The New Confessions

5 WOCC

Two weeks after that hellish day in the Salient, Donald and I were driven in his staff car into the muddy courtyard of a small farm near the Fifth Army HQ at Elverdinghe. An old woman looked impassively at us from the door of the farmhouse and did not acknowledge Donald’s cheery wave. Another motorcar, a clean Humber, was parked by a barn. A large pigsty, unused, and a storehouse made up the other two sides of the square.

“Home,” Donald said and showed me inside the barn.

The big room had been divided into two. One half contained a table and chairs, a dresser and a stove. On a window ledge stood a gleaming walnut wind-up Gramophone. In the other room were three iron beds, a vast wardrobe and numerous trunks and suitcases.

“I’m not far away,” Donald said. He was attached to the HQ staff and lived in a disused laundry at Château la Louvie. “The other two’ll be here before dark, I should say.” He smiled and handed me a key on a key ring.

“What’s this?”

“It’s for your motor. That’s it outside. All your equipment’s in the back. I’ll pop back tomorrow to see how you’re getting on.” He squeezed my shoulder. “You look quite your old self, Johnny.”

In late 1915 Donald Verulam had been transferred from his duties in the War Office to “Wellington House,” the secret propaganda department of the Foreign Office, to aid in the establishment of a systematic filming program of the war. Strange to relate, there had been no official filming or photography of the war at all during the first two years of its duration. Some independent film companies had sent cameramen out to the front, but they worked with French or Belgian forces as there was a complete ban on photography in the British sectors, such was the suspicions of the army staff. In 1915, the film trade, in the shape of the British Topical Committee for War Films, finally received permission to film from the War Office under the guidance of Wellington House. This somewhat ad hoc arrangement was reorganized in December 1916 when the War Office Cinema Committee was created. It appointed official cameramen and it became Donald’s job to supervise their activities in the field. He had also to ensure that the completed film survived its laborious journey from France to the developing and editing labs in London, from there to the Department of Information, thence back to France and the chief censor at general headquarters. Only then could the approved film be shown as a newsreel at home and abroad.

Donald had been in France and at work on this job since June 1917. He was in close contact with his immediate superior, John Buchan, at the Department of Information in London. Still highly cautious, GHQ had decreed that there were never to be more than three film cameramen at the front at any one time. It was my good fortune that one McMurdo had come down with pneumonia and had been returned home to convalesce three days before Donald and I met in that lane behind the Ypres-Comines canal.

I spent only one more day with the bantams before my new posting as official WOCC cameraman came through. I rested for a week in Bailleul before the necessary documentation was approved and authorized. I was deloused and consigned my old uniform to the incinerator. I drew new clothes from divisional stores: a shirt and tie, a well-cut jacket, creamy khaki jodhpurs, glossy lace-up riding boots, a short, waisted overcoat, a peaked cap, an ashplant stick. I became an “honorary” officer.

And so now I strolled around my new billet, enjoying the strict click of my boots on the cool flagged floor. The stove was lit; it was warm inside. Two colored calendars hung on the wall. The old woman came in with an armful of firewood and brewed up some coffee. Without asking, she fried me four eggs and served them up with bread and margarine. I ate them, drank the coffee and smoked a cigarette. My God, this was the life! A light rain had begun to fall, so I postponed the inspection of my motor. I looked at it through the windows and wondered if I would be able to drive it properly. Donald had elucidated the principles of motoring and it seemed simple enough. As well as pretending to be able to drive, it had been necessary — for Donald’s plan to work — that I also claim to be intimate with the operations of a moving film camera. He had shown me some of the films the WOCC had produced and we had spent a couple of afternoons practicing with the standard Aeroscope camera. It was more functional and robust than the alternative, a Moy-Bastie.

The Aeroscope looked like a small wooden attaché case with a rotating handle on one side and a hole in one end for the lens. A simple latched flap revealed its innards, and it was a relatively straightforward process to load and unload. It was not particularly heavy to carry on its own, but its tripod was a real burden. Sometimes, Donald told me, film cameramen could persuade battalions or companies that were being filmed to provide an orderly to lug equipment about, but most of the time we would have to carry it ourselves.

This was the most onerous aspect of what was otherwise to be a most pleasant existence. Indeed, after the bantams it was like some paradisiacal reverie. We dressed as officers — notional second lieutenants — but we wore no rank or unit badges and carried no weapons. The old lady in the farm was paid (by the WOCC) to cook and care for us, and, twice a week, rations and fuel were delivered from the divisional QM stores. Our most important document was our pass. This allowed us access to all parts of the front and required individual commanders to facilitate us in every possible way. One would drive to a chosen area, present oneself to the adjutant, or whoever was orderly officer, inform him of what one wanted to film and set about it. According to Donald, the prospect of having a moving film made of the unit was irresistible. All doors were opened.

I had learned all this during the two days I had spent with Donald in Bailleul. There was no embarrassment between us, I am glad to report. No mention was made of that hideous walk in the countryside around Charlbury. I even managed to ask after Faye without blushing. Donald was his usual courteous, caring self. I was the one who had changed. It was only just over a year since we had last seen each other, but the experiences I had lived through had transformed me from passionate, foolish schoolboy into a numb, prematurely disillusioned adult. I did not go into details about that last day with Teague and the attack on the mythical crossroads at S—, but Donald had clearly guessed from the state I was in that I could not have taken much more.

