A Rose In Flanders Fields (38 page)

‘He’s a good man,’ Jack said, and I heard genuine approval in his voice. ‘He’ll keep you in check once all this is over, goodness knows you need a strong bloke to keep you on the straight and narrow.’

‘Uncle Jack!’

He grinned at my protest, and his teasing helped ease the ache. For a while we talked of inconsequential things, but soon the conversation drifted back to Oliver.

‘He’s just twenty-one,’ I said, ‘surely they’ll go easy if he gives himself up?’

‘If Potter’s alive, maybe. It’ll still be the desertion charge, and that’s bad enough, but once we get Kitty over it might just go in his favour. Plus, he’s an officer, and, anecdotally, if not officially, it’s less likely he’ll be shot for desertion. But if someone finds Potter’s body, and they realise he’s not a military casualty…’ He didn’t have to complete the sentence, and we didn’t discuss it any further as we turned to walk back, and I bitterly regretted all the times I’d taken our leisure for granted.

We said goodbye in the yard, and Jack paused with his hand on the car door handle.

‘Evie?’

‘Yes?’

He didn’t smile, but I felt his strong, dependable love reaching across the cool air between us. ‘You did the right thing telling me.’

I nodded, but watching him drive away, I felt very young, and suddenly quite lost. What if all our hopes came to nothing? How would Kitty survive that, knowing what had spurred Oli into violence?

‘Come inside, poppet,’ Boxy said, coming out of the cottage. ‘Elise has made lunch.’

I turned and smiled. I could feel it wobbling, and knew she could see it, but moments like this weren’t unusual, certainly nothing to dig over. The trouble was, I could feel the expectation of many more “moments” to come, and it was getting harder and harder to pick myself up. The morning of April 23
^rd
1917, St George’s Day, would prove to be one of the worst.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

It started at around four a.m.

I’d left everything in the ambulance after the last run; I hadn’t even given it a cursory clean, but had fallen into bed, unable to think beyond closing my eyes and resting my aching muscles. But, naturally, I lay awake for too long while my mind played over the news I’d had that afternoon from Uncle Jack:
O located. Confessed. Trial noon 23
^rd
. Will send staff car.
All I could think about was Oli’s haunted eyes as he’d pleaded with me, and how I could possibly say anything that might save him now he’d confessed. Despite being physically worn out, it was a long time before sleep crept in and smothered my racing thoughts.

Shouts and whistles, and sounds of panic outside, brought me struggling upright out of a disjointed and fractured dream. I blinked into the darkness, then realised what was happening and lunged for my gas mask. It wasn’t there, and, with a groan of fearful dismay, I pictured it quite vividly, sitting on the seat of the ambulance. I had gone to bed half-clothed, as was usual, and now seized a jumper and my coat, and hunted about for my boots. Boxy was doing the same, and we stumbled into the yard together, trying to hold our breath until we could pull open the ambulance and get our masks, for once cursing our good fortune in having a vehicle with a closed-in driving seat. Boxy coughed, an innocuous enough sound under ordinary circumstances, but one which filled me with unease now.

‘Here!’ I threw her mask to her, and she fumbled it, dropping it into the mud. I dragged my own mask on and hurried around to where she was scrabbling about in the dark, and between us we managed to get it fixed in place. Her eyes, when I saw them up close, were wide and frightened, but she was breathing all right, thank God. In the light of my torch her freckles stood out on her pale face, but she had that determined look about her, and I knew I could rely on her as always.

The gas was coming in waves down the street from the front lines, and we could hear the distinctive, double-explosion of the shells and canisters as they dispensed death with horrific regularity. I clambered on board the ambulance, and Boxy took the car and we drove up to the lines, waiting with growing impatience as the orderlies loaded as many as they could, before lurching over mud and rocks to the road, and the re-formed group of clearing stations.

I kept glancing at Boxy whenever our paths crossed, worried by that initial, harsh cough, and the realisation that she would, quite naturally, have taken a deep breath immediately afterwards. She seemed unaffected though, and I didn’t say anything to worry her; I didn’t need to. She knew the dangers as well as any of us. I had a moment to thank the heavens Kitty was not here, and then all my thoughts were for those hit by the attack.

