The Dust That Falls from Dreams (7 page)

A mysterious location not permitted to be revealed even to mothers, but you know my squadron number anyway, so do write back to that, somewhere near St Omer
.

4 February 1915

Ma chère maman, elegante et magnifique!

You’ll never guess who I’ve run into! I came down in front of the lines
–
but worry not! It happens all the time and is only to be expected, and I was unharmed, unlike my poor machine, a pretty little Morane-Saulnier whose name was Florence, you may remember, and was immediately shelled to smithereens by Fritz
–
and I managed to get into one of our trenches, and guess who was in it! I’ll write and tell you tomorrow
.

Tomorrow. Same address
.

It was Ashbridge Pendennis, he of two doors down when I was little and you were even younger, the American boy with the two brothers who was always mooning around Rosie McCosh, and she around him. He and the aforementioned
frères
are with the HAC, and he was ‘mighty glad’ to see me after all these years. He tells me that he is engaged to Rosie. This information made me feel very forlorn, I have to tell you, because I rather fancied her for myself. What lovely grey eyes! Or were they blue? Such wondrous cascades of chestnut hair! Such touching freckles and an adorable little nose!

I will tell you of my most recent escapades tomorrow
.

Gee, it’s tomorrow already
.

I took a potshot at a Taube with my carbine and missed. Couldn’t get close enough to take a hack with my sabre
.

We had the most enormous binge in the mess, which was of far greater danger to me than Fritz is ever likely to be. I woke up in a ditch with frost on my beard, if I had had one. We’d been playing Cardinal Puff which is most lethal. Apparently there was a terrific rag after I passed
out, and now the mess looks as though a shell has landed in it. Please don’t tell my mother
–
she would be very shocked. Nay, tell her that I have spent part of my spare time on my knees in church, and the rest reading the work of lady poets!

But why did we binge and rag?
Chère maman
, it was because a Rumpler flew over the aerodrome yesterday, and dropped some eggs somewhat inaccurately, so yours truly ran outside with the aforementioned carbine, and took a potshot at him. By some miracle I got the pilot in the calf, and he had to land before he passed out. Ergo (and eheu!) one captured intact machine, and two disgruntled Fritz aviators! We packed the pilot off to the casualty clearing station in the tender, but the observer stayed for the binge and rag, and is now in the guardroom with all his regrets and the mother of all hangovers. So
, chère maman
, behold the hero of the hour!

Heroically yours,
grandes bises, je t’embrasse
! Any news of Archie?

Ton fils dévoué,

Daniel P
.

R
est camp at Sanvic. Have to lie down in ten inches of mud. Spend a lot of time unloading supplies in Rouen. Aching all over. Food was inedible. First fatigues moving hundreds of bales of hay. Second was loading tins of petrol. Empty tins end up as water vessels, so water in the front line always has the tang of petrol. My friend Hutch says he can tell from the flavour whether or not the can has been BP. Fun dropping matches into the cans to burn off the vapour.

Detailed to go and help in the bacteria lab. The Major extremely nice. Made specimens of bacteria for him taken from wounds. Let me see them under the microscope. Thanked me and asked me to come again. Told him I was really an engineer, and asked him what he thought I should do.

8th Jan. Pay parade and I got eight francs. Found a Frenchwoman with a tub and paid for a bath. Bought a fur coat made of a piebald goat. Not popular with pals – smells of former owner.

9th. Was sick, and so allowed to slack. An aeroplane came down between the lines, and after dark the pilot and observer crept up and dropped into the trench. We filled them up with tea, and damn me if one of them didn’t turn out to be Daniel Pitt, an original Pal, who used to live the other side of Rosie’s house! Had a good chinwag about childhood days. Said he’d crashed three times in the last fortnight. Par for the course, apparently. Feel envious of the birdmen, but by God, you have to be darned brave. They get colder than we do. Wouldn’t catch me up there.

10th. Cookhouse fatigues. Felt very poorly. Probably flu. A lot of us got sick in the cattle truck. Thirty to a car.

12th. Some sweets arrived from my aunt. Extremely cold. This is a decent place. Lots of food locally. Enemy aeroplane dropped two bombs and didn’t hit anything. Terrific noise, however. One of the men got run over by a lorry (five tonner) from head to
foot. Thought he was dead, but just squashed into mud so had to dig him out. Contusions, that’s all. That driver makes a custom of running people over.

This isn’t the glamorous kind of soldiering we’d volunteered for.

13th. Marched seven miles in the rain. Glad to arrive. Quartered in a school. Shell burst five hundred yards away. A fine sight, my first real experience of shells. Grenade practice. A serious business. You light the fuse and have five seconds to throw it.

No idea where to go or what to do when we finally arrived. No plan, nobody came to meet us. Ruined village, heaps of engineers’ supplies, knife rests, barbed wire, shovels, trenching tools, etc. Only intact structure was a grandstand with the paint peeling off.