Anyway, such is the natural resilience of my character that I found I was no longer brooding on my unpleasant experience with the bantams but was instead relishing the comforts I now found myself surrounded by. I visited the latrine (it was blissful not to be constipated, the fixture of trench life); I poured myself another cup of coffee. Then I heard a motorcar arrive.

The first of my colleagues to return was Harold Faithfull — the celebrated Harold Faithfull. He had been one of the first film photographers on the Western Front, arriving just after the Battle of the Somme in 1916. His greatest moment had come with the attack on Messines Ridge a year later. Faithfull had been there and — by sheer luck, I am sure — had managed to record the explosion of one of the massive mines beneath the ridge. The resulting fifty-minute film, The Battle of Messines (Donald had shown it to me at Bailleul), had played to packed cinemas in Britain and America for over three months. Faithfull received all the plaudits (although I now know for a fact that it was also the work of one, if not two, other cinematographers); he delivered many lectures and he had just published a book—How I Film War and Battle—which was, Donald said, selling extremely well.

Faithfull greeted me in an affable and only marginally condescending manner — Donald had forewarned him of my arrival — but I instinctively disliked him. He was in his mid-twenties, and had a handsome, plump face and fine, thinning fair hair. His voice was surprisingly deep, full of sage gravitas. I was sure this was an affectation of maturity. The problem was that, to me, Faithfull reeked of deceit. I confess that at this stage my conclusion was based solely on prejudice (I am prepared to admit to some jealousy — already I envied his success with The Battle of Messines), but in spite of that there was something too glib about the man. He was always too conscious of himself and of the impression he was creating on others — an infallible sign of the vain and the fraudulent.

He was soon joined by his crony Almyr Nelson, which completed our number. Nelson was an official stills photographer. He was known as “Baby” Nelson, possibly because of his curly light-brown hair. However, I could never bring myself to call him this. With Nelson I was on safer ground professionally, and I used to talk technical matters with him, preferably in Faithfull’s hearing. Faithfull was suspicious of me and how I came to be in the WOCC unit — the most elite unit in the British Army, as he dubbed it. I had not been an avid cinemagoer before the war and my few hours of instruction on the Aeroscope would not stand much interrogation. So whenever the subject turned to the subject of moving films I steered the conversation into general areas — composition, portraiture, the merits of the posed shot against the natural — and no one, I think, guessed at my real ignorance. Faithfull possessed some wily intelligence. Nelson was more agreeable, but as far as brains were concerned, he was — as Sergeant Tanqueray would have phrased it—“as thick as shit in a bottle.”

A routine soon established itself. Donald would arrive every other day with a list of potential subjects that the WOCC considered to be newsworthy or of propaganda value. Faithfull had first choice (he was very keen on visiting dignitaries — he claimed he had filmed the visits to the front of two kings, three prime ministers and entire cabinets of politicians) and would set off after a leisurely breakfast, often accompanied by Nelson. Frequently, they stayed away the night. Faithfull seemed to receive a warm welcome at every regimental mess. Since The Battle of Messines he had become a celebrity. All his new films were very boring.

At the outset, Donald set me to work on a series entitled Great British Regiments, a simple enough job with the advantage that it allowed me to master the Aeroscope. I filmed a battalion of the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, receiving victuals at a field kitchen, playing football, listening to a singsong and marching up to the front along a road lined with shattered poplars. I shot four reels of film and sent it off to London, where some nameless editor in the Topical Film Company’s labs in Camden Town cut it up and patched it together.

A week later it was back, passed by the censor, and we showed it to the KOYLI colonel and his officers in their battalion reserve billets.

I will never forget that evening. It was in November. We drove over at dusk. There was some sleet in the air melting like spit on the windscreen. A “stunt” was on and a battery of sixty-pounders in a field a mile away fired throughout our visit. We had a drink in the officers’ mess and then went into a barn where a sheet had been tacked to a wall. I rigged up the projector and started the portable generator; the beam flickered, then sat — shivering slightly but true square — on the makeshift screen.

I can bring it all back. The faint frowsty smell of old hay, the fragrant reek of pipe tobacco, the thrum of the generator, the rolling boom of the guns, the laughter and comments of the officers, the lanterns turned down, plump with oily light.

GREAT BRITISH REGIMENTS NO. 23

THE KING’S OWN YORKSHIRE LIGHT INFANTRY

No other name, no credits (no sound, of course), but it was mine. The opening monochrome shot of smiling marching men waving at the camera (I had been vainly shouting, “Don’t wave! Don’t look at the camera!”), then the inept jocularity of some War Office copywriter … I watched it all pass before me, entranced. I cannot say I was in the grip of some artistic or aesthetic visitation; my mood was rather — what? — proprietorial. This was mine. John James Todd fecit. Donald stood beside me puffing on his pipe, and I thought back to that day on the train from Barnton when he had held me at the window and I had taken my first photograph, “Houses at Speed.” I felt a rush of affection for him and his constant generosity to me.

