The Black Mountains (44 page)

Bruised and stunned, she obeyed, pulling up her torn drawers and trying to tie them together across her stomach. Her eyes were wild, but she did not speak, and he had the sudden crazy notion that she might never speak again. Then she slumped back against the chair, leaving her skirts bunched up around her legs, and staring into space as if she were in a trance.

The tiny hairs on the back of Rupert's neck began to prickle. Tears he could have coped with, but this silence was unnerving.

“Becky?” he said tentatively.

For a long moment she did not answer. Then she slowly swivelled her head until her eyes rested on him.

“Becky, you'll marry me now?”

Her face was blank and expressionless, but oh, her eyes! They were like black coals, shining with hate.

“Becky?” he said for the third time, and she caught her breath in low, shallow gasps.

“No, I won't marry you.”

“But …”

“If my father finds out about this, he'll kill us both.”

“You're exaggerating!”

“No. You don't know him as I do.” Her voice was flat, emotionless, matter-of-fact. “You've only seen the side of him he wanted you to see. He wouldn't stand for you doing that to me. He'll kill you, more surely than any Hun.”

“But I only …”

“It's sin. Fornication.”

“Where did you learn that, word?”

“From him. He hates fornication.”

“Dear heaven!” Rupert was afraid now, more afraid than he had ever been in his life. There was something so odd about Becky repeating herself in this sing-song drawl that it made him shiver, and the vision of Alfred's fury was an alarming one. As Becky had said, he thought he might prefer to look down the barrel of a German gun than face the full wrath of her father.

“You'll marry me, then everything will be all right.”

“No.” She shuddered, straightening her skirts in the same distant manner, as if none of this had anything to do with her any more. She did not tell him of the nights she had lain listening to Alfred using her mother as a plaything for his perverted lust. She did not tell him she would rather die than face the same fate, particularly now she knew that it was every bit as bad as she had imagined it to be. She did not tell him that, if she could not marry for love and give herself freely, she would rather stay an old maid for the rest of her life. But somehow she had no need, for the expression in her eyes said it all.

He buttoned his jacket, slapping his pockets with a pretence of normality. “Well, I'll be going then.”

“Please do, Rupert.”

“Next week perhaps I could take you for a spin in the side-car.”

She did not answer. Her face was small and stiff.

“Well, goodbye for now then …”

“Goodbye.”

Only when the door had closed after him did she move. She drew a deep, shuddering sigh, and the tears glittered in her eyes. The pain was still there, not so sharp, but burning still deep within her.

Never again, she thought. If I can help it, never ever again. Not with him.

One of the tears escaped and slid down her nose. “ Oh Ted,” she whispered, and the tears began to fall in earnest. “ Ted, where are you? And would you even want me now?”

Desolation, so complete it swamped even the pain, washed over her, and sinking into the sofa, her head in her hands, she wept.

Summer came, and as France sweltered the Western Front erupted again with a new and frightening violence. On the 1st July, thirteen British divisions went ‘over the top,' bayonets glinting in the sun, and the long and bloody battle for the Somme had began.

Ted Hall was amongst those who formed the human battering ram that hot summer's day, and as he staggered wearily back to his dug-out that night, he wondered how he could ever have wanted to be part of the stinking mess that was war.

Five months of action had taken their toll. His bright gold hair was darkened now, caked with dust and sweat. His face was thinner, and his chin covered with fine, fair stubble. And if his blue eyes still blazed with defiance, it was directed now as much at Haig and the British staff officers who sent wave after wave of men to certain death, as it was against the Hun.

They were all-powerful, those staff officers who led from the rear. He had seen them at practice attacks, sitting astride their sleekly beautiful horses, and looking for all the world as if they had just turned out of a spotless barracks. Some, he supposed, weren't as black as they were painted, and he had heard grudging stories of generals who did care what their men were going through. But largely, they had no idea, and Ted reckoned they looked on the Tommies as toy soldiers on a nursery floor instead of living, thinking men. He couldn't understand why so many of the men accepted them automatically as their betters, doing as they were told without question or criticism just because they wore breeches and Sam Browne belts and had red staff-officer tabs on their collars.

