No Man's Land (37 page)

‘Lisez, monsieur. Je serai très contente si vous voulez bien la lire. Vous êtes si gentil, et je n'aime que lui.'

It was a simple letter. There was no self-consciousness intervening between the writer and the emotion which he tried to put into words, though he had been conscious enough of the censorship, and perhaps of other things intervening between them. Her hand fluttered again on Bourne's sleeve, as she coaxed him to translate it for her; and he did his best, his French halting more than ever, as he studied the handwriting, thinking it might give him some notion of the writer. The script was clear, rather large, commonplace enough: one might say that he was possibly a clerk. Everything was well, that went without saying; they were having a quiet spell; the village where they had their rest-billets had been evacuated by its inhabitants, except for a few old people; the war could not last much longer, for the Hun must know that he could not win now; and then came the three sentences which said all he could say: ‘I shall go back and find you some day. I wish we were together again so that I could smell your hair. I love you always, my dearest.' There were signs of haste in the handwriting, as though he had found some difficulty at that point in opening his heart.

‘C'est tout?'

‘Je ne puis pas traduire ce qu'il y a de plus important, mademoiselle: les choses qu'il n'a pas voulu écrire.'

‘Comme vous avez le coeur bon, monsieur! Mais vraiment, il était comme ça. Il aimait flairer dans mes cheveux tout comme un petit chien.'

She tucked the letter away into that place of secrets, and lifted her hand again, to caress the beloved hair. Suddenly he became acutely jealous of this other man. He stooped, and picked up her basket.

‘Ah, mais non, monsieur!' she protested. ‘C'est pas permis qu'un soldat anglais porte un panier dans les rues. C'est absolument défendu. Je le sais bien. II m'a dit toujours, que c'était defendu.'

‘Had he?' thought Bourne, and tightened his grip on the handle of it.

‘Je porterai le panier, mademoiselle,' he said quietly.

‘Mais pourquoi…?' she asked anxiously.

‘Parcequ'apparemment, mademoiselle, c'est mon métier,' he said with an ironic appreciation of the fact. She looked at him with troubled eyes.

‘Vous voulez bien m'aider à écrire cette petite lettre, monsieur?'

‘Mademoiselle, je ferai tout ce que je puis pour vous servir.'

She suddenly relapsed into anxious silence.

Born in Sydney in 1882,
Frederic Manning
settled in the UK in 1903. When the war broke out, he was keen to enlist and enrolled in the King's Shropshire Light Infantry as a private with the number 19022 – who was credited with the authorship of
Her Privates We
when it was published in an expurgated version in 1930. The book had been published anonymously in 1929 in a limited edition of 500 with the title
The Middle Parts of Fortune
. Praised highly by Ernest Hemingway, T. E. Lawrence and Ezra Pound, the book conveys, with robust language and gallows humour, the life of soldiers as opposed to officers. In his introduction to the Serpent's Tail edition of the book, William Boyd writes:

STRATIS MYRIVILIS

ANIMALS

from
Life in the Tomb

translated by Peter Bien

A
NIMALS
in wartime.

All day today I have been thinking of nothing else. It's fine and dandy for the humans involved in war. People have ‘interests,' ideologies, whims, megalomanias and enthusiasms – just what the doctor ordered for cooking up a truly first-class conflict. And once the war is declared, we have our tricks for saving ourselves once we see that the affair is likely to be a little more than we bargained for. Dugouts and ‘going sick,' for example, not to mention desertions.

But what about the animals? What about the poor innocent beasts mobilized by us to wage war at our sides?

Do you know what I think? I think that even if the human race succeeds one day in driving out the devil which makes it erupt in periodic fits of mass murder, it will still have cause to hang its head in shame for the remainder of its existence. Why? For one reason only: because it dragged innocent beasts along to its wars. On reflection, I feel that the day will come when this is considered one of the blackest marks in human history.

Our division carried numerous donkeys along with it when it left the island. An entire ammunition train, in fact. The entry in our official documents speaks of ‘an ammunition train of mules,' but if truth be told, the unit has nothing but donkeys. Getting these animals on shipboard caused them considerable suffering, as did getting them off again at Salonika. The angrily groaning cranes seized them and lifted them aloft in strong slings. This drove them wild. Their fright was depicted with astonishing vividness in their frantic eyes. They kicked into the void, brayed, rolled their eyeballs. The horror impressed wrinkles on their hides. After this, they traversed all of Macedonia with us, laden with munitions. By this time they had their own accounts to settle with the Germans, Turks and Bulgarians. When we occupied the trenches their park was established behind our lines at Koupa, a village devastated by artillery-fire and inhabited only by a few French bakers. There, at Koupa, in a beautiful ravine, our division's ‘ammunition train of mules' put down its stakes.

