As he’d anticipated, Ned had been forced to fight every step of the way back to his old battalion in France. The family hadn’t scrupled to enlist the official support of the War Agricultural Committee in their efforts to keep him in Sussex; and in the end it had taken a directive from the War Office itself to release him.
At the Base in Étaples they’d insisted on retraining him, as effective support for the improved Mark IV tanks which had proved so successful at Cambrai the previous autumn – and what with one thing and another, it was March of 1918 before the powers-that-be had been willing to return him to his regiment.
At first Meriel had blankly refused to believe that he could contemplate abandoning her and the children a second time. He’d clearly discharged his duty to the wretched country already, she claimed. Nobody could say he hadn’t, or even think it. Then when she saw that he could be neither shamed nor bullied out of his preposterous notion, she’d marshalled her own opposing forces: his grandmother and the boys, Simmie, Helly, the Agricultural Committee, even the estate trustees; anyone with any kind of interest in keeping him home. Finally, when all else failed, she’d totally refused to speak, even to look at him, for the whole of the last miserable day they’d spent together in England.
It was childish and unworthy of Meriel to send him away like that; and the fact that he understood the love, the fear and the wounded pride that made her act that way, hadn’t prevented Ned from carrying the weight of her rejection away with him, as a burden that grew heavier with every mile he put between them. He’d written to her from Étaples – a gentle, loving treatise to defend himself as best he could, and remind Meriel of how deeply and how faithfully he loved her. But her reply had set the tone for her future correspondence; avoiding any possible emotional pitfalls by sticking to a brisk, domestic bulletin, which had wrung a rueful smile from its recipient even as it hurt him.
The Bury, Sellington
March 7th 1918
My dear old Noggin,
Well here we are again then in spite of everything – with you in France on this fool’s errand of yours, with me at home to do what’s really needed, and the Base as frustrated as ever by the lack of any kind of information in your letters! Your effort of the 3rd arrived this morning well up to time, and of course clean as a whistle as far as the purple pencil was concerned (although I must say I don’t feel very happy about perfect strangers reading all that very personal stuff you go in for, Nog!). You may not be exactly enjoying yourself over there at the Base (and whose fault is that, might I ask?). But be thankful at least that you’re out of harm’s way. I certainly am!
The answer to your (one sensible) question is yes. We’re still finding the rations quite adequate, thank you, or would do if I had charge of them! Some things remain in short supply, of course, but it was absurd of G.M. to say that I couldn’t have sugar on that pudding! We’ve been using golden syrup on most things recently, and should certainly have saved pounds of the stuff by now. It’s a great mistake, I think, to give Cook control of the supplies, because I’m convinced that it’s she and Gertrude who use them up. Even so, we’re still a great deal better off than most. The only ‘meat’ that some people can afford now is offal or macaroni flavoured with Bovril (can you imagine?). And when you think what everyone else has to pay for dairy products and that filthy margarine, you can see how absolutely right I was to insist on those extra milking cows. It’s all milk nowadays. The United Dairies wants everything we can produce and more.
If only your blessed old army would hurry up and put an end to this ghastly, hopeless war, then perhaps we could have our men back home where they belong and return to some kind of normality again. Don’t take this the wrong way Nog, but you know it does so spoil a man to get involved with all this military tomfoolery, I’ve always said it haven’t I? It seems to me that after a time all soldiers begin to think of themselves as little tin gods. Everyone knows that army officers are always perfectly awful when they’re old, and I shouldn’t like that to happen to you…
Saddening as Ned found it, there was nothing new in Meri’s attitude; and in his more sanguine moments at Étaples he even drew some comfort from the brutal matter-of-factness of her written style. Because at least it showed that she was coping.
And Ned wasn’t to know, because nobody ever told him, that Meriel carried his letters all around the farm with her, reading and re-reading them until they parted at the folds.
