September MGWAT

[Katie Elizabeth Stewart]

So young, but so discreet! Wise beyond her years, she is.

And you're a true gentleman, I'm sure.

[Ozzie]

Good Officer?

“He was a good officer, wasn’t he?”

“Good officer?” he shouted, “What the hell do you mean, bloody good officer?”

Harry spat these words, as he swung around and stared at the boy.

“What the hell would you know what makes a good officer? That ******* nearly got me killed a dozen times! Run here, stay there, your uniform is not up to scratch! He wasn’t an officer’s ****! He was a desk clerk, sent here cause all the other officers got blown to hell.”

The boy’s cheeks were red, and he looked down as Harry continued his rage.

“That idiot sent four of my mates to hell, because he couldn’t read a map, and he thought that cause he had read a manual, he knew best! We’d been in since ’15 and he arrived ten bloody days ago, and he thought he knew it all. Wouldn’t listen. Nooo! He carried out his bloody orders to the letter!”

Finally drawing breath, Harry took a drag of his rolly.

The boy looked up at Harry, his lips trying to form the words he needed to say.

Without noticing the boy’s turmoil, Harry continued.

“What are you? Seventeen? Eighteen? Wet behind the ears. Why the hell did you come for? You should have heard by now that war ain’t a bloody game!”

Again, the boy’s eyes showed his anguish as he tried to get the words he needed.

“I…”

“You what? You know everything cause you read about it in the newspapers for the past two years? Let me tell you something, for nothing, matey. There are officers and there are officers. On that godforsaken bloody piece of land they call Gallipoli, we had officers that you would take home to your mother, cause they knew the right words to say, they had the manners. But they had no bloody sense! Then we had officers that you could take down to the docks, and they would fit right in, cause they knew men, they knew what a fight meant, and they bloody well got out there and showed us how!”

Lifting his hand to his mouth, Harry picked a strand of tobacco from between his yellow teeth. As he looked down at the boy, whose head hung down, his arms resting on his knees, Harry felt a stab of remorse for his tirade against this boy for mentioning that the now dead officer had been “a good officer”.

“Sorry, mate, if I got a bit dark, but there is good officers and then there are idiots. I’ve seen too many men suffer cause of a few idiots. What was it you were trying to say?”

The boy looked up at Harry, tears on his cheeks.

“I was just going to say that my mum said that he was a good officer, and that I should do as he says. He was my Uncle.”

Kim

[Michael Johnson]

Good one Ozzie! And yet another twist.

Katie? I know you're busy with applications, but how's yours coming?

[squirrel]

Nice one Ozzie.

[Gunboat]

Nice one Kim, I loved the image of the man picking a stray strand of tobacco from his mouth an image I used myself in a recent piece of work, it conveys such an image of self-assurance, that Harry is so confident in his conviction and in his belief, that he can afford to look away from the boy during his tirade to doing something trivial. Wonderful image, a really good twist as well.

[Katie Elizabeth Stewart]

Nice one Kim, I loved the image of the man picking a stray strand of tobacco from his mouth an image I used myself in a recent piece of work, it conveys such an image of self-assurance, that Harry is so confident in his conviction and in his belief, that he can afford to look away from the boy during his tirade to doing something trivial. Wonderful image, a really good twist as well.

A rather different context though. I would have said that the image could be used to represent both self-assurance and reticence. It could alternatively serve as a means of avoiding someone's eye, or occupying oneself so as not to look awkward. But yes, I loved the sort of culmination of that last piece. Writing something that provokes a shudder in the closing line has always been something I have strived for.

My entry??? Well, I've spent most of this week so stressed I could run around in circles shrieking, but now the UCAS deadline has been and gone for me, the situation has cleared a little. However, I have not added so much as an apostrophe to my entry for ages, so unless there's a miracle...

I will see what I can do. When is the deadline?

[Michael Johnson]

Gunboat? The young lady wants an extension on her essay. I think it wouldn't hurt.

Katie - you are going to major in English, aren't you? Very good observations.

