My fractured gaze strays again to the soldier. Oh Danny, we are not safe. Not at all. I can see it, glinting in the sunlight as the soldier tugs it out of the earth. The buckled and blasted-open shape of my writing case. I see its lid yawn wide as he lifts it, a spill of envelopes falling to the ground. But Danny’s attention is focused solely on the uneven path ahead, on getting me safely to the nearest casualty clearing station, and so he doesnotsee as the man gathers up my letters and absently stuffs them inside his tunic, tossing the empty case aside.
‘Luh-look. Pluh-please.’
I try to raise my hand to Danny’s face, to turn his head, but my arm is like a dead weight. Danny hushes me again, consoling and soothing, carrying me past the soldier and the discarded corpse of my writing case. In my mind’s eye, I imagine it: that intimate sketch of the man I love wrapped up in my farewell note, now within this stranger’s keeping. Will he open the unaddressed envelope, just so that he can decide where it ought to be sent? Will he read the contents? Will he unfold the sketch? If he does then the handwriting will match those on the other envelopes he has just collected from the case. Letters that, unlike Danny’s, contain my signature. We need to stop and order this man to hand over the treasure that might damn us.
Instead we’re moving on, Danny carrying me past the soldier and down the trench. My throat issodry, my lipssoparched. I try to speak once more, but the warning words won’t come. I feel the sun on my face, look up and see him smile and mouth reassurances I cannot hear. He lifts me now, taking me off my feet, holding me to his chest. I rest my head against his shoulder, hear the heavy thud of his heart.
Danny is holding me still when the darkness reclaims me.
Two Years Later
Epilogue
13th December 1918, London
The telegram arrived this morning. My landlady brought it up and lingered in the doorway of my room while I opened it, chatting idly about the scandalous price of meat and the trouble she was having with mould in her second-best bedroom. She only stopped when she saw the telegram drop from my shaking hand.
‘Oh dear, Mr Wraxall, not bad news, I hope?’
‘What?’ I shook my head, stared at her. ‘I’m sorry, what did you...?’
She nodded at the curling piece of paper at my feet. ‘So much of that still going on. You’d think all the killing would be done and over with by now, but what with this terrible Spanish flu going about... Don’t tell me it’s a bereavement? If so, I’m sorry for your loss. Next door’s son caught it on the ship home and was dead within the week. Imagine that! Got through the whole war, only to be killed by the flu! What I say is—Oh, Lord! Oh, Mr Wraxall! Just you stay right there and I’ll bring up some brandy.’
I hadn’t even realised I’d fallen.
Now I lie here on this threadbare carpet in my lonely rented room, reaching for the telegram, hugging it to my chest, curling myself into a ball and weeping like a child. Feeling the dull, heavy agony of two long years swell inside me. I have tried my best to hold on. I tried so, so hard.
And now this.
I come up out of the ground and into a fresh flurry of snow. The crowds around me button up their coats and shudder, but I don’t mind the cold. It feels good to have the wind on my face. I pause for a while outside the Underground station, adjusting myself to the hubbub of the street. After a week’s freedom, I’m still not entirely used to it. War had been chaos, I suppose, but life in the trenches had possessed its patterns and routines. In fact, it was one of the ways one coped with the randomness of fate out there, to lose oneself in cleaning rifles and darning socks. If anything, prison had been even more regimented. A daily cycle of mealtimes and marches, breaking rocks and digging ditches, sewing mattresses until lights out. Two years of that, and I find freedom both exhilarating and frightening.
I place my hand against my chest. Feel the throb of my heart steady. Pull down a wintry breath. Then, taking out Grandpa’s watch from my jacket pocket, I check the time. Five-thirty. I click the casing shut and move slowly down the Strand, making way for bowler-hatted businessmen who shoot me narrow-eyed glances. I suppose I cut a rather sorry figure, hatless and with my mutilated ear on display, shambling in my cheap suit and worn-out shoes. But these clothes were all they could rustle up for me on my last day in the Glasshouse.
