by Dan Simmons
What fascinated me were his teeth. The lips themselves may once have been full, even sensuous, but a day or more in the July sun had withered these and pulled them away from the teeth and gums so that even in the dim light I could see the bulging expanse of white and pink. The teeth were too perfect and protruded as if my friend were trying to spit out some final discharge, even if only an epithet at the injustice of his own banal death here.
As I sat staring, accustomizing myself to his presence there and my own presence here—here in the theatre of almost certain death where pieces of sharp metal come flying at one’s eyes faster than one can perceive or dodge—I realized that those teeth, that jaw, were moving.
At first I thought it a trick of the flickering light, for although the shelling had subsided somewhat, more flares were drifting down as both the Boche and British lines anticipated the pre-dawn patrols through No Man’s Land.
It was not the light. I leaned forward, thrusting my own face within a yard of my friend’s.
The jaw was moving. I could hear it as dried and withered tendons stretched and popped.
The great white teeth—dentures, I realized now, for although the face was young, the teeth were certainly artificial—began to part. The entire face began to squirm, as if my friend were attempting to separate himself from the muddy trench wall and lean forward to join me in an open-mouthed kiss at the center of the pit.
I could not move. I could not breathe, even as the white teeth opened further and a great hiss of escaping gas billowed out and over me, bringing a stench of internal corruption worse than mustard gas or phosgene. The jaws worked. The throat writhed as if my dead friend were struggling against all the bonds of Hades to make one final utterance, perhaps to impart one final warning.
Then the dentures fell out, tumbling and chattering across the sunken, muddy chest, the throat and jaw writhed a final time, the mouth opened wide into a purely black, hissing oval, then stretched further into some obscene simulacrum of birth…and then an oily black rat—huge, its sleek body as long as a weasel’s, its eyes black and arrogant—forced its way out between withered lips and rotting gums.
I did not move as the rat scuttled over me in its slow escape. It was well fed and in no hurry.
I did not move for some time after the rat had gone, but sat staring at my friend’s chest and belly and wondering if I perceived other movement there.
I—my kind, my comrades and I—had brought about this young man’s terrible pregnancy.
Who, I wondered, will bring this gift to me?
I did not move until the sun was well and truly up and three men from B Company, 13th Platoon, found me while foraging for souvenirs. This trench was not a true connecting trench at all, only a fortified extension of a sunken road the Germans had defended. It was beyond our lines, but well back from the new German position and somewhat shielded by a low ridge. The boys from B Company led me back.
I returned to the Battalion H.Q., made sure that the men of my company had been billeted in their rough dugouts, and then absently joined two men from my brigade, a certain Rifleman Monckton and Corporal Hoyles, as they brewed their morning tea.
A few minutes ago, just as I finished the first part of this entry, the Colonel came along with an officer from Staff. The Staff Captain climbed onto the firestep, peered oh-so-cautiously above the parapet toward the old No Man’s Land where my men had been retrieving bodies from the wire all night, spied the hundreds of sun-blackened British corpses still lying about, and said to Colonel Pretor-Pinney, “Good God, I didn’t know we were using Colonial troops!”
The Colonel said nothing. Eventually they left. “Dear God,”
Monckton muttered to the Corporal near him, “hasn’t that bastard ever seen a dead man before?”
I moved away from the enlisted men before duty required me to officially overhear and reprimand them. I began laughing then. I was able to stop only seconds ago. My tears of laughter have smudged some of the lines on this page.
It is just 9 A.M. So begins our first day on the line.
Sunday, 9 July—
Have not slept since Thursday. The Captain says that the Rifle Brigade has been chosen to lead the way when we go over the top—probably tomorrow.
The Colonel came up to ask me about the Big Push of July the first. He had sent me up to visit my friend Siegfried {Ed. note—Siegfried Sassoon} in A Company and to watch the attack so that I could later describe it to him, the Colonel, but I wasn’t able to locate Siegfried or Robert {Ed. note—Graves perhaps? James Edwin Rooke had known both of these poets before the war}. I did run across another friend, Edmund Dadd, and he allowed me to watch with the other officers from their position in reserve. Dadd and his fellows in the Royal Welch Fusiliers had a brilliant view of the 21st Division advance and the Manchester Pals attack.
