The New Confessions (16 page)

She looked at me incredulously.

“
Vous pensez?
” she said. “
C’est pas vrai.
”

“Oh, yes—oui,” I said. “
Votre thé
 …” I kissed my bunched fingertips, a parody gourmand.

She turned and said something to her father or uncle and they both laughed. I laughed with them. But as a result of that exchange she remembered me. I ate there every day—fried eggs and chipped potatoes washed down with gallons of her disgusting tea.

“
Oh, voilà Monsieur Thé,
” she said as I came round for my third refill. “Tea. Ver’ good. You like.” She laughed.

“John. John James Todd. My name …” I paused. “
Votre nom?
”

“Huguette,” she said, turning the spigot on the vat. Tawny tea frothed into my enamel mug.

I thought of her now as I looked out over the tea-colored sand. I would not be back in Wormstroedt for getting on two months. I wondered if I could last that long; if my carefully hoarded store of images would sustain me through two months of masturbation. Perhaps I could persuade Louise to send me to brigade reserve on some specious mission.… Perhaps … To my surprise I found I had my hand on the scruff of Ralph’s neck and had been absentmindedly scratching behind his ears for God knows how many minutes. His humid eyes gazed at me. A loop of saliva hung from his jowl. I gave him a mighty shove and he went tumbling down the dune slope onto the beach. He got to his feet and shook the sand from his coat.

“Bugger off!” I shouted. I slithered down to the beach and walked down towards the distant water’s edge. I looked down at my boots and puttees, felt the rough serge of the khaki trousers chafe my inner thighs. I took a rather bent cigarette from one of my breast pockets and turned away from the wind to light it. I walked on. Flat sky, flat sand, flat sea. I was the only vertical thing in my universe. I felt surprisingly good. I felt strong, all of a sudden. I was an adult at last, a soldier, with my big moustache, and dreams of my girl, Huguette. I grinned.… Where was that bloody dog? I looked round for a pebble to throw.

Ralph was not his obligatory three paces behind me. I saw him, two hundred yards off, loping towards the front and the German line, running along the water’s edge, his reflection merging with and separating from his body, bounding back to wherever he had come from.

“Go on!” I shouted after him. “
Traitor!
I knew it. I bloody knew it!”

Good riddance, I thought, finally got the message. I reached the sea’s edge. It was a calm day, a small surf turned over on the ridged gleaming sand. I turned my back on Ralph and the east and headed west towards the tiny distant shapes of the ruined villas and bathing huts of Oostduinkerke.

I must have walked nearly a mile before I saw them. I was on the point of turning back, the evening was drawing in, when I noticed what at first looked like a cluster of smooth pale rocks upon which the waves were breaking. But then I saw that the waves moved and shifted them to and fro. I walked closer. A strange minatory weight seemed to press on me.… Some sort of cargo? Washed overboard in a storm? In the nacreous late-afternoon light, I approached full of dread curiosity.

There were several drowned men, huddled together as if for comfort by the advancing tide. Most of them were naked, or almost so. One man wore a shirt; one man still had his boots on. I was struck by their inert tranquillity. I felt no lasting shock. I counted them. Eight. They looked like deep sleepers: expressionless, untouched, unblemished by whatever tremendous experience had washed them up on this shore. I saw a tattooed forearm, creases in a belly, the dark print of pubic hair on blue-white loins. The wavelets rolled one over, who flung an arm on the sand as if seeking purchase.

“Jesus,” I said out loud. I looked up and down the deserted beach. I was equidistant from the villas of Oostduinkerke and the mouth of the Yser. The packed grayness of the late afternoon seemed to thicken and condense around me. The tangle of bleached bodies surged as if one, and crept a few inches up the sand.

I ran for the dunes. A naval battle? A mine? A ship rent in two, a wardroom of sleeping men tossed into the North Sea? I felt a kind of clawing in my gorge. I raked my throat and spat.

There was wire on these dunes. I found the zigzag path and stumbled up it to the dune crest. I ran down through the gorse and broom brushes and along the muddy edge of a cabbage field. The kitchen smell of cabbage nauseated me. I suddenly associated the reek with those washed, clean dead men.… Through a hawthorn hedge and onto a cart track. I ran on. An old man sat in the doorway of a half-demolished cottage. I stopped. What was the French for drowned?

