it is unavoidable to not be caught up in the inhumanity of the crowd; swept along with it.
From that dead man I got a pocket watch. I still have it now, it is finely worked; silver casing with careful roman numerals on its face. It keeps remarkably good time if you wind it correctly. I don't know why I took it really. Do you think that was really so badly flippant of me, my dear Esme? Is it such a sin to steal from a dead man?
I saw it glinting after everyone else had gone; just left lying in the mud below his stripped and bloody naked body. I guess I thought about him being a person too, before he fell from the sky to such an awful fate. The watch has an engraving in Germanic lettering inside its cover. I have no idea what it says, but I like to think that he was given it by a loved one. Perhaps these are words of love.
I still have the image of his peaceful face in my mind. Once they had peeled back his inhuman mask it was a face of peace, carefully trimmed whiskers, blue eyes wide beneath a shock of blond hair and what could be described as almost a smile upon his thin lips. One small drop of poppy-red blood clotted on his cheek like a frozen tear. No more suffering for him; like the tear he is congealed in that moment in my memory, peacefulness frozen in time.
Some of the Tommies talk of how you get used to death when you see it so readily, so often. But I honestly think I will never get used to it. Never. Perhaps it will always haunt me, for however long I have left.
Anyway enough of such macabre talk, I should at least explain to you where I am. After a day’s march weaving through the rearguard lines we eventually came to our billets. Well, I say 'billets', really it is just a large slender patch of scrubby field in amongst the wide expanse of tents and makeshift structures; the massing of an army. When we got there at dusk we came upon several irregular mounds of canvas and poles and we struggled to raise our bivouac tents before the darkness descended.
This massive campsite is some good distance of miles back from the Wall, though its concrete winding structure clearly looms and visibly dominates the skyline both east and west. As ever the Wall hangs over us. Recent events have shown that we are nowhere near far enough back to be safe.
Behind us, almost as far as the eye can see, there are endless rows of khaki and camouflage bivouacs, mess tents and sheds; a tent city that stretches far out into the French countryside. To our left a platoon of incongruous Frenchmen; it's unusual to see their baggy blue uniforms at this part of the Front. They are mostly congenial fellows, with jaunty moustaches and pouches of black tobacco, with which they trade for our meagre supplies of chocolate.
There are flags and pennants that the men have made; rippling in the wind above the tents in all directions. The Union Jack and regiment colours mixed with banners denouncing the Kaiser and the Hun. The large open-sided mess tents are filled with steaming pots and cooks galore; making the best they can from the unsavoury ingredients that the supply trucks and carts provide.
On the edge of the camp, about a mile away to the south there is an encampment of Frenchies; civvies, obviously mostly women, with lots of little stalls selling the strangest assortment of items. Sometimes they may sell the occasional rabbit, hare or dog for soldiers to spit roast over their open fires. More often they sell trinkets and souvenirs of France and the war. Such an odd thing, it seems to me, to want a souvenir of the war. They make clocks and ornaments and jewellery from any used brass shell casings they can find in the mud; casings that have not been claimed for smelting and re-use. It is a dangerous game to dig for used shell casings as these are imperfect objects and many are unexploded. Hendricks tells of a time a smoking shell landed right next to him but did not go off, and it is not unheard for someone to die treading on a shell that may have been there for many years. The French make finely engraved objects with the metal; I even saw a full size grandfather clock once, made entirely from shell casings. Many a soldier is persuaded to part with what little English cash they possess for such objects. I suppose they must send them back to loved ones at home.
However the majority of the troops tend to save their cash for the evening times, when the N.C.O.s are generous and give them leave for the night. It is in the evenings that this makeshift market comes to life. From dusk onwards the stalls sell sweets along with bottles and jugs of what purport to be wine and whisky, though are more likely to be harsh potato spirit dyed with carmine. Rows of soldiers sit on bales of straw and drink themselves into oblivion. Fiddles and concertinas play and the men drink and dance and sometimes fight. Every evening there are enough of them with off duty time to fill the place with shouting and revelry. We can hear their shouts from our tent.