As for the junior officers, they were another breed again, as stupid in their way as their seniors, but brave too, bringing the traditions of their public schools on to the battlefield. They ‘played the game' at all costs, and more often than not got themselves killed in the process. Ted admired them without understanding them, for he could not share the maxims they lived by.

That night, the 1st July, as he lay sleepless, listening to the steady rambling thunder of guns, Ted thought that never had he imagined he would see so many corpses as he had seen in the last twelve hours.

Where could they all have come from, he wondered? Battalion upon battalion had been drawn up on the lines, it was true. But those dead! All those dead!

Ted closed his eyes, then opened them again. Now that the guttering candles had been snuffed out, it was dark in the dug-out, but not so dark as when his eyes were closed. And the darkness only brought the events of the day so close that he felt he was living it all again, from the nervous, but jaunty, start, when they had sipped their ram rations before dawn to give them Dutch courage, and then set off in single file along the communications trench to the front line.

He lay remembering the way his stomach had seemed to almost fold up from a mixture of fear and anticipation, so that he had wondered for a moment if he was in for a dose of the dysentery that had gone through so many of his comrades. But as the trenches became deeper, interspersed with craters, and the shells began to burst around him, there was no time left for thinking.

The noise was deafening, and the earth shook beneath his feet. Fear and the awareness of danger honed his senses to a fine edge, but he felt a strange detachment that was almost indifference.

And yet now, lying in the dark and reliving it, all he could see was the mile upon mile of corpses …

Those corpses. No matter how he tried to get away, they kept drawing him back. Again and again they rose before his weary red eyes, men in both khaki and field-grey, whose bodies had fallen into the most awkward and undignified positions, some horribly distorted, some curiously unmarked. There they lay, beyond help, while the flies that were already multiplying in the oppressive heat feasted upon them.

Dawn came, creeping slowly into the dug-out and bathing it in soft pink light. The ghosts of the dead receded with the shadows, and Ted pulled himself up in the narrow, make-shift bunk, and reached into the pocket of his tunic for his cigarettes. He found them, and put one between his lips, then changed his mind and replaced it carefully in the packet. His mouth was already stale and bitter; a cigarette would not taste good. And out here, cigarettes were too precious to waste.

Instead, he fumbled for his wallet, thinking he would reread the last letter he had received from Rebecca. He knew it almost by heart, but remembering it was not the same as holding the paper that she had held, and seeing her rounded, carefully formed hand.

He wished he had a more recent letter to read, though, for it was several months since the last one had reached him. He blamed the number of times his company had moved about for that—most of the men complained about the irregularity of mail which was a lifeline to them—but he had received letters from home, telling of Jack and Harry's schooling, Dolly and Amy's latest boyfriends, and the progress of Jim's children, and there had even been a parcel of cigarettes and chocolate. Only from Rebecca had there been no word.

Her last letter was from Wycherley, where she was safe and happy, well away from her father and the ravages of war. Ted consoled himself with this knowledge, telling himself that although something had prevented her letters from reaching him, they would catch up with him eventually.

He reached again for his tunic, twisting it around so that he could get at the pocket where he kept his wallet. It felt curiously flat, and when he slipped his hand inside, it was empty. He wrinkled his brow, perplexed but not worried, and lifted his tunic up on to his bunk, systematically going through the pockets. When they yielded nothing more than a handkerchief or two and a half-used packet of cough lozenges, his frown deepened. His wallet must be somewhere. He'd had it yesterday. He reached for his trousers and searched those pockets too, although he knew he never carried his wallet there, and when they, too, proved to be empty, he pulled himself up, leaning over to look on the floor of the dug-out.

“What's wrong, old son?” Redvers Brixey asked from the bunk above, and Ted swore.

