The Wild Dark Flowers (28 page)

He nodded slowly. He turned her hand over in his and smoothed a finger over her palm. “Yes,” he said. “We all know. But you can’t think that way, otherwise you’d never go. You’d just turn tail and run for the hills. So we’ll stick together and mind each other’s backs. And keep our spirits up. That’s all we can do.”

“And not be a hero.”

He laughed. “And not be a hero.”

“Promise me.”

“I promise,” he said.

“Neither you nor Arthur. You tell him that.”

“I will.”

He looked at her with deep affection. She could be such a fierce girl; he liked that in her. “I hope I don’t bring sorrow to your door, Mary,” he murmured.

Her mouth dropped open slightly; her eyes rapidly filled with tears. “Oh hush,” she said. And she put her arms around his neck. “You’re right,” she whispered into his ear. “You’ll come back, and we’ll get married, and we’ll have a little family, and we’ll work here if we’re able to, and it will all be just as it was. But better.”

And then she sprang back from him, apparently only just then realizing what she had said. He started to laugh, because the look of embarrassment on her face was so comical. “Jumping the gun a bit, aren’t you?” he teased.

“Well, I . . .” She blushed harder. David watched her with fascination; he’d never seen her react to anything like that. He hadn’t even known until this last hour that she could color up at all. “Well, you’ve got ahead of me,” he said. “You’ve been thinking a lot while I’ve been away, by the looks of it.”

She dropped his hand as if it were a hot brick and started fussing with the teacups. He snatched back her hand and forcibly turned her to face him.

“Don’t make fun of me.” She dipped her head.

“Do you suppose Mrs. Jocelyn would give you a week off later this year?” he asked. “Do you think you might be able to come down to Wiltshire?”

“Wiltshire? Why?”

“We’re going to Shropshire in two days. Then they reckon Wiltshire a week or two later. To Fovant, the big camp there. But the lads say they’ll give us a bit of leave before we go to France.”

“And when will that be?”

“Ah, there’s the question. Who knows? Sometime in the autumn. People want to get in the thick of it.”

She made a small groaning noise.

“I know. But Mary . . . before that. In the leave they give us before going to France . . .”

She looked up at him expectantly. Then, in the silence, they heard footsteps on the stairs from the main house. Several sets of footsteps, and raised voices, Mr. Bradfield’s among them.

“Mary,” he said, “be quick now, and give me an answer before they all come in. Before I leave Wiltshire, before I go to France . . .”

She shook her head, puzzled. “Well, what?”

“It seems like you’ve got it all worked out already,” he said. “And it looks to me like the best plan, since you mention it.”

“You’re talking in riddles,” she complained.

“So I am,” he admitted. “So here it is, plain enough. I’d have liked to do a bit of courting. I’d have liked to take it a bit steadier for you. But since you’ve brought the subject up, and time’s against us . . . will you please marry me?”

*   *   *

I
t was strange, but, in the darkness, he thought he could hear a bell ringing.

Harrison stood, and listened. It was two in the morning, and he was on sentry duty in the forward trench.

He was tired, although the word didn’t even begin to describe it. He thought that, long ago—it seemed like centuries now—that he had used to be tired at the end of a working day at Rutherford. He had thought then that there was nothing more fatiguing than standing in the dining room, especially at a celebratory dinner when the room was full, waiting on his lordship and the family and their friends. In those days, the staff could be standing there for four or five hours sometimes. But, in reality, he had never known what tiredness was until now. This was beyond weariness and beyond boredom. His muscles had strained and ached for so long that it had become normal, and the ache went deep down into his bones, a kind of tortuous rheumatic fever that never let up, never released its grinding grip.

A cool air blew over the land that had once been fields.

It brought with it a sensation of the openness of the ground. The trees were long gone. And Aubers Ridge . . . well, that was a joke if ever there was one, he thought. The Ridge was just a minor ripple, a few yards higher than the churned soil that stretched around it for mile after mile.

The breeze brought more unpleasant things with it than just the sensation of space, however. It brought a kind of dirty miasma, a mixture of wet and cordite and a deeper and more insistent fetid rot. Clay and blood and bones.

