Chapter 27
Days pass and even our reconnaissance takes on a kind of routine.
We explore the Front, we scale hillsides, we venture into bits of ditch that almost rub shoulders with the German line, we plot maps, make notes, sketch defences.
We send our reports to HQ and hear nothing back.
I’m not surprised. Our conclusions are probably about as welcome as a belch in a gas mask.
That is, if Beddowes is even passing them on.
Danny and I have been away from our sector for almost seventy-two hours.
Apart from that moment in the church tower, we haven’t had much time to ourselves.
The past three nights have either been spent curled up in exposed ditches surrounded by other platoons or else with me billeted in an officer’s dugout while he sleeps in a cubbyhole nearby.
During the day the continuing build-up to the big push has made all but a few stolen moments impossible.
Still, we snatch them when we can. We are taking observations of enemy transport movements from a raised parapet one afternoon when, both reaching for the field glasses, Danny’s hand accidentally brushes mine.
We lock eyes and the joy I see in his, the almost indescribable happiness, is like a mirror of my own.
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ he says. ‘You first.’
Glancing around, seeing we’re alone for once, I pull his fingers to my lips and kiss each in turn.
His Adam’s apple bobs in his throat and he closes his eyes.
I slide his forefinger into my mouth, run the tip of my tongue across the pad.
I feel him tremble. This is reckless, stupid even, but I can’t help myself.
‘Stephen...’ he whispers.
And then a Tommy comes inching along the uneven parapet like a tightrope walker, offering us tea from two battered tin mugs.
He’s so focussed on not spilling the mud-brown liquid, he doesn’t notice as I let go of Danny’s hand.
Danny takes the cup with hearty thanks and, before lifting it to his lips, gives me the biggest smile.
I live for that smile. It feels like my world.
But these moments are few and far between.
There are men and machinery everywhere now.
Trundling traction engines dragging behind them yet more guns, monstrous barrels sweeping high above the doll-like forms of the soldiers that continue to pour into the Somme.
Even on the hillsides there are vast encampments, every inch of earth covered in canvas.
And everywhere, rumours, whispers, reassuring predictions of victory that cannot completely dispel the fear in eyes.
For Danny and me, we often have only snatches of conversation and scribbled notes, like those we passed to each other in the listening post.
‘When can I kiss you again?’ he whispers to me now.
‘Shhhh.’
He takes out a scrap of paper from his tunic pocket and writes.
We are sitting close together in a shallow trench, men hunkered down all around us while British and German machine-gunners duel overhead.
It’s amazing really, Danny has been in the trenches only a week and yet he’s already used to the sound of the typewriters.
Some of the newer recruits aren’t so relaxed, many flinching as the air above us is sliced with metal.
But it’s not only these green boys who are affected.
My own hands shake a little and I notice a couple of experienced officers having to make fists to disguise their shattered nerves.
Paper rustles into my hand: When?
I shake my head at him and smile.
But honestly, will the time ever come when we can hold each other again?
The trenches are now stuffed with fresh bodies ready to be fed into the meatgrinder.
There is nowhere that we can be truly alone.
Meanwhile, the date for the push is set for the twenty-ninth.
Only eleven days to go. By rights, we should get a couple of days rest away from the Front before we’re ordered over the top, but with everything accelerating around us any such leave could be cancelled.
That kiss in the church might be the first and last Danny and I ever get to share.
It’s a thought that gnaws at me as we rise to our feet, the guns having finally fallen silent, and start back towards our sector.
I watch the swing of his strong hand beside mine, see the crop of curls as he thumbs up the brim of his helmet, notice the parting of his lips as he laughs.
I want nothing more than to hold that hand, to brush my fingers through those curls, to feel his lips on mine.
But I can’t, because I’m as trapped here as I ever was in that collapsed tunnel.
We’re both trapped, hurtling towards a zero hour we can’t escape, without even the opportunity to do and say the things that might make the prospect of our deaths even a little bearable.
‘Do you think they’ll all be there when we get back?’ Danny asks suddenly.
We’ve just passed a wonky sign proclaiming this area MANCHESTER AVE. Only a few hundred yards now to our platoon’s position.
