Authors: Elizabeth Buchan
In the corridor, her heart somersaulted and she stopped abruptly. Someone lurked in the dark wedge made by the shadow between two windows. Then she realized who it was.
‘Robbie,’ she said sharply. ‘What on earth are you doing? There’s no need to hang about on the landing.’ She felt along the wall with her hand and turned on the light.
Robbie’s face was blotched from crying. For the first time in many weeks, she addressed Flora. ‘I’m keeping watch in my own way.’
For a dreadful moment, Flora thought Robbie had gone mad – and the cold, the dark and the creaks of the floorboards in the landing heightened the fancy. Then she pulled herself together. ‘Please, Robbie. You mustn’t get like this. You mustn’t mind about Danny.’
Extremity made Robbie reckless, and, from her self-imposed exile, she attacked. ‘I don’t trust him. He has some sort of hold, knows something about Sir Rupert.’ Robbie caught Flora by the arm. ‘I’ve known what it was, Miss Flora. Do you?’
Because Robbie was so distressed, Flora stopped herself from pushing her away. ‘No, Robbie, of course not. I can’t think what you’re talking about.’ She felt her temper slipping and thought to herself that Robbie was quite ridiculous to make a scene at such a moment. Besides, Flora’s first priority was to get her tired husband some tea and, as far as she was concerned, Robbie and Danny would have to fight it out between them. ‘I wish you wouldn’t be lurid, Robbie,’ she said crossly. ‘They’re two comrades from the war, admittedly rather odd ones, who like a drink and have kept up their friendship, that’s all. Now, I suggest you come downstairs with me and have a cup of tea.’
Robbie moved down the passage and the electric light trapped her face in its glare. Fresh from her discovery of physical love, Flora was suddenly alerted by the expression in the older woman’s eyes. I have nothing, it said. And I wanted more. I wanted what most women have.
Ye gods, she thought. And I have everything.
‘Robbie,’ she said and slid her arm around the older woman’s waist. ‘It’s no use you going to pieces. We rely on you to get us through.’
‘Yes,’ said Robbie, after a moment. ‘Yes, pet.’
‘You should go to bed.’ Kit bent over Matty and pulled her to her feet.
‘I’m fine.’
‘No.’ Kit was deadly serious. ‘It would be very difficult if you got over-tired and had a relapse.’
She looked up at the fair head she had spent so long trying to see inside, and saw that the shutters were closed against her. Rupert’s dying was private, and Kit did not want her there. For a second, the demon squeezed her chest and then she said, ‘If you like,’ and went.
‘Danny.’ Rupert managed to get out an approximation of the word.
‘Sir.’
Kit took up a position by the window. Wrapped in a tartan rug from Ardtornish, Flora knelt at the foot of the bed and Robin drank his tea by the fire.
The logs hissed. Flora really ought to be holding a lighted candle, Kit thought with the irreverence that catches the mind at important moments. Then she would resemble one of those plump, worldly women in a medieval Dutch painting who kneel in adoration of the Christ-child in a welter of household goods.
It was cold by the window, and his thoughts drifted. He recollected his escapes from the home he often found intolerable, riding into Damascus with Max in blazing heat, of pure blue sky, of peach and almond blossom, of the tinkle of water in courtyards. He thought of Daisy.
He remembered, too, held until not so very long ago, his dislike and distrust of his father... the blame he attached to Rupert for Hesther’s suicide... his anguish that Rupert never noticed him, never appeared to care. They were fading now, those feelings, in the shrouded room, leaving Kit curiously empty.
‘Remember the marching we did up to the line,’ said Danny. ‘Through the mud. Feet all soft from the trenches. Up Tin Pan Alley. “Don’t look round,” you said to us, sir. “Just keep going.” We knew that an ‘ard time lay ahead but you say, “There’s an omelette waiting for each chap at the depot if you get through.” Cigarettes, too. Letters, perhaps. “Look, chaps,” you say to our lot. “We got through the Marne, le Câteau. Wipers. Let’s get through this bloody awful one.’” Danny paused. ‘And we did, sir...’
In June 1916, Kitchener’s New Army assembled to fling itself at a German army that had already been dug into French soil for two years – a first, second and sometimes third line that had snatched every high spur and chalky ridge of the Somme downland for its advantage and disappeared into a labyrinth of underground bunkers.
Kitchener’s boys had to make do with the terrain they had.
