The New Confessions (22 page)

Teague turns towards me. Suddenly the barrage lifts for a second or two.

“Here we go, Todd,” he says. A whistle goes somewhere. Stampe puts his own to his mouth and blows fiercely. The pea jams. Silence. He smiles guiltily and climbs up the ladder onto the parapet, waving us up and on. I go up the ladder, sober this time, the world flat and fixed. Ahead a cliff of smoke and explosions mark the German line. I crouch and head off, following the backs of others through the gaps cleared in our wire. Within yards my boots are heavy with a thick rind of mud and clay. I have lost Teague. I keep my head down, watching for mud pools. I walk in as straight a line as possible. Some shells start to burst round us. I skirt an icy lagoon forty feet across. I slip and fall. I look up; Stampe stands ahead.

“All right?” he yells.

I struggle to my feet. He moves on. Twenty yards to my left a British soldier levels his rifle at Stampe and shoots him in the back. Stampe falls. The soldier glances round. MacKanness. I crumple to the ground as if hit. I wait a minute, then (there is no sign of MacKanness) cautiously get up and go and look for Stampe. He is face down in the mud. I pull him up and unplug the dirt from his mouth and nose. He is still alive. Stampe is almost the same height as me. To a bantam all tall men must be indistinguishably high.

“Go on,” Stampe says. He pushes me away.

Teague is suddenly behind me. “Come on,” he says. We run off.

“Where are we?” I shout.

“Nearly at the wood!”

Where was the château? I wonder. Through the drifting smoke I see some stumps and shattered trunks of trees. Chunks of wood fly up, spinning off them. Teague and I fall to the ground. Teague starts firing his rifle. I do the same. I can see nothing. Teague takes a Mills bomb from his bag and throws it. It explodes—yellow and orange, white
smoke, erupting earth. He takes out another and slithers forward a few yards through the black trunks. He throws again. This time the bomb seems to detonate almost immediately after it has left his hand. I hear him scream.

Then, seconds later, “
Todd! Todd!
”

I crawl over to him.

Teague has lost two fingers on his throwing hand and his face has taken a lot of flash from the defective bomb. Most of his hair is burned away, as is the first layer of skin, some of which hangs in long fragile shreds from his cheeks like stiff rice paper. He has no top lip and, as far as I can see, no eyelids left. His eyes are bleeding from the perforated whites, filling the sockets.

I help him to his feet and we stumble off. Blood tears an inch wide track his face. We are suddenly free of the black stumps, but I have absolutely no idea which way to go. I seem to be in a circle of infernal noise. Distant shapes of men scurry and creep in every possible direction. I do not know if we are being shot at.

Teague sinks to his knees. He is moaning now. His face seems to be effervescing, forming a creamy brown froth like the head on a glass of stout. “
Whiter than the snow, whiter than the snow
” hums in my head.

“I’ll get a stretcher-bearer,” I say faintly. I notice there are traces of tangled grass among the mud and upturned clods of earth. We must have come quite far.

I stand up. The noise of explosions has moved off a way. There is still no one firing at me. I lay Teague down and run off in what I think is the right direction. Stretcher-bearers should be following the second wave. I run on.

Then I hear the noise of an immense motor. To my left, bucking and heaving through and over the tree stumps, is a tank, a huge three-dimensional metal parallelogram, eight feet tall, its tracks hurling up a heavy spray of clods and mud. There is a name painted on the front:
Oh, I say!
The machine gun in the forward turret traverses and begins firing at me.

I fling up my arms, fall down and pretend to be dead for the second time that day. The tank churns on. I get up and, ridiculously, shake my fist and swear at it. Then I run off on my way again, looking for stretcher-bearers.

I stop suddenly, a horrifying image forming in my mind. I feel a bolus of acid nausea rise in my throat. I turn and run back towards
Teague. I hear the engine of
Oh, I say!
ahead in the drifting smoke, straining, grinding.

The tank has run over Teague’s legs. He is alive but unconscious. His legs are oddly shapeless now, like partially filled kit bags. One boot is pointed delicately, like a ballet dancer’s shoe.

