John Boyne - The Absolutist

“Load of tosh,” whispers Will to me. “The bloody army can’t afford any more uniforms, that’s all it is. It’ll be weeks before we’re kitted out.”

I don’t reply, nervous of getting caught talking, but I believe him. For as long as the war has been going on I’ve been following it in the newspapers and there are constant complaints that the army doesn’t have enough uniforms or rifles for every soldier. The downside is that we will be stuck in our civvies for the foreseeable future; the upside is that we can’t be called to France until we have a suitable kit to fight in. There’s already uproar in Parliament about men sacrificing themselves without even having the proper uniform.

We begin with fairly rudimentary drilling techniques: ten minutes of stretching, followed by running on the spot while we build up a good perspiration. Then, quite suddenly, Sergeant Clayton decides that our file of five by four men is quite disordered and charges between us, pulling one man a step forward, pushing another a fraction back, dragging some poor unsuspecting lad to his right while kicking another further to the left. By the time he has finished—and I’ve received my own share of pushes and shoves during his manoeuvres—the lines don’t look any more ordered or disordered than they did ten minutes earlier, but he seems more satisfied with them and I’m willing to believe that what is not obvious to my untrained eye is a glaring offence to his more experienced one.

Through it all, Sergeant Clayton complains loudly about our inability to hold formation, and his voice becomes so strained and his face so angry that I genuinely believe he might do himself an injury if he does not take care. And yet, to my surprise, when we are finished and dismissed, sent back to the wash house to scrub ourselves clean, he seems as composed and unflappable as he did when we first encountered him.

There’s only one order left for him to give. Wolf, he decrees, has let the side down badly by not lifting his knees high enough as he marched.

“Another hour for Wolf, I think,” he says, turning his head to Moody, who responds with a firm “Yes, sir” before Wells leads us back to where we started, our colleague standing alone in the middle of the parade ground, marching in a perfect formation of one as the rest of us leave him to it, apparently unconcerned for his welfare.

“The old man rather has it in for Wolf, doesn’t he?” Will says as we lie on our bunks later that day, having been granted a thirty-minute reprieve before we are to report back for an evening march over some wild terrain, even the thought of which makes me want to groan out loud.

“It’s to be expected,” I say.

“Yes, of course. All the same, it’s not very sporting, is it?”

I turn to him and smile, surprised. There’s a bit of the toff in the way he speaks and I imagine that his upbringing as the son of a Norfolk vicar was perhaps a little more salubrious than mine. His language is refined and he seems to care about others. His kindness impresses me. It gathers me in.

“Was your father upset when you were drafted?” I ask him.

“Terribly,” he replies. “But he would have been worse if I’d refused to fight. King and country mean an awful lot to him. What about yours?”

I shrug. “He didn’t care very much.”

Will nods and breathes heavily through his nose, sitting up and folding his pillow in two behind his back as he lights a tab and smokes it thoughtfully.

“Here,” he says after a few moments, his voice growing quieter now so that no one else can hear him. “What did you think of that doctor chap earlier, then?”

“Think of him?” I reply, confused by the question. “I didn’t think anything of him. Why do you ask?”

“No reason,” he says. “Only I thought you seemed very interested in what he was doing, that’s all. Not planning on running off to join the Medical Corps, are you?”

I feel my face begin to blush again—he had caught me staring at him after all—and turn over on the bed so he won’t notice it. “No, no, Bancroft,” I say. “I’m sticking with the regiment.”

“Glad to hear it, Tristan,” he says, leaning near enough towards me for me to smell a faint scent of perspiration coming my way. It feels as if his entire spirit is about to press down upon me. “Only we’re stuck with a right group of no-hopers here, I think. Corporal Moody might have a point about that. It’s good to have made a friend.” I smile but say nothing; I can feel a sort of sting running through my body at his words, like a knife placing itself in the centre of my chest and pressing forward, hinting at the pain that is sure to follow. I close my eyes and try not to think about it too deeply. “And for God’s sake, Tristan, stop calling me Bancroft, would you?” he adds, collapsing back on his own bunk now, the weight of his body throwing itself down so enthusiastically that it causes the springs to cry out as if they’re in pain. “My name’s Will. I know every bugger here calls each other by their surname but we’re different, I think. Let’s not let them break us, all right?”

Over the weeks that follow we endure such torturous training that I can’t believe this is something I had wanted to be a part of for so long. Our reveille comes most mornings at five o’clock when, with no more than three minutes’ warning by Wells or Moody, we’re expected to wake, jump from our beds, dress, pull our boots on and line up in formation outside the barracks. Most days we stand there in a sort of daze, and as we begin to march out of the camp for the four-hour hike ahead our bodies cry out in pain. On these mornings I imagine that nothing could be worse than basic training; soon I will learn that I was wrong about that, too.

The result of such activity, however, is that our young bodies begin to develop, the muscle forming in hard packs around our calves and chests, a tightness appearing at our abdominal muscles, and we begin to look like soldiers at last. Even those few members of our troop who arrived at Aldershot overweight—Turner, Hobbs, Milton, the practically obese Denchley—begin to shed their excess pounds and take on a more healthy aspect.

We’re not obliged to march in silence and usually keep up low, grumbling conversations. I form good relations with most of the men in our troop but it’s to Will that I cleave most mornings and he appears content to spend his time with me, too. I haven’t experienced much friendship in my life. The only one who ever mattered to me was Peter, but he abandoned me for Sylvia and then, after the incident at school, my subsequent disgrace ensured that I would never lay eyes on him again.

And then, one afternoon on a rare hour’s break in the barracks, Will comes inside to find me alone, my back turned to him, and he leaps upon me in a fit of enthusiasm, screeching and squawking like a child at play. I wrestle him off me and we roll around on the floor, grabbing and jostling, laughing at nothing. When he has me in a clinch, pinned to the floor, his knees on either side of my torso, he looks down at me and smiles, his dark hair falling in his eyes, and I am sure that he looks at my lips for moment, turns his head a little and stares at them, his body arcing forward just a touch, and I raise my knee slightly and risk a smile. We look each other—“Ah, Tristan,” he says mournfully, his voice soft—and then we hear someone at the door and he jumps up, turning away from me, and when he looks back as Robinson enters the barracks I notice that he cannot, just now, catch my eye.

Perhaps it’s not unusual, then, that I find myself seething with jealousy on an early-morning march when, having stopped to retie my bootlaces as I leave camp, I find that I have lost Will in the pack of men and, brushing my way through them quickly, careful not to appear too obvious in my intentions, I discover him walking ahead of the others with none other than Wolf, our conscientious objector, as his boon companion. I stare at them in surprise, for no one ever walks or talks with Wolf, on whose bed small white feathers appear every night from our pillows to such an extent that Moody, who has no liking for Wolf any more than the rest of us do, tells us to pack it in or our pillows will be stripped bare and we’ll develop neck ache from stretching flat out on our mattresses with nothing to cushion our heads. I glance around, wondering whether anyone else has noticed this unusual pairing, but most of my fellow recruits are too focused on putting one foot in front of the other as they march along, heads bowed, eyes half closed, thinking about nothing other than getting back to base as quickly as possible and the dubious pleasures of breakfast.