Just a tease

If Mary could see him now, stirring his underwear in a bubbling dixie of petrol-tainted water, she’d laugh her head off. It was a far cry from any kind of laundry she knew, with no soap or mangle and a metal tin precariously perched over four stubby candles in the dark instead of the copper boiler she used at home. That he was attempting the task at all would have amused her, but it wasn’t something he could add to the letter he was trying to write. For a start, he wouldn’t want to mention the bayonet he was using to stir the pot, or the lice he was trying to kill. She didn’t need to be worrying about that kind of thing. The trouble was it was difficult to find anything to write about that wouldn’t make her worry. One way or another, even the most innocuous things tended to end up running to horror, and every letter he wrote could so easily be his last. 

This letter had started off well enough, with the glorious day, all bright sun and patches of blue sky, and the green shoots poking their heads up here and there in No Man’s Land. He’d written about the ragged clumps of poppies, cornflowers and white daisies bravely sprouting along the chalky rubble of the parapets, adding splashes of colour to the endless sea of dusty brown and khaki, and he’d been quite poetic about the butterfly he’d seen flitting from one to another. She’d probably laugh about him being called Joe all the time, because of the chalky dust that made them all look the same. It came up in choking clouds whenever they moved and fell again in a gritty layer that coated everything. He and Joe were both short, dark-haired and lean, but Joe fancied himself a handsome devil and acted all offended whenever he was mistakenly called Corporal Brodrick, or Thomas.

The letter was all going well until he got to the magpie. He’d heard the rasping call and seen it swoop down somewhere amongst all those green shoots after something shiny, but he daren’t mention the dead man the trinket had once belonged to, or the shot that rang out. She didn’t need to be thinking about a bored German sniper getting his eye in, even if the magpie had flown off unharmed, a flash of black and white against the periwinkle blue. Seeing it escape had pleased him, but, if Mary knew about it, she’d only worry about who the sniper was going to aim at next. He never wrote about that kind of stuff. She didn’t need to know how the snipers picked off anything that moved, or how they’d all learned to keep their heads down or risk losing them. It was easier for short arses like him and Joe, but poor old Lofty said he was developing a dowager’s hump from all the crouching. She’d have laughed at that, too, but he couldn’t write it.

‘Anyone want to have a whip round to get Corporal Brodrick a washboard and an apron?’ Joe interrupted his thoughts. His grin was a flash of white teeth in the gloom as he drained the last drop of tea from his tin mug.

‘No, but I’ve got some smalls he could wash while he’s at it.’ Wally slouched against the earthen wall of the dugout, a Woodbine glued to his lip and his notebook open on his knee. He imagined he was a poet, but the likes of Graves, Owen and Sassoon had little to worry about on that score.

‘If they’re yours they’ll hardly be smalls and, if I hang them out, Jerry’s likely to think it’s a white flag and we’re surrendering.’ Thomas laughed along with them. The mickey taking was just a bit of banter to break the monotony. 

‘Oh, I thought it was soup,’ Lofty chuckled and ran the flame of a candle along the seams of his jacket. Like the boiling underwear, this was meant to kill the lice and their eggs, although it was like pissing in the wind. ‘It smells just like the stuff we had yesterday.’

‘Louse soup, the speciality of the house.’ Joe smiled and looked down affectionately at the rat nestled on his lap. Thomas had got a few letters out of Joe’s attempts to tame the creature, despite Wally’s objections. Boredom created strange bedfellows and Ruby the rat, with her beady red eyes, was the closest thing to a pet any of them had. Joe said she was their mascot. 

Wally disagreed. ‘I swear that filthy bloody animal is just waiting for you to cop it so it can eat you.’ 

‘There’s more meat on your bones,’ Joe said, ‘so she’s probably got her eye on you.’ 

