“Christ, Sadler, I thought you’d never get here,” he cries, breaking away now and tapping me on the arm for good luck. “Everything all right beyond?”
“Fine, Bill,” I reply—Tell is another who prefers to be addressed by his Christian name; perhaps it makes him feel that he is his own man still—and then step forward to dig my feet into position and pull the box-periscope down to eye level. I’m about to ask him whether he has anything to report but he’s already gone and I sigh, narrowing my eyes as I look through the muddy glass, trying to distinguish between the horizon, the fields of battle and the dark clouds up ahead, and do everything in my power to remember what the fuck it is that I’m supposed to be looking out for anyway.
I try to count the days since I left England and decide that it is twenty-four.
We took the train from Aldershot to Southampton the morning after passing out and marched along the roads towards the docks at Portsmouth, families coming out on to the pavements to cheer us on to war. Most of the men revelled in the attention, particularly when some of the girls in the crowd jumped forward to plant kisses on their cheeks, but I found it difficult to concentrate when my mind was still so focused on the events of the previous night.
Afterwards, Will had dressed quickly and stared at me with an expression unlike any I had ever seen before. A mixture of surprise at what we had done, tainted by an inability to deny that he had been not only a willing participant but the prime mover. He wanted to blame me, I could see that, but it was no good. We both knew how it had begun.
“Will,” I began, but he shook his head and tried to climb the bank that surrounded us, tripping over in his eagerness to get away and sliding back down before he could get a stronger foothold. “Will,” I repeated, reaching out for him, but he shrugged me off impatiently and spun around, glaring at me, teeth bared, a wolf ready to attack.
“No,” he hissed, disappearing over the top and into the night.
When I returned to my bunk, he was already in his bed, his back turned towards me, but I knew that he was still awake. His body was rising and falling in a controlled way, his breathing heavier than normal; it was the movement and respiration of a man who wants to give the impression of sleep but does not have the acting skill to be entirely convincing.
And so I went to sleep myself, sure that we would talk in the morning, but when I awoke, he was already gone before Wells or Moody had even sounded the bell. Outside, after roll call, he took his place in the final march far ahead of me, in the centre of the pack, that claustrophobic spot he usually hated, surrounded by newly anointed soldiers to his left, right, fore and rear, each one providing a defence, if one were needed, against me.
There was no chance to talk to him on the train either, for he made sure to sequester himself by a window in the heart of a noisy rabble and I was some distance away, confused and agitated by this clear rejection. It was only later that night as we sailed towards Calais that I found him alone by the railings of the boat, his hands gripping the metal tightly, his head bowed as if deep in thought, and I watched from a distance, sensing his torment. I might not have approached him at all had I not been convinced that we might never get another chance to talk, for once we stepped off the boat, who knew what horrors lay ahead of us?
My footsteps on the deck alerted him to my presence and he lifted his head a little, his eyes open now, but he didn’t turn around. I could tell that he knew it was me. I kept some distance between us, looked out in the direction of France, took a cigarette from my pocket and lit it before offering the half-filled case to him.
He shook his head at first, then changed his mind and took one. As he put it to his lips I handed mine across, thinking that he could take the light, but he shook his head once again, abruptly, and dug in his pockets for a match instead.
“Are you frightened?” I asked after a long silence.
“Of course I am,” he said. “Aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
We smoked our cigarettes, grateful that we had them so we wouldn’t be obliged to talk. Finally he turned to me, his expression sorrowful, apologetic, then looked down at his boots, swallowing nervously, his eyebrows and forehead knitted together in despair.
“Look, Sadler,” he said. “It’s no good. You know that, don’t you?”
“Of course.”
“It couldn’t…” He hesitated and tried again. “We’re none of us thinking straight, that’s the problem. This bloody war. I wish it was all behind us. We haven’t even got there yet and I’m wishing it was over.”
“Do you regret it?” I asked quietly, and he turned, his expression more aggressive than before.
“Do I regret what?”
“You know what.”
“I’ve said, haven’t I? It’s no good. Let’s just act as if none of it ever happened. It didn’t really, if you think about it. It doesn’t count unless it’s, you know… unless it’s with a girl.”
I laughed; a quick, involuntary snort. “Of course it counts, Will,” I said, taking a step towards him. “And why are you calling me Sadler all of a sudden?”
“Well, it’s your name, isn’t it?”
“My name’s Tristan. You’re the one who always says how much you hate the way we’re referred to by our surnames. You said it dehumanizes us.”
“And so it does,” he replied gruffly. “We’re not men any more.”
“Of course we are!”
“No,” he said, shaking his head quickly. “I didn’t mean that. I meant we can’t think that we’re regular men now; we’re soldiers, that’s all. We have a war to fight. You’re Private Sadler and I’m Private Bancroft and there we are and that’s an end to it.”
“Back there,” I said, lowering my voice and nodding in the direction from which we had come, the direction of England, “our friendship meant a lot to me. At Aldershot, I mean. I’ve never been good with friends and—”
“Oh, for pity’s sake, Tristan,” he hissed, flicking the end of his cigarette overboard now and turning on me furiously. “Don’t speak to me like I’m your sweetheart, all right? It sickens me, that’s all. I won’t stand for it.”
“Will,” I said, reaching out to him again, meaning nothing by it, simply hoping to stop him marching away from me, but he slapped my arm aside in a rough fashion, rather more violently than he had intended perhaps, for as I stumbled he looked back at me with a mixture of regret and self-hatred. Then he pulled himself together and continued to walk back towards the deck, where most of our fellows were gathered.
“I’ll see you over there,” he said. “None of the rest of it matters.”
He hesitated for a moment, though, turned around, and seeing the expression of pain and confusion on my face, relented a little. “I’m sorry, all right?” he said. “I just can’t, Tristan.”
Since then we have barely spoken. Neither on the march to Amiens, when he kept a clear distance between us, nor as we advanced towards Montauban-de-Picardie, which, Corporal Moody reliably informs us, is the desecrated region where I stand with my eyes to the mud-smeared glass of my box-periscope. And I have tried to forget him, I have tried to convince myself that it was just one of those things, but it’s difficult to do that when my body is standing here, eight feet deep in the earth of northern France, while my heart remains by a stream in a clearing in England where I left it weeks ago.
Rich is dead. Parks and Denchley, too. I watch as their bodies are taken out of the trenches and as much as I want to turn away, I can’t. They were sent on a wiring party last night, over the top, to lay thick reams of barbed wire in front of our defences before the next spate of shelling began, and were picked off one by one by German snipers.