The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (39 page)

Then took the other, as just as fair …

Thomas is stung, seeing the poem as a parody of his indecisiveness over the question of the war. He interprets it as a spur, feels it as a goad:
Hurry up, man, and make a choice; stop dithering at the junction
. It’s a drastic misreading of the poem, but Thomas closes his mind to subtlety. He writes sharply back to Frost. Within weeks he has made his choice. In early July he draws up his will and enlists. On 14 July he passes his medical. The King’s shilling is taken: he is Private 4229 in the 28th Battalion of the Artists Rifles, part of the larger London Regiment. He has committed to a route, and the knowledge of its irreversibility reassures him.

Why, really, does he enlist? Impossible to say: another path vanishing back into the distance, another track petering out. One of so many things lost in the creases where the map folds. He doesn’t even know himself: ‘
Several people
have
asked me [why I joined], but I could not answer yet.’ To Gordon Bottomley, the best he can do is characterize the decision as ‘
the natural culmination of
a long series of moods & thoughts’. He doesn’t even tell Helen in person, instead sending her a telegram from London. ‘
No, no, no,’ is all that
she can say, ‘not that.’

But he is writing so fast; a life’s worth of poems torrenting from him now that he has set his face to France. Verse – from the Latin
vertere
, ‘to turn’. He writes nearly sixty poems between enlisting and embarking for the front. Sometimes a poem a day, quick and brilliant: ‘Roads’, ‘When we two walked’, ‘The Lane’, ‘The Green Roads’. Some of these poems seem to know more of his own fate than he does; they draw out part of him beyond his thinking: ‘
the future and the maps
/ Hide something I was waiting for.’

Thomas’s first proper posting is to Hare Hall Training Camp in Essex, where he works as a navigation instructor. In spare hours he writes poems, but covertly.
He doesn’t mind poets knowing he’s a soldier
, but he does mind soldiers knowing he’s a poet. He’s surprised by how much he likes aspects of army life: polishing his high trench boots – left hand stuck into the boot, right hand buffing across the toecap – until his own face looms in the shine. Surprised by how he enjoys the unvarying routines: teaching map-reading with a prismatic compass to the men of A Company, taking them out on foot-manoeuvres. Surprised by how much he likes Essex. Surprised by the absence of depression; ‘
black despair
’ has given way to ‘calm acceptance’.

On top of a hill in Epping Forest he finds a run-down cottage called High Beech, where Helen and the children can live and which he can easily visit when he has furlough. When the snow falls during their first winter there, time slows and modernity retreats. ‘
It is fine and wintry here
,’ he writes in a letter. ‘The hills look impassable and make me think they must have looked like that 2,000 years ago.’

In early December 1916 a call comes round for volunteers to go straight out to the batteries in France. Thomas is among the first to sign up. On 6 January he comes back to High Beech for his last days of leave before departing for the front. He tries to behave as if nothing is wrong, but Helen can barely function. He studies maps with Merfyn, tries to show Helen how to take a bearing on his prismatic compass; she cries. They’re sharp and bickery, then they quarrel openly, then she cries again, and then they are tender together. On the morning of his departure, the snow around the cottage is frozen iron-hard, with the footprints of birds set into it like hieroglyphs. Thomas gives Helen a book into which he has copied out all his poems. ‘
Remember that, whatever happens
, all is well between us for ever and ever,’ he tells her. A freezing mist hangs in the air.

Thomas walks away, the hard snow unmarked by his leaving feet. Helen stands at the gate and watches him go until the mist hides him. As he descends the hill, he keeps on calling
coo-ee!
to her, as if he were arriving rather than leaving. She answers him with her
coo-ee!
and they go on like that, call and answer, fainter and fainter.

The day before he’s due to sail he hires a bicycle and pedals out from the transit camp in Kent in which he is billeted, to say goodbye to England. It is such a ride! Hedgeless roads over long sloping downs sprinkled with thorns, and covered with old tracks whose routes are marked by juniper. A clear pale sky. A faint sunset, a long twilight.

Embarkation: 29 January 1917. Thomas and his men march through the pre-dawn dark to the station. The air very cold, very still. Soldiers stamp their feet. He is one of seven officers commanding 150 men, who will work four 9.2-inch howitzers, and who together make up Number 244 Siege Battery.

The men sing ‘Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit-bag’.

