William Boyd - The New Confessions

I almost wished she were weeping. I was profoundly unsettled by her solemn gloom.

“Because I never do,” I said honestly.

“You should have chosen not to,” she said. “I had. Couldn’t you see I’d made that choice? Sometimes to choose not to do something is as important as …” She faltered, but I had the gist of her reasoning. The left turning or the right? Down which avenue of possibilities will you travel? We want to do the best, but there is always a course of action that gives you the worst of all possible worlds. I seemed to have a knack for picking it out.

We never kissed or touched again. And we lost what we had before I embarked ourselves on those impulsive seconds. My kissing Heather opened no door for us, it merely canceled the alternatives and left us both impoverished. What I envy most in people is their ability to use restraint and denial in a positive way. To live and be happy with the negative, the route not chosen. In the scale of my life’s enormous disappointments, my three-second kiss with Heather has to be regarded as insignificant, but it proved to be a small and lasting regret, like a grumbling appendix, nagging, nagging.

My next blunder was not of the same order. It cost me dearly, its ramifications were massive, but I forgave myself immediately. Any man in my position would have done the same.

I went to the dentist, Thompson’s dentist, a nice man in Barnton, to have a tooth filled. This was two days after my — what? — my brush with Heather and three or four days before the crucial meeting at the bank. I sat down in the waiting room and picked up a copy of the Daily Herald that was lying there. The paper, along with every other publication in Britain, was full of news about the impending coronation. I flicked through it. I stopped abruptly on one page because I thought I saw a photograph of Sonia, but it turned out to be of Mrs. Wallis Simpson. Then, down below, my eye was caught by a headline: TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF THE THIRD BATTLE OF YPRES. Now, here was a face I recognized. I read on.

As part of our series commemorating this great battle we invite old soldiers to share their memories. This week the distinguished film director Mr. Leo Druce, currently at work on Court Films’ Great Alfred , recounts his part in the battle.

The piece was headed “Bombing the Ridge at Frezenburg.” I read on.

We went over the top at dawn. Our objective was the first German trench line on the notorious and deadly Frezenburg Ridge. I was leader of the bombing section in D Company, 13th (Public School) Service Battalion of the South Oxfordshire Light Infantry. The Hun machine guns did not open up until we were halfway across the perilous quagmire that was no-man’s-land. All hell broke loose. Bullets buzzed through the air like maddened bees, only these insects carried a fatal sting. I saw our platoon commander go down, shot through the heart, as he stopped to aid a wounded comrade. Before he died he waved us on and shouted, “On you go, lads!” We struggled on through the merciless hail of bullets. Then, on my right, there was an enormous explosion as my close friend the Hon. Maitland Bookbinder literally disintegrated as his sack of bombs exploded. The fields of Flanders had become a charnel house flowing with English blood. We pressed on gallantly, men falling like flies all around. Fortunately the tremendous barrage from our guns had cleared enormous gaps in the Hun wire.…

Leo Druce duly threw all his bombs. Modestly, he “did not pause to see what dread effect those mighty detonations had.” Then on his way back — to rearm himself, naturally — he was flattened by an explosion and came round with a “searing pain” in his left leg. Somehow he managed to crawl back to the lines, where he fell unconscious from pain and loss of blood. When he woke up in a casualty-clearing station he knew “the battle was over for me. But I Was proud to have played my part in one of the bitterest, bravest conflicts that the modern world has seen.”

There were further banalities about “our men who fought like lions” and not allowing the gallant fallen to go unremembered. At that point I was summoned into the surgery. I never felt a thing. I was in the grip of a frying, sputtering rage. As the dentist pumped away on his drill I was composing my letter to the editor of the Daily Herald . I wrote it that evening and posted it the next day. Unfortunately I have lost the original clipping but have preserved a draft among my papers.

Sir,

Mr. Leo Druce writes with vivid authority about his dramatic experiences during the attack on Frezenburg Ridge by the 13th (PS) Service Battalion of the SOLI. This is most curious. I was a member of that same bombing section led by Lance Corporal Druce and saw nothing of him during the entire action. The only member of our section who successfully bombed the German lines was Mr. Julian Teague, for which gallantry he was later decorated, I believe.

When I next saw Mr. Druce he explained his absence from the battlefield in this way. He told me he had been shot through the calf seconds after leaving our trench. He asked me to relate the events of that day (in which our section took appalling casualties) as — and I believe I quote him accurately—“I never saw a thing.”

It is bad enough when self-appointed heroes like Mr. Druce turn up at battalion reunions wearing medals to which they are not entitled, but it really is a disagreeable if not intolerable slur on the memory of those men who perished in this most futile of battles when a newspaper such as your own allows charlatans fraudently to boost their own nonexistent reputations as “gallant soldiers.”

I remain, sir, your obedient servant,

John James Todd, ex-private

13th (PS) Service Battalion, SOLI

I think I toned down the frothing outrage in the last sentence and changed the odd word (I think I called Druce a “toiling cliché-monger”), but this is essentially the same letter that was published three days later. I have no regrets. It was a sublime opportunity for revenge — I imagined it being read in horrible embarrassed silence at Young’s mansion near High Wycombe. But I wrote also out of principle. No one in that benighted squad had the right to the airs of fortitude and derring-do that Druce bestowed upon himself, apart possibly from Teague — and look how he ended up. It was a matter of pure principle first and foremost, but I have to admit I enjoyed picturing Druce’s hideous shame when the letter was read by his friends and colleagues. I waited for his retraction with glee. What denial would he, could he possibly offer up? I pondered getting in touch with Teague and Noel Kite but I was distracted from this, and indeed forgot all about it, when the day of the bank’s decision arrived.

I walked into that bank (a vast Greek temple of a building on George Street) as if I were coming before a heavenly tribunal. The marble chill of its many halls and corridors, the busts and dark oil portraits, the uniformed doormen and porters, the studied absence of any light or human touch (not even a flower display, for God’s sake!) seemed to portend that the denizens of this lair took their business very seriously. I sat in an airless anteroom whistling stupidly through my teeth. Aleph-null lived or died today and suddenly I saw through all the silly optimism of my plans.

Then Thompson came out. His smile gave nothing away; the professional mask was admirable. But as I walked past him into the boardroom he whispered in my ear, “Relax. Good news.”

In the room was a long table behind which sat three of the bank’s directors whom I had lunched with. I delayed events slightly and irritated everyone by accepting the chairman’s purely formal offer of tea or coffee. While Thompson went in search of someone who could provide me with one or other of these libations (I had not made a choice; either would do, I had said, nervously, whichever was easiest), we made awkward small talk until a little woman in a green apron brought me a juddering cup of coffee, well-skinned, and a cracked rich tea biscuit on a china plate. I did not touch either of them.