“Another ten yards.”
We came out of the firebay. Five very small men — very small men indeed — sat around a tommy-cooker brewing tea. They looked at us with candid hostility. They wore kilts covered with canvas aprons. Their faces were black with mud, grime and a five-day growth of beard. Two of them stood up. The tops of their heads came up to my chest. Neither of them could have been more than five feet tall. Bantams … These were the 17th/3 Grampians, a bantam battalion, every man under the army’s minimum height of five feet three inches. Kite and Somerville-Start were both taller than six feet.
“What the fuck are youse cunts looking at?” One of the men said in a powerful Scottish accent.
“What?” Kite said, unable to conceal his astonishment.
“Rations,” I said. At least I could understand. He told me where to go.
We made our way diffidently along the support trench until we found the supplies sap. There, a dozen bantams were collecting rations. We waited our turn uneasily, like lanky anthropologists among a pygmy tribe. We stood head and shoulders above these tiny dirty men. They seemed more like goblins or trolls than members of the same race as ourselves. The bantams appeared indifferent to our presence, but we were all ill at ease, full of bogus smiles, as if we suspected some elaborate practical joke was being played on us and had not quite divined its ultimate purpose. We gladly picked up our petrol cans of water and headed back.
The bantams did not like us. It cannot just have been because of our height, though it has to be said that as ex-public-school boys we were on average taller than the other ranks in most regiments. I suspect it was a combination of our stature, our voices, our bearing and our Englishness that let us down. It did not help when, on our way back that first day, Kite said loudly, “I think they’re rather sweet little chaps. Is it true they’ve been specially bred?” In any event, there swiftly grew up an invisible barrier between our company flanks and the bantams on either side. It was so uncomfortable that we demanded our own ration parties, which, somehow, Louise managed to arrange for us. The company’s first deaths in action were sustained in this way. The pipe band were carrying up pots of hot stew when they “got a shell all to themselves,” as the saying had it. Four were killed and three were wounded. It shocked us all profoundly: the pipe band had seemed indestructible. Louise, I recall, took it particularly badly.
Trench routine continued as normal for the next few days. My diary records the daily round:
Sentry duty, 4 A.M.–6 A.M. Stand to. B’fast — tea, pickled mackerel, biscuit. Repaired trenches. Ration carrying. Lunch: beef stew, biscuits. Slept. Sentry duty, 6 P.M.–8 P.M.
It rained from time to time and I grew steadily dirtier. I watched my uniform take on that particular look common to heavily soiled clothes — one sees it on tramps and refugees, for example. The fibers of the material seem to become bulked out with dirt so that jacket and trousers look as if they have been cut from a thick coarse felt. Creases at armpits, elbows and backs of knees develop a permanent concertinaed effect — rigid and fixed. Your hair dulls, then becomes oily, and then transforms into a matted, clotted rope-end. Fingernails are rimmed with earth, your hands hard and calloused as a peasant’s. Your beard grows. Your head itches, itches all day long.
We knew our “stunt” was approaching as the ridge in front of us steadily took more shelling. Tension increased, and the routine wariness that had characterized our waking moments was replaced by neurotic edgy alarm. We kept expecting to be pulled out of the line for a period of rest before the attack, but we appeared to have been forgotten. Even Teague and Somerville-Start were subdued. As for myself, I had evolved a new approach. I decided to be logical. I was going, as far as possible, to think my way to survival, even if it meant disobeying orders.
We stood to at half past four, an hour before dawn. Our objectives were the two ruined farms. D Company was going for the right-hand one, along with the bantams on our right flank. We were to capture the farm, secure it and repel and counterattack until the second wave passed us. All night the ridge had been pounded by our guns. As we lined up in the fire trench the bombardment was still going on. Louise passed among us, white-faced and muttering what I suppose were words of encouragement. I could not hear him above the noise of the shells. Beside me stood Pawsey. On the other side was Somerville-Start. He held a ladder; so did I. I was as ready as I would ever be.
But I had forgotten about the rum. The quartermaster sergeant passed among us, pouring out the tots from the big ceramic bottle. The rum looked black, evil, thick as molasses. I drank my allocation — half a wineglass, I suppose — in two gulps, and I was seriously drunk within a minute. I saw Pawsey vomit his issue and lean gagging against the trench wall. Somerville-Start’s face wore a kind of fixed, zealous grimace — he was breathing fiercely through his nose, both hands on his ladder.
Then everyone urinated. I suppose an order must have been given. The trench filled with vinegary urine steam. I was giddy. I felt the trench had acquired a steep, dipping gradient to the left, down which I might at any moment slide. I held on to my ladder, and adjusted the weight of my sack of bombs. I never heard the whistle go, but suddenly I saw people begin to climb their ladders. Somerville-Start and I set off simultaneously.
I do not remember my first unprotected view of no-man’s-land — that initial astonishing second — because Somerville-Start got shot in the mouth. The moment his face cleared the parapet I saw his teeth shatter as they were hit by the bullet, and a plume of blood, like a ponytail, issued from the nape of his neck. Several teeth, or teeth fragments, hit me in the face, stinging me like thrown gravel, and one piece cut me badly above my right eye. My eye filled with warm blood and I blundered over the sandbags blindly, wiping my eye with my sleeve. I sensed Pawsey going by me. My vision cleared and I saw him running off in the direction of the ridge. There was no sign of the ridge itself — the creeping barrage some fifty yards in front of us obscured everything.
“Think!” I said out loud. I crouched down and scampered forward, almost on all fours, like a baboon.
“Stand up, that man!” somebody bellowed.
I ignored him.
We were now, I realized, being shelled in our turn, and I suppose there must have been machine-gun fire from somewhere because I saw some bantams on my right gently falling over. I scrabbled after the creeping barrage, dragging my rifle on the ground. As far as I was concerned the world was still canted over towards the left and I kept falling over heavily on my left side, bruising my left knee. I moved like some demented cripple.
Then a shell exploded near me and the blast of air snatched my rifle from my grasp and whipped my helmet from my head. Warm earth hit my face and I felt the weal of the chin strap hot on my throat I was stunned immobile for some seconds. Then, crablike, I scuttled into the fuming crater.
Kite was already there, on his back, wounded. He held up the stump of his right arm, fringed like a brush, not bleeding but clotted with earth.
“Somebody’s gone and shot my bloody arm off!” he shouted.
I blinked. I screwed up my eyes to adjust focus.
“Damn nuisance,” Kite said. He seemed wholly unperturbed.
I wondered if I should help him.
“D’you want a hand?” I yelled, in all innocence.
“Very funny, Todd,” he said petulantly. “Hardly the time or place.” He began to move. “I can make it on my own.” He crawled back towards our lines.
I looked round. I could not see a soul. The din was so general it seemed quite normal, like the factory floor of an iron foundry.… I still had my sack of bombs. I wondered where I should throw them. I slithered forward, past some small dead bantams. I saw what looked like a horrifically mangled side of beef, flayed by a maniac butcher with an ax. The melancholy of anatomy. At the top there was an ear, some hair and part of a cheek. At the bottom, a bare knee with a smudge of dirt on it.