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A Legend of the Great War

By: aabelard



Andrew Dunbar had donned the kilt just two years after his first long trousers, and turned seventeen in the trenches of Flanders. It amazed him, sometimes, that he was there, for he had been odd man out among his four brothers. Among those feuding hoodlums in the slums of Glasgow, Andrew was timid and studious, and would as soon have spent his life in the Mitchell Library or the Art Galleries at Kelvingrove. A kindly recruiting-sergeant of the Black Watch, while people still had a peacetime idea of what kindness was, had told him he could be measured with his boots on, and cast a thoughtful eye towards the newspaper. So Andrew, whose worst enemies would never have called him slow on the uptake, got into the army with the Daily Mail for the 4th August 1914 wadded up inside his boots.

As he was so slight and unmilitary, but a very capable rifle shot, a benevolent company commander made the boy a sniper to keep him out of the violence, setting him on the path to more killing than most soldiers see. Two days in the autumn of 1915 saw all his brothers dead, three of them in a bad quarter of an hour on the Taupière redoubts, and himself sent to London to receive his Cross from the King-Emperor's hand. When people called him lucky, he would always say he was a timid man, and that is how he learned that the naked truth can pass for modesty, if you tell it the right way.

With almost everyone he had known dead on the Taupière, Andrew's closest friend, and usual companion in the almost umbilical partnership of sniper and observer, was a man whom most people took time to recognise as the giant he was. Staff-sergeant Colin Campbell Sime, born in Lucknow in the siege, had been a soldier two decades longer than regulations allowed. Most people wondered why an impeccable soldier, fearsome fighter, crafty wangler and staunch Army man like Ross, who should long since have made Regimental Sergeant-Major, had remained a sergeant. After all, it was only his peacetime rank, which he had held on the terrible retreat from Mons, as he carried three weaker men's rifles for them, and the junior subaltern under his arm when he told it where drink was to be had. To casual inquirers Ross mentioned drinking and fighting, though never dishonesty, or disrespect to an officer of the crown. 

Andrew knew the true story. On Prussian Guard day at Ypres, Colin Ross had scraped together a few remains of his own battalion, a few Indian Dogras and a couple of Gurkhas, and in his own words, 'We gave the last wave the right aboot, and that Die Wacht am Rhein song, they'll be singin' it in Nepal yet.' A week later Ross had politely refused an exhausted general's order to summarily execute a deserter, because 'There's time for due process, sir, so it's no' lawful.' 

Not a word went on Ross's record, of course, for the lowliest subaltern could have told the general he had been saved from far worse trouble than the old man. The general, once in possession of his faculties again, was rumoured to know it. But Ross's promotion and medal had evaporated, without a word admitted in principle. Andrew – and what was more important, every one of Ross's regimental officers – thought a medal as big as a soup-plate would have met the case nicely.

On returning from leave, Andrew and Ross were told that their battalion had been moved, and they would have to remain where they were pending further orders. So they waited in Boulogne with some more men of various regiments who had returned from leave, spending their mornings doing fairly light fatigues. After lunch they would report to the Town Major's office to have their leave passes datestamped and receive a chit for a further day's rations and billet. This was the process by which crafty soldiers had been known to obtain an extra week's leave, and often some travel around France into the bargain.

In the afternoons they were sent to mark targets on the rifle range, which for Andrew was not work at all. When his civilian sporting rifle was noticed, he was detailed to instruct a new draft, while Colin Ross was borrowed to teach drill to groups of colonial officers, whose experience had brought direct commissions as captains and majors while they still required a final polish in the military arts. They were planters, ivory hunters, Boer War irregulars, and on one joyous occasion a former rissaldar of Bengal cavalry who had bought his own ticket to London. Ross's theory of discipline was strained by meeting so many old friends. 

Andrew's work at Boulogne unsettled him more than he could have explained. He could teach, all right, in the sense that he understood and could communicate all that he did. But he felt his lack of self-projection, his inability to draw the interest of people who were only marginally interested in what he had to give.

Like frustrated teachers everywhere, he blamed his students, and the system which had sent such people to war, even though blaming the system was a far less automatic response in those days than it has since become. But beyond all doubt, the quality of some of the battalions arriving in France was not what it used to be. When it came to shooting, they were disinclined to make an effort, and far too prone to blame their weapons. This gained little sympathy from Andrew, who had been well taught with a Japanese Arisaka rifle, of all things, and learned to like it very well. But when he took a new Lee-Enfield from its grease and put twenty-six shots into the four hundred yard target in one pounding, roaring minute, they took it for some kind of trick.

Compared with his original battalion, among the First Hundred Thousand and well leavened from the old regular army, the new men seemed resigned to horrors which Andrew in his day had hardly suspected, blind to the possibility that the man who studied his own survival might outlive those who did not. Some were the very best of good men, but without the inclination to be good soldiers. They were in the army from the highest of motives, most of them, but thought their duty discharged by being there and enduring what was to be endured. Many would die so uselessly and so soon, Andrew thought, that they were virtually stealing the labour of valued soldiers who had been detached to train them, and wasting the equipment they took to the earth with them.

Andrew was forgetting the men whom early death or wounds had weeded out of his own battalion – for bad soldiers get unlucky faster - and he was forgetting, through details like his resentment of petty discipline or his inability to keep step in drill, just how high his own standards in trench soldiering had become.

Once Andrew was witness to a quite astonishing tirade, by which a sergeant proposed to educate some new arrivals:

'Now this 'ere is your rifle, and the nature of your rifle is to be a man's weapon. That is why yer fucking queer fellows, clever as they may be in musical comedies an' that, don't 'ave no chance of becoming proficient in its use. Now it's well known that your southern races an' such are kind of suspect that way, to say it polite-like - if you want proof, look at the fuss they make about their bleedin' masculinity, hey? Which is why good musketry is the preserve of your northern European peoples, see. Take our gallant allies the Froggies, now, I don't deny as they can fight. Very nice field artillery they got, what you aim by doing sums an' turning handwheels, an' they don't mind cold steel, just like them fucking 'omosexualists will scratch each other's bleedin'eyes out, see? But that don't make 'em rifleman like what we are - or even like the Huns, for them barstards are at least northern Europeans. Now you'll get dahn an' fire ten rounds rapid, an' you'll understand why, if any of you young ladies puts a shot off the paper - she don't need to waste no breath explaining nothing!'

