Passions of War (7 page)

‘What will you do, when Ralph and I have gone?' he asked.

‘Oh, I shall find war work of some sort. Victoria is convinced that the FANY will be given a role of some kind. If not, I'll go to Mabel Stobart. She is already starting to organize some kind of women's national service unit. Don't worry about me.'

He sighed and shook his head. ‘That's just it. I know you. I know what you did in the Balkans. Of course I shall worry.' He stood up. ‘I had better go. I have to go and see my parents and put my affairs in order.'

‘You will come and say goodbye, before you leave for France?'

‘If I can, of course – and I'll bring Ralph.'

She reached up and kissed his cheek. ‘Dear Tom! There was a time when I thought you a very lukewarm suitor and the whole idea of an engagement between us filled me with despair. It's ironic, isn't it, that now I know there can never be any question of marriage I have come to regard you as one of my dearest friends?'

‘That is all I could ever wish for,' he said. ‘And a far better outcome than I ever imagined.' He kissed her in return. ‘I won't say goodbye now. I'm sure there will be another chance.'

When he had gone Leo sat down again at her desk but she could not concentrate on the papers. She went upstairs and put on her hat and set off for FANY headquarters.

‘He said what?'

‘When Dr Elsie Inglis offered to take a medical team to the front Sir Arthur Sloggett told her to “go home and sit still. We don't want any petticoats here”.' The speaker was Edith Wharton, a long-established FANY. ‘So I don't give much for our chances of getting a different reaction.'

‘I don't believe it!' Victoria drummed her fists on the table in despair. ‘After all the work we've done, and after what we went through in Bulgaria. How can they treat us like that?'

‘All right, all right! We all know that you two have seen active service,' someone said cuttingly. ‘There's no need to go on about it. It doesn't entitle you to special treatment.'

‘I'm not saying it does!' Victoria exclaimed. ‘I'm angry for all of us. It's just that I thought we'd proved something out there – and now it has just been forgotten.'

‘Well, there's one comfort,' Lilian Franklin put in. ‘Ash is on her way back.'

‘Already?'

‘As soon as she heard that war had been declared she cabled ahead to Cape Town and booked her passage home. She only spent four hours ashore.'

‘That's great news!' Victoria exclaimed. ‘If anyone can get things moving, she can.'

Leo said nothing. It was true that Grace Ashley-Smith had made the FANY much more efficient since she took over two years earlier. But if the Corps was sent anywhere it would almost certainly be France or Belgium, and Leo's thoughts were on another battlefield, along the Danube and the Sava where the Serbs were fighting to preserve their homeland.

Ralph and Tom came to say goodbye on the evening of 11 August.

‘We can only stay a few minutes,' Ralph told her. ‘We entrain at midnight.'

It was an awkward half hour. Ralph was flushed with excitement, helping himself a little too liberally from the whisky decanter; Tom was grim and silent. None of them had much to say to each other and Leo had the impression that in one sense they had left already. Their minds were on what awaited them in Belgium and the only thing left to say that had any meaning was ‘goodbye and God bless you'. To her shame, she felt relieved when the door closed behind them.

Five

The rusty crane creaked and swayed slightly as Tom climbed and the rungs of the ladder were slick from the cold drizzle that was falling. He gritted his teeth and fixed his eyes straight ahead of him, knowing that if he looked up or down he would be lost. He had hated heights ever since the day some of the boys on the estate had dared him to climb a slender poplar in the grounds.
‘Go on! A bit higher! A bit higher! You're not scared, are you?'
He must have been about eight at the time. The higher he climbed, the more the tree swayed and when he tried to climb down he found he was stuck and one of the game keepers had had to scramble up to fetch him. The man had told his father, thinking it a joke, and Tom had been beaten for causing a nuisance – or was it for being a coward? He forced the thought to the back of his mind and climbed further.