There was loud, delighted applause at the end of the film. We returned to the mess for more drinks and much flattering appreciation was expressed. My first audience, my first acclaim. I felt enfolded in a radiant cloud of happiness and innocent pride.

I drove back with Donald, the two silver film canisters warm in my lap.

“Jolly good,” Donald said. “Inniskilling Fusiliers the day after tomorrow.”

But I was not listening. “I wonder why,” I said, “they didn’t use that shot of the sergeant major in shirtsleeves — you know, feeding jam to his pet squirrel.… It was far and away the best.”

Prophetic words. Prophetic complaint. I knew then that what I wanted was control, total control. And it is from that moment — and not those first hesitant turnings of the Aeroscope’s handle one morning in a village street on the Abeele-Poperinghe road — that I date the start of my career, my vocation, my work, my downfall.

In the next two weeks I filmed the Inniskilling Fusiliers and the Ox and Bucks. Light Infantry. The finished films were virtually indistinguishable from the first. But all the while I was shooting them, an idea was slowly forming in my mind. I decided, quite independently, to make my own film, one that was not just an assembly of loosely related fragments, but that had a distinct shape and form, that told a story. I think the title came to me almost before anything else: Aftermath of Battle. Already I could see it on advertisement posters, on marquees above cinemas. This would be a film true to a soldier’s experience of battle, an experience that the director himself had undergone.

From what Donald had shown me of WOCC material at Bailleul it was clear that most films of offensives dealt extensively with the buildup to an attack. This was followed by a few shots of men leaving the trenches and, if you were lucky, a long view of the enemy trenches under fire. There was a final collage of glum German prisoners and smiling walking wounded at casualty-clearing stations. The implicit message was that stalwart fortitude was the route to ultimate victory. The film I had in mind would be quite different.

I was not entirely candid about my ambitions with Donald. I suspected he would gently chide me for overreaching myself, running before I could walk. I told him only that I wanted to drop Great British Regiments and see if I could convey something more interesting about the immense range of activity that went on behind the lines. He happily gave me permission to proceed.

One morning I left the farm well before dawn and drove up to the northern sector of the Salient. I went to the battalion HQ of the 107th Canadian Pioneers and was given permission to film one of its wiring parties coming out of the line. A sleepy orderly led me along a duckboard track to the mouth of a communication trench. I set up my tripod, mounted my Aeroscope on top and waited.

At about half past six the men appeared. There was just enough light. I filmed their exhausted, haggard faces as they filed past me, barely glancing at the camera. Some were wounded and leaned on other men for support. Stretcher-bearers ferried out the gravely injured and three dead bodies.

With the orderly carrying the tripod, I ran down the duckboard track and overtook the shambling pioneers. I set up again on the far bank of the canal by a pontoon bridge over the canal. Wisps of mist rose from the torpid brown water. The men tramped across the bridge; the pontoons dipped; ripples expanded through their bending reflections; some early sun lit the water.

Later that morning I filmed them brewing tea and frying bread and corned beef. I took long, long close-ups as they gazed without expression into the lens. My last shot was of them sleeping, huddled in bivouac sheets, still as corpses.

Then I cut to real corpses, two days later in a graveyard near a field hospital. I had the Aeroscope focused on half a dozen bodies and then directed the burial party to step into frame and dump the contents of their stretchers beside them. Later too I filmed the bizarre, inflexible faces of a Chinese labor battalion digging graves for dead Europeans. Then I caught the unhappy faces of the teenage boys in the burial party pulling on long rubber gloves before hefting the dead into their narrow holes.

In my naïveté I proceeded to film more or less chronologically, shooting scenes in the order I wished them to appear, and in this way, over the next week I put together my film, with an absolute, almost uncanny confidence in the shape it was acquiring, absolutely sure of its effectiveness. I filmed an officer writing letters to next of kin, nurses bandaging wounds, carpenters making wooden crosses, amputees receiving their new crutches, piles of bloodstained uniforms being incinerated and the calm, silent, sunlit rooms of the moribund wards at a base hospital. The final image was the classic one: fresh troops marching up to the front, grinning, waving their tin hats at the camera.

I wrote no script or outline for Aftermath of Battle, but I had as clear a conception of its form as if it were all neatly plotted and laid out before me on paper. My next problem was how to ensure it was edited in the way I desired. I asked Faithfull how to resolve this problem.

“You’ve got this little chap back in Islington or Clerkenwell, see, editing miles of newsreel a week, bored stiff, mind on the pint of ale he’s going to have at lunchtime, but he’s got to stick all this stuff together. He’d be delighted if you’d help him out. Write it all down for him — words of one syllable, mind — and make sure you’ve numbered your reels properly. Does it need captions?”

“No. I don’t think so.”

“No captions?” He frowned at me. “Even simpler.… What are you up to, Todd?”

“Oh, just ‘behind the lines’ stuff.”

“I see.… Mmmm. Well, I’m going to put on a cigarette, I think. What about you? Chuck the tin over, Baby, there’s a good fellow.”

