The New Confessions

by William Boyd

  In my naïveté I proceeded to film more or less chronologically, shooting scenes in the order I wished them to appear, and in this way, over the next week I put together my film, with an absolute, almost uncanny confidence in the shape it was acquiring, absolutely sure of its effectiveness. I filmed an officer writing letters to next of kin, nurses bandaging wounds, carpenters making wooden crosses, amputees receiving their new crutches, piles of bloodstained uniforms being incinerated and the calm, silent, sunlit rooms of the moribund wards at a base hospital. The final image was the classic one: fresh troops marching up to the front, grinning, waving their tin hats at the camera.

  I wrote no script or outline for Aftermath of Battle, but I had as clear a conception of its form as if it were all neatly plotted and laid out before me on paper. My next problem was how to ensure it was edited in the way I desired. I asked Faithfull how to resolve this problem.

  “You’ve got this little chap back in Islington or Clerkenwell, see, editing miles of newsreel a week, bored stiff, mind on the pint of ale he’s going to have at lunchtime, but he’s got to stick all this stuff together. He’d be delighted if you’d help him out. Write it all down for him—words of one syllable, mind—and make sure you’ve numbered your reels properly. Does it need captions?”

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  “No captions?” He frowned at me. “Even simpler.… What are you up to, Todd?”

  “Oh, just ‘behind the lines’ stuff.”

  “I see.… Mmmm. Well, I’m going to put on a cigarette, I think. What about you? Chuck the tin over, Baby, there’s a good fellow.”

  Two interesting encounters occurred while I was filming Aftermath. First of all I met Teague again in the base hospital at St.-Omer. I had set up my camera in a moribund ward and shot my film. Then it suddenly struck me that Dagmar might conceivably be working in the place and I went in search of a matron to find out. I found her in another ward full of heavily bandaged men—burn cases. She informed me that she knew of no Dagmar Fjermeros on the nursing staff, and as I turned to go I heard a voice from one of the beds.

  “Hodd! Hodd!” it sounded like.

  The top half of Teague’s head was covered in a moist gauze bandage, thick with ointment, from which one wet, red eye peered. In place of his top lip there was a cotton-wool moustache soaked in some camphor-smelling lotion. I felt my own head begin to ache in sympathy. Both his legs ended at the knee, the blanket tented by a basketwork support. We shook hands gently, left-handed—his right was bandaged, a round white fist.

  I had never really liked Teague, but now I felt genuinely glad to see him. After all, we had shared most of that ghastly day. We talked of this and that—I explained my new job and uniform. As I looked at him, shattered and wasted, I sensed a sort of tickle in my brain, irresistible, like a cerebral sneeze forming.

  I tried to resist it. “I reported those swine in the tank, you know, but I’m not sure if anything happened.” I paused. “How are you, all things considered?”

  “All right, I suppose. Going to look a bit peculiar, though. Not much left to work with. At least I’ve got an eye.”

  I had to ask. “How do you feel about it all—now?”

  “Wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”

  “Seriously?” The skepticism in my voice made it go up a register. “Sorry,” I added. “It’s just I never expected you to say that.”

  “It’s a risk you take and a price you have to pay. At least I’m still alive.”

  I don’t believe you, I said to myself. But I suppose you have to try and think like that. If you thought anything else, you’d go mad. Look at Kite, I thought; he cracked up and he only lost a hand. I’d be like that, like Kite, bitter and angry, full of resentment …

  I filmed Teague later. I thought it might cheer him up. We had him being pushed in a wheelchair towards a camera down the length of a long airless corridor, passing through shafts of autumn sunlight.

  The second meeting was less eventful, but curiously more significant for me. The officer whom I had filmed writing letters to next of kin was in fact Captain Tuck. The 13th had been re-formed, rumors of a transfer to the Italian Front had proved ungrounded and the battalion was back in its usual role of furnishing working parties for the artillery. There were very few faces I recognized.

  After Tuck had obliged me with a few scribbles and a suitably somber face—he needed no persuading; the Aeroscope was an infallible seductress—he walked me back to my motorcar.

