The Soldier's Song (31 page)

‘I do beg your pardon. Are you Lieutenant Reilly?’ The voice was young but sounded tired. Not a waitress, but Susan Devereux. Stephen looked up sharply. Viewed this close she had the look of her brother, but more kindly, softer. She seemed hesitant, embarrassed, as she bobbed her head to Lillian, ‘Forgive me if I’m interrupting your lunch.’

‘It’s Captain Ryan, actually,’ Stephen answered, and as he started to stand up her gloved hand restrained him.

‘No, please, don’t get up, captain. I won’t detain you. You see, I saw you come in, and the colour of your hatband is the same . . .’ She gave a nervous laugh and more words tumbled out. ‘I’m terribly sorry to intrude. My name is Susan Devereux. I wonder do you know my brother, Alfred?’ She pointed to the wheelchair. Devereux was staring at them in his lopsided way, one eye fixed, the other moving. ‘He was with the Dublin Fusiliers, you see, and he seems to think he knows you.’ She opened her hands to reveal a little notebook with odd words and sentences scrawled across it in pencil. Just above her finger he could see the words ‘Tell Reilly’ written in an uneven, childlike hand.

‘Do you remember him at all? Ryan, you say? Perhaps he has made a mistake, but you can see he has written Reilly here quite clearly. I dare say he’s mistaken you for somebody else. The poor soul often gets confused. Sometimes he doesn’t even know where he is.’ Again the nervous laugh, betraying the horror. ‘Look,’ she turned the notebook around so he could read the whole message, ‘he’s got it into his head that you came here especially to see him. He says you shouldn’t have bothered!’

The loud crack of the shot brought him awake with a start. His eyes snapped open and he cast around wildly before he saw it was only Nightingale glaring angrily over the sights of his revolver. The tiny dugout was half filled with gun smoke, but Nightingale wasn’t finished. He followed the sleek black rat as it bounded along the back wall and jumped into the knee-deep puddle that covered the floor. It started to swim for shelter under the rudimentary plank bed where Stephen was lying, but Nightingale fired again and the rat disappeared with a splash.

‘For Christ’s sake! Do you mind?’

‘Sorry, old man!’ Nightingale grinned sheepishly, ‘I thought you were asleep.’

Asleep? He couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept properly. The best he could manage was a fitful doze. Seven days they’d been here, seven days of continuous shelling. The noise was unbearable – the constant thunder of shells roaring overhead had stretched his nerves to breaking point. That they were British shells made no difference. Hour after hour, day and night, they ripped through the sodden sky. As he lay in the leaky dugout he could feel the thumping, pulsing air pressing him into the mud, pushing him down and down until he gasped involuntarily, unable to breathe.

He didn’t say anything more, but rolled back on his plank, staring up at the roof. Rough-hewn logs and corrugated iron – it couldn’t even keep out the rain, let alone the shells. Water dribbled in through the holes, splashing and plinking into the puddle that covered the floor. It had been raining for seven days too – nonstop, day and night. Everything was sopping wet. The wooden walls of the dugout, cobbled together from Huntley and Palmer biscuit boxes, were starting to swell and warp. One had cracked earlier on, and a black tongue of mud was oozing down towards the floor.

This was the price of their success. When they detonated the mines at Messines they had attacked from well-built trenches of three years’ standing. The ground they had taken was the very ground they had been shelling for all that time and the intricate network of streams and ditches that had kept it dry had long since disappeared. While the Germans had fallen back on a carefully prepared line of concrete outposts, the Allies now had to face them from a morass, sheltering in a broken chain of shell craters that were slowly filling with the unending rain.

The rats were the worst he had seen. They were big and fat and seemed to know no fear. Out of the corner of his eye he saw another one scramble in under the gas curtain and plunge into the yellow scum that floated on top of the puddle. Gas residue – he might live to regret that little dip. But he swam on, scrambled out, and darted through the gap between two boards. Nightingale let him pass because he was busy painting his feet. Now that he’d taken his boots off – no easy task in itself – Stephen could see how bad they were. They looked like the feet of a corpse, blanched dead white with mottled patches of green and brown. Nightingale was painting them with the gentian violet the doctor had given him. The smell was horrendous.

