The Thing Itself

FOUR

I didn’t get a scratch in the Great War. Not even a Blighty wound for me. I knew a lot of men who prayed for that wound serious enough to earn them a ticket home without being life-threatening. Some men tried to inflict it on themselves. One man shot off his toes and then had to hobble unaided to the post where a firing squad was waiting to shoot him for cowardice.

As the war ground us ever more finely, I knew many men become so desperate to get out they would happily sacrifice a limb. Two limbs. Maybe some of the men I saw in Brighton did the same.

Men put their hands up above the trench parapets to have them shot by the Germans. Soaking a gunshot wound in a filthy pond would ensure a worse injury. Some faked abscesses by injecting paraffin or turpentine under the skin. One man drank petrol to make himself ill but he drank too much of it and died.

The authorities came down hard on malingerers. They got field punishment number one, morning and night for up to twenty-one days. It didn’t hurt but it humiliated them. They were tied to a wheel by their wrists and ankles. From a distance, they looked like they’d been crucified.

I don’t know many survivors of the Great War willing to talk about the horror of those four years. I’m not the man to describe it. I will say that I never saw a bayoneted baby. I will say that I never would have imagined the many ways in which Humpty Dumpty can be taken apart, with no hope of him ever being put back together again. I will say that we played football with the Hun in no-man’s-land on Christmas Day, but on Boxing Day we were sticking German heads on poles all along the top of our trench.

Sigmund Freud might fruitfully have explored the effect of that close confinement in the stench and ooze of the trenches on the libido. It destroyed the urge for many. But just as the devastation wrought by pipe grenade and machine gun and howitzer shell blurred what it meant to be human, so the edges of sexuality dissolved for others.

A batman I knew called himself his colonel’s slut. Married men openly comforted each other in the most physical way imaginable. Men with sweethearts at home loved other men. Less welcome — but unsurprising, given the darkness at the centre of all our beings — men raped other men.

You won’t read about that kind of behaviour in the poems of Mr Sassoon or the memoir of Mr Graves.

At Mons, where the battle was ghastly beyond description, I saw acts of tenderness amid the horrors. I saw Ted’s brains blown out, but further down the line I also saw two men going over the top hand in hand. In the calm after that phase of the battle I saw a Royal Sussex man I vaguely knew cradling his dying mate in his arms.

‘I’ll give you your mother’s kiss, Bob,’ I heard him murmur. ‘And one for me.’

He kissed him twice on the brow.

I saw men cry all the time. But then there were no words to describe what we were experiencing. Later I realized that the only true account was the thing itself.

I was raised in pessimism and sorrow. After Jim, Jack and Ted all copped it I steered clear of pals. I decided I could not get too close. I know comradeship is one of the great themes of the Great War. At the time, the authorities pushed the idea of the Pals battalions — friends from before the war fighting side by side. But it was a lie.

What was the point of making pals who would be dead within the week? Once, we were playing marbles in our trench and someone straightened up and was shot through the head. At Mons, in those tremendous twenty-two hours, the deaths of my fellow men seemed a very small thing. Why, in the first thirty minutes I saw two thousand gallant men lay down their lives.

I learned not to stop to help wounded men and I was not alone in that.

The years passed. Every day I expected to be killed. Every winter I expected to freeze to death. I began the war in fear. Shuddering, corrosive fear. I was surprised at how long a man can live in fear. But then I decided I was going to die and I accepted it. Fear replaced neither by fatalism nor resignation but by certainty.

In that I was wrong. I lived. But at what price? I have not shed a tear for twenty years. I am unable to feel anything except self-loathing. My body is not my own. I came back from the Great War cut off from everything and everybody. I pretend, of course. I make a facsimile of living.

I survived the war: the Hun couldn’t kill me. But the Spanish flu almost did. The pandemic. Millions died — more than in the Great War. I was laid low in a hospital in London for months. I recovered, although I didn’t know until later that it had made me sterile.

I resumed a life. Of sorts.