[Katie Elizabeth Stewart]

Gunboat? The young lady wants an extension on her essay. I think it wouldn't hurt.

Katie - you are going to major in English, aren't you? Very good observations.

Ahem...well, the fact remains that I am not contributing very much to this thread other than observations at the moment, so I had better get my creative hat on.

[marina]

Good Officer?

Kim

Loved that, Kim. Well done.

Marina

[Katie Elizabeth Stewart]

I say amen to that. Might I just add, I also enjoyed the dialogue. I thought it captured army speak perfetly!

[susanhemmings]

Well done Kim, I really like the context of this. Again from a different perspective. I really felt for that boy........

Susan.

[Ozzie]

Ta for the comments. Helps to restore the belief.

Cheers

Kim

[Landsturm]

Good one, Kim! Genuine trench-rage

[Guest soren1916]

Yes good stuff everyone!

[Roxy]

Good effort, Kim - I never saw it coming!

Roxy.

Soren,

Are you a relative of Soren1915?

[Katie Elizabeth Stewart]

Here's mine at last, getting in by the skin of my teeth as usual...

It was initially a poem, but then I realised I was just trying to convey too many ideas that were too big in the space of a couple of stanzas. Apologies in advance if it's too long for anyone to have time to read! It's more of an epic than I intended. No official word limit is there?! Also, please be gentle with criticisms, I've never really done anything like this before...

In Memoriam. M. E. Threlkeld, killed in action. To the best Officer ever, from a soldier who Really Misses Him.[/size]

…you were David’s father,

But I had fifty sons

When we went out in the evening

Under the arch of the guns,

And we came back at twilight-

Oh God! I heard them call

To me for help and pity

That could not help at all.

Oh never will I forget you

My men that trusted me

More my sons than your fathers’

For they could only see

The little helpless babies

And the young men in their pride

They could not see you dying

And hold you while you died.

Happy and young and gallant

They saw their firstborn go

But not the strong limbs broken

And the beautiful men brought low,

The piteous writhing bodies,

They screamed ‘Don’t leave me Sir,’

For they were only your fathers

But I was your Officer…

By Lieutenant Ewart Alan Mackintosh, killed 1918 in the Great War

Now then. Harry Worthing’s the name. Henry, if we’re going to be posh. Me before the War? All right, let’s go back to when I left school at thirteen. Lived in the East End, didn’t I? Lights everywhere. That’s about all I remember of the place. Bridges, pubs, clubs…it had what you’d call a thriving nightlife. Some of em so seedy they was almost magnificent. You’d see men discreet as anything, tapping on the door with their canes. The sort with sallow complexions and silk handkerchiefs. Then they look left, look right, and edge inside wary as if they’d been caught with their hands down their breeches. Or someone else’s, I suppose.

I should know all right, cos I’d seen em, hadn’t I? Where do you think I was back then, night after night? Great vantage point, the street corner. You could really watch the world go by. Those nights and me Subaltern between em, they taught me everything a lad needs to know about human nature. Gawd, it was cold, though. In the winter, I reckoned I could just about feel the air rushing through the hollow bit in the middle of me bones. (Threlkeld – that was me Subaltern, and more of him later – he used to say that was why I’d be snug as a bug in a rug out in the trenches even when I just the tarpaulin over me – not like all the other poor *******, them ones that really felt the cold – I’d gotten accustomed to it in me East End years, you see).

Anyway, there would be me in shirtsleeves and braces, out on the pavement in winter. Me toes in their boots picking out their own little tune, stamping up a rhythm from the stone dead paving slabs. Hands in me pockets, of course. Either that or turning me cap round and round like the wheel on a motorcar. Waiting for Him to come. Who? I dunno. Whoever paid the most? Nah. I never liked the toffs. They was always too rough with me – liberating for them though, I suppose. Whoever lived nearest, and could bring me in from the cold quicker? Maybe… I knew one gent lived up Hackney way would have steak and kidney pud set out on the table for me when he’d finished.

