit and slither down the crumbled sides of a gully. A sunken track or road, pounded out of recognition. I clamber up the other side and get a brief view of our line again. Two hundred yards to go.

“Hey, you! Help! Over here!”

It is a man, up to his armpits in a mud pool at the bottom of a large, deep shell crater. If he had not shouted I would never have spotted him. His face is covered with dark-red blood.

“You English? I can’t see very well.” He has a strong Ulster accent.

“I’m Scottish, actually … but it doesn’t matter.”

“Get me out of here, pal, will you? I’m going down.” Doyn, he pronounces it.

“Right you are.”

I slither carefully down the slope of the crater. The man is about eight feet away. I sink in up to my ankles. The mud is thick, like fudge. I hold out my rifle. He stretches for it. There is still a two-foot gap.

“I’m missing a fuckin’ leg here, an’ all. Blown up right into this fuckin’ bog.”

“I can’t reach you. I’m sorry.”

“Sweet Jesus Christ.… Wade out a bit, pal. I’m going down.”

“I’ll sink too.”

I can see he is going down. The muddy water is up to his neck. He makes little fluttering movements with his fingers — as though his hands were wings and he could fly out.

“God God God.… Well, put me out of me misery, pal, will you do that? I don’t want to droyne in this shite.”

“I can’t do that!”

“Sure I’d do the fuckin’ same for you!”

He stretches his chin clear of the viscid surface. I make a final futile stretch. I am up to my knees. He grabs. There is still an insurmountable eighteen inches.

“Come on. Do us a favor.”

Suddenly, it seems the most reasonable request in the world. I put myself in his place. I would make the same plea. Of course.

“Look the other way,” I say.

He turns his head and I take aim. My fatigue makes my rifle sway. I fire. And miss. A gout of mud is thrown up behind his head.

“For God’s sake!” he screams, his composure all gone.

“I’m sorry.” I pull the trigger again and my rifle jams.

“I’ll get another,” I shout. I claw my way up the bank. I run here and there looking for a corpse with a rifle. At one moment I run back to the crater to check on my Ulsterman. But he has gone.

I shut my eyes and rub my face. I feel stupid and empty with tiredness. My back is sore, my leg mysteriously bruised. I trudge back towards the line of trenches. My shock and outrage steadily die as I slip and slither home.

I arrive at the British line and am directed to my sector. I seem to have wandered a mile over to the right. I try not to think about Teague or the man in the pool. I hum my tune, blotting out the images as I shuffle with the wounded along duckboards through communication trenches: “… whiter than the snow … wash your dirty daughter … whiter than the snow, Holy Joe.”

I find the bantams two hours later. It is midday. They sit on the banks of a sunken lane behind the Ypres-Comines canal, silent, morose, exhausted. We are all black, filthy, pasted with drying mud. I sit down, rest my arms on my knees and my head on my arms. A light drizzle falls and it gets cold. I hear short exchanges of conversation. The bantams had a good day. One lot killed forty prisoners. It is their special pride that they kill everyone: the potent fury of small angry men. Tanqueray walks up and down checking who is missing. There is no sign of MacKanness. Stampe is alive and in a field hospital. Tanqueray rebukes me wrathfully and at length for losing my rifle. I hear his iron voice and a horrible fear invades me. Now Teague has gone and I am alone with the bantams. I do not have the strength to cope with them anymore. I know then that I have to run away.

I look up and offer my grimy face to the soft rain. I have had enough.

“Johnny? Good God, is that you, Johnny?”

I look round.

Standing there, tall, neat, in a staff captain’s uniform, is Donald Verulam.

VILLA LUXE, June 2, 1972

My God. The bantams. I used to have nightmares about them for years. Every time I went back to Scotland I was in a state of fearful suspense that I might run into my ex-comrades. Especially Tanqueray. I would go into pubs and have a good look round before I ordered a drink. I don’t know if he survived the war, but those bantams had a tenacious hold on life that was quite inhuman — given our species’ particular vulnerability. They were more like some sort of insect — silver lice or cockroaches, small tough well-armored beetles.

I will only say this about that terrible day in the Salient: it changed me forever. Not dramatically; in fact, at the time I thought it had left me mentally, as well as physically, unscathed. But it hadn’t. It had changed me forever. You can’t encounter such chaos and cruel absurdity on that scale and not have it affect your view of life. You never see anything else in quite the same way again.

This morning I moved my most comfortable chair from the poolside to the cliff edge. There’s a small pine tree there that casts good shade until about 11 A.M. I used to sit facing the pool, never out to sea, but now I don’t derive the same enjoyment, looking at it empty. Now, on my new perch, two hundred feet high, I have a superb view of the bay, and when it blows I can catch the breeze off the sea.

Below me the wide bay stretches out its arms, one long, one short. To the west, the long arm is a hilly promontory that in silhouette looks like a giant crocodile’s head half-submerged in the sea. You can quite clearly make out the twin bulges of its eyes, the long ramp of its jaw, the hump of its nostrils. I can see along its shoreline the new villas being constructed and the small public beach with its bright umbrellas, paddleboats and restaurant shack.

To the east is the other, short arm. A smaller promontory this, ended by an almost perfectly conical hill. Nestled into the corner this hill makes with the isthmus of land that joins it to the shore, is my beach. There’s not much sand. The beach is composed largely of mounds of dry seaweed, regularly washed up here by some persistent current. Beneath your bare feet it feels soft, like shreds of old newspaper, a yard thick. I haven’t been there for ages. There was no real need, while I had the pool. But now a sea bathe seems almost unbearably enticing. However, it can be reached only by an awkward twenty-minute walk down a winding path through steep pinewoods and along the cliff edge. And it takes me four times as long to return. These days I find such hikes a real effort.

What else can I tell you about my property — Eddie’s property? There is a small field to one side of the house, filled with fine blond grass and dry clumps of chamomile bushes. Along the cliff edge rosemary grows in profusion, like gorse. In the field too there are some bright-green carob trees, two or three dying olives and the huge pestilential fig, its lazy boughs propped up by wooden crutches. The pines planted round the house exude an opaque spunky sap. It builds up like candle wax on the trunks. The air is full of heady herby smells.

This morning as I sat on my new perch above the bay (I already refer to it mentally as the “lookout”), I watched a small motorboat putter out from the moorings by the public beach in my direction. It stopped almost below me. I went and fetched my binoculars.

It was Ulrike Günther. The boat was a small vivid-yellow four-seater with a powerful outboard motor, which Günther and his sons normally use for water-skiing. Ulrike was alone. She anchored the boat five or six yards from the cliff base and removed her T-shirt. She was wearing a dark heliotrope one-piece swimsuit. She fitted goggles, snorkle and a waistbag and dived in. She swam to the rocks and, as far as I could make out, started chipping away at them with a knife. She spent twenty minutes collecting specimens, then returned to the boat.

As she climbed onto it and stood upright, her body and costume glossy with water, wringing out her hair, I felt in my viscera a lightening, an invigorating airiness that I recognized, quite unmistakably, as lust.