by John Boyne
I stare at him. “Peter Wallis,” I say, careful to control the tremor in my voice. “What exactly happened to him?”
“Well, I’m not sure I remember all the details,” he says, scratching his chin. “Didn’t the Nestor get hit by the German cruisers? Yes, that’s it. They got the Nomad first, then the Nestor. Bang, bang, sunk, one after the other. Not everyone was killed, thankfully. Mortimer survived it, as I say. But Wallis was one of the unlucky ones. Sorry, Sadler. Was he a friend of yours, then?”
I look away and feel as if I might collapse with grief. So we are never to be reconciled. I am never to be forgiven. “Yes,” I say quietly. “Yes, he was.”
“At long bloody last,” says Turner suddenly, pointing ahead. “Here’s the trucks. Want me to go and get the old man for you, Bancroft?”
“Please,” says Will, and I can feel his eyes on me now as I turn to him. “A good friend?” he asks me.
“Once,” I say, unsure how to describe him, unwilling to dishonour him in death. “We grew up together. Knew each other from the crib. We were neighbours, you see. He was the only … well, the best friend I had, I suppose.”
“Rigby,” says Will, “why don’t you run over and ask the driver how much timber there is? Then at least we can tell Sergeant Clayton when he gets here. We’ll have a better idea of how long it will take to unload.”
Rigby looks at both of us and then, sensing the awkwardness of the moment, nods and moves away. Only when he’s out of sight does Will step closer to me, and by now I am trembling, wanting to run away, wanting to be anywhere but here.
“Keep it together, Tristan,” he tells me quietly, placing a hand on my shoulder as his eyes search to make and hold a connection with my own, his fingers pressing tightly around my flesh, sending a current of electricity through me despite my grief; it’s only the second time he’s touched me since England—the first was when he helped to lift me off the floor of the deluged trench—and the only time he’s spoken to me since the boat. “Keep it together, yes? For all our sakes.”
I step closer to him and he pats my arm in consolation, leaving his hand there longer than is necessary.
“What did Rigby mean when he said he was sorry to hear about … well, he didn’t finish his sentence.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I say, moving forward in my grief to put my head on his shoulder, and he pulls me to him for a moment, his hand at the back of my head, and I am almost certain that his lips brush the top of my hair, but then Turner and Sergeant Clayton come into sight, the loud voice of the latter complaining about some new disaster, and we separate once again. I wipe the tears from my eyes and look at him but he’s turned away and my thoughts return to my oldest friend, dead like so many others. I wonder why in God’s name I ever went to look at Rich, Parks and Denchley’s bodies when I could have been in my foxhole all this time, grabbing a few minutes’ sleep, and knowing nothing about any of this, nothing about home or Chiswick High Street, my mother, my father, Peter or the whole bloody lot of them.
We advance further north, taking a long, narrow row of German trenches with minimal casualties—on our side at least—and news of our success prompts a visit from General Fielding.
Sergeant Clayton is beside himself with anxiety all morning and insists on personal inspections of all the men to ensure that we strike the right balance between the cleanliness that hygiene regulations demand and the filth that confirms we are doing our jobs. He tells Wells and Moody to follow him as he works his way down the line, one with a bucket of water, the other with a bucket of mud, and personally scrubs or soils the face of any man he thinks does not reach his exacting standards. It is the most extraordinary scene. Of course he shouts and screams as he goes, a litany of abuse or exaggerated praise, and I fear for his sanity. Williams has told me that Clayton is one of triplets and that both his brothers were killed in the opening weeks of the war by hand grenades that exploded too soon as the pins were pulled out. I don’t know if this is true or not but it certainly adds to the mythology of the man.
Later, when the general arrives, more than two hours late, the sergeant cannot be found and it turns out that he’s in the latrine. His timing is almost comical. Robinson is sent to look for him and it’s another ten minutes before Clayton reappears, red-faced and furious, staring at every soldier he passes as if somehow it is our fault that he chose that moment to take a shit. It’s difficult not to laugh but somehow we control ourselves; the punishment would be membership of an after-dark wiring party.
