3

“L’homme de l’extrême gauche”

I was the first man on the Western Front. Literally. By the time I arrived in France—August 1916—the line of trenches stretched from the English Channel to the Swiss border. The Western Front began at Nieuport-Bains in Belgium on the coast. There was the sea, the beach with its minefield and wire, and then in the dunes the trench line started.

I was standing leaning against the revetted end of the Allied line, looking east towards the Germans. On my left was the beach and the sea, and on my right a trench system six hundred miles long. I was at the very tip of an attenuated snake uncoiled limply across Europe. It provoked a curious sensation in me standing there, almost physical in its effects. The left side of my body, for example, felt unusually light—airy and untethered. But my right side felt burdened by the immense weight of this chain I started. All the armies of Belgium, France and Britain spread like the tail of a comet from my right side. The Belgians called this position l’homme de l’extrême gauche. It was more than mere description: it was like participating in a metaphor. I often found myself unconsciously massaging my right shoulder. And, strangely, my left side always felt cold, as if I stood in a strong draft blowing off the sea.

The German trenches were a thousand yards away at Lombartzyde, in the direction of Ostend. Between us lay pleasant dunes and strong barbed wire entanglements. It was a quiet sector; so quiet as to be almost inert. In fact this northern end of the Western Front was, strictly speaking, the responsibility of the Belgian Army, but for some reason we had been sent here as replacements for one of their units. The fact was no one really knew what to do with the 13th (Public School) Service Battalion of the Duke of Clarence’s Own South Oxfordshire Light Infantry.

At the outbreak of the war a Universities and Public School Brigade had been raised, entirely of volunteers. The four battalions became the 21st, 22nd, 23rd and 24th battalions of the Royal Fusiliers. However, keenness to enlist was such that the Army Council allowed other regiments to create privately funded service battalions similarly composed. The Middlesex Regiment, for example, had a battalion of ex-public-school boys—the 16th. And so too did the Duke of Clarence’s Own South Oxfordshire Light Infantry. Its 13th Battalion was made up at the outbreak of war by boys from public schools in and around the Thames Valley—Eton, Marlborough, Radley, St. Edward’s—and overflow from the Public School Brigade. However, as the war advanced and as the casualty rates of officers soon outstripped supply, the ordinary rank and file of the battalion found themselves, as Peter Hobhouse had told me, in great demand as potential officer material. By 1916 there were few battalions left and those were very understrength as the initial flood of recruits died away. Back in England there were depot companies that went through the motion of recruiting, but in reality the day of the public school battalions was over. Indeed, I think my intake was among the last. After that, any spirited public-school boy could find a place in an established regiment without much difficulty.

A further problem was the constant poaching of our numbers. Our officers were the first to go, then the NCOs and finally any moderately capable private found himself being offered a commission. The remainder found themselves obliged to occupy the roles of those who had left. Consequently our level of ability—as soldiers—remained consistently low. By the time I joined we were a depleted bunch of unintelligent, initiativeless misfits, and all from minor public schools (the old school tie operated in the army too: connections were everything). We were not much in demand as soldiers.

I myself was graded as almost educationally subnormal. Minto Academy’s bizarre curriculum let me down again. I lied about my age (nineteen) and had no qualifications. I saw the ferrety sergeant at the recruiting office write “NOM” on my form. Not Officer Material. In fact, it took some convincing for this loathsome man to accept that Minto Academy was even a public school. After he had searched vainly in the Public Schools Yearbook I managed to persuade him that there was a separate Scottish edition in which the Academy was sure to be found.

I was ideal material for the 13th Battalion as it was now composed. Minto refused to allow a corps at the school and so I did not even possess the most rudimentary military skills. Moreover, my mood at the time was extremely depressed and I was generally sullen and unresponsive. It was only through Peter’s recommendation to Colonel O’Dell that I was passed through basic training.

I do not remember much about our camp. That it was near Oswestry is all I can bring to mind. It was a dismal featureless place where, along with a thousand other recruits, I learned to drill, fire a rifle, use a bayonet and gas mask. We spent many days simulating platoon attacks on trenches and strongpoints while instructors threw thunderflashes and shouted at us. I made no great efforts, or friendships, at that stage. I wanted merely to get through and get away, while I nursed my private griefs and shame.

It is hard for me to recall those dreadful hours after Donald Verulam told me the true explanation of those references in my mother’s letters. At such moments of intense despair the brain does not function normally. Just as it is for the benefit of the organism as a whole that our bodies cannot remember physical pains as we have endured, so it is similarly blessed on occasions of grievous mental torment. We can summon up some old griefs, some shames, some envies—but not all. It would be too much to bear. There was nothing about those feverish, crawling, sweaty sensations I underwent then that I would ever want to retain. I became suddenly dull, that day, blandly smiling, making noncommittal remarks when required, while I furiously rejigged my perceptions of myself, rejecting fanciful romance for humdrum disappointing reality. Donald and I walked on, he troubled and concerned, I supplying false, unconvincing reassurances. Somehow I got through the evening. The night was devoted to ruthless self-castigation. The next morning I announced I was going back to Edinburgh. I packed, made my farewells and got on a train to London. I disembarked at Oxford, caught another train to Marlborough, where I presented myself at the recruiting office. Some days later, at Oswestry, I wrote and told everyone where I was and about the change of plan.

My father, my true father, seemed not too perturbed. He wrote to me: “It is not a course of action I would have advised, but if you feel called to serve your country I will not stand in your way. There was no need to flee the Academy to achieve this. You might at least have thought to confide your plans to me. But let us put all this behind us. At the root of this unfortunate business it seems your motives are essentially fine.…” And so on, much in the same vein. I heard nothing from Donald Verulam or Aunt Faye.

Of the batch of new recruits that left Oswestry bound for the 13th (Public School) Service Battalion of the SOLI, three of us found ourselves in the same platoon. We were notionally in the bombing section, 2nd Platoon, D Company. Prior to an attack this section would be issued with a supply of Mills bombs and we would find ourselves in the vanguard of any assault on the enemy lines. None of us was particularly skilled at bomb throwing. At Oswestry we had practiced with potatoes. We had little specialized training apart from that. As I remember, we spent most of our time fitting detonators into Mills bombs.

Our progress to the front was slow. At first the battalion was attached to a Naval Division regiment guarding Dunkirk, where we acted as fatigue parties. Then, after two months, we were marched up the coast to Coxyde-Bains where our fatigue duties continued, this time for the siege batteries of the Royal Marine artillery at La Panne. It was here that we were sent from time to time into the trenches at Nieuport. It was not testing or dangerous. The war here was an affair of long-range artillery duels. We heard the guns and sometimes saw the explosions—distant puffs of smoke—but it took place far above our heads. After a day or two the guns were no more alarming than distant thunder in another country: rain was falling on somebody else.

The 13th was considerably understrength. There were nine of us in the so-called bombing section and at Dunkirk and at Coxyde-Bains we all slept in the same large bell tent. The three new recruits to the bombers were myself, Julian Teague and Howard Pawsey. The fellow bombers we encountered were, clockwise round the tent (we three were on groundsheets near the entrance flap), on my left, Leo Druce, Tim Somerville-Start, Noel Kite, the Honorable Maitland Bookbinder and two others whose names I have forgotten. They made no impression on me. I remember one, I think, a dim fellow, always reading—Floyd, I think. Our company commander was an older man, a lieutenant, called Louis McNiece. He was gray-haired and worried looking and known to everyone as Louise. Louise had had a commission as a major in the Mashonaland Light Horse. He had sailed promptly back from Africa to England at the outbreak of war, but the best position he could obtain was this company commandership in the 13th, with a commensurate drop in rank. He had no hopes of promotion and was maniacally fearful of getting into trouble. His authority over his company was minimal, but he was looked on charitably by Colonel O’Dell, who regarded him, however erroneously, as a regular soldier, as was the colonel himself.

