Chapter 15
A year ago, sleeping safely abed in Whitechapel, Ashley’s nightmares had been of fire raining down from zeppelins like tongues of the Holy Spirit.
Now her dreams were haunted by the fiery shrapnel of Allied aeroplanes torn apart by the bloody Red Baron.
It was the first time she’d ever seen such a contraption.
The zeppelins which had plagued her home in London were mammoth floating monsters that drifted through the sky like weaponized whales. Arriving at night under the cloak of darkness made them all the more frightful for what you knew was lurking beyond what you could see.
When the Red Baron flew his agile Fokker over the trenches near Arras in the light of day, Ash couldn’t help gazing up at the sky in awe-struck wonder.
Well aware of the danger, she was too tired and too mesmerized to look away, though he had shot down countless Allied pilots like children knocking bricks out of a ring.
“Blimey,” Tom said with a shiver.
“That’s sure something,” Cooper agreed.
“If men were meant to fly, God would have granted them wings,” Blake argued, hunkering down in his funk hole for cover.
“He did,” Ashley said. “Baron von Richthofen’s are just made of iron.”
“Running’s a bit like flying, isn’t it?” Cooper asked, still staring up at the sky.
“You sound like you admire him,” Blake scoffed.
“I don’t admire him. He didn’t invent that machine, he only pilots it.” She didn’t even admire the planes so much as stand in awe of what they could do—what they would be able to do outside of war.
Still, it was almost a mercy when the snow turned to rain just ahead of the next push, because even the Red Baron dared not attempt to fly through wind and hail.
They traded their wool blankets for gum boots and a reminder to change their socks.
“Every day,” the captain cautioned them. “Twice on Sundays. Pair off to check each other’s feet for signs of trench foot. Remember, once prepared, twice rewarded,” he added, echoing the quarter bloke’s favorite line.
Sleep came but fitfully in those spring days, punctuated by constant rumbling that might be bombs as easily as thunder, and a chill settled into Ashley’s bones along with the damp.
To keep their minds off their discomfort, she read to her friends from The Life of the Fields, the volume Rook had given her for luck before the Somme, though by now she could just about recite it all from memory.
Its imagery of England was a balm for their homesick souls.
In quieter moments, she tried to lull herself to sleep by pretending she was little Amy Dorrit, tucked in a makeshift bed inside a drafty church near the Marshalsea.
One day she dozed off curled up in a two-man cubby, only to dream the mad Red Baron had invaded Little Dorrit’s church and was setting upon her with sharp fangs and fingers that writhed like snakes.
She jumped awake.
Had she actually just screamed?
And what was pawing at her now? Her helmet had slid down over her eyes and she fought the heavy hands that groped her, wrestling and flinging them away, one and then the other, and then the first again—until she managed to knock off her tin hat and she was met with beady red eyes, not a man at all, she realized in equal horror.
“Rats,” TomTom murmured, awakened by her kicking and flailing, as she struggled to get them off her chest. It still felt like thousands of tiny feet and heavy swarming spiders tickled her skin.
She wanted to scream and scream and scream, but she bit down hard on her lip until only a whimper could escape.
“Oy!” Rook yelled from his nearby post, holding one up, large as a cat, impaled on the end of his bayonet. “Did you just toss a bloody great vermin grenade at me?”
Tom and Ash burst out laughing, a pressure valve for her hysteria.
From a nearby funk hole, Cooper hollered, “Shut it, mate,” making them dissolve deeper into fits of sleep-deprived giggles.
“Thought you might be hungry,” Ash teased Rook.
He raised his eyebrows, examining the rat like he might consider it. “I was going to save it for the dog, but now you mention it...”
“S’pose they come for the water,” Tom said, trying to press himself deeper into the hole.
“And stay for the corpses,” Rook replied turning back towards No Man’s Land, rain dripping off his helmet and down his sodden coat.
“Maybe we should strap them to toffee apples—send them over to the other side,” Ash suggested, trying to make Rook join their laughter.
“That would be a sight,” he said, stroking his afternoon stubble as he considered it.
“Rattie von Ratter, Flying Ace of Ratzeburg.”
A smile tugged at his lips, though he still didn’t break.
Ash couldn’t help noticing the rain had soaked through his uniform. She felt a touch guilty for appreciating how the damp trousers clung to his shapely bum and thighs as he stretched towards the parapet, and she had to force herself to look away.
When his watch ended, Rook joined them, tucking himself alongside the sandbags that lined their hole, though he was still out in the rain.
“Shift over,” she told Tom. There was hardly room in the cubby for two, let alone three men, but they did their best to make space.
