Martin Longbridge plucked at his straggly ginger moustache.
“You’ll pull that thing off your face.”
His mother hated the moustache. It reminded her that Martin was no longer a fresh-faced schoolboy. She knew why he had stopped his twice weekly shave. Earlier, in a tide of patriotic fervour and ignorance of modern warfare, he had queued with several under-age former classmates outside the recruiting office.
“Sorry, lad.” The Boer War veteran smothered a grin. “You’d never convince the officer. Come back next year.”
None of the others had been rejected.
At the time he had felt wretched, and immediately began cultivating age-adding bristles. As nineteen-fourteen moved on through 'fifteen, the war news gave reason to count the blessings of physical immaturity, and he never returned to the recruiting office, although by then the moustache would have fulfilled its purpose. His mother constantly urged him to shave it off.
Now, in his non-moustache tugging hand trembled an official buff envelope and a letter. The document was commonplace throughout the country in nineteen-sixteen. Thousands of men had received similar letters, and many more would be delivered before the year drew to a close. Longbridge had been called up. Casualties had to be replaced.
After the first blood-soaked day on the Somme, the city battalion had virtually ceased to exist. It had taken hours for Longbridge to get over the shakes as his thin finger ran down the casualty list pausing on name after name of dead and missing classmates with whom he had tagged along to try to enlist. Now his own services were demanded without him being given the choice. His country needed him, and he was no longer sure he wanted to go.
No, to be fair, he desperately wanted to go. Or at least his inner hero wanted to fight the good fight. The skinny outer youth who held the letter found the thought almost physically sickening. Longbridge occupied the lower reaches of the pecking order of life, and the outside civilian world was challenging enough. Even his first job of selling newspapers was a battle.
“Look, son. Young Gordon sells four times as many copies as you. It’s ‘cos he’s got a good call. Use yer lungs. Don’t matter what you shout, just get their ruddy attention.” The newsagent treated Martin to a series of totally unintelligible rhythmic bellows of the ‘Morny Stannit!’ variety. “See? Then shove the paper under their noses. Make it hard to get past without buying. Everybody needs the morning paper.”
Unfortunately everyone elbowed past Martin, and his tentative ‘call’ barely reached the nearest ear. He sold copies to those of a sympathetic nature, although they were few in the morning rush hour.
The unhappy fact about Martin was that his body and character did not match his yearning. He may have been faint-hearted, uncertain, and horribly self-conscious, but inside beat a stout heart. He longed to have the confidence and courage to be one of life's champions. He dreamt of bold deeds, of gloriously leading his fellow man, but it was as if the actor wishing to represent the hero on this worldly stage, had been given the costume and lines of the fool.
Hundreds of times in his life he had prayed for strength, for the unthinking courage he had seen displayed by others on the rugby field, or even for the simple unblushing ability to stand and sing in the chapel choir, but his prayers had remained unanswered. He was deeply scared. Luckily, it took less courage to comply with his mobilisation orders than to cut and run.
If school had been a trial, life in barracks was worse. Bullies were bigger, unpleasant duties more frequent, and life brutal and more physically demanding. There seemed no time to pause and reflect; no privacy.
His instructors harried him.
“Get a move on Longbridge. I wanna see scorch marks. Pick yer feet up.”
“Volunteer wanted for the cookhouse. You’ll do, Longbridge. Double away.”
“You call that barrel clean, you ‘orrible little man? I wouldn’t even shoot a Hun with sunnink that grubby.”
"I know it's probably stronger than you, Longbridge, but it's only a sack of bleedin' straw, an' it ain't gonna fight back. Pretend it's yer muvver-in-law and stick the ruddy bayonet in."
His fellow recruits mocked. He had kept his moustache but like his under-developed body, it suffered by comparison: recent schoolboys appeared more mature.
“What nearly crawled up your nose and died, Longbridge?”
“Watch out, Longbridge! Thought it was just your uniform hanging up. Didn’t realise you wus inside it, Har! Har!”