Indeed the battalion owed its very existence to O’Dell and to Noel Kite’s father, Findlay. Both were rich men (Kite had made his fortune in dye) and in 1914 they had paid for the formation and upkeep of the battalion (food, uniforms, transport, pay) out of their own pockets for several months, until the Army Council recognized it officially as a New Army service battalion. Our first uniforms—navy-blue serge—were made up at Selfridge’s. We even had our own pipe band.

Findlay Kite felt strongly that every battalion should have a band and had recruited and paid eight youths from Glasgow to join the battalion. The Army Council refused to take on this expense and it was still borne by the Kite family—much to Noel Kite’s irritation. The pipers were fully cognizant of their privileged position and refused any other duties. They lived apart from the rest of us in well-tended billets (they received an extra allowance for food and clothing when overseas). The sight of the pipers lounging around their braziers in shirtsleeve order was the only thing that seemed to rile Noel, normally placid to the point of inertia. “Work-shy peasants!” he used to call them and regularly wrote to his father encouraging the band’s dissolution. But his father and Colonel O’Dell always vetoed it. They liked the idea of an English battalion with a Scottish band. It gave the 13th a ready-made gloss of tradition, O’Dell argued.

A few days after my arrival at Dunkirk an orderly runner told me that I was wanted by the colonel. I went to battalion HQ worried that my father had changed his mind and was going to demand my return. But not at all. O’Dell was a bald cheerful man with a frizzy blond moustache.

“Welcome aboard, Todd. Peter Hobhouse’s cousin, yes? He wrote to me.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Todd … Todd … You must have been in Fetter’s, then. George Armitage’s house.”

“Sorry, sir?”

“No, no. Got it now. Gallway’s. Never forget a face. Grand you’re here. Could do with a few more Stanburians, I can tell you.”

I did not correct him.

“Remember the motto? Plutôt fort que piquant. That’s the spirit.”

“Yes, sir.”

At Dunkirk, apart from doing the Naval Division’s fatigues, we were sent on route marches with Louise around the warm and dusty countryside. “Route strolls,” as Maitland Bookbinder referred to them. We were relieved to march up to Coxyde-Bains to take over the end of the Belgian line. The skirling music of the pipes led us through battered Belgian villages, gazed upon by the incurious eyes of the few inhabitants who turned out to watch us pass. There was a discernible quickening of our spirits as we approached these hamlets. Our plod became a swagger; our caps were set at extravagant angles. Louise, on a bicycle, would ride by and implore us to throw away our cigarettes. “Nao ciggies, chips,” he would say in his South African accent. “Unsoldierly. Come on, please, fags out.” We puffed on regardless. Louise gave up quickly. He had not been to public school—not that we cared—and I think he felt socially uneasy with us. It was strange, but every time we passed through a village we seemed to pick up an escort of four or five dogs that scampered alongside for a mile or so, sniffing and tails wagging, before abandoning us.

The line at Nieuport is where I really date the start of my military career. At Dunkirk we had been little more than servants and laborers in our working-party duties for the disdainful Naval Division. At Coxyde in reserve, or in the trenches at Nieuport, at least we felt more like soldiers. We were facing the enemy after all, albeit under reasonably pleasant circumstances. Here too I began to shed the integument of gloom and self-loathing that had enfolded me since that black weekend at Charlbury. I began to emerge. A fragile self-confidence established itself. I started to correspond with Hamish and learned something of the events subsequent to my departure from school.

Our plan had worked well. I was not discovered absent until the next day. Angus was dispatched to Galashiels Station and then traveled up and down the line searching for traces of me. Hamish’s role was discovered swiftly and he was duly flogged. He wrote: “It was as bad as everyone had said. I do not think I have ever experienced such pain before. Still, it was a useful experience. Now I know what it is like to be mercilessly beaten. (Minto is quite batty, I am sure.) It all adds to one’s store of knowledge.” He sounded almost grateful, as if I had opened a locked door in his life. But it made me feel guilty.

Our routine at Nieuport was straightforward. Two companies held the line for a week and were relieved by the other two. The resting companies occupied battalion reserve (an orchard) at Coxyde-Bains and occasionally supplied fatigue parties for the Royal Marine siege gunners. After each company had spent a total of a month in the line, we returned to brigade reserve at Wormstroedt, some distance away, behind the British sector of the Western Front. Life at Coxyde-Bains was pleasant, if boring. The town was out of bounds to us, but not to Belgian troops. There was a sizable detachment garrisoned here as King Albert had his HQ at nearby La Panne. There was a small closer village, St. Idesbaldle, which we were allowed to visit, with two cafés—one for officers, one for other ranks—but it did not offer much in terms of diversion. Our time was taken up with prettifying the reserve lines (creating ash-clinker paths with whitewashed stone borders, allotments, building a clay tennis court for the officers’ mess), route marches, close-order drill, musketry practice and endless sessions of battalion sports of every type. About two miles away, near St. Idesbalde, was a large Belgian field hospital. Once or twice we passed this, either marching or on a cross-country run, and we saw the off-duty nurses with red crosses on their starched aprons and what I took to be an order of Belgian nuns with headdresses like stiff white-linen sombreros, the vast brims complicatedly folded. This view excited some of our more sensual types—Leo Druce and Noel Kite in particular—who instantly planned to strike up acquaintances. Little was achieved beyond vain shouts of introduction as we jogged past—much to Louise’s irritation.

My main pleasure at Coxyde-Bains—when I had the chance—was to walk on the beach. If one left the orchard and walked down a lane past a farm, one soon came to the dunes. They evoked for me memories of Scotland and, when the tide was out, the huge flat beach recalled the West Sands at St. Andrews in Fife. Sometimes I would walk west towards Dunkirk. On other occasions I would walk east towards Nieuport and the front line. I would stop when I could just see the revetments and sandbags at the mouth of the Yser River at Nieuport, which marked the position I so often occupied as l’homme de l’extrême gauche. At low tide the furthest extension of the wire was often exposed and I was often obscurely tempted to walk on and wade round the double entanglements, then traverse the mile of no-man’s-land and perhaps bypass the German line too. There I might meet my German counterpart: a young private, a little unhappy, uncertain of his future, whiling away his off-duty hours with a morose stroll on the sands at Ostende-Bains. Perhaps we would simply nod “Good morning” and saunter on? Perhaps I might ask him for a light: Hast du Feuer? It was a pleasing fantasy.…

One day, I went down to the beach in just such a mood of contemplation. Hands in my pockets, collar up against the wind.

Then I saw, slightly distorted by the reflections on the wet gleamy sand, what I took to be a man running along the water’s edge. Absurdly, spontaneously, I thought: was this my German doppelgänger come to meet me?… I peered at the distorted black shape, trying to separate bouncing solid from bouncing reflection. A man? A small man? He was certainly moving in a curious gait. I seemed to see a cripple, terribly bent over, hunched, traveling along in a fast lolloping limp.

Then as I looked the enigma resolved itself. A dog, rather large, bounding along in a kind of easy half gallop, pausing occasionally to sniff at seaweed or a piece of tide wrack before starting off again. I watched it approach. Then it saw me and changed course. The loose-limbed canter became a pelting, ears-back gallop. I felt uneasy, then fearful. Bloody hell, I thought crazily, what if this is some sort of Hun secret weapon? Killer dogs loosed behind the lines? Mad … rabid.

