Human Traces

by Sebastian Faulks

  ‘Why did you volunteer for this?’ said Daniel, starting off with careful steps.

  ‘Two-to-one on says I was going to get told to anyway, mate. Also, I can’t stand the smell in that fucking pillbox. Like half the Hun army’s used it as their private latrine.’

  At night the Engineers came out to mend the duckboard paths the German guns tore up by day, but the weeks of Passchendaele had thinned the sapper numbers, and gaps had started to appear in the walkways. Daniel was valued as someone with good balance and a steady nerve. ‘A level head,’ as Denniston had put it, ‘in both senses. Shame you have no initiative, Rebière, or we could have made an officer of you.’

  Daniel heard the rain dripping on the groundsheet he wore as a cape across his shoulders. A late German shell exploded some two hundred yards or so to his left, but he did not quiver at the sound; in fact he found it helpful in orientating himself in the darkness. He felt his leading foot slip for a second on the slimy wood. At moments such as these he often thought of Charlotte and Martha, because the world they came from was so different in all its lineaments from the one that he inhabited; yet they wrote to him and he knew they cared; they seemed to represent to him everything that was worth fighting for. It was extraordinary, he thought, how insulated you could be from your surroundings; if there was one part of you that remained dry, as his torso still was for the time being, you could exist within a private cocoon; while you fumbled with your respirator as the stench of gas rose in the evening mist and seemed to seep into your skin and lungs, you could be holding the thought of two girls in a foreign capital far away, hanging up streamers for Christmas.

  ‘We’ alfway yet, Frenchie?’

  A British flare shone a brief yellow light in the gloom ahead of them and Daniel thought he could make out the section of reserve line where the supply dump was identifiable by the remains of a dry stone wall, which in the summer had been part of a trench system. The rain and the artillery, however, had obliterated all the trenches, so that the men in the line now lived like reptiles in the mud. Daniel had overheard Denniston saying to a fellow-officer that staff estimates put the British casualty figure in the battle so far at 300, 000. ‘Not much of a loss, most of them,’ Denniston continued. ‘Conscripts. Men with rickets and short sight. A lot of them have just drowned.’

  They came to a section of better duckboarding and scrambled up the incline to the heap of white stones and down the other side. Behind it was a dug-out made of timber and corrugated iron with a double gas curtain; it looked almost fussily correct, built by the book, in a landscape where nothing was solid any more. Inside were a sergeant and two signallers who were trying to breathe life into a broken telephone system.

  Daniel explained what he and Reader had come for and after initial reluctance owing to his lack of paperwork, the sergeant told him to take what he wanted. ‘And if you can get them mules back where you’ve come from you should be in Barnum and Bailey’s bloody circus. Take all the sandbags you want, young man, but I can only let you have one packet of Woodbines. The stores haven’t come up for days.’

  After they had had some tea, they went out to load the mules. Reader held the first animal’s head while Daniel heaved the sodden sandbag onto its back.

  ‘This is a mug’s game if you ask me,’ said Billy.

  ‘We don’t have a choice,’ said Daniel. ‘We can’t leave the front of our pillbox unprotected.’

  ‘We do have a choice, Frenchie. We could leg it. Denniston would never know. No one knows where anyone is any more. They don’t care, neither. Don’t you see? It’s just a shambles. Me and you, we could slip off in the dark and say we got lost. Join some unit in support, say, “Ever so sorry, sir, and all that. We was heading in a westerly direction and must have lost our bearings and all ready and reporting for duty, sir” – but by that time our pillbox is blown to smithereens and our number’s come up for leave.’

  ‘What about Jack? We can’t leave him.’

  ‘You’re a stubborn bastard, aren’t you? You’ old the bloody animal,’ e’s giving me the willies. That look in his eye. I’ll load the bloody bags.’

  They took two laden mules and led them back round the dug-out, down through the mud and onto the duck-boards.

  ‘Good luck, men,’ said the sergeant. ‘See you at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. Top of the bill, I expect. Put that light out. I’ll put up a flare for you in ten minutes if you like.’

  ‘No thank you, Sergeant,’ said Daniel. ‘I don’t think the snipers have gone to bed yet.’