Stephen closed his eyes again. The need for sleep was overpowering but he knew it wouldn’t come – not even now that there was a lull in the shelling. His nerves were stretched to breaking point and even in the near silence it was all he could do to lie still without grinding his teeth. He slid his hand down to his pocket and felt for the little square box. Still there. He’d had it in that same pocket ever since he came back to France, carrying it like a touchstone, a reminder of what he’d missed. Or worse, he thought bitterly, a reminder that you’re a bloody coward.

Sometimes he almost convinced himself that it wasn’t really his fault. He tried to blame it on Devereux – poor bloody Devereux with his crooked face and his long-suffering sister. That’s what had kicked him off – seeing them in the café that day. Just when he thought he was the better of it, a fit came on him again. He saw the wounded and the maimed, their grey, bloodless faces at every table, leering at him like Devereux, beckoning to come and join them. Then the fear deadening his limbs: the cold hands, cold feet, the shakes. It was worse than going into bloody action. Susan Devereux was still prattling away when he suddenly stood up and said he had to leave. As he marched to the door he heard Lillian apologizing for him, then running after him. She caught his arm outside.

‘Stephen, are you all right?’

‘Yes – no, I . . .’ The headache had him in its grip now. The bright sun seemed to magnify it. He felt his temples throbbing. The pain was intense, but there was anger there too, a sort of giddy malevolence. He felt the urge to lash out, to strike something. Maybe that would make it go away. ‘I’m just not feeling . . . can you leave me alone for a few minutes, please? I just need some peace and quiet.’

And he walked away, just like that. It was so easy it made him sick to think about it. When he thought of her standing there on the pavement, watching him leave, he wanted to cry. His hand came back up and clutched the gas mask against his chest, holding it like a child’s toy. Flaming awful thing. More like a hideous rubber parasite than a toy. The thought of putting that obscene snout back on – the sweaty heat and the faint smell of death – turned his stomach. He had lived in it half the night and he could hardly bear to put it back on. His throat was raw and his ears and neck were chafed and bloody from the straps. It wasn’t worth it. If the whistles blew for another gas attack he would throw it away and take a lungful. Get it bloody well over with.

But he knew he would never do that. Not with mustard gas. If ever there was a fate worse than death, it was a dose of that stuff. It burned the skin and seared the throat, melting the lungs inside your chest. Even with the mask on and every inch of flesh covered up you could feel it prickling, tingling, burning. It lingered in corners and oozed out of the ground in a foul yellow mist. He had seen what it did to Gardner. Poor bloody Gardner – he’d held him in his arms as he thrashed and screamed through his scorched throat, clawing at the sleeve of his coat in his agony. When he finally stopped, the glass eyes of the mask were splashed with his spittle, flecked yellow and red. That was no way to go.

He’d become so used to the noise of the shelling that when it stopped – or paused, for it was only a lull – the near silence made him uncomfortable. The little sounds irritated him; the drumming of the rain and the plink-plink of it dribbling into the puddle, the tuneless whistle as Nightingale painted his feet. He was relieved to hear squelching footsteps approach, and then the gas curtain flapped open and Wilson splashed in, pouring water from the creases in his cape. Acting major now – he was supposed to be the battalion adjutant but they’d been hit so hard he was running the whole bloody show. The number of men they’d lost just sitting here was appalling – and they hadn’t even started the attack yet. Only Wilson knew when that would be, but if he’d heard anything over at Brigade HQ, he wasn’t saying. He took off his helmet and Stephen realized he looked bloody shattered. It had been a long week’s wait, but he still managed to smile. He sniffed deeply and wrinkled his nose.

‘Och, has something died here?’ he asked.

‘I believe my feet have actually started to rot,’ Nightingale replied, looking at one of his toes with some distaste.