I looked down at my heavy boots. I’ll kick it in the throat, I said to myself, none too confidently. The dog was three hundred yards away and approaching fast. I threw away my cigarette, turned and ran for the dunes. I was seriously impeded by my greatcoat and heavy boots. I flashed a glance over my shoulder. Christ! It was coming at me like a cheetah—head down, tail out. I could hear the skittering thump of its feet on the sand.

“Help!” I bellowed aimlessly at the tranquil dunes. “Bastaaaaaard!”

The dog was on me as I lumbered vainly along. Jumping up and down, barging into me, tongue lolling, darting forward and back, crouching down like a pseudo-beast of prey in that irritating manner dogs have when they want some fun. I stopped, threw my head back and gulped air, hands on my hips.

The dog, I saw, was quite big, with untidy gray fur and a blunt stupid face. It looked like a cross of Irish wolfhound, setter and bull terrier. It came up to me, tail wagging, and stuck its nose in my crotch.

“Get off! Dirty bugger!”

I slapped its face away. I felt hot, angry and itchy from my hectic run. I wiped sweat from my eyebrows and upper lip. My peaceful, contemplative stroll had been ruined by this idiot hound, which was now, as far as I could see, eating sand.

I trudged back through the dunes towards the company lines, the dog following. I spoke violently to it (it is strange how we address dumb animals so, is it not?).

“If you don’t leave me alone, I’ll go back to camp get my rifle and shoot you.”

The dog was adopted by the bombers as section mascot. Bookbinder and Pawsey made a great fuss of it giving it tins of MacConnachie stew several times a day. A name was chosen by lottery (I did not participate) and the dog became known as Ralph—Tim Somerville-Start’s choice. I wanted nothing to do with the beast. In fact I was rather superstitious of it—it had come from the direction of the German lines, after all. I refused to call it Ralph, never petted it and every time it shat in the tent, pissed on someone’s shoes, knocked over stands of rifles, coffeepots and mess tins, my voice was loudly raised urging its peremptory execution. But the animal never left me alone. It came to me, it sat by me, it slept as near to me as it was allowed. This provoked considerable jealousy among the others.

“Are you feeding Ralph secretly, Todd?” Pawsey demanded.

“Come here, boy, here, here,” Teague would call. The dog never budged.

“I think Todd must have some special dog-smell,” Kite said. “See how Ralph is always trying to snuffle at his balls?” Much laughter at this.

“Some sort of Scotch affinity with the beasts of the field,” Bookbinder said.

“Scots or Scottish. Scotch is whiskey,” Druce said.

“Thank you, Druce,” I said. “Look, I want to kill the damn thing. I hate it.”

“Och aye! The fury of the Pict when roused,” Somerville-Start said. “Perhaps we should see how Ralph reacts to the pipe band. Here, Ralph. Here, Ralphie boy. Biscuit.”

Ralph went to him. He was always lured by food.

There was a certain amount of tedious, though good-natured, mockery of my accent, which at that time was quite marked and in strong contrast to the others in the tent. I was something of the odd man out in more ways than this. Teague and Somerville-Start had been to the same school. Most people in the battalion came from schools in the South of England. Most knew of each other’s schools, had friends at them, had played sports against them. No one had ever heard of Minto Academy. I kept my answers to their questions vague. Also, they were all older than me. Pawsey, the next youngest, was nineteen. Druce and Teague were the oldest, both twenty-four. They were all English too, and at first, to my untutored ears, they all seemed to speak with one voice, like a gang of Chinese.

Howard Pawsey was tall, thin, with straight hair parted in the middle. Every time he bent his head, two wings would fall across his brow. To my increasing annoyance he had developed a habit of sweeping only one back and leaving the other dangling. He had a weak chin.

Tim Somerville-Start was fair, fresh-faced, broad-shouldered and incredibly stupid. He and Julian Teague were longing to fight the enemy. They were the self-appointed warriors among us. Teague was more complex in his zeal, though. He had very curly hair forced back over his head to form regular waves, as if they had been created by curling tongs. He had a square face, a thick neck, a small moustache and small restless eyes. He was most unhappy that we had been posted to a quiet sector.

Noel Kite had blond thinning hair and a handsome lean face. He had the easy insouciance of the very rich. The material problems of his life having been taken care of, he cultivated a languid incuriosity about everything. Cynicism seemed to be the most vehement emotion in his repertoire.

Maitland Bookbinder was a curiosity: plump, lazy, genial, an old Etonian—one felt he should have been in the Guards. When asked what he was doing in the 13th, he said merely that he had wanted a change.

Leo Druce was the only one I instinctively liked, and at the same time was the most enigmatic. He wore his toffee-brown hair brushed straight back, glossy with a specially prepared, scented pomade. He had fine, almost delicate features, which sat oddly with his deep bass voice. He was clever, cleverer than all of us, and this was why I was drawn to him. Druce was a lance corporal, in charge of the section. The rest of us were privates. We were distinguished from all the other enlisted men in the British Army by possessing two letters in front of our army serial number. PS: Public School. I was PS 300712.

“Where are you going, Todd?”

It was Louise.

“Down to the beach.”

“Maike sure you’re bick by six.”

“Could you hang on to Ralph for five minutes, please, Louise? Just till I’m out of sight.”

Louise took hold of Ralph’s collar.

“For God’s sake, min, you mustn’t call me Louise!”

He looked hurt, as he crouched holding a straining, panting Ralph.

“What if the colonel heard? Don’t be so bliddy selfish.”

“Sorry, sir.”

“Right, that’s bitter. Off you go. Ah’ve got the dog.”

It was the end of March 1917. It was a cold, windy, but clear day. The trees were bare; only the hedges were in bud as I walked down the lane towards the dunes. We had been based at Coxyde-Bains for over five months. Almost a year had passed since that dire weekend at Charlbury. My eighteenth birthday had come and gone, unacknowledged by everybody, a week since. The war seemed as if it would go on forever, and as far as I was concerned it seemed we would be at Coxyde forever too, guarding our stretch of dunes.

I had seen the enemy through binoculars, strolling around the parapets of their trenches in the evening. Nobody took cover in this quiet sector. Our trenches were immaculate: clean, strong, with beautifully carpentered fire steps and paneled dugouts. At every firebay stood red buckets of sand and water, and all our equipment was oiled and greased against the corrosive effects of salt in the wind off the sea. We, the troops, were sleek, well fed, and well rested. Only Teague and Somerville-Start fretted. Indeed, Teague seemed almost unhinged with frustration. He repeatedly asked Colonel O’Dell to put him up for a commission in another regiment, but O’Dell always regretfully refused. He had seen the battalion’s ranks casually plundered for years and was not prepared to allow further privations.

I myself was happy enough. I seemed to be in a kind of agreeable limbo, stuck in a society and a place that made few inconvenient demands on me. I had no idea what the future held and at the time I did not care. I had even seen my first dead man, a sergeant in A Company who had been run over by a Commer truck bringing in two tons of potatoes to the cookhouse. I had changed physically too. I had reached what I later discovered was to be my full height—five feet nine inches, I had filled out and was now thickish set with a solid, well-muscled body. The moustache I had started growing the weekend I left Charlbury was a familiar feature in my shaving mirror each morning: thick, dense, neatly clipped, glossy. I looked older than my years. The main bugbear in my life was the dog, Ralph, which as the weeks passed seemed to become perversely more fond of me. Never had a man shown less feeling for an animal than I, but my very indifference seemed to act as a goad. Even while eating bread and jam from Teague’s fingers, the dog would pause—munching—and glance round to confirm I was in the company.

