‘I’m asecondlieutenant,’ I tell him, tapping the single star on my sleeve. ‘Lieutenant Wraxall.’ Then, harshly, ‘Hasn’t anyone taught you to salute when you’re in the presence of an officer?’
He stands back, startled, then straightens his spine and gives a sloppy salute. ‘Sorry, sir.’
I shake my head. ‘Better buck up your ideas, Private McCormick, or you won’t last five minutes at the Front.’
They are hard words. My eyes sting at the echo of them and I have to turn my face to the window.
A whistle sounds. Doors clack shut.
At last, we begin to move.
2
6th June
Moonlight on the water, a silver arrow feathered by the lazy ripple of the tide. Just after midnight now, Grandfather’s pocket watch confirming the toll of some distant church bell. I wander along the Leas, the pretty promenade that sweeps the beaches of Folkestone and runs down to the dockyard where our ship lies at anchor. In the end, the lateness of our train hadn’t mattered. The SSOnwardwas herself delayed by engine trouble that will, we’ve been promised, be fixed by dawn. Even from a mile off, I can hear the clang of men at work in the harbour, readying the steamer so that she might deliver another cargo of fresh recruits into the meatgrinder.
I walk on. The sea hushes against the shore. Then all at once a gust of rain rattles the pathways of the prom. I hurry across a short stretch of grass and climb up into the bandstand, its tent-shaped canopy sheltering me from the downfall. I wipe the rain from my nose, fix my gaze back on the darkness. Perhaps theOnwardwon’t feed us into the meatgrinder after all. Perhaps she’ll drown us instead. Only two months ago, theSt Ceceliawas sunk by a German U-boat five miles off this coast.
I squeeze the handrail. What the hell is wrong with me? Do Iwantto drown? Then why not head down to the beach right now and wade out into those peaceful waters? True, the grand hotels behind me are all stuffed-to-bursting with soldiers, but even if some restless private should glance out of his bedroom window, by the time he raised the alarm and a party reached the shore I would...
We’ll get through this, Stephen. We’ll survive and we’ll see each other again, I promise.Michael’s words echo in my head. Our final goodbye before we headed off to war.
The sea whispers to me, coaxing... And then I see them in my mind’s eye, a host of mud-splattered ghosts rising up before me. Geordie, Phil Danvers, all the old platoon, whole again yet ragged in their blood-soaked khaki.Don’t you dare take that way out. Don’t you dare. You’ll buy it the way we bought it, Lieutenant WraxallM-bloody-C; you’ll die hard and you’ll do it in the filth of the Somme, like us. I nod and, at that moment, feel a tiny tremor work through the cast iron under my hand.
I know that murmur, have felt its gigantic heartbeat up close, juddering my bones. Even though I’ve stood beside those bellowing howitzers, all lined up behind our trenches, watched as they unleash their shells across No Man’s Land and into the German lines, it still amazes me that their aftershock can be felt here at home, setting British bandstands atremble. They roar across the smooth sea, an angry voice calling me back.
My hand drifts to the side of my face. To the scarred and puckered flesh where my ear used to be. The rain has stopped. And now there is movement down by the beach. Four or five wakeful Tommies have jumped from the sea wall and are running about like schoolchildren, plunging their hands into English sand for perhaps the last time, finding shells to hurl at each other. I know why they can’t sleep. Nervous excitement, tinged with dread, sings under their skin. I remember feeling the same thrill on the night before I first left for France. Visions of glory, of valiant battle, of the evil Hun pleading for mercy at the point of my bayonet. Tales fed to me by my instructors at Sandhurst, as well as reminders of the atrocities the invading Germans had inflicted on poor defenceless Belgium in the early days of the war. The Boche were demonic, they deserved hell, and I was going to give it to them.
On the beach, one of the young soldiers spins on his heel and the moonlight hits him full-face. It’s the boy from the train. Private Daniel McCormick. Danny. He is smiling that broad, attractive smile.You should be in bed, Private, snatching every morsel of rest while you can. You have no idea of the exhaustion that lies ahead. The soul-sapping slog across a shattered country to those few hundred yards of ditch that will soon become your world.Ignorant of the future, Danny swoops across the beach, laughing, dodging a sand-tailed comet hurled by one of his friends.
