Chapter 23
We speak with paper and pencil, conversations passed between us in eloquent silence.
While Danny scribbles his latest response, I take out Grandpa’s pocket watch and squint at the time.
Ten to midnight. Another hour to check the last German sentry change and we can call it a night.
I roll my head from side to side, hear the bones crackle in my neck.
It’s been thirteen hours since we crawled into this old abandoned listening post, situated well out in No Man’s Land.
A friendly, plummy-voiced officer from the Northumberland Fusiliers had told us about it.
‘Not sure why the sappers gave it up,’ he’d said, offering us both a cigarette.
Danny declined while I lit up. ‘Could be something structural, but we’re damned close here to the Huns’ Front line, so it might suit your purposes very well.
Only, if the whole thing comes down on your heads, don’t blame me, what? ’
Glancing into the dark hole that led out from the front of the trench, we’d decided it was worth a try.
From my knowledge of the lie of the land, I was confident that it would give a good view of the German position around the occupied town of La Boisselle.
And so we had left our kitbags with the officer and entered on hands and knees, our shoulders brushing the earthen walls, mouths clamped shut against billows of disturbed dirt.
It had been a nervy few minutes. After living in a cramped dugout, I thought I was pretty much immune to claustrophobia, but creeping along that narrow passage, with its creaky wooden struts holding up tonnes of earth above our heads, I’d realised how wrong I was.
I imagined us passing under those vicious coils of barbed wire that defended our trenches, then beneath the dead zone of No Man’s Land, craters clustered either side of us, some still cradling unexploded shells.
At last, we’d emerged into the listening post, a tiny chamber just large enough for two men to sit opposite one another.
Overhead, a small hole in the roof had been disguised by a strip of netting covered with stones and rough grass.
‘Well, that was certainly an experie—’ Danny began, pulling himself into a cross-legged position.
I’d quickly leaned over and placed my hand against his mouth.
Voices tend to carry across No Man’s Land, and we were close enough now that a bored German sentry might catch even the faintest whisper.
Danny’s startled blue eyes stared back at me.
As I slowly pulled my hand away, he had winced, mouthing: Sorry.
I gave a nervous smile and tried to ignore the tingling in my stomach.
The sensation of his lips pressed against my palm.
.. Reaching into the small satchel I had dragged along the tunnel behind me, I took out a bundle of loose paper and a pencil.
Although it was gloomy in the chamber, shafts of daylight battled through gaps in the grass ceiling and allowed enough illumination to write by. Apology accepted, big mouth.
Danny took the note, read it with a grin, then scrunched it into a ball and launched it playfully at my head.
And so the hours passed. To begin, I’d taken the small retractable periscope from my satchel and, easing it through the camouflaged ceiling, surveyed our immediate surroundings.
I then divided a couple of sheets of paper into a grid system and started mapping out portions of No Man’s Land: the rise and fall of the ground, the odd isolated clump of trees, every snarl of enemy wire, each shell crater and scrap of discarded metal.
Anything that might slow down our advancing troops.
It was a painstaking process with Danny planting his eye to the periscope to check my observations.
That done, I sketched what I could see of the German trenches themselves – machine gun nests and the height of their parapets, any evidence of fresh fortifications and the placement of weapons.
At one point I noticed a work party busy replacing a wall of rotten sandbags.
I passed Danny a note: Look where those men are working. What do you see?
He took the periscope, watched for a while, then scribbled back: They’re wobbling a lot. On high ladders. Trench might go very deep. Like you said at HQ, if their dugouts are far underground then bombardment might not have much effect.
I nodded grimly and noted the observation on a separate page.
The day wore on. Between a couple of sentry reliefs and the arrival of a ration party, there were acres of time when nothing happened. We filled it with our scribbled conversations.
Tell me about home.
I took the note from Danny and thought for a moment, picturing my old bedroom: the framed biblical samplers on the wall over my bed, my neatly ordered desk, my books, my cricket bat propped in the corner, my sketches stowed safely away in a drawer.
Not much to tell. Just me, my mother and father.
And your drawings. I’ve only seen one of them but it was incredible.
I shrugged.
That painting I cut out for you – the old ship – why does it mean so much to you?
