The Storms of War (34 page)

‘This isn’t a party, men,’ said Bilks, sharply. Cook was leaning against the side of the trench, laughing hysterically. ‘Stop that. Over here, please, Wheeler, Ebbots and the rest of you. Let’s get started.’

Cook straightened his face, walked over. Michael’s group pulled out their paper and set about the near side, the one he had just checked, drawing out the size of the trench and what they guessed what would be its overall plan. Michael watched Wheeler as he bent to pick up a bullet, then looked back at his own work. Birds spun overhead.

They had nearly finished their drawings. Michael could feel the men growing restive, as if he had taken a group of children to a party and then refused to allow them to play.

‘Stop that!’ he shouted. Cook was prodding at the eye of one of the corpses with his finger. ‘Have some respect for the dead.’

‘For Fritz, sir?’

‘We are here to do a job. Get back to it.’ Cook bent his head to his paper.

‘Finished, sir.’ Ebbots moved off to another section of the trench. There was now no one between him and Tom. Michael watched. He could see Tom’s face registering their closeness. He moved nearer and raised his finger to Tom’s paper. ‘That is a good likeness.’

Tom lifted his eyes briefly, then returned to his paper. ‘Thank you, sir.’

Michael glanced across at Wheeler, but he was some way along, on the other side of the trench, and did not see. He looked back
at Tom. There were a dozen things he wanted to say. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘An excellent likeness.’

There was a clatter behind them. Michael turned to chastise Cook for fiddling again – and then felt his whole heart still. Along from them in the trench, near where Wheeler was drawing, a man in khaki was sitting up from under one of the corpses. His face was covered in blood. That was the side Michael had checked. He opened his mouth.
You’re supposed to be dead,
he tried to say. The others were not looking. The man held up two grenades, smiled. ‘Good morning,’ he said.

There was another movement, someone else scrambling to their feet on the other side. ‘Run!’ Tom was tugging him, shouting. Then it was all about battering up the side of the trench, Tom climbing out first, grasping his hand. ‘Come on, Michael.’ Then pulling him hard, running fast. And an explosion behind him so powerful that they were both thrown forward, flat on their faces. That was when he remembered. ‘Wheeler!’ he screamed. ‘Wheeler!’ He struggled to his feet.

Tom seized him. ‘Get back here, Michael.’

‘Let me go!’

‘They’re all dead! Don’t! There might be more of them.’

‘I don’t care!’

He flung himself back through the smoke to the trench, coughing, his eyes watering, fighting through with his hands. He could hear Tom coming behind him, shouting for him to stop. He skidded to a halt at the side of the trench. He could see nothing but blackened bodies, limbs, blood. Tom’s hands were on him, pulling him back, begging him. ‘They’re all
dead.
We need to go
now,
sir. Michael.’ He felt nothing then, blackness over his mind as he fell back into Tom’s arms.

‘You have to get better,’ the CO was saying. ‘You must. Awfully bad luck what happened to you chaps. But the Germans caught us out.’

Michael did not reply. Over three months later and he was still
in the French convalescent hospital. They said he was resting. He lay in bed, staring at the sky.

‘Look, Michael,’ the CO was saying. ‘I know it was a hard blow. It’s always sad to lose men. And I know how friendly you were with Bilks. He’s a loss to the service, no doubt about it. A most reliable chap. But you were lucky to survive. To think, two Germans with grenades, and you and Cotton lived. I suppose, being in the middle, you were farthest away from both of them, but still, it was a lucky escape. God has spared you and there is nothing wrong with you. We can’t let you stay here much longer. You must go back. Cotton is already there.’

Michael gazed up, heard the man’s voice but could not see his face.

‘It’s nearly December. We need you. I’ve found you a new second, Orchard, you’ll like him.’

Michael shook his head. ‘It was my fault,’ he said. ‘I didn’t check every one.’

‘What? I can’t hear you, man.’

‘My fault.’

The man brushed back his hair. ‘Now you know that’s not correct, Witt. It was the fault of the Germans. Look, thousands of men have been killed this summer. It is no one’s fault but the enemy. You should know that.’ Michael had read all the reports, the thousands of men, falling in front of the enemy, the dressing stations overwhelmed with the dying, the guns firing into the air, the search for bodies that still went on. He knew, rationally, that if they’d stayed in Pozières, most of the men might have died anyway. But the rational part of his brain wouldn’t work.

