The First of July(69)

“I want to bet they can’t even find the field,” I said. But they wouldn’t take it.

The Middlesexes won 42-0. Thought we would never hear the last of it.

We still had on our winter sheepskins at night and scarves or balaclavas knitted by sweethearts or Red Cross ladies. Sweethearts tended to knit in a single color, very neat, sometimes with initials worked in. Red Cross scarves were like something biblical: scarves of many colors, made of oddments. So, plain says someone loves you, stripes says someone likes the idea of you. But after an hour cutting trenches or latrines, you’d be down to shirt and suspenders, loved or not.

Horrible work. I had lumbago from the start.

I wondered about Isaac. How would he manage? But I smiled to remember how in training he’d shown me a great dark fur hat that had belonged to his granddad, back in Russia, and that he now planned to take to the war. Great flaps you could tie under the chin and a furry peak to catch the snow. He put it on once and looked like a theatre bear; and then he took it off fast, feeling faint from heat and the weight of it. But now, Isaac should be smiling.

“Excellent,” says Sergeant Oughtibridge, stamping on the ground with his boot that morning. “Like a racetrack. Off you go.” More like a skating rink, I thought.

“Good show,” says Captain Bolitho when I got there; “you’ll be of some use for once.”

Cheeky blighter—but I liked him. He was a cheery sort on top and serious underneath. He didn’t just give orders, the lads said, but often explained what they were doing, like they could learn something. Some liked that, some didn’t. When he saw me, he’d always say “Ah, here comes Hermes.” I don’t know why he called me that. Some of the other lads thought he’d called me Hermann, and I never heard the last of it.

The captain even spoke German and was quite happy to tell us he’d been in Vienna and Berlin before the war and what fine cities they were, in a way that didn’t make anyone think he was soft on the enemy. One day a while back, I’d taken a message up to him where the sappers were digging wells. Suddenly some corporal tells us to shush and get down. We could hear singing—German singing. A fine voice and a marching tune. And then a whole troop marched by, above us but only yards away, singing cheerfully as they went off to kill our boys. We’d ducked down but they only had to look to their right to see us, yet Bolitho had a little smile on his face the whole time, and his head was moving like he was enjoying it.

“What’s he singing?” says one lad as a second voice joined in, and the others gave him nasty looks for speaking too loud, though they’d passed well down the track by then.

“It’s a traditional song about the Rhine,” says the captain very quietly. Then he adds, “That’s a river in Germany.”

“Shall we take them out, sir?” whispers the corporal.

The captain shook his head. When the German and his pals had sung themselves off back to their lair, he said it was because it would simply alert Fritz to our position, which was far closer than we’d been told, but I think he liked the voice.

When things were quieter I asked “What was that German song, sir?” Most officers would have told me to bug off with my stupid questions. But he told me, and he wrote it down in German and English and I tucked it in my pack. “Fest steht und treu die Wacht, die Wacht am Rhein.” “That means: one thing is certain and true—the watch on the Rhine,” he said. Which seemed like something an Englishman might sing about the Thames.





CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE


L’Abbaye de Royaumont, April 1916


Je donnerais Versailles,

Paris et Saint-Denis,

Le royaune de mon père,

Celni de ma mère aussi… .

ONE SOLDIER SINGING DOESN’T DISGUISE the fact that it is another bloody morning in the Abbaye de Royaumont. The ascetic shades of medieval monks have fled before the Scottish ladies who have turned the abbey into a military hospital. The stern lady doctors, the prim and pretty lady nurses, the orderlies, cooks, drivers, managers of supplies, cleaners. All females. All from Scotland. The patients, most of whom are French, think this is part of their delirium. They wake from what they thought or hoped was death to find themselves in an ancient holy place with women toiling over their vulnerable and altered bodies. Some cross themselves. Some weep.

Auprès de ma blonde,

Qu’il fait bon, fait bon, fait bon… .

Fucking hell. By the Holy Virgin and all the saints. Fuckfuckfuck my fucking leg.

Fix bayonets.

Of your mercy… .

Maman. Mama. Aide-moi.

I’ll show you murdering bastards.