My Dear I Wanted to Tell You (12 page)

Couch lying down.

A poor head, all alone in a shell-hole.

Locke, gesturing.

Dowland, running back to the English line – falling. An officer behind him. Pistol up. Jessop?

The first wave was dead at their feet; the third wave rolling through them.

Ferdinand, praying.

The German wire, and his own hand cutting through it with clippers, metal biting through metal – there he is, he can see himself.

Himself, in a German trench.
Nice revetting!

A Prussian, shooting.

Breath.

So many soldiers.

His bayonet in a bloodied tunic. Feel the resistance. Stink of blood and cordite. Noise, bare or shrieking, muffled, coming in waves. His own heartbeat. The concentric circles and the rising red.

Oh, the tall brave one, oh—

Where is everybody
?

Twelve German prisoners and an ambulance.

A tangle of brambles, harsh and bleak, with,
ah
, dead men hanging off them like rags, poor fuckers.

Locke again, howling: ‘Where are the others?’

The fourth wave . . .

Shelling. Shrapnel flying around, dropping, hissing, whizzing, floating, no, surely not, all around. He paused to watch it.

The
noise
, blurred and wavy, coming and going . . .

Time passing. Presumably.

He was in woods. Locke and Ainsworth were there. So was Captain Jessop but he was dead. They were fighting alongside – he wasn’t sure who. They were tripping on the roots of trees that no longer existed. He had no breath and his eyes started in his head. His arms flew to automatic actions. Metal and blood.

Locke wasn’t there any more. He was—

Ohhhh – ohhhh, Major Locke, that don’t look good.

Major Locke was smiling at him.

Take the major home, Riley.

Purefoy was glad to have a clear and definite opportunity to do the right thing, and he took the major home: lifted him over his shoulder, ran low and zigzag, held fast as lockjaw to the major’s leg and his arm, shouted at him all the way – a mile and a half, he was told later. Blood all over his face, looked a right fright. He did remember handing him over to the stretcher-bearer with incredibly black eyebrows, and not knowing what to do, and Locke, his leg at a very strange angle, shouting, ‘Carry on, Purefoy! Back to the lads. Jessop’s in charge!’ and him saying, ‘Jessop’s a goner, sir,’ and Locke saying, ‘Damn, so he is – then you’re in charge, old boy.’

So he gathered some other wild-eyed stragglers and shouted to them, and they turned back, shuddering, staggering, past Ferdinand, Couch, Dowland, Jessop, Bloom, Wester, Lovall, Green, Atkins
– God, what are their names? I’m forgetting their names
– and proceeded on back up the tiny hill.

*

He was spun – what? He was aware of mud and blood and noise, of the taste of his collar in his mouth, stink, racket, a great bucket of mud, alone. Poor Ferdinand, fond even of trees, sad that the country should be mashed up and poisoned.

He was staring up. Stars and flowers and bodies whirled across his sky.

*

Someone was tugging him. He seemed to have no shirt on.

Voice: Come on. Come on, Purefoy.

He let himself be lugged, low, dropping.

I’m all right, he said.

No you’re not, said someone.

Was it night? Or was that just him?

*

Nadine read about it two days later, from a newspaper-seller yelling outside the station.

Daily Chronicle
3 July 1916

At about 7.30 o’clock this morning a vigorous attack was launched by the British army. The front extends over some 20 miles north of the Somme. The assault was preceded by a tremendous bombardment, lasting about an hour and a half. It is too early as yet to give anything but the barest particulars, as the fighting is developing in intensity, but the British Troops have already occupied the German front line. Many prisoners have already fallen into our hands, and as far as can be ascertained our casualties have not been heavy.

Chapter Ten

France, July 1916

Major Locke was talking to him.

‘. . . so you see,’ he was saying, ‘we kept the Hun off the French at Verdun, and that was, um, valuable, as it doesn’t do to let a Frenchman feel alone . . .’ and for a while Purefoy, half consciously grateful for any scrap of logic or policy, considered hating the French.

