“Where the hell have you been?”
I told him. And recounted how I had met Dagmar.
“Bloody marvelous,” he said. “Here we are, meant to be fighting the Hun. One lot plays football, another goes to have lunch with his girlfriend. ‘What did you do in the war, Daddy?’ ‘Me? Oh, I twisted my ankle in a match against A Company.’ Makes me sick.”
He was genuinely angry. But I had seen him often enough in this mood not to be perturbed.
“You should visit that hospital. You wouldn’t be quite so keen then.”
“What do you know, Pictish lout?”
I was not frightened of Teague, especially as he was immobile.
“I know I’d watch my lip if I were you, Teague. Or I might just twist your other ankle.”
“Shag off.”
“Shag off yourself, fat face.”
It carried on like this for a minute or so before I left to watch the end of the match. It sounds depressingly puerile, I know, but remember we were most of us just out of the sixth form and we often bickered this way. Our profanities coarsened steadily as time went by. We took our lead from the pipe band, cheerful foul-mouthed fellows, with a colorful line in invective.
Two days later we went up the line to relieve B and C companies. I looked at the immaculate trenches with different eyes. There was something sinister, almost insulting about their order and rectitude. My encounter with the drowned men had made me preternaturally wary. I no longer strolled along the parapet at dusk, as I used to. I never even exposed my head above the sandbags. I surveyed the distant German lines through a periscope. I saw the small figures of the enemy quite clearly, as indifferent to our presence as we were to theirs. For the first time I completed the equation of myself, my rifle and the target a thousand yards away. Then I transposed it. Congruence. My alarm deepened.
One evening in the section dugout Teague and Somerville-Start asked Druce to persuade Louise to let them form a raiding party.
“What on earth for?” he said. We all listened intently.
“To do something for once,” Teague said.
“We’re going mad with boredom. Let’s take a prisoner. Interrogate him.” Somerville-Start grinned, showing his big teeth. “Have some fun.”
“No,” I said, suddenly terrified. “It’s the most stupid idea I’ve ever heard.”
“Does sound a bit on the keen side,” Bookbinder said. “I’m not complaining.”
“Anything for a quiet life,” Kite said. “Who wants to go prowling around in the dark?”
“You might get hurt,” Bookbinder said.
“Bloody funk,” Teague said to me.
“It’s not funk, it’s sense.”
“Louise’ll never agree, anyway,” Druce said calmly. “He’ll ask O’Dell and O’Dell will say no. This is Belgian line, you know, not ours.”
“They’re mad,” I said to Druce when the others had gone. “Raving mad.”
Druce smiled. “Raiding party. Don’t know what they’re talking about.” He slapped me on the shoulder. “Keep it up, Jock, you’ll save our necks yet.”
I liked Druce for that. He seemed so much older than the rest of us: calmer, more skeptical, less ruffled by events.
However, despite Druce’s presence, as our sixth month in the Nieuport sector wore on, my own worries steadily increased. The drowned men had thrown me off balance. The unreal routine and the tolerable nature of our life at the front had been exposed for the temporary haven it was. We would not be left in a quiet sector forever. As each day passed it brought a possible posting closer. I began to speculate about the nature of my death, all the horrible versions that were available. And behind this fear another deep disquiet was nurtured. I was still a virgin, and, Oonagh apart, I had never even kissed a girl. The thought of dying with life so unlived, so little experienced, seemed outrageously unfair. My encounter with Dagmar had naturally exacerbated this emptiness at the center of myself. Dagmar or Huguette? Huguette or Dagmar? Which one would I choose? In such bouts of vain self-deception did I while away my time. It was doubly galling as it was difficult to masturbate discreetly in the trenches. I used to wait until I was on sentry duty in a small observation sap pushed forward some ten or fifteen yards into no-man’s-land where for four futile hours I was meant to guard against a German attack. (As it happened, one did occur in July of that year—1917—but by then we were long gone.)
From my diary:
April 23, 1917. Druce has just told me that I am on sentry duty from 2 A.M. to 6 A.M. Tried to sleep in dugout but had serious row with Teague and S.-Start about the “thrill of battle.” Teague openly accused me of killing Ralph. Even Bookbinder and Kite seemed not to accept my story. Eight days to go and then back to Wormstroedt and Huguette.
I remember that date vividly. All through that night of sentry duty the German batteries at Wilskerke shelled the bridge across the canal at Wulpen. I could see across the sand hills the distant muzzle flash of the guns, but I could not see or hear the shells land. The irregular flickering and the faint reports kept me alert and edgy. Around five o’clock I began to see the shape of the ruined lighthouse at the mouth of the Yser emerge from the darkness. It had been a warm night, the warmest of the year so far.
I had a piss in the corner of the sap. As I did so I looked up at the lightening sky and saw the faint stars still sparkling in an immense field of lightest bluey-gray. I rubbed my face and looked at my watch. Half an hour to go. A breakfast of tea, a tin of sardines, and bread and margarine waited. I sniffed, spat, yawned, flexed my fingers and allowed my gaze to wander out over no-man’s-land.
I saw the gas instantly, as it rolled thick, white and heavy down through the dunes from Lombartzyde. A breeze on the seaward side swung a flank round faster on the left, hooking in towards me. It seemed dense and solid as smoke from burning green leaves, obliterating everything as it advanced. I turned and ran back down the sap to the trench. There a large, highly polished section of girder hung from a bracket, and beside it an iron bar.
I seized the bar and beat furiously on the girder, numbing my fingers cruelly with the blows. The clear harsh sound of metal on metal clattered down the trench line.
“Gas!” I screamed. “GAS ATTACK!”
I heard other gas alarms being sounded — sirens, gongs and rattles — shouts of frantic inquiry. I tore my goggles from a pocket and put them on. I fumbled for my cotton pad. Not there! I re-searched my pockets. Nothing. Nothing. I thought of pints of yellow fluid, foam-filled rotting lungs, searing mustard burns … I hurled myself into the dugout. Blurred faces shouted nonsense at me.
“Gas!” I bellowed. “Gas!”
I scrabbled among my kit, found my cotton pad and stumbled back outside. The gas was fifty yards away. Our platoon crawled out of dugouts. The air was filled with alarms, loud with meaningless panic. I saw a baffled Noel Kite, who had also been on sentry duty, trying on his cotton pad. Dry.
“Urine, Kite!” I yelled at him, and at the others who now piled haphazardly out of the dugout entrance, tin helmets on, rifles ready.
“Wet the pad. Quickly!”
Violent fear galvanized them. Full early-morning bladders were emptied steaming onto the cotton. I laid my own pad on the fire step and snatched at the buttons of my fly with blunt agitated fingers. I saw Teague wrap a sopping mask around his face, saw the more fastidious Kite wring his out before applying it. Somerville-Start crouched behind the sandbagged parapet on the fire step, fixing his bayonet, his hanging cock luminously white against the khaki of his battle dress. I strained desperately to urinate, but I had emptied my bladder minutes before. Nothing. Not a drop. I could smell the gas above the acid reek of urine, which filled the trench. The whole section was now masked and ready except for me and Pawsey, who had raised his sodden pad to vomit. I saw Louise, half-dressed, stumbling along from his dugout.