Chapter 12 A Country Drive
“What in God’s name is going on here?!” It was somewhat remarkable that Ned’s accent got even posher when he was yelling. Had he taken special classes, or was it something he was born with, a gift of nobility?
With some effort, Charlie lifted his head from where he had been resting it on the rough table. He wanted to answer Ned, but first he needed to remember how words worked.
Behind him he heard someone vomiting. Those new lads really couldn’t hold their brandy at all. Unlike Charlie. After two and half years of training in Flanders, he had a stomach of steel.
“Up, up on your feet, all of you!” Hands jerked Charlie up. He tried to push them off, and then realised the ground was swaying to a very worrying degree. Now Charlie remembered that was why he’d been sitting. They should all be sitting. Or lying down.
They had been singing before. Brandy always made men want to sing. Maybe that was what had given their little party away? Smythe and his damnably loud voice. Charlie hummed ‘It’s a long, long way to Tipperary’ to himself.
“Corporal Villiers?” Ned sounded shocked.
He shouldn’t have been. This sort of drunken disobedience was Charlie’s speciality. That and delivering a killing blow with the butt end of his rifle. Wouldn’t his mother be proud?
Charlie tried to salute, although seeing Ned in the low light of the firepit made Charlie want to give the man a very different type of salute. Fuck, those cheekbones and that jaw. Who needs a fancy accent when you have a face like that?
Ned should’ve been drinking with them. Charlie liked Ned when he’d had a bit of drink. He got both cuddly and wild, sucking Charlie’s cock like Charlie had the answers to the universe.
Now that would have been a good way to end this evening.
“These new recruits don’t know better, but I would have expected more of you, Corporal.” Ned stepped right in front of Charlie’s face, so close that his cheekbones and evening stubble were all Charlie could see. “What’s the explanation for this?”
Charlie’s fuzzy brain tried to remember how he’d got here.
The new lads were so green they barely knew which way to point their rifles, so earlier in the evening Charlie had sat them down by the fire and given them tips about avoiding lice and making the ration biscuits edible.
Made them practise putting on their gas masks and reassured them about not firing their rifles the first time they went over the top.
What was most important was that they came back.
Then Smythe had arrived with their secret brandy, offering to welcome the lads properly.
Charlie had done three shots in a row, because he needed to forget that most of these bright-faced boys wouldn’t be making it back.
Like Henderson, and all those other men he hadn’t been able to save on the fields of the Somme.
Charlie couldn’t say any of that to Ned. He didn’t want any of those thoughts to even be in his head, just like he didn’t want to think about how he had described to the boys how to use a bayonet to gut an enemy like a pig. So he shrugged.
Ned opened his mouth and hesitated a fraction of a second before saying, “If you won’t explain this, let me ask you another question, Corporal. I understand you are off duty tomorrow?”
“Yes, sir,” Charlie replied. The brandy’s fog was lifting, and the humiliation of Ned pulling rank was as vicious as any hangover.
A hush fell over the assembled men, both the sober and drunk, as they waited for Charlie’s punishment.
Ned paid the peanut gallery no attention.
“I’m in need of a driver tomorrow. Hopefully a drive through France will give you time to think about the regulations against drunkenness.
You will meet me at the motor depot at eight a.m. sharp. ”
Another, more vindictive, officer would wait to watch the salt settle in the wound, but that wasn’t Lieutenant Pinsent’s style. He had already turned on his heel and gone, leaving Charlie swaying.
???
What Charlie would never admit was that driving was one of the activities he truly loved. Sliding behind the steering wheel and putting his foot to the pedal was almost as good as the day's leave he was missing out on. Better than brandy. Maybe even better than sex.
Thoughts of sex reminded Charlie of the rigid figure beside him.
Ned was in his formal dress uniform, hair combed, perfectly shaved with brightly polished boots.
Matthews had outdone himself; Ned looked like he was about to walk into the War Office in Whitehall, not traversing battlefields in Northern France.
While normally Charlie relished the challenge of needling Ned out of whatever odd mood he was in, today it just felt like too much work to untangle what was going on in the other man’s head, especially after yesterday’s humiliating interaction.
