by William Boyd
To the east is the other, short arm. A smaller promontory this, ended by an almost perfectly conical hill. Nestled into the corner this hill makes with the isthmus of land that joins it to the shore, is my beach. There’s not much sand. The beach is composed largely of mounds of dry seaweed, regularly washed up here by some persistent current. Beneath your bare feet it feels soft, like shreds of old newspaper, a yard thick. I haven’t been there for ages. There was no real need, while I had the pool. But now a sea bathe seems almost unbearably enticing. However, it can be reached only by an awkward twenty-minute walk down a winding path through steep pinewoods and along the cliff edge. And it takes me four times as long to return. These days I find such hikes a real effort.
What else can I tell you about my property—Eddie’s property? There is a small field to one side of the house, filled with fine blond grass and dry clumps of chamomile bushes. Along the cliff edge rosemary grows in profusion, like gorse. In the field too there are some bright-green carob trees, two or three dying olives and the huge pestilential fig, its lazy boughs propped up by wooden crutches. The pines planted round the house exude an opaque spunky sap. It builds up like candle wax on the trunks. The air is full of heady herby smells.
This morning as I sat on my new perch above the bay (I already refer to it mentally as the “lookout”), I watched a small motorboat putter out from the moorings by the public beach in my direction. It stopped almost below me. I went and fetched my binoculars.
It was Ulrike Günther. The boat was a small vivid-yellow four-seater with a powerful outboard motor, which Günther and his sons normally use for water-skiing. Ulrike was alone. She anchored the boat five or six yards from the cliff base and removed her T-shirt. She was wearing a dark heliotrope one-piece swimsuit. She fitted goggles, snorkle and a waistbag and dived in. She swam to the rocks and, as far as I could make out, started chipping away at them with a knife. She spent twenty minutes collecting specimens, then returned to the boat.
As she climbed onto it and stood upright, her body and costume glossy with water, wringing out her hair, I felt in my viscera a lightening, an invigorating airiness that I recognized, quite unmistakably, as lust.
5
WOCC
Two weeks after that hellish day in the Salient, Donald and I were driven in his staff car into the muddy courtyard of a small farm near the Fifth Army HQ at Elverdinghe. An old woman looked impassively at us from the door of the farmhouse and did not acknowledge Donald’s cheery wave. Another motorcar, a clean Humber, was parked by a barn. A large pigsty, unused, and a storehouse made up the other two sides of the square.
“Home,” Donald said and showed me inside the barn.
The big room had been divided into two. One half contained a table and chairs, a dresser and a stove. On a window ledge stood a gleaming walnut wind-up Gramophone. In the other room were three iron beds, a vast wardrobe and numerous trunks and suitcases.
“I’m not far away,” Donald said. He was attached to the HQ staff and lived in a disused laundry at Château la Louvie. “The other two’ll be here before dark, I should say.” He smiled and handed me a key on a key ring.
“What’s this?”
“It’s for your motor. That’s it outside. All your equipment’s in the back. I’ll pop back tomorrow to see how you’re getting on.” He squeezed my shoulder. “You look quite your old self, Johnny.”
In late 1915 Donald Verulam had been transferred from his duties in the War Office to “Wellington House,” the secret propaganda department of the Foreign Office, to aid in the establishment of a systematic filming program of the war. Strange to relate, there had been no official filming or photography of the war at all during the first two years of its duration. Some independent film companies had sent cameramen out to the front, but they worked with French or Belgian forces as there was a complete ban on photography in the British sectors, such was the suspicions of the army staff. In 1915, the film trade, in the shape of the British Topical Committee for War Films, finally received permission to film from the War Office under the guidance of Wellington House. This somewhat ad hoc arrangement was reorganized in December 1916 when the War Office Cinema Committee was created. It appointed official cameramen and it became Donald’s job to supervise their activities in the field. He had also to ensure that the completed film survived its laborious journey from France to the developing and editing labs in London, from there to the Department of Information, thence back to France and the chief censor at general headquarters. Only then could the approved film be shown as a newsreel at home and abroad.