Two interesting encounters occurred while I was filming Aftermath. First of all I met Teague again in the base hospital at St.-Omer. I had set up my camera in a moribund ward and shot my film. Then it suddenly struck me that Dagmar might conceivably be working in the place and I went in search of a matron to find out. I found her in another ward full of heavily bandaged men — burn cases. She informed me that she knew of no Dagmar Fjermeros on the nursing staff, and as I turned to go I heard a voice from one of the beds.

“Hodd! Hodd!” it sounded like.

The top half of Teague’s head was covered in a moist gauze bandage, thick with ointment, from which one wet, red eye peered. In place of his top lip there was a cotton-wool moustache soaked in some camphor-smelling lotion. I felt my own head begin to ache in sympathy. Both his legs ended at the knee, the blanket tented by a basketwork support. We shook hands gently, left-handed — his right was bandaged, a round white fist.

I had never really liked Teague, but now I felt genuinely glad to see him. After all, we had shared most of that ghastly day. We talked of this and that — I explained my new job and uniform. As I looked at him, shattered and wasted, I sensed a sort of tickle in my brain, irresistible, like a cerebral sneeze forming.

I tried to resist it. “I reported those swine in the tank, you know, but I’m not sure if anything happened.” I paused. “How are you, all things considered?”

“All right, I suppose. Going to look a bit peculiar, though. Not much left to work with. At least I’ve got an eye.”

I had to ask. “How do you feel about it all — now?”

“Wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”

“Seriously?” The skepticism in my voice made it go up a register. “Sorry,” I added. “It’s just I never expected you to say that.”

“It’s a risk you take and a price you have to pay. At least I’m still alive.”

I don’t believe you, I said to myself. But I suppose you have to try and think like that. If you thought anything else, you’d go mad. Look at Kite, I thought; he cracked up and he only lost a hand. I’d be like that, like Kite, bitter and angry, full of resentment …

I filmed Teague later. I thought it might cheer him up. We had him being pushed in a wheelchair towards a camera down the length of a long airless corridor, passing through shafts of autumn sunlight.

The second meeting was less eventful, but curiously more significant for me. The officer whom I had filmed writing letters to next of kin was in fact Captain Tuck. The 13th had been re-formed, rumors of a transfer to the Italian Front had proved ungrounded and the battalion was back in its usual role of furnishing working parties for the artillery. There were very few faces I recognized.

After Tuck had obliged me with a few scribbles and a suitably somber face — he needed no persuading; the Aeroscope was an infallible seductress — he walked me back to my motorcar.

“Half a mo,” he said. “There’s someone you should meet before you’re off.”

He led me round behind a cowshed to where the field kitchens were situated. On the ground, gnawing a bone, was Ralph, the dog. He got slowly to his feet and wandered over to Tuck. He was hugely fat.

“Quartermaster spoils him rather.”

I clicked my fingers. “Here, Ralph. Here, boy.”

The dog did not budge. He looked at me, yawned and licked his chops.

“Doesn’t remember you,” Tuck said. “Strange.”

I felt my heart thump with joy and relief. “It always was a rather stupid animal,” I said, and walked elatedly back to my motor. I never saw Ralph again.

“They’ve censored it,” Donald Verulam said. He looked serious.

‘What?’

“Aftermath of Battle.”

“No! Damn.… Which bits?”

“The entire film. The whole thing. The chief censor is furious. You’re lucky you’re not cashiered. I had to tell him it was some sort of ghastly blunder. Fragments inadvertantly edited together. It won’t really wash. He wasn’t convinced.”

I swallowed. “Where is it?”

“I’ve got it back.”

“Thank God!” I paused. “What do you think about it?”

He looked at me and gave a thin smile.

“Well … it’s strong stuff. A bit grim and morbid for my taste. But I’m sure we can use bits of it. The early sections are good. We could cut them into Faithfull’s film.” He looked at me. “I wish you’d told me you were doing this, Johnny.”

“What’s Faithfull’s film?”

“It’s called Ypres, or possibly Wipers. We need another battle film like Messines. Another Harold Faithfull battle film. Not yours.”

I thought quickly. “Donald, will you give the film back to me? I’ll tinker with it. Film some more scenes. Change its tone.”

We argued for a while but I knew he would give in eventually. I saw a miraculous opportunity ahead of me. The decision of the chief censor was a minor impediment. What I would do next would force him to change his mind.

I retrieved Aftermath and ran it privately for myself several times when Faithfull and Nelson were away. As I plotted what to do next I saw that the merits of the film were clear: this was true; this was what really happened after a battle. Whatever I did next, I should not forget that fact. Unconsciously I was formulating a credo that would inform all my work. The truth was what mattered, unflinching verisimilitude. This was what made my film so different from all the others and this was what had to apply in the future.

One morning in the farmhouse, Nelson and I were breakfasting when an orderly runner arrived with instructions from Donald that I take some extra reels of film to Faithfull as quickly as possible.

“You take them to him,” I said to Nelson. “I don’t know where he is.”

“No can do, old chap. I’ve got Marshal Foch handing out medals at noon. I can’t go all the way to Étaples.”

“Étaples? What’s he doing there?”

“Making his film.”

With bad grace I motored off to Étaples. I arrived there about eleven o’clock. Ahead of me lay the town and, from the crest of this hill, a distant gray glimpse of the Channel. Nelson’s directions led me to a camp — a vast trampled field enclosed by a wire perimeter fence. Inside were row upon row of tents and a dusty parade ground upon which squads of men were being drilled.