"Look, Shortarse. We’ll swap my guard duty tonight. It'll be healthier for you, 'cos if you don't, you'll be on Sick Call tomorrow."
All were equally afraid and nervous of what lay in front of them and needed someone weaker and more vulnerable to give them confidence in their own bravery. Longbridge fitted the bill perfectly.
Funnily enough, Longbridge loved the army. Or more accurately, he loved the idea of the army. The routine, the drills, the precision, the regulations, and most of all the uniformity, could have given him a secure place. He would ultimately have found a niche. But there was a war on and the Front was hungry for men. He was given no chance to acquire the anonymity offered by the vast organisation. He was pitched in, stirred about, and ejected before he could properly come to terms with the gigantic khaki machine. He might have dreamt of being a Wellington or Marlborough, to die in the hour of victory as nobly as a General Wolfe, but he had not even broadened out to fill his ill-fitting tunic, as the Quartermaster had promised, before he found himself in France. Nobility was the last thing he encountered.
It was the first time Longbridge had been abroad, although there was little indication that this chilly place was in a foreign country. He saw few of the local populace, he tasted none of their cuisine, unless "bully" and stew were all they ate. The only foreign sounds were the distant crump of the heavy artillery, and the everlasting tramp of booted feet on the cobbles.
For all the haste of his training there seemed little anxiety to get him and the new men anywhere special. A period of uncertainty followed that could well have spilled over from his nervous civilian life. He was unsure of what was required of him, but he drew comfort from the fact that no one else seemed sure of anything in that chaos behind the Flanders' lines.
There were six days, which for all the discomfort and strangeness, could have been said to equal the best in Longbridge's drab life. He did not feel set apart. No one was settled or secure, thrown as they were willy-nilly upon an alien shore, and Longbridge, for the first time in his life, did not experience that aching sense of loneliness caused by the gulf between him and his more capable fellow men.
Good things never last, and too quickly the battalion was on the move, shepherded and shouted at by irate and ghost-seeing Sergeants with lined faces and sunken eyes. The nearer they approached the Front, the more they saw of the white, strained faces. Longbridge was sensitive to nuances of looks and words. People who are timid need to be able to read the signs that tell them when they must head for cover. Longbridge was excessively timid and thus an exceptionally good sign reader. The more he read, the less he wished to go where those gaunt-faced men had been.
Before dusk on their way forward, they rested beside the stubby remains of a farmhouse, and Longbridge saw his first corpse. He had seen plenty of stretchered bodies in the rear, some of whom may have been dead, but this was the first time he had seen a dead person in situ. He had steeled himself for the moment as best he could but when it arrived it was almost beyond bearing. The stiff, appealing attitude of the limbs, the hideous, tight-stretched grin, the bloated body, the stench, and the impossibly coloured cold flesh, were unimaginable.
Their guide, an ancient lad of nineteen or less, casually pushed the German body aside and squatted in the ditch, looking down at the mud in front of him with unseeing eyes. There was no callousness in his action, there was nothing at all, except a man going through the motions of living, and for a second, Longbridge forgot his own misery and fear.
Even if Longbridge had been a normally cou
rageous man there was little enough chance of dying nobly, as a nation's hero. He had supreme difficulty in preventing himself from cowering into a muddy corner, pulling his cape over his head and shutting the mad world out forever. His heroic insides may desperately have longed to be servers of mankind, but his legs had a rubbery will of their own. He could not stop himself from dropping to the trench duckboards whenever he heard the tearing sound of a shell passing overhead. Newcomers quickly recognised the need to duck when a "close'un" was arriving, but Longbridge never made the distinction. No matter how much he wanted to be like the other men who moved with complete unconcern around the dug-out, he could not do it. Even the passing asthmatic breath of a neighbour-bound "whizz-bang" would cause him to scrabble at the bottom of the trench as if trying to escape that earthly hell to a quieter place below.
