The New Confessions (24 page)

I can bring it all back. The faint frowsty smell of old hay, the fragrant reek of pipe tobacco, the thrum of the generator, the rolling boom of the guns, the laughter and comments of the officers, the lanterns turned down, plump with oily light.

No other name, no credits (no sound, of course), but it was mine. The opening monochrome shot of smiling marching men waving at the camera (I had been vainly shouting, “Don’t wave! Don’t look at the camera!”), then the inept jocularity of some War Office copywriter … I watched it all pass before me, entranced. I cannot say I was in the grip of some artistic or aesthetic visitation; my mood was rather—what?—proprietorial. This was
mine
. John James Todd
fecit
. Donald stood beside me puffing on his pipe, and I thought back to that day on the train from Barnton when he had held me at the window and I had taken my first photograph, “Houses at Speed.” I felt a rush of affection for him and his constant generosity to me.

There was loud, delighted applause at the end of the film. We returned to the mess for more drinks and much flattering appreciation was expressed. My first audience, my first acclaim. I felt enfolded in a radiant cloud of happiness and innocent pride.

I drove back with Donald, the two silver film canisters warm in my lap.

“Jolly good,” Donald said. “Inniskilling Fusiliers the day after tomorrow.”

But I was not listening. “I wonder why,” I said, “they didn’t use that shot of the sergeant major in shirtsleeves—you know, feeding jam to his pet squirrel.… It was far and away the best.”

Prophetic words. Prophetic complaint. I knew then that what I wanted was control, total control. And it is from that moment—and not those first hesitant turnings of the Aeroscope’s handle one morning in a village street on the Abeele-Poperinghe road—that I date the start of my career, my vocation, my work, my downfall.

In the next two weeks I filmed the Inniskilling Fusiliers and the Ox and Bucks. Light Infantry. The finished films were virtually indistinguishable from the first. But all the while I was shooting them, an idea was slowly forming in my mind. I decided, quite independently, to
make my own film, one that was not just an assembly of loosely related fragments, but that had a distinct shape and form, that told a story. I think the title came to me almost before anything else:
Aftermath of Battle
. Already I could see it on advertisement posters, on marquees above cinemas. This would be a film true to a soldier’s experience of battle, an experience that the director himself had undergone.

From what Donald had shown me of WOCC material at Bailleul it was clear that most films of offensives dealt extensively with the buildup to an attack. This was followed by a few shots of men leaving the trenches and, if you were lucky, a long view of the enemy trenches under fire. There was a final collage of glum German prisoners and smiling walking wounded at casualty-clearing stations. The implicit message was that stalwart fortitude was the route to ultimate victory. The film I had in mind would be quite different.

I was not entirely candid about my ambitions with Donald. I suspected he would gently chide me for overreaching myself, running before I could walk. I told him only that I wanted to drop
Great British Regiments
and see if I could convey something more interesting about the immense range of activity that went on behind the lines. He happily gave me permission to proceed.

One morning I left the farm well before dawn and drove up to the northern sector of the Salient. I went to the battalion HQ of the 107th Canadian Pioneers and was given permission to film one of its wiring parties coming out of the line. A sleepy orderly led me along a duckboard track to the mouth of a communication trench. I set up my tripod, mounted my Aeroscope on top and waited.

At about half past six the men appeared. There was just enough light. I filmed their exhausted, haggard faces as they filed past me, barely glancing at the camera. Some were wounded and leaned on other men for support. Stretcher-bearers ferried out the gravely injured and three dead bodies.

With the orderly carrying the tripod, I ran down the duckboard track and overtook the shambling pioneers. I set up again on the far bank of the canal by a pontoon bridge over the canal. Wisps of mist rose from the torpid brown water. The men tramped across the bridge; the pontoons dipped; ripples expanded through their bending reflections; some early sun lit the water.

Later that morning I filmed them brewing tea and frying bread and corned beef. I took long, long close-ups as they gazed without expression
into the lens. My last shot was of them sleeping, huddled in bivouac sheets, still as corpses.