  They pulled the mules by a leading rein until they would go no further, then stuck their bayonets in the animals’ rumps to move them on.

  Soon Daniel found there was no part of him that was not wet: his puttees clamped the sodden trousers against his skin; his feet were cold and slipping inside his boots, and his face muscles ached from where he had screwed up his eyes against the rain. Artillery fire was increasing from the German line, as it usually did for an hour after darkness when they guessed the Engineers had come out. He pressed on, wondering why he did so. In the fifteen months that he had been in the army he had long since stopped being able to give himself a reason for anything he did. He was no longer motivated by a sense of patriotism or a certainty that his side was right; he kept going only because he could not stop.

  He felt his right arm suddenly pulled, then a pain in his shoulder; his mule had slipped and fallen from the duckboards and was thrashing in the deep mud beside him. Daniel at once let go, for fear of being pulled under. They were at the edge of a shellhole, not large, but filled with liquid mud. The mule was drowning under the weight of its sandbags and could not find a footing; twice it seemed on the point of pulling itself clear, and twice it slipped, the frantic churning of its legs seeming to bog it further into the mire. Daniel briefly shone his torch to see what he could do, but the beam of it only caught the animal’s eyes bulging in panic as it went under.

  As he went to grab the leading rein once more, he felt his arm pulled back. ‘Leave ’im, Frenchie, or ’e’ll pull you in with ’im.’

  It was too late, however, as the toss of the mule’s head at the rein caused Daniel’s feet to slip. His hip cracked on the duckboard and he slid down into the slime, feeling the ooze come over his head for a moment before he bobbed up. There was something unpleasant beneath his feet; there was something in his hand that felt like someone else’s face. He scrabbled at the edge of the shellhole but could get no purchase. He was desperate not to go down beneath the surface, among the arms and legs of those who had gone before him.

  ‘Billy!’ he cried in the darkness, his throat full of mud and the fumes of mustard gas. ‘Billy!’

  As he started to slip back again into the pit, he felt a hand flapping at his wrist, his arm, and finally succeeding in clinging on. ‘Hold this, mate.’ It was the rein of the second mule. ‘Don’t pull. Just hold it. I’m going to back ’im up slow. Don’t let go now.’

  Daniel had a terrible fear that the hands of the dead would clutch him and pull him down before he could be dragged clear. He heard Billy cursing the mule and heard the animal bray and squeal with pain, as Billy jabbed it with his bayonet; but slowly the creature did move back, and Daniel felt the suction of the mud start to slacken and release his legs. When he was halfway out, Billy took him under the arms and pulled him clear, cursing his stupidity all the time.

  ‘You should have let the animal go straight off, never mind turning the fucking torch on him. Now Fritz has got a bearing on us and—’

  ‘Not much of a bearing,’ coughed Daniel. ‘It was just for a moment. And anyway, thank you.’

  ‘Don’t thank me, you daft French cunt, just get me out of here.’

  ‘Let me get my breath back.’

  They were a hundred yards short of the pillbox, with enough sandbags on the surviving mule to have made the trip worthwhile, when Billy suggested they stop for a cigarette. ‘We want to smoke as many as we can before we ’ave to give ’em up to De
nniston. Stick a couple inside your shirt for Jack.’

  They crouched behind the mule and Daniel struggled with a damp match; eventually it flared for long enough to allow Billy’s desperate inhalation to set fire to his cigarette. He squatted and sucked happily before offering the red tip to Daniel. They hid the glowing ends in their hands to keep off the rain and in order not to attract the attention of some diligent sniper still on duty.

  ‘Christmas soon,’ said Billy Reader.

  ‘I suppose so.’

  They heard a shell that seemed much closer than the others. One thing the veterans had told Daniel from the day he joined up was that you never heard the one that had your name on it; but as Billy suddenly grabbed his wrist, and Daniel could make out his ferrety expression from the light of his cigarette end, it was clear that the same thought had occurred to him: this one was theirs and they were hearing it every inch of the way. As Daniel was lifted from the duckboards by the blast, he knew that Billy Reader was dead; he had seen or sensed the red pieces of him in the marshy, yellow night air.