I had no difficulty finding Faithfull — everyone seemed to know of the film — and I was directed along a track leading towards the rifle butts. As I approached I could hear the noise of firing and other explosions. I stopped the motor and, lugging my reels of film in a couple of sandbags, went in search of the famous cameraman.

As I arrived everything went quiet. I passed two companies of men, standing easy. Ahead of me were gentle grassy hills and a hundred-yard section of immaculate trench — revetted, zigzagged, with precisely angled firebays, clean sandbags and taut wire in front. It reminded me strongly of Nieuport.

Faithfull was in the trench, camera pointed at a platoon of men with fixed bayonets.

“Ah, Todd, thank God you’ve come. I’m down to my last two reels.” He introduced me to a couple of beaming officers, then ran about conferring with various men and checking details in his notebook.

“What’s going on?” I said.

“This is the rifle brigade attacking Glencorse Wood in August … something like that,” Faithfull said. He turned. “Captain Frearson? Smoke now, please.” He crouched behind his camera. “Remember your numbers, you men! Ready when you are, Lieutenant Hobday.… Smoke, Captain Frearson.”

Faithfull started turning the handle of his Aeroscope. A small smoke canister was lit and white smoke began to drift over the top of the trench. Lieutenant Hobday stepped forward and blew his whistle—“Don’t look at the camera, Hobday!”—and the platoon went smartly up the trench ladders.

“One! Two!” Faithfull shouted. Two men flung up their arms and fell back. Hobday stood on the parapet, revolver drawn, and waved his men over the top.

“Three!” Faithfull yelled. “Three! Damn you!” Number three buckled and fell.

“Don’t move!” Faithfull bawled. “Absolutely still!” The dead men remained immobile while the rest of the platoon deployed and advanced in extended order through the uncoiling smoke, rifles waist high.

I stayed on long enough to see Faithfull mount the “attack of the second wave.” Here he used his two companies of men, much more smoke and plenty of explosive charges. I had to concede that the battle was efficiently stage-managed. My most grudging admiration was reserved for his final ploy, when two men held up a tangle of barbed wire in front of his camera as he filmed the backs of the advancing men. I had covertly read How I Film War and Battle and could imagine Faithfull’s caption to the scene: “From a shell hole in no-man’s-land I film the second wave attacking Glencorse Wood under heavy fire.”

By this time I had removed myself some distance away. At first I felt a hot, angry incredulity at Faithfull’s reconstruction and — I can think of no other way of expressing it — a sense of moral and aesthetic outrage. I knew how soon Faithfull’s simple, tidy version of the attack on Glencorse Wood would come to stand for the enormous chaotic horror of the real thing. It was not so much the gap between the film and the reality that offended me as the shock I felt when I saw how easy it was to falsify the truth. Only people who had actually fought in the trenches would recognize the grotesque fallacy of what Faithfull was producing — a tiny minority, whose protesting voices, in time, would dwindle and fade. But seeing Faithfull at work on Wipers, observing both the scale of the enterprise and its blatant factitiousness, had shown me what to do with Aftermath. The WOCC needed a battle film — well, they should have mine, and it would expose Faithfull and his film for the tawdry impostures that they were.

As it now stood, Aftermath of Battle was twenty-two minutes long. What I now planned to do was film an actual battle sequence of ten or fifteen minutes’ duration that would act as a sort of prologue. It would not only alter the tone of the existing sequences, it would justify them. I could not be accused of “morbidity” in Aftermath if I had shown in all its raw potency just what had gone before.

It meant too, I realized, a return to the front line, but now, for some reason, I seemed to have lost all my fear and apprehension at this prospect. I became wholly absorbed in the task in hand. I was going to film battle sequences that would make Wipers look like a stroll in the park.

And for this to happen I required above all more mobility. I wanted battle sequences unlike anything else that had appeared in WOCC newsreels. In a field near the farm I practiced filming with the Aeroscope balanced on my shoulder. I ran, cranking the handle as best I could from side to side. A tin of these experiments was returned to me marked “defective,” as indeed they were. I could not turn the handle at the requisite speed to ensure proper exposure. I would be obliged to use the camera from a static base. ^*

I made my plans carefully over a period of two weeks. I was still supplying film for the WOCC, but I cannot recall what I shot at the time — it is of no interest, in any event (though sometimes in old newsreels I experience a spasm of recognition when I see, say, an ammunition limber stuck in the mud, or a line of gassed men at a clearing station). All my attention was now focused on my battle film.

I was still misleading Donald, I am sorry to say. I told him I had broken my tripod and I needed another. Duly provided with one, I cut its legs down to a length of eighteen inches. This way I could attach the Aeroscope to the tripod and carry them both together (they were heavy but manageable), and thus set them down and instantly begin filming from the necessary fixed and static base. The angle of all shots would be low, but this disadvantage would be outweighed by the stunning immediacy of the action.

The next task was to find a unit that would let me go forward with the advancing troops into no-man’s-land. This had never been allowed — or suggested — before. Faithfull boasted that scenes in The Battle of Messines had been filmed from shell holes in front of our line, but this was a lie. His barbed wire trick more than confirmed this.

