The Ghost Road (24 page)

I've been recommended for the MC for going out to
bring Hallet in. I'd have been like a dog with two tails three years ago.
Hallet's still alive, anyway. More than a medal, I wish somebody would just
tell me I did the right thing.

11 October

Today we all had to stand up in front of the men and
promulgate a new order. 'Peace talk in any form is to cease immediately in the Fourth
Army.'

The brass hats needn't worry. Some of the men were
sitting on bales of straw cleaning equipment while one read aloud from the
paper: Austro-Hungarian Empire collapses, peace imminent, etc. Jenkins, a
wizened weasel of a man
(must
be over age, surely), hawked the accumulated phlegm of four
long years into his mouth and spat on his rifle. Then he went back to polishing
it.
Can't think of a better comment.

And yet.
And yet.
We all, at some
level, think we may have made
it,
we
may
be going to be all right. At any moment now the guns may stop. Oddly enough it
doesn't help.

We spend our time in the usual way while 'at rest'.
Baths, change of clothes, general clean-up, exercises, compulsory games, church
parade. Oh, and of course,
gas drills.
A lot of the men are coughing and hoicking and
wheezing because they were slow putting on their masks. And perhaps
deliberately in some cases; perhaps some people thought they'd get sent back.
If so, they've been thoroughly disillusioned, and the proof is the endless
cough, cough, cough, cough that accompanies all other activities. Owen
irritated me profoundly by saying it was their own fault. He put
his
mask on in time, he's all right, he says. I'm afraid I let fly. The only person
round here who has the right to be smug about surviving a gas attack is me. ME.

When we got here we found a new draft had arrived from
Scarborough. They're sitting around at the moment, expecting to be welcomed,
though so far they haven't been. Difficult to say why the other men avoid them,
but they do.
Heads too full of battle to be able to cope with
all those clean, innocent
,
pink
faces.
A couple of them I remember.
One particularly useless boy, the bane of Owen's life at the
Clarence Gardens Hotel, until he upset some hot soup in the CO's lap, after
which everybody, including Owen, found him a lot more tolerable.
Waiters, drummer boys.
They sit around, when they're not
being chivvied from one place to another, most of them dejected, miserable.
Frightened.
A few strut up and down—hard men—real
killers—and succeed only in looking even more like baby thrushes than the rest.

12 October

Parcels arrived today.
Shared out
fags in parcels intended for the dead and wounded.
Tempers immediately
improved. A lot of niggling administrative jobs connected with feeding men from
the new draft into the companies. Get flashes from the battle while I'm filling
in forms. The man I bayoneted. What worries me is that he was middle aged. Odd
really—it's supposed to be golden youth you mourn for. But he was so obviously
somebody who should have been at home, watching his kids grow up, wondering
whether brushing his hair over the bald patch would make it more or less
obvious, grumbling about the price of beer. And yes, you
could
see
all this in his face—with some people you can. Some people do look exactly what
they are.
Fuck it.

Meanwhile more exercises.
Route
marches.
We feed our faces on precisely adequate quantities of horrible
food. Bread now has potatoes in it.
(Makes an interesting
combination with the wood chippings.)

15 October

Last night we were entertained by The Peddlers, the
whole battalion, and a few officers invited over from our neighbours on the
left. Among whom
was
Marshall-of-the-Ten-Wounds, now
acting Lt Colonel, who applauded every turn with childlike glee. Exactly what
you wouldn't expect him to do. At the end of the evening, when things are
allowed to get a bit slushy, somebody sang 'Rose of England':

Rose of England breathing England's air,

Flower of liberty beyond compare.

Not a bad voice—it soared over the privies and the
tents, the columns of smoke from the fires—and I looked along the row and there
was Marshall with great big fat tears rolling down his cheeks. I envied him.

16 October

Bainbrigge's dead. I remember him in the oyster bar in
Scarborough a couple of nights before we left. We were all pissed, but
Bainbrigge was pissed enough to quote his own poems (than which there is no
pisseder). He was talking to Owen, saying real antiwar poems ought to
celebrate what war deprives men of—wait for it—'Beethoven, Botticelli, beer and
boys.' Owen kicked him under the table, for my benefit, I think.
A wasted kick.

More new arrivals from England yesterday.
And I've been transferred to a tent, just as the
weather's laying on the first real taste of winter.
The
misery of sleety rain under canvas.
Not that we spend much time under
it. We're out all day doing route marches, column into line, consolidation,
etc., etc. And gas drills.

But now it's evening. The men are leaning against
their packs or each other's knees, aching legs allowed
to
sprawl
at last, writing to wives, mothers, girlfriends.
Perhaps even one or two to Beethoven & Co.
I said I
wasn't born to the delusion that I'm responsible for them. True. (True I wasn't
born to it, true it's a delusion.) But I wouldn't like it to be thought I
didn't care.
So.
Going round the
group nearest to me.
Wilson's got a fucking great nail sticking up
through the heel of his left boot. We've all had a go at it: hammers, pliers,
tent pegs, God knows what. Still it sticks up, and since it breaks the skin
he's quite likely to get a septic sore, unless I can find him another pair of
boots. Which ought to be easy, but isn't. Unfortunately, the septic sore won't
be enough to get him out of the line if we have to go back there. It'll just exhaust
him,
make every step a greater misery than it need be.

