Harry, France,
June 30, 1916
I
T WAS ALL WIRE TALK
at dinner, with the C.O. making no attempt to stop them. Harry was with his new company, replacing a man who’d been killed two weeks before. Dinner, with the battalion commander and three subalterns, consisted of some kind of fatty pork stew. It was all a long way from Amiens.
Their new colonel was trying hard to be in good spirits. He was short with a reddish moustache, recently promoted from major. A scared man, out of his depth, Harry thought and, for a few seconds, felt sorry for him. They had been ready to go on June 29, but the foul weather had delayed the attack and the C.O. had to cope with over a thousand men and officers, few of them very experienced soldiers, all tensely waiting for what they knew was coming. The continuous shelling of the German lines by their own artillery was, in the colonel’s view, a mistake, and now it had stretched out a further forty-eight hours.
“Impossible to sleep,” he’d said when he welcomed Harry. “They’ll run out of ammunition if this goes on much longer. Which would be something of a relief.” He gave a short, loud laugh.
“The first of July,” the C.O. said. “Thank God.”
He poured out some brandy and handed each officer a small glass.
“The wire’s not cut, of course, not all along, and the Germans will be ready and waiting after our week of explosive announcement with those bloody guns.”
He poured himself another drink. It was increasingly obvious he’d had several before they arrived.
Despite the mood in the room, it was clear that the company commander and two of the platoon commanders couldn’t wait to go. The third, a boy, looked apprehensive. He was eighteen, no more, and had joined his regiment only three weeks earlier. He had gone on exercises with the whole division at the rear and been out on patrol a couple of times, he explained, as if accounting for a misdemeanor to a housemaster, but the second time had been a fiasco and they had lost three soldiers. He blamed himself, he’d said miserably; they were good men. Harry thought what he was sure the boy was also thinking: that such an inexperienced subaltern shouldn’t be here. But now that he was, he must at least act the part and reassure his troops.
“Do you think they’ve cut the wire? sir?”
“I think the gunners know what they’re doing,” Harry said, in what he hoped was a persuasive tone.
As he walked back to his billet to ready himself for the morning, he could hear the men, out of sight but shuffling like tethered horses in the darkness. Then, a single voice singing an old tune, “Oft, in the Stilly Night.” Instantly and achingly, it brought back his night walks in New York and the ever-wakeful Irish of the Lower East Side tenements.
There were two letters waiting for him. One was from his lawyers, confirming his recent instructions. The other was from Isabelle. His servant, a new man, Welsh and efficient, brought him some strong tea and he sat down to read it. Abbotsgate seemed so very far away.
Dearest Harry,
I hope all still goes well with you. Here we follow the news in the paper and hope that you are safe and not in the thick of any fighting. Too many local boys are killed or injured and I was glad to hear you are at headquarters because I always imagine that to be out of the reach of the Germans, but of course I know little.
To see the photographs of destruction in the newspapers is very shocking and for me painful. As a Frenchwoman by birth I weep for my poor country and hope this time the Germans can be kept from reaching Paris. Who would have thought, when we first knew each other, that you would be there, defending my country, and I would be here, caring for your estate?
I don’t like to think of you carrying unnecessary burdens at such a time so I must speak now. I have your recent letter and it goes beyond saying that I am so very grateful that you have left the unentailed part of Abbotsgate to Teddy in your new will. This removes all fear that I had for Teddy’s future should anything happen to me. Thank you.
But then you say that you want to make it clear that this
is not because you assume he is your son,
but because it is the right thing to do, and this I was horrified to read. No. No. You have made a terrible mistake, Harry. Of course Teddy is not your son. He was a very early, very frail baby, who fought for life, I was seriously ill and the doctors said we would lose him. His early birth was not some device to deceive your father, if that’s what you somehow came to believe. He was, is, your
brother,
your father’s son. Not yours. I cannot bear it that you thought this for so long. Why did you not ask me?
Did your father know about us, whatever it was that we were? I think he did not. I came to love him very much. But I married him, as you guessed so angrily, all those years ago, because he had position and wealth and could take care of me.
