The Vintage Book of War Stories

by Sebastian Faulks

  After a while I listen again. I still haven’t sorted out where I am. The wilderness of shell holes seems so confusing that in my agitated state I no longer have any idea which way to go. Maybe I am crawling parallel with the trenches, and I could go on for ever doing that. So I make another turn.

  These damned Verey lights! It feels as if they last for an hour, and you can’t make a move, or things soon start whistling round you.

  It’s no use, I’ve got to get out. By fits and starts I work my way along. I crawl crabwise across the ground and tear my hands to pieces on ragged bits of shrapnel as sharp as razorblades. Often I get the impression that the sky is becoming lighter on the horizon, but that could just be my imagination. Gradually I realize that I am crawling for my life.

  A shell hits. Then straight away two more. And then it really starts. A barrage. Machine-guns chatter. Now there is nothing in the world that I can do except lie low. It seems to be an offensive. Light-rockets go up everywhere. Incessantly.

  I’m lying bent double in a big shell hole in water up to my waist. When the offensive starts I’ll drop into the water as far as I can without drowning and put my face in the mud. I’ll have to play dead.

  Suddenly I hear their shellfire give way. Straight away I slip down into the water at the bottom of the shell hole, my helmet right on the back of my neck and my mouth only sufficiently above water to let me breathe.

  Then I remain motionless – because somewhere there is a clinking noise, something is coming closer, moving along and stamping; every nerve in my body tenses up and freezes. The clinking noise moves on over me, the first wave of soldiers is past. All that I had in my head was the one explosive thought: what will you do if someone jumps into your shell hole? Now I quickly pull out my small dagger, grip it tight and hide it by keeping my hand downwards in the mud. The idea keeps pounding in my brain that if anyone jumps in I’ll stab him immediately, stick the knife into his throat at once, so that he can’t shout out, there’s no other way, he’ll be as frightened as I am, and we’ll attack each other purely out of fear, so I have to get there first.

  Now our gun batteries are firing. There is an impact near me. That makes me furiously angry, that’s all I need, to be hit by our own gunfire; I curse into the mud and grind my teeth, it’s an outburst of rage, and in the end all I can do is groan and plead.

  The crash of shells pounds against my ears. If our men launch a counter-offensive, I’m free. I press my head against the earth and I can hear the dull thunder like distant explosions in a mine – then I lift my head to listen to the noises above me.

  The machine-guns are rattling away. I know that our barbed-wire entanglements are firm and pretty well undamaged; sections of them are electrified. The gunfire increases. They aren’t getting through. They’ll have to turn back.

  I collapse into the shell hole again, tense almost to breaking point. Clattering, crawling, clinking – it all becomes audible, a single scream ringing out in the midst of it all. They’re coming under fire, the attack has been held off.

  It’s got a little bit lighter. Footsteps hurry by me. The first few. Past me. Then some more. The rattle of the machine-guns becomes continuous. I am just about to turn round a bit when suddenly there is a noise and a body falls on to me in the shell hole, heavily and with a splash, then slips and lands on top of me –

  I don’t think at all, I make no decision – I just stab wildly and feel only how the body jerks, then goes limp and collapses. When I come to myself again, my hand is sticky and wet.

  The other man makes a gurgling noise. To me it sounds as if he is roaring, every breath is like a scream, like thunder – but it is only the blood in my own veins that is pounding so hard. I’d like to stop his mouth, to stuff earth into it, to stab again – he has to be quiet or he’ll give me away; but I am so much myself again and suddenly feel so weak that I can’t raise my hand against him any more.

  So I crawl away into the furthest corner and stay there, my eyes fixed on him, gripping my knife, ready to go for him again if he moves – but he won’t do anything again. I can hear that just from his gurgling.

  I can only see him indistinctly. I have the one single desire – to get away. If I don’t do so quickly it will be too light; it’s already difficult. But the moment I try to raise my head I become aware that it is impossible. The machine-gun fire is so dense that I would be full of holes before I had gone a step.

