The New Confessions (19 page)

I went through a gap in the wire and down the steps of the wall onto the sand, turned east and walked gloomily along for a good while, lost in my thoughts. I was trying to revive my innate, natural optimism, trying to regenerate a sense of my own special worth. Without self-esteem you can accomplish nothing, and I knew that I had to overcome the twin disappointments of Dagmar and Huguette.… Dagmar, I told myself, if only I had been bolder there. Remember her name: Dagmar Fjermeros. After the war you can go to Norway, find her, marry her, start a family. What had she said to me? “You will survive. I’m almays right.” Almays. If only she had said “always” …

I stopped. In the distance I could see Nieuport-Bains and beyond its two piers I thought I could make out the shattered base of the lighthouse behind the trench line on the right bank of the Yser. I felt—surprisingly—suddenly proprietorial. That was my position:
l’homme de l’extrême gauche
. A special post. The first man on the Western Front. Others had occupied it; doubtless someone was occupying it now, but I felt as if I were leasing it to him. I remembered Teague’s sneer: “What did you do in the war?” It was quite a claim I could make. I turned and began to walk back. I was
l’homme de l’extrême gauche
. The more I thought about it, the more pleased I was with the image. It seemed apt, portentous. That, I now saw, was to be my role in life.

A powerful blow in the small of my back knocked me heavily to the ground. Sand was kicked in my face. Winded, on all fours, I gasped for breath, trying to pick grains from my smarting, weeping eyes. I heard a depressingly familiar bark. Ralph.

The stupid brute capered and leaped about me like a lamb. He went into a semicrouch, rump up, tail wagging, front legs flat on the sand.

“Stop it!” I screamed. “Leave me alone!”

I felt an irrational fear at the dog’s return. Ralph was, to me at least, a bad omen: at best a powerful irritant, at worst some kind of malign harbinger. I walked back along the beach, quickening my pace. I had not intended to come so far. Ahead the wet beach shone a lustrous scaly silver like a fish. I looked round. Ralph loped behind me.

“Go away!” I shouted. He pricked up his ears and came closer. I scooped a handful of sand and flung it at him. He barked with pleasure at this new game. I turned and started to run. I felt a sort of hot, mazy confusion descend on me. My self-imposed fast and huge intake of tobacco were still affecting my system. I stopped, suddenly exhausted, bile in my throat. I lowered myself to my haunches. Ralph panted idiotically beside me on the enormous beach. My solitude overwhelmed me—a reluctant actor on a vast deserted stage, giddy with fear and apprehension.

The happy return of Ralph prevented the others from noticing my distress. The movement order had come through. We were to entrain at Coxyde-Bains at 0600 hours the next day.

“Where are we going?” I asked Leo Druce.

“A place called Ypres,” he said.

Emilia’s day off. I wander up to the village for a bite of lunch. The café-bar is simple: crudely and entirely successful. A dark interior room, tiled and shuttered, with minimal lighting. Outside, a large L-shaped terrace. Vines and bougainvillea grow above on trellises. Many well-watered pots boast flowers—zinnias and geraniums. If there’s a breeze, sit outside. If you seek cool shade, sit indoors. Your eyes will soon grow accustomed to the limpid gloom.

The bar is owned by Ernesto, a swarthy amiable lout of a man, but it is run by his aged parents. Days can go by with no sign of Ernesto—he drives off to town in his ancient Simca whenever he feels like it. The old man, Feliz, and his wife, Concepción, work on with placid patience. They greet me as a respected client. I have seen their son grow from an eager slim youth into this parody Lothario (he is always growing and shaving off a thin moustache). They know I know what they suffer. We smile and shrug. The children: what can we do? There is a benign freemasonry of old folk—we help each other get by.

I order a beer and a plate of olives. Feliz shuffles into the kitchen to
cook me a tough steak. I look forward to an afternoon’s pleasant mining of my dental cavities for meat fibers.

I am halfway through my steak when the two German girls come in. These are the twins, Günther’s daughters. They must be in their early twenties. They wear shorts and T-shirts. Their legs are already pink with a few days’ suntanning. They are pretty girls, these twins, with square strong faces. They are well built, like swimmers, with broad shoulders and thick blondish hair. One twin, the slightly prettier, has streaked her hair with a whiter blond color.