Andrew stood numbed by the horror of it. It would have taken a lot to make him into a useless shot - but this, early in his military life, might have done it. For his own part, he taught his drafts that their lot was easier than it might have been, for rifle shooting was a rational science, the sole skill he knew in which achievement was precisely proportional to the amount of work put into it. But he would always remember the sergeant's speech, as typifying the awful purpose of a man with an idea behind him. He did not think he knew any homosexualists personally, and had only the vaguest idea what they did, but for the moment at least, he was on their side. There were very credible rumours of a homosexual sergeant being killed on the Taupière, and Andrew knew the men had taken great care always to let him use the latrine alone, which was surely a mark of respect. 

On the fourth morning they were sent by train to Étaples, there to be joyously reunited with their surviving comrades. Their battalion was in the process of amalgamation with another Black Watch battalion which had suffered badly at Loos, to be brought up to more or less full strength by the drafts of new men coming from Scotland.

This, above all other places, was where they realised that a great army is a society and as diverse as any other. The Bull Ring at Étaples was a training camp, which had been set up to give new arrivals their final preparation before going to the front. In theory it could have given the practical training, on war as it really was, which Andrew and his friends had lacked, but this opportunity was entirely thrown away.

The specialised courses were well-run, but they were for experienced soldiers, not the new drafts. Andrew was determined to be nothing but a sniper, so he got himself detailed for a course in demolition by explosives. Nothing, he felt, was so unlikely to find any application in France, where the problem was to get anything to stay up. 

Far more than a technical school, though, the Bull Ring was a place where the function of drill and discipline had swelled to a monster, where merciless drill-sergeants seemed impelled to crush the last vestiges of civilian independence which any miscreant might try to smuggle up the line to the front. Andrew wondered whether the world actually needed the sort of men who became Bull Ring drill-instructors, and the presence of seasoned troops seemed only to incense them. Everybody hated them, just as everyone hated staff officers, munitions workers, or any others who had safe jobs and yet profited by war.

They did not know, of course, about Colonel Ronald Campbell, ex-O.C. Bayonets, who was to do such wonderful work on the farm which he ran as a convalescent home for shell-shocked men. There was a lot that they did not know. But disaffection hung about the place like a miasma, offending Andrew more than his ordeals at the hands of the instructors. Even the dunes along the coast were unsafe because of the sandbaggers, deserters living rough, who would murder a man for his rations or a few shillings. Two of them were court-martialled and shot while Andrew was there, and few pitied them. 

Accounts of the Bull Ring mutinies, which came after Andrew's time, have been greatly exaggerated: most men just took what was handed out to them, knowing it must come to an end. But they did not like it any the better for that, and reflected, as Andrew did, that they served in another army.

The men were not at all sorry when they entrained for all the perils of the front. They had no idea where they were going, till the train crossed the Belgian frontier and drew into Hazebrouk station, which was heavily congested with British military traffic.

'Nae doubt aboot it,' Ross judged. 'We're for Wipers again.'

'Come on, Andy, there's other places in Belgium.' 

'For seasoned troops, fresh frae six weeks' rest?' 

'Aw Christ, the Bull Ring rest, he says?'

'Naw, but the staff says. Staff work is that hard, they'd fair enjoy a wee go in the Bull Ring. If they could be spared, that is.'

They detrained in Poperinghe, just as before. But this time it was raining, on a day of unceasing light rain, which had long since soaked through the tents in which they would spend the night. It was still raining in the morning, when they tumbled out and stood shivering in their ranks for roll-call, and it still rained as they marched that dismal seven miles through Vlamertinghe and Ypres. The shell of the Cloth Hall was more mountain and less building now, the square empty, but amid all the added destruction of the last few months, some of the scattered cobble-stones still lay where he had last seen them. 

He could recognise the re-entrant angle where he had once seen the tattered rags of a Belgian girl who had been selling postcards. He still had the postcard he had been buying as the salvo came in, folded in his paybook, together with the white feather which he had been handed by an English girl in Trafalgar Square, while he was illicitly wearing his first civilian suit. Perhaps the Belgian girl could have done the same, and it was only death that had made her sweet-natured and understanding forever. Or was that unjust? In Andrew's experience, enthusiasm for slaughter seemed inversely proportional to the individual's likelihood of ever experiencing it - which he could not call unreasonable, when he thought about it - and the Belgian girl must have lived her last months in considerable fear.

He really knew very little about girls. Once, when Andrew's eldest brother Jimmy was alive, Andrew had forgotten someone's advice to keep out of the barn where they were billeted, and he had heard sounds from the loft, which even the most naive of dwellers in Glasgow's crowded tenements could hardly avoid recognising. Much later he had seen Jimmy and the bread-shop widow emerging from the building, the latter buttoning her blouse, and this worried him extremely, for they had only been there for two days, and released from duty for just over an hour. The widow had smiled so charmingly at the men as they marched past her shop, and Garn knew that it took weeks or months, at the very least, for a respectable woman to develop the kind of relationship which led to sexual feelings. He wondered if he should warn Jimmy that he was accidentally taking advantage of someone who must be feeble-minded. But he had learned that his advice was not always welcome.

Women, unless something was wrong, were undoubtedly more like Colin Ross's niece Susan, a munitions worker and teenage suffragist in Camden Town. She and Andrew had spent some time alone together on his last leave, and yet there was a coldness about her. She seemed to relish talking about her ideas, and nothing else. Andrew knew very well that there were women who never had any ideas to talk about, and a man could do far worse than her. But he was not sure what, if anything, he wanted.

Ross's prediction of the summer came true this time, for they marched straight along the Menin Road, dodging the splashing columns of G.S. wagons which had come out with the dusk, and occupied a position opposite the German stronghold of Hooge.

It was an unspeakable place. The Hooge chateau, on the right of the Menin Road, had been a British headquarters at First Ypres, until one divisional commander was killed and another wounded by shell-fire. Since then the chateau and its stables had been pounded to rubble, and several mines had been exploded by the brave men who tunnelled and laid charges in the ice-cold clay far below. The crater had each time to be taken and held against the counter-attack which always followed, sometimes to change hands several times. Meanwhile the area became saturated with drainage from the nearby Bellewarde Lake, making a morass of the kind into which the entire Salient would be pounded in two years' time.