Mixed in with the New Army were the remnants of those who had fought in the north and east. The ‘old ‘uns’. Blooded, experienced soldiers, unlike the new recruits who didn’t know nothing from nothing. Among them Lieutenant-Colonel, formerly Major, Rupert Dysart, Danny Ovens, Bill Cranstone and Jack Oakley from the Hampshires. The ‘old ‘uns’, who knew a thing or two, rested up and waited, assembled their kit and their thoughts, wrote letters home and watched the raw recruits fling themselves around. Rupert struggled to get a grip on his unstable nerves.
These days Danny stuck to Rupert. They had come to an arrangement. Danny made Rupert’s tea, shone his boots and shaved him. He liked having an officer to look after, and Rupert wanted a batman. He was a Londoner, Danny confided to Rupert during the long evening twilights. I never would have guessed, said Rupert with a rare flash of humour, I thought your dropped aitches were from Manchester. Danny explained he had joined up with the Hamps after a couple of beers on a day visit to Farnham to see his sister and one regiment was like another. Anyway, he was thinking of moving to the country. ‘Course, there’s not much left of us Hamps now, is there, sir?’
‘No,’ said Rupert, white-faced, his head in his hands. ‘No, there isn’t, Danny.’
On 1 July the 19th Wilts – the Butterflies – which had been held in reserve moved up to the left of those who still survived, dug into positions overlooking the village of La Boisselle. Nearly a thousand men slogged down the line towards the front, and the Germans, bunked up on their higher vantage point, picked them off like targets in a shooting gallery. By the time they reached the assault trench, the men were sweating from the physical effort — and from fear.
‘I’ll need me fucking Danny’s Cockney luck today,’ Danny said.
Crouching in the dirt among writhing telephone cables, the men settled in for the wait. A long line of them. Bombers. Snipers. Mopers. Messengers. Signallers. Sappers. But all fodder.
Rupert sprinted along the top of the trench and ordered, ‘Fix your bayonets and get ready to go over when you hear the whistle.’ A German machine gun screamed, there was a volley of bullets and Rupert’s water bottle was hit.
‘Get down, sir,’ shouted Danny.
Rupert threw himself over into the trench.
‘Don’t think you’ll do that again, sir,’ said Danny.
‘Shut up,’ said Rupert, who agreed.
The worst of waiting in the assault trench was the machine guns, which arced backwards and forwards, cutting the sandbags to pieces on the parapets. Going over the top was a joke, going over with your eyes and nose full of sand was hilarious.
It was midday and hot. The men had to ration use of the water bottles and Danny’s tongue swelled to twice its size.
‘Tell you what,’ said Rupert, unhooking his water bottle from his belt. ‘Take some of the sandbag rags, put them in this tin with some candle grease and see if you can’t boil the last of the water and we’ll have some tea.’
An hour later, they had warm, wet liquid but not much else.
A colonel came in from the 19th and requested Rupert for a signaller to go down the line to help get the troops into position. Rupert detailed his man. Pressed down into the earth, Danny watched the signaller’s flag dip and wave, and the companies shuffled forward, bayonets fixed. Then it was up and over.
The German guns began in earnest.
The stretch of land that the Hamps and the 19th Wilts had to cross lay in front of a huge mine crater. Beyond that lay the second German line, which they had been ordered to take.
When the whistle went, Danny threw his rifle on top of the trench, pulled himself up, grabbed it and surged forward. Underfoot was pitted with shell holes, and treacherous. He stumbled, fell, got up, ran, fell, and was never sure if he was going down with a bullet in him or not.
From the third German line on the higher ground, the machine guns hammered out hell, the guns tore the sky apart and the shells burst like burnt-out stars.
Weaving, dodging, Danny ran. Rupert was behind him, bringing up the rear. Then Danny caught his foot, fell, and Rupert ran on past. Danny flung himself to one side, and caught a glimpse of his face from which emotion had been stripped.
He struggled upright. Ran. Reached what he thought was the parapet of the German trench, hovered on the edge and, with a crump, a shell exploded. For a second or two, the world coloured black. Danny felt his spirit rise out of his body and watch while his body rolled and bumped down forty feet or more with a dozen or so of the other men following him.
‘Bloody fuckin’ ‘ell.’ He spat out chalk and earth and tried to sit up. ‘It’s a fuckin’ mine crater.’ That was the last thing he said for several minutes, for he passed out. When he woke, it was quiet except for a loud buzzing. Then the guns started again.
