The Ghost Road (27 page)

24 October

More marching.
I have visions of us marching into Berlin at this
rate. Nearest village was shelled last night. Five civilians killed. When did
we stop thinking of civilians as human? Quite a long time ago, I think. Anyhow,
nobody's devastated by the news. And yet the people round here are friendly, we
get on well with them. Only there's a slight wariness, I suppose. They hated
the invasion, nobody doubts that, but the Germans were here a long time. An
accommodation of some sort was reached. And the German troops in this area
anyway seem to have been
very
disciplined. No
atrocities. The respectable young ladies of the village are very respectable
young ladies indeed, despite having spent four years in the clutches of the
brutal and lascivious Hun. And the shell-holes that lie in the orchards, fields
and roads round here—great gaping wounds—were made by
our
guns. The bombardment was very heavy at times. Some of the children run away
from us. And yet we're greeted everywhere with open arms.

Still can't get used to ordinary noises, especially
women's and children's voices. It must feel like this coming out of prison.

25 October

Owen is to be court-martialled. Mainly because he
speaks French better than anybody else and all the local girls make a bee-line
for him, not just thanking him either, but actually
kissing
him. I caught his eye while all this was going on, and thought I detected an
answering gleam.
Of irony or whatever.
Anyway the
Great Unkissed
are
thoroughly fed up with him and have
convened a subalterns' court martial. Shot at dawn, I shouldn't wonder.

Wyatt, meanwhile, is visiting a farmhouse on the
outskirts of the village where lives an accommodating widow and her equally
accommodating but rather more nubile daughters. At this very moment, probably,
he's dipping his wick where many a German wick has dipped before it. (A
frisson
wasted on Wyatt, believe me.)

But this morning I saw a woman in the village with
sunlight on her hair and one of those long loaves of bread in her arms and
there was more sensuality in that moment than in all Wyatt's humping and
pumping.
Out of bounds, of course.
Perfectly
respectable housewife doing the shopping.

26 October

This morning I went to one of the local farms to sort
out a billeting problem. The woman who runs the farm had accused some of the
men in 'C' company of stealing eggs. They denied it vociferously, but I'm sure
she's right. After calming her down and paying her more for the eggs than they
were worth, I noticed a boy with red hair staring at me. Not staring exactly,
but his eyes met mine longer than was strictly necessary. About sixteen, I
suppose.
Perhaps a bit older.
He was walking across
the yard clanking a bucket of pig swill, and after I'd taken leave of Madame
(his mother, I
think
) I followed him into the fetid darkness, full of snuffling
and munching, pigs rooting round with moist quivering nostrils, trotting
towards him on delicate pink feet. After he poured the swill in
they
squealed and guzzled for a bit, then raised their
heads, watching us calmly from under long fine white eyelashes as they munched.
I scratched their backs and tried to talk to him. Chinks of sunlight came in
through gaps in the tiles, a smelly greenish wetness under foot. He spoke
rapidly and I got very little of it—schoolboy French no use at all. I spun
back-scratching out as long as I could, then departed, wondering how much of
that initial look I'd imagined.

Nothing particularly attractive about him—dead white
skin, splodgy freckles, curious flat golden brown eyes—not that it bothered me.
After two months without sex I'd have settled for the pigs.

I met him again later, near the church. There's a lane
runs past the churchyard, a low stone wall on one side, a canal on the other,
one of the many canals that run through this area. A rather dank gloomy stretch
of water, listlessly reflecting a dense white sky, fringed by willows with limp
yellow leaves. He was sitting with his big, red, raw-knuckled hands clasped
between his knees. The red hair glowed in the greyish light, not bright red,
not auburn, a dark, flat, burnt-looking colour.

He was very obviously lingering. He greeted me with a
smile and tapped his mouth, making smoking movements. I gave him a Woodbine and
stood by the canal, a few feet away, looking up and down to make sure we
weren't being observed. He made smoking movements again and pointed to the
packet. When I didn't immediately respond, he pointed again and said something
in German.
I thought, My God. Have you really got your head stuck so deep in the fucking
pig bucket you don't know which army's up the other end? I suppose it should
have disgusted me, but it didn't. In fact it had the opposite effect—I'd have
given him every packet I possessed. I handed them over and he got up and led me
into the trees. It took a while finding somewhere sufficiently screened. I
showed him what I wanted. He leant against the tree trunk, bracing himself on
his hands. I pulled down his trousers and drawers and started nosing and
tonguing round his arse, worrying at the crack to get in because the position
hardened the muscles. A smell of chrysanths left too long in water, then a
deeper friendlier smell, prim, pursed hole glistening with spit and, on the
other side of that tight French sphincter, German spunk. Not literally—they
left a bit longer ago than
that
—but
there
nevertheless, the shadowy figures one used to glimpse
through periscopes in the trenches, and my tongue reaching out for them. I
thought,

Oh ye millions I embrace you,

This kiss is for the whole
world...

Suddenly it struck me as funny, and my breath made a
farting noise between his buttocks and he tried to pull away, but I held on,
and fucked him, and then turned him round and sucked off his quite small stubby
very purple cock.

And then we parted. And I've been neurotically running
my tongue round my lips feeling for sores ever since.

27 October

Everybody finds these marches gruelling. I spend a lot
of my time on foot inspections. Some of the men have blisters the size of eggs.
And my own feet, which were not good this morning, are now
very
not good.