The pain involved in his eventual reunion with his unit was something he had not anticipated. Ned suspected from his Movement Order that the battalion must by now be somewhere in the line well to the north of Arras and Monchy le Preux; and in the event he found it entrenched between Armentières and the old 1915 battlefield of Neuve-Chapelle, enduring a sustained bombardment from superior enemy position up on Aubers Ridge. The situation there was familiar enough, involving the usual routine of trench reliefs and working parties; the usual gloomy labyrinths of mud and wire and rotting sandbags. But something else had changed. In the protracted battle for Cambrai which followed Monchy, more than a third of Ned’s battalion had been killed or wounded – so many friendly faces absent. And now he felt estranged in some way, even from old comrades who remained; separated from them by the horrors they’d endured, while he walked free in Sellington or lay clean and safe with Meriel in their big lotus bed. Time appeared to have accelerated in his absence. He felt like Rip Van Winkle faced by strangers where there’d been friends – and closer now to death.
On March 21st, and long before Ned felt he’d earned it, the battalion was marched back from Aubers for a rest; only to be told when they arrived at the relief camp, that the long awaited German counter-offensive had just started on a forty-mile front south of Vimy Ridge. Jerry had brought in reinforcements from the Russian Front, they gathered, in a final bid to smash Allied resistance before the Americans arrived in force – and two days later, Ned’s battalion received orders to dump all surplus stores and kit in readiness for a move south.
‘They’ve ’ad a bloody cave-in down there,’ a lance corporal in Ned’s platoon said sombrely, ‘an’ want us for effin’ pit-props.’
They found a battered column of London motor buses waiting for them on the Lillers-St Pol highway, at the end of a fifteen-mile night march past growing munition dumps and hurriedly constructed stretches of back-up railway. The moon was bright enough to make the larger Brigade convoy they had joined an obvious target for enemy aircraft; and they saw bombs exploding in the fields on both sides as they approached it, followed by a furious retaliation by their own ‘Archies’.
They watched, they noticed, but they went on marching – and singing, even as they climbed aboard the buses. Sussex by the Sea, they sang and Tipperary, and the very rudest version of Mademoiselle from Armentières in defiance of the enemy and Brigade H.Q. And singing with his own platoon at the very top of all their voices, Ned felt at last the old sense of belonging that he’d sought. It was a strange thing – but that night in transit, his love for Meri and the boys, even the probability of his own death or injury in the coming show, seemed less important to him than the splendid men he had returned to lead.
At the village of Pernes no more than three or four miles down the road, the entire convoy halted to take cover from hostile aircraft. From the door of a ruined cowshed, Ned and his platoon sergeant had seen the bus in which they’d travelled reduced to an inferno of blazing paintwork by an unlucky hit. Uncomfortably crammed with most of their platoon into a repair lorry barely large enough to hold them, they chugged behind the column to St Pol – where once again they’d taken cover from an aerial bombardment. This time their overheated vehicle had refused to start when they returned to it, delaying them for a further hour while the mechanics cursed and scalded themselves and failed to bandage a fractured radiator hose with someone’s webbing straps. Meanwhile, the Brigade column had disappeared into the night, and it was only when their lorry was eventually cool enough to continue, that they’d found out that nobody on board it knew where the Divisional rendezvous was meant to be.
‘Bound to be Albere, Sir.’ The driver addressed himself to Ned as the senior officer. ‘Everythin’ ends up in Albere sooner or later.’
And since it was common knowledge that in the past few days the Germans had regained most of the ground they’d lost the previous spring – to return the Front to where it was two years before, it was a fair bet that the driver was right. Because if Albert had been the centre of Allied operations for the first Somme show, it was likely to be doing so again.
So from St Pol they set off south against the never-ending stream of traffic that was the Allied Army in retreat. Foot soldiers trudged alongside French civilians. Every kind of transport vehicle, with motor ambulances and horse-drawn limbers were tangled into mammoth traffic jams in Frévent and Doullens, where westbound streams from Vimy and Arras joined them. In the grey turn-of-the-world time between darkness and early dawn they crept slowly onward. Bloodstained limbs protruded from the backs of ambulances. Draft animals were spattered with dry blood. In pristine staff cars, senior officers slumped glassy-eyed, while behind them the smart furnishings of Corps Headquarters crawled past in motor lorries – and behind them the walking-wounded slipped and stumbled as best they might on foot. But nowhere was the appalling seriousness of the situation more apparent than in the drained, hopeless faces of the retreating Tommies; many of them without rifles or steel helmets, all demoralised beyond their last reserves of humour.
