rules. There’ve been a couple of fights, a knifing.”
“Are you going to run for it?”
He shook his head. “It’s all up.”
“What’s the penalty, if you are caught?”
“The penitentiary, bread and bleeding water. Loss of privileges for weeks, more. I could even lose my stripe.”
I got up, went to the door, and looked out. A lieutenant was moving toward the stairs that led to the bedrooms and the room where we were waiting. I closed the door again.
“What’s your name?”
“Meadows, sir.”
“I mean your first name, and don’t call me ‘sir.’”
He nodded. “John, sir.” He made a face. “John.”
I took off my jacket. “You’re in luck. I know the officer on the stairs. Only slightly, but he’ll recognize me.”
“How does that help me?”
I held out my jacket. “My first name’s Hal. Put this on and sit over there. Try to look relaxed.”
“You want me to impersonate an officer?”
I still held out the jacket. “It’s your choice.”
He took it.
I lounged in an easy chair, trying to look as relaxed as I could.
Meadows hesitated, looking me straight in the eye. Then he slipped his arms into my jacket and slumped onto the sofa.
The door burst open and a man I knew as Lieutenant Ralph Coleman came in. He stopped, looked at me, nodded, and then looked at Meadows.
Meadows coughed.
“John,” I said. “Can you spare another cigarette, please? I think I must have rolled onto mine.” I grinned.
He did his best to grin back. “Sure, Hal. Here.” And he threw the packet in my direction.
Coleman took a step further into the room. What now? He looked from me to Meadows. “Can I bum one of those cigarettes, do you mind? I’ve run out.”
Meadows nodded and I threw the pack toward Coleman.
He lit the cigarette, dropped the packet on a table, blew smoke into the room. “You lucky bastards,” he said softly. “I was told there were some enlisted men in here today, but I’ve found no one so far.” And, as he backed out, he grinned. “Don’t tire the girls out, you two. My turn tomorrow.”
I never saw Crimson or the Baltic Wharf again. Toward the end of October, we shipped out to France. We arrived at the Front by motorbus. Two thousand of them, driven by reservists, had been sent out by the government. You can imagine the jokes that circulated about arriving at a war by bus. In no time, in November in fact, we saw heavy fighting around and along the Marne River and our strength was reduced so much that the minimum height restriction for recruits was lowered from five foot eight to five foot three. Christ, we were taking a battering. I was directly affected by this because my immediate superior, a full lieutenant who was from Bath and all of six months older than me, was killed in the push on Nieuport and I had to take over.
And so, with the war only weeks old, my unit was—in terms of personnel—already 80 percent different from the one that had left Tetbury. Almost no one under my command was out of their teens, and some, I am fairly sure, had lied about their age to get into the infantry and should by rights have been at school.
By Christmas Eve we were all, in a way, tired old men. The mud, the danger, the constant bombardment, the sight of so many bodies, and so many bits of bodies, not to mention the blinded, the maimed who had lost arms or legs, the quantities of blood sluicing through the mud, the screams, in the middle of the night, of men who could not be rescued from no-man’s-land… this was a very different kind of experience from Munich. We learned to sleep standing up, to ignore cold and damp, to forget about sex, to accept the insect life on our bodies, to stop thinking beyond the next day. In my first letters home I tried to describe the horror, but after a few attempts I gave up. No words could describe what we saw. In the trenches, we stopped talking about it.
The Christmas Eve carol singing lasted for about half an hour. I thought our side stole a march on the Germans because we had a young man in our lines who had been in the choir at Gloucester Cathedral (and, given his probable age, should still have been there). He sang beautifully and had teamed up with an older man who was a bit of a virtuoso on the mouth organ. The