‘Aye, well, they’re giving us a day’s rest in camp tomorrow, so you can get the doctor—’ Wilson broke off and looked to the roof. Outside, there was the whiz and thump of incoming artillery. Five-nines, with the distinctive wobbling sound of gas shells. One, two, three, four. They all looked at one another, then Nightingale started pulling on his socks.

‘Hell and death!’ Wilson cursed, as the whistles started to shrill.

‘Gas! Gas! Gas!’ bellowed a distant voice and Stephen sat up groggily, water lapping around his legs. Then he stumbled out through the curtain after Wilson, gagging as he dragged the mask on.

They only lost two men getting back to camp. One killed and one wounded, both by the same shell. The wounded one was Kinsella – pierced through the shoulder by a splinter that stuck out like a jagged dagger. From the way his arm hung loose, it must have broken his collarbone, but no amount of pain could wipe the grin off Kinsella’s grimy face. It was the very model of a Blighty wound. He was going home.

The survivors paraded when they got back to camp. Barely a couple of hundred left from a nominal strength of over a thousand. As if to mock them, the sun came out as they formed up and raised faint clouds of steam from their sodden clothes. Stephen looked at them standing in their pitifully short ranks; muddy, filthy, wet and worn out. If they were going to attack anything, it had better be soon, because they couldn’t hang on much longer.

Wilson knew it as well as he did. When the men were dismissed he took him to one side.

‘It’s tomorrow,’ he said, stuffing his pipe, ‘we go back up tonight, attack in the morning.’

‘Where?’

‘Vampire Farm.’

‘Vampire Farm?’ He looked over his shoulder at the dissolving ranks, ‘We don’t have enough men for that!’

Wilson just nodded. They’d both been watching Vampire Farm this last week – a squat concrete blockhouse set into the crest of the ridge and ringed by wire entanglements. They’d both seen the machine guns coming back up during lulls in the barrage, and they’d both counted them. Five machine guns.

‘You’d best get some rest,’ Wilson said, and lit his pipe with a match. ‘Try to sleep. I’ll brief you and Nightingale after lunch.’

Nightingale came hobbling up to catch him before he reached his tent. He was shouting his name, but Stephen hardly noticed as he shuffled across the camp, thinking only of his bed. He was dead tired: three gas alarms last night had kept them all on edge. He couldn’t believe that Nightingale still had the energy to run on his swollen feet, still less the good-natured smile plastered across his face.

‘A letter!’ he shouted breathlessly. ‘Stephen! You got a letter.’

Stephen looked at him dully, thinking he wouldn’t get that excited if the letter was for somebody else. But he took it with a polite ‘Thank you’ and then his heart tripped. He recognized the envelope without even having to see whose hand the address was in. Nightingale ran on with another letter for Wilson, and Stephen swayed on his feet as he turned the envelope over in his fingers.
At last.

He couldn’t wait to get to his tent, but found a quiet spot and sat down on the grass. Mud crumbled under his fingers as he wearily unbuttoned his tunic. Six weeks since he’d been back and no letters save an indignant one from Billy.
Dear Stephen, what the bloody hell do you mean by taking off without even a word of goodbye . . .
He knew he didn’t deserve one, but he’d always hoped. His hands were shaking as he opened the envelope and slid out the single sheet of notepaper.

* * *

Dublin

5 August 1917

Dear Stephen,

I hope this letter finds you well and I hope you do not mind me writing to you. When we last parted I could see you were quite upset and I wondered if it was something I had said or done. It was only afterwards that I realized what a shock it must have been for you to see Alfred Devereux like that. I know the war has put a tremendous strain on you and I am very sorry that I didn’t make more of an effort to help you. In my defence, I had thought I might be able to see you again before you went back to France. It came as quite a shock when Billy called on me the next day to say that you had gone back early.

Having said that, I am still unsure where I stand. I write to you in the hope that we can still be friends. If you think this letter is an imposition then please throw it away and think no more about it. However, I want you to know that I think of myself as your friend and I care very deeply about you. If you feel the same way then please, please, write to me and let me know that you are safe.

I remain,

Your friend,

Lillian

* * *