Gifts of War (2 page)

I remember that the girl was called Crimson—not her real name, obviously—and that she was from Halifax in Nova Scotia. She had lived in Bristol for some months, having been smuggled aboard a ship in her hometown in Canada to service the crew, then been too frightened to sail home, because war had broken out and the North Atlantic had suddenly become very dangerous.

The Wharf was a very civilized place for a brothel (at least, I imagine it was; I am not too qualified to speak, Munich and Bristol being my only experiences in that direction). Besides a number of bedrooms on the first floor, the Wharf had a sitting room, a place where you could relax, put your feet up, have a smoke and a drink, read the newspapers. It was quite clever in its way. The idea was not to rush the men away, once the main business was finished, so to speak,
but to persuade them to linger, perhaps try another girl after a suitable break. Anyway, I was relaxing in the room, alone with a drink and a cigarette, waiting for the others I had traveled down with and leafing through that day’s
Morning Post
, when another man joined me. He nodded, poured himself a drink, and began to light a cigarette.

I was a bit preoccupied, to tell the truth. There was a piece in the paper about some of our ships being sunk off Ireland. Crimson wouldn’t be going home yet awhile.

Just then we heard a commotion below, and raised voices. A look of fear crossed the other man’s face and he rushed to the door. He stuck his head out, left it there for a moment, then slammed the door shut.

“Jesus!” he growled.

“What is it?” I asked. “Police?”

“No,” he breathed, more quietly now. “Worse. Curfew.”

“Curfew? It’s not late.”

“Not that kind of curfew. Enlisted men aren’t allowed by the harbor. Officers only.”

“Oh! Why?”

He shrugged. “I don’t make the rules. There’ve been a couple of fights, a knifing.”

“Are you going to run for it?”

He shook his head. “It’s all up.”

“What’s the penalty, if you are caught?”

“The penitentiary, bread and bleeding water. Loss of privileges for weeks, more. I could even lose my stripe.”

I got up, went to the door, and looked out. A lieutenant was moving toward the stairs that led to the bedrooms and the room where we were waiting. I closed the door again.

“What’s your name?”

“Meadows, sir.”

“I mean your first name, and don’t call me ‘sir.’”

He nodded. “John, sir.” He made a face. “John.”

I took off my jacket. “You’re in luck. I know the officer on the stairs. Only slightly, but he’ll recognize me.”

“How does that help me?”

I held out my jacket. “My first name’s Hal. Put this on and sit over there. Try to look relaxed.”

“You want me to impersonate an officer?”

I still held out the jacket. “It’s your choice.”

He took it.

I lounged in an easy chair, trying to look as relaxed as I could.

Meadows hesitated, looking me straight in the eye. Then he slipped his arms into my jacket and slumped onto the sofa.

The door burst open and a man I knew as Lieutenant Ralph Coleman came in. He stopped, looked at me, nodded, and then looked at Meadows.

Meadows coughed.

“John,” I said. “Can you spare another cigarette, please? I think I must have rolled onto mine.” I grinned.

He did his best to grin back. “Sure, Hal. Here.” And he threw the packet in my direction.

Coleman took a step further into the room. What now? He looked from me to Meadows. “Can I bum one of those cigarettes, do you mind? I’ve run out.”

Meadows nodded and I threw the pack toward Coleman.

He lit the cigarette, dropped the packet on a table, blew smoke into the room. “You lucky bastards,” he said softly. “I was told there were some enlisted men in here today, but I’ve found no one so far.” And, as he backed out, he grinned. “Don’t tire the girls out, you two. My turn tomorrow.”

I never saw Crimson or the Baltic Wharf again. Toward the end of October, we shipped out to France. We arrived at the Front by motorbus. Two thousand of them, driven by reservists, had been sent out by the government. You can imagine the jokes that circulated about arriving at a war by bus. In no time, in November in fact, we saw heavy fighting around and along the Marne River and our strength was reduced so much that the minimum height restriction for recruits was lowered from five foot eight to five foot three. Christ, we were taking a battering. I was directly affected by this because my immediate superior, a full lieutenant who was from Bath and all of six months older than me, was killed in the push on Nieuport and I had to take over.

And so, with the war only weeks old, my unit was—in terms of personnel—already 80 percent different from the one that had left Tetbury. Almost no one under my command was out of their teens, and some, I am fairly sure, had lied about their age to get into the infantry and should by rights have been at school.

By Christmas Eve we were all, in a way, tired old men. The mud, the danger, the constant bombardment, the sight of so many bodies, and so many
bits
of bodies, not to mention the blinded, the maimed who had lost arms or legs, the quantities of blood sluicing through the mud, the screams, in the middle of the night, of men who could not be rescued from no-man’s-land… this was a very different kind of experience from Munich. We learned to sleep standing up, to ignore cold and damp, to forget about sex, to accept the insect life on our bodies, to stop thinking beyond the next day. In my first letters home I tried to describe the horror, but after a few attempts I gave up. No words could describe what we saw. In the trenches, we stopped talking about it.