‘I’m not sure,’ I admit. ‘A lot can happen in three days.’
‘I don’t want to bury anyone else,’ he says.
I’ve moved on a couple of paces when I realise he isn’t walking beside me any more.
Glancing over my shoulder, I see that, apart from Danny, there’s no one else in this twist of ditch.
If I dared, I might give into that ache inside my chest. I could go to him, hold him, press my mouth to his.
But he suddenly looks so desolate, so troubled.
‘I don’t want to hurt anyone either,’ he says.
I step towards him. ‘Is that why you didn’t shoot that sniper? Because you don’t want to hurt anyone?’
‘I could’ve bagged him easy,’ Danny confesses.
‘Surprised no one else has, actually. The idiot might be a good marksman, but he stuck his head clean out of that gunner’s nest two or three times.
Would’ve been like shooting fish in a barrel.
All I had to do was squeeze.’ He looks down at his forefinger, curled as if tensed around a trigger.
‘But I couldn’t. Not like that. Not in cold blood. ’
Damn it. If anyone comes traipsing into this trench, let them believe whatever they like. I go to him and take his hand in mine. ‘Danny, I’m sorry, but you will have to. One day, to save yourself or a man from our platoon, you will have to hurt someone. It’s just the way things are out here.’
He looks at me with haunted eyes. ‘But I’m not sure I can, Stephen. Because if I do, then I might not be able to stop. Hurting people.’
‘Danny, what do you me—?’ I begin.
But his gaze has fixed over my shoulder and I stop dead.
Turning sharply, I find three men standing at the bend in the trench, their expressions ranging between flinty anger to stark alarm.
I drop Danny’s hand. For an absurd moment I wonder if they’ve come to arrest us.
Has Beddowes somehow convinced Gallagher of his suspicions and a charge of indecency been brought against us?
But then I notice their uniform; these are Royal Engineers, not Military Police.
I open my mouth to say something and they each hold up their palm in warning.
One comes forward, almost tiptoeing across the duckboards.
Reaching us, he says softly: ‘We’ve picked up vibrations around the corner.
Sounds like tunnelling. Come with us, tread gently, don’t say a word. ’
He gestures and we carefully follow the sappers around the bend.
There’s a cluster of men waiting there, more engineers crouched against the wall, ears and stethoscopes planted to the earthen bank and to any scrap of dry ground.
They remain so still that they appear frozen in place, like mannequins in a waxwork.
When they do move – to incrementally adjust the position of a stethoscope or exchange a glance with their comrades – it’s almost startling.
The other men are all ordinary soldiers who, like us, seem to have stumbled into this silent nightmare.
If anyone so much as coughs or sneezes, the sappers’ heads snap in their direction and a glare almost as murderous as the threat beneath our feet is offered up.
Danny shoots me a questioning look. Very gingerly, I take out a pencil and slip of paper from my pocket.
They’ve heard tunnelling – Germans planting mines under our line. If the Hun hear us above them, they’ll set the charge and blow us all sky high.
Danny takes the note, reads, and scribbles back: Can’t we just creep away?
I shake my head: A forward trench can’t be abandoned. We’ll have to wait and see.
See if we’re dynamited into bloody pieces, just like some of my old platoon.
I try to focus on the moment, to think of anything other than that snow-speckled horror.
Still my hands tremble as I push the paper back into my pocket and take out Grandpa’s watch.
Four twenty-three. The sun glints off the brass casing, a dazzle reflected on the wall of the trench.
Danny and some of the other soldiers follow it with their eyes.
Apart from the statue-like sappers, there is nothing else to look at.
Seconds wear into minutes, minutes to hours.
We stand side by side, stock-still, breathing slowly as the engineers patiently listen.
After a while, my legs and back begin to seize up, twitches and spasms jumping in my calves and between my shoulders.
I long to move, a tiny step to readjust my position, but I know that the smallest sound might give us away.
And so, to distract myself, I go over and over what Danny has just said: I know his caring nature, but his reluctance to hurt anyone, even in a world such as this?
And what did he mean, that he might not be able to stop?
