by David Malouf
When they got down at last, on the outskirts of Ballieul, in the middle of the new landscape, Jim realized what it was he had been reminded of. It was a picture he had been shown, away back in Sunday school, of the building of the pyramids.
Large numbers of men, all roped together, were hauling blocks of stone up a slope, yoked together in thousands like cattle and hauling the blocks from every point of the compass towards a great cone that was rising slowly out of the sands. The fair-headed girl who was their teacher (she was called Agnes McNeill and later married a school-teacher) had drawn a moral from the picture: the Pharaohs were cruel (if you looked close you could see the overseers’ whips) and ungodly, and their project was monstrous. But Jim, seeing the thing perhaps from the wrong perspective, and with the eyes of another century, had been impressed, as he was impressed now by the movement he saw all about him, vast numbers of men engaged in an endeavour that was clearly equal in scale to anything the Pharaohs had imagined and of which he, Jim Saddler, was about to become part.
11
IT WAS A quiet section of the front. They were billeted in an abandoned cotton mill close to the centre of town. Though Armentières by then had been fought over and taken and then retaken, and was frequently bombarded, it still retained a measure of normality; it hadn’t as yet been gas-shelled and was not deserted. Girls appeared at the factory gate each morning with trays of buns and coffee; there were half a dozen good estaminets and several brothels; peasants on the outskirts of the town were still growing cabbages or trying to raise a wheatcrop right up to where the trenches began.
They were the local people whose farms had been where the war now was. They hadn’t all left and they weren’t all grateful that their land was being defended against invaders. Mostly they just wanted the war to move away. They were grim, wooden-faced people in clothes as muddy and ragged as the soldiers’, their feet sometimes in clogs but more often in bundles of rags. They stood about on the doorsteps of shattered houses, defending their property – a few chickens, a cow, a cellar full of dusty bottles – against the defenders, who were always on the lookout for something to eat or steal, or for a woman who could be induced into one of the dirty barns, or for any sort of mischief that would kill boredom and take their minds off what lay ahead.
There were several wars going on here, and different areas of hostility, not all of them official.
As for the townspeople, they were like townspeople everywhere. The war was good business. The girls who sold cakes outside the cotton factory were pretty. Their mothers kept bars. Their younger brothers, in the afternoon, went up through the support lines to sell papers.
On the last night before they went into the line (they were to go up on December 23rd and spend Christmas there) Clancy prevailed on Jim to break bounds and go to a village just out of town. It was two miles off over the snow. It wasn’t much of a place now, and probably never had been, but a woman kept a good estaminet there, in the shell of a bombed out farm-house, with eggs and sometimes cognac, and Clancy was on close terms with her. Though they had only been here a couple of weeks she was already on the List. Her name was Monique.
‘Come on, mate, be a devil,’ Clancy urged. ‘We might all be dead by Christmas.’
Teasing Jim amused him. After all these months of raw camp life Jim still existed in a world of his own, not withdrawn exactly but impenetrably private. He did everything with meticulous care and according to the strict order of the book as if there were some peculiar safety in it, cleaning and swaddling his rifle, polishing his boots, laying out his kit. The odd thing was that Clancy respected this. It was what he saw in Jim that was most likeable and attractive. His drawing him out was a way of having Jim dig his heels in and be most earnestly himself.
‘I tell yer, mate, in this world you’ve got t’ work round the edge of things, the law, the rules. Creep up from behind. The straight way through never got a man nowhere.’
Jim dug in. ‘No, Clancy. I reckon I’ll stay.’
‘Well Monique’ll be disappointed. I promised ’er you’d be along. My mate Jim, I said. Next time up I’ll bring my mate Jim.’
‘The Captain –’
‘Aw, bugger the Captain. D’y’ think he cares? He makes the rules with ’is tongue in ’is cheek, the way he expects us t’ keep ’em. Grow up mate! This is the real world. We’re not the only ones, y’ know. Half the battalion’ll be there.’