After some thought I attached myself to an Australian battalion. They were in reserve at Reningelst, relatively fresh and expecting to be sent forward at any time. It was the beginning of October and the final assaults on the ruined villages of Poelkapelle and Passchendaele were imminent. (I had no idea of this at the time. My impression of the Third Battle of Ypres was extremely shadowy. It seemed merely that the fighting and shelling had been going on, with a few pauses and lulls for weeks and weeks. It was true to say that at any given moment somewhere in the Salient somebody was under fire.)

I picked the Australians because their discipline was lax and easygoing. They did not salute their officers and on several occasions I had heard enlisted men swear openly and vilely at officers in English regiments. To ingratiate myself, I filmed them for a few days at their usual rest-area chores and diversions and got to know their officers, particularly a young company commander called Colenso — a decent man, small-faced but with strangely large nostrils, which gave him a look of always being about to laugh or sneeze. The weather at the time was miserably cold and wet, with driving rain and gusting winds. At the correct moment I asked the adjutant if I could accompany them to the front when the order came. He was delighted.

On the tenth or eleventh of October I was informed that the Australians had gone up the line to relieve a battalion of the East Lancs on the Bellevue Ridge. Directions were provided and I went up to join them at dusk that night.

I remember my emotions on my return to the front with vivid clarity. I drove into Ypres and parked my motor in the lee of a ruined church, close to the transport lines of a Service Corps unit. Then I walked, carrying my Aeroscope on its short tripod, up the Ypres-Zonnebecke road. The light was fading and with the onset of darkness the traffic on the road increased. There was no sunset worth talking about. I walked east with an unwholesome sallow glow at my back. Apart from my camera, I was lightly burdened. I had a small haversack containing four rolls of film, a pack of fish paste sandwiches, two bars of chocolate, some malted milk tablets and two hundred Three Castles cigarettes — about a couple of days’ supply for me then. I had a gas respirator in a leather case and a water bottle containing three parts Scotch whisky to one part water. I wore my double-breasted greatcoat and had exchanged my lace-up boots for a pair of thigh-length rubber waders. I had gloves, a scarf and a tin helmet.

In that sulfurous light, the Ypres-Zonnebecke road looked a drab and dismal place. On either side were gun batteries, with their usual litter scattered about. Here and there were supply dumps, here and there apprehensive groups of men lying on bivouac sheets waiting for orders. From time to time an exploratory shell would come over from the German lines and throw up a shower of mud. I walked on, past the occasional shattered bole of a tree. Thankfully, it was too gloomy to see much of the corpses. They were in the process of becoming part of the ground and had a vegetable or tuberous look to them, some fungoid growth or boletaceous excrescence. White tapes marked where the road had once been. It was muddy — say three inches deep — but beneath it one had a firm footing.

At Zonnebecke, captured a few days previously, I left the road at what I took to be the correct point and followed a winding duckboard path through the flattened rubble of ruined houses, and then across what had once been fields. (What was it like? You know those corners of farmyards, or gateways to fields, where farm vehicles or herds of cattle have passed endlessly? It was like that, for mile after mile, with here and there the glimmer of water in the deep pools of the shell craters.) Ration parties were beginning to move now that it was safer, and relief troops were being brought up as replacements. Squally showers of rain bothered us as we picked our way through the dark.

By a fritter of bricks I came across a large taped area that had been a jumping-off point two days earlier. I was on the right track. To the left was the shape of an old German blockhouse. It was unusual to see something solid and hard amidst so much soft organic fluidity. This was the Australians’ battalion HQ.

I stayed there, getting a little sleep, until a runner took me up to the front line at four in the morning. There were no trenches. The Australians occupied a linked sequence of shell-hole rims and spade scrapes lined with a few sodden sandbags. I found Lieutenant Colenso and his company and explained my plan.

The barrage began at five-fifteen. I slithered out of my shell hole and crawled some twenty or thirty yards ahead into no-man’s-land with the Aeroscope strapped to my back. My ears were stuffed with cotton wool. The noise of the shells bursting on the obliterated village somewhere in front of me was reduced to a dull manic roar. I moved with pedantic slowness in almost total gloom, feeling ahead of me with my fingers gauging the texture of the mud. After about twenty minutes I found a suitable hole, crawled carefully into it, found that the water in its base was only a foot deep and set up my camera — pointing back at our line.

At six o’clock, in a tarnished silver light, through the clamor of the barrage I heard the whistles blow and started filming. Through the lens I saw the men of Lieutenant Colenso’s company get to their feet with a geriatric sloth and squelch through the mud towards me. No one attempted the impossible task of running. Machine-gun fire from the German strongpoints in the village began and a few men fell over. They did not collapse histrionically like the men in Faithfull’s film. Most stopped abruptly, sank slowly to their knees and fell forward, dead, their heads resting on the ground like Muhammadans at prayer. The semblance of a line broke and people started slogging forward independently as best they could from cover to cover. A dozen men splashed my hole. I picked up the Aeroscope and waded across the crater to the opposite lip. Here my truncated tripod served its purpose perfectly. Normally it takes five minutes to dismantle and set up, but now I was filming again within seconds. Turning the handle I peered through the lens at the dark soldiers stumbling forward. I panoramed slowly right to left, left to right. Little men moving with almost drugged slowness, some upright, some crouched, some dropping down. An irregular flattish skyline, some puffs of white smoke. Here was battle. It was the best and most authentic battle sequence filmed in the entire First World War — search your archives for something superior; it was inglorious, entirely chaotic and, if it had not been true, incomprehensibly and indisputably dull.

