by Pete Ayrton
‘Restez, monsieur, restez un moment,’ she said, placing her basket on the footpath; and then, putting a hand into her blouse, and hunching her shoulders a little as she forced it slightly but perceptibly between her breasts and corset, she drew out a letter, an authentic letter stamped with the postmark of the field service post-office B. E. F., and with the name of the officer who had censored it scrawled across the lower left-hand corner of the envelope. She gave it to him.
‘Lisez, monsieur. Je serai très contente si vous voulez bien la lire. Vous êtes si gentil, et je n’aime que lui.’
It was a simple letter. There was no self-consciousness intervening between the writer and the emotion which he tried to put into words, though he had been conscious enough of the censorship, and perhaps of other things intervening between them. Her hand fluttered again on Bourne’s sleeve, as she coaxed him to translate it for her; and he did his best, his French halting more than ever, as he studied the handwriting, thinking it might give him some notion of the writer. The script was clear, rather large, commonplace enough: one might say that he was possibly a clerk. Everything was well, that went without saying; they were having a quiet spell; the village where they had their rest-billets had been evacuated by its inhabitants, except for a few old people; the war could not last much longer, for the Hun must know that he could not win now; and then came the three sentences which said all he could say: ‘I shall go back and find you some day. I wish we were together again so that I could smell your hair. I love you always, my dearest.’ There were signs of haste in the handwriting, as though he had found some difficulty at that point in opening his heart.
‘C’est tout?’
‘Je ne puis pas traduire ce qu’il y a de plus important, mademoiselle: les choses qu’il n’a pas voulu écrire.’
‘Comme vous avez le coeur bon, monsieur! Mais vraiment, il était comme ça. Il aimait flairer dans mes cheveux tout comme un petit chien.’
She tucked the letter away into that place of secrets, and lifted her hand again, to caress the beloved hair. Suddenly he became acutely jealous of this other man. He stooped, and picked up her basket.
‘Ah, mais non, monsieur!’ she protested. ‘C’est pas permis qu’un soldat anglais porte un panier dans les rues. C’est absolument défendu. Je le sais bien. II m’a dit toujours, que c’était defendu.’
‘Had he?’ thought Bourne, and tightened his grip on the handle of it.
‘Je porterai le panier, mademoiselle,’ he said quietly.
‘Mais pourquoi…?’ she asked anxiously.
‘Parcequ’apparemment, mademoiselle, c’est mon métier,’ he said with an ironic appreciation of the fact. She looked at him with troubled eyes.
‘Vous voulez bien m’aider à écrire cette petite lettre, monsieur?’
‘Mademoiselle, je ferai tout ce que je puis pour vous servir.’
She suddenly relapsed into anxious silence.
Born in Sydney in 1882, Frederic Manning settled in the UK in 1903. When the war broke out, he was keen to enlist and enrolled in the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry as a private with the number 19022 – who was credited with the authorship of Her Privates We when it was published in an expurgated version in 1930. The book had been published anonymously in 1929 in a limited edition of 500 with the title The Middle Parts of Fortune. Praised highly by Ernest Hemingway, T. E. Lawrence and Ezra Pound, the book conveys, with robust language and gallows humour, the life of soldiers as opposed to officers. In his introduction to the Serpent’s Tail edition of the book, William Boyd writes:
It is the unremitting honesty of Her Privates We that stays in the mind; its refusal to idealise the serving soldier and military life; the absolute determination to present the war in all its boredom, misery and uncertainty; its refusal to glorify or romanticise; the candour that makes a soldier say about the civilians back home, ‘They don’t give a fuck what ’appens to us ’uns.’ We know now that all this was true – but we needed Frederic Manning to bear fictional witness for us, to make it truer.
Manning died in 1935 in Hampstead.
STRATIS MYRIVILIS
ANIMALS
from Life in the Tomb
translated by Peter Bien
ANIMALS in wartime.
All day today I have been thinking of nothing else. It’s fine and dandy for the humans involved in war. People have ‘interests,’ ideologies, whims, megalomanias and enthusiasms – just what the doctor ordered for cooking up a truly first-class conflict. And once the war is declared, we have our tricks for saving ourselves once we see that the affair is likely to be a little more than we bargained for. Dugouts and ‘going sick,’ for example, not to mention desertions.
But what about the animals? What about the poor innocent beasts mobilized by us to wage war at our sides?
Do you know what I think? I think that even if the human race succeeds one day in driving out the devil which makes it erupt in periodic fits of mass murder, it will still have cause to hang its head in shame for the remainder of its existence. Why? For one reason only: because it dragged innocent beasts along to its wars. On reflection, I feel that the day will come when this is considered one of the blackest marks in human history.