‘Why was I not beside him? We could have been together.’

‘Look, man, you have to stop this. You have to pull yourself together. HQ have been merciful so far.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Not the best idea to have sent you to that place, of course.’ Michael closed his eyes. ‘But you have to pull yourself together. No more of this. We need every man. Too many have fallen ill over the winter. Properly ill.’ He stood up. ‘If you’d never come here, you wouldn’t be like this. Should have got straight back
into the saddle. I am going to put in for your transfer out next week. You’ll meet Orchard. We’ll put you on offensive quite soon; Orchard will help you. Take a run at the Germans again. We’ll get the better of them.’

Michael stared at the ceiling. Wheeler was projected on it, like a film. He was smiling, holding out his hand.
Meet me in five minutes,
he said.
At the back of the barn.
They stood together and held each other until you could not tell where one ended and the other began. He breathed out.

Two weeks later, he was on the back of a lorry heading south. He’d said goodbye to the nurses and the MO, taken his new uniform and gun and practised with the gas mask in front of the instructor. He sat shivering under his greatcoat, his head spinning, dazed. He didn’t talk to the men around him, just felt the lorry bump as it drove forward, further from Wheeler, closer to the front.

Étaples, December 1916

‘The commandant wants to see you,’ said the nurse, carefully. It was Celia’s fifth day in the hospital – not that she would have known if they had not told her – and her first day free of the drugs that made her sleep. She lay in bed in a room with six other girls, the injury ward rather than the infectious diseases. Two other girls had been hit that night, but escaped with a broken leg each and bruises. Celia watched them, reading in bed, and tears rolled down her cheeks. The nurse had told her that Warterton was coming to see her after cleaning her ambulance. Celia did not know what she would say to her. Warterton, always so cheerful, practical. She would remain untouched by the war; in fifteen years’ time she would be the mother of six fine boys in the country, organising jolly running races, the ambulances forgotten apart from the odd day when the local ladies’ group asked her to give a talk about her experiences. Warterton would sit at the end of her bed, hold her hand and tell her that Shep would not have wished her to be so cast down.

‘Ask the commandant if I can see her tomorrow,’ she said. ‘I do not believe my health is up to it today.’

‘She says it is very important. Come now, I will take you down. Let’s get you out of bed.’ Celia pushed her legs over the side; they were weak with underuse. ‘I have shoes here,’ said the nurse. ‘Easier to wear for the walk.’ She wrapped a dressing gown around Celia. ‘Let’s go.’

The commandant’s office was sparse. ‘Thank you, Nurse. You may remain. Witt, I think it is best that you sit down.’

‘I can stand, Commandant.’ The commandant’s pity was much more painful than her sharp words.

‘All the same, I suggest you sit down. Nurse, perhaps you could help her.’

Celia folded her body into the seat. This was what normal people did, she reminded herself. Sit down. Stand up. She put her hands in her lap.

The commandant picked up a piece of paper. ‘I have a letter here from your mother. She would like you to return to your home. I believe it is in Hampshire.’

‘I don’t think I wish to go home. I’m up to the work, I promise.’ She didn’t want to go home. She wanted to lie somewhere cool and dark and not have to think.

‘It is not that, my dear.’ Behind her head, Celia heard the nurse shift. She had no time to consider it, for the commandant was hurrying on, talking, sending out words. ‘There was a great advance of troops. Many men were sent over. Thousands have been lost. We have been trying to keep up here with the injured. But the lost …’

I don’t understand,
Celia wanted to cry.
Stop talking like this. I just want to sleep.

‘The medical staff did everything they could for him,’ she was saying.

For who? Celia was confused. Then suddenly her mind cleared. ‘Tom!’ she whispered. ‘Tom!’ The nurse put her hand on her shoulder, because she was shaking.

The commandant looked across the table at her, confused. ‘Tom? Do you call him Tom? It is your brother, dear. Michael.’