Slumped on the green and smoked while officer went off to find someone who knew anything. Ended up distributed between least demolished cottages. With eight others in a tiny room with one shell hole punched neatly through it. Shell still lying there. Decided that it probably wouldn’t explode. Hutch scrawled ‘RIP’ on it. I slept very well.

Dug latrines. Always the first thing to do. Don’t even wait for officers to detail you. You arrive, unshoulder your weapon and shoulder your spade. Pulled up some leeks, dug a nice latrine. We pray, ‘Dear Lord, please do not let a shell land in the latrines, because I am buggered if I am going to dig another one.’ Ours has a horizontal pole to perch on. Nothing to clean up with. Can’t bear to use Rosie’s letters, so am using letters from anyone else, after memorising and replying. Post is extraordinarily efficient, considering. A lot of the lads forced to use their love letters. I don’t smoke much, makes me feel dizzy, so use my cigarette ration to buy letters, as well as the extra rum. A sad fate for beautiful feminine sentiments.

14th. Went on fatigues to repair the road. Mud and water! Shovelled mud, sank in mud, breathed in mud. Felt like a fly on flypaper. Saw Albert, and he was the same dear brother, but very tired of it all. Plenty of shells.

Hutch found out that two old women still living in the village would sell us coffee and bread if we got there first. Like cartoon
witches from a book of fairy tales. Found cans of Scotch broth just lying at the side of the road. Hooray! And they had a granddaughter who was prepared to ‘teach French’.

Hutch says that we are nobody’s children. Don’t know exactly what he means. Must ask. He keeps repeating it. Certainly, nobody seems to be in charge of looking after us, so we do it. Shot a rabbit. Last one in Flanders. Stewed it up with leeks. Bullet went through the ribs so no real meat was spoiled. Thought of how Rosie would have been upset by my shooting a rabbit. Such a big soft spot for animals. Expect she would have cried. Hutch made ripping little stove out of a biscuit tin and set it up in a niche. Call it ‘the Savoy Grill’. The Major said it was just about the best in the battalion. He brought the anti-gas equipment today. Onward Christian soldiers.

15th. Re-dug a dugout that collapsed because of a shell. Spent all day in it. Stink perfectly horrible. Shells going overhead sound like carts on cobbles. Worked from 8.30 to 4.30 and then detailed to take bundles of wood to the Lancashires. Went in single file and fell in mud over and over. Bullets whizzed above us, and when they fell in the mud, they sizzled. Shell nearby made me jump, but already quite used to them. The Germans have extraordinary sniper. We put three sticks in a row poking up above the trench, and he snapped each in turn. Definitely don’t approve of shrapnel. Fizzes and whizzes about like lethal metal bees. Causes one to execute a tactical narrowing of front, and keep it narrow thereafter. Rifles bunged up with mud and unshootable.

10 p.m. Hutch and a few others detailed to go and carry a pump from the chateau to the trenches. I was groaning in the latrine in the dark so was let off. Hutch brought back a spent bullet. Said it had been hell. Completely drenched and covered with stinking filth. You throw yourself down in the mud every time a star shell goes up, and Hutch fell straight into the corpse of a horse. Stretcher parties stumbling about in the dark, collecting the dead and wounded, because it can’t be done by day. Continuous muttering of curses in the dark. Like the murmuring of nocturnal animals. Hutch said they finally delivered the pump and got cups of tea, only twenty yards from the Boche.

Morning. Cut off the bottom of my greatcoat. Did as he said.
We look like a tribe of vagabonds. The skin of that rabbit ended up under my helmet. Great joy over the arrival of balaclavas/gum boots. Collected pieces of string to tie faggots and little lumps of wood to my webbing. No fire means no warm food/no warm hands. Woke up covered with snow, clothes so stiff with frost they crackled when I moved. Bearded like the pard, and beard plastered with mudcrust, unlike the pard.

16th. Went on fatigues to build a shed for the horses, but mostly slacked. Shrapnel shell burst above a cattle shed and got men inside. Caught flea, big enough to use in a cockfight. Cracked it with thumbnail. Very satisfactory. Some of us getting mudbite. Difficult to sleep at night because of rats playing tag/British bulldog/other joyous games all over us.

Fatigues, dogsbody stuff, carrying sandbags. Ain’t there no respect for territorials? Truth is that a soldier spends life digging and lumping things, shovelling mud and wreckage off roads etc. The ditches bridged by single planks, so at night you spend your time climbing out of the ones you fell in. Common knowledge that Army keeps us busy to keep us sane.

17th. My birthday! Package from Rosie! Sweets and a knife and fork, amongst other things. Detailed to bury a horse. You can tell by the smell what’s died nearby. Donkey smells different from horse or fox, but I haven’t detected any difference in the whiff of decaying Boche/Frenchies/Gonzoubris. A rat ran up my leg. Happy birthday, dear Ash, happy birthday to me. Another rumour death of Kaiser, German surrender imminent.

