The New Confessions

by William Boyd

  The barrage began at five-fifteen. I slithered out of my shell hole and crawled some twenty or thirty yards ahead into no-man’s-land with the Aeroscope strapped to my back. My ears were stuffed with cotton wool. The noise of the shells bursting on the obliterated village somewhere in front of me was reduced to a dull manic roar. I moved with pedantic slowness in almost total gloom, feeling ahead of me with my fingers gauging the texture of the mud. After about twenty minutes I found a suitable hole, crawled carefully into it, found that the water in its base was only a foot deep and set up my camera—pointing back at our line.

  At six o’clock, in a tarnished silver light, through the clamor of the barrage I heard the whistles blow and started filming. Through the lens I saw the men of Lieutenant Colenso’s company get to their feet with a geriatric sloth and squelch through the mud towards me. No one attempted the impossible task of running. Machine-gun fire from the German strongpoints in the village began and a few men fell over. They did not collapse histrionically like the men in Faithfull’s film. Most stopped abruptly, sank slowly to their knees and fell forward, dead, their heads resting on the ground like Muhammadans at prayer. The semblance of a line broke and people started slogging forward independently as best they could from cover to cover. A dozen men splashed my hole. I picked up the Aeroscope and waded across the crater to the opposite lip. Here my truncated tripod served its purpose perfectly. Normally it takes five minutes to dismantle and set up, but now I was filming again within seconds. Turning the handle I peered through the lens at the dark soldiers stumbling forward. I panoramed slowly right to left, left to right. Little men moving with almost drugged slowness, some upright, some crouched, some dropping down. An irregular flattish skyline, some puffs of white smoke. Here was battle. It was the best and most authentic battle sequence filmed in the entire First World War—search your archives for something superior; it was inglorious, entirely chaotic and, if it had not been true, incomprehensibly and indisputably dull.

  Shortly after that I stopped filming. The handle of my Aeroscope was knocked off by a shell fragment. I received a second injury to add to that of Somerville-Start’s tooth—a deep gash on the side of my hand. I wrapped a handkerchief round it and lugged the camera back to the line. But for this damage I would have filmed the second wave going over. As it was I made my way back to the battalion HQ blockhouse, caught my breath, drank some whiskey, smoked half a dozen cigarettes and generally composed myself before attempting the risky journey back to Ypres.

  I sent the new footage and the twenty-two minutes of Aftermath back to the Topical Film lab in Camden Town with precise instructions on how they were to be cut together. I told Donald that I had made significant alterations to the film and predicted that as it now stood there could be no possible objection from the chief censor.

  Ten days later, one evening, I came back to the farmhouse to find Donald waiting for me.

  “Is it back?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well? What d’you think?”

  “I think it’s splendid. Extraordinary piece of work.”

  I felt pleasure drain through me.

  “I’ve been ordered to destroy it.”

  His face was taut, somehow both sad and stern. He spent a long time filling his pipe. Then he told me the rest of the news. Only with the greatest of difficulty had he been able to prevent me from being sent back to the 13th. He had pleaded my youth and implied that I had been embittered by my own experiences of battle in the Salient, and that for me the film was a kind of expiation. Eventually, the chief censor had yielded somewhat. However, my pass was withdrawn. I was not to be allowed within one mile of the front line. All filming was to be vetted and supervised by Donald and must be strictly noncontroversial. Any more “seditious” film (the censor’s word) and I would be court-martialed and disciplined.

  “So what do I do?” I asked, bitterly. “Great British Regiments?”

  “Out of the question. I can offer you the Army Veterinary Corps, or a balloon unit of the Signals regiment.”

  Animals or balloons? I chose balloons.

  Then I apologized sincerely to Donald. He accepted it and warned me that one more error would be impossible for him to cover up.

  “By the way,” he shouted as he drove out of the courtyard, “I’ve left something in the back of your motor.”

  I walked over and looked in the boot. A sandbag filled with a cylindrical object. I looked—six silver film canisters. I felt my heart suddenly open to Donald, like a book. There was one copy of Aftermath of Battle extant in the world after all.

