It was the end of March 1917. It was a cold, windy, but clear day. The trees were bare; only the hedges were in bud as I walked down the lane towards the dunes. We had been based at Coxyde-Bains for over five months. Almost a year had passed since that dire weekend at Charlbury. My eighteenth birthday had come and gone, unacknowledged by everybody, a week since. The war seemed as if it would go on forever, and as far as I was concerned it seemed we would be at Coxyde forever too, guarding our stretch of dunes.
I had seen the enemy through binoculars, strolling around the parapets of their trenches in the evening. Nobody took cover in this quiet sector. Our trenches were immaculate: clean, strong, with beautifully carpentered fire steps and paneled dugouts. At every firebay stood red buckets of sand and water, and all our equipment was oiled and greased against the corrosive effects of salt in the wind off the sea. We, the troops, were sleek, well fed, and well rested. Only Teague and Somerville-Start fretted. Indeed, Teague seemed almost unhinged with frustration. He repeatedly asked Colonel O’Dell to put him up for a commission in another regiment, but O’Dell always regretfully refused. He had seen the battalion’s ranks casually plundered for years and was not prepared to allow further privations.
I myself was happy enough. I seemed to be in a kind of agreeable limbo, stuck in a society and a place that made few inconvenient demands on me. I had no idea what the future held and at the time I did not care. I had even seen my first dead man, a sergeant in A Company who had been run over by a Commer truck bringing in two tons of potatoes to the cookhouse. I had changed physically too. I had reached what I later discovered was to be my full height — five feet nine inches, I had filled out and was now thickish set with a solid, well-muscled body. The moustache I had started growing the weekend I left Charlbury was a familiar feature in my shaving mirror each morning: thick, dense, neatly clipped, glossy. I looked older than my years. The main bugbear in my life was the dog, Ralph, which as the weeks passed seemed to become perversely more fond of me. Never had a man shown less feeling for an animal than I, but my very indifference seemed to act as a goad. Even while eating bread and jam from Teague’s fingers, the dog would pause — munching — and glance round to confirm I was in the company.
I walked down the lane towards the dunes. Behind me I heard a rattle of pebbles and a familiar hoarse panting. I looked round. That blunt terrier’s snout, those moist idiot eyes. Louise must have let him go too soon. I picked up some stones and threw them at him. One hit his rump and he squealed. His tail wagged with masochistic pleasure. I set off. He trotted three yards behind me.
I climbed up a sand path that led to the crest of the dunes. It was a cloudy day, shadowless, with a diffused silver light. The tide was out. I sat down, lit a cigarette and stared at the pewter sea. Life was settled, routine, ordered — but I was in turmoil. I was in love again. In love with a girl called Huguette.
In our first stint in the Nieuport trenches we had been called back twice to brigade reserve at Wormstroedt. Wormstroedt was a large village, or a small town, some twenty miles behind the front line. Before the war it had enjoyed modest prosperity owing to the siting there of a tobacco factory. This was now empty, one wing of it destroyed by bombardment during the German advance of 1914. Here, we were billeted in tall airless rooms smelling strongly of tobacco. We slept in low wooden beds, sixty to a room like a vast dormitory. Leave in Wormstroedt was perferable to our off-duty hours in St. Idesbalde, if only because we were freer to roam around. There was a cinema set up in a tent in the shattered main square and a good dozen cafés and restaurants. Men of the 13th tended to patronize a large estaminet conveniently close to the factory. It was run by an extended Belgian family who were doing well out of the war. They had been swift to adapt to the tastes of the British soldier. Fried eggs and chipped potatoes were the staple diet, and it was not unusual for us to order up to six fried eggs at a time. You could also eat bread and pickled mackerel, or bacon, or brawn, bread and margarine with jam or cheese, rice pudding or sponge pudding with jam. They even made tea — and this was Huguette’s job. The tea was brewed in large copper vats and liberally sweetened. Milk was added by punching holes in several tins of condensed milk and dropping them into the stewing tea. The paper labels floated off the tins to form an unusual, brightly colored scum on the surface.
Huguette was the daughter, or cousin, or niece of the owner. I think she was sixteen or seventeen. She was plump; even at that age a tender double chin hung damply below her jaw. She was dark-haired and had a distinct moustache of tiny fine hairs on her top lip. But she was pretty in a sulky, spoiled way. I can see her now, impassively puncturing condensed milk tins with something that looked like a steel marlinespike and tossing them over her shoulder into the sandy pool of simmering tea without a backward glance.
The estaminet was capacious and always crowded. Over a hundred people could fit into it without difficulty. On my first visit I waited at the head of the queue while Huguette milked a new batch of tea. She had been working all day. Her shapeless lime-green dress, tight in the armpits, was damp with fresh sweat I could smell it, clear and thin, through the strata of odors — smoke, grease, egg, tea — that suffused the atmosphere. I stood beside her, estimating the size of her breasts, inhaling it. Her sharp smell seemed to prod at my lungs like a stick. She stirred the tea vat with a three-foot wooden ladle. The condensed milk cans clanked dully in the dun liquid.
“C’est formidable …” I said. “Le thé. Pour le soif”
She looked at me incredulously.
“Vous pensez?” she said. “C’est pas vrai.”
“Oh, yes — oui,” I said. “Votre thé …” I kissed my bunched fingertips, a parody gourmand.
She turned and said something to her father or uncle and they both laughed. I laughed with them. But as a result of that exchange she remembered me. I ate there every day — fried eggs and chipped potatoes washed down with gallons of her disgusting tea.
“Oh, voilà Monsieur Thé,” she said as I came round for my third refill. “Tea. Ver’ good. You like.” She laughed.
“John. John James Todd. My name …” I paused. “Votre nom?”
“Huguette,” she said, turning the spigot on the vat. Tawny tea frothed into my enamel mug.
I thought of her now as I looked out over the tea-colored sand. I would not be back in Wormstroedt for getting on two months. I wondered if I could last that long; if my carefully hoarded store of images would sustain me through two months of masturbation. Perhaps I could persuade Louise to send me to brigade reserve on some specious mission.… Perhaps … To my surprise I found I had my hand on the scruff of Ralph’s neck and had been absentmindedly scratching behind his ears for God knows how many minutes. His humid eyes gazed at me. A loop of saliva hung from his jowl. I gave him a mighty shove and he went tumbling down the dune slope onto the beach. He got to his feet and shook the sand from his coat.
“Bugger off!” I shouted. I slithered down to the beach and walked down towards the distant water’s edge. I looked down at my boots and puttees, felt the rough serge of the khaki trousers chafe my inner thighs. I took a rather bent cigarette from one of my breast pockets and turned away from the wind to light it. I walked on. Flat sky, flat sand, flat sea. I was the only vertical thing in my universe. I felt surprisingly good. I felt strong, all of a sudden. I was an adult at last, a soldier, with my big moustache, and dreams of my girl, Huguette. I grinned.… Where was that bloody dog? I looked round for a pebble to throw.