I might be afraid. Fear is a taste and smell more than a feeling, at least I’ve found it so. It doesn’t have much to do with your thoughts. Some smells draw it up. The first time up the line, you don’t even know what the smells are. They catch in your throat and you gag, but it’s dark and what you have to do is follow the man ahead of you so that the man behind you can follow in his turn. Sometimes it’s so dark that you’ll feel a hand from behind coming on to your shoulder, like the hand of a blind man. And so you go on through the darkness, with mud sucking at your boots and clogging them so each foot weighs more than seven pounds. You get used to everything step by step, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to bear it. Later on, you know what it is you’re smelling. Chloride of lime, cordite, raw mud, latrines, petrol-tainted water, rotting flesh. You learn to put a face on it when fear swells up in you like a balloon. You sweat in your animal self, but being a man you hide it.
All night Frederick is close to me. I don’t see him or hear him, and there isn’t a moment when my hair crisps on my neck. He leaves me in peace, but he keeps alongside. He said to me once: ‘You know those cards people leave, when they go visiting? Hopeless system. I’ve a wider acquaintance among the dead than the living. I’d rather see them than anyone. Except you, my dear BB.’ He said it so casually I didn’t grasp it. Besides, how should I know about those cards? I didn’t like to hear him say that. His company was cut to bits, and he was beyond finding new company in us. He had a way of staring into the darkness, very intently, which might have been only the sharpness of a good officer, but to me it seemed as if he was looking where he ought not to look, where the dead were.
We were billeted together before the trench raid, as Frederick said we would be. Forty-eight of us, Sergeant Morris and one officer in command: Frederick. Our purpose was to obtain maps, cut telephone wires and secure at least one prisoner for interrogation. The raiding party would be supported by three forty-five-second bursts of artillery fire at intervals, with the final burst being the signal for us to attack the enemy trench. Or so they said. We looked at each other. A ripple that you couldn’t see or hear went round us.
We were told off for two days’ training. It was a cushy billet, just as I’d hoped: a clean barn with clean farm rats that ran away into corners instead of looking at you bold as brass while they chirruped over bits of bodies that were blown out of the side of the trench. Frederick had a room in the farmhouse. We put on balaclavas, blacked our faces with cork and wriggled over a mocked-up no-man’s-land. The ground was taped out to mark our route to the trench we were going to attack. They said the wire would be cut for us by the preliminary barrage, but no one trusted that. We had our wire-cutters. The way the German wire was staked in our sector, there was no chance of getting under it.
I was surprised how much care went into the preparation. Most trench raids, all you’d get was a tap on the shoulder the same day. This one was going to be a proper job, it seemed. Frederick was never still. He seemed fired up by it. We were issued with knobkerries, and we weren’t to fire a shot until we’d gone through the first bay of the German trench, so as to keep ‘the element of surprise’. Knobkerries, entrenching tools, knives and bayonets would do it, until the ‘strategic aims of the raid had been accomplished’, and then it’d be time for the Mills bombs. That way we wouldn’t draw fire until we had to. We’d be safe back in our trenches before Fritz had got our range.
‘Mind you,’ said Blanco, too quiet for anyone else to hear, or so he thought, ‘by the time they’ve finished putting down that box barrage, every bastard from here to Balloo’s going to know we’re on our way.’
Sergeant Morris heard that, though all he did was raise his eyebrows. He never said much. He had one of those long, doleful faces, and the cuttingest tongue. He didn’t set much store by the plan of attack, you could see that. As for the knobkerries, his expression as he weighed one in his left hand, then swung it, was a thing of wonder. But he didn’t say anything beyond ‘Very much favoured in Ireland as a weapon, I believe,’ and gave us extra bayonet drill. What he thought of Frederick, I had no idea. He rested his long, speculative gaze on him as he did on everyone.
The farm had a battered bit of an orchard, which might have been pretty in summer. But now, with the rain on it and the yellow-grey sky above, it was nothing much. The rain never stopped.
Send it down, David
, Blanco had yelled up at the sky that morning. Frederick was in the orchard, smoking.
