Kipling's Choice Read online

  But the new recruits like John Kipling, Rupert Grayson, and their men are so keyed up for battle that they aren't put off. Everyone is impatiently awaiting the real adventure, the confrontation with the barbaric Huns, the exchange of gunfire, and, who knows, perhaps a chance to be a hero. They hang on the words of their colleagues. Powerful stories are savored with a few glasses of "plonk," French white wine, while Captain Alexander sits on a table under the sheltering trees and cheers up the whole crowd with tunes on his harmonica.

  Some soldiers in the First Battalion are not cheered up by the festivities.

  "Those boys all grew up together," a young captain says with a sigh. He has noticed that John is looking inquisitively at three silent young men who are sitting farther up in the grass and staring straight ahead.

  "Oh yes, we have that in a couple of platoons, too," Rupert Grayson interrupts, a bit too cheerfully. "Are they chaps from the same district who reported for duty together?"

  The officer nods, frowning.

  "Fantastic, isn't it?" John exclaims. "True comrades, together in the fight."

  "There were eight boys in that group on Wednesday." The captain presses his lips together.

  There are no further questions.

  That night, John tosses and turns in bed until very late. He sees his fallen friends George Cecil and John Manners standing beside him. "With waxen, freshly washed faces that were smiling at me," he will tell Rupert Grayson much later. "Their uniforms were full of bullet holes and bayonet cuts, and blood was everywhere."

  John breaks out in a cold sweat in the middle of the night. Shivering, he takes some writing paper. He sees the glazed eyes the Irish veterans of the First Battalion marching back and forth in his head looking like porcelain dolls. "Some look like animated corpses," the young Kipling will later write home. "Real walking corpses, so exhausted and knocked about. From the beginning they've gone through an unbelievable number of battles—often with heavy losses. We're still brand-new to this."

  ***

  Mummy? Is that you, Ma? Yes, that does me good, rubbing my forehead like that. I can't open my eyes very well, Mums. Wait. Ow, that hurts. Careful with my head, oooh. Steady with my neck. That's better, rub there a bit. My eyelashes are stuck together.

  It is late in the afternoon on Monday, September 27, 1915, on the battlefield of Loos. The road that rises gently from La Bassée to Lens cuts the grand French-Flemish fields down the middle. The chalk pits are on the right, just past the hamlet of Hulluch. A little farther along is the village of Loos, with its church in the center. Next to the main road is the Bois Hugo, a forest on a hill. Between the road and the forest lies a wounded boy in a disheveled uniform. A gold-colored harp is sewn on his collar, but in the sinking afternoon sun this emblem of the Irish Guards is covered with blood. Lieutenant John Kipling opens his eyes with difficulty. He is awakening from a brief coma. Disoriented, he slowly regains his senses. He can barely move and he cannot speak.

  "There you are, sir. You have lost a lot of blood," he hears a deep, friendly voice say.

  Who is that, John wonders in a daze. Where am I? A cap, the army—France, the front, the attack.

  The day's events come to mind like a festering sore that breaks open suddenly. At the same time a searing pain jumps from his leg up to his head. His body is racked with spasms.

  "Quiet, sir. Don't move," the man says. His voice is soothing. His silhouette blacks out the low sunlight as he bends over him. John's gaze now falls on the man's white armband and a dim red cross upon it.

  Could it really be bad? Oh, my face is burning. Dear God, man! Keep your white rags away from my face! Nooo, that fellow is stripping the skin off my head. Stop! Make him stop!

  The army medic sees the pain and panic in John's eyes and the taut muscles in his legs. "Quiet, Lieutenant. I've got to stop the bleeding. You've lost too much blood already."

  John tries to cry out but his vocal chords are gone. His faltering breath is barely audible and becomes lost in the pink air bubbles and brown froth that well up from his formless mouth and ravaged throat. Don't let me die, please take me with you, he begs with his eyes. He looks back and forth and follows each move of the medic with suspicion.

  "Shhh. Above all else don't move, sir. We'll take care of you. Quiet now, please." The man drops his arms to his side and shakes his head.

