The Last Full Measure (35 page)
Read The Last Full Measure Online
Authors: Michael Stephenson
Bourne, the central character of Frederic Manning’s novel,
Her Privates We
, based on his own experiences, describes the exultant spike of adrenaline that could turn the possibility of death into something he felt was glorious:
For a moment they might have broken and run themselves, and for a moment they might have fought men of their own blood [British troops retreating through Bourne’s unit], but they struggled on as Sergeant Tozer yelled at them to leave that bloody tripe alone and get on with it. Bourne, floundering in the viscous mud, was at once the most abject and the most exalted of God’s creatures. The effort and rage in him, the sense that others had left them to it, made him pant and sob, but there was some strange intoxication of joy in it, and again all his mind seemed focused into one hard bright point of action. The extremities of pain and pleasure had met and coincided too.
127
When the angel of death passed men over, choosing others in their stead, the joy of survival might strike us as being shockingly naked:
“… Barbier was killed.
… He had the top of his back taken off by a shell … as if it had been cut with a razor. Besse had a piece of shrapnel through his belly and his stomach. Barthélemy and Baubex were hit in the head and neck.… You remember little Godefroy? The middle of his body was blown right away. He was emptied of blood on the spot, in an instant, like turning over a pail.… Gougnard had his legs blown off.…”
… “So many fine friends less, my dear old Marchal.”
… “Yes,” says Marchal.
… But he is swept away by a horde of his comrades, shouting at him and ragging him … they all laugh and jostle one another.
… I look from one face to the next. They are merry and, through the weary lines and stains of earth, they seem triumphant.…
… I pick out one of the survivors who is humming a tune and marching along.
… “Well, Vanderborn, you look pretty pleased with yourself!”
… Vanderborn, usually a quiet fellow, shouts to me:
… “It wasn’t me this time, see? Here I am!”
And with a sweeping gesture like a madman he claps me on the shoulder.
… Now I understand.
… These men are happy, despite everything, as they emerge from hell—for the very reason that they are emerging. They are coming back, they are saved. Once again, death was there, but spared them.…
… This is why, though they are crushed by weariness and still spattered with the recent slaughter, and their brothers have been snatched away … in spite of everything …
they rejoice at having survived and enjoy the infinite glory of being on their feet.
128
The staggering good fortune of not being killed needed to be celebrated with life-affirming sensuality:
“Where’s Dixon?”
“Gone west. Blown to fuckin’ bits as soon as we got out of the trench, poor bugger. Young Williams ’it same time, ’ad most of his arm blown off.…”
They spoke with anxious, low voices, still unsteady and inclined to break; but control was gradually returning; and all that pity carried with it a sense of relief that the speaker, somehow, but quite incredibly, had himself managed to survive.
When breakfast came they at first seemed to have no appetite, but once they had started, they ate like famished wolves, mopping up the last smear of bacon fat and charred fragments from the bottom of the pan with their bread.
129
To survive a great battle was to be elected to an elite. There had been no shirking or avoidance; but by some wonderful stroke of good luck death had spared them. It was possible to walk out of the terrible fire with a renewed sense of life:
All around me are faces which sleep might not have visited for a week.…
… The Somme was over, our little bit had been well done and before us there was rest.… It is these moments that make war possible.…
… Certainly it was worth going through a show to come out of it. There was a battle on up there, but we were at peace with all the world.
130
THE DEAD WERE
both shocking and yet familiar; gruesome and occasionally gruesomely funny. Battle after battle laid down a sediment of corpses to form archeological strata that men would have to excavate as though through the loam of a compost pile: “The churned-up field was gruesome. In among the living defenders lay the dead. When we dug foxholes, we realized that they were stacked in layers. One company after another, pressed together in the drumfire, had been mown down, then the bodies had been buried under showers of earth sent up by shells, and then the relief company had taken their predecessors’ place. And now it was our turn.”
131
Digging and the constant churning of exploding shells created macabre reappearances, as though the dead were, in some unnerving way, reanimated:
The ground is so full of bodies that landslides uncover the places bristling with feet, half-clothed skeletons and ossuaries of skulls, one beside the other in the sheer wall, like china jars.
In the earth here there are several layers of dead bodies and in places the pounding of the shells has brought up the oldest and placed them or scattered them across the newer ones.
132
Mud became an oversaturated solution of the killed. Lieutenant John Glubb recalled that in early 1916, “during the battle last month the troops suffered heavily and were too tired to bury their dead. Many of them were merely trampled into the floor of the trench, where they were soon lost in mud and water. We have been digging out a lot of these trenches again, and are constantly
coming upon corpses. They are pretty well decomposed, but a pickaxe brings up chips of bone and rags of clothing. The rest is putrid grey matter.”
133
A German soldier even in the early days of trench warfare in 1914 complained:
Neither the dead nor the wounded can be removed. If you put up as much as a finger above the edge of the trench, the bullets came whizzing round immediately. The dead bodies must therefore be allowed to remain in the trench; that is to say, the dead man is got rid of by digging a grave for him in the floor of the trench. A few days ago … a soldier was so badly hit by a shell that he was cut in two [and] could not be removed without risk to the survivors and was therefore allowed to remain. But presently he gave rise to a horrible stench and whatever they did the men could not get away from the mutilated blackened features.… One gets hardened in time.
