Polystom (29 page)

He spent an hour walking about. There was a network of trenches, from which doorways led to various dugouts. Men stood to attention as he strolled past. Standing on toes, to look over the lip of the trench, he could see the long ridge they were ordered to capture; the hogsback. ‘Isn’t it exciting?’ he said, addressing an ordinary soldier, and gesturing at the salient, their military objective. ‘Tomorrow we’ll be up there!’

‘Yes sir,’ replied the soldier, a slightly wild look in his eyes.

That night Polystom had the jolliest meal with his two lieutenants in all their time together. When enough drink had passed into them all, he became almost confessional. ‘You boys know,’ he said, ‘that I’ve never been in battle before.’

‘You’ll do fine sir,’ said Stet.

‘Absolutely fine.’

Polystom waved their words away. ‘Just let me know what to expect.’

‘Ask us,’ said Stet, ‘when there’s a
real
battle in prospect. The bombs’ll fall over the ridge tomorrow, and pound the
enemy into the mud. Anything alive will be . . . well, won’t be alive after that.’

‘Hurrah!’ chimed Sof.

They clinked glasses.

‘It’ll be a walk,’ said Stet,

‘A walk through the mud,’ said Sof.

That night Polystom slept soundly, with no nightmares about flayed men to wake him up. He was shaken into consciousness after dawn by his batman, and he got out of bed with the thrill in his belly of a child expecting to receive presents on the morning of his birthday.

The attack took place late in the morning. For twenty minutes aircraft droned overhead, and the sounds of muffled explosions drifted on the air, one after another, on and on. ‘That looks like quite a severe pounding,’ Polystom muttered to his sergeant.

‘Yes sir,’ said Crius, fervently.

‘Not just smoke and noise,’ said Polystom, wanting to convince himself as much as anything. ‘Real bombing.’

Finally the bombing stopped, and everything fell quiet. Polystom took his revolver from its pouch, and timed off five minutes on his watch. His stomach was tense, burning a little on the inside with the excitement. But there was a faint sensation of sourness at the back of his mind. This would be too easy a first experience of battle. All the defenders on the hogsback would be dead, smashed to scrags of flesh, and all he would be doing would be leading his men on a jog-trot through the mud. Perhaps, he told himself, he would see a more glorious battle some other day.

There was a shout, orders being issued, followed closely by another further down the line. To his right and left, men pulled themselves over the lip of their trenches, Stet and Sof taking their men up there.

Everything was quiet. Polystom sent four men up, and then clambered up after them. The mud was soggy, clutching
and sucking at his boots. All clear: he waved up the remaining men from his trench, and hefted the weight of his pistol.

He stood for a moment, looking around. The plain was a dark expanse scored out with thousands of tiny craters, like a turbulent sea frozen in brown. His men, and, further off, the men of Captain Parocles, were drifting forward in a great line. The sky was an untouched pale purple from horizon to horizon. The sun looked swollen, ripe with heat. It stung his eyes. His skin was prickling with sweat. Before him the ground was more or less flat for half a mile, rising sharply to the ridge, the hogsback itself. The indistinct promontory looked as shapeless as a mass of modelling clay pummelled and pummelled by children’s hands. Nothing was alive up there, clearly.

It was going to be a hot walk.

‘Come along then,’ he said to his men. With a sharp sense of insight he realised that he was actually there – he was in the middle of a battle. He had arrived. In the future, he thought, I’ll be able to say
I was at the battle of the hogsback
, and fellow military men would nod, and non-military types would look on with awe. He had done it. Pride bubbled in his chest.

It was not easy walking: each step had to be dragged out of the clingy mud, and carefully placed to provide a solid enough pivot for the next step. Polystom marched on for ten minutes, perhaps fifteen, struggling a little to keep pace with the main body of men.

There was a whistling sound, away to the left. One of the men was warbling some song or other. Polystom looked in that direction, annoyed; Sof, or Stet, would, he decided, isolate the fellow after the attack and punish him. On his orders. Just because the march was going well, under a sunny sky, was no reason to ignore discipline. Whoever the whistling man was, he certainly wasn’t taking this assault seriously enough.

The whistling stopped with a faint
thud
, as if the whistler had been punched in the stomach. Serve him right. Then somebody to the right started whistling, and there was another thud, and Polystom’s eye was distracted by the sight of somebody tumbling backwards out of the line. He had been punched too hard, perhaps. The whistling was reprehensible, but there was no need for excessive violence. The delinquents could be disciplined later, when the assault was over.