“
Mort
,” I said, panting heavily. “Eight,
huit morts.
”

“
L’hôpital
.” He gestured up the road. He had a lazy eye. It seemed to be trapped in the middle of an interminable wink.

I remembered. The field hospital at St. Idesbalde. I turned and ran on.

I entered the hospital precincts from the side somewhere. I saw the back of what looked like a row of loose boxes, rounded them and came upon a neat square of a dozen large olive-green tents. A nurse was coming out of the first one.

“
Huit morts
 … 
dans la mer!
”

“I speak English,” she said in a cool, perfect but somehow instantly foreign accent.

“Eight drowned men,” I said. “On the seashore.” It sounded like a nursery rhyme.

I led this nurse and three nuns back down to the beach. An ambulance was following with orderlies and stretchers. The tide was further
in but our group still clung together. The evening light shone lemon through gaps in charcoal clouds. The sand seemed shot with blue and green. We walked down the beach, the nuns muttering some prayer or heavenly invocation.

“We’d better get them out,” the nurse said. She took off her watch. She had not brought her coat. “Can you keep this dry for me?” she asked. I put it in a pocket and watched with some astonishment as she waded strongly into the sea, the waves soaking her to the waist, and she began to haul a man out. The nuns joined in. I registered the incongruity of the dark surplices and the absurd meringue hats as they stooped and tugged at the naked men. Naked men … nothing to what they saw in that field hospital. I sloshed into the water with them. The bodies shifted out of focus beneath my sensitive gaze. To grasp an ankle or a wrist? I saw a hand, limp, elegant—like something on a classical statue—and took hold of it. Very cold. But no more rebarbative than picking up a leg of lamb or a plucked chicken. I pulled him onto the beach. I took his other wrist. He was heavier on the sand, heels furrowing. The nuns were working two to a body. I heard shouts and saw the orderlies come running down the beach with their stretchers.

It was almost dark by the time the beach was clear. I stood with the nurse. She had a wide round face, a slightly large nose, covered in coarse prominent freckles. I could not see her hair as it was hidden beneath her neat headdress.

“What do you think it was?” I asked.

“Who can say? At least they looked peaceful. They didn’t seem to be hurt.” She looked at me. “I didn’t know there were English troops here.”

I explained about the Royal Marine gunners.

“Have you got a cigarette?”

I gave her one and lit it for her. She inhaled avidly.

“The nuns don’t approve. I have to take my moments carefully.” She blew smoke through her nose. “Wonderful. English tobacco!”

I suddenly remembered the time. “God! I’m going to get merry hell. Look, can I give your name?”

“Of course. I’m a sister at the field hospital. Dagmar Fjermeros.”

I got her to repeat it a couple of times.

“Can we give you a lift?”

“It’ll be quicker along the beach.” I said good-bye and left her.

Louise was furious, and put me on company report. Two hours later my story was confirmed after a few telephone calls. I was perturbed and
unsettled by the whole experience. It was the tangle of bodies that bothered me and their untroubled expressions. They seemed docile and compliant in death, perfectly at ease. But for the first time since joining the army I felt frightened. I feared for my skin. That day I resolved to do anything not to get hurt. Not to die like those men.

While my alarm deepened, and self-preservation occupied the key position in my mind, I found another image began slowly to claim my attention. Dagmar, the nurse … her round placid face highlit by the flare of the match I applied to her cigarette. The full pout of her lips as she inhaled … I had written down her name on my return. Dagmar Fjermeros. A Scandinavian of some sort. I still had her wristwatch in my pocket.

After this excitement life returned to normal. The only event of note was a battalion parade where we were required to hand in our old phenate-hexane gas respirators. These were horrible objects, like a canvas sack with glass eye-holes, and which had to be tucked beneath the collar of one’s jacket. New box respirators, we were informed, would be issued to us in the next few days. Meanwhile, in preparation, Captain Tuck, the adjutant, would give us a lecture later that morning on antigas precautions and the best use of the box-respirator gas mask.

At half past twelve, D Company was mustered for Captain Tuck’s gas lecture. As we filed into the tent we were each handed what looked like a rectangular pad of cotton with two tapes, eighteen inches long, attached at either end, and a pair of rubber goggles.

