John Boyne - The Absolutist

“Your brother was not a coward,” I insisted. “You must believe that, Marian.”

“Of course I believe it,” she snapped. “I don’t think it for a moment. How could I? I who knew him best. He was the bravest one of all. But try telling that to the people here and see how far it gets you. They’re ashamed of him, you see. The only boy from the entire county during the whole war ever to be lined up in front of a firing squad and executed for cowardice. They’re ashamed of him. They don’t understand who he is. Who he was. They never have. But you do, Tristan, don’t you? You know who he was.”

ACRY OF DESPAIR and weariness emanates from the pit of my stomach as the wall behind me begins to crumble and dissolve into a slow-moving river of thick, black, rat-infused mud that slides down my back and slips into the gaps at the top of my boots. I feel the sludge seeping its way into my already sodden socks and throw myself against the tide, desperate to push the barricade back into place before I am submerged beneath it. A tail passes quickly across my hands, whipping me sharply, then another; next, a sharp bite.

“Sadler!” cries Henley, his voice hoarse, his breathing laboured. He’s standing only a few feet away from me with Unsworth, I think, by his side and Corporal Wells next along the line. The rain is falling in such heavy sheets that I’m spitting it from my lips along with mouthfuls of foul dirt and it’s difficult to make any of them out. “The sandbags—look, they’re over here—pile them as high as you can.”

I make my way forward, trying to pull my boots out of three feet of mud. The terrible sucking sound they make as they emerge reminds me of the echo of a man’s last breath, deep and frantic, gasping for air, failing.

Instinctively I open my arms as a sandbag filled with excavated earth comes at me, almost knocking me off my feet when it hits me in the chest, but although I am winded I am equally quick to turn back to the wall, slamming the sandbag where I think the base must be, turning for another, catching it, padding the wall again, and another and another and another. Now there are five or six of us all doing the same thing, piling the sandbags high, crying out for more before the whole bloody place collapses about us, and it feels like a fool’s errand, but somehow it works and it is over and we forget that we have very nearly died today as we wait to die again tomorrow.

The Germans use concrete; we use wood and sand.

It’s been raining for days, an endless torrent that makes the trenches feel like troughs for the pigs rather than defences in which our regiment can take cover as we launch our sporadic attacks. When we arrived, I was told that the chalky ground of Picardy, through which we have been advancing for days now, is less liable to crumble than that of other parts of the line, particularly those miserable fields towards Belgium, where the high wetlands make entrenchment almost impossible. I can scarcely imagine any place worse than where we are. I have only these whispers and rumours to take for comparison.

All around me, what was this morning a clear pathway is now a river of mud. Pumps arrive and three of the men have a go at them. Wells shouts something at all of us, his voice gravelly, lost in the conquering environment, and I stare at him, feeling close to laughter, a sort of disbelieving hysteria.

“For fuck’s sake, Sadler!” he screams, and I shake my head, trying to make it clear that I didn’t hear the order. “Do it!” he roars at me. “Do it or I’ll fucking bury you in the mud!”

Above my head, over the parapet, I can hear the shelling beginning again, a prologue of sorts, for it isn’t heavy yet, nowhere near as heavy as it has been over the last few days, anyway. The German trenches are about three hundred yards north of ours. On quiet evenings we can hear an echo of their conversation, occasional singing, laughter, cries of anguish. We’re not that different, them and us. If both armies drown in the mud, then who’ll be left to fight the war?

“Over there, over there!” shouts Wells, grabbing me by the arm and dragging me over to where Parks, Hobbs and Denchley are attacking their pumps. “There’s buckets, man!” he yells. “This whole area must be drained!”

I nod quickly and look around. To my right, I’m surprised to see two grey tin buckets, the type that normally stand behind the reverse line, close to the latrines. Yates makes it his business to keep them as sanitary as possible. His obsession with maintaining hygiene in this place borders on the psychotic. What the hell are they doing here, I wonder as I stare at them? Yates will lose his mind if he sees them lying around like this. They can’t possibly have rolled over in the rain and landfall, for the supervision trench stands between the reverse and the front and each is about eight feet deep. Someone returning them to where they belong must have been picked off along the way. If the buckets are at my feet, then the carrying-soldier is a few feet above me, lying on his back, staring up at the dark sky over northern France, his eyes glazed over, his body growing cold and hard and free. And it’s Yates, I realize then. Of course it is. Yates is dead and we’ll have filthy latrines for the foreseeable.

“What’s the matter with you, Sadler?” shouts Wells, and I turn to him, apologizing quickly as I reach down to pick up the buckets, my hands covered in shit the moment I take their handles, but what matter, I think, what matter at all? Placing one at my feet I hold the other by top and base and scoop up a quarter-gallon of water and, looking up and checking the air, toss the great sodden mess north-east, towards Berlin, in the direction that the wind blows, watching as the murky effluent flies through the air and falls to the ground atop. Is it falling on him, I wonder? Is it falling on Yates? Obsessively clean Yates? Am I throwing shit all over his corpse?

“Keep at it, man!” shouts a voice to my left and whoever it is—Hobbs?—pumps more water away as I drive my bucket deep and deeper again, lifting the water out, sending it on its way, reaching down for more. And then a heavy body, running too fast and slipping in the mud, curses, rights himself and pushes past me and I fall, knocked head over feet, my face in the sludge and the water and the shit, and I spit out the noxious earth as I place a hand down to lever myself up, but my hand seems to just sink deeper and deeper into the mud and I think, How can this be, how can my life have descended into such filth and squalor? I used to go swimming on warm afternoons at the public baths with my friends. I would play conkers with the fallen horse chestnuts in Kew Gardens, boiling them in vinegar for a better chance of victory.

A hand reaches down to help me up.

There’s a lot of shouting now, none of it making any sense, then a great rush of water in my face, and where did that come from, I wonder? Is the wind rising and taking the rain with it? My bucket is thrust hard back into my hands and I turn to see who has helped me; his face is dark and filthy, almost unrecognizable, but I catch his eye for a moment, the man who lifted me, the man who helped me, and we stare at each other, Will Bancroft and I, and say not a word before he turns away and presses on, going I know not where, sent not to help us but to make his way further along the trench and into who knows what type of dreadfulness ten, twenty, a hundred feet away.

“It’s getting heavier,” cries Denchley, looking up for a moment at the heavens, and I do the same, closing my eyes and letting the rain fall on my face, washing the shit away, and I know that I have only a few seconds to enjoy it before Wells screams at me again to fill my bucket and drain the area, to drain the fucking area before every one of us is buried here in these filthy fucking French fields.