‘The rules,’ I mused, looking over to where Danny marched alongside Percy and Robert. ‘Who do they protect, I wonder?’
‘A fair question,’ Jackson conceded. Then, in a murmur, ‘But best not asked out loud.’
Now the ghost of Captain Danvers stands on the plateau above the sunken road and watches me pass below, a new commanding officer at my side. Jackson is not unlike Danvers, I think. They are both kind men.
Rain plinks against my helmet. A flare goes up, bleaching the world for a second or two, making our marching shadows monstrous. But the dead cast no shadow. Still I feel them watching me, blood-stained and ragged, their silence impenetrable. In my head, I scream at them:What do you want? I came back, didn’t I? Just like you ordered me to. I could’ve stayed home, I had the chance; I could’ve killed myself, I wanted to. I look back at Danny, his encouraging smile, only a hint of trepidation in those frank blue eyes.I wanted to... until I found him.
‘Steady, men,’ Jackson says in that gentle yet commanding way. He has noticed the first sign of jitters among them. ‘Steady.’
I turn my head. I see Arthur Morse stumble as the earthen walls rise up, then blow out his cheeks as if whistling his nerves away. Taffy grips the straps of his kitbag, keeps his gaze fixed on the man in front. The trench narrows and we move into single file. Stray soldiers coming in the opposite direction step into dugouts or niches to allow us to pass, murmuring a hello and a good luck to the new recruits. The ground underfoot softens, squelches, sucks, splashes. Duckboards begin to slide beneath our boots. A match erupts in the gloom and someone shouts to put it out. In that brief flicker, I see the trench wall beside me, wooden struts and woven sticks embedded in compacted mud, everything slickly green. Familiar smells reach out, sparking memories: the iron tang of stagnant water, the catch of burned powder and oil, that indescribable stench of men living in filth and fear and brotherhood and boredom.
Finally we reach the junction which marks the forward trench. We are here at last. The Front. It stretches out either side of us – the rat’s maze, the shooting gallery, the mouth of the meatgrinder. On now through our zigzagging section, some stumbling in the dark, knocking knees against stray planks and ammunition boxes, muttering curses under their breath. The moon rides in the column of sky above us, dulled only by the odd enemy flare, a fearful brightness that makes some of the men crouch so low, the swilling mud almost touches their chin.
‘Is it always like this?’ Danny murmurs.
Does he mean the mud? Yes, it is. Even in the driest weather, mud is our constant companion. We’ve dug so deep that these avenues almost always run wet. And what with the ceaseless stamp of boots and the eternal scrape of spades, ploughing and reploughing, building walls and burrows over and over, is it any wonder that this earth never stops bleeding?
On now. On past landmarks I recognise well: the cubbyhole in which Geordie Peters swore blind he’d seen a rat the size of a poodle; the fire step from where Private Beattie had flashed his backside at the Hun; and a little further along, a grinning human skull planted into the wall.
‘What the hell is that?’ Danny whispers into my ear.
‘No one knows his name,’ I reply. ‘We think he must be a French soldier from the days when they held this section of the line. Some people think he was buried when a shell hit the old trench and that they couldn’t dig him out in time. Then, when we were shoring up a bit of wall, we uncovered him. The men, they...’ I find it hard to speak the words out loud. ‘Some of them rub his head for luck as they pass by.’
I glance back. My platoon has stopped and a few are staring at the shiny pate of the unknown soldier. Then one by one, they reach out and gently touch the hollow-eyed totem. I sigh. It’s begun. The grasping at superstition, the haggling with death, the path that will one day lead them to making jokes about their dead friends stranded out in No Man’s Land.How’s the weather treating you, Stan? What’s the news from up top?
‘Sir?’
Danny grips my shoulder. He hasn’t joined the others in the ritual. I’m glad. But why should I laugh at their superstitions when all I see around me are phantoms? I know the dead boy isn’t here, waiting for me at the end of this shadowy sweep of trench. I know the bodies littered at his feet are all inside my head. That isn’t really the corpse of Captain Danvers outside our old dugout, that isn’t Geordie Peters blown into a dozen pieces against the wall. The German soldier isn’t looking at me, his eyes dull in the dark. He isn’t speaking. He isn’t.
Kamerad.
‘Sir? Lieutenant Wraxall?’
I shrug off Danny’s hand. I’m fine. I’m where I belong.
I’m home.
22
13th June
I lie on my back and stare at the dangling leg thrown over the edge of the bunk above me. One gum-booted foot, muddy up to the knee, swaying in time to the music of Captain Jackson’s snoring. Not that his snorts and grunts have kept me awake. At the Front, even the lightest sleeper quickly adapts. If you don’t, you’ll never sleep again. This place is seldom silent. There’s always some noise, great or small – the drip of rain from the gas curtain covering the dugout doorway; the slosh of boots passing by; the chirruping chatter of rats in the walls; the crack of a rifle or that distinctive scream, like a motorised saw cutting through wood, that signals a shell overhead.
I sit up and look blearily around me. The old place is much as I remember it. A cramped hole dug into the back of a ditch, its floor two feet below the level of the duckboards outside. Our bunks are positioned at the rear, each made of wire netting stretched between stakes that are in turn supported by stout poles driven into the wall. I manoeuvre around the dangling leg and stand up, my head just shy of the ceiling. Lifting my hand, I run my fingers across that canopy of tarred felt, my mind’s eye moving through the layers above: the rough-hewn logs, the sheets of galvanised iron, the stones and earth. Not shell-proof but bullet- and shrapnel- and waterproof. Mostly anyway.
I’m just pulling on my tunic when Danny flaps aside the sodden sheet from the doorway and steps into the dugout. With him comes that earthy, leathery, metal smell of the trench. I catch a scrap of sky, booming with vivid cloud like a Monet dawn, before the sheet snaps back into place. He looks only a little tired as he places two bowls of steaming water on the table.
‘What kind of miracle is this?’ a voice yawns from behind me. Jackson stirs in his bunk, rubbing his eyes. ‘Hot water at this time in the morning? You must pray to a generous god, McCormick.’
‘Haven’t prayed since...’ Danny stops, his smile faltering. ‘Not in years, sir. But I had a little wander along the trench this morning and got talking to the fella in charge of the Vickers gun up top. He told me his machine gun was water-cooled and that, as he’d just fired off a few rounds, the water was boiling. I gave him a couple of squares of chocolate and he very kindly disconnected the hose from the gun’s bucket and allowed me to fill a canister. Which means...’ Danny ducks back outside, returning a second later with a couple of tin mugs. ‘Hot tea that doesn’t taste like a swimming pool.’
Jackson leaps down from his bunk, eyes gleaming. Taking his mug from Danny he enjoys a long swig. ‘Nectar,’ he sighs. ‘You know, I can’t remember the last time I had a brew that didn’t reek of those bloody water-purification tablets.’
‘And for my final trick...’ Danny disappears and reappears again, this time with two brimming plates. ‘Breakfast. Bread and butter, couple of fried eggs, nice bit of bacon.’
He lays it all out on the table (the ‘table’ being a packing case perched on four wobbly stakes), adding brass cutlery polished to a gleam.
‘This soldier-servant of yours is a wonder, Wraxall,’ Jackson says, taking his seat on an old ammo box.