Celia felt her face crumple and drop into nothing. She fell to the floor. There were strange noises in the room, great bellowing sobs that did not sound like anything human. They bounced off the walls, echoing in her ears.
Stop!
she wanted to cry at the person who was making the noise. Then she realised that it was her.

Isle of Man, December 1916

It was morning. Rudolf walked twenty-five times around his cell. He walked around it twenty-five times at lunchtime, and twenty-five times more at suppertime. Each round usually took him fifteen seconds at average pace. Sometimes he would go faster, Thus he would keep himself fit and ready, not like the other men near him, who he supposed sat down, felt hopeless, saved all their energy for shouting out for the warders. That wasn’t him. He had no time for such weakness of spirit. Eric, his father, was watching him from above, and he wished to make him proud. Even imprisoned, even without liberty, even subject to indignity, he would not lose his soul.

He marked off the days on the wall, telling them by the change of the light in the window overhead. Then, after the dinner tray, he recited great works until the light faded and the guards started shouting for quiet. He had started out intending to recite English works. He would practise Shakespeare, and after he had recited everything he could remember, he would move on to Marlowe and then Jonson. When they finally decided to let him free, he would be like a butterfly, still healthy, knowledgeable. But when he came to it, he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t recite
Twelfth Night.
Or
Macbeth
or
As You Like It
or any of them. He found himself wanting to declaim German works instead: Goethe, Schiller and his mother’s favourite, Sophie de la Roche. He spoke the words quietly, under his breath, so that no one would hear. He used English only when the guards shouted to him, came to empty his pail or took him out for his weekly exercise up and down the corridor. Otherwise, he spoke German.
I am becoming what you
think I am,
he said softly in his mind as they hauled him out by his arm.
German, not English. I can’t stop.

One morning, Jervis, one of the guards who was less rough when he took him out, came to his cell and opened the door. He pulled paper and a pen from his pocket, hissed in Rudolf’s ear: ‘You’ve got three minutes to write to your family. Quick.’

Rudolf stared at him. ‘What do you mean?’

He hissed again: ‘Hurry.’ Then raised his voice. ‘Brief cell inspection, Witt. Turn over your bed, please.’ Rudolf went to his bed and Jervis pulled him back. ‘Write!’

‘But why?’ Rudolf gazed at the man, sweating in his uniform. It had to be some sort of trap. They had chosen Jervis because he had thought him kind.

Jervis dropped his voice. ‘Look, favour from some friend of yours. Lord Smith or someone. Quickly.’

Rudolf looked at his paper. What to write. At the beginning, he had scribbled to his wife in his head, over and over. But after the months elapsed and nothing changed, he found his mind too full of the words of his books to write.

‘It’s your last chance!’ said Jervis. He raised his voice and started shouting something about the pillows. Rudolf bowed his head and began writing.

Dear wife and children,

I hope you’re all well. I hope, Verena dear, you have heard from Michael. And that Arthur is home now. I’m sure Emmeline is also once more friends with us all. How is the house? Does the ivy need cutting back? I wish I were there to do it. How is my little Celia? Working hard at her lessons, I imagine. I am well, wife, taking exercise, keeping my spirits up. I hope that I may

Jervis snatched the paper. ‘Right, that’s it. Time to go.’

‘Please,’ said Rudolf. ‘Please let me sign it.’ He felt a tear at his eye.

Jervis handed him the letter; Rudolf scribbled, gave back the
pen. Jervis shouted out loudly about the inspection and how Rudolf should keep his cell tidy from now on. Then he slammed out of the door. Rudolf sat there staring at it. The words he’d written resounded in his mind, simple, childish. He felt full of shame. Next time, he would think of something better. He would practise, not spend every night reciting German. He would be ready.

Verena repeated Rudolf’s words in her mind. Taking exercise, keeping up spirits. She had written back, sealed it, but Lord Smith’s man had told her there would be no chance of a reply. She left the envelope on her bureau, just in case.

