—

War, for Major Blood, had started on the week following his honeymoon when he received orders to join a party taking horses to France. Surprised, never having had anything to do with horses except by way of leisure, he nevertheless travelled to Southampton where he discovered that not only was he to join a party, he was to take charge. With the bit of luck that every officer needs to get by, the sergeant was an old Sweat who had experienced worse than horses being in the charge of a bandsman.

Amazingly in all the confusion of an army on the move, reservists were eventually allocated to companies, horses laagered, and wagons hooked into transporters. The enforcement of censorship was surprisingly easy, for nobody knew anything except where they were at any given moment. Bindon spoke to Esther by telephone. ‘I’m afraid that I can’t say where I am, but listen.’ He held the instrument out of the window where it picked up the screams of seagulls and ships’ hooters. In the excitement of his preparations to embark, it had not occurred to him that his new bride might not be equally aroused. ‘You’re not weeping, Esther?’

‘Of course I am weeping, Bindon. What woman would not weep when she hears the sounds of an army leaving home.’

‘Oh, my dear.’ He was genuinely shocked. ‘You must not worry on my account. They’ve given me a company of horses to command.’

And she had giggled. ‘Horses?’ A little strained, but it was better than the tears.

The rumour was that their destination was Rouen, as part of the first British Expeditionary Force – it turned out to be true. The sheds where both horses and men were assembled were rank and hot and had scarcely cooled by evening when the last of the men left them to board the transporting vessel. As an officer, Bindon Blood had been allocated space in a minute cabin which was even more stifling than the sheds had been. He dumped his bags and went up on deck and sat with, but apart from, a group of NCOs who had apparently served together everywhere from South Africa to India. He knew no one. In his previous existence as a bachelor he would have taken out his pipe and listened to the stories of the NCOs, but as a husband just back from a honeymoon with the most exquisite bride in the world, he could have wept for himself.

Had it not been for some anarchist student taking a pot shot at some Archduke in some godforsaken Austrian town, then he and Esther might have lived an enchanted existence. He might even have resigned his commission. He would probably have been welcomed into any orchestra in London.

Suddenly, the grinding and bumping at the quayside ceased, the air freshened, and they were at sea on their way to fight a war.

To fight a war!

Above all else, Bindon vowed, I shall go back to Esther whole.

The NCOs accepted a fill from the major’s tobacco pouch and they all sat through the next hours as the vessel ploughed its way towards the war zone. The first excitement was when a pilot boarded; then land was sighted, which Bindon was able to identify for the NCOs as Le Havre, then Quillebeuf, and slowly along the Seine to Rouen.

At Rouen, Bindon was able to transfer his command of horses into the hands of a cavalry officer who, for some reason, was aboard the same vessel as Bindon, but not in charge of horses. No one questioned the strange ways of the army; they were used to them.

His stay in Rouen was about a fortnight, during which time he was attached to a company of mixed Regulars and Reservists. The Reservists, poor devils, were despised by many of the time-serving men. Yet, as Bindon reasoned, they’re as much in France as the rest of us, and worse off than we are by not knowing the ropes and dodges.

And then they marched.

Full packs, rations, ammunition, entrenching tools, maps and handbooks.

And then they entrained for God only knew where.

Here and there a cup of coffee and a roll at a railway station – this being France there was not a sign nor scent of a fragrant cup of tea.

And then they marched again towards the land of flat fields and dykes.

The roads were clogged with marching men and convoys of lorries. At first the sight of townspeople and villagers cheering and waving tricolours lifted the spirits of the men, but after twenty such accolades it was necessary for NCOs to prod a bit of a return waving and cheering from the footsore soldiers.

It had taken twenty days of marching, sleeping in woods, sitting in peaceful, newly-cut cornfields, eating bully-beef and biscuits, brewing tea and waving. The closer they got to the Belgian border, the more dispirited and antagonistic-looking the peasants appeared. It was hot, extremely hot. The men were ordered to dig in. That order countermanded. Then the first order reinstated. There was, as with everything else, so it seemed, a shortage of picks and shovels, so that men sweated and swore as they attacked the rock-hard ground with their light entrenching tools. It was almost as light relief that they saw in the distance a German reconnaissance aircraft.

And then came the first sound of guns.

They were in the war.