The Dust That Falls from Dreams (6 page)

Regimental no. 1967

Rifle no. 1695

Pte Ashbridge Pendennis

D
izzy, sick and exhausted by the time we got to Kemmel. Don’t think I ever felt seedier. Trudged in full view of the Huns up on the hill. No idea why they didn’t mow us down. A miracle.

Officers got told off. Came in cattle trucks, then buses that still had ‘London General Omnibus Company’ on the sides, but then it was slogging through mud and rain, mile after mile, with rifle, ammo, a cape, a goatskin and supplies. Aching and shivering, sweating and freezing. End of my greatcoat so soaked in earth and water. Terribly heavy. Sidney and Albert and I ended up almost carrying each other. Thank God they were there. Arrived, slumped down and slept, without removing our webbing. Could hear bombardment not far off. First time under fire, and too tired to care. Am extra fit because of ribbing about being a Yank, so always trained hard to be one and a half times as good.

Kept worrying about when I would get a chance to zero my sights. Was thinking, ‘What’s the point of this gun if I aim it and miss?’ Other fellows had been developing the same obsession.

My gun quite old, but good. Nice feel to it. Obviously loved by a previous owner. ‘PLG’ in tiny letters on the stock, and a lot of wax or boot polish rubbed into the woodwork. Glows dark brown. Barrel immaculate, not one pit. Bolt slides perfectly. Must always look out for mud up the barrel, because then it could explode in your hands. Took a tip and plugged the muzzle with a tiny cork from a medicine bottle. Am almost as worried about looking after that cork as I am about the gun.

Wonder who PLG was, and whether still alive. Think of him as a guardian spirit. If he’s dead, hope he watches over me and his old Lee–Enfield. Fear that the first time I get a chance to take a potshot at Fritz, will feel sorry for him and funk it. Might aim at the ground, and made him skip.

You pick up on the lore of a unit almost as soon as you join it. The lore is one of the things that keeps you together. It’s very like the stories that come down families, so that things that happened to your grandmother almost seem as if they had happened to you. Must write them down sometime.

Trenches taken over from the French. Just channels of slime. No wire, no sandbags, no proper parapets, no communication trench. Too shallow, so have to sit down in the mud, but if lucky might find the chest of a Frenchman to sit down on. Strange and disconcerting at first, but am already used to how dead bodies sigh if you sit on them.

Deep hole full of water in our trench, keep forgetting it’s there. Sink into it up to your thighs. Good for thinning the half-inch of mud encrusting greatcoats. Hell to be made to march in greatcoats. Some lads cut the bottoms off.

German lines higher than ours, only a hundred yards away. Huns always have the high ground, simply because they got there first. Always have the advantage of us in a firefight, but I think we lose just as many men to sickness, including our doctor.

Snowed and froze, but mostly rained. Work at night, so sleep in the afternoons, but sometimes sleep in snatches, just two minutes during busy times. You can’t sleep wearing webbing and water bottle, but not allowed to take them off. Groundsheet isn’t big enough, so you sleep sitting up, with your helmet on, so that drips fall away onto shoulders. In the front line we’re not permitted to remove our boots and socks. Puttees leave horrible trackmarks round legs. Bad idea to take off boots in icy weather anyway, because they freeze solid. Can’t get them on again.

Stand to on firing step at dawn every day. All night for preparation, so best time to attack. Fritz does exactly the same thing, of course, and no attack ever comes. All casualties from snipers and shellfire. Proper attacks rare as alligator feathers.

Regiment lost twelve officers and 250 men to enemy action,
exposure, exhaustion and frostbite, before I got here. Relieved by Royal Scots Fusiliers in December. Boys ate nothing but bully beef. You open the tins with a bayonet.

Thank God for rum ration. That navy stuff goes right down to your toes and heats you all the way back up again. Sincerely hate any NCO who tries to cream it off.

Rum and cigarettes; I guess that’s what a soldier lives for. Swap my cigarettes for rum, and think it a darned good deal too.

Couldn’t hold the line after middle of January. Lost too many men. Transport people volunteered to come and fight in place of our dead.

Began to think that there’s something about a young man that makes him want to die, and die well, whilst still at the height of life, whilst still not tired of it. Or maybe war so terrible that the prospect of death entices. Is it a comfort not to have to face the future? We all end up discarded on the midden of time, so might as well be flung there now. Ain’t I quite the philosopher?

Not thinking along those lines. I have Rosie to live for. Told her I was her angel, but really she’s mine. Also knew that if I was killed she’d never have the chance to become disillusioned. She’d never get tired. We’d never have an argument. I’d be young, strong, handsome forever. Would never watch her grow old, either. No plans to die, but it might be a good thing before I let her down. If I die, the vision lives.