‘Bloody fuckin’ ‘ell.’
One of the men had clambered up the opposite side of the crater and lay under cover keeping watch. Bill Gunstone wriggled on his stomach back to Danny, sending a shower of chalk over his face. ‘All right, son?’
‘Where’ve I got it?’
‘Thigh, I should say.’ Bill fiddled in his bag for a dressing and did his best to tidy up the wound which was bleeding heavily. ‘Not like Jack over there.’
Danny squinted. Jack Oakley lay twitching in a pool of drying red. One of his legs had been mashed up and, by the look of it, his shoulder had gone. Bill shoved the neck of his water bottle into Danny’s mouth. ‘Here. Looks like we’re stuck here for the time being. We’ll have to wait till dark.’
‘Nice ‘otel,’ said Danny, and the pain in his leg hit him.
The shells kept coming. How they kept coming. Every so often the crater took a hit and a man cried out. The summer sun blazed like the Day of Judgement. One by one, the sweltering, islanded men were picked off. Bill first, then the others. Then Jack began to scream.
‘
Will someone shoot me.’
His cries scrambled Danny’s nerves until he, too, was shrieking inside his useless body. Only his eyes were capable of movement, sliding from side to side, watching the darkening sky while he listened to Jack die. In the end, Danny knew he had to make himself move. If it was the last thing he ever did, he
had
to move. He couldn’t go out, just like that, with no effort.
Inch by gasping inch Danny pulled himself up the side of the crater on what he hoped was the British side. A body lay at the top, and he heard machine-gun bullets rip into it. They made the same sound when they tore into sandbags.
Didn’t matter to the poor bugger now.
With a final effort, Danny raised his head above the rim of the crater and peered through the stifling grey smoke. Through it he could make out men stumbling to and fro as the battle raged for the line, reeling from the fumes of the gas-soaked earth and smoke.
But Danny became conscious of only one thing: the buzzing of a thousand million flies settling over the bodies that lay between the lines in the Flanders’ fields.
That Danny dreaded most, dying in no man’s land in gas-infected crater water, in pain. Alone. With no one to see him out.
Danny wept into the foul-smelling earth, and then fainted.
When he regained consciousness it was dark. Moonlight played over the scorched landscape. Mercifully, it was quiet, the lull while more reserves were brought in. There was the merest hint of a moon in the sky, and from time to time an odd flare spat yellow light. Perhaps I’m dead already, he thought.
Creeping with infinite care, morphia pills tucked into his jacket, aching, exhausted, Rupert launched himself from the dug-out in the British line to where he and the men had retreated, and slithered towards the crater having ordered the others to keep cover.
Somehow he got himself over the top.
He owed Danny a debt. He knew some would say that the carnage cancelled it out: it did not matter one way or the other any more. There was no time for such niceties. But Rupert did not agree. He could not, would not, let go of the idea that he could do something right, that it mattered he tried. That he owed a man the honour of being buried with his own kind. He could not let go. Despite the shattered nerves, despite the failures, he would pay his debt, and if he had to crawl over the hellish landscape until he dropped, so be it.
So Rupert crawled, the dust coating his Dysart hair, freezing into the ground every other foot, willing himself forward. A gun spluttered. A burst of German from the trenches in front of him was quickly hushed. The instant dazzle of a match. Then silence and darkness.
At the top of the crater where Rupert, turning to look back in battle, had seen Danny throw up his arms and fall, he rolled his body over and spiralled down to the bottom. Seconds later a machine gun splattered bullets where he had been.
‘Ovens.’ Rupert lit a match and cupped his hand around it. ‘Ovens,’ he whispered. The flare lit a huddled form half-way up. ‘Danny Ovens?’
And Danny waking from the nightmare of pain and fear heard the Angel of Deliverance.
‘Here,’ he said. ‘Over here, sir.’
Rupert crawled his way back up the side of the crater, hanging onto the chalky earth with his clawed hands. By the time he reached Danny earth clogged his nostrils and he was dizzy from the exertion.
‘Sir,’ said Danny and felt fresh blood welling on his leg. ‘You’re a fool...’
Rupert’s hand crept precariously over the earth and grasped Danny’s.
‘I wouldn’t let you die on your own, Danny.’
Danny cradled his whisky and blew into it. ‘Somehow, he got me across that piece of land. He stuffed me with morphia pills, and he dragged me on his back, I think.’