  There was a letter for Sonia and Jacques from a Major Bartelot at the Infantry Record Office at 4, London Wall Buildings, London EC2, telling them that Private Rebière, D 2210824727 was reported missing in action at Passchendaele, but that they had had reports unconfirmed, based on an eyewitness report of a Sergeant Kimber, that he had been taken down the line by stretcher bearers to a casualty clearing station. An examination of the wounded lists at all the likely hospitals had so far proved fruitless, but further information would be passed on to them as soon as it was forthcoming. The major offered his sympathy at a time of what he knew must be ‘great suspense’.

  A letter came many weeks later to the address of Dr T. Midwinter in Bayswater, London. It was not the first communication, but it was one that was much pored over by the family.

  It began, ‘Dear Uncle Thomas and Aunt Kitty,’ and continued, ‘Don’t ask me how or why, but I appear to be in Italy. After my little adventure in the mud at Passchendaele, I was unconscious for quite a long time, and when I came to, I asked the MO where I was. He, being a typical MO, if you will forgive my saying so, was impatient about my wish to know where I was (not a terribly unreasonable question, I felt) but eventually said, “Well if you must know, young man, you are in Abbeville.” I do not know how I got to Abbeville, which is in France, or why I came here, except that the hospital has very good facilities for treating those with shell shock, memory loss and head wounds.

  ‘It transpired that my wounds were slight. Poor old Billy Reader had been blown into a thousand pieces, but I was simply lifted clear by the blast and dumped in another hole. I broke an arm and had some slight burns. I have gone rather deaf in one ear, but that might be useful in later life (if I marry a Madame Valade, for instance). The problem is my memory, but I suppose it does not matter too much. Perhaps there are some things it is better to forget. Eventually I was sent to rejoin my unit, who had been moved from Belgium down to Amiens. I was surprised and very pleased to see Jack Turney alive and I managed to be polite to Capt Denniston who had held his little pillbox more or less single-handed until the battle was declared over. How could they tell it was “over”? Nothing was gained, nothing was lost but a few hundred thousand lives. They told me Field Marshal Haig paid his first visit to the chosen site of his offensive in January, after it was finished. He surveyed the swamp and said, “God, did our men really have to fight in this?” And he wept.

  ‘(I do not know whether to believe that or not. Some say it was Kiggell, his second in command.)

  ‘Anyway, the boy who bakes the bread heard from a man who drives a train that we were off to Italy. The cook told Tommy who told the corporal, who told the sergeant, who told the sergeants’ mess, where it was thoroughly discussed. On a majority vote, the sergeant was detailed to tell the adjutant, who, five days later, received his top-secret written orders to that effect from Staff headquarters. We packed up our kit and marched to the station where we climbed into cattle trucks, marked “Chevaux 8, Hommes 40”. Tommy mystified by this inscription. What it is to be bilingual!

  ‘As well as the cattle trucks, there were two passenger coaches for the elect. The CO had half of one coach to himself, but let other officers into the other half; the second coach was occupied by other Great Men, such as the Sergeant Cook and the Armourer Sergeant.

  ‘I never thought I could be so glad to see the back of France, but as the train crawled south and east, I felt my spirits lift. We broke open a section of the truck to make a window and soon we were passing along the valley of the River Aisne, in view of a ridge called the Chemin des Dames, where a French king – I forget which one – encouraged the ladies of his court to exercise. It is better known now as the place where the French infantry mutinied after General Nivelle sent too many off to die. (As you will see, this letter is in a so-called green envelope and not subject to censorship, except the remote chance of a random check at base, as at the time of writing I am in an area of low risk. So I can say what I like.) But back to the story –

  ‘We eventually left French soil through one of the great mountain tunnels, at Mt Cenis, and in the morning pulled into our first Italian village. Young women poured onto the platform, throwing flowers through the open doors of the trucks (which greatly improved the atmosphere inside). They gave us oranges to eat and were happy to kiss the most repulsive-looking men. The mayor of the local town came on to the platform, a small brass band played and bottles of vino rosso were opened. I looked at the faces of my comrades from the Ypres Salient, such as are still with us, and they were filled with wonder. This Italy, they were thinking, is a kind of heaven.

