An End of Poppies

sincerely hope this letter find you well Jimmy. I look forward to your next missive.

  Much love

  Esme

  X

  M.O.D Approved. This letter has been censored in accordance with War Office Directive 728/4. All content of a sensitive nature has been removed by order of the Ministry of War.

  Remember - CARELESS TALK COSTS LIVES!

  076938964

  Ypres Zone

  Middlesex Regiment

  Sappers Unit 2064

  21st April 1962

  Pvt. 761382 J.Fitzpatrick

  Dearest Esme,

  Thank you so, so much. It is still so lovely to receive your letters. I am coming to rely on them so. I have a veritable small library of your words to peruse. I keep them bundled up with an elastic band in my pack, next to the Dickens you sent me.

  Well it had to happen sometime and now I must report that the regiment is finally, sadly, back at the Front. We have been sent right into the thick of it, at the very pinnacle; in the hump of the bulge that is the salient that surrounds Ypres. I wonder if you can pinpoint that on the map you have of the Front; you know that one you said you got from the Daily Mail.

  Ypres itself has to be one of the saddest places on earth. I have seen pictures of what it looked like before the war; way back before 1914. They once published some in the 'Tommy Gazette'. Have you heard of it Esme? It is a thin kind of newspaper that they sometimes distribute amongst the soldiers to boost morale. Anyway, once it had black and white photographs of the ancient town of Ypres, to show how the dastardly Hun had destroyed it. It looked such a fine place, with magnificent tall medieval houses and shops. In the centre stood the famous 'Cloth Hall' where for centuries people traded their wares. Of course there is no hint of that splendour left now and hasn't been for pretty much all of the last forty seven years.

  It still amazes me sometimes that we fight over the same ground as the last two generations. The same dirt. This was one of the first places where men dug trenches and the stalemate and constant bombardment began. The Germans here always fight the fiercest they can, or so it is said, because they have always harboured the ambition to turn the salient into a bubble. Make a breakthrough and surround us here on all four sides and not just three.

  We marched through what is left of the town, which certainly isn't much. The walkways just pass through ground-down rubble, craters and mud. Every single building that was here fifty years ago has been obliterated; pushed slowly down into the earth by the endless bombardment, or the stone and brick plundered and embedded in the Wall. The only way that one might realise that this used to be a bustling, thriving town is from the air. I have seen it from the top of the Wall and and there is a vague impression of the different sections of the town. The planking walkways and wider gravel roads built for the crawler tanks are pretty much where some of the original roads and streets would have been and there is the impression of slightly different coloured browns and blacks and oranges in the rubble and dirt. With a map or a picture of the town as it was you could probably work out the landmarks from these impressions. It is stunning to think that people could ever have lived peaceful and productive lives in such a place. It is truly what one might call a ghost town; a town so dead that its flesh and bones are rotted and desiccated; flattened and destroyed beyond redemption.

  So we now live in pretty much the same trenches that our forebears did. They are just below the Wall on our side, so back in 1914 they would have been the support trenches a few lines back at the very first battle of Ypres. You must have been taught about it in history lessons Esme, where the heroic B.E.F. resisted the German push and the lines of this War were established. Those original trench lines are now marked by the thirty five mile stretch of the Great Wall.

  At Ypres the Wall is one of the very highest sections along the whole Front. Only in rare places does the Wall shift from this original pattern of following the trench lines, perhaps at the very ends, where it is built down the beach and into the north sea or where it oddly stops so abruptly at the Swiss border. I have never seen these places so I cannot be certain. I have just heard talk of them, though why neither side has dared to break Switzerland's neutrality and simply send their army over the border and around the Wall I do not know. Perhaps it is a problem of geography; maybe it is mountainous in the south of Alsace and into Switzerland. But again I do not know. Jones says it stands to reason it is mountainous as Switzerland is "all cuckoo clocks and mountains," but then again he hasn't been there either.

