Chapter 17
Danny is on the warpath. He wants answers. I do too.
We go first to our platoon, some of whom are still awake, nodding over the embers of their fire.
Seeing us approach, they stagger to their feet and salute.
I think they’ve been waiting to tell what they know, to make their own outrage clear.
They answer my questions but keep glancing at Danny, no doubt aware of the fury printed on his face.
He says nothing, only listens, his fist clenched tight around the strap of his rifle.
He doesn’t even flinch when a lucky German shell sails across the British line and strikes an empty ambulance wagon only a few hundred yards away, shards of wooden shrapnel shooting into the air.
It seems that Captain Beddowes was as good as his word and indeed gave Ollie all the attention he thought the private deserved.
After leaving us at the crucifixion fence, he had returned with Gallagher to the column.
While the colonel rode on ahead, Beddowes had ordered Ollie down from the cart.
When the other men objected, pointing out that the boy could barely stand, the captain had threatened them all with charges of insubordination.
And so together they had helped to rebandage Ollie’s feet, eased on his boots, and assisted him to the road.
The next few miles had pretty much killed him, they all agreed on that.
‘The captain had ridden on by that point,’ Arthur Morse tells us. ‘And even if he hadn’t, me and the fellas had decided enough was enough and he could punish us however he liked, but we weren’t going to let the boy walk another step.’
‘Poor child.’ Spud Pearson nods. ‘Yes, I’ll call him a child, sir, cos in truth he weren’t much older than my grandson back home. Anyway, me and Taff gets hold of him between us and carries him half a mile or more, then Arthur here and some of the other lads took over.’
Taffy Colston bows his huge head. ‘It was rough-going, sir. I won’t lie.’
The fire has died and I glance at faces illuminated only by the smoke-shrouded moon. Young and middle-aged, innocent still or already knocked about by life, they all look back at me with the same harrowed expression.
‘He raved most of the way,’ Arthur says, his voice catching. ‘Raved with delirium or else was quiet because he’d passed out. That were worse in a way, the quiet.’
‘That’s how we brought him into camp, dead to the world,’ Taffy grunts. ‘Except not dead, not then.’
‘I sent one of the lads to fetch a doctor while the rest of us spied out that old barn. We made it as comfortable as we could for him.’
‘There wasn’t a doctor waiting for Ollie?’ I ask. ‘Captain Beddowes promised—’
‘Captain Beddowes made him walk,’ Taffy snaps, then holds up a hand in apology. ‘Forgive me, sir. But it weren’t no surprise that no doctor was waiting for the boy.’
I hear a creak of leather. The sound of Danny’s grip tightening on his rifle strap.
‘The lad finally came back with a medic,’ Arthur says.
‘Decent fella, from the field dressing station behind the line, but looking none too healthy himself, truth be told. He examined Ollie, gave him some stuff for the pain, but told us there was nothing more he could do. The infection was in his blood. Anyway, the doc was needed back at the Front. There’s not much left to tell, sir.
We stayed with the kid, held his hand, asked if he had any messages. ’
‘Did he?’ It’s the first time Danny has spoken. His voice sounds dead and cold, utterly unlike him.
‘He did. He wanted his mother to be told that he loved her. The doctor said that the poor boy was in a fever and that his wits had left him, but I think he knew what was happening to him. Hey now, where are you storming off to, Dan?’
I am much taller than Danny, my stride is longer, but still I have to run to catch up with him.
He dashes between the tents, leaping guy ropes, darting around men half-asleep as they stumble from their billets in search of a latrine.
I don’t shout for him to stop. The short gun battle has died down and the night is as peaceful as any night can be this close to the line.
I don’t want to wake the men if I can help it.
It’s in a warren of streets winding their way to the Front that I finally catch up with him.
My legs have weakened with each passing yard, the toll of the day threatening to bring me to my knees, but I have been in Authuille before.
Captain Danvers and I passed through it in the blizzards of January when the snow was up to our waists.
I know the rough layout of the village, its twists and turns and blind alleys.
I wait now at the mouth of one of these for Danny to retrace his steps.
‘What the hell do you think you’re playing at?’ He tries to step past me but I grasp him by the shoulders. ‘Answer me, Private. Now.’
‘Is that an order?’ he asks.
‘If you like.’ I sigh. ‘Danny, what’s going on?’
