Michael Dibdin - The Tryst

‘ “For some reason that conviction served only to increase my mortal terror of the place where I had witnessed these uncanny events. I took to my heels and ran back the way I had come as fast as I could, intending to raise the alarm. But once I was out of the wood and back in the civilized precincts of the Hall, I began to realize how incredible my story would sound. Of course, I was not to know that I had a witness in young Matthews. On the contrary, Maurice had impressed on me that he had told no one else about the woman. Surely if I were to offer such a tale, at five o’clock in the morning, as an explanation for a man’s violent death, I would come under the gravest suspicion myself. After some reflection, therefore, I determined to wait until it was light, then ride out to the house in the wood as if for exercise and report the discovery of Maurice’s body as though I had come upon it for the first time. It was not only to spare myself that I took this decision, but also to protect the Jeffries family from the pain and embarrassment of having to confront fully the fact that Maurice had done away with himself in a fit of madness. Perhaps I was wrong. Had I been sitting quietly in my study all evening, deliberating the issue judiciously, I might have acted otherwise. But after the horrific experience that I had just lived through, I was not quite myself. And all would have been well enough, except that when I returned to the clearing the next morning, Maurice’s body was not there.

‘ “I was absolutely astounded. I searched the house and the garden without finding anything. In the end I began to wonder if I could have imagined the whole thing. Had it been nothing but an unusually vivid dream brought on by my wakeful night and Maurice’s story? In any event, the arguments that had induced me to remain silent the night before now applied with redoubled force. In the absence of the corpse, I was left with nothing but a tissue of wild improbabilities which I had no hope of bringing anyone else to believe, since I could scarcely believe them myself. No doubt if hostilities had not broken out immediately afterwards, I would have told someone sooner or later. As it was, the matter rested there until I heard that Maurice’s body had been found. But I was still at a loss what to do until Private Matthews approached me this morning. Here was a witness who would support at least half my story. I resolved to risk the rest and break my silence.” ’

The old man broke off suddenly, his jaws working away as though he was chewing. His breath came in little puffs through his nose. It reminded Steve of the way the stotters acted when they overdid the glue, and it suddenly occurred to the boy how easy it would be for Matthews just to keel over and never get up again. It would seem natural. The stotters had to work hard to damage themselves that badly, but the old man was like a wasp in October: bumbling, vulnerable and doomed.

‘That was as much as I heard about the matter,’ Matthews went on at last, ‘for the next morning, just after dawn, the great attack began. It was a beautiful summer day. The sun was shining, and when our guns finally fell silent you could hear the birds singing. Then the officers blew their whistles and off we went. I wasn’t afraid. We’d been told that the enemy had all been killed by our bombardment. My chief concern was to act the part and not disgrace the uniform I had tricked my way into. I tried hard not to fall like a lot of the others. We were all carrying heavy packs and I supposed they must have lost their footing somehow, but I remember saying to myself, “Here I am, a mere boy, and if I can carry on then you should be able to!” Then I felt something pluck my arm. It might have been someone tugging at my sleeve to attract my attention, except there was no one near. The next moment I tripped over someone lying on the ground and fell headlong like the rest. When I started to get up, I saw to my surprise that there was no one left on his feet, although just a moment before there’d been hundreds and hundreds of us walking up the hillside. I thought that there might have been an order that I hadn’t heard. “Do what the others are doing” was the general rule of Army life, I’d learned, so I decided to stay where I was. My arm ached, and when I rubbed the place my hand came away all red and sticky, as if I’d been eating blackberries. I realized then that I’d been hit. It didn’t bother me much at the time. I’d seen worse at home, like that time the miller’s son got his leg caught under a millstone they were changing. What I didn’t understand, though, was where the bullet had come from, if the enemy were all dead. I thought perhaps I’d caught one of ours going the wrong way. I could hear all manner of yelps and groans around me, mixed in with the twittering of a lark overhead. I thought I could hear a woodpecker too, and that was strange, for there were no trees near.

