SOMEWHERE NEAR CAMBRAI, 20 NOVEMBER 1917
Dear Mama and Papa,
I should have left a letter with the chaplain at Rouen but did not think to do so. I hope that if anything happens to me someone will find this one and send it to you.
Papa, please do not feel guilty for sending me here. I believe I have been of real use to my country, and that is what matters. I have seen more of life in my time here than I ever might have back in Butterwood. I have known kindness and honesty in the most desperate times. It was my own choice to leave the comparative safety of my earlier posting to come here, and I do not regret it for a second.
You are the best and most loved parents it is possible to have, and Arthur and William are the kindest and the bravest of brothers. I am so proud of my family.
Your loving daughter,
Jean
The whole trench system knew the push was on now, and the basics of the tactics. The afternoon was filled with checking equipment, hauling rolls of cable out of dug-outs, and digging ‘saps’, small trenches that would allow the rolls of cable to be rolled out simultaneously at various spots along the trench.
Major Galbraith seemed everywhere, inspecting the saps for stability — a collapsed wall at the wrong moment could mean the loss of precious minutes, equipment, men. The junior officers checked equipment; the sentries stood at their post, watching; the mess dug-out had queues of men waiting outside and an equal number coming out, though Jean only had a few seconds to take it all in during a quick visit to her sandbag. She supposed the queued men were waiting for provisions, for there might be no way to get cooked meals in the next few days.
If this worked. Jean had already heard enough gossip at Rouen to know that by the end of the night they might have been forced to retreat, as grandly planned ‘pushes’ had ended so many times before, the tanks bogged in mud, the enemy harrying them, leaving tens of thousands of dead behind without an inch of soil gained.
None of those retreats had been reported in the newspapers, ostensibly to keep up morale. Jean reckoned the real motive was to keep the blunders secret.
A private she hadn’t met before brought her dinner, more of the ‘beans and almost ham’, saluting as he entered and standing to attention till she told him to stand easy. Like most of the British army he obviously had no idea what ranking systems applied to the women in Signals. Lieutenant Seabrook brought her supper, bread and cheese and tea, and a supply of the army-issue chocolate that rumour said was mostly coagulated horse blood.
‘The chocolate’s for when we move off. I’m assigned to accompany you, in case you need help, and Private Coth and Private Mealworm will carry the machine. They’re good men.’
Alan Galbraith had clearly decided Lieutenant Seabrook was more likely keep himself together if he thought he was protecting her. Alan Galbraith must also have decided that Jean would keep her head, and not descend into hysterics.
‘Mealworm?’
‘It’s Meikle really, but he complained about maggots in the biscuit on his first day and the name stuck. We told him the mealworms were especially added to soften the biscuits to make them edible.’
‘Nothing could make army biscuit edible,’ she said with feeling.
‘Try four days under fire and no other supplies.’ Lieutenant Seabrook’s face had become pale and expressionless again.
‘That’s happened to you?’
Lieutenant Seabrook nodded.
‘Well, it won’t happen this time,’ she said decidedly. ‘I have pockets full of chocolate — real chocolate, not the army stuff — and you’ll be travelling with me.’
His face lost its tension. ‘I happen to have a few bars of proper chocolate too.’
‘We will dine excellently then.’
He nodded. ‘We follow the cable layers — there’s not much point in our standing out exposed until there’s cable to send messages. We’ll be sending despatch riders back to headquarters too, but that’s too slow to get a response in time.’
‘Why on earth don’t you use radio signals telephones?’
‘Too easy for the enemy to pick up the signals.’
‘True. But it doesn’t matter what the enemy picks up if it’s all sent in code, as long as the code is changed often enough.’
‘You’re probably right. I know the Americans use telephones. Maybe in a hundred years our army will catch up. Keep your gas mask ready to put on at all times,’ Lieutenant Seabrook continued. ‘Our boys will be using Livens Projectors to spread gas to clear the way, and the enemy will probably lob some canisters back at us.’
Jean thrust away the memory of William’s bandages. ‘Yes, sir.’
The few messages that came in overnight were long ones. In between sending, transcribing and decoding both she and Lieutenant Seabrook took turns to doze, their heads on their arms on the bench. It seemed that the major had decided that no one else would relieve the lieutenant. He would sleep more restfully in this dug-out with Jean, and that was what Lieutenant Seabrook needed more than a chance to stretch out on a wooden pallet.
Jean woke to the noise of men shouting and the clanging of machinery outside the curtain. When she peered outside it was just getting light.
The push would begin any minute now.
Lieutenant Seabrook rubbed his eyes. ‘Any word yet?’
She hurried back to the headphones, just as the first pulse came through. ‘I think this is it.’ She scribbled down the message, handed it to Lieutenant Seabrook, then without being asked, sent the code for Message received.
Lieutenant Seabrook looked up from it. ‘It’s on!’ he said and hurried out of the dug-out to get someone to pass it to. He was back within seconds.
