An End of Poppies

Pale-faced clerks sit at desks behind mosquito nets, compiling the ledgers and lists of all the fallen and taking deliveries of the latest pile of dog tags. Accountants quantifying the dead as if they were at the gates of hell or purgatory. Surely the grimmest of impossible tasks. We will never know the true tally.

  Outside in the dirt stand forlorn men whose job it is to endlessly shovel lime onto the heaps of scattered bodies lying in the open pits. The bodies all naked, long since stripped of any clothing. All items of uniform that remain serviceable are re-used; recycled. Jackets, boots, trousers, helmets and caps, even socks or underwear. Most soldiers, including me, wander the battlefields in dead men's clothes. It is best not to think about the former occupants of your battledress. I think my jacket is new at least. Well it was when I came here.

  These endless bodies seem unreal and thin; their broken pallid bony shapes perform impractical gymnastic shapes on top of one another. Shapes unfeasible in life. Here the dead faces grimace like gargoyles in pain. Not at all like the peace I have witnessed in the countenance of the newly deceased. I cannot bring myself to imagine that this multitude of husks used to be living men. Perhaps their souls are departed from the physical shells, hopefully long distant from the resting place of their bodies.

  Once the bodies are covered in lime the steam tractors slowly push the dirt over the pit, men shovelling at the sides, before they move on to dig new ones.

  The desperate men at the pits stand stooped as they dig; their faces covered with dirty scarves. Covered from the flies and the stink and shame of it. There must be places and people like this all along the Front. On their side and ours.

  This whole conglomeration of a camp site reminds me of some medieval painting by Heironymus Bosch. I imagine the tents at Agincourt and the carts and wagons full to bursting with hangers-on. Flags flying as they waited for battle, all huddled round fires like we are. All there for King and Country like we are. Ours is an inflated version of the wars of the past and without the hindsight of history it seems less noble somehow. It is industry now. Industry has removed any humanity from war, if there ever was such a thing.

  Our tiny part of this shifting conurbation surrounds an ancient farmhouse; it's smoke-stained thatch worn through. No more than four ragged walls really. The N.C.O.s have claimed this as their own, just like many of their ilk before them. As, perhaps, did brightly garbed officers in Napoleonic times. There is a lineage in war. A lineage defined by rank.

  I share my tent with Jones and Hendricks and a new lad called Thompson. Another fresh faced boy seconded to us a couple of days ago, after his unit was wiped out in a truly horrendous attack last Wednesday. He is such a sad thin-faced boy.

  As I have implied our distance from the Wall is no guarantee of safety. Wednesday proved this. It was broad daylight and I was setting up the pot over our meagre fire when I heard the first explosion. A massive thundering noise that shook the earth beneath my boots. I stood and saw the rolling fire and black mushroom of smoke billowing high about half a mile away. There was no warning; no clanging bells or shouts, no whooshing of the shells through the air that normally precedes an artillery bombardment.

  Then I saw the three aeroplanes, unlike any plane I had seen before. They didn't have props, they seem to be a new design that has CENSORED and they can CENSORED CENSORED, so incredibly CENSORED that your eye can't even follow them. They screamed like banshees as they passed overhead. So fast, like you wouldn't believe. Machine guns blazing. That fairly sent panic through the camp, everyone ducking and running and then more explosions, even more massive than the first one. I lay in the dirt by our tent.

  I am not sure what weapon caused those explosions; it certainly wasn't shellfire, well not any shellfire I have ever experienced. Hendricks says it must be some new type of rocket that Jerry has developed, but rockets don't have that kind of range, or at least I sincerely hope they don't. Perhaps this new type of plane can CENSORED CENSORED CENSORED and if that is true it is a truly frightening prospect. The truth is we don't know, and neither do the officers. Well not those around here anyway.

  I was ordered to help out with stretcher duty after the attack and the craters produced were astonishing. Truly vast. Much bigger than any ammonite explosion crater. Almost unbelievable. They say we lost as many as CENSORED men. It made me wonder if we would all be better off back in those lice-infested tunnels.