Captain Tuck, a Wykehamist, was a brisk jolly man who spent most of his time looking at birds through his field glasses. He had an odd pursed look to his face, as if he were playing an invisible musical instrument—a spectral oboe or clarinet, say. First, he told us about the various types of gases—phosgene, chlorine and mustard—and their effects. Chlorine turned your face blue and you drowned in the water produced by your own tormented lungs. Phosgene caused your lungs to discharge four pints of yellow water every hour. Mustard made your eyelids swell and close, burned and blistered your skin, made you cough up your mucous membranes. Tuck read out other ghastly symptoms—congested larynx, collapsed lungs, swollen liver. I was very shocked.

A box respirator was circulated among us and we tried it on. Tuck explained how it worked. He informed us that the entire battalion would be issued with these in a matter of days.

“In the meantime,” he said, “we will be relying on the temporary respirator handed to you as you came in.”

I looked at the cotton pad in my hand. I wondered how it would stop me from coughing up four pints of yellow liquid in an hour. Suddenly I felt an acute, rotting fear. I saw the dead men on the beach. I glanced right and left. Everyone seemed to be smiling; even Tuck had a grin on his face.

“In the very unlikely event of a gas attack in this sector, this is what—it says here—you must do.” He opened a pamphlet and read from it. “ ‘When the gas alarm goes, first put on the goggles. Then soak the cheesecloth pad, or a handkerchief or a sock, in fresh urine before applying it to the face, making sure both mouth and nostrils are covered.’ ”

He paused for effect. His audience took this in for a second in silence before baying hoots of skeptical laughter and cries of disgust erupted.

“Gentlemen, please!” Tuck shouted above the din. “A final word of advice.… According to this document, the urine of older men is particularly efficacious! Dismiss.” Tuck strode out of the tent very pleased with his performance. D Company were most amused.

The next day I went in search of Louise and asked if I might cycle over to the field hospital to return Nurse Fjermeros’s watch. He agreed reluctantly, signed a chit and I drew one bicycle from the quartermaster’s stores. I pedaled off down the drab lanes in a fine drizzle. I noticed a curious fizzing sensation at the back of my head. I recognized the symptoms of mild euphoria.

It took me twenty minutes to get to St. Idesbalde. A Belgian sentry directed me to an office in a wooden shack where I waited for Dagmar. She arrived wearing full uniform. I handed over the watch.

“It’s very kind of you.”

“Not at all.… I wondered if the men—if you knew.”

“We think they are Dutch. A fishing boat, perhaps hitting a mine.” She shrugged, then smiled. “Can I offer you something to eat, Mr.… ?”

“Todd. John James. Yes, please.”

We walked through the hospital. It had originally been a rather grand farmhouse with numerous outbuildings. Large tents had been pitched in every available space and duckboard walkways laid between them. Looking inside one tent I could see neat rows of patients in low camp beds. We crossed the lawn of a small walled garden and emerged from it
onto the graveled driveway of the main house. Three motor ambulances were pulled up at the door. Some men, in filthy uniforms and stark, almost indecently white bandages, were being helped inside.

“We’re very quiet at the moment,” she said. “Waiting for spring offensives.”

I nodded and followed her across the driveway and into a stable block. There was a row of loose stalls and for an instant I was back in Minto Academy. I had paused involuntarily, and now Dagmar stood at the door of an old barn waiting for me. I followed her in.

The noise of conversation was colossal. The barn had been converted into a canteen and was filled with trestle tables around which sat dozens of injured soldiers, some in uniform, some in pajamas and dressing gowns, eating, drinking, playing cards, and all—as far as I could hear—talking at the top of their voices. Smoke from their cigarettes drifted up into the exposed rafters. A big fat iron stove stood in the center of the room and at the far end was a makeshift kitchen and serving area staffed by nuns. There I was given a plate of stew, three slices of coarse grayish soda bread and a tin mug of coffee.

Dagmar and I found two unoccupied seats and sat down. Here and there among the groups of soldiers were nurses and nuns. I suddenly felt a shaft of envy for these wounded Belgians, with their loud conviviality, their plentiful food and their female company. I looked at Dagmar—she was tucking stray hair back under her cap. Her hair was a fine reddish blond.