Chapter Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Seven
Risky, very risky…
Murdoch is still muttering it like a litany as he gets to work, paid but unhappy.
His lips purse, his glances across at Duncan are frequent.
Duncan studiously ignores them, sits in a listing, damp-smelling armchair on the other side of the room.
Beyond the grimed-up windows, Shoreditch carouses—voices and stumbling hilarity, the odd chime of breaking glass.
Ribald shrieks of laughter. It’s the first spring since the Armistice, and Forest notwithstanding, most men he’s met are still walking around with a giddy light-headed gratitude at being alive.
From the tavern at the mouth of the alley comes the poorly tuned plink-plonk of piano, some reedy attempts at song, turned up briefly loud each time someone opens the door to enter or leave, like a radio on bad atmospherics.
Finally, the forger sighs, pushes back from his desk. Props his glasses up on his balding head, pinches his eyes. Scrubs with one open hand at his stubbled jowls.
“Look,” he says. “Da Silva, it’s not just uncommon, it sahnds fuckin’ uncommon. Like an aristocrat or somefink. It’ll stick in people’s minds, mark my words, and then so will you. You don’t want that. An’ I don’t want that, if it comes back to me. You wanna sound more ordinary.”
“I’m used to it,” says Duncan stubbornly.
But it’s a little more than that.
—
He demobbed as da Silva, had been going by it over a year before that, ever since the mix-up in the hospital.
His rank was tied to it, his liaison with the Americans, the new place he made for himself in all the screaming chaos, the twist of fortune that fell into his lap that June evening with low-angled sun striping the wards through the western windows, and the starched to and fro bustle of nurses around him.
The harried adjutant, advancing down the corridor toward him—Captain da Silva!
Captain Gareth da Silva?—messy armful of paperwork, exasperated with orders he’s struggling to find the officers to fulfill.
Duncan just gapes at him.
Well, are you or aren’t you? I haven’t got all day.
We’ve got Yanks landing by the shipload all over Brittany, and Command is still fighting about who’s going to be giving them orders, Haig or Pershing, what weapons they’re going to be using, and God alone knows what else besides.
Liaison is going to be a bloody nightmare.
So. Do I have the right man, Captain da Silva, or not?
On some wild impulse, Duncan nods.
And are you fit for duty, Captain? Leafing awkwardly through the papers in the crook of his arm. It says here trench fever and shrapnel wounds. But you seem able bodied.
They dug the shrapnel out of his back and thigh a week ago at the Casualty Clearing Station.
He beat the fever and shin pains two days later, here in the hospital, and he’s been hobbling up and down the corridors ever since, trying to walk some strength back into his legs. He’s still shaky on his feet, but—
Aye, sir. Ready to get out of here. Only my papers, sir, all my documentation was—
Don’t worry about that—I’ll get something sorted out. Uniform, too. Machine Gun Corps, wasn’t it?
Duncan nods again, wordless, still not quite believing what he’s just done.
Good. Thank you, Captain. I’ll have a motor transport collect you here Monday next. You’ll report to, ahhh, let’s see…Yes, Colonel Mortimer, Kings Own Royal Lancaster, at the Naval Operating Base in Saint-Nazaire. That’s four days from now. Get what rest you can, Captain, you’re going to need it.
Even now, looking back, he’s not sure why he did it. Like a pole-vaulter shattering some previous record, he can recall the moments of lift and free fall, the act itself, but very little of the run-up to it, the placing of footfalls that made the jump.
Then, as now, fragments come back—da Silva’s soft, Welsh-accented voice and kindly face by lamplight in the dugout of the German trench they’ve taken, as Duncan shudders in the grip of the fever—don’t you worry, Lieutenant, I’ve seen this before, it’s a mild dose.
You’re young and strong, you’ll pull through—mugs of sweet black tea he can hardly lift to his chattering teeth long enough to drink without spilling, so da Silva cups the back of his head and helps hold the mug to his lips—soon as we stabilize that advance, lovely boy, I’ll get you sent back to a CCS.
