The New Confessions (26 page)

Faithfull and Nelson had learned of my misdemeanor and that the censor’s office at GHQ regarded me as highly suspect. Their manner towards me grew distinctly cooler, Faithfull’s in particular. I think he sensed I had been trying to outdo his
Wipers
film. I was suspicious of his motives now, and hid the canisters of
Aftermath
separately about my kit.

On the tenth of November, Passchendaele Ridge was finally captured and the Third Battle of Ypres was officially over, 156 days after it had begun with Faithfull’s mines (as I always thought of them) erupting under Messines Ridge, back in early summer.

I was, as ever, unaware of this a few days later as I stood in a sodden field behind Ypres watching the observers unroll and inflate their silvered canvas balloon. I did not resent my new assignment as much as I had anticipated. My balloon film
Eyes in the Sky
was almost complete. I filmed the balloon inflating, watching the bloated fish shape emerge and, with a billowy stirring, rise to the extent of its fore and aft tethers, until the roomy wicker basket slung beneath it just cleared the ground. The observers donned their parachutes and binoculars, connected their telephone lines and climbed in. With surprising speed the balloon rose up in the air to a height of round about a thousand feet.

I had everything I needed. I sat and drank tea with the winch operators, huddling in the lee of the lorry, sheltering from a keen wind that was blowing from the west. Our balloon was spotting for a sixteen-gun brigade of six-inch howitzers a quarter of a mile away in a ruined village. Every ten minutes or so we could hear the loud, drawn-out rip of the cannonade.

After a while the guns stopped firing and the balloon was winched down. We brewed up and had a surprisingly tasty lunch of corned beef fritters and MacConnachie stew, cooked over a Primus stove. We sat and chatted, glancing from time to time at the balloon as it twitched and shrugged at its moorings.

I do not know what prompted me, but suddenly I asked, “Do you think I could pop up for five minutes with my camera? Not too high—just to get an artillery observer’s view of the world.”

This was applauded as a marvelous notion by the observers. In truth,
I was not thinking of
Eyes in the Sky
. I knew that here I would have my perfect opening shot for
Aftermath of Battle
.

I climbed into the creaking wicker basket and set up the Aeroscope on its tripod, which was lashed to the side. The simple operation of the field telephone was explained. I was offered a parachute and declined. I assured them I had no intention of jumping out. Soon all was ready. The mooring ropes were slipped and the balloon rose slowly up into the air.

For the first hundred feet or so I felt sensations of alarm, giddiness and faint nausea. I looked at the shrinking field where I had had my lunch, down the vertiginous arc of the balloon cable, watching the lorry, the crew, my motorcar diminish in size. Over to the left was the battery surrounded by its usual mess. So this is what a bird sees, I thought naively, as the countryside was revealed to me like a map. The roads, the farms, the dumps, the billets, the motor pools and transport lines, the fields and copses … From the air everything looked neater, had a context revealed that a ground view denied one. That bend in the road suddenly had a purpose—to avoid a stream. The jumble of shattered houses revealed the grid of streets and alleyways upon which they had been built. That distant straggle of trees edged a canal.… The banality of these observations only strikes the modern eye. This was the first time I could look down on the world from above. For me it was a kind of revelation, and never more so than when the front came into view.

At first glance it was like a vast path, stamped across Europe. I imagined a six-hundred-mile thoroughfare for giants trudging from the Alps to the North Sea. On either side, drab green wintry landscape bisected by this brown swathe stretched back into the haze of distance. I was astonished at just how localized it was. In the Salient the whole universe seemed brown and mired. Up here you realized just how thin that mud world was.

The green countryside browned gradually. There was a kind of bruised and trampled verge before the vermiculated lines of the old trench systems appeared—bay and traverse, bay and traverse—and beyond them the erratic spoor of duckboard and fascine tracks across the mud, the pools in the craters flat and opaque like pennies. From this range I could not see any men, but I knew they were down there, in their hundreds of thousands, hiding. It seemed like such a miserable attenuated strip of land to be fighting over, to have fought over for three years.… A smear across the countryside. A giant snail, leaving its
slime track across Europe. A messy point of impact between two colliding forces.

