Kipling's Choice (7 page)

It's the first day of September 191 J,
John thinks, and he swings his legs out of bed. The season is changing and the rain will be welcome indeed, for it will cool the air and wash away the dust and the flies.

"Holy cow! Damn!" His feet are in a puddle on the floor. He is surprised by how quickly he has picked up the swear words of his men. Water is trickling along one of the edges of the roof and down the wall behind his head. He mops the water around his bed and grabs the white enameled chamber pot from the cupboard. "I can't fill it up this morning, anyway," John says to himself with a chuckle. He sets the pot down against the wall behind the bed.

John is free this morning. Because there is no inspection or morning exercises or drill, he can take his time breakfasting with his host family. When Celle, the daughter, moves her chair and cutlery closer to him, he pretends not to notice. She sits right across from him, beaming.

"
Quel temps, n'est-ce pas?
" John begins.

Her father, who is sitting next to John, growls something like "
oh-la-la
" and looks worriedly outside.

John continues to talk about the weather so the man doesn't pay attention to his blushing daughter, who is rubbing her leg against John's. She has kept her eyes on him all week. Yesterday she launched the attack for real. While milking the cow in the little stall, she called to him as he walked by.

"Is it true what they say about
les Boches,
about what the Germans do to women and children?" she asked. She kicked the door shut behind her, cornering him to prevent an escape.

John can still feel her whispering breath in his ear. "Of course it's true," he answered hoarsely. "Otherwise I wouldn't be fighting here. Those dirty Huns drag innocent women away by the hair after they've speared the babies on their bayonets."

"Innocent?" she said. There was something strange and confusing in her voice. "
Vraiment innocentes?
" It was so cramped in that tiny space. She kept moving closer. He pushed his glasses a bit higher up on his nose.

Innocentes?
John had seen it with his own eyes, certainly on posters about "poor little Belgium" which stated, "Their women are being murdered, or worse." And the newspapers had reported it, too. The
Daily Telegraph
was regularly sending Daddo to Belgium and France, for that matter.

John had never been so close to a girl's face before. When someone began to fiddle with the door handle, his lenses fogged up. Even the cow was jumpy, and Celle rushed back to her milking stool. Later on he could not remember what he had said to her mother as they each sidled through the narrow doorway.

And here she is again, sitting right across the table. Actually it's exciting to be so near to Celle.

"
Oh-la-la, quel temps!
" The kitchen door swings open and her mother staggers inside, dripping wet. "It's a strange sight, all those soldiers with their brown capes in the rain.
Les pauvres.
"

"I've got to go," John says, and he jumps up. "Breakfast was delicious,
merci.
"

He walks along the Rue de l'Eglise with his head down and his hands deep in the pockets of his leather raincoat. It is difficult to see out of his thick glasses in the pouring rain. Dozens of soldiers are walking around the little marketplace. Water is streaming down the rain capes that they wear over their shoulders.
They look like shiny dancing bells,
John thinks. John hurries up the steps of the parsonage, where their temporary headquarters have been established.

"Ah, Lieutenant Kipling!" Captain Alexander says. He is in a cheerful mood. "The new gas masks are here."

"That is good news, sir, although I don't think we should be expecting a gas attack in this weather."

"Kipling, Colonel Butler wants
you
to be in charge of training the men to use the new masks."

"Well, thank you, Captain." John swallows.

"Thank
him,
old boy," Alex replies, giving john a poke in the ribs. "I think the colonel is right. It's just as well to put those new things in the hands of young officers. Go ahead, test them yourself. You're free this morning, aren't you?"

The captain points through the window to the motorized wagon in the courtyard. "Those ten crates there. Twelve dozen gas masks in each one."

It has been rumored for weeks that the British and French troops are about ready to try their hand at using poison gas. John doesn't even think to tell the captain about this state of affairs. The battalion commander himself has not been informed about his army's new top-secret weapons.