I watch their play and think of past times. Not long ago, not really. Twelve months, perhaps: I am chasing Michael through the cornfield that bustles up behind the brewery near his home. We hurtle between swaying yellow waves, pulling off caps and school blazers as we go. I can see him now, his outstretched hand surfing the corn, drunk on his own laughter. And then we are grappling and falling together, suddenly hidden beneath that dusty canopy. Hidden and safe. I feel the warmth of him against me, his face so close to mine...
I shake my head and return to the present. Not long ago, we might have joined Danny and his friends on the beach. Michael and I, boys together, playing their stupid chase game. But those days are gone. It isn’t age that divides me from Danny McCormick. I might be as little as six months older than him. It’s the things I have seen.
Danny stops, hunches over, combs his fingers through the sand to bring up his own missile. Then he turns and throws it overarm, like a spin-bowler, and a neat little plume of white jets out of the black sea.
A breath catches in my throat. Another memory takes me, darker this time. I am back in my sector on the last day, my platoon about to fall around me. Missiles are arcing high against the bone-white strip of sky above our trench. Missiles with bulbous heads and long handles. More like unlit torches than the Mills bombs that fit snuggly in a British soldier’s palm.Stielhandgranate.I barely have time to think the word before the German grenades land at our feet, scattering almost innocently between our boots like a rack of toppled bowling pins. Glances are exchanged, no words, an eternity squeezed into a few seconds. A light flurry of snow settles on our shoulders, begins to melt on cheeks and eyelashes, and then...
Flame and agony and blood. And me – a single miraculous survivor. A survivor who plays dead for a time. Blanketed by bits and pieces of my platoon, I bite through my bottom lip to stifle a scream. It feels like the right side of my face is on fire. I listen to whispers as the enemy fans out and only one demonic Hun is left to stand guard over the slaughter. I watch him through narrowed slits, count my heartbeats, stamp down the pain, see him turn his back. And then I rise, shakily, blinded by gore, half-deaf, my Webley Mk VI grasped in wet fingers. The revolver I’ve never yet fired in combat. My boots crunch on a splinter of duckboard. I see the murderer, the guard, the soldier, the victim, flinch. He twists clumsily around and stares at me. No pleading in his eyes, no terror, only the dull stupidity that we all share out here.
He said one final word, that young German, before I squeezed the trigger.Kamerad. Comrade. I shall never forget how he said it...
‘Lieutenant Wraxall? Hey up there, lieutenant, is that you?’
A shout from the beach. The blue-eyed boy dissolves back into my nightmares and another takes his place. Private Daniel McCormick stands at the water’s edge, the tide lapping at his boots. He waves up at the bandstand as if greeting an old friend. I prise my fingers from the railing, dig my hands into my pockets, and head back to the hotel.
Smoke blooms from the twin funnels of the big transport ship and is torn to shreds by the wind. I stand at the stern, my greatcoat fastened up to my chin, watching until the white cliffs of Dover are lost and the horizon is nothing but sea. Then I turn towards the heaving upper deck of the SSOnward.
There’s a jittery excitement to some of the men as they play cards, sheltering winning and losing hands from the breeze. On the lower level, a group of Tommies try to set up a game of shove ha’penny on the wet, rolling deck. I watch their loose change skate about until they realise it’s a hopeless cause and collect up their coppers. Most have never set foot on a ship before, certainly not one of this size, and a few are already at the rail, hurling their breakfast into the Channel.
A fresh gust tugs at the brim of my cap. I dig out a woodbine from the tin in my breast pocket, cup the flame of my lighter, and draw deep. I keep sweeping the deck with my eyes, looking out for a familiar face. Perhaps a fellow officer or private from my own regiment, the Manchesters. Someone I’d known during training or had shared a drink with at one of the half-ruined bars behind the lines at Maricourt. But there is no one.
At least...
I almost step forward, the woodbine hanging from my lip. On the lower deck, the flash of a grinning face between a sea of khaki, there one moment, gone the next. A face lit with an infectious kind of humour. The boy from the train. From the beach.
I think of his words as he held my sketch of Michael in his hand. The simple kindness of them:Did you do this? You’re very good.Apart from Michael and one or two masters at school, has anyone ever expressed interest in my art before?Genuineinterest?