French bodies unburied everywhere. Stinks to high Heaven, even though January. God help us if summer comes. Corpses seem to watch you, especially at night.

18th. Snowed hard. You show up against the snow even at night. On parade 10.30 inspection.

New trench made for us by sappers. Classy affair, little cupboards cut into sides, proper parapet of sandbags, dugouts to curl up in. Duckboards, and sinks to collect the water, so that you can bail it out. Huns only a few yards away, invisible behind sandbags/mounds of earth, apart from dead ones, with their short hair and new uniforms, lolling together in front, like sleeping drunks. Huns have annoying grenade catapults. Guard duty last night. Told to
fire off a round every ten minutes. Don’t know why. Nothing to aim at, even if you could see. Perhaps it just keeps the guard awake. Important to make us feel we’re doing something. You can poke your head above the parapet as much as you like in the dark. Pop it down again the moment a star shell goes up. I like the star shells. The strongest and blackest shadows. Violence of the light miraculous. Nice to have something flying about that doesn’t explode. Wouldn’t put it past the Huns to invent some kind of gadget for seeing us at night. Hope not to be the first one they try it on.

19th. Warmer, but everything soaking wet. The mud! Got into A Company and saw Albert. Lots of old letters. Birthday box from home. Thought about Rosie a great deal. Somehow she keeps me going.

Hutch said, ‘Why do the Huns have a black sandbag every few yards?’ Became quite a topic of conversation. Decided to find a German speaker who could shout very loudly, so that we could ask. Failed. Decided to shout question in French. Nothing doing, so still in ignorance. Probably just took a delivery of black hessian.

20th. 0400. Marched to Kemmel in the rain. Really ripping quarters in a school. I allow they’re the best we’ve had so far. Wooden floors to sleep on! Rain rain rain. Received a hamper from Fortnum & Mason thanks to Mr McCosh. Shared it with section. Oh what a treat. Practically cried with joy. Hutch got cooked sausages all wrapped up, still wonderfully edible.

Hutch said, ‘If I cop it, will you take care of my diary?’

I said, ‘I thought you were writing letters.’ He replied, ‘Well, a diary is a kind of letter, isn’t it?’

I said, ‘Is it?’ and he said, ‘It’s a letter to whoever’s going to read it in the future. You might even read it yourself when you’re old, and then it’s like a letter to yourself.’

Asked him where it was and he said knapsack, wrapped up in bit of mackintosh. Asked if anything I’d like him to do, and I said, ‘Go and see Rosie,’ and he said ‘What should I say?’

Said, ‘Tell her I died well. Even if I died screaming with my legs blown off. Tell her to go ahead without me. Tell her that I was loved by my comrades,’ and Hutch said, ‘Well, that’s true, even though you’re a Yank.’

Gave him Rosie’s address and he put it in the back of his diary.

Stood side by side, at the ready, and Hutch said, ‘I love the smell of bacon in the morning. It takes you straight home.’ Delicious whiff of impending breakfast washing over us from the support lines. Hutch nodded in the Fritz’s direction and said, ‘I wonder what that lot have for breakfast.’

Said, ‘By all accounts it’s sausage made from Belgian babies.’

21st. Still raining. Slack day. Truly needed it. Drank some red wine yesterday, and also water, and one of them has upset my stomach. Rosie sent sterilising pills and am going to use them in my H
₂
O.

22nd. Very cold. Germans shelled the hill as usual. Fatigues carrying bricks up to firing trench. Hell, absolute hell. Weight of bag about 75 lb. Fired on by snipers. Through mud up to knees. Cover behind dead animals etc. Dead French in dugout. One bullet missed me by a yard. Was glad to get back.

23rd. Aeroplanes. Shrapnel on hill as usual. Much brighter day. Started at 4.45. Finished at 11.45.

24th. Aeroplanes overhead. Daniel came and stunted. Marched to billets in school. Slept soundly.

Hutch watches the enemy shells flying over, to see where they’ll land. Don’t like that game at all. Have to duck down in a split second. German gunners spent the afternoon bombarding ruined farmhouse. Completely pointless, terrible waste of ammunition. Suppose they want to keep busy. I like the sound of Jack Johnsons, as long as they’re at a decent distance. The sausages come over broadside on. Make the loudest bang conceivable. Rings inside your head. Hate the whiz-bangs at night.

25th. Inspection 10.30. Moved into church for the night, slept on chairs.

26th. Very wobbly service going on when I awoke. Parade 7 a.m. full kit – expected an attack by Prussian friends. Funeral service and baptism after breakfast. Rather weird experience. It was so barbaric – bells and Latin and incense. Concert in the evening. Very funny. Officers dressed as French tarts, down to a T.

Am getting ribbed because some of the rifle ammo is misfiring
or not firing at all, and the guilty ammo is American. Do feel a little guilty about the American rounds. Huge task to find and remove them. A lot of our shells are duds. They go over and land, but no explosion. Daniel came and stunted again.