He opened his eyes to chandeliers and mirrored walls, a sparkling, dripping, doubling and tripling of reflecting glamour. He closed them again. There was a smell of rotting swamp. Gas gangrene. Your flesh goes green. Opened them again. Still seemed to be in a giant nightclub. Not that he’d ever been in a nightclub. He’d thought, when he woke earlier, that he was hallucinating. Now he realised he must be at Le Touquet, in what had been the casino in the parallel universe of Before, when it was possible to be something other than a new circle of hell.

‘You’re looking better, Purefoy,’ said Locke. ‘Nearly up to scratch?’

‘Fine, sir,’ he replied. He stopped to check. Pain in his shoulder and the feeling of loss in his head, a kind of reeling emptiness that seemed to have replaced his . . . his something. ‘How about you?’

Locke waved a crutch, and said, ‘Mustn’t grumble.’

‘Blighty one, is it, sir?’ asked Purefoy.

‘Neither yours nor mine, I’m afraid,’ Locke said. ‘You should have left me out there longer. Might have had to have it off – then I’d be all right. That’s the kind of detail you tend to forget when you’re out there praying for a Blighty one. The reason it is a Blighty is the very reason you wouldn’t want it.’

‘Sir?’ said Purefoy.

‘Do you remember, Purefoy?’

Purefoy was silent for a second. Then, before he could control himself, he blurted: ‘Ferdinand Couch Dowland Jessop . . .’

‘And many others,’ said Locke. ‘But not me, thanks to you.’

Purefoy said nothing.

‘You saved my life. And apparently I promoted you to captain.’

What?
Purefoy blinked, suddenly very aware.
Not again . . . they must be desperate . . .

‘Because of your courage and discipline under fire beyond the call of duty, your experience, intelligence and leadership abilities, and, of course, your rapport with the men.’

‘Thank you, Major, I do know that you’ve noticed I’m common as muck . . .’

‘Do you want it or not?’ Locke said, with half a smile.

‘I haven’t been lieutenant yet.’

‘Details, Purefoy. We need captains: all the old ones are dead. But don’t go on about it – someone might notice.’

‘I’d be honoured, sir,’ Purefoy said. More training, more money for Mum, more leave. Half his brain was racing, half seemed . . . as dead as the captains.

‘Soon as you’re fit,’ said Locke. ‘Sort out the details and so on.’ He stared down at Purefoy, bandaged in the bed. ‘Ainsworth bought it,’ he said. ‘Died of wounds. They buried him at Hébuterne. Apparently he wanted you to have this.’ He held out a scrap of paper, folded, worn.

For a flash it was unbearable. Then control descended. ‘I’ll write to his widow,’ Purefoy said. ‘Sybil.’

‘Sybil?’ said Locke.

‘Sybil,’ said Purefoy. ‘It’s her name. Wives have names. Sybil.’

‘Julia,’ said Locke, thoughtfully.

‘Nadine,’ said Purefoy. ‘If she’ll have me.’

Locke remembered the letter to her, the one from a year ago, about not existing. A year more war on top of that. How can a man feel now, if that was how he felt then?

‘You know Julia is expecting a child,’ said Locke.

‘You told me, sir. Congratulations,’ said Purefoy.

‘I’m feeling very odd about it,’ said Locke.

‘I should imagine you are, sir,’ said Purefoy.

‘Well, yes, I am.’ Locke stood for a moment, balanced on his crutch, then picked it up and looked at the bottom of it. ‘I thought I might get drunk, one of these nights,’ he said.

‘Good idea, sir,’ said Purefoy.

‘Yes, I thought so. Perhaps you’d join me.’

‘Soon as I can lift a glass, sir.’

*

I’ll be given a platoon – oh, God, a company – of conscripts, bank clerks, farmers and lowlives and God knows what. Don’t want to waste a proper officer on them, so they drag me out of the mud to lead them slowly into gunfire.

Orders are, don’t run.

Morality no longer exists: no guidelines, no natural law, no common sense.

Love thy neighbour.

Wasn’t the Hun our neighbour? Our old queen’s cousin? Christian nations slaughtering each other?

