The Thing Itself

ONE

Twenty years earlier

August 1914, and I was upstairs on the front seat of a London double-decker bus a few yards behind a Waring and Gillow pantechnicon. We should have been on Oxford Street but we were jostling along a cobbled road in northern France, lined by cheering peasants throwing flowers.

In the narrow seats behind me in the scarlet bus, tired soldiers dozed on each other’s shoulders. I didn’t have a shoulder to sleep on but I couldn’t sleep anyway, despite my exhaustion.

In the past week 80,000 of us — the British Expeditionary Force — had been mobilized and shipped over to fight the Bosch. A year earlier I’d lied about my age to enlist. In a couple of years other men would be lying about their ages to get out. But for the time being everyone was gung-ho and keen to get at the Hun, who was bayoneting Belgian babies and raping nuns and Red Cross nurses.

I’d been infected by Rudyard Kipling. Until 1910 I’d been at preparatory school in Rottingdean, outside Brighton, with his son Jack. Jack got a good-natured ribbing every May when we had to memorize and recite his father’s poem, Children’s Song, about our duty to the Empire. Personally, I believed the sentiments.

I liked Jack. We’d started chatting first when he’d seen me reading City of Dreadful Night and thought it was his father’s Indian story with the same title. We’d lost touch but I’d heard Jack had tried to get into the war in 1914 — his father had pushed him forward — but he was as blind as a bat so would be useless in battle.

Not that I’d had battle experience. I was wet behind the ears. Even so, I was a professional soldier, a Tommy Atkins. Kitchener’s amateur army came the following year.

I was in the Royal Sussex. Good lads but not all from Sussex. I’d palled up a bit with three ex-weavers from somewhere up north. Cousins: Jim, Jack and Ted. A salty bunch. Ted and Jack were both married men with two young ones apiece but they’d been reservists. All three men reckoned the war would be over by Christmas and they’d be home war heroes with the chance of better jobs.

A whole panoply of boats, steam whistles screeching, left Southampton and took us to France one night. We’d crossed the rough and tumbling channel on a civilian ferry like holidaymakers. Holidaymakers who could fire fifteen rounds a minute in three clips of five.

There were six divisions in the BEF and we knew we were just a gesture of support for the French. Although we wanted to, we didn’t expect to get stuck in.

There was a remote possibility. The French had a million men mobilized but they were in the wrong place. There was a danger of them being outflanked by the German army coming through Belgium. Our job was to plug the gap if need be.

At dawn we were steaming up the Seine to Rouen. People lined each bank, cheering and waving tricolore flags. Rowing boats tried to keep up, people standing unsteadily in them, throwing fruit and flowers, toffees and rosettes.

We were mobbed in the narrow streets of Rouen. People were hanging out of windows, children running alongside waving flags. Our buttons were ripped off our jackets as souvenirs by screaming women. Hardly anybody hung on to their cap badges. A lot of us lost our caps altogether.

For other regiments that was pretty straightforward, but we in the Royal Sussex had the Roussillon plume as part of our cap badge. The regiment had got it at the battle of Quebec decades earlier when we had wiped the floor with the soldiers of the French Roussillon brigade and ripped the plumes off their helmets.

When asked about the plume by curious older men in Rouen, I simply said the French brigade had given it to us in recognition of our bravery in battle. Others, stupidly, told the truth in gory detail. The welcoming crush turned into a near-riot.

It was a hot afternoon and marching on cobbles, buffeted at every turn, was no picnic. By now our uniforms were hanging mostly buttonless. We stumbled finally into a large park where we were bivouacking for the night.

I wandered down to find my Lancashire mates at one of the beer tents. I’d managed to get some local currency early on. Just as well — there were long queues outside the Paymaster’s as soldiers changed coppers and threepenny bits so they could get a tuppenny pint.

I found Jim, Jack and Ted and we sat together eating our iron rations — biscuits and bully beef — then Jim was lured away by the siren sounds of girls calling from outside the park railings. Some just wanted to flirt, others had a more professional purpose. The warm evening got hotter.

‘Not interested?’ I said to Jack and Ted.

‘I love my wife,’ Ted said.

‘And you made her a promise.’

He shook his head.

‘Didn’t need to. It goes without saying.’

I sipped my beer.

‘What about you, Jack?’

‘Didn’t you read that note from Kitchener?’

We all laughed. Kitchener had put a note in every kit bag: ‘Do Your Duty Bravely, Fear God, Honour The King.’ It also said: ‘In this new experience you may find temptations both in wine and women. You must entirely resist both temptations, and, whilst treating all women with perfect courtesy, you should avoid any intimacy.’

‘You?’ he said.

‘Nobody back home waiting for me or worried about me.’ I gestured towards the railings. ‘But I’m not interested in that.’

‘You’ve got family at home, though, worrying over you,’ Jack said. ‘A mum and dad.’

‘Neither.’ I smiled. ‘I’m God’s lonely man.’

Ted clapped me on the back.

‘Jesus, lad — that’s a bit bleak for your age. Wait until you go home the conquering hero — the girls will be all over you.’

We marched fifteen miles north the next day. We were billeted in the evening in school rooms, village halls and, in my case, a big barn stinking of cow dung. We were supposed to stay there a few days, so the next day we helped with the harvest — the grain in the fields was ripe and high. Grateful women kept us supplied with buckets of home-brewed cider.

We cheered when on the lane beside our field we saw a line of bright red London double-decker buses led by a van with an advertisement for HP Sauce plastered on its side. Posters on the side of the buses advertised West End plays — Shaw’s Pygmalion and a comedy with Sir Charles Hawtrey at the Coliseum. The sight of them tugged at my heart.

We didn’t cheer quite so much when the next day we had to get in the buses for the journey up to the Mons-Conde canal. We bumped and shuddered and listed for mile after slow mile through the French countryside.

It was hard to think about fighting alongside the French, not against them. I had an ancestor who had fought and died at Malplaquet. The Roussillon plume in my cap was a constant reminder of our former enmity.

On Thursday, 20th August, the Belgian army was forced to abandon Brussels and withdraw to Antwerp after eighteen days resisting the Germans. The Belgians were poorly trained and ill-equipped but clearly brave — it was only later, when we came face-to-face with the mass of the German army, that we realized they must have been outnumbered a hundred to one.

On the 22nd we had our first sight of the enemy. We were on the undulating Nimy Road and a German cavalry patrol trotted over the brow of the next hill, bold as brass on their big horses, spruce in their grey uniforms and polished helmets, long lances held upright. The commander was puffing on a cigar. They were a shock, I can tell you. A few of us opened fire.

We set up quite a racket but we were too far away to hit anything. The horsemen wheeled in an orderly manner and trotted back over the brow of the hill, leaving us pocking only the bright blue sky.