Jim relented. It was, after all, their last night and the immediate future was unpredictable. They set out; but hadn’t gone more than a hundred yards when there was a call behind them.
‘Hey Jim, Clancy, where yous goin’?’
It was Eric Sawney, a pale, sad youth who from their very first day in Thompson’s Paddock had latched on to Clancy and whose doglike devotion was a company joke. Clancy had found no way of discouraging the boy. Short of downright brutality Eric was not to be put off.
‘Shit!’ he said now, ‘it’s bloody Eric. I thought we’d lost ’im. They ought t’ make that kid a police-dog.’
‘Were yous goin’?’ Eric repeated.
Clancy stood tugging his ear. ‘Nowhere much, mate. We’re just walkin’ down our meal.’
‘You’re goin’ into town,’ the boy said, ‘yous can’t fool me. Can’t I come?’
‘Now Eric. Town is out of bounds at this hour. You know that. What’d y’ mother say?’
‘I havn’ got a mother.’
‘Well yer auntie then.’
Eric stuck. His drawn face, always pale, assumed a hard white look. He set his jaw somewhere between stubbornness and the sulks. Snow was falling.
‘You’re underage,’ Clancy said desperately. ‘I bet you’re not sixteen.’
‘I am so too. I’m eighteen.’
‘Oh Jesus,’ Clancy moaned. ‘Come on then. But try not t’ start a box on, eh mate? Keep that fierce temper a’ yours under a bit of control.’
Clancy winked at Jim and Eric fell in beside them. Other groups, muffled against the cold, were up ahead, trudging on through the mud. There were more behind.
Monique was so unlike what Jim might have predicted that he wondered later about Muriel from the Passage and Phyllis, and Betty and Irene. She was a heavy blond woman of maybe fifty, sadly voluptuous, with bruised lips. She welcomed them all, let Clancy pinch her, and spent the rest of the evening resting her comfortable bosom on the counter or pouring slow drinks. Before long there were twenty or thirty of them, and later as many again from the 43rd. Two younger women, just girls really, came in to help fetch and carry and an old grannie with no teeth handled a big black pan, cooking omelettes and pommes frites. Clancy drank spirits, Jim and Eric vin blanc with syrup.
‘Jesus,’ Clancy protested, ‘what is this? A kiddies’ birthday do?’
But Jim craved the sweetness. For some reason, up here, he couldn’t get enough of it. He blushed now to be in the same boat as Eric, who was always childishly whining for cakes and buns and whose pockets were full of squares of half-melted chocolate in silver paper for which he traded even his tobacco ration.
It was warm after a while, what with the crowd and the grog and the smoke from the pan. A Frenchman played a squeezebox. Jim got mildly drunk and Clancy got very drunk. Eric, wrapped up in his greatcoat and with his babyish mouth ajar, fell peacefully asleep.
‘There mate, doesn’t that feel good now? – a nice crowd, a woman leanin’ on the bar.’ Clancy had a talent for creating minor festivals out of almost nothing at all. Jim felt a great affection for him. ‘I mean it’s somethin’ to remember isn’ it, when we’re up there freezin’ our balls off all through Christmas. I remember last Christmas, I –’ and Clancy was off on one of his stories. As usual Jim was soon lost in it. The wonders of Clancy Parkett’s life. Only suddenly it turned in a direction he hadn’t expected.
‘Knocked me back,’ Clancy was saying of some girl Jim had never been told about before and who didn’t figure in the List. She had slipped into this particular story by stealth. Jim
wondered if he hadn’t, under the effects of the wine and the heat and Clancy’s familiar voice, dozed off for a minute and missed her entry, till he saw that she had been in Clancy’s sights all along, over there at the edge of what he was telling. He had, in his roundabout way, been leading up to her, but at the same time ignoring her presence, while he occupied himself with other things: the car he had driven last year, the places he went. He gave up at last and confronted her. ‘Margaret,’ he said, as if calling her in. ‘Margaret she was called,’ and immediately reddened all the way to the roots of his hair. Jim was astonished. The story had become a confession. ‘So there you are. I joined up the next day.’
