‘They must have done. You persuaded him to come out.’
‘Oh yes. I suppose that was some sort of achievement, John!’
‘Stop that!’
‘Why did you come upstairs for me? Why couldn’t you have stayed and talked to him yourself?’
‘It was pointless, I wasn’t getting through to him, I wasn’t even getting him to listen. I don’t think he so much as realized that I was there. I knew it would be different with you, that you’d succeed where I couldn’t.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. Does it matter? I was right, that’s the point.’
‘I touched him, I held on to him. That’s what he needed. That was all he needed. It wasn’t what I said to him.’
‘You could do it for him,’ Hilliard said slowly, ‘and I could not. It’s what you do for me. You listen and you’re there. That’s all. It’s the same thing.’
Barton lifted his head. The skin beneath his eyes was chalk white and crossed finely, like tissue paper. He looked exhausted. ‘You’re still alive. That’s the difference,’ he said. ‘Harris isn’t.’
Hilliard wanted to put his hand out and touch him. And could not.
Coulter came up the stairs to wake them.
And so we came on here and now we are in support trenches behind the front line. After what happened last night I don’t believe that I can ever be badly shaken again. I have, for instance, been quite unmoved by the sight of unburied bodies lying about here, just as they lay about in Feuvry. They are all along the sides of the road, and out in the fields, in shell craters, and piled up on top of the trenches like sandbags. Some of the ones in the craters are Germans. Doesn’t the enemy have the right to a decent burial either? But why ask that, since so few people have any sort of burial at all during the offensive – scarcely during the whole war, it seems. No time, no time. And yet some of the men say there is all the time in the world, the days drag along. But I have been ashamed of myself for getting so thoroughly hardened so quickly. John says I am not, that this is just a sort of numbness after shock, everyone gets it at first. I wonder. Perhaps I do not know myself at all. I was so appalled at the broken buildings and so little worried by the broken bodies. That cannot be good.
I have been reading Sir Thomas Browne, who comforts me, because I learn great truths, which I have read and passed over before, simply because I had nothing to relate them to, in my own experience. ‘Christians have handsomely glossed over the deformity of death by careful considerations of the body, and the civil rites which take off brutal terminations.’
Well, that is not true here.
I have never in my life been so tired as I am today, and the difference seems to be that it is not a healthy tiredness. John feels it too. We both look at one another’s faces and remark and change and know. We don’t bother to say anything about it. The rest camp, the orchards and the quiet lane and the path alongside the stream, all have receded far away, they seem like some dream country which we inhabited long ago: though I cannot truly believe that we were ever there, and that we were so contented and had no quarrels with anyone, and that the sun shone so kindly.
Though it has been shining here again today, there seems to be no sign of any move into real autumn weather. The men are glad of that, they tell me about the horrors of rain which brings the mud, and I listen and believe them, so I’m glad that it is dry, even though this means water rationing. And everything smells so much worse, too, under the sun.
Since we got here we have done nothing but work. Until this evening, at least. And now I have to write that letter to Harris’s parents. They live in Devon. I am putting it off. John is sitting opposite me making his way slowly through the other letters about the dead men. Captain Franklin came in to see how we were getting on – I could see (and feel) John bristle the moment he came through the curtain. He really is not so bad, though, just a cold fish. John’s face gives nothing away except his own tiredness. But how angry it makes me that we should be sitting here doing this at all, because the whole accident was so pointless, the men were doing nothing except sleeping and waiting for today. I am glad there has been so little trouble for you with bombing, after the early scares, because shells are frightening, and they make the most shocking noise. But I suppose one would rather be catapulted out of sleep into death than to have to sit and watch it creeping up on one. Though one or two of those men did not, in fact, die at once, they were half blown to bits but lasted various lengths of time, waiting for the ambulances to come. I’m sorry to pile on these agonies but I need to tell you. I shall only keep back what might worry you unduly. But then, in your heart of hearts you will know, all of you, and we have never kept even unpleasant truths from one another.
We have a reasonably comfortable dugout in this trench. John says it is more than ‘reasonably comfortable’ which shows only how much I have yet to find out! You come along the trench, which is quite narrow and zig-zags crazily, so that you lose your way after a yard or so, in all the right angles – and the dugout is cut into the bank. We have a corrugated tin roof, and sacking in front of the door. Someone kindly labelled it, years ago, with ‘Chez Nous’ written on a broken bit of wood, and nailed up. It remains. Inside, it’s surprisingly spacious, we can both stand up and stretch our arms out without quite touching! There are two bunks (hard) and a table of sorts. And all the paraphernalia we brought with us, of course. You’ve no idea how much one has to carry with one in the army. Not to mention all the clothes one wears and the bits and pieces strapped about one’s person. Still, one thing we do have here is a gramophone. There is another at Battalion H.Q. which the C.O. uses to play drawing room ballads, sung by bass baritones. But this was quite unexpected treasure – nobody knows who originally owned it, but now it goes with the other fixtures and fittings. I suppose someone brought it down and then was killed and it was never returned or auctioned off. There is a small and very curious selection of records. I wonder if you could manage to send some of mine out? Only a few, and I shall have to think about exactly what, because they’ll be heavy and I don’t want us to be even more loaded. I’d like to take the gram. into the front line trench but John laughs a hollow laugh and points out that we’d never manage to hear a thing. Also that it does belong here. I take the last point, but one of our Lewis guns sends cheery salvoes over every few minutes and I have proved that there is only one point, as they actually fire, at which you simply cannot hear the music at all!
Now – I seem to have written myself out of the awful depression I felt when I sat down. Reading the last paragraph, I sound almost cheerful. Well, and Coulter has just come in and he is always enough to make anyone perk up. We’re still sharing him, especially after the losses of yesterday. One of those men was to have been my batman here. I wonder when we shall get replacements. John says one of the hardest things is having to get used to new faces, new faces. Some you never get to know at all, they don’t manage to impress themselves on you. Nobody could say that of Coulter though. But he isn’t ‘a card’. The platoon does have one of those, a man called Fyson, who is not bad if he’s kept under, but he becomes rather tedious, especially as his stories and jokes are both fearfully obscene and very un-funny – unpardonable combination!
As I have worked myself into this better frame of mind, I must write to the parents of Private Harris and get it over. And I really do want to write. Only it will be such a deceit. I have learned a great deal about deceit, since coming to this war.
Then it will be the beginning of my first night in a trench. There won’t be much to do. We were to have begun with carrying parties to bring up all the stuff we need to mend our wire and get the trench cleared up and the sides strengthened, but because of last night’s loss of sleep, all that has been put off until tomorrow. It makes me wonder how long we are all intended to be here. Rebuilding trenches will be rather like repairing a house – presumably people are going to be staying in it. I should have thought the object was to get out as quickly as possible and move into the enemy trenches ahead. It doesn’t look as though anyone expects us to move for the rest of our lives. But really there is no telling what is supposed to be going on.