Nah, there was always one bloke I really liked. You could tell from his dress he wasn’t right up there with Churchill and everyone. But he was different from the others. Softer spoken. No less educated, mind. Lithe sorta fella, sunburnt ears. Self-conscious as they come. Wouldn’t like to say who was more nervous, him or me. That was probably why he always treated me with kid gloves and never hurt me. He was always asking if I was all right. It made me laugh. He used to call me ‘violet-eyes’, and I lost count of the number of times he told me I was beautiful. As I said, I liked him. I heard off a mate he died a horrible death. Devil’s Wood at its worst, I reckon. Lay there for hours in a swamp – when they pulled him out, he was coughing up bullets. Reminds me a bit of me dad, actually. He went out and got paralytic one night at the pub. I was very small. He fell asleep on the way home. This was in January, mind, when there was still freckles of snow on the ground. They brought him home to mam next morning in the frost. Shirt all drenched in blood, dead as a doornail - or a coffin nail, as Charles Dickens would say. It was the life blood he coughed outta himself.

I never had many friends as a lad. Leastways, not until I joined the army. Nineteen fourteen, Harry Worthing, went to fight the Hun. Best year of me life. Made more friends than I could remember birthdays. Earned a few bob (sent mam some cheques for food and stuff – she’d just got sent packing from the big house where she was working – ******* of a landlord laid the blame on her – crikey, the irony – when he got caught with her on the rug by the wood stove after he got back from hunting). Got meself a girlfriend – hellova lass, my Bessie – well-to-do too, she’d wear a straw hat to the parish church on Sundays - reckon she liked the uniform and don’t blame her neither. Polished buttons every day for parade – butters up the Company Commander a treat.

Only all that changed when I took a blighty up at High Woods. Three months’ sick leave in England, and I was a new man. Bought meself a couple of new shirts and ties, then took the earliest train possible to Folkestone. I was looking forward to being back in jolly old Flanders. Only it wasn’t jolly anymore. Not a bit of it. Could have cried when I got back to our billet. I might have if I was the crying sort. Do you know, there wasn’t a single face I knew? And these lads were quiet. I don’t think they’d know a game of bridge or a song if it came up and tapped them on the nose. I went among them, just meself, just like the usual, but they weren’t having any of it. They were a surly bunch. They soon came along and wiped the smile clean off my face.

I said to one of em, “The hell ave you got to be so glum about? What news?”

Oh oh. This was it, you see. Us lads was meant to be going over the top in a couple o weeks. And it wasn’t only that. It was just the boredom, the boredom of waiting. Of sitting around living, except not living. At least not in the normal meaning of the word. We was living all right, but we was sitting around waiting to die. You daren’t ask another man his name, for fear he’d stop answering it in roll call. We lit stoves and we made tea, but we never knew when a shell might come around the corner and blow us up. Empty our stomachs of the breakfast we’d just eaten.

One day it got so I couldn’t stand it anymore. And with me, that’s sayin something, seein as how I spend half my life getting rogered by toffs with their swagger sticks. It was in the morning just after we’d done stand to. I was goin out of the firing bay, rifle slung, hands at the ready as I had a feeling I’d have a few salutes to do at any minute. I heard this strange keening noise, rising to a decibel that made me want to stuff me fingers in me ears, then breaking and ending with a gasp. I went around the next zig-zag pretty quickly, not running obviously, cos I’d have come a cropper on them duckboards that were still all wet and covered in scum from the rain we had last night.

I saw him at once. The newest subaltern, fresh from training. Bit of young blood, by all accounts. Barely my age. He was...well, blimey he had just sat down in the middle of the trench to have a cry.

“Fifteen at the very oldest…” he was howling in between sobs. I’m tellin you, the noise he was makin, it sounded like the end of the world had come. But I took his point. There was one dugout had collapsed under shellfire a few days back. We knew about it all right, we’d reckoned it had been empty; s’far as we knew, the Suffolks was out in rest. We couldn’t do anything about it, though, it’d have been too bloody dangerous. Fritz were supposed to have moved a week ago, but you know, had they ****. They’d been getting more and more accurate for about the last three days. Anyway, another five nine had come along and churned the earth up a bit. I suppose it was a mercy there was no-one there. I suppose.

