Two days’ home leave before shipping out. I’m halfway tempted to stay in camp, or go up to London with some of the others for a last fling. But I can’t; it wouldn’t be fair to the parents. Even though right now I’d just as soon face a German gunner than Mama’s tears for her baby boy. Don’t I wish they’d had another child, a daughter, to take the pressure off. I wonder how Ogilby would react if I asked him to tie a blindfold on me before I went in through the door. Knowing him, he’d just ask if I wished to use my own, or if I wanted him to fetch one, My Lord.
Christmas Day
Behind the lines, but not far. We can smell it now, and my men are acting the way I feel, like a horse at the scent of smoke, jumpy and white-eyed. Lots of jokes, most of them dirty. They’re shelling up the line, our guns or theirs, making the earth quiver like a fractious horse. A few days here, then up to the Front. I pray God I not disgrace my family.
Epiphany 1918
I had my doubts about this name lark, wondered if it wasn’t going to be more trouble than it was worth, being always on the alert for an old friend or one of the men spotting the occasional “Hughenfort” letter and catching on. Still, I’ve only had a couple of sticky moments, and all in all, I think it’s been a good idea. Growing up, close as I was to some of the people on the estate, I knew that “My Lord” was always in the back of their minds, if not actually on their tongues. The men here know my class—how could they not?—but to most of them I’m just another public school boy who doesn’t know the first thing about war, whose job it is to survive long enough to get slapped into shape, and to transmit orders received, and to take the heat from above when necessary. When I came, I was lucky enough not to put my foot wrong too disastrously, and it must have been obvious that I was pathetically grateful for any instruction they could give me. When they saw that, and began to feel that they could trust me a little, they relaxed, and have adopted me as a sort of pet. Not in the articles of Army discipline, I’m sure, but I feel I’m coming to know my countrymen in a way I’d never have in normal times. And I am grateful, to them all.
28 January
Never have I imagined cold such as this. Even the frost-rimed dugout the officers share seems an oasis of warmth. Heaven is dry stockings, even if they are caked with dirt. Paradise would be a bed with clean sheets—but that is more than my mind can grasp. The earth no longer holds such things; all the world is half-frozen slime and ear-shattering noise.
A shell hit the neighbouring section of trench today; I went to help a wounded soldier to his feet only to discover he had no legs below the thigh. I shall never lose the sensation of lifting up a legless man. Thank God he was already dead.
And my first thought after the original shock was, I wonder if his feet are dry now. And then I started to laugh. I managed to reach the privacy of the dugout before my nerves gave way and the laughter turned to tears. The first time in days my nerves have gone like that, and not yet in front of the men. The mind toughens slowly.
4 February
Jerry’s shelling kept us pinned in our mud-holes four days after we were supposed to go back. There was finally a lull, and we could shift the wounded and trade places with the poor bas souls coming up to take our places. Baths and louse-free shirts and beds that don’t jump and twitch under us, hot food and a chance for the ears to cease their endless ringing. But we’ve pulled a short one this time for some reason—we’re headed back into it in three more days. Just in time for the lice to find us again.
Why don’t lice get trench foot, or freeze to death? God’s mysteries.
7 February
I’ve found myself, in recent days, thinking about the dome over the Hall in Justice, with its frescoes of what the prophet Amos calls the Day of the Lord. I have been reflecting that since I was a child, certainly at least a year or two before the archduke’s assassination set the spark to the Balkans, I have been aware that there would be a war, and that the war would be a good thing, however painful. I have been remembering those early days, when the older boys and the young men of the estate put on their proud uniforms and clasped to their breasts the opportunity to “trounce the Kaiser” and “show the Hun what for.” The nobility of their faces, their shared cause, made my boyish self burn with envy. I raged that they would do the job before I had a chance to join in.
“Why would you want the Day of the Lord?” Amos cries out in horror. Having come here, to the trenches, I understand exactly what Amos means: Why in heaven’s name would anyone want Armageddon, if they knew what it really meant, the innocent and the sinner alike crushed underfoot? As if a man fled from a lion to meet a bear, or took refuge in a house to be bitten by a serpent. We lusted after war, and by God, we were given the trenches. The Day of the Lord.
I myself thirst after those waters at the centre of the fresco, for the justice that will flow down like waters, the righteousness like an everflowing stream poised above us, ready to sweep through northern France and wash us all away, cleanse the land of howitzers and tanks, half-rotted corpses and gas canisters, filth and blood and terror and desperation. The land will be empty when the flood has passed through, but it will be clean.
Fancy, I know, but that is what I have been thinking, in recent days.
11 February
Writing this by the Very lights that Jerry’s been shooting up over our heads for a week now, one generation of which scarcely fades before the next comes up. I never want to see another display of fireworks as long as I live.
Our howitzers are going now, pounding our bones as we trade death with the men 150 feet away, in their holes, behind their wire. Did I say men? The last group of prisoners I saw might have been thirteen or fourteen. Two of them were crying for their mothers. One of them fell asleep with his thumb in his mouth, for Christ’s sake. I saw him. His boots had holes worn through the soles.
The shells are getting closer. Time to choose whether to stay in the open trenches and risk shell fragments, or to get into the dugout and chance being buried.
The sergeant’s brewing tea on the fire step, a nonchalant Woodbine hanging off his lip. He reminds me of old man Bloom, who kept a hut in the woods to keep an eye for poachers. The gamekeeper had a cough, too, like the sergeant has, though I suppose his came from the cigarettes and wood smoke instead of mustard gas like Sergeant West’s. What I’d give for a nice lungful of wood smoke now, clean and honest. I’d not even mind if
4 March
Three weeks ago, the shells suddenly got near enough to make me close this journal and button it into my pocket, and at that very instant, before I could even get to my feet, the world erupted and buried me alive. I woke on the stretcher a different man.
It makes me smile, to think that at the first sight of Helene I thought she was a man. Her back was to me, of course—no-one looking into her eyes would ever make that mistake, no matter how scrambled his brains!—and she was wearing a heavy leather jacket with sheepskin at the collar. Then she turned to me, checking that I wasn’t going to be thrown to the floor when we hit a pothole, and thus undo all the work the bearers had gone to. I’ve never seen eyes like that, green as the hills she was raised in. Heaven only knows what she saw. I could’ve been a Chinaman for all she could tell, or old as her father or ugly as sin. I was clotted with France, hair to boot-lace, and stinking of battle.
18 March
A brief flurry of changes, and back I am, in the trenches again. Different trenches, same war.
Two days’ quick leave, after hospital and before reporting to my new regiment, and I used it to pay a visit to an aunt who had extended the invitation long ago. I had not seen Aunt Iris since I was in short pants, and her marriage to my uncle Marsh seems to exist in name only, so I had expected a certain amount of discomfort all around. Instead, I came away feeling that I had gained a blood relation, so easy was she to talk to. There were areas into which we did not go—I have my secrets and she very obviously has hers (if indeed one can have an obvious secret; still, I should say her friend Dan is one of those), and I have found it impossible to speak openly
