William Boyd - The New Confessions

However, despite Druce’s presence, as our sixth month in the Nieuport sector wore on, my own worries steadily increased. The drowned men had thrown me off balance. The unreal routine and the tolerable nature of our life at the front had been exposed for the temporary haven it was. We would not be left in a quiet sector forever. As each day passed it brought a possible posting closer. I began to speculate about the nature of my death, all the horrible versions that were available. And behind this fear another deep disquiet was nurtured. I was still a virgin, and, Oonagh apart, I had never even kissed a girl. The thought of dying with life so unlived, so little experienced, seemed outrageously unfair. My encounter with Dagmar had naturally exacerbated this emptiness at the center of myself. Dagmar or Huguette? Huguette or Dagmar? Which one would I choose? In such bouts of vain self-deception did I while away my time. It was doubly galling as it was difficult to masturbate discreetly in the trenches. I used to wait until I was on sentry duty in a small observation sap pushed forward some ten or fifteen yards into no-man’s-land where for four futile hours I was meant to guard against a German attack. (As it happened, one did occur in July of that year—1917—but by then we were long gone.)

From my diary:

April 23, 1917. Druce has just told me that I am on sentry duty from 2 A.M. to 6 A.M. Tried to sleep in dugout but had serious row with Teague and S.-Start about the “thrill of battle.” Teague openly accused me of killing Ralph. Even Bookbinder and Kite seemed not to accept my story. Eight days to go and then back to Wormstroedt and Huguette .

I remember that date vividly. All through that night of sentry duty the German batteries at Wilskerke shelled the bridge across the canal at Wulpen. I could see across the sand hills the distant muzzle flash of the guns, but I could not see or hear the shells land. The irregular flickering and the faint reports kept me alert and edgy. Around five o’clock I began to see the shape of the ruined lighthouse at the mouth of the Yser emerge from the darkness. It had been a warm night, the warmest of the year so far.

I had a piss in the corner of the sap. As I did so I looked up at the lightening sky and saw the faint stars still sparkling in an immense field of lightest bluey-gray. I rubbed my face and looked at my watch. Half an hour to go. A breakfast of tea, a tin of sardines, and bread and margarine waited. I sniffed, spat, yawned, flexed my fingers and allowed my gaze to wander out over no-man’s-land.

I saw the gas instantly, as it rolled thick, white and heavy down through the dunes from Lombartzyde. A breeze on the seaward side swung a flank round faster on the left, hooking in towards me. It seemed dense and solid as smoke from burning green leaves, obliterating everything as it advanced. I turned and ran back down the sap to the trench. There a large, highly polished section of girder hung from a bracket, and beside it an iron bar.

I seized the bar and beat furiously on the girder, numbing my fingers cruelly with the blows. The clear harsh sound of metal on metal clattered down the trench line.

“ Gas! ” I screamed. “ GAS ATTACK! ”

I heard other gas alarms being sounded — sirens, gongs and rattles — shouts of frantic inquiry. I tore my goggles from a pocket and put them on. I fumbled for my cotton pad. Not there! I re-searched my pockets. Nothing. Nothing . I thought of pints of yellow fluid, foam-filled rotting lungs, searing mustard burns … I hurled myself into the dugout. Blurred faces shouted nonsense at me.

“Gas!” I bellowed. “Gas!”

I scrabbled among my kit, found my cotton pad and stumbled back outside. The gas was fifty yards away. Our platoon crawled out of dugouts. The air was filled with alarms, loud with meaningless panic. I saw a baffled Noel Kite, who had also been on sentry duty, trying on his cotton pad. Dry.

“Urine, Kite!” I yelled at him, and at the others who now piled haphazardly out of the dugout entrance, tin helmets on, rifles ready.

“Wet the pad. Quickly!”

Violent fear galvanized them. Full early-morning bladders were emptied steaming onto the cotton. I laid my own pad on the fire step and snatched at the buttons of my fly with blunt agitated fingers. I saw Teague wrap a sopping mask around his face, saw the more fastidious Kite wring his out before applying it. Somerville-Start crouched behind the sandbagged parapet on the fire step, fixing his bayonet, his hanging cock luminously white against the khaki of his battle dress. I strained desperately to urinate, but I had emptied my bladder minutes before. Nothing . Not a drop. I could smell the gas above the acid reek of urine, which filled the trench. The whole section was now masked and ready except for me and Pawsey, who had raised his sodden pad to vomit. I saw Louise, half-dressed, stumbling along from his dugout.

“What’s going on?” he shouted. “Who gave that alarm?”

“ Gas, Louise! ” I shrieked at him.

“Don’t call me Louise!” he bellowed back.

I remembered Tuck’s lecture. An old man’s urine is particularly efficacious .

“I can’t piss!” I shouted. I grabbed at his fly buttons.

Louise saw his masked men and panicked. He laid his square of cotton beside mine on the fire step, ripped open his trousers and sprayed the two pads with wild arcs of urine.

“Quickly,” I yelled, pounding his kidneys with my fists. “Faster!”

It was too late. The gas was on us, sweeping thick and white over the breastwork of sandbags. Cool, moist, almost refreshing and faintly salt. The first sea mist of the spring.

Luckily, no one in real authority knew who started the panic. I myself claimed I had heard an earlier alarm from the Belgian lines to our right. We had many cuts and bruises among us, but in A Company there were two broken arms and a fractured pelvis, Louise was furious and sent me back to Coxyde-Bains on field punishment. Single-handedly I dug latrines for an entire company of amused Royal Marines at La Panne. Then I joined a working party from C Company filling sandbags for three days. My charge was unsoldierly conduct: unacceptable and unseemly behavior that had caused confusion and indiscipline in the ranks. You can imagine how popular I was with the bombers, who had not welcomed the close contact with their own excreta. It was hard to convince them it was not a practical joke. Captain Tuck, who was orderly officer the day I reported back to Coxyde-Bains, severely rebuked me for my behavior, adding that I had not only let down the 13th Battalion but also the public-school boys of Britain.

“But what if it had been gas, sir?”

“But it wasn’t, so your observation is irrelevant. What school did you go to, Todd? Harrow? Charterhouse?”

“Minto Academy.”

“Stands to reason then.” He dismissed me.

The only tangible result of my false alarm was the prompt issuing of the new box respirators two days later. But I received no thanks for this.

One day during my field punishment I was walking back to Coxyde-Bains — shovel and pick over my shoulder — with the orderly sergeant who had been supervising my latrine digging. He was an agreeable enough man, a nearsighted twenty-year-old who had done a term at Cambridge and who had an interest in photography. We were discussing the relative merits of plate over roll film, I rather listlessly — I was filthy and my back and shoulders ached. We walked through a tiny hamlet, quite ruined from the 1914 advance, on the La Panne-Oostduinkerke road, when we passed a broken-down Fiat lorry full of nurses. A driver busied himself with the engine while some of the nurses waited by the side of the road in the mild late-afternoon sun.