He said, ‘It isn’t going to get any better. It is not going to stop being more terrible. None of that nonsense about its all being over and done with by Christmas, about our driving them out like foxes from cover. I scarcely believe that it will ever be over. At any rate there is no point in thinking so.’
‘But I asked you if it were true that where life is more terrible it is the truest valour to live.’
‘Isn’t it something you have to make up your own mind about?’
‘Is it true for you, then?’
‘Yes,’ Hilliard said, ‘it’s true. I think so. And you?’
‘I don’t know.’
Barton was looking down at the scattered shreds of paper. ‘What a philosophical night!’
‘No. We have been talking about what is happening, about yesterday and today and tomorrow.’
‘Yes. Do you suppose I ought to gather up the remains of Sir Thomas Browne?’
‘He’s stuck in the mud.’
‘A sort of burial. Fitting.’
‘Yes. Though as a matter of fact I’m rather sorry. I wanted to borrow the book and read it for myself.’
Barton stood up and put his arm across Hilliard’s shoulders, his face suffused with amusement. ‘Don’t worry. I’ve got another copy at home. I’ll get my mother to send it out to us!’
‘Do that.’
A gust of wind blew the tent flap open, blew rain inside.
‘It’s going to be bloody wet and bloody cold,’ Hilliard said looking down at his groundsheet. They ought to finish their sleep, though he had no idea of the time.
Barton let his arm drop, and moved a pace away. He said, ‘I love you, John.’
Hilliard looked at him. ‘Yes.’ He was amazed at himself. That it was so easy.
‘Yes.’
Part Three
Yes, I know you will have been thinking that something has happened. I’m sorry. But there were various troubles which I won’t go into now, because they’re resolved or under control anyway and more practically, I simply haven’t had a chance to write until now, we have been shifted about so much, nobody has had the faintest idea what’s been going on. We had a shocking march up here, we have scarcely unpacked for a week and your letters are only just being sent on to me, after long delays – which shows that nobody else knows where we are, either! I suppose there may be others of yours still to come. The upshot of it all is that we have come further north and that it has rained solidly for a fortnight. We are now in the front line trenches and under heavy fire the whole time. No farther than 150 yards away from the enemy. Why we moved from the last place is a mystery – we had thought they were fattening us up for the kill there, but apparently not and in any case all of our movements seem to be a mystery, we go when and where we are told. Perhaps someone knows why.
The rain. Yes, they all told me what it would be like, but I wasn’t really prepared for it and nor was John, because of course he didn’t come out till last spring, by which time the worst of it had cleared. The trenches here are very bad, under about 2–3 feet of water all the time. Of course we have trench pumps and of course they don’t work so the men spend much of their time baling us out with great ladles. Pretty useless and the rain just fills us up again. We live all the time in waders and mackintoshes. But I doubt if I shall ever feel truly dry again. I cannot believe that only a couple of weeks ago the ground was cracked and parched with the sun, and we were still passing through the last of the fruit orchards.
We have a tiny dugout which has been shelled a few times in the immediate past and patched up badly. It smells, it’s under a bank and the roof is only broken timber reinforced with some sandbags. There are two bunks of wire netting, which is useless. The old dugout in the supports was like a Grand Hotel suite in comparison and we have lost the gramophone – I mean, we were forced to leave it behind. I feel it may be a good thing. We have been in very low spirits and physically exhausted, very depressed altogether – our heads feel black and blue (if you see what I mean) from constant noise and alarums. It would have been hard to listen to Schubert and Elgar and be soothed, only to be dragged back so roughly into this present every other minute.
Besides, we have simply had no time.
John has had an appalling cold and sore throat, I suppose because of the wet feet and wet beds – wet generally. We have lice for the first time – a pleasant addition. And rats, which are what I really cannot cope with. You will remember how I used to secrete white and other mice in the house – well, don’t worry. I shall never be able to look any sort of verminous creature in the face again. And what faces these rats have! Really evil, and they are so bloated and fat and fit looking, they are scurrying about the whole time, you never know when one will come up. They feed on the corpses, of course, of which there are plenty and our own new ones are added every day. There was a battle here about a month ago, leaving the place in a terrible state.
Everybody is on digging parties during the day, rebuilding and sandbagging, down at support line and then back here at night. There is no rest at the moment, and we snatch what sleep we can – we don’t seem likely to be relieved.
At night the parties have somewhat got to carry on as usual through the mud and rain, struggling to bring up the supplies, food and mail and all the stuff we need for our digging and repair work and so on. It’s much worse in this weather, it takes so much more time – with water up to your thighs and shells bursting all over the place, you often feel like simply giving up and lying face down in the water. The duckboards are quite useless. But somehow it is still tedious and fairly pointless work: imagine trying to patch up derelict houses in the middle of nowhere all through a pouring wet autumn night! We are drones not fighting men. Not that I want to be a fighting man. But John says that at least there’s a feeling of doing something positive, having one clear objective, in a battle. I suppose that means the men are ‘dying for the cause’ whereas here they are simply shelled or snipered at random in the middle of dinner or foot inspection or sleep, it is like a road accident on an ordinary day, you feel resentful because of the sheer waste of it all.
But I am feeling very resentful altogether now – I have seen enough. The men sing ‘I want to go home’ and they mean that they want to see their families and that they are sick of all this tiredness and wet and cold and din. That’s what I mean, too, but more, I want to be out of it all because I feel guilty that I’m here, and doing nothing to stop it – even if that were to mean bringing it to an end in some great, violent push. And I also just want to be comfortable again and sleep in a bed and have dry socks, to wander about where and when I choose, and to see you all – oh, but you cannot imagine how we long for the small everyday things, scarcely worth mentioning, scarcely noticed at home.
I think we have been brought up here because of some attack planned on the enemy trenches but really we do not know, it might simply be because we’re good at repairing. We thought we were going into battle at the last place, before we went down to reserve camp, but nothing came of that. It’s all hearsay.
You have never seen such a desolate place as this, it has got uglier and uglier the further up we have come and now it doesn’t look like a land made by either God or man, it was thrown up by some prehistoric monsters or devils with no sense of anything but chaos. The road coming was just like a river, with trucks and cars and horses bogged down in the mud and what houses were left just a few bits of wall sticking up out of the ground. As far as the eye can see it is flat and wasted. There are some stumps of trees left and at night they take on all kinds of weird shapes, lit by the Verey flares. The men tell one another they have seen spectres and dead Germans rising up, and although nobody believes it, there is a fashion for telling these rather crude ghost and horror stories just now. It’s amazing how many people can produce a tale of haunting when called upon.