They sit outside with their drinks and a plate of pistachios, and light up cigarettes. I munch on, chewing my steak—Feliz has excelled himself; my jaw aches with the effort of mastication.

The girls keep looking at me. Then the less pretty one comes inside to buy more drinks. She puts on a pair of spectacles and pretends to look at one of the gaudy calendars Ernesto’s suppliers have pressed upon him and with which he decorates the otherwise bare walls of the bar. I know she really wants to have a closer look at me.

Feliz’s potatoes ooze oil. I mop it up with a piece of bread.

“
Guten Tag.
”

“
Tag,
” I say unreflectingly.

“Do you speak German?”

“A little.… I used to—that’s to say, a long time ago. But I’m forgetting it, ah …”

“English?”

“Yes, that’s easier.”

“We didn’t know. We thought maybe you were Italian or Spanish.”

“I’ve lived here for years.”

“Are you English?… May I sit down?”

“Scottish.… Please.”

“Would you like a cigarette?” She sits down. She has a crumpled soft pack tucked in the sleeve of her pea-green T-shirt. Her breasts shudder briefly beneath the verdant cotton as she sits.

“No, thanks.”

She still has her spectacles on. Tortoiseshell. Modishly rearranged rectangles.

“My name is Ulrike Günther.” She lights her cigarette. Her sister comes in. “This is my sister, Anneliese.”

We shake hands. “Todd,” I say. “John James Todd.”

Ulrike Günther frowns. “Todd?”

“Yes,” I say.

We talk about our villas, problems of water supply, staff, electricity. I tell them my pool is empty this summer. You must swim in ours, they insist. They talk good English, these fair strong girls. My irritation subsides, marginally.

Anneliese breaks a nail on a recalcitrant pistachio. I show her how to open the nuts using a discarded half shell as a lever. They are full of admiration. Did I invent this infallible method of opening pistachio nuts—the best nut in the world? You need never break another nail on them—you need never be frustrated by those nuts with their thin maddening smiles, never leave them unopened in the bottom of the bowl any longer.

Ulrike is enchanted by the simple efficiency of my device.

“Oh yes,” she says. “It’s like—how do you say? The same with
Muscheln.
”

“Mussels,” I say. “The same word.”

“I should know,” she says. She tells me she is a marine biologist writing a thesis on molluscs.

After our drinks we walk back down the track to our villas, neighbors now. At their gate Ulrike pauses, frowning.

“Were you ever in Germany, Mr. Todd?”

I’m already backing off—easy to pretend I didn’t hear her.

“You must all come round for a drink. Very soon,” I call. “Bye now.”

We missed the Battle of Messines Ridge by a few days. The huge mines were exploded beneath it on the seventh of June, and thus was initiated the Third Battle of Ypres, which lasted, in fits and starts, until mid-November. In fact everything stopped shortly after Messines for a couple of months until the offensive was renewed again at the end of July. Meanwhile the 13th (Public School) Service Battalion of the Duke of Clarence’s Own South Oxford Light Infantry moved into the Ypres Salient.

We had hoped, indeed Colonel O’Dell had assured us, that we were to be reunited with the regiment, but this was not to be. On June 17 we found ourselves posted to corps reserve behind Bailleul, some dozen miles from Ypres. We were billeted in a farm across the road from a battalion of Australian pioneers. The bombing section of D Company pitched its tent and thus began the familiar round of equipment cleaning, fatigue parties and sports. My God, I was sick of sports by then!
Football, badminton, rugby, cricket, everything—even battalion-sized games of British bulldog.

We could hear the guns on the front clearly. Somehow they sounded different from the long-range boom of the siege artillery at Nieuport—like the small thunder of a skittle ball, more sinister and dangerous, knocking things down. One week we laid a corduroy road of raw sappy elm planks for the use of a battery of heavy howitzers—squat, muscle-bound guns with fist-sized rivets—that fired a fat shell a foot in diameter. These guns were towed into place—hence the road—by traction engines. Standing back fifty yards, fingers in our ears, we watched their first salvo. The earth shivered; the guns disappeared in smoke. It took five minutes to load them; the shells were trundled up on light railways and then, with some difficulty, winched into the breech with primitive-looking block and tackle rigged beneath wooden tripods.