Our division carried numerous donkeys along with it when it left the island. An entire ammunition train, in fact. The entry in our official documents speaks of ‘an ammunition train of mules,’ but if truth be told, the unit has nothing but donkeys. Getting these animals on shipboard caused them considerable suffering, as did getting them off again at Salonika. The angrily groaning cranes seized them and lifted them aloft in strong slings. This drove them wild. Their fright was depicted with astonishing vividness in their frantic eyes. They kicked into the void, brayed, rolled their eyeballs. The horror impressed wrinkles on their hides. After this, they traversed all of Macedonia with us, laden with munitions. By this time they had their own accounts to settle with the Germans, Turks and Bulgarians. When we occupied the trenches their park was established behind our lines at Koupa, a village devastated by artillery-fire and inhabited only by a few French bakers. There, at Koupa, in a beautiful ravine, our division’s ‘ammunition train of mules’ put down its stakes.
The animals were allowed to rest for a few days to recuperate from the prolonged journey, which had left them stunned with fatigue. They caught their breath again. Indeed, they discovered grass in abundance, ate, and began to feel like their old selves. Invigorated, they suddenly noticed that springtime had covered the earth with its resplendence, and that Love was prodding all things, from grubs to flowers, to join in the age-old festival of reproduction. Obedient, filled like all animals with innocence and unknowing, the donkeys heeded the great summons and answered ‘Present!’ with their amorous trumpet-call. Their ravine droned with jarring epithalamiums; the brayings reverberated through the various defiles until this amorous trumpeting reached all the way to the Peristeri ridges. At this point an airplane took off with a roar from somewhere opposite us. It flew to the ravine and circled it once or twice. As for the donkeys, they did not change their tune. The plane then headed home amidst the enthusiastic reception provided for it by our anti-aircraft batteries whose shells, bursting in the sky, surrounded it with an ever-multiplying flock of little white lambs.
Donkeys do not even know that planes exist. In any case, these particular donkeys were so corporeally absorbed in the joy of living that they had no time left to notice anything else.
Shortly afterwards a series of piercing whistles and sonorous bangs set the ravine howling with pain. It was a genuine slaughter of the innocents. The beasts were massacred on the tender grass, disemboweled amidst the orgasmic intoxication of their genital pleasure. They expired like humans, sighing. Falling to the ground, they gave up the ghost little by little, bending their necks to gaze mournfully at their entrails swaying like red snakes between their legs. Comprehending nothing, they moved their large heads up and down, shuddered; dilated their quivering nostrils; spread their bro
ad lips and uncovered their teeth; drew themselves along the ground on shattered legs. In the end they died, watering the flowers with their blood, their huge eyes filled with perplexity and suffering. One animal with a broken spine dragged its body for a distance of about fifteen meters supported by its front legs only. Then its knees buckled, it turned its head toward its large wound, and gasped with protracted death-throes until it passed on.
One of the drivers started to run like mad as soon as the bombardment commenced. Though in a daze, he had enough presence of mind to keep a tight hold on his donkey’s bridle, and he still had it firmly in his grip when he arrived at the dugout occupied by the French bakers. Here, amidst general jeering from our Gallic allies, he finally realized that all he had been pulling behind him was the donkey’s head, scythed off at the neck.
The animal was still holding a clump of daisies between its clenched teeth, the yellow petals speckled with blood.
STRATIS MYRIVILIS
ANCHORITES OF LUST
from Life in the Tomb
translated by Peter Bien
INVESTIGATING THE WALLS of the dugout today, I encountered a recess whose opening was covered by a triangular stone. It is practically a cupboard, a diminutive one. Inside, I found two cigars which had been forgotten, some additional quinine (what huge amounts our Gallic allies seem to require) and a thin book in French.
A book! How many months since I had set eyes upon one! Snatching this specimen up avidly, I discovered it to be a pornographic pamphlet meant for young adolescents, the kind which, using the pretense of ‘science,’ informs the teenager about the ugliest perversions of the sexual instinct, complete with outlandish details. The booklet made me realize that French soldiers, and indeed all soldiers of the world’s nationalities – including the Greeks – dedicate the long and interminable days in the trench to smut. Millions of men everywhere, underground, sitting there in the dirt: filthy, stinking, covered with whiskers and lice…, and they babble about women!
Although I am extremely ashamed to admit the pleasure I experienced in finding this booklet, I have read it over and over with a glee which seems insatiable. At first I deceived myself, concluding that the mere possession of a book – of the ‘printed word’ which my spirit had been deprived of for so long – explained my avidity. Now, however, I see my mistake very clearly. No, it was not the hunger for books which caused me to cry out with gluttonous joy when I swooped down, hastily clutched this rotten bone thrown to me by fortune, and began to suck at it as though it were a delicacy; it was another hunger, the craving for female flesh. This lust is inflamed here by our obscene talk. It is a passion which grows from deprivation by consuming its own flesh, an unsatisfied instinct whose embers, as soon as they begin to settle inside the tormented body, are blown again into sky-high flames by the aroused imagination. Not only the officers but the N. C. O.s as well – whoever is privileged to visit the dugouts in the French sector on the next hill – have brought back piles of colored pictures from Parisian magazines and have pinned them on their walls. Before sleeping or eating, and each time they wake up, they cross themselves (half in jest, half seriously) and plant huge, copious kisses on the nude women in the pictures: on their breasts, their legs, their bellies – prolonged, juicy kisses. This is supposed to be a joke, yet they close their eyes voluptuously while they execute this ‘joke.’ As for me, I have often caught myself discovering a thousand and one excuses to be assigned some duty connected with the sergeant-major’s dugout, the chief reason being that I want to loiter there (without seeming to) and waste my time in front of these shameless pictures – one in particular!