Colonel Pretor-Pinney came by today in the early afternoon, peered up at the mirror above our parapet—vibrating now as the enemy was dropping 5.9s near us—and said, “Well Jimmy. What did you see last week?”
In the past week I had grown confident that the Old Man would never ask. Now, with our own Big Push less than twenty hours away, I could see that he needed to know. “Where do you want me to start, Sir?” I asked.
The Colonel offered me a cigarette from a gold case, tamped his against the case, lighted both of ours with his trench lighter, and said, “The barrage. Start with the barrage. I mean, we heard it in Albert, of course…” He trailed off. Our bombardment of German lines had gone on for seven days. It was said in the trenches that they had heard the guns in Blighty. Everyone from Sir Douglas {Ed. note—Sir Douglas Haig, Commander-in-Chief of British forces} on down had said that after such a bombardment, the Big Push would be a walkover. Most of the lads I’d known in the 34th had been worried that they wouldn’t get to the German trenches in time to find the best souvenirs.
“It was a sight to watch, Sir,” I said.
“Yes, yes, but the effect,” said the Colonel. His voice was still soft—I had rarely heard the Colonel raise his voice—but there was more emotion there than I had heard before. I watched him pick a shred of tobacco from his tongue while he composed himself. “What was the effect on the wire, Jimmy?”
“Negligible, Sir. The wire was uncut in most places. The Manchesters had to bunch up in the few places where there were holes in the German wire. Most of them fell then.”
The Colonel was nodding. He had heard the casualty reports during the past week. Forty thousand of our finest men had fallen before breakfast that day. “So the shelling had little effect on their wire?”
“Almost none, Sir.”
“How soon did the German snipers and machine guns open up?”
“Immediately, Sir. Men were hit as soon as they lifted their heads above the parapet of the New Trench.”
The Colonel continued nodding but I could see that the movement was automatic. He was thinking of something else. “And the men, Jimmy? How did the Manchesters comport themselves?”
“Brilliantly,” I said. It was both the absolute truth and the greatest lie I had ever told. The Manchesters had shown profound courage—walking upright into the machine-gun fire as if they were on dress parade. As if they were walking to the theatre. But is it brilliance when one advances like a lamb to slaughter? Our Battalion had buried thousands of these brilliant lads in the past twenty-four hours.
“Good,” said Colonel Pretor-Pinney, absently tapping my shoulder. “Good. I know our chaps will be equally splendid in the morning.”
It was the first confirmation I had heard that the Push was definitely set for tomorrow morning. I have always disliked Mondays.
After the Colonel had left, squelching down the line of trench, chatting up the lads along the firesteps as he went, I glanced down at my hand holding the burning cigarette. It was shaking as if palsied.
Monday, 10 July, 4.45 A.M.—
No sleep again tonight. I was tapped for a night patrol. Absolute waste of our time, three ho
urs of crawling around in No Man’s Land with ten of my men. All as terrified as I, only they were allowed to show it. No intelligence garnered. No prisoners gathered. But no casualties either. We were lucky to find our way back through the desolation.
The Night Patrol
{Ed. note—Several lines were crossed out here.}
…and everywhere the dead.
Only the dead were always present—present
As a vile sickly smell of rottenness;
The rustling stubble and the early grass,
The slimy pools—the dead men stank throughall,
Pungent and sharp; as bodies loomed before,
And as we passed they stank: then dulled away
To that vague foetor, all encompassing
Infecting earth and air.2
{Ed. note—A page has been roughly torn out here with only two words remaining on the serrated stub—“pure terror…” The verse on the next page appears to be a separate poem.}
We had no light to see by, save the flares.
On such a trail, so lit, for ninety yards
We crawled on belly and elbows, till we saw,
Instead of the lumpish dead before our eyes,
The stakes and crosslines of the German wire.
