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trench, the attackers surging so close to his position that he could see every detail of their faces as they fell to his platoon’s frantic rifle-fire. Afterwards, my grandfather stared in disbelief at the shreds of skin smoking and peeling from his right hand; the bolt of his Lee–Enfield .303 had become almostred-hot during the intense firing. He couldn’t understand why the mechanism hadn’t jammed.
    Then there was the sight of a comrade, one arm cleanly shot off by a burst of machine-gun fire, running in tight circles, screaming, before collapsing in death.
    One especially vivid glimpse into hell took place on a warm summer’s afternoon when Granddad was sent with a message to the field hospital. When he got there he heard peculiar growling noises coming from behind a tent. Curious, he went to see what it was.
    Four or five men were suspended, upside down, from meat hooks clipped to a metal A-frame. They were in the last stages of lockjaw–tetanus–and as their spines arched in the agonising death throes, medics thought some small relief could be found by inverting them.
    Within days of arriving at the British trenches near Rouen, Granddad, like everyone else, was lousy. When the parasites weren’t dining on their host, they would hide in the seams of the men’s uniforms. The soldiers who’d been out there for a while showed the boy from Shropshire how to de-louse clothing, passing the flame of a candle smoothly along the stitching, paying special attention to the backs of collars. On cold nights nobody wanted to take off their tunic, and the men would help each other burn lice off the backs of their uniforms.
    When I was about fifteen I once asked my grandfather if, as a young man barely twenty, he had been afraid of dying. Actually, I didn’t. By then I had learned that direct questions about his experiences in the trenches never got a reply; onehad to pose them as more thoughtful musings. I said something like: ‘I expect a lot of you–especially the younger ones–would have been very shocked and afraid. One minute you were safe in England, the next you were in the lines, fighting for your lives.’
    After the long pause that always followed such not-so-subtle attempts to get him to describe his experiences, he answered: ‘Well, you see…we didn’t really talk about all that. No point. I think there was a silly song at the time, “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here.” Something like that. Everyone was in the same boat and you just had to get on with things and do your best…knowing it was the same for everyone was a sort of help.’
    And beyond this handful of stories and comments, my grandfather’s war withdraws itself into a privacy. Except for this postscript. After he had told me about the men dying of tetanus, I asked another question–one too many, I think, although there was no reproach in my grandfather’s eyes as he looked steadily into mine. I can clearly remember the scene: we were standing in a glade in an autumnal Epping Forest, foraging for sweet chestnuts. Finally he spoke. ‘Believe me, Richard…that was nothing like the worst of it.’
    God knows what appalling secrets my grandfather–and millions like him–kept locked inside their heads. Some literally went mad, others withdrew into an interior world for the rest of their lives. Granddad probably saw himself as a survivor. He had managed to absorb the crushing fate of being abandoned as a child, and had long ago determined his own strategy to reverse it, a strategy fully in place as he preparedto head home after the armistice in late 1918, more or less in one piece. He had lost part of one foot, from a machine-gun burst, and would be permanently deaf in one ear after a shell landed close to his trench. Both wounds were more or less hidden disabilities: his one good ear allowed him to continue to appreciate music, although years later the arrival of stereo hi-fi would be of little interest to him; the