Many cavort drunkenly with the French tarts, imported especially from the poorest sections of Paris. These women with exotically rouged faces have their own line of little ridged tents at the back of the market where they ply their trade, if you know what I mean. They dress in ancient whalebone corsets and dirty lace flounces and have the tired air of dancers beyond their best. When you see their fake smiles as they wink at you in the last daylight of early evening they have the melancholy of youth disappeared; despite the fact that many of them are probably only as young as me. It as if they had been sacked long ago from the Moulin Rouge, back when it still existed. Sacked for no longer being young enough, or agile enough, or for that matter pretty enough. I wonder if they feel as condemned by this war as we do. We all live lives not of our own choosing and we live them as best we can. I suppose that is all those women are doing, so we should not judge them.
It puzzles me how the traders and tarts there survive; our wages are poor so their prices have to be low. Some say the French economy is finally at breaking point, so perhaps they are desperate. But then again they have been saying that about France for years.
Sapper Jones likes to go there of an evening so he can spend his meagre wages on a bottle or two of heavy spirits. During the day he is always partaking of a sly swig from his hip flask. I wouldn't describe him as a drunk, but he does seem mostly either jolly or sedately melancholic. Or at the very least it gives him a faraway look. When he is in jolly spirits his lilting Welsh accent is filled with humorous expletives, but when his is morose he simply mumbles and it is best to leave him be for a while. Thankfully joking seems to be his modus operandi most of the time. I asked him once in the tunnels why he was in the Middlesex Regiment and not in the Welsh Guards or something like that. He just laughed and said that when he was fifteen he had thought it best that he come and show us daft English buggers how to fight properly. Then he went back to swigging his hip flask and digging the dirt. In reality I think his family live in Willesden or maybe Wembley. Somewhere with a 'W' anyway.
For some I suppose alcohol is like a sedative; dulling the mind to exactly where we are. And why. I think Jones is one of these, though he would never admit it to your face. We all have to escape somehow. For me, I escape into your letters and writing back to you. This precious pen is my link to you; my escape.
Although alcohol is not the only distracting chemical. Hendricks says that the parachute commando units are issued with pills to keep them alert. 'Uppers' he calls them; says they give you a 'buzz'. Not sure that I like the idea of that. It's hard enough to keep your wits about you and keep a straight head, especially in combat, without some chemical or other interfering. It also seems that some take to smoking more than cigarettes. So says Hendricks anyway. He has seen black troops (perhaps from South Africa or the Indies) smoke cannabis though I have never seen this myself, but Hendricks says it has a sweet smell. I asked him if he ever tried it. Apparently he did once but it made him throw up and feel sick as a dog. I cannot see the attraction myself; what is the point if it simply makes you sick? Having said this it wouldn't surprise me if such drugs were rife, even though they are illegal and highly frowned upon. They are just another way of escaping I suppose, just like Jones and his drinking.
Be rest assured Esme that I am not a drinker, not in that sense anyway. I only ever drink when the regiment passes out the traditional
rum, ale or grog ration and then it is a kind of duty. That is not to say I do not like to drink, it is just that for me it seems that drinking should be a pleasurable experience. One taken in moderation and in good company, not one taken to escape in indulgence and pity. And not one taken alone.
That is not to say that I judge those who choose to attempt escape in this way. We all have to cope in our own ways as it is impossible to avoid be reminded daily of the reality of our situation.
For example over to the east of our camp are the makeshift field hospital tents and the vast grave pits. These pits must rank as one of the most difficult things I have ever had to witness and as I think of it now I can barely muster any adequate words to describe the horror of it. Suffice to say that the dead outnumber the living here. By a large margin. The countless dead of all these years. Each mass grave is marked by a single large wooden cross. In summer one can see the location of these pits from a distance as the flies swarm in epic numbers; fuzzy black clouds of them. It has the look of a biblical plague.
Nearby there is always a hut or tent where the records are kept.