Read Online The Dust That Falls from Dreams by Louis De Bernières - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Louis De Bernières
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big enough, so you sleep sitting up, with your helmet on, so that drips fall away onto shoulders. In the front line we’re not permitted to remove our boots and socks. Puttees leave horrible trackmarks round legs. Bad idea to take off boots in icy weather anyway, because they freeze solid. Can’t get them on again.
Stand to on firing step at dawn every day. All night for preparation, so best time to attack. Fritz does exactly the same thing, of course, and no attack ever comes. All casualties from snipers and shellfire. Proper attacks rare as alligator feathers.
Regiment lost twelve officers and 250 men to enemy action,exposure, exhaustion and frostbite, before I got here. Relieved by Royal Scots Fusiliers in December. Boys ate nothing but bully beef. You open the tins with a bayonet.
Thank God for rum ration. That navy stuff goes right down to your toes and heats you all the way back up again. Sincerely hate any NCO who tries to cream it off.
Rum and cigarettes; I guess that’s what a soldier lives for. Swap my cigarettes for rum, and think it a darned good deal too.
Couldn’t hold the line after middle of January. Lost too many men. Transport people volunteered to come and fight in place of our dead.
Began to think that there’s something about a young man that makes him want to die, and die well, whilst still at the height of life, whilst still not tired of it. Or maybe war so terrible that the prospect of death entices. Is it a comfort not to have to face the future? We all end up discarded on the midden of time, so might as well be flung there now. Ain’t I quite the philosopher?
Not thinking along those lines. I have Rosie to live for. Told her I was her angel, but really she’s mine. Also knew that if I was killed she’d never have the chance to become disillusioned. She’d never get tired. We’d never have an argument. I’d be young, strong, handsome forever. Would never watch her grow old, either. No plans to die, but it might be a good thing before I let her down. If I die, the vision lives.
Impossible to imagine oneself being dead, because one is still there, imagining it. That’s how we can watch our comrades die, and carry on. If I imagine myself dead, I’m still at Rosie’s side.
13
Daniel Pitt to his Mother (1)
Somewhere in deepest darkest France
3 January 1915
Ma chère maman,
How lovely it was to spend Christmas with you on the South Downs, and
quel plaisir
to go tobogganing with one’s mother! It was cruel of you to make me drag both of our toboggans back uphill, though. How will I ever forgive? Perhaps time will heal
.
It was very sweet of you to come to the aerodrome to see me off. How marvellously you frightened the sentries and charmed the CO! and even his dog! I thought you were very brave, the way you held back your tears, but really, you didn’t need to. Everyone was perfectly aware that you are French and have the perfect excuse to be emotional
.
But,
chère maman
, I do know how you feel. You saw my brothers off to South Africa, never to see them again, and we don’t know what’s going to happen to Archie out in Waziristan. You must be very lonely and worried. Even I am worried, a lot more than my fellow birdmen, none of whom seem to be older than eighteen. At twenty-two I feel a little less bulletproof than they do
.
I want to tell you why you shouldn’t worry, but first of all I have to relate what happened on the way over. As you know, I came over in a gunbus, with another pilot in the front, and the plan was to collect a nice little Morane-Saulnier at St Omer. Well, the gunbus is a stout fellow, and a remarkably dependable and safe machine, but ours conked out not far from Gravelines. Broken ignition wire, it turned out
. Ça se passe
. I can’t tell you how frightening it was. I was fiddling with the instruments, almost in a blue funk, thinking I was going to have to ditch in the sea and get dissected by crabs and other molluscs, and the odd dogfish. But I
Stand to on firing step at dawn every day. All night for preparation, so best time to attack. Fritz does exactly the same thing, of course, and no attack ever comes. All casualties from snipers and shellfire. Proper attacks rare as alligator feathers.
Regiment lost twelve officers and 250 men to enemy action,exposure, exhaustion and frostbite, before I got here. Relieved by Royal Scots Fusiliers in December. Boys ate nothing but bully beef. You open the tins with a bayonet.
Thank God for rum ration. That navy stuff goes right down to your toes and heats you all the way back up again. Sincerely hate any NCO who tries to cream it off.
Rum and cigarettes; I guess that’s what a soldier lives for. Swap my cigarettes for rum, and think it a darned good deal too.
Couldn’t hold the line after middle of January. Lost too many men. Transport people volunteered to come and fight in place of our dead.
Began to think that there’s something about a young man that makes him want to die, and die well, whilst still at the height of life, whilst still not tired of it. Or maybe war so terrible that the prospect of death entices. Is it a comfort not to have to face the future? We all end up discarded on the midden of time, so might as well be flung there now. Ain’t I quite the philosopher?
Not thinking along those lines. I have Rosie to live for. Told her I was her angel, but really she’s mine. Also knew that if I was killed she’d never have the chance to become disillusioned. She’d never get tired. We’d never have an argument. I’d be young, strong, handsome forever. Would never watch her grow old, either. No plans to die, but it might be a good thing before I let her down. If I die, the vision lives.
Impossible to imagine oneself being dead, because one is still there, imagining it. That’s how we can watch our comrades die, and carry on. If I imagine myself dead, I’m still at Rosie’s side.
13
Daniel Pitt to his Mother (1)
Somewhere in deepest darkest France
3 January 1915
Ma chère maman,
How lovely it was to spend Christmas with you on the South Downs, and
quel plaisir
to go tobogganing with one’s mother! It was cruel of you to make me drag both of our toboggans back uphill, though. How will I ever forgive? Perhaps time will heal
.
It was very sweet of you to come to the aerodrome to see me off. How marvellously you frightened the sentries and charmed the CO! and even his dog! I thought you were very brave, the way you held back your tears, but really, you didn’t need to. Everyone was perfectly aware that you are French and have the perfect excuse to be emotional
.
But,
chère maman
, I do know how you feel. You saw my brothers off to South Africa, never to see them again, and we don’t know what’s going to happen to Archie out in Waziristan. You must be very lonely and worried. Even I am worried, a lot more than my fellow birdmen, none of whom seem to be older than eighteen. At twenty-two I feel a little less bulletproof than they do
.
I want to tell you why you shouldn’t worry, but first of all I have to relate what happened on the way over. As you know, I came over in a gunbus, with another pilot in the front, and the plan was to collect a nice little Morane-Saulnier at St Omer. Well, the gunbus is a stout fellow, and a remarkably dependable and safe machine, but ours conked out not far from Gravelines. Broken ignition wire, it turned out
. Ça se passe
. I can’t tell you how frightening it was. I was fiddling with the instruments, almost in a blue funk, thinking I was going to have to ditch in the sea and get dissected by crabs and other molluscs, and the odd dogfish. But I
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