Chapter 26
While most of the platoon remain on duty, a small party of us leave early the next morning, bearing Arthur Morse’s body between us.
We carry him on a stretcher back to Maricourt where, without too much fuss, a pine box, a chaplain and a couple of shovels are rustled up.
One of the ever-expanding cemeteries next to a French church serves as the private’s resting place, a bottle containing a slip of paper with his name, regiment and rank placed beside him in the coffin.
While the padre reads the burial service and Danny sings a lilting hymn, Captain Jackson makes careful note of the exact location of the grave.
This done, we all help to fill in the hole, then salute and begin the tedious march back to the trenches.
It’s a fine morning after last night’s storm.
Bees bob across our path, larks trill in the valley below, a riot of roses smothering the burned-out memory of a house sweeten the air.
This could be England, I think, Ollie’s words coming back to me.
It could indeed, apart from the sunken road lying ahead of us.
We walk towards it in silence. The atmosphere today is not the same as it was after Ollie’s funeral.
I can tell from the sullen, almost anxious mood of Danny, Percy, Taffy and the rest that an awful truth has dawned upon them.
Ollie was the first of them to die and it had struck them hard for the tragedy it was.
Arthur’s death is different and they don’t want to admit why: that this is a first step on the road to death losing some of its power and becoming as routine to them as oiling their rifle or darning their socks.
I should reassure them, I suppose. Tell them that they may fear the blunting of their emotions but that death never completely loses its sting.
It may bide its time, piling slaughter upon slaughter, until you wonder if you can still feel anything at all.
And then, out of nowhere, it will reach into your chest and squeeze your heart so tight that you reel back, grateful and frightened by the knowledge that you’re still a human being.
I felt something like this when I saw that black-edged card in Michael’s mother’s window.
I felt it again last night when I thought Danny was dead.
But I’m not sure you can explain such things. It’s knowledge these men need to come by the hard way.
‘Private McCormick tells me you had quite a time of it on your first reconnaissance,’ Jackson says. He turns that piercing gaze on me. ‘Sure you’re all right to go back out again today?’
I look ahead to where Danny has just entered the communication trench with Spud and Percy.
We didn’t have a chance to speak much last night.
After stowing Arthur’s body in a vacant cubbyhole, the captain had ordered everyone not on watch to get to their beds, and so all we’d managed were a few words regarding Danny’s visit to HQ.
Apparently, Captain Beddowes had been too busy to receive our report personally and Danny had been forced to leave it with a guard at the door.
A fact that makes me glad that I’ve decided to keep copies, written up by Danny, in case the originals go astray.
In all honesty, I wouldn’t put anything past Beddowes.
Anyway, that was all Danny had been able to tell me before we retired, me to the dugout I shared with Jackson, Danny to his own separate cubbyhole.
I had lain awake in my bunk for hours afterwards, remembering how he’d held me following the tunnel collapse, longing to be held like that again.
‘Private McCormick shouldn’t have worried you,’ I say to Jackson.
‘Nonsense,’ he grunts, then smiles. ‘The man’s your squire, isn’t he? Your welfare is his priority. Being buried alive is not something to shrug off, Lieutenant.’
I shake my head. ‘I’m fine, sir. Anyway, I believe we’ve already gathered some valuable intelligence.’
Jackson nods. ‘Your observations about the depth of the German trenches. Yes, Danny told me. Potentially very concerning.’
‘I also got a good view of their entanglements yesterday from the hills overlooking Ovillers,’ I say. ‘I made a few sketches and I think Danny could be right about our guns not making a big enough dent in the wire.’
‘Well, if you’re sure you’re up to heading out again, let’s see what further intelligence you two can gather.
Oh, and Lieutenant?’ I glance at the captain and find his gaze fixed on Danny.
‘Be careful, won’t you? I have a great deal of respect for you both and I wouldn’t like to see you come to harm. ’
There’s no menace in Jackson’s voice, only concern. I find it both reassuring and worrying.
Our kitbags repacked, we start out, moving further north along the line.
At first Danny is quiet, the death of Arthur Morse probably playing on his mind.
But as the miles pass and we leave the trenches to gain higher ground, he begins to smile again.
Perhaps it’s the warmth of the sun on our skin or maybe the view that lightens his mood.
With our backs to the Front, it is possible to forget the war, if only for a moment.
Dandelion and pimpernel flame the untamed fields that stretch to the horizon.
Insects buzz in a blaze of yellow mustard while a hare appears at a fencepost, the sun glowing red through his quivering ears.
‘Let’s not ever turn around,’ Danny says. ‘Let’s pretend that this is all there is to see.’