Impossible to imagine oneself being dead, because one is still there, imagining it. That’s how we can watch our comrades die, and carry on. If I imagine myself dead, I’m still at Rosie’s side.

Somewhere in deepest darkest France

3 January 1915

Ma chère maman,

How lovely it was to spend Christmas with you on the South Downs, and
quel plaisir
to go tobogganing with one’s mother! It was cruel of you to make me drag both of our toboggans back uphill, though. How will I ever forgive? Perhaps time will heal
.

It was very sweet of you to come to the aerodrome to see me off. How marvellously you frightened the sentries and charmed the CO! and even his dog! I thought you were very brave, the way you held back your tears, but really, you didn’t need to. Everyone was perfectly aware that you are French and have the perfect excuse to be emotional
.

But,
chère maman
, I do know how you feel. You saw my brothers off to South Africa, never to see them again, and we don’t know what’s going to happen to Archie out in Waziristan. You must be very lonely and worried. Even I am worried, a lot more than my fellow birdmen, none of whom seem to be older than eighteen. At twenty-two I feel a little less bulletproof than they do
.

I want to tell you why you shouldn’t worry, but first of all I have to relate what happened on the way over. As you know, I came over in a gunbus, with another pilot in the front, and the plan was to collect a nice little Morane-Saulnier at St Omer. Well, the gunbus is a stout fellow, and a remarkably dependable and safe machine, but ours conked out not far from Gravelines. Broken ignition wire, it turned out
. Ça se passe
. I can’t tell you how frightening it was. I was fiddling with the instruments, almost in a blue funk, thinking I was going to have to ditch in the sea and get dissected by crabs and other molluscs, and the odd dogfish. But I managed to land right at the sea’s edge, on the beach. Thank God it was low tide. The other fellow and I managed to drag it up the beach with the aid of
stalwart fishermen who had been innocently beachcombing, and we telephoned through to Squadron HQ. Whilst waiting for the ack emma we got royally treated by the inhabitants of a bistro. I’ve never had such a good steak. I can tell that being a half-French birdman is going to be a huge bonus out here. I will have simpering girls draped off both arms, and have to check that there aren’t any in my shoes in the mornings, as we did with scorpions out on the NWF. The weather leaves most of our flying days completely dud, so…more time for the fair maidens of France!

Anyway, to the point. If you fly over France, you see beneath you a country of the most magnificent beauty. Where else are there towns like Fleurs, or Poitiers, or Abbeville? Where else are there lovely long avenues of poplars and infinitely long Roman roads? And rivers with such lovely curves? And elegant chateaux that were never made for war? And women who think you must be mentally deficient if you are not in love with them? Where everyone drinks wine and sings, but nobody’s drunk?

The point is
, maman
, that I love France with all my heart and soul. She is my mother, as you are, and England is my father, as Father was. One loves one’s parents equally, if differently, and I love France as I love you, with a sort of passionate aching tenderness
.

Not far from here there is a strip, neither very long nor wide, where this exquisite land has been reduced to a hideous bog of brown mud, pitted with interconnecting shell holes full of filthy water, where there are no trees unbroken and no church or farm or house intact. It is already a vast graveyard of the unburied. The gunfire is relentless and maddening. The front is an obscenity
, maman,
and this was inflicted on France by a madman who overran two neutral countries in order to get to it and bring about this wreckage. Only when it is covered with snow is purity restored to this land, and even then the trenches cut through it like cracks in glass
.

At Westminster we had to learn reams of heroic poetry. It was beaten into us, did you but know it, but there’s a verse I remember, by Lord Macauley, I believe, which goes:

‘To every man upon this earth

Death cometh soon or late:

And how can man die better

Than facing fearful odds
,

For the ashes of his fathers
,

And the temples of his gods?’

Well, that’s how I feel. Airmen don’t live long, as you probably know. I may be lucky, or I may have the worst of luck and be maimed rather than killed. But if I am killed, I would like you to be fearsomely proud as you show my photograph to your visitors, and say, ‘That was my son
, mort pour la France.’

Ton fils dévoué,

Daniel P
.

B
oxing Day of 1914 began very wet, and Rosie was awakened by the sound of rain on the windowpanes. Her face was cold, but her body was warm from being tucked under the covers. The coal fire, which had been banked up the night before, had burned itself out, and was giving very little heat. It was still dark outside, and she lay in bed thinking about Ashbridge in France. He would almost certainly be outside in the trenches, and she wondered how one could possibly cope with being there in weather like this. Rosie remembered that it was St Stephen’s Day, and that he had been the first Christian martyr. She got dressed in bed.