  John faints, but a voice rouses him instantly.

  "We'll never be able to bring this one back," the medic calls out to someone nearby. "Impossible."

  John listens intently. There are gunshots as always, in the distance. Men are groaning not far from him, voices that beg for help. What are they calling out? Do I know that voice? Or not? My platoon—how are they doing? Have they made it? Shells and grenades skim by overhead. There is cursing from the medics. Is that why they don't dare move me? The ground is shaking a little underneath me. There, now I hear missiles exploding in the distance.

  A second army cap turns and floats above John's face.

  "Goodness gracious, no." A man with a higher voice speaks close to his ear. He sighs. "It's best for this one to stay here. We'll lay him a bit farther up, in a ditch."

  "The nearest trench is on that side," says the man with the low voice. "At least he'll have a chance there. The poor devil will be hit with more shrapnel if we leave him here."

  They're afraid, John thinks. They're going to let me die here. He feels like a boxer who has fallen in the ring, knocked out by a double uppercut, down for the count. He closes his eyes and hears the din swell all around him.

  The two medics begin to argue. They pay no attention to John, for they believe he is unconscious.

  Hurry up, you amateurs! John rages to himself.

  "They're fast approaching now," calls the first medic. "Come on, man, grab his feet."

  "Leave him, there's no point."

  "Come on, man, this is an officer. We can't just ignore him."

  "Officer, my arse," shouts the other.

  The low voice becomes raised. "To the trench with him, I tell you! Quick, before it's too late!"

  "And we'll put a gas mask on him, too," answers the second medic cynically.

  John is becoming nauseated from their bickering. And from the pain. He tries to think about something else. Trenches, gas masks... The words reverberate through his head.

  ***

  "My God!" John shouts. He has been blasted awake by a sharp bang and by his own loud voice. The straw mattress slips off his bed. For a second he thinks they are being attacked by German artillery. But that's impossible, he realizes, because the Fritzes are too far away. A long, drawn-out crack from a nearby bolt of lightning fills the small guest room. John gazes suspiciously at the beam above his head. Boom! Light flashes through the curtain just before a second clap of thunder shakes the room. Only now is he aware of the rain that is beating down on the tiled roof.

  It's the first day of September 191 J, John thinks, and he swings his legs out of bed. The season is changing and the rain will be welcome indeed, for it will cool the air and wash away the dust and the flies.

  "Holy cow! Damn!" His feet are in a puddle on the floor. He is surprised by how quickly he has picked up the swear words of his men. Water is trickling along one of the edges of the roof and down the wall behind his head. He mops the water around his bed and grabs the white enameled chamber pot from the cupboard. "I can't fill it up this morning, anyway," John says to himself with a chuckle. He sets the pot down against the wall behind the bed.

  John is free this morning. Because there is no inspection or morning exercises or drill, he can take his time breakfasting with his host family. When Celle, the daughter, moves her chair and cutlery closer to him, he pretends not to notice. She sits right across from him, beaming.

  "Quel temps, n'est-ce pas?" John begins.

  Her father, who is sitting next to John, growls something like "oh-la-la" and looks worriedly outside.

  John continues to talk about the weather so the man doesn't
pay attention to his blushing daughter, who is rubbing her leg against John's. She has kept her eyes on him all week. Yesterday she launched the attack for real. While milking the cow in the little stall, she called to him as he walked by.

  "Is it true what they say about les Boches, about what the Germans do to women and children?" she asked. She kicked the door shut behind her, cornering him to prevent an escape.

  John can still feel her whispering breath in his ear. "Of course it's true," he answered hoarsely. "Otherwise I wouldn't be fighting here. Those dirty Huns drag innocent women away by the hair after they've speared the babies on their bayonets."

  "Innocent?" she said. There was something strange and confusing in her voice. "Vraiment innocentes?" It was so cramped in that tiny space. She kept moving closer. He pushed his glasses a bit higher up on his nose.