She turned over in bed, reminding herself to tell the girls to change the sheets. Every day for the last week she had forgotten to ask them. And now they were dirty. Even worse, she hardly noticed. Why, she wondered, why were you supposed to wash sheets? It was one of the routines of Stoneythorpe. But what would happen if you didn’t? Perhaps it was all just a great lie to keep everyone occupied, women, servants, the people who made sheets – who did that? – filling their time, over and over, because if they stopped, they might want to ask questions. Well, she wouldn’t allow that. She pulled herself out of bed – no need to dress, since there was no one to see – put on a shawl for the cold and padded downstairs.

Her mother had been very fond of cleanliness. ‘Next to godliness,’ she had said to all the servants, dismissed plenty for not measuring up. She spent hours training Verena in the standards that she desired her to keep in her own future home. Lady Deerhurst had great hopes of Verena’s future.

How many years? Verena pondered. Nearly twenty-five years ago she had stood in Buckingham Palace waiting to be presented to the Queen. Mama was particularly concerned about the ostrich feather. They had hunted all over for one that protruded properly from her hair. But still the feather of the girl in front of her billowed out much higher than hers. And, she realised, gazing at the others, her diamonds were a little dull. Other dresses were
a more brilliant white. How could it be, she thought, that after all her mother’s efforts, still someone else’s dress was a brighter white than her own?

They progressed forward. The room was incredibly hot and bright and there were dozens of girls ahead of her. She could just make out a tiny black-clad figure with a pile of hair. ‘No crown,’ whispered a girl somewhere. She waited, hot in her dress, sure that when she reached the Queen, her ostrich feather would have sunk and her dress would be sticking to her throat. After an hour or so, she was three girls away from the throne. The girl ahead of her with the perfect ostrich feather was still looking quite pristine. The flowers in the room were terribly pungent and the lights were so hot. The diamonds scratched her neck but she didn’t dare move them. Men in swords surrounded the Queen and someone was giving out names.

She had been told hundreds and hundreds of times that this would be the most wonderful day of her life. Presented to the Queen! As Lady Deerhurst had told her, thousands of girls were not presented. Their families were not deemed proper! Now she was here. Afterwards, Lady Deerhurst had promised her, a great vista of wonder would open and her life would begin. All the dancing lessons, the French, the careful schooling, the dressmakers’ bills and the creams ploughed into her skin would now prove their worth.

Lady Deerhurst herself had been presented to the Queen when she was nineteen, a group that became special, as it happened, because it was the last one before the death of the Prince Consort. ‘They looked so happy,’ Lady Deerhurst said, shaking her head. ‘He was a great support to her.’ She was fascinated by the Queen’s widowhood, talked at length about whether one should set aside a special room for one’s late husband if the Queen did. The question of how to be a dignified widow was one that she found constantly occupying. Verena’s father was some way from death yet, but
still.
One had to plan.

Verena didn’t think that her mother ever believed the Queen might die. And yet here they were, years later, governed by her son,
at war with her nephew. She had not thought much of the Queen when she met her. Perhaps Her Majesty was tired; she supposed it was even harder under all the lights for such an old person. Verena gave the deep curtsey – which she had practised probably a thousand times – and looked up into the tiny eyes. She smiled, and a flash of something crossed the Queen’s face. She recognised it with a jolt: displeasure. It was exactly the same expression that crossed her mother’s face when she had said something wrong. She flushed miserably and stumbled up, ungainly. Still, years later, the memory of it made her blush.

And then afterwards it was as if everything she did was slightly wrong, a little shadowed. She went to the balls of the daughters of friends of her parents in cold country houses, talked to men who were as bored by her as her father seemed to be, ate cold meat and cake. Her parents hosted a party for her with musicians and singers, the Great Hall decked with greenery that took the servants a whole week to bring in and put up. Her mother set up six fittings for a special gown for her, pale yellow with pure gold thread running through it. She watched them pull it around her too-tall figure blushingly, knowing it would have suited her mother so much better. Gold and lemon were her mother’s colours – she had worn them to her own coming-out ball. Verena felt clumsy and ill at ease, and was quite sure that every girl who arrived looked prettier than her. Some of them she barely recognised, even though she had been going to the same parties as them for the past four months. She danced with some men who trod on her gown, heard some of the mothers discussing her father’s renovations to the hall, wondered if it was just her imagination that there were fewer people at her ball than anyone else’s – and pretended to have a quite wonderful time. At the end of a whole year of balls and gowns and cold meat and cake, not a single man had asked her to marry him. ‘No one,’ said Lady Deerhurst in a voice full of doom, ‘has even come
close
.’