The earth had chucked everything else around a bit. Spewed up a few of its secrets, or so to speak. Five men, all of them dead. Couple o them had no eyes and was turning black. I knew which one Threlkeld was talking about. Lad that still had his eyes in and opened. Lips slightly parted. We reckoned he’d been wounded before, as he’d about rotted up to the hips. Ground was glutinous with their blood. Took Threlkeld what seemed like hours before he could get another word out. Eventually, he said “go fetch the whiskey Worthing, there’s a lad.”

All I saw back in them days was corpses. You learn a hell of a lot about the different stages of putrefaction. And even the ones that weren’t corpses were as good as. It was as though they’d forgotten how to do anything, anything at all but live in the sort of lifeless limbo we’d got ourselves trapped in. I began to wonder what it would feel like to be able to care again, to care and to worry about the normal things. I can’t even imagine that there are normal things anymore, or not like there used to be. There can’t be, can there, when we all have to exist like this? Because us lot are only lads, and we won’t ever be able to do those kind of things again. They don’t know what it’s like for us. How can they, when there’s not a word in the English language that can describe it and do it justice? All of my friends are dead. And just when I begin to make a new one, I daren’t try too hard, because I know next morning a shell’ll come making its horrible off-key wailing and take him away from me. I might not have been good all me life. I might have made one hell of a dirty living, but honest, I swear by me Ma and me Bessie’s life, I do not know what I can have done to deserve this.

Thank God, then, for Threlkeld. And I really mean that. All right, he was a gentle soul with not much character. All right, he could barely string two sentences together, unless it were four hundred lines of John Keats. And back in the war, he walked around in an everlasting drunkard’s stupor. But he loved me. I know he did.

Why else would he ave held me all night in the dugout when I felt homesick, and the whiz-bangs was falling all around us like gross fireworks? All that night, he wrapped me up in his own blanket, on his own bunk bed, and even as the earth all about us was shaking, he talked to me about his home, and his ma, and all his little sisters. We talked about the future, we did. And then in the morning, he carried me in his arms out of the dugout and into the rain. “It’s all right, Harry,” he kept saying, and he gathered me into his chest. “It’ll be all right. Just stay with me, whatever happens and it’ll be over soon, and you’ll be able to use your pay to get married…”

Funny thing to say, that. I thought so then. Even funnier, in a way he reminded me of me old favourite patron back in the East End. He acted like he really needed me, just as much as I needed him. Because I bloody well did. I’m telling you, nothing, nothing would have made me stand up on that ladder at the break of the day, when the ground was still all covered in dew, and wait for that awful whistle. Wait just the same as how we had been waiting for days.

Only this waiting was worse. The grass was all flecked through with flowers, I can see it as clearly as though it was yesterday. Poppies and sorrel. They gave it a nightmarish effect, like we was imagining it all. Like it wasn’t real. How could we be feeling the wet grass on our legs one minute, the next lying on our backs never to feel a darned thing again? I didn’t question it, I just looked around for Threlkeld, the one who would get me through this. He had inch-long, sandy hair that stood up like a hearth brush. So long as I could see that, I told meself, it would be all right. Only I had to trust in him.

I saw his back dip forwards as the whistle went, hard left, he walked, screaming orders into the whirring air. All around him, men was falling. Andrews the other side of me talking to his mate, kicking a petrol can as he went, trying to calm his self. Reckon his mate just assumed he tripped over the petrol can and fell. But I saw the bullet go in one side of his chest and out the other. Reckon it must have taken his heart with it. His mate didn’t last much longer, neither. One of the last things I saw before I fell meself was him lunging over a shell hole, on his stomach now, then he got all shot full of bullets up the neck and copped it mid shout.

Bodies on the floor. Everywhere you went, you was just treading on them. It was impossible, the number of bodies. Don’t reckon I even knew there was that many in England. They was writhing around like fish out of water, gasping for air, not finding it, then their lives out, just like that.

