The New Confessions (21 page)

“Very funny, Todd,” he said petulantly. “Hardly the time or place.” He began to move. “I can make it on my own.” He crawled back towards our lines.

I looked round. I could not see a soul. The din was so general it seemed quite normal, like the factory floor of an iron foundry.… I still had my sack of bombs. I wondered where I should throw them. I slithered forward, past some small dead bantams. I saw what looked like a horrifically mangled side of beef, flayed by a maniac butcher with an ax. The melancholy of anatomy. At the top there was an ear, some hair and part of a cheek. At the bottom, a bare knee with a smudge of dirt on it.

I crawled on until I reached some tangled wire. The German line? I glanced back. I could make out nothing. I turned: was that the farmhouse up ahead? It should have been easy for me to determine—we were meant to run uphill, after all—but my dipping, left-biased world had made me immune to gradients. I had the disarming impression, all at once, that I was in fact moving parallel to our front line. So I turned, with some difficulty, right, leaning into the slope, and felt I was falling. I immediately ran across Pawsey and Louise. Pawsey was shot through the chest. He had dry cherry foam on his lips. He was trying to speak but only pink bubbles formed and popped in his mouth. Louise, I guessed, had gone to help him and—so it seemed—had been caught by a concentrated burst of machine-gun fire in the throat, which was badly torn. He was quite dead. One bullet had taken off his nose with the neatness of a razor.

I looked up. The barrage had lifted. I could now hear the dreary clatter of machine-gun fire. I saw bantams running back to our lines. More bubbles popped between Pawsey’s lips. I grabbed him under the arms and began to drag him back to safety. I had not gone ten yards when he died. There is an unmistakable limpness about a dead person that no living being can imitate. Instinct tells you when it has arrived. But I needed no instinct, remember: I had dragged dead men from the surf at Coxyde-Bains. Poor Pawsey felt the same.

I laid him down. There was no point in dragging back a dead man. Heavy firing was coming from further up the line, and a few shells were
now bursting on the ridge, more an acknowledgment of the attack’s failure than an attempt to silence the German guns. My section of no-man’s-land was now strangely quiet. All the same I zigzagged back to the lines, moving carefully from shell hole to shell hole. In one particularly large hole I saw a couple of bantams searching corpses for loot. I passed by on the other side.

I was helped into the trench by men I did not recognize. This must be the second wave of the attack, I guessed, whose presence had not been required. I was passed down the line into the support trenches. Eventually I found my bits and pieces and sat down. I felt terrible. My brain was tender and bruised. I was nauseous. My mouth was dry and rank. My legs were visibly shaking and my joints ached. So this is battle fatigue, I thought. I know now I was suffering from a massive hangover. My first.

After a while I managed to light a cigarette. I put my trench cap on and waited for the others. Then I began to remember, piecemeal. Kite, with no hand. Louise and Pawsey, dead.…

A corporal from another platoon came over. He looked very tired.

“Any sign of Lieutenant McNiece?”

I told him about Louise. And Kite and Pawsey. I wondered if the others were all right.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t find a soul from my platoon.”

“You haven’t seen any of my lot, have you?”

“I saw someone … well,
explode
. Must have been a bomber. Whole sack of bombs went up. Took about five chaps with him.”

“Good God!”

“Are you all right?” he asked. “You’ve got blood all over your face.”

“Just a scratch,” I said reflexively, followed by a warm spurt of pride at my nonchalance. I put my hand up to my forehead. I felt a curious lump embedded above my eyebrow. It moved. I plucked it out with a wince. It was a tooth. One of Somerville-Start’s incisors. I still have the scar.

The delayed shock arrived about an hour later. It was not so much what I had witnessed that overwhelmed me as the retrospective sense of awful peril I had been in. I saw myself running foolishly here and there about the battlefield, somehow avoiding the multitudinous trajectories of thousands of pieces of whizzing hot metal. I was not grateful for my luck. I was horrified, if you like, that I had used up so much. We all have narrow escapes in life, some of which we are entirely unaware.
What upset me was the hundreds of thousands of narrow escapes I must have had during my few hectic minutes in no-man’s-land. I was convinced I had overdrawn my balance of good fortune; that whatever haphazard benevolence the impassive universe might hold towards me was all but gone.