He peered into the night.

He thought, just then, that he had seen a shape out there. Someone moving. Something hovering just above the ground. He narrowed his eyes and tried to focus: there couldn’t be anything there, surely? It was just not possible. All it could possibly be was ground mist, not a person. He looked up at the sky, where a few clouds scudded. He decided that it was just the shadow of clouds, one degree paler than the inkiness of the night, casting their fleeting impression on the earth below.

One of the lads had said that at Neuve Chapelle, just as the light had been coming at dawn, the battalion had plainly seen a priest walking about the battlefield, leaning down to the dead, and kneeling beside the wounded, giving absolution. A priest wearing a long black cloak.

“That wasn’t a priest,” one man had said, laughing derisively. “That was the Grim Reaper. Come to get souls.”

Perhaps he was out there now, Harrison thought. His face set in a grimace. If it was him, the collector of souls, then he had a bloody busy job lately. A bloody and a busy job, all right. Harrison’s hands shook. He looked momentarily away from the ground and down at his feet. Blinked once or twice. Looked up again.

He had spent the last few days trying to hide the intractable jittering of his body. It was as if his own fingers wouldn’t obey him anymore. He lived in fear that an officer would see him lose his grip on his rifle, or fumble cleaning it. He thought that it might look as if he was nervous; and he wasn’t nervous, and he wasn’t lazy, and he wasn’t clumsy. He had lost the ability to feel anything striking; he was numb. He really believed that he wouldn’t be able to be afraid anymore; it would take an energy that he no longer possessed. Courage or cowardice didn’t come into it. It all seemed so irrelevant to him, to be afraid or to be strong. After all, strength or weakness weren’t required of him. He was required to be an automaton, a body moving about or standing still or lying down. Just a body that did as it was told, that obeyed orders.

But his damned hands wouldn’t do what he wanted them to do. He had to concentrate hard, chewing on his lip, making his mouth hurt so that the distraction jolted his fingers into action.

He clutched his rifle now, staring out to the German lines four hundred yards away.

He could feel something other than the smell of the ground. He could feel other men looking back at him, at the British lines. Other men waiting and, beyond them, thousands of others. He didn’t doubt that there were reserve lines and communication trenches and arms depots and railway lines and troop trains behind that four-hundred-yard-away parapet. Lines that stretched all the way back to Germany. Here he stood, facing another man just like himself, staring at the dark, clutching a rifle. And both of them, perched at the edge of an abyss, standing at the edge of a bottomless cliff, teetering on the rim of it while, behind them on both sides, others pressed forward, full of anxious misery and bravado. But he didn’t feel any of that. He was scoured out, empty.

He kept thinking of Nat, and others. Only a few hours ago, he had run back to a reserve trench, carrying a message, and there on the edge of the trench was a hand, cut off at the wrist. A wedding ring, greasy with mud, was on the third finger, but otherwise it looked like marble, the hand of a statue. No one knew nor cared to whom this oddly displaced hand belonged. No one would ever know.

There was a cursed and continuous ringing in his ears. It was just like the bells in Rutherford before the new electrical system was put in, he thought. All the little bells on the yards-long rail belowstairs, each bell with a painted notice saying who was calling upstairs.
Her ladyship’s room . . . drawing room . . . upper bedroom five . . .

Such a long time ago and so far away.

He put one hand to his head. Perhaps it was all the noise over here that had done it. Caused the ringing. After a bombardment, sometimes you couldn’t hear at all for a while. It was like a hundred thunderstorms raging around you. And in the silence, if there was silence, a man’s ears would hiss and rumble, replaying the noise. He swayed slightly, trying to focus his eyes.
Clang, clang, clang
went the bell in his head.
Clang
, like the village school bell.
Clang
, like all the bells in Rutherford going off at once.
Clang
, like the bells on churches.
Clang
 . . . ruined churches.

He pulled his mind away from the associations.
Don’t think about bells, even if you can hear them
, he told himself. Think about the bloody Boche. Think about fixing a bayonet. The battle was coming; they’d got word only an hour ago.