Shortly after that I stopped filming. The handle of my Aeroscope was knocked off by a shell fragment. I received a second injury to add to that of Somerville-Start’s tooth — a deep gash on the side of my hand. I wrapped a handkerchief round it and lugged the camera back to the line. But for this damage I would have filmed the second wave going over. As it was I made my way back to the battalion HQ blockhouse, caught my breath, drank some whiskey, smoked half a dozen cigarettes and generally composed myself before attempting the risky journey back to Ypres.

I sent the new footage and the twenty-two minutes of Aftermath back to the Topical Film lab in Camden Town with precise instructions on how they were to be cut together. I told Donald that I had made significant alterations to the film and predicted that as it now stood there could be no possible objection from the chief censor.

Ten days later, one evening, I came back to the farmhouse to find Donald waiting for me.

“Is it back?”

“Yes.”

“Well? What d’you think?”

“I think it’s splendid. Extraordinary piece of work.”

I felt pleasure drain through me.

“I’ve been ordered to destroy it.”

His face was taut, somehow both sad and stern. He spent a long time filling his pipe. Then he told me the rest of the news. Only with the greatest of difficulty had he been able to prevent me from being sent back to the 13th. He had pleaded my youth and implied that I had been embittered by my own experiences of battle in the Salient, and that for me the film was a kind of expiation. Eventually, the chief censor had yielded somewhat. However, my pass was withdrawn. I was not to be allowed within one mile of the front line. All filming was to be vetted and supervised by Donald and must be strictly noncontroversial. Any more “seditious” film (the censor’s word) and I would be court-martialed and disciplined.

“So what do I do?” I asked, bitterly. “Great British Regiments?”

“Out of the question. I can offer you the Army Veterinary Corps, or a balloon unit of the Signals regiment.”

Animals or balloons? I chose balloons.

Then I apologized sincerely to Donald. He accepted it and warned me that one more error would be impossible for him to cover up.

“By the way,” he shouted as he drove out of the courtyard, “I’ve left something in the back of your motor.”

I walked over and looked in the boot. A sandbag filled with a cylindrical object. I looked — six silver film canisters. I felt my heart suddenly open to Donald, like a book. There was one copy of Aftermath of Battle extant in the world after all.

Faithfull and Nelson had learned of my misdemeanor and that the censor’s office at GHQ regarded me as highly suspect. Their manner towards me grew distinctly cooler, Faithfull’s in particular. I think he sensed I had been trying to outdo his Wipers film. I was suspicious of his motives now, and hid the canisters of Aftermath separately about my kit.

On the tenth of November, Passchendaele Ridge was finally captured and the Third Battle of Ypres was officially over, 156 days after it had begun with Faithfull’s mines (as I always thought of them) erupting under Messines Ridge, back in early summer.

I was, as ever, unaware of this a few days later as I stood in a sodden field behind Ypres watching the observers unroll and inflate their silvered canvas balloon. I did not resent my new assignment as much as I had anticipated. My balloon film Eyes in the Sky was almost complete. I filmed the balloon inflating, watching the bloated fish shape emerge and, with a billowy stirring, rise to the extent of its fore and aft tethers, until the roomy wicker basket slung beneath it just cleared the ground. The observers donned their parachutes and binoculars, connected their telephone lines and climbed in. With surprising speed the balloon rose up in the air to a height of round about a thousand feet.

I had everything I needed. I sat and drank tea with the winch operators, huddling in the lee of the lorry, sheltering from a keen wind that was blowing from the west. Our balloon was spotting for a sixteen-gun brigade of six-inch howitzers a quarter of a mile away in a ruined village. Every ten minutes or so we could hear the loud, drawn-out rip of the cannonade.

After a while the guns stopped firing and the balloon was winched down. We brewed up and had a surprisingly tasty lunch of corned beef fritters and MacConnachie stew, cooked over a Primus stove. We sat and chatted, glancing from time to time at the balloon as it twitched and shrugged at its moorings.

I do not know what prompted me, but suddenly I asked, “Do you think I could pop up for five minutes with my camera? Not too high — just to get an artillery observer’s view of the world.”

This was applauded as a marvelous notion by the observers. In truth, I was not thinking of Eyes in the Sky. I knew that here I would have my perfect opening shot for Aftermath of Battle.

I climbed into the creaking wicker basket and set up the Aeroscope on its tripod, which was lashed to the side. The simple operation of the field telephone was explained. I was offered a parachute and declined. I assured them I had no intention of jumping out. Soon all was ready. The mooring ropes were slipped and the balloon rose slowly up into the air.