The Christmas Eve carol singing lasted for about half an hour. I thought our side stole a march on the Germans because we had a young man in our lines who had been in the choir at Gloucester Cathedral (and, given his probable age, should still have been there). He sang beautifully and had teamed up with an older man who was a bit of a virtuoso on the mouth organ. The young man, the boy, sang a sad lament—composed for a soprano voice—from one of Handel’s operas,
Rinaldo
, I think. I don’t remember the Latin title, but in English the lament was called “Let Me Weep,” which I thought no more than appropriate. An English boy singing a German song in a Flanders field. Handel, I know, had found real fame only in London. The aria was doubly suitable.

When the boy had finished and the strains of the mouth organ subsided, leaving only a faint whisper of wind, we all knew that there would be no more music that night.

“Gute Nacht, Fritz!”
shouted our linguist.
“Schlafen Sit gut.”

“Good singing, Tommy!” someone shouted back. “Merry Christmas.”

The mood of the men in the trench that night was different. “Maybe we’ll get some proper sleep,” one man growled.

“I hope so, too,” I replied. “But the guard will be maintained, as always. We’re taking no risks.”

“Do you think that’s really necessary, sir?” said one of the men.

“I don’t know, but I don’t want to lose anybody for the sake of elementary precautions. In any case, whoever is on duty will have me for company, at least to begin with. I have letters to write.”

They didn’t like it, but they could see the sense in what I said.

The men designated as guards took up their positions and I settled down to my letters. I say “my” letters, but they weren’t really. Besides being underage, a handful of the “men” in my unit—as in all units—were unable to read or write. Most of them had never anticipated
the importance of letters at the Front—letters received from home, and letters they sent to their families. I hadn’t foreseen this problem either, but it quickly became apparent where the solution lay. Many of the men who
could
read and write could do so only with difficulty, and by Christmastime writing letters for the men, and reading aloud the replies they got from home, was one of my more important duties, crucial so far as morale was concerned.

My routine was simple. I read the men’s letters to them as soon as they arrived, usually late at night. The men told me what they wanted to say in return, I made notes, and spatchcocked their personal details together with an account of what action our unit had seen in the previous few days. They made their mark at the end of whatever I wrote before it was sent off. In this way I got to know far more about the men under me than I had ever anticipated—who had missed the birth of their infants, due to being abroad, whose brothers had already been killed, who supported which football team, who expected their girlfriends to stay faithful and who didn’t, the names of their dogs, what brand of beer they missed most.

It was amazing how quickly we slipped into the routine, and how much the men came to rely on these exchanges. Even though they couldn’t read them, they carried their letters from home in their tunic pockets and would take them out from time to time. “Here, sir, read us that bit about our Lily telling the vicar his sermon was defeatist.” “Sir, can you just read that part about my mother’s prize at that garden show?”

“Oh no, don’t, sir,” others would complain.” J
ee-sus
, we had all that garden fête stuff nonstop yesterday—and the day before. Give us a break.” But they didn’t mean it. For men who had seen what we had seen, even in our short time at the Front, normal news from home— about a garden fête, or a vicar’s sermon, or a terrier who had had puppies by caesarean—was as near sacred as it got.

There was lots of sad news, of course, especially for the men from large families with several brothers away in the war. I read those quietly, and in private, warning the men what was to come. That helped me know whom to give leave to, and when.

I don’t know when I did fall asleep that evening, but eventually the letter writing was done and I nodded off. When I woke up it was just getting light. A weak sun was lifting itself over the Caillette hills in the east. Yawning, I sneaked a look across to the German lines. Never was a landscape so pitted and pockmarked with shell holes, flats of mud, and disfigured by twisted shards of shrapnel as our section of south Belgium. Nowhere, in the entire history of the world, was loved less than this bloodied patch of land. The mud flats remained frozen; the thin layer of white crystals that had fallen the afternoon before still formed a translucent sheet, glistening like the stubble on an old man’s beard. Dead trees, their leaves blasted away, were outlined in white against the mud. Stenciled against the landscape, they had no right to be so beautiful.

But the mood of the men that day was like that of the night before—somehow different from usual, and right from the beginning, from first light. You have to remember that in 1914, in the British army, we had no helmets—they were not introduced until 1916. So although the trenches were, in theory, supposed to be deeper than the height of a man, meaning one was always protected, in practice this was nowhere near true everywhere. Infills, underground streams, rocky outcrops all meant that, in many places, one had to stoop, or even crawl, to prevent one’s head from showing and presenting itself as an easy target to the enemy snipers.

But not that day. From daybreak, both sets of soldiers moved around freely, allowing themselves the luxury, for once, of standing up straight to shave, placing a mirror on the lip of a trench, in full daylight and in full view of the Germans, who did the same. We cooked
breakfast, whistled our heads off, shouted “Happy Christmas” across the barbed wire, and those who could wrote letters home.

Around half past ten, one of their men stood up on open ground. He raised his arms, to show he was carrying no weapons, and held aloft a metal rod of some sort with a white handkerchief tied to it. I ordered that no one on our side should fire. Instead, we watched as he made his way forward, through the shell craters and frozen mud, to the German line of barbed wire. He stopped and beckoned.

I sent out the company sergeant, a carpenter from Bath called Frank Stephenson. He too was unarmed. He returned a short time later with a message.

“Their CO. would like to meet you at noon, sir, noon our time. For an exchange of gifts and a discussion about burying the dead.”