  Innocentes? John had seen it with his own eyes, certainly on posters about "poor little Belgium" which stated, "Their women are being murdered, or worse." And the newspapers had reported it, too. The Daily Telegraph was regularly sending Daddo to Belgium and France, for that matter.

  John had never been so close to a girl's face before. When someone began to fiddle with the door handle, his lenses fogged up. Even the cow was jumpy, and Celle rushed back to her milking stool. Later on he could not remember what he had said to her mother as they each sidled through the narrow doorway.

  And here she is again, sitting right across the table. Actually it's exciting to be so near to Celle.

  "Oh-la-la, quel temps!" The kitchen door swings open and her mother staggers inside, dripping wet. "It's a strange sight, all those soldiers with their brown capes in the rain. Les pauvres."

  "I've got to go," John says, and he jumps up. "Breakfast was delicious, merci."

  He walks along the Rue de l'Eglise with his head down and his hands deep in the pockets of his leather raincoat. It is difficult to see out of his thick glasses in the pouring rain. Dozens of soldiers are walking around the little marketplace. Water is streaming down the rain capes that they wear over their shoulders. They look like shiny dancing bells, John thinks. John hurries up the steps of the parsonage, where their temporary headquarters have been established.

  "Ah, Lieutenant Kipling!" Captain Alexander says. He is in a cheerful mood. "The new gas masks are here."

  "That is good news, sir, although I don't think we should be expecting a gas attack in this weather."

  "Kipling, Colonel Butler wants you to be in charge of training the men to use the new masks."

  "Well, thank you, Captain." John swallows.

  "Thank him, old boy," Alex replies, giving john a poke in the ribs. "I think the colonel is right. It's just as well to put those new things in the hands of young officers. Go ahead, test them yourself. You're free this morning, aren't you?"

  The captain points through the window to the motorized wagon in the courtyard. "Those ten crates there. Twelve dozen gas masks in each one."

  It has been rumored for weeks that the British and French troops are about ready to try their hand at using poison gas. John doesn't even think to tell the captain about this state of affairs. The battalion commander himself has not been informed about his army's new top-secret weapons.

  For a long time the horror of chlorine gas was the No.l topic of conversation at Warley Barracks and at John's London club. At the end of April 1915, the newspapers were positively drooling over this lurid subject. "Our boys" put up considerable resistance in the Second Battle of Ypres, they wrote. From a maze of trenches, the British and French had been able to hold the front line that curved around the city of Ypres, but it had cost thousands of lives and many appalling injuries: men whose eyes were burned out, whose lungs had burst. Even the best soldiers were powerless against those surprising gas attacks. The bizarre frontline command, "Piss on your handkerchief! Hold it over your mouth!" was thought to be rather amusing back home in England. "But what else could we have done? Nothing, God damn it!" Nigel Francis said bitterly. He was an officer stationed at the front but was home on leave one month after the attack at Ypres. John had met him by chance quite some time ago, during an evening out in London, just before Francis was sent to the trenches in Flanders. Lieutenant Francis was a quiet, amiable student. When John ran into him again in May, he almost went right past him, for Francis looked like a sick, older version of himself.

  "You would—oh, God!" the young man exclaimed. "You would have gone mad if you had seen those poor boys spitting their bleeding lungs up. Hundreds of them all at the same time. It was hell! Their eyes and throats were on fire. That's why all those who could still get away jumped into the water. The canal by Boezinge was full of dead bodies." John can still picture Nigel Francis biting down on his knuckles as he finished his story.

  John also recalls hearing about the African soldiers who were suffocated during the gas attack. They were dressed in gaudy red trousers and fezzes. They had just arrived in Ypres from the French colony of Senegal. "How scared those wogs must have been!" everyone in the gentlemen's club exclaimed, and they laughed. They felt worse about the two thousand Canadians who were defending Ypres. Their task was to close a five-kilometer-wide breach, and they died near Saint Julien while doing so. Strong stories, all, which John and his friends usually enjoyed with a crystal glass of whiskey and soda as they lounged in the club's plush easy chairs. He remembers how he and his mates tried to outdo one another with their knowledge of the deadliest gas formulas and powerful poisons. They felt like true military gentlemen, a little club of merciless warlords.