  “Half a mo,” he said. “There’s someone you should meet before you’re off.”

  He led me round behind a cowshed to where the field kitchens were situated. On the ground, gnawing a bone, was Ralph, the dog. He got slowly to his feet and wandered over to Tuck. He was hugely fat.

  “Quartermaster spoils him rather.”

  I clicked my fingers. “Here, Ralph. Here, boy.”

  The dog did not budge. He looked at me, yawned and licked his chops.

  “Doesn’t remember you,” Tuck said. “Strange.”

  I felt my heart thump with joy and relief. “It always was a rather stupid animal,” I said, and walked elatedly back to my motor. I never saw Ralph again.

  “They’ve censored it,” Donald Verulam said. He looked serious.

  ‘What?’

  “Aftermath of Battle.”

  “No! Damn.… Which bits?”

  “The entire film. The whole thing. The chief censor is furious. You’re lucky you’re not cashiered. I had to tell him it was some sort of ghastly blunder. Fragments inadvertantly edited together. It won’t really wash. He wasn’t convinced.”

  I swallowed. “Where is it?”

  “I’ve got it back.”

  “Thank God!” I paused. “What do you think about it?”

  He looked at me and gave a thin smile.

  “Well … it’s strong stuff. A bit grim and morbid for my taste. But I’m sure we can use bits of it. The early sections are good. We could cut them into Faithfull’s film.” He looked at me. “I wish you’d told me you were doing this, Johnny.”

  “What’s Faithfull’s film?”

  “It’s called Ypres, or possibly Wipers. We need another battle film like Messines. Another Harold Faithfull battle film. Not yours.”

  I thought quickly. “Donald, will you give the film back to me? I’ll tinker with it. Film some more scenes. Change its tone.”

  We argued for a while but I knew he would give in eventually. I saw a miraculous opportunity ahead of me. The decision of the chief censor was a minor impediment. What I would do next would force him to change his mind.

  I retrieved Aftermath and ran it privately for myself several times when Faithfull and Nelson were away. As I plotted what to do next I saw that the merits of the film were clear: this was true; this was what really happened after a battle. Whatever I did next, I should not forget that fact. Unconsciously I was formulating a credo that would inform all my work. The truth was what mattered, unflinching verisimilitude. This was what made my film so different from all the others and this was what had to apply in the future.

  One morning in the farmhouse, Nelson and I were breakfasting when an orderly runner arrived with instructions from Donald that I take some extra reels of film to Faithfull as quickly as possible.

  “You take them to him,” I said to Nelson. “I don’t know where he is.”

  “No can do, old chap. I’ve got Marshal Foch handing out medals at noon. I can’t go all the way to Étaples.”

  “Étaples? What’s he doing there?”

  “Making his film.”

  With bad grace I motored off to Étaples. I arrived there about eleven o’clock. Ahead of me lay the town and, from the crest of this hill, a distant gray glimpse of the Channel. Nelson’s directions led me to a camp—a vast trampled field enclosed by a wire perimeter fence. Inside were row upon row of tents and a dusty parade ground upon which squads of men were being drilled.

  I had no difficulty finding Faithf
ull—everyone seemed to know of the film—and I was directed along a track leading towards the rifle butts. As I approached I could hear the noise of firing and other explosions. I stopped the motor and, lugging my reels of film in a couple of sandbags, went in search of the famous cameraman.

  As I arrived everything went quiet. I passed two companies of men, standing easy. Ahead of me were gentle grassy hills and a hundred-yard section of immaculate trench—revetted, zigzagged, with precisely angled firebays, clean sandbags and taut wire in front. It reminded me strongly of Nieuport.

  Faithfull was in the trench, camera pointed at a platoon of men with fixed bayonets.

  “Ah, Todd, thank God you’ve come. I’m down to my last two reels.” He introduced me to a couple of beaming officers, then ran about conferring with various men and checking details in his notebook.

  “What’s going on?” I said.

