Chapter 18
On now to Albert. We are running a little behind Lieutenant-Colonel Gallagher’s schedule but we should still reach the town by mid-morning.
I have kept my platoon at the rear of the column so as to avoid running into Captain Beddowes.
With any luck, the Toad and the Snake will remain at the head of the line and Danny will be spared the sight of them.
I glance his way as we leave Authuille and the last resting place of Ollie Murray.
He seems calmer this morning. Perhaps helping me with the letter to Ollie’s mother has settled him in some way.
We sat in the shelter of my tent just before dawn as I scratched out a few lines in pencil, discussing the phrasing between us.
‘It all sounds so... inadequate,’ Danny said, throwing back his head. ‘How do you do this, Stephen?’
I’d shrugged. ‘Because it’s the least I can do.’
Now, marching on through the rain, he offers me a weak smile.
We’re all on our last legs, officers in flowing rain cloaks, infantry splattered with mud.
The exhaustion of the past few days, the sleeplessness after Ollie’s death, it’s catching up with us.
And yet none of the column look as wretched as the figures coming towards us.
An order is bellowed down the line and as one we stand aside to allow motorised ambulances to rattle past. Then, in their wake, the walking wounded, bowed, bloodied, maimed and mutilated, all in their long blue overcoats with the filth-dappled skirts folded back.
‘Jesus Christ,’ Percy says. ‘Who are these poor buggers?’
‘Survivors from Verdun,’ I whisper back. I’d heard that morning of a transport that had been bringing wounded up the line but which had broken down just outside Albert. ‘And keep your tone respectful, Private Stanhope.’
These men have been through a hell that I pray he will never know.
It’s a hell they carry with them too. You can see it in their haunted eyes and the way some of them twitch and shiver as they walk.
The stories of the endless battle at Verdun, a fortress town far beyond the southernmost tip of the British sector, is chilling, even to those of us who have already seen action.
Four months of brutal fighting, thousands dead, and still the battle rages on, devouring men and resources on both sides.
We stand for twenty minutes or more, watching these veterans of hell pass by.
Some hobble on crutches, others, burned and blinded, are guided by their friends.
One with a dent in his head is ferried in a wheelbarrow and sings ‘La Marseillaise’ while swishing his fingers through the air, as if conducting an invisible orchestra.
‘Are you all right?’ Danny asks me.
He’s looking down at my hands. They’re shaking badly.
‘Fine,’ I nod. ‘Men, back into position. Forward march.’
The rain eases as we pass into Albert. I split my platoon off from the main column here and assemble us in what remains of the town square, a bomb-blasted wasteland dominated by the wreckage of the Basilica of Notre-Dame de Brebières.
I’m just negotiating with a quartermaster for billets for the night when a ragamuffin boy runs up to us, waving a note.
‘Lieutenant Wraxall? Is he here? I am searching for Lieutenant Wraxall?’
‘I’m Wraxall,’ I say.
The boy looks relieved. He has probably already tried half a dozen companies. ‘From the Bécourt Chateau, monsieur,’ he pants, holding out a mucky hand.
I drop a coin into his palm and the messenger hurtles off again.
‘What is it?’ Danny asks.
‘I’m summoned to battalion HQ to meet our new CO, Captain Jackson.
Oh well,’ I sigh, daydreams of a nap upon a well-sprung mattress dissolving before my eyes.
‘Better get it out of the way, I suppose. Lieutenant?’ I address the quartermaster.
‘What chance do I have of finding a horse to ride out to Bécourt?’
The whiskery old soldier hems and haws. ‘Not much of one, I’d say.
Every nag in the town’s already spoken for.
But on the sunnier side of things, I know an empty villa that can house you and your boys for the night, long as you don’t mind sharing with a basement full of rats and a roof full of sparrows. ’
‘How far is this battalion HQ?’ Danny asks, resting his kitbag on the ground beside me.
‘A couple of miles, I think.’ I feel my legs ache at the very thought.
Danny nods, his gaze skating around the square. ‘All right, just give us a tick.’
Before I can ask what he’s up to, my squire has sped away into one of the rubble-strewn streets.
Meanwhile the quartermaster takes charge of my platoon.
Spud and Taffy relieve me of my own kitbag, whistling for other men to come forward and take Danny’s, before they are guided off towards the rat-infested, sparrow-stuffed villa.
Too tired to think any more, I slide down the wall behind me and rest my head against the cold stone.
My eyes glaze. My head sinks to my chest. I doze. I dream...
Calm as a mirror, the waters of the estuary lap around the hull of the Fighting Temeraire.
I stand with Danny at her prow, his strong hand resting beside mine upon the rail.
Together, we watch threads of sticky brown smoke bulge out from the funnel of the paddle steamer that draws the old warship to her doom.
I open my mouth to say something. To order, to persuade, to plead.
I want to stop the destruction that awaits her – awaits us all – but I am frozen in place.