I walked down the lane towards the dunes. Behind me I heard a rattle of pebbles and a familiar hoarse panting. I looked round. That blunt terrier’s snout, those moist idiot eyes. Louise must have let him go too soon. I picked up some stones and threw them at him. One hit his rump and he squealed. His tail wagged with masochistic pleasure. I set off. He trotted three yards behind me.

I climbed up a sand path that led to the crest of the dunes. It was a cloudy day, shadowless, with a diffused silver light. The tide was out. I sat down, lit a cigarette and stared at the pewter sea. Life was settled, routine, ordered—but I was in turmoil. I was in love again. In love with a girl called Huguette.

In our first stint in the Nieuport trenches we had been called back twice to brigade reserve at Wormstroedt. Wormstroedt was a large village, or a small town, some twenty miles behind the front line. Before the war it had enjoyed modest prosperity owing to the siting there of a tobacco factory. This was now empty, one wing of it destroyed by bombardment during the German advance of 1914. Here, we were billeted in tall airless rooms smelling strongly of tobacco. We slept in low wooden beds, sixty to a room like a vast dormitory. Leave in Wormstroedt was perferable to our off-duty hours in St. Idesbalde, if only because we were freer to roam around. There was a cinema set up in a tent in the shattered main square and a good dozen cafés and restaurants. Men of the 13th tended to patronize a large estaminet conveniently close to the factory. It was run by an extended Belgian family who were doing well out of the war. They had been swift to adapt to the tastes of the British soldier. Fried eggs and chipped potatoes were the staple diet, and it was not unusual for us to order up to six fried eggs at a time. You could also eat bread and pickled mackerel, or bacon, or brawn, bread and margarine with jam or cheese, rice pudding or sponge pudding with jam. They even made tea—and this was Huguette’s job. The tea was brewed in large copper vats and liberally sweetened. Milk was added by punching holes in several tins of condensed milk and dropping them into the stewing tea. The paper labels floated off the tins to form an unusual, brightly colored scum on the surface.

Huguette was the daughter, or cousin, or niece of the owner. I think she was sixteen or seventeen. She was plump; even at that age a tender double chin hung damply below her jaw. She was dark-haired and had a distinct moustache of tiny fine hairs on her top lip. But she was pretty in a sulky, spoiled way. I can see her now, impassively puncturing condensed milk tins with something that looked like a steel marlinespike and tossing them over her shoulder into the sandy pool of simmering tea without a backward glance.

The estaminet was capacious and always crowded. Over a hundred people could fit into it without difficulty. On my first visit I waited at the head of the queue while Huguette milked a new batch of tea. She had been working all day. Her shapeless lime-green dress, tight in the armpits, was damp with fresh sweat I could smell it, clear and thin, through the strata of odors—smoke, grease, egg, tea—that suffused the atmosphere. I stood beside her, estimating the size of her breasts, inhaling it. Her sharp smell seemed to prod at my lungs like a stick. She stirred the tea vat with a three-foot wooden ladle. The condensed milk cans clanked dully in the dun liquid.

“C’est formidable …” I said. “Le thé. Pour le soif”

She looked at me incredulously.

“Vous pensez?” she said. “C’est pas vrai.”

“Oh, yes—oui,” I said. “Votre thé …” I kissed my bunched fingertips, a parody gourmand.

She turned and said something to her father or uncle and they both laughed. I laughed with them. But as a result of that exchange she remembered me. I ate there every day—fried eggs and chipped potatoes washed down with gallons of her disgusting tea.

“Oh, voilà Monsieur Thé,” she said as I came round for my third refill. “Tea. Ver’ good. You like.” She laughed.

“John. John James Todd. My name …” I paused. “Votre nom?”

“Huguette,” she said, turning the spigot on the vat. Tawny tea frothed into my enamel mug.

I thought of her now as I looked out over the tea-colored sand. I would not be back in Wormstroedt for getting on two months. I wondered if I could last that long; if my carefully hoarded store of images would sustain me through two months of masturbation. Perhaps I could persuade Louise to send me to brigade reserve on some specious mission.… Perhaps … To my surprise I found I had my hand on the scruff of Ralph’s neck and had been absentmindedly scratching behind his ears for God knows how many minutes. His humid eyes gazed at me. A loop of saliva hung from his jowl. I gave him a mighty shove and he went tumbling down the dune slope onto the beach. He got to his feet and shook the sand from his coat.

“Bugger off!” I shouted. I slithered down to the beach and walked down towards the distant water’s edge. I looked down at my boots and puttees, felt the rough serge of the khaki trousers chafe my inner thighs. I took a rather bent cigarette from one of my breast pockets and turned away from the wind to light it. I walked on. Flat sky, flat sand, flat sea. I was the only vertical thing in my universe. I felt surprisingly good. I felt strong, all of a sudden. I was an adult at last, a soldier, with my big moustache, and dreams of my girl, Huguette. I grinned.… Where was that bloody dog? I looked round for a pebble to throw.

Ralph was not his obligatory three paces behind me. I saw him, two hundred yards off, loping towards the front and the German line, running along the water’s edge, his reflection merging with and separating from his body, bounding back to wherever he had come from.

“Go on!” I shouted after him. “Traitor! I knew it. I bloody knew it!”

Good riddance, I thought, finally got the message. I reached the sea’s edge. It was a calm day, a small surf turned over on the ridged gleaming sand. I turned my back on Ralph and the east and headed west towards the tiny distant shapes of the ruined villas and bathing huts of Oostduinkerke.

I must have walked nearly a mile before I saw them. I was on the point of turning back, the evening was drawing in, when I noticed what at first looked like a cluster of smooth pale rocks upon which the waves were breaking. But then I saw that the waves moved and shifted them to and fro. I walked closer. A strange minatory weight seemed to press on me.… Some sort of cargo? Washed overboard in a storm? In the nacreous late-afternoon light, I approached full of dread curiosity.

There were several drowned men, huddled together as if for comfort by the advancing tide. Most of them were naked, or almost so. One man wore a shirt; one man still had his boots on. I was struck by their inert tranquillity. I felt no lasting shock. I counted them. Eight. They looked like deep sleepers: expressionless, untouched, unblemished by whatever tremendous experience had washed them up on this shore. I saw a tattooed forearm, creases in a belly, the dark print of pubic hair on blue-white loins. The wavelets rolled one over, who flung an arm on the sand as if seeking purchase.

“Jesus,” I said out loud. I looked up and down the deserted beach. I was equidistant from the villas of Oostduinkerke and the mouth of the Yser. The packed grayness of the late afternoon seemed to thicken and condense around me. The tangle of bleached bodies surged as if one, and crept a few inches up the sand.

I ran for the dunes. A naval battle? A mine? A ship rent in two, a wardroom of sleeping men tossed into the North Sea? I felt a kind of clawing in my gorge. I raked my throat and spat.

There was wire on these dunes. I found the zigzag path and stumbled up it to the dune crest. I ran down through the gorse and broom brushes and along the muddy edge of a cabbage field. The kitchen smell of cabbage nauseated me. I suddenly associated the reek with those washed, clean dead men.… Through a hawthorn hedge and onto a cart track. I ran on. An old man sat in the doorway of a half-demolished cottage. I stopped. What was the French for drowned?

“Mort,” I said, panting heavily. “Eight, huit morts.”

“L’hôpital.” He gestured up the road. He had a lazy eye. It seemed to be trapped in the middle of an interminable wink.

I remembered. The field hospital at St. Idesbalde. I turned and ran on.

I entered the hospital precincts from the side somewhere. I saw the back of what looked like a row of loose boxes, rounded them and came upon a neat square of a dozen large olive-green tents. A nurse was coming out of the first one.

“Huit morts … dans la mer!”

“I speak English,” she said in a cool, perfect but somehow instantly foreign accent.

