William Boyd - The New Confessions

“We’re very quiet at the moment,” she said. “Waiting for spring offensives.”

I nodded and followed her across the driveway and into a stable block. There was a row of loose stalls and for an instant I was back in Minto Academy. I had paused involuntarily, and now Dagmar stood at the door of an old barn waiting for me. I followed her in.

The noise of conversation was colossal. The barn had been converted into a canteen and was filled with trestle tables around which sat dozens of injured soldiers, some in uniform, some in pajamas and dressing gowns, eating, drinking, playing cards, and all — as far as I could hear — talking at the top of their voices. Smoke from their cigarettes drifted up into the exposed rafters. A big fat iron stove stood in the center of the room and at the far end was a makeshift kitchen and serving area staffed by nuns. There I was given a plate of stew, three slices of coarse grayish soda bread and a tin mug of coffee.

Dagmar and I found two unoccupied seats and sat down. Here and there among the groups of soldiers were nurses and nuns. I suddenly felt a shaft of envy for these wounded Belgians, with their loud conviviality, their plentiful food and their female company. I looked at Dagmar — she was tucking stray hair back under her cap. Her hair was a fine reddish blond.

“Not eating?”

“No,” she said. “I already finished. Please, don’t mind me.”

I ate the stew. A curious-tasting meat — half pork, half venison (it was mule, I learned later). We chatted about something or other. She told me she was Norwegian and had joined the Red Cross in 1915. I let her know something of my past, lying blatantly only when I said I had abandoned a place at university to enlist.

“I think you were better to stay at university.”

“I think you’re right,” I said spontaneously, my new mood of apprehension prompting me. I smoothed my moustache with thumb and forefinger. I took out a tin of cigarettes — Trumpeters — offered her one and received a wry refusal. I lit mine and passed the tin across the table to her.

“Have it,” I said. “I’ve got tons.”

She smiled and quickly slipped the tin into a pocket in her uniform. This mild illicit act joined us as fellow conspirators. I felt my face hot and a curious sense of disequilibrium afflicted me for an instant. I looked at her round face, her random freckles … Her hands were on the table, one nail tapping gently. I saw fine red-gold hairs at her wrist. I wanted to ask her if we could meet again, but the words seemed to form in my stomach rather than my throat, as if only vomiting would release them.

“I keep thinking about those drowned men,” I blurted out. “They’re the first actual dead … I mean, like that — casualties.”

“You should stay here for a day. We filled two cemeteries since I’m at St. Idesbalde.”

“Of course. I see. It’s just that, for the first time …” I gave a weak smile. “This quiet sector, it’s very misleading.”

She met my gaze. “I know you’ll be all right,” she said seriously. “I get these sensations about people.” She smiled. “I’m almays right.”

“Sorry?”

“I’m almays right.”

“Oh. Good, good.”

That was what it sounded like to me. “Almays.” Was it a speech defect? Did she think it was an actual English word: a conflation of “almost always”? Did she mean “almost” or “always”? I decided to take it for the latter. I felt a benign sense of release spread upwards through my body from my bowels, a kind of erotic fatigue. I felt I had her word for it. I was going to come through.

“I hope you are,” I said. “Right, I mean.”

She looked at her watch. “I should go.”

She walked me to the camp gate. I put on my cap and climbed on my bicycle. She leaned towards me.

“Thanks for the cigarettes,” she said in a low voice. Her sweet breath hit the side of my face.

“Do you ever go walking on the beach,” I asked, “at Coxyde-Bains?”

“Me? No.…”

“I do, as often as I can.”

“Maybe I’ll see you one day.”

“Yes. Fine.… Well, good-bye.”

It was the best I could do. I cycled back to camp in a dull, vexed mood; too dull even to be angry with myself. At the camp, teams from A and D companies were playing soccer with each other, thirty a side.

I went into our tent. Teague was there, his foot up — sockless — on a pile of blankets.

“Twisted my bloody ankle,” he said, “playing bloody footer.” His thick face was red and sweaty. The normally immaculate ridges of his hair were mussed.

“Where the hell have you been?”

I told him. And recounted how I had met Dagmar.

“Bloody marvelous,” he said. “Here we are, meant to be fighting the Hun. One lot plays football, another goes to have lunch with his girlfriend. ‘What did you do in the war, Daddy?’ ‘Me? Oh, I twisted my ankle in a match against A Company.’ Makes me sick. ”

He was genuinely angry. But I had seen him often enough in this mood not to be perturbed.

“You should visit that hospital. You wouldn’t be quite so keen then.”

“What do you know, Pictish lout?”

I was not frightened of Teague, especially as he was immobile.

“I know I’d watch my lip if I were you, Teague. Or I might just twist your other ankle.”

“Shag off.”

“Shag off yourself, fat face.”

It carried on like this for a minute or so before I left to watch the end of the match. It sounds depressingly puerile, I know, but remember we were most of us just out of the sixth form and we often bickered this way. Our profanities coarsened steadily as time went by. We took our lead from the pipe band, cheerful foul-mouthed fellows, with a colorful line in invective.

Two days later we went up the line to relieve B and C companies. I looked at the immaculate trenches with different eyes. There was something sinister, almost insulting about their order and rectitude. My encounter with the drowned men had made me preternaturally wary. I no longer strolled along the parapet at dusk, as I used to. I never even exposed my head above the sandbags. I surveyed the distant German lines through a periscope. I saw the small figures of the enemy quite clearly, as indifferent to our presence as we were to theirs. For the first time I completed the equation of myself, my rifle and the target a thousand yards away. Then I transposed it. Congruence. My alarm deepened.

One evening in the section dugout Teague and Somerville-Start asked Druce to persuade Louise to let them form a raiding party.

“What on earth for?” he said. We all listened intently.

“To do something for once,” Teague said.

“We’re going mad with boredom. Let’s take a prisoner. Interrogate him.” Somerville-Start grinned, showing his big teeth. “Have some fun.”

“No,” I said, suddenly terrified. “It’s the most stupid idea I’ve ever heard.”

“Does sound a bit on the keen side,” Bookbinder said. “I’m not complaining.”

“Anything for a quiet life,” Kite said. “Who wants to go prowling around in the dark?”

“You might get hurt,” Bookbinder said.

“Bloody funk,” Teague said to me.

“It’s not funk, it’s sense.”

“Louise’ll never agree, anyway,” Druce said calmly. “He’ll ask O’Dell and O’Dell will say no. This is Belgian line, you know, not ours.”

“They’re mad,” I said to Druce when the others had gone. “Raving mad.”

Druce smiled. “Raiding party. Don’t know what they’re talking about.” He slapped me on the shoulder. “Keep it up, Jock, you’ll save our necks yet.”

I liked Druce for that. He seemed so much older than the rest of us: calmer, more skeptical, less ruffled by events.