  Faithfull and Nelson had learned of my misdemeanor and that the censor’s office at GHQ regarded me as highly suspect. Their manner towards me grew distinctly cooler, Faithfull’s in particular. I think he sensed I had been trying to outdo his Wipers film. I was suspicious of his motives now, and hid the canisters of Aftermath separately about my kit.

  On the tenth of November, Passchendaele Ridge was finally captured and the Third Battle of Ypres was officially over, 156 days after it had begun with Faithfull’s mines (as I always thought of them) erupting under Messines Ridge, back in early summer.

  I was, as ever, unaware of this a few days later as I stood in a sodden field behind Ypres watching the observers unroll and inflate their silvered canvas balloon. I did not resent my new assignment as much as I had anticipated. My balloon film Eyes in the Sky was almost complete. I filmed the balloon inflating, watching the bloated fish shape emerge and, with a billowy stirring, rise to the extent of its fore and aft tethers, until the roomy wicker basket slung beneath it just cleared the ground. The observers donned their parachutes and binoculars, connected their telephone lines and climbed in. With surprising speed the balloon rose up in the air to a height of round about a thousand feet.

  I had everything I needed. I sat and drank tea with the winch operators, huddling in the lee of the lorry, sheltering from a keen wind that was blowing from the west. Our balloon was spotting for a sixteen-gun brigade of six-inch howitzers a quarter of a mile away in a ruined village. Every ten minutes or so we could hear the loud, drawn-out rip of the cannonade.

  After a while the guns stopped firing and the balloon was winched down. We brewed up and had a surprisingly tasty lunch of corned beef fritters and MacConnachie stew, cooked over a Primus stove. We sat and chatted, glancing from time to time at the balloon as it twitched and shrugged at its moorings.

  I do not know what prompted me, but suddenly I asked, “Do you think I could pop up for five minutes with my camera? Not too high—just to get an artillery observer’s view of the world.”

  This was applauded as a marvelous notion by the observers. In truth, I was not thinking of Eyes in the Sky. I knew that here I would have my perfect opening shot for Aftermath of Battle.

  I climbed into the creaking wicker basket and set up the Aeroscope on its tripod, which was lashed to the side. The simple operation of the field telephone was explained. I was offered a parachute and declined. I assured them I had no intention of jumping out. Soon all was ready. The mooring ropes were slipped and the balloon rose slowly up into the air.

  For the first hundred feet or so I felt sensations of alarm, giddiness and faint nausea. I looked at the shrinking field where I had had my lunch, down the vertiginous arc of the balloon cable, watching the lorry, the crew, my motorcar diminish in size. Over to the left was the battery surrounded by its usual mess. So this is what a bird sees, I thought naively, as the countryside was revealed to me like a map. The roads, the farms, the dumps, the billets, the motor pools and transport lines, the fields and copses … From the air everything looked neater, had a context revealed that a ground view denied one. That bend in the road suddenly had a purpose—to avoid a stream. The jumble of shattered houses revealed the grid of streets and alleyways upon which they had been built. That distant straggle of trees edged a canal.… The banality of these observations only strikes the modern eye. This was the first time I could look down on the world f
rom above. For me it was a kind of revelation, and never more so than when the front came into view.

  At first glance it was like a vast path, stamped across Europe. I imagined a six-hundred-mile thoroughfare for giants trudging from the Alps to the North Sea. On either side, drab green wintry landscape bisected by this brown swathe stretched back into the haze of distance. I was astonished at just how localized it was. In the Salient the whole universe seemed brown and mired. Up here you realized just how thin that mud world was.

  The green countryside browned gradually. There was a kind of bruised and trampled verge before the vermiculated lines of the old trench systems appeared—bay and traverse, bay and traverse—and beyond them the erratic spoor of duckboard and fascine tracks across the mud, the pools in the craters flat and opaque like pennies. From this range I could not see any men, but I knew they were down there, in their hundreds of thousands, hiding. It seemed like such a miserable attenuated strip of land to be fighting over, to have fought over for three years.… A smear across the countryside. A giant snail, leaving its slime track across Europe. A messy point of impact between two colliding forces.

  Different horizons, I thought cranking the handle of the Aeroscope, different perspectives. I felt a curious privilege about having been allowed to witness both: exalted and abased. I swung my camera along the enormous furrow. What an opening shot, I thought; what a vision for my film. The godlike view. And then the scrabbling, squabbling mortals in the mud pools.