  John knows that at the firing lines the fear of gas and the elusive enemy has been firmly instilled. And now that his battalion is moving closer to the front, he can feel a change in the atmosphere, too. When they were at Brentwood, they practiced using those first gas masks until they were blue in the face. The "smoke helmets" are awful for John and other boys who wear glasses. Thick, smelly canvas caps is what they actually are, and treated with chemicals that cut off your breath. There is a little pipe for blowing out air, and two glass peepholes that break almost of their own accord. Pure misery.

  John Kipling spends the whole afternoon hauling chests of gas masks. He recruits about ten men from his platoon to help, for an officer is there to give orders, after all. The boys are relieved to be inside in such nasty weather. The ten crates are unloaded in a shed by the parsonage. With united effort, the men then drag the crates one at a time onto the empty veranda and break them open.

  The new gas masks look exactly like the old ones, and stink just like them, too. "They have the stench of a corpse," John remembers his drill sergeant at Brentwood saying.

  They've delivered the wrong ones, John thinks for a moment until he unfolds one. This model has flaps over the glass, he notices to his relief.

  "Gas!" he shouts half an hour later. "Attention! Smoke helmets on!"

  They are practicing in a greenhouse used for growing grapes. It's a nice place for a drill, he muses; there is plenty of light, it is cozy and dry, and his voice sounds the same as it does outside.

  "In God's name, Johnson, those eye flaps must be shut. That's precisely what they're for."

  "Yes, sir."

  "Break just one piece of glass and you'll be mopping all the floors of the parsonage!"

  The flaps appear to be working. The drilling with gas masks is a matter of discipline. Flaps are shut when folding them up; flaps are opened when the thick linen caps go on the head. The men practice putting on the masks over and over again, until they can take them out, put them on, fold them up, and put them away with their eyes closed. And along with those masks, they have to cope with those military caps, always a major production.

  "Hup! And one, two!"

  Ten masks are raised into the air. They look ridiculous, John thinks, but this is a matter of life and death.

  "Flaps off! Now! One, two!"

  The soldiers practice putting on the masks while lying down, standing up, and while running in the courtyard between rai
nstorms. One after another they begin to gag from lack of oxygen within the airtight linen mask.

  "Sergeant Cochrane, can you take over for me for a bit? Fifteen-minute break. Be especially careful that the masks are fully closed under their coat collars."

  The sergeant salutes briskly. "Yes! Sir!" he replies, satisfied. At least he doesn't have to put on that suffocating cap anymore.

  The officers have a pleasant time together that evening. John demonstrates his drill technique on his lieutenant colonels. He bites and barks out orders to them, for that is what they want him to do. But they laugh and drink together, as well.

  "Gas, gasss," cries someone who comes bursting into the room. "Help! Smoke!" Thick clouds of smoke pour out from under his cap.

  Quickly they remove the mask to reveal Captain Alexander, armed with a fat cigar.

  "They call these things smoke helmets, don't they?" he says, and he roars with laughter. "That smoke is worse than I thought!"

  The Irish Guards have difficult days ahead. The officers are more aware of this than ever. The daily marches now run about twenty miles, and there are military maneuvers on the program, too. It's tough luck, for the heavy rains continue. But above all, a command to march directly to the front could come any day.

  One night, John and Rupert are a bit tipsy as they walk back to their billeting quarters.

  "You have nice lodgings, don't you?" Rupert teases.

  "They're all right," says John.

  "Et les femmes, mon cher? Celle is her name, isn't it?"

  "Who says?"

  "The walls have ears, Kipling!"

  Actually Rupert has no idea about Celle's aggressive moves. But John can't resist telling him about his adventure in the cow stall. Rupert is green with jealousy.

  "Hey, man, let's trade places. It's dark, at any rate, and she won't even notice."

  "Not for love or money!"

  They chase each other down the street like two schoolboys.

  "See you tomorrow!" Rupert calls, when John closes the garden gate behind him. "And give her mother my regards!"