“What’s going on?” he shouted. “Who gave that alarm?”
“Gas, Louise!” I shrieked at him.
“Don’t call me Louise!” he bellowed back.
I remembered Tuck’s lecture. An old man’s urine is particularly efficacious.
“I can’t piss!” I shouted. I grabbed at his fly buttons.
Louise saw his masked men and panicked. He laid his square of cotton beside mine on the fire step, ripped open his trousers and sprayed the two pads with wild arcs of urine.
“Quickly,” I yelled, pounding his kidneys with my fists. “Faster!”
It was too late. The gas was on us, sweeping thick and white over the breastwork of sandbags. Cool, moist, almost refreshing and faintly salt. The first sea mist of the spring.
Luckily, no one in real authority knew who started the panic. I myself claimed I had heard an earlier alarm from the Belgian lines to our right. We had many cuts and bruises among us, but in A Company there were two broken arms and a fractured pelvis, Louise was furious and sent me back to Coxyde-Bains on field punishment. Single-handedly I dug latrines for an entire company of amused Royal Marines at La Panne. Then I joined a working party from C Company filling sandbags for three days. My charge was unsoldierly conduct: unacceptable and unseemly behavior that had caused confusion and indiscipline in the ranks. You can imagine how popular I was with the bombers, who had not welcomed the close contact with their own excreta. It was hard to convince them it was not a practical joke. Captain Tuck, who was orderly officer the day I reported back to Coxyde-Bains, severely rebuked me for my behavior, adding that I had not only let down the 13th Battalion but also the public-school boys of Britain.
“But what if it had been gas, sir?”
“But it wasn’t, so your observation is irrelevant. What school did you go to, Todd? Harrow? Charterhouse?”
“Minto Academy.”
“Stands to reason then.” He dismissed me.
The only tangible result of my false alarm was the prompt issuing of the new box respirators two days later. But I received no thanks for this.
One day during my field punishment I was walking back to Coxyde-Bains — shovel and pick over my shoulder — with the orderly sergeant who had been supervising my latrine digging. He was an agreeable enough man, a nearsighted twenty-year-old who had done a term at Cambridge and who had an interest in photography. We were discussing the relative merits of plate over roll film, I rather listlessly — I was filthy and my back and shoulders ached. We walked through a tiny hamlet, quite ruined from the 1914 advance, on the La Panne-Oostduinkerke road, when we passed a broken-down Fiat lorry full of nurses. A driver busied himself with the engine while some of the nurses waited by the side of the road in the mild late-afternoon sun.
“Mr. Todd.”
I turned. Dagmar. I introduced the orderly sergeant, who discreetly, and decently, took himself off a few paces.
“Miss Fjermeros …” I felt an irritating blush grow. I took off my trench cap, set down my clinking tools. The dim peasant greets lady of the manor.
“Fee-ermeros. The J is silent.”
“Sorry. Of course. How are you?”
“What’re you doing? You’re so dirty. Are you in trouble?”
“No, no. I’ve been digging latrines. Nothing serious.” I needlessly ran my fingers through my short hair, touched my moustache as if it were false and coming unstuck.
“Where are you going?” I asked. The soft sun on her face at that moment made her almost unbearably beautiful. I felt like weeping. I wanted to lay my head on that starched apron and weep.
“We’re being transferred.”
I nodded. She mentioned a name. I suppose I should have remembered it, but my head was full of a drumming sound, like heavy rain on a tin roof.
“I’m sorry we didn’t have our chance of a walk on the beach.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Thank you for bringing my watch that day. It was kind.”
“Don’t mention it.” My sergeant cleared his throat. “I’d better be off. I hope he fixes your lorry soon.”
“Oh, it doesn’t matter. It’s agreeable to be in the sun.” She lifted her calm face to the oblique rays and closed her eyes. I saw the iridescent golden eyelashes, the fine blue veins pulsing on her lids.
“Isn’t it.… Well, good-bye.”
She opened her eyes. “Remember what I told you, Mr. Todd.”
The walk back to camp at Coxyde-Bains might have taken place underwater, so blurred and streaming were my eyes. I sneezed and honked into my handkerchief all the way back, unable to control myself.
“Hay fever,” I said to the skeptical sergeant.
That night I wrote in my diary:
Dagmar has gone, and with her, what wonderful opportunities? Living, it seems to me, is really no more than a long process of steady embitterment.
May 23, 1917. Back in Wormstroedt at brigade reserve. All my lust for Huguette has returned, enhanced and fortified by the loss of Dagmar. I spend all my time in the estaminet.
It is curious how the enamored eye transforms. Huguette now seemed to me the very image of pulchritude. Every detail contributed to the harmonious impact of the whole. The dark downy hairs on her lip, the thick fleshiness of her upper arms, her plump cheeks, the three or four creases round her neck. All this made me love her more.
She greeted me as always — curtly — but at least she knew who I was. She was manifestly fatter since our last time at Wormstroedt, but in my inflamed state the idea of fat round soft thighs, round fat soft belly and fat soft round breasts seemed far more attractive than anything more svelte and lissome. And there is, is there not, something enticing about youthful obesity, where the extra weight has bounce and firmness and nothing has turned loose or slack?
In my preoccupation I only half-noticed the increased traffic in Wormstroedt. The big guns and their limber constantly moving through the town, the lines of lorries, the increase in staff officers in sputtering motors, the military police, the frequent arrival of new units. In the tobacco factory we had doubled up to provide space for others, and for the first time the reek of tobacco was overwhelmed by the smells of hot, tightly pressed human bodies.
There was some talk of a transfer away from Nieuport. Teague and Somerville-Start indulged in eager speculation about potential postings. Such guesswork that reached my ears only turned my thoughts more towards Huguette. One fact now dominated my thinking: I must not die without the experience of sex. I played in a few football matches; I visited the bathhouses, drew new equipment, went on a bombing course; I drilled as if I were some sort of automaton. During off-duty hours I sat in the estaminet, drinking Huguette’s abominable tea, eating eggs and chipped potatoes, watching her punch holes in condensed milk tins or move sullenly through the tables collecting plates and cutlery on a tray wedged against her yielding thigh.
On the third of June we received orders to return to Nieuport, where the 13th was to await further instructions. Our days in the quiet sector were all but over. Teague’s face was round with glee. I realized we might never be in Wormstroedt again. That last evening I stayed on as late as I could in the estaminet. Most of the 13th had left. There were a noisy three tables of Australian engineers drinking beer. There was little demand for tea. Huguette stood by the dull copper urn, head down, preoccupied, as she picked at a callus on her finger. The late-evening sun shone through the small windows turning the room’s smokehaze milky, basting the chipped tables and curved chair backs with a rare polished gleam. I moved through a wand of light towards her. She looked up.