“It’s as though no one was ever here,” said Pim. She gave a small, nervous laugh. “The way people wake up and they find they’ve slept for a hundred years.”
“We haven’t,” said Mary. “Can’t you hear the guns?”
There hadn’t been noise outside before, Laura thought vaguely. Or had there been? Was that part of her fever-dreams, that they’d spent the night free of the rumble of the guns? The only sound she remembered was music. Softly, Pim said, “Like faerie revels that end at sunrise.”
“Drugs in the wine, maybe,” said Mary. “We need to go.”
“But—” Pim said.
“Now,” said Mary, turning toward the door. “If it was a hoax, damn him. If a hallucination, I don’t want to think about it. If he wants his bill settled, he can find me at Couthove. Come on.” She strode across the lobby floor, glass crunching under her feet.
There was nothing to do but follow. Laura had no strength to search, even if she’d wanted to. They passed through the airless stillness, across the lobby, and back into the daylit world. The hinges screamed as the door shut behind them. Pim’s forehead was lined with bewilderment. They found themselves out in a brisk wind and clear sun, standing on cracked cobbles rimed with melting frost, anonymous crumbling buildings all around. Pim had turned back to the hotel with an uncomprehending face.
Half the hotel was collapsed. The other half was barely standing, as though the first high wind would scatter it like dandelion fluff, back into its component bricks and wood and tile.
“I don’t understand,” said Pim again.
Laura stood beside her, staring. She didn’t understand either.
But Mary was already walking away. Just beyond the still, ruined village lay a road. They could hear the rumble of it, see the traffic. The distance between the ruined village and the teeming road was like the border between sleep and waking.
Mary had already crossed over. “Something must be happening further up the line,” she called. “Come on. Look at all that traffic. They’re going to want us at the hospital. Can you walk, Iven? No—I didn’t think so. We’ll beg a lift, then. Come on.”
“Are you all right, Laura?” said Pim. She put the back of her hand to Laura’s forehead. The maternal gesture made her ache. “You’re burning up.”
· · ·
Hitchhiking was a perfectly usual way for nurses to get about, and it took hardly a moment’s trying before a unit of sappers took them up. The three women were met with a wave of delighted chatter, eager conversation. But there was a constraint on the men too, a grimness, and they glanced often to the east. Laura leaned against Pim, her eyes half-closed.
“Sir, what is happening?” Mary asked the officer, as they jolted along.
“Fritz is trying to get through,” came the reply. “Trying proper, this time. They say they’ve attacked the French at Amiens, pushed the Frogs back. Some say they’ve broken the French line already. We’re reinforcing the Salient. Haig’s said hold to the last man.” The sergeant turned his head and spat.
Laura and Mary exchanged glances. The line had surged back and forth but had remained unbroken for four years. And it wouldn’t break now, Laura told herself. Itcouldn’t.Not before she went looking for Freddie. But she was so damned sick…The chatter of the men fell disembodied on her ears as the thin spring sun fell warm on her neck. She must get well, quick as she could. She shut her eyes. “—The Americans are hopeless, I hear. Big, well fed. But hopeless. Charge machine guns like maniacs, no notion of tactics.”
“That’s what the Frogs did back in ’14. Don’t need tactics, if there’re enough of them.”
“They’ll get killed in droves.”
“Better them than us. If only they come in time.”
“They won’t.”
“Haig’s at Chenonceau, I hear. Foch is there too. And the king of Belgium. The whole shooting match.”
“Jawing and eating frog legs, are they?”
“Trying to agree on a high command. Put one bloke in charge, they say, that’s the ticket. Better one bugger in one château, deciding things, than— Sorry, ma’am,” he added, when his compatriots chided him for his language.
“Strange place to have picked you up,” another of the men was saying to Mary.
“We were wrecked on the road,” said Mary.
“There was a light across the field,” chimed in Pim. “We came upon a hotel—”
Laura was only half-listening, trying to make plans despite her feverish haze. She had to find the men of Freddie’s unit. Talk to his CO. Find one of the boys from Halifax who’d been in Freddie’s platoon. Unwillingly, she recalled the hallucination of the night before, Freddie’s face amid a seething crowd. She’d thought it was him because she wanted it to be.
Then she heard the strange silence that had fallen on the men in the lorry. One man said to his neighbor, “Do you think it was—”