Then I cut to real corpses, two days later in a graveyard near a field hospital. I had the Aeroscope focused on half a dozen bodies and then directed the burial party to step into frame and dump the contents of their stretchers beside them. Later too I filmed the bizarre, inflexible faces of a Chinese labor battalion digging graves for dead Europeans. Then I caught the unhappy faces of the teenage boys in the burial party pulling on long rubber gloves before hefting the dead into their narrow holes.

In my naïveté I proceeded to film more or less chronologically, shooting scenes in the order I wished them to appear, and in this way, over the next week I put together my film, with an absolute, almost uncanny confidence in the shape it was acquiring, absolutely sure of its effectiveness. I filmed an officer writing letters to next of kin, nurses bandaging wounds, carpenters making wooden crosses, amputees receiving their new crutches, piles of bloodstained uniforms being incinerated and the calm, silent, sunlit rooms of the moribund wards at a base hospital. The final image was the classic one: fresh troops marching up to the front, grinning, waving their tin hats at the camera.

I wrote no script or outline for
Aftermath of Battle
, but I had as clear a conception of its form as if it were all neatly plotted and laid out before me on paper. My next problem was how to ensure it was edited in the way I desired. I asked Faithfull how to resolve this problem.

“You’ve got this little chap back in Islington or Clerkenwell, see, editing miles of newsreel a week, bored stiff, mind on the pint of ale he’s going to have at lunchtime, but he’s got to stick all this stuff together. He’d be delighted if you’d help him out. Write it all down for him—words of one syllable, mind—and make sure you’ve numbered your reels properly. Does it need captions?”

“No. I don’t think so.”

“No captions?” He frowned at me. “Even simpler.… What are you up to, Todd?”

“Oh, just ‘behind the lines’ stuff.”

“I see.… Mmmm. Well, I’m going to put on a cigarette, I think. What about you? Chuck the tin over, Baby, there’s a good fellow.”

Two interesting encounters occurred while I was filming
Aftermath
. First of all I met Teague again in the base hospital at St.-Omer. I had
set up my camera in a moribund ward and shot my film. Then it suddenly struck me that Dagmar might conceivably be working in the place and I went in search of a matron to find out. I found her in another ward full of heavily bandaged men—burn cases. She informed me that she knew of no Dagmar Fjermeros on the nursing staff, and as I turned to go I heard a voice from one of the beds.

“Hodd! Hodd!” it sounded like.

The top half of Teague’s head was covered in a moist gauze bandage, thick with ointment, from which one wet, red eye peered. In place of his top lip there was a cotton-wool moustache soaked in some camphor-smelling lotion. I felt my own head begin to ache in sympathy. Both his legs ended at the knee, the blanket tented by a basketwork support. We shook hands gently, left-handed—his right was bandaged, a round white fist.

I had never really liked Teague, but now I felt genuinely glad to see him. After all, we had shared most of that ghastly day. We talked of this and that—I explained my new job and uniform. As I looked at him, shattered and wasted, I sensed a sort of tickle in my brain, irresistible, like a cerebral sneeze forming.

I tried to resist it. “I reported those swine in the tank, you know, but I’m not sure if anything happened.” I paused. “How are you, all things considered?”

“All right, I suppose. Going to look a bit peculiar, though. Not much left to work with. At least I’ve got an eye.”

I had to ask. “How do you feel about it all—now?”

“Wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”

“Seriously?” The skepticism in my voice made it go up a register. “Sorry,” I added. “It’s just I never expected you to say that.”

“It’s a risk you take and a price you have to pay. At least I’m still alive.”

I don’t believe you, I said to myself. But I suppose you have to try and think like that. If you thought anything else, you’d go mad. Look at Kite, I thought; he cracked up and he only lost a hand. I’d be like that, like Kite, bitter and angry, full of resentment …

I filmed Teague later. I thought it might cheer him up. We had him being pushed in a wheelchair towards a camera down the length of a long airless corridor, passing through shafts of autumn sunlight.

The second meeting was less eventful, but curiously more significant for me. The officer whom I had filmed writing letters to next of kin was in fact Captain Tuck. The 13th had been re-formed, rumors of a transfer
to the Italian Front had proved ungrounded and the battalion was back in its usual role of furnishing working parties for the artillery. There were very few faces I recognized.

