At about half past six the men appeared. There was just enough light. I filmed their exhausted, haggard faces as they filed past me, barely glancing at the camera. Some were wounded and leaned on other men for support. Stretcher-bearers ferried out the gravely injured and three dead bodies.
With the orderly carrying the tripod, I ran down the duckboard track and overtook the shambling pioneers. I set up again on the far bank of the canal by a pontoon bridge over the canal. Wisps of mist rose from the torpid brown water. The men tramped across the bridge; the pontoons dipped; ripples expanded through their bending reflections; some early sun lit the water.
Later that morning I filmed them brewing tea and frying bread and corned beef. I took long, long close-ups as they gazed without expression into the lens. My last shot was of them sleeping, huddled in bivouac sheets, still as corpses.
Then I cut to real corpses, two days later in a graveyard near a field hospital. I had the Aeroscope focused on half a dozen bodies and then directed the burial party to step into frame and dump the contents of their stretchers beside them. Later too I filmed the bizarre, inflexible faces of a Chinese labor battalion digging graves for dead Europeans. Then I caught the unhappy faces of the teenage boys in the burial party pulling on long rubber gloves before hefting the dead into their narrow holes.
In my naïveté I proceeded to film more or less chronologically, shooting scenes in the order I wished them to appear, and in this way, over the next week I put together my film, with an absolute, almost uncanny confidence in the shape it was acquiring, absolutely sure of its effectiveness. I filmed an officer writing letters to next of kin, nurses bandaging wounds, carpenters making wooden crosses, amputees receiving their new crutches, piles of bloodstained uniforms being incinerated and the calm, silent, sunlit rooms of the moribund wards at a base hospital. The final image was the classic one: fresh troops marching up to the front, grinning, waving their tin hats at the camera.
I wrote no script or outline for Aftermath of Battle, but I had as clear a conception of its form as if it were all neatly plotted and laid out before me on paper. My next problem was how to ensure it was edited in the way I desired. I asked Faithfull how to resolve this problem.
“You’ve got this little chap back in Islington or Clerkenwell, see, editing miles of newsreel a week, bored stiff, mind on the pint of ale he’s going to have at lunchtime, but he’s got to stick all this stuff together. He’d be delighted if you’d help him out. Write it all down for him — words of one syllable, mind — and make sure you’ve numbered your reels properly. Does it need captions?”
“No. I don’t think so.”
“No captions?” He frowned at me. “Even simpler.… What are you up to, Todd?”
“Oh, just ‘behind the lines’ stuff.”
“I see.… Mmmm. Well, I’m going to put on a cigarette, I think. What about you? Chuck the tin over, Baby, there’s a good fellow.”
Two interesting encounters occurred while I was filming Aftermath. First of all I met Teague again in the base hospital at St.-Omer. I had set up my camera in a moribund ward and shot my film. Then it suddenly struck me that Dagmar might conceivably be working in the place and I went in search of a matron to find out. I found her in another ward full of heavily bandaged men — burn cases. She informed me that she knew of no Dagmar Fjermeros on the nursing staff, and as I turned to go I heard a voice from one of the beds.
“Hodd! Hodd!” it sounded like.
The top half of Teague’s head was covered in a moist gauze bandage, thick with ointment, from which one wet, red eye peered. In place of his top lip there was a cotton-wool moustache soaked in some camphor-smelling lotion. I felt my own head begin to ache in sympathy. Both his legs ended at the knee, the blanket tented by a basketwork support. We shook hands gently, left-handed — his right was bandaged, a round white fist.
I had never really liked Teague, but now I felt genuinely glad to see him. After all, we had shared most of that ghastly day. We talked of this and that — I explained my new job and uniform. As I looked at him, shattered and wasted, I sensed a sort of tickle in my brain, irresistible, like a cerebral sneeze forming.
I tried to resist it. “I reported those swine in the tank, you know, but I’m not sure if anything happened.” I paused. “How are you, all things considered?”
“All right, I suppose. Going to look a bit peculiar, though. Not much left to work with. At least I’ve got an eye.”
I had to ask. “How do you feel about it all — now?”
“Wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”
“Seriously?” The skepticism in my voice made it go up a register. “Sorry,” I added. “It’s just I never expected you to say that.”
“It’s a risk you take and a price you have to pay. At least I’m still alive.”
I don’t believe you, I said to myself. But I suppose you have to try and think like that. If you thought anything else, you’d go mad. Look at Kite, I thought; he cracked up and he only lost a hand. I’d be like that, like Kite, bitter and angry, full of resentment …
I filmed Teague later. I thought it might cheer him up. We had him being pushed in a wheelchair towards a camera down the length of a long airless corridor, passing through shafts of autumn sunlight.
The second meeting was less eventful, but curiously more significant for me. The officer whom I had filmed writing letters to next of kin was in fact Captain Tuck. The 13th had been re-formed, rumors of a transfer to the Italian Front had proved ungrounded and the battalion was back in its usual role of furnishing working parties for the artillery. There were very few faces I recognized.
After Tuck had obliged me with a few scribbles and a suitably somber face — he needed no persuading; the Aeroscope was an infallible seductress — he walked me back to my motorcar.
“Half a mo,” he said. “There’s someone you should meet before you’re off.”
He led me round behind a cowshed to where the field kitchens were situated. On the ground, gnawing a bone, was Ralph, the dog. He got slowly to his feet and wandered over to Tuck. He was hugely fat.
“Quartermaster spoils him rather.”
I clicked my fingers. “Here, Ralph. Here, boy.”
The dog did not budge. He looked at me, yawned and licked his chops.
“Doesn’t remember you,” Tuck said. “Strange.”
I felt my heart thump with joy and relief. “It always was a rather stupid animal,” I said, and walked elatedly back to my motor. I never saw Ralph again.
“They’ve censored it,” Donald Verulam said. He looked serious.
‘What?’
“Aftermath of Battle.”
“No! Damn.… Which bits?”
“The entire film. The whole thing. The chief censor is furious. You’re lucky you’re not cashiered. I had to tell him it was some sort of ghastly blunder. Fragments inadvertantly edited together. It won’t really wash. He wasn’t convinced.”
I swallowed. “Where is it?”
“I’ve got it back.”
“Thank God!” I paused. “What do you think about it?”
He looked at me and gave a thin smile.
“Well … it’s strong stuff. A bit grim and morbid for my taste. But I’m sure we can use bits of it. The early sections are good. We could cut them into Faithfull’s film.” He looked at me. “I wish you’d told me you were doing this, Johnny.”