Post of Honour (24 page)

It is doubtful whether Ikey Palfrey, still serving with the artillery in or around the Cuinchy brickstacks, would have bothered to argue with Horace Handcock upon the subject of how long the war would last but if, for some reason, he had been drawn into a discussion at The Raven his rebuttal of Horace’s prophecies might have led to him being branded as a defeatist. After nearly eighteen months at the front, broken by a single spell of leave in June, 1915, Ikey had formed certain theories about modern warfare and they were not of the kind likely to win preferment for a professional. He had artillery-spotted for several small-scale offensives and two major pushes, including the Loos debacle and had come to the conclusion that at least two drastic changes would have to be made on the Western Front before the Allies could advance as far as Roulers and Lille, much less Cologne and Berlin. In the first place all British ex-cavalry generals bent over maps at HQ would have to be put out of harm’s way, preferably by a bullet through the head, although, in this case, shots would have to be fired point-blank for it was a well-known fact that all cavalry generals had bullet-proof skulls. This having been done, and a new General Staff having been recruited from men who had ceased to think of war in terms of Balaclava, some new tactical method would have to be devised as a means of penetrating the German trench system and covering the advance of infantrymen across open ground traversed by enemy machine-guns. Ikey had watched, through powerful binoculars, the advance of successive waves at Loos and for four days had seen the clusters climb out of their assembly points, plod a few yards over churned-up ground and wither away before they had travelled half the distance to their first objective. They looked, he thought, like a swarm of clockwork dolls moving across a brown tablecloth and when, during the first two days, attack after attack failed, he was at first surprised, then furiously angry and finally filled with hatred for men who ordered their advance without regard for the vulnerability of flesh and bone to bullets and shrapnel. Then, as his duties required him to keep the surging attacks and counter-attacks under constant observation, he was able to eliminate the human element altogether and study the battle in a tactical sense, reasoning that before the fortified ground on either side could be taken and held something far more imaginative than a preliminary bombardment was needed to fortify the attacker during the initial stage of a breakthrough. His mind began to toy with smokescreens, low-level aerial machine-gunning and even bullet-proof vests but he rejected all three as too clumsy, too revolutionary and too ineffectual. Then, on the third day, he had the germ of an idea and it excited him; what was surely needed out here, what would have to be found before substantial progress could be made, was some kind of war chariot mounted with quick-firing guns, something impervious to all but a direct hit from a mortar or long-range shell, a machine, moreover, that could crush wire and circumnavigate all but the smallest shell-holes, a moving fort behind which the hardy infantry could advance without being scythed down by traversing machine-guns and rifle fire. That night, back in his dug-out, he took pencil and paper and began to sketch but he was less than half-satisfied with the drawing he produced, thinking that it resembled a memory copy of one of the sketches of military engines made by Leonardo da Vinci that he remembered seeing in a magazine in the mess at Quetta. He persisted, however and at last evolved something that seemed to him to be at least partially practical, a kind of squat armoured car, with broad, steel-plated wheels looking a little like an armadillo. He was so absorbed that he got behind with his real work and it was not until the candle burned low that he put the sketch-pad in his valise, marked his maps and finally rolled on to his wire-netting bed to sleep. Outside the guns went on grumbling, not violently but persistently, somewhere to the south and before he slept Ikey thought the distant cannonade sounded exactly like autumn thunder in the Sorrel Valley.

There was a woman, formerly of the Valley, abroad that same night not forty miles from the sector where Ikey sat sketching war-chariots and although she had always prided herself on being a realist, she would have done her utmost to extract a crumb of comfort from Horace Handcock’s optimistic prophecies. Having come to regard the war as the most hideous tragedy that had ever beset the world she would have welcomed any terms, including unconditional surrender, that brought the suffering she witnessed each night to an abrupt end.