“I’ll get you wet,” Rook protested.
“We’re already wet,” Ash assured him, and so he squeezed in next to her, his proximity making it suddenly rather difficult to breathe.
He offered them each a cigarette, which they both declined, though Ash liked to watch his lips pucker when he smoked.
Reaching inside his coat once more, he took out a roll of English toffees which he offered her instead.
They’d been more or less protected from the weather. “Happy birthday,” he said.
“What day is it?” she asked.
“Easter, isn’t it?” Tom answered.
“Happy Easter then.”
“Few weeks’ time, it’ll be a year since we all joined Surrey.”
The weight of TomTom’s words felt heavier than the toffee in Ashley’s hand. England seemed a lifetime ago, but one year was almost no time at all. How could both things be true?
“You reckon this is all there is?” Tom asked, leaning back and staring bleakly out at the rain.
“How d’you mean?” Rook said.
“Just… This is our life now. Whether we grow old or die, we’ll do it here. In trenches. Our only job is soldier, no matter what we’d hoped or planned. Our whole identity is just what’s written on these discs. I don’t know how I’d go back home, even if it all ended tomorrow.”
Rook shook his head. “One whiff of your ma’s cooking, this’ll be nothing but a long, bad dream.”
And because he said it, Ash believed it to be true.
“I suppose,” Tom agreed halfheartedly. “Thing is… I was meant to be a gamekeeper. Take over for my dad up at the big house,” he went on, breaking one of the unspoken rules.
Though they often mentioned home in the abstract, they never really talked in detail about the other lives they might be leading back in England.
“Turns out, I think I rather hate guns. No offense,” he added, glancing over at Rook, who guffawed.
“I may have joined the London Rifles, but I didn’t choose to be a sniper.”
“Didn’t you?” Ashley asked.
“It’s like Napier always says, who among us has a choice? I was just damn good at it, more’s the pity.” He stared grimly at his cigarette and then stubbed it out. “What would you do instead?”
Tom shook his head. “Gardner maybe? Learn to grow food and flowers. I’m already used to the rain and mud.”
“Then you’d never be hungry,” Ash teased.
“What about you, Ash? What job would you be going back to if they up and sent us home?” Rook asked, nudging her shoulder in a way she quite enjoyed.
But the very notion of parting from her friends made her feel quite queasy. “Dunno,” she admitted. “Maybe I might like to cook or bake.”
Tom jabbed her sharply with his elbow.
“What?” she protested. “Men can cook.”
“Course they can,” Rook agreed. “Went to Paris when I had leave, and all the best chefs were men. Perhaps you could train there for a bit before you go home.”
“The first item on my award-winning menu: Rat du Guerre,” Ash said, and they collapsed in another fit, laughing at the ridiculous dish as much as the impossibility of home, chuckling until they drifted back to sleep.
Despite the rain, or perhaps because of it, Command decided to press their advantage, and the next day a bombardment began before dawn.
“Eat up,” Sergeant Major Chapman warned the runners who sat bleary-eyed at breakfast. “Don’t know when you’ll get another bloody chance.”
“I’m too wet to eat,” Blake moaned.
“Aww, poor Blakey. Want some jam on it?” Cooper teased.
“I’ll have yours,” TomTom said, reaching across the table, but Blake snatched his breakfast closer to his chest.
Inside, though, they all agreed with him. Ash wasn’t sure she could remember what the word dry even felt like.
The gutters running along either side of the duckboard path were so full water sloshed across their boots as they walked—water that was filled with climbing, hopping, chirping little frogs who tried to escape their marching boots by scaling the mud-caked walls.
“Where do they come from?” she asked, both horrified and intrigued.
“Such a city lad, hey?” TomTom teased. When she shrugged, he added, “From the earth, right? They live down in the mud and get sort of floated up by the rain.”
Ash looked to Rook for confirmation, but of course he was a city lad like herself and merely shrugged. “Good an explanation as any.”
“Reckon Cook’ll fry ’em up for tea like the Frenchies do?” Cooper asked, eyeing the frogs suspiciously and making Ashley gag.
“It’s a bloody nightmare,” Blake whined. “Rats and rain and frogs—like a fucking plague.”
“Not as bad as all that,” Stew cajoled him.
But Blake badly needed a few days’ leave and would not be consoled. “Cause you’re sleeping with the terriers.”
“They do enjoy the taste of rat.”
“He has a point though,” Cooper said. “All them rats, you think they’ll bring the plague?”
“Not the plague. A plague,” Blake corrected.
“Like from the Bible? Moses and Pharaoh and them?” Tom asked.