We worked non-stop for the first few hours. I drove between ADS and CCS, and on one fuel break I found Boxy replacing a wheel on her car, a job made hideously difficult by the mask she wore, so I stopped to help. We’d almost finished when we heard the crunching sound of another vehicle coming into the yard and, seeing the staff car, I only then remembered today was Oliver’s court-martial. Boxy and I looked at one another, and she straightened, waving me away. ‘You have to go, if you don’t your friend’s brother might as well kill himself.’

‘But how can I just –’

‘Don’t be a blithering idiot, Evie! Just go!’

‘You take the ambulance. I’ll be back as soon as I can,’ I said, trying not to give in to the guilty feeling that I would rather see these boys safe, and my girls too, than fight for a foolish young man with a hot temper. I knew as soon as I saw him I would feel differently, but my instinct was towards anger, unreasonable or otherwise.

The driver was friendly-sounding, but I had no wish to talk about anything; my mind was on Oliver and what I could say to help him, so I let the conversation remain more or less one-sided as we drove. He’d just returned from two weeks’ leave, after a two-week secondment in France, and closer to the lines than he was used to. ‘Shook me up proper,’ he confessed, before moving on to happier things: his wife had hopes that this time she might be pregnant, that’d please his little boy; a brother or sister to look after. I murmured polite things in return, wishing he’d hush, but at the same time soothed by the obvious pleasure in his voice when he spoke of his home life.

‘I thought I’d resent leaving there to come back,’ he said, ‘but it sort of feels like home here too, if you get me?’

I did, and told him so. He nodded. ‘I can’t say I like this business though, Miss.’ He gestured to his own gas mask and I agreed again. Wordless little grunts, he must think me most rude. ‘Dirty game,’ he went on. Then he was back to talking about his boy again and I couldn’t help smiling, although of course he couldn’t see my face. ‘Reckon you’re all right to breathe here, Miss,’ he said as we pulled up outside HQ, a splendid-looking hotel in a former existence.

I waited until I was inside to gingerly remove my mask, however, and immediately heard a voice calling. ‘Miss? Come with me, your clothes will be full of gas.’ The hurried-looking adjutant kept his distance but gestured to me, and I looked around anxiously for a sign of Uncle Jack, but the lobby was full of hurrying people and I couldn’t see his distinctive, tall figure anywhere.

‘Excuse me, is Jack Carlisle here?’

‘I don’t know the name. Rank?’

I had to stop and think; Uncle Jack had not resigned his commission when he took up his work for MI6, but he never referred to himself in relation to it. I thought back to his uniform, and remembered the crown on the insignia. ‘Major, I think.’

‘If he’s anything to do with Captain Maitland’s court-martial, he’ll be incommunicado until it’s over,’ the adjutant said, and directed me to a room where I could wash, and where I was able to borrow a smallish-sized army uniform. Looking in the mirror, with my short blonde hair up in sweaty spikes, and the khaki jacket and trousers that were still too big, I looked like nothing so much as an under-aged boy soldier. A very tired one. I sighed, and rubbed cold water over my face and into my hair, acknowledging I would not cut a particularly glamorous figure but hoping it wouldn’t diminish my credibility.

In the end my part in the trial was very small indeed, and over in less than ten minutes, giving me little time to do or say anything of any real help. I was called in early, asked about Oliver’s return to England, and about his disappearance at Dover. Not once did the question of the murdered driver come up, all they were interested in from me was information about the desertion. It seemed Oliver had not mentioned I’d seen him at Number Twelve, for which I sent him silent thanks: if it came out that I’d seen him and not reported it, I would be accused alongside him. He looked back at me, eyes expressionless beneath the peak of his cap, but his clenched teeth evident in the tenseness of his jaw.

I explained what had happened at Dover, while omitting Archie’s part in the plan, and I also said I was certain Oliver had planned only to be away long enough to persuade Kitty to return and tell her story. I was given a telling-off for saying that, as the prosecution insisted I could only suppose it and didn’t know for sure, but words once uttered cannot be undone, no matter how firmly one is told to disregard them. I had to trust they had done their work.