‘Are we downhearted? YES – YES WE ARE! ’
The news from the retreating army was uniformly bad. Peronne and Bapaume had fallen to the enemy. A long-range gun was shelling Paris, someone said; while many who called out to Ned and his platoon appeared to think the German reinforcements were unbeatable, and that despite the Yanks the war might be already lost.
‘’Fousands an’ ’fousands of ’em, mate! You can’t ’ardly ’ope to ’old ’em back.’
They entered Albert through a crazy tangle of splintered wood where once there’d been an avenue of poplar trees. Here and there where individual trees escaped destruction, Ned recognised the untidy shapes of magpies’ nests built in the upper branches – and sidling slyly into his mind had come the hideous thought that this season, this spring of 1918, it could be his flesh, or the flesh of those who travelled with him to the Somme, that nourished the fledgling brood.
The centre of the town was frantic with hurrying figures, and wheeled traffic converging with dire results from a knot of seven or more approach roads. Spirals of dark smoke rose from the ruined villas and factories to the east where howitzer shells were still falling. The air was thick with brick dust and the streets strewn with the debris of a major bombardment; rubble, horses dead and dying in the shafts of stranded transport waggons, and human bodies – boneless rag dolls in khaki and black, abandoned wherever they’d fallen on the pavements and in the gutters. In the Place d’Armes the red-tabbed Staff Officer they’d been hoping to find came charging up to them of his own volition, brandishing a brass Very pistol and panting like a blown heifer.
‘Never mind the 12th Division. The Boche have broken through! They’re up the road in Beaumont-Hamel! That’s the score, boys,’ he shouted wildly. ‘So now it’s up to us to stop ’em… halt the advance, boys… we have to halt the advance!’
‘Take it easy, old man; we’ll stop them.’ Ned was as anxious to reassure his own men as to calm down this poor fellow. ‘Just tell us where we can find the 36th Infantry Brigade H.Q., if you’ve heard, and leave the Hun to us.’
He injected as much firmness and confidence into his voice as he could; and something of it must have registered. Because the Staff Officer stopped waving his arms about, and peered at him through the windshield of the lorry as if he recognised a face he knew. ‘Henencourt, Warloy,’ he muttered jerkily. ‘First right turn off the Amiens road, to Lavieville.’ And the next moment, to everyone’s embarrassment, he began to whimper like a child.
Above them, high on the spire of the basilica of Notre Dame de Brébières, the famous gilded statue of the ‘Leaning Virgin of Albert’ seemed ready at last to plunge into the ruins of the Place. Since the town’s first bombardment early in 1915, and for more than three years of warfare on the Somme, she had remained head-downwards in a diving position, with her gilded Christ Child held out before her. A story had gone around the Allied soldiers who marched out beneath her to the Front – a legend that her final fall would mark the ending of the war. And in the shambles of the British retreat, with German shells still raining on the town, another sly thought slipped into Ned’s mind to suggest it could be true.
It was raining at The Bury; a fine drizzle dripping from the trees and damping Meriel’s hair. She didn’t care about the rain. She never had. As a child in Queensland she’d learned to think of the Wet as an essential sponsor of fresh growth, and even if English rain had never learned quite when to stop, it had to be good thing after such a dry March. It had brought the primroses and cowslips out to join the daffodils and glossy little celandines along the drive – all the yellow heralds of a welcome spring. The anemones in the wood had done well too this year in preparation for the greater glory of the bluebells that were budding underneath them; and as she hurried up the path to the Bury-house, the flower-heads clutched at the legs of Meriel’s twill overalls to smother them with pale pink petals.
She didn’t ask herself why she was climbing up there in the rain. She could have read Ned’s letter uninterrupted in the library or the Flat, or in any number of sheds and byres around the farm. But when she met the post-woman on her way up from the yards, she’d simply snatched her own mail from her and made off with it into the wood. She’d read the letter aloud to G.M. and the others later, leaving out the racy bits. But not until she’d had it to herself for long enough to suck out every last drop of love and reassurance that it held.
There was a small Field Service postcard with the letter, postmarked for April 2nd – just four days ago; and because everyone in England knew of the desperate counter-offensive which was at this moment being fought in France, Meriel stopped to read the card at once with the rain dripping down her collar.
