An End of Poppies

to see through the clear spectacles of retrospect, I suppose my youth obscured our cruelty at the time. Billy teased him constantly about his glasses and his podgy frame. He looked like his body was full of air; childish puppy fat straining the buttons on his tunic. I will always picture him wiping the mud from those bent wire framed specs, tears on his round red blotchy cheeks. Pathetic really. Pathetically sad considering what happened to him. He seemed younger and less well equipped somehow, though I now realise this is unfair to him. We were all only sixteen, some only fifteen, and I don't suppose any of us were really equipped for the reality of this war. Is anyone I wonder?

  Marching over muddy moors with full kit, Archie was always the last in line; the slowest snail in a pack of hungry young hares. Everyone blamed him when our unit always came last and we didn't get our weekend passes. The cocky drill Sergeant used to clip his ear and call him 'fatso' so Billy took to calling him that too. Constantly. And, to be honest, so did I. That and other insults and jibes; cruel unpleasant bullying. I wonder why I did that now. Cruelty lies in cowardice it seems to me.

  There is a lot of talk of cowardice in this war. The constant rant from N.C.O.s about the consequences of cowardice. Cowardice can be a powerful tool; used in such a way as they do to make people conform, and we all desire to conform Esme. To fit in and be part of something, part of 'the gang'. We are social animals I suppose. We require approval and companionship. So we succumb to cowardice and false bravery to feel belonging. It is not brave to stand up and bully someone; that is a false version of strength. That is why Billy and I bullied poor Archie Groves. It gave us a false feeling of strength, as if we were the clever ones, the strong ones who would survive. The real bravery would have been to challenge the injustice and cruelty of it. To stand up and defend poor boys like Archie. None of us admitted it back then but we all knew, as we still know now, that our lives are destined to be short. Like our fathers before us. There was an unmentioned tense feeling hanging over us like a gathering storm cloud that darkened our youthful exuberance. There is always a tension hanging over us. And that tension produces unspoken fear. Hidden black fear; back then it turned us into shameful bullies.

  I hope you don't mind me writing about such things Esme, but I feel that if we are to be close, and I sincerely hope that we are, then I shouldn't hold back. You should know who I am and know what my life has been and is. I hope you aren't too shocked or think too badly of me. I have done terrible shocking things and seen terrible shocking things. In war this is inevitable.

  So this is why I tell you about Archie Groves. Poor fat Archie Groves. I watched him die. My first shocking brush with the sweeping scythe of death that scours this unholy patch of land we fight over.

  The regiment was posted to Bapaume. Our first posting. I don't remember much about the channel crossing, just the cloying oil smell of the ship's engines as I was throwing up below decks. I never thought I would be one to be seasick. But then my nausea was soon replaced by a feeling of anticipation as soon as my boots hit the wood and concrete of the floating French dock. There was such excitement on the train. Eager young eyes scanning the terrain of a foreign field for the first time. Strange to think that I enjoyed those moments so. It is a queer truth Esme but there are those that enjoy war and the powerful feelings it can bestow upon an individual, but I now know from experience that I am not one of them.

  Those French fields passed our carriage windows and we devoured them with our expectant eyes. They slowly turn from poppy reds, straw yellows and verdant greens to slick mud browns and dirty wet greys the nearer to the Front you get. The honest bright hue of rural farmland that has been tilled for centuries is replaced by the dull monochromatic industry of war. As if the celestial artist who painted it gradually lost his way; lost any sense of colour, as the oils on his pallet became mixed by all the years of churning shell fire. If you mix all the rainbow colours of creation all that you are left with is brown. Dirty mud brown. It makes me wonder if mud brown is all there is beneath everything. Beneath all existence.

  I remember the excited cries and nervous thrill at seeing the Great Wall for the first time as it loomed over the sky-line of this flatly undulating land. I also remember the looks of tired disdain from those experienced troops in our carriage. You could see them positively sniffing and rolling their eyes at our childish whoops.