They’ll be able to look after you much better there—the endless, fatherly patience the other officer has for him, though Duncan thinks he can’t be more than a couple of years older—I hear you’re a bit of a terror, Lieutenant Slaven!
Seen some frightful fighting, they say, and still come through it.
Mentioned in dispatches, likely to get a medal before the year’s out.
Duncan, feverish, can’t be sure, but he thinks that’ll be for the way he hacked four men to death with a trenching spade as the Germans tried to drive his party out of a machine gun nest they’d just taken at Delville Wood.
Then again, it might have been something else.
The rage his years in the Forest stoked in him has served him well out here, just as it did in the bullying, polish-reeking corridors of Cadogan’s.
He fantasizes Huldu faces on the Germans he fights, and the banked fires of his fury do the rest. Anyway, you’d better rest up, we’re going to need men like you—the flow of mild conversational gambits to keep him engaged—Forest of Argyll, really?
Must be beautiful up there, always wanted to go, I love the forest; grew up in Cardiff myself, whole bloody life there, see, but d’you know what, my family name, it’s Portuguese originally, means from the forest—silva, remember your Latin?
Da…Silva. So maybe it’s in my blood, family of Iberian foresters or something, I don’t know, and I just want to get back there, to my roots like—and Duncan shivering violently, trying to tell him to be careful what he wishes for.
—
He’s actually starting to feel a little better by the time the Germans decide to bombard their own captured trenches and drive out the Allied advance.
He hears the screaming from the sky outside, almost makes it up off his bare-boards bunk before the dugout comes down around him in a chaos of shattering timbers and choking black earth.
And as it buries him, presses down on him, face and body, he feels an odd kind of letting go with the weight, something close to the feeling he had when he was shipped away to Cadogan’s at eleven, a sense that nothing mattered anymore, there was nothing left for him, he could just relinquish everything and—
Man buried! Help here! Man buried!
It’s da Silva’s voice, and there’s something flailing violently in the dirt by Duncan’s upraised leg.
The firm grip of hands. He’s tugged at, dragged at.
More muffled shouting. Someone hauls him bodily from the collapsed dugout, turns him on his side and hammers at his back.
He hacks and spits up loose earth and phlegm in knots—that’s it, lovely boy!
That’s it! You cough up that shit!—finally he lies panting and shuddering on the loose earthen ground.
A milling of men around him in the dark, da Silva checking him everywhere for injuries—that’s fine, you go on, I’ve got him—the other men recede, calling out to each other, heads turtling involuntarily as shells continue bursting farther up the line.
Screams and yells and whistles, a confusion as muddy and torn and darkened as what’s left of the dugout they dragged him from.
We’re getting out of here, boyo—da Silva stripping off his jacket now, forcing Duncan into it one arm at a time.
That fever still got you, has it? You’d think a big bloody German shell up the arse might have cured it, now, wouldn’t you?
Duncan coughs up laughter and muddy drool.
Da Silva slings Duncan’s arm over his shoulders, lifts him under the armpits—can you stand?
He finds he can. Command just called the retreat, and that’s good enough for me.
The Vickers are buggered anyway, Fritz’ll be back up at us as soon as this shit stops. So we’d better go.
Staggering down the trench, bits of men strewn underfoot, hung from wire where the blast has thrown the pieces high and they’ve caught coming down. Duncan gets glimpses of strung viscera, a grasping hand, what looks like half of a face, hooked through the eye socket—
Don’t you look at that! Da Silva steering him firmly the other way, up a shambles of sloping, sliding soil where a shell has smashed the trench wall apart. Here, this way, up you go.
He shoves Duncan on hands and knees ahead of him, up to the crest. They crouch and look out across a darkened sea of churned mud and wire, shattered trees like the snapped-up splinters on the broken end of a plank, the same fucking ground they took with bayonets and Mills bombs, blood and rage, only days before.
Shellfire lights the landscape fitfully, but the bombardment seems to be letting up.
Good a time as any, grunts da Silva, and pats him on the shoulder.
And they’re off!