But there were no more messages.
They waited, Jean and Lieutenant Seabrook sitting on their chairs, hands idle, waiting. Waiting.
Major Galbraith glanced in briefly. Jean smiled at him. He gave her a flicker of a smile and vanished again behind the hessian.
She supposed there was a correct response to give him to show all was in readiness, her gas mask, pliers, knife, a new first aid kit and the trenching tool Sergeant Lawson had given her on her belt, and the chocolate in her pocket. She had even pulled a ribbon from a set of combinations to secure her helmet over her hair and headphones. The ribbon was pale pink, and definitely not regulation. She considered dipping it in mud, then decided it would get splattered with filth soon enough.
They waited. Sapper Coth and Sapper Mealworm were helping push the rolls of cables out of the trench before joining them to carry the coding machine, but Sapper Mealworm brought Jean and Lieutenant Seabrook breakfast of pannikins of tea and another of tepid bully beef stewed with biscuit, which Jean forced herself to swallow.
They waited.
The sounds of the trenches hadn’t changed at all. If anything, they were quieter — less shelling in the past night, less movement in the trench now — as all was in readiness for the advance. Jean could vaguely hear thunder somewhere. Just what they needed: a thunderstorm.
But it wasn’t thunder. The sound grew — it was artillery fire, exactly as the message had predicted. The ground around them began to vibrate. Earth trickled between the planks above them, and even more mud. Rats squeaked in alarm.
‘It’s started,’ Lieutenant Seabrook said quietly, as the vibrations escalated to the noise of a thousand elephants charging towards them.
The roaring drew closer until it filled the world. The whole trench and dug-out shuddered but seemed in no danger of collapse. The rumbling continued, but after an hour seemed to be no closer. Evidently their trench was not on the route the tanks were taking, nor the artillery that followed.
Slowly the booming became a rumble, then almost ceased, except as a far-off constant background quivering that the body could feel but not hear above the other noise.
Or a thousand noises. No, tens of thousands, Jean thought. Every explosion known to humanity, every shot and scream and roar, engine noise, the creaking from the cable rolls, the stamp of feet as men used the saps to exit the trench. In an unbelievably short time, the sounds of their trench had almost vanished, the trench emptied of all that might be useful. Even the boxes of army biscuit under their benches had been taken.
Jean sat upright, listening. Lieutenant Seabrook and Sapper Coth and Sapper Mealworm sat with her. Sapper Mealworm meditatively chewed an army biscuit, a process that might take longer than the war. He was almost as young as Lieutenant Seabrook, his chin so smooth it looked as if he didn’t even need to shave yet. Sapper Coth was obviously a country man, skin sun-wrinkled, aged anywhere from thirty to fifty.
The main cables to headquarters and to other camps she didn’t know the names of were still operating. Messages came. Lieutenant Seabrook translated them to be delivered, but this time gave a copy of the translation to each of them. If only one of them got through they could deliver it to Major Galbraith, or whoever had taken his place if he’d been wounded.
Wounded, thought Jean stubbornly. Nothing more. She nibbled chocolate, although she wasn’t hungry, knowing she would need the energy.
Lieutenant Seabrook looked at his pocket watch. ‘Time to go,’ he said quietly.
Jean took out her pliers and undid the box from the cable, then quickly packed up the box, as she had practised. Sapper Mealworm hefted it efficiently onto his back. Sapper Cloth carried rolls of spare cable, in case they came across breakages. Lieutenant Seabrook led the way through the now empty trenches, rats staring at them as if unable to believe that the giant creatures who had created this paradise of death and muck and rat food might vanish so suddenly. Jean thought of the men whose bodies still lay here. She almost heard them whisper ‘Good luck!’
We’ll do our best for you, she thought.
The four of them emerged into full daylight, or what was left of it in the dust and smoke. It was Jean’s first sight of the area, as she’d come here at night, and through the trenches.
She had expected devastation after their tanks had advanced, but this land must have been devastated long before. The ground was bare, and brown and black. The trees were shrivelled posts. Barbed wire lay in tangled drifts as if left by a monstrous tide. The land was flat, except for shell holes, a giant’s dimples in the fields.
Nothing moved except men, not even birds. She had not understood the bravery of Pigeon 2709 until now. One bird winging through the blank dust would be an easy target. Pigeons understood the need for camouflage, for grass and greenery and the flock around them. What strange sense of duty or instinct had kept Pigeon 2709 flying?
Lieutenant Seabrook set off at an efficient trot straight across what had been no-man’s-land, with Sapper Mealworm behind him carrying the box, then Jean running to keep up, then Sapper Coth. Jean had expected German soldiers to lie in wait for them, but they were unhindered, dodging barbed wire pushed by the invading tanks into vast nightmare tangles, following the cable. Eventually sappers would have to return along this route and dig a trench to keep the cable safe but for now it lay in a shallow depression in the earth.