For the first hundred feet or so I felt sensations of alarm, giddiness and faint nausea. I looked at the shrinking field where I had had my lunch, down the vertiginous arc of the balloon cable, watching the lorry, the crew, my motorcar diminish in size. Over to the left was the battery surrounded by its usual mess. So this is what a bird sees, I thought naively, as the countryside was revealed to me like a map. The roads, the farms, the dumps, the billets, the motor pools and transport lines, the fields and copses … From the air everything looked neater, had a context revealed that a ground view denied one. That bend in the road suddenly had a purpose — to avoid a stream. The jumble of shattered houses revealed the grid of streets and alleyways upon which they had been built. That distant straggle of trees edged a canal.… The banality of these observations only strikes the modern eye. This was the first time I could look down on the world from above. For me it was a kind of revelation, and never more so than when the front came into view.

At first glance it was like a vast path, stamped across Europe. I imagined a six-hundred-mile thoroughfare for giants trudging from the Alps to the North Sea. On either side, drab green wintry landscape bisected by this brown swathe stretched back into the haze of distance. I was astonished at just how localized it was. In the Salient the whole universe seemed brown and mired. Up here you realized just how thin that mud world was.

The green countryside browned gradually. There was a kind of bruised and trampled verge before the vermiculated lines of the old trench systems appeared — bay and traverse, bay and traverse — and beyond them the erratic spoor of duckboard and fascine tracks across the mud, the pools in the craters flat and opaque like pennies. From this range I could not see any men, but I knew they were down there, in their hundreds of thousands, hiding. It seemed like such a miserable attenuated strip of land to be fighting over, to have fought over for three years.… A smear across the countryside. A giant snail, leaving its slime track across Europe. A messy point of impact between two colliding forces.

Different horizons, I thought cranking the handle of the Aeroscope, different perspectives. I felt a curious privilege about having been allowed to witness both: exalted and abased. I swung my camera along the enormous furrow. What an opening shot, I thought; what a vision for my film. The godlike view. And then the scrabbling, squabbling mortals in the mud pools.

I heard a strange noise, like pam pam pamperipam pam. I looked round. A small airplane was flying towards me through a cloud of black dust smudges. What happened next is hard to reconstruct. I retain certain distinct images. First, the airplane seemed to be flying so slowly. A puff of black dust would from time to time knock it comically off course. I felt a tug as the winch began to haul the balloon down. Then I remember an almost human gasp coming from the balloon itself. The field telephone started buzzing, and as I reached automatically, chunks of wicker basket seemed to explode in the air around me. Then a great lurch, a tumbling in the pit of my stomach as the balloon and its basket soared up and away suddenly free. I hung on tenaciously as we swayed wildly to and fro. I caught a mad glimpse of Ypres turned on its side and then I was in the clouds — gray, damp, enfolding.

The clouds saved me, I suppose, and the fact that the wire cable had been fortuitously severed by a bullet or bullets from the airplane’s guns. I floated in those clouds for three or four minutes, I would guess. When I descended from them I was above placid green countryside. Then I remembered the keen west wind and, with a jolting heart, looked about me. Behind, retreating, was the brown stripe of the Western Front. Below was occupied Belgium.

VILLA LUXE, June 10, 1972

Emilia brings me my salad. How old is she? I wonder. She’s worked for me for two years now. Her predecessor was an ancient crone who was eventually done for by sheer decrepitude. Emilia has five children and eleven grandchildren. Her youngest child is twenty-four, and yet she doesn’t look much more than fifty. It’s quite possible; girls often are married and bearing children at sixteen on this island.…

Emilia has thick, curly chestnut hair shot with gray. She has a dark, strong and well-proportioned face and a lot of gold in her teeth. She exudes a mild but freshly acidic body odor. She is broad-hipped and agile. Drives her little motorbike with élan. Covertly, as she places the salad before me, I examine the loose pale green folds of her faded green dress and try to estimate the size of her breasts.…

Why am I doing this? What’s happening to me? For two years we have been fixed in an ideal, polite, respectful employer-employee relationship. I ruminate on a lettuce leaf. It was my spying on Ulrike that did it. And my dormant vanity was flattered by the obvious way the twins sought me out in the bar.

I watch Emilia saunter back to the kitchen. Heaven help me but I have a sudden powerful desire to spank her naked buttocks. Not hard, just in fun.… I have an image of Emilia across my lap. Those big pale buttocks, that deep dark cleft. Lots of joyous laughter.

This is quite bizarre! I have never had this fantasy before. What’s going on? But, I remember. That isn’t true. I have had these desires. In 1929, with … I can’t believe it. Good God, these things never leave you. After all these years, who would have thought it?

I get up and wander round, a palpable old man’s erection beneath my trousers. How am I ever going to see her naked?

Off the kitchen there is a room where Emilia keeps the ironing board, brushes and the various tools and cleaning materials she requires for the housework. There is also a small WC for her personal use.

When she leaves, I go and investigate. There is a window, bolted and shuttered. If I drilled a tiny hole through the frame at the precise angle, I might just be able to see her as she raises her skirts to sit on the pan.

Five minutes’ search of the villa’s cupboards reveals a perfectly servicible hand-powered drill.

* Note for film historians: I want to record this as the first use of a hand-held camera for deliberate dramatic effect.