Wherever these qualms come from, he will need to get over them. And quickly.
Shadows are lengthening in the unmoving trench when Danny’s hand locks around my wrist. I glance at him to find his face slick with sweat. I mouth: Are you all right? There’s a kind of rigid terror in his eyes.
I pass him a scrap of paper and Danny scribbles: I can’t do this.
I write back: No choice. If the engineers think a charge has been set, they’ll tell us. Then we can run.
He snatches the paper out of my hand and writes: It’s not that. Not the idea of the mine going off. It’s the waiting. I can’t stand it.
He glances back the way we came and I see his boot twist on the duckboard.
Now it’s my turn to grip his wrist. I shake my head at him and mouth No.
I feel him try to pull away but I dig my fingers into the flesh of his arm.
This isn’t Danny. In his right mind, he’d never put these men at risk.
What’s going on inside that head of his?
I let go of his arm and hold him with my gaze while I scrawl another note: You could kill everyone here. Do you understand?
He licks his lips, sets his jaw, gives a single sharp nod. I grasp his shoulder and feel him tremble, this brave man who hasn’t so much as flinched under relentless machine gunfire. He suddenly looks like a child who has tried on a soldier’s uniform and marched out with his friends to play at war.
‘All right, lads, false alarm,’ the sapper who first spoke to us suddenly announces. ‘You can all be about your business.’
He groans a little as he uses the trench wall to push himself upright. The other men stretch their arms and legs and curse under their breath.
‘Can’t be helped,’ the sapper sighs. ‘We reckon the Jerries probably struck an underground stream while digging. What we thought was them tamping down the earth around a fuse was the beating of their drainage pumps. Listen, it’s better than the alternative.
At least you’ve all still got the correct number of limbs. ’
This very reasonable excuse is waved away by grumpy Tommies, who have probably now missed their dinner.
Wires and stethoscopes are packed up and, within seconds, the sappers have vanished and Danny and I are alone again.
The sky is darkening, the trench so inky black that it’s difficult to pick out the shape of our boots from the mud.
‘What was that all about?’ I snap.
‘I’m sorry,’ Danny says. ‘I don’t know what happened to me.’
I look at him. That rigid terror is gone but shadows of the frightened boy remain. ‘You don’t?’
‘I...’ He lowers his head. ‘No, I suppose I do, but it’s never happened before and so.
..’ Danny steps away to rest his back against one of the iron sheets that reinforce the trench.
Running his fingers along the undulations of the corrugated metal, he cranes his face to the sky.
‘My mother was a drunk, Stephen. Soft as a sparrow and with the voice of a lark, but a drunk just the same.’ He hesitates, cutting his gaze away from me.
‘She wasn’t a monster. You have to understand that.
But life had knocked her about and so she hit the bottle from time to time. ’
‘Danny—’
When I try to approach, he gestures me back.
‘Let me finish, please.’ He takes a breath and plunges on.
‘I’d been with some friends down by the river.
Mudlarking, playing war. It was late when we started back, almost eleven.
Mum had been out of work for a few days and I knew what that meant.
When I got back to our lodging house, everyone was standing outside on the pavement.
There’d been a gas leak and no one was to go back into the building until the engineers arrived.
The air was poison, they said, and a stray flame could set the whole street ablaze.
I asked the neighbours if Mum had come out with them and they all shuffled their feet and avoided my eye.
They said our door was locked and that she hadn’t answered their knock.
I tried to get past, tried to barge through the door but the landlord stopped me.
He said if she was still in there then there was nothing I could do for her.
Not now. I fought against him but he was a big bastard and held me fast. So I just stood there with the rest, waiting, waiting, waiting, until finally the engineers arrived and the gas was turned off and the house ventilated.
Then they let me go. I found her up in our attic room, cold and dead, the bottle still in her hand.
But it was the standing there that was the worst of it.
That was why I couldn’t bear it just now.
The standing, the waiting. It was as if it was all happening again. ..’
I go to him, hold him close as he weeps. If anyone comes round the corner now, they might forgive such a sight. Even the bravest man can break down occasionally. I hold him, I whisper comfort, and I feel a little closer to learning the truth about him.