BURRANGONG, SEPTEMBER 1978
‘You moved again the next night?’ asked Arjun. The old woman had been silent for minutes now. Maybe she was dozing. But people died of cold, didn’t they? Especially old people. The air breathed chill around his face.
He had to keep her awake, keep her talking, moving as much as possible. He couldn’t let her die! Not after surviving so much. He was sure now the water was even dropping a little. They both could live!
He found her hands, muscular but thin and chilled as a lamb chop straight from the freezer, and tried to warm them by rubbing them in his hands, cold too, but the rubbing helped. At last she began to speak again. Her voice croaked at first, and then grew stronger.
‘Yes, we moved the next night, and kept on moving.’
‘What was it like?’ It was the first question he could think of.
‘I . . . I’m not even sure I remember it properly. The nights blurred together, running and ducking and trying not to get caught in the barbed wire or trip over a body or fall into a crater or a hole gouged out by the tanks. Time seemed to vanish. I don’t even know how many times we moved.’
Arjun caught the sketch of a shrug in the darkness.
She turned around stiffly on the motorbike seat so she was facing the other way now, and managed to hug her knees instead of kneeling. ‘Everyone expects you to know all about a battle if you were in it, but mostly you only know the tiny bit you took part in. We travelled at night, so I didn’t see much. Mealworm and I followed the cable — it was just lying on the ground in many places, and even where it was dug in you could follow its track, more or less, from the line of freshly dug earth. The only light came from the yellow-green of exploding shells or the red of burning trees or fires in the trenches. I saw things in flickers — coils of ripped or flattened barbed wire, then darkness again, or bodies, or sometimes an ambulance.’
‘There were ambulances there?’
‘Not official ones, not that I saw, anyway. I only saw the one during the whole battle, but I saw that one several times. Two women took turns driving it. They wore overalls and air force jackets and balaclavas, sort of wrapped-up blobs in the night, but you could still tell they were women. It must have been a butcher’s truck before the war. You could still see Johnson’s Fine Meats written on one side, but someone had painted white over it then put wobbly red crosses on each door. I caught a glance inside it once — the back where the butcher carried the meat had been carved up into shelves, each just high enough to hold a man, maybe twenty men each time. The truck had a high clearance and solid wheels, so I suppose it could follow the tank tracks. I never asked.’
‘You know,’ she added slowly, ‘I’ve never even read any accounts of the Battle of Cambrai, to find out how many days we were on the move. I didn’t want to go back there. Still don’t.’
‘But you’re telling me now.’
‘Yes. Well. It’s keeping us from dozing off, isn’t it? If we sleep, we stop moving, and if we stop moving we might die of hyperthermia, of cold.’
So she had realised that too. But he’d learned from movies, and she’d been taught by real life. He caught her faint moonlit grin. ‘You can tell me all about yourself if you’d rather.’
‘There’s nothing interesting about me. Dad’s an accountant, and Mum’s a librarian. Nanni and Poppa have a hobby farm over the other side of the river, where it doesn’t flood. Poppa used to be an accountant too. I’ve got a three-year-old sister called Priya who won’t wear anything that isn’t pink or purple and that’s about it. I don’t even have a girlfriend. And I don’t have any idea what I want to do when I leave school,’ he added, because that was the question adults always asked when they didn’t know how to have a conversation with anyone under sixteen.
‘What do you enjoy?’
‘Fishing. Reading. I read a lot of history.’ But nothing he’d read had felt like this, listening to her voice in the darkness and flood. ‘Mrs McLain, please, what happened then?’
‘Too much to remember. Too much to want to remember. Too much I’m not going to tell you either, my lad,’ she added sharply.
‘Why not?’
‘We were following where tanks had crushed trenches, barbed wire, and human beings, sometimes in one great tangle all together, where men had fought to get that cable laid, and died or been wounded. The wounded were hardest. I still wonder . . . still have nightmares.’
For the first time her voice shook. ‘We couldn’t stop to look after anyone, you see. Men screaming, crying out for help. There was one man, a Scot, his face ripped by shrapnel and who knows what other injuries. But he managed to yell, “Keep going, lassie! Get the message through.” He must have been a signaller and recognised our equipment. I hardly slept, or rather, ran and even worked in a half-doze. Mealworm did the same. We’d become partners. In each new position I’d have the case open and the headphones on and be ready to transmit as soon as he’d stripped the cable and attached the two wires in it to the knobs on the machine. He was fast.
‘The first few days were the worst — and the best — the tanks forging ahead. It was terrible, but also unbelievably exciting. There we were, forging our way into the heart of the strongest German fortifications. One of the tanks had a special device to lay cable, so there was almost no break in transmission each time we advanced.
‘The cabling was essential, as the enemy could easily see any visual signal, and the advance was so swift, so cluttered with tanks and barbed wire, that at times it was impossible for messengers to get through. Our army advanced so quickly in those first days that despatch riders might reach a trench to deliver a message and find no one there except a few men guarding the prisoners.
‘There weren’t any proper meals after that first one — the stew must have been prepared when we arrived. The Germans had more warning after that first day, too, so took most of their supplies when they retreated.