Jim didn’t know what to say. He wasn’t used to this sort of thing. He took another long swig of the sickly drink, then pushed it away from him; he’d had enough. Clancy gave Eric a shove and the boy started awake, grinning, then slept again.
‘C’mon tiger,’ Clancy said, hauling him upwards. Eric’s eyes were closed and he was smiling blissfully. ‘At least,’ Clancy said, regarding the boy, ‘if he’s goin’ t’ get killed f’ Christmas he’ll ’v been pissed once in his life. Y’ reckon you can walk, mate?’
‘I can walk,’ the boy said with sudden belligerence.
‘All right, keep y’ shirt on! I only asked.’
Next evening, after a day of anxious preparation, of cleaning and checking their kit and simply hanging about waiting, they made their way into the lines.
12
OFTEN, AS JIM later discovered, you entered the war through an ordinary looking gap in a hedge. One minute you were in a ploughed field, with snowy troughs between ridges that marked old furrows and peasants off at the edge of it digging turnips or winter greens, and the next you were through the hedge and on duckboards, and although you could look back and still see farmers at work, or sullenly watching as the soldiers passed over their land and went slowly below ground, there was all the difference in the world between your state and theirs. They were in a field and very nearly at home. You were in the trench system that led to the war.
But at Armentières, on that first occasion, you came to the war from the centre of town. Crossing Half-past Eleven Square (it was called that because the Town Hall clock had stopped at that hour during an early bombardment; everything here had been renamed and then named again, as places and streets, a copse, a farmhouse, yielded up their old history and entered the new) you turned left and went on across Barbedwire Square till you came to a big red building called the Gum-boot Store. There, after being fitted out with rubber boots that went all the way to mid-thigh, and tramping about for a few minutes to get used to the things, you were led away into the grounds of another, larger building, this time of brick, that was an Asylum; and from there, via Lunatic Lane, into the lines. Lunatic Lane began as a cobbled street, then became dirt, and before you quite knew it you were on planks. From this point the duckboards, for all their twisting and turning, led straight to the war.
They began to move up just at dusk, and by the time night fell and the first flares became visible, throwing their yellow glare on the underside of clouds and falling at times in a shower of brilliant stars, they were in the support line, stumbling in the dark through a maze of communication trenches, round firebays and traverses, jostling water-bottles, messtins, entrenching tools, grunting with the effort of trying to keep up, and quite blind except for the warning passed back from man to man of a hole up ahead in the greasy duckboards – But where? How far? Am I almost on it? – or a wire obstacle overhead.
The deeper they went the worse it got. In places where seepage was bad the duckboards were a foot under water. Once a whole earthwall had fallen and the passage was so narrow they could barely squeeze through: the place had been hit by a ‘minnie’. They met two stretcher bearers moving in the opposite direction with a man who screamed, and some of the moisture, Jim thought, as they brushed in passing, must be blood. They hurried to keep up with the man in front and were soon breathless and sweating, partly because of the cracking pace that was being set – the men up front must actually have been running – but also because they were so keyed-up and eager to get there at last and see what it was. Everything here was so new, and they didn’t know what might happen next, and when it did happen, how they would meet it. There was no stopping. If a man paused to adjust his pack or got his rifle caught in an overhead entanglement the whole troop might take a wrong turning and be lost in the dark.
The smell too got worse as they pushed further towards it. It was the smell of damp earthwalls and rotting planks, of mud impregnated with gas, of decaying corpses that had fallen in earlier battles and been incorporated now into the system itself, occasionally pushing out a hand or a booted foot, all ragged and black, not quite ingested; of rat-droppings, and piss, and the unwashed bodies of the men they were relieving, who also smelled like corpses, and were, in their heavy-eyed weariness as they came out, quite unrecognizable, though many of them were known to Jim by sight and some of them even by name; the war seemed immediately to have transformed them. They had occupied these trenches for eleven days. ‘It’s not so bad,’ some of them mumbled, and others, with more bravado, claimed it was a cakewalk. But they looked beaten just the same.
