“Guns,” said Laura.
The light was beginning to draw in, gray mist over gray fields, where the crops hadn’t sprouted. The war had left its detritus: here a tire, a flipped lorry, an empty petrol can, there a dead cow, hooves stabbing the sky. Small houses with barred windows. Pim kept reading, her eyes going from the page to the sopping gray countryside and back.
In the stormy east-wind straining,
The pale yellow woods were waning,
The broad stream in his banks complaining,
Heavily the low sky raining
Over tower’d Camelot;
Outside the isle a shallow boat
Beneath a willow lay afloat,
Below the carven stern she wrote,
The Lady of Shalott—
Pim shook her head once and passed the poems to someone else.
· · ·
They got off the train, trailed by a chorus of yearning farewells. A lorry was waiting for them at the station. “Can’t we just change trains?” said Laura, eyeing the lorry, thinking of how much slower it would be, and how a few hours of lurching on Belgian roads would hurt her aching head. The branch railway ran east as far as Poperinghe.
“You’re not in the army now, Iven,” Mary said, coming up briskly. “No room on the train going east for oddities like us. It’s drive or march.” Soldiers would march, Laura knew. But her leg would never take it.
Their lorry was driven by one of the orderlies from the hospital, called Fouquet. He was a Walloon, a French-speaking Belgian. Without a word, he helped them with their trunks. Mary’s donated supplies would follow. A train whistled behind them, high and lonely, as they drove off into the dusk.
The road grew worse, and worse still as they went east, destroyed by tires and marching feet. It smelled of earth and petrol and that indescribable hovering stink of unwashed men congregated together. Laura tried to run her mind over what she knew of Freddie’s last known billets, the name of his company commander, a list of hospitals that might have seen him, taken his clothes. But her mind slid away from it all, exhausted.
Pim tried to give Laura her coat, and was only restrained by the combined protest of Laura and Mary. The road swam in Laura’s gaze like water, and for a second she imagined itwaswater, black water, sweeping them all along in its current. She blinked the illusion away. Then the lorry was slowing.
“Checkpoint,” Mary said. “They’ve been trying for four years to keep the spies, the tourists, and the bereaved out of the forbidden zone. Pim, for God’s sake, you’re going to work in a field hospital. Try not to look like you’re about to wash anyone’s feet with your tears.”
Laura was silent. They put up checkpoints to keep men from deserting too.
The checkpoint guards had a plum job, fairly safe and relatively dry. They emerged with a bit of swagger: big men with massive knitted comforters wound about their throats so that only the tips of their noses and their eyes poked out. One stuck the muzzle of his rifle into the back of the lorry. The other one shone a pocket torch. “What we got here?” said one and grinned, predictably. “Cannon fodder?”
“Just say that again when the next show starts,” said Mary, leaning forward so that the light caught her face.
The man started. He looked like a grimy scarecrow, decayed by the rain. “Mrs. Borden,” he said. “I thought you’d gone to America.”
Mary said, “I came back.”
A faint, disreputable grin was her answer, and a wet cough. The soldier had a violent cold. Was everyone ill, this side of the Atlantic?
“We’re for Couthove,” added Mary. “With new staff.”
Their driver, Fouquet, had come round the back. He had spent all those miles hunched like a gargoyle over wheel and gearbox. He had been an under-gardener at Couthove before the war, or so Mary said. An expert in roses.
Fouquet said, “Problem?”
“I can’t imagine,” Mary said.
Laura could. The guards were bored.