The house was quiet now that all the male servants had gone. When she went downstairs the Christmas tree seemed lifeless with its candles unlit, and the presents gone from beneath it. She was the first of the family to be up, although she could hear Cookie and Millicent clattering in the kitchen. She sat in the drawing room watching the world become light outside, and felt helpless.

That morning she conscientiously wrote her thank-you letters, and then put on her coat and a sou’wester and went next door to see Mr and Mrs Pendennis. She found the latter very pale and agitated, but doing her best to be collected.

‘My dear,’ said Mrs Pendennis, ‘I shall just have to resign myself, won’t I? I’ve got three boys out there, and it’s not very likely that they’ll all come back, is it? Have you noticed that the parents of the dead boys have become a kind of club?’

‘They do errands for each other,’ said Rosie. ‘It’s nice in a forlorn kind of way, isn’t it?’

‘I’m worried about my husband,’ said Mrs Pendennis. ‘He’s smoking an awful lot, and it’s giving him a cough. He says it helps to clear his lungs, but I really don’t think it helps at all.’

‘We spend our time clutching at straws, don’t we?’ said Rosie.

On the next day, which was the day of St John the Evangelist, there was a terrible gale, and once again Rosie woke up feeling a kind of horror for Ashbridge, in case the weather should be like this wherever he was. Mrs McCosh, sensitive to Rosie’s worries, tried to keep her busy, and despatched her to the post office, so that she came back drenched and windswept. Because Millicent was so busy, Rosie made up the fire in the drawing room herself and knelt in front of it to dry out. It was unbearable to think of Ash being shelled and soaked, with no real shelter and no fire to dry out next to. Rosie stared into the flames as if there were something to be divined there.

She tried to read, but could not concentrate. She wrote a letter to the Poetry Bookshop to ask when the next collection of Georgian poetry was due out, and then settled down with their anthology for 1911–12. She bypassed the rather overblown contributions of Lascelles Abercrombie and Gordon Bottomley, and turned straight to the five contributed by Rupert Brooke. How very strange to read a long poem written in Germany about nostalgia for one place in England. ‘Grantchester’ was a poem that could no longer be written. You could write something very like it in France, though. Rosie wondered how many of the soldiers were writing poems. It wasn’t something that Ash was likely to do.

She read ‘Dust’ four times to herself, and then stood up and read it aloud as she paced about the drawing room. That poem was certainly about her and Ash, should one of them die. She liked the phrase ‘The shattering fury of our fire’. That’s what it was, this desperate passion. She read ‘The Fish’, and noticed how clever was that cascade of couplets, connected by so much deft enjambement. Rosie would have loved to write a poem as accomplished as that. ‘Town and Country’ was irrelevant because it was about the seeping away of love, and that was something in which Rosie did not believe. ‘Dining Room Tea’ seemed a little obscure and strange to her, so she went back and read ‘Dust’ again. Then she turned to page 71 and read Walter de la Mare’s ‘The Listeners’. Really, it was by far the best poem in the book, even better than ‘Dust’. Rosie wished again that she could write poetry of such
quality. She knew that somewhere inside her there was poetry waiting to come out. She had an obscure instinct that all she needed to do was read enough poetry with her eyes, and one day it would start coming out of her fingers. She went and fetched a paper knife from her father’s desk, and eagerly began to cut the remaining pages.

In the evening Mrs McCosh, Rosie and Christabel went out to play bridge, and when they were coming back, Mrs McCosh’s umbrella was blown inside out and wrecked.

On the 28th Rosie could not stand the agony of sitting around worrying, so she went to the YMCA hut to see if there was any way in which she could be useful, but there wasn’t. What was she supposed to do with herself? She went round to see Mr and Mrs Pendennis again. Mrs Pendennis asked Rosie about the Pitt brothers who used to live on the other side of the McCoshes, wanting to know if she knew where they were these days. She said, ‘No, but I expect Mama does,’ and on the way home she remembered what a little scallywag Daniel Pitt had been, expert in all those horrible tricks and tortures that little boys love. He’d fired a rotten plum at her with his catapult, and it had splattered all over her dress. Still, she had been very fond of him. She remembered his brother Archie, who was older, and thought how nice it would be to see them again, after all these years. No doubt they were both caught up in the war too.

Rosie drifted through the 29th and 30th in a fog of numbness, but on the 31st it was raining violently again, and once more she was desperate with worry on Ash’s behalf. That evening Mr and Mrs Pendennis came round for dinner, and afterwards they all played bridge until 11.30. As everyone does in wartime, they kept themselves distracted with conviviality. It was raw and painful having to sing the new year in with ‘Auld Lang Syne’. Mr McCosh became emotional and stood up to recite Robert Burns. Then he sang ‘The Flowers of the Forest’ and the Pendennises went home feeling bleak.