But we're in decent billets tonight. I've actually got
a bed in a room with roses on the wallpaper, and a few left in the garden too.
Went out and picked some and put them in a bowl on the kitchen table in memory
of Amiens. Big blowsy roses well past their best, but we move on again today so
I won't be here to see the petals fall.

29 October

Arrived here under cover of darkness.
Village wretched, people unsmiling,
dazed-looking, not surprising when you think we were bombing them to buggery
not long ago.

There's a rumour going round that the Austrians have
signed a peace treaty. The men cheered up when they heard it, and they need
cheering when you look at their feet. Nobody here can understand why it's still
going on.

I lay in bed last night and listened to them in the
barn singing. I wish I didn't feel they're being sacrificed to the subclauses
and the small print. But I think they are.

Thursday, 31
October

And here for a while we shall stay. The Germans are
dug in on the other side of the Sambre-Oise Canal, and seem to be preparing to
make a stand.

The village is still occupied, but houses in the
forward area have been evacuated and we're crammed into the cellar of one of
them. Now and then we venture upstairs into the furnished rooms, feeling like
rats or mice, and then we scurry back into our hole again. But it's warm, it
feels
safe, though the whole house shakes with the impact of exploding shells, and
it's not good to think what a direct hit would do. Above ground the Germans
have chopped down all the trees, but there's a great tangle of undergrowth,
brambles that catch at your legs as you walk past, dead bracken the exact
shade, or one of the shades, of Sarah's hair. No possibility of exercises or
drill or anything. We lie low by day, and patrol at night, for of course
they've left alarm posts on this side of the canal, a sort of human trip-wire
to warn of an impending attack. Cleaning them out's a nasty job since it has to
be silent.
Knives and knobkerries in other words.

1 November

My turn to go out last night.
One alarm post 'exterminated'. I hope it's the last.
We crawled almost to the edge of the canal, and lay looking at it. There was
just enough starlight to see by.
A strong sense of the
Germans on the other side, peering into the darkness as we were, silent,
watchful.
I had the sense that somewhere out there was a pair of eyes
looking directly into mine.

The canal's raised about four feet above the
surrounding
fields,
with drainage ditches on either
side (the Germans have very sensibly flooded them).
It's
forty feet wide.
Too wide to be easily bridged, too narrow
from the point of view of a successful bombardment.
There's no safety
margin to allow for shells falling short, so men and equipment will have to be
kept quite a long way back.
Which means that when the barrage
lifts, as it's supposed to do, and sweeps forward three hundred yards, there'll
be about five minutes in which to get across the swampy fields, across the
drainage ditches, and reach even our side of the canal.
Plenty of time
for them to get their breath and man the guns—though officially, of course,
they'll all have been wiped out.

The field opposite's partially flooded already, and
it's still raining. Notjust rain, they've also flooded the drainage ditches on
their
side. From the canal the ground rises steeply to La Motte Farm, which is our
objective in the attack.
Uphill all the way.
Not a
scrap of cover.
Machine-gunners behind every clump of grass.

Looking at the ground, even like that in semi-darkness,
the problem became dreadfully apparent. Far clearer than it is on any of the
maps, though we spend hours of every day bent over them. There are two
possibilities. Either you bombard the opposite bank so heavily that no
machine-gunner can possibly survive, in which case the ditches and quite
possibly even the canal bank will burst, and the field on the other side will
become a nightmare of weltering mud ten feet deep, as bad as anything at
Passchendaele.
Or
you keep the bombardment light, move it on quickly, and wait
for the infantry to catch up. In that case you take the risk that unscathed
machine-gunners will pop up all over the place, and settle down for a nice bit
of concentrated target practice.

It's a choice between Passchendaele and the Somme.
Only a
miniature
version of each, but then that's not much consolation.
It only takes on bullet per man.

They've chosen the Somme. This afternoon we had a
joint briefing with the Lancashire Fusiliers on our left.
Marshall-of-the-Ten-Wounds was there, surprisingly outspoken I thought, though
you can afford to be when you're so covered in wound stripes and medals it's
starting to look like an eccentric form of camouflage. He said his men stand
no
chance of getting up the slope with machine-guns still intact above them and no
cover. Building a bridge in the open under the sort of fire we're likely to
encounter is
impossible.
The whole operation's
insane.
The chances of success are
zero.

Nobody argued with him, I mean nobody discussed it. We
were just told flatly, a simple, unsupported assertion, that the weight of the
artillery would overcome all opposition. I think those words sent a chill down
the spine of every man there who remembered the Somme. Marshall threw his
pencil down and sat with his arms folded, silent, for the rest of the briefing.

So here we sit writing letters. Supplies take a long
time to get here, because the Germans blocked the roads and blew up the bridges
as they withdrew. Nobody's been inside a proper shop for six weeks, so I keep
tearing pages out of the back of this book and giving them to people.

Not many left now.
But enough.

2 November 1918

2nd Manchester Regt. France

My dear Rivers,

As you'll have realized from my last letter, I'm still
intact. Should this happy state of affairs not continue, I would be grateful if
you would try to see my
mother.
She took quite a fancy
to you when you met last year at Craiglockhart and you, more than most people,
would know what to say. Or have the sense to say
nothing,
which was always rather your forte, wasn't it
?