Someone screamed and I looked around, then up. There was a Zeppelin, cutting lazily across the sky. It was too high to see the crew leaning over to toss out the bombs, but I saw a dozen or so explosives drifting through the air before they plummeted sharply, growing larger as they fell to earth.
The explosions were loud. The sound bounced off the tall buildings. Ten minutes later I reviewed the damage. The Grand Hotel had taken a hit and a tram had come off its lines. A motor car swerved by it, throwing up dust on the dirt road.
The hit on the Grand would cause panic right enough. I’d been in there the day before for afternoon tea. It was stuffed with people who had left London for fear of air raids. Members of the royal families and the aristocracy of Britain and Europe rubbed shoulders with theatre and cinema stars, wives of bankers and industrialists, profiteers and more obvious London crooks like the Sabinis, who ran the rackets at the racecourse.
Most German Zeppelin attacks on the coast had been in the east, in Suffolk and Kent. German warships had shelled the east coast. In consequence, those people taking holidays flocked to Brighton rather than Broadstairs.
I thought about going out into the country, maybe down to Black Rock. But I also had the address of a brothel. It had been given me by a man who died beside me at Le Couteau. He joined up in 1912 at Preston barracks, just outside Brighton. His father had taken him there when he turned sixteen. His father had kept the shilling his son was paid as a new recruit.
He was with the Second Sussex. He told me he was a virgin but he’d been given this address and on his first Blighty leave he was going to see to that. He died an hour later without ever knowing a woman.
I looked across the road at the slums that came right down to the sea. I could find some girl in there who’d do it for a penny and a tot of gin but I was mindful of disease.
Ted’s wife had asked me if I’d go to see a friend of the family, who was invalided up on the Ditchling Road in a school converted into a hospital. She said he was very low. A grenade blast had caught him, splintered his right arm, blinded him in his right eye; crippled him.
I went there now. It continued to be a hectic day. There were a lot of men in the hospital coughing up their lungs from the poisoned gas. More Zeppelins soughed over, bombs falling out of the sky. They were trying to hit the munitions factory in Hove. I came away not knowing which of us had tried harder to be cheerful.
FOUR
I didn’t get a scratch in the Great War. Not even a Blighty wound for me. I knew a lot of men who prayed for that wound serious enough to earn them a ticket home without being life-threatening. Some men tried to inflict it on themselves. One man shot off his toes and then had to hobble unaided to the post where a firing squad was waiting to shoot him for cowardice.
As the war ground us ever more finely, I knew many men become so desperate to get out they would happily sacrifice a limb. Two limbs. Maybe some of the men I saw in Brighton did the same.
Men put their hands up above the trench parapets to have them shot by the Germans. Soaking a gunshot wound in a filthy pond would ensure a worse injury. Some faked abscesses by injecting paraffin or turpentine under the skin. One man drank petrol to make himself ill but he drank too much of it and died.
The authorities came down hard on malingerers. They got field punishment number one, morning and night for up to twenty-one days. It didn’t hurt but it humiliated them. They were tied to a wheel by their wrists and ankles. From a distance, they looked like they’d been crucified.
I don’t know many survivors of the Great War willing to talk about the horror of those four years. I’m not the man to describe it. I will say that I never saw a bayoneted baby. I will say that I never would have imagined the many ways in which Humpty Dumpty can be taken apart, with no hope of him ever being put back together again. I will say that we played football with the Hun in no-man’s-land on Christmas Day, but on Boxing Day we were sticking German heads on poles all along the top of our trench.
Sigmund Freud might fruitfully have explored the effect of that close confinement in the stench and ooze of the trenches on the libido. It destroyed the urge for many. But just as the devastation wrought by pipe grenade and machine gun and howitzer shell blurred what it meant to be human, so the edges of sexuality dissolved for others.
A batman I knew called himself his colonel’s slut. Married men openly comforted each other in the most physical way imaginable. Men with sweethearts at home loved other men. Less welcome — but unsurprising, given the darkness at the centre of all our beings — men raped other men.
You won’t read about that kind of behaviour in the poems of Mr Sassoon or the memoir of Mr Graves.
At Mons, where the battle was ghastly beyond description, I saw acts of tenderness amid the horrors. I saw Ted’s brains blown out, but further down the line I also saw two men going over the top hand in hand. In the calm after that phase of the battle I saw a Royal Sussex man I vaguely knew cradling his dying mate in his arms.
‘I’ll give you your mother’s kiss, Bob,’ I heard him murmur. ‘And one for me.’
He kissed him twice on the brow.
I saw men cry all the time. But then there were no words to describe what we were experiencing. Later I realized that the only true account was the thing itself.
I was raised in pessimism and sorrow. After Jim, Jack and Ted all copped it I steered clear of pals. I decided I could not get too close. I know comradeship is one of the great themes of the Great War. At the time, the authorities pushed the idea of the Pals battalions — friends from before the war fighting side by side. But it was a lie.
What was the point of making pals who would be dead within the week? Once, we were playing marbles in our trench and someone straightened up and was shot through the head. At Mons, in those tremendous twenty-two hours, the deaths of my fellow men seemed a very small thing. Why, in the first thirty minutes I saw two thousand gallant men lay down their lives.
I learned not to stop to help wounded men and I was not alone in that.
The years passed. Every day I expected to be killed. Every winter I expected to freeze to death. I began the war in fear. Shuddering, corrosive fear. I was surprised at how long a man can live in fear. But then I decided I was going to die and I accepted it. Fear replaced neither by fatalism nor resignation but by certainty.
In that I was wrong. I lived. But at what price? I have not shed a tear for twenty years. I am unable to feel anything except self-loathing. My body is not my own. I came back from the Great War cut off from everything and everybody. I pretend, of course. I make a facsimile of living.
I survived the war: the Hun couldn’t kill me. But the Spanish flu almost did. The pandemic. Millions died — more than in the Great War. I was laid low in a hospital in London for months. I recovered, although I didn’t know until later that it had made me sterile.
I resumed a life. Of sorts.
FIVE
After the war I had an appetite for the ladies and the money to feed it. Then, in 1925, up at the racecourse, I met a young woman and her swaggering brother. The young woman took a shine to me, her brother less so. They were both cockneys but were Italian by descent. The brother worked for the Sabini family, who controlled the rackets on many racecourses.
The young woman worked in Liberty in London. I was footloose. I moved up to London. She held out for marriage. In a moment of foolishness — she was a beautiful woman and lust was about the only emotion I was capable of feeling — I married her.