“Eight drowned men,” I said. “On the seashore.” It sounded like a nursery rhyme.

I led this nurse and three nuns back down to the beach. An ambulance was following with orderlies and stretchers. The tide was further in but our group still clung together. The evening light shone lemon through gaps in charcoal clouds. The sand seemed shot with blue and green. We walked down the beach, the nuns muttering some prayer or heavenly invocation.

“We’d better get them out,” the nurse said. She took off her watch. She had not brought her coat. “Can you keep this dry for me?” she asked. I put it in a pocket and watched with some astonishment as she waded strongly into the sea, the waves soaking her to the waist, and she began to haul a man out. The nuns joined in. I registered the incongruity of the dark surplices and the absurd meringue hats as they stooped and tugged at the naked men. Naked men … nothing to what they saw in that field hospital. I sloshed into the water with them. The bodies shifted out of focus beneath my sensitive gaze. To grasp an ankle or a wrist? I saw a hand, limp, elegant—like something on a classical statue—and took hold of it. Very cold. But no more rebarbative than picking up a leg of lamb or a plucked chicken. I pulled him onto the beach. I took his other wrist. He was heavier on the sand, heels furrowing. The nuns were working two to a body. I heard shouts and saw the orderlies come running down the beach with their stretchers.

It was almost dark by the time the beach was clear. I stood with the nurse. She had a wide round face, a slightly large nose, covered in coarse prominent freckles. I could not see her hair as it was hidden beneath her neat headdress.

“What do you think it was?” I asked.

“Who can say? At least they looked peaceful. They didn’t seem to be hurt.” She looked at me. “I didn’t know there were English troops here.”

I explained about the Royal Marine gunners.

“Have you got a cigarette?”

I gave her one and lit it for her. She inhaled avidly.

“The nuns don’t approve. I have to take my moments carefully.” She blew smoke through her nose. “Wonderful. English tobacco!”

I suddenly remembered the time. “God! I’m going to get merry hell. Look, can I give your name?”

“Of course. I’m a sister at the field hospital. Dagmar Fjermeros.”

I got her to repeat it a couple of times.

“Can we give you a lift?”

“It’ll be quicker along the beach.” I said good-bye and left her.

Louise was furious, and put me on company report. Two hours later my story was confirmed after a few telephone calls. I was perturbed and unsettled by the whole experience. It was the tangle of bodies that bothered me and their untroubled expressions. They seemed docile and compliant in death, perfectly at ease. But for the first time since joining the army I felt frightened. I feared for my skin. That day I resolved to do anything not to get hurt. Not to die like those men.

While my alarm deepened, and self-preservation occupied the key position in my mind, I found another image began slowly to claim my attention. Dagmar, the nurse … her round placid face highlit by the flare of the match I applied to her cigarette. The full pout of her lips as she inhaled … I had written down her name on my return. Dagmar Fjermeros. A Scandinavian of some sort. I still had her wristwatch in my pocket.

After this excitement life returned to normal. The only event of note was a battalion parade where we were required to hand in our old phenate-hexane gas respirators. These were horrible objects, like a canvas sack with glass eye-holes, and which had to be tucked beneath the collar of one’s jacket. New box respirators, we were informed, would be issued to us in the next few days. Meanwhile, in preparation, Captain Tuck, the adjutant, would give us a lecture later that morning on antigas precautions and the best use of the box-respirator gas mask.

At half past twelve, D Company was mustered for Captain Tuck’s gas lecture. As we filed into the tent we were each handed what looked like a rectangular pad of cotton with two tapes, eighteen inches long, attached at either end, and a pair of rubber goggles.

Captain Tuck, a Wykehamist, was a brisk jolly man who spent most of his time looking at birds through his field glasses. He had an odd pursed look to his face, as if he were playing an invisible musical instrument—a spectral oboe or clarinet, say. First, he told us about the various types of gases—phosgene, chlorine and mustard—and their effects. Chlorine turned your face blue and you drowned in the water produced by your own tormented lungs. Phosgene caused your lungs to discharge four pints of yellow water every hour. Mustard made your eyelids swell and close, burned and blistered your skin, made you cough up your mucous membranes. Tuck read out other ghastly symptoms—congested larynx, collapsed lungs, swollen liver. I was very shocked.

A box respirator was circulated among us and we tried it on. Tuck explained how it worked. He informed us that the entire battalion would be issued with these in a matter of days.

“In the meantime,” he said, “we will be relying on the temporary respirator handed to you as you came in.”

I looked at the cotton pad in my hand. I wondered how it would stop me from coughing up four pints of yellow liquid in an hour. Suddenly I felt an acute, rotting fear. I saw the dead men on the beach. I glanced right and left. Everyone seemed to be smiling; even Tuck had a grin on his face.

“In the very unlikely event of a gas attack in this sector, this is what—it says here—you must do.” He opened a pamphlet and read from it. “ ‘When the gas alarm goes, first put on the goggles. Then soak the cheesecloth pad, or a handkerchief or a sock, in fresh urine before applying it to the face, making sure both mouth and nostrils are covered.’ ”

He paused for effect. His audience took this in for a second in silence before baying hoots of skeptical laughter and cries of disgust erupted.

“Gentlemen, please!” Tuck shouted above the din. “A final word of advice.… According to this document, the urine of older men is particularly efficacious! Dismiss.” Tuck strode out of the tent very pleased with his performance. D Company were most amused.

The next day I went in search of Louise and asked if I might cycle over to the field hospital to return Nurse Fjermeros’s watch. He agreed reluctantly, signed a chit and I drew one bicycle from the quartermaster’s stores. I pedaled off down the drab lanes in a fine drizzle. I noticed a curious fizzing sensation at the back of my head. I recognized the symptoms of mild euphoria.

It took me twenty minutes to get to St. Idesbalde. A Belgian sentry directed me to an office in a wooden shack where I waited for Dagmar. She arrived wearing full uniform. I handed over the watch.

“It’s very kind of you.”

“Not at all.… I wondered if the men—if you knew.”

“We think they are Dutch. A fishing boat, perhaps hitting a mine.” She shrugged, then smiled. “Can I offer you something to eat, Mr.… ?”

“Todd. John James. Yes, please.”

We walked through the hospital. It had originally been a rather grand farmhouse with numerous outbuildings. Large tents had been pitched in every available space and duckboard walkways laid between them. Looking inside one tent I could see neat rows of patients in low camp beds. We crossed the lawn of a small walled garden and emerged from it onto the graveled driveway of the main house. Three motor ambulances were pulled up at the door. Some men, in filthy uniforms and stark, almost indecently white bandages, were being helped inside.

“We’re very quiet at the moment,” she said. “Waiting for spring offensives.”

I nodded and followed her across the driveway and into a stable block. There was a row of loose stalls and for an instant I was back in Minto Academy. I had paused involuntarily, and now Dagmar stood at the door of an old barn waiting for me. I followed her in.

The noise of conversation was colossal. The barn had been converted into a canteen and was filled with trestle tables around which sat dozens of injured soldiers, some in uniform, some in pajamas and dressing gowns, eating, drinking, playing cards, and all—as far as I could hear—talking at the top of their voices. Smoke from their cigarettes drifted up into the exposed rafters. A big fat iron stove stood in the center of the room and at the far end was a makeshift kitchen and serving area staffed by nuns. There I was given a plate of stew, three slices of coarse grayish soda bread and a tin mug of coffee.

Dagmar and I found two unoccupied seats and sat down. Here and there among the groups of soldiers were nurses and nuns. I suddenly felt a shaft of envy for these wounded Belgians, with their loud conviviality, their plentiful food and their female company. I looked at Dagmar—she was tucking stray hair back under her cap. Her hair was a fine reddish blond.