  “This is the rifle brigade attacking Glencorse Wood in August … something like that,” Faithfull said. He turned. “Captain Frearson? Smoke now, please.” He crouched behind his camera. “Remember your numbers, you men! Ready when you are, Lieutenant Hobday.… Smoke, Captain Frearson.”

  Faithfull started turning the handle of his Aeroscope. A small smoke canister was lit and white smoke began to drift over the top of the trench. Lieutenant Hobday stepped forward and blew his whistle—“Don’t look at the camera, Hobday!”—and the platoon went smartly up the trench ladders.

  “One! Two!” Faithfull shouted. Two men flung up their arms and fell back. Hobday stood on the parapet, revolver drawn, and waved his men over the top.

  “Three!” Faithfull yelled. “Three! Damn you!” Number three buckled and fell.

  “Don’t move!” Faithfull bawled. “Absolutely still!” The dead men remained immobile while the rest of the platoon deployed and advanced in extended order through the uncoiling smoke, rifles waist high.

  I stayed on long enough to see Faithfull mount the “attack of the second wave.” Here he used his two companies of men, much more smoke and plenty of explosive charges. I had to concede that the battle was efficiently stage-managed. My most grudging admiration was reserved for his final ploy, when two men held up a tangle of barbed wire in front of his camera as he filmed the backs of the advancing men. I had covertly read How I Film War and Battle and could imagine Faithfull’s caption to the scene: “From a shell hole in no-man’s-land I film the second wave attacking Glencorse Wood under heavy fire.”

  By this time I had removed myself some distance away. At first I felt a hot, angry incredulity at Faithfull’s reconstruction and—I can think of no other way of expressing it—a sense of moral and aesthetic outrage. I knew how soon Faithfull’s simple, tidy version of the attack on Glencorse Wood would come to stand for the enormous chaotic horror of the real thing. It was not so much the gap between the film and the reality that offended me as the shock I felt when I saw how easy it was to falsify the truth. Only people who had actually fought in the trenches would recognize the grotesque fallacy of what Faithfull was producing—a tiny minority, whose protesting voices, in time, would dwindle and fade. But seeing Faithfull at work on Wipers, observing both the scale of the enterprise and its blatant factitiousness, had shown me what to do with Aftermath. The WOCC needed a battle film—well, they should have mine, and it would expose Faithfull and his film for the tawdry impostures that they were.

  As it now stood, Aftermath of Battle was twenty-two minutes long. What I now planned to do was film an actual battle sequence of ten or fifteen minutes’ duration that would act as a sort of prologue. It would not only alter the tone of the existing sequences, it would justify them. I could not be accused of “morbidity” in Aftermath if I had shown in all its raw potency just what had gone before.

  It meant too, I realized, a return to the front line, but now, for some reason, I seemed to have lost all my fear and apprehension at this prospect. I became wholly absorbed in the task in hand. I was going to film battle sequences that would make Wipers look like a stroll in the park.

  And for this to happen I required above all more mobility. I wanted battle sequences unlike anything else that had appeared in WOCC newsreels. In a field near the farm I practiced filming with the Aeroscope balanced on my shoulder. I ran, cranking the handle as best I could from side to side. A tin of these experiments was returned to me marked “defective,” as indeed they were. I could not turn the handle at the requisite speed to ensure proper exposure. I would be obliged to use the camera from a static base. *

  I made my plans carefully over a period of two weeks. I was still supplying film for the WOCC, but I cannot recall what I shot at the time—it is of no interest, in any event (though sometimes in old newsreels I experience a spasm of recognition when I see, say, an ammunition limber stuck in the mud, or a line of gassed men at a clearing station). All my attention was now focused on my battle film.

  I was still misleading Donald, I am sorry to say. I told him I had broken my tripod and I needed another. Duly provided with one, I cut its legs down to a length of eighteen inches. This way I could attach the Aeroscope to the tripod and carry them both together (they were heavy but manageable), and thus set them down and instantly begin filming from the necessary fixed and static base. The angle of all shots would be low, but this disadvantage would be outweighed by the stunning immediacy of the action.