I chase after the tank. I can see its tracks clearly in the muddy grass. I come over a small rise and stop, staring in astonishment. Ahead of me, fresh in the morning sun, stretches the Belgian countryside. Roads, trees, fields, villages, a steeple, smoke from chimneys. About a mile off I see the fortifications of the German third line and a column of troops being marched towards me. Reinforcements.

“Oil You the British Army then?”

I turn round. The tank has stopped about fifty yards away. One of its crew is urinating against its side. I bite my bottom lip to stop myself from bursting into tears. I walk over. The man shudders and starts to do up his flies. He comes to meet me. He is small, almost as small as a bantam.

“I reckons as we’ve gone a touch too far, mate.” He walks round the front of the tank. “Right through the bloody middle, a hot knife through butter.”

I follow him round.

“No trenches here, see. Only blockhouses.”

On the other side of the tank the crew sit in the sun, in shirt sleeves. They are drinking whiskey—Johnny Walker—from the bottle, and eating bread and ham. One man carves from a joint.

“Here’s the British Army,” my man says, introducing me. “Better late than never.”

“Hello, hello,” says another. “Feeling peckish, I’ll warrant.”

“You people,” I say, unable to control the tremble in my voice, “you people have just run over my friend.”

“No chance,” says one. “Not us, mate.”

“A wounded man,” I say slowly. “You crushed his legs with your tracks.”

“No, no,” says the urinator. “I’d have known. I’m the driver, see. You didn’t spot no one, did yah?” he asks another.

“Nah. Couldn’t have been us, old son. We don’t make that sort of mistake. We run over Huns. Not our lads.”

“His legs are flattened!”

“Ow … nasty. Probably a shell, though. Do funny things, those shells.”

“Damn right. I saw this man once. Dead. Flat as a pancake. Could have rolled him up like a carpet.”

“Bound to be a shell, yeah.”

“
Bastards!
I’m going to report you. Bloody bastards!”

“Steady on, sunshine. George told you he didn’t run over no one.”

“And I should know as I’m the bloody driver, Jock.”

“Yeah, and watch who you’re calling names, you Scottish berk.”

I leave them to their ham and Johnny Walker and run back. I see that, as the driver told me, there is no German trench line here. Just mangled wire and ruined blockhouses. Somehow we have come through a temporary gap in their defenses. Where I left Teague at the edge of the so-called wood is a small group of men from the Durham Light Infantry, black, exhausted, making some attempt to dig in. They tell me Teague has been carried back, still alive but in a bad way. I ask them if they have seen the Grampians. No one knows.

Shells begin to explode again in the wood. Large pieces of tree trunk are hurled tumbling into the air. A counterattack. I go back with a runner from the Durhams. He points me in the right direction and we separate. I come over the lip of a small rise and I see the undulating mess of no-man’s-land in front of me and—just distinguishable—the thin humped sprawl of the British trench line with its scribble of barbed wire three or four hundred yards away. I recognize nothing. I pause for a second. We must be in some kind of lull. The crash and rumble of guns continues and a ridge a mile away is being pelted with barrage after barrage. This strip of sodden clogged acres on either side of me is full of little figures crawling, hopping, shambling, being carried. Four-man teams of stretcher-bearers search the rims of foul mud pools for wounded. The sun still shines through gaps in the clouds and warms my back and shoulders. I sit down for a minute. Fifty yards away an officer limp-hops back to the lines, using a rifle as a stick. He pays me no attention.

I set off again, sticking to rough plowed-field mud and avoiding the stuff that looks like runny porridge. I make slow progress. I pass a confetti of discarded equipment, a group of about twenty bloodless dead men, people huddling miserably in shell craters waiting for stretchers. I have lost sight of our trenches now. The view changes entirely in a ten-yard journey. I come across a well-organized machine-gun pit, ammunition
boxes stacked tidily, a taut tarpaulin shelter against possible rain. The men in it are alert, ready to repel a counterattack. They look surprised to see me. I trudge past.

“Hoy!” the officer, a lieutenant, shouts. “Where are you from?”

“German line.”

“Is it far away?”

“I should say so.”

“Drat! All right you men, pack up. Sorry chaps, wrong place.”

I leave them to dismantle their neat pit and slither down the crumbled sides of a gully. A sunken track or road, pounded out of recognition. I clamber up the other side and get a brief view of our line again. Two hundred yards to go.

