Louis de Bernières - The Dust That Falls From Dreams

Detailed to go and help in the bacteria lab. The Major extremely nice. Made specimens of bacteria for him taken from wounds. Let me see them under the microscope. Thanked me and asked me to come again. Told him I was really an engineer, and asked him what he thought I should do.

8th Jan. Pay parade and I got eight francs. Found a Frenchwoman with a tub and paid for a bath. Bought a fur coat made of a piebald goat. Not popular with pals — smells of former owner.

9th. Was sick, and so allowed to slack. An aeroplane came down between the lines, and after dark the pilot and observer crept up and dropped into the trench. We filled them up with tea, and damn me if one of them didn’t turn out to be Daniel Pitt, an original Pal, who used to live the other side of Rosie’s house! Had a good chinwag about childhood days. Said he’d crashed three times in the last fortnight. Par for the course, apparently. Feel envious of the birdmen, but by God, you have to be darned brave. They get colder than we do. Wouldn’t catch me up there.

10th. Cookhouse fatigues. Felt very poorly. Probably flu. A lot of us got sick in the cattle truck. Thirty to a car.

12th. Some sweets arrived from my aunt. Extremely cold. This is a decent place. Lots of food locally. Enemy aeroplane dropped two bombs and didn’t hit anything. Terrific noise, however. One of the men got run over by a lorry (five tonner) from head to foot. Thought he was dead, but just squashed into mud so had to dig him out. Contusions, that’s all. That driver makes a custom of running people over.

This isn’t the glamorous kind of soldiering we’d volunteered for.

13th. Marched seven miles in the rain. Glad to arrive. Quartered in a school. Shell burst five hundred yards away. A fine sight, my first real experience of shells. Grenade practice. A serious business. You light the fuse and have five seconds to throw it.

No idea where to go or what to do when we finally arrived. No plan, nobody came to meet us. Ruined village, heaps of engineers’ supplies, knife rests, barbed wire, shovels, trenching tools, etc. Only intact structure was a grandstand with the paint peeling off.

Slumped on the green and smoked while officer went off to find someone who knew anything. Ended up distributed between least demolished cottages. With eight others in a tiny room with one shell hole punched neatly through it. Shell still lying there. Decided that it probably wouldn’t explode. Hutch scrawled ‘RIP’ on it. I slept very well.

Dug latrines. Always the first thing to do. Don’t even wait for officers to detail you. You arrive, unshoulder your weapon and shoulder your spade. Pulled up some leeks, dug a nice latrine. We pray, ‘Dear Lord, please do not let a shell land in the latrines, because I am buggered if I am going to dig another one.’ Ours has a horizontal pole to perch on. Nothing to clean up with. Can’t bear to use Rosie’s letters, so am using letters from anyone else, after memorising and replying. Post is extraordinarily efficient, considering. A lot of the lads forced to use their love letters. I don’t smoke much, makes me feel dizzy, so use my cigarette ration to buy letters, as well as the extra rum. A sad fate for beautiful feminine sentiments.

14th. Went on fatigues to repair the road. Mud and water! Shovelled mud, sank in mud, breathed in mud. Felt like a fly on flypaper. Saw Albert, and he was the same dear brother, but very tired of it all. Plenty of shells.

Hutch found out that two old women still living in the village would sell us coffee and bread if we got there first. Like cartoon witches from a book of fairy tales. Found cans of Scotch broth just lying at the side of the road. Hooray! And they had a granddaughter who was prepared to ‘teach French’.

Hutch says that we are nobody’s children. Don’t know exactly what he means. Must ask. He keeps repeating it. Certainly, nobody seems to be in charge of looking after us, so we do it. Shot a rabbit. Last one in Flanders. Stewed it up with leeks. Bullet went through the ribs so no real meat was spoiled. Thought of how Rosie would have been upset by my shooting a rabbit. Such a big soft spot for animals. Expect she would have cried. Hutch made ripping little stove out of a biscuit tin and set it up in a niche. Call it ‘the Savoy Grill’. The Major said it was just about the best in the battalion. He brought the anti-gas equipment today. Onward Christian soldiers.