  I heard a strange noise, like pam pam pamperipam pam. I looked round. A small airplane was flying towards me through a cloud of black dust smudges. What happened next is hard to reconstruct. I retain certain distinct images. First, the airplane seemed to be flying so slowly. A puff of black dust would from time to time knock it comically off course. I felt a tug as the winch began to haul the balloon down. Then I remember an almost human gasp coming from the balloon itself. The field telephone started buzzing, and as I reached automatically, chunks of wicker basket seemed to explode in the air around me. Then a great lurch, a tumbling in the pit of my stomach as the balloon and its basket soared up and away suddenly free. I hung on tenaciously as we swayed wildly to and fro. I caught a mad glimpse of Ypres turned on its side and then I was in the clouds—gray, damp, enfolding.

  The clouds saved me, I suppose, and the fact that the wire cable had been fortuitously severed by a bullet or bullets from the airplane’s guns. I floated in those clouds for three or four minutes, I would guess. When I descended from them I was above placid green countryside. Then I remembered the keen west wind and, with a jolting heart, looked about me. Behind, retreating, was the brown stripe of the Western Front. Below was occupied Belgium.

  VILLA LUXE, June 10, 1972

  Emilia brings me my salad. How old is she? I wonder. She’s worked for me for two years now. Her predecessor was an ancient crone who was eventually done for by sheer decrepitude. Emilia has five children and eleven grandchildren. Her youngest child is twenty-four, and yet she doesn’t look much more than fifty. It’s quite possible; girls often are married and bearing children at sixteen on this island.…

  Emilia has thick, curly chestnut hair shot with gray. She has a dark, strong and well-proportioned face and a lot of gold in her teeth. She exudes a mild but freshly acidic body odor. She is broad-hipped and agile. Drives her little motorbike with élan. Covertly, as she places the salad before me, I examine the loose pale green folds of her faded green dress and try to estimate the size of her breasts.…

  Why am I doing this? What’s happening to me? For two years we have been fixed in an ideal, polite, respectful employer-employee relationship. I ruminate on a lettuce leaf. It was my spying on Ulrike that did it. And my dormant vanity was flattered by the obvious way the twins sought me out in the bar.

  I watch Emilia saunter back to the kitchen. Heaven help me but I have a sudden powerful desire to spank her naked buttocks. Not hard, just in fun.… I have an image of Emilia across my lap. Those big pale buttocks, that deep dark cleft. Lots of joyous laughter.

  This is quite bizarre! I have never had this fantasy before. What’s going on? But, I remember. That isn’t true. I have had these desires. In 1929, with … I can’t believe it. Good God, these things never leave you. After all these years, who would have thought it?

  I get up and wander round, a palpable old man’s erection beneath my trousers. How am I ever going to see her naked?

  Off the kitchen there is a room where Emilia keeps the ironing board, brushes and the various tools and cleaning materials she requires for the housework. There is also a small WC for her personal use.

  When she leaves, I go and investigate. There is a window, bolted and shuttered. If I drilled a tiny hole through the frame at the precise angle, I might just be able to see her as she raises her skirts to sit on the pan.

  Five minutes’ search of the villa’s cupboards reveals a perfectly servicible hand-powered drill.

  * Note for film historians: I want to record this as the first use of a hand-held camera for deliberate dramatic effect.

  6

  The Confessions

  I seemed fated to get tunes stuck in my head for days, weeks even. For five days I heard nothing but “If You Were the Only Girl in the World.” On and on, on and on. I tried to forget it, but that lilting melody would not leave me. It made my solitary confinement worse—perhaps this is one of the secret punishments of solitary? It was a sign too of just how impoverished my world was. I had heard a guard whistling it—a new guard, I suppose; none of the old ones made a sound—and since then it had played on in my echoing skull, an interminable Gramophone record.