“Not eating?”

“No,” she said. “I already finished. Please, don’t mind me.”

I ate the stew. A curious-tasting meat—half pork, half venison (it was mule, I learned later). We chatted about something or other. She told me she was Norwegian and had joined the Red Cross in 1915. I let her know something of my past, lying blatantly only when I said I had abandoned a place at university to enlist.

“I think you were better to stay at university.”

“I think you’re right,” I said spontaneously, my new mood of apprehension prompting me. I smoothed my moustache with thumb and forefinger. I took out a tin of cigarettes—Trumpeters—offered her one and received a wry refusal. I lit mine and passed the tin across the table to her.

“Have it,” I said. “I’ve got tons.”

She smiled and quickly slipped the tin into a pocket in her uniform. This mild illicit act joined us as fellow conspirators. I felt my face hot and a curious sense of disequilibrium afflicted me for an instant. I looked at her round face, her random freckles … Her hands were on the table, one nail tapping gently. I saw fine red-gold hairs at her wrist. I wanted to ask her if we could meet again, but the words seemed to form in my stomach rather than my throat, as if only vomiting would release them.

“I keep thinking about those drowned men,” I blurted out. “They’re the first actual dead … I mean, like that—casualties.”

“You should stay here for a day. We filled two cemeteries since I’m at St. Idesbalde.”

“Of course. I see. It’s just that, for the first time …” I gave a weak smile. “This quiet sector, it’s very misleading.”

She met my gaze. “I know you’ll be all right,” she said seriously. “I get these sensations about people.” She smiled. “I’m almays right.”

“Sorry?”

“I’m almays right.”

“Oh. Good, good.”

That was what it sounded like to me. “Almays.” Was it a speech defect? Did she think it was an actual English word: a conflation of “almost always”? Did she mean “almost” or “always”? I decided to take it for the latter. I felt a benign sense of release spread upwards through my body from my bowels, a kind of erotic fatigue. I felt I had her word for it. I was going to come through.

“I hope you are,” I said. “Right, I mean.”

She looked at her watch. “I should go.”

She walked me to the camp gate. I put on my cap and climbed on my bicycle. She leaned towards me.

“Thanks for the cigarettes,” she said in a low voice. Her sweet breath hit the side of my face.

“Do you ever go walking on the beach,” I asked, “at Coxyde-Bains?”

“Me? No.…”

“I do, as often as I can.”

“Maybe I’ll see you one day.”

“Yes. Fine.… Well, good-bye.”

It was the best I could do. I cycled back to camp in a dull, vexed mood; too dull even to be angry with myself. At the camp, teams from A and D companies were playing soccer with each other, thirty a side.

I went into our tent. Teague was there, his foot up—sockless—on a pile of blankets.

“Twisted my bloody ankle,” he said, “playing bloody footer.” His thick face was red and sweaty. The normally immaculate ridges of his hair were mussed.

“Where the hell have you been?”

I told him. And recounted how I had met Dagmar.

“Bloody marvelous,” he said. “Here we are, meant to be fighting the Hun. One lot plays football, another goes to have lunch with his girlfriend. ‘What did you do in the war, Daddy?’ ‘Me? Oh, I twisted my ankle in a match against A Company.’ Makes me sick.”

He was genuinely angry. But I had seen him often enough in this mood not to be perturbed.

“You should visit that hospital. You wouldn’t be quite so keen then.”

“What do you know, Pictish lout?”

I was not frightened of Teague, especially as he was immobile.

“I know I’d watch my lip if I were you, Teague. Or I might just twist your other ankle.”

“Shag off.”

“Shag off yourself, fat face.”

It carried on like this for a minute or so before I left to watch the end of the match. It sounds depressingly puerile, I know, but remember we were most of us just out of the sixth form and we often bickered this way. Our profanities coarsened steadily as time went by. We took our lead from the pipe band, cheerful foul-mouthed fellows, with a colorful line in invective.

Two days later we went up the line to relieve B and C companies. I looked at the immaculate trenches with different eyes. There was something sinister, almost insulting about their order and rectitude. My encounter with the drowned men had made me preternaturally wary. I no longer strolled along the parapet at dusk, as I used to. I never even exposed my head above the sandbags. I surveyed the distant German lines through a periscope. I saw the small figures of the enemy quite clearly, as indifferent to our presence as we were to theirs. For the first time I completed the equation of myself, my rifle and the target a thousand yards away. Then I transposed it. Congruence. My alarm deepened.

One evening in the section dugout Teague and Somerville-Start asked Druce to persuade Louise to let them form a raiding party.

“What on earth for?” he said. We all listened intently.

“To do something for once,” Teague said.

“We’re going mad with boredom. Let’s take a prisoner. Interrogate him.” Somerville-Start grinned, showing his big teeth. “Have some fun.”

“No,” I said, suddenly terrified. “It’s the most stupid idea I’ve ever heard.”

“Does sound a bit on the keen side,” Bookbinder said. “I’m not complaining.”

“Anything for a quiet life,” Kite said. “Who wants to go prowling around in the dark?”

“You might get hurt,” Bookbinder said.

“Bloody funk,” Teague said to me.

“It’s not funk, it’s sense.”

“Louise’ll never agree, anyway,” Druce said calmly. “He’ll ask O’Dell and O’Dell will say no. This is Belgian line, you know, not ours.”

“They’re mad,” I said to Druce when the others had gone. “Raving mad.”

Druce smiled. “Raiding party. Don’t know what they’re talking about.” He slapped me on the shoulder. “Keep it up, Jock, you’ll save our necks yet.”

I liked Druce for that. He seemed so much older than the rest of us: calmer, more skeptical, less ruffled by events.

However, despite Druce’s presence, as our sixth month in the Nieuport sector wore on, my own worries steadily increased. The drowned men had thrown me off balance. The unreal routine and the tolerable nature of our life at the front had been exposed for the temporary haven it was. We would not be left in a quiet sector forever. As each day passed it brought a possible posting closer. I began to speculate about the nature of my death, all the horrible versions that were available. And behind this fear another deep disquiet was nurtured. I was still a virgin, and, Oonagh apart, I had never even kissed a girl. The thought of dying with life so unlived, so little experienced, seemed outrageously unfair. My encounter with Dagmar had naturally exacerbated this emptiness at the center of myself. Dagmar or Huguette? Huguette or Dagmar? Which one would I choose? In such bouts of vain self-deception did I while away my time. It was doubly galling as it was difficult to masturbate discreetly in the trenches. I used to wait until I was on sentry duty in a small observation sap pushed forward some ten or fifteen yards into no-man’s-land where for four futile hours I was meant to guard against a German attack. (As it happened, one did occur in July of that year—1917—but by then we were long gone.)

I remember that date vividly. All through that night of sentry duty the German batteries at Wilskerke shelled the bridge across the canal at Wulpen. I could see across the sand hills the distant muzzle flash of the guns, but I could not see or hear the shells land. The irregular flickering and the faint reports kept me alert and edgy. Around five o’clock I began to see the shape of the ruined lighthouse at the mouth of the Yser emerge from the darkness. It had been a warm night, the warmest of the year so far.

I had a piss in the corner of the sap. As I did so I looked up at the lightening sky and saw the faint stars still sparkling in an immense field of lightest bluey-gray. I rubbed my face and looked at my watch. Half an hour to go. A breakfast of tea, a tin of sardines, and bread and margarine waited. I sniffed, spat, yawned, flexed my fingers and allowed my gaze to wander out over no-man’s-land.