The triangle of craters, ruins and trenches had been fought over many times. Scarcely any excavation did not turn up its bodies, and even the mud itself was infected with the corruption of decaying flesh. Any object or garment which touched that mud became imbued with a pestilence which could kill as surely as steel, in contact with even the most trivial of wounds, and some held that the bacteria even floated on the air. It was only some civilian's rumour that air friction rendered a bullet sterile. Many of those bodies were heavily charred from the flame-thrower attack of the 30th July, and at a certain level, buried by the shelling which had followed, everything they turned up bore the mark of fire.

The wretchedness of the Hooge trenches was indescribable. Some of them were lines of linked shell-holes, only deep enough to crouch in, and the lines were sometimes so close together that they could hear the Germans conversing in their guttural, slurred speech. Where there were continuous trench-lines, they soon became knee-deep rivers of flowing water and mud, which the eternal concussion of shellfire pounded into a more penetrating slurry than any farm-ditch back home. 

There they fought a brutal war of minor attacks and counter-attacks, sometimes with tacit and ephemeral truces which were more unnerving than open hostilities, from the certainty that they would be broken by trench-raid or grenade. No Man's Land was so dangerous, even at night, that the dead of six months lay unburied in some of the shell-holes, home and sustenance to the septic-toothed rats, which sought to augment their body warmth with the warmth of decay. 

Pip the colonel's fox-terrier, with the hair grown back white on the shrapnel-wound in his neck, would have killed rats all day if they had let him. But this Colonel Cameron would seldom allow, knowing the danger a rat-bite in that place would bring. Sentiment apart, the dog was a born sentinel, who could tell Germans from British by smell, and knew his enemy. Andrew kept his cartons of Eley 9mm. ammunition for serious practice, but when someone gave him the contents of a dead German officer's pouches, he laid ambushes with his pistol and shot every rat he saw. In the trenches at Hooge, it was about as much as he was good for. But it was a waste of effort to shoot just one or two, he told himself, since they at once became food for other rats.

It was the worst winter of the war, and not only because the weather was the most severe in living memory. There was none of that optimism for a new offensive in the spring, which had characterised the winter of 1914-15. Even in rest areas, the troops had long since given up singing that unholy old chorus which went:

We beat them on the Marne,
We beat them on the Aisne,
And when this winter's over,
We will beat them once again.

There would be other winters of crushed hopes. But in those, the army would be better adapted to coping with the miseries which cold and wet piled upon those of other seasons. There were a few cases of frostbite, but not many; the men failed to agree whether this was due to the anti-frostbite preparation which reached them in 2-lb. tins. It was mostly animal fat, presumably, since it was labelled 'Not for issue to Indian troops', and orders stated that it had to be applied by an N.C.O. Needless to say Andrew never saw that done, although he heard many a joke on the subject, and so did the N.C.O.s. It burned quite well in a crude lamp, and the whale-oil which replaced it was even better.

Far more common than frostbite was trench feet, a festering necrosis of tissues which had become swollen by putrid water and deprived of circulation by tight boots and cold. It was said that trench feet was caused by inadequate care - by low morale, ultimately, and the Black Watch had gone a long way down that accelerating spiral since April. But Andrew equated that opinion with General Harper's assertion that no man had ever been killed by the bayonet unless he had his hands up first. While Andrew, who knew his business very well, would have backed any good firearm against cold steel, he had too often seen the latter used in desperate combat to accept a similar dismissal of trench feet.


A Legend of the Great War



Colin Ross crouched in his burrow, re-reading for the fiftieth time a note which he had found in a new case of Mills bombs:

Dear Soldier,

My name is Jenny, and I am nineteen, with blue eyes, brown hair and medium figure, and I live in Aldershot...

Ross came to a decision, took out a writing-pad and indelible pencil which looked suspiciously like army property, and began to write with a neatness and grammar which would have surprised many who knew him. The spelling is all his own:

Dear Jenny,

My name is Colin, and I am afraid you are out of luck this time, because I am fifty-nine and not dead yet, with grey hair, and you can see I am an honest man, and trusting you with a big secret, or I could tell you I am only forty-six, and it would be sort of half-true, since that's what battalion records say. For they don't allow men to serve at my age, which is a rotten shame, since I never was sick in my life, and I know the business.

I just wanted you to know that your letter did not reach anybody that would not appreciate it, or would appreciate it the wrong way, and to say DON'T GIVE UP, because many a young soldier could die happy if he knew somebody like you cared about him. You would not believe what fine young men we have here, far better than they were back home. That is why I am writing now, although I am old enough to be your grandfather, and considering some of the times I have had in Aldershot, that does not seem so impossible at all. Really your letter has given great pleasure to an old man that was getting just a wee bit too intolerant of the folk back home, and that never had any children of his own, not white ones anyway...

Ross finished his letter with some hints that he knew a boy who would make a most splendid man with the right kind of woman behind him. He stopped and read through it, just to make sure that everything was exactly right, and reflected that fifty-nine was still too young to understand women. 

'Ach, she'll just have tae make allowances,' he grunted, and sealed the envelope. Later he slipped Jenny's note into Andrew's greatcoat pocket.

As the winter drew on, men began to be affected by something more disturbing than any physical ailment: the barely-acknowledged condition which had come to be known as shell-shock. Crushed by the agony and despair of trench war, men would withdraw further and further into themselves, until eventually an unseen curtain would come down. It was as though a man's soul left him, leaving him oblivious to all the evil of the world - perhaps forever, since of all the men whom Andrew saw taken down the line like that, he never met one again. 

It seemed to affect the few originals of 1914 more than newer and more timorous soldiers, and more often stolid, apparently indomitable types than someone like Andrew. This seemed to support the opinion of many army doctors - the enlightened ones, who admitted that it existed at all - that it was a progressive physical deterioration of the nervous system, occasioned by the concussion of shellfire. As a result, though, army medical boards were usually hard on those who had given way under the fear of bullets, gas, infection, barbed wire or cold steel. 

