by John Boyne
“Christ, Sadler, I thought you’d never get here,” he cries, breaking away now and tapping me on the arm for good luck. “Everything all right beyond?”
“Fine, Bill,” I reply—Tell is another who prefers to be addressed by his Christian name; perhaps it makes him feel that he is his own man still—and then step forward to dig my feet into position and pull the box-periscope down to eye level. I’m about to ask him whether he has anything to report but he’s already gone and I sigh, narrowing my eyes as I look through the muddy glass, trying to distinguish between the horizon, the fields of battle and the dark clouds up ahead, and do everything in my power to remember what the fuck it is that I’m supposed to be looking out for anyway.
I try to count the days since I left England and decide that it is twenty-four.
We took the train from Aldershot to Southampton the morning after passing out and marched along the roads towards the docks at Portsmouth, families coming out on to the pavements to cheer us on to war. Most of the men revelled in the attention, particularly when some of the girls in the crowd jumped forward to plant kisses on their cheeks, but I found it difficult to concentrate when my mind was still so focused on the events of the previous night.
Afterwards, Will had dressed quickly and stared at me with an expression unlike any I had ever seen before. A mixture of surprise at what we had done, tainted by an inability to deny that he had been not only a willing participant but the prime mover. He wanted to blame me, I could see that, but it was no good. We both knew how it had begun.
“Will,” I began, but he shook his head and tried to climb the bank that surrounded us, tripping over in his eagerness to get away and sliding back down before he could get a stronger foothold. “Will,” I repeated, reaching out for him, but he shrugged me off impatiently and spun around, glaring at me, teeth bared, a wolf ready to attack.
“No,” he hissed, disappearing over the top and into the night.
When I returned to my bunk, he was already in his bed, his back turned towards me, but I knew that he was still awake. His body was rising and falling in a controlled way, his breathing heavier than normal; it was the movement and respiration of a man who wants to give the impression of sleep but does not have the acting skill to be entirely convincing.
And so I went to sleep myself, sure that we would talk in the morning, but when I awoke, he was already gone before Wells or Moody had even sounded the bell. Outside, after roll call, he took his place in the final march far ahead of me, in the centre of the pack, that claustrophobic spot he usually hated, surrounded by newly anointed soldiers to his left, right, fore and rear, each one providing a defence, if one were needed, against me.
There was no chance to talk to him on the train either, for he made sure to sequester himself by a window in the heart of a noisy rabble and I was some distance away, confused and agitated by this clear rejection. It was only later that night as we sailed towards Calais that I found him alone by the railings of the boat, his hands gripping the metal tightly, his head bowed as if deep in thought, and I watched from a distance, sensing his torment. I might not have approached him at all had I not been convinced that we might never get another chance to talk, for once we stepped off the boat, who knew what horrors lay ahead of us?
My footsteps on the deck alerted him to my presence and he lifted his head a little, his eyes open now, but he didn’t turn around. I could tell that he knew it was me. I kept some distance between us, looked out in the direction of France, took a cigarette from my pocket and lit it before offering the half-filled case to him.
He shook his head at first, then changed his mind and took one. As he put it to his lips I handed mine across, thinking that he could take the light, but he shook his head once again, abruptly, and dug in his pockets for a match instead.
“Are you frightened?” I asked after a long silence.
“Of course I am,” he said. “Aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
We smoked our cigarettes, grateful that we had them so we wouldn’t be obliged to talk. Finally he turned to me, his expression sorrowful, apologetic, then looked down at his boots, swallowing nervously, his eyebrows and forehead knitted together in despair.
“Look, Sadler,” he said. “It’s no good. You know that, don’t you?”
“Of course.”
“It couldn’t …” He hesitated and tried again. “We’re none of us thinking straight, that’s the problem. This bloody war. I wish it was all behind us. We haven’t even got there yet and I’m wishing it was over.”
“Do you regret it?” I asked quietly, and he turned, his expression more aggressive than before.
“Do I regret what?”
“You know what.”
“I’ve said, haven’t I? It’s no good. Let’s just act as if none of it ever happened. It didn’t really, if you think about it. It doesn’t count unless it’s, you know … unless it’s with a girl.”
I laughed; a quick, involuntary snort. “Of course it counts, Will,” I said, taking a step towards him. “And why are you calling me Sadler all of a sudden?”
“Well, it’s your name, isn’t it?”
“My name’s Tristan. You’re the one who always says how much you hate the way we’re referred to by our surnames. You said it dehumanizes us.”
“And so it does,” he replied gruffly. “We’re not men any more.”
“Of course we are!”
“No,” he said, shaking his head quickly. “I didn’t mean that. I meant we can’t think that we’re regular men now; we’re soldiers, that’s all. We have a war to fight. You’re Private Sadler and I’m Private Bancroft and there we are and that’s an end to it.”
“Back there,” I said, lowering my voice and nodding in the direction from which we had come, the direction of England, “our friendship meant a lot to me. At Aldershot, I mean. I’ve never been good with friends and—”
“Oh, for pity’s sake, Tristan,” he hissed, flicking the end of his cigarette overboard now and turning on me furiously. “Don’t speak to me like I’m your sweetheart, all right? It sickens me, that’s all. I won’t stand for it.”