After that there was little more I could do. The defence’s questions allowed me to repeat my impressions of Oliver as a splendid officer and a protective brother, and to explain all Kitty had told me and what I had seen for myself. I told them Potter had been lurking around the cottage and kept giving Kitty longing looks, and noticed the puzzled glances flickering around the room…he must had made himself quite popular, for them to be surprised. Finally I was able to make it quite clear that Kitty had wanted to give her own evidence, but was currently too sick to do so. Instead she relied on me to relay her side of things. No mention was made of me not being there that night, to my great relief, at least I would not be put in the position of telling the court that Colonel Drewe had allowed me to borrow the car; it would have been unfair to drag him into this. I wondered if he had any notion of the true nature of the man who’d been driving him around, and how he would feel when he found out.

While I would have desperately wished to stay and see it out, or at least speak to Uncle Jack, I was equally relieved to be dismissed just after lunch, and permitted to return to my station to assist where I could. I was still wearing the borrowed uniform, and when Boxy saw me she grinned at the sight. It was an exhausted grin, but it was real, and I was relieved to see it, but I just gave her a withering look and asked how we were doing.

‘There were several waves,’ she said, smothering a yawn, ‘but the worst seems to have dissipated now, though the ADS is still filling up all the time. The trenches were evacuated, and Fritz ran at us, but he was pushed back and we held the line, thank God.’

‘Do we know about losses?’

‘No numbers, but both sides. The Germans copped it from our fire, and we took some prisoners. Also I think the wind shifted, and some of their men went down under their own gas.’ She rubbed at her eyes with a grubby hand.

‘Right, you’re having a break now,’ I told her firmly. ‘Go and bathe if you can, get out of those clothes and soak them. And,’ I handed her my own bundle of dirty clothes in their protective bag, ‘if you wouldn’t mind doing these at the same time?’ She took them off me with a sigh of mock annoyance, and I grinned, but as I drove out of the yard and looked back I saw her holding the bag at a distance; the attack had clearly shaken her more than I realised.

I drove long into the evening, taking men away from where the heavy gas had lain the longest; the attack had come so swiftly many had not been able to don masks in time to avoid taking a deep lungful. We had to take some who had been exposed but seemed fine, as well, since chlorine gas had a nasty habit of often holding off a day or so before making its effects felt. These men looked at their comrades with ill-disguised fear, seeing their own future in blue lips and bloodied phlegm.

When I arrived back at the cottage the cellar was once again full, and the oxygen masks all used up, reminding me strongly of the night Number Twelve had been hit. I wondered if we should expect the same again; the Germans disabling as many as they could with gas before launching their bigger, further-ranging guns. It seemed likely, and when I fell into bed in the early hours I was still wearing my clothes and boots, just in case. Boxy was asleep, but her breathing sounded harsh and laboured and I didn’t like it.

I closed my eyes and thought back to the sight of Oli, alone and terrified in the huge room at HQ that had been the site of his court-martial. My anger towards him had, as I had known it would, vanished immediately I saw him, and all I could think of was how he was really just a child who, by now, would know whether he was to live or die. It seemed ominous that Uncle Jack had not come over to tell me the verdict, but exhaustion was creeping in, making a nonsense out of any coherent thought and, with the sounds of Elise and the other two girls moving about downstairs, administering treatment where they could and comfort where they couldn’t, I drifted into a light, troubled sleep.

Around five a.m. I was woken again, this time by a hand on my shoulder, shaking me roughly.

‘Boxy!’ I sat up, horrified by the sound of her breathing. My own chest was tight, and I fought the urge to cough, knowing it would hurt, but she was in a much worse way.

‘Can’t breathe, poppet,’ she gasped, and tried to smile, but it turned to tears and her fear transmitted itself to me through the grip of her hands on my arm.

‘Ambulance. Now! There are no oxygen masks left.’ I pulled her outside and she staggered to the ambulance, her head dropping as she struggled for breath. Somehow we got her on board, and I drove in the faint light of dawn towards the base hospital. All the way, I could hear her dragging short, agonised breaths, and I kept up a steady patter of nonsense that was worthy of her own non-stop talking. A glance at her now and again showed her staring fixedly at me, nodding, understanding what I was trying to do. When we reached the hospital it was all I could do to keep her on her feet, and an orderly came across to help us. His expression, when he looked at Boxy, made me feel sicker than ever.