A Rose In Flanders Fields (41 page)

‘What happened?’

‘He got hung up on their wire. Credit to him, sir, he didn’t shout, but Private Davies realised and went back to get him. They was got by a sniper, sir.’

I moaned into my gloved hands, squeezing my eyes tight shut as if by blocking out the light I could block out the words.

‘Can’t get them tonight, Corporal.’ The C.O.’s voice was regretful.

‘No, sir.’

‘First light. Not leaving those boys out there for the bloody crows, not after that siege. Bloody heroes, the pair, even if Glenn botched it at the end.’

Botched it.
Barry Glenn had killed my husband.
Botched it
. The scream in my head did nothing to drown out those words, and I only vaguely heard the corporal explaining how the grenade had been thrown after the sniper’s second shot; that Will had, at least, lived long enough to take the enemy with him. My chest and stomach felt like rocks, my throat hurt with the effort not to let the scream loose, and all I wanted to do was strike someone. Hurt them. I didn’t even care who. The urge was almost overwhelming, but I fought to control it and as a result my fingers cramped, the pain sudden and breathtaking. It gave my mind the chance it needed to clear, to comprehend, but not to accept; I could not leave him out there alone.

Somehow I rose to my feet, and stumbled away from the three men, back the way I had just come. A fragment of my mind skittered towards Archie, wondering whether I should go to him for help, but he would only stop me. The movement of troops was increasing, carrying me along in its wave towards the Front, meeting others coming the other way; shattered to the point of collapse, but relieved to have made it through another push alive.

Unlike Will.

Reality kept trying to force its way through; unthinkable numbers of men and boys, and serving VADs and nurses too, had died in this hideous conflict. Will was not a special case, he was just another in that awful number. Hundreds of thousands. Millions. I realised now, how innocently speculative had been my conversation with Lizzy: it wasn’t a question of whether it was better to die or to suffer; too many suffered, struggled, fought for every breath, experienced gut-wrenching fear of death, and then died anyway, with no more understanding of why than when they had joined up. But those who died quickly were no better off; bodies that had been full of life and energy, minds that had sung with intelligence, humour and kindness – snuffed out, destroyed and then left to rot. A job to be done at first light. A task to be performed “for decency’s sake”, but no one to hold their hand, no one to lie with them in the dark while the cold, wet ground stole the last of their warmth.

But Will
was
special. He had died trying to save his friend’s life.
As have others!
He had taken down his enemy before he died.
As have many!
He was…he was my own Lord William. I wondered when the tears would come, and only realised they were already coursing down my face when they began to run into my hair as I stared upwards at the black night sky. I was not sobbing, my breath was coming evenly, clear and steady, but the pain was threatening to pitch me to the duckboards beneath my feet.

We burst into clearer space, and the troops behind me dispersed in different directions. The trench was now running the other way, and with a cold sense of triumph that eclipsed my former fear, I realised I’d made it to the front line. The parapet rose in front of me, sandbagged and filthy, and I could see the tiny loopholes that permitted sight out into No Man’s Land. I was about to climb up onto the fire-step to look through one, when someone bumped me and I staggered against the side of the trench.

‘Sorry, mate,’ the soldier mumbled, and hurried on. I levered myself off the wall, feeling my elbow sink into the mud, and began to walk. It didn’t matter which direction I went in; I couldn’t see more than a few feet ahead. My eyes had adjusted a while ago to the darkness, and whenever a flare rose in the distance it took just a few minutes blinking to readjust, but the trenches zigzagged and dog-legged across the landscape and I never knew what I would see when I rounded the next bend. Time and again I slipped on the wet boards, but I kept walking, my head down, thankful for the tin helmet although my mind kept hissing the savage question;
whose was it, Evie, before?

A sign hung, haphazardly, on one corner: “to centre of section”. An arrow pointed the way I was going, and every few steps I looked for an unmanned fire-step. But it was a clear night and there was an expectation of retaliation. Ladders stretched up the side of the parapet, and I saw the scuffs of countless muddied boots on them, and wondered how many of the men who’d made those marks had lived beyond the next few, unspeakably shocking minutes.

