Passion Read Online Free PDF Page A

always pleading with us to prove him right.
    At night when the storm had dropped and we were left in sodden tents with steaming bowls of coffee, none of us spoke out.
    No one said, Let's leave him, let's hate him. We held our bowls in both hands and drank our coffee with the brandy ration he'd sent specially to every man.
    I had to serve him that night and his smile pushed away the madness of arms and legs that pushed in at my ears and mouth.
    I was covered in dead men.
    In the morning, 2,000 new recruits marched into Boulogne.
    Do you ever think of your childhood?
    I think of it when I smell porridge. Sometimes after I've been by the docks I walk into town and use my nose tracking fresh bread and bacon. Always, passing a particular house, that sits like the others in a sort of row, and is the same as them, I smell the slow smell of oats. Sweet but with an edge of salt. Thick like a blanket. I don't know who lives in the house, who is responsible, but I imagine the yellow fire and the black pot. At home we used a copper pot that I polished, loving to polish anything that would keep a shine. My mother made porridge, leaving the oats overnight by the old fire. Then in the morning when her bellows work had sent the sparks shooting up the chimney, she burned the oats brown at the sides, so that the sides were like brown paper lining the pot and the inside slopped white over the edge.
    We trod on a flag floor but in the winter she put down hay and the hay and the oats made us smell like a manger.
    Most of my friends ate hot bread in the mornings.
    I was happy but happy is an adult word. You don't have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Talking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind. Much
    easier to let it blow all over you. This is where I disagree with the philosophers. They talk about passionate things but there is no passion in them. Never talk happiness with a philosopher.
    But I'm not a child any more and often the Kingdom of Heaven eludes me too. Now, words and ideas will always slip themselves in between me and the feeling. Even our birthright feeling, which is to be happy.
    This morning I smell the oats and I see a little boy watching his reflection in a copper pot he's polished. His father comes in and laughs and offers him his shaving mirror instead. But in the shaving mirror the boy can only see one face. In the pot he can see all the distortions of his face. He sees many possible faces and so he sees what he might become.
    The recruits have arrived, most without moustaches, all with apples in their cheeks. Fresh country produce like me. Their faces are open and eager. They're being fussed over, given uniforms and duties to replace the yell for the milk pail and the insistent pigs. The officers shake hands with them; a grown-up thing to do.
    No one mentions yesterday's parade. We're dry, the tents are drying, the soaked barges are upturned in the dock. The sea is innocent and Patrick on his pillar is shaving quiedy. The recruits are being divided into regiments; friends are separated on principle. This is a new start. These boys are men.
    What souvenirs they have brought from home will soon be lost or eaten.
    Odd, the difference that a few months makes. When I came here I was just like them, still am in many ways, but my companions are no longer the shy boys with cannon-fire in their eyes. They are rougher, tougher. Naturally you say, that's what army life is about.
    It's about something else too, something hard to talk about.
    When we came here, we came from our mothers and our sweethearts. We were still used to our mothers with their work- hard arms that could clout the strongest of us and leave our ears ringing. And we courted our sweethearts in the country way. Slow, with the fields that ripen at harvest. Fierce, with the sows that rut the earth. Here, without women, with only our imaginations and a handful of whores,