The First Casualty Read Online Free PDF

Beauty.’
    ‘Good. No need to read it then, eh? Put away your satchel, little schoolboy, and dance awhile with me instead.’
    ‘I think you’re very cruel,’ Stamford said, tears starting in his eyes. ‘I’m a poet, just like you. I thought that you might respect that.’
    ‘I’m not a poet, darling. Not any more. Bored with it. Such a yawn, don’t you know. Haven’t written a thing in months. Not a bean. And by the way, have you any idea how many people come up to me and want me to read their silly stuff? They send it to me in the bloody post! Simply everyone’s a poet these days, darling! I think that’s why I’ve chucked it in, just too, too common for words .’
    ‘So you won’t read my work?’
    ‘No, little poet, I will not.’
    ‘I see.’
    Stamford put his satchel aside.
    ‘Can we still be friends?’ he enquired. ‘Even though you think me contemptible?’
    ‘Darling! Contemptible? Whatever gave you that idea? I think you’re sweet and lovely and very, very beautiful and honestly if I were ever again to read anyone’s poems I should read yours first and only yours but, you see, I shan’t, ever…and tonight, well, wouldn’t it be more fun to dance?’
    The pianist was playing a waltz and Abercrombie took Stamford by the hand.
    ‘Come along, sweetie,’ he said. ‘I’ll be Albert, you be Doris.’
    Together they waltzed as best they could in the limited space available in front of Mr Bartholomew’s little bar. Two or three other couples shared the floor and they all danced together until, one by one, they drifted towards the staircase.

FIVE
    A bath in a brewery
    Just as Kingsley was watching Agnes disappear and Viscount Abercrombie and his young friend were dancing a waltz together in the tiny bar of the Lavender Lamp, across the Channel in the small Belgian village of Wytschaete a large group of private soldiers of the 5th Battalion East Lancs were awaiting their first bath in many weeks.
    Wytschaete had been a tiny village with few comforts and amenities even before it had been engulfed by the various battles of the Ypres salient. Now, three years into the carnage, there was very little left of it. Its buildings were all ruins, its singled cobbled street no more than a muddy ditch, its church spire had been atomized and what trees and flowers had ever grown there grew no longer. The little village did, however, have one supreme advantage to recommend it to the men of the 5th Battalion of the East Lancashire Regiment. It stood (or had once stood and now lay) a whole two miles from what was currently the Wipers front line. This was why the regiment had selected it as one of the locations in which it attempted to provide brief respites from the line for its exhausted soldiers.
    The Wytschaete army bathhouse was located, as was often the case with army bathhouses, in an old brewery. This one had been partially shelled out, but the sappers had done a decent job of putting in a replacement roof and the brewery plumbing within had been efficiently converted to provide a communal shower.
    A group of about fifty men stood outside it amongst the shattered walls of the next-door building, their towels flung across the shoulders of their filthy uniforms. They smoked their fags and waited for the fifty men within to complete their wash.
    ‘I can remember when we went in only twelve at a time,’ one man grumbled, ‘and we had baths then, proper barrels filled with lovely hot water, and five minutes all alone to soak. Not like now where we stand on duckboards and the army pisses all over us.’
    Might as well stay in the trenches and wait for rain.
    ‘Wouldn’t ‘ave long to wait,’ another man joked. ‘Not in bleeding Wipers. I reckon your Belgian civvie is part fish.’
    ‘ And you kept your own clothes then,’ the grumbler insisted. ‘They was numbered before you went in and medical orderlies brushed ‘em and ironed out the seams for bugs while you were ‘aving your tub, and they give