For a long time the horror of chlorine gas was the No.l topic of conversation at Warley Barracks and at John's London club. At the end of April 1915, the newspapers were positively drooling over this lurid subject. "Our boys" put up considerable resistance in the Second Battle of Ypres, they wrote. From a maze of trenches, the British and French had been able to hold the front line that curved around the city of Ypres, but it had cost thousands of lives and many appalling injuries: men whose eyes were burned out, whose lungs had burst. Even the best soldiers were powerless against those surprising gas attacks. The bizarre frontline command, "Piss on your handkerchief! Hold it over your mouth!" was thought to be rather amusing back home in England. "But what else could we have done? Nothing, God damn it!" Nigel Francis said bitterly. He was an officer stationed at the front but was home on leave one month after the attack at Ypres. John had met him by chance quite some time ago, during an evening out in London, just before Francis was sent to the trenches in Flanders. Lieutenant Francis was a quiet, amiable student. When John ran into him again in May, he almost went right past him, for Francis looked like a sick, older version of himself.

"You would—oh, God!" the young man exclaimed. "You would have gone mad if you had seen those poor boys spitting their bleeding lungs up. Hundreds of them all at the same time. It was hell! Their eyes and throats were on fire. That's why all those who could still get away jumped into the water. The canal by Boezinge was full of dead bodies." John can still picture Nigel Francis biting down on his knuckles as he finished his story.

John also recalls hearing about the African soldiers who were suffocated during the gas attack. They were dressed in gaudy red trousers and fezzes. They had just arrived in Ypres from the French colony of Senegal. "How scared those wogs must have been!" everyone in the gentlemen's club exclaimed, and they laughed. They felt worse about the two thousand Canadians who were defending Ypres. Their task was to close a five-kilometer-wide breach, and they died near Saint Julien while doing so. Strong stories, all, which John and his friends usually enjoyed with a crystal glass of whiskey and soda as they lounged in the club's plush easy chairs. He remembers how he and his mates tried to outdo one another with their knowledge of the deadliest gas formulas and powerful poisons. They felt like true military gentlemen, a little club of merciless warlords.

John knows that at the firing lines the fear of gas and the elusive enemy has been firmly instilled. And now that his battalion is moving closer to the front, he can feel a change in the atmosphere, too. When they were at Brentwood, they practiced using those first gas masks until they were blue in the face. The "smoke helmets" are awful for John and other boys who wear glasses. Thick, smelly canvas caps is what they actually are, and treated with chemicals that cut off your breath. There is a little pipe for blowing out air, and two glass peepholes that break almost of their own accord. Pure misery.

John Kipling spends the whole afternoon hauling chests of gas masks. He recruits about ten men from his platoon to help, for an officer is there to give orders, after all. The boys are relieved to be inside in such nasty weather. The ten crates are unloaded in a shed by the parsonage. With united effort, the men then drag the crates one at a time onto the empty veranda and break them open.

The new gas masks look exactly like the old ones, and stink just like them, too. "They have the stench of a corpse," John remembers his drill sergeant at Brentwood saying.

They've delivered the wrong ones,
John thinks for a moment until he unfolds one. This model has flaps over the glass, he notices to his relief.

"Gas!" he shouts half an hour later. "Attention! Smoke helmets on!"

They are practicing in a greenhouse used for growing grapes.
It's a nice place for a drill,
he muses; there is plenty of light, it is cozy and dry, and his voice sounds the same as it does outside.

"In God's name, Johnson, those eye flaps must be shut. That's precisely what they're for."

"Yes, sir."

"Break just one piece of glass and you'll be mopping all the floors of the parsonage!"

The flaps appear to be working. The drilling with gas masks is a matter of discipline. Flaps are shut when folding them up; flaps are opened when the thick linen caps go on the head. The men practice putting on the masks over and over again, until they can take them out, put them on, fold them up, and put them away with their eyes closed. And along with those masks, they have to cope with those military caps, always a major production.

"Hup! And one, two!"

Ten masks are raised into the air.
They look ridiculous,
John thinks, but this is a matter of life and death.

