The Soldier's Song (20 page)

‘You took your bloody time, Jimmy,’ one of them whispered to Kinsella, and he realized they had made their relief.

Haversacks were eased from aching shoulders and rifles unslung. A whispered order was passed along and half the men climbed up on the firing step as sentries, the rest stretching out where they could or settling into little niches in the walls to sleep. Stephen stood and listened for a few moments, feeling strangely at home with the dark and the smell of the earth. Then he tilted his head up to the sky, hoping for a glimpse of the stars. He felt tired, slightly dazed. It felt as if was only a few minutes since he’d left the camp at Etaples.

‘Officers’ dugout is a bit further along, sir,’ Kinsella said, but Stephen was startled by another knot of men bumping up the communication trench. A flare soared up and he recognized Devereux’s sergeant at the head of his platoon. They’d been lagging behind all the way and there was no sign of their officer.

‘Where is Mr Devereux, sergeant?’ he asked.

‘Bringing up the rear, sir.’ The sergeant jerked his thumb over his shoulder, and in the same instant the air was ripped open by a loud whizzing sound, then an ear-splitting crack that shook the earth. Half a dozen more followed, flashing orange flame and sending stones and earth rattling down on his helmet.

‘Looks like the quare fellas are putting out the welcome mat for us, sir.’ The sergeant chuckled, getting up and moving on. Stephen climbed to his feet and brushed the earth from his tunic. A strange sound came from the communication trench and he felt his heart begin to race. Had somebody been wounded? The sound was somewhere between a laugh and a howl, high-pitched, hysterical, and he picked up the acetylene lamp and edged towards it nervously. The light fell on a figure huddled against the side of the trench and he hurried over.

‘Are you hurt?’ he gasped, turning the beam onto the man’s face.

‘No, I’m all right,’ Devereux answered, wiping his eyes with his sleeve. ‘Go away, Ryan. Leave me alone.’

19 November 1916

I don’t think Devereux was pleased to see me the other night. I wasn’t very happy to see him either, but there it is. He has number five platoon and I have number six. We’re stuck with each other.

From what I’ve managed to winkle out of Hollis, I gather that Devereux has only been here a month, and this is his first stint at the front. Apparently, his illustrious uncle managed to get him a cushy job on the staff that kept him out of harm’s way until now. This begs the question: what is he doing here, where people are trying to kill him, when he could be in a nice safe office ten miles behind the front? Devereux says he volunteered, but everybody else thinks he was sent. He’ll need some frontline experience if he wants to get ahead on the staff, so he’s been sent here to get it. Better still would be a medal or a mention in dispatches, but the chances of either of those are very slim indeed.

It wouldn’t be fair to call him a coward – even after what I saw when we were shelled that night. We’re all cowards at some time or another, and I wouldn’t hold it against him. The real test is how he conducts himself day after day. How he stands up to it, how he handles his men, and how he gets things done. The trouble is, this is where he’s sadly lacking.

Wilson has a very low opinion of him. Devereux had the watch when my predecessor, Ingram, was shot by our own sentries, and it was his responsibility to make sure they knew there was a patrol out. Wilson doesn’t trust Devereux to lead a patrol himself and since there probably won’t be any major actions until next spring, that means he has almost no hope of getting a medal.

It doesn’t help that Devereux is such a snob. He resents being under the command of an officer who was commissioned from the ranks and he looks down his nose at Hollis and Gardner because they are temporary officers like myself, while he has a regular commission. This certainly isn’t warranted because they’re both fairly decent chaps, and far better soldiers than he is. Things would be much smoother without Devereux, but the situation is pretty sticky. Normally Wilson could get rid of a bad officer by dishing him in his monthly report, but with Devereux’s connections he must tread carefully. He has come here for glory, and glory he must have.