‘The slope we were lying on, smooth and bare, reminded me of the hillside above the village. The sun grew hotter and hotter. I couldn’t understand why we had been ordered to lie down, and after a while I called to the man I’d tripped over and asked him what was going on. I got no answer, so I crawled over to him. The dust all around started kicking up, the way it does when the first big raindrops hit during a summer storm. That was another strange thing, for there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. When I got close enough, I saw why the man had taken no notice of me. Young as I was, I’d seen dead men before, and I knew he was dead. Then another man nearby started to lift himself up on his arms, making a kind of noise that made me look at him. I hailed him, but then the woodpecker sound started up again, and all of a sudden the man’s face just disappeared, the way your reflection does if you drop a stone in a pond. It was then that I finally twigged what had happened. The enemy hadn’t all been killed. They were sitting pretty in their trenches, and as we advanced they’d opened fire with machine-guns and cut us down. And the men lying on the ground around me weren’t obeying some orders I hadn’t heard. They were wounded or dying or dead.

‘By now the sun was scorching, and when I tried to reach the water bottle in my pack I got hit again. What was making the dust kick up, I learned, was bullets. The enemy had snipers on the lookout for any movement and one of them got me through the foot. After that I could do nothing but lie still, or as still as I could with the pain, pretending to be dead. Later on, great clouds of smoke came billowing across from our side, and I saw men running forward inside it. Another attack had started, and I hoped for a moment to be rescued. But straight away that damned tap-tap-tapping started up again, and when I looked again the men were gone. After that the enemy laid down a barrage into no-man’s-land, where I was. Shrapnel started flying all around, along with other things. I saw what I thought was a glove bounce on the ground just in front of me, and when I looked again I saw that it was a man’s hand cut off at the wrist. When it finally started to get dark, I set off to try and crawl back to our lines. At first I tried to avoid the bodies that were lying everywhere, but in the end I just dragged myself over them, planting my hands on their stomachs and my feet in their faces. They weren’t all dead, either. Many moaned and moved when I touched them, and one even begged me to shoot him, just like a child pleading for a sweet. It came on to rain, which made everything slimy and the going even more difficult. As day broke, I realized that I was still a long way from safety.

‘There was a large shell-hole nearby, so I crawled in there so as to be safe from the sniper fire. My water was all gone and I had a raging thirst, so I was glad to see that a puddle of rainwater had formed at the bottom of the hole. I was about to drink when I noticed what I thought for a moment was my own reflection looking back at me. It was a corpse. He must have crawled into the hole for shelter the previous day and then drowned when the rain came on. I sat there all that day, alone in the shell-hole, staring at that dead man guarding the water that he didn’t need and I couldn’t drink, and listening to the shells exploding all around. I asked myself why he had died and I was still alive. There seemed to be no reason to it. Every time a shell went off, the water rippled, blurring his features. I expected to be blown to shreds every moment, or cut apart by shrapnel. But it didn’t happen, and when night fell I tried once more to make my way back to our lines. By then I was almost mad with thirst, and I must have gone badly astray, for the next morning I found myself lying out in the open less than fifty yards from the enemy trenches. I could hear them calling to each other in their foreign lingo. Once in a while they loosed off a few shots when they thought they saw movement. They’d shoot at the corpses too, just for fun. The dead had begun to swell up and change colour by now, and I was afraid that the enemy would know I was alive by that. To keep my mind steady, I concentrated on watching this scrap of khaki cloth I could see, snagged on the barbed wire. It must have been part of the uniform of one of our lads who’d made it that far. All day long I watched it flapping about in the wind like some bird caught in a snare and struggling to free itself. As soon as it grew dark I set off again. Luckily it was a clear night this time, and by keeping an eye on the stars I was able to keep moving towards our lines. At daybreak I saw figures moving nearby. I didn’t know if they were living creatures or ghosts, still less whether they were from our side, but I called out as loudly as I could and they came running. It was a British stretcher-party on the lookout for casualties from the previous day’s action.’