A lump rises in my throat. I turn back to the grey waters and throw my fag into the swell. Why had I spoken to him so harshly on the train?Better buck up your ideas, Private McCormick, or you won’t last five minutes at the Front.That didn’t sound like me. At least, it didn’t sound like the person I used to be. Sounded more like my father, if anything. A thought that makes me sick to my stomach. But this is what war does to you: hollows you out, makes you brutal, builds up walls inside you.
I turn again and scan the lower deck, searching for Danny among the crowd. I don’t want this for him. To see that smile withered away or for it to slowly transform into the doomed, rigid grin I have seen on so many faces after a week or two at the Front. Right now, if it were in my power, I would order this ship back to shore, would drag Daniel McCormick down the gangplank and then command the boy to run.
Run and never look back.
I almost laugh at myself. It’s absurd. Only, perhaps this feeling isn’t just about me and how I’ve changed. Perhaps it has something to do with losing Michael too. He joined up at the same time I did. Joined up because ofme.There’d been no need for him to do so; conscription hadn’t yet come into force. I’d argued with him about it, saying we’d be separated anyway, both in training and, quite possibly, during our service. But Michael had insisted that I wouldn’t face this hell alone. That he’d be with me in France, even if not in the same trench. In the end, I’d simply given in and let him sign his life away.
I shake my head. Light another cigarette. There’s nothing I can do for Danny. I can’t save him from the war nor what it will do to him. I am just an insignificant cog in the great engine, roaring here on the sea, roaring at home in factories and training camps, roaring in the trenches of the Somme – a mindless engine to be oiled with much of the life that teems on this deck. There is no arguing with it. No appeal for kindness that it will hear. All I can do as one of its cogs is to help push Danny forward to his fate, as I myself am pushed.
And anyway, why should I care?
I tell myself I don’t. That to care is pointless. And yet... If I could make amends for those hard words I’d spoken on the train, if I could somehow keep him from becoming like me – hollowed-out and defeated, old before his time... I don’t know. Maybe it might feel like I was saving a part of myself.
I close my eyes and hear a cry of triumph from below, followed by a chorus of groans. A man has won his hand at cards. Which means, of course, that everyone else has lost.
3
7th June
I wake in a hard bed at the end of a long wooden hut filled with snoring, farting men, some sleeping, some watchful, as if the Hun might storm the place at any moment. Rubbing my eyes, I glance up. Pale light is beading the edge of the sack-covered window above my head. Soon the double doors at the end of the hut will be flung open and a barked order to ‘rise and shine’ will stun those still dreaming from their slumbers.
I sit up and waggle my aching toes. No spare troop transports were available when we arrived at the dockside, and so it had been a weary twelve-mile march to this old scout’s hut at the heart of the British encampment at Étaples-sur-mer. A march that has already drained some of the spirit from those fresh-faced Tommies. They’ll probably regain scraps of it during the morning, but for now their first taste of war has knocked some of the liveliness out of them. Slogging along cobbled roads carrying seventy pounds of kit after hours on a swaying, sea-sprayed deck will do that.
As an officer, I’d felt obliged to bark an order or two myself to keep them all in line, striding along the column, offering the odd word of encouragement where I could. In the drizzle that accompanied us from the harbour to the field kitchen set up outside the hut, I had noticed the first sign of smiles starting to slip. Hot soup, a slab of grey bread and a cup of rum had lifted them a little, but Jesus, if they were tired now, what would they be like in a couple of months?
There was only one smile I missed in the ranks. Despite keeping an eye out for him, I had seen no sign of Private Danny McCormick. All the way off the ship and to the camp, I had told myself again and again how ridiculous that idea of mine had been. To try and save Danny from the brutalising effects of this war. Even to make up for those harsh words of mine on the train. It was all so absurd, so impossible.
The bedsprings sigh as I stand. The man next to me whimpers in his sleep. I wash and dress as quietly as I can – cold water from the washstand at the end of the bed; then my vest, shirt, trousers, tie, socks, puttees laced firmly around my calves and ankles, the boots I had polished to a dazzle before going to bed pulled onto tender feet, my thick woollen tunic, my Sam Browne belt cinched around my waist and strapped over my shoulder, cap pulled tight onto my head, hand momentarily brushing the scorched flesh at the side of my face.
I pause for a second or two before collecting my revolver. It sits in my open palm and I look at it in the half-light of the scout hut, where little boys would once have practised their knots and sworn allegiances they barely understood. Boys who might now be men serving in the killing grounds at Verdun, if not already dead and buried. I force my hand to stop shaking and add the Webley to the holster on my belt.
