Lieutenant Henry Frost had found a table which, remarkably, still had its legs after being buried in much of the wreckage of the house. He also found a chair, plain light coloured, possessing all of its legs as well. It was a start.
He set the two by the broken window, looking out onto a rubbled side street to the ruined houses opposite. It wasn’t much of a view, but it gave him some natural light on the unit diary as he wrote. After all, there was much to document. The artillery strike. The German trench. Fampoux. The patrol which never returned from last night’s sortie. He stopped and thought about each man who’d gone forward and never came back. He wondered what had happened to them, what the Germans were doing to them now; for surely they’d run into a German patrol themselves, or stumbled into the German front line and been taken prisoner. He hoped they were being treated well, according to the Geneva Convention, according to the morals of man. It might be war, but they were all still gentlemen.
One thing it proved to Henry was that the Germans weren’t beaten, that they were still entrenched in the nearby land. Almost on cue, the whining shriek of a barrage sounded from the east, thundering down on the far outskirts of the village. The rolling, shrieking roar sent men tumbling and careering for cover, men who twenty hours earlier had proudly stood in the ruins of Fampoux and boasted of their invincibility, of the might of the British Expeditionary Force and the cowardice of Fritz. Now they ran, charging and plunging for their holes, like foxes from a hunt.
The barrage was brutal and purposefully mean, an inhuman rampage of shells and explosive rounds full of venom and spite at the Germans’ loss of Fampoux. Henry sat and listened with trepidation to the falling bombs, the cries of the injured. The French boy with the perfect teeth suddenly appeared at the window, making Henry jump and curse.
“Les Allemands viennent!” he cried and then laughed before skipping away – “The Germans are coming!”
A cold trepidation swept over Henry. Urgently, he stood and crossed to the far window, one which gave him a better view of the land to the east of the village. There was nothing to suggest the Germans were on the charge, no grey silhouette or slow gathering of men, bayonets glinting, eyes fixed firm to the western horizon. He chuckled and gently cursed, shaking his head at the image of the boy giggling and running away. It alarmed him that he could turn from cold panic to wry humour in the split of a second. He wondered how much more this war would reveal about himself. A fly buzzed about his face and he chased it away with a hand. Unlike the birds, which took flight at the first sound of falling bombs, the flies seemed defiantly resilient under the barrages. But they’d be foolish to leave such choice delicacies of the dead upon which to feed.
The thought of the dead drew the question of the boy’s parents into Henry’s mind. He wondered what had become of them. It was a pointless thing to consider and Henry quickly gave up on the idea. Henry was slowly accepting that in this war, people simply vanished, never to be seen again.
His mind turned to his own parents and his younger brother. He checked his watch and considered what they might be doing at this very moment, over the channel, back in Britain. He supposed his father Thomas would be at work at Flitchards, studiously studying lines of accounts, estimating dividends, calculating profit margins and expenditure for the company’s clients. Later he would leave for home, a short walk through the Cathedral grounds of Salisbury into Harnham and the small family home on the river.
Thomas would spot his teenage son Ralph hanging by an arm from his favourite tree, or doing something equally ridiculous in their garden, as he reached the apex of the bridge across the River Avon, and he’d be considering whether he had time to slip into the Rose and Crown for a quick half before supper was on the table. His mother Ethel’s meals were legendary. It was said she could make a feast out of a famine. Henry licked his lips unconsciously and heard his stomach groan.
A bitter longing for home came over him. He’d been away from home with the army many times before. After all, he was a professional soldier. It was his life now. But he’d never been out of the country for so long in such conditions. Whenever he returned home, he secretly cursed the cramped living conditions, the sterility of the life presented, its regimented sameness, and couldn’t wait to leave. Now, it was all he wished to know.
To the backdrop of the falling bombs, he sat down at his desk and began to write: detailing the capture of Fampoux, the digging of trenches beyond the village’s reach, the lack of resistance from the German forces, the fact that you could now turn around and see the joint British and French line behind you whilst Pewter’s unit was moving ahead. The thought both charged and concerned Henry. Great gains had been achieved but, having moved forward, he was painfully aware they had pushed ahead of the accompanying lines either side of them. They were exposed on three sides, as if they had forced themselves forward into the jaws of the enemy, and at any time Fritz could take a bite.