We lay in shelter of the last dead man,
Ourselves as dead, and heard their shovels ring
Turning the earth, then talk and cough at times.
A sentry fired and a machine gun spat;
They shot a flare above us, when it fell
And spluttered out in the pools of No Man’s Land,
We turned and crawled past the remembered dead:
Past him and him, and them and him…
And through the wire and home, and got our rum.3
Monday, 10 July, 8.05 A.M.—
A beautiful morning. I know I am to die and it seems a cruel irony to die on such a perfect day.
In the night, during the patrol, all was mud and slime and slither. Then a summer sunrise. A vapor is rising from the trenches and shell holes as the fierce summer sun strikes the pools of foetid water. Here in the forward trench, German corpses remain and I can see vapor streaming skyward from the sodden wool uniforms on several of the bodies. Like souls fleeing heavenward from…
…from Hell? It seems so banal to write that. It does not sound like Hell. I can hear a lark from the direction of la Boisselle.
Colonel Prector-Pinney and Captain Smith from D Company came by seconds ago and the Colonel said softly, “We go over at 8.45. Set your watches.”
I did so, removing my father’s silver watch and carefully setting it to match the Colonel’s and the Captain’s. It is 8.22. My father’s watch had read 8.18 when I had to reset it to 8.21. I lost three minutes of life merely by setting a watch.
A strange calmness has descended upon me.
Oddly, there has been no bombardment for the past hour or so. The silence is deafening. I had overheard Colonel Prector-Pinney tell Major Sir Foster Cunliffe that the bombardment had ended ten minutes early on July the first because of a mistaken communication to the artillery blokes. I wonder if a similar mistake has been made this morning.
From my position near the periscope—actually just a mirror set on a pole above the parapet—I can see a small wood a few hundred yards ahead of the trenches. To the right of the wood—largely splintered trunks, but a few whole trees remaining—lies another copse of shattered trunks and the remnants of the village of Contalmaison. Our chaps in the 23rd Division chased Jerry out of that village yesterday evening and now our Battalion is set to chase them out of their trenches. I wish we had learned more from the patrol last night.
The nearest Germans are only a 150 yards or so ahead of us. One could kick a football there. (My friend from the 2nd Welch Fusiliers, Eddie Dadd, told me that some of the chaps did kick a football ahead of them on the morning of the Big Push. It was a Pals Battalion of footballers and South African ruggers who’d joined up together. Eddie said that out of one 40-man platoon, only one man returned…)
8.30. Sergeants Laney on my left and Cross on my right are going up and down the lines, warning the men not to bunch up. “If you bunch up, they’ll pick you off like rabbits,” Sergeant Laney is saying. The words are oddly calming.
Of course they will pick us off like rabbits. I remember, as a child of about six, watching my father skin a rabbit. One incision and a tug and the fur slipped off like a guest shedding a coat, with only sticky strands of thin, gummy stuff connecting it to the pale, blue flesh.
8.32. What is a poet doing here? What are any of us doing here? I would say something inspiring to the men, but my mouth is so dry that I doubt if I could speak.
8.38. Hundreds of bayonets. They gleam in the bright sunlight. Sergeant Cross is snapping at the men to keep their bayonets below the line of the parapet. As if the Germans do not know we are coming. Where the goddamn hell is the bombardment the Colonel said they promised us?
8.40. I know what might save me. A litany of life. The things I love in ways that only a living person may love and a poet can articulate—
—white cups, clean-gleaming
—wet roofs beneath the lamp-light
—the strong crust of friendly bread and many-tasting food
—the comfortable smell of friendly fingers
—live hair that is shining and free
—the unpassioned beauty of a great machine
8.42. Jesus Christ, Oh Jesus. I do not love God but I love life. The cool kindliness of sheets. Radiant raindrops crouching in cool flowers. The rough kiss of clean blankets.4 Christ, to lose all this?