  I turned to my only distraction. I pulled the chair over to the window, stood on it and looked out. The top two lights were plain glass, not frosted like the others. The view: a patch of longish grass leading to a steep ravine at whose bottom the river Lahn flowed. Beyond the ravine were the beech- and elm-wooded hills of the Taunus Forest. To the right, the palisaded square of the exercise yard where the “solitary” prisoners were permitted to exercise, and beyond that the dull square buildings of the veterinary science college where 150 Russian, 20 French and 4 Belgian officers were held prisoner. The four Belgians were all retired generals who had been captured when the Germans took Brussels. They had had no time to change after their arrest and had never been issued with uniforms; consequently they still wore their civilian clothes—three in tweed suits, one in gray worsted.

  The solitary cells were above the college’s gymnasium. The gym was not used by the prisoners but sometimes the guards played volleyball there, and I would hear the thumps of the ball and the shouts of encouragement rise up through the floorboards of my bare room. I had been kept here in the solitary cells for over two months. I was the only prisoner.

  As far as cells went, my room was not too uncomfortable. A pine table, a crude wooden chair that looked as though it belonged in a van Gogh painting, a bed with a thin straw-and-woodshaving mattress, two gray blankets and a white enamel chamber pot with an unmatching powder-blue lid. There were bare floorboards and whitewashed walls. It was cold.

  My routine was invariable. I slept, if I could, until eight, when I was roused by a guard with my breakfast of watery coffee and two slices of hard brown bread. At nine I was taken to a small washroom where I shaved and emptied my slops. From ten to eleven o’clock I was outside in the palisaded yard, weather permitting, where I could do whatever exercise I saw fit. Midday was lunch—soup and a plate of vegetables. Three P.M.—more coffee and bread. Four to five—exercise yard. Six o’clock—slop emptying. Eight o’clock—dinner: soup and a plate of vegetables, sometimes augmented by salted fish or sauerkraut. Every two weeks I was given a brown paper cone of sugar.

  I was not especially hungry and my day was one of constant interruption. I was not denied human company. The guards in the gymnasium were possibly as bored as their single prisoner. I spoke no German and we exchanged sign language or hopeful monosyllables. I am happy wi
th my own company and the first week passed without undue strain. Into the second month, though, and the regime was proving more onerous. Nothing changed, and it was precisely this that began to worry me. Perhaps if conditions had worsened or improved I might not have begun to question them, but after forty days I became convinced that I had been forgotten. And this new worry suddenly made my reduced condition intolerable. I needed a sense of my incarceration being finite. (I think we all need the finite—limits of some kind; it is locked into our human natures. We need to know that things will end.) Two months of this bland solitary confinement gave me an unwelcome hint of what eternity was like. Soon the only way I could distinguish one day from the other was by the kind of soup I was served. At least it always changed. Barley soup, cabbage soup, peawater soup, something called mango soup, oil cake soup, fish soup, rice soup, macaroni soup, turnip soup … I began to think of the passage of time in terms of cabbage or peawater days. Had I not suffered a morning twinge of toothache last fish soup day? The weather on rice soup day had been unusually mild. Two turnip days ago I had had diarrhea … and so on. As I shaved each morning I looked at my face and saw chronological time reckoned by the rate of my hair growth. On capture I had been showered and deloused, my clothes fumigated—quite unnecessary—and had had my head shaved. In those days my hair grew at a rate of two inches a month. After eight weeks I was tucking it behind my ears like an artist. As a matter of personal record, my hair has never ever been as long as it was in those months of captivity in 1917–18. I shaved off my moustache too.

  After two months of this unrelenting routine I was beginning to fall apart. My mind was occupied by four things. One: “If You Were the Only Girl in the World.” Two: the near-hysterical fear that my “case” had been forgotten. Three: a frenzied craving for a cigarette. And four: an overwhelming desire for mental diversion—anything, something to occupy me other than those three obsessions listed above. All my thoughts were quite overused by now—limp, soft and transparent like an overlaundered shirt. I wanted new thoughts, new stimulation. I wanted something to read. I suppose pencil and paper, a source of music, lively conversation would have been equally welcome, but in my desperation I saw my salvation in a book. Any book. I wanted to be entertained, beguiled, but above all to commune with another mind, another imagination, than my own. I had stopped dreaming; I had stopped masturbating. I was empty, a husk. I required a little fertilization. A drop of fuel to start the machine running again.