Dead Man's Land (3 page)

As she rolled over to see who was disturbing them, Mrs Gregson unbalanced on the edge of the mattress and crashed to the floor, crying out as the wind was driven from her body. ‘Jesus.’ She remembered herself. ‘Sorry, Alice. I mean, good grief.’

When she had finally lowered her legs and raised her head, she could see Elizabeth Challenger, their formidable matron, standing in the doorway, hands on generous hips.

‘Pippery. Gregson. What on earth are you doing?’

‘It’s my fault, Matron—’ Miss Pippery began.

‘I thought I felt a mouse in my bed,’ said Mrs Gregson. ‘I have a phobia of mice.’

The matron smirked at the thought of Mrs Gregson fleeing from any small furry creature. ‘Well, I wouldn’t worry too much about that, you’ve been asked to report to the Senior Medical Officer in Charge for reassignment.’

Now the matron had Mrs Gregson’s full attention. She sat bolt upright. ‘Where?’

Matron shook her head. ‘I have no idea. But wherever you are going, you’ll be going there with a Major Watson.’

Sergeant Geoffrey Shipobottom hammered his fist on the doorpost of the officers’ dugout. He waited until a muffled voice told him to enter, pulled the gas curtain aside and ducked into the dim interior. The captain was sitting at the rough table, papers in front of him, pencil in hand. Cecil, his Jack Russell, was lying at his feet, eyeing the newcomer with suspicion. Lieutenant Metcalf was lying on one of the bunks, smoking, a small, leather-bound volume of poetry propped on his chest.

Shipobottom kept his head down as he approached the captain, which made for an awkward salute. The bunker was well constructed of timber, steel plate and sandbags, but the ceiling was far too low even for men of average height. Which Shipobottom certainly wasn’t. Must have been built by Welshmen, Lieutenant Metcalf had joked when they had taken up residence.

‘What is it, Sergeant?’ Captain Robinson de Griffon asked.

Shipobottom detected a brittle, impatient edge to his voice. Not like the captain at all. ‘There’s a balloon gone up, sir.’

The two officers exchanged glances and Metcalf swung his legs off the bunk. A balloon was often a sign that a barrage was imminent. And after a barrage came an assault on enemy lines.

‘How many?’ de Griffon asked.

‘Jus’ the wun, sir.’

‘And how far away?’ asked Metcalf.

‘Can’t rightly say, sir. Not close. Not too high yet, either.’

‘Shipobottom,’ said Metcalf impatiently, ‘one swallow does not make a spring. And a solitary balloon does not make a barrage.’ It was customary for at least four to be launched prior to any artillery action, spaced several miles apart.

‘No, sir. But, y’know, the men was wondering. If you’d heard anything, like.’ His eyes darted to the field telephone. ‘That might change things.’

De Griffon studied the big man before him. Like most of the soldiers in his company, Shipobottom had worked at the Lancashire cotton mills. He was taller and bulkier than most of his compatriots, however, with the exception of Corporal Platt, and with a startlingly bulbous nose that suggested a good proportion of his wages never made it to the family home.

‘Sergeant Shipobottom, I intend to hold a faces and rifles inspection shortly. Tomorrow, full kit. Then, as far as I know, we will be marching out of here for a well-deserved rest. And as we march, I want anyone who is watching to ask: who are those smart lads? And the answer will be, those are the Leigh Pals.’

Metcalf jumped in. ‘And if we find anyone who is dragging their feet or dishonouring the uniform, it’ll be Field Punishment Number One before he can undo his puttees. Is that clear?’

Shipobottom was taken aback. ‘Sir.’

De Griffon waved him away with his pencil. ‘Dismiss. And, Shipobottom, tie back that gas curtain, will you? Can’t breathe in here.’

Taking the hint, Metcalf rose and stubbed his cigarette out. Once Shipobottom had gone, he asked: ‘More tea, sir? There’s some condensed milk left.’

