SOMEWHERE IN FRANCE, NOVEMBER 1917
‘Good morning, miss. Lovely morning it is too.’ The batman spoke with the accents of an excellent butler. She almost expected him to offer to draw her curtains, so she could see sunlight and rose gardens out a window.
Instead, he put a tin plate and a mug on the biscuit box. ‘Tea, miss. I hope you don’t mind that I have already sugared it.’
‘No,’ she said, sitting up groggily. ‘Thank you.’
‘There’s a nice bully beef sandwich too. With real bread — the major’s own supply,’ he added, in case she didn’t realise what an honour it was to have bread for breakfast, as well as sugar.
‘Thank you,’ she said again.
‘Ahem. If you need the facilities, miss, use the sandbag over against the wall.’
She hadn’t noticed it last night. It had a cut across the top, exposing the sand within, and did exude a certain odour, but then so did the entire trench: men, urine, faeces, and the sweet smell of rotting flesh, human and rat.
He left her then. She dug a small hole in the sand with the spade that sat beside the sandbag, squatted over it, then used the spade again to cover up what she’d deposited.
She presumed the water in the dish was for washing, used it, then drank the tea thirstily, wishing there was another cup. Perhaps she should have saved the water to drink? No: she didn’t want to risk drinking any water without knowing if it had been boiled — she knew from the gossip at Rouen that dysentery and other diseases from filthy water caused almost as many deaths out here as battle.
She sat on the bed to eat the sandwich slowly. The bread was almost fresh and good quality, almost certainly from an officers’ mess, where the bakers didn’t add the sawdust or ground acorns rumour said were added elsewhere, including even in civilian bakeries. Both slices were thick, with a generous helping of corned beef too. The batman had obviously decided she would need sustenance more than elegance.
He was right, she thought, heart thudding at what was to come, head aching a little from too little sleep on too hard a pillow, and too much that had happened in such a short time.
I haven’t even written to Mama and Papa, she realised. They’ll be writing to me at Rouen. Their letters would sit on the wooden table unclaimed, unless one of her friends put them in a box for her, or to send back if she didn’t return.
Most men left ‘last letters’ for their loved ones with chaplains or someone else they trusted. She had never read one, but suspected they usually said much the same, though some could fancy it up with prettier words.
I love you. Tell the family, tell my friends, I love them too. Hug the dog for me. Do not grieve for me. I do this for my country and for you.
Did any ‘last letter’ ever tell another truth? She had learned so much more of the world in her few free days or brief workday conversations at Rouen. Dear Mum and Dad, Your expectations helped force me to enlist. I was scared then. I am scared now. I have been shut in a world of smoke and blood, and you helped lock me in here.
Her letter would never have said that. She should have left one with Chaplain Chisolm, but there hadn’t been time to write, or even think of writing, though she could have written something in the train, and given it to Mrs Reynolds, if she’d had paper and a pencil. Maybe she could write a letter when she got to her destination . . .
‘Excuse me, miss? I’m Sergeant Lawson, miss, to take you up the line.’
She pushed aside the hessian curtain and found another man of mud, this one small and wiry as a ferret, with sunken eyes, gazing at her with resignation — or was that contempt? He inspected her briefly and thoroughly and his look of weary disapproval lessened slightly.
‘First rule, miss. Keep your head down. The Germans have pulled back but there are snipers about. If they see your head above the trench they’ll shoot it. Second rule: don’t take your helmet off. Bits of flying shrapnel can kill you as easily as a bullet. Third: this is your gas mask. If you hear a bell ring or anyone beating a bit of metal on a shell, or smell garlic, or if anyone yells “Gas,” put it on. If in doubt, put it on. Understood?’
‘Yes, sergeant.’
‘Fourth, trenching tool.’ Sergeant Lawson handed her a cross between a short-handled pick and a spade. ‘This trenching tool is now your best friend. If the firing is heavy, dig yourself a hole.’ He shrugged. ‘The best protection is to heave up a pile of bodies and shelter behind them, but I doubt you’d have the strength. Just remember, the only danger in a trench is from above. Dig yourself a nice cave fast enough with this tool and you might survive. Fifth: obey every order I give you, and keep moving. Understood?’
‘Yes, Sergeant.’
‘What did I say?’
‘Head down, helmet, gas mask, dug-out, keep moving, do as you say.’
‘You’ll do. Watch your feet.’ Sergeant Lawson strode away in a strange almost balletic gait, to keep his balance on the shifting duckboards and avoid tangles of torn netting. Jean found herself staring at his feet, copying him. She envied him his trousers.
Vaguely she was aware of men staring at her as she passed: men with rifles, bayonets at the ready, a man peering up with a periscope, a line of men sitting in a dug-out at the side holding out bare feet for inspection.
They walked. They kept on walking.
The trenches curved, sometimes turned sharp corners. Walls of sandbag would change to walls of poles, and then a mixture. She tried not to look at one section where the whole wall seemed to be made of bodies.