The men here wrestle beneath Death’s shadow; they crawl on the ground like snakes, a convulsive grimace of doleful pleasure on their faces. Everyone is aware of this unliftable shadow as it settles over the trench, expands invisibly into the very air we breathe and thence into our lungs. It is cast by a cloud which hovers motionlessly above us, cutting us off from divine sunlight and hurling down its threats upon us. Death is omnipresent; he touches everything, wraps everything in his acrid essence, bequeathes to everything a special appearance and a symbolic meaning. His taste is uninterruptedly on our lips. We all are his vassals, all of us, living in his kingdom on sufferance. At any moment he may blow his chilling breath into our lairs. Then, the limbs of all these young bodies panting with sexual frenzy will instantaneously stretch out stiff and yellow. The human form will remain frozen in the ultimate posture of ‘attention’ which it assumes when Death’s trumpet sounds the ultimate roll-call – fingers rigid, jaws hanging loose, eyes glazed. And then, finally, our bodies will be relieved of every lustful desire, for ever and ever.
STRATIS MYRIVILIS
HOW ZAFIRIOU DIED
from Life in the Tomb
translated by Peter Bien
ALONG WITH MY RATIONS TODAY, Dimitratos brought me a piece of news from the company which has kept me in a state of turmoil ever since. From the disconnected fragments he let fly, I realized from the start that he had something to tell me. As soon as he had put down the mess tin, my wine, and the plate of meat (you see, we don’t eat too badly here in the rest-camp) he emitted a hypocritical sigh:
‘Ah, my friend, the world is full of surprises.’
‘What surprises, for instance?’
‘Mmm, nothing. It’s not the best of subjects for mealtime. Eat first; we’ll have the leisure to talk afterwards. Ask the girl to make me a cup of coffee if you don’t mind and give me your cigarettes to keep me busy in the meantime.’
He dropped the bomb as soon as I had finished.
‘They found Sergeant Zafiriou!’
‘They caught him?’
‘Heaven help us, no! First and foremost, he didn’t have to be caught – he was absolutely stationary. Second, in the state he was in, no one had the nerve to set hands on him.’
‘So he’s dead, is he? Get it over with; you’re driving me crazy!’
‘As you like. It’s a rather… um… filthy story. He didn’t come to a good end, this “Hellene”. Have you ever considered the worst possible way a man could die? No? Well then, listen. You know we have a common latrine at the regimental encampment – a large ditch with some long, wide planks placed over it from one edge to the other, like bridges. The boys pull down their skivvies and squat there in rows with their left foot on one plank and their right on another. Groaning away, they evacuate their whole gut along with the salted Australian buffalo the French toss us to eat – you’d think we were wild beasts in a circus. When we pitched camp we found a French regiment cursing up hill and down dale as they pulled up stakes and put their kits together for up top – for the trenches. So we inherited some nice things from that regiment: its kitchens, artillery, a lumber dump, quite a few barrels of vegetable fat, a couple of sleeping-dens infected with scabies, and last but not least a colossal ditch like the one I was telling you about. Nearly full… Well we, our bellies flat as tambourines from the rations in the line, no sooner do we pitch camp than we set the dixies bubbling and dive into the chow. So it didn’t take us more than a day or two, praise the Lord, before we filled that ditch right up to the top with shit. Then comes an order: we were supposed to get a working-party to remove the planks from the old ditch and throw them over the new one which had been dug alongside it. The same working-party was to stuff the abandoned latrine solid with stones and dirt. Stones! That was fine in theory, but in practice they’d have to be hauled from a considerable distance in wheelbarrows, since Ordnance Stores wouldn’t allot a single cart. So the men of the working-party got going. They sprinkled the ditch with dirt only, and the hell with the rest.
‘“Did you stuff it full?” they were asked when they returned.
‘“Yes.”
‘“Really full?”
‘“Solid!”
‘A lousy pack of lies… Well, Zafiriou the “Hellene” gets up one night to take a piss. Maybe he was a little tipsy – who knows? We’d had a ration of cognac distri
buted to us that evening. Maybe he was just groggy because his sleep had been interrupted. In any case, instead of going to the new latrine, he heads straight for the old one. This looked like firm ground because of the dirt they’d thrown over it. He makes a bee-line for it with that regulation marching-step he used even for going to the jakes, and braaaaf! down he goes, almost to the bottom. He fought down there, he struggled, tried to jump out, but no use. The poor devil just sank deeper and deeper until he suffocated and kicked the bucket. The doctor says he died from asphyxia. Your fine hero gave up the ghost gorged with shit.’
‘What you’re doing is cheap and vulgar, Dimitratos.’