Unlike Clayton, General Fielding seems a pleasant enough fellow, even rational, and shows concern for the welfare of the troops under his command, an interest in our continued survival. He makes an inspection of the trenches and the foxholes, speaking to men along the way. We line up as if he’s visiting royalty, which he is in a way, and he pauses at every third or fourth man with a “Treating you all right, are they?” or a “Giving it your best foot forward, I hear” but when he reaches me he merely smiles a little and nods. He talks to Henley, who’s from the same neck of the woods as he is, and within a minute or two they’re exchanging gossip about the glories of the First XI cricket team from some public house in Elephant & Castle. Sergeant Clayton, hovering by Fielding’s right shoulder, listens on and appears rather jumpy, as if he would prefer to control everything that is said to the general.
Later that night, after General Fielding has left us for the safety of GHQ, there comes the brittle sound of sustained shelling from about thirty or forty miles to the south-west of us. I break with my orders for a moment and turn my box-periscope towards the sky, watching as the sudden bursts of electric sparks signify the dropping of bombs on the heads of German or English or French soldiers—it scarcely matters who. The sooner everyone’s killed, the sooner it’s all over.
There’s a sense of fireworks about the planes’ shelling and I think back five years ago to the only time I ever saw such a display in real life. It was June of 1911, the evening of George V’s coronation. My sister, Laura, was ill at the time, laid low by a fever of some description, so my mother was forced to stay at home and tend her while my father and I walked through London towards Buckingham Palace, waiting in the heart of the crowds for the King and Queen Mary to drive past on their return from Westminster Abbey. I didn’t like it there. I was still shy of my twelfth birthday and small for my age, and stuck as I was in the centre of the throng I couldn’t see anything except the overcoats of men and women pushing me on either side. I found it hard to breathe and tried to explain this to my father, but he let go of my hand when he started a conversation with whoever was standing next to him. The carriages began to pass and I ran after them in my excitement at seeing the royal couple, and soon I was lost entirely and unable to find my way back.
I didn’t lose heart but searched for my father and called his name, and when he finally found me an hour later, he slapped me so hard and so unexpectedly across the face that I didn’t even have the wherewithal to cry. Instead, I simply stood blinking at him as a woman leaped forward, shouting at my father and punching him in the arm in retaliation, a blow he ignored as he dragged me through the gathering, all the while telling me that I was never to run off on him again or there’d be worse in store for me. Soon we were standing near the Victoria memorial and as the light grew dark and the fireworks began, and the tenderness on my cheek began to rise into a purple bruise, my father took me quite by surprise, lifting me on to his shoulders and holding me there so that I was above the crowd for once, staring down at the heads of the other revellers. The sparks, rockets and colours exploded in the sky, and I looked around at the sea of men and women that stretched as far as my eyes could see and at all the other children perched on the shoulders of their fathers, looking at each other, grinning in the ecstasy of the moment.
“Sadler!” shouts Potter, six-foot-eight-in-his-boots-and-helmet Potter, pulling at my shoulder and dragging me down deeper into the trench. “What the hell’s the matter with you? Get your fuckin
g head out of the clouds.”
“Sorry,” I say, returning my box-periscope to its proper position and scanning the terrain ahead. I have a panic that, having lost my concentration for a few minutes, I will be suddenly faced with a group of twenty Germans on their bellies advancing towards me like snakes and it will be too late for me to raise the alarm, but no, it’s peaceful out there, even if it is hellish in the heavens, and the gulf of terrain that separates two groups of terrified young men from opposite sides of the North Sea remains empty.
“Don’t let the old man catch you daydreaming,” Potter says, lighting a tab and taking a deep drag before rubbing his arms against the cold. “And poke your head out there like that one more time and I promise you that Fritz will have no hesitation in blowing it off.”
“They couldn’t get me from this distance.”
“Want to test that theory, do you?”
