William Boyd - The New Confessions

Boredom set in again, but it was of a slightly different order: beneath it lay a seam of excitement. An offensive was on; fairly soon, surely, it would be our turn for a “stunt.” There was real enthusiasm in our tent, shared by everyone with the exception of Pawsey and myself. Even Noel Kite said he was keen to “have a go at the Teutons.” Ralph the dog, which we had brought from Nieuport, became the bombing section mascot. I have a photograph of us all, taken with Somerville-Start’s box camera. There they sit — Kite, Bookbinder, Somerville-Start (Ralph panting between his knees), Druce, Teague, Pawsey and the others whose names I cannot recall — grinning, fags in mouths, caps pushed back, shirt-sleeved, collars open, Teague clutching a Mills bomb in each hand. We look like a typically close bunch of “mates,” cheery and convivial. It is an entirely illusory impression. The months at Nieuport had forged few bonds. If truth be told, we all rather grated on each other’s nerves. We were like schoolboys at the end of term, needing some respite from the close proximity.

At the end of June we marched from Bailleul through Locre and Dickebusch to Ypres. The countryside had a look of certain parts of England. Gentle hills, red-tiled cottages and farms, scattered woods and along the lane sides a profusion of lilac, may and laburnum bushes. We skirted the shattered town and went into reserve trenches on the left bank of the Ypres-Comines canal. This was the first time the battalion came under fire, from a few stray shells. We all thought we were blasé about shelling after the artillery duels at Nieuport, but this was our first experience of real explosions. I remember seeing the puffs of dirt erupt and collapse in the fields across the canal and thought they possessed a fragile transient beauty—“ earth trees that live a split second, ” I wrote in my diary. A few landed in the reserve lines, knocking down a couple of poplars, but I registered no alarm. There seemed nothing inherently dangerous in them — as threatening as the puffs of smoke that drifted harmlessly in the sunlit air after the clods of earth had thumped to the ground.

A and B companies went into the front line to relieve a battalion of the Royal Sussex Regiment. Two days later I went up myself as part of a ration party, carrying four gallons of tea in a couple of petrol cans.

What can I tell you about the Ypres front in early July 1917? Later, I used to explain it to people like this:

Take an idealized image of the English countryside — I always think of the Cotswolds in this connection (in fact, to be precise, I always think of Oxfordshire around Charlbury, for obvious reasons). Imagine you are walking along a country road. You come to the crest of a gentle rise and there before you is a modest valley. You know exactly the sort of view it provides. A road, some hedgerowed lanes, a patchwork of fields, a couple of small villages — cottages, a post office, a pub, a church — there a dovecote, there a farm and an old mill; here an embankment and a railway line; a wood to the left, copses and spinneys scattered randomly about. The eye sweeps over these benign and neutral features unquestioningly.

Now, place two armies on either side of this valley. Have them dig in and construct a trench system. Everything in between is suddenly invested with new sinister potential: that neat farm, the obliging drainage ditch, the village at the crossroads, become key factors in strategy and survival. Imagine running across those intervening fields in an attempt to capture positions on that gentle slope opposite you so that you may advance one step into the valley beyond. Which way will you go? What cover will you seek? How swiftly will your legs carry you up that sudden gradient? Will that culvert provide shelter from enfilading fire? Is there an observation post in that barn? Try it the next time you are on a country stroll and see how the most tranquil scene can become instinct with violence. It requires only a change in point of view.

Of course as the weeks go by the valley is slowly changed: the features disappear with the topsoil; buildings retreat to their foundations; trees become stumps. The colors fade beneath the battering until all you have is a homogenous brown dip in the land between two ridges.

But I thought only of my idyllic prospect as I peered out through a thin embrasure in the sandbags as our tea was issued in the trenches. Admittedly the landscape in that part of Belgium is flatter and there are no real hedgerows, but as I looked out through our wire across a grassy meadow that ascended a gentle slope to the ridge opposite, I thought I might as well be in a valley of Oxfordshire. There were hawthorn bushes and scrubby hedges marking the intersections of field boundaries. I saw an unpaved road, small clumps of trees (somewhat knocked about), a group of farm buildings (ditto), but essentially it was no more than a section of run-of-the-mill countryside. If it had not been for the enemy wire and the dark outline of the earthworks of their trench system, I might not have been able to stifle a yawn. The evening sun was pleasantly warm and I could see wisps of smoke rising from their lines. No-man’s-land. It was unimpressive.

We spent a week on the canal bank, during which we had two days and two nights in the line. There, I was gratified to discover — despite the occasional barrages — that I was not panic stricken. It was still close enough to my experience of the trenches at Nieuport not to be too unnerving.

The most irritating consequence of our first visit to the trenches at the salient was that we became lousy. I tried all the usual remedies — powder; hours of diligent nit picking, like an ape; a candle flame run up and down the seams — but nothing worked. Eventually I used to turn my shirt inside out, wear it that way for a couple of days, then turn it back again, and so on. It seemed to regulate the itching at least. I was always scratching, but it no longer rose to peaks of intolerance.

After our time at the front we duly marched back to Bailleul and routine reestablished itself. Cleaning, drilling, sports, working parties and occasional visits to cafés in the town. I gained a real impression too of the vast organism that is an army: all those separate units that allow the whole to function — ordnance, transport, clothing, feeding, animals, signals, engineering, road building, policing, communications, health and sanitation … There was an invisible city camped in the fields round Ypres and it required its civil servants, paymasters, administrators, labor force and undertakers to make it function. The part the 13th Battalion played in its organization was to dig cable ditches for the signalers, muck out open-air stables in the brigade transport lines, help lay tracks for light railways, stand guard over vast supply dumps, dig graves and latrines at a field hospital. We were no more than ants in an ant heap. But at the same time in those weeks of waiting I played atrociously in goal for the D Company soccer team (we lost 11–2 against the Australian pioneers); came down with a dose of influenza; wrote a letter to my father and three to Hamish; almost had a fist fight with Teague when he accused me of stealing; felt bored, sexually frustrated, tired and occasionally miserable and one night dreamed vividly of my death — eviscerated by a German with an entrenching tool. I oscillated between the roles of soulless functionary and uniquely precious individual human being; from the disposable to the sine qua non .

It all came to an end on July 16 when the guns started up again in earnest. Then the one-week barrage preliminary to the attack was extended to two as the renewed offensive was continually delayed. For the first few nights the fireworks display on the horizon was tremendous, but as it continued night after night it became only another source of grumbles. The 13th was not even in reserve for the big push of July 31. The day the battle proper began, we were marched to a sugar beet factory near Locre for delousing.