At the best it was a coma, a trance, in which a man seemed deaf and dumb, insensible to pain, staring into space with fixed, unfocussed eyes. Worse, the next man might be shaking like a victim of some tropical fever, so that his friends could not hold him still, and he had to be strapped to a stretcher. Or his body might be contorted in an air-clawing rigor by muscular spasms, like an epileptic or a man asphyxiating. Once Andrew saw a man clawing at his own face, with black-edged nails which had just been grovelling in a slime of mud and rotten flesh. Such extremes happened to only a few, of course, and Andrew was determined that he would not be one of them. A few soldiers, like Colin Ross, seemed able to carry on unaffected forever, and he hoped to be another. But of the few men left who had trained with him in Perth, scarcely any were quite as much to be relied upon as they once had been.

Once they spent a week in a rest-camp behind the line, a bleak place of Adrian huts which Andrew hated. One Sunday morning a hard frost had burst a carelessly-laid water-main at the Base Hospital, and a working-party of Black Watch was called in to dig out the rusted piping and clear up after the flood. It was cold, dirty, back-breaking work among the newly-thawed leaf-mould of the wood onto which the hospital backed, although kilted troops were not as badly off as they would have been in sodden trousers. When it was finished, a few of the men started a fire to brew up some tea. But Ross drew Andrew aside.

'Andrew, Billy Morrison's likely in that hospital. They'd never let us a' in, but maybe we'd make it if it wis just the twa o' us.'

Morrison was one of the trench foot cases, a Fife man who had enlisted with Andrew, in Perth Barracks on that same morning in August 1914.

'Is that allowed, do you think?'

'Laddie, how lang have ye been in the airmy? Whit they dinnae forbid is allowed, see? An' it cannae be forbidden unless ye ask. Come wi' me if ye want tae see a try-on.'

Ross, who had a puzzling ability to avoid collecting dirt, got Garner remarkably clean, considering. They washed their boots in a stream, and went round to the front of the hospital. It was a big house with ivy-covered walls and French windows, the grounds filled with the usual accumulation of huts. At the gate Ross took out a brown envelope, to look like a message, and the sentry did not challenge them. But they were stopped by the R.A.M.C. porter in his booth just inside the front gate.

'Here, what's your business?'

'Visitin' a friend, corp'ral. Private Morrison, Black Watch, in wi' trench feet. That's okay, is it no'?'

'No, it bleedin' ain't. Sorry, but I can't let you in without a pass.'

'What, an' the colonel askin' for him? Saved the colonel's life, Billy Morrison did, up the Salient.'

'Look, I shouldn't.'

'Okay chum, we understand. We'll need tae get a chit frae the colonel, that's a', an' we'll maybe be sent up the line afore we can get back.'

'Oh well, I didn't see you, did I? Trench feet, that's outside the main building, second black hut on the left.'

'Billy Morrison never saved any colonel's life, neither Cameron's nor Boswell's, did he?' Andrew asked, as they made for the back door.

'No' exactly, but he'd have saved them if they'd needed it, an' whaur's the justice in punishin' a man for lack o' opportunity?'

They were stopped by a middle-aged woman in W.A.A.C. khaki, not the navy blue of the V.A.D. voluntary nurses. She wore badges of rank which looked odd on a woman, but she had a voice and a manner which impressed them more.

'Where do you think you're going?'

'Visitin', ma'am. We've a friend in here, and we're gaun' up the line the morn.'

'Oh? You've no permission to be here, and you know it. I'm thoroughly fed up with you soldiers trailing in here, looking for your friends. Look at yourselves, you're covered with germs, and this is a hospital.'

'Wi' respect, ma'am, there were nae germs in my young day.'

'Why, I can't understand a word you say! How did you get past Malone?'

'Ah weel, ma'am, I'm no' sayin' we slippit past deliberately. But yon wee window's no' very convenient for him.'

'He'll see you if you try it again, I guarantee that, or he'll wish he had. Now go away! Any man in his hospital is getting the best of treatment, and that's what matters. If I started letting people in whenever they chose, the place would be like a railway station tomorrow, and no more hygienic. You can see that, can't you?'

'Oh aye, ma'am, I know fine ye're only daein' your job. I'm sorry if we've troubled ye.'

'And I'm really sorry I can't help you, but the rules have to be the same for everyone. We can't make any exceptions.'

Once outside, Ross turned to Andrew. 

'That's it, laddie, I'm afraid. Ye can keep on tryin' wi' some folk, but no' the likes o' her.'

'Well, you can't win all the time.' 

'Look, at least I kept us oot o' trouble. I never mentioned the colonel again, did I? That's because she's the sort that checks up.' 

'You said we were going up the line tomorrow. Suppose she checks up on that?'

'We could be. An' that's a military secret. They'd no' tell her, an' she'd no' like the refusal. The staff's no' keen on women, no' unless they're young typewritin' hussies, wi' hair-ribbons in the divisional colours, an' their skirts half-wey tae their knees.' 

'She seemed quite kindly, in a way, at the last.'

'Ah, dealin' wi' women's as much a science as soldierin'. Remember, laddie, that politeness costs ye nae money. I wis polite, see, an' I sort o' hinted that I wis protectin' her gatekeeper, that she hadnae the time for a row wi'. Of course I wouldnae claim a lady, like her, would get seized wi' the womanly passions at a few words frae the likes o' me, no' since we gave up the red coats, especially. But they're creatures o' habit, so speak them fair, an' they'll no' mistake a man for cattle.'

As they headed for the gate, a van came in and drew up on the gravel in front of them.

'Hey Andrew, that's oor M.O.'

The Black Watch medical officer got out and saw them.

'Hello, what are you two doing here?'

'Tryin' tae see Billy Morrison, sir, but they'd no' let us in. Can ye help us?'

'H'm. I need one or two men to bring some things out to the van for me, and I suppose it might as well be you. Tried to get in, you say? You've not been caught in any kind of trickery, I suppose?'

'Sir, the very idea! We wouldnae – '

'Get caught. Yes, I know you, Ross. Follow me, then.'

The M.O. led them inside, Ross exchanging a wink with Corporal Malone. The trench feet ward was the first place he went, and he showed them to the bedside of Private Morrison. There was a screen around the foot of the bed, with an extra piece of cloth tacked in place, so that the patient's feet were hidden. They exchanged a few conventional words with him, Andrew hardly knowing what to say. When the M.O. and an orderly went to the door to talk, Morrison leant forward and whispered to them.