He wrote with conviction, his tongue always firmly wedged between his teeth, his studious eyes fixed to the paper. He recalled the endless hours of handwriting practice, the sharp bite of the cane from the master when a character ran over a line, when a word was misspelled. How he had hated handwriting lessons at Winchester. But, as he looked proudly at his manuscript in the pale light of the Fampoux sun, he had a new found appreciation for them and the tyrannical master who corrected mistakes with corporal punishment.
This was how Sandrine found him, bent over the diary recording the developments in the unit, when she walked into her home. Henry nearly jumped out of his skin at the sight of her and reached for his revolver.
At first he thought her grey with age, courtesy of chalk dust, until she began to beat the dust out of her hair. He was instantly smitten by her loveliness, despite her bedraggled appearance. There was a flair and easy style about how she stood and held herself, about how she moved.
“Who are you?” she demanded curtly in French, one hand still on the edge of the door in case a sudden escape was required. Despite many hours in the tunnels between Arras and Fampoux, her senses were still honed, her mind full of distrust, her heart still beating hard within her chest. She’d cursed herself for her stupidity at returning to Alessandro’s house. Returning for what? For a loving reunion with him? As soon as she’d been told of Andreas’ death she knew, somewhere and somehow, things had gone badly. To have gone back to his house had been too foolish a thing to have done. She’d found the body in the crypt, she’d seen the wounds with her own eyes. What was to be gained by returning to Alessandro? To tell him the truth, that no heart attack had killed his brother? She’d chastised herself for her good heart. She knew she had a responsibility, which stood above any such reckless care.
For all she knew, Alessandro was now probably dead too. Had she been a moment slower in recognising the danger in that street, she too might have been dead. The Priest and the Sister, they looked like killers, particularly the Priest. The net had closed. There was no question in her mind that they’d come to that place in the hope of finding her, perhaps to kill her, to silence her and the plans she’d helped to put in place. She’d experienced the ruthlessness of the Catholic Church first hand. She knew when it acted, it acted without emotion or hesitation.
When she’d pulled herself out of the tunnel hole into the light of Fampoux, her mind was still a rage of doubt and worry. How much had the Church uncovered? How much did they know of the plot? But she knew there was nothing that could be done. She just prayed that the plan still did remain undiscovered, unchanged.
Henry put down his pencil and brushed at his clothes. The fly returned and Henry rather impressed himself by catching it in the snatch of a hand.
“Lieutenant Henry Frost,” he said, proffering his other hand and a smile.
Sandrine ignored it.
“What are you doing in my house?”
“Your house? Oh sorry. Uh, writing,” he replied, hesitantly in French. He stepped to one side and indicated the open tome on the table.
“Writing? Writing what?”
“Our achievements.” Henry shrugged and felt foolish and arrogant to have used such a word. “Events, in our unit’s life.”
“British?” Sandrine enquired. It was a silly question. She could tell from his accent he was as British as bowler hats and pipe smoke.
“Yes.” Something about the woman transfixed him. He watched her shake herself down. “Have you …” He stopped. “I am sorry, my French is not that good.”
“Then you should have tried harder at school,” Sandrine retorted in English for the first time, tying her hair back in a plait, once she was sure as much of the chalk dust as possible had been removed.
Henry laughed.
“Yes,” he said. “I suppose I should. I apologise. I was just going to ask, have you climbed out of the ruins? You look, well, dusty?”
Sandrine ignored him. She was stepping her way slowly through the house, her hand to her mouth in horror.
“I’m sorry,” called Henry, stepping after her. “I haven’t had a chance to tidy up.”
The Germans had made a mess of Sandrine’s home. It seemed that everything they could ransack or damage they had. The windows had been smashed in, doors splintered. Every piece of furniture had been pushed over and emptied, all Sandrine’s belongings ripped out, torn and hurled around the place. A dreadful stench hung in every room so stubbornly, it was as if the awful odour had actually seeped into the very fabric of the building.
