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His life can’t simply have stopped—surely it must have ended.
I have lost more than I can say, and what remains of me is not worth much.
“Sandys,” said Gaunt, and his voice sounded much less firm than he would have liked. “You can’t talk like this.” “I can, with you,” said Sandys. “And you can, with me.” Gaunt shook his head. “It’s one thing to—to do what we do—to pass the time,” he said. “You behave as if you have so much time to spend,” said Sandys, “but you haven’t. You’re squandering your years as if they’re limitless—” “It’s the middle of the night; get out of my room,” said Gaunt. “Stephen loves me,” said Sandys. Gaunt slammed his fist into his desk, and Sandys yelped. “What the hell are you talking about,” said Gaunt,
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“What’s the worst that could happen?” repeated Gaunt in disbelief. “I could be expelled. I could be sentenced to hard labour in a prison camp, and bring shame down on my family and everyone associated with me. I could be hanged.” “They don’t hang people for that any more,” said Sandys. “And none of those are the reason you won’t tell him. You won’t tell him because you’re frightened of what he’ll say.”
I began this letter planning to tell you I could not imagine your grief; but that isn’t true. I do imagine it, over and over. If you were killed, I doubt I should receive a telegram—our friendship has always been too tenuous for others to be aware of it. Still, in my imagination, I receive a telegram. I see your name and think, There goes the man I might have spoken to, had I only been able to open my mouth. You say that what is left of you is not worth much. I can only respond by assuring you it is worth a great deal—to me. Your friend, Gaunt
The Hague Convention sought to make war more humane. We had reached a point in history where we believed it was possible to make war humane.
We have conquered the world with promises that could not be kept. We told those Algerians that their civilisation was no good, that they must have ours instead, we carried our white man’s burden dutifully, enlightening Indians—Indians! They who built the Taj Mahal! And Egyptians! For we knew better than their pyramids! We swarmed through Africa and America because we were better than they, of course we were, we were making war humane, and now it has broken down and they are dragged into hell with us. We have doomed the world with our advancements, with our democracy that is so much better than
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I stood on the most God-forsaken patch of earth I hope ever exists and I thought: I wonder how Elly is.
My leg is healing nicely. Soon I will have to go back. I am terrified. I wish to God I could see you again before I die. Yours, Gaunt
But Ellwood could not stand to read another letter like that, sitting helplessly in his cosy bedroom. If something dreadful was being done to Gaunt, he wanted it done to him as well.
Mrs. Ellwood sat up. She was still in her thirties. She was pretty and dark and slight; she could have married anyone after his father died, but she hadn’t. “Why should I, when I have you?” she had told Ellwood when he was twelve, flattering and frightening him at once.
I was telling one of the other officers about Maitland, about how he would describe a novel by only mentioning irrelevant details (“Count of Monte Cristo, jolly good tome about a girl running away with her piano mistress!”), and suddenly I realised they would never meet him. He was so charming, and they’ll never know.
“Have you seen him cry like that before?” Hayes shifted on his feet. “I—I don’t like to say.” “Christ.” “He’ll be all right,” said Hayes. “He just needs a rest, that’s all. He’s tired. We’re all tired.” Tired. A new word ought to be invented, if this was tired.
Gaunt watched him. Gaunt was always watching him, as if Ellwood was something important he wanted to remember, but this was different. He leant against the trunk of the oak tree, his teeth clenched, frowning. He seemed in pain.
“I think the sky is one of the few redeeming features of the War. I would pay a shilling to watch it, and yet it’s free.”
Ellwood wanted to punch him. He wanted to make him bleed, and then tend to the wounds.
Writing Kohn’s letter left Ellwood with a sense of rootlessness. How did Jews bury their people? Kohn would have known. Strange, drifting memories came back to him: a dark house, mirrors cloaked in black mourning cloth, ripped sleeves. A funeral he had attended as a small child. The images were so eerie that he wondered if he had made them up. It didn’t matter, in any case. Kohn had been blown apart by the shell that hit his dugout, and there hadn’t been enough of him to fill a sandbag.
“Haven’t you had the poetry scoured out of you yet?” asked Gaunt. Ellwood frowned. “I need it now more than ever.
Except that had been a form of obedience, too, thought Ellwood—to a pre-existing command. He had been obeying the unwritten instructions in Gaunt’s terrible letter after the Second Battle of Ypres: “I wish to God I could see you again before I die.” Come here, that letter had said. I need you. And Ellwood, obedient as ever, had enlisted instantly. He wondered if Gaunt knew that he would do anything for him. “My dust would hear her and beat, / Had I lain for a century dead,” provided Tennyson, helpfully.
Gaunt was woven into everything he read, saw, wrote, did, dreamt. Every poem had been written about him, every song composed for him, and Ellwood could not scrape his mind clean of him no matter how he tried.
And it was a magical thing, to love someone so much; it was a feeling so strange and slippery, like a sheath of fabric cut from the sky.