We went back into reserve, were given something to eat and then paraded in a field for roll call. D Company’s casualties were dreadful, well over 50 percent, and the bantams had fared little better. Of the bombing section, only Teague and myself were present on parade. Louise was dead; so were Pawsey, Somerville-Start and Bookbinder. It was Bookbinder who had atomized when his sack of bombs exploded, and the blast had accounted for two other bombers dead and one wounded (Lloyd). Also wounded were Kite and, I learned, Druce.

That evening I went down to the field dressing station to have the cut above my eye stitched. The dressing station was a bizarre place dominated by the twin emotions of intense relief and intense pain. It was established in a small quarry some four hundred yards behind the canal. To my surprise the ground was littered with discarded boots, and everywhere was the powerful contrast of filthy blackened men and new, very white bandages. Walking wounded sat in groups waiting to be driven to the field hospital. Rows of stretcher cases lay docilely in the soft evening sun. I had my cut dressed and went in search of Druce. I heard my name called. It was Kite.

He was sitting with a group of amputees and head wounds. A blunt club-shaped bandage covered his stump. He looked dark-eyed and his face was tense. I lit a cigarette and gave it to him. He seemed depressed, not nearly as jaunty as on the battlefield. I told him about our casualties.

“At least you’ll be out of it,” I said.

He looked at his stump. “I’m finding it a bit hard keeping the old famous unconcern going,” he said, his voice shaking. He started to cry. “I just think it’s a bloody shame. I
need
my hand.” His voice was raised; other men looked round.

“Steady, Noel,” I said, and patted his shoulder. “Here, have some fags.” I stuffed half a dozen into a pocket. “Be back in a second. Have a word with Leo.”

Druce was lying some yards away, a leg bandaged. I told him the appalling news about the section.

“Kite’s a bit shaken up,” I said. “What happened to you?”

“I climbed up the ladder, took a couple of steps and got a piece of shrapnel through my calf muscle. I went down and was dragged back into the trench. Must have been out there for all of five seconds. Never saw a thing.” He paused. “What about you?… I mean, what was it like?”

I thought. “Very strange.” And then, “Horrible.” I told him in more detail about Pawsey and Louise. I tried to express myself better.

“It’s like … nothing or nowhere else.…” I had no vocabulary. “It’s just mad.”

“I’m not sure if I should have thrown the whole sackful down.… I mean, in a dugout, you’d think one or two bombs would be enough. Damn! I should have held on to some. Think what—”

“Suffering Christ, shut up!” I said. We were stacking railway sleepers. During the attack Teague had in fact reached the German line. He had emptied his sack of bombs down a dugout stairwell and thrown in two after them. Apparently he had killed eighteen Germans and had been recommended for a decoration. On the way back to our lines he had sniped at a machine-gun crew and claimed to have hit two of them. He talked about the battle constantly to me. I was deeply bored.

“Where exactly did you get to? You said you got to the wire.…”

“Yes. No.… I think so. I got to some wire. Look, I don’t know. I told you I hadn’t a clue what was going on.”

“
Less fuckin’ natter, more work, youse two English bastards!
”

These words came from Platoon Sergeant Tanqueray, a bantam, supervising our working party. The top of his head reached my armpit. Teague and I had been seconded to a Grampian company in the reforming of the battalion after the attack on Frezenburg Ridge. D Company could barely muster two full-strength platoons, so the rest of us were temporarily attached to the bantams to fill gaps in their ranks. By this stage of the war the bantam battalions had more than their fair share of half-grown lads and degenerates. My kit was pilfered almost daily. Anything precious I kept on my person.