Private Ollie Murray is not frozen. He sways high above us, crucified against the crossbeam of the ship’s mast. A figure as pale and poignant as the dead saviour who hangs in my father’s study back home.
Like Christ’s friends and disciples in Rubens’ painting, Danny and I extend our arms to help the poor boy down from his cross, but he is too high for us to reach.
He cries out to the setting sun and his feet weep blood.
Rain begins to fall upon the deck of the Fighting Temeraire.
Only it isn’t rain but clods of wet earth.
Cemetery dirt slapping against the coffin boards of the deck.
Trench mud knocking us to our knees, blinding us, burying us, pulling Danny and I apart until I have lost him in the suffocating blackness.
I am alone.
In the earth.
All alone.
Except.
Kamerad...?
A hand shakes my shoulder, dragging me out of the darkness.
‘Sir, wake up. Stephen, it’s all right.’
I jerk into consciousness, leaping to my feet, blinking against the daylight.
The busyness of the square floods my senses: a parade of pigeons strutting along a wall; workmen in overalls arguing over how best to repair a gun carriage; sunlight flashing in semaphoric shafts through the arches of the half-demolished basilica; a company of soldiers marching past, their captain as proud-chested as the pigeons.
‘Bad dreams?’ Danny asks.
I nod. Then shake my head. ‘What have you got there?’
He’s sitting astride an ancient-looking bicycle, a matching one balanced against his hip.
He grins and gives the bell on the handle a playful trill.
‘Never seen a push bike before, Lieutenant? Well, you’re in for a treat.
You just plant your backside in the saddle, then use your feet to push the pedals and off you go! ’
Taking off my cap, I give the cheeky sod a good swat. ‘I know how to ride a bloody bike.’
He laughs, batting me away, then glances up at the looming tower behind him. ‘Well, as long as you don’t end up taking a tumble like that poor old girl.’
I follow his gaze to where a golden statue hangs precariously from the church tower.
The virgin Mary and her infant Christ had stood atop the massive basilica before a German shell dislodged them.
Now they hang suspended, as if frozen in midfall.
It makes for a bizarre, miraculous, almost macabre sight, catching the imagination of every soldier that marches through Albert.
‘The Hanging Virgin,’ I say. ‘She’s become a sort of mascot for the Tommies of the Somme. They’ve even created a legend about her.’
Danny uses his hand to shade his eyes. ‘Let me guess: when she falls, the war will end.’
I stare at him. ‘That’s right. How did you—?’
He turns to me, his face full of mischief. ‘The bloke who rented me the bikes told me.’
I laugh and swat him again with my cap.
‘So, are we heading off or what?’ Danny asks.
I shake my head. ‘No need for you to accompany me. Get yourself to this villa and I’ll see you later.’
‘Can’t do that,’ Danny says, puffing out his cheeks and pushing off. ‘What kind of squire doesn’t ride out alongside his master?’
I smile and, planting my feet on the pedal, start after him.
Threading through the wreckage of the town, we leave Albert and its fateful statue behind and plunge onto the main road that leads, with Roman straightness, towards the Front. As we cycle, I point ahead to the iron-grey horizon.
‘Keep following this road and it’ll lead you right across No Man’s Land all the way to Bapaume,’ I tell him.
‘That’s the Hun’s version of Albert, about a dozen miles away on their side.
This road is like the central axis for our part in the war.
When the real fighting starts here, this will be at the heart of it. ’
Danny nods sombrely. ‘A dozen miles of ground for how many lives?’
I turn my bicycle south, away from the bleak landscape and guide us slowly into the gentle wooded valley of Bécourt.
Although this tiny hamlet is largely dead ground for the Germans, it has still been found by their artillery, trees blasted to stumps, houses reduced to atoms. Even the old chateau that contains many battalion headquarters has not escaped unscathed.
Pocked with holes, the long carriageway leading up to the house sports a wonky wooden sign daubed with the words PICCADILLY CIRCUS.
Danny and I park our bikes beside the sign and stride over to where a soldier stands guard at the main door.
‘Must have been a swanky gaff once upon a time.’ Danny whistles, his gaze playing over the ivy-choked facade. ‘Now it looks like it’s waiting for a prince to come and wake it with a kiss.’
I smile. ‘Quite the Romantic.’
He smiles back in a way that makes my heart skip. ‘I have my moments.’
We climb the steps and the guard salutes. ‘I’m here to see Captain Gordon Hunter Jackson,’ I say. ‘Could he be informed that Second Lieutenant Wraxall waits without.’
‘Without what?’ Danny laughs when the guard disappears into the building.
I sigh. ‘Official time now, Private. We’re about to meet our new CO.’
Danny snaps out his own salute. ‘Sir!’
Eventually the guard reappears. ‘Captain Jackson will see you in G Room, sir. The library, that is. He asked me to inform you that Captain Beddowes is with him and that they are both looking forward to your report concerning certain recent events.’