“Will,” I said, reaching out to him again, meaning nothing by it, simply hoping to stop him marching away from me, but he slapped my arm aside in a rough fashion, rather more violently than he had intended perhaps, for as I stumbled he looked back at me with a mixture of regret and self-hatred. Then he pulled himself together and continued to walk back towards the deck, where most of our fellows were gathered.
“I’ll see you over there,” he said. “None of the rest of it matters.”
He hesitated for a moment, though, turned around, and seeing the expression of pain and confusion on my face, relented a little. “I’m sorry, all right?” he said. “I just can’t, Tristan.”
Since then we have barely spoken. Neither on the march to Amiens, when he kept a clear distance between us, nor as we advanced towards Montauban-de-Picardie, which, Corporal Moody reliably informs us, is the desecrated region where I stand with my eyes to the mud-smeared glass of my box-periscope. And I have tried to forget him, I have tried to convince myself that it was just one of those things, but it’s difficult to do that when my body is standing here, eight feet deep in the earth of northern France, while my heart remains by a stream in a clearing in England where I left it weeks ago.
Rich is dead. Parks and Denchley, too. I watch as their bodies are taken out of the trenches and as much as I want to turn away, I can’t. They were sent on a wiring party last night, over the top, to lay thick reams of barbed wire in front of our defences before the next spate of shelling began, and were picked off one by one by German snipers.
Corporal Moody is signing the paperwork that will be needed to transport the bodies out of here and he turns around at the sound of my footsteps, surprised to see me there.
“Oh, Sadler,” he says. “What do you need?”
“Nothing, sir,” I reply, staring at the corpses.
“Then don’t stand around all day like a bloody idiot. You’re off duty?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. The trucks will be here shortly.”
“Trucks, sir?” I ask. “What trucks?”
“We ordered replacement timbers for the new trenches and to repair some of the old,” he tells me. “We can take most of the sandbags away once they get here. Reinforce the streets. Go up top and help with that, Sadler.”
“I was just about to get some sleep, sir,” I say.
“You can sleep any time,” he replies, and there isn’t even a hint of sarcasm in his tone; I think he actually means it. “But the sooner we get this done the more secure we’ll all be. Go on, Sadler, look lively, they’ll be arriving soon.”
I climb out, marching back towards the reverse line without fear of being shot; the distance is too far for the German guns to reach us here. Up ahead, I see Sergeant Clayton gesticulating wildly with three men and when I get closer I realize that one of them is Will, one Turner and the other a slightly older man, perhaps in his mid twenties, whom I’ve never laid eyes on before. He has a mop of red hair that’s been shorn close to the scalp and his skin looks raw and aged. All four turn as they hear me approach and I try not to look at Will, not wanting to know whether his initial reaction will be one of pleasure or irritation.
“Sadler,” snaps Sergeant Clayton, looking at me with contempt, “what in hell do you want?”
“Corporal Moody sent me over, sir,” I tell him. “He said you might need a hand with the trucks.”
“Of course we do,” he says, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “What’s keeping them, anyway?” He looks down the rough path that has been carved into the terrain and shakes his head, then glances at his watch. “I’ll be at supervision,” he mutters, turning away from us. “Bancroft, make sure you come and find me when they get here, all right?”
“Sir,” says Will, a brief acknowledgement before he turns away and looks down the road himself. I want to talk to him but it’s awkward here, with Turner and the unknown redhead standing between us.
“I’m Rigby,” announces the stranger, nodding in my direction but not extending his hand.
“Sadler,” I say. “Where have you sprung from, then?”
“Rigby’s a feather man,” says Turner but without any aggression in his tone. Indeed, he says it as if it’s a perfectly natural thing.
“Really?” I say. “And yet here you are all the same.”
“GHQ keep moving me around,” he tells me. “I expect they’re hoping I’ll get picked off one of these days. A German bullet rather than a British one, to save them the cost of the gunpowder. I’ve done six nights of stretcher-duty in a row, if you can believe it, and I’m still alive, which I suspect is something of a record. Unless I’m dead and so are you and this is hell.” He sounds remarkably cheerful about the whole thing and is, I assume, therefore, completely mad.
I look down at the ground as the three men continue talking, tipping the toe of my boot hard against the earth, separating dirt from stone, and watching as some of the dried mud flakes off into the ground. There’s no aggression towards the objectors any more, at least not towards those who have agreed to serve but not to fight. There would probably be a lot less sympathy towards those on the farms or in prison except, of course, we never see any of them. The fact is that everyone who is over here is at risk. It was different back at Aldershot. There we could play politics and stir ourselves up into fits of outraged patriotism. We could make Wolf’s life a bloody hell and never feel the worse for it. We could drag him from his bed in the middle of the night and cave his head in with a rock. None of us will survive here anyway, that’s the general belief.
Will is walking around in circles, keeping a fine distance from me, and it’s all that I can do not to run towards him, shake him by the shoulders and tell him to stop all this nonsense.