'Hey, lads, can ye' no look an' tell me whit my feet are like? They'll tell ye nothin' here.'

Andrew was nearest, so he edged up to the screen and peered through a crack. Morrison's feet were uncovered, and it was all Andrew could do to stop himself from drawing back in horror. They were blackened and swollen to such a degree that the toes appeared to have started from their sockets, and protruded at odd angles from a fungoid, glistening growth like something on the underside of a log. Most of the nails were missing, leaving raw scars like eye-sockets. It seemed so inconceivable that those objects could ever again be feet, so monstrous that a man should survive the Taupière for this, that Andrew's head swam with horror. But he maintained perfect composure, for after all, what was one more horror, these days?

'What d'ye make o' it?' Morrison asked, almost pleading. 

'Oh, terrible to look at, but that's the usual thing, don't you know? You'll just be miserable if you let it worry you.'

'It's hard no' tae worry, but.'

'You're a good sight better off here than in the line, that's for sure.'

'Wish I could be sure o' that.'

They followed the M.O. from ward to ward, while he exchanged a few words with every casualty from their battalion who was able to talk. It was a deeply depressing tour, most of the cases being the result of foul conditions, infection and disease. For in the trenches, wounds usually took the form of head injuries, fatal or worse than fatal, and it was not surprising that many men longed for an attack, which increased the chances of escaping lightly with a Blighty wound.

Even advances in treatment could have their grim side. The doctors, with their vast experience of emergency surgery, were now keeping life, or a kind of life, in men who would have been despaired of in 1914. Looking at those helpless wrecks of men, many of whom would never be anything else, he could not quite bring himself to think that they would be better off dead. He himself would have clung to life on any terms whatever. But the sight left in him a dread which he found hard to define. It was only partly outrage, at what had been done to people like Private Morrison, for it was fused with the revulsion which healthy young men often feel towards the sick or the abnormal. So he left the hospital ashamed of himself, another torment added to those among which he lived.

But that was the beginning of a kind of friendship between Andrew and the M.O., when the latter discovered that the boy knew something of what the senior major termed 'the Viennese loony-doctors'. But that became a little strained when the M.O., who had contacts, obtained an American intelligence test, one of the first, and Andrew's scores were invariably off the upper end of the scale. The M.O. would never be convinced that Andrew had not obtained a copy somewhere, and practiced them. That was the sort of suspicion which association with Colin Campbell Ross let you in for.

For all the acuteness of Andrew's memory, the few who hear of that French town can never extract from him its name. It was probably not as far south as Amiens, or as far from the front as St. Omer. Some say Hazebrouk, but it was probably bigger, and there are good reasons why it would have been in France, rather than Belgium. 

The night of the working party at the hospital, some of the men were worn out or suffering badly from the cold. So Colonel Cameron announced that they were free until ten the following morning. He had motor transport for those who needed it, but the others were free to make their own way back to the camp, mostly via the estaminets of the town. Andrew, though, chose not to join them. He parted company with Ross at the beginning of an area of quiet residential streets, which would take him along the little stream that ran through the town. He needed to arrive back at the camp before the others, and light the coal fire to heat the old wash-room copper for a hot bath. But that left him with some time he badly needed, to be alone with his thoughts, and to savour the luxury of walking at his own pace, without rifle or pack.

As he rounded the corner which led to the riverside walk, he saw a succession of little public gardens between the red-brick houses which backed on the riverbank. These were planted with trees and shrubs, so that he could see very little of the river from the street. He walked into the first of these, and leant for a while on the cast-iron railing, looking down into the black water and weedbeds of the shallow stream. There was scarcely any lighting in the street across the river, but a bright three-quarters moon. The sky had cleared and the stars were out, and Andrew realised that he was very cold.

As he stepped back onto the street, Andrew saw something which he was not, he realised, meant to see. About fifty yards along the street, a well-dressed French lady was walking briskly towards him. He looked in the other direction for a moment, turned back, and she was gone. 

He wondered, for a moment, if she had entered one of the houses. But he would have heard the door, and he did not think she had been close to one at the time. She must surely have been adjacent to the next riverside garden, but there had been something more purposeful in her stride, than in that of a person who would stop there on a winter's evening. For a few minutes he conjectured, though he considered it none of his business. What could Sherlock Holmes have made of the incident?

Then he thought of suicide, though he realised that it would be difficult for anyone to do, in a river that could hardly be more than a foot and a half deep. Should he investigate? If the woman just wanted to be alone, as he had done, or was meeting a lover, she would surely resent his intrusion. But she could be caught in the freezing weeds and mud, to endure a far worse death than she could have planned for. Andrew walked slowly to the entrance of the next garden.

He stopped for a moment at the gate. The place was divided into shrubberies and arbours which would have given a pleasant shade and privacy on a sunny day. But now it was like a place of darkened caves, where he could make out very little. He could hear noises which puzzled him, but did not come from the water. There was a low thumping noise, and a muffled gasping, which struck him as for all the world like an asthmatic kitten trying to mew. He heard men's voices muttering in French – with an ugly tone to them, as it might have been in an illicit card game where the play was suspect, but it still caused him some relief. That surely meant he did not have to get involved, so he started walking again.

Then there came a tearing of fabric, a curse and a female scream, which ended in an instant. Andrew turned on his heel and entered the garden. For a moment he heard nothing, but then a scuffling in one of the arbours caught his attention. Three men in French army uniform were holding a struggling woman on the ground, and one of them was twisting a piece of cloth which covered her face. Her blouse and camisole were torn open and her skirt raised around her waist, to reveal her pale breasts and threshing legs. She got a foot free and lashed out blindly, catching one of the men on the cheek. But his comrade struck her hard across her hooded face, and her motion stopped for a moment. Andrew unbuttoned his tunic where he would reach for his pistol, and stepped forward. 

'Messieurs…' he stammered.

One of the men growled something quite unintelligible in French, and Andrew, strengthened by the knowledge that the Luger must come as a shock, remained impassive. One man's organ stood taller and glistened more darkly than Andrew could have imagined, but it sagged as they saw his resolve.

'Faisez comme vous devez,' he said evenly. 'Et moi aussi.' 

He told himself that such an incident, among the millions of uniformed men in France, was hardly to be wondered at. Was it surprising that the horrors he knew should bring worn-down conscripts to an act like this, when punishment was unlikely to be worse than sending them up the line?

