“No,” he replies, shaking his head. “No, they sent him to the Front to act as a stretcher-bearer. They do that, you know. If you refuse to fight they say the least you can do is be of assistance to those who will. Some are sent to work on the farms—work of national importance, they call it—they’re the lucky ones. Some go to prison, they’re not so lucky. But most of them, well, they end up here anyway.”
“That seems fair,” I say.
“Only until you realize that a stretcher-bearer at the Front has a life expectancy of about ten minutes. They send them over the trenches and out into no-man’s-land to pick up the bodies of the dead and the wounded and that’s the end of them. Snipers pick them off quite easily. It’s a sort of public execution really. Doesn’t seem quite so fair now, does it?” I frown and consider it. I want to reply carefully, for I already know that it’s important to me that Will Bancroft thinks well of me and adopts me as his friend. “Of course I could have tried that myself, the whole religious thing,” he adds, thinking about it. “The pater’s a vicar, you see. Up in Norwich. He wanted me to go into the Church, too. I suppose that would have spared me the draft.”
“And you didn’t fancy it?”
“No,” he says, shaking his head. “Not for me all that malarkey. I don’t mind soldiering. At least, I don’t think I’ll mind it. Ask me again in six months. My grandfather fought in the Transvaal, you know. Was something of a hero out there before he was killed. I like the idea of proving myself as brave as he was. My mother, she’s always kept a— Watch out now, here we are.”
We step inside the medical hut, where Moody splits us into groups. Half a dozen take their seats on a group of bunks behind a row of curtains while the others stand nearby and wait their turn.
Will and I are among the first to be examined; he has chosen the last bed again and I take the one next to his. I wonder why he seems to have such a disdain for being in the centre of the room. For my part, I rather like being in the middle: it makes me feel part of something and somehow less conspicuous. I have an idea in my head that factions will develop soon among our number and those on the outskirts will be among the first to be picked off.
The doctor, a thin, middle-aged man wearing a pair of thick-rimmed spectacles and a white coat that has seen better days, indicates that Will should strip out of his clothes and he does so without embarrassment, pulling his vest over his head and tossing it carelessly on to the bed beside him, then dropping his shorts on the ground as if they matter not a jot. I look away, embarrassed, but it doesn’t do much good, for everywhere I look, the other members of my troop, those sitting on the beds at least, have also stripped down to the altogether, revealing a set of malformed, misshapen and startlingly unattractive bodies. These are young men of no less than eighteen and no more than twenty, and it surprises me that they are for the most part so undernourished and pale. Sparrow chests, thin bellies, loose buttocks are on display wherever I look, except for one or two chaps who are at the other end of the extreme, overweight and corpulent, thick flabs of fat hanging around their chests like breasts. As I undress, too, I quietly thank the construction firm where I worked for the past eighteen months as a labourer for how it fed my muscle, before wondering whether my relative strength and fitness might see me called up for active duty sooner than is healthy.
I turn my attention back to Will, who is standing straight as a rod, both arms extended before him as the doctor peers inside his mouth, then runs a measuring tape across the expanse of his chest. Without thinking how it might look, I take him all in with a glance and am struck once again by how good-looking he is. Out of nowhere I have a sudden flashback to that afternoon at my former school, the day of my expulsion, a memory still buried deep inside me.
I close my eyes for a moment and when I open them I find that I am looking straight into Will’s eyes. He’s turned his head to look at me; it’s another curious moment. I wonder, Why isn’t he looking away? And then, Why aren’t I? And the look lasts for three, four, five seconds before the corners of his mouth turn up into a slight smile and he looks away at last, staring directly ahead once again, exhaling three times, long and deep, the response, I realize, to the doctor holding a stethoscope to his back and asking him to breathe in deeply and out again.
“Thank you,” says the doctor in a disinterested tone as he comes around to the front and tells Will that he can put his clothes back on. “Now,” he says, turning his attention towards me. “Next.”
I endure a similar examination, the same measuring of heart rate and blood pressure, height, weight and pulmonary ability. He grabs my balls and tells me to cough; I do so quickly, willing him to let go, then he orders me to extend both hands in front of my body and hold them there, as still as I can. I do as he asks and he seems pleased by what he observes. “Steady as a rock,” he says, nodding and ticking off a box on his paperwork.
Later, after a terrible breakfast of cold scrambled eggs and fatty bacon, I find myself back in our barracks once again and kill a few minutes by taking in the lie of the land. The screened-off area at the opposite end from Will and me is where Wells and Moody sleep, their bunks offering a small degree of privacy from their useless charges. The latrine is outside, a single hut that contains a few pisspots and something worse, far more foul-smelling, and which we are informed we will be taking it in turns to empty every evening, starting that night, of course, with Wolf.
“You don’t think they might have let us digest our breakfast first?” asks Will as we make our way to the drill ground, walking alongside each other again but this time more to the centre of the pack. “What do you think, Tristan? I feel as if I’m going to throw that whole mess up at any moment. Still, we are at war, I suppose. It’s not a holiday camp.”
Sergeant Clayton is waiting for us, standing erect in a freshly pressed uniform, and he doesn’t move or even appear to breathe as we fall into line before him and his two apostles take their positions on either side.
“Men,” he says finally, “the idea of seeing you engaging in exercise while wearing the colours of the regiment is abhorrent to me. For that reason, until I deem otherwise, you shall train and drill in your civvies.”
A low murmur of disappointment rings out across the ranks; it’s clear that many of the boys want nothing more than to put on the longed-for khaki fatigues here and now, as if the clothes themselves might turn us into soldiers immediately. Those of us who have waited a long time to be accepted into the army have no desire to wear the cheap, dirty clothes we arrived in for a moment longer than is necessary.
“Load of tosh,” whispers Will to me. “The bloody army can’t afford any more uniforms, that’s all it is. It’ll be weeks before we’re kitted out.”
I don’t reply, nervous of getting caught talking, but I believe him. For as long as the war has been going on I’ve been following it in the newspapers and there are constant complaints that the army doesn’t have enough uniforms or rifles for every soldier. The downside is that we will be stuck in our civvies for the foreseeable future; the upside is that we can’t be called to France until we have a suitable kit to fight in. There’s already uproar in Parliament about men sacrificing themselves without even having the proper uniform.
We begin with fairly rudimentary drilling techniques: ten minutes of stretching, followed by running on the spot while we build up a good perspiration. Then, quite suddenly, Sergeant Clayton decides that our file of five by four men is quite disordered and charges between us, pulling one man a step forward, pushing another a fraction back, dragging some poor unsuspecting lad to his right while kicking another further to the left. By the time he has finished—and I’ve received my own share of pushes and shoves during his manoeuvres—the lines don’t look any more ordered or disordered than they did ten minutes earlier, but he seems more satisfied with them and I’m willing to believe that what is not obvious to my untrained eye is a glaring offence to his more experienced one.