  This poor boy Thompson lost all his newly drafted pals in the blink of an eye. In the time it takes him to blink he must have seen all his friends obliterated or dismembered. They had only been here two days.

  He has the weighty look of shock about him still, and he simply sits cuddling himself and rocking on his cot. Barely a word has passed from his thin lips. There is a certain inevitable guilt when one loses one's pals. I had it when I lost Billy and Archie and I have had it since when I have lost those around me. I still have it. A guilt that asks 'why them and not me?' It is hard to shake.

  I have tried to talk to Thompson and reassure him but he simply nods and looks at the bare earth floor. Hendricks, Jones and I have made a pact that we will look out for him as best we can.

  At least being billeted back here there isn't much for us to do, except for polishing and cleaning our kit ready for snap inspections and the occasional drill. I am resigned that if another attack like that one comes, as it surely will, then there is nothing we can do about it, so it's best put out of mind. Many a man here can go virtually insane from thinking about such calamity. So the empty look that poor Thompson has in his eyes is worrying. I wonder if I had such a look back when I was sixteen, and I saw Archie Groves get his head blown off. That day when Billy called me a 'coward'.

  I try to distract myself with the little things. Little comforts. Thank you so much for the toothbrush you sent me. That is undoubtedly a God-send; it makes me feel positively human to have clean teeth every morning. I have finished the book you sent me and started reading it again. In the evenings I read sections of it out loud to the others as we lay in our rickety cots beneath our little patch of canvas. I shine a small torch at the yellowed pages and read until they have all fallen asleep.

  It reminds me of you, to read aloud like that, and I imagine that you must be reading to Dulcie back in England at the very same time I am reading in our bivouac. I too lie under a grey scratchy standard issue blanket. Just like Dulcie and yourself, though an eiderdown like you have would be miraculous. It is so often horrendously cold at nights. The thought of you reading whilst I am reading makes me feel connected to you and gives me comfort.

  I wish I could give comfort to Thompson, he hardly seems to sleep at all and when he does he wakes from the most violent nightmares. His rheumy eyes have the faraway red look of sleep deprivation. This isn't unusual in the camp. Often we are woken by the screams and sobbing from nearby tents. We all have our demons to face in the darkest parts of the night.

  We have also shared the newspapers you sent us and all read them cover to cover more than once. That is except for Sapper Jones. He was reluctant when I offered a paper for him to read and later, when we were alone sat around in the icy mud next to our makeshift fire, he confided in me that he couldn't read. It was the most serious face I have ever seen on him and he got me to promise that I wouldn't tell any of the others. Of course I made this promise but told him that there was no shame in it. Lots of the Tommies seem to have missed out on the essentials of education. I suppose that some of the things they teach in school seem especially irrelevant when you know you are destined to fight. From the moment you can begin to think for yourself every male child is taught that their duty and destiny will be in the war. Is it any wonder then that Jones didn't concentrate at school? He told me that he spent most of his time 'bunking' anyway. He says he and his friends used to spend their days fishing or plane spotting at his local aerodrome or simply having larks or japes while they played on bomb sites. You can't blame them really. When fighting and dying is the sole purpose of each and every ordinary man th
en what use is reading? I think underneath it all they unconsciously wanted to suck life dry while they could; have as much fun as possible before it was all taken away from them. Billy and I were not much different. I offered to teach Jones to read, but he said he didn't see the point. And too be fair to him I too wondered about the point. Except it seems to me that by reading we learn, and perhaps learning is a way to change this war? I do not know.

  We found those newspapers very entertaining but I had better not write what I really think of them, for the censors might not like what I have to say. Let us just say that they are an amusing and enlightening fiction. Hendricks says you would never see a Daily Mail reporter here, this close to the Wall.

  I do not wish to be too bold Esme but I do dream and think of you often. In fact I dream of what it must be like to kiss you. Do you know that I have never kissed a girl? It occurred to me the other day; twenty one years old and not so much as kissed a pretty girl on the cheek. Of course many of the other soldiers make use of those French girls they draft into the camp, if you understand what I mean. But I cannot bring myself to countenance such an idea. It seems so