Kamerad.The word slides into my mind like a bayonet blade. Did you deserve that bullet, my Hun friend? Does anyone?
A quick glance in the shaving mirror. The mirror – the entire shaving set – had been my father’s. A neat leather case, handed over to his son by the Reverend Montague Wraxall with a kind of knowing nod. Handed over in the hope that the manliness of war might encourage a wisp or two to sprout on my obstinately naked upper lip. But not even the supremely ‘masculine’ act of killing another human being has worked that miracle.
A boy stares back at me from the mirror. Large brown eyes, sticking-out ears, a sensitive mouth with overly red lips. The kind of complexion the Romantic artists I admire like Dante Gabriel Rossetti had preferred to paint, full of the pale promise of death. Not a face made for war at all. ‘A bit too womanly, if anything,’ as one of my old schoolmasters had once snorted. I toss the looking glass onto the bed and stride as noiselessly as I can out of the dormitory.
It’s going to be a hot day. You can feel it in the sunrise that is just now searing the horizon. A lick of fire that, within seconds, will paint scarlet the thousands of white tents stretching across these rolling sand dunes. In a tight avenue between them, I stand aside to allow a steely nurse in VAD uniform to hurry past. She’s carrying something in her hands vaguely limb-shaped, all wrapped up in stained newspaper. Then a big-knuckled sergeant emerges from a tent on my right with a stuffed scarecrow under his arm. He salutes when he sees me and the motion jiggles free a little of the straw from one of the many holes punched into the mannequin.
‘For bayonet practice, sir,’ he says unnecessarily. ‘Gotta get some of these new boys up to snuff. Don’t know what they’re teaching ’em at them camps back in Blighty. All we keep getting sent these days is a bunch of sissies, am I right?’
I leave him with his dummy and move on.
An odd place, the encampment at Étaples. In a way, it’s a mirror for the beginning and end of many a soldier’s experience of war. Part of it serves as a vast hospital complex, treating the injured who have been passed down the line from the casualty clearing stations at the Front. I stayed here myself for a short time after the raid on our trench and before I was shipped home. They remade what remained of my ear and, when I started shaking uncontrollably one morning, had told me to pull myself together.
The other function of this great tented city is a little more infamous. They call it the ‘Bull Ring’ – the final training camp before a new recruit is dispatched to his sector. Run by a host of sadistic officers who have never seen Front-line action themselves, it has a nasty reputation amongst the Tommies. A well-deserved reputation, in my opinion.
The geography of Étaples is always changing, hospital tents pulled down and repositioned almost overnight, so it takes a while for me to locate the cookhouse and my breakfast. Eventually, I find myself in yet another hut with a couple of trestle tables set up at one end, each stacked with bowls into which a thick gloopy porridge is being slopped. The place smells of starch, boiled cabbage, carbolic soap. Our chef this morning is a man who appears to have half the Somme under his fingernails. He sniffs, coughs, and ladles out my portion, while at the same time using one of those filthy fingers to excavate the treasures of his left ear.
‘Spot of honey to go with it?’ he asks.
I shake my head. I’m not even sure I want the porridge any more.
I sit alone at a big round table, my bowl pushed aside, sipping chlorine-flavoured tea from a tin mug. There’s a scatter of magazines strewn about – old copies ofPunch, John Bull, The Strand. While an Australian private starts up an argument with the chef – ‘Call this breakfast? I could tar my backyard with this muck!’;‘Well, if ya don’t like it you know what you can do, ya Ozzie bastard’ –I pick up one of the dog-eared magazines, turning it over in my hands. On the back there is a colour reproduction of J. M. W. Turner’sThe Fighting Temeraire. The subject is a ghostly old warship being dragged into port for the last time, its reward for forty years of faithful service to be stripped apart and broken up for scrap. I remember my father taking me to the National Gallery as a young boy and how I stood in front of this haunting image, fascinated. Even though I hadn’t understood its symbolism back then, it had brought tears to my eyes. Tears that had prompted an embarrassed grunt from Father and his handkerchief shoved against my chest.
Stop all that nonsense right this minute. Can’t you see, people are looking?
I feel the prickle of tears again now, staring down at this masterpiece: the glassy water, the setting sun, the proud old ship gliding almost majestically towards her grave. Sooner or later, it seems to be the fate of all warriors to be smashed to pieces.