After Tuck had obliged me with a few scribbles and a suitably somber face—he needed no persuading; the Aeroscope was an infallible seductress—he walked me back to my motorcar.

“Half a mo,” he said. “There’s someone you should meet before you’re off.”

He led me round behind a cowshed to where the field kitchens were situated. On the ground, gnawing a bone, was Ralph, the dog. He got slowly to his feet and wandered over to Tuck. He was hugely fat.

“Quartermaster spoils him rather.”

I clicked my fingers. “Here, Ralph. Here, boy.”

The dog did not budge. He looked at me, yawned and licked his chops.

“Doesn’t remember you,” Tuck said. “Strange.”

I felt my heart thump with joy and relief. “It always was a rather stupid animal,” I said, and walked elatedly back to my motor. I never saw Ralph again.

“They’ve censored it,” Donald Verulam said. He looked serious.

‘What?’

“
Aftermath of Battle.
”

“No!
Damn.…
Which bits?”

“The entire film. The whole thing. The chief censor is furious. You’re lucky you’re not cashiered. I had to tell him it was some sort of ghastly blunder. Fragments inadvertantly edited together. It won’t really wash. He wasn’t convinced.”

I swallowed. “Where is it?”

“I’ve got it back.”

“Thank God!” I paused. “What do you think about it?”

He looked at me and gave a thin smile.

“Well … it’s strong stuff. A bit grim and morbid for my taste. But I’m sure we can use bits of it. The early sections are good. We could cut them into Faithfull’s film.” He looked at me. “I wish you’d told me you were doing this, Johnny.”

“What’s Faithfull’s film?”

“It’s called
Ypres
, or possibly
Wipers
. We need another battle film like Messines. Another Harold Faithfull battle film. Not yours.”

I thought quickly. “Donald, will you give the film back to me? I’ll tinker with it. Film some more scenes. Change its tone.”

We argued for a while but I knew he would give in eventually. I saw a miraculous opportunity ahead of me. The decision of the chief censor was a minor impediment. What I would do next would force him to change his mind.

I retrieved
Aftermath
and ran it privately for myself several times when Faithfull and Nelson were away. As I plotted what to do next I saw that the merits of the film were clear: this was
true;
this was what really happened after a battle. Whatever I did next, I should not forget that fact. Unconsciously I was formulating a credo that would inform all my work. The truth was what mattered, unflinching verisimilitude. This was what made my film so different from all the others and this was what had to apply in the future.

One morning in the farmhouse, Nelson and I were breakfasting when an orderly runner arrived with instructions from Donald that I take some extra reels of film to Faithfull as quickly as possible.

“You take them to him,” I said to Nelson. “I don’t know where he is.”

“No can do, old chap. I’ve got Marshal Foch handing out medals at noon. I can’t go all the way to Étaples.”

“Étaples? What’s he doing there?”

“Making his film.”

With bad grace I motored off to Étaples. I arrived there about eleven o’clock. Ahead of me lay the town and, from the crest of this hill, a distant gray glimpse of the Channel. Nelson’s directions led me to a camp—a vast trampled field enclosed by a wire perimeter fence. Inside were row upon row of tents and a dusty parade ground upon which squads of men were being drilled.

I had no difficulty finding Faithfull—everyone seemed to know of the film—and I was directed along a track leading towards the rifle butts. As I approached I could hear the noise of firing and other explosions. I stopped the motor and, lugging my reels of film in a couple of sandbags, went in search of the famous cameraman.

As I arrived everything went quiet. I passed two companies of men, standing easy. Ahead of me were gentle grassy hills and a hundred-yard section of immaculate trench—revetted, zigzagged, with precisely angled firebays, clean sandbags and taut wire in front. It reminded me strongly of Nieuport.

Faithfull was in the trench, camera pointed at a platoon of men with fixed bayonets.

“Ah, Todd, thank God you’ve come. I’m down to my last two reels.” He introduced me to a couple of beaming officers, then ran about conferring with various men and checking details in his notebook.

“What’s going on?” I said.