De Griffon nodded. He reached down to ruffle the dog’s fur. ‘What is the matter with Shipobottom? He’s prancing like a filly on hot coals.’

Metcalf primed and lit the stove. ‘He went to a fortune-teller in Cairo before we left. Apparently, she told him he’d come to a sticky end.’

De Griffon leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head. His blond hair bunched beneath his fingers. He must get it cut. Grew like corn on a hot summer’s day. ‘She probably thought he was bound for Gallipoli. Not much clairvoyance needed to predict what fate would befall any soldier sent there.’ They had missed being transferred to those hellish beaches by a whisker. ‘Still, that doesn’t mean it won’t happen to him out here. Or, indeed, any of us.’

The nihilism of that remark was so uncharacteristic of the captain that Metcalf was emboldened to speak up. ‘I hope you don’t mind me asking, sir, but is everything all right with you? You seem a bit out of sorts.’

De Griffon’s blue eyes seemed to grow a shade paler as they turned on him and Metcalf thought he had overstepped the mark. They might both be officers, but Metcalf was a Manchester Grammar School lad, who had once spoken in an accent not much different from Shipobottom’s. Metcalf was considered to be – and expected to act like – a gentleman as long as the war lasted, but they all knew his was a temporary promotion to the gentry. The captain, on the other hand, was as blue-blooded as they came.

The chair landed on its front legs with a thump, and de Griffon stood, remembering to crick his neck at the last moment. ‘Do I? Was I hard on Shipobottom? I thought your threat of the field punishment was perhaps unnecessary, I must say.’

Metcalf shifted uneasily. ‘Sorry, sir. I was simply backing you up. If I spoke out of turn—’

‘Don’t fret about it,’ he interrupted. ‘You know my family, don’t you, Metcalf?’

‘Not personally, sir.’

‘No, of course not.’ Metcalf’s parents owned several large hardware stores in Leigh, Preston and Salford. They had supplied the de Griffons with goods and chattels, but had never socialized. Although, Metcalf reminded himself, here they were having tea, almost as equals. His parents would be thrilled.

‘Give me one of those gaspers, will you?’ de Griffon asked. He took a cigarette from Metcalf and lit it from an oil lamp. He walked over to the doorway and exhaled from the corner of his mouth, so that the smoke drifted out into the reserve trench. What with the black tar from lamp wicks, the constant cigarettes, not to mention the tang of rat piss and the sour smell of unwashed clothes and bodies, the atmosphere in any dugout was oppressive and rank. He saw no reason to add to it.

Cecil trotted over and slumped to the floor next to him. De Griffon gave him a friendly prod with the toe of his boot and the dog began to worry at the leather with claws and teeth. ‘You know, Bertie – the Prince of Wales – once called my mother “a professional beauty”. Queen Victoria had thought her “too fast” because, when the fancy took her, she shot with the men at Sandringham. Quite a character, Mother. And she shot until quite recently. Flitcham, where I was brought up, was once a sporting estate to rival Holkham, Malden and Quidenham. You’ve never been?’

‘No, sir.’ His family was not the sort to enter a place like Flitcham by the front door.

De Griffon puffed on the cigarette, his face grown slack as he recalled his boyhood, his features for once devoid of the worry lines the war had gifted him. The captain looked just as he must have done in peacetime, Metcalf thought, a well-groomed, handsome young man with the confident afterglow of a good upbringing, secure in the knowledge of an equally privileged life ahead for generations to come.

‘A bag of two thousand or more a day throughout November was not uncommon,’ de Griffon continued. ‘If Sir Ralph Payne Gallwey or Lord Walsingham were visiting, that could be doubled. We had the most beautiful shooting brake, an Albion, to ferry us around. I still remember the wicker baskets of champagne for the guns and the ginger beers for the beaters that would be lugged out to Shillingham Wood. Then, a little more than two years ago, everything changed. The pheasantries are empty now. The partridges strut around as if they own the place.’