Different horizons, I thought cranking the handle of the Aeroscope, different perspectives. I felt a curious privilege about having been allowed to witness both: exalted and abased. I swung my camera along the enormous furrow. What an opening shot, I thought; what a vision for my film. The godlike view. And then the scrabbling, squabbling mortals in the mud pools.

I heard a strange noise, like
pam pam pamperipam pam
. I looked round. A small airplane was flying towards me through a cloud of black dust smudges. What happened next is hard to reconstruct. I retain certain distinct images. First, the airplane seemed to be flying so slowly. A puff of black dust would from time to time knock it comically off course. I felt a tug as the winch began to haul the balloon down. Then I remember an almost human gasp coming from the balloon itself. The field telephone started buzzing, and as I reached automatically, chunks of wicker basket seemed to explode in the air around me. Then a great lurch, a tumbling in the pit of my stomach as the balloon and its basket soared up and away suddenly free. I hung on tenaciously as we swayed wildly to and fro. I caught a mad glimpse of Ypres turned on its side and then I was in the clouds—gray, damp, enfolding.

The clouds saved me, I suppose, and the fact that the wire cable had been fortuitously severed by a bullet or bullets from the airplane’s guns. I floated in those clouds for three or four minutes, I would guess. When I descended from them I was above placid green countryside. Then I remembered the keen west wind and, with a jolting heart, looked about me. Behind, retreating, was the brown stripe of the Western Front. Below was occupied Belgium.

Emilia brings me my salad. How old is she? I wonder. She’s worked for me for two years now. Her predecessor was an ancient crone who was eventually done for by sheer decrepitude. Emilia has five children and eleven grandchildren. Her youngest child is twenty-four, and yet she doesn’t look much more than fifty. It’s quite possible; girls often are married and bearing children at sixteen on this island.…

Emilia has thick, curly chestnut hair shot with gray. She has a dark, strong and well-proportioned face and a lot of gold in her teeth. She exudes a mild but freshly acidic body odor. She is broad-hipped and
agile. Drives her little motorbike with élan. Covertly, as she places the salad before me, I examine the loose pale green folds of her faded green dress and try to estimate the size of her breasts.…

Why am I doing this? What’s happening to me? For two years we have been fixed in an ideal, polite, respectful employer-employee relationship. I ruminate on a lettuce leaf. It was my spying on Ulrike that did it. And my dormant vanity was flattered by the obvious way the twins sought me out in the bar.

I watch Emilia saunter back to the kitchen. Heaven help me but I have a sudden powerful desire to spank her naked buttocks. Not hard, just in fun.… I have an image of Emilia across my lap. Those big pale buttocks, that deep dark cleft. Lots of joyous laughter.

This is quite bizarre! I have never had this fantasy before. What’s going on? But, I remember. That isn’t true. I
have
had these desires. In 1929, with … I can’t believe it. Good God, these things never leave you. After all these years, who would have thought it?

I get up and wander round, a palpable old man’s erection beneath my trousers. How am I ever going to see her naked?

Off the kitchen there is a room where Emilia keeps the ironing board, brushes and the various tools and cleaning materials she requires for the housework. There is also a small WC for her personal use.

When she leaves, I go and investigate. There is a window, bolted and shuttered. If I drilled a tiny hole through the frame at the precise angle, I might just be able to see her as she raises her skirts to sit on the pan.

Five minutes’ search of the villa’s cupboards reveals a perfectly servicible hand-powered drill.

I seemed fated to get tunes stuck in my head for days, weeks even. For five days I heard nothing but “If You Were the Only Girl in the World.” On and on, on and on. I tried to forget it, but that lilting melody would not leave me. It made my solitary confinement worse—perhaps this is one of the secret punishments of solitary? It was a sign too of just how impoverished my world was. I had heard a guard whistling it—a new guard, I suppose; none of the old ones made a sound—and since then it had played on in my echoing skull, an interminable Gramophone record.