Who, then – who let this happen? British men marching British men slowly into gunfire?

There is nothing redeemable here at all.

Unless it’s just, you know, necessary. To stop the badness.
From what they overheard, it was still going on.

*

A casino full of men mewing like baby pigeons: the sound of men dying. He didn’t care where he was. They’d marched them into gunfire and shellfire, and told them to walk slowly. He’d lain in a shell-hole and four men had asked him to say something, to someone, and he’d promised, and he didn’t know who they were, or what he’d promised to say, and he’d gone back and gathered up another load of men
and taken them out again.
And Ainsworth, Couch, Ferdinand, Dowland and Jessop.
And many others
.

They were saying it had been a success.

Dowland’s brother was in the next ward, a vast room which had been a skating rink. A skating rink – full of beds full of one-legged and no-legged men.
What extraordinary nonsense.
Dowland’s brother had no legs. Purefoy went to see him, and looked about, and thought:
When did this become possible? When did this become normal?
This should be full of children with red velvet collars, and laughing women with elegant furs saying, ‘Oh, no, no, you go. I’ll stay and have a tisane . . .’

Dowland’s brother wept all day. He had been told about his brother, the coward, who had been shot in the back in the field by his commanding officer. The doctors here had a big new enemy: collapse of the will to live. Captain – as he now was – Purefoy lay quietly. Gunshot wound to the upper arm. Right as rain in no time.

Memory came to him in waves, and left him again. He held no memory of the journey north from the battlefield to Étaples, and the passing of time was eluding him. He hadn’t known his mind could hide things from him. He considered the deaths of Ainsworth, Dowland, Couch, Ferdinand and Jessop (
and many others
), and the survival of Burgess, and read nothing into anything. Too many of every type of man had been left fluttering in bloody shreds on the wire for any idea of logic to survive any better than their ragged bodies. Only a fool thought only the good died young. But in the quiet moments he considered the virtues lost: the kindness of Ainsworth, his battered gentleness, his singing voice, and the un -cluttered pleasure he had taken in simple things; Ferdinand’s childish delight in food and company; Couch’s vulnerability – the honest desire he had to be a proper man, perverted though it was into a soldierly fetishism, the same as had made a murderer of Jessop. It seemed a shame that these admirable qualities should disappear from this fast-depleting world. If there was to be a world at all after what they had seen and been through on 1 July, these qualities would have been useful. It would be a shame if a new world contained nothing but, on the one hand, Burgesses and, on the other, those who followed discipline and obedience to the death.

His put-away silent self reached out quietly for the characters of Ainsworth and Couch and Ferdinand and Dowland and Jessop, and took them to the protected secret area of his mind. He hadn’t really known Dowland. Only that he was young, and didn’t smoke, and that his nerve had given out.

*

Did they not think? Did they just think we were too stupid to do anything more complicated than walk out in lines, slowly? Too dumb to follow a creeping barrage, perhaps, or dodge from cover to cover? Did they not consider making a feint: stop the barrage, wait and see if the Germans still had their guns and were going to use them; then, when they did, our artillery could have picked up the barrage again . . .

We thought they knew what they were doing.

*

Some started screaming. Some were struck dumb.
What is happening
, Purefoy wondered,
inside me? I’ve surrendered to bloodlust, I’ve waved the flag of insane cheerfulness, I’ve wept, I’ve lied, I’ve analysed my thoughts for hallucination . . . How do I know I’m not going mad? Why wouldn’t I? The strain of trying to hold on to sanity would drive you mad.

A shaker passed through his ward: he had started to shake and hadn’t stopped, legs flinging, arms wriggling, unstoppable, day and night, couldn’t walk, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t stop. He had been removed to their own area before he drove down morale.

Purefoy lay back in his hospital bed and considered the parts of a man.
Because my shoulder is wounded, they do not look at my mental state.
He thought about Dowland and his brother. It seemed to Purefoy that if your legs are shot to pieces no one expects to you to keep going, but if your nerve, the machinery of your self-control, is shot to pieces, they do. It’s not your will, your desire, your willingness to fight on – it’s a separate part of you, but it’s one they don’t understand yet, because they never yet put this much on a soldier. Ainsworth had talked about that – how they had never before given heavy industry to war.