Needless to say, Wilson is very curious about my relationship with him. He hasn’t said anything, but I know he’s watching to see if I’m tarred with the same brush. To prove my mettle, I’ve volunteered to take a patrol out tonight. Somewhere opposite us the Germans have a contraption for throwing those big bombs they call ‘rum jars’ and I am to take half a dozen men out to see if we can steal it or at least get a good look at it. I can only hope I’ll still be in a position to write about the outcome tomorrow!

20 November 1916

Back to billets again after my first week at the front. I’m looking forward to a bath and a whole night’s sleep.

My patrol went off quite well last night. We didn’t do this sort of thing much in Turkey, and I found it quite nerve-racking. A bit like breaking into somebody’s house in the middle of the night, I imagine. I think I must have held my breath for the best part of half an hour on the way out! At least this rum jar contraption was more or less where we thought it was – in a sap with only a single man guarding it. Unfortunately, stealing it was out of the question because of the sheer size of the bloody thing. It was absolutely huge! It looked like an enormous beer barrel sawn in two and banded with iron, and it must have weighed half a ton.

Since there was no way we could shift it we booby-trapped it as best we could with a few Mills bombs and some wire and started back to safety. At least we still had the guard as a prisoner – having managed to knock him out with a cosh when we surprised him in the sap. But when we were about halfway back he woke up and started making a racket and in two seconds Kinsella had killed him with a bayonet. Very useful for this sort of stunt, is Kinsella – though I wouldn’t like to get on his bad side.

So I came back empty-handed. Devereux snorted a bit when I made my report (we both volunteered but he was turned down) but Wilson seemed pleased. Nobody was wounded and it wasn’t my fault we couldn’t shift the contraption. As it was I was able to make a decent sketch of the thing, and pinpoint it on the map, so we might be able to drop some shells on it if it starts becoming a nuisance.

It’s Gardner’s birthday tomorrow, so we’re taking him to a pub in Locre. They call them ‘
estaminets
’ over here. He’s nineteen.

* * *

By Christmas week it felt as if the whole world had turned to ice. Time passed in a slow cycle of icy blue days and clear frozen nights, with no sound but the clinking icicles on the wire and the clump of sentries stamping their feet. The cold was continuous and unrelenting and the officers’ dugout near Arundel House had no stove worth talking about. It was barely warmer than the trench outside, and the walls glittered with frost, icicles hanging down from the roof beams.

Stephen sat at the table with a plate of barely warm Maconochie stew and an unfinished letter. He had just ended his watch and his fingers were still numb with the cold. He warmed them over the guttering candle in the middle of the table as he reread the last few paragraphs of his letter:

. . . Captain Wilson is an engaging character once you get to know him. At first glance he seems to be a typical dour Ulsterman – not to mention a bit eccentric – but he grows on you quickly enough. He has a wife and two sons back in Belfast, and it would warm your heart to see how he can hardly wait for his home leave after Christmas. Also, he is a very good officer and takes great pains to look after his men. I suspect this might be because he has risen from the ranks himself. He joined the army when he was sixteen, did his seven years and then left to become a schoolteacher. When the war started he was recalled from the reserve and spent the first few months as a sergeant, distinguishing himself at the first battle of Ypres to the extent that he was awarded a DCM and given a field commission.

When he reached the end, Stephen paused to take another spoonful of stew, glancing across at the pile of blankets on the bottom bunk. Wilson was sleeping under all that and only the periodic puff of steam from his breath betrayed his presence. On the far side of the room Hollis was curled up on the other bunk, wrapped tight in a blanket and with a red woollen cap on his head. Gardner was out, bringing up the rations for the morning, and Devereux, who now had the watch, sat in the tattered armchair near the door with a blanket over his knees, chain-smoking cigarettes.

Quickly rubbing his hands together to get the circulation going, Stephen picked up his pen and unscrewed the cap.

‘Who are you writing to?’ Devereux asked, before the nib even touched the paper.

‘Lillian – Lillian Bryce,’ Stephen answered.

‘Lillian Bryce?’ Devereux savoured the name for a moment, then his face brightened and he gave a wry grin as he gently rubbed his cheek. ‘Of course. I remember her. The suffragette. She was at Mary’s . . .’ he pulled himself up, as if he’d said something he shouldn’t, then asked, ‘Is she your girl?’