Yes, I lured him into my bed. Yes, your rage was not misplaced, although I had no idea that you would then turn your back on us, on Teddy, on Abbotsgate, on England. I did not mean to hurt you. It never entered my head that you thought Teddy was your son. But you never let me speak to you, never came back to Abbotsgate again, or all this might have been made clear in an instant. No. No. He is your brother—so very much like you. Dearest Teddy, the greatest gift I ever had, the son and brother of brave men.
Thank you for providing for us both.
I pray for you, and Teddy and I both send you our love. He has a photograph of you by his bed at school.
Isabelle
“Jesus.” He heard himself say it aloud and his orderly, who had just returned with a top-up of tea, looked startled.
He was bone-weary yet overalert; the barrage would test the patience of the most pacific saint; he had nearly three hundred frightened men under his command, an attack tomorrow—and now this. A simple piece of information, which, when his tired brain could process it, would change how he viewed himself, how he had led his life, how he had treated other people.
His first, slow response was a mixture of relief, all-consuming regret, and then shame. He had run away because his lover had chosen a man over a boy; he had assumed because of his youthful virility that the child was his, yet he had refused to confront this, had hidden rather than find out the truth; he had abandoned his father, treated Isabelle with icy reserve, and ignored the little boy who was guilty of nothing and who was, in fact, all the time, his brother. All he could grasp at now was that clearly his father and Isabelle had been happy, and that Teddy was much loved. He was determined to survive these weeks and months and get to know this brother properly.
How could he have been so stupid about so much? The answer was his utter self-absorption. With his obsessive jealousy over Isabelle, there had never been any time for anything or anybody else until Marina. How incredibly lucky he was, and how undeserved his happiness with his wife.
He put Isabelle’s letter in his pocket. He would think what to say to her when tomorrow’s attack was over. He looked at his watch—
today’s
attack. He owed her an apology so great, he hardy knew how to begin it. He longed to return to Abbotsgate, all guilt behind him.
For now, he picked up his pen to write to Marina. He had saved up much to tell her, but in the end it took no time at all to set down everything he needed to say. When he’d finished, he handed the letter to his servant to post, sat back, and drank a single measure of brandy from his hip flask. It had once, in some other war, been his father’s.
Jean-Baptiste, France,
June 30, 1916
A
T FIRST JEAN-BAPTISTE HAD STAYED
north, making his way between soldiers and heavily loaded horse-drawn wagons going in one direction and refugees going the other. He kept his head down, tried not to look at the men who were walking alongside him, and dropped back often so that he was not with the same group for any length of time. It was not hard, but after two or three hours he was already tired, muscles he had not used for months aching, his scars tight. His bladder burned, and despite the warmth of the day he shivered in what were now damp clothes. He ate some bread, drank from his water bottle. Everything was hazy as he walked on into the low afternoon sun. The river—which, when he had known it, changed from one stretch to another; sometimes green, sometimes clear to the bottom—was now all one murky brown.
As the sun set, the air smelled of explosive, the noise was loud and continuous, but it was difficult to judge how many kilometers away the guns were. Sometimes he thought he recognized the landscape, but new roads had been dug, small farmsteads flattened. The smell was getting worse along the bank. A few meters on, he saw a dead horse that had been swept downstream and had lodged in tree roots where the bank had been undercut by water. Its belly had burst open and greenish intestines were drying on its upper flank. He put his arm up over his nose and mouth. Flies were crawling over its head and the leather bridle that was still attached. So many flies that he could hear them. The horse’s yellow teeth were bared in a snarl around the bit. He thought of Godet and the forge and the beautiful bay that had killed the old man and then been shot, after which one calamity after another had seemed to follow him. He would get back to Corbie and he would make it up to his mother. He wouldn’t even tell her that Vignon was a German, that she had been deceived in more ways than she could imagine. He would tell her Vignon had saved his life.
“Of course they’ll go through the motions of a trial, they’re not barbarians, but, no, on reflection, I shall certainly be shot,” the doctor had said, in that last conversation. He had been drawing on his cigarette. “No matter what my sympathies are, no matter my service for France. In the end your country chooses you, not you your country. I’m a German by birth and medical training, and once a German always a German to your fellow warriors. They’ll shout ‘Remember Verdun’ as the volley rings out.” He looked contemplative. “I’ll have no chance to say ‘my good chaps, I do. I do. I have spent days and nights and my health and vigor reassembling your countrymen just to send them back there to be dismembered again.’” He exhaled a ring of smoke. “I don’t expect they’ll even let me wear my uniform.”