At last he reached the little driver's cabin and once he was safely seated inside it he was able to look down. Below him stretched an industrial landscape of pitheads and slag heaps, interspersed with small red-brick villages divided by cobbled streets. The pits were silent today and the sound of church bells from the town behind him reminded Tom that it was Sunday. If it had been a weekday, he wondered, would the pits be working, ignoring the fact that they were about to be the epicentre of a battle? Certainly, in the town, as he passed through, the people seemed to be going about their normal Sunday activities as if what was happening did not concern them.

Tom raised his gaze beyond the pitheads to where the canal gleamed dully between its marshy banks. On the far side the ground was level, running back to woods about three hundred yards distant, indistinct in the morning mist. He strained his eyes, looking for any sign of movement, but if the enemy were out there he could not see them. Below him, between the mining villages and the canal, he could just make out the dark lines of shallow trenches dug into a ridge of coal spoil and the heads of men crouched in them. It seemed to him a pathetically thin line, more a series of isolated posts with nothing to back them – but apparently this was the best that could be arranged. Only yesterday, they had been marching forward, confident that they were advancing to join their French allies and roll back the German attackers. Then, suddenly, the orders had been countermanded. They were to stop where they were and dig in. No one seemed to know why. Tom took his sketch pad out of his rucksack and flexed his chilled fingers. If this was going to be the British Expeditionary Force's first battle, he would have a bird's-eye view of it. He headed the first page
Mons, Belgium – Sunday 23 August
.

A movement away to his right caught his eye. A company of cavalry came cantering out of the mist, heading towards the trenches. At first Tom thought they were British, a reconnaissance party coming to report; then he saw that the uniforms were wrong. French, possibly? Or Belgian? Then there was a boom that made him jump and he saw smoke billowing up from an artillery position on the right flank and a gout of earth shot up just in front of the advancing horsemen. ‘Boche, by God!' he said aloud. The rest of the guns had joined in by now and Tom saw shells falling among the horses. For a brief moment it seemed the riders intended to come on, regardless, then they wheeled away and galloped off into the trees. ‘First blood to us,' Tom muttered, sketching busily.

He had no time to complete the picture. As if the initial gunfire had been a starting signal, the air was shaken by a series of huge explosions and shells began to fall all along the line of the British trenches. The crane trembled under Tom with the violence of the impacts and he saw huge craters opening up to both sides of him. He strained his eyes towards the forest on the far side of the canal and saw that the mist was lifting and beyond the trees the ground rose to a low ridge, from where he could see the muzzle flashes of the German cannon. The noise was terrifying – a continuous roar as one gun after another spewed flame and then a sobbing whistle as the shells flew through the air and explosion after explosion as they landed. Tom had seen what artillery could do, on the road to Kumanovo, and heard it around Bitola, but he had never encountered a bombardment like this. Even with his limited experience, he could tell that these German guns were bigger and more powerful than anything the Serbs had possessed – or than anything his own country could produce, he suspected.

The bombardment went on for hours and Tom looked down at the devastation below him and wondered if anything could possibly remain alive. His hands were shaking and his head was ringing and all he could think of was that Ralph was down there, somewhere, with his men. They had parted quite casually that morning, as if what was coming was nothing more than an exercise. Is this where it ends? Tom wondered. All our high hopes wiped out, and Ralph with them, almost without firing a shot.

The rain had stopped and steam was rising from the marshes as the sun came out, and suddenly there they were! An ordered phalanx of troops in their grey uniforms, marching out, rank on rank, from the sheltering trees. They advanced in a solid block and Tom, staring down, thought what an unmissable target they would make, if only anyone were left alive to shoot. He visualized them pouring across the canal, through the trenches full of dead, and realized that soon his crane would be surrounded. Would they see him? If so, he could look forward to spending the rest of the war as a prisoner. Should he draw his revolver and hope to kill one or two, before they shot him down? For a moment he felt constriction in his throat, not at the prospect of captivity but at the thought that he should have been down there, with Ralph and the others, taking his chance like the rest of them. Perhaps his father had been right all along!