The soldiers spread out to left and right, and Andrew knew that if he let them surround him, no weapon ever made could save him. He might be overwhelmed by survivors if they panicked, even as it was, and with horrid imagination he imagined himself being found in the river the next day. But one of the men drew a fine-bladed little trench-knife, and that was Andrew's cue to present the Luger at the man's midriff, held close in by his body, with his left hand poised to impede any attempt to grab it or strike it away. He put off the safety with a sharp click, although he could have done it as silently as the grave, had he chosen.

The men grinned sheepishly, and tried to move away. One tried to pick up a greatcoat which lay on the ground, but Andrew motioned him away. The lady's dark coat was nowhere to be seen, in the river perhaps, and he could not turn his back to search the shadows. 

'Madame en a besoin,' he said, indicating the near-naked woman who lay on the ground glaring in fury at the men, her sobbing ceased. The owner of the coat swore softly, but moved away with the others. Andrew listened carefully to make sure their footsteps and curses died away in the proper way, then averted his eyes and offered the woman the coat.

'Oh mon dieu, quel emmerdeur!' she exclaimed. 'Vous êtes anglais?'

'What, in these clothes? Not English, ma'am. I'm from Scotland'

'Oh, pardonnez-moi, monsieur. Are they gone, you think?' She spoke English confidently, with a strong but delightful accent, and it struck Andrew that she was a stronger person than he had expected. She reminded him of nothing so much as the first picture of Trilby in the Du Maurier novel, which he had always liked, although the coat was bleu horizon, rather than the darker blue which men turned up while digging, sometimes. Her hair was blonde and curly, forming a halo-like mass, and he supposed that was what women did with curling tongs. It came to Andrew that the late thirties, as he supposed, were not really old, and that he was very dirty.




A Legend of the Great War



'I doubt if they'd stay around, but you never know. I'd better see you somewhere safe.'

'My 'ouse, yes, thank you. It is near.'

She led Andrew through two deserted streets, until they came to an area of much larger houses. Andrew sensed when they turned into the last street, and as they did so, the woman said something he did not understand:

'I owe you so much, monsieur. What they do, them, I could feel it like another woman, you know.'

'Like anybody, I suppose.'

'There are people 'oo would not believe it.'

The house, as well as her remarks, puzzled and surprised Andrew. It was very large, with enough electric lighting to suggest some kind of party, although it was a Sunday evening, and all was quiet. The gardens, with their topiary hedges, were far better kept than he was used to seeing in wartime, and there were recently-built conservatories, cast-iron he thought, at each end of the building. The whole thing suggested money, enough to intimidate him a little. But it was not in the fashionable part of town, and most of the houses around it were relatively run-down.

'You are safe now. Au revoir, madame.'

'Oh, but no! Come inside for a moment, monsieur.'

Uncertain of himself, Andrew accompanied her, to be met by what he took for a host of servants. But that was odd, too. There were only a couple each of housemaids and footmen in servants' livery, and at least half a dozen agitated women and girls, in expensive-looking dresses which seemed just a shade overdone for a casual evening. They acted like family, but were not sufficiently alike to be relatives. Indeed, one was dark-skinned, North African Andrew guessed, although her hair was more brown than black. All of them were exceptionally good-looking. 

Two very large, hard-faced young men in dark suits sidled into view, and seemed to grow quite upset as they heard the lady's tale. One of them appeared to remonstrate with her in some way, and yet they bore themselves like employees. A cane rapped against a table leg with a strangely dull sound, as if it was heavier than wood, and Andrew, through a better class of tailoring than the army's, thought he could make out the shape of a hidden pistol. Who could this lady be, that she should need bodyguards? Or if she needed them, why should she have been alone on a dark winter's night? 

She had disappeared for the moment, and Andrew was shepherded into the salon, where he was given some kind of aperitif which banished the chill. He was surrounded by cooing females who were clearly moved by his assistance to their mistress, but whose chattering French he found hard to understand. A housemaid brandished a clothes-brush, clearly waiting for the mud on his uniform to dry, but they would have none of his suggestions that he should remain standing, or something be placed on the armchair before he sat down. 

'Is madame lying down?' he asked. 'Really she should, you know.'

For some reason they all giggled.

'I must leave soon. Will you give my thanks to madame.'

'Mademoiselle,' said someone, and they all giggled again. 

Then she was in the room, more transformed than he would have thought possible. She was wearing a green dress trimmed with lace, just a little more restrained and higher at the neck than the others', and a necklace and earrings with some kind of matching stones. Her hair was up, and no trace remained of an ordeal that had happened, Andrew realised, not half an hour before. She made a gesture, and the crowd dispersed.

'I must thank you, monsieur,' she said, with a radiant smile. 'I 'ope you can stay to dinner.'

Now here was an odd thing. With what he already knew, why in the world should there be a trace of nervousness in her voice, which he sensed was not often nervous? Suddenly he very much wanted to stay.

'Well, I need to be back… No, I don't need to be back.'

'C'est bien! It will be very quiet here. We are closed tonight.'

'Closed? Do you have a business here?' 

He wondered what it could be, for the girls certainly did not look like seamstresses, and there was too much of an air of luxury for any business he could think of.

'Oh monsieur, do you not know? This is an 'ouse.'

Andrew was mystified for a moment, for he knew a house when he saw one, and her words made no sense. The roof and the walls were a giveaway. He tried to think of some French idiom that might explain her words, and then he thought of the house in the Rue Voltaire, near Saint-Luc l'Église. He was in a rather grand version of the local brothel, and the lady…

'Oh. I see.' 

'You must 'urry somewhere, per'aps? I understand very well.' 

Too well, Andrew thought, and faltered. He felt this was altogether too complicated for him, and he might have refused if it could only have made her think he was shy, childish, slow on the uptake or impossibly gauche. But it was typical of the boy, who had detected added strain in her voice, that he could not risk having her think he despised her. Ah well, it could be no worse than the Salient, that was for sure.

'Well, I suppose… '

'C'est dimanche, bien entendu.' She saw Andrew's main fear, and her accent grew thicker. 'We are closed, and no… no people will come here. You 'ave be'aved like my true friend this night, and it is late and cold, and… and late to go open tins, no?'

'And it wouldn't inconvenience you?'

