I nod and rub my eyes. I’m feeling tired now; perhaps it’s time to say goodnight and return to my foxhole for sleep.
“That night,” says Will, and I don’t turn my head or raise my eyes but sit still, as steady as my hands were a few moments before. “Before, I mean.”
“At Aldershot?” I say.
“Yes.” He hesitates before speaking again. “Funny thing, wasn’t it?”
I breathe heavily through my nose and consider it. “We were frightened, I suppose,” I tell him. “Of what was coming next, I mean. It wasn’t planned.”
“No,” he says. “No, of course not. I mean I’ve always thought that I might like to get married some day. Have a few little ones, that type of thing. Don’t you want that, Tristan?”
“Not really,” I say.
“I do. And I know it’s what my parents would want.”
“And they matter all that much, do they?” I ask bitterly.
“They do to me,” he says. “But that night—”
“Well, what of it?” I ask, frustrated.
“Had you ever thought of it before?” he asks, looking directly at me now, and in the candlelight I can see pools forming in his eyes and I want to reach out and hold him and tell him that if he will just be my friend again, then that is all I need; I can live without the rest if I have to.
“I had,” I say quietly, nodding my head. “Yes, I think it’s… well, it’s there, I mean. In my head. I’ve tried to rid myself of it, of course.” I hesitate and he stares at me, waiting for me to continue. “It’s no good, though,” I concede. “It was there before I even knew what it was.”
“One hears of men,” he says. “There are court cases, of course. One reads about them in the newspapers. But it all seems so… so vile, don’t you think? The secrecy involved. The subterfuge. The whole filthy sordid nature of it.”
“But that is not of their own volition,” I say, choosing my pronoun carefully. “They have no choice but to live secret lives. Their liberty depends on it.”
“Yes,” he agrees. “Yes, I’ve thought of that. Still, I have always thought that it would be nice to be married, haven’t you? To a decent girl from a good family. Someone who wants a happy home.”
“Someone conventional,” I say.
“Ah, Tristan,” he sighs, moving closer to me—the third time he’s used these words—and before I can reply, his mouth is already on mine, urgently, and I almost fall backwards in surprise but manage to steady myself and allow it to happen, wondering at what point I’m allowed to let myself go and simply enjoy the embrace.
“Wait,” he says, pulling away and shaking his head, and I think that he is about to change his mind, but the combined look of desire and urgency in his face suggests otherwise. “Not here,” he says. “Anyone could come in. Follow me.”
I stand as he leaves the tent and walk after him, practically running in case I lose him in the darkness of the night, away from the trenches, moving so fast and to such a distance that a part of me worries whether this might be considered desertion; another part is curious about how easily he finds this patch of hidden ground. Has he been here before? With someone else? Milton or Sparks, perhaps? Or one of the newer boys? Finally, however, he appears to feel safe, and he turns to me and we lie down and as much as I want this, as much as I want him, I remember that night at Aldershot and the way he looked at me afterwards. The way he has barely spoken to me between then and now.
“It will be all right this time, won’t it?” I ask, pulling free for a moment, and he looks down at me, a dazed expression on his face and nods quickly.
“Yes, yes,” he says, then moves down my body, touching every part of me as he goes, and this time I tell myself to ignore the voice in my head that says that this is simply a few minutes of pleasure in exchange for who knows how long of antipathy on his part because it doesn’t matter; at least for these few minutes I can believe that we are no longer at war.
I scramble forward and raise myself to a half-crouch, then trip and fall over a body, someone I half recognize, a new boy, and I land with a crash in the mud. Digging my heels into the soil, I raise myself up, spitting dirt and grit from my lips, ignoring him, pressing on. It’s pointless to wipe the filth away; I haven’t been clean in months.
Launching myself out into no-man’s-land gets more terrifying every time. It’s Russian roulette: with every pull of the trigger the chances of your surviving the next shot diminish.
I can hear Wells or Moody, one of them, issuing orders further down the line but it’s difficult to make out exactly what he’s saying; the combination of strong winds and sleeting rain render it impossible to act on anything other than pure instinct. It’s madness to go over in conditions like this but the orders came through from GHQ and are not to be questioned. Unsworth, petulant as ever, queried the wisdom of the move and I thought that Clayton was going to strike him down for it but he quickly apologized and made for the ladders, apparently fearing the enemy’s guns less than our sergeant’s wrath. Clayton seems to have completely lost control of whatever senses were left to him since General Fielding’s visit. He doesn’t sleep much and looks like death. The sound of his roaring can be heard from wherever one is positioned. I wonder that Wells or Moody don’t do something about him; he needs to be relieved of his command before he does something that endangers us all.
I crawl forward on my belly, holding my rifle before me, my left eye firmly closed as I look down the viewfinder for anyone advancing in my direction. I picture myself locking eyes with a boy of my own age, both of us terrified, in the instant before we shoot each other dead. Above us the sky is lousy with aircraft and the dark blue that forces its way through the grey clouds holds a certain beauty, but it’s dangerous to look up so I keep moving, my heart pounding in my chest, my breath escaping my body in staccato gasps.
Will and Hobbs were sent forward last night on a recce that took so long I became convinced we would never see either of them alive again. When they finally reappeared they reported to Corporal Wells that the German trenches were located about three-quarters of a mile north of ours but they had been built in separate runs, not connected to each other as they had been elsewhere. We could take them one at a time if we were careful about it, Hobbs said. Will remained silent and when Sergeant Clayton screeched, “And what about you, Bancroft, you stupid son of a bitch? What do you say?” he simply nodded and said that he agreed with Private Hobbs.
I turned away at the sound of his voice. I feel as if I would be happy never to hear it again.
It has been three weeks since our second encounter and he has neither spoken to me nor answered when I have addressed him. When he sees me approaching—walking in his direction, I mean, not seeking him out—he turns and walks the opposite way. If he enters the mess tent when I am eating, he changes his mind and returns to his own private inferno. No, he spoke to me once, when we turned a corner, ran into each other and found ourselves alone. I opened my mouth to say something and he simply shook his head quickly, raised the palms of his hands to create a barrier between us, and said, “Just fuck off, yes?” and that was the end of that.
There’s a sound of artillery fire up ahead. Hold the line, comes the word from man to man, nineteen or twenty of us in an uneven row as we get closer to the enemy trench. The firing stops; a dim light can be seen, probably a candle or two, then muffled voices. What’s the matter with them? I wonder. Why don’t they see us coming and pick us off one by one? Why don’t they just fucking end us?
But it is in such ways that wars are won, I suppose. One side lets down its guard momentarily, another takes advantage of it. And on this particular night it is our turn to be lucky. Another minute, no more, and we are all on our feet, our rifles raised and primed, hand grenades at the ready, and now there is a constant sound of gunfire and the explosive light of our bullets shooting through the night and down into the trenches below. There’s shouting from beneath us, heavy sounds of timber being thrown to one side—I picture a group of German boys forgetting their duty and playing cards to relieve the tension—and then they swarm like ants below us, raising their guns too late, for we have the advantage of the higher ground and the element of surprise, and we continue to shoot and reload, shoot and reload, shoot and reload, the line breaking a little as we work our way down to cover the length of the trench, which Will and Hobbs have promised us is five hundred yards long, no more than that.