The days of the new year dragged by. Rosie kept going down to the YMCA hut, but they never found any use for her. Her mother did the household accounts as usual at this time of year, and became irritable. Rosie went out to tea and people came to
tea, she went shopping, she went to see Mrs Pendennis. On 5 January it occurred to her that the one thing she could do was to go and visit the Cottage Hospital, but she found it almost impossible not to get in the way, and felt very awkward with people who did not really want to speak. The sights and particularly the sounds were more dreadful than she could possibly have imagined. She knew that her horror was selfish, because she was never thinking of the victims before her, but only of the possibility that something like this could happen to Ash. Of course, she told herself, she would marry and love him anyway, even if he were blind and missing his legs, and even if he were covered in burns, but what worried her was how Ash himself might take it. Rosie was convinced that he would prefer to die rather than become some of the things that she had seen, whether she were to marry him or not.

On Friday the 8th of January, Rosie learned that Mrs Crow’s husband had been killed, and so she and her mother went round to take her some black things to wear. She had been too distraught to go and get some for herself. Rosie felt helpless in the face of such abject despair, but she decided to go back every day for a while, if Mrs Crow were agreeable.

On the 11th it rained cats and dogs again, and Rosie remembered how Ash used to joke that English rain was more like horses and donkeys sometimes. Then on the 14th there was news that Mrs Burman’s son Bill had been wounded and was in Lady Meynell’s Hospital. Mrs McCosh became very excited about this, and immediately wanted to go there just in case she ran into Lady Meynell. They did not see Lady Meynell, but Bill Burman was in good spirits. He had a shattered knee and would always walk stiffly because the surgeons simply fused all the bones together. He was mainly worried about how it might affect his golf. Clearly, he would have to give up tennis. On the 17th Vera Burman came to tea and she told Rosie that Bill found her visits very comforting, and looked forward to them a great deal. Rosie told her that she would quite like to work in a hospital, because it was so awful to feel useless at times like these.

On Saturday the 23 rd there was snow and fog, and Rosie had to break the ice in her jug in the morning before she could wash.
Mrs McCosh announced that it was as heavy as the great snowfall of 1881. Christabel, Ottilie, Sophie and Rosie made a huge snowman in the garden, but had to keep coming back in to warm up in between forays. What if it has been snowing on Ash like this? Ottilie said, ‘Don’t worry, there couldn’t possibly be any battles in weather like this.’

And then it thawed in the night and the lovely huge snowman melted away completely.

On the 25th Mrs McCosh went into Holders to ask about getting her violin valued and serviced. She only played it when everybody but the servants was out, and had long ago given up entertaining guests with it. She possessed genuine talent and a very romantic style, and the girls used to love it when they came home and were looking for their keys at the front door, and they would hear her in the morning room. She would prop the music up in front of the Bible on its lectern, and throw herself into pieces by Kreisler. Now that the war had got going, and she was particularly anxious about Ashbridge, she was playing more than ever, but only the servants had the profit of it. They knew every note of ‘Schön Rosmarin’.

On the 27th Sidney Pendennis came home on leave and he said that Albert and Ash were bearing up well. He brought letters from Ashbridge, and a strange souvenir, which was a German bullet exactly stuck through a British one so that it made a St Andrew’s cross. Everybody thought it a wonderful and strange thing, which indeed it was. Rosie put it in her jewellery box, next to the curtain ring that had been her original token of engagement from Ashbridge.

Another letter came from Ashbridge, in which he said that he had encountered Daniel Pitt, after how many years? He reported that Daniel was in the Royal Flying Corps now, but just a tyro, and had done a forced landing not far from Ash’s trench, in between the lines. Apparently Daniel had had to hide in a shell hole until darkness fell, and meanwhile the Germans had completely wrecked his aeroplane with shells. Rosie thought about Daniel for a while, remembering how he’d once wrapped himself in a sheet and pretended to be a ghost in broad daylight, which had not been the slightest bit frightening.

On the 28th Rosie and her mother went to meet a huge convoy of Belgian refugees at Victoria Station, to assist in the general mustering and sorting. They were poor souls, miserable and confused, but also overwhelmed with gratitude for their friendly reception. Upon their return, Mrs McCosh learned that her violin was worth £90. It seemed an astonishing piece of good news amid all the gloom spread by the casualty lists. Rosie went to supper with Mr and ‘Mamma’ Pendennis. Between them they managed, for a couple of hours, to erect a thin facade of cheerfulness and optimism. Before Ashbridge left he had arranged a code, and from his latest letter they were able to work out that he had been in a place called Sanvic, but was now in Kemmel.