I let out an exasperated sigh. Potter and I are not close; his popularity expanded as his mimicry became more accomplished and now he never listens to any voice but his own. He doesn’t outrank me but seems to think he does on account of having some displaced duke somewhere on his family tree while mine, as he mentions often, are in trade.
“All right, Potter,” I say. “I’ll keep my head down, but your infernal shouting isn’t helping matters either, is it?”
I turn back to scan the horizon, sure that I can hear something out there, but all seems to be still. I have a sense of unease, though; it doesn’t feel right even if it looks clean.
“I’ll speak when I want to speak, Sadler,” Potter snaps. “And won’t be told not to by the likes of you.”
“The likes of me?” I ask, turning on him, for I am in no humour for this nonsense tonight.
“Well, you’re all the same, aren’t you? Haven’t got the sense you were born with, any of you.”
“Your father’s a carpenter, Potter,” I say, for I heard somewhere that he ran his own lumberyard in Hammersmith. “That doesn’t make you Jesus Christ.”
“Watch your blasphemy, Sadler,” he says angrily, standing to his full height now so his own head is peeping out over the top, exactly as he told me not to. He holds his cigarette in the air as he does so, the red-flamed tip just visible above the parapet, and I gasp in horror.
“Potter, your tab—”
He turns, notices what he’s doing, and I am immediately rendered blind by what feels like a bucket of hot mucus being chucked in my face. I spit and blink, retching against the side of the trench as I throw myself to the ground, wiping whatever filth this is away from my eyes, and look across to see Potter’s body lying at my feet, a great hole in his head from where the bullet entered, one eye completely gone—somewhere on my person, I suspect—the other hanging uselessly from its socket.
The sound of the shelling thirty miles away appears to grow louder, and for a moment I close my eyes, imagining myself elsewhere, and then I hear the voice of the woman who remonstrated with my father for hitting me, five years ago on the night of the coronation. “The lad’s done nothing wrong,” she’d said. “You should learn to show a little kindness towards the boy.”
The weeks pass, we advance, we stop, we entrench, we fire our Smilers and throw our grenades, and nothing ever seems to change. One day we are told that the line across Europe is pressing forward and it won’t be long now, and the next we hear that things look grim and we should prepare for the worst. My body is not my own any more: the lice have offered joint tenancy to the rats and vermin, for whom I am a chew-toy. I console myself by thinking that this is their natural terrain, after all, and I am the intruder. When I wake now to find a parasite nibbling at my upper body, its nose and whiskers twitching as it considers an attack, I no longer jump about and shout but merely brush it away with the palm of my hand, the way I would a fly buzzing around my head in St James’s Park. These are the new normalities and I give them little thought, but follow instead my routine of standing at my post, holding the line, going over the top when it is my turn to risk death, eating when I can, closing my eyes and trying to sleep, letting the days pass, believing that one day either it will all be over or I will.
It is weeks now since Potter’s brains were spattered over my uniform and it has been washed since, of course, but the dark red and grey stains around the lapels bother me. I’ve asked others about them but they shake their heads and tell me there’s nothing there. They’re wrong, of course. The marks are most definitely there. I can smell them.
I finish a shift of more than ten hours and am dead on my feet when I make my way to the reverse. It’s late and we expect to be shelled later tonight; on account of this the candles are mostly out, but I see someone sitting alone in the corner of the mess and advance towards him, eager for a little conversation before sleep. But I hesitate when, upon getting closer, I see that it’s Will. He’s hunched over some sheets of paper, a pen twisted in an unusual way in his fist, and for the first time I realize that he is left-handed. I stare at him, desperate to speak, but turn around, my boots sounding in the dirt as I walk away, and then he says my name quietly.
“Tristan.”
“Sorry,” I say, turning back but not stepping forward. “I didn’t mean to disturb you.”
“You’re not,” he says, smiling. “Off duty, then?”
“Just this minute. I’d better get some sleep, I suppose.”
“Sleep is that way,” he says, indicating the direction from which I have come. “What are you doing over here?”