Reading his note, I’d reached into my pocket and brought out the print. Carefully, I unfolded The Fighting Temeraire and handed it to him.
My father took me to the National Gallery – I wrote – and I remember catching sight of it between all these bustling bodies.
I think – I hesitated, pencil poised above the page, trying to recapture that feeling from long ago.
It called to me. Its sadness, its power.
I could feel the truth of it. Does that make any sense?
Danny looked up from the note. He seemed to study me for a while before dipping his head to the page: Yes! This is what music – what singing – means to me! It’s beyond words to explain.
Your singing has the power of paintings, I wrote back.
He read this and shook his head, blushing.
I’ve seen it, Danny. You bring joy and comfort with your voice. I paused. In my mind, I could picture it again, a distraught Ollie lying on the ground, Danny soothing him with his song:
‘The boy I love is up in the gallery,
The boy I love is looking now at me...’
A hand gripped my knee. Danny mouthed: Stephen? Are you all right?
I put down the piece of paper and placed my hand over his.
It felt warm, strong, steady, reassuring.
I am, I mouthed back. He lifted his thumb in response and very gently stroked the side of my index finger.
I swallowed hard. The touch of his skin on mine.
He had held me close in that alleyway back in Authuille, our hearts hammering together, but this was a quieter kind of intimacy.
Again, I felt the flutter in my stomach, a thrilling heat radiating into every corner of my body, making the little hairs on my arms stand to attention.
I licked my lips. His own lips, so soft, so beautiful, half-open, sketching a hesitant smile.
Withdrawing his hand from my knee, he wrote: Can I ask – who was the boy in your sketch? The one from the train?
I took a deep breath. Images flickered through my head like cartoons in a child’s flipbook.
Years of friendship condensed into a single burst – two small boys meeting outside a school gate, shy introductions encouraged by our mothers; games of Robin Hood in the woods with bamboo bows and arrows; summer days swimming in the river; winter-blue hands building snowmen; jokes, laughter, tears, tantrums, arguments and reconciliations, birthdays, Christmases.
.. A touch of lips in the summer house; a final goodbye: We’ll get through this, Stephen.
We’ll survive and we’ll see each other again, I promise.
I wrote: Someone I cared about at school. Very much. His name was Michael.
I turned away, glancing back down the tunnel to the pinpoint of light shining at its end. Danny again reached for my hand. He held it for a long time.
Hours passed. The spears of daylight weakened.
We made more observations – passing patrols, the changing of a gunner.
At just after seven in the evening, the Front was quiet again and Danny pulled some packages from his satchel, all wrapped up in greaseproof paper.
Corned beef sandwiches with thick buttered bread.
When we’d finished eating, he passed me another note.
Will you ever sketch me?
I wanted to draw him, very much. I thought of that moment in the garden of the old villa.
Danny standing naked beside the waterlogged crater, his beautiful body dazzled by moonlight.
The sweep of his back, the slope of his strong shoulders, that crop of Titian curls stark against the marble of his skin.
How could I even begin to capture all that on a scrap of paper in the gloom of this underground chamber?
Another time.
Danny read and smiled, but I could see the disappointment in his eyes.
The night wore on.
Now, approaching midnight, I pull out the periscope for the last time and slide it through the grass-covered ceiling.
No Man’s Land rolls out in all its eerie emptiness, a blighted nothing lying under the indifferent gaze of the moon.
The enemy trenches appear quiet and still.
Except... a movement just to the south. The gleam of a black barrel, shiny as sealskin, emerging from a camouflaged parapet.
I hear a crack and in the next moment the periscope in my hand shatters, bits of metal and glass flying everywhere.
Voices erupt out of the night, a German calling up to his gunner.
They’ve seen where we’re hiding!
Danny grabs my hands, turning them over in the pale shafts of moonlight.
I see blood in my palms and think again of that Rubens painting in my father’s study.
Christ with his still-bleeding wounds, cut down from his cross.
Danny opens his mouth to speak but before the words can leave his lips, the drum of a hundred bullets punches into the earth above our heads.
And now other voices are shouting, British soldiers hollering down the hole.
‘Get the hell out of there, lads! You’ve been spotted! Quick about it now, or you’re both dead men!’