Rose picked up her coat and ran down the stairs, ignoring the tuts of her parents in the adjoining room. She opened the door and closed it silently behind her, before stepping out into the falling snow.
‘Can you blame me? I loved Sam. We were going to be married. You were the first man to enter my life since he died and it stirred old memories and feelings again.’ She grew angry at the injustice of needing to explain. ‘I opened my heart to you, Nicholas,’ she retorted, keeping her distance from him. ‘But you don’t really understand what you have done to me. You experienced war but you don’t understand what it is like to wait at home. Every day I woke wondering if today was the day we would receive the news that Sam had died. My life stood still. Our plans for a future together were on hold, waiting for the day when it would be finally torn into tatters. I lived for his letters, but they didn’t really tell me anything. Only that when he wrote them he was still alive and had been thinking of me. But that was all. I didn’t know what he was enduring, where he was or when he would be home again.
‘His mother received the form informing us he was dead. I was going to be his wife, but I heard second-hand. Being hisfiancée meant nothing, I might as well have been a neighbour or a friend. But at least I finally knew he was not coming home and my wait was over. There would be no more news to fear, for it had already come and broken my heart. So I learnt to carry on and my boring life became a routine to help me survive. Then you step into my life, wearing the uniform and taking an interest in me as Sam had once done. Did I think of Sam? Did I compare you? Of course I did.’
Nicholas remained silent. His eyes, black as ebony and glistening with unshed tears, watched her. She tried to remain strong. She did not want his pity.
‘You walked into my life and acted out a poem that, in reality, I knew was pure fantasy. You see, I think I always knew in my heart that Sam would never come home. I can’t explain it, I just did. So we are both fools, Nicholas. Me for penning a fantasy and you for acting upon it.’
‘Does it matter how and why we first met?’
‘Sam will always be between us. We have both betrayed him by falling in love. He is out there somewhere, buried in a country I will never see—’
‘Then youdolove me?’
His question startled her. Had she fallen in love with him in such a short space of time? She had spoken without thinking.
‘It doesn’t matter how I feel about you.’ She shook her head, confused, even dazed. ‘It’s all wrong. Go away, Nicholas. I need to be alone. I don’t know who you really are. You have been acting a role. If I have fallen in love, it is not with the real you. The real you lied to me.’
She slipped inside, turned and closed the door. His face, pained with concern, remained in her mind long after she heard him walk away.
Chapter Ten
Tuesday, 16th December, 1919
Nicholas parked his car at the station, bought a ticket and headed for the platform. Despite being early, an assortment of travellers were already waiting for the train to arrive. Nicholas quietly joined them, although inwardly he was impatient and eager to be gone. He turned up his collar against the early morning chill and watched his fellow travellers to help pass the time. A young family stood at the far end, clustered together in their excitement for the journey ahead and carrying Christmas gifts in their hands. An elderly couple and a few solitary men remained aloof and quiet, whilst a guard walked along the platform, with purpose in his stride and a sprig of mistletoe in his buttonhole. Each one, thought Nicholas, had their own tale to tell. If only they knew his and where he was going.
The ride was uneventful. Nicholas marked the journey by the vacant seats around him as they filled and emptied at each stop. Only one traveller, a gentleman, attempted a conversation, but Nicholas’s one-worded responses did not encourage him to persist and he soon gave up. Nicholas suspected the man was as thankful as he was when his journey came to an end and he could leave Nicholas to his solitary mood. Nicholas’s next travelling companion was a young man, who greeted him with a half-hearted nod. He was rather pale, despite the feverish shine on his head, and preferred to sleep most of the time. This suited Nicholas and he soon became lost in his own thoughts on how the day would unfold. Several hours later, the train finally arrived at Bristol station and they both got out and followed the tide of departing passengers. At some point they parted company, never to see one another again, and Nicholas was finally outside in the streets.
He withdrew a letter from his pocket to remind him of the address he had been sent many months before. It was his first time in Bristol and although he had planned to eat something before searching for the address, the knot in his stomach ensured he had no appetite to carry his plan out. The visit he was about to make was long overdue, and perhaps should never be undertaken at all. It was a conundrum that he had yet to work out and decide upon, but he was here now and he would not turn back.
He found the address — a mid-terrace house, small and suitable for a railway labourer who travelled the country laying down tracks. He knocked on the door, inclining his head slightly as he listened to the voices and footsteps inside. The door eventually opened and a man’s face appeared in the crack. He recognised Nicholas instantly and grew wary, his eyes lifting nervously to look behind him.
