Pat Barker - The Ghost Road

I shot it myself. I'm proud of that. In the trenches sometimes you'd be watching through a periscope and you'd see a German soldier — generally well back in the support lines — walking along believing himself to be safe, and he'd drop his breeches and settle down for a nice contented crap. You don't want to shoot him because there's something about the vulnerability of that bare arse, you feel the draught up your own crack, a moment of basic human empathy. So you point him out to the sentry and order the sentry to shoot him. That lets everybody off the hook — you haven't shot him, the sentry has, but only under orders.

But I shot the dog myself. I took him into the barn holding on to his collar. He knew something bad was going to happen, and he rolled over on to his back and showed me his puppy-pink tummy and widdled a bit, quite certain these devices for deflecting aggression would work. I tickled him behind his ear and said, 'Sorry, old son. I'm human — we're not like that.'

And I'm glad of the fug of human warmth in here, and not just because it keeps out the wind and rain. Those who've bagged themselves seats by the fire have steam rising from their boots and puttees. The rest of us just wiggle our toes and make do.

Having said I daren't think about Sarah, I think about her all the time. I remember the first time we met — that ludicrous wrestling match on a tombstone which in retrospect seems a rather appropriate start for a relationship so hedged in by death. And before that in the pub, plying her with port to get her knickers off, and she wanted to talk about Johnny's death and I didn't want to listen. Loos, she said. I remember standing by the bar and thinking that words didn't mean anything any more. Patriotism honour courage vomit vomit vomit. Only the names meant anything. Mons, Loos, the Somme, Arras, Verdun, Ypres.

But now I look round this cellar with the candles burning on the tables and our linked shadows leaping on the walls, and I realize there's another group of words that still mean something. Little words that trip through sentences unregarded: us, them, we, they, here, there. These are the words of power, and long after we're gone, they'll lie about in the language, like the unexploded grenades in these fields, and any one of them'll take your hand off.

Wyatt sleeps like a baby, except that no baby ever snored like that. Hoggart's peeling potatoes. Mugs of chlorine-tasting tea stand round. And somebody's chopping wood and feeding it to the fire, though it's so damp every fresh stick produces darkness, sizzling, a temporary shadowing of faces and eyes and then the flames lick round it, and the fire blazes up again. We need a good fire. Everybody's coughing and wheezing, a nasty cold going the rounds. I'm starting to feel a tickle in my throat, hot and shivery at the same time. I think of rats on the canal bank with long naked tails and the thought of that cold water is definitely not inviting. But we sing, we tell jokes and every joke told here is funny. Everybody's amazingly cheerful. The word I'm trying not to use is fey. There is an element of that. We all know what the chances are.

And soon I shall turf Wyatt out of that bunk and try to get some sleep.

Five months ago Charles Manning offered me a job at the Ministry of Munitions and I turned it down, and said if I was sent back to France… 'If if if if — I shall sit in a dug-out and look back to this afternoon, and I shall think, "You bloody fool."'

I remember sitting on the stiff brocade sofa in his drawing-room as I said it.

Well, here I am, in what passes for a dug-out. And I look round me at all these faces and all I can think is: What an utter bloody fool I would have been not to come back.

Brown fog enveloped the hospital. Coils of sulphurous vapour hung in the entrance hall, static, whirled into different patterns whenever somebody entered or left the building. He'd gone out himself earlier in the evening to buy a paper from the stand outside Victoria Station, a brisk ten-minute walk there and back, a chance to get some air into his lungs, though air these days scorched the throat. The news was good. At any moment now, one felt, the guns would stop and they would all be released into their private lives. They all felt it — and yet it almost seemed not to matter. The end that everybody had longed for was overshadowed by the Spanish influenza epidemic that had the hospital in its grip. If somebody had rushed along the corridor now opening doors and shouting, 'The war's over,' he'd have said, 'Oh, really?' and gone back to writing up notes.

He looked at his watch and stood up. Time to go up to the ward.

Marsden was trying to catch his eye. He'd had the impression that morning, during his ward round, that Marsden wanted to ask something, but had been deterred by the formality of the occasion. Rivers had a quick word with Sister Roberts — the staffing situation for this duty was particularly bad — and then went and sat by Marsden's bed, chatting about this and that while he worked himself up to say whatever it was he wanted to say. It was quite simple. He'd overheard a junior doctor talking to a colleague at the foot of his bed and had caught the phrase 'elicited the coital reflex'. Did this mean, Marsden wanted to know, that he would eventually, he stressed, hedging his bets, not now obviously, eventually, be able to have sex again? 'Have sex' was produced in a flat, no nonsense, all-chaps-together tone. He meant 'make love'. He meant 'have children'. His wife's photograph stood on his locker. Rivers's neck muscles tensed with the effort of not looking at it. No, he said slowly, it didn't mean that. He explained what it meant. Marsden wasn't listening, but he needed a smoke-screen of words behind which to prepare his reaction. He was pleating the hem of the sheet between his fingertips. 'Well,' he said casually, when Rivers had finished. 'I didn't really think it meant that. Just thought I'd ask.'

One incident; one day.

* * *

Faces shadowed by steel helmets, they would hardly have recognized each other, even if the faint starlight had enable them to see clearly. Prior, crouching in a ditch beside the crossroads, kept looking at the inside of his left wrist where normally his watch would have been. It had been taken away from him twenty minutes ago to be synchronized. The usual symptoms: dry mouth, sweaty palms, pounding heart, irritable bladder, cold feet. What a brutally accurate term 'cold feet' was. Though 'shitting yourself'—the other brutally accurate term — did not apply. He'd been glugging Tincture of Opium all day, as had several others of the old hands. He'd be shitting bricks for a fortnight when this was over, but at least he wouldn't be shitting himself tonight.

He looked again at his wrist, caught Owen doing the same, smiled with shared irritation, said nothing. He stared at the stars, trying to locate the plough, but couldn't concentrate. Rain clouds were massing. All we need. A few minutes later a runner came back with his watch and with a tremendous sense — delusional, of course — of being in control again he strapped it on.

Then they were moving forward, hundreds of men eerily quiet, starlit shadows barely darkening the grass. And no dogs barked.

* * *

The clock at the end of the ward blurred, then moved into focus again. He was finding it difficult to keep awake now that the rounds were done, the reports written and his task was simply to be there, ready for whatever emergencies the night might throw his way. Sister Roberts put a mug of orange-coloured tea, syrupy with sugar, in front of him, and he took a gulp. They sat together at the night nurses' station-there were no night nurses, they were all off with flu — drinking the too strong, too sweet tea, watching the other end of the ward, where the green screens had been placed round Hallet's bed. A single lamp shone above his bed so the green curtains glowed against the darkness of the rest of the ward. Through a gap between the screens Rivers could see one of the family, a young boy, fourteen, fifteen years old perhaps, Hallet's young brother, wriggling about on his chair, bored with the long hours of waiting and knowing it was unforgivable to be bored.