Time vanished. She had been walking for hours, or running-slipping-balancing for hours . . . there was no one word that quite described moving in trenches. One area was so deep in water she had to hold her skirt over her knees, then the water was gone, and the duckboards were dry, and then oozing mud, then dry again . . .
The figure in front of her vanished. Jean blinked, then realised he had ducked to one side into a dug-out. She followed him. This one was larger than any they’d passed, and far larger than the one she’d slept in. A man huddled over an old petrol can on a spirit stove.
‘Any tea?’ demanded Sergeant Lawson.
‘Chance’d be a fine thing. It’ll take another hour to get this lot warm. Got cold tea over there.’ The man shrugged at another petrol tin, then realised one of the figures in front of him was female, and stared, as if worried he was delirious.
‘She’s a signaller,’ explained Sergeant Lawson briefly.
‘Blimey, are we that hard up? Sorry, miss. No offence intended. I can do you bread and cheese,’ he offered quickly, as if to make up for his stare.
‘Thank you,’ said Jean. She took a mug of the cold tea. It tasted of petrol and mud, but there must have been tea in there somewhere as she felt stronger for the drink.
‘Come on,’ ordered Sergeant Lawson. ‘No time to dally here to eat.’
They chewed at the stale bread and hard cheese as they moved onwards through the network of trenches. Jean could make out the different sounds of individual guns now, not just a distant roar and choke.
‘Not much happening,’ said Sergeant Lawson. They were the first words he’d spoken to her since they’d left the last dug-out. ‘The Germans have mostly moved off.’
Jean nodded. Did he also guess they were about to retake the enemy’s lines?
Men slept on sandbags on sandbags on either side of the trench, oblivious to the noise of the guns, or people passing, or else too exhausted to do more than sleep. In another section a dug-out had been lined with a dozen or so occupied shelves, each wide enough for a man to lie on. Around the corner another man slept on a pile of corpses that had almost sunk in the mud, hands or feet missing, faces now beyond recognition, but still recognisably people. Comrades . . .
Who wouldn’t mind if their remnant bodies gave a few hours’ sleep out of the mud to a friend, she thought. A respectful burial was impossible here, or any burial at all. Yet there was comradeship.
Throughout the whole day she had heard no quarrels: just men bringing mugs of the not-really-tea to each other, passing around chocolate or cheese. No one was resorting to army biscuit, except to use their boxes as seats, or to make a table on which to play cards.
Dusk was falling, the air becoming darker than the mud on either side. The trenches they passed through were busier now: rolls of cable being pulled out of dug-out storerooms, men buttoning overalls, trenching tools to the ready.
There’d be no machines to dig the trench and lay the cable here, only men with the most basic tools. Other men peered over the top of the trenches with periscopes, though she wondered how much they could see in the dimness. They were looking for lights, she supposed, or a hint of movement.
Another muddy patch. The boards squelched under her feet, but she and Sergeant Lawson were moving too fast to sink too deeply, unlike the sentry, submerged to his knees, resignedly still holding his bayonet while two men on either side of him, their feet on extra duckboards, hauled him out of the mud.
Any sense of adventure had long since seeped away. This was . . . impossible. Mud. Bodies. Rats. Squatting on a bag of sand. The constant almost sweet stench of rotting flesh; the thudding and the shriek of long-range weapons. Despite all she had seen, and heard, her mind would not accept that men could live like this for weeks — or much, much longer.
‘Coming through!’ Men in canvas coats and thick gloves pushed a roll of barbed wire up a ‘cut’, a smaller trench curving out of the main one to the outside.
‘Come on,’ said Sergeant Lawson. ‘Don’t want to get in the way of the night’s work. Don’t want to have to walk too far in the dark either, or risk showing a light too long.’ He didn’t add, ‘I’d be a lot faster if you weren’t a girl wearing a skirt.’
But the flickering candles and lamps of the men working around them gave enough light for them to pick their way. At last Sergeant Lawson stopped in a section of trench that looked like every other section of trench, except for its width. It had makeshift but solid walls, though still the same mud and stench. And rats, she thought, as one ran over her foot, eager for its night’s feeding. Trenches full of rotting bodies were a paradise for rats. She had already heard them squeaking and scratching and quarrelling in the dug-outs and along the edges of the trenches as they passed.
The sergeant lifted another curtain, made of mud-thickened blankets this time. ‘Sergeant Lawson reporting, sir.’ He saluted. ‘She’s here.’
‘She?’ said a vaguely familiar voice. ‘What do you mean, she?’
‘The telegraph girl, sir,’ said Sergeant Lawson wearily. ‘They’ve sent you a woman.’
‘Hell and damnation,’ swore the voice. ‘They can’t be bally serious.’
Jean ducked under the curtain and blinked in the lamplight. ‘Good evening, Lieutenant Galbraith,’ she said.