“English?”
“Yes, that’s easier.”
“We didn’t know. We thought maybe you were Italian or Spanish.”
“I’ve lived here for years.”
“Are you English?… May I sit down?”
“Scottish.… Please.”
“Would you like a cigarette?” She sits down. She has a crumpled soft pack tucked in the sleeve of her pea-green T-shirt. Her breasts shudder briefly beneath the verdant cotton as she sits.
“No, thanks.”
She still has her spectacles on. Tortoiseshell. Modishly rearranged rectangles.
“My name is Ulrike Günther.” She lights her cigarette. Her sister comes in. “This is my sister, Anneliese.”
We shake hands. “Todd,” I say. “John James Todd.”
Ulrike Günther frowns. “Todd?”
“Yes,” I say.
We talk about our villas, problems of water supply, staff, electricity. I tell them my pool is empty this summer. You must swim in ours, they insist. They talk good English, these fair strong girls. My irritation subsides, marginally.
Anneliese breaks a nail on a recalcitrant pistachio. I show her how to open the nuts using a discarded half shell as a lever. They are full of admiration. Did I invent this infallible method of opening pistachio nuts — the best nut in the world? You need never break another nail on them — you need never be frustrated by those nuts with their thin maddening smiles, never leave them unopened in the bottom of the bowl any longer.
Ulrike is enchanted by the simple efficiency of my device.
“Oh yes,” she says. “It’s like — how do you say? The same with Muscheln.”
“Mussels,” I say. “The same word.”
“I should know,” she says. She tells me she is a marine biologist writing a thesis on molluscs.
After our drinks we walk back down the track to our villas, neighbors now. At their gate Ulrike pauses, frowning.
“Were you ever in Germany, Mr. Todd?”
I’m already backing off — easy to pretend I didn’t hear her.
“You must all come round for a drink. Very soon,” I call. “Bye now.”
4 New Geometries, New Worlds
We missed the Battle of Messines Ridge by a few days. The huge mines were exploded beneath it on the seventh of June, and thus was initiated the Third Battle of Ypres, which lasted, in fits and starts, until mid-November. In fact everything stopped shortly after Messines for a couple of months until the offensive was renewed again at the end of July. Meanwhile the 13th (Public School) Service Battalion of the Duke of Clarence’s Own South Oxford Light Infantry moved into the Ypres Salient.
We had hoped, indeed Colonel O’Dell had assured us, that we were to be reunited with the regiment, but this was not to be. On June 17 we found ourselves posted to corps reserve behind Bailleul, some dozen miles from Ypres. We were billeted in a farm across the road from a battalion of Australian pioneers. The bombing section of D Company pitched its tent and thus began the familiar round of equipment cleaning, fatigue parties and sports. My God, I was sick of sports by then! Football, badminton, rugby, cricket, everything — even battalion-sized games of British bulldog.
We could hear the guns on the front clearly. Somehow they sounded different from the long-range boom of the siege artillery at Nieuport — like the small thunder of a skittle ball, more sinister and dangerous, knocking things down. One week we laid a corduroy road of raw sappy elm planks for the use of a battery of heavy howitzers — squat, muscle-bound guns with fist-sized rivets — that fired a fat shell a foot in diameter. These guns were towed into place — hence the road — by traction engines. Standing back fifty yards, fingers in our ears, we watched their first salvo. The earth shivered; the guns disappeared in smoke. It took five minutes to load them; the shells were trundled up on light railways and then, with some difficulty, winched into the breech with primitive-looking block and tackle rigged beneath wooden tripods.
Boredom set in again, but it was of a slightly different order: beneath it lay a seam of excitement. An offensive was on; fairly soon, surely, it would be our turn for a “stunt.” There was real enthusiasm in our tent, shared by everyone with the exception of Pawsey and myself. Even Noel Kite said he was keen to “have a go at the Teutons.” Ralph the dog, which we had brought from Nieuport, became the bombing section mascot. I have a photograph of us all, taken with Somerville-Start’s box camera. There they sit — Kite, Bookbinder, Somerville-Start (Ralph panting between his knees), Druce, Teague, Pawsey and the others whose names I cannot recall — grinning, fags in mouths, caps pushed back, shirt-sleeved, collars open, Teague clutching a Mills bomb in each hand. We look like a typically close bunch of “mates,” cheery and convivial. It is an entirely illusory impression. The months at Nieuport had forged few bonds. If truth be told, we all rather grated on each other’s nerves. We were like schoolboys at the end of term, needing some respite from the close proximity.
At the end of June we marched from Bailleul through Locre and Dickebusch to Ypres. The countryside had a look of certain parts of England. Gentle hills, red-tiled cottages and farms, scattered woods and along the lane sides a profusion of lilac, may and laburnum bushes. We skirted the shattered town and went into reserve trenches on the left bank of the Ypres-Comines canal. This was the first time the battalion came under fire, from a few stray shells. We all thought we were blasé about shelling after the artillery duels at Nieuport, but this was our first experience of real explosions. I remember seeing the puffs of dirt erupt and collapse in the fields across the canal and thought they possessed a fragile transient beauty—“earth trees that live a split second,” I wrote in my diary. A few landed in the reserve lines, knocking down a couple of poplars, but I registered no alarm. There seemed nothing inherently dangerous in them — as threatening as the puffs of smoke that drifted harmlessly in the sunlit air after the clods of earth had thumped to the ground.
A and B companies went into the front line to relieve a battalion of the Royal Sussex Regiment. Two days later I went up myself as part of a ration party, carrying four gallons of tea in a couple of petrol cans.
What can I tell you about the Ypres front in early July 1917? Later, I used to explain it to people like this:
Take an idealized image of the English countryside — I always think of the Cotswolds in this connection (in fact, to be precise, I always think of Oxfordshire around Charlbury, for obvious reasons). Imagine you are walking along a country road. You come to the crest of a gentle rise and there before you is a modest valley. You know exactly the sort of view it provides. A road, some hedgerowed lanes, a patchwork of fields, a couple of small villages — cottages, a post office, a pub, a church — there a dovecote, there a farm and an old mill; here an embankment and a railway line; a wood to the left, copses and spinneys scattered randomly about. The eye sweeps over these benign and neutral features unquestioningly.
Now, place two armies on either side of this valley. Have them dig in and construct a trench system. Everything in between is suddenly invested with new sinister potentiaclass="underline" that neat farm, the obliging drainage ditch, the village at the crossroads, become key factors in strategy and survival. Imagine running across those intervening fields in an attempt to capture positions on that gentle slope opposite you so that you may advance one step into the valley beyond. Which way will you go? What cover will you seek? How swiftly will your legs carry you up that sudden gradient? Will that culvert provide shelter from enfilading fire? Is there an observation post in that barn? Try it the next time you are on a country stroll and see how the most tranquil scene can become instinct with violence. It requires only a change in point of view.