'Can you believe we are so popular 'ere, and yet we don' 'ave no superfluity of true friends?'

'Well, maybe…' Andrew believed her, and knew a surge of sympathy, for true friends were what he, surely the most natural of outcasts, had never lacked since he enlisted.

She led Andrew through to a little sitting-room, most exquisitely furnished and with a table ready laid. Andrew wondered who had been there before, and banished the thought.

'You go in there, and take off your uniform. We clean. You can wash, and put on a robe.'

The place was a tiny dressing-room, with another door which opened into some other room. In an alcove was a shower-bath, which Andrew had never even heard of, but which he found marvellously refreshing when he worked out the principle. Afterwards he donned a brocaded dressing-gown, and left his uniform on the table.

'Oh wonderful!' the lady exclaimed as he emerged. 'You look different. Very 'andsome, I think.'

'No, surely not?'

'Oh yes, surely yes. 'Andsome. Surely, since your skirt is so dark, you must be of le Waterloo Black Watch? But it is much shorter in the old paintings.' 

'It should come exactly to the top of the kneecap. And we don't call it a skirt.'

'I'm sorry. I don't think the French painter could have seen them. You will take an aperitif?' 

They sat on a sofa, and a footman brought some sweet wine which Andrew liked very much. They chatted inconsequentially for a while, and then the footman brought a light consommé, so they moved to the table, which was just big enough for two. They exchanged names, and hers is a thing which no questioning would ever draw from Andrew. There was something indescribably delightful about the way she pronounced his, and he had never experienced, with any woman, such an impression of interest in what he thought and felt. A niggling little worm in his brain whispered that that was no doubt a professional skill. But why should she waste it on the likes of him, when she must have rated his finances even lower than they were? She seemed to be picking his brains, moreover, on everything to do with his life, and with his war. Andrew, who had an ear, would forever fall better into the rhythm of French, after that conversation, though it was mostly in English. 

'But I'm talking too much about myself,' he said at last. 'Would you like to tell me about you?'

'About 'ow I come to this life, you mean?' she said, with a tilted little smile, and she made that strange French expulsion of air that Andrew, in others, had never much liked. People render it as 'Pouf!', but it has less to do with the voicebox than that. 'That is what they all ask.'

'Only if you it think matters.'

'Andrew, it matters to me. My parents, to escape the mines, they leave Lens and go to Armentières, where I was born poor – poorer than you maybe. Do you know Armentières?'

'It depends what you mean by know. I've never been there, but I know it's close to the lines.'

'Three kilometres. When I was very young my father disappear, and my mother come to Paris. Did you ever see anything like this?'

Her hands were exquisitely cared for, but where she pointed, on the inside of the top joint of her right index finger, the fingerprint was gone, and the pad might have been slightly swollen. It was the remains of an almost vanished callous.

'From some kind of work, perhaps? It isn't at all ugly'

'It is from a great ugliness, just the same. I became a seamstress when I was nine, and those years… ' She opened a small crocheted case with an almost furtive glance around the room, and showed him a pair of gold spectacles. 'You see? And in haute couture, les salauds, in work only tiny fingers can do. Andrew, such things should not be. At fourteen there was old Monsieur Jarliet, who was a… a friend of my mother's. It made my mother angry, for an hour or two, but what could she do? At sixteen I follow my mother onto the streets – you know, in places the lowest, Belleville at first. You know what is Belleville?'

'No. A beautiful town, the name means.'

'Beautiful?' The Gallic expulsion of air was quite violent, like a sort of rasping snort. 'Oh Andrew, you could not know, but it is the banlieue industriale de Paris, un mauvais quartier. You think being on the streets don' get worse? There are the streets of Belleville, where the p'tit bourgeois come for something dirty. At seventeen I identify my mother's body after a week in the river, on that slab in the morgue, with water dripping from a little brass tap, and I see the marks and… you know, the traces, that I can't make policemen see… It is strange I was not killed, like I think she was, or got diseases. But I know the secret, the thing which not one street girl in a thousand knows. I 'ated my life, but I didn' let myself 'ate the person who was nearest, for it. Can you believe that in those years, despite all difficulty, I never go 'alf a day without washing, or wear dirty clothes? When you start dirtiness, you never stop.'

'Well yes, I understand – '

'Oh no, Andrew, I am sorry!' Her hand shot up, in front of her mouth. 'A soldier becomes dirty from the things 'e is made to do…'

'I know what you mean. Go on.'

'I know it is my job and my fortune always to make men 'appy, the most I can, not the least I 'ave to… And girls who make men happy, they don' 'ave so much trouble. Andrew, don' you try any experiences about street girls.'

'I wasn't planning to… I mean…'

'You don' insult me with taking my advice, Andrew. Because I knew these things, and I was clean, and because I was lucky with structure of the bones, when I was seventeen I got a job in a maison tolérée, in Paris. A very grand place, for the beau monde, do you understand? Can you understand, for a little gamine like me, it was like a lifebelt when one is drowning? Madame Sophie, she liked me, and she taught me a million things. Ah, she had vision, Madame Sophie, for she saw what I could be. Do you think all this so terrible, Andrew?'

'I think the way you came to it was terrible. I've spent the last few months killing people, of whom I know nothing but where their conscription papers came from, and I was thinking about doing that for a living, afterwards. I can't see that you've done anything so bad.'

'Oh, tu sais répondre, toi! You don' 'ave to go to any 'ouse, you, if you talk so well to girls. Then when I was nineteen Monsieur le Vicomte made an arrangement with Madame Sophie, and kept me in 'is… in 'is residence, at Auteuil – it is no secret, for le tout Paris knows these things – and I lived like a princess for seven years. Oh, the prince is lucky who 'as such a princess, and the princess who 'as such a prince! Only I don' wear haute couture, never at all.'

'Oh? I thought you did.'

Again came the Gallic noise, half-laughing this time. 

'Then 'e married Mademoiselle de Lavelle, such a lovely girl. We both knew it must 'appen someday. It was the family. Twenty years younger than him, les salauds! But I am sure 'e was never unkind.'

'So he abandoned you?'