He blew out the candles, lit a cigarette and thought about what else to write. He tried to send a letter every few days, but they’d been in this forward trench for four days now and he hadn’t sent one. Nothing much was happening other than a little gentle strafing and the distant rumble of artillery. He couldn’t tell her that and he was running out of material. Last time they were here he’d told her about the dugout, a cave-like place the size of a box room, with a tarpaulin across the doorway to keep the dim light of the Tilley lamp inside. He’d waxed lyrical about the earthy, musty smell of damp that permeated everything but he hadn’t mentioned the stink of unwashed, flatulent men, Wally being the prime example of the latter. For now, this was home and his real home, the terraced house by the river, was like a beautiful, barely remembered dream. He squeezed his eyes shut and thought of Mary’s fine-boned face, her chestnut curls and her eyes the blue of a summer sky. Six years they’d been married, and he still couldn’t quite believe his luck. Of course, he’d only been at home for two of them, which might explain why she hadn’t thrown him out on the street yet. 

‘Just four more days of this, if we’re lucky.’ Wally dragged him back to the present. ‘Then we can go back to the support line.’

They’d settled into a kind of torpid routine. There’d been no action for weeks and the only hospital cases they’d had were all the chaps who’d caught the flu. Though all they’d needed was a few days rest and they were as right as rain. 

 ‘It’s the billets after that I’m looking forward to. There’s a little mademoiselle waiting for me in that village,’ Joe said with something between a leer and a wink.

‘This quiet can’t last.’ Wally licked the end of his pencil, squinted and wrote a few words. ‘They’re building up the ammo. There’s a big storm brewing, mark my words.’

‘Perhaps it’ll turn around and this next push will be the last?’ Even as he said it, Thomas knew it was rubbish. 

‘How many times have we said that?’ Joe snorted.

He was right. When the Yanks and the tanks came, they said it would all be over soon, but they’d had tanks since the summer of ‘16 and Yanks since last spring, yet here they were still, barely fifty miles from where they’d been at the start. When it did kick off again there was no guarantee any of them would make it through to see the end. All they could hope was that death would be quick and relatively painless, something like a bullet through the head would do nicely. 

‘It could be worse,’ Joe said. ‘It could be raining like it was when we were here by the Somme in ‘16.’ 

‘I’m glad I missed that,’ Lofty said. ‘The snow was bad enough.’

‘I’m not sure what I hate the most, the mud or this chalky bloody dust.’ Thomas stubbed out his cigarette and began to fish his underwear from the pot with the bayonet. 

Joe laughed at his attempts to wring out the clothes without burning his hands. The underwear was still hot and stank of petrol from the cans all their water came in. They drank the stuff, cleaned their teeth in it, cooked in it and even shaved with it. He must have consumed so much petrol by now he ought to have a starting handle fitted to his chest to make him run. Still, between the heat, the water and the petrol, his underwear should be louse free for a little while. As he moved about, the Tilley lamp flickered and cast towering shadows on the drab walls. Sometimes it felt as if all the men they’d lost lingered in the gloom watching them. Like thoughts of home, they were never far from his mind. 

He took the dripping washing out into the darkness of the trench. If Mary could see him now, she’d probably wonder why he was hanging his clothes out in the dark when it had been such a perfect drying day. There was so much about this place she would never understand, especially how they’d all become more or less nocturnal, as it wasn’t safe to move about much in the daylight. The silvery blue glow of the moon gave him just enough light to fumble his way towards the makeshift washing line they’d rigged up between two dugouts. He reached up into the shadows and felt around for the line. He got the undershirt over and managed to skewer it in a couple of places with the dolly pegs Mary had sent him. As he lifted his left arm to hang his underpants, he caught sight of the hands of his watch glowing in the darkness, five and twenty to midnight. A second later, a blow from behind, like a cricket bat to the back, sent him to his knees gasping. What had happened? Why couldn’t he get his breath? A sickening panic knotted his stomach. He struggled to inhale. Blood pounded in his ears. Then the edges of the world turned black.

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