‘I need to find this doctor,’ he says. ‘Ask him how Ollie died. I want—’
‘We know how he died,’ I say gently. ‘His feet were badly infected. You helped dress them yourself. The wounds turned septic, that’s all. They were probably already heading that way when we treated them yesterday. But I know what you want the doctor to tell you.’
‘Only the truth,’ he grunts.
I shake my head. ‘You want him to say that Beddowes making Ollie march caused his death. You want someone official to lay all the blame at the captain’s door so that you can – what?
’ I close my eyes. ‘The doctor isn’t going to tell you that, Danny.
The most he might say is that Ollie was made to suffer unnecessarily. ’
‘So the bastard gets away with it,’ Danny says, throwing off my hand.
‘Let me do what I can,’ I say. ‘Let me try anyway.’
Tears shine in his eyes as Danny tries to look away.
Then he suddenly turns and launches his fist into a broken door that lies hanging from one of the ruined villas.
Rotten wood splinters and he kicks at the fallen shards.
Then, without a word, he shakes out his hand, a few drops of blood flicking against the ground.
When I try to reach for him, he pushes me roughly away, insisting that he’s all right.
But the look on his face. I’ve seen that rage before, simmering, barely suppressed.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says, eyes wide as he shakes his head, as if coming out of a dream. ‘Are you hurt? I swear, I didn’t mean to push you.’
Cupping the side of his face, I draw him back to me.
‘Where is all this anger coming from?’ I ask. ‘All this rage?’
He flinches, as if stung. ‘I’m not...’ He looks at me determinedly. ‘Stephen, I promise you, the anger, it’s not...’
‘Not what?’ I ask gently.
In answer, he lifts his own hand and, mirroring me, gently touches the scarred flesh where my ear used to be.
It takes all my willpower not to pull away.
No one has touched that hideous landscape of skin since the doctor stitched it all back together.
Even I hate to touch it, not because of its ugliness but because of what it represents.
A moment in the trenches when everything changed.
We stand like this for a time, in the darkened mouth of the alley, the houses around us pulverised and abandoned.
No one at those glassless windows, no one in the gaping doorways.
No one to see as he draws me close and wraps his arms tight around me.
Tight, until all I can feel is the thud of his heart against my own.
I feel safe here. Safer than I’ve felt since that night with Michael in the summer house before we were discovered by my father.
11th June
A black wooden cross gleams in the downpour as rain pummels the rough-hewn coffin below.
Finally, the heat of the past couple of days has broken and now, while the sun struggles over the horizon, a bloat of thunderheads blot the eastern sky.
After a little persuasion from me, a chaplain from some local regiment has agreed to rise early and perform the service.
As he speaks his final prayer and makes the sign of the cross, he invites Danny to step forward.
The entire platoon bows its head.
‘Abide with me, fast falls the eventide;
The darkness deepens, Lord with me abide...’
Danny’s voice is sweet yet powerful. I see Percy sniff and wipe his eyes, Arthur Morse brush away what he would probably claim is only the rain from his face.
Spud and Taffy stand with hands folded, their eyes downcast. As I listen to Danny, I think of the two of us last night, sitting around a fire we’d built outside the old barn, keeping vigil for Ollie.
We had sat apart, perhaps still a little stunned by the intimacy we’d shared in the alleyway.
Then Danny had lifted his gaze to the stars.
‘Ollie is the first man I know to die out here,’ he said. ‘Do you ever get used to it?’
Kamerad. My old platoon lying in pieces around me. Captain Danvers, a mangled corpse lying on the ground outside our dugout. A German invader, a boy, claiming a kind of comradeship with me before I ended his life.
‘I don’t know,’ I told him truthfully. ‘Perhaps you never should.’
A clod of earth smacks against the coffin lid and I blink myself back into the present.
Danny has stopped singing and the men are lining up to throw their own bit of dirt into the grave.
Rain lashes the pine lid, pulping their offerings into dirty smears.
The service is over. Soldiers begin to shovel the earth back into place.
Private Ollie Murray is dead and buried.
It’s time to move on. I thank the chaplain for his time and the yawning clergyman shrugs.
For a moment I think of my father in his place, shrugging away the death of a boy as part of some grand unknowable scheme.
I think Father would survive very well out here.
‘Sad, of course,’ the chaplain says. ‘But perhaps in a way it’s a blessing. After all, I understand he was only in France a couple of days. Unlike the rest of your platoon, the poor devil never had chance to witness the real horror of this war.’