Ellwood sighed. “Why can’t he just leave me be?” “Because he’s in love with you!” cried Gaunt, stepping away from the altar to face Ellwood. “Of course he’s not,” said Ellwood, unnerved by this sudden display of emotion. “You’re blind,” said Gaunt, staring at him. “He loves you desperately.” Ellwood stared back, wrong-footed. “Just look at the poems,” said Gaunt, breaking eye contact and gesturing loosely at the crumpled piece of paper in his hand.
“Why are you getting so wound up about Macready? He doesn’t matter.” “Perhaps you matter to him!”
They never spoke of it again, but whenever Ellwood touched the flat spot Gaunt had punched into his nose, he remembered: there was something inside the fortress.
They did not talk much. If they were silent, Ellwood could pretend Gaunt loved him, and Gaunt could pretend…Ellwood wasn’t sure what Gaunt was pretending. In any case, silence served them well.
In the hypermasculine atmosphere of war, they were not overly concerned with manliness.
If Ellwood were a girl, he might have held his hand, kissed his temple. He might have bought a ring and tied their lives together. But Ellwood was Ellwood, and Gaunt had to be satisfied with the weight of his head on his shoulder.
Loos hung over them, a word he felt sure would someday have black meaning, but now was only a whisper of dread in his stomach.
He looked even more like a painting than usual. He radiated peace and prosperity. He was 1912; a world where savagery had been purged from the human spirit, for ever and ever.
Gaunt turned over to face Ellwood and caught his eye. Ellwood smiled, and a sudden, dry bleakness spread over Gaunt’s heart as he thought of Hercules, and Hector, and all the heroes in myth who found happiness briefly, only for it not to be the end of the story.
“Do you suppose,” said Ellwood, “that Perseus ever forgave Zeus? For not caring about him when it mattered?” There was a long silence. Then Gaunt spoke. “No,” he said.
The only thing that prevented Divisional Rest with Ellwood from being the happiest time in Gaunt’s life was the certainty that it would end, and the knowledge that what would follow would shatter him. Even if they should both, by some miracle, survive the War unharmed, Gaunt didn’t know how he would stand by Ellwood’s side at the altar and watch him marry Maud after these hazy, sunny weeks of kisses and poetry and sex.
Boys thought him brave because he never complained, but Gaunt didn’t call that bravery. Bravery was not so unquestioning.
“I can’t bear to think of anything happening to him,” said Ellwood. “He’ll be all right,” said Gaunt. “He’s not the sort to die tragically young. Too prosaic.” Ellwood’s shoulders shook with soft laughter. “You’re right,” he said. “He’s got to live. He’s destined to have six boring children and a boring job.”
“I used to wish I had brothers,” he said. “Me, too,” said Gaunt.
Gaunt was struck with sudden pity for the gangly boy standing a step or two above him. Burgoyne had never stood a chance, really. He was clever enough to know he didn’t fit in, but not clever enough to know how to change.
“He’s a revolting little snake. He’s probably never seen a dead body.” An agonising laugh broke out of Gaunt. “Oh, God, Elly, is that how we judge men now?” Ellwood didn’t answer.
“Will you write about me when I die, Elly?” “Yes,” said Ellwood. His voice was thick with sudden and inexplicable anger. “What will you call it? In Memoriam H.W.G.?” “Maybe. I haven’t decided yet.”
Gaunt wished the War had been what Ellwood wanted it to be. He wished they could have ridden across a battlefield on horseback, brandishing a sword alongside their gallant king.
It had been hopeless to love Ellwood because Ellwood did not love him back, and now it was hopeless even though he did.
Poor Elly, he thought, as he fell. It’s so much harder to be left behind.
Now that the thing has begun, what other choice have we but to try to end it?
My fear for you is like a weight that must be carried even in my sleep. Please write back.
Tell you what, war isn’t as colourful as in the illustrations in Our Island Story. Where are the banners? I want BANNERS, dash it all!
“He doesn’t rag on you,” said Ellwood, later, when they had sent Lansing out on a particularly foolhardy scouting mission. Hayes scoffed. “Doesn’t think I’m worthy. You don’t rag on plebs.” “I’m sure that’s not it,” said Ellwood. Hayes twisted his mouth and didn’t reply. Ellwood had the uneasy feeling he had misspoken, that it was like all the times in Shell when boys had called him miserly and Gaunt had told him it wasn’t because he was Jewish. It occurred to him now that Gaunt had meant to reassure him. It had only ever made Ellwood feel alone.
How alive it all seemed, and how gracious—to die in an era when your death bought you a brief moment at the centre of something. To be important, rather than one of millions.
We’re friends, aren’t we?” “Yes,” said Ellwood, because that was simpler than explaining to her that there was no vibrancy to a friendship not threatened by violence.
“My Peter was killed at Loos,” said the farmer when he brought the milk. “Were you at Loos?” Ellwood was forced to admit he had been. “What was it like?” He did not know how to answer. It was the Hell you’d feared in childhood, come to devour the children. It was treading over the corpses of your friends so that you might be killed yourself. It was the congealed evil of a century.
discovering something new about Gaunt, and knowing there was a limit to how many more discoveries could be made. Perhaps this was his last one.
He was beginning to think the War would continue until No Man’s Land enveloped the world, and the last two men alive shot at each other from their ditches in the mud.
