The Thing Itself Read Free Page A

unrelenting racket of big guns and machine-gun fire. It rained still more, and withdrawing through villages I slipped and slid as the coal dust on the cobbles turned to slime.
    On the last day, 26th August, at a place called Le Cateau, I had my first taste of hand-to-hand combat. Well, bayonet-to-bayonet, really. I was the lucky one in that encounter. Lucky in the battle altogether. We suffered 8,000 casualties on that last day alone. Everyone I’d known in the Royal Sussex had died. I hadn’t got a scratch.

THREE
    I n 1915 I got my first Blighty leave. I stepped off the train in Brighton, in a uniform still splattered with mud from the front, surrounded by Tommies just as muddy but all carrying rifles.
    I’d heard stories of men returning home earlier than expected, finding their wives or girlfriends messing about with some man in essential work and putting one of the King’s issue bullets into each of them. The whole affair hushed up and the soldier sent back to the Front.
    I visited Jack and Ted’s wives to deliver the final letters, wedding rings and other stuff, including the photographs taken in Rouen. I substituted my copy of the photograph for Ted’s. Mine was crumpled and muddy but his was stained with blood.
    Both wives were working to make ends meet. Jack’s wife was a tram conductor, Ted’s was working as a dance teacher three afternoons a week and as a hostess in a dance hall in Gloucester Place for two evenings. Men paid fourpence a dance and she got a ticket for every dance they had. At the end of the session she got twopence for each ticket. She was a pretty woman and I regretted I wasn’t much of a dancer.
    I stayed in Brighton for my leave. Every day on the seafront I could hear the sound of the big guns across the Channel; distant booming in the bright blue air.
    Brighton was the recuperation centre for men who had lost limbs during the war. Hundreds of men thronging the promenade without legs or arms, in wheelchairs and on crutches. Those who had lost all their limbs were carted around in big baskets. Basket-cases they were called.
    On my last day of leave I was walking down near the West Pier by the bathing machines when the guns started up again. There was a gang of limbless men huddled together near the gents’ toilet. One with no legs perched in a wheelchair; several with one leg and crutches. They were watching the young women come out of the machines with their buckets and spades. The girls screeched and giggled as they paddled into the cold water.
    I threaded between the sailboats drawn up on the shingle between the huts.
    â€˜Someone’s copping it,’ I said to a man with no arms. He ran his eyes over my stained uniform and gave me a nod. He saw me looking at his empty sleeves.
    â€˜I had to go into no-man’s-land to cut a bit of wire,’ he said. ‘So that our major could show it to his old woman. I knew the idea was she would be so proud of his bravery she would let him have a bit of grummer.’
    â€˜â€œGrummer”?’ I said.
    â€˜That’s what some Irishmen call the “blow through”.’ I still looked puzzled. ‘Sex, man, sex.’
    â€˜Of course,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’
    â€˜I hope he’s like me, and when she’s on her back waiting for him to up her, he won’t be able to get a hard-on.’
    He spat next to his polished boot. I nodded to him and walked on, past barrows loaded with herring, twenty-four for a shilling. They stank but it was a better stink than I was used to.
    I was thinking I wouldn’t mind a bit of grummer myself, but wondered if I’d be able to manage.
    I stepped aside for big, lumbering horses pulling carts piled with tradesmen’s wares and a coal cart pulled by the biggest horse I’d ever seen. I was surprised these animals weren’t at the Front.
    On the King’s Road there was a hubbub. Khaki-clad troops marched by, their uniforms