I saw the gas instantly, as it rolled thick, white and heavy down through the dunes from Lombartzyde. A breeze on the seaward side swung a flank round faster on the left, hooking in towards me. It seemed dense and solid as smoke from burning green leaves, obliterating everything as it advanced. I turned and ran back down the sap to the trench. There a large, highly polished section of girder hung from a bracket, and beside it an iron bar.

I seized the bar and beat furiously on the girder, numbing my fingers cruelly with the blows. The clear harsh sound of metal on metal clattered down the trench line.

“Gas!” I screamed. “GAS ATTACK!”

I heard other gas alarms being sounded—sirens, gongs and rattles—shouts of frantic inquiry. I tore my goggles from a pocket and put them on. I fumbled for my cotton pad. Not there! I re-searched my pockets. Nothing. Nothing. I thought of pints of yellow fluid, foam-filled rotting lungs, searing mustard burns … I hurled myself into the dugout. Blurred faces shouted nonsense at me.

“Gas!” I bellowed. “Gas!”

I scrabbled among my kit, found my cotton pad and stumbled back outside. The gas was fifty yards away. Our platoon crawled out of dugouts. The air was filled with alarms, loud with meaningless panic. I saw a baffled Noel Kite, who had also been on sentry duty, trying on his cotton pad. Dry.

“Urine, Kite!” I yelled at him, and at the others who now piled haphazardly out of the dugout entrance, tin helmets on, rifles ready.

“Wet the pad. Quickly!”

Violent fear galvanized them. Full early-morning bladders were emptied steaming onto the cotton. I laid my own pad on the fire step and snatched at the buttons of my fly with blunt agitated fingers. I saw Teague wrap a sopping mask around his face, saw the more fastidious Kite wring his out before applying it. Somerville-Start crouched behind the sandbagged parapet on the fire step, fixing his bayonet, his hanging cock luminously white against the khaki of his battle dress. I strained desperately to urinate, but I had emptied my bladder minutes before. Nothing. Not a drop. I could smell the gas above the acid reek of urine, which filled the trench. The whole section was now masked and ready except for me and Pawsey, who had raised his sodden pad to vomit. I saw Louise, half-dressed, stumbling along from his dugout.

“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:

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.

“Voilà, Tommy; encore du thé?”

“No, no thanks.” I gestured outside. “Une minute. Parler?”

She glanced at me quizzically. Then looked round the room, her top lip held between her teeth. It made her look faintly simian.

“Pourquoi pas?”

We went out through a side door into a small sad courtyard. Some lank hens scratched. We turned a corner and found ourselves in a narrow sunny lane, unused, weedy. Over a brick wall I could see the slab back of the tobacco factory and its rows of grimy windows. Huguette led me down the lane to a shed and we went in. I saw an old machine, a turnip mincer, rusted and useless. A clean scythe hung on the wall. At the back was a dank hump of turnips. A pile of jute sacks was on the floor. An earthy root-vegetable smell in the air—wet, organic, dark.

Huguette leaned against the wall. I tried to kiss her. I was trembling and sweating. She pushed me away.

“Baiser, c’est dix francs!”

I emptied my pockets and gave her ten francs. I held her big face between my hands. Slowly, tenderly, I touched my lips to hers.

Her squirming agile tongue almost made me shout with shock. It was like a live leaping eel in my mouth. I felt I had a piston in my chest compressing the air of my lungs. It was astonishing. Then she pushed me away again.

I had six francs and a few sous left. All my money had gone on her filthy tea and eggs and chipped potatoes. I held the money out on a slick and jittery palm. She scooped the coins up.

“C’est pas beaucoup,” she said, counting, somewhat sulkily. She put the money in a pocket, shrugged, took my hand and thrust it up under her skirt. I felt her thighs—warm, soft—and moved my hand upwards. Fingertips touched hair—curled, springy, dry—just like my own. I gently cupped her groin. I seemed to have stopped breathing. I will show you fear in a handful of fuzz. My eyes were fixed on a knot in the wood of the plank wall before me. Huguette shifted slightly.

“Fini?”

“Yes. Oui.”

I stepped back. She looked faintly surprised.

“I love you, Huguette,” I said, hoarse.

“Oh, pouf, oui.… ‘I loave you,’ ça marche pas!” She shook her finger grimly. “C’est une question d’argent.”

She opened the door. I walked out into the palpitating dusk. The sun hit the tall windows of the tobacco factory, turning them to fabulous golden mirrors.

At least I had said it. A man to a woman. I had kissed. I had touched that secret place. I felt buoyant, strangely calm. On the train back to the railhead at Coxyde I sat on the floor of the truck beside Leo Druce. He had his cap off; it was sitting balanced on one of his knees. A faint sweet smell came from the oil on his hair. His kind, delicate features seemed at odds with the crude cut and serge of his battle-dress coat. He twirled his cap on his knee.

“Where do you think we’ll be going?” I asked.

“Don’t know. The Somme? Arras? Louise hasn’t told me.”

“Is there a push on?”

“Looks like it.”

I felt a stomach-churn of alarm.

“I shouldn’t worry, Todd old fellow. They’ll probably forget about us.”

I was grateful for his words of reassurance, however unrealistic they might be. I wanted to tell him why I was so apprehensive, indicate the true nature of my fears.

“I’m just worried that I—you know—haven’t done enough.” I smiled faintly. “In life, as it were.” I paused. “I mean I’ve never really even been in love. Properly.”

“Well, imagine if you were. You might feel worse.”

“I suppose so. I …”

“What?”

“You know that girl in the estaminet?”

“The one that serves the tea or the one that washes up?”

“The tea one.”

“What about her?”

“What do you think of her?”

“I don’t know … obliging enough. Pretty cheap. Thirty francs isn’t bad for a roger.”

“Huguette?”

“Is that her name?” He turned to Kite. “Hey, Noel, that bint in the estaminet, Todd says she’s called Huguette.”

“Ah … Huguette,” Kite said, tasting the name. “Did you shaft her, Todd?”

“Yes … oh yes.”

“She’s Bookbinder’s favorite,” Druce said. “Noel and I prefer the washer-up.”

“Ah.”

“I should give her a go if we ever get back there.”

“Good idea. I will.”

*     *     *

I think my health began to give way round about then. Suddenly I felt ill all the time, laden with apathy. It was not so much my health declining, perhaps, as my well-being. I held myself in low esteem, disgusted at my naïveté, not so much because I had made such a banal romantic error, but for what it revealed to me about my own conceit. This made me even less prepared for our transfer, and more fearful of this “push” that everyone was discussing. I was determined somehow to get out of the front line.… If I could just get sent back to reserve, back to Dunkirk even. I would happily work in fatigue parties for the duration.

I began to think wildly of desertion, or even a self-inflicted wound, but I knew I had not the courage for such a course of action. This was the source of my apathy. I wanted to act but had no guts for the effort required.

It was Pawsey who gave me the idea. Ever since he had vomited during the false gas attack, he had looked wan and peaky. The alarm had unsettled him. He claimed the urine made him sick, but it was the fear. He was generally regarded as a malingerer, especially by Teague and Somerville-Start. I watched Pawsey closely, and after a while I began to suspect that he was half-trying to poison himself. Whenever we were outside he chewed grass constantly and I never saw him spit out the pulp. He looked anemic and thin and was never out of the latrines.

Then we heard that our move was to be three days hence—destination a secret. More importantly, for my purposes, the entire battalion was to parade in companies for an inspection by the brigade medical officer the day before our departure. From somewhere in the back of my mind I recalled an old goldbrick’s trick (I cannot remember who told me this—possibly Hamish), the gist of which was that heavy smoking on an empty stomach forced the heartbeat up dangerously high. I reduced my eating to a minimum and started smoking as much as I could bear.

