William Boyd - Waiting for Sunrise

Lysander stepped out of the car feeling like a new boy on his first day at school — excited, apprehensive and faintly queasy. He and Munro were directed to the battalion H.Q. situated in a nearby requisitioned farmhouse, where Munro handed over the official papers to a taciturn and clearly disgruntled adjutant — who took his time reading what they contained, making little gasping sounds in his throat as he did so, as if they substituted for the expletives he’d have preferred to use.

“Signed by Haig himself,” he said, looking at Lysander with some hostility. “You’re to be ‘afforded every assistance’ you require, Lieutenant Rief. You must be a very important man.”

“He is,” Munro interrupted. “It’s essential that everything is done to help the lieutenant in every possible way. Do you understand, Major?”

“I understand but I don’t understand,” the major said, laconically, rising to his feet. “Follow me, please.”

Well, that’s it, Lysander thought. That’s done it: Munro’s pushed it too far, it’s like being blackballed at a club — the major’s face was a picture of superior disdain. He took them along a brick path to a cow-byre where several camp beds were set up. He pointed one out to Lysander.

“Dump your kit there. I’ll have a servant assigned. Dinner at six in the mess tent.”

“Leave him to me,” Munro said as they watched the major stroll off. “I’ll have another quiet word with our fine fellow.” He smiled. “Scare him to death.”

Sometimes, Lysander thought, it was an advantage having someone like Munro on your side. All the same, he sat in silence throughout the meal in the mess tent. No other officer made any effort to engage him in conversation, but more, he thought, out of extreme caution than contempt. God knows what Munro had said. So he tackled his meal, a beef stew with dumplings and a steam pudding with custard, feeling full and uncomfortable but sensing it would only incur further opprobrium if he pushed his plates away half-eaten.

As soon as was polite, he went back to his camp bed in the cow-byre and smoked a cigarette.

“Mr Rief, sir?”

He sat up. A sergeant stood in the doorway.

“I’m Sergeant Foley, sir.”

They saluted each other. Lysander still felt a little strange being addressed as ‘sir’. Foley was a squat dense man in his late twenties, he guessed, with a pronounced snub nose. He had a thick Lancashire accent that somehow suited his muscled frame.

“There’s a wiring party going up. We can follow them.”

They didn’t waste any time getting rid of me, Lysander thought, as he quickly gathered up a few essential belongings — a bottle of whisky, cigarettes, torch, compass, map, his kitbag with the two grenades, a scarf and spare socks. He left his raincoat behind — it was a warm clear night — and followed Foley out, feeling sudden misgivings stiffen his limbs and making his breathing a task he had to concentrate on. Keep calm, keep calm, he said to himself, remember it’s a quiet sector — all fighting is elsewhere — that’s why you’re here. You’ve been fully briefed and trained, you’ve studied maps, you’ve been given simple instructions — just follow them.

He and Foley stayed at the rear of the wiring party as they tramped up a mud road and turned off it into a communication trench, waist-deep at first but gradually deepening until breastworks on each side reduced the evening sky to a strip of orange-grey above his head.

By the time they reached the support lines Lysander was beginning to feel tired. Foley showed him to the officers’ dugout and there Lysander introduced himself to a Captain Dodd, the company commander — an older man in his mid-thirties with a drooping, damp-looking, curtain moustache, and two very young lieutenants — called Wiley and Gorlice-Law — who could barely have been twenty, Lysander thought, like senior prefects at a boarding school. They knew who he was, word must have been sent ahead, and they were polite and welcoming enough, but he could see them eyeing the red staff-officer flashes on his lapels with suspicion, as if he were contagious in some way. He was assigned one of the bunk beds and took his whisky bottle out of his kitbag as a donation to the dugout. Everyone had a tot immediately and the atmosphere became less chilly and formal.

Lysander relayed his cover-story — that he was here from ‘Corps’ to reconnoitre the ground in front of the British and French trenches and to try and identify, if possible, the German troops opposite.

“They’ve burnt off most of the grass in front of their wire,” Dodd said, pessimistically. “Difficult to get close.”

Lysander took out his trench map and asked him to identify the precise section of the trenches where the British line ended and the French began. Dodd pointed to a V-shaped salient that jutted out into no man’s land.

“There,” he said. “But they’ve filled it with wire. You can’t get through.”

“Never the twain shall meet,” Wiley said, cheerily.

“Foley’s the man to take you out,” Gorlice-Law said. “Apparently he loves patrolling.” He was spreading anchovy paste on a hard biscuit and he bit into it with relish, like a boy in the school tuck-shop, munching away. “Delicious,” he said, adding in apologetic explanation, “I’m always starving — can’t think why.”

Dodd sent Wiley out to walk the front-line trench and check on the sentries. Lysander topped up their mugs with more whisky.

“They say it’s bad luck when staff come up to the line from Corps,” Dodd remarked, gloomily. He wasn’t exactly a ray of sunshine, Lysander thought.

“Well, I’ll be gone the day after tomorrow,” Lysander said. “You won’t remember me.”

“That’s all very well, but you’ll have still come up, don’t you see? Right here, to us,” Dodd said, persistently. “So what kind of attack are you planning?”

“Look, it’s just a recce,” Lysander said, wanting to tell him he wasn’t a real staff officer at all, therefore there would be no malign curse involved. “Nothing may come of it.”

“You wouldn’t tell us anyway, would you?” Gorlice-Law said, reaching for another biscuit. “Deadly secret and all that. Hush-hush.”

“Have another drop of whisky,” Lysander said.

♦

He slept fitfully in his thin hard bunk, kept awake by his ever-turning mind and by Dodd’s long, deep snores. He heard the whistles of the dawn ‘stand-to’ and breakfasted on tea and jam sandwiches brought to him by Dodd’s batman. Foley arrived and offered to show him the front-line trench, to ‘have a gander’ at no man’s land.

The trenches at this, the furthest right-hand wing of the British Expeditionary Force, were narrow, deep and well-maintained, Lysander saw. Dry too, with a duckboard floor and a solidly revetted fire-step and a thick crowning berm of sandbags. Apart from the sentries standing on the fire-step the other soldiers huddled in scrapes and small half-caves hollowed out from the facing wall — eating, shaving, cleaning their kit. Lysander was amused to see that most of them were wearing shorts and their knees were brown — as if they were on a strange sort of a summer holiday — as he followed Foley along the traverses to a net-covered loophole. He was handed a pair of binoculars.

“You’re safe enough from snipers,” Foley said. “You can see through the net but they can’t see in.”

Lysander raised the binoculars and peered out over no man’s land. Long grass and self-seeded corn badged with rusty clumps of docks. In the middle distance, directly in front of them, was a small ruin — more like a pile of smashed and tumbled stones — and some way off were three leafy, lopsided elms with some of their main branches blasted off. It looked tranquil and bucolic. A warm breeze was blowing, setting the rough meadow that was no man’s land in easy flowing motion, the tall grasses and the docks bending before the gentle combing wind.