‘Why do the men say,
Send it down, David
?’ he asked. I had no idea, even though I shouted it out myself when the rain fell in stair rods and we marched and marched under our waterproof capes, if we had them.
‘It’s for luck,’ I answered.
He offered me a cigarette from his case. They were Players. We smoked them silently, sheltering the cigarettes in our fists while rain dripped off the branches. The guns were sounding up the line.
‘I wish I hadn’t let you in for this,’ said Frederick.
I didn’t answer. I’d volunteered, he knew that. I would have explained my idea about how you couldn’t get out of your death by trying, but I was too tired. I felt flat, too, in spite of the tension. Nothing was going right, and Frederick hadn’t got the knack of making us feel that it would. We weren’t quick enough. We’d crawled over our makeshift ‘no-man’s-land’, following the tapes laid out for us. We’d captured the ‘German’ trench over and over, but the rate we were going, Sergeant Morris said, Fritz’d have time to paint our portraits as we came over.
‘I should think this was a nice place once,’ said Frederick, looking about.
‘I shouldn’t think so,’ I said. ‘It’d have been full of the Frogs, selling one another watered-down vin blanc and offering their sisters for jig-a-jig tray bong.’
‘They’re only doing that for the duration, my dear BB.’
‘Roll on, duration.’
The wind was from the east. Frederick listened, out of habit, as the firing became sporadic. It was a quiet day, or at least it seemed so from here. And we were here, where the loudest thing was the noise of rain on the few dead leaves that had clung on through winter. You couldn’t join up the two things,
there
and
here
: they were so absolutely different. If one was real, then the other couldn’t be.
Frederick looked around the orchard with disfavour. That muscle in his cheek was jumping again. ‘You’re right, BB,’ he said. ‘It’s a damned dismal spot.’
‘It’s not so bad,’ I said. Suddenly, it was important that Frederick thought that. He seemed far away and sunk in gloom. We couldn’t have him leading the raid in that state of mind. As if he caught my thoughts, he came to himself. Briskly, he said, ‘You ought to get into a sniper section.’
‘I’m better off as I am.’
‘Are you? Perhaps you are. You know that poem you were telling me in the garden? The one about the sea? Do you remember any more of it?’
‘It’s long,’ I said, although I knew every line.
‘Is it? Tell me some of it, then. You don’t know how lucky you are, you old blowviator, carrying a library around in your head the way you do.’
‘You never went near your father’s library, if you could help it.’
‘Yes, but out here— You want different things, I suppose that’s what it is. Can you believe that the harbour still looks the same? I try to picture it, but I can’t get the colour of the water right. It goes as murky as the slop under the duckboards.’
‘I don’t think about it.’
‘That’s the best way, I suppose. But I can’t help thinking of things.’ He pulls restlessly at a branch and a shower of drops comes down on us. I duck, and he laughs, but it’s not a real laugh. His eyes don’t change, and they are fixed on me. ‘Can you tell me those lines again?’ he asks.
I know which one he means, and I don’t pretend not to understand him.
‘
Ah, love
,’ I say, and I have to stop because the lines are so strong in me. I look down at the wet grass, and then up at Frederick again.
‘Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.’
When I’ve finished, we are both silent for a while. Then:
‘That’s us,’ says Frederick.
I wait. My heart thuds heavily.
‘
Ignorant armies clash by night
.’
My whole body goes slack with disappointment. ‘Yes,’ I say.
Frederick looks around the orchard. Daylight is seeping away. Another raw dusk, another night. The raid. I need to be with the others. Sometimes it’s lonelier just being with one other person than being alone. I’m tired of poems. Suddenly I’m sick of the whole crew of them: Matthew Arnold, Tennyson, Coleridge, Lord Byron, Christina Rossetti, the lot. The trenches of my mind are crammed with poets, squatting in their dugouts, not to be moved. I want Christina Rossetti up on the fire-step. And then I hear Frederick laughing, real laughter this time, warm and amused.
‘What are you muttering about now, you old blowviator?’
‘Christina Rossetti.’
‘You looked as if you wanted to shoot somebody. Who the hell’s she? Sounds like a spy. Beats me, how you carry them all in your head.’