  I have another go, lifting up my helmet and pushing it forwards to gauge the height of fire. A moment later a bullet knocks it out of my hand. The gunfire is sweeping the ground at a very low level. I am not far enough away from the enemy trenches to escape being hit by one of the snipers the moment I tried to make a break for it.

  It gets lighter and lighter. I wait desperately for an attack by our men. My knuckles are white because I am tensing my hands, praying for the firing to die down and for my mates to come.

  The minutes trickle past one by one. I daren’t look at the dark figure in the shell hole any more. With great effort I look past him, and wait, just wait. The bullets hiss, they are a mesh of steel, it won’t stop, it won’t stop.

  Then I see my bloodied hand and suddenly I feel sick. I take some earth and rub it on to the skin, now at least my hand is dirty and you can’t see the blood any more.

  The gunfire still doesn’t die down. It’s just as strong now from both sides. Our lot have probably long since given me up for lost.

  It is a light, grey, early morning. The gurgling still continues. I block my ears, but I quickly have to take my hands away from them because otherwise I won’t be able to hear anything else.

  The figure opposite me moves. That startles me, and I look across at him, although I don’t want to. Now my eyes are riveted on him. A man with a little moustache is lying there, his head hanging lopsidedly, one arm half-crooked and the head against it. The other hand is clasped to his chest. It has blood on it.

  He’s dead, I tell myself, he must be dead, he can’t feel anything any more; that gurgling, it can only be the body. But the head tries to lift itself and for a moment the groaning gets louder, the forehead sinks back on to the arm. The man is not dead. He is dying, but he is not dead. I push myself forward, pause, prop myself on my hands, slip a bit further along, wait – further, a terrible journey of three yards, a long and fearsome journey. At last I am by his side.

  Then he opens his eyes. He must have been able to hear me and he looks at me with an expression of absolute terror. His body doesn’t move, but in his eyes there is such an incredible desire to get away that I can imagine for a moment that they might summon up enough strength to drag his body with them, carrying him hundreds of miles away, far, far away, at a single leap. The body is still, completely quiet, there is not a single sound, and even the gurgling has stopped, but the eyes are screaming, roaring, all his life has gathered in them and formed itself into an incredible urge to escape, into a terrible fear of death, a fear of me.

  My legs give way and I fall down on to my elbows. ‘No, no,’ I whisper.

  The eyes follow me. I am quite incapable of making any movement as long as they are watching me.

  Then his hand falls slowly away from his chest, just a little way, dropping only an inch or two. But that movement breaks the spell of the eyes. I lean forward, shake my head and whisper, ‘No, no, no’ and lift up my hand – I have to show him that I want to help him, and I wipe his forehead.

  The eyes flinched when my hand came close, but now they lose their fixed gaze, the eyelids sink deeper, the tension eases. I open his collar for him and prop his head a bit more comfortably.

  His mouth is half open and he makes an attempt to form some words. His lips are dry. I haven’t got my water bottle, I didn’t bring it with me. But there is water in the mud at the bottom of the shell hole. I scramble down, take out my handkerchief, spread it out, press it down, then cup my hand and scoop up the yellow water that seeps through it.

  He swallows it. I fetch more. Th
en I unbutton his tunic so that I can bandage his wounds, if I can. I have to do that anyway, so that if I get caught the other lot can see that I tried to help him, and won’t shoot me outright. He tries to push me away, but his hand is too weak. The shirt is stuck fast and I can’t move it aside, and since it is buttoned at the back there is nothing for it but to slit it open.

  I look for my knife and find it again. But as soon as I start to cut the shirt open his eyes open wide again and that scream is in them once more, and the look of panic, so that I have to close them, press them shut and whisper, ‘I’m trying to help you, comrade, camarade, camarade, camarade –’ and I stress the word so that he understands me.

  There are three stab wounds. My pack of field dressings covers them but the blood flows out underneath, so I press them down more firmly, and he groans.

  It’s all I can do. Now we must just wait, wait.

