Everything smells, reeks, of years of decay and shell-fire and burned wood. I find myself thinking all the time of how it must have been – though really it is hard to reconstruct a town out of all this: and of the people who lived ordinary lives here, who saved up for these things, owned and enjoyed them, and now they all mean nothing, they are rubbish, rolling about in corners, rotting in heaps. We have what they are pleased to call houses for our billets. The men are twenty or thirty to a tiny room, and they are in a bad state, dirty and everything broken. There isn’t a whole roof, and scarcely a whole floor. The water supply and all the sanitation system is hopelessly polluted, we have to look for rats everywhere. And then there are so many dead bodies, because the place has been in the direct line of fire for so long. Ambulances come through but they seem to have missed a lot and they only take away the possible survivors, now. They are too hard pressed fetching and carrying the wounded from the front lines.
I came across a man sitting upright in a doorway, with his bayonet fixed, but he was quite dead, he must have been on sentry duty. It was not apparent how he died, he seemed to have no injuries, only some terrible distortion of his face. It was as though he had blown up inside, but nothing had come out. He belonged to a regiment which was here two weeks ago.
The horses are better off than we are, they have gone into stables half a mile away, and we won’t have much to do with them from now on, as we go into the trenches straightaway. Well, I’m glad they look after them. As for us – I’m aching a bit but not tired. I cannot stop looking around me and seeing more ugliness and mess than I have seen in my life. John is quiet and a bit tense. He doesn’t say much and in any case we’re pretty busy. The men are getting rum issue, which they deserve, so I shall have to go and see to it in a moment. It comes up in a gallon jar, and must never be let out of the sight of an officer!
Actually, the men deserve long cool drinks of water even more than rum but it’s rationed here, so they get short measure and it tastes of the stuff they use to sterilize it. God knows if we’ll ever get a wash. I’m already beginning to feel the squalor of the army at war. My feet have sweated inside my boots and the rest of me inside my uniform. My hair feels dusty and sticky at the same time. Oh, you wouldn’t like me at all just now! John would say this is nothing, you wait and see, this is cushy compared to what will come later on. Well, he is probably right. But so often now have I seen him biting back that kind of remark. I suppose he wants to save me from knowing anything before I’ve absolutely got to. But I’ve got some imagination and eyes to see and ears to hear, I’ve a pretty good idea about what’s coming and that it won’t be anybody’s idea of a picnic.
I must say I shall mind being filthy and physically in a mess more than the thing I thought I should mind most of all – that is, the having no time or place or scarcely anything to call my own. Because, oddly enough, one does have a fair measure of all those – so far, at any rate. And I am happy being with our platoon, and with John. I don’t at all mind the idea that I’m doing this or that along with a few thousand other people. Perhap’s that’s the advantage of coming from a large family!
But really it isn’t at all fair to say what I do or don’t mind, I haven’t seen much yet except training camp and rest camp. Not until today, at least. This place is so frighteningly ugly, and the guns are still battering away at it the whole time. They have ruined the church here, which was apparently Romanesque and very beautiful, with a lovely tower. I hadn’t realized what a noise the guns make, though they are not really near to us and in fact a lot of it is echo from what buildings are left. I don’t care to think about the noise of the guns and shells when I actually come near them. It’s the one idea which really does bother me. I have never been very good with loud noises, have I? And it has been so quiet and peaceful at the camp. You wouldn’t have known there was anything much going on at all for a hundred miles. Some days I might have been at home, sitting down by the beck. Well, it’s going to be different for some while now.
I think I should like some fruit in a parcel, please, especially if we are going to continue to be rationed with our water. Apples or oranges would be nice. You will know what travels well, better than I do, as it takes a while for parcels to reach us. And longer now, I imagine.
But here’s the Sergeant with the rum jar…
‘What are you doing?’
‘Finishing a letter.’
‘Tell me, did you manage to get a dozen or two written while you were actually marching?’
‘Certainly!’
They were in the tiny back washroom of what had once been a tall, perhaps even rather stylish house – the wallpaper which was left was elaborate and expensive-looking. Now, the windows were boarded up, and the basin had gone: above their heads, the plaster and wood of the ceiling sagged down and when the guns vibrated they were showered with flakes and splinters. The room smelled stuffy, with the grease from their candle and with old dirt and dust. There was nothing in it at all, apart from what they themselves had brought except for an old stone flower-urn, ornate and quite undamaged, with a little, greenish soil still in the bottom.
It was late by the time they had seen Garrett, who was across the street in what had been a school. The cupboards hung open and, inside on the shelves, books were piled up, bundled with string and covered in dust. Names were written in pencil on the plaster at desk leveclass="underline"
Geneviève Maury. Marie Crêpes. Jean Bontin. Adèle P.
Barton wondered where they all were.
Coming back, a shell had soared over their heads and they had raced for a doorway. Barton’s head and limbs were aching now. His eyes smarted, in the smoke from the candle.
‘For heaven’s sake…’
‘All right. Sorry.’
He had just written:
There is something all the men hate about this place. Now, I can sense it myself. Something old and bad and dead, a smell, a feeling you get as you walk across the street. It is not simply the bodies lying all about us, and the fact that the guns are firing, it is something else, something…
Hilliard had pulled his blanket half over him. Barton put the letter away. Footsteps on the stairs. None of the rooms in this house had doors.
‘Sir?’
Hilliard sat up at once. ‘What is it?’
‘I’d be glad if you could come, sir. It’s Harris.’
The Sergeant was invisible in the doorway. His voice sounded both apologetic and urgent. Hilliard was pushing off his blanket.
‘Let me go,’ Barton was on his feet. ‘You’ve been at it since we got here. You’d far better get some sleep.’
For he had seen John trying to work himself into a state of exhaustion, his face had been pale and stiff, and Barton had realized that he had had time to think all day, riding the horse, going back to the front, remembering. There had been no marching to tire out his body.