"Flaps off! Now! One, two!"

The soldiers practice putting on the masks while lying down, standing up, and while running in the courtyard between rainstorms. One after another they begin to gag from lack of oxygen within the airtight linen mask.

"Sergeant Cochrane, can you take over for me for a bit? Fifteen-minute break. Be especially careful that the masks are fully closed under their coat collars."

The sergeant salutes briskly. "Yes! Sir!" he replies, satisfied. At least
he
doesn't have to put on that suffocating cap anymore.

The officers have a pleasant time together that evening. John demonstrates his drill technique on his lieutenant colonels. He bites and barks out orders to them, for that is what they want him to do. But they laugh and drink together, as well.

"Gas, gasss," cries someone who comes bursting into the room. "Help! Smoke!" Thick clouds of smoke pour out from under his cap.

Quickly they remove the mask to reveal Captain Alexander, armed with a fat cigar.

"They call these things
smoke helmets,
don't they?" he says, and he roars with laughter. "That smoke is worse than I thought!"

The Irish Guards have difficult days ahead. The officers are more aware of this than ever. The daily marches now run about twenty miles, and there are military maneuvers on the program, too. It's tough luck, for the heavy rains continue. But above all, a command to march directly to the front could come any day.

One night, John and Rupert are a bit tipsy as they walk back to their billeting quarters.

"You have nice lodgings, don't you?" Rupert teases.

"They're all right," says John.

"
Et les femmes, mon cher?
Celle is her name, isn't it?"

"Who says?"

"The walls have ears, Kipling!"

Actually Rupert has no idea about Celle's aggressive moves. But John can't resist telling him about his adventure in the cow stall. Rupert is green with jealousy.

"Hey, man, let's trade places. It's dark, at any rate, and she won't even notice."

"Not for love or money!"

They chase each other down the street like two schoolboys.

"See you tomorrow!" Rupert calls, when John closes the garden gate behind him. "And give her mother my regards!"

John chuckles and walks past the dimly lit kitchen window. In the darkness he can't see a thing. By groping he finds the stepladder to the attic above the little barn.

Five minutes later he opens his ink pot and begins to scratch his pen across the paper.

***

 

Second Lieutenant J. Kipling

Mr. and Mrs. R. Kipling, Bateman's, Burwash
(Sussex)

2 September 1915, France

Dearest Mummy and Daddo,
We are still in the same village, far enough from the front, therefore safe. Not allowed to give names. Understandable. The people I've been staying with have been very kind to me.

Tomorrow we're moving to X for the Brigade Field Days. Long marches, actual war drills, fighting techniques, making trenches, evacuations. We'll be sleeping there. This is real. I'm looking forward to it. However, it's raining just as hard and long as it does at home. English weather.

That leather jacket is as heavy as lead, completely soaked. On the field I'll have to use those clumsy army canvases. For that matter, the mud is also a problem during the street marches. Wait until we're lying in our trench.

Will you send me the following items right away: a genuine navy oilskin, pipe cleaners, a tin box of matches, and some dry underwear.

 

The oil lamp on John's table begins to flicker all of a sudden. A draft comes through the floorboards. He lays down his pen. The rustle of trees rises up the stairwell. Has the door blown open?

"Is anyone there?"

No answer. The rustling stops. He hears only the water dripping off his raincoat onto the wooden floor. He holds his breath for a few seconds. There is silence.

John picks up his pen again and tries to read the page, but a tread creaks on the steps. And another...

***

Two brown eyes stare at John, motionless. They look right through him. He lies bleeding in a ditch. This is his very first field battle. He is slipping in and out of consciousness. And he is waiting, helpless.

John glides forward on a cottony little cloud through a milk-white haze and lands soundlessly in the grassy ditch. Slowly he awakens once again. A shadowy form is beginning to appear above his face. Everything he looks at is barely visible without his glasses. His myopic gaze zooms in on two glassy eyes that are wide open.