‘They were never in France.’
‘So much the better for them.’ He looks down at his watch. ‘I’ve got to get on. Shall we see each other? Of course we shall.’
‘We better bleddy well had, seeing as how you’re leading this raid. Sir.’ As soon as I’ve said it, I wish I hadn’t. He takes half a step backwards. I reach out, and get hold of his arm. ‘You picked the wrong line,’ I say. ‘You’ve got a terrible memory.’
He’s quite still, his eyes on me. In me, I want to say. I don’t think anybody has ever looked into me like that. ‘You’re the one who’s got it wrong,’ he says. ‘I remember everything.’
‘Sir! Message from Captain Ferryman!’
We didn’t see him coming. A runner all sopped with rain, panting as he crashes through the orchard gate. Young lad. Green.
‘I’d best be off,’ I say. ‘The boys are in the Cat Fur.’
‘Have one for me.’
I don’t like leaving him. It’s because of the rain, the dankness of the orchard, the gunfire that never knows when to stop. I half wish that he could come to the Cat Fur with me, but of course it’s impossible. As if he knows what I was thinking, and doesn’t want me to pity him, he says quickly, ‘More bumf come up from Battalion HQ. Think yourself lucky you don’t have to read it.’
I light the fire, mix oatmeal into water and add salt, then cook it carefully so it won’t catch. The saucepan is thin, almost worn out. There’s no change in the darkness yet, but I can tell that the dawn’s coming. Out of habit, I glance down at my wrist to register the exact time. Maybe Felicia’s awake. She doesn’t sleep well, she said. It’s because of waking in the night for Jeannie. And for Frederick too, I know that. You don’t get as thin as Felicia’s got because of a child. And then all of a sudden I realise that the loneliness in Felicia is the same as the loneliness I saw that day in Frederick. You’d think that the baby would have anchored her, but she’s adrift, just as he was. She wants to be with Harry and Frederick, even though she knows it’s wrong and she ought not to want it. That’s why the baby goes so often to Dolly Quick’s.
I come to, and find myself standing stock-still, with Mary Pascoe’s wooden spoon in my hand and porridge dropping off it into the fire. The smell is awful. I want to go to Felicia. I want to hold her. Frederick said, ‘I remember everything.’ I went away. The runner came but I could have waited. I hear my own voice saying:
The boys are in the Cat Fur
, as if that was what mattered. Then I’m outside the Cat Fur. The windows are steamy with the rain and I can’t see in, but I open the door and the fug of heat grease boots smoke vin blanc and voices roaring
Mop it down
swallows me.
Only three minutes have passed. I’ll eat my porridge and then scrub out the pot. Empty the latrine bucket, milk the goat, let the hens out into the run. I won’t go up to Venton Awen, in case Felicia comes while I’m not here. We can walk up to the farm together, and take the pony.
Move the goat’s tether-post, oil the spade that I should have oiled yesterday before I put it away. Sweep out the cottage. By then surely she’ll be here.
18
And the coming wind did roar more loud,
And the sails did sigh like sedge,
And the rain poured down from one black cloud;
The Moon was at its edge.
AS SOON AS
we go into the yard at Venton Awen, the collie bitch runs to me and buffets her head into my leg. Felicia shrinks back, and I remember how dogs scare her, in spite of her talk about wanting to get one. The Dennises never kept any.
‘She’s all right. You’re a soft old thing, aren’t you?’ I give the collie my hand to fondle with her tongue.
‘Do you know her, then?’
‘She was out on the coast path the other day, and she followed me home. She’s a wanderer, not a guard dog. Here, give her your hand. She won’t hurt you.’ Reluctantly, Felicia yields. I steady her hand, as the collie bitch sniffs but doesn’t lick it. ‘Now she knows you,’ I say.
There are a couple of other dogs barking at us from the yard, chained up I should say, for they don’t run out. The back door opens, and out bounces a red-faced girl in a blue apron. She has a scrubbing brush in her hand and it looks as if she’s scrubbed her own face with it before she started on the floors. I don’t know her. She looks at me and then at Felicia, and says something in a high, strange voice. I can’t make out the words, but Felicia understands.