Donald had been in France and at work on this job since June 1917. He was in close contact with his immediate superior, John Buchan, at the Department of Information in London. Still highly cautious, GHQ had decreed that there were never to be more than three film cameramen at the front at any one time. It was my good fortune that one McMurdo had come down with pneumonia and had been returned home to convalesce three days before Donald and I met in that lane behind the Ypres-Comines canal.
I spent only one more day with the bantams before my new posting as official WOCC cameraman came through. I rested for a week in Bailleul before the necessary documentation was approved and authorized. I was deloused and consigned my old uniform to the incinerator. I drew new clothes from divisional stores: a shirt and tie, a well-cut jacket, creamy khaki jodhpurs, glossy lace-up riding boots, a short, waisted overcoat, a peaked cap, an ashplant stick. I became an “honorary” officer.
And so now I strolled around my new billet, enjoying the strict click of my boots on the cool flagged floor. The stove was lit; it was warm inside. Two colored calendars hung on the wall. The old woman came in with an armful of firewood and brewed up some coffee. Without asking, she fried me four eggs and served them up with bread and margarine. I ate them, drank the coffee and smoked a cigarette. My God, this was the life! A light rain had begun to fall, so I postponed the inspection of my motor. I looked at it through the windows and wondered if I would be able to drive it properly. Donald had elucidated the principles of motoring and it seemed simple enough. As well as pretending to be able to drive, it had been necessary—for Donald’s plan to work—that I also claim to be intimate with the operations of a moving film camera. He had shown me some of the films the WOCC had produced and we had spent a couple of afternoons practicing with the standard Aeroscope camera. It was more functional and robust than the alternative, a Moy-Bastie.
The Aeroscope looked like a small wooden attaché case with a rotating handle on one side and a hole in one end for the lens. A simple latched flap revealed its innards, and it was a relatively straightforward process to load and unload. It was not particularly heavy to carry on its own, but its tripod was a real burden. Sometimes, Donald told me, film cameramen could persuade battalions or companies that were being filmed to provide an orderly to lug equipment about, but most of the time we would have to carry it ourselves.
This was the most onerous aspect of what was otherwise to be a most pleasant existence. Indeed, after the bantams it was like some paradisiacal reverie. We dressed as officers—notional second lieutenants—but we wore no rank or unit badges and carried no weapons. The old lady in the farm was paid (by the WOCC) to cook and care for us, and, twice a week, rations and fuel were delivered from the divisional QM stores. Our most important document was our pass. This allowed us access to all parts of the front and required individual commanders to facilitate us in every possible way. One would drive to a chosen area, present oneself to the adjutant, or whoever was orderly officer, inform him of what one wanted to film and set about it. According to Donald, the prospect of having a moving film made of the unit was irresistible. All doors were opened.
I had learned all this during the two days I had spent with Donald in Bailleul. There was no embarrassment between us, I am glad to report. No mention was made of that hideous walk in the countryside around Charlbury. I even managed to ask after Faye without blushing. Donald was his usual cour
teous, caring self. I was the one who had changed. It was only just over a year since we had last seen each other, but the experiences I had lived through had transformed me from passionate, foolish schoolboy into a numb, prematurely disillusioned adult. I did not go into details about that last day with Teague and the attack on the mythical crossroads at S——, but Donald had clearly guessed from the state I was in that I could not have taken much more.
Anyway, such is the natural resilience of my character that I found I was no longer brooding on my unpleasant experience with the bantams but was instead relishing the comforts I now found myself surrounded by. I visited the latrine (it was blissful not to be constipated, the fixture of trench life); I poured myself another cup of coffee. Then I heard a motorcar arrive.