On the back was the usual exhortation in printed officialese: NOTHING is to be written on this side except the date and signature of the sender. Sentences not required may be erased. If anything else is added the postcard will be destroyed. And Ned, gloriously, had crossed out all the options for being sick or wounded! All he’d left was I am quite well (with the quite illicitly underlined) and Letter follows at first opportunity– and he’d signed it Nogginissimo, the idiot! With the Fools Day date of April 1st.
Meriel bent over it to study every dear stroke of Ned’s pencil for some clue as to the way he looked. The way he might have felt when he had sent it. Then she slipped it into her pocket with the still unopened letter and continued through the wood.
I am quite well. That meant ‘quite safe’. ‘And thank God for that,’ she thought with one foot on the first wet step into the Bury-house. ‘Thank God he’s safe! I don’t care if they break through to the Channel ports. I don’t care if we win or lose, so long as Noggin’s safe!’
The Bury-house was derelict and dismal in the wet. Part of the ceiling had come down that winter, littering the bench and table with plaster and bits of old birds’ nests. Ivy crept out across the floor and a vigorous growth of elder had already half obscured the famous view of the valley. But Meriel barely noticed. Sweeping a clear space for herself to sit down, and lighting a Gold Flake with trembling fingers, she fished out the letter and ripped it open.
It had been written on Monday March 25th, a full week before the Field Service card.
My darling, darling girl,
No letter from you to answer unfortunately, and it will probably be some little time, I fear, before you get another from me. It really isn’t my fault, darling. Please understand. We are on the move you see, and will be quite cut off from the mails.
Tonight as I write this, we are in billets behind the lines and ready to move again in the morning. We have been told to get rid of practically all our personal belongings (including that good camp bed of mine), and I’m afraid the next few days are likely to prove a fair sort of Hades for our Div. As you will have read in your newspapers, the old Boche is in a pretty desperate mood now. So it’s no good expecting any real respite for a while. We have had one or two shells down here near our billets this afternoon, but none have burst really close. In fact it’s almost quiet, considering.
The men are all very scattered, most of them in the fields under canvas. But my servant, Rogers, and I are going to be sleeping in the attic of an old French farmhouse tonight, with the Padré and one or two other officers as neighbours – in real beds, Meri, with clean sheets. I can hardly believe it! The village here has been knocked about a bit and is now deserted. But this little farm has hardly been touched. From the window where I’m sitting I can see three speckle-faced cows tethered to pasture on some rough grass beyond the yard wall (three old friends), and on my side of the wall, a group of bantams scratching around the maxon. There’s a big walnut tree too, and a fine old flint dovecot like a miniature oast house all complete with birds (although how they’ve survived an army of hungry Tommies, I can’t imagine). I can hear them now, just like English pigeons, such a peaceful sound.
The family who farm here are rather splendid I think, like so many others I’ve met in this area – Madame and Marthe, who still work in the fields in their kilted-up skirts and ploughman’s boots, and Marie with her hair still in ties, and little Jean-Baptiste, the man of the family now, asleep in his cradle in the kitchen. The farmer, who was Madame’s son and Marie’s husband and the father of the two children, was killed two years ago at Verdun. But the women mean to keep on exactly as they had before, as if the war around them is no more than a severe freak of the weather that’s taken to sowing their land with jags of iron. They work on in the fields, pretending that the din of cannonading and the drone of aeroplanes is as normal as a squabble of rooks or a flight of pesky starlings. And they treat us soldiers so well too, darling, as if it’s us and not them who are suffering the most. I only wish I could make up to them just a little of what the Boche and our own politicians and generals have between them managed to destroy…
‘Oh God, how typical! As if… as if…’ Meriel flicked the page over in exasperation. How typical of Ned to waste his sympathy on a family of peasants, when he should be thinking of his own safety – and his own family, for pity’s sake, worrying themselves half to death over him back at home in Sussex. Where was the wretched farmhouse, anyway?
She ran her eye swiftly down the close-written pencil lines to find the place-name code which Ned had concocted with his grandmother; to be commenced with the name of a fictitious farm labourer and completed with the phrase I would advise. And there it was, half way down the fourth page, and plain as a day to all it seemed but the obtuse army censor!