Oakshott, who's sort of on the fringes of the
group—he's taken to not talking to people—is well on the way to cracking up. (I
should know.) The thing is he's
not
windy,
he's a perfectly good soldier, no more than reasonably afraid of rifle and
machine-gun bullets, shells, grenades. (Let's not ask ourselves how afraid that
is.) He isn't even windy about gas, though inevitably it comes across like
that. He's just terrified of the
mask.
I don't know what
to do with him. Once or twice recently I've noticed him lagging behind in gas
drills, and I've noticed myself letting him get away with it.
Which I mustn't do.
If
he
gets away with it,
they'll all start.

Next to him, in front of him rather, is Moore. Moore's
wife spent the evening of the Friday before last in the lounge bar of the Rose
and Crown (I know it well) in the company of one Jack Puddephat, who has a good
job at the munitions factory (same one Dad works at) and brings home five quid
a week. Moore's sister-in-law, a public-spirited soul, was kind enough to write
and tell him about it.

Heywood's kid has tonsillitis and the doctor's all for
whipping them out. Heywood's all for leaving well alone, but the letter he's
writing now won't get there in time.

Buxton's missus is expecting their first. The birth
doesn't seem to worry her, but it terrifies him. His own mother died in
childbirth, and he's convinced himself the same thing's going to happen to her.

Jenkins writes the most incredibly passionate love
letters to his wife. They've been married since before the Flood, but obviously
nothing's faded. I get erections reading them. Nothing else I've done sexually
has filled me with such shame. In fact it's the only thing that's ever filled
me with
any
shame. He
must
know they're censored, and yet still he
writes, page after page. Perhaps he needs to say it so much he somehow manages
to forget that I read them first? It's the mental equivalent of the baths. Here
I sit, fully clothed as it were, knowing my letters to Sarah
won't
be censored. I suppose
random checks are carried out on officers' letters, but at least it's done
somewhere else, and not by people you have to see every day.

Peace talk goes
on whether orders forbidding it are promulgated or no. On the night we heard
the Germans had agreed to peace talks there was a great impromptu party,
officers and men together. Everybody sang. And then next day in
John Bull
there's
Bottomley saying, No, no, no and once again no. We must fight to the bitter end.
(Whose
end?)
I
don't want any more talk about not being out to
destroy the German nation—that is just what I am out
for...

But it doesn't
wash with the men. Not this time. In fact some of them have taken to going to
the latrines waving copies of
John Bull.

Nobody here sees
the point of going on now.

18 October

But others do.
We leave here today, going back into the line.

CHAPTER
SIXTEEN

October rain spattered the glass. Outside in Vincent
Square golden leaves were trodden in the mud. Rivers stopped coughing, put his
handkerchief away, and apologized.

''S all right,' Wansbeck said. 'I should be
apologizing to you. I gave it you.'

'At least I can't give it back,' Rivers said, wiping
his eyes. 'In fact you and I are about the only two round here who can't get
it.'

Things are getting pretty bad, aren't they? I mean, on
the wards. I don't suppose I could do anything to help?'

Rivers looked blank.

'Lifting patients.
It just seems bloody ridiculous a great big chap like
me sitting around doing nothing while some poor little nurse struggles to lift
a twelve-stone man on her own.'

'It's very kind of you,' Rivers said carefully. 'But I
really don't think the authorities would allow it. In any case you're not doing
"nothing".'

Silence.
The hint was not taken up. Rivers forced himself to
open his shoulders, knowing his tension was communicating itself to Wansbeck,
though it was only the tension of driving himself through a long day while
still feeling very far from well. 'How have you been?'

'Smell's gone.'
A flicker of
amusement.
'I know it wasn't there, but it's still nice to be rid of
it.'

'Hmm, good.'
What pleased Rivers even more than the vanished smell
was the hint of self-
mockery.
The one expression you
never see on the faces of the mentally ill. 'When did that happen?'

'Just faded gradually.
I suppose about the middle of last week I suddenly
realized I wasn't worried about it any more.'

'And the dream?'

'It isn't a dream.'

'The apparition, then.'

'Oh, we still see quite a bit of each other.'

'Do you ever miss a night?'

A faint smile.
'You mean
,
does
he
ever miss a night? No.'

A long silence.
Rivers said, 'It's difficult, isn't it, to talk
about...
beliefs?'

'Is it?'

'I find it so.'

Wansbeck smiled. 'What a very honest man you are.'

'I wanted to ask if you believe in life after
death?
'

A groan, followed by silence.

It
is
difficult, Rivers
thought. He could list all the taboo topics on Eddystone, but in his own
society it seemed to him the taboos had shifted quite considerably in recent
years. It was almost easier now to ask a man about his private life than to ask
what beliefs he lived by.
Before the
war...
but one must beware
of attributing everything to the war.
The change had started years
before the war.