  Hours. The gurgling starts up again – how long it takes for a man to die! What I do know is that he is beyond saving. To be sure, I have tried to convince myself otherwise, but by midday this self-delusion has melted away, has been shot to pieces by his groans. If I hadn’t lost my revolver when I was crawling along I would shoot him. I can’t stab him.

  By midday I am in that twilight area where reason evaporates. I am ravenously hungry, almost weeping for want of food, but I can’t help it. I fetch water several times for the dying man and I drink some of it myself.

  This is the first man I have ever killed with my own hands, the first one I’ve seen at close quarters whose death I’ve caused. Kat and Kropp and Müller have all seen people they have hit as well, it happens often, it’s quite common in hand-to-hand fighting –

  But every gasp strips my heart bare. The dying man is the master of these hours, he has an invisible dagger to stab me with: the dagger of time and my own thoughts.

  I would give a lot for him to live. It is hard to lie here and have to watch and listen to him.

  By three in the afternoon he is dead.

  I breathe again. But only for a short time. Soon the silence seems harder for me to bear than the groans. I would even like to hear the gurgling again; in fits and starts, hoarse, sometimes a soft whistling noise and then hoarse and loud again.

  What I am doing is crazy. But I have to have something to do. So I move the dead man again so that he is lying more comfortably, even though he can’t feel anything any more. I close his eyes. They are brown. His hair is black and slightly curly at the sides. His mouth is full and soft underneath his moustache; his nose is a little angular and his skin is tanned – it doesn’t seem as pale as before, when he was still alive. For a moment his face even manages to look almost healthy, and then it gives way quickly to become the face of a dead stranger, one of the many I have seen, and every one of them looks alike.

  His wife is bound to be thinking of him just now: she doesn’t know what has happened. He looks as if he used to write to her a lot; she will go on getting his letters, too – tomorrow, next week – maybe a stray one in a month’s time. She’ll read it, and he’ll be speaking to her in it.

  My state of mind is getting worse all the time, and I can’t control my thoughts. What does his wife look like? Like the slim dark girl in the house by the canal? Doesn’t she belong to me? Perhaps she belongs to me now because of all this! If only Kantorek were sitting here by me! What if my mother saw me in this state – The dead man would surely have been able to live for another thirty years if I’d taken more care about how I was going to get back. If only he had been running a couple of yards further to the left he’d be back in his trench over there writing another letter to his wife.

  But this will get me nowhere, it’s the fate we all share. If Kemmerich’s leg had been a few inches further to the right, if Haie had leaned an inch or two further forward –

  The silence spreads. I talk, I have to talk. So I talk to him and tell him directly, ‘I didn’t mean to kill you, mate. If you were to jump in here again, I wouldn’t do it, not so long as you were sensible too. But earlier on you were just an idea to me, a concept in my mind that called up an automatic response – it was a concept that I stabbed. It is only now that I can see that you are a human being like me. I just thought about your hand-grenades, your bayonet and your weapons – now I can see your wife, and your face, and what we have in common. Forgive me, camarade! We always realize too late. Why don’t they keep on reminding us that you are all miserable wretches just like us, that your mothers worry themselves just as much as ours and that we’re all just as scared of death, and that we die the same way and feel the same pain. Forgive me, camarade, how could you be my enemy? If we threw these uniforms and weapons away you could be just as much my brother as Kat and Albert. Take twenty years from my life, camarade, and get up again – take more, because I don’t know what I am going to do with the years I’ve got.’

  He is silent, the front is quiet apart from the chatter of machine-guns. The bullets are close together and this is not just random firing – there is careful aiming from both sides. I can’t get out.

  ‘I’ll write to your wife,’ I tell the dead man breathlessly, ‘I’ll write to her, she ought to hear about it from me, I’ll tell her everything that I’m telling you. I don’t want her to suffer, I want to help her, and your parents too and your child –’

  His uniform is still half open. It is easy to find his wallet. But I am reluctant to open it. Inside it will be his paybook with his name. As long as I don’t know his name it’s still possible that I might forget him, that time will wipe out the image of all this. But his name is a nail that will be hammered into me and that can never be drawn out again. It will always have the power to bring everything back, it will return constantly and will rise up in front of me.