I passed through the centre section, again unchallenged. The trenches were busiest at night in any case, and while I wasn’t trying to blend in, it seemed I had managed it anyway. My thoughts went back to the gas attack that had caused my clothing change, and the worry of an evacuation that had persuaded me to remain clothed and booted when I went to bed. It was all I needed to convince myself I was doing the right thing, and I pushed on, acknowledging, but not accepting, fate’s apology for stealing my love, while providing me with the means to go to him.

The further I went, the fewer people I saw, and the rougher the ground became. The overhead wooden struts that shored up the sides were sagging and off-kilter, and then the duckboards abruptly ended, leaving me floundering in mud almost to my knees. I realised this end of the trench was unoccupied now. There were a couple of dugouts but they were shallow and empty, and the ladders opposite were broken. Shattered, in fact. This had probably been the scene of an enemy attack – burst shells and discarded bayonets, evidence of hand-to-hand fighting, was everywhere I looked, and no attempt appeared to have been made to repair this section; it seemed the troops had consolidated their efforts where they could do most good, up near the centre.

I eyed the ladders, trying to decide if one of them might bear my weight, and then, just up ahead before the solid wall of earth, I noticed another, very narrow, entrance running off at a right-angle. Another sign, broken but readable, pointed down it: “LP”.

I took a deep breath, and it shook quite audibly. The listening post, abandoned or not, would be quite some distance out into No Man’s Land. I could feel my trembling getting worse, but the thought of Will lying there in the dirt was too much to bear and I glanced behind me; no one was in sight although I could hear voices, quite clearly, just around the bend. One of them made the breath catch in my throat. It was angry, low, and unmistakeably Scottish.

‘What the bloody hell do you mean, you don’t know? She’s a woman for Christ’s sake!’

‘Ain’t seen no women, sir,’ the nervous Tommy stuttered. ‘They don’t belong down here.’

I melted silently down into the sap leading to the listening post, my heart pounding. If one of those people I’d passed was forced to think, they’d remember an extremely short boy, stumbling along as if the layout was completely unfamiliar, and, more tellingly, carrying nothing. That would be enough for Archie.

I fought my way up to the sap-head, and it took forever for each step; pulling my foot clear of the sucking mud, and feeling my other foot slipping beneath me, finding no strong purchase in the waterlogged ground. My hands braced either side of me in the narrow space, pushing against the sides and sinking into the earth, and my gloves peeled off in turns, sticking there in the walls of the trench and leaving my hands icy-cold and filthy. I strained through the night to hear what was going on in the main trench, but professionalism had dampened Archie’s fury and there were no more raised voices.

And there was the ladder. Unbroken, waiting. I closed my eyes briefly, pictured Will, and began to climb. As my head rose above the parapet I had to swallow a surge of nausea; terror took hold and threatened to push me back down and propel me back into Archie’s safe, comforting arms. But Will lay out here, just up ahead by the copse, Archie had said. My gentle, clever, courageous Lord William. Dead. And he’d died believing I had broken my promise and given up on him.

My hands slipped on the ladder, and I felt the sting of a splinter from the rough wood but managed not to hiss aloud in pain. No one had taken a shot at me yet; it seemed the rumours were right, that Will had managed to take out the last remaining sniper before he died.
Died
…oh God… Could I bear to see him, after all? See those beautiful, clear blue eyes staring up at the sky, the mouth I had kissed now falling open, slack and cold? I stopped, holding on to the last part of the ladder, almost praying for an invisible bullet to take me too. Then self-preservation took over and I threw myself forward, flat onto the torn and blasted ground of No Man’s Land.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

The first flare almost made me shout. A hiss, a whine, and I shoved my face into the dirt before the light spilled across the land and could catch my white, terrified face. I pulled my frozen hands back up my coat sleeves and, lying there, breathing in the wet filth, I waited for the shot that would reunite me with Will, but it still didn’t come. I lay still, unable to see when the light had faded, and finding it harder and harder to breathe as the mud got into my nose, and I began to feel as if I was suffocating.