  You ask about the Wall in your letter, and I wonder about the picture you have seen of it in the paper. The Wall is certainly an imposing structure it's true, but unlike other structures it is almost a fluid thing. It never looks the same each time you see it. That first time I saw it I was struck by how ragged it looked. It has a forlorn air, an inevitability; a foreboding darkness to it that implies its true deathly purpose. There is no mistaking it is a construction of war.

  It has a differing nature depending on where you are and where you view it from. Some sections, especially those crossing what used to be farmland, seem smoother and more uniform. Others, where it passes through long gone towns and villages, it is higher and appears more stout and irregular. In these places the lower reaches of the Wall contains endless lumps of stone and bricks of all shapes and sizes, plundered from the surrounding buildings. Many stick out like scabrous monuments to the past.

  In one place, not far from Bapaume, there is a whole church tower, complete with bells, standing proud against the concrete. It is as if it has been stuck with glue to our side of the Wall. Goodness knows how they constructed that. It has the bizarre appearance of a church sunk into the ground, just one side of the tower pressing out of the Wall. They even still use the bells to this day, as a warning of an attack.

  This magpie plundering of French and Belgian architecture is how it began in the first place after all. Desperate soldiers on both sides shoring up their precarious trenches with plundered bits of wall and chimneys, columns and stone from nearby broken churches, townhouses or farmhouses. What a desperate time that must have been, the twenties and thirties; both sides perilously trying to construct their Wall ever higher whilst continually under heavy bombardment. An arms race of concrete and scaffold.

  The top-most reaches are largely always rubble. Apart from a few sections where the poor condemned men of the concrete teams perpetually struggle to maintain its strength against the bombardment. Hastily constructed new turrets and pill-boxes appear along its heights as if by magic all the time. Sometimes, when there is a long tired lull in the fighting, these new constructions last for months, at other times they can be obliterated within a day. Like some child playing with wooden bricks it is continually being built and re-built where sections of its summit are knocked down by the indelicate podgy fingers of shells and rockets.

  Haphazard cranes, pulleys, ropes and chains pull the cranky wooden lifts that stripe each section of the wall. They carry the concrete, steel and wood required for such a gargantuan task, as well as the men and ordnance; countless shells and bullets, grenades and rockets to continue the good fight. Soldiers live on, around and within its massive frame for months on end. Living in bunkers deep within the wall, fed on bully beef, stale bread and soup in poorly lit messes. The dust of concrete lacing every mouthful. Cement particles adding to the prematurely grey hair of the frightened.

  When one views it from a distance the Wall has the appearance of an ancient ruin crawling with impossible spider-webs. These vertical and horizontal webs carry everything to various entryways and gangways. Webs of trenches, tracks, railways and walkways thread outwards from its base. And the concrete; always more concrete is needed to plug the gaps. Trains, trucks, tracked carriers and crawler tanks constantly pull up to the base; agitated beetles delivering their dung balls to the pile.

  From our side the higher surfaces of the Wall are mostly flat grey concrete, with the occasional massive buttress looming down dotted with overhanging ledges or entryways. But when you finally see it from no-man's land it is impossibly pock-marked, like a vertical cratered moonscape. Its size plays tricks with your vision and
can almost give one a feeling of vertigo from the ground. It is as if gravity is wrong and that one ought to be able to walk up its surface and navigate between those craters and shell holes. Such an unreal sight it is hard to describe. The endless massive acne scars of years of shell fire and rocket bursts. Again its appearance is ever changing and fluid; forever unfinished, as if the wall itself were alive; a kind of hideous diseased beast snaking over the land. This side, the one that faces the enemy and no-man's land, and the very top sections are the most dangerous places for concrete duty.

  At Baupaume the Wall is lower than some of the other stretches. At least it was when we first arrived. It was definitely lower than it is here at Ypres, although at Bapaume it still seemed enormous to my inexperienced eyes. I don't suppose anyone ever really bothers to measure its height, which is always changing anyway. They say that it is mostly between CENSORED CENSORED and the CENSORED batteries reach to the CENSORED.

  On our first day the Captain took us on an initial tour during the early evening before we bunked down. We marched through tunnels and along gangways, up