Ned could sort himself out for once; Charlie was going to focus on the road in front of them.
“You’re a good driver.” Ned’s words came out as if choked, which Charlie had learned signalled the other man at his most uncomfortable.
“My uncle taught me to drive,” Charlie answered.
More silence, and then more choked-out words. “I’m not a good driver. I hate it. The speed, the distractions, so many things to keep track of. My brother likes to say I’m built for horse and carriage speeds.”
“It's the speed I love, to feel so free. Plus, French potholes are easier to dodge than London pedestrians.” Charlie had to pause talking to navigate through a particularly rough patch of road. “It's good to know I’ve one advantage over you.”
“You have many.” Ned started ticking items off his fingers.
“You are courageous when you need to be but have even better survival instincts. You fight like the devil himself for your countrymen. You have a good tactical mind and ability to anticipate the enemy. If you didn’t insist on making everything so hard for yourself, you would have been made sergeant a long time ago. ”
Charlie could see what Ned was trying to do, and he felt the same burn in his throat as when Ned pulled rank the evening before. “I don’t expect you to understand, but yes, I do have to make things this hard.”
“Maybe I would understand if you tried to explain. We have the time.” Ned gestured towards the nearly non-existent road in front of them.
It was hard to put into words, like describing the wetness of water.
Still, Ned had asked, and that was more than Charlie could really expect, so he tried.
“You would think in a country so flat, you would be able to see the whole war from where you stand. Yet in the zigzag of the trenches, you can get so turned around you don’t even know where the front lines are.
And that’s life as a Tommy. Every moment of your day is getting turned around and around as someone decides when you get up, what you wear, what you eat, where you march, when you go over the top, when you hold back, until you don’t even know what you’re doing or why.
I remember a chap that came back from the Somme without a scratch, but his left leg wouldn’t stop kicking.
His mind was still ready to follow orders, but his body refused.
If I’m a rebellious son of a bitch, it’s because I’m trying to keep my mind connected to my body. ”
Except Charlie wasn’t so sure he was succeeding anymore. After two years on the front, he craved numbness.
Ned slammed the map down onto his lap. “So why don’t you go after a rank that would see you do more than follow?”
The frustration Charlie had anticipated, but not this question.
“I see the way you look when you come back from the front, or from the dressing stations, or after writing letters back to the widows. I may hate what I’m being asked to do half the time, and hate doing it the other half, but you look like you’ve lost a piece of your soul some days. ”
Ned flinched, but didn’t respond.
Charlie’s words kept pouring out of him.
“I think you are one posh tosser, posher than even the other officers. Why are you even here when you could have a post in London that would allow you more options to live as you would like to?” Charlie had thought about that a lot.
When having to hide himself so completely was such a burden on Ned, why didn’t he get himself out of Flanders?
Ned muttered something under his breath that sounded a lot like “Intuitive bastard.”
“I don’t expect you to understand, but yes, I do need to be here in Flanders.
” It wasn’t lost on Charlie that Ned had repeated his own words.
“I wake up every day with the horror of knowing that my decisions will decide the fate of dozens, if not hundreds, of men. I’m here because I know I can lead.
I know I can make this scrappy bunch of cockney Londoners as good a platoon as any in the BEF, and that if I can figure out how to keep you trained, persuade the higher-ups to give us the right sort of missions, then I think I can get a good number of you home to England at the end of this war.
Even more, I think we might be able to deliver some meaningful blows to the Germans.
Maybe it’s all hubris, but I feel it is my duty to put my abilities at the service of my country and my countrymen. ”
Charlie gripped the steering wheel, moved by Ned’s explanation, even if he wasn’t quite sure what hubris meant. He found himself reaching out and squeezing Ned’s knee, the kind of gesture they only engaged in during the stolen moments after getting off.
They could have ended the conversation there, with a recognition of how the other man saw the world, but they both seemed drawn to return to the sensitive areas the other had just exposed, as fraught and risky as an artillery shell.
Of course Ned tackled the most explosive. “I hate disciplining you.”