Another man started whistling, but had barely started when the thud came and he tripped forward. Two whistles, one on either side, two thuds like knocking on a padded door,
knock, knock
, and two men fell. Sweat was dribbling from Polystom’s forehead, where the brim of his hat pressed against the skin. It was dripping a little into his eyes. This place was altogether too hot. Uncomfortable. The men were moving more rapidly now. The whistling seemed everywhere, and more men were falling down. The sun was too bright. Polystom couldn’t see properly. And then somebody was screaming, but screaming impossibly, up in the sky, a weird howling that changed in pitch, changed again and then broadened violently into a crashing drumroll.

Away to the right a tall, brown-branched willow appeared from nowhere, hung in the air, and fell away in shreds of dirt.

Everybody was running, sluggishly but earnestly.

Polystom tried to pick up his feet. There was another crashing sound of detonation, and another enormous tuft of mud sprouted and wilted away to the right.

Then, much closer, there was an explosive double compression,
boum-boum
, and Polystom was flattened, flicked over by the force of it. Face to the mud. He couldn’t hear properly. His head wobbled, his thoughts scribbling like sunlight on choppy water. Trying to get to his feet, the clay clutching at his legs. He rose up, overbalanced backwards and fell again, the pale mauve of the sky above him. The
whole battle had gone eerily silent. There was nothing except a high-pitched sound of birdsong. Bird? No, it was tinnitus, singing inside his head. Trying again to get to his feet. Up, unsteadily. One of his men was in front of him. He could feel the man’s grip on his shoulders, see his anxious face right in front of him. He was yelling something, his mouth working vigorously, but Polystom’s ears weren’t functioning. The man was waving his arms. Waving, and then pushing, pushing him back towards the trenches, go back now, and Polystom, stunned, turned unsteadily and started heaving his steps through the mud. Back in the direction he had come. It was all silent. Epileptic flashes of light blinked in the corner of his eye. A series of ragged lumps of smoke barrelled past. The singing noise in his head rose a tone, a tone and a half, and then popped into muffled sounds.

‘. . . on the hogsback,’ a voice was yelling behind him. ‘They must have heavy guns up there. Get the captain under cover.’ Other figures, bent forward, were on the edge of Polystom’s vision.

‘Get him back to the dugout!’ Behind the words was a grumbling sub-bass, the deepest of organ notes, punctuated by crackles and thuds. And it was so hot. Too hot. Sweat was dribbling into his eyes, soaking down his neck, as his legs laboured and laboured through the mud. Polystom saw the wooden pegs that marked the outer edge of the trench, and turned to see who it was had guided him back. He saw the man’s face for only a moment.

There was an enormous clatter. The air all around buckled and twisted like a great sheet of steel being crunched up. Sight dissolved to smoke. Polystom felt a smack, a punch, in his gut, and almost at once he was in the air, flying backwards, the world caught in an impossible perspective of vertical horizon and bleaching sunlight, and then with a soggy crunch his shoulder bashed into the back wall of the trench, the rest of his body colliding into the
mud a moment later. The next thing Polystom knew he was on the floor of the trench, on his side, winded, panting, the sweat still dribbling into his eyes and over his face. There was a fierce pain in his gut. He had been shot. Shrapnel had penetrated his abdomen. He was going to die.

With a steady sort of panic, a sort of panic that he had never experienced before, cold and intense and terrifying, Polystom pulled himself into a sitting position and started unbuttoning his jacket. He had to see the wound for himself. Men were on either side – ‘You alright, sir?’ ‘Caught one, sir?’ – but he had no time for them now. He had to be alone with his wound, alone with his own death. He hauled the jacket off his back, pulled away the tie, and started scrabbling at his shirt buttons, imagining the gaping hole that must be there, the blood-rimmed emptiness, and finally the shirt was off.

He looked down at himself, panting. The skin of his stomach was whole, entire, white, unmarked except for the snail-trail lines of his own sweat. There was a slight redness to one side.

He breathed, breathed. The stomach pulsed in, out.

He looked up at the men who had gathered around him. ‘What are you looking at?’ he shrieked. ‘Man the trench! Are they counterattacking? The enemy, are they coming?’ He pulled his shirt shut over his torso as they scattered.

