The Ghost Road Passage

Pages 240-242

 

19 October 1918

Marched all day through utter devastation. Dead horses, unburied men, stench of corruption. Some-times you look at all this, craters, stinking mud, stagnant water, trees like gigantic burnt matches, and you think the land can’t possibly recover. It’s poisoned. Poison’s dripped into it from rotting men, dead horses, gas. It will, of course. Fifty years from now a farmer’ll be ploughing these fields and turn up skulls.

            A huge crow flew over us, flapping and croaking mournfully. One for sorrow. The men didn’t rest till they’d succeeded in spotting another.

            Joe awaits us, then.

The unburied dead, though not cheerful companions for a march, had one good result. A boot for Wilson. Getting it wasn’t pleasant, but once the debris left by the previous owner (of the previous owner) had been cleaned out it did well enough. He looks happier.

            Men very cheerful for the most part, a long singing column winding tirelessly along (but we’ve a long way to go yet!). I found myself thinking about Longstaffe. Not dead three weeks, and yet he rarely crosses my mind. In Tite Street, three doors down from Beattie’s shop, there was an old couple who’d been married over fifty years and everybody thought when one of them went the other would be devastated. But when the husband died the old lady didn’t seem all that upset, and hardly talked about him once the funeral was over. In spite of all the young male vigor around here – and my God it’s bloody overwhelming at times – we’re all in the same position as that old woman. Too close to death ourselves to make a fuss. We economize on grief.

Later

Men bivouac in the open, but the officers are in dugouts, the remains of an elaborate German system. The dugouts are boarded off, but behind the planks are tunnels which reach back very deep. You can put your eye to a gap in the boards and look into darkness and after a while the eyeball begins to ache from the cold air. The extraordinary thing is everybody’s slightly nervous about these tunnels, far more than about the guns that rumble and flicker and light up the sky as I write. And it’s not a rational fear. It’s something to do with the children whom the Pied Piper led into the mountain who never came out again, or Rip Van Winkle who came out and found that years and years had passed and nobody knew him. It’s interesting, well, at least it interests me, that we’re still afraid in this irrational way when at the same time we’re surrounded by the worst the twentieth century can do: shells, revolvers, rifles, guns, gas. I think it’s because it strikes a particular chord. Children do go into the mountain and not come back. We’ve all been home on leave and found home so foreign that we couldn’t fit in. What about after the war? But perhaps it’s better not to think about that. Tempting fate. Anyway, here comes dinner. I’m hungry.