'Andrew, you read too many stories! Les nouveaux riches, they will abandon, but did you never hear that noblesse oblige? He say "Where you like to live?", and that Paris is not good for me, which I know better than 'e does. I can't think of anywhere, so of course I say "Armentières", and 'e buy the house in Armentières for me, better than this, and give me money to live well. I choose my town quickly, jus' like that, but truly I find I chose a wonderful place. So I open the best house north of Paris, and really, I don' think south can be better. Would you believe that people, people with names, come from Paris for our weekend parties in Armentières? And do you know where I find my girls?'

'Er, no, I never really wondered…'

'In Belleville, or places very similar. Ha, you don't think it, to look?'

'I wouldn't have thought of it of you. Or you of me, perhaps.' 

'Just so. But they are strays, orphans, apaches, people marked for death. But I teach them to make beautiful something which could be ugly, to be nobody's fool, and yet to be warm, valued people after they leave me. Do the moralistes do so much? Then comes the war. Then the world abandon M. le Vicomte, my true friend and the friend of the least among the French. For 'e was killed at Maubeuge, and Andrew, I weep for 'im, and also for Armentières. I don' even know if my house is standing.'

Andrew knew, better that her, what it meant to be three kilometres from the lines. 

The servants brought in the main course, which was delicious little peppered tournedos with diced and fried potatoes, which in some way were very different from the pommes de terre frites he knew so well. There was a burgundy, which even Andrew could tell was very good, with the beef, and a sweet yet clean-tasting Montbazillac, of which Andrew prayed he would remember the name, with the profiteroles and cream. She led him back to the sofa, and in some mysterious fashion the lighting dimmed. 

The talk became inconsequential for a time, but at length she drew out the stories he had only hinted at, and thought he never would tell to anyone, of how much had been vacant and barren in his Glasgow childhood, and about the eternal, numbing fear and horror of war. He could not well deny what the dull little ribbon of the Victoria Cross on his chest was, and with just a word here and there, she drew forth more of its importance than Andrew thought he told her, and a far more real story of the storming of the Taupière than any other civilian had heard. As he came to an end, on top of that filthy, sliding slagheap, with the distant, antlike figures clustering around the dying General Von Zechlin in his sunlight-gilded puddle on the road to her childhood home of Lens, it shocked him to realise that he had done more talking than ever before in his life, and he thought it too much. But Mademoiselle, whom men must have queued up to impress, seemed spellbound.

'Oh, Andrew, you 'ave done this for France, and… and for Armentières.'

'Well, I don't believe I thought about France, the day we enlisted. But I've seen what bringing war to a country means, and nobody has done that to the Germans.'

'You know, Andrew, we French are not a grateful people. Not collectivement, you understand, when the nephews and grandchildren of those who fought will talk of obligation in future years, mostly for politics. But those who fought and shed their blood for France will never be forgotten.'

'I've hardly bled at all, to speak of.' 

'Thank God. You make it sound, Andrew, like this war 'as been good for you.'

'Up to now, in a way, it has. I feel a stronger person than I ever thought I could be. But it could get a lot worse in a minute, any minute of any day, and I've seen a lot of good people die. I've never lost a home I loved, as you have, and plenty of other French and Belgian people.'

'Oh, where I am is my 'ome. In a way the war 'as made my business easier. We are busy, and the war brings a better class of person to us. Our peacetime clientele, do you see, they are all damaged in some way, to come to us. Oh, I don' feel guilty, because we don' damage them any worse, and what is better to do for them? Don' you forget that the girls are damaged too, even me. If you were some brave British major of forty with a tobacco smell, a practical age, I should be afraid to 'ave you 'ere, I think, because I might show damage, and make you despise me. But in war, in our manner, I believe we serve France. I think men away from women, men leading a hard, maybe short life, they idealize us, and they like to take away kind memories. Only a fool, I think, wants his last memory of a woman to be an unpleasantness. 

'We saw unpleasantness tonight, I think. We have some soldiers like that, not many I hope. I think the strain destroys some men's judgement.'

'Bien sûr. But I don' want the police to know. If soldiers do wrong, could God ever 'ave a better chance to régler sa compte, no? If 'e doesn't, 'e is not looking for my 'elp.'

'Well, maybe you're right. But I wouldn't want to think of them going and doing the same to another woman, who might be more easily hurt. They can't all have a man with a pistol turn up.'

'You think they will do it again? Andrew, did you see 'ow terrified they were? And me too. When I was in Belleville I tell myself that I can endure the worst any man can do, if it happens. But I never thought they would cover my face. Andrew, sit closer.'

Andrew, in some fashion, suddenly felt a lot more flustered than the previous time he had sat down so close to the lady. With a non-smoker's keen senses, he had always hated perfume, but there was something irresistible in the subtlety of the fragrance the woman wore, and 'subtle' is a word Andrew had always loved. Now hadn't he heard that perfume was diffused by the warmth of the skin? The boy was not sure whether he ought to be thinking about skin.

She called for something, and the footman brought a tray with decanter, glasses and a jug of water. She poured some water, and then a green liquid from the decanter, through a lump of sugar held in a little spoon with a pierced lid. A milky opalescence spread in the glass.

'La fée verte. The green fairy. Absinthe.'

'I… I see. Isn't the government making it illegal this year?'

'If someone 'as to drink too much, it is the cheapest. But those will pay a few sous more, v'là tout, and solve their problems in worse ways. Like my business, do you see? But a little is relaxing, that is all. Let me tell you something. Do you see a line on the decanter, just a centimetre from the surface?'

'No.'

'There is no line. But me, I see it, just like I saw it every night in Belleville. A woman must know 'ow much she drinks, Andrew, absinthe or anything else, or there wait the marble slab, and the brass tap. Yes, and perhaps the marks policemen don't want to see. You try it?'

'Well, all right…'

There was a strangely attractive bitter pungency to the green liqueur, and it did indeed seem no stronger than many another drink he knew. She went over to the piano in the corner, with a lamp behind her which turned her hair into a golden halo, and played for some time. Perhaps it was the absinthe, but for Andrew, like silent music inside his own head, she seemed to have the knack of converting the most petty little traditional airs into something far greater. The memory he would always associate with that halo-like head was a curious, tinkling little French tune with a deceptively strong rhythm, which he had already heard in an estaminet somewhere. But now it seemed to speak to the human soul, and he grew unafraid. Perhaps it was her marvellous talent for putting him at his ease. Or perhaps it was the absinthe.