  I hold the wallet, unable to make up my mind. It slips out of my hand and falls open. A few pictures and letters drop out. I collect them up and go to put them back in, but the pressure that I am under, the complete uncertainty of it all, the hunger, the danger, the hours spent with the dead man, these things have all made me desperate, and I want to find out as quickly as possible, to intensify the pain so as to end it, just as you might smash an unbearably painful hand against a tree, regardless of the result.

  There are photographs of a woman and of a little girl, small amateur snapshots, taken in front of an ivy-covered wall. There are letters with them. I take them out and try to read them. I can’t understand most of them, since they are difficult to decipher and I don’t know much French. But every word I translate hits me like a bullet in the chest – or like a dagger in the chest –

  My head is nearly bursting, but I am still able to grasp the fact that I can never write to these people, as I thought I would earlier on. Impossible. I look at the photos again; these are not rich people. I could send them money anonymously, if I start earning later. I cling to this idea, it is at least a straw to grasp at. This dead man is bound up with my life, and therefore I have to do everything for him and promise him everything so that I can be rescued. I swear wildly that I will devote my whole existence to him and to his family. I assure him of this with wet lips, and deep within me, while I am doing so, there is the hope that I can buy my own salvation that way, and maybe get out of this alive – it’s a little trick of the mind, because what you promise are always things that you could only see to afterwards. And so I open the paybook and read slowly: Gerard Duval, compositor.

  I write down the address on an envelope with the dead man’s pencil, and then in a great hurry I shove everything back into his tunic again.

  I have killed Gerard Duval, the printer. I think wildly that I shall have to become a printer, become a printer, a printer –

  By the afternoon I am calmer. All my fears were groundless. The name no longer bothers me. The attack has passed. ‘Well, pal,’ I call across to the dead man, but now I say it calmly, ‘Your turn today, mine tomorrow. But if I get out of all this, pal, I’ll fight against the things that wrecked it for both of us: your
life, and my –? Yes, my life too. I promise you, pal. It must never happen again.’

  The sun’s rays are slanting. I am numb with exhaustion and hunger. Yesterday seems nebulous to me. I no longer have any hopes of getting out of here. So I doze fitfully, and don’t even realize that it is evening again. Twilight. It seems to come quickly now. Another hour. If it were summer, another three hours. Another hour.

  Now I suddenly start to tremble in case anything goes wrong. I am not thinking about the dead man any more, he’s of no importance to me. All at once my desire for life comes back and everything that I promised before gives way in face of that desire. But just so as not to attract bad luck at this stage I babble mechanically, ‘I’ll do everything, everything that I promised you’ – but I know already that I won’t.

  It suddenly occurs to me that my own mates might shoot at me if I crawl their way: they don’t know it’s me. I’ll shout out at the first possible point where they might understand me. Then I’ll wait there, I’ll lie in front of the trench until they answer.

  The first star. The front is still quiet. I breathe out and talk to myself in my excitement: ‘Don’t do anything stupid now, Paul – keep calm, Paul, calm – then you’ll be OK, Paul.’ It’s a good move for me to say my own name, because it sounds as if someone else were doing it, and is that much more effective.

  The darkness deepens. My agitation subsides and to be on the safe side I wait until the first light-rockets go up. Then I crawl out of the shell hole. I have forgotten the dead man. In front of me is the young night and the battlefield bathed in pale light. I pick out a shell hole; the moment the light dies away I rush across, feel my way onwards, get to the next one, take cover, hurry on.

  I get nearer. Then by the light of one of the rockets I see something in the barbed-wire that moves for a moment before it stops, so I lie still. The next time, I spot it again, it must be men from our trench. But I’m still cautious until I recognize our helmets. Then I shout.