Tanqueray watched us heft the sleepers. He hated Teague and me, as did the rest of his men. He was five feet two inches, just under the army minimum. He was bitter enough as it was, missing out on the chance of a regular battalion by one inch, but having two tall ex-public-school boys in his platoon seemed almost to have deranged him. Tanqueray had a weak chin, a ginger moustache and pink watery eyes. He was a fisherman from Stonehaven and I fancied he still smelled of fish. The
fact that I was Scottish also incensed him, paradoxically. He insisted I was English and I was tired of remonstrating. I became a symbol of the dark genetic conspiracy that had contrived to render him small.

“You’re dogshite, Todd,” he used to say to me. “You and all your kind. Dogshite.”

I was not clear what he meant by my “kind” but I did not care. My mood since the day of the attack on the ridge had vacillated between taciturn depression and a brand of fretful neurotic terror that I could barely suppress.

My diary:

Since the attack on Frezenburg Ridge we had had one other period—uneventful, as it turned out—in the line. New drafts of recruits had come into the battalion and our rest periods were taken up with reorganization and retraining. Teague and I, perforce, were thrust closer together. We tried to spend as much time as possible with the other members of D Company, but as far as Tanqueray was concerned that was tantamount to fraternizing with the enemy.

After a couple of weeks it was clear that the 13th was being brought up to full strength again and a new D Company beginning to take shape. Some of the original members were recalled from the Grampians, but no movement order came for Teague or me. I began to worry that we had been forgotten. I spoke to Captain Tuck, reminding him of our existence. He said matters were still in a state of disarray, but assured me that when the battalion re-formed Teague and I would be part of its number. Until then, D Company of the 13th Battalion. SOLI was still attached to the Grampians. I should stop worrying and be patient.

We went back up to the front towards the end of August. Guns had been firing for days. It was clear we were about to enter a new phase of
the offensive on the Salient. I felt ill with ghastly premonitions. I was so convinced of my impending death that the filthy squalor of the trenches and the sullen hate of my comrades-in-arms seemed mere irritants. But Teague—literally—had the light of battle in his eye. He seemed distant, preoccupied, as if inspired by some visionary impulse. I was baffled at his zeal. I felt meek and terrified; Teague looked forward to the prospect of fighting. I told him of MacKanness’s threat (which was often repeated: “Gonnae get youse, cunt, see’f ah doan’t, right inna fuckin’ spine. Palaryze yu. Die in paaaaayne!” That sort of thing). Teague was untroubled.

“Stick with me, Todd,” he said. “We’ll be all right. Look how we got through Frezenburg—barely a scratch.”

I looked at his square face and his small eyes. He was the second person, after Dagmar, who had assured me I would survive. We were sitting in support lines, the night before the attack.

“I’m going to die,” I said. “I
know
. Just because I made it once doesn’t mean a thing.”

“You’ll be fine. You’re like me, Todd. We’re special, different.”

I could not think of anyone I was less like, except, perhaps Tanqueray and MacKanness.

“You
really
think you’re not going to …?” I left the question deliberately unfinished.

“I don’t care. I’m just going to go in there and have the fight of my life.”

I looked away. For some reason Teague’s attitude rather disgusted me. We had eaten well that evening: pea soup, fried corned beef, sardines. In my hand I had a piece of sponge cake covered in jam. I threw it over the parapet for the rats.

August 22, 1917. I stand in the front-line trench waiting for the barrage to lift. Teague is on my right by the ladder. Standing on its bottom step is Lieutenant Stampe, our company commander. Stampe is six months younger than me, just eighteen, a pleasant fair-haired person. Tanqueray refers to him as a “pup.” Tanqueray himself comes down the trench issuing rum. I decline.

“I’ll be watching you, Todd,” he says. “Very closely.” I have a stupid song in my head. I cannot rid myself of the tune.

The catchy tune keeps my mind off other subjects. This time we are to attack some long-ruined château, take the remains of a wood and advance through open country to the crossroads at S—. I have only the vaguest idea of our objectives. In any case, they will mean nothing once the whistle blows. There is no château, no wood, no open country, no crossroads at S—.