  The next task was to find a unit that would let me go forward with the advancing troops into no-man’s-land. This had never been allowed—or suggested—before. Faithfull boasted that scenes in The Battle of Messines had been filmed from shell holes in front of our line, but this was a lie. His barbed wire trick more than confirmed this.

  After some thought I attached myself to an Australian battalion. They were in reserve at Reningelst, relatively fresh and expecting to be sent forward at any time. It was the beginning of October and the final assaults on the ruined villages of Poelkapelle and Passchendaele were imminent. (I had no idea of this at the time. My impression of the Third Battle of Ypres was extremely shadowy. It seemed merely that the fighting and shelling had been going on, with a few pauses and lulls for weeks and weeks. It was true to say that at any given moment somewhere in the Salient somebody was under fire.)

  I picked the Australians because their discipline was lax and easygoing. They did not salute their officers and on several occasions I had heard enlisted men swear openly and vilely at officers in English regiments. To ingratiate myself, I filmed them for a few days at their usual rest-area chores and diversions and got to know their officers, particularly a young company commander called Colenso—a decent man, small-faced but with strangely large nostrils, which gave him a look of always being about to laugh or sneeze. The weather at the time was miserably cold and wet, with driving rain and gusting winds. At the correct moment I asked the adjutant if I could accompany them to the front when the order came. He was delighted.

  On the tenth or eleventh of October I was informed that the Australians had gone up the line to relieve a battalion of the East Lancs on the Bellevue Ridge. Directions were provided and I went up to join them at dusk that night.

  I remember my emotions on my return to the front with vivid clarity. I drove into Ypres and parked my motor in the lee of a ruined church, close to the transport lines of a Service Corps unit. Then I walked, carrying my Aeroscope on its short tripod, up the Ypres-Zonnebecke road. The light was fading and with the onset of darkness the traffic on the road increased. There was no sunset worth talking about. I walked east with an unwholesome sallow glow at my back. Apart from my camera, I was lightly burdened. I had a small haversack containing four rolls of film, a pack of fish paste sandwiches, two bars of chocolate, some malted milk tablets and two hundred Three Castles cigarettes—about a couple of days’ supply for me then. I had a gas respirator in a leather case and a water bottle containing three parts Scotch whisky to one part water. I wore my double-breasted greatcoat and had exchanged my lace-up boots for a pair of thigh-length rubber w
aders. I had gloves, a scarf and a tin helmet.

  In that sulfurous light, the Ypres-Zonnebecke road looked a drab and dismal place. On either side were gun batteries, with their usual litter scattered about. Here and there were supply dumps, here and there apprehensive groups of men lying on bivouac sheets waiting for orders. From time to time an exploratory shell would come over from the German lines and throw up a shower of mud. I walked on, past the occasional shattered bole of a tree. Thankfully, it was too gloomy to see much of the corpses. They were in the process of becoming part of the ground and had a vegetable or tuberous look to them, some fungoid growth or boletaceous excrescence. White tapes marked where the road had once been. It was muddy—say three inches deep—but beneath it one had a firm footing.

  At Zonnebecke, captured a few days previously, I left the road at what I took to be the correct point and followed a winding duckboard path through the flattened rubble of ruined houses, and then across what had once been fields. (What was it like? You know those corners of farmyards, or gateways to fields, where farm vehicles or herds of cattle have passed endlessly? It was like that, for mile after mile, with here and there the glimmer of water in the deep pools of the shell craters.) Ration parties were beginning to move now that it was safer, and relief troops were being brought up as replacements. Squally showers of rain bothered us as we picked our way through the dark.

  By a fritter of bricks I came across a large taped area that had been a jumping-off point two days earlier. I was on the right track. To the left was the shape of an old German blockhouse. It was unusual to see something solid and hard amidst so much soft organic fluidity. This was the Australians’ battalion HQ.

  I stayed there, getting a little sleep, until a runner took me up to the front line at four in the morning. There were no trenches. The Australians occupied a linked sequence of shell-hole rims and spade scrapes lined with a few sodden sandbags. I found Lieutenant Colenso and his company and explained my plan.