  The trenches that we now live in are pretty safe in the shadow of the Wall, particularly as the current lull in the fighting continues. The proximity to the Wall means that shell fire cannot reach us at this point due to the angles involved. But we are vulnerable to bombers. So we have dugouts and shelters and an underground barracks of sorts. Of course there are tunnels here too; some of them link to the CENSORED and the CENSORED at the south end of the CENSORED. It is through these that we will go when we are called to CENSORED. But for the moment all things are calm.

  Despite the weather men still often prefer to be above ground when they can. So all sorts of makeshift shelters dot the edge of the trench line and the boardwalks. Men huddle under them playing cards while it rains. They sit in bunches with full kit and helmets pulled tight, and a heavy feeling hangs in the still damp air. As it inevitably always does. It is a feeling of slow anticipation; of waiting. At least for those of us who have been through this before. The few new pals brigades are louder, more boisterous. More impatient.

  In some of those boys I see the eyes of Billy Treacher; the naive look of expectant heroism. It reminds me of when I first came here. They have soaked up the fine words of duty and King and Country; those fine words that describe the beauty of war, words that entice with their talk of the transition to strength and manhood. Those boys have a bit too much of a spring in their step; an eagerness in their joking and tomfoolery. These earnest boys are the ones who look the youngest to me now. Me; the old experienced hand at the ripe old age of twenty one. To me some look no older than thirteen or fourteen, and perhaps they are. I am well aware, as I suspect you are Esme, that it is an unspoken truth in England that many an underage boy has run away from home and school, lied about their age and joined up. And despite all the protestations of the distraught mothers over the years, the female recruiting officers and the stale old men that make up the stagnant government would rather turn a blind eye than do something about it. So, inevitably they send us children; children masquerading as men. When I compare us with them we look so much older. Even Thompson, poor shivering Thompson, positively looks like an old man compared to them.

  The look in their eyes makes me fretful Esme and I wonder about having children myself, as you describe. Of course, deep down, I would love to be a father, just like you would love to be a mother. But could I bear to have a son, knowing that his fate would be to become another boy destined for the war machine? Like all these fresh faced joking children they send? I am not so sure about it.

  But not all of those boys have such a countenance. Others have a look in their eyes that reminds me of poor Archie Groves. Fear ages a person quickly and some of the boys have the beginnings of the haunted look of it as they huddle from the rain. Thompson has this look. Permanently. They too look young but not as impossibly young as those who have swallowed the idea that this war will be some kind of adventure, however short they must know it to be.

  Anyone who has been here a while and seen what this place is mostly pays no heed to these boys. Some tease them and bully them. Or they simply swear at them to go away. This is not callousness but self-preservation it seems to me. Those who have experienced the combat for what it is would prefer experience at their side in the trenches. That and the fact that men often vainly attempt to avoid any close friendships for the most part. And if you make a friendship with any one of these young boys; take them under your wing as it were; it can be so very hard to watch them die through their inexperie
nce or foolishness.

  I know that such talk makes us seem an inhuman bunch but it is not all like this. Despite how hard they try, even the most hardened soldier seems to form bonds, to have 'pals'. Like Jones, Hendricks and me. We have been forced together over many, many months and now we come to rely on each other. If only for human company. Companionship of sorts. This is why we have taken Thompson under our wing.

  Disconcertingly I keep seeing that smarmy Colonel Conway. He always seems to pop up at unfortunate moments. Like last Tuesday he just suddenly appeared behind me outside the latrine. Thompson was in there throwing up his lunch, as he often does. He is so very thin. I see his collar bones and ribs when he takes off his battle-dress tunic. Sharp bones poking through his undershirt.

  I was stood there with my canteen, ready to give Thompson some water when he came out and Conway sort of sidled up next to me and just stood there.

  "Not too well is he?" he asked, obviously listening to Thompson's half-hearted retching.

  "No sir," I said, stiffening my back, but resisting the urge to stand to attention.

  "Hmm," said Conway, "not a shirker is he?"

  I was somewhat taken aback so just said "No sir," again. He didn't say anything else