The New Confessions (20 page)

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.

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:

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.