“Rigby’s a Londoner, like you,” says Turner, and I look up to see that he’s addressing me; I get the impression that Rigby’s already said this and Turner’s been forced to repeat it as all three of them are staring at me now.
“Oh yes?” I reply. “Where from?”
“Brentford,” he tells me. “Do you know it?”
“Yes, of course. My family lives not far from there.”
“Really? Anyone I might know?”
“Sadler’s Butchers,” I say. “Chiswick High Street.”
He looks at me in surprise. “Are you serious?” he asks, and I frown, wondering why on earth I wouldn’t be. I notice Will turning around now at the unexpected question and drifting carefully back towards our company.
“Of course I am,” I tell him.
“You’re not Catherine Sadler’s son, are you?” he asks me then, and I feel a little light-headed to hear her name. All the way over here. In a field in France. With the bodies of Rich and Parks and Denchley decomposing a few hundred feet from where I stand.
“That’s right,” I say carefully, trying hard to maintain my composure. “How do you know my mother?”
“Well, I don’t know her, not really,” he says. “No, it’s my own mother who’s friends with her. Alison Rigby. You must have heard your mother talk of her?”
I think about it and shrug my shoulders. It rings a bell somewhere but then my mother has a network of female friends around the town and I have never taken the slightest interest in any of them.
“Yes, I think so,” I say. “I’ve heard the name, anyway.”
“What a piece of luck! What about Margaret Hadley? You must know Margaret.”
“No,” I say, shaking my head. “Should I?”
“Works in Croft’s Café?”
“I know Croft’s. But it’s been a few years. Why? Who is she?”
“She’s my girl,” he replies, smiling brightly. “Thought you might have run into her, that’s all. You see, her mother, Mrs. Hadley, who I expect will be my mother-in-law one day, runs fund-raisers for the war effort with my mother and yours. They’re thick as thieves these days, the three of them. I can’t believe you don’t know Margaret. Pretty girl, dark hair. Your mother thinks very highly of her, I know that for a fact.”
“I haven’t been back in a while,” I tell him. “I don’t … well, my family and I, we’re not close.”
“Oh,” he says, sensing perhaps that he might have fallen into difficult territory. “I’m sorry to hear that. Gosh, Sadler, I was terribly sorry to hear about your—”
“It’s quite all right,” I say, unsure how best to pursue this conversation but I don’t need to, because Will is beside us now, separated from me only by Turner, and I’m surprised to see him there, surprised to realize that he is taking such an interest.
“She’s all right, is she, Mrs. Sadler?” asks Will, and Rigby turns and nods at him.
“Last I heard she was,” he replies. “Why? Do you know her, too?”
“No,” says Will, shaking his head. “Only I suppose Tristan would like to hear that his mother’s doing well, that’s all.”
“Pink of health, as far as I know,” he says, turning back to me. “Margaret, my girl, well, she writes to me fairly often. Tells me all the news from home.”
“That must be nice,” I say, glancing across at Will, grateful for his intervention.
“It’s been bloody awful for them, of course,” he continues. “Margaret’s brothers were both lost early on, in the first few weeks, in fact. Their mother was a wreck over it, still is really, and she’s a wonderful lady. Of course, none of them were happy when I lodged my objections to the MTB but I had to stick to my principles, that’s the truth of it.”
“Wasn’t it hard, though?” asks Will, leaning forward, taking a keen interest now. “Making your mind up to go ahead with it after all that?”
“Damned hard,” he says through gritted teeth. “Still don’t know if I’ve done the right thing, if I’m honest. All I know is that it makes sense to me somehow. I know I’d feel as if I was let
ting the side down if I stayed at home or whiled the years away in prison. At least here, bearing stretchers and doing whatever is asked of me, I feel I’m of some use. Even if I’m not willing to pick up a gun.”
All three of us nod but make no comment. In a larger gathering, this man might feel more awkward telling us these things, but here, in such an intimate group, it isn’t so difficult. We have no intention of arguing with him about it.
“They’ve had a hard run of it all the same back home,” he continues, turning to me. “I expect your mother has told you all about it.”
“Not much,” I reply.
“Yes, hundreds of boys from home have fallen. Did you know Edward Mullins?”
I nod. A boy from the year ahead of mine in school. “Yes,” I say, recalling a rather plump chap with bad skin. “Yes, I remember him.”
“Festubert,” says Rigby. “Gassed to death. And Sebastian Carter?”
“Yes,” I say.
“He was done for at Verdun,” says Rigby. “And what about Alex Mortimer? Did you know him?”
I consider the name for a moment and then shake my head. “No,” I say. “No, I don’t think so. Are you sure he was from my neck of the woods?”
“He was a blow-in. Originally from Newcastle, I think. Moved to London about three years ago with his family. Knocked about with Peter Wallis all the time.”
“Peter?” I say, looking up in surprise. “I know Peter.”
“Battle of Jutland,” he says, shrugging his shoulders as if this is just another casualty, nothing significant, nothing to write home about. “Went down with the Nestor. Mortimer, on the other hand, survived it out there but the last I heard he was holed up in an army hospital somewhere outside Sussex. Lost both his legs, the poor bastard. Got his balls blown off, too, so that’s him singing soprano in the church choir ever after.”
