Excerpt: War Poets

Chapter 1 – ...Shall Be Forever England

1 mile east of Steloi, Belgium, 21st April, 1915

It was early morning. The sky was that funny in-between shade, not dark enough to still be night, nor yet bright enough for dawn to have fully broken. It was the sort of blue you didn't get in England, at least not near anywhere of size. A skyline free of reflected light from gas lamps and other intrusions, despite the city two miles to the north. In almost any other circumstance the sky would have seemed beautiful.

“Coffee, sir?”

The lieutenant looked up with a start. Private Higgs had mastered the orderly's secret skill of approaching silently and speaking just a little too loudly when you were off somewhere in your own mind. It was unnerving, it derailed the train of thought and brought you staggering back to now with little warning.

“Sorry?” the lieutenant asked, for a moment still far off.
“Would you like some coffee, sir?”

Private Higgs proffered an enamel mug, from which steam rose softly in the cold pre-dawn.

“It depends,” said the lieutenant, with guarded joviality, “Is this going to be any better than the coffee from last night?”
“It is the coffee from last night, sir,” Higgs said, then continued after a short pause and some thought, “So probably not.”

The lieutenant weighed up his options. Higgs made coffee that had more in common with peat than it did with most beverages. However, it fulfilled the vital early morning function of being simultaneously hot and liquid, which few things around here did.

“Go on, then.”

Higgs pressed the cup into his hands and moved off, leaving the lieutenant with his thoughts. This was not, as it went, a happy place to be left right now. Having been roused back to the reality of where he was and what was happening, it was very tough to return to innocent musings about the colour of the sky, like he was a carefree artist messing around with paintbox and canvas. Certain realities were inescapable.

He was in the army. He was on the front lines.

Therefore, he had to face up to his mortality in ways that being an Anglican choirboy had not prepared him for. Close by, horribly close if you asked him, there were hundreds of men, thousands of men, all heavily armed, all trained and prepared, with what his paranoid frame of mind interpreted as one purpose alone: to kill him.

The lieutenant would not have said that he was a coward. That wasn't something you came out and said, not if you had gone to one of the better public schools, as he had, and especially not if you had left an expensive university half way through your first year in order to enlist in the army and fight for your country, as he had. Nevertheless, he was fast growing to suspect that a coward was what he was.

He had been in the army for four months now, on the continent for two of them, and stationed in a trench close to Ypres for the last six weeks, and for that whole time he had been scared to death. The time before felt nothing short of unreal, a hazy dream from which vile coffee and cold mud awoke him. He remembered walking to the enlistment office, high on a mixture of young love and Rupert Brooke, and signing his life away. It took him a full ten seconds to remember the girl's name. Rebecca, a lovely young thing who was studying at Newnham College and promised her hand to him if he came back from the war a hero. This was back when he still thought of himself a hero, before he saw the trenches.

From one point of view, they were remarkable things. Earthworks laid fast, adapted constantly and reinforced heavily. They were first dug, he was told by cheerful men who had been involved, with tremendous speed the previous year in a race to the sea to outflank the Boche. He would have felt nothing but admiration for the trenches, had he not looked across the narrow strip known as No Man's Land and seen the near identical earthworks on the other side. They were every bit as defended, bristling with barbed wire and machine gun emplacements, and the general idea seemed to be that he and the men around him would climb out of their own trench and try to rush the enemy in theirs. If it was cowardice to view such an endeavor as insane, then he would take the name. He found it hard to view wanting to live another day as the attitude of a coward, even when wearing a scratchy woolen uniform.

The coffee had gone from being hot and bearable to being a tepid source of nausea. The lieutenant threw the dregs from his cup into the earthen ground, noticing with interest how close the colours of the drink and the dirt were. He had watch for another hour or so, then he would be relieved, and he could at least go and sit inside where he could pretend he was somewhere else. If he had time and could borrow a few sheets of paper, he could work on his piece for Punch. If they printed it, he could reasonably apply to be moved to the communications division, away from the lines. He would still be serving his country, and maybe even convince Rebecca that he was still a hero. It would just mean he was serving his country from a marginally safer place.

“Everything quiet, Higgs?” he asked the orderly as the private ran back to take the mug from him.
“Reckon the Boche have stayed in bed this morning, sir.”

Higgs smiled, and the lieutenant smiled back, thinking about what he was going to write, how grand the byline would look, and underneath this how safe an office in the communications division would be. He had visited them last time he was in Ypres. On a good day, you couldn't hear the artillery fire at all.

He was turning from Higgs, considering making an excuse so he could duck back inside and get writing sooner, when he felt a twinge of pain. Just a stab, for a second, like the first flare of a headache. It faded for just long enough for him to notice it was gone, and then came back, stronger than before. It had to be neuralgia or something, perhaps he could see if anyone had any aspirin.

It was at this moment that the floodgates opened. The pain, a nuisance before, was suddenly crippling. It was like grabbing hold of a coal from the centre of the fire, only with your whole body. Every nerve screamed. From somewhere far away he felt himself lose balance and fall to the ground. He was vaguely aware that the fall hurt.

He opened one watering eye, and saw the soldiers around him fall, faces twisted in pain. Whatever was happening to him was happening to everyone. It could be gas, only he hadn't seen anything and the air seemed...

Somehow the pain increased, obliterating all logical thought. His mind held on to the image of a girl's face, even as the name was lost to him. Darkness took him, and within a few more moments, the pain and everything else stopped.