The first of my colleagues to return was Harold Faithfull—the celebrated Harold Faithfull. He had been one of the first film photographers on the Western Front, arriving just after the Battle of the Somme in 1916. His greatest moment had come with the attack on Messines Ridge a year later. Faithfull had been there and—by sheer luck, I am sure—had managed to record the explosion of one of the massive mines beneath the ridge. The resulting fifty-minute film, The Battle of Messines (Donald had shown it to me at Bailleul), had played to packed cinemas in Britain and America for over three months. Faithfull received all the plaudits (although I now know for a fact that it was also the work of one, if not two, other cinematographers); he delivered many lectures and he had just published a book—How I Film War and Battle—which was, Donald said, selling extremely well.
Faithfull greeted me in an affable and only marginally condescending manner—Donald had forewarned him of my arrival—but I instinctively disliked him. He was in his mid-twenties, and had a handsome, plump face and fine, thinning fair hair. His voice was surprisingly deep, full of sage gravitas. I was sure this was an affectation of maturity. The problem was that, to me, Faithfull reeked of deceit. I confess that at this stage my conclusion was based solely on prejudice (I am prepared to admit to some jealousy—already I envied his success with The Battle of Messines), but in spite of that there was something too glib about the man. He was always too conscious of himself and of the impression he was creating on others—an infallible sign of the vain and the fraudulent.
He was soon joined by his crony Almyr Nelson, which completed our number. Nelson was an official stills photographer. He was known as “Baby” Nelson, possibly because of his curly light-brown hair. However, I could never bring myself to call him this. With Nelson I was on safer ground professionally, and I used to talk technical matters with him, preferably in Faithfull’s hearing. Faithfull was suspicious of me and how I came to be in the WOCC unit—the most elite unit in the British Army, as he dubbed it. I had not been an avid cinemagoer before the war and my few hours of instruction on the Aeroscope would not stand much interrogation. So whenever the subject turned to the subject of moving films I steered the conversation into general areas—composition, portraiture, the merits of the posed shot against the natural—and no one, I think, guessed at my real ignorance. Faithfull possessed some wily intelligence. Nelson was more agreeable, but as far as brains were concerned, he was—as Sergeant Tanqueray would have phrased it—“as thick as shit in a bottle.”
A routine soon established itself. Donald would arrive every other day with a list of potential subjects that the WOCC considered to be newsworthy or of propaganda value. Faithfull had first choice (he was very keen on visiting dignitaries—he claimed he had filmed the visits to the front of two kings, three prime ministers and entire cabinets of politicians) and would set off after a leisurely breakfast, often accompanied by Nelson. Frequently, they stayed away the night. Faithfull seemed to receive a warm welcome at every regimental mess. Since The Battle of Messines he had become a celebrity. All his new films were very boring.
At the outset, Donald set me to work on a series entitled Great British Regiments, a simple enough job with the advantage that it allowed me to master the Aeroscope. I filmed a battalion of the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, receiving victuals at a field kitchen, playing football, listening to a singsong and marching up to the front along a road lined with shattered poplars. I shot four reels of film and sent it off to London, where some nameless editor in the Topical Film Company’s labs in Camden Town cut it up and patched it together.
A week later it was back, passed by the censor, and we showed it to the KOYLI colonel and his officers in their battalion reserve billets.
I will never forget that evening. It was in November. We drove over at dusk. There was some sleet in the air melting like spit on the windscreen. A “stunt” was on and a battery of sixty-pounders in a field a mile away fired throughout our visit. We had a drink in the officers’ mess and then went into a barn where a sheet had been tacked to a wall. I rigged up the projector and started the portable generator; the beam flickered, then sat—shivering slightly but true square—on the makeshift screen.
I can bring it all back. The faint frowsty smell of old hay, the fragrant reek of pipe tobacco, the thrum of the generator, the rolling boom of the guns, the laughter and comments of the officers, the lanterns turned down, plump with oily light.
