William Boyd - The New Confessions

In our first stint in the Nieuport trenches we had been called back twice to brigade reserve at Wormstroedt. Wormstroedt was a large village, or a small town, some twenty miles behind the front line. Before the war it had enjoyed modest prosperity owing to the siting there of a tobacco factory. This was now empty, one wing of it destroyed by bombardment during the German advance of 1914. Here, we were billeted in tall airless rooms smelling strongly of tobacco. We slept in low wooden beds, sixty to a room like a vast dormitory. Leave in Wormstroedt was perferable to our off-duty hours in St. Idesbalde, if only because we were freer to roam around. There was a cinema set up in a tent in the shattered main square and a good dozen cafés and restaurants. Men of the 13th tended to patronize a large estaminet conveniently close to the factory. It was run by an extended Belgian family who were doing well out of the war. They had been swift to adapt to the tastes of the British soldier. Fried eggs and chipped potatoes were the staple diet, and it was not unusual for us to order up to six fried eggs at a time. You could also eat bread and pickled mackerel, or bacon, or brawn, bread and margarine with jam or cheese, rice pudding or sponge pudding with jam. They even made tea — and this was Huguette’s job. The tea was brewed in large copper vats and liberally sweetened. Milk was added by punching holes in several tins of condensed milk and dropping them into the stewing tea. The paper labels floated off the tins to form an unusual, brightly colored scum on the surface.

Huguette was the daughter, or cousin, or niece of the owner. I think she was sixteen or seventeen. She was plump; even at that age a tender double chin hung damply below her jaw. She was dark-haired and had a distinct moustache of tiny fine hairs on her top lip. But she was pretty in a sulky, spoiled way. I can see her now, impassively puncturing condensed milk tins with something that looked like a steel marlinespike and tossing them over her shoulder into the sandy pool of simmering tea without a backward glance.

The estaminet was capacious and always crowded. Over a hundred people could fit into it without difficulty. On my first visit I waited at the head of the queue while Huguette milked a new batch of tea. She had been working all day. Her shapeless lime-green dress, tight in the armpits, was damp with fresh sweat I could smell it, clear and thin, through the strata of odors — smoke, grease, egg, tea — that suffused the atmosphere. I stood beside her, estimating the size of her breasts, inhaling it. Her sharp smell seemed to prod at my lungs like a stick. She stirred the tea vat with a three-foot wooden ladle. The condensed milk cans clanked dully in the dun liquid.

“ C’est formidable …” I said. “ Le thé. Pour le soif ”

She looked at me incredulously.

“ Vous pensez? ” she said. “ C’est pas vrai. ”

“Oh, yes — oui,” I said. “ Votre thé …” I kissed my bunched fingertips, a parody gourmand.

She turned and said something to her father or uncle and they both laughed. I laughed with them. But as a result of that exchange she remembered me. I ate there every day — fried eggs and chipped potatoes washed down with gallons of her disgusting tea.

“ Oh, voilà Monsieur Thé, ” she said as I came round for my third refill. “Tea. Ver’ good. You like.” She laughed.

“John. John James Todd. My name …” I paused. “ Votre nom? ”

“Huguette,” she said, turning the spigot on the vat. Tawny tea frothed into my enamel mug.

I thought of her now as I looked out over the tea-colored sand. I would not be back in Wormstroedt for getting on two months. I wondered if I could last that long; if my carefully hoarded store of images would sustain me through two months of masturbation. Perhaps I could persuade Louise to send me to brigade reserve on some specious mission.… Perhaps … To my surprise I found I had my hand on the scruff of Ralph’s neck and had been absentmindedly scratching behind his ears for God knows how many minutes. His humid eyes gazed at me. A loop of saliva hung from his jowl. I gave him a mighty shove and he went tumbling down the dune slope onto the beach. He got to his feet and shook the sand from his coat.

“Bugger off!” I shouted. I slithered down to the beach and walked down towards the distant water’s edge. I looked down at my boots and puttees, felt the rough serge of the khaki trousers chafe my inner thighs. I took a rather bent cigarette from one of my breast pockets and turned away from the wind to light it. I walked on. Flat sky, flat sand, flat sea. I was the only vertical thing in my universe. I felt surprisingly good. I felt strong, all of a sudden. I was an adult at last, a soldier, with my big moustache, and dreams of my girl, Huguette. I grinned.… Where was that bloody dog? I looked round for a pebble to throw.

Ralph was not his obligatory three paces behind me. I saw him, two hundred yards off, loping towards the front and the German line, running along the water’s edge, his reflection merging with and separating from his body, bounding back to wherever he had come from.

“Go on!” I shouted after him. “ Traitor! I knew it. I bloody knew it!”

Good riddance, I thought, finally got the message. I reached the sea’s edge. It was a calm day, a small surf turned over on the ridged gleaming sand. I turned my back on Ralph and the east and headed west towards the tiny distant shapes of the ruined villas and bathing huts of Oostduinkerke.

I must have walked nearly a mile before I saw them. I was on the point of turning back, the evening was drawing in, when I noticed what at first looked like a cluster of smooth pale rocks upon which the waves were breaking. But then I saw that the waves moved and shifted them to and fro. I walked closer. A strange minatory weight seemed to press on me.… Some sort of cargo? Washed overboard in a storm? In the nacreous late-afternoon light, I approached full of dread curiosity.

There were several drowned men, huddled together as if for comfort by the advancing tide. Most of them were naked, or almost so. One man wore a shirt; one man still had his boots on. I was struck by their inert tranquillity. I felt no lasting shock. I counted them. Eight. They looked like deep sleepers: expressionless, untouched, unblemished by whatever tremendous experience had washed them up on this shore. I saw a tattooed forearm, creases in a belly, the dark print of pubic hair on blue-white loins. The wavelets rolled one over, who flung an arm on the sand as if seeking purchase.

“Jesus,” I said out loud. I looked up and down the deserted beach. I was equidistant from the villas of Oostduinkerke and the mouth of the Yser. The packed grayness of the late afternoon seemed to thicken and condense around me. The tangle of bleached bodies surged as if one, and crept a few inches up the sand.

I ran for the dunes. A naval battle? A mine? A ship rent in two, a wardroom of sleeping men tossed into the North Sea? I felt a kind of clawing in my gorge. I raked my throat and spat.

There was wire on these dunes. I found the zigzag path and stumbled up it to the dune crest. I ran down through the gorse and broom brushes and along the muddy edge of a cabbage field. The kitchen smell of cabbage nauseated me. I suddenly associated the reek with those washed, clean dead men.… Through a hawthorn hedge and onto a cart track. I ran on. An old man sat in the doorway of a half-demolished cottage. I stopped. What was the French for drowned?

“ Mort ,” I said, panting heavily. “Eight, huit morts. ”

“ L’hôpital .” He gestured up the road. He had a lazy eye. It seemed to be trapped in the middle of an interminable wink.