William Boyd - The New Confessions

We marched back to our billets that evening in heavy rain. It rained constantly for the next four days and nights. Suddenly the dark damp countryside seemed to ooze foreboding. Rumor abounded about the attack — all of it baleful. A company of the Australians, out rewiring one night, took heavy casualties (“heavy casualties”—a bland, soft phrase). I asked one man what it had been like. “Fuckin’ shambles,” he said.

On August 7 we were moved back up to brigade reserve on the canal bank. Before we occupied the trenches we were paraded in a field where Colonel O’Dell addressed us. The battalion, he said, had been ordered to provide reinforcements for other units in the brigade. I do not remember the details; two companies were going to the Royal Welch, I think. D Company was to be attached to a battalion of the Grampian Highlanders.

I already thought of us as the “unlucky” 13th and this latest move seemed to me yet another turn for the worse. Teague and Somerville-Start, however, rejoiced. There was much excited talk about the “Jocks” and their fighting spirit, and ill-informed speculation about this venerable regiment’s battle honors.

The next night we set off, having left most of our kit at the battalion dump. Ralph was entrusted to the quartermaster. The bombers made a great fuss of their farewells; you would have thought they were saying good-bye to their grandmothers. I had nothing to do with it — I was glad to be rid of the animal at last.

It took hours to join our new unit. There was immense toing and froing behind the front. We followed duckboard and fascine paths across black fields and were often redirected back down them. Once we eventually gained the trench system, we were continually halted to allow a passage of ration and ordnance parties, engineers and signalers. Eventually we found the right communication trench. We toiled up this. Ahead I heard Louise reporting to an officer in the Grampians. Soon we were deployed in the support lines.

It was immediately clear that these trenches were not what we were used to: no dugouts, not even ledges cut for sleeping. I put my waterproof cape on the ground and sat down, my back against the rear wall. Druce passed among us, checking that all was well. I tipped my helmet forward and tried to sleep. My nostrils were full of the smell of wet earth and from the right came Bookbinder’s body odor — truly appalling, a vile hogo. On my left Pawsey was having a shit in his helmet — he was too scared to go to the latrine sap.

From my diary:

August 9, 1917. Our first morning with the Grampians. Woken by random shelling. Stand to. Misty dawn. Up ahead, beyond our wire, a low ridge and two obliterated farms. Over to our right, according to Druce, the Frezenburg-Zonnebecke road. I can see no sign of it .

It is not very evocative, I admit. The biggest shock for me was not the shelling but the transformation in the landscape. All the ground as far up as the ridge looked as though it had been badly plowed. Almost all the long grass and shrubs that I had seen five weeks earlier had disappeared. I could not see behind me, nor much to either side, but the countryside we occupied was a more or less uniform dark brown. It was hard to believe we were in high summer. I was also — curiously, for I am not particularly fastidious — somewhat offended at the mess everywhere. The trench was full of litter — empty tins, discarded equipment, boxes and fragments of boxes — and through slits in the parapet of sandbags, no-man’s-land seemed to be scattered with heaps of burst mattresses. I swear it was five minutes before I realized they were dead bodies.

Druce sent me, Kite and Somerville-Start into the Grampians’ trenches to draw our water ration for the section. We passed along the support line through our company looking for the lead-off trench to the battalion ration store. We turned the corner of a firebay.

“Where are the Grampians?” Kite asked.

“Another ten yards.”

We came out of the firebay. Five very small men — very small men indeed — sat around a tommy-cooker brewing tea. They looked at us with candid hostility. They wore kilts covered with canvas aprons. Their faces were black with mud, grime and a five-day growth of beard. Two of them stood up. The tops of their heads came up to my chest. Neither of them could have been more than five feet tall. Bantams … These were the 17th/3 Grampians, a bantam battalion, every man under the army’s minimum height of five feet three inches. Kite and Somerville-Start were both taller than six feet.

“What the fuck are youse cunts looking at?” One of the men said in a powerful Scottish accent.

“ What? ” Kite said, unable to conceal his astonishment.

“Rations,” I said. At least I could understand. He told me where to go.

We made our way diffidently along the support trench until we found the supplies sap. There, a dozen bantams were collecting rations. We waited our turn uneasily, like lanky anthropologists among a pygmy tribe. We stood head and shoulders above these tiny dirty men. They seemed more like goblins or trolls than members of the same race as ourselves. The bantams appeared indifferent to our presence, but we were all ill at ease, full of bogus smiles, as if we suspected some elaborate practical joke was being played on us and had not quite divined its ultimate purpose. We gladly picked up our petrol cans of water and headed back.

The bantams did not like us. It cannot just have been because of our height, though it has to be said that as ex-public-school boys we were on average taller than the other ranks in most regiments. I suspect it was a combination of our stature, our voices, our bearing and our Englishness that let us down. It did not help when, on our way back that first day, Kite said loudly, “I think they’re rather sweet little chaps. Is it true they’ve been specially bred?” In any event, there swiftly grew up an invisible barrier between our company flanks and the bantams on either side. It was so uncomfortable that we demanded our own ration parties, which, somehow, Louise managed to arrange for us. The company’s first deaths in action were sustained in this way. The pipe band were carrying up pots of hot stew when they “got a shell all to themselves,” as the saying had it. Four were killed and three were wounded. It shocked us all profoundly: the pipe band had seemed indestructible. Louise, I recall, took it particularly badly.

Trench routine continued as normal for the next few days. My diary records the daily round:

Sentry duty, 4 A.M.–6 A.M. Stand to. B’fast — tea, pickled mackerel, biscuit. Repaired trenches. Ration carrying. Lunch: beef stew, biscuits. Slept. Sentry duty, 6 P.M.–8 P.M.

It rained from time to time and I grew steadily dirtier. I watched my uniform take on that particular look common to heavily soiled clothes — one sees it on tramps and refugees, for example. The fibers of the material seem to become bulked out with dirt so that jacket and trousers look as if they have been cut from a thick coarse felt. Creases at armpits, elbows and backs of knees develop a permanent concertinaed effect — rigid and fixed. Your hair dulls, then becomes oily, and then transforms into a matted, clotted rope-end. Fingernails are rimmed with earth, your hands hard and calloused as a peasant’s. Your beard grows. Your head itches, itches all day long.

We knew our “stunt” was approaching as the ridge in front of us steadily took more shelling. Tension increased, and the routine wariness that had characterized our waking moments was replaced by neurotic edgy alarm. We kept expecting to be pulled out of the line for a period of rest before the attack, but we appeared to have been forgotten. Even Teague and Somerville-Start were subdued. As for myself, I had evolved a new approach. I decided to be logical. I was going, as far as possible, to think my way to survival, even if it meant disobeying orders.