Steadily, the grey-clad figures advanced until they were less than a hundred yards from the canal bank. Then a voice rang out, ‘
Fire!
' and all along the trenches heads appeared, rifles were aimed and bullets tore into the massed ranks of the enemy. So rapidly were the shots repeated that the sound was continuous and the German soldiers fell like wheat before the harvester. Watching, Tom remembered that Ralph had told him that it was the pride of the infantry that they could fire fifteen aimed rounds per minute. For all his hatred of war, he found himself cheering as the German ranks wavered and then fell back. His cheer was echoed along the thin line of the trenches.

The sun rose higher and Tom began to sweat in the confined space of the cabin but the battle continued to rage below him and the crane shuddered with the impact of the German shells on the ground below. The German infantry made two further attempts to advance, but each time they were driven back, leaving the ground beyond the canal strewn with bodies. Tom worked feverishly, filling page after page with sketches. Then, looking to the west, he saw movement. Small groups of men were retreating towards him, each in turn providing covering fire while the others withdrew through them. With a sickening lurch in his stomach Tom realized that the enemy had succeeded in crossing the canal by one of the bridges. Below him, other groups were moving, slipping back towards the slag heaps and the buildings of the mining villages. It was time to leave his vantage point. With cramped and shaking limbs, he began the long climb down to the ground.

At ground level the cacophony of the bombardment was more deafening than before. At the whistle of an approaching shell he threw himself face down and felt the ground heave. Soil thrown up by the explosion pattered down on to his back. He scrambled up and, keeping low, scuttled in the direction of the mine buildings until he encountered a platoon of Coldstream Guards.

‘I'm looking for Lieutenant Malham Brown,' Tom said. ‘Do you know where he is?'

‘Back there, sir,' the corporal said, nodding towards a long, low building. ‘Casualty clearing station.'

Tom's stomach churned again. Somehow he had convinced himself that in the midst of all this desolation he would find Ralph unharmed. He turned and stumbled towards the building. It was a disused factory and Tom entered a huge, echoing room, empty except for lines of wounded men lying on the floor. There was no sign of any doctors or orderlies, and the prospect of trawling the lines in search of Ralph was too daunting, so he picked his way across to a doorway leading into a second room. This one, too, was full of wounded but there was more activity. Two doctors were at work at trestle tables on the far side and several orderlies with Red Cross armbands were bustling about with trays of dressings.

Tom waylaid the nearest one. ‘Lieutenant Malham Brown? Is he here?'

‘Over there, sir.' The man indicated with a jerk of his chin and Tom turned to see Ralph crouched beside a prone figure.

Ralph looked up as he approached and for a moment his eyes were blank, as if he did not recognize his friend. Then he said, ‘Ah, Tom. You're still in one piece then,' in a flat tone that expressed neither surprise nor relief. His face was smeared with coal dust and spent powder but beneath the filth he was chalk white.

‘And you?' Tom said breathlessly. ‘You're not hurt?'

‘Me? No, no I'm all right. Just checking on the lads, like this one.'

He looked down at the still figure on the stretcher and Tom saw that it was a boy who looked hardly old enough to enlist. One sleeve of his tunic was ripped and a rough bandage had been applied, which was already dark with blood. Ralph put his hand on the boy's other shoulder and pressed it gently. ‘Hang on, old chap. The medics will be with you soon.'

‘Don't worry about me, sir,' the boy whispered. ‘I'll be OK. There's others worse off than me.'

Ralph straightened up and looked about him with the same blank, lost look and Tom said quietly, ‘Is there anything I can do?'

‘I need to get back,' Ralph said. ‘We're withdrawing to the second line of defence. Stay here, will you, and help out?'

‘Of course,' Tom agreed. ‘If there's anything useful I can do.'

Ralph started to move towards the door, then he stopped and looked round the room. ‘There are so many,' he murmured, as if to himself, ‘so many . . .' Tom wondered if he meant the Germans or the casualties, but before he could frame the question Ralph shook himself like a dog and left the room.

Tom located one of the doctors, who was bending over a man who was clutching his belly and sobbing. ‘Is there anything I can do, Doctor? I've no medical or first aid training but I'm willing to help in any way I can.'