Metcalf, never having heard his captain divulge such personal history before, poured the hot water into the metal teapot and kept silent. He wasn’t sure of the form at this kind of confessional. Did he comment, make sympathetic noises and gestures or simply keep his mouth shut? The latter was surely the safest option.

‘My father took ill. Horrible, terrible disease. Wasted away before our eyes. We were lucky, we had a chauffeur, Harry Legge, who was devoted to him. Turned him every four hours to prevent bedsores. Day and night. That’s real, genuine devotion. Drove into town every two days to fetch Dr Kibble, then drove him back. Fed my father three meals a day, which was far from easy. We were terrified Legge would volunteer or be called up. We even put up with his amorous adventures with the housemaids and the cook. Then my father died. Which was a relief. Couldn’t even speak at the end. But my mother went into a mourning that would have done Queen Victoria proud. Legge, poor chap, got blind drunk and crashed the motor car and put paid to his chances of ever serving. Terrible limp. My older brother was already in the army. I decided to enlist to make sure I could get a commission here, with the Leigh Pals. At least it was a battalion I had a connection with, no matter how distant.’

At this point Metcalf risked a nod, because he knew some of the background. Although the de Griffons owned several large cotton mills in Leigh, Lancashire, Lord Stanwood was for the most part an absentee landlord, spending his time at Flitcham, his Gloucestershire seat. Ever since the strikes of the 1890s, he had left the day-to-day running of the mills to his hard-nosed managers. By his own admission, Robinson de Griffon was a stranger to the town that had created so much of the family wealth.

‘Then this came this morning.’ He picked up a single sheet of oft-folded paper and handed it across. ‘Please keep it to yourself.’

Metcalf was flattered that he was to be taken into the captain’s confidence, but also apprehensive about the contents of the letter. He doubted it was good news.

‘It’s the original. My mother forwarded it. Go on, read it.’

‘Is that tea ready?’ asked de Griffon, as he screwed his cigarette into a brass ashtray, fashioned from the flattened fuse of a shell casing.

‘Sir.’ But Metcalf continued to stare at the letter. It took a few seconds for the lieutenant to comprehend, beyond it involving yet another family tragedy, its true consequences. He held up the piece of paper.

‘I’m truly sorry about your brother, sir. But does this mean that you’re—’

‘It does, Metcalf. It bloody well does. With Charlie dead, I am now Lord Stanwood.’

When Shipobottom left the officers’ dugout he went straight back along the duckboards to the funk hole, an alcove excavated from the side of the trench and lined with old waterproof capes and sections of ammunition boxes. Sitting in it were corporals Platt – a man even larger than Shipobottom – and Tugman, plus privates Farrar and, the baby of the group, Moulton. All had grown up within two streets of each other; all had worked at the mills back home in Leigh; all had joined up within a day of each other, and been trained, in Wales, Catterick and Egypt, in the same platoon. Their battalion wasn’t called the Leigh Pals for nothing.

All were watching the billycan that sat on the paraffin stove, waiting for it to boil for a brew. Every man was smoking, rifles and gas masks had been laid to one side, helmets taken off. They were in the reserve trenches, and the nerve-jangling tension that accompanied the hours and days at the firing line was slowly dissipating. Which was why the sight of the balloon had spooked them; if there were a barrage, they might be rotated forward to the support or even the fire trenches, rather than back to a recuperation area. They had heard it happened a lot: a spot of rest dangled like a carrot and snatched away at the last moment. Just one more example of Brass Hat torture.

‘What’d the cap’n say, Shippy?’ Platt asked, offering him a Woodbine.

Shipobottom crouched down, his bulk almost blocking the light from the cubbyhole, and took the cigarette. ‘Ta. Nothin’,’ he said, his relief evident. ‘Balloon’s nothin’. All goin’ ahead. We’ll be marchin’ away from here aw reet, although we’ll have Metcalf on our backs by the sound of it. But we’ll be sleepin’ on silk soon enough. Well, stinkin’ straw, anyways.’