I knew for sure then that I wasn’t yet ready to die, despite the pain of grief that ripped at me, and the absence of anything hopeful to cling to, and I twisted my head to the side far enough to drag in a breath through my mouth, then turned back into the ground again. I had no need to rush, but at the same time every moment I wasn’t at Will’s side felt like someone was gradually unravelling me from the inside out. Only touching him now could stop it, and leave me with some part of myself intact.

My head still down, I concentrated until I had my bearings, picturing the location of the German trench in relation to my outstretched hands, and then began to inch forward over the pits and boggy mounds. The patches of grass that had survived the barrage were like little oases of cleanliness, and I used them to wipe mud from my eyes so I could see at least, but I had to fight the strong urge to do the same with my face and hands. The former German stronghold was silent, but a good distance before I reached it I saw the first huge coils of barbed wire. It was of a heavier gauge than the wire the British Expeditionary Forces used, and near my hand lay a set of wire-cutters, no doubt cast aside in frustration at their inability to cut through it. The bombardment didn’t seem to have done much to it either, the same sorry story as the Somme offensive last year; were lessons never to be learned?

A shadow moved up ahead and I bit back a cry and turned my face back down, heart thudding. From the corner of my eye it had looked as though a man were standing beside the wire, swaying from side to side as if he rocked a troubled child in his arms. I waited for a challenge, or the snap of a rifle and then oblivion, but heard nothing except the wind rustling in the trees of the nearby copse. Slowly, I raised my head again and looked properly. The shadow was in fact a silhouette, a darker patch in the darkness of the night, and he swayed because the wire did: the two were now one.

He was tall. Extremely so, and I realised who he was and couldn’t stop a moan from breaking free because at his side lay another shape, face down, his pack hanging open where he’d fumbled for his grenade with dying fingers. Behind me I heard a whisper, and it registered somewhere that it was urgently speaking my name, but I couldn’t turn to look back; Will lay a few feet in front of me and that awful unravelling was happening faster. If I didn’t get to his side I would die too.

I crawled to him, over mud and stones, feeling my skin tear as it fell on the twisted metal of spent shells; my hands and knees were a mass of blood by the time I reached him. I tried to roll him onto his back, desperate for the sight of his face, praying I would recognise him, that he hadn’t been hit there, at least. But he was heavy. His uniform and pack were weighed down with equipment, and water-logged by his lying out here in the wet for hours, and I couldn’t roll him over, I had no strength with which to do it.

I sobbed aloud then, throwing care to the bitter winds, what did it matter if I was heard?

‘Evie!’ the voice came again but I still didn’t turn.

‘I can’t move him, Archie. Help me!’

‘Damn you! What were you thinking?’ But he crawled up beside me and when I finally looked at him I saw his face was not angry at all, but desperately sad. ‘What are you trying to do?’

‘I couldn’t leave him out here,’ I said, my voice hitching. Will’s hat had fallen off as I tried to roll him, and the sight of his familiar dark hair, and the vulnerability of the back of his fair-skinned neck, lit by the sliver of moon, sliced through me like a blade. ‘Help me take him back, Archie? Please?’

A second later we both threw ourselves flat as another flare went up. Archie stirred first, after an age it seemed. ‘It’s all right,’ he said, ‘the Bosche are well back, they’ve abandoned this post. The flares are just proof we’ve shaken them.’

‘Then say you’ll help me,’ I begged again. He looked at me, then at Will, and nodded. I realised I’d been so lost in my own grief I hadn’t spared a thought for his; he and Will had been close for a while, he must be feeling the loss acutely too. I touched his arm, but didn’t say anything.

Together we took hold of Will’s shoulder and rolled him. There was a sucking sound as the front of his uniform came free of the mud, and where he had been lying with his head turned to one side, the right side of his face was plastered in it. His eyes were closed, the lashes dark against the white of his clean cheek, and matted on the dirty side. His mouth was only partly open, showing a glimpse of half-muddied teeth, and he looked pale and very, very young.

‘Wh…where was he hit?’ I managed to say, and Archie patted his hands down Will’s body. ‘In the side, I think,’ he said. ‘Hard to say until we get him back into the light.’ He added more softly, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll see the mortuary treat him with respect.’