John Boyne - The Absolutist

And I go back to work, as I always do. I focus. I fill my bucket. I throw it over the side. I fill my bucket again. And I believe that if I keep doing it, then time will pass and I will wake up at home, with my father throwing his arms around me and telling me that I am forgiven. I turn to my right and make for a deeper pool, glancing down the trench, the twenty or thirty feet of it that I can see—trying to see where Will has vanished to, wanting to make sure that he is all right, and I wonder, as I always wonder at these moments, whether I will ever see him alive again.

Another day.

I wake and step out of the foxhole where I have tried to sleep for three or four hours and gather my marching order about me, my rifle and bayonet, the ammunition that slips into my pockets front and rear, my trowel, a depleted bottle of liquid that goes by the name of water but tastes of chloride of lime and which provokes sporadic attacks of diarrhoea, but if it’s a choice between dehydration and the shits, I’ll take the shits any day. My greatcoat is wrapped around me, the curved plates beneath my shirt digging into my skin, for they’re an unhappy fit meant for a smaller man, but damn it, Sadler, they tell me, we’re not running a department store here, it’ll have to do. I tell myself that it is a Tuesday, although I have nothing to base that on. Naming the day offers some dull pretence of normality.

Mercifully, the rain has stopped and the sides of the trenches are holding fast and solidifying once again, the sandbags piled up against each other, black and muddy from the previous day’s packing. I’m on top-duty in twenty minutes and, if I’m quick, I can make it to mess for tea and bully beef before returning to take up my position. Walking along, I fall into line with Shields, who looks the worse for wear. His right eye is blackened and half shut; there’s a trail of hardened blood running along his temple. It’s shaped like the Thames, twisting south towards Greenwich Pier at his eyebrow, then north to London Bridge at his forehead and disappearing into the depths of Blackfriars amid the untidiness of his lice-infested hair. I make no remarks; we are none of us as we should be.

“You up, Sadler?” he asks me.

“Twenty minutes.”

“Just finished. Food and sleep, that’s what I need.”

“I’m thinking of going to the pub later,” I tell him. “A few pints of mild and a game of feathers, if you’re interested?”

He says nothing, doesn’t even acknowledge the joke. We all say things like this from time to time and sometimes there’s fun to be had in it but Shields shows no interest in banter right now. He leaves me as we reach Glover’s Alley, which leads to Pleasant Way, which in turn splits off at the top left and turns right into Pilgrim’s Repose. We live here, beneath the ground like cadavers, and carve streets into the terrain, then we name them and erect signposts to give us the illusion that we remain part of a common humanity. It’s a maze down here, the entrenchment splitting off in so many directions before it links with one path, snubs another, provides a safe passageway to a third. It’s easy to get lost if you don’t know where you’re going, and God help the man who is not where he is supposed to be when he is supposed to be there.

I make my way out of the front trench and into the supervision, where our support lies, those small amounts of medical help we can muster together and some cots for the officers. Beyond here I can smell the food cooking and I make my way towards it eagerly, looking around the ill-kept mess row along the south-west-facing alley of the third line and see mostly familiar faces, some who are new, some who don’t speak, some who never stop, some who are brave, some who are foolhardy, some who are falling mad. Some from Aldershot, before us and after. Some with Scottish accents, some with English, some with Irish. As I make my way along there is a low murmur of conversation, the suggestion of a greeting perhaps, and I take my helmet off as I reach the mess and scratch my head, not bothering to look at what this leaves under my fingernails, for my scalp is covered in lice, and my armpits, too, and my crotch. Everywhere that they can nest and breed. It repulsed me once but now I think nothing of it. I am a charitable host and we live peacefully together, them feeding off my filthy skin, me occasionally plucking them away and ending them between the pincer-nails of thumb and forefinger.

I take what I can find and eat quickly. The tea is startlingly good; it must have been made fresh only minutes before and it summons up a memory, something from boyhood, and if I work at it I dare say I could bring it to life, but I have neither the energy nor the interest. The bully beef, on the other hand, is atrocious. God only knows what is forced into these tins; it might be badger or rat or some unknown vermin that has the audacity to continue to exist here, but we call it beef and let that be good enough for it.

I force myself not to look around, not to search for him, because in that direction only pain lies. If I see him, I will be too afraid of his rejection to approach, and there is every possibility that in my anger I will simply launch myself over the top later, directly into no-man’s-land, and take whatever is due to me. And if I don’t see him, I will convince myself that he has been picked off in the last few hours and I will throw myself over anyway, an easy potshot for the snipers, for what is the purpose of continuing if he does not?

In the end, food in my stomach, the taste of tea in my mouth, I stand up and make my way back to where I started, congratulating myself on how well I have done; how I never searched for him, not once. From such moments, half-happy hours can be strung together.

Climbing back into the front trench I hear a commotion ahead and, although I have little interest in arguments, I have to pass it to get where I am going, so I stop for a while and watch as Sergeant Clayton, who has grown bone thin in these few short weeks since we arrived, is screaming at Potter, an exceptionally tall soldier who was popular back at Aldershot for his abilities as a mimic. In good times he can do a fine imitation not only of our leader but also of his two apostles, Wells and Moody, and once, in a surprisingly buoyant mood, Clayton asked him to perform his sketches for the entire regiment, which he did and it went off well. There was no malice to it although there was, I thought, an edge. But Clayton lapped it up.

The argument appears to concern Potter’s height. He stands above us all at six feet and six inches in his stockinged feet, but add a pair of boots and a helmet atop his high-domed forehead and then he’s rearing closer to six feet eight. We’re all accustomed to him, of course, but it doesn’t make his life any easier, for the trenches are no more than about eight feet deep and less than four feet wide at their northernmost part. The poor man can’t walk tall with his head above the parapet or he’ll lose his brains to a German bullet. It’s hard on him, although we haven’t time to care, but Clayton is screaming in his face.

“You make yourself a standing target!” he cries. “And when you do that, you endanger everyone in your regiment. How many times have I told you, Potter, not to stand tall?”

“But I can’t do it, sir,” comes the desperate reply. “I try to bend over but my body won’t let me for long. My back aches something rotten on account of it.”

“And you don’t think an injured back is a small price for a head?”

“I can’t crouch all day, sir,” complains Potter. “I try. I promise I do.”

And then Clayton screams a few random obscenities at him and rushes towards him, pushing him back against the wall, and I think, That’s the spirit. Just unsettle all those sandbags, why don’t you, and put us all in even more danger? Why not throw all our artillery away while you’re at it?