William Boyd - The New Confessions

There was loud, delighted applause at the end of the film. We returned to the mess for more drinks and much flattering appreciation was expressed. My first audience, my first acclaim. I felt enfolded in a radiant cloud of happiness and innocent pride.

I drove back with Donald, the two silver film canisters warm in my lap.

“Jolly good,” Donald said. “Inniskilling Fusiliers the day after tomorrow.”

But I was not listening. “I wonder why,” I said, “they didn’t use that shot of the sergeant major in shirtsleeves — you know, feeding jam to his pet squirrel.… It was far and away the best.”

Prophetic words. Prophetic complaint. I knew then that what I wanted was control, total control. And it is from that moment — and not those first hesitant turnings of the Aeroscope’s handle one morning in a village street on the Abeele-Poperinghe road — that I date the start of my career, my vocation, my work, my downfall.

In the next two weeks I filmed the Inniskilling Fusiliers and the Ox and Bucks. Light Infantry. The finished films were virtually indistinguishable from the first. But all the while I was shooting them, an idea was slowly forming in my mind. I decided, quite independently, to make my own film, one that was not just an assembly of loosely related fragments, but that had a distinct shape and form, that told a story. I think the title came to me almost before anything else: Aftermath of Battle . Already I could see it on advertisement posters, on marquees above cinemas. This would be a film true to a soldier’s experience of battle, an experience that the director himself had undergone.

From what Donald had shown me of WOCC material at Bailleul it was clear that most films of offensives dealt extensively with the buildup to an attack. This was followed by a few shots of men leaving the trenches and, if you were lucky, a long view of the enemy trenches under fire. There was a final collage of glum German prisoners and smiling walking wounded at casualty-clearing stations. The implicit message was that stalwart fortitude was the route to ultimate victory. The film I had in mind would be quite different.

I was not entirely candid about my ambitions with Donald. I suspected he would gently chide me for overreaching myself, running before I could walk. I told him only that I wanted to drop Great British Regiments and see if I could convey something more interesting about the immense range of activity that went on behind the lines. He happily gave me permission to proceed.

One morning I left the farm well before dawn and drove up to the northern sector of the Salient. I went to the battalion HQ of the 107th Canadian Pioneers and was given permission to film one of its wiring parties coming out of the line. A sleepy orderly led me along a duckboard track to the mouth of a communication trench. I set up my tripod, mounted my Aeroscope on top and waited.

At about half past six the men appeared. There was just enough light. I filmed their exhausted, haggard faces as they filed past me, barely glancing at the camera. Some were wounded and leaned on other men for support. Stretcher-bearers ferried out the gravely injured and three dead bodies.

With the orderly carrying the tripod, I ran down the duckboard track and overtook the shambling pioneers. I set up again on the far bank of the canal by a pontoon bridge over the canal. Wisps of mist rose from the torpid brown water. The men tramped across the bridge; the pontoons dipped; ripples expanded through their bending reflections; some early sun lit the water.

Later that morning I filmed them brewing tea and frying bread and corned beef. I took long, long close-ups as they gazed without expression into the lens. My last shot was of them sleeping, huddled in bivouac sheets, still as corpses.

Then I cut to real corpses, two days later in a graveyard near a field hospital. I had the Aeroscope focused on half a dozen bodies and then directed the burial party to step into frame and dump the contents of their stretchers beside them. Later too I filmed the bizarre, inflexible faces of a Chinese labor battalion digging graves for dead Europeans. Then I caught the unhappy faces of the teenage boys in the burial party pulling on long rubber gloves before hefting the dead into their narrow holes.

In my naïveté I proceeded to film more or less chronologically, shooting scenes in the order I wished them to appear, and in this way, over the next week I put together my film, with an absolute, almost uncanny confidence in the shape it was acquiring, absolutely sure of its effectiveness. I filmed an officer writing letters to next of kin, nurses bandaging wounds, carpenters making wooden crosses, amputees receiving their new crutches, piles of bloodstained uniforms being incinerated and the calm, silent, sunlit rooms of the moribund wards at a base hospital. The final image was the classic one: fresh troops marching up to the front, grinning, waving their tin hats at the camera.

I wrote no script or outline for Aftermath of Battle , but I had as clear a conception of its form as if it were all neatly plotted and laid out before me on paper. My next problem was how to ensure it was edited in the way I desired. I asked Faithfull how to resolve this problem.

“You’ve got this little chap back in Islington or Clerkenwell, see, editing miles of newsreel a week, bored stiff, mind on the pint of ale he’s going to have at lunchtime, but he’s got to stick all this stuff together. He’d be delighted if you’d help him out. Write it all down for him — words of one syllable, mind — and make sure you’ve numbered your reels properly. Does it need captions?”

“No. I don’t think so.”

“No captions?” He frowned at me. “Even simpler.… What are you up to, Todd?”

“Oh, just ‘behind the lines’ stuff.”

“I see.… Mmmm. Well, I’m going to put on a cigarette, I think. What about you? Chuck the tin over, Baby, there’s a good fellow.”

Two interesting encounters occurred while I was filming Aftermath . First of all I met Teague again in the base hospital at St.-Omer. I had set up my camera in a moribund ward and shot my film. Then it suddenly struck me that Dagmar might conceivably be working in the place and I went in search of a matron to find out. I found her in another ward full of heavily bandaged men — burn cases. She informed me that she knew of no Dagmar Fjermeros on the nursing staff, and as I turned to go I heard a voice from one of the beds.

“Hodd! Hodd!” it sounded like.

The top half of Teague’s head was covered in a moist gauze bandage, thick with ointment, from which one wet, red eye peered. In place of his top lip there was a cotton-wool moustache soaked in some camphor-smelling lotion. I felt my own head begin to ache in sympathy. Both his legs ended at the knee, the blanket tented by a basketwork support. We shook hands gently, left-handed — his right was bandaged, a round white fist.

I had never really liked Teague, but now I felt genuinely glad to see him. After all, we had shared most of that ghastly day. We talked of this and that — I explained my new job and uniform. As I looked at him, shattered and wasted, I sensed a sort of tickle in my brain, irresistible, like a cerebral sneeze forming.

I tried to resist it. “I reported those swine in the tank, you know, but I’m not sure if anything happened.” I paused. “How are you, all things considered?”

“All right, I suppose. Going to look a bit peculiar, though. Not much left to work with. At least I’ve got an eye.”

I had to ask. “How do you feel about it all — now?”

“Wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”

“Seriously?” The skepticism in my voice made it go up a register. “Sorry,” I added. “It’s just I never expected you to say that.”