A freezing train to Southampton, where they wait until dusk. Thomas walks to pass the time and stay warm. Inland, an ice-scattered lake, birds diving, a dark wood beyond. Some of the men play rugby on a stretch of waste ground. As the light fails the seagulls seem to float rather than fly.

At 7 p.m. they board the
Mona Queen
, clumping up a sagging gangplank. The sea tumbles. Thomas rests rather than sleeps during the crossing, listens from his cabin to the men laughing and swearing.

Le Havre dock, 4 a.m. Light falling in slabs from the windows of tall pale houses and in arcs from the electric quay lamps. They march through the town in fine falling snow. French sentries: hooded with long loose cloaks and carrying rifles with curved bayonets. Dinner is iron rations, supplemented with cheese and marmalade. They sleep that night in tents, twelve men in each, each with two blankets against the cold. Subalterns sit up late by lanterns in the mess, censoring letters.

Days of waiting, hard clear nights. Troop ships arrive, black stark vessels from the north-west. Hospital trains pull in from the east, carrying men with shocking wounds. At last, on 4 February, they spend cold hours entraining the guns. When the job is done they all sit on bales of cotton on the railway platform and wait for the train to the front.

The men sing ‘There’s a Long, Long Trail’.

When the train at last arrives some of the men begin shouting in jest, ‘All tickets!’, ‘All tickets please!’ Then they fall quiet. At 11 p.m. prompt, the train lurches away and a yell of
HURRAY!
ripples down the carriages. Then silence again, even before they’re clear of the bare platform with its trampled snow.

The train clacks past Alaincourt, past Amiens and on to Doullens. Thomas looks out of the window at the wooded chalk hills. He’s back in the South Country already. Poplars in lines. Mistletoe in the branches. They’re on the highest land in northern France and the roads are frozen.

Forwards to Mendicourt, where they billet in part-ruined barns. Enemy planes float over like pale moths, looking serene among the black shrapnel bursts. Thomas rigs up a table on which to do his paperwork. He remembers how one night on the Downs he had gazed up and wondered ‘
what things that same moon
sees eastward about the Meuse’. Forwards again to Dainville along a shell-pocked track, to billets on the Arras road, near a graveyard with three recently arrived residents. Big-gun firing is audible now. There is the distant rickle of machine guns. From an observation post Thomas glasses the snowy broken land. Glinting wires, dead trees. A corpse under a railway bridge. The shell-holes make him think of tumuli and dew ponds. Paths everywhere: duckboard zigzags, wriggling little tracks, and medieval field boundaries now turned into sunken roads used to hide the movement of troops and supplies.

The officers dine on bully, cheese and white wine. Someone has brought a gramophone, its ribbed and flaring trumpet reminding Thomas of bindweed flowers. He writes letters home to Helen, up to five a week, finding it easier to inhabit his marriage lovingly at a distance.

The gramophone plays cheery tunes: ‘Wait Till I’m as Old as Father’ and ‘Where Does Daddy Go When He Goes Out?’

Days pass. Cannonades thud away to the south, over near Ancre. An old white horse works a treadmill, tramping in patient circles. Farmers carry on as best they can. The gramophone plays Gounod’s ‘Ave Maria’.

Thomas comes to know this landscape as he has come to know all others: by walking and watching. He hadn’t expected so much life in such a shattered place. Hare, partridge and wild duck in fields south-east of his guns. Grass just beginning to show green through melting snow. Black-headed buntings talking to each other, rooks cawing. Vegetation flopping over the edge of the trenches: dead campion umbels, rank grass-tangles, clots of thistles.

The gramophone plays ‘Dormez-Vous’, by the end of which they have all fallen silent.

He writes up the fighting book, sleeps badly. Star shells light up the night. When the big guns fire, he can feel the blasts quivering in his guts. His table and mantelpiece silt up with letters to be censored. One night the artillery falls silent. He can only hear machine guns and rifle shots. He lies, idly, toying with words and rhymes. Rifle and idle, vital and rifle. How odd that rifle fire can feel almost relaxing in comparison to the Berthas. The machine guns sound like someone knocking at a door.

