“You did say you lived alone.”
“I said that I liked to give the islanders the impression that I lived alone.”
The dryness in his voice made me feel that I was being very naïve. The woman was simply his mistress, whom for some reason he did not want me to meet; or perhaps who did not want to meet me. I went and sat down on the lounging chair.
“I’m being tactless. Forgive me.”
“Not tactless. Perhaps a little lacking in imagination.”
“I thought perhaps I was meant to notice what obviously I’m not meant to notice.”
“Noticing is not a matter of choice, Nicholas. But explaining is.”
“Of course.”
“Patience.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Do you like the brandy?”
“Very much.”
“It always reminds me of Armagnac. Now. Shall I continue?”
As he began to speak again I smelt the night air, I felt the hard concrete under my feet, I touched a piece of chalk in my pocket. But a strong feeling persisted, when I swung my feet off the ground and lay back, that something was trying to slip between me and reality.
19
“I found myself in France a little more than six weeks after I enlisted. I had no aptitude with the rifle. I could not even bayonet an effigy of Kaiser Bill convincingly. But I was considered ’sharp' and they also discovered that I could run quite fast. So I was selected as company runner.
“My training company commander was a Regular Army officer of thirty or so. His name was Captain Montague. He had broken his leg sometime before and so had been unfit for active service till then. A kind of phosphorescent pale elegance about his face. A delicate, gallant moustache. He was one of the most supremely stupid men I have ever met. He taught me a great deal.
“Before our training was finished, he received an urgent posting to France. That same day he told me, as if he were giving me a magnificent present, that he thought he could pull strings and have me posted with him. Only a man as blank as he would have failed to see the hollowness of my enthusiasm. But unfortunately he had grown fond of me.
“He had a brain capable of only one idea at a time. With him it was the offensive a outrance—the headlong attack. Foch’s great contribution to the human race. 'The force of the shock is the mass,' he used to say—'the force of the mass is the impulsion and the force of the impulsion is the morale. High morale, high impulsion, high shock—victory!' Thump on the table—'Victory!' He made us all learn it by heart. At bayonet drill. Vic-tor-ree! Poor fool.
“I spent a last two days with my parents and Lily. She and I swore undying love. The idea of heroic sacrifice had contaminated her, as it had contaminated my father. My mother said nothing, except an old Greek proverb: A dead man cannot be brave. I remembered that later.
“We went straight to the front. One of the company commanders had died of pneumonia, and it was his place Montague had to take. This was early in 1915. It sleeted and rained incessantly. We spent long hours in stationary trains in railway sidings, in gray towns under grayer skies. One knew the troops who had been in action. The ones who sang their way to death, the new recruits, were the dupes of the romance of war. But the others were dupes of the reality of war, of the ultimate Totentanz. Like those sad old men and women who haunt every casino, they knew the wheel must always win in the end. But they could not force themselves to leave.
“We spent a few days on maneuvers. And then one day Montague addressed the company. We were going into battle, a new sort of battle, one in which victory was certain. One that was going to bring us to Berlin in a month. The night of the next day we entrained. The train stopped somewhere in the middle of a flat plain and we marched eastwards. Dikes and willows in the darkness. Endless drizzle. It crept down the columns that the place we were to attack was a village called Neuve Chapelle. And that the Germans were to receive something revolutionary. A giant gun. A mass attack by the new airplanes.
“After a while we turned into a field, thick with mud, and were marched up to some farm buildings. Two hours’ rest before taking up position for the attack. No one can have slept. It was very cold, and fires were forbidden. My real self began to appear, I began to be afraid. But I told myself that if I was ever to be really frightened, I should have known it before then. This is what I had willed to execute. That is how war corrupts us. It plays on our pride in our own free will.
“Before dawn we filed forward slowly, many stops, to the assault positions. I overheard Montague talking with a staff officer. The entire First Army, Haig’s, was engaged, with the Second in support. And there seemed to me a safety, a kind of warmth in such numbers. But then we entered the trenches. The terrible trenches, with their stench of the urinal. And then the first shells fell near us. I was so innocent that in spite of our so-called training, of all the propaganda, I had never really been able to believe that someone might want to kill me. We were told to halt and stand against the walls. The shells hissed, whined, crashed. Then silence. Then a splatter of falling clods. And shivering, I awoke from my long sleep.
“I think the first thing I saw was the isolation of each. It is not the state of war that isolates. It is well known, it brings people together. But the battlefield—that is something different. Because that is when the real enemy, death, appears. I no longer saw any warmth in numbers. I saw only Thanatos in them, my death. And just as much in my own comrades, in Montague, as in the invisible Germans.
“The madness of it, Nicholas. Standing in holes in the ground, thousands of men, English, Scots, Indians, French, Germans, one March morning—and what for? If there is a hell, then it is that. Not flames, not pitchforks. But a place without the possibility of reason, like Neuve Chapelle that day.
“A reluctant light began to spread over the eastern sky. The drizzle stopped. A trill of song from somewhere outside the trench. I recognized a hedge sparrow, the last voice from the other world. We moved forward again some way and into the assault trenches—the Rifle Brigade was to form the second wave of the attack. The German trenches were less than two hundred yards ahead, with our front trench only a hundred yards from theirs. Montague looked at his watch. He raised his hand. There was complete silence. His hand fell. For some ten seconds nothing happened. Then, from far behind us, there was a gigantic drum-roll, a thousand tympani. A pause. And then the whole world ahead exploded. Everyone ducked. A shaking of earth, sky, mind, all. You cannot imagine what the first few minutes of that bombardment were like. It was the first massive artillery barrage of the war, the heaviest ever delivered.
“A runner came from the front trenches, down the communicating trench. His face and uniform were streaked with red. Montague asked if he was hit. He said everyone in the front trenches was splashed with blood from the German trenches. They were so close. If only they could have stopped to think how close .
“After half an hour the barrage was moving over the village. Montague, at the periscope, cried, 'They’re up!' And then—'The Boches are done for!' He leapt onto the parapet and waved to all of us around him to look over the edge of the trench. A hundred yards ahead a long line of men trotted slowly across the scarred earth towards some shattered trees and broken walls. A few isolated shots. A man fell. Then stood up and ran on. He had simply tripped. The men about me began to shout as the line reached the first houses and a cheer came back. A red light soared up, and then we in our turn advanced. It was difficult to walk. And as we went forward, fear was driven out by horror. Not a shot was fired at us. But the ground became increasingly hideous. Nameless things, pink, white, red, mud-bespattered, still with rags of gray or khaki. We crossed our own front trench and traversed the no-man’s-land. When we came to the German trenches there was nothing to see. Everything had been buried or blown out of them. There we halted for a moment, lying down in the craters, almost in peace. To the north the firing was very intense. The Cameronians had been caught on the wire. In twenty minutes they lost every officer except one. And four-fifths of their men were killed.