It was five minutes, fully five minutes, before the panic relaxed sufficiently to allow himself to dress himself again. His jacket, thoroughly muddied, was stiffly recalcitrant as he tried to button it. Finally he tried to stand, like a newborn deer, wobbled, slipped back down, and tried again. His pistol was not in his hand. He must have dropped it out on the battlefield. He needed a pistol. His other one was in his digs. He needed his batman to retrieve it for him. Where was the man? Twisting his head left, right, looking up and down the trench.

Men were tumbling back into the dugout now in ones
and twos, and the crashing explosive sounds were still beating out a dull, sodden rhythm in the air.

Twenty minutes later the barrage had ceased. A man helped him, wobbly, along the trench to his hole.

Everything was still, as if there had never been anything but silence and sunshine on this world. Polystom was sitting, his hands trembling slightly, holding a metal, book-shaped whisky flask. He had drained it, but the shivers in his hands hadn’t stopped. He was sitting in the door to his digs, watching men come and go along the trench.

A shadow spilled up and embraced him. Sof was standing over him. Or was it Stet? No, it was Sof. ‘You alright sir?’ he drawled.

Polystom thought of saying something, thought again. Took a deep breath. ‘Did you find my batman?’ he asked.

‘He caught one, sir, I’m sorry to say.’

‘Caught one? Dead, you mean?’

‘Come inside, sir,’ said Sof, helping him to his feet and leading him into the muggy darkness of the room inside. He settled Stom into his chair, and sprawled himself nonchalantly over the edge of the table. Stom watched him as he fished a cigarette packet from his upper pocket, pulled a white stick from inside, popped it into his mouth and replaced the packet, all with one hand. It was remarkably dextrous. The same hand located the lighter, and placed a glowing dot of red at the end of the cigarette. His eyes had their usual lazy, dreamy look, although there was a red cut, thin as an insect’s leg, running up the middle of his forehead, and small marks and bruises on his nose and chin.

‘Quite a party, eh, sir?’ he said, finally.

‘Party,’ said Polystom, numbly.

‘I’m sure you’re just about to ask, sir, so I’ll tell you. We lost nineteen, sir, with another seven wounded too badly to fight tomorrow.’

Polystom tried to think of something to say to this, but
couldn’t. Sof seemed to be in no hurry. He sucked in the smoke, and it poured out of his face, white dribbles from his mouth, his nostrils.

‘Is Stet dead?’ Polystom asked, his face in his hands.

‘Sorry, sir? Didn’t catch that?’

‘Lieutenant Stetrus,’ said Polystom, sitting up properly.

‘Stet’s fine,’ said Sof, sucking in a great lungful of smoke. ‘He’s sorting out non-commissioned rankings. We lost both sergeant and corporal. Unlucky that.’ He exhaled, and the smoke drained out of him. Polystom noticed that it was coming out of the middle of the man’s cheek as well as his mouth and nose. A spike of smoke, thrusting out from the exact middle of his cheek, like steam coming out of a boiling kettle.

‘What’s wrong with your cheek?’ he asked.

Sof opened his eyes marginally, his dumb-show for surprise, and put his free hand to his left cheek. Polystom shook his head, and Sof touched his right cheek, fingering the hole there. ‘Well well,’ he said, getting to his feet and wandering over to the mirror. ‘I must have got a bit of scrap metal through there. It’s a hole as big as my big finger.’ He leaned into the mirror, slipping a finger inside his mouth and poking it out again through the hole in his cheek. There was something obscene about the gesture. ‘Will you look at that,’ he said, with his mouth full of fingers. He withdrew the hand, and laughed: short, donkey brays. ‘That’ll spoil the face a little. I’d better have it sewn,’ he said, squashing the cigarette under his heel. ‘Back in a moment.’

He wandered out.

Polystom’s hands were still shaking.

He unbuttoned his jacket and took it off, holding it in front of him. It was completely crusted with heavy, dark-brown mud. It looked as though it had been dipped in a tub of boiling brown wax and left to dry.

A messenger arrived an hour later, looking for Polystom.
‘With your permission, sir,’ he said, handing over a black cloth-sealed envelope. Polystom opened it, read the order slip inside, nodded to the messenger, and sat down again.
Assault to recommence. Bombing run in thirty minutes
.