This regime did indeed have a curious effect on me. At first I experienced a palpable euphoria. I felt light-headed, strangely taller. After forty cigarettes a dull headache set in and I began to feel queasy. The morning of the inspection found me etiolated and bilious. I lit a cigarette immediately on waking and managed to smoke three more before my rising gorge demanded a cup of tea.

Druce remarked on my addiction to tobacco.

“Relax,” he said. “I’m sure we’ll be going back to reserve. We’re quiet-sector material.”

I smiled weakly and set fire to another cigarette.

D Company were called for inspection at 11 A.M. As we filed into the tent I noticed a sign saying FFI INSPECTION. I asked Druce what the letters stood for.

“Free from Infection,” he said.

“But what exactly does that mean?”

He said he had no idea.

A morose-looking, sallow-faced doctor confronted us. He had a swagger stick under one arm. I put my hand on my heart. It certainly seemed to be beating unusually fiercely. My headache keened thinly at my temples too. I was pasty and a film of perspiration covered my face. My hair was damp on my brow. Surely, I said to myself, they cannot send a man in my condition into battle. Along the line I saw Pawsey, jade-green, his jaws working relentlessly.

“Right,” the doctor said. “Drop your trousers. And your drawers.”

Baffled, hesitantly, some of us grinning lewdly, we complied. Our shirttails, fore and aft, preserved our modesty. The doctor approached the first file of men. With his swagger stick he lifted the front of the first man’s shirt, glanced down and asked, “Are you all right?”

“Yes, sir.”

He did this to everyone, moving quickly down the line. He reached me and lifted my shirt.

“Are you all right?”

“Well, sir, my heart—”

He was on to the next man. Louise, following, glared at me. I felt sharp tears of anger. I glanced at Pawsey. He looked shocked at my peremptory treatment.

The doctor reached him. Lifted his shirt.

“Are you all right?”

“No, sir,” Pawsey said boldly, swallowing his cud.

The doctor moved on to the next man.

It took him less than an hour to inspect the entire battalion and we were to a man passed Free from Infection. Free to go and get killed and not contaminate the battlefield, Pawsey said bitterly, when we compared our outrage later.

“I feel dreadful,” Pawsey said. “Truly dreadful. I’m ill, for God’s sake. That bloody quack …” His chin buckled slightly as he tried to control his tears.

For my part, I felt only sullen and resigned. I seemed to stand before a high looming cliff of despair. That afternoon, I slipped away from yet another soccer match and walked down the lane through the dunes towards the seawall.

It was a day of high gray solid clouds, dense and packed like cobbles. There was a distant mist far out to sea that blended the water with the sky at the horizon. The light cast was even, drab, monochrome. The tide was going out and the vast beach gleamed with a dull wet iridescence.

I went through a gap in the wire and down the steps of the wall onto the sand, turned east and walked gloomily along for a good while, lost in my thoughts. I was trying to revive my innate, natural optimism, trying to regenerate a sense of my own special worth. Without self-esteem you can accomplish nothing, and I knew that I had to overcome the twin disappointments of Dagmar and Huguette.… Dagmar, I told myself, if only I had been bolder there. Remember her name: Dagmar Fjermeros. After the war you can go to Norway, find her, marry her, start a family. What had she said to me? “You will survive. I’m almays right.” Almays. If only she had said “always” …

I stopped. In the distance I could see Nieuport-Bains and beyond its two piers I thought I could make out the shattered base of the lighthouse behind the trench line on the right bank of the Yser. I felt—surprisingly—suddenly proprietorial. That was my position: l’homme de l’extrême gauche. A special post. The first man on the Western Front. Others had occupied it; doubtless someone was occupying it now, but I felt as if I were leasing it to him. I remembered Teague’s sneer: “What did you do in the war?” It was quite a claim I could make. I turned and began to walk back. I was l’homme de l’extrême gauche. The more I thought about it, the more pleased I was with the image. It seemed apt, portentous. That, I now saw, was to be my role in life.

A powerful blow in the small of my back knocked me heavily to the ground. Sand was kicked in my face. Winded, on all fours, I gasped for breath, trying to pick grains from my smarting, weeping eyes. I heard a depressingly familiar bark. Ralph.

The stupid brute capered and leaped about me like a lamb. He went into a semicrouch, rump up, tail wagging, front legs flat on the sand.

“Stop it!” I screamed. “Leave me alone!”

I felt an irrational fear at the dog’s return. Ralph was, to me at least, a bad omen: at best a powerful irritant, at worst some kind of malign harbinger. I walked back along the beach, quickening my pace. I had not intended to come so far. Ahead the wet beach shone a lustrous scaly silver like a fish. I looked round. Ralph loped behind me.

“Go away!” I shouted. He pricked up his ears and came closer. I scooped a handful of sand and flung it at him. He barked with pleasure at this new game. I turned and started to run. I felt a sort of hot, mazy confusion descend on me. My self-imposed fast and huge intake of tobacco were still affecting my system. I stopped, suddenly exhausted, bile in my throat. I lowered myself to my haunches. Ralph panted idiotically beside me on the enormous beach. My solitude overwhelmed me—a reluctant actor on a vast deserted stage, giddy with fear and apprehension.

The happy return of Ralph prevented the others from noticing my distress. The movement order had come through. We were to entrain at Coxyde-Bains at 0600 hours the next day.

“Where are we going?” I asked Leo Druce.

“A place called Ypres,” he said.

VILLA LUXE, May 27, 1972

Emilia’s day off. I wander up to the village for a bite of lunch. The café-bar is simple: crudely and entirely successful. A dark interior room, tiled and shuttered, with minimal lighting. Outside, a large L-shaped terrace. Vines and bougainvillea grow above on trellises. Many well-watered pots boast flowers—zinnias and geraniums. If there’s a breeze, sit outside. If you seek cool shade, sit indoors. Your eyes will soon grow accustomed to the limpid gloom.

The bar is owned by Ernesto, a swarthy amiable lout of a man, but it is run by his aged parents. Days can go by with no sign of Ernesto—he drives off to town in his ancient Simca whenever he feels like it. The old man, Feliz, and his wife, Concepción, work on with placid patience. They greet me as a respected client. I have seen their son grow from an eager slim youth into this parody Lothario (he is always growing and shaving off a thin moustache). They know I know what they suffer. We smile and shrug. The children: what can we do? There is a benign freemasonry of old folk—we help each other get by.

I order a beer and a plate of olives. Feliz shuffles into the kitchen to cook me a tough steak. I look forward to an afternoon’s pleasant mining of my dental cavities for meat fibers.

I am halfway through my steak when the two German girls come in. These are the twins, Günther’s daughters. They must be in their early twenties. They wear shorts and T-shirts. Their legs are already pink with a few days’ suntanning. They are pretty girls, these twins, with square strong faces. They are well built, like swimmers, with broad shoulders and thick blondish hair. One twin, the slightly prettier, has streaked her hair with a whiter blond color.

They sit outside with their drinks and a plate of pistachios, and light up cigarettes. I munch on, chewing my steak—Feliz has excelled himself; my jaw aches with the effort of mastication.

The girls keep looking at me. Then the less pretty one comes inside to buy more drinks. She puts on a pair of spectacles and pretends to look at one of the gaudy calendars Ernesto’s suppliers have pressed upon him and with which he decorates the otherwise bare walls of the bar. I know she really wants to have a closer look at me.

Feliz’s potatoes ooze oil. I mop it up with a piece of bread.

“Guten Tag.”

“Tag,” I say unreflectingly.

“Do you speak German?”

“A little.… I used to—that’s to say, a long time ago. But I’m forgetting it, ah …”

“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.”