William Boyd - The New Confessions

“Stick with me, Todd,” he said. “We’ll be all right. Look how we got through Frezenburg — barely a scratch.”

I looked at his square face and his small eyes. He was the second person, after Dagmar, who had assured me I would survive. We were sitting in support lines, the night before the attack.

“I’m going to die,” I said. “I know . Just because I made it once doesn’t mean a thing.”

“You’ll be fine. You’re like me, Todd. We’re special, different.”

I could not think of anyone I was less like, except, perhaps Tanqueray and MacKanness.

“You really think you’re not going to …?” I left the question deliberately unfinished.

“I don’t care. I’m just going to go in there and have the fight of my life.”

I looked away. For some reason Teague’s attitude rather disgusted me. We had eaten well that evening: pea soup, fried corned beef, sardines. In my hand I had a piece of sponge cake covered in jam. I threw it over the parapet for the rats.

August 22, 1917. I stand in the front-line trench waiting for the barrage to lift. Teague is on my right by the ladder. Standing on its bottom step is Lieutenant Stampe, our company commander. Stampe is six months younger than me, just eighteen, a pleasant fair-haired person. Tanqueray refers to him as a “pup.” Tanqueray himself comes down the trench issuing rum. I decline.

“I’ll be watching you, Todd,” he says. “Very closely.” I have a stupid song in my head. I cannot rid myself of the tune.

Whiter than the snow, whiter than the snow ,

Wash me in the water

Where you wash your dirty daughter

And I shall be whiter than the snow, Holy Joe .

The catchy tune keeps my mind off other subjects. This time we are to attack some long-ruined château, take the remains of a wood and advance through open country to the crossroads at S—. I have only the vaguest idea of our objectives. In any case, they will mean nothing once the whistle blows. There is no château, no wood, no open country, no crossroads at S—.

Teague turns towards me. Suddenly the barrage lifts for a second or two.

“Here we go, Todd,” he says. A whistle goes somewhere. Stampe puts his own to his mouth and blows fiercely. The pea jams. Silence. He smiles guiltily and climbs up the ladder onto the parapet, waving us up and on. I go up the ladder, sober this time, the world flat and fixed. Ahead a cliff of smoke and explosions mark the German line. I crouch and head off, following the backs of others through the gaps cleared in our wire. Within yards my boots are heavy with a thick rind of mud and clay. I have lost Teague. I keep my head down, watching for mud pools. I walk in as straight a line as possible. Some shells start to burst round us. I skirt an icy lagoon forty feet across. I slip and fall. I look up; Stampe stands ahead.

“All right?” he yells.

I struggle to my feet. He moves on. Twenty yards to my left a British soldier levels his rifle at Stampe and shoots him in the back. Stampe falls. The soldier glances round. MacKanness. I crumple to the ground as if hit. I wait a minute, then (there is no sign of MacKanness) cautiously get up and go and look for Stampe. He is face down in the mud. I pull him up and unplug the dirt from his mouth and nose. He is still alive. Stampe is almost the same height as me. To a bantam all tall men must be indistinguishably high.

“Go on,” Stampe says. He pushes me away.

Teague is suddenly behind me. “Come on,” he says. We run off.

“Where are we?” I shout.

“Nearly at the wood!”

Where was the château? I wonder. Through the drifting smoke I see some stumps and shattered trunks of trees. Chunks of wood fly up, spinning off them. Teague and I fall to the ground. Teague starts firing his rifle. I do the same. I can see nothing. Teague takes a Mills bomb from his bag and throws it. It explodes — yellow and orange, white smoke, erupting earth. He takes out another and slithers forward a few yards through the black trunks. He throws again. This time the bomb seems to detonate almost immediately after it has left his hand. I hear him scream.

Then, seconds later, “ Todd! Todd! ”

I crawl over to him.

Teague has lost two fingers on his throwing hand and his face has taken a lot of flash from the defective bomb. Most of his hair is burned away, as is the first layer of skin, some of which hangs in long fragile shreds from his cheeks like stiff rice paper. He has no top lip and, as far as I can see, no eyelids left. His eyes are bleeding from the perforated whites, filling the sockets.

I help him to his feet and we stumble off. Blood tears an inch wide track his face. We are suddenly free of the black stumps, but I have absolutely no idea which way to go. I seem to be in a circle of infernal noise. Distant shapes of men scurry and creep in every possible direction. I do not know if we are being shot at.

Teague sinks to his knees. He is moaning now. His face seems to be effervescing, forming a creamy brown froth like the head on a glass of stout. “ Whiter than the snow, whiter than the snow ” hums in my head.

“I’ll get a stretcher-bearer,” I say faintly. I notice there are traces of tangled grass among the mud and upturned clods of earth. We must have come quite far.

I stand up. The noise of explosions has moved off a way. There is still no one firing at me. I lay Teague down and run off in what I think is the right direction. Stretcher-bearers should be following the second wave. I run on.

Then I hear the noise of an immense motor. To my left, bucking and heaving through and over the tree stumps, is a tank, a huge three-dimensional metal parallelogram, eight feet tall, its tracks hurling up a heavy spray of clods and mud. There is a name painted on the front: Oh, I say! The machine gun in the forward turret traverses and begins firing at me.

I fling up my arms, fall down and pretend to be dead for the second time that day. The tank churns on. I get up and, ridiculously, shake my fist and swear at it. Then I run off on my way again, looking for stretcher-bearers.

I stop suddenly, a horrifying image forming in my mind. I feel a bolus of acid nausea rise in my throat. I turn and run back towards Teague. I hear the engine of Oh, I say! ahead in the drifting smoke, straining, grinding.

Wash me in the water

Where you wash your dirty daughter.…

The tank has run over Teague’s legs. He is alive but unconscious. His legs are oddly shapeless now, like partially filled kit bags. One boot is pointed delicately, like a ballet dancer’s shoe.

I chase after the tank. I can see its tracks clearly in the muddy grass. I come over a small rise and stop, staring in astonishment. Ahead of me, fresh in the morning sun, stretches the Belgian countryside. Roads, trees, fields, villages, a steeple, smoke from chimneys. About a mile off I see the fortifications of the German third line and a column of troops being marched towards me. Reinforcements.

“Oil You the British Army then?”

I turn round. The tank has stopped about fifty yards away. One of its crew is urinating against its side. I bite my bottom lip to stop myself from bursting into tears. I walk over. The man shudders and starts to do up his flies. He comes to meet me. He is small, almost as small as a bantam.

“I reckons as we’ve gone a touch too far, mate.” He walks round the front of the tank. “Right through the bloody middle, a hot knife through butter.”

I follow him round.

“No trenches here, see. Only blockhouses.”

On the other side of the tank the crew sit in the sun, in shirt sleeves. They are drinking whiskey — Johnny Walker — from the bottle, and eating bread and ham. One man carves from a joint.