Two Extracts from The Ghost Road by Pat Barker
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EnglishVoice Age
Middle Aged (35-54)Accents
British (General)Transcript
Note: Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and may contain errors.
October 25th. Oh, in is to be caught marshalled mainly because he speaks French better than anybody else. And all the local girls make a beeline for him, not just thanking him either, but actually kissing him. I caught his eye while all this was going on, and I thought I detected an answering gleam of irony or whatever. Anyway, the great un kissed a thoroughly fed up with him and have convened a sultan's court marshal shot at dawn. I shouldn't wonder. Wyatt, meanwhile, is visiting a farmhouse on the outskirts of the village where lives in accommodating widow and her equally accommodating but rather more Newbold daughters. At this very moment, probably he's dipping his wick, where many a German wick has dipped before it. A free song wasted on Wyatt, believe me. But this morning I saw a woman in the village with sunlight on her hair, looking at the ground. Even like that in semi darkness, the problem became dreadfully apparent, far clearer than it is on any of the maps that we spent hours of every day bent over them. There are two possibilities. Either you bombard the opposite bank so heavily that no machine gunner can possibly survive, in which case, the ditches and quite possibly even the Canal Bank will burst, and the field on the other side will become a nightmare of, well, Tsering mud 10 ft deep, as bad as anything at passion Dale or you keep the bombardment light, move it on quickly and wait for the infantry to catch up. In that case, you take the risk that unscathed machine gunners will pop up all over the place and settle down for a nice bit of concentrated target practise. It's a choice between passion, Dale and the some only a miniature version of each. But then that's not much of a consolation. It only takes one bullet. Pirmin. They've chosen the some. This afternoon we had a joint briefing with the Lancashire Fusiliers on our left marshal of the 10 Wounds. Was there surprisingly outspoken? I thought you can afford to be when you're so covered in wound stripes and medals, it's starting to look like an eccentric form of camouflage, he said. It's men stand no chance of getting up the slope with machine guns still intact above them and no cover building a bridge in the open under the sort of fire we're likely to encounter is impossible. The whole operation's insane. The chances of success are zero. Nobody argued with him. I mean, nobody discussed it. We were just told flatly a simple, unsupported assertion that the weight of the artillery would overcome all opposition. I think those words sent a chill down the spine of every man there who remembered the some Marshall through his pencil down and sat with his arms folded silent for the rest of the briefing. So here we sit writing letters. Supplies. Take a long time to get here because the Germans blocked the roads and blew up the bridges as they withdrew. Nobody has been inside a proper shop for six weeks, so I keep tearing pages out of the back of this book and giving them to people. Not many left now, but enough