The Germans seemed to have taken delight in wanton destruction, every plate in the house used and then thrown into a wall, every glass smashed. She stepped through into the pantry, her shoes crunching on the broken crockery as she went, and, as expected, she found the shelves stripped bare, all her jars and pots of carefully stored produce, her curing meats and vegetables gone.
She had stayed longer than most of the residents in the village when the Germans had first appeared on the horizon, a reluctant hurrying stream of refugees pouring out from Fampoux to the west. She hadn’t wanted to go. She was needed in Fampoux. She had errands. She’d watched the slow progression of people tread past her house, residents driving their carts and livestock in ragtag clumps of a fleeing nation: the cranking turn of a wagon wheel, a low moan from their livestock, the shrill cry of a terrified infant. There was rumour of dark happenings within villages further east when the Germans arrived; tales of rape and torture as the invaders looked to gather information as to what lay ahead of them and take possession of what they could.
“Come away, Sandrine!” villagers had called to her, as she stood at the doorstep of her home. “Come with us before they arrive.”
She’d watched the Germans’ appearance on the horizon, the vague outline of a vast black army, trundling forward with their huge machines and their innumerable grey and black clad soldiers, rifles slung across shoulders, Pickelhaubes shimmering in the late summer sun. At first, barely audible above the cacophony of panicked cries and screams from those residents who had stayed, the sound of music came. As it grew louder, people stopped in their dashing about to gather their belongings and escape and, instead, turned and looked in the direction from where it was coming, out along the main road east towards Fampoux. Now the music was ringing out clearly in the air of summer morning, music from a marching band, the voluptuous thump of the bass drum, the shrill heights of the piccolo. A man shouted out ‘The Faithful Hussar’ and all heads turned in wonder towards this army who were playing songs as they conquered.
Row upon row of soldiers, dressed in sharp uniforms, short boots of black untanned leather, huge knapsacks straining at the seams, picks, spades and other utensils clanking from straps of the backpacks, rifles slung over shoulders, marched up the road in precise and efficient lines. At their front marched a military band, boots gleaming, instruments glinting in the early morning sun. As they neared the village, a great crowd of residents waiting for them caught hold of the tune and joined them.
So it was that the Germans took Fampoux, amid cheering and singing from the residents who stayed.
But quickly the Germans had rounded up those who had stayed behind and interrogated each of them to find out what they knew of the defences ahead, who they were and what they could offer in the village. Four men were taken out into the main square and shot without hesitation when they refused to part with information deemed pertinent to the war effort. Only a few women had stayed with their husbands or out of loyalty to their village. That evening, as the officers billeted themselves within residences, they took turns raping those women who had stayed behind, as means of recovering and recuperating from their long and arduous push across France. The husbands, if not shot for resisting the crimes beforehand, had been forced to watch and then taken to the main square and shot afterwards.
After all, why did the Germans need villagers who no longer respected their new masters?
Three officers had been billeted at Sandrine’s home that first night. They’d wolf whistled and grabbed at Sandrine several times as she’d made her way around them in the small house, pulling at her clothes and cupping her breasts. They’d forced her to cook for them and watched her avidly as she’d served them a stew, made with what little she had, complimenting her with caustic German jibes or muttering dark promises of what was coming for her later.
By morning, there was no trace of them. It was suggested that a British or French patrol had taken them during a sweep of the village. Sandrine too had left the village before first light.
“I’m terribly sorry about all the mess,” said Henry, “I really am. I’ll help you tidy up. I just needed to update the unit’s diary. I was so far behind and there was so much to document. But when I am done, I am relieved and then I can help –”
“Where are the Germans?” Sandrine asked without acknowledging him or his offer, stepping through the rooms with slow and deliberate care.
“Well, uh … we think they’re probably four hundred yards east of here. We sent out a patrol last night. It …”
“Did they put up much of a fight? The Germans?”
“Well …” Henry let himself trail off from answering. “Look, would you like to sit down?” He could see Sandrine’s shock at what remained of her home. “I mean, there’s a lot to take in. To be honest, I’m surprised you were allowed through. I thought they weren’t letting anyone back up the road.”
“The Germans, did they put up much of fight?” she asked again.
“Oh, well, no, they didn’t.”