As regards instructions for old Jim, sow all our barley on leys, I would advise. It’s by far the best plan…‘Last letter of word following name.’ Meriel repeated the cipher to herself while she scrabbled around on the floor for her own used matchstick to mark the letters with. ‘Then first, third and fourth letters of the words following, and first, third and fourth again to the end of the message. Let’s see… sow all our barley on leys: w – a – r – l – o – y.
‘Warloy.’ So that’s where he was! She’d look it up on the big map in the library as soon as she got back to the house.
Ned left his farmhouse billet near Warloy on the morning of March 26th; and by the morning of April 6th, as Meriel climbed through the Bury wood, he was crouching in the scrape of discoloured chalk that called itself the front line trench, on a ridge to the west of Albert. It was ten days now since Jerry had crossed the River Ancre. But the war wasn’t over. The Leaning Virgin of Albert still clung to her steeple above the Place d’Armes, while the British stubbornly held the line of chalk hills that rose above the river to the west.
In the defences of Aveluy Wood and Bouzincourt village, Ned’s battalion had been deployed like a piece of tired elastic, looped in, cobbled up or stretched out wherever they were most needed along the line, wherever the bombardment was most intense, until eventually their fighting strength had been reduced to little more than a single company. In a week Ned had seen more men die than in any other month of the war, including the battle of Arras. He saw friends, comrades, men with the same physical aspirations and fears as he had crumple beside him in the trenches; fall face-down in the mud; silent or tensed in one last long scream for life; bloody or outwardly unmarked. Dying all around him. In all likelihood – today or tomorrow, sometime soon – his turn would come. He accepted that as everybody else did. It was the only way to face what they must face and still stay sane.
And if he had to die, there was some kind of sense in dying here on the Somme, where he’d first heard the sound of the guns across the water from the Gap.
So what happened to its babies when it died, do you think, Daddy?… Patrick’s little humming bird, Patrick’s anxious little face.
Ned closed his eyes. No time to work that out. The bombardment would begin again at any moment. When he next looked, he quite expected to see the first flash down at the foot of the scarp – to hear a second later the sound of the first explosion. From the lip of the trench you could see all the way to Albert where the sun pierced through the rain. There really ought to be a rainbow somewhere…
Meriel stubbed out her cigarette on the stone bench and crammed Ned’s letter back into its envelope. If only he could see her as she was now, looking out over his beloved valley from the top of the Bury-house steps, with the wind in her face and the collar of her overalls turned up against the rain.
‘Don’t die there, Nog.’ Her spoken thought was like a prayer. She felt tears swimming in her eyes and blinked deliberately to make them fall – and wished that he could see that too; his Meri crying for him just like any other idiotic war wife!
‘I’ve never told him how frightened and alone I’d be without him, how I couldn’t cope,’’ she thought. ‘I’ve never really told him anything in my letters, have I? But I will! I’ll write to him this afternoon and tell him all of it – every damn thing!’
The clamour of the bombardment quickened to a drumming in Ned’s ears – too loud, one would have thought, and too continuous to distinguish the individual signature tunes of Flying Pigs and Weary Willies. And yet he heard the leisurely rustle of the 5.9 quite clearly – looked up to see the sunlight on its polished surface as it came to find him; and something passive at the centre of his fear accepted his own death.
‘Christ!’ It was the last word he would ever utter.
Meriel, pacing slowly down the Bury-house steps in the rain, was chanting to herself the little rhyme that he’d once taught her there: ‘Hey diddle derry, dance round the Bury…’
Ned actually heard the sound of the shell thud into the chalk beside him, and had time to thank God that after all it was a dud. Then a roaring, blinding inferno of heat and light and searing pain consumed him. He was conscious of being flung upwards and backwards; the muscles of his arms and legs convulsed and rigid. Then something black and heavy blotted out his memory of the event. Then and forever.
A few minutes later, a young soldier of the 5th Royal Berks slipped down into the crater. As he stumbled onto Ned’s body, he registered with revulsion that the lower part of the man’s face had been partially blown away. In the bloody pulp of its remaining features, one eye was scorched and blackened. The other stared back at him in sightless astonishment; a clear unclouded blue.
‘Poor beggar!’ The man soldier hesitated, wildly casting around him for some cover. But before he could find it a second shell had fallen – to tear him as Ned was torn and to toss him lifeless into the mud.