Rudolf had rescued her from it all. The strange, tall man who danced like a jerky puppet at the ball of a friend of her father’s. Lord Deerhurst had attended under sufferance, because many of
the guests were
in business.
His banker had begged him – and friendly favour from a banker was always useful to have, he thought. ‘Don’t worry about dressing her up too much,’ he said to his wife. ‘We don’t want to look as if we have
tried
.’

‘Would you care to dance?’ Rudolf had asked her. He had come over, hand outstretched. As he took her around the room, she only wanted to laugh. His movements were so untidy, and he grasped her so hard that she thought his fingernails might pierce the back of her gown. After a brief wrestle, she took to more or less guiding him. He tried to say something about the room and she shook her head. If he spoke, he would surely not be able to dance at all.

‘Thank you, Miss Colebridge,’ he said, when it was over, escorting her to her seat. ‘The Honourable Miss Colebridge, I believe.’

‘Quite correct.’

‘Your parents must be very proud of such a pretty and graceful daughter.’

‘I am sure, sir.’ She jerked his arm to swerve him out of the way of a couple that he hadn’t seen.

She had not thought anything of him, then, other than that he was a jolly man who could barely dance. She didn’t think he would be her saviour, the man who rescued her from what she now realised had been her future: to keep going to balls and receptions with all the other girls who had failed to get a husband, over and over until she managed it – or, she supposed, everyone gave her up as a lost cause. But he was. Next morning, he paid a social call on Lady Deerhurst, and her. They talked inconsequentially about churches.

‘What an odd man,’ said Lady Deerhurst. ‘I think we shan’t be in when he next calls.’

They were not. But still, he wrote, sent letters via servants that Lady Deerhurst did not see. Verena met him in the park when she was meant to be riding, at the portraitist and even when she said she was visiting Charlotte Sutherland for tea.

‘When did you fall in love with me?’ she asked him, in bafflement, after his proposal.

‘On the spot. I knew you were the one. I could see I would have a fight. I saw your mother’s face. But you were my princess, like in those Arthurian myths. I had to capture you and set you free.’

And free she became. Free, she thought, and much richer than some of the other girls in that line for the Queen. Charlotte Sutherland had married the most dreary old marquis, who turned out not to have a bean. Not many of them probably lived in a house like Stoneythorpe now. And yet although she loved Stoneythorpe – and all the more because Rudolf did too – the time when she had been happiest was when she and Rudolf were first married: poor, cut off by her father. Rudolf was working every hour for the factories and they were living in the house in Hampstead where each one of their children was born.

Verena had come to decide that she was fondest of children when they were about four or five; no longer babies, but still close to those early days of childhood where they lived in their own odd world. Babies muddled her; she worried why they cried. Arthur had wailed whatever they did; she and the nurse picked him up, put him down, fed him, didn’t feed him. Nothing worked. Everything seemed to send him into a temper, his face bright red with fury. So she was happiest, perhaps, when he was five, Michael three and Emmeline two – and she and Rudolf had decided she would have a year before beginning another child (their
last
child, she said).

June 1897, the summer of the Queen’s Jubilee. Arthur perched on Rudolf’s shoulders near the Mall to watch the tiny Queen go by. ‘Mama met the Queen,’ Rudolf said with pride. Now the Queen received her tributes outside St Paul’s, because she couldn’t walk up the stairs.

Verena thought of her as she lay under the oak tree in the Hampstead garden. Not even so old and a widow. She watched the play of light through the leaves. Sarah, the nurse, took the older children on long walks, Rudolf was out working all day and she had the house to herself, padding around it, gazing at the shafts of light through the windows.

After an afternoon of lying outside, the children would return with Sarah, and at seven or half past or so, Rudolf would come home. It was perfect. Until his tedious cousin, Heinrich, arrived from Bavaria for a visit. He wanted to see London, hauled Rudolf off to walk along the Thames and demanded dinner at the club.

‘How long will he be here?’ Verena had hissed after Heinrich’s stay stretched into a second week.