“Hey, you! Help! Over here!”

It is a man, up to his armpits in a mud pool at the bottom of a large, deep shell crater. If he had not shouted I would never have spotted him. His face is covered with dark-red blood.

“You English? I can’t see very well.” He has a strong Ulster accent.

“I’m Scottish, actually … but it doesn’t matter.”

“Get me out of here, pal, will you? I’m going down.”
Doyn
, he pronounces it.

“Right you are.”

I slither carefully down the slope of the crater. The man is about eight feet away. I sink in up to my ankles. The mud is thick, like fudge. I hold out my rifle. He stretches for it. There is still a two-foot gap.

“I’m missing a fuckin’ leg here, an’ all. Blown up right into this fuckin’ bog.”

“I can’t reach you. I’m sorry.”

“Sweet Jesus Christ.… Wade out a bit, pal. I’m going down.”

“I’ll sink too.”

I can see he is going down. The muddy water is up to his neck. He makes little fluttering movements with his fingers—as though his hands were wings and he could fly out.

“God God God.… Well, put me out of me misery, pal, will you do that? I don’t want to droyne in this shite.”

“
I can’t do that!
”

“Sure I’d do the fuckin’ same for you!”

He stretches his chin clear of the viscid surface. I make a final futile stretch. I am up to my knees. He grabs. There is still an insurmountable eighteen inches.

“Come on. Do us a favor.”

Suddenly, it seems the most reasonable request in the world. I put myself in his place. I would make the same plea. Of course.

“Look the other way,” I say.

He turns his head and I take aim. My fatigue makes my rifle sway. I fire. And miss. A gout of mud is thrown up behind his head.

“
For God’s sake!
” he screams, his composure all gone.

“I’m sorry.” I pull the trigger again and my rifle jams.

“I’ll get another,” I shout. I claw my way up the bank. I run here and there looking for a corpse with a rifle. At one moment I run back to the crater to check on my Ulsterman. But he has gone.

I shut my eyes and rub my face. I feel stupid and empty with tiredness. My back is sore, my leg mysteriously bruised. I trudge back towards the line of trenches. My shock and outrage steadily die as I slip and slither home.

I arrive at the British line and am directed to my sector. I seem to have wandered a mile over to the right. I try not to think about Teague or the man in the pool. I hum my tune, blotting out the images as I shuffle with the wounded along duckboards through communication trenches: “… 
whiter than the snow … wash your dirty daughter … whiter than the
snow,
Holy Joe.
”

I find the bantams two hours later. It is midday. They sit on the banks of a sunken lane behind the Ypres-Comines canal, silent, morose, exhausted. We are all black, filthy, pasted with drying mud. I sit down, rest my arms on my knees and my head on my arms. A light drizzle falls and it gets cold. I hear short exchanges of conversation. The bantams had a good day. One lot killed forty prisoners. It is their special pride that they kill everyone: the potent fury of small angry men. Tanqueray walks up and down checking who is missing. There is no sign of MacKanness. Stampe is alive and in a field hospital. Tanqueray rebukes me wrathfully and at length for losing my rifle. I hear his iron voice and a horrible fear invades me. Now Teague has gone and I am alone with the bantams. I do not have the strength to cope with them anymore. I know then that I have to run away.

I look up and offer my grimy face to the soft rain. I have had enough.

“
Johnny?
Good God, is that you, Johnny?”

I look round.

Standing there, tall, neat, in a staff captain’s uniform, is Donald Verulam.

My God. The bantams. I used to have nightmares about them for years. Every time I went back to Scotland I was in a state of fearful suspense that I might run into my ex-comrades. Especially Tanqueray. I would go into pubs and have a good look round before I ordered a drink. I don’t know if he survived the war, but those bantams had a tenacious hold on life that was quite inhuman—given our species’ particular vulnerability. They were more like some sort of insect—silver lice or cockroaches, small tough well-armored beetles.

I will only say this about that terrible day in the Salient: it changed me forever. Not dramatically; in fact, at the time I thought it had left me mentally, as well as physically, unscathed. But it hadn’t. It had changed me forever. You can’t encounter such chaos and cruel absurdity on that scale and not have it affect your view of life. You never see anything else in quite the same way again.