“I've lost me wallet.”

“Go on! How d'you manage that?”

“I don't know. It's not here, is it? I must have lost it yesterday.”

“D'you reckon it's been pinched?”

Ted shook his head. It was not in his nature to think the worst of people. “ I reckon I've lost it. Though it might turn up yet.”

“Is there much in it?”

“Every bloody thing of value I've got with me,” Ted said bitterly. “There's not much money, it's true. But it's all my personal things—letters, photographs, stuff you can't replace.”

“That's hard hide,” Redvers sympathized.

He watched Ted get up and search every corner of the dug-out before adding unnecessarily: “ You're not going t' find it here.”

“No, you're right there, Redvers,” Ted said, dejected.

The sky was lightening with every passing minute, and when the dug-out was roused, Ted asked the other men if they had seen his wallet, but none of them was interested enough to give him a satisfactory answer. Out here, a lost wallet seemed of little importance. They grunted and shrugged and gulped at their rum ration, and after a while, Ted gave up, gulped his own belly-warming rum, and followed Redvers up the rough ladder from the dug-out.

The morning air was cool, and smelled of death. Ted, suppressing a shudder, thought it was an odour he would never be able to get out of his nostrils.

As they left the dug-out they swung around to the right, following one behind the other in single file. “We're pushing 'em back, you know, we're pushing the buggers back,” Redvers murmured optimistically over his shoulder, and Ted nodded.

It was true, the line had moved a little further to what he supposed must be the north-east. The trench they were filing into now had been a support trench yesterday. Now, it was on the Front, and the forward trenches that angled sharply away from it were cutting into the heart of No Man's Land, their tentacles protected from attack by a wide hedge of barbed wire.

In a curve of the trench, a German soldier, bloodied, broken, and trodden over by scores of determined British boots, confirmed that the enemy attack had indeed been beaten back in this sector. Ted, following Redvers closely, side stepped hastily to avoid treading in the soft pulp that had once been a face.

“See, we've got the bastards on the run!” Redvers muttered gleefully. “They must have sent a raid over last night and we beat 'em back!”

But where are we going now? Ted wondered. What had they to encounter today? How could he protect himself? Only by being alert and adaptable, and keeping his wits about him.

As if his thought process had triggered off the enemy reflexes, a shell exploded in the sky. It was a signal for all hell to break loose. With a roar like a wall of water breaking through a dam, the German guns opened fire; a second later the British countered with their own. Shells screamed through the still morning air, raining splinters of steel on to both men in the trenches and those who had been caught in the open. Machine guns crackled and drummed, mowing down row upon row of advancing men. Soldiers yelled and sobbed and swore, and the whole earth shook. Ted saw a shell land in the front bench, and as it exploded the air was full of flying mud and boarding, flesh and torn khaki. Then the sides caved in, concealing the destruction.

The desperate optimism had gone now, and the bravado turned to panic. A shell exploded nearby, and Ted felt a sharp pain in his foot. It quickly dulled to a burning sensation, and he dismissed it altogether. Only when he tried to take a step and the weight of his body made him scream in surprised agony did he realize that a splinter of shrapnel had pierced his boot and buried itself in his foot.

“Get back, lad, go on, get back!” the sergeant shouted at him over the cacophony of guns. “You're no good here now.”

His boot was spurting blood like a geyser, but Ted burned with resentment at the sergeant's words. No good? He was more use even now than the poor devils who were falling all around him.

Gritting his teeth, he took another step forward, but as his foot touched the ground, sharp screaming pain enveloped him again. He held his breath to keep from crying out, then swore. He knew that the sergeant was right, and that he'd have to get back behind the lines until his foot was bound up; at least.

Stumbling, Ted inched his way back towards the dug-out. Men pushed past him, their voices lost in the roar of battle, yet adding oddly to the general pandemonium. They swore at him, their faces moving, gaping, meaningless, and he inched on, moving like a man in a dream, determined but unreal.