As an ambulance driver shunting regularly between casualty-clearing station and hospital, Grace Lovell was more familiar with the extremes of pain and human desolation than even a front-line infantry man. A fighting man was primarily concerned with his own plight, and either stuck it out, like a terrified mole, or was caught up in a struggle for survival demanding a quality of exclusive concentration. Grace Lovell did most of her work outside the range of all but the howitzers and therefore found it very difficult to isolate herself from the load of misery in her vehicle and devote her entire attention to the task of driving over shell-pocked roads with quarter-power headlamps.

She had been in France for close on a year now, having volunteered for ambulance driving after a brief, unhappy spell in a London hospital when the 1914 amnesty freed all imprisoned suffragettes. She emerged from Holloway half-way through her sixth sentence and her experiences during the previous decade had not been such as to encourage her to embrace a patriotic crusade. Ever since 1904 she had been hounded, hunted, man-handled, forcibly fed, and hectored by men and to the hard core of the Movement, some of whom, like Grace, were reduced to skin and bone by hunger-strikes and nervous strain, the war was regarded as a fitting punishment for a world of men who had been callous, sadistic and mulish in responding to a demand for basic human rights.

This savage mood endured through the autumn and into the spring of 1915, while she was recuperating at a holiday home in Scotland run by a wealthy sympathiser but she began to relent a little as the casualties of the first winter’s fighting appeared on public platforms at meetings loosely associated with women’s suffrage, men who, for the most part, were no longer men at all but patched-up parodies of men lacking arms, legs or even half a face. As news of the death or mutilation of some of her personal friends reached her, the shift of sympathies kept pace with her improvement in health and although she still regarded the war as the climax of years of blundering inefficiency on the part of the male cabals of Europe, she could find it in her heart to feel desperately sorry for the millions of young men urged to lay down their lives at the toot of a bugle and the flutter of a Union Jack. Veterans of the movement, women like Annie Kenney and Christobel Pankhurst, assured her that this was the opportunity for which they had been working since 1904 and that after the war every woman in Britain would have the franchise. She did not know whether she believed them but after a spell as a VAD in a London hospital it did not seem to matter much for the keen edge of her fanaticism was blunted by a factor removed from the purely physical suffering she witnessed in the wards. This was a creeping doubt as to whether women in authority were any more reasonable, or even as efficient as men. She had the bad luck to come within the orbit of a fat-rumped martinet whose only qualification for her position as Commandant was newly-acquired wealth and Grace soon had good reason to despise this type of woman as wholeheartedly as she despised Cabinet Ministers. The titled Commandant administered the hospital like an eighteenth-century school, treating her volunteer nurses much as the more ignorant of the wardresses had treated prisoners in Holloway. Grace came to suspect that, again like some of the wardresses, the Commandant was not only a bully and a snob but also a Lesbian for she made favourites of all the doll-faced little nurses from aristocratic houses and was hostile to any member of her staff who had been a suffragette. After two or three months of back-breaking toil and humiliation Grace knew that she would have to choose between resigning or changing her hospital, and since almost every reception-centre for the wounded was in charge of middled-aged women enjoying the exercise of despotism she managed, by pulling various strings, to transfer to the transport section of the Department and was sent to France in time to evacuate some of the casualties of the battle of Veuve Chapelle, in April.

It was here, driving between clearing-station and base, that her re-orientation really began, for during her ten years in and out of gaol she had forgotten that men also possess the capacity to suffer. Back in the hospital wards at home, freshly washed, rid of their filthy uniforms and with their wounds covered by clean bandages, wounded men could be regarded with a certain amount of detachment but out here, where they were lifted into ambulances much as they had quitted the battlefield, compassion came near to prostrating her until she was able to convince herself that every stretcher case needed instant, practical help far more than tears. By the time the Loos fighting began she had become an extremely efficient driver and assistant orderly so that she was put on a regular run through devastated territory wrecked during the previous autumn’s fighting.