Jean-Baptiste hadn’t known what to say. Vignon was probably right.
“Why did you come to us? To Corbie?”
“It was nowhere. I liked that. And I liked fishing.”
Frank, France,
June 30, 1916
I
WAS WRITING A NOTE
to Dad, full of jolly stories, when the major came to tell us that after all the chopping and changing, the big June push was in the morning. Which would be July, in fact. He said it tapping the side of his nose as if he was sharing a big secret, as if we didn’t know anything was in the air. There had been a long buildup, he told us (in case we were blind), and tomorrow we would take over German trenches. In case we were deaf too, he added that we might have noticed a heavy barrage—“Ha, ha, ha,” he said—well, this barrage would have torn the wire apart and, undoubtedly, most of the Germans too who might otherwise not be too happy to have us in their trenches slicing their Battenberg cake. This was a joke. The major was keen on jokes, although it turned out he had only another day to get them all out.
One of the lads made a noise—halfway between a snort and a laugh. The major gave him a hard look.
“There’s been a great deal of planning by a great many first-class military minds,” he said.
“Sorry, sir,” the lad muttered, but you could see by his face that he was trying not to laugh at the thought of this, and even Mr. Pierce wouldn’t catch anybody’s eye.
I often thought that when they’d run out of the right-size boots, or half the shells were duds, or they were short of medics or tea or plans or, basically, ideas, they tried to draw you into some big scheme in which fussing about small things made you seem less of a man. When I look back, the Reverend Mr. Tudor Williams was much the same. Once you were in search of salvation, wanting to hang on to a florin you were saving for a
£
9 17
s
. 6
d
. bicycle seemed niggardly.
Our big distraction was going to start with some pretty mighty fireworks, so they promised. The sappers were so excited, they couldn’t resist the odd hint, the odd wink. Not that, given it was war, given there was going to be an attack, there was much that would surprise anybody. All the sappers could do was produce more and louder of what they’d been doing all along. One of them crept up on another while his pal was drinking tea and clapped two metal plates together behind his head. The tea drinker threw tea all over himself. Oh, how the other sappers laughed.
First thing the next day, it was all going to happen. The sergeant major said the lads up front would be able to saunter over, Fritz would be jam and our boys could take all the glory. The newer men were all keen to up and go, and disappointed to be held back until the third wave, and comforted only by being told they’d be going forward soon enough. They were the ones going to win the war, they’d been told. But they knew that this time tomorrow, one way or another, some of them wouldn’t be here. That was a fact, although nobody said it. All they didn’t know was how many.
So, what was I thinking? I didn’t sit there knowing what was ahead. Not the whole measure of the thing. I didn’t care much. June had been a washout. So, one more month was coming; perhaps it would be drier. One more attack; perhaps we’d push forward half a mile. One more half-year of war; with any luck it would end by Christmas. Like they’d said last year and the one before. Fat chance. That was the future now: nothing like the plans that had once driven me on. The saving, the dreaming, the working hard in order to climb, all that “this time next year,” the finding a girl or a Sturmey-Archer gearbox, going to the Institute, keeping accounts and getting fit to cycle the length of the Thames with Dick. Now the future was always more of yesterday or it was nothing. Oblivion. A new word I’d learned from Lieutenant Pierce when he’d had a bit to drink one evening.
I was all over the place with messages that last day; Isaac too. I could even see the shells whizzing over Nora and me to Jerry’s lines, and I could get a smell of the coming battle. I was whacked by the time it got dark. The major thanked me. He was good like that and the men liked him, despite his little ways.
He said, in his reciting voice:
his state
Is kingly: thousands at his bidding speed,
And post o’er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait.
I must have looked a bit puzzled because he added: “
They also serve who only sit and cycle
—what?”
I could see I was expected to smile, so I did. We were all going a bit barmy.