Boredom set in again, but it was of a slightly different order: beneath it lay a seam of excitement. An offensive was on; fairly soon, surely, it would be our turn for a “stunt.” There was real enthusiasm in our tent, shared by everyone with the exception of Pawsey and myself. Even Noel Kite said he was keen to “have a go at the Teutons.” Ralph the dog, which we had brought from Nieuport, became the bombing section mascot. I have a photograph of us all, taken with Somerville-Start’s box camera. There they sit—Kite, Bookbinder, Somerville-Start (Ralph panting between his knees), Druce, Teague, Pawsey and the others whose names I cannot recall—grinning, fags in mouths, caps pushed back, shirt-sleeved, collars open, Teague clutching a Mills bomb in each hand. We look like a typically close bunch of “mates,” cheery and convivial. It is an entirely illusory impression. The months at Nieuport had forged few bonds. If truth be told, we all rather grated on each other’s nerves. We were like schoolboys at the end of term, needing some respite from the close proximity.

At the end of June we marched from Bailleul through Locre and Dickebusch to Ypres. The countryside had a look of certain parts of England. Gentle hills, red-tiled cottages and farms, scattered woods and along the lane sides a profusion of lilac, may and laburnum bushes. We skirted the shattered town and went into reserve trenches on the left bank of the Ypres-Comines canal. This was the first time the battalion came under fire, from a few stray shells. We all thought we were blasé about shelling after the artillery duels at Nieuport, but this was our first experience of real explosions. I remember seeing the puffs of dirt erupt and collapse in the fields across the canal and thought they possessed a
fragile transient beauty—“
earth trees that live a split second,
” I wrote in my diary. A few landed in the reserve lines, knocking down a couple of poplars, but I registered no alarm. There seemed nothing inherently dangerous in them—as threatening as the puffs of smoke that drifted harmlessly in the sunlit air after the clods of earth had thumped to the ground.

A and B companies went into the front line to relieve a battalion of the Royal Sussex Regiment. Two days later I went up myself as part of a ration party, carrying four gallons of tea in a couple of petrol cans.

What can I tell you about the Ypres front in early July 1917? Later, I used to explain it to people like this:

Take an idealized image of the English countryside—I always think of the Cotswolds in this connection (in fact, to be precise, I always think of Oxfordshire around Charlbury, for obvious reasons). Imagine you are walking along a country road. You come to the crest of a gentle rise and there before you is a modest valley. You know exactly the sort of view it provides. A road, some hedgerowed lanes, a patchwork of fields, a couple of small villages—cottages, a post office, a pub, a church—there a dovecote, there a farm and an old mill; here an embankment and a railway line; a wood to the left, copses and spinneys scattered randomly about. The eye sweeps over these benign and neutral features unquestioningly.

Now, place two armies on either side of this valley. Have them dig in and construct a trench system. Everything in between is suddenly invested with new sinister potential: that neat farm, the obliging drainage ditch, the village at the crossroads, become key factors in strategy and survival. Imagine running across those intervening fields in an attempt to capture positions on that gentle slope opposite you so that you may advance one step into the valley beyond. Which way will you go? What cover will you seek? How swiftly will your legs carry you up that sudden gradient? Will that culvert provide shelter from enfilading fire? Is there an observation post in that barn? Try it the next time you are on a country stroll and see how the most tranquil scene can become instinct with violence. It requires only a change in point of view.

Of course as the weeks go by the valley is slowly changed: the features disappear with the topsoil; buildings retreat to their foundations; trees become stumps. The colors fade beneath the battering until all you have is a homogenous brown dip in the land between two ridges.

But I thought only of my idyllic prospect as I peered out through a thin embrasure in the sandbags as our tea was issued in the trenches.
Admittedly the landscape in that part of Belgium is flatter and there are no real hedgerows, but as I looked out through our wire across a grassy meadow that ascended a gentle slope to the ridge opposite, I thought I might as well be in a valley of Oxfordshire. There were hawthorn bushes and scrubby hedges marking the intersections of field boundaries. I saw an unpaved road, small clumps of trees (somewhat knocked about), a group of farm buildings (ditto), but essentially it was no more than a section of run-of-the-mill countryside. If it had not been for the enemy wire and the dark outline of the earthworks of their trench system, I might not have been able to stifle a yawn. The evening sun was pleasantly warm and I could see wisps of smoke rising from their lines. No-man’s-land. It was unimpressive.