She was now retracing her steps through the ground floor and beginning to climb the broken stairs to the first. Henry waited at the foot of them until the woman had reached the top for fear of catching sight of her thighs beneath her dress. Sandrine stopped and looked down at him. “Are you coming up, Lieutenant Frost?”
“Please, call me Henry,” said Henry, nodding and trotting up after her.
“What happened here, Henry?”
“Nothing,” the Lieutenant replied. “That’s the thing. There was nothing left. No Germans at all. They’d left the village. No trace of them. They’d left their forward trenches and had gone back. There were only a few we found.”
“What did they say?” Sandrine asked.
He looked down at his boots and then slowly he raised his eyes up to Sandrine. She was standing three paces away from him, amid the clutter and waste of her home.
“Well, it sounds ridiculous but …”
“Tell me.”
“Wolf.”
There was no change in Sandrine’s face. She stared hard at Henry and then looked back across the ruin of her home.
Henry shrugged and forced a chortle. “Have no idea what they meant but, well … that was what they said. I don’t suppose it makes any sense to you, does it?”
She turned and stepped with deliberate slowness along the corridor, vanishing into a room at the far end.
Henry called after her but Sandrine didn’t answer back. He called again and then said, “I’m coming in,” before pacing along with his heavy boots. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m in your house and I don’t even know your name! It’s terribly rude of me. After all, you’ve asked me mine.”
“Sandrine,” she replied, looking around at what was left of her bedroom.
“Ah,” said Henry, spotting the cruel mess. “I am so sorry.”
Sandrine looked at him and her features softened. Henry could feel the inside of him tingle on noticing the thawing of her frosted look.
“Why do you keep apologising, Henry?” she asked. “I don’t think you started the war. I don’t think you have wrecked my home. And it is only that, a home. It is not a living thing. It is not as bad as death.”
Henry shrugged again. Sandrine peered out of the window which, surprisingly, had been left undamaged.
“How long have the British been in Fampoux?”
“Uh, one night,” replied Henry, counting the days and nights out on his fingers. “Tonight is our second night.”
“You sent out a patrol?” she asked, still peering down onto the street below.
“We did, yes. It didn’t come back. We suspect the Germans got it.”
“They didn’t,” Sandrine retorted, looking up at Henry. “You must listen to me very carefully,” she said, stepping forward and taking Henry by the shoulders so that there was no question where his attention would be focused. “Send out no more patrols at night. Only during the day are you safe.”
“What?”
“Make sure that all your men are secured inside at night.”
“My men? They’re not my –”
“Then tell whoever is in charge that every man must be locked inside a building at night. There must be no one outside when night falls.”
“But that’s … well, that’s impossible as well as ridiculous!” Henry replied, laughing. “We need to protect –”
“The only thing you need to protect yourself against in Fampoux is the night.”
“But –”
“Henry! Listen to me! You are not safe here. Why do you think there were no Germans here when you arrived?” Henry went to speak but Sandrine continued. “They were forced to retreat. There are many unspeakable things which appear here in the night.”
Henry laughed nervously. Sandrine shook him.
“Listen to me, stupid British soldier!” she hissed.
“Now steady on!”
“Tell your men, they must barricade themselves in at night. Do not walk the streets at night. Do not go out into the night on patrol. Do not go into the trenches.”
“But –”
“Beware the moon, Henry! Beware the wolf!”
She slipped past him and ran down the stairs.
“But … where are you going?” he called after her, rushing down the stairs and into the street to follow her.
“This door,” Sandrine said, looking at the front door to the house. “Can you fix it?”
Henry looked at the smashed frame and lock where a German boot had broken it open. A few lengths of wood and nails should secure it. He was sure he could.
“And this window,” Sandrine continued, “board it up. We cannot stay here tonight as it is.”
“We?” replied Henry, taken aback at the suggestion of sharing the house with a female resident, especially one quite so beguiling as Sandrine. “Well, I’m not sure we could spend the night in this house together.”
Sandrine looked at him, her head tilted sympathetically to one side, her hands on her hips.
“I mean,” he continued, “it’ll go against all contingencies that are recommended during war time service.”
Sandrine allowed herself a giggle and wandered away down the street in the direction of the falling shells. “Then you better find yourself other lodgings, Mr Henry.”