15th. Re-dug a dugout that collapsed because of a shell. Spent all day in it. Stink perfectly horrible. Shells going overhead sound like carts on cobbles. Worked from 8.30 to 4.30 and then detailed to take bundles of wood to the Lancashires. Went in single file and fell in mud over and over. Bullets whizzed above us, and when they fell in the mud, they sizzled. Shell nearby made me jump, but already quite used to them. The Germans have extraordinary sniper. We put three sticks in a row poking up above the trench, and he snapped each in turn. Definitely don’t approve of shrapnel. Fizzes and whizzes about like lethal metal bees. Causes one to execute a tactical narrowing of front, and keep it narrow thereafter. Rifles bunged up with mud and unshootable.

10 p.m. Hutch and a few others detailed to go and carry a pump from the chateau to the trenches. I was groaning in the latrine in the dark so was let off. Hutch brought back a spent bullet. Said it had been hell. Completely drenched and covered with stinking filth. You throw yourself down in the mud every time a star shell goes up, and Hutch fell straight into the corpse of a horse. Stretcher parties stumbling about in the dark, collecting the dead and wounded, because it can’t be done by day. Continuous muttering of curses in the dark. Like the murmuring of nocturnal animals. Hutch said they finally delivered the pump and got cups of tea, only twenty yards from the Boche.

Morning. Cut off the bottom of my greatcoat. Did as he said. We look like a tribe of vagabonds. The skin of that rabbit ended up under my helmet. Great joy over the arrival of balaclavas/gum boots. Collected pieces of string to tie faggots and little lumps of wood to my webbing. No fire means no warm food/no warm hands. Woke up covered with snow, clothes so stiff with frost they crackled when I moved. Bearded like the pard, and beard plastered with mudcrust, unlike the pard.

16th. Went on fatigues to build a shed for the horses, but mostly slacked. Shrapnel shell burst above a cattle shed and got men inside. Caught flea, big enough to use in a cockfight. Cracked it with thumbnail. Very satisfactory. Some of us getting mudbite. Difficult to sleep at night because of rats playing tag/British bulldog/other joyous games all over us.

Fatigues, dogsbody stuff, carrying sandbags. Ain’t there no respect for territorials? Truth is that a soldier spends life digging and lumping things, shovelling mud and wreckage off roads etc. The ditches bridged by single planks, so at night you spend your time climbing out of the ones you fell in. Common knowledge that Army keeps us busy to keep us sane.

17th. My birthday! Package from Rosie! Sweets and a knife and fork, amongst other things. Detailed to bury a horse. You can tell by the smell what’s died nearby. Donkey smells different from horse or fox, but I haven’t detected any difference in the whiff of decaying Boche/Frenchies/Gonzoubris. A rat ran up my leg. Happy birthday, dear Ash, happy birthday to me. Another rumour death of Kaiser, German surrender imminent.

French bodies unburied everywhere. Stinks to high Heaven, even though January. God help us if summer comes. Corpses seem to watch you, especially at night.

18th. Snowed hard. You show up against the snow even at night. On parade 10.30 inspection.

New trench made for us by sappers. Classy affair, little cupboards cut into sides, proper parapet of sandbags, dugouts to curl up in. Duckboards, and sinks to collect the water, so that you can bail it out. Huns only a few yards away, invisible behind sandbags/mounds of earth, apart from dead ones, with their short hair and new uniforms, lolling together in front, like sleeping drunks. Huns have annoying grenade catapults. Guard duty last night. Told to fire off a round every ten minutes. Don’t know why. Nothing to aim at, even if you could see. Perhaps it just keeps the guard awake. Important to make us feel we’re doing something. You can poke your head above the parapet as much as you like in the dark. Pop it down again the moment a star shell goes up. I like the star shells. The strongest and blackest shadows. Violence of the light miraculous. Nice to have something flying about that doesn’t explode. Wouldn’t put it past the Huns to invent some kind of gadget for seeing us at night. Hope not to be the first one they try it on.