‘I’m alone,’ reassured Nicholas. ‘I needed to see you.’ Their eyes locked, both weighing up the sanity of the meeting, before the man holding the door gave a curt nod and allowed him to step inside.
Nicholas took off his hat as he entered and waited for him to shut the door. It gave him a few precious moments to see how time had changed him. His hair was a little longer and now parted to the left, and his shoulders were more rounded than he recalled, but it was still him.
‘Hello, Sam,’ said Nicholas. Like an aged man, Sam haltingly turned to face him and braced himself. Two soldiers, brought together by war and parted by war, hiding a secret that could get them both killed. Nicholas opened his arms and Sam walked into his embrace.
* * *
1917
The spring and summer of 1917 were a constant round of deployment for the 1st Battalion of the Duke of Cornwall Light Infantry as they were called upon to relieve other divisions, engage in skirmishes and charge into battle with, at times, no more than an hour’s notice. The frontline had barely moved along the Western Front as troops on either side had dug in to stand their ground. The troops were getting weary; the earlier confidence, born from naivety and propaganda, dwindled long ago in the gun smoke of no man’s land.
There is only so much shell-fire and machine-gunning a man could take, and Sam was beginning to struggle. At first, he hid his distress well, under the cloak of jovial banter that came so naturally to him. The other soldiers looked to him to keep their spirits up. Nicholas did too until the day he first noticed the uncertainty in Sam’s eyes and the nervous glances to his side, as if he was expecting a sniper to jump out at him at any moment. He had also grown quieter, which was easy to overlook when surrounded by other troops. A stoic formal march, the crowded conditions of a mud-filled trench or the noisy mess hut were fine settings for a withdrawn man to hide.
Nicholas told himself that everyone was scared and Sam’s fear was not abnormal. A man would not be human if he did not feel fear, he told himself. Nicholas felt it too and often wondered if he would still be alive at the end of their stint at the front. The relief they felt at having survived their allotted days on the frontline was often coupled with anxiety. The arrival of the soldiers’ relief, and subsequent changeover, was a dangerous time as heads were lifted above the trenches and soldiers scrambled to the next dugout. Yet the reward of a rest away from the frontline, albeit counted in days rather than weeks, after living in mud and enduring sleepless nights, was worth the risk.
Initially Nicholas did not ask Sam how he was faring, concerned, perhaps, that voicing his thoughts would eitherinsult him or open a dam to emotions Nicholas did not have the skill to face. So they carried on playing their role as pawns in a war made by others.
The months dragged on, with only small amounts of ground gained or lost. The capture of the small wood that had been in their sights for months was a great victory. It had harboured enemy machine guns and trench mortars and now it was theirs, but in reality it was no more than an acre wide. A new frontline was formed, in a surreal world which had no maps to place it on.
By October Nicholas and Sam were fighting over land that had been blasted with shell fire almost continuously for three years. Nothing had survived and, for the first time, Sam was unable to hide the hopeless horror he was feeling. They viewed the scene — spread out before them were the remains of tall leafy trees. They were now charred, blackened stumps pointing to the sky like macabre tombstones in a landscape of mud and craters filled with putrid water. Rumour had it that their division had already fought twice for this wasteland, before Sam and Nicholas had joined earlier in the year. Nicholas dared not ask if any of the original soldiers had survived and were fighting with them now as he felt he already knew the answer. Few had seen the beginning of the war and lived to tell the tale.
Their days on the frontline were exhausting, even after they were relieved by other divisions. The march to a safe haven could sap a battle-weary man’s strength still further. Narrow, slippery duck boards placed over ground marked by deep ruts, puddles and craters, provided a treacherous track for sodden boots to march upon.
It was about this time Sam became less astute. On several occasions Nicholas had to help him on with his gas mask when the alarm went off, as he was like a lost child, his hands trembling uncontrollably as he fumbled with the straps. Late in October, when Christmas was on the horizon, Sam andNicholas’s battalion were waiting in reserve. The relative respite, against a backdrop of gunfire and gas shells, did not last long and soon they found themselves following orders and running across no man’s land to take a chateau in yet another muddy landscape they did not care for. Sam came perilously close to death when a shell exploded near him. However, they both survived, although many didn’t. When they were finally relieved, Nicholas noticed Sam had suddenly developed a facial tic that he could not control. It distressed Sam greatly.