They. It.

And what did I do? During the attack, during any attack, I felt . . . callous. I thought of nothing but pushing on. I don’t believe I felt or thought anything at all – like a dog that you couldn’t call away from chasing a cat; or like a creature with the scent up . . . a yob still tearing at a girl’s clothes when she’s crying no. Remember – those boys in the shell-hole, and he wanted water, and all I felt was impatient. As far as I remember. Remember carrying Locke. Remember the men you can’t remember. Remember the red concentric circles. Remember Ainsworth. Remember Ferdinand Dowland Couch and Jessop (and many others). Remember everything.

Dismember: to take to bits. Remember: to put back together.

There was one lad, a deserter, he’d forgotten his name, and he’d said to Purefoy: ‘I didn’t run away, sir. It was my legs. I couldn’t stop them, and they took me with them.’

Is that cowardice?

Remember him.

*

Last year we had many smallish hopes, made many smallish attempts, suffered many smallish failures, and we died one by one. This year a change of plan! One big hope, one big push, one big fuck-up, and we all die at once.

*

It was days later that he woke up in the glittering, glamorous room thinking: Captain Purefoy. Captain Purefoy. With three pips, perhaps – perhaps . . . Could he present himself with three pips?

Captain Purefoy to see Miss Waveney on a personal matter . . .

When will we have our life back?

Will we have our life back?

What life can we have, now? What would ‘back’ mean, exactly, now?

He rolled over, and a dart of pain shot through his shoulder. With rest and quiet, enough of his life force had returned for him to realise how much of it he had lost, and that was a godforsaken moment.

My blood, my time, my youth, my friends, my strength, my sanity.

Come on, Purefoy. Buck up. You’re alive. You’re young. Sort of. You’re alive. Here. Now.

*

If no one won that, after all that, that – if neither side won that, then neither side can win. The war won, and goes on winning.

*

Captain Purefoy rejoined the shattered Paddingtons with a shining, puckered scar in his upper arm and a second wound stripe. The battle was still going on at the Somme. He wished they were down there but someone had noticed their depletion and put them back in the Salient, which was, for once, quiet. What the men called ‘peacetime’ – no actual battle going on right there.

He was happy to be back, even behind the lines, stuck in Pop, on light duties. No time for thinking, out here.

Locke took him aside just as he arrived. ‘Thought you ought to know, in case you didn’t,’ he said.

‘What?’ asked Purefoy.

‘It was Burgess who brought you back.’

Oh
, thought Purefoy.
Old times’ sake? Paddington station? My dad and his dad?

Surely not.

‘Thank you,’ he said.

Burgess himself came up behind Purefoy, later, and coughed. ‘Sir,’ he said, with his innocent face and his habitual insolent little intonation of disrespect.

‘Burgess,’ said Purefoy. ‘I hear I owe you—’ he said, and stopped, because he didn’t want to owe Burgess. ‘I hear you pulled me out. Thank you.’

Burgess looked at him steadily. The fresh bloom that had disguised him so well back then was completely gone. His eyes were dull, his teeth rotten, his demeanour exhausted. ‘I’d do the same for anyone,’ he said. ‘I know you’ll be a bit . . .
surprised
by my sudden attack of better nature but, despite what
you
think, I’m only human.’ He stared Purefoy in the eyes – a challenge. He lowered his voice, and said wearily, ‘And if you want to turn me in,
sir
, then fucking turn me in. I’d rather know, one way or the other. Sir.’

And that did surprise Purefoy. He grasped at himself within the haze. ‘I won’t turn you in,’ he said, ‘because you’re going to stop doing it. There’s going to be nothing to turn you in for. And don’t try to use that against me because,
Burgess
’ – and here he used the same insolent emphasis that Burgess used – ‘if you do, I
will
, and the hell with the lot of us.’