Chapter 21
I sit alone in an attic room, a family of sleeping sparrows nestled in the rafters above my head.
Through the hole in the roof that is their doorway, I can glimpse the trench-deep darkness of a starless sky.
The villa groans and creaks around me but otherwise the night is still.
No boom of artillery, no machine gun rattle.
For long stretches of time, it can be like this at the Front.
The war isn’t always blood and bellow; sometimes it teases you with a reminder of what peace was like.
Scattered throughout the villa, my men are asleep.
I should be too. Tomorrow I step back into the war proper.
I know what awaits me – the noise and the filth, the endless living on your nerves.
Only this time I suppose it will be different.
I think again of our journey back from the chateau, that winding cycle ride through wooded valleys and past untenanted houses.
‘So what do you think of their plan?’ Danny asked me.
‘You mean the big push or our little mission before it all kicks off?’
He shrugged. ‘Both, I suppose.’
‘Our part makes sense,’ I sighed. Although in truth it worried me.
There are dangers aplenty in a trench but at least the patterns of your own small bit of ditch are largely predictable.
But continually moving through a network of trenches?
The hazards we routinely face – snipers, enemy raids, mines laid by Hun tunnelling parties – begin to multiply.
Even as I thought this, however, I knew how absurd it sounded.
In a couple of weeks, we would all be thrust into the rat-trap of No Man’s Land.
Lifting my foot from the pedal, I had reached out and tapped Danny’s ankle. ‘What do you think of it?’
‘Of the bombardment? Of us going over the top? I think...’ He shook his head. ‘I think a lot of families will be getting a lot of letters they don’t want to read.’
I nodded. ‘I think Captain Jackson has his doubts too. What did you make of him?’
Danny surprised me with his answer. ‘I liked him very much.’
I laughed at that. ‘Even after he ordered you to apologise to Beddowes?’
‘Not my favourite moment,’ he admitted. ‘But I thought he was a decent man. Honourable, you know? And rather good-looking.’
A schoolboy blush erupted involuntarily across my cheeks. ‘Yes, I... I suppose he was.’
‘Although,’ Danny mused, reaching out with his own foot and tapping my shin. ‘Not really my type.’
Blushing harder than ever, I fixed my gaze back on the road. What had he meant by that? He surely didn’t mean that I’m his type.
‘Race you back to the villa,’ I said, and with a grin, pushed down hard on the pedals.
Laughing, we hurtled together through the woodland and the valleys, scattering birds in our wake, releasing the handlebars on the few straight patches of road, throwing our arms to the sky and whooping like the children we had been, not all that long ago.
It only hits me now, sitting alone in this empty attic, that perhaps Danny’s example is rubbing off on me.
Am I reclaiming something of my old self?
I had hoped to save him in some way. Is he saving me instead?
I lift my hand and brush the ruined remnants of my ear.
Do I dare tell him my story? That story he thinks he already knows – a tale of heroism that earned his commanding officer the MC.
How would he react if he heard the truth?
That all I did was play dead and then take a single soldier by surprise?
A sound from downstairs – the squeak and snap of the back door.
I leave the table and go over to the cobwebbed window that looks onto the garden.
There, under the shadow of a twisted elm that grows slantwise out of the earth, I watch a barefoot figure stand motionless at the edge of a huge shell crater.
Returning from their afternoon of training, some of the men had run to this spot, shedding their uniforms onto the grass and plunging into the rain-filled hole.
Laughter had filled the air and, in that brief moment, the cares of the war had seemed to lift from their shoulders.
Now I hold my breath as I see Danny pull off his shirt and trousers.
He stands for a moment, naked at the crater edge, a splash of moonlight on the firm pale skin of his back.
Then he stretches his arms to the sky, fingers splayed.
I notice the twist of muscle in his neck, the pepper of freckles across his shoulders and down his spine, the angle of his hips, the curve of his buttocks.
He is perfect, like a living artwork. Something I could never hope to capture in paint or pencil.
And tomorrow I will be the one to guide him to a place where that perfection might well be annihilated.
I turn away from the window. I hear a splash. I close my eyes.
12th June
Ghosts await me on the last stretch of our march to the Front.
On the waterlogged mile before we reach the communication trench, I see a soldier whose name I’ve forgotten.
He is the mayfly private who fell in the storms of December and who died from a sniper’s bullet only minutes after entering the trenches.
He stands, not in the summer rain that falls around us, but in a blizzard of white, waving cheerily, a snow-speckled bullet hole below his right cheek.
I grasp the strap of my kitbag, commanding my hands to stop shaking.
Kindness had killed him. The kindness of Captain Danvers, who waits up ahead with the rest of my old platoon at the entry point of the sunken road. The gateway to the Front line.
‘Sir? What’s the matter?’ Danny whispers at my side.
I bow my head. ‘Nothing. Just memories.’
Do I look afraid? Perhaps. Who wouldn’t in this place, the shadows deepening around us as we step into the long communication trench? Captain Jackson had been delayed at battalion headquarters for most of the day and so by the time we set out from Albert it was nearly dusk.
‘I’m sorry to have made you wait all day,’ he’d said in his quiet way.