There was one aspect of trench life for which he was continually grateful, and that was that none of the other men taunted or mocked him when he felt compelled to dive face down into the mud. Each had his own way of coping with the fear and constant tension, and such things were no laughing matter. Back in the rear, resting for a short time from the ever present danger, it was permissible to raise a chuckle at the foolish things one did, but only until it was necessary to do them again.
Longbridge was lucky. He arrived at the Front Line during a long lull in the fighting along his sector. Both sides were quietly licking their terrible wounds, and repairing what they could of their damaged men and warren-like homes. There were even several days when Longbridge did not have to scrape the mud from the front of his tunic after taking refuge pressed to the gelid ground. It could not last. There were action-demanding Generals, and the tempo began to warm once more. Again he was lucky.
The first time he fired his rifle in anger, at least it was as a defender. Anger and defender are merely words. Longbridge was not angry: there is no room for other emotions when the body is consumed with terror. As for defender, it is difficult to defend successfully with eyes tightly closed. Longbridge fired his rifle, but he had no idea where the rounds were going and nobody had time to spare to tell him that he was wasting Government property. He worked the bolt and pulled the trigger, his whole body clenched like his screwed-up eyes, and remained that way long long after the feeble probing attack by the Germans had petered out.
Longbridge's prayers now were not pleas to be given strength, but along with the majority of praying men on the front, he asked to receive a "Blighty" wound. It was a measure of how far he had been driven when he could pray to be hit and not to be spared completely from bodily pain.
By what must have been a clerical oversight, or it may have been that casualties arranged themselves conveniently, Longbridge eventually got leave, and the following summer he found himself in England away from the shells. He was glad to be home and away from the noise, fear, mud and danger, but it was like being in a dream. Always there was the numbing thought that he had to go back. It clouded everything, and gave Longbridge no respite from the twisting sensation in his stomach. He did experience a new feeling however; the attitude of other people towards him had changed. The uniform he wore brought him sympathetic glances and a sense of separation from the rest of the civilian world, which was totally opposite to the hostile separation he had always had to bear before.
Once, in a public house, an old man bought him a drink. The man had not said a word but placed the tumbler of whisky before Longbridge, patted him lovingly on the shoulder, and left. Longbridge had been overwhelmed. If ever he had wanted to be a real hero it was at that moment. He felt so unworthy. Before, his shortcomings had been a matter for self-loathing because they made his life worse for himself, now he despised them because he could not justify an old man's faith.
Back in the trenches he found that he was still the same man. When the barrage started, he was already huddled in the deepest part of the dug-out or pressing himself as closely as possible into the churned-up ground. He knew that there was never going to be a way he could justify the old man's gesture. In his heart he wanted to, but it was beyond him whenever he heard that calico-tearing sound of incoming death.
The time came when Longbridge had to do the thing that he feared above all else. It was considered the moment for a big "push" and his battalion was to form the first wave of yet another tide that would batter itself on the enemy rocks. That night there were jars of rum to still the thought of facing those stitching guns, and he drank more than he had ever done. The rum did not still the jumping muscles or fill the boundless emptiness in his chest. It did, however, carry his unwilling feet over the top in the cold dawn light, before all his fears were quieted for ever in the ensuing chaos and carnage, by a bursting shell.
If he had lived, Longbridge would never have possessed the courage, knowledge or opportunity to have developed into the hero who desperately wanted to inhabit his unfortunate body. He had not been given the qualities that would enable him to be an example to all men as he would have liked.
Much later though, his soaring spirit, body-freed, could have dreamt of no more glorious way to serve mankind than as a perpetual reminder of man's need for brotherhood, as it looked down to see the resurrected broken bones of Private Martin Longbridge laid to honourable rest beneath the eternal flame and inscription of the Unknown Soldier.
THE END
BABY
by Olga Núñez Miret
https://www.amazon.com/Olga-Núñez-Miret/e/B009UC58G0