What time was it now? He looked along the trench and saw the officer making his way towards him. They checked every hour, checked each man on sentry duty. It was a court-martial offense to be asleep. They shot you for it. You could be a serving soldier, an old hand, a regular, and you’d still get treated the same, no matter how many years’ service you had. They took you away and shot you along with the deserters and the madmen and the crying boys.

But he wouldn’t fall asleep. He didn’t know if he really slept at all now. He had no sensation and no recollection of it. Dreams were nightmares, and the days were nightmares. It was all the same, waking or sleeping. All the same.

The officer had reached him. “All right, Harrison?”

“All right, sir.”

“Bombardment at five a.m. Leading battalions over the top at five thirty. That’s us.”

“Right, sir. What time is it now?”

“Almost three.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Flying Corps will be up there. Should see them after dawn.”

He watched the officer go. A few days ago they’d been taken into the reserve trenches and had Sunday service. There had been hundreds of them in a semi-circle, and he couldn’t hear the priest. There were two of them—the first sermonizing, the second giving the Sacrament. And blow him down if the second one hadn’t been old Whittaker from the village. Looking frail and trembling, but Whittaker all the same.

He’d wanted to rush over and say something, but what was there to say? And maybe . . . maybe he’d just imagined it was Whittaker. Like a lot of imaginings he’d had lately. Imagined he’d seen something moving in no-man’s-land, and imagined he’d seen the aircraft above them guarded by real wings, like birds’ wings, massive, hidden in the streams of clouds. Imagined he was tasting tea with his elbows on the scrubbed table in the servants’ kitchen. Ah, that would be lovely. That would be good. But it was all useless, for the imaginings had no power.

*   *   *

A
t four a.m., the sun rose, and all was still.

They let him stand down, and he had a breakfast of sorts there in the trench alongside the others who had been brought up. There was nothing hot to drink; there was only hard tack. He tried to chew it, but his mouth was dry. He swallowed a few bites. They all gave up and threw the rest away, and they started to clean their rifles. They did it thoroughly, and whenever he felt his hands shaking, he would tell a joke.

“You’re a riot,” someone said. “Regular comedian.”

It was all in whispers, hunkered down below the parapet.

Five o’clock came, and the sky was streaked with a fine pattern of cobalt blue and pink. And the bombardment began. Field guns were firing shrapnel at the German wire, and howitzers were sending high explosive shells onto their front line. Earth shifted, a stench came out of the broken ground; mud was flung in all directions. The shells wailed as they sailed overhead, high pitched and mournful, like numberless girls crying and keening, and then crashed with blinding force.

Oh. Make it stop
, he thought.

He crouched in his line, inhaling the cold sweat of the man directly ahead of him.

“Get up,” came the order. “Stand by.”

Five twenty. They hung together, looking up at the edge of the trench where they would soon fling themselves. They hung wordlessly, panting, drifting, shoulder against shoulder, arm against arm, feet knocking against other feet as they shuffled. Hung like a row of dirty washing, pinned in the breeze, elbow nudging elbow, face alongside face, hearts thudding.

The bombardment got suddenly heavier. Field guns firing at the German breastworks in an effort to wipe them out. In the cacophony, somewhere out to their left, they heard whistles blowing. Brigades of First Division were moving. The Northants and the Royal Sussex were out there, and the Royal Munster Fusiliers and Royal Welsh Fusiliers. Men from the farmland of middle England, and men from the Welsh mountains and mining valleys. Somewhere too, the Indian Corps, the Dehra Dun Brigade and the Ghurkhas and the Seaforth Highlanders.

Ready now, ready.

Wildness surged into the blood. A thickness of spirit, as if his soul had got heavy inside him and needed to be shrugged off, as if it would weigh him down. Let go his soul and his sanity. Ready now. Foot on the ladder. Raining soil and stink. Ready now.

They started up. In an orderly line, with the officers behind them making sure that no one waited too long. But there was no need. The infantry pressed forward, struggling to get purchase on the steps, heavy with their packs and ammunition and guns, forcing themselves out of the shadow of the trench and into the smeared dawn light. Then they were properly up, and half walking, half shambling along in a jogging line, trying to balance on the uneven ground, deafened by the blasts of the guns.