He goes to Arras itself; it reminds him of Bath. White houses, shutters, domes, an empty square. There’s so much to recall home and the chalk counties. When sentries challenge him in the street, he answers with the password ‘Sussex’. A mad captain takes his men behind the lines to drive partridges into the air, whistling and crying ‘Mark over!’, as though he were on a field shoot in Wiltshire. A strategic ridge to the west of his position, from which German snipers hunt, is called Telegraph Hill. One day Thomas looks up from his observation post to see kestrels hanging in pairs as they used to over Mutton and Ludcombe hills, except that above the kestrels wheel five planes.

He shifts billet to an abandoned big house, mirrors and paintings still on the wall. In the evenings he reads Shakespeare’s sonnets or Frost’s poetry. When the guns fire, he and his fellow officers cannot hear each other speak, and gulp like fish, trying to lip-read. He is adjutant to a ruddy colonel, ex-Raj, who refers fondly to the ‘
confoundedly cheeky
… old Hun’, even as his men are dying.

The gramophone plays ‘Peer Gynt’, its music drifting through the building.

He begins to experience the world as silent tableaux. German prisoners standing in the mud, one with his hand resting on another’s shoulder. A turbaned Indian at a barn door, holding a sheep by a rope around its neck. A line of dark thin trees standing against the bright afternoon sky. One day in early March he sees the Royal Flying Corps lose four planes. The tank of the last burns white as the plane drops from the sky, both pilots scorched to death. The land an exhausted cinder.

The gramophone plays Chopin’s ‘Berceuse’.

244 Battery moves forward for their first shoot. The men tramp up the road whistling ‘It’s Nice to Get Up in the Morning’ and ‘The Minstrel Boy’. Six-inch guns snuffle. The field shells sing. Machine guns spatter. The wind blows the water in the shell-holes into close intersecting patterns, like that of a file’s blade.

The gramophone plays ‘Allan Water’.

One night, lying in bed, he becomes sure he will die there, by shell-blast, in that big room. It’s the first time he has felt real fear – what a place to feel it! Should he die with his clothes on? Should he haul his bed to the window side of the room, or to the chimney side? Should he sleep upstairs where he might fall further if a shell strikes, or on the ground floor where he might be crushed? He has too much time to think: he wants to bite the day to its core. At dawn he listens to the thrushes.

The gramophone plays Ambrose Thomas’s ‘Mignon Gavotte’.

In March there is snow again, fine snow and a fierce wind. Thomas is working on aerial reconnaissance, using photographs secured by the
RFC
boys, trying to fit them together into a meaningful pattern. Seen from above – the view of the hawk or the helmeted airman – the trench system resembles an intricate network of paths and holloways, leading from everywhere to everywhere. As well as the photographs he is using flash-spotting and new sound-ranging techniques involving triangulated microphones: all part of the effort to locate and destroy the German gun emplacements, hidden away behind ridges, including those camouflaged from aerial view.

An RFC wireless man reads
The Song of Hiawatha
aloud: ‘Down a narrow path they wandered / Where the brooklet led them onward / Where the trail of deer and bison / Marked the soft mud on the margin …’ Skylarks sing over no-man’s-land. There is the noisy parley of starlings, and revolver reports from men hunting rats in the trenches.

He spends dangerous, dull days in observation posts, peering out with his field glasses through a hedge of elder and thorn in which sparrows and blackbirds chink. Action erupts in its casual baffling way, always expected but never anticipated. More of his home life slips from him. He is frustrated by waiting. He feels friendless. The mud sucks at his boots. On the morning of 14 March he is looking out towards no-man’s-land when he sees a piece of burnt paper skipping towards him, whisking in the air. No, not paper. A bat, probably shaken from one of the last standing sheds in Ronville. He notices an old grey-green track that crosses no-man’s-land, its path still visible even among the devastation. It must once have been a country way to Arras. How hard it is to erase a path. Deep green water has collected in one of the bigger shell-holes, and the skeletons of whole trees can be seen lying there. He writes home to Merfyn, asking him to oil up a bicycle so that the two of them can go out riding together when he returns in the summer.

The gramophone plays ‘D’Ye Ken John Peel?’

The military and the natural are so compressed here that it becomes hard to sort the one from the other. When the Huns’ guns fire above their heads into Beaurains, the shells come over like starlings returning, twenty or thirty a minute. He sees a great shell-burst stand up like a birch tree. When the larks sing he feels invulnerable. Buried seeds thrown to the surface by explosion and trench digging have resulted in surreal sprays of early spring flowers, growing among bones and mess tins.