I turned to my only distraction. I pulled the chair over to the window, stood on it and looked out. The top two lights were plain glass, not frosted like the others. The view: a patch of longish grass leading to a steep ravine at whose bottom the river Lahn flowed. Beyond the ravine were the beech- and elm-wooded hills of the Taunus Forest. To the right, the palisaded square of the exercise yard where the “solitary” prisoners were permitted to exercise, and beyond that the dull square buildings of the veterinary science college where 150 Russian, 20 French and
4 Belgian officers were held prisoner. The four Belgians were all retired generals who had been captured when the Germans took Brussels. They had had no time to change after their arrest and had never been issued with uniforms; consequently they still wore their civilian clothes—three in tweed suits, one in gray worsted.

The solitary cells were above the college’s gymnasium. The gym was not used by the prisoners but sometimes the guards played volleyball there, and I would hear the thumps of the ball and the shouts of encouragement rise up through the floorboards of my bare room. I had been kept here in the solitary cells for over two months. I was the only prisoner.

As far as cells went, my room was not too uncomfortable. A pine table, a crude wooden chair that looked as though it belonged in a van Gogh painting, a bed with a thin straw-and-woodshaving mattress, two gray blankets and a white enamel chamber pot with an unmatching powder-blue lid. There were bare floorboards and whitewashed walls. It was cold.

My routine was invariable. I slept, if I could, until eight, when I was roused by a guard with my breakfast of watery coffee and two slices of hard brown bread. At nine I was taken to a small washroom where I shaved and emptied my slops. From ten to eleven o’clock I was outside in the palisaded yard, weather permitting, where I could do whatever exercise I saw fit. Midday was lunch—soup and a plate of vegetables. Three
P.M
.—more coffee and bread. Four to five—exercise yard. Six o’clock—slop emptying. Eight o’clock—dinner: soup and a plate of vegetables, sometimes augmented by salted fish or sauerkraut. Every two weeks I was given a brown paper cone of sugar.

I was not especially hungry and my day was one of constant interruption. I was not denied human company. The guards in the gymnasium were possibly as bored as their single prisoner. I spoke no German and we exchanged sign language or hopeful monosyllables. I am happy with my own company and the first week passed without undue strain. Into the second month, though, and the regime was proving more onerous. Nothing changed, and it was precisely this that began to worry me. Perhaps if conditions had worsened or improved I might not have begun to question them, but after forty days I became convinced that I had been forgotten. And this new worry suddenly made my reduced condition intolerable. I needed a sense of my incarceration being finite. (I think we all need the finite—limits of some kind; it is locked into our
human natures. We need to know that things will end.) Two months of this bland solitary confinement gave me an unwelcome hint of what eternity was like. Soon the only way I could distinguish one day from the other was by the kind of soup I was served. At least it always changed. Barley soup, cabbage soup, peawater soup, something called mango soup, oil cake soup, fish soup, rice soup, macaroni soup, turnip soup … I began to think of the passage of time in terms of cabbage or peawater days. Had I not suffered a morning twinge of toothache last fish soup day? The weather on rice soup day had been unusually mild. Two turnip days ago I had had diarrhea … and so on. As I shaved each morning I looked at my face and saw chronological time reckoned by the rate of my hair growth. On capture I had been showered and deloused, my clothes fumigated—quite unnecessary—and had had my head shaved. In those days my hair grew at a rate of two inches a month. After eight weeks I was tucking it behind my ears like an artist. As a matter of personal record, my hair has never ever been as long as it was in those months of captivity in 1917–18. I shaved off my moustache too.

After two months of this unrelenting routine I was beginning to fall apart. My mind was occupied by four things. One: “If You Were the Only Girl in the World.” Two: the near-hysterical fear that my “case” had been forgotten. Three: a frenzied craving for a cigarette. And four: an overwhelming desire for mental diversion—anything, something to occupy me other than those three obsessions listed above. All my thoughts were quite overused by now—limp, soft and transparent like an overlaundered shirt. I wanted new thoughts, new stimulation. I wanted something to
read
. I suppose pencil and paper, a source of music, lively conversation would have been equally welcome, but in my desperation I saw my salvation in a book. Any book. I wanted to be entertained, beguiled, but above all to commune with another mind, another imagination, than my own. I had stopped dreaming; I had stopped masturbating. I was empty, a husk. I required a little fertilization. A drop of fuel to start the machine running again.