The animals were allowed to rest for a few days to recuperate from the prolonged journey, which had left them stunned with fatigue. They caught their breath again. Indeed, they discovered grass in abundance, ate, and began to feel like their old selves. Invigorated, they suddenly noticed that springtime had covered the earth with its resplendence, and that Love was prodding all things, from grubs to flowers, to join in the age-old festival of reproduction. Obedient, filled like all animals with innocence and unknowing, the donkeys heeded the great summons and answered ‘Present!' with their amorous trumpet-call. Their ravine droned with jarring epithalamiums; the brayings reverberated through the various defiles until this amorous trumpeting reached all the way to the Peristeri ridges. At this point an airplane took off with a roar from somewhere opposite us. It flew to the ravine and circled it once or twice. As for the donkeys, they did not change their tune. The plane then headed home amidst the enthusiastic reception provided for it by our anti-aircraft batteries whose shells, bursting in the sky, surrounded it with an ever-multiplying flock of little white lambs.

Donkeys do not even know that planes exist. In any case, these particular donkeys were so corporeally absorbed in the joy of living that they had no time left to notice anything else.

Shortly afterwards a series of piercing whistles and sonorous bangs set the ravine howling with pain. It was a genuine slaughter of the innocents. The beasts were massacred on the tender grass, disemboweled amidst the orgasmic intoxication of their genital pleasure. They expired like humans, sighing. Falling to the ground, they gave up the ghost little by little, bending their necks to gaze mournfully at their entrails swaying like red snakes between their legs. Comprehending nothing, they moved their large heads up and down, shuddered; dilated their quivering nostrils; spread their broad lips and uncovered their teeth; drew themselves along the ground on shattered legs. In the end they died, watering the flowers with their blood, their huge eyes filled with perplexity and suffering. One animal with a broken spine dragged its body for a distance of about fifteen meters supported by its front legs only. Then its knees buckled, it turned its head toward its large wound, and gasped with protracted death-throes until it passed on.

One of the drivers started to run like mad as soon as the bombardment commenced. Though in a daze, he had enough presence of mind to keep a tight hold on his donkey's bridle, and he still had it firmly in his grip when he arrived at the dugout occupied by the French bakers. Here, amidst general jeering from our Gallic allies, he finally realized that all he had been pulling behind him was the donkey's head, scythed off at the neck.

The animal was still holding a clump of daisies between its clenched teeth, the yellow petals speckled with blood.

STRATIS MYRIVILIS

ANCHORITES OF LUST

from
Life in the Tomb

translated by Peter Bien

I
NVESTIGATING THE WALLS
of the dugout today, I encountered a recess whose opening was covered by a triangular stone. It is practically a cupboard, a diminutive one. Inside, I found two cigars which had been forgotten, some additional quinine (what huge amounts our Gallic allies seem to require) and a thin book in French.

A book! How many months since I had set eyes upon one! Snatching this specimen up avidly, I discovered it to be a pornographic pamphlet meant for young adolescents, the kind which, using the pretense of ‘science,' informs the teenager about the ugliest perversions of the sexual instinct, complete with outlandish details. The booklet made me realize that French soldiers, and indeed all soldiers of the world's nationalities – including the Greeks – dedicate the long and interminable days in the trench to smut. Millions of men everywhere, underground, sitting there in the dirt: filthy, stinking, covered with whiskers and lice…, and they babble about women!

Although I am extremely ashamed to admit the pleasure I experienced in finding this booklet, I have read it over and over with a glee which seems insatiable. At first I deceived myself, concluding that the mere possession of a book – of the ‘printed word' which my spirit had been deprived of for so long – explained my avidity. Now, however, I see my mistake very clearly. No, it was not the hunger for books which caused me to cry out with gluttonous joy when I swooped down, hastily clutched this rotten bone thrown to me by fortune, and began to suck at it as though it were a delicacy; it was another hunger, the craving for female flesh. This lust is inflamed here by our obscene talk. It is a passion which grows from deprivation by consuming its own flesh, an unsatisfied instinct whose embers, as soon as they begin to settle inside the tormented body, are blown again into sky-high flames by the aroused imagination. Not only the officers but the N. C. O.s as well – whoever is privileged to visit the dugouts in the French sector on the next hill – have brought back piles of colored pictures from Parisian magazines and have pinned them on their walls. Before sleeping or eating, and each time they wake up, they cross themselves (half in jest, half seriously) and plant huge, copious kisses on the nude women in the pictures: on their breasts, their legs, their bellies – prolonged, juicy kisses. This is supposed to be a joke, yet they close their eyes voluptuously while they execute this ‘joke.' As for me, I have often caught myself discovering a thousand and one excuses to be assigned some duty connected with the sergeant-major's dugout, the chief reason being that I want to loiter there (without seeming to) and waste my time in front of these shameless pictures – one in particular!