134
“One gets hardened in time,” and the commonplace could render the dead flat-out, music-hall hilarious. Corporal Clifford Lane described a German trench near Thiepval in the summer of 1916:
It was very hot … this trench was full of dead Germans and they’d been there some time. Some were sitting on the steps of these deep dugouts … others were lying on the trench floor. We’d seen plenty of dead people before, but we’d never seen anything like this. They were all different colours, from pallid grey to green and black. And they were bloated—that’s how a corpse goes in time, they get blown up with gases. We thought it was funny, really, which shows how your mind can get inured to such situations. We started making up the trench and had to tread on one of these
blokes, who was partly buried. Every time we trod on him his tongue would come out, which caused great amusement amongst our people.
135
Robert Graves encountered a corpse “lying on the fire-step waiting to be taken down to the grave-yard tonight: a sanitary-man, killed in the open while burying lavatory stuff between our support lines. His arm was stretched out stiff when they carried him in and laid him on the fire-step; it stretched right across the trench. His comrades joke as they push it out of the way to get by. ‘Out of the light, you old bastard! Do you own this bloody trench?’ Or else they shake hands with him familiarly. ‘Put it there, Billy Boy.’ ”
136
The dead had a useful afterlife in all sorts of ways. Captain Dunn recalls that on October 23, 1914, “the front was under fire, more or less all night … we had, I think, 19 men to bury. A large grave had been dug, and the first few poor chaps put into it when the usual nightly attacks started. There was no cover where we were except the grave, so in we went—the quick and the dead together.”
137
During the battle of Passchendaele in 1917 gunner Aubrey Wade crossed a stream, the Steenbeek, by “a bridge composed of a compact mass of human bodies over which I stepped gingerly. I was not at all squeamish, the sight of dead men having long lost its terror for me, but making use of corpses, even enemy corpses, for bridge-building purposes seemed about the limit of callousness. The major said nothing, but stopped to light his pipe on the farther bank.”
138
The dead could also be quite profitable. Gunner Leonard Ounsworth explains how the killed provided increased rations for the survivors: “When you lost men, it was a day or two before you could stop their rations coming up. The Army Service Corps would still be sending up the rations of so many men while you
might have lost half of them. And what happened to all that grub? You’d live like fighting cocks on what was left for a day or two.”
139
“The bread ration varied,” explains Corporal Frederic Hodges, “four or five men to a loaf when we had recently received a new draft to replace casualties, or three to a loaf when we had recently suffered casualties but still received their rations. As the ration party came in sight, the first question we asked was ‘How many to a bun?’ ”
140
Even after the war ex-soldiers employed to exhume bodies could hit the jackpot. One such at Ypres in 1920 reported: “It’s jolly hard work. But it ‘as its better side. Some fellers the other day came on a dug-out with three officers in it, and they picked up five thousand francs between ’em.”
141
In a convoluted bit of irony, propaganda points could be scored from the (completely fictitious) profit squeezed from British bodies by the fiendish Hun. George Coppard remembers:
[There was] a piece of psychological propaganda, put about by some War Office person, which brought poor comfort to Tommies. The story swept the world and, being gullible, we in the trenches were taken in by it for a while. With slight variations it indicated that the German war industry was in a bad way, and it was short of fats for making glycerine. To overcome the shortage a vast secret factory had been erected in the Black Forest, to which the bodies of dead British soldiers were dispatched. The bodies, wired together in bundles, were pitchforked on to conveyor belts and moved into the factory for conversion into fats.… If the object of the story was to work the British troops into a state of fighting frenzy, then it was a complete and utter wash-out.
142
If the long-dead proclaimed their own putrid narrative of past battles, the bodies of the freshly slain created a heartbreaking
topography—if one had the eye to read it as the poet John Masefield did:
The field of Gommecourt [the Somme, 1916] is heaped with the bodies of Londoners: the London Scottish lie at the Sixteen Poplars; the Yorkshire are outside Serre; the Warwickshires lie in Serre itself; all the great hill of the Hawthorn Ridge is littered with Middlesex; the Irish are at Hamel, the Kents on the Schwaben, and the Wilts and Dorset on the Leipzig. Men of all the towns and counties of England, Wales, and Scotland lie scattered among the slopes from Ovillers to Maricourt. English dead pave the road to La Boisselle, the Welsh and Scotch are in Mametz. In gullies and sheltered places, where wounded could be brought during the fighting, there are little towns of dead in all these places.
143
Another poet, Siegfried Sassoon, viewed the same battlefield and also saw a kind of confraternity: “After going a very short distance we made the first of many halts, and I saw, arranged by the roadside, about fifty of the British dead. Many of them were Gordon Highlanders. There were Devons and South Staffordshires among them, but they were beyond regimental rivalry now—their fingers mingled in blood-stained bunches as though acknowledging the companionship of death.”
144
The forced intimacy of “the quick and the dead” could be profound. Ernst Jünger saw it as a kind of resurrection: “The day’s sentries were already in position while the trenches had yet to be cleared. Here and there, the sentry posts were covered with dead, and, in among them, as it were, arisen from their bodies, stood the new relief with his rifle. There was an odd rigidity about these composites—it was as though the distinction between alive and dead had momentarily been taken away.”
145
And for the Italian poet-soldier Giuseppe Ungaretti the proximity was transfiguring:
WATCH
CIMA QUATTRO, 23 DECEMBER 1915
A whole night through
thrown down beside
a butchered comrade
with his clenched teeth
turned to the full moon
and the clutching
of his hands
thrust
into my silence
I have written
letters full of love