I open my mouth to respond but can’t think of an answer. I don’t want to tell him that I needed company. He smiles at me again and nods at the seat next to his. “Why don’t you sit down for a few minutes?” he asks me. “It’s ages since we’ve talked.”
I walk over, trying not to feel irritated by his implication that this has been a mutual decision. There’s no point in being angry with him, though; he’s offered me the gift of his company and there’s not much more that I want from life. Perhaps there will be an end to hostilities after all.
“Writing home?” I ask, nodding at the papers set out before him.
“Trying to,” he says, gathering them up and shuffling them on the table before stuffing them into his pocket. “My sister, Marian. I’m always uncertain about what to say, though, aren’t you? If I tell her the truth about how things are going out here, she’ll only worry. And if I lie, then there seems to be no point in writing at all. It’s a bit of a puzzle, isn’t it?”
“So what do you do?” I ask.
“I talk about other things. I ask questions about home. It’s small talk but it fills the pages and she always replies to me. I’d go bloody mad if I didn’t have her letters to look forward to.”
I nod and look away. The mess tent is completely empty, which surprises me. There are almost always people here, eating, drinking tea, their heads bowed over their settings.
“You don’t write home?” he asks me.
“How do you know I don’t?”
“No, I only meant I’ve never seen you write. Your parents, surely they’d like to hear from you?”
I shake my head. “I don’t think they would,” I tell him. “I got thrown out, you see.”
“Yes, I know. But you’ve never told me why.”
“Haven’t I?” I ask, and leave it at that.
He says nothing more for a few minutes, takes a sip of his tea, then looks up again as if he’s just remembered something. “What about your sister?” he asks. “Laura, isn’t it?”
I shake my head again and look down, closing my eyes for a moment, wanting to tell him about Laura but unable to; it would require longer than we probably have.
“You’ve heard about Rigby, I suppose?” he asks after a while, and I nod.
“Yes,” I say. “I was sorry to hear it.”
“He was a sound chap,” says Will gravely. “But really, every time they send a feather man out into no-man’s-land, they’re just praying that he’ll be picked off. They don’t care
about the poor bastard they’ve gone out to retrieve, either.”
“Who was that, anyway?” I ask, turning to him. “I never heard.”
“Not sure,” he replies. “Tell, I think? Shields? One of those.”
“Another one of ours,” I say, picturing the boys in their beds in Aldershot barrack.
“Yes. Only eleven of us left now. Nine gone.”
“Nine?” I ask, looking up and frowning. “I counted eight.”
“You heard about Henley?”
“Yes, but I included him,” I reply, my heart sinking at the idea that another one has gone; I keep a close track of the boys from the barracks, of who is still with us and who has been killed. “Yates and Potter. Tell, Shields and Parks.”
“Denchley,” says Will.
“Yes, Denchley, that makes six. Rich and Henley. That’s eight.”
“You’re forgetting Wolf,” says Will quietly.
“Oh yes,” I say, feeling my face flush a little. “Of course. Wolf.”
“Wolf makes nine.”
“He does, yes,” I agree. “Sorry.”
“Anyway, Rigby is still out there, I think. They might send a team out later tonight to collect him, although they probably won’t. What a waste of bloody time, eh? Sending a stretcher-bearer to collect a stretcher-bearer. Then he most likely gets killed and we have to send another out to retrieve him. It’s an endless bloody cycle, isn’t it?”
“Corporal Moody says there are eighty more men marching our way so we should have reinforcements in a day or two.”
“For all the good they’ll do,” he says grimly. “Bloody Clayton. And I mean that literally, Tris. Bloody Sergeant James Bloody Clayton.”
Tris. One single syllable of intimacy and the world is put to rights.
“It’s hardly his fault,” I say. “He’s only following orders.”
“Ha!” He snorts, shaking his head. “Don’t you see how he sends the ones he doesn’t like over the sandbags? Poor Rigby, I don’t know how he survived as long as he did, the number of times he went out there. Clayton had it in for him from the start.”
