William Boyd - The New Confessions

“Where do you think we’ll be going?” I asked.

“Don’t know. The Somme? Arras? Louise hasn’t told me.”

“Is there a push on?”

“Looks like it.”

I felt a stomach-churn of alarm.

“I shouldn’t worry, Todd old fellow. They’ll probably forget about us.”

I was grateful for his words of reassurance, however unrealistic they might be. I wanted to tell him why I was so apprehensive, indicate the true nature of my fears.

“I’m just worried that I — you know — haven’t done enough.” I smiled faintly. “In life, as it were.” I paused. “I mean I’ve never really even been in love. Properly.”

“Well, imagine if you were. You might feel worse.”

“I suppose so. I …”

“What?”

“You know that girl in the estaminet? ”

“The one that serves the tea or the one that washes up?”

“The tea one.”

“What about her?”

“What do you think of her?”

“I don’t know … obliging enough. Pretty cheap. Thirty francs isn’t bad for a roger.”

“ Huguette? ”

“Is that her name?” He turned to Kite. “Hey, Noel, that bint in the estaminet , Todd says she’s called Huguette.”

“Ah … Huguette,” Kite said, tasting the name. “Did you shaft her, Todd?”

“Yes … oh yes.”

“She’s Bookbinder’s favorite,” Druce said. “Noel and I prefer the washer-up.”

“Ah.”

“I should give her a go if we ever get back there.”

“Good idea. I will.”

* * *

I think my health began to give way round about then. Suddenly I felt ill all the time, laden with apathy. It was not so much my health declining, perhaps, as my well-being. I held myself in low esteem, disgusted at my naïveté, not so much because I had made such a banal romantic error, but for what it revealed to me about my own conceit. This made me even less prepared for our transfer, and more fearful of this “push” that everyone was discussing. I was determined somehow to get out of the front line.… If I could just get sent back to reserve, back to Dunkirk even. I would happily work in fatigue parties for the duration.

I began to think wildly of desertion, or even a self-inflicted wound, but I knew I had not the courage for such a course of action. This was the source of my apathy. I wanted to act but had no guts for the effort required.

It was Pawsey who gave me the idea. Ever since he had vomited during the false gas attack, he had looked wan and peaky. The alarm had unsettled him. He claimed the urine made him sick, but it was the fear. He was generally regarded as a malingerer, especially by Teague and Somerville-Start. I watched Pawsey closely, and after a while I began to suspect that he was half-trying to poison himself. Whenever we were outside he chewed grass constantly and I never saw him spit out the pulp. He looked anemic and thin and was never out of the latrines.

Then we heard that our move was to be three days hence — destination a secret. More importantly, for my purposes, the entire battalion was to parade in companies for an inspection by the brigade medical officer the day before our departure. From somewhere in the back of my mind I recalled an old goldbrick’s trick (I cannot remember who told me this — possibly Hamish), the gist of which was that heavy smoking on an empty stomach forced the heartbeat up dangerously high. I reduced my eating to a minimum and started smoking as much as I could bear.

This regime did indeed have a curious effect on me. At first I experienced a palpable euphoria. I felt light-headed, strangely taller. After forty cigarettes a dull headache set in and I began to feel queasy. The morning of the inspection found me etiolated and bilious. I lit a cigarette immediately on waking and managed to smoke three more before my rising gorge demanded a cup of tea.

Druce remarked on my addiction to tobacco.

“Relax,” he said. “I’m sure we’ll be going back to reserve. We’re quiet-sector material.”

I smiled weakly and set fire to another cigarette.

D Company were called for inspection at 11 A.M. As we filed into the tent I noticed a sign saying FFI INSPECTION. I asked Druce what the letters stood for.

“Free from Infection,” he said.

“But what exactly does that mean?”

He said he had no idea.

A morose-looking, sallow-faced doctor confronted us. He had a swagger stick under one arm. I put my hand on my heart. It certainly seemed to be beating unusually fiercely. My headache keened thinly at my temples too. I was pasty and a film of perspiration covered my face. My hair was damp on my brow. Surely, I said to myself, they cannot send a man in my condition into battle. Along the line I saw Pawsey, jade-green, his jaws working relentlessly.

“Right,” the doctor said. “Drop your trousers. And your drawers.”

Baffled, hesitantly, some of us grinning lewdly, we complied. Our shirttails, fore and aft, preserved our modesty. The doctor approached the first file of men. With his swagger stick he lifted the front of the first man’s shirt, glanced down and asked, “Are you all right?”

“Yes, sir.”

He did this to everyone, moving quickly down the line. He reached me and lifted my shirt.

“Are you all right?”

“Well, sir, my heart—”

He was on to the next man. Louise, following, glared at me. I felt sharp tears of anger. I glanced at Pawsey. He looked shocked at my peremptory treatment.

The doctor reached him. Lifted his shirt.

“Are you all right?”

“No, sir,” Pawsey said boldly, swallowing his cud.

The doctor moved on to the next man.

It took him less than an hour to inspect the entire battalion and we were to a man passed Free from Infection. Free to go and get killed and not contaminate the battlefield, Pawsey said bitterly, when we compared our outrage later.

“I feel dreadful, ” Pawsey said. “Truly dreadful. I’m ill, for God’s sake. That bloody quack …” His chin buckled slightly as he tried to control his tears.

For my part, I felt only sullen and resigned. I seemed to stand before a high looming cliff of despair. That afternoon, I slipped away from yet another soccer match and walked down the lane through the dunes towards the seawall.

It was a day of high gray solid clouds, dense and packed like cobbles. There was a distant mist far out to sea that blended the water with the sky at the horizon. The light cast was even, drab, monochrome. The tide was going out and the vast beach gleamed with a dull wet iridescence.

I went through a gap in the wire and down the steps of the wall onto the sand, turned east and walked gloomily along for a good while, lost in my thoughts. I was trying to revive my innate, natural optimism, trying to regenerate a sense of my own special worth. Without self-esteem you can accomplish nothing, and I knew that I had to overcome the twin disappointments of Dagmar and Huguette.… Dagmar, I told myself, if only I had been bolder there. Remember her name: Dagmar Fjermeros. After the war you can go to Norway, find her, marry her, start a family. What had she said to me? “You will survive. I’m almays right.” Almays. If only she had said “always” …

I stopped. In the distance I could see Nieuport-Bains and beyond its two piers I thought I could make out the shattered base of the lighthouse behind the trench line on the right bank of the Yser. I felt — surprisingly — suddenly proprietorial. That was my position: l’homme de l’extrême gauche . A special post. The first man on the Western Front. Others had occupied it; doubtless someone was occupying it now, but I felt as if I were leasing it to him. I remembered Teague’s sneer: “What did you do in the war?” It was quite a claim I could make. I turned and began to walk back. I was l’homme de l’extrême gauche . The more I thought about it, the more pleased I was with the image. It seemed apt, portentous. That, I now saw, was to be my role in life.