Ralph was not his obligatory three paces behind me. I saw him, two hundred yards off, loping towards the front and the German line, running along the water’s edge, his reflection merging with and separating from his body, bounding back to wherever he had come from.
“Go on!” I shouted after him. “Traitor! I knew it. I bloody knew it!”
Good riddance, I thought, finally got the message. I reached the sea’s edge. It was a calm day, a small surf turned over on the ridged gleaming sand. I turned my back on Ralph and the east and headed west towards the tiny distant shapes of the ruined villas and bathing huts of Oostduinkerke.
I must have walked nearly a mile before I saw them. I was on the point of turning back, the evening was drawing in, when I noticed what at first looked like a cluster of smooth pale rocks upon which the waves were breaking. But then I saw that the waves moved and shifted them to and fro. I walked closer. A strange minatory weight seemed to press on me.… Some sort of cargo? Washed overboard in a storm? In the nacreous late-afternoon light, I approached full of dread curiosity.
There were several drowned men, huddled together as if for comfort by the advancing tide. Most of them were naked, or almost so. One man wore a shirt; one man still had his boots on. I was struck by their inert tranquillity. I felt no lasting shock. I counted them. Eight. They looked like deep sleepers: expressionless, untouched, unblemished by whatever tremendous experience had washed them up on this shore. I saw a tattooed forearm, creases in a belly, the dark print of pubic hair on blue-white loins. The wavelets rolled one over, who flung an arm on the sand as if seeking purchase.
“Jesus,” I said out loud. I looked up and down the deserted beach. I was equidistant from the villas of Oostduinkerke and the mouth of the Yser. The packed grayness of the late afternoon seemed to thicken and condense around me. The tangle of bleached bodies surged as if one, and crept a few inches up the sand.
I ran for the dunes. A naval battle? A mine? A ship rent in two, a wardroom of sleeping men tossed into the North Sea? I felt a kind of clawing in my gorge. I raked my throat and spat.
There was wire on these dunes. I found the zigzag path and stumbled up it to the dune crest. I ran down through the gorse and broom brushes and along the muddy edge of a cabbage field. The kitchen smell of cabbage nauseated me. I suddenly associated the reek with those washed, clean dead men.… Through a hawthorn hedge and onto a cart track. I ran on. An old man sat in the doorway of a half-demolished cottage. I stopped. What was the French for drowned?
“Mort,” I said, panting heavily. “Eight, huit morts.”
“L’hôpital.” He gestured up the road. He had a lazy eye. It seemed to be trapped in the middle of an interminable wink.
I remembered. The field hospital at St. Idesbalde. I turned and ran on.
I entered the hospital precincts from the side somewhere. I saw the back of what looked like a row of loose boxes, rounded them and came upon a neat square of a dozen large olive-green tents. A nurse was coming out of the first one.
“Huit morts … dans la mer!”
“I speak English,” she said in a cool, perfect but somehow instantly foreign accent.
“Eight drowned men,” I said. “On the seashore.” It sounded like a nursery rhyme.
I led this nurse and three nuns back down to the beach. An ambulance was following with orderlies and stretchers. The tide was further in but our group still clung together. The evening light shone lemon through gaps in charcoal clouds. The sand seemed shot with blue and green. We walked down the beach, the nuns muttering some prayer or heavenly invocation.
“We’d better get them out,” the nurse said. She took off her watch. She had not brought her coat. “Can you keep this dry for me?” she asked. I put it in a pocket and watched with some astonishment as she waded strongly into the sea, the waves soaking her to the waist, and she began to haul a man out. The nuns joined in. I registered the incongruity of the dark surplices and the absurd meringue hats as they stooped and tugged at the naked men. Naked men … nothing to what they saw in that field hospital. I sloshed into the water with them. The bodies shifted out of focus beneath my sensitive gaze. To grasp an ankle or a wrist? I saw a hand, limp, elegant — like something on a classical statue — and took hold of it. Very cold. But no more rebarbative than picking up a leg of lamb or a plucked chicken. I pulled him onto the beach. I took his other wrist. He was heavier on the sand, heels furrowing. The nuns were working two to a body. I heard shouts and saw the orderlies come running down the beach with their stretchers.
It was almost dark by the time the beach was clear. I stood with the nurse. She had a wide round face, a slightly large nose, covered in coarse prominent freckles. I could not see her hair as it was hidden beneath her neat headdress.
“What do you think it was?” I asked.
“Who can say? At least they looked peaceful. They didn’t seem to be hurt.” She looked at me. “I didn’t know there were English troops here.”
I explained about the Royal Marine gunners.
“Have you got a cigarette?”
I gave her one and lit it for her. She inhaled avidly.
“The nuns don’t approve. I have to take my moments carefully.” She blew smoke through her nose. “Wonderful. English tobacco!”
I suddenly remembered the time. “God! I’m going to get merry hell. Look, can I give your name?”
“Of course. I’m a sister at the field hospital. Dagmar Fjermeros.”
I got her to repeat it a couple of times.
“Can we give you a lift?”
“It’ll be quicker along the beach.” I said good-bye and left her.
Louise was furious, and put me on company report. Two hours later my story was confirmed after a few telephone calls. I was perturbed and unsettled by the whole experience. It was the tangle of bodies that bothered me and their untroubled expressions. They seemed docile and compliant in death, perfectly at ease. But for the first time since joining the army I felt frightened. I feared for my skin. That day I resolved to do anything not to get hurt. Not to die like those men.
While my alarm deepened, and self-preservation occupied the key position in my mind, I found another image began slowly to claim my attention. Dagmar, the nurse … her round placid face highlit by the flare of the match I applied to her cigarette. The full pout of her lips as she inhaled … I had written down her name on my return. Dagmar Fjermeros. A Scandinavian of some sort. I still had her wristwatch in my pocket.
After this excitement life returned to normal. The only event of note was a battalion parade where we were required to hand in our old phenate-hexane gas respirators. These were horrible objects, like a canvas sack with glass eye-holes, and which had to be tucked beneath the collar of one’s jacket. New box respirators, we were informed, would be issued to us in the next few days. Meanwhile, in preparation, Captain Tuck, the adjutant, would give us a lecture later that morning on antigas precautions and the best use of the box-respirator gas mask.
At half past twelve, D Company was mustered for Captain Tuck’s gas lecture. As we filed into the tent we were each handed what looked like a rectangular pad of cotton with two tapes, eighteen inches long, attached at either end, and a pair of rubber goggles.
Captain Tuck, a Wykehamist, was a brisk jolly man who spent most of his time looking at birds through his field glasses. He had an odd pursed look to his face, as if he were playing an invisible musical instrument — a spectral oboe or clarinet, say. First, he told us about the various types of gases — phosgene, chlorine and mustard — and their effects. Chlorine turned your face blue and you drowned in the water produced by your own tormented lungs. Phosgene caused your lungs to discharge four pints of yellow water every hour. Mustard made your eyelids swell and close, burned and blistered your skin, made you cough up your mucous membranes. Tuck read out other ghastly symptoms — congested larynx, collapsed lungs, swollen liver. I was very shocked.