8.43. Women. I do love women. The clean-smell powder-and-talc scent of women. Their pale skin and pale pink nipples in candlelight. Their gentleness and firmness and the muskscent terrible wetness…
8.44. I will think of women. I will close my eyes and think of a litany of femaleness, scent and touch of life womanness. All things alive and vital in {Ed. note—This line unfinished.}
8.45. Whistles blowing down the line. I will try to blow mine. Sergeants pushing the men up and out. Other NCOs leading. Will follow in…{Ed. note—illegible}…not fair.
A litany of feminine life force. Muse protects.
Good-bye.
{Ed. note—It is well known that J.E.R.’s other trench diary ends here. Or, rather, with the following terse note.}
10-7-16, 8.15 A.M.—The Colonel passes among us a final time and I prepare my men to go over the top. Our big guns remain silent. Perhaps the Staff do not want to spoil the surprise we have in store for the Germans. I joked with Sergeant Cross that I hoped Jerry was cooking breakfast as I was ravished with hunger. Gave the chaps a good laugh.
{Ed. note—It might be noted that the poems seen here in rough form have often been misdated. “The Night Patrol” is often quoted as being the result of J.E.R.’s observation of a night patrol returning on 30 June while he was observing with the 2nd Welch Fusiliers. The bit of verse beginning “And clink of shovels…” is usually attributed to the previous Christmas when the 13th Rifle Brigade was comfortably billeted at Hannescamps and Lieutenant Rooke was assigned to his first burial detail. What has been described elsewhere as “…a brilliant young poet’s active imagination turned toward the perceived horrors of the Front” turns out to be simple reportage rather than poetic imagination.
Finally, the segment dealing with the actual experience of a night patrol—“We had no light to see by, save the flares.”—is not to be found in any edition of Trench Poems. It is obvious, to this bibliographer at least, that J.E.R. was working toward a longer, more definitive version of The Night Patrol and would have realized it had not circumstances intervened.}
Friday, 14 July—
The Lady is not with me tonight. She was here earlier, but the doctors made noise and she has not returned. I smell her scent.
Brickers, next to me, the one with half a face who has managed to moan every hour I have been conscious, died a few minutes ago. The ga
rgle and rattle were unmistakable.
The Lady was here then. She is not here now. I pray for her return.
Saturday, 15 July, 9.30 A.M.—
I am more cognizant of my whereabouts today. I recognize the pounding of guns. Sister Paul Marie, the nicer of the two nuns who nurse us, tells me that there is another Big Push under way. The thought makes my skin crawl.
I believe my Lady was here in the night—I remember her touch—but everything else from the past few days is a strange, pain-riddled blur. When I first became aware of myself and my surroundings yesterday, on my bedside table there were two items which I had brought back from No Man’s Land: my father’s watch, stopped now at 10.08, and the secret diary in which I had been scribbling just before we went Over the Top. It seems that I carried these two things in my hands during the attack. When I finally reached the dressing station some two days later, the watch was still firmly gripped in my left hand and the journal had somehow been transferred to the pocket of my blouse—almost the only bit of clothing on me that had not been shredded.
Let me describe my surroundings. I am in an RAMC forward hospital {Ed. note—Royal Army Medical Corps} just outside of Albert. Because this village is only two miles from the Front, this place is a kind of way stop between the crude dressing stations and field surgical hospitals closer to the Front and the true Base Hospitals much further back. (Many in England herself.) This “hospital” consists of three whitewashed rooms in what may have been part of the convent here. From my window I can see the Golden Virgin. {Ed. note—In the center of the village of Albert was a large church and on its spire was a gilded statue of the Virgin Mary holding the infant Jesus above her head. The statue was struck by a German shell in 1915 and had been leaning at right angles to the spire ever since. The journals of Sassoon, Graves, Masefield and a hundred lesser names mention marching to the Front under this bizarre landmark. A legend had grown up on both sides of the Front that if the Virgin fell, the war would end. German troops added the coda that if the statue did indeed fall, Germany would be the victor. French engineers then quickly secured the hanging Madonna and Infant with steel hawsers. It remained in that position until Germans re-occupied Albert in 1918 and began using the steeple as an observation post, at which time British gunfire brought down both steeple and Virgin.}