Although the oldest woman in her section she withstood the demands of active service better than most. Her experiences had bred in her an iron self-discipline and once she was rested, and had recovered from successive hunger-strikes, she put on weight and regained her taut, resilient physique. She had need of strength. In addition to the strain of night-driving over bad roads, where every jolt produced screams of agony, and the sickening morning routine of scrubbing out the ambulance, her seniority made her a target for all the younger women seeking a confidante. There were those whose health proved unequal to the demands of the work but who wanted most desperately to acquit themselves well, and, there were those who had rushed starry-eyed into the Service at the beginning of the war and were now driven to distraction by nagging superiors. There were others, perhaps the most pitiable, whose greatest fear was to succumb to fear, and there was, of course, a steady stream of pregnancies among girls from good-class homes in city suburbs, girls whose staggering ignorance of the basic facts of hygiene caused Grace to rage against the social taboos of the last few generations.

Some of the girls who came to her for help and advice were only half aware of how they had become pregnant and there were even more hopeless examples of girls who had been virgins when they stepped ashore at Le Havre and had contracted venereal disease in a matter of weeks. Grace did what she could, exploiting her many personal contacts at home, delivering impromptu lectures on sexual hygiene and contraception, using her campaigning and even her prison experiences to alleviate distress wherever possible, but sometimes it seemed to her she was distributing a handful of oats in a meadow full of donkeys. Whenever possible she conserved her nervous energies, making few close friends and spending her meagre spare time sitting alone in the sun and letting her mind go blank, a substitute for sleep that she had learned in the cells. But this was not always easy, particularly after an offensive, when, night after night, she had to handle men with wounds in the lungs, wounds in the stomach, wounds in the groin, legless and armless men, men with hideously disfigured faces and, worst of all, gas cases, so that she sometimes thought what a blessed relief it would be to look upon a young man who was whole and unblemished.

Perhaps it was this subconscious longing that urged her, in the early spring of 1916, to make a deliberate sacrifice of her privacy and involve herself, physically and emotionally, in what proved to be the most bizarre yet in some ways the most rewarding of her campaigns.

He returned to her for the third time in April, a gangling boy of no more than twenty who had been wounded in the shoulder at Neuve Chapelle and again, this time in the forearm, at Loos. She remembered him because of the terrible distress he showed after vomiting over her as they were helping him to board the ambulance and when they sent him back into the fight a third time in anticipation of the summer offensive on the Somme, he went to a great deal of trouble to seek her out explaining, naively, that he had never ceased to think of her all the time he was home and had written several times although his letters seemed to have gone astray.

She was oddly flattered by his attentions for it had seemed to her that never again would she earn the sidelong glance and smile of a young man. At thirty-four she still had an excellent figure but her dark curls were showing streaks of grey and her eyes seemed too big for her small, rather pinched face; in any case years had now passed since she had given more than a passing thought to a man who was not, automatically, a persecutor. Because of his insistence she let him take her out to dinner once or twice at a hotel that could still provide an excellent meal for officers attached to the transport centre, and she was touched when, on escorting her back to her quarters, he asked shyly if he might kiss her. For all his battle experience he was still no more than a timid boy and was also good-looking, she supposed, in the conventional English way, with his wavy, light-brown hair, a straight, short nose, clear eyes and fresh complexion. She let him kiss her, more as a joke against herself than from any desire to be kissed but the gentle pressure of his lips, and his reverential approach to her, renewed in her the yearning for a fresh, clean man, someone who was whole and whose clothes were not infested with lice and about whom there was no stale smell of sweat, blood and Flanders mud.

She must have responded to his kiss more eagerly than she intended for he began to pour out protestations of love, saying that the younger women at home meant nothing to him and that he had been unable to get her out of his mind during his convalescence after Loos. She tried teasing him, pointing out that, as an enterprising girl of fourteen, she could have been his mother but when he raised his hand and stroked her hair she succumbed to the crazy pressures of war and after one or two furtive embraces in the limited privacy of the base she promised to spend three days’ leave with him after he had completed his gas course, at Montreuil.