My thoughts fly back there now as I glance up and see Nelson’s Column appear from behind the sweep of the Strand: Aldershot Military Prison, Hampshire. A long, stark, imposing building nicknamed ‘the Glasshouse’ on account of its immense glazed roof. My home ever since I arrived back in Blighty following my court-martial.
The trial itself was postponed a few weeks, both because of my injury and the fact that the Battle of the Somme, as it became known, was still raging. Twenty thousand men died on that first day, with over fifty-seven thousand injured. The campaign dragged on until mid-November, an agonising five months that failed to make any significant breakthrough. The war then continued for the whole duration of my imprisonment, finally ending only a month ago. After the battle, it was reported in the English newspapers that the grand plan had foundered because the German trenches were too deep and because the bombardment hadn’t a hope of cutting the enemy wire.
I think Gallagher already knew back then that this criticism would be made of those in charge. It probably accounted for the fact he showed me no mercy. He had ignored our reconnaissance reports and so it was useful now to have me out of the way. Sitting in judgement in a barrack room far behind the line, he conferred with his fellow judges, all brother officers, as to my punishment. The evidence of indecency was clear, he barked at last, glaring down at me from a raised table. ‘An obscene letter and a filthy drawing,’ discovered by a dutiful soldier in the broken shell of an officer’s writing case and passed along the chain of command, first to battalion HQ and then into the hands of a delighted Captain Beddowes.
My prediction had been correct. When the unaddressed envelope was opened and its contents discovered, the soldier had referred to the other letters he had collected from the writing case. The handwriting on those envelopes was identical to the one in Danny’s letter and, when these were opened in turn, my signature had damned me. The writing case was also reclaimed from the wreckage of our trench and was produced at the trial, my initials on the lid the final piece of evidence. Now, Lieutenant-Colonel Gallagher had grunted, if only I would name the degenerate soldier to whom I had written, then my sentence might be reduced.
Had some subconscious part of my brain feared that this might happen? Was that why I had only addressed Danny as ‘My darling’ in the letter? Whatever the truth, with only the faceless drawing and an ‘obstinate pervert’ who would not give up his lover’s identity, Gallagher had taken vengeance by handing down the maximum penalty within his power: two years’ hard labour, plus another three months for contempt of court for my unwillingness to cooperate with the trial. Helped from the barracks by Captain Jackson, I had hobbled past a triumphant Beddowes, who tapped his swagger stick against my chest.
‘Goodbye, Wraxall,’ he crooned. ‘And don’t think that I have given up on exposing your little friend either.’
His words had sent a chill through me. I had no doubt about the Snake’s commitment to persecuting Danny. And, as I was loaded onto a hospital train heading back to Étaples, it was beyond my power to protect him.
Assisting me into the carriage, settling my still-aching leg into as comfortable a position as possible, Jackson had gripped my arm and whispered: ‘I’ll do my best to look out for him. But Stephen, you must listen: if you want to keep him safe, then there must beno letters. No communication between the two of you at all. Not a single word from this day forward. Do you understand?’
I’d nodded dumbly. I understood very well. That was why I’d forbidden Danny to visit me during my time at the field hospital. Everything must be done now to keep him safe.
Even if it meant us never speaking to one another again.
In the end, the Snake never got the chance to pursue his vendetta against Danny. A note from Jackson arrived two months into my sentence informing me that Captain Stanley Beddowes had been fatally wounded while returning from a tour of inspection with Lieutenant-Colonel Gallagher. A sniper bullet killed him instantly as he climbed out of a communication trench. I’d felt no joy at the news. This particular threat to Danny was lifted, but the war had taken another life and no one who had served should celebrate that. As for Gallagher, I heard that he was swiftly retired after the Somme and now presides over the smoking room of his club in Pall Mall, telling anyone who will listen that he is entirely blameless for the slaughter.
Private Robert Billings was injured soon after I landed in the Glasshouse. A scrap of shrapnel in the shoulder – a Blighty wound that sent him back to Manchester and his work as a carpenter. He visited me once, six months or so after his return.
‘Not much of a gaff, is it?’ he’d said, looking around the echoing visitor room. ‘Sorry, Lieutenant, you don’t need me coming here, bringing you down.’
