“Is it far away?”
“I should say so.”
“Drat! All right you men, pack up. Sorry chaps, wrong place.”
I leave them to dismantle their neat pit and slither down the crumbled sides of a gully. A sunken track or road, pounded out of recognition. I clamber up the other side and get a brief view of our line again. Two hundred yards to go.
“Hey, you! Help! Over here!”
It is a man, up to his armpits in a mud pool at the bottom of a large, deep shell crater. If he had not shouted I would never have spotted him. His face is covered with dark-red blood.
“You English? I can’t see very well.” He has a strong Ulster accent.
“I’m Scottish, actually … but it doesn’t matter.”
“Get me out of here, pal, will you? I’m going down.” Doyn, he pronounces it.
“Right you are.”
I slither carefully down the slope of the crater. The man is about eight feet away. I sink in up to my ankles. The mud is thick, like fudge. I hold out my rifle. He stretches for it. There is still a two-foot gap.
“I’m missing a fuckin’ leg here, an’ all. Blown up right into this fuckin’ bog.”
“I can’t reach you. I’m sorry.”
“Sweet Jesus Christ.… Wade out a bit, pal. I’m going down.”
“I’ll sink too.”
I can see he is going down. The muddy water is up to his neck. He makes little fluttering movements with his fingers — as though his hands were wings and he could fly out.
“God God God.… Well, put me out of me misery, pal, will you do that? I don’t want to droyne in this shite.”
“I can’t do that!”
“Sure I’d do the fuckin’ same for you!”
He stretches his chin clear of the viscid surface. I make a final futile stretch. I am up to my knees. He grabs. There is still an insurmountable eighteen inches.
“Come on. Do us a favor.”
Suddenly, it seems the most reasonable request in the world. I put myself in his place. I would make the same plea. Of course.
“Look the other way,” I say.
He turns his head and I take aim. My fatigue makes my rifle sway. I fire. And miss. A gout of mud is thrown up behind his head.
“For God’s sake!” he screams, his composure all gone.
“I’m sorry.” I pull the trigger again and my rifle jams.
“I’ll get another,” I shout. I claw my way up the bank. I run here and there looking for a corpse with a rifle. At one moment I run back to the crater to check on my Ulsterman. But he has gone.
I shut my eyes and rub my face. I feel stupid and empty with tiredness. My back is sore, my leg mysteriously bruised. I trudge back towards the line of trenches. My shock and outrage steadily die as I slip and slither home.
I arrive at the British line and am directed to my sector. I seem to have wandered a mile over to the right. I try not to think about Teague or the man in the pool. I hum my tune, blotting out the images as I shuffle with the wounded along duckboards through communication trenches: “… whiter than the snow … wash your dirty daughter … whiter than the snow, Holy Joe.”
I find the bantams two hours later. It is midday. They sit on the banks of a sunken lane behind the Ypres-Comines canal, silent, morose, exhausted. We are all black, filthy, pasted with drying mud. I sit down, rest my arms on my knees and my head on my arms. A light drizzle falls and it gets cold. I hear short exchanges of conversation. The bantams had a good day. One lot killed forty prisoners. It is their special pride that they kill everyone: the potent fury of small angry men. Tanqueray walks up and down checking who is missing. There is no sign of MacKanness. Stampe is alive and in a field hospital. Tanqueray rebukes me wrathfully and at length for losing my rifle. I hear his iron voice and a horrible fear invades me. Now Teague has gone and I am alone with the bantams. I do not have the strength to cope with them anymore. I know then that I have to run away.
I look up and offer my grimy face to the soft rain. I have had enough.
“Johnny? Good God, is that you, Johnny?”
I look round.
Standing there, tall, neat, in a staff captain’s uniform, is Donald Verulam.
VILLA LUXE, June 2, 1972
My God. The bantams. I used to have nightmares about them for years. Every time I went back to Scotland I was in a state of fearful suspense that I might run into my ex-comrades. Especially Tanqueray. I would go into pubs and have a good look round before I ordered a drink. I don’t know if he survived the war, but those bantams had a tenacious hold on life that was quite inhuman — given our species’ particular vulnerability. They were more like some sort of insect — silver lice or cockroaches, small tough well-armored beetles.
I will only say this about that terrible day in the Salient: it changed me forever. Not dramatically; in fact, at the time I thought it had left me mentally, as well as physically, unscathed. But it hadn’t. It had changed me forever. You can’t encounter such chaos and cruel absurdity on that scale and not have it affect your view of life. You never see anything else in quite the same way again.
This morning I moved my most comfortable chair from the poolside to the cliff edge. There’s a small pine tree there that casts good shade until about 11 A.M. I used to sit facing the pool, never out to sea, but now I don’t derive the same enjoyment, looking at it empty. Now, on my new perch, two hundred feet high, I have a superb view of the bay, and when it blows I can catch the breeze off the sea.
Below me the wide bay stretches out its arms, one long, one short. To the west, the long arm is a hilly promontory that in silhouette looks like a giant crocodile’s head half-submerged in the sea. You can quite clearly make out the twin bulges of its eyes, the long ramp of its jaw, the hump of its nostrils. I can see along its shoreline the new villas being constructed and the small public beach with its bright umbrellas, paddleboats and restaurant shack.
To the east is the other, short arm. A smaller promontory this, ended by an almost perfectly conical hill. Nestled into the corner this hill makes with the isthmus of land that joins it to the shore, is my beach. There’s not much sand. The beach is composed largely of mounds of dry seaweed, regularly washed up here by some persistent current. Beneath your bare feet it feels soft, like shreds of old newspaper, a yard thick. I haven’t been there for ages. There was no real need, while I had the pool. But now a sea bathe seems almost unbearably enticing. However, it can be reached only by an awkward twenty-minute walk down a winding path through steep pinewoods and along the cliff edge. And it takes me four times as long to return. These days I find such hikes a real effort.
What else can I tell you about my property — Eddie’s property? There is a small field to one side of the house, filled with fine blond grass and dry clumps of chamomile bushes. Along the cliff edge rosemary grows in profusion, like gorse. In the field too there are some bright-green carob trees, two or three dying olives and the huge pestilential fig, its lazy boughs propped up by wooden crutches. The pines planted round the house exude an opaque spunky sap. It builds up like candle wax on the trunks. The air is full of heady herby smells.
This morning as I sat on my new perch above the bay (I already refer to it mentally as the “lookout”), I watched a small motorboat putter out from the moorings by the public beach in my direction. It stopped almost below me. I went and fetched my binoculars.
It was Ulrike Günther. The boat was a small vivid-yellow four-seater with a powerful outboard motor, which Günther and his sons normally use for water-skiing. Ulrike was alone. She anchored the boat five or six yards from the cliff base and removed her T-shirt. She was wearing a dark heliotrope one-piece swimsuit. She fitted goggles, snorkle and a waistbag and dived in. She swam to the rocks and, as far as I could make out, started chipping away at them with a knife. She spent twenty minutes collecting specimens, then returned to the boat.