Well, as for me, I carried on. Jus carried on walking. I didn’t know how I was left standing, but I was. Looking sideways I could see Threlkeld, see him scrabbling around for his water bottle to tip down the throat of one lad who was half-rotting alive. Gawd bless him, I thought, and ran a few shaky steps further. Looking down at the ground, I stepped over a boy who lay without his legs on. I guessed I was about halfway between our line and Fritz, although I daren’t look behind me. I just kept on going. There was less bullets in the air by now, so maybe we had taken more of them out than we reckoned. Even so, the lad in front suddenly kneeled down in the middle of the field and stopped moving. He was right in front of me, and I couldn’t get past. I was so exhausted by now I didn’t think of going round him. I looked around for Threlkeld, thinking, he’d know what to do. Couldn’t see him.

Started to panic then. So I lay down, right on top of the bodies and began to scramble over them. And that’s where I begin to forget what happened. I know I shouted and cried a lot. I know I looked into all their faces, the dead boys. I lost count of the number of corpses I turned over, clutched at frantically, and then left there to rot. I was looking for him, and I couldn’t find him. If he weren’t dead, then he had to be alive. I know I swore a lot, I know I kept on shouting things like, “how the hell could they have let this happen?”

The more faces I saw leer at me, the more blank eyes, the more rats I saw, coats sleek with blood, the more I lost hope. Nobody answered any of my calls. There wasn’t a damned thing alive left to answer. Eventually, I gave up and just lay down in a shell hole. I didn’t know what would happen to me, and I was beyond caring. I know I cried a lot, because the back of my throat felt dry and sore as splintered bones. And that made it worse, because I remembered the first time I spoke to Threlkeld, and he was crying. I don’t know how long I lay there. It might have been hours, it might have been days. It stank of dead men, but I’d stopped noticing. I lay and ached and looked at the sun and wished She’d go away and ached some more and then it got colder. Night fell and I couldn’t remember anything, not even Threlkeld. I shivered in me khaki, and clung to the corpse next to me.

I might have remembered one time on leave when Bessie and me lay by a brook in the country and talked, then she fell asleep and I picked her up and dunked her in. Don’t know why I remembered that time, neither. She didn’t see the funny side, and I ruined her new gingham dress. When I woke up (if I was ever asleep) it was because the corpse I was holding had started to talk.

This point, I just wanted to cop it meself. My life was so dulled it was barely there, and I didn’t want it to carry on struggling. Me brain was all foggy, me life was damned worthless now anyway because God knew Bessie wouldn’t want me back after all I’d seen, all I’d done, all the people I’d killed. I wanted the feller to shut up, whoever he was. His groaning in me ear was all that kept me from oblivion.

I opened me mouth to say so, then was pre-empted when I realised (and it was a lightening bolt moment, to a lad who could barely see for hunger and lack of sleep) what the feller was saying, and whose voice it was.

“Water…water”

No questions. He was in no fit state to answer, to tell me where the hell he’d been, why he’d left me, what we was going to do now that we was the only ones left in a whole field full of hundreds and hundreds of men…

I just shoved me flask at him quite blindly, only looking down when he didn’t take it off me to find that he had no arms. He’d a perfect, gaping wound at the top of one shoulder, a hole through which you could see sinew and bone, and the blood was pouring staunchlessly. His lifeblood. And looking into his eyes then, I could tell he knew it. I could tell he wasn’t ready, that if he could have chosen, it wouldn’t have been my hand that held the bottle steady at his suckling lips, or the coarse sleeve of a soldier’s uniform that wiped the tears clumsily from his cheeks, or the mouth of a boy his own age that muttered meaningless nothings into his ear. We could only wonder at the strangeness of the whole situation. Soldier and Officer, father and son, one eighteen and the other twenty. As he died and I lay there shivering, we could only hope that we might have salvaged something for the next generation, however tiny, even if we could never enjoy it. I dunno. Maybe there will be better times to come. I’m telling you, though, beneath them stars that night, them stars that looked unnaturally bright from where we lay in our grave, it was difficult to imagine. Even if we do survive, I dunno what we will do with ourselves. Us lads.

