William Boyd - The New Confessions

I remembered. The field hospital at St. Idesbalde. I turned and ran on.

I entered the hospital precincts from the side somewhere. I saw the back of what looked like a row of loose boxes, rounded them and came upon a neat square of a dozen large olive-green tents. A nurse was coming out of the first one.

“ Huit morts … dans la mer! ”

“I speak English,” she said in a cool, perfect but somehow instantly foreign accent.

“Eight drowned men,” I said. “On the seashore.” It sounded like a nursery rhyme.

I led this nurse and three nuns back down to the beach. An ambulance was following with orderlies and stretchers. The tide was further in but our group still clung together. The evening light shone lemon through gaps in charcoal clouds. The sand seemed shot with blue and green. We walked down the beach, the nuns muttering some prayer or heavenly invocation.

“We’d better get them out,” the nurse said. She took off her watch. She had not brought her coat. “Can you keep this dry for me?” she asked. I put it in a pocket and watched with some astonishment as she waded strongly into the sea, the waves soaking her to the waist, and she began to haul a man out. The nuns joined in. I registered the incongruity of the dark surplices and the absurd meringue hats as they stooped and tugged at the naked men. Naked men … nothing to what they saw in that field hospital. I sloshed into the water with them. The bodies shifted out of focus beneath my sensitive gaze. To grasp an ankle or a wrist? I saw a hand, limp, elegant — like something on a classical statue — and took hold of it. Very cold. But no more rebarbative than picking up a leg of lamb or a plucked chicken. I pulled him onto the beach. I took his other wrist. He was heavier on the sand, heels furrowing. The nuns were working two to a body. I heard shouts and saw the orderlies come running down the beach with their stretchers.

It was almost dark by the time the beach was clear. I stood with the nurse. She had a wide round face, a slightly large nose, covered in coarse prominent freckles. I could not see her hair as it was hidden beneath her neat headdress.

“What do you think it was?” I asked.

“Who can say? At least they looked peaceful. They didn’t seem to be hurt.” She looked at me. “I didn’t know there were English troops here.”

I explained about the Royal Marine gunners.

“Have you got a cigarette?”

I gave her one and lit it for her. She inhaled avidly.

“The nuns don’t approve. I have to take my moments carefully.” She blew smoke through her nose. “Wonderful. English tobacco!”

I suddenly remembered the time. “God! I’m going to get merry hell. Look, can I give your name?”

“Of course. I’m a sister at the field hospital. Dagmar Fjermeros.”

I got her to repeat it a couple of times.

“Can we give you a lift?”

“It’ll be quicker along the beach.” I said good-bye and left her.

Louise was furious, and put me on company report. Two hours later my story was confirmed after a few telephone calls. I was perturbed and unsettled by the whole experience. It was the tangle of bodies that bothered me and their untroubled expressions. They seemed docile and compliant in death, perfectly at ease. But for the first time since joining the army I felt frightened. I feared for my skin. That day I resolved to do anything not to get hurt. Not to die like those men.

While my alarm deepened, and self-preservation occupied the key position in my mind, I found another image began slowly to claim my attention. Dagmar, the nurse … her round placid face highlit by the flare of the match I applied to her cigarette. The full pout of her lips as she inhaled … I had written down her name on my return. Dagmar Fjermeros. A Scandinavian of some sort. I still had her wristwatch in my pocket.

After this excitement life returned to normal. The only event of note was a battalion parade where we were required to hand in our old phenate-hexane gas respirators. These were horrible objects, like a canvas sack with glass eye-holes, and which had to be tucked beneath the collar of one’s jacket. New box respirators, we were informed, would be issued to us in the next few days. Meanwhile, in preparation, Captain Tuck, the adjutant, would give us a lecture later that morning on antigas precautions and the best use of the box-respirator gas mask.

At half past twelve, D Company was mustered for Captain Tuck’s gas lecture. As we filed into the tent we were each handed what looked like a rectangular pad of cotton with two tapes, eighteen inches long, attached at either end, and a pair of rubber goggles.

Captain Tuck, a Wykehamist, was a brisk jolly man who spent most of his time looking at birds through his field glasses. He had an odd pursed look to his face, as if he were playing an invisible musical instrument — a spectral oboe or clarinet, say. First, he told us about the various types of gases — phosgene, chlorine and mustard — and their effects. Chlorine turned your face blue and you drowned in the water produced by your own tormented lungs. Phosgene caused your lungs to discharge four pints of yellow water every hour. Mustard made your eyelids swell and close, burned and blistered your skin, made you cough up your mucous membranes. Tuck read out other ghastly symptoms — congested larynx, collapsed lungs, swollen liver. I was very shocked.

A box respirator was circulated among us and we tried it on. Tuck explained how it worked. He informed us that the entire battalion would be issued with these in a matter of days.

“In the meantime,” he said, “we will be relying on the temporary respirator handed to you as you came in.”

I looked at the cotton pad in my hand. I wondered how it would stop me from coughing up four pints of yellow liquid in an hour. Suddenly I felt an acute, rotting fear. I saw the dead men on the beach. I glanced right and left. Everyone seemed to be smiling; even Tuck had a grin on his face.

“In the very unlikely event of a gas attack in this sector, this is what — it says here — you must do.” He opened a pamphlet and read from it. “ ‘When the gas alarm goes, first put on the goggles. Then soak the cheesecloth pad, or a handkerchief or a sock, in fresh urine before applying it to the face, making sure both mouth and nostrils are covered.’ ”

He paused for effect. His audience took this in for a second in silence before baying hoots of skeptical laughter and cries of disgust erupted.

“Gentlemen, please!” Tuck shouted above the din. “A final word of advice.… According to this document, the urine of older men is particularly efficacious! Dismiss.” Tuck strode out of the tent very pleased with his performance. D Company were most amused.

The next day I went in search of Louise and asked if I might cycle over to the field hospital to return Nurse Fjermeros’s watch. He agreed reluctantly, signed a chit and I drew one bicycle from the quartermaster’s stores. I pedaled off down the drab lanes in a fine drizzle. I noticed a curious fizzing sensation at the back of my head. I recognized the symptoms of mild euphoria.

It took me twenty minutes to get to St. Idesbalde. A Belgian sentry directed me to an office in a wooden shack where I waited for Dagmar. She arrived wearing full uniform. I handed over the watch.

“It’s very kind of you.”

“Not at all.… I wondered if the men — if you knew.”

“We think they are Dutch. A fishing boat, perhaps hitting a mine.” She shrugged, then smiled. “Can I offer you something to eat, Mr.…?”

“Todd. John James. Yes, please.”

We walked through the hospital. It had originally been a rather grand farmhouse with numerous outbuildings. Large tents had been pitched in every available space and duckboard walkways laid between them. Looking inside one tent I could see neat rows of patients in low camp beds. We crossed the lawn of a small walled garden and emerged from it onto the graveled driveway of the main house. Three motor ambulances were pulled up at the door. Some men, in filthy uniforms and stark, almost indecently white bandages, were being helped inside.