21
I sit alone in an attic room, a family of sleeping sparrows nestled in the rafters above my head. Through the hole in the roof that is their doorway, I can glimpse the trench-deep darkness of a starless sky. The villa groans and creaks around me but otherwise the night is still. No boom of artillery, no machine gun rattle. For long stretches of time, it can be like this at the Front. The war isn’t always blood and bellow; sometimes it teases you with a reminder of what peace was like.
Scattered throughout the villa, my men are asleep. I should be too. Tomorrow I step back into the war proper. I know what awaits me – the noise and the filth, the endless living on your nerves. Only this time I suppose it will be different. I think again of our journey back from the chateau, that winding cycle ride through wooded valleys and past untenanted houses.
‘So what do you think of their plan?’ Danny asked me.
‘You mean the big push or our little mission before it all kicks off?’
He shrugged. ‘Both, I suppose.’
‘Our part makes sense,’ I sighed. Although in truth it worried me. There are dangers aplenty in a trench but at least the patterns of your own small bit of ditch are largely predictable. But continually moving through a network of trenches? The hazards we routinely face – snipers, enemy raids, mines laid by Hun tunnelling parties – begin to multiply. Even as I thought this, however, I knew how absurd it sounded. In a couple of weeks, we would all be thrust into the rat-trap of No Man’s Land.
Lifting my foot from the pedal, I had reached out and tapped Danny’s ankle. ‘What doyouthink of it?’
‘Of the bombardment? Of us going over the top? I think...’ He shook his head. ‘I think a lot of families will be getting a lot of letters they don’t want to read.’
I nodded. ‘I think Captain Jackson has his doubts too. What did you make of him?’
Danny surprised me with his answer. ‘I liked him very much.’
I laughed at that. ‘Even after he ordered you to apologise to Beddowes?’
‘Not my favourite moment,’ he admitted. ‘But I thought he was a decent man. Honourable, you know? Andrathergood-looking.’
A schoolboy blush erupted involuntarily across my cheeks. ‘Yes, I... I suppose he was.’
‘Although,’ Danny mused, reaching out with his own foot and tapping my shin. ‘Not really my type.’
Blushing harder than ever, I fixed my gaze back on the road. What had he meant by that? He surely didn’t mean thatI’mhis type.
‘Race you back to the villa,’ I said, and with a grin, pushed down hard on the pedals.
Laughing, we hurtled together through the woodland and the valleys, scattering birds in our wake, releasing the handlebars on the few straight patches of road, throwing our arms to the sky and whooping like the children we had been, not all that long ago.
It only hits me now, sitting alone in this empty attic, that perhaps Danny’s example is rubbing off on me. Am I reclaiming something of my old self? I had hoped to save him in some way. Is he savingmeinstead? I lift my hand and brush the ruined remnants of my ear. Do I dare tell him my story? That story he thinks he already knows – a tale of heroism that earned his commanding officer the MC. How would he react if he heard the truth? That all I did was play dead and then take a single soldier by surprise?
A sound from downstairs – the squeak and snap of the back door. I leave the table and go over to the cobwebbed window that looks onto the garden. There, under the shadow of a twisted elm that grows slantwise out of the earth, I watch a barefoot figure stand motionless at the edge of a huge shell crater. Returning from their afternoon of training, some of the men had run to this spot, shedding their uniforms onto the grass and plunging into the rain-filled hole. Laughter had filled the air and, in that brief moment, the cares of the war had seemed to lift from their shoulders.
Now I hold my breath as I see Danny pull off his shirt and trousers. He stands for a moment, naked at the crater edge, a splash of moonlight on the firm pale skin of his back. Then he stretches his arms to the sky, fingers splayed. I notice the twist of muscle in his neck, the pepper of freckles across his shoulders and down his spine, the angle of his hips, the curve of his buttocks. He is perfect, like a living artwork. Something I could never hope to capture in paint or pencil. And tomorrow I will be the one to guide him to a place where that perfection might well be annihilated.
I turn away from the window. I hear a splash. I close my eyes.
12th June
Ghosts await me on the last stretch of our march to the Front. On the waterlogged mile before we reach the communication trench, I see a soldier whose name I’ve forgotten. He is the mayfly private who fell in the storms of December and who died from a sniper’s bullet only minutes after entering the trenches. He stands, not in the summer rain that falls around us, but in a blizzard of white, waving cheerily, a snow-speckled bullet hole below his right cheek. I grasp the strap of my kitbag, commanding my hands to stop shaking. Kindness had killed him. The kindness of Captain Danvers, who waits up ahead with the rest of my old platoon at the entry point of the sunken road. The gateway to the Front line.
‘Sir? What’s the matter?’ Danny whispers at my side.
I bow my head. ‘Nothing. Just memories.’
Do I look afraid? Perhaps. Who wouldn’t in this place, the shadows deepening around us as we step into the long communication trench? Captain Jackson had been delayed at battalion headquarters for most of the day and so by the time we set out from Albert it was nearly dusk.
‘I’m sorry to have made you wait all day,’ he’d said in his quiet way. ‘I got caught up in some last-minute briefings with Lieutenant-Colonel Gallagher. You’re an experienced officer, Wraxall, so I don’t need to tell you that my complaint about Private McCormick’s punishment fell on deaf ears. Gallagher accepted your version of events, though – that Danny served his allotted time and that the guard’s story shouldn’t be accepted at face value.’ He had glanced at me then, those searing eyes searching mine. ‘But he maintains the punishment was justified. He also dismisses any talk of negligence leading to the death of Private Murray. Captain Beddowes is off the hook.’
I nodded grimly. ‘I never imagined he was ever on it.’
‘I’m sorry anyway,’ Jackson said. ‘If the rules were different then perhaps—’