A single enemy blast erupted a hundred yards away, and then another, slightly nearer. They picked up the pace and kept running, so when the third blast came it was even further behind them.
How far had they run? Jean’s throat was dry, not just from running but from the smoke and dust. She reached for her bottle of water without stopping, took a gulp, then shoved it back into her pocket.
A shot rang out, ripping the ground so close to her that it would have torn her skirt if she was still wearing it. Lieutenant Seabrook swirled, and dived at Jean, hurling her to the ground, his pistol suddenly in his hand. Two more shots rang out, almost at the same time.
Jean had promised not to scream, and so she didn’t when she saw Lieutenant Seabrook’s eyes gazing blackly at the sky, his throat still pumping blood onto her overalls. A few yards away a German soldier lay slumped and tangled in the barbed wire, the fresh red hole in his head the only colour. Even the blood on his mangled leg had turned black. Jean wondered vaguely how many days the man had been trapped there, still able to fire at the enemy.
Sapper Coth hauled Lieutenant Seabrook away from Jean, then pulled her to her feet. Sapper Mealworm was already trotting along the cable.
No breath to spare, thought Jean, as she hurried between Sapper Coth and Sapper Mealworm now. No time to even see if Lieutenant Seabrook had left a letter to his family in his pockets, or to take the chocolate he would no doubt have wished them to share.
She tried to pray for Lieutenant Seabrook silently: a frightened man who had saved her life and lost his own in an instinctive act of bravery. She hadn’t thought it possible to pray and run at the same time, but somehow the prayer steadied her.
The cable was twisted even more here, around old entrances to trenches that might have been Allied or German, and even more barbed wire, and there were piles of bodies well gnawed by rats, and almost all the land was reshaped by years of shelling. They were close enough to the battlefront to hear the stuttering of gunshot, and once a bugle call.
How far had they come? Surely more than a mile, thought Jean — an astounding advance in a war where a hundred yards of conquered earth would be hailed a victory. Two miles? Three? The sun still sat above her, smoke clad, as if the dust from the battle was solid enough to hold it up, glowing redly in the sky.
Another shell wailed. Jean ducked instinctively, but it crashed far behind them.
Sapper Mealworm gave an inarticulate cry. He broke into a run, the coding machine bouncing on his back. The cable they had been following vanished into a sap. They’d made it! Or at least survived this first day, thought Jean.
‘Picking Pink Primroses!’ Sapper Mealworm yelled to the sentries presumably guarding the entrance, giving the passwords to distinguish ally from enemy.
‘Daffodils on the Primrose Path!’ someone called from the depths of the trench. ‘Advance and be recognised.’
Sapper Mealworm signalled to Jean to follow.
The sap into the trench was long, and sturdily built, its dirt walls lined with rocks. It led to a far wider and better established trench than Jean had seen so far. Its walls too were neatly lined with stones. The dug-outs were substantial rooms, some open, others with wooden doors instead of curtains. She stared. Beds — proper beds, with mattresses! And this must be a kitchen, with an iron stove and oven.
‘Along here, miss.’ Sapper Mealworm was not to be distracted by ovens. He vanished into another dug-out. Jean followed, to find he had shrugged off the coding machine. A sapper she didn’t recognise was already connecting the cable to the machine.
‘Messages?’ The man had a captain’s insignia. Jean pushed exhaustion away to try to think clearly. Lieutenant Seabrook had the messages she had received back in the other trench, but she and Sapper Mealworm had copies. She pulled the page out of her coat pocket and handed it to the captain. He handed her another page of code. ‘Transmit this at once, please.’ The captain gave her a tired grin. ‘I didn’t believe them when they told me a girl was with us now. We’ve won the war today, miss.’
‘Really, sir?’ She stared at him. ‘The Germans have surrendered?’
‘They’ve fled.’ He gestured around the room, at the solid wooden desk, still with notepads neatly piled on either side, a china mug filled with pencils, and an ink well, blotting paper, pens, and a jar of fresh nibs.
Whoever had been here that morning hadn’t had any warning before the order came to retreat.
‘Another few days like this and we’ll occupy the entire Hindenburg Line. We’ll be invincible. The kaiser will have no choice but to surrender.’ The captain seemed to force back his elation. ‘They say you’re the fastest coder on the Front. We’ll need it. I’ll send in two men to translate the cipher. I imagine there’ll be a lot going back and forth tonight.’
‘Yes, sir,’ she said.
A time without war, she thought, standing there unmoving as the captain left the room. It was almost too much to take in. A month ago, it had seemed impossible, as if both sides would batter each other till the world was in ruins.
Peace, she thought, and I will have helped make it happen.
Had Major Galbraith survived the advance? Surely they would have told her if he had not. But there was no time to try to find out now.
She sat at the solid, well-made table, in the comfortable chair with armrests to support her as she worked, trying to ignore the screams and groans of the wounded further down the trench, the cries in both German and English. She began to tap out the captain’s message.