‘I got caught up in some last-minute briefings with Lieutenant-Colonel Gallagher. You’re an experienced officer, Wraxall, so I don’t need to tell you that my complaint about Private McCormick’s punishment fell on deaf ears.
Gallagher accepted your version of events, though – that Danny served his allotted time and that the guard’s story shouldn’t be accepted at face value.
’ He had glanced at me then, those searing eyes searching mine.
‘But he maintains the punishment was justified. He also dismisses any talk of negligence leading to the death of Private Murray. Captain Beddowes is off the hook.’
I nodded grimly. ‘I never imagined he was ever on it.’
‘I’m sorry anyway,’ Jackson said. ‘If the rules were different then perhaps—’
‘The rules,’ I mused, looking over to where Danny marched alongside Percy and Robert. ‘Who do they protect, I wonder?’
‘A fair question,’ Jackson conceded. Then, in a murmur, ‘But best not asked out loud.’
Now the ghost of Captain Danvers stands on the plateau above the sunken road and watches me pass below, a new commanding officer at my side. Jackson is not unlike Danvers, I think. They are both kind men.
Rain plinks against my helmet. A flare goes up, bleaching the world for a second or two, making our marching shadows monstrous.
But the dead cast no shadow. Still I feel them watching me, blood-stained and ragged, their silence impenetrable.
In my head, I scream at them: What do you want?
I came back, didn’t I? Just like you ordered me to.
I could’ve stayed home, I had the chance; I could’ve killed myself, I wanted to.
I look back at Danny, his encouraging smile, only a hint of trepidation in those frank blue eyes. I wanted to... until I found him.
‘Steady, men,’ Jackson says in that gentle yet commanding way. He has noticed the first sign of jitters among them. ‘Steady.’
I turn my head. I see Arthur Morse stumble as the earthen walls rise up, then blow out his cheeks as if whistling his nerves away.
Taffy grips the straps of his kitbag, keeps his gaze fixed on the man in front.
The trench narrows and we move into single file.
Stray soldiers coming in the opposite direction step into dugouts or niches to allow us to pass, murmuring a hello and a good luck to the new recruits.
The ground underfoot softens, squelches, sucks, splashes.
Duckboards begin to slide beneath our boots.
A match erupts in the gloom and someone shouts to put it out.
In that brief flicker, I see the trench wall beside me, wooden struts and woven sticks embedded in compacted mud, everything slickly green.
Familiar smells reach out, sparking memories: the iron tang of stagnant water, the catch of burned powder and oil, that indescribable stench of men living in filth and fear and brotherhood and boredom.
Finally we reach the junction which marks the forward trench.
We are here at last. The Front. It stretches out either side of us – the rat’s maze, the shooting gallery, the mouth of the meatgrinder.
On now through our zigzagging section, some stumbling in the dark, knocking knees against stray planks and ammunition boxes, muttering curses under their breath.
The moon rides in the column of sky above us, dulled only by the odd enemy flare, a fearful brightness that makes some of the men crouch so low, the swilling mud almost touches their chin.
‘Is it always like this?’ Danny murmurs.
Does he mean the mud? Yes, it is. Even in the driest weather, mud is our constant companion.
We’ve dug so deep that these avenues almost always run wet.
And what with the ceaseless stamp of boots and the eternal scrape of spades, ploughing and reploughing, building walls and burrows over and over, is it any wonder that this earth never stops bleeding?
On now. On past landmarks I recognise well: the cubbyhole in which Geordie Peters swore blind he’d seen a rat the size of a poodle; the fire step from where Private Beattie had flashed his backside at the Hun; and a little further along, a grinning human skull planted into the wall.
‘What the hell is that?’ Danny whispers into my ear.
‘No one knows his name,’ I reply. ‘We think he must be a French soldier from the days when they held this section of the line. Some people think he was buried when a shell hit the old trench and that they couldn’t dig him out in time.
Then, when we were shoring up a bit of wall, we uncovered him.
The men, they...’ I find it hard to speak the words out loud.
‘Some of them rub his head for luck as they pass by.’
I glance back. My platoon has stopped and a few are staring at the shiny pate of the unknown soldier.
Then one by one, they reach out and gently touch the hollow-eyed totem.
I sigh. It’s begun. The grasping at superstition, the haggling with death, the path that will one day lead them to making jokes about their dead friends stranded out in No Man’s Land.
How’s the weather treating you, Stan? What’s the news from up top?
‘Sir?’
Danny grips my shoulder. He hasn’t joined the others in the ritual.
I’m glad. But why should I laugh at their superstitions when all I see around me are phantoms?
I know the dead boy isn’t here, waiting for me at the end of this shadowy sweep of trench.
I know the bodies littered at his feet are all inside my head.
That isn’t really the corpse of Captain Danvers outside our old dugout, that isn’t Geordie Peters blown into a dozen pieces against the wall.
The German soldier isn’t looking at me, his eyes dull in the dark. He isn’t speaking. He isn’t.
Kamerad.
‘Sir? Lieutenant Wraxall?’
I shrug off Danny’s hand. I’m fine. I’m where I belong.
I’m home.