  ‘Eventually they put electric engines front and back onto our train to get us down from the mountains, then steam took over again in the plain of Lombardy. There seems to be no coal here, so the stoker throws logs onto the fire. This works well enough, and I was sent to ask him if we could have hot water from his boiler for a brew of tea, as there was no other provided. “You go, Frenchie, you speak the foreign lingo.” Vain to point out that it is a different “lingo” – though I do speak a little Italian, because of having lived so near the border. But I am doing my best to keep that very quiet.

  ‘When the train had gone as far as it would go, it was everybody out and back on foot. We were all in good spirits and no one minded a march, though I do not see why the train could not have taken us a bit further. Our line here is about 80 miles long from the Adriatic to the Alps; it starts on the River Piave, then curves up north-west. The Italians were much further east, butwere drivenback by the Austrians at the Battle of Caporetto, as they call it. Caporetto is in fact Karfreit, where all those workmen on the Wilhelmskogel came from. The Italians fought very well, they say, but the retreat from Caporetto was a disgrace, apparently, with discipline breaking down in a sauve-qui-peut rush to safety, women and children abandoned, trampled underfoot or left on the mountain roads, along with vast numbers of guns and equipment, to the mercy of the advancing Austrian enemy. How strange and sad it seems, after all these years, to write those last two words. I think of Freddy and the other boys from school and wonder where they are.

  ‘Anyway, there has now been a considerable regrouping and stiffening of the line with French and British divisions in it. The War is going about as badly as it could be for the Allies on the Western Front. We are out of men. Even what my CO would call the “runts” – the 1917 conscripts with their bandy legs and gig-lamps – are dead. We wait for more tanks and more Americans.

  ‘But here in Italy, there is a better atmosphere. Our Italian allies have regained their composure, apparently. The French troops are hard and competent and the five British divisions contain men from some of the great regiments – Royal West Kents, Durham Light Infantry, Bedfords, Cheshires, Norfolks, Warwicks, Sherwood Foresters and King Edward’s Horse among others. It is a large presence, and most of these are men who have survived the Western Front and know what they are doing. That must in
clude me, Uncle Thomas. Or at least it half includes me: I have survived the WF; I have never had the smallest idea what I am doing . . . Sorry about these digressions; perhaps it is my “concussion”; anyway, now definitely back to the story: –

  ‘The plain of Lombardy is a dull place: pale, flat fields with green poplars and variegated-red-brick campaniles the only vertical marks in its horizontal sweep. The Roman roads are straight with the villages attached at a short distance; after a while we are told to march “at ease”, which means you can push back your cap, loosen your buttons, smoke and chat to the men around you. Usually there is a song, but the men have not had time to think up filthy words with Italian connections yet. The first night we slept in a cattle shed in a farm and were surprised when all the women of the village came to join us at night with their sewing. Jack Turney was rubbing his hands in delight, but it seems they like to sit among the cows for warmth, there being no coal here and they want to save the wood as much as they can for their cooking stoves. Jack broken-hearted when this was explained; but there is a good feeling because the women bring vino rosso. In return, we have given them some spare army blankets, which return the following day in the shape of quite fetching khaki skirts.

  ‘The Italians are greatly taken by the sight of our shire horses (which are used for pulling wagons), as they have never seen such beasts. We also use oxen at the tail of the column and when a man’s feet are so bad from marching that it is thought dangerous for him to carry on, he is allowed to deposit his pack on an “oxo wagon” and continue thus lightened. I have fortunately never reached that stage, because I dread to think what the teasing would be like.

  ‘Now I have to tell you something rather odd. We arrived on the third day of marching at a town with a huge red sandstone clock tower and battlements at its entry joined to medieval walls. (This is Cittadella. I now remember I can tell you such things in a “green envelope”.) I went to the church after lunch and saw the most beautiful paintings by Veronese and Giorgione. I cannot believe that this is “allowed” in time of war. I feel so fortunate to be alive. When I think of all the men in my section, only Jack and me still living (Mac, I heard was killed in the Salient); and not just living but able to go into this enchanted country and stare at the walls of its churches, while Billy lies in tiny pieces in the mud of Belgium. It made me want to cry, though whether with happiness or grief I could not say. I was sitting in a café, thinking about these things, when Capt Denniston comes up and says he wants to talk to me.