They stayed eleven days themselves, and though the smell did not lessen, they ceased to notice it; it was their own. They were no longer the ‘Eggs a-cook’ of the easy taunt: ‘Verra nice, verra sweet, verra clean. Two for one.’ They were soldiers like the rest. They were men.
For eleven days they dug in and maintained the position. That is, they bailed out foul water, relaid duckboards, filled and carried sandbags to repair the parapet, stood to for a few minutes just before dawn with their rifles at the ready, crouched on the firestep, waiting – the day’s one recognition of the reality of battle – then stood down again and had breakfast. Some days it rained and they simply sat in the rain and slept afterwards in mud. Other days it was fine. Men dozed on the firestep, read, played pontoon, or hunted for lice in their shirts. They were always cold and they never got enough sleep. They saw planes passing over in twos and threes, and occasionally caught the edge of a dogfight. Big black cannisters appeared in the sky overhead, rolling over and over, very slowly, then taking a downward path; the earth shook. You got used to that, and to the din.
Jim never saw a German, though they were there alright. Snipers. One fellow, too cocky, had looked over the parapet twice, being dared, and had his head shot off. His name was Stan Mackay, and it worried Jim that he couldn’t fit a face to the name even when Clancy described the man. He felt he ought to be able to do that at least. A fellow he had talked to more than once oughtn’t to just go out like that without a face.
Snipers. Also machine-gunners.
One of them, who must have had a sense of humour, could produce all sorts of jazz rhythms and odd syncopations as he ‘played’ the parapet. They got to know his touch. Parapet Joe he was called. He had managed, that fellow, to break through and establish himself as something more than the enemy. He had become an individual, who had then of course to have a name. Did he know he was called Parapet Joe? Jim wondered about this, and wondered, because of the name, what the fellow looked like. But it would have been fatal to try and find out.
One night, for several hours, there was a bombardment that had them all huddled together with their arms around their heads, not just trying to stop the noise but pretending, as children might, to be invisible.
But the real enemy, the one that challenged them day and night and kept them permanently weary, was the stinking water that seeped endlessly out of the walls and rose up round their boots as if the whole trench system in this part of the country were slowly going under. Occasionally it created cave-ins, bringing old horrors back into the light. The dead seemed close then; they had to stop their noses. Once, in heavy rain, a hand reached out and touched Jim on the back of the neck. ‘Cut it out, Clancy,’ he had protested, hunching closer to the wall; and was touched again. It was the earth
behind him, quietly moving. Suddenly it collapsed, and a whole corpse lurched out of the wall and hurled itself upon him. He had to disguise his tendency to shake then, though the other fellows made a joke of it; and two or three times afterwards, when he dozed off, even in sunlight, he felt the same hand brush his neck with its long curling nail, and his scalp bristled. Once again the dead man turned in his sleep.
Water was the real enemy, endlessly sweating from the walls and gleaming between the duckboard-slats, or falling steadily as rain. It rotted and dislodged A-frames, it made the trench a muddy trough. They fought the water that made their feet rot, and the earth that refused to keep its shape or stay still, each day destroying what they had just repaired; they fought sleeplessness and the dull despair that came from that, and from their being, for the first time, grimily unwashed, and having body lice that bred in the seams of their clothes, and bit and itched and infected when you scratched; and rats in the same field-grey as the invisible enemy, that were as big as cats and utterly fearless, skittering over your face in the dark, leaping out of knapsacks, darting in to take the very crusts from under your nose. The rats were fat because they fed on corpses, burrowing right into a man’s guts or tumbling about in dozens in the bellies of horses. They fed. Then they skittered over your face in the dark. The guns, Jim felt, he would get used to; and the snipers’ bullets that buried themselves regularly in the mud of the parapet walls. They meant you were opposed to other men, much like yourself, and suffering the same hardships. But the rats were another species. And for him they were familiars of death, creatures of the underworld, as birds were of life and the air. To come to terms with the rats, and his deep disgust for them, he would have had to turn his whole world upside down.
