I was a bit iffy with Isaac when I got back. I shouldn’t have been—he’d been a good friend to me, but he thought backward too much.
“Did you ever see men dead before?” he said. “I saw my mother and father, but they were neat in their clothes. I never thought to see bits of people. But yesterday—”
“I’ve seen thousands of the deceased,” I said. “Timely and untimely. In all conditions of death.” It was probably an exaggeration and less than a hundred was more like it and the worst I’d seen before France was an old farmer hanged himself. Isaac looked at me as if I was Jack the Ripper, so I had to tell him my father was a coffin-maker and I’d gone with him for the measuring since I was a young ’un.
“You never said,” he said, as if we were an old married couple keeping secrets from each other. “Though I always thought your voice was a bit funny.”
Two days it rained: bad news for battles and cycles alike. We all thought the big show was in days: June 25, some swore, definitely the twenty-eighth others said, but, like a creeping barrage, the day of reckoning (what the new colonel called “giving Jerry a good kick up the backside”) seemed to march on ahead of us.
They’d been moving up men and stores for weeks: rolling stock, horses, and mule trains bringing it in, and there were more gunners and guns than I’d ever seen in one place. Put your hand out and you’d touch a gunner. Not that you’d want to, they were a cocky lot and thought it was all about them. So did the sappers. We cyclists didn’t. We followed war, we didn’t make it. With no war, they’d be out of a job and we’d just be on a pleasant tour of the Continent.
There were exercises and patrols like there was no tomorrow, but unfortunately tomorrow was always what we were leading up to and—when we got there—was what some of us would have no more of. Everybody was exhausted and tense all at the same time. A random shell hit one of the latrines, blew it and its contents sky-high. The men in it knew nothing, I expect, dying with their breeches down. You’d feel safe like that, I thought, as if you’d stepped out of the war, but you weren’t safe anywhere with guns that could fire from miles away.
What a stinking mess.
That waiting made some mute, made some peevish, excited some madmen, and made most of us damned fed up. I saw a man fly into a rage because he was doing a jigsaw and the last two pieces were missing. Sky was all they were, you could see it was a picture of Windsor Castle, but he was accusing this man and that in a fury. Another West Country lad was full of how his brother had helped a wounded French soldier; but when he’d unbuttoned the blue tunic, underneath it was a girl. “Short hair but two little titties,” he said. “What do you think about that?” He told us the story three, four, five times over, holding his hands up in a double squeezing action on each telling.
But it wasn’t likely anything special would happen while the rain kept coming down. At night the noise of it, on the sheets of corrugated iron that were called a roof, was almost louder than the exchanges of fire from the forward trenches and the thump-bloody-thump of our guns. The water trickled through, and no sooner had you moved clear of one drip than the rain found a new way in. The M.O. had given Isaac syrup for his cough a while back, but he’d still wake us up, hacking away, then keep us awake finding a spoon he’d lifted from a canteen and carefully measuring out the dose by the light of a torch, all the while, in case any of us, by some miracle, was still asleep, hissing, “Sorry. Sorry, boys.”
“Just take a swig,” I said one night. “It’s not opium, it’s sugar water. You don’t need to measure it. Take too much, you’re not going to die of it; more likely it’ll fatten you up, which you need.”
“It’s got squills in it. It says syrup of squills,” he said.
“What the hell are squills?”
“I don’t know,” he said miserably. “They don’t seem to help.”
One of the other lads had said they’d be better off ditching the medicine and giving everyone who had to be in billets with Isaac a double dose of rum.
“You’re all bones, Meyer,” he said. “Just go forward sideways and no Jerry’ll ever hit you: all they’ll see is a helmet and a kitbag and they’ll think you’re a spook.”
“He’s bonier than his cycle, en’t he, Hermann?” one spotty boy said to me, hardly able to speak for laughing. “Your machine gets in the mud again, you can ride on Spook here.”
After that, the names stuck, though for me he was always Isaac and I Frank to him. The next evening, we were polishing our equipment when he started coughing. Then, as he reached for it, he saw that someone had emptied his bottle. It lay on its side in a small sticky puddle beside his pack. The cork was nowhere to be seen. Isaac looked as if he was going to cry. His stifled coughs went on all night.