‘If only we could,’ I sigh.
He turns to me, blinking against the light. ‘How are you?’ He trails his fingers gently against my bandaged hand, his touch igniting fire under my skin. ‘The other night... You spoke in your sleep. You said his name. Michael.’
‘Did I?’
He asks softly, ‘Where did he die?’
‘Here.’ I close my eyes. ‘Somewhere close by, I think.’
‘How—?’
‘I don’t know. Please, Danny, don’t ask me.’ I take a breath, open my eyes, trace the back of his hand with my fingertips. ‘I don’t want to know.’
‘Sometimes it’s better not to know upsetting things.’ He drops his hands to his sides, balling them into fists. When I reach for him, he flinches away as if I’d struck him. ‘Sorry, I’m... I’m all right. Come on, let’s get to work.’
I feel as if he were on the brink of telling me something. I also know that if I push now then he might never tell it. And so we continue with the mission we’ve been assigned, secrets kept, for now.
It turns out to be a long day. We head first in the direction of Fricourt where, after making diagrams of the German defences, we notice that every ravine and hollow on the British side has been converted into a battery position with dozens of big guns lined up, ready to fire.
Around this area, a swarm of signallers are at work, pouring like ants over miles of cables laid out to form a vast new telephone system.
I glance at Danny and wonder what kind of casualty reports might soon be zipping along those wires.
Moving on, we come to yet another ruined French village, its remaining walls honeycombed with shrapnel. A sergeant we meet in the square mentions a church tower that is still just about vertical and, after a perilous climb up its disintegrating staircase, we find ourselves in the belfry.
‘Feels like a stiff wind will knock it down.’ Danny speaks very softly, as if he believes his voice alone might be enough to topple the tower. ‘Everything else here is pretty much flattened, I wonder why Fritz hasn’t finished the job.’
‘I don’t know,’ I say, digging out my field glasses and focussing them across No Man’s Land. ‘Maybe they’ve been getting information from here.’
‘The Germans?’ Danny looks at me curiously. ‘But how?’
‘They’re fortifying their parapets over there.
..’ I murmur absently, dropping the binoculars and making a note.
‘Sorry.’ I refocus on Danny. ‘Well, you see, a few months back there was a suspicion that French spies in the area might be working for the enemy. A little to the south of our sector there was a town with a church just like this, visible to the German line. It was discovered that the local gravedigger had been climbing up into the tower at night and altering the hands of the clock.’
‘You mean a sort of code?’ Danny asks.
I nod. ‘A kind of semaphore that revealed information about our troop movements and gun positions.’
‘Jesus,’ he whistles. ‘What happened to him?’
‘The British handed him to the French police who shot him as a traitor. I’m not sure they even had a trial.’
‘But why did he do it?’
I shrug. ‘Money, I suppose.’
‘Or maybe he thought he was doing the right thing.’ Danny casts his gaze across wave after wave of barbed wire, lapping like a rusty tide against the trenches.
‘Millions of them over there must think they’re on the right side, just like millions of us think that we’re the heroes. I wonder who’s right.’
‘Neither,’ I say.
Danny turns to me. ‘I’m not sure you’d have said that a few days ago. The rules—’
‘The rules.’ I almost laugh. ‘They didn’t seem to mean very much when I was buried in that tunnel. It wasn’t the rules that saved me.’
He gives me a sad smile and is about to say something when the sergeant calls up from the churchyard, offering us a bite to eat from his platoon’s kitchen.
There isn’t much more to see from the tower and so we ease our way back down the rickety stair.
We’re close to the bottom when the final rotten step crumbles under Danny’s boot and he stumbles against me.
I almost overbalance catching him, and we end up staggering against the stone wall, Danny with his back planted to the brickwork, my chest pressed to his.
The echo of our collision fades in the throat of the tower.
I take a breath, laugh; Danny does the same.
Then, hesitating only a little, he rests his palm against the side of my face, his fingers gently brushing my ruined ear.
When I begin to pull away, he whispers: ‘You don’t ever have to hide from me. ’
The tower door groans on his hinges, swaying slightly in the breeze. I turn to look, and Danny cups the back of my neck, drawing me to him. His eyes are so blue, the lids lightly freckled. I graze my fingertips through his hair and, at last, his lips find mine.
For the first time since that autumn night in the summer house, I’m not thinking of shame and dishonour and grief and bloodshed.
All I think, all I feel, all I know is pressed into this moment.
And what I know is that I can’t let him go.
Somehow I have to hold onto Danny, even when the whistle blows and we clamber over the top, I will keep him by my side.
And I will keep him safe, for as long as I can.