Stephen had to think for a moment before he answered. He’d never really thought of it in those terms before. He found himself smiling as he answered.

‘Yes. Yes, I suppose she is.’

‘Well, good for you.’

He looked like he might have said more, but there was a familiar whirring sound overhead, then the double thump of shells landing nearby. The noise brought Devereux flying out of his chair, the blanket falling to the floor, and Stephen had to snatch up his pages as the roof rattled and dropped a clutch of icicles on the table.

‘Christ Almighty!’ Devereux whispered, crouched and anxious, as if he was still afraid the roof might come in. Then, with an unhappy sigh, he turned and stumped outside to check for damage. Stephen swept the table clear with his sleeve and smoothed out his letter again.

. . . As for Devereux, well, he’s just been asking about you. Believe it or not, he seems to think rather highly of you(!). Sometimes, I don’t know what to make of him. If you get him on his own he isn’t so bad – he drops the airs and graces and you can have a half-decent conversation with him – but mix him in with other people and he just can’t resist becoming a snob and a boor. In the quieter moments I often feel a bit sorry for him, as he is very isolated here. Necessity has made friends of the rest of us. We share almost everything, be it hats and gloves, food, or little treats and bits of news from home. But Devereux remains aloof. Truth be told, he rarely gets letters from home, although he does dash off at every opportunity to see his uncle on the staff.

He also drinks rather heavily. I must take care not to sound like a hypocrite, because we all drink rather heavily by normal standards. It isn’t unusual for us to have a tot of rum with breakfast – particularly with the weather we’re having – and, more often than not, another to help you sleep when you turn in. Devereux is no better or worse than the rest of us when we are at the front, but when we move into a rest area he takes to the bottle with a ferocity that has been noted by his superiors. I fear it will only be a matter of time before something is said.

Now, to the workings you sent me. Your thoughts on the Goldbach have the makings of a most interesting proposition, and I have made a few further notes that you might find useful. As you will see, I believe your calculations are valid for both the weak and the strong conjectures, and I’m sure you would do well to look into Lagrange’s four-square theorem . . .

He stopped writing as he heard Devereux’s heavy tread approaching on the duckboards outside. There was a slide, a thump and a string of muttered curses, and then Devereux came back in through the crackling gas curtain, blowing on his hands and flopping back into his chair.

‘Well?’ Stephen asked.

‘Bloody German bloody shells,’ Devereux said, taking out another cigarette and putting it shakily to his lips. ‘Bloody pain in the arse.’

The man in the basket was looking at them through binoculars. The twin discs obscured half his face and made him look like some sort of insect, hunched and small in the distance. Only when he took them down to lean over and shout something down to the ground did he become human again.

Can he see me? Stephen wondered. Does he know what I’m going to do? He’d been watching him for the last hour, studying him, getting used to the motion of the balloon. With the naked eye it appeared to be motionless, a great grey maggot painted in the sky, but through the glass he could see that it moved. It swayed regularly like an inverted pendulum, and with every gust of wind it shuddered, shook and bobbed up and down like a fishing float.

He took his eye away from the scope and adjusted the focus. Kinsella was sitting on the firing step beside him, calmly smoking a cigarette.

‘How’s it looking, sir?’

‘The balloon is moving in the breeze.’

‘Aye, it’ll do that.’

Not much encouragement there. Kinsella was the best shot in the company – or had been up to now. He’d put his title on the line when he declined the shot. Too far, he said. Not even with the scope.

Funny how it was the scope that had caused the penny to drop. The captured Zeiss scope and his diary were the only things he’d managed to bring home from Turkey. God knows how they had survived, when even the clothes he’d stood up in had been destroyed at one of the hospitals. It was only when he took it out of his haversack last night that he thought of that roasting hot trench, and a man lying face down, shot as he tried to get a drink of water. Fusilier Kinsella. Of course!