‘We ate when we could. I’d break off a bit of biscuit or chocolate and chew it while I tapped out a message. We ate as we jogged from trench to trench, too. Mealworm found a German sausage once — one of those hard ones you slice thinly — and he and I ate that on and off for most of a day, passing it back and forth. Thank goodness they’d given me a pen knife, or I’d have had to gnaw it.
‘I remember one night we spent in a shell hole because it was too dark to see where we were going — not just no moon, but too much smoke to see even two feet ahead. Mealworm spliced the cable for me and I sent my first and only message that wasn’t in code: Mealworm and I in shell hole by cable. Too dark to proceed. Miss M. I thought, Let the enemy think that’s code — they’d never have had a telegraph girl in the German army. The kaiser wouldn’t even let his officers dance the waltz in case it made them “womanly”.
‘Mealworm and I made ourselves a kind of two-person dug-out in the side of the shell hole, as much as to keep warm as for protection, and so we wouldn’t be seen. It was funny — it was the first time Mealworm actually talked to me instead of running or transcribing.
‘He told me all about living with his widowed mum — his dad had been a greengrocer and had died about six months before the war, and Mealworm’s mum and sister were keeping the grocery shop going. Mealworm had wanted to go to university and become a teacher — the shop had been doing quite well — but he reckoned he had no chance of that now. I told him how Papa was a headmaster and about Arthur and William, then an hour or so before dawn someone turned up with a lantern and showed us to the next trench. They were good trenches,’ she repeated. ‘So much better than ours.’
Arjun thought maybe Mrs McLain was crying, or trying not to cry, from the sound of her voice as she continued. ‘Back in England the church bells were ringing out to celebrate our victory. We’d won the war! But even while they were still ringing the Germans began fighting back. They’d worked out what we were doing by then, you see, so instead of sending in a wave of men to be mown down by the tanks they sent out small parties of highly armed, highly trained soldiers. You couldn’t have called any of our men highly trained — by then most had only had a few weeks of basic training — nor were they well-armed. They were still using Churchill’s shoddy armaments back then.’
‘But Churchill was a great man!’
‘Not in the first war. He made blunder after blunder and purchased dud ammunition that couldn’t penetrate German metal because it was cheaper. That was one of the great tragedies of the war. Who knows what would have happened if our armies had been properly equipped from the beginning?’
‘Did one of the German squads attack you and Mealworm?’
‘Not us, but we heard them, we saw them. Once the mud in front of us just erupted and it was German soldiers, but they weren’t after us — I just froze, but before Mealworm could fire they’d run past us — they wanted the cable-laying team, not us. They knew if they disrupted communications we were lost. The battlefield covered about sixty square miles by then. There were gas attacks too — shells filled with gas that exploded in the trenches. I was lucky — I didn’t even get a mouthful of it.
‘But we kept advancing, despite it all. We seemed unstoppable, despite the German patrols, the shelling. The war really was going to be over by Christmas, just as everyone had said that first year.
‘And then we came to the final trench we’d capture in that battle, though we didn’t know that then. It was the best equipped of any we’d seen so far. It even had sheets and blankets on the beds, and a table set for the officers’ dinner with knives and forks and spoons and a great pot of stew again — rabbit and potato stew this time, not as glamorous as the first one, but oh, it was good. I passed Major Galbraith in the trench, and he took one look at me and ordered me to have a bowl full of that stew then get two hours’ sleep in one of those beds. I could do with some of that stew now,’ she added. ‘Not to mention the bed.’
‘Who sent the messages while you were asleep?’
‘I think Major Galbraith did. We were only passing messages between headquarters and the front by then, so there might be none for an hour or two, then several in a row. Mealworm woke me up with a cup of acorn coffee and black bread and cheese — the Germans had abandoned all that too.
‘“We’ve had orders to dig in here,” Mealworm told me. “The front’s about eight miles ahead of us. We’ve come so far they need us to keep the cables maintained behind and ahead of us.”
‘He grinned at me. I hadn’t realised how young he was till that grin. He’d been talking about not being able to go to university, but it hadn’t occurred to me he had still been at school when he enlisted.
‘“Would madam like a bath?” he asked, just like a posh butler.
‘“A bath?” I said, and Mealworm laughed. “A bucket of hot water, anyway. This place is extraordinary. You should see the way they’ve used the stonework to secure the top of the trenches. They even have proper latrines with pipes to take the waste away, and deep wells with all the clean water we can use.”
‘So we stayed there, in that trench. It was hard work, but not as frantic as it had been, at least for me. The advance had slowed down, and so there were fewer messages, and for hours at a time no messages at all, because the cables had been cut or bombed and we had to send out parties to find the breaks and repair them.
‘I’m not sure how much sleep Major Galbraith had — he’d be at one end of the trench getting a briefing from the repair parties who had come back in, or over in the dug-out for the wounded — somehow the girls in Johnson’s Fine Meats still reached us and took the wounded back to an aid station. But every time he passed our dug-out he’d look in and ask, “All ship shape in here?” Mealworm began to make a joke of it, saying, “Aye-aye, sir.” I think we were all a bit drunk on hope that week. The Germans might be beginning to fight back, but we were still advancing, even if the great race into their territory had slowed down.
‘I began to wait for the message, the one that said the Germans wanted a ceasefire, were willing to talk terms, had surrendered. We had no idea,’ she said softly. ‘No idea at all.’