Louis de Bernières - The Dust That Falls From Dreams

Wonder who PLG was, and whether still alive. Think of him as a guardian spirit. If he’s dead, hope he watches over me and his old Lee — Enfield. Fear that the first time I get a chance to take a potshot at Fritz, will feel sorry for him and funk it. Might aim at the ground, and made him skip.

You pick up on the lore of a unit almost as soon as you join it. The lore is one of the things that keeps you together. It’s very like the stories that come down families, so that things that happened to your grandmother almost seem as if they had happened to you. Must write them down sometime.

Trenches taken over from the French. Just channels of slime. No wire, no sandbags, no proper parapets, no communication trench. Too shallow, so have to sit down in the mud, but if lucky might find the chest of a Frenchman to sit down on. Strange and disconcerting at first, but am already used to how dead bodies sigh if you sit on them.

Deep hole full of water in our trench, keep forgetting it’s there. Sink into it up to your thighs. Good for thinning the half-inch of mud encrusting greatcoats. Hell to be made to march in greatcoats. Some lads cut the bottoms off.

German lines higher than ours, only a hundred yards away. Huns always have the high ground, simply because they got there first. Always have the advantage of us in a firefight, but I think we lose just as many men to sickness, including our doctor.

Snowed and froze, but mostly rained. Work at night, so sleep in the afternoons, but sometimes sleep in snatches, just two minutes during busy times. You can’t sleep wearing webbing and water bottle, but not allowed to take them off. Groundsheet isn’t big enough, so you sleep sitting up, with your helmet on, so that drips fall away onto shoulders. In the front line we’re not permitted to remove our boots and socks. Puttees leave horrible trackmarks round legs. Bad idea to take off boots in icy weather anyway, because they freeze solid. Can’t get them on again.

Stand to on firing step at dawn every day. All night for preparation, so best time to attack. Fritz does exactly the same thing, of course, and no attack ever comes. All casualties from snipers and shellfire. Proper attacks rare as alligator feathers.

Regiment lost twelve officers and 250 men to enemy action, exposure, exhaustion and frostbite, before I got here. Relieved by Royal Scots Fusiliers in December. Boys ate nothing but bully beef. You open the tins with a bayonet.

Thank God for rum ration. That navy stuff goes right down to your toes and heats you all the way back up again. Sincerely hate any NCO who tries to cream it off.

Rum and cigarettes; I guess that’s what a soldier lives for. Swap my cigarettes for rum, and think it a darned good deal too.

Couldn’t hold the line after middle of January. Lost too many men. Transport people volunteered to come and fight in place of our dead.

Began to think that there’s something about a young man that makes him want to die, and die well, whilst still at the height of life, whilst still not tired of it. Or maybe war so terrible that the prospect of death entices. Is it a comfort not to have to face the future? We all end up discarded on the midden of time, so might as well be flung there now. Ain’t I quite the philosopher?

Not thinking along those lines. I have Rosie to live for. Told her I was her angel, but really she’s mine. Also knew that if I was killed she’d never have the chance to become disillusioned. She’d never get tired. We’d never have an argument. I’d be young, strong, handsome forever. Would never watch her grow old, either. No plans to die, but it might be a good thing before I let her down. If I die, the vision lives.

Impossible to imagine oneself being dead, because one is still there, imagining it. That’s how we can watch our comrades die, and carry on. If I imagine myself dead, I’m still at Rosie’s side.

Somewhere in deepest darkest France

3 January 1915

Ma chère maman,

How lovely it was to spend Christmas with you on the South Downs, and quel plaisir to go tobogganing with one’s mother! It was cruel of you to make me drag both of our toboggans back uphill, though. How will I ever forgive? Perhaps time will heal.

It was very sweet of you to come to the aerodrome to see me off. How marvellously you frightened the sentries and charmed the CO! and even his dog! I thought you were very brave, the way you held back your tears, but really, you didn’t need to. Everyone was perfectly aware that you are French and have the perfect excuse to be emotional.

But, chère maman , I do know how you feel. You saw my brothers off to South Africa, never to see them again, and we don’t know what’s going to happen to Archie out in Waziristan. You must be very lonely and worried. Even I am worried, a lot more than my fellow birdmen, none of whom seem to be older than eighteen. At twenty-two I feel a little less bulletproof than they do.

I want to tell you why you shouldn’t worry, but first of all I have to relate what happened on the way over. As you know, I came over in a gunbus, with another pilot in the front, and the plan was to collect a nice little Morane-Saulnier at St Omer. Well, the gunbus is a stout fellow, and a remarkably dependable and safe machine, but ours conked out not far from Gravelines. Broken ignition wire, it turned out. Ça se passe. I can’t tell you how frightening it was. I was fiddling with the instruments, almost in a blue funk, thinking I was going to have to ditch in the sea and get dissected by crabs and other molluscs, and the odd dogfish. But I managed to land right at the sea’s edge, on the beach. Thank God it was low tide. The other fellow and I managed to drag it up the beach with the aid of stalwart fishermen who had been innocently beachcombing, and we telephoned through to Squadron HQ. Whilst waiting for the ack emma we got royally treated by the inhabitants of a bistro. I’ve never had such a good steak. I can tell that being a half-French birdman is going to be a huge bonus out here. I will have simpering girls draped off both arms, and have to check that there aren’t any in my shoes in the mornings, as we did with scorpions out on the NWF. The weather leaves most of our flying days completely dud, so … more time for the fair maidens of France!

Anyway, to the point. If you fly over France, you see beneath you a country of the most magnificent beauty. Where else are there towns like Fleurs, or Poitiers, or Abbeville? Where else are there lovely long avenues of poplars and infinitely long Roman roads? And rivers with such lovely curves? And elegant chateaux that were never made for war? And women who think you must be mentally deficient if you are not in love with them? Where everyone drinks wine and sings, but nobody’s drunk?

The point is, maman , that I love France with all my heart and soul. She is my mother, as you are, and England is my father, as Father was. One loves one’s parents equally, if differently, and I love France as I love you, with a sort of passionate aching tenderness.

Not far from here there is a strip, neither very long nor wide, where this exquisite land has been reduced to a hideous bog of brown mud, pitted with interconnecting shell holes full of filthy water, where there are no trees unbroken and no church or farm or house intact. It is already a vast graveyard of the unburied. The gunfire is relentless and maddening. The front is an obscenity, maman , and this was inflicted on France by a madman who overran two neutral countries in order to get to it and bring about this wreckage. Only when it is covered with snow is purity restored to this land, and even then the trenches cut through it like cracks in glass.