Katie

[Katie Elizabeth Stewart]

Just been reading through that again, and what a load of **** and how cliched. I'm so appallingly sorry to have posted it, and I shan't do so again on this thread. Please forgive me the disservice I'm doing all the men who served in the war to end all wars, it's almost as bad as Ben Elton.

[Greyhound]

Just delete it, if you're not happy with it.

[Katie Elizabeth Stewart]

Just delete it, if you're not happy with it.

I might well do that. Certainly, I don't want it going in the poll. But there's one person whose opinion I want first. I will reserve my final condemnation of the effort until I have it.

[marina]

Go on then, Katie - give us a clue.

Who is the One?

But if you'll take my advice, never rubbish your own work.

Marina

[Michael Johnson]

I just shoved me flask at him quite blindly, only looking down when he didn't take it off me to find that he had no arms. He'd a perfect, gaping wound at the top of one shoulder, a hole through which you could see sinew and bone, and the blood was pouring staunchlessly. His lifeblood. And looking into his eyes then, I could tell he knew it. I could tell he wasn't ready, that if he could have chosen, it wouldn't have been my hand that held the bottle steady at his suckling lips, or the coarse sleeve of a soldier's uniform that wiped the tears clumsily from his cheeks, or the mouth of a boy his own age that muttered meaningless nothings into his ear. We could only wonder at the strangeness of the whole situation. Soldier and Officer, father and son, one eighteen and the other twenty. As he died and I lay there shivering, we could only hope that we might have salvaged something for the next generation, however tiny, even if we could never enjoy it. I dunno. Maybe there will be better times to come. I'm telling you, though, beneath them stars that night, them stars that looked unnaturally bright from where we lay in our grave, it was difficult to imagine. Even if we do survive, I dunno what we will do with ourselves. Us lads.

Don't sell yourself short, Katie. Perhaps you tried to cover too much, but then you hadn't the time to edit. My selection above I consider to be excellent writing. It has moving imagery, and an intriguing juxtaposition of the roles of officer and man. And overlaying it all, a dreary sense of the futility of war.

You might edit down the prologue, just giving a sense of where he's coming from. The ending is powerful enough.

[Ozzie]

Katie, Great background, from a different angle. Loved the angle. Shall have to read it again to absorb it, as you have covered so much in the story.

In giving the horror and the conditions of the men, you have not done a disservice to the men, but have given yet another reason to make us think of what they went through, and who they were.

I admire your bravery in putting forward a character who some might cringe at, but must of existed. I agree with Micheal's words and Marina's.

Keep on writing!

Cheers

Kim

[AlanCurragh]

Good heavens, Katie - you're much better than Ben Elton! You have certainly not done a dis-service to the men who served.

Would say this - I admire the way you haven't given us an easy conclusion. Harry might or not survive, and isn't really sure whether he wants to anyway. The sense of futility of the war comes through strongly.

Alan

[Landsturm]

Katie, just now I had time to read the whole thing and I'm glad I did. Interesting way to close this month!

Gunboat, my clock says October the first, it's time for a poll (Katie's work included) and the new title...

[Gunboat]

Katie

I agree with everyone elses comments a good piece of writing that has some touches of excellence. As Michael suggested had you had the time you probably would have edited it differently. I think you suffer with the same problem as I do, which is once a seed for a plot germinates in your mind it grows rapidly and branches off in all sorts of directions, it then becomes overgrown and unruly and needs to be controlled and in some case cut right back for it to grow better. None of the offshoots are wasted they can be used again elsewhere in some cases as a seed for a completely new short story.

You certainly shouldn't be so self critical and you shouldn't be deterred from enetering again. I have found MGWAT a really useful testing ground, its a really safe environment to test ideas and different styles of writing. I have found the feedback both encouraging and worthwhile.

Gunboat

Ps. Not sure whether this is literary criticism or Gardeners Question Time