GREAT BRITISH REGIMENTS NO. 23
THE KING’S OWN YORKSHIRE LIGHT INFANTRY
No other name, no credits (no sound, of course), but it was mine. The opening monochrome shot of smiling marching men waving at the camera (I had been vainly shouting, “Don’t wave! Don’t look at the camera!”), then the inept jocularity of some War Office copywriter … I watched it all pass before me, entranced. I cannot say I was in the grip of some artistic or aesthetic visitation; my mood was rather—what?—proprietorial. This was mine. John James Todd fecit. Donald stood beside me puffing on his pipe, and I thought back to that day on the train from Barnton when he had held me at the window and I had taken my first photograph, “Houses at Speed.” I felt a rush of affection for him and his constant generosity to me.
There was loud, delighted applause at the end of the film. We returned to the mess for more drinks and much flattering appreciation was expressed. My first audience, my first acclaim. I felt enfolded in a radiant cloud of happiness and innocent pride.
I drove back with Donald, the two silver film canisters warm in my lap.
“Jolly good,” Donald said. “Inniskilling Fusiliers the day after tomorrow.”
But I was not listening. “I wonder why,” I said, “they didn’t use that shot of the sergeant major in shirtsleeves—you know, feeding jam to his pet squirrel.… It was far and away the best.”
Prophetic words. Prophetic complaint. I knew then that what I wanted was control, total control. And it is from that moment—and not those first hesitant turnings of the Aeroscope’s handle one morning in a village street on the Abeele-Poperinghe road—that I date the start of my career, my vocation, my work, my downfall.
In the next two weeks I filmed the Inniskilling Fusiliers and the Ox and Bucks. Light Infantry. The finished films were virtually indistinguishable from the first. But all the while I was shooting them, an idea was slowly forming in my mind. I decided, quite independently, to make my own film, one that was not just an assembly of loosely related fragments, but that had a distinct shape and form, that told a story. I think the title came to me almost before anything else: Aftermath of Battle. Already I could see it on advertisement posters, on marquees above cinemas. This would be a film true to a soldier’s experience of battle, an experience that the director himself had undergone.
From what Donald had shown me of WOCC material at Bailleul it was clear that most films of offensives dealt extensively with the buildup to an attack. This was followed by a few shots of men leaving the trenches and, if you were lucky, a long view of the enemy trenches under fire. There was a final collage of glum German prisoners and smiling walking wounded at casualty-clearing stations. The implicit message was that stalwart fortitude was the route to ultimate victory. The film I had in mind would be quite
different.
I was not entirely candid about my ambitions with Donald. I suspected he would gently chide me for overreaching myself, running before I could walk. I told him only that I wanted to drop Great British Regiments and see if I could convey something more interesting about the immense range of activity that went on behind the lines. He happily gave me permission to proceed.
One morning I left the farm well before dawn and drove up to the northern sector of the Salient. I went to the battalion HQ of the 107th Canadian Pioneers and was given permission to film one of its wiring parties coming out of the line. A sleepy orderly led me along a duckboard track to the mouth of a communication trench. I set up my tripod, mounted my Aeroscope on top and waited.
At about half past six the men appeared. There was just enough light. I filmed their exhausted, haggard faces as they filed past me, barely glancing at the camera. Some were wounded and leaned on other men for support. Stretcher-bearers ferried out the gravely injured and three dead bodies.
With the orderly carrying the tripod, I ran down the duckboard track and overtook the shambling pioneers. I set up again on the far bank of the canal by a pontoon bridge over the canal. Wisps of mist rose from the torpid brown water. The men tramped across the bridge; the pontoons dipped; ripples expanded through their bending reflections; some early sun lit the water.
Later that morning I filmed them brewing tea and frying bread and corned beef. I took long, long close-ups as they gazed without expression into the lens. My last shot was of them sleeping, huddled in bivouac sheets, still as corpses.
Then I cut to real corpses, two days later in a graveyard near a field hospital. I had the Aeroscope focused on half a dozen bodies and then directed the burial party to step into frame and dump the contents of their stretchers beside them. Later too I filmed the bizarre, inflexible faces of a Chinese labor battalion digging graves for dead Europeans. Then I caught the unhappy faces of the teenage boys in the burial party pulling on long rubber gloves before hefting the dead into their narrow holes.
