Waiting for Sunrise (26 page)

‘Dump your kit there. I’ll have a servant assigned. Dinner at six in the mess tent.’

‘Leave him to me,’ Munro said as they watched the major stroll off. ‘I’ll have another quiet word with our fine fellow.’ He smiled. ‘Scare him to death.’

Sometimes, Lysander thought, it was an advantage having someone like Munro on your side. All the same, he sat in silence throughout the meal in the mess tent. No other officer made any effort to engage him in conversation, but more, he thought, out of extreme caution than contempt. God knows what Munro had said. So he tackled his meal, a beef stew with dumplings and a steam pudding with custard, feeling full and uncomfortable but sensing it would only incur further opprobrium if he pushed his plates away half-eaten.

As soon as was polite, he went back to his camp bed in the cow-byre and smoked a cigarette.

‘Mr Rief, sir?’

He sat up. A sergeant stood in the doorway.

‘I’m Sergeant Foley, sir.’

They saluted each other. Lysander still felt a little strange being addressed as ‘sir’. Foley was a squat dense man in his late twenties, he guessed, with a pronounced snub nose. He had a thick Lancashire accent that somehow suited his muscled frame.

‘There’s a wiring party going up. We can follow them.’

They didn’t waste any time getting rid of me, Lysander thought, as he quickly gathered up a few essential belongings – a bottle of whisky, cigarettes, torch, compass, map, his kitbag with the two grenades, a scarf and spare socks. He left his raincoat behind – it was a warm clear night – and followed Foley out, feeling sudden misgivings stiffen his limbs and making his breathing a task he had to concentrate on. Keep calm, keep calm, he said to himself, remember it’s a quiet sector – all fighting is elsewhere – that’s why you’re here. You’ve been fully briefed and trained, you’ve studied maps, you’ve been given simple instructions – just follow them.

He and Foley stayed at the rear of the wiring party as they tramped up a mud road and turned off it into a communication trench, waist-deep at first but gradually deepening until breastworks on each side reduced the evening sky to a strip of orange-grey above his head.

By the time they reached the support lines Lysander was beginning to feel tired. Foley showed him to the officers’ dugout and there Lysander introduced himself to a Captain Dodd, the company commander – an older man in his mid-thirties with a drooping, damp-looking, curtain moustache, and two very young lieutenants – called Wiley and Gorlice-Law – who could barely have been twenty, Lysander thought, like senior prefects at a boarding school. They knew who he was, word must have been sent ahead, and they were polite and welcoming enough, but he could see them eyeing the red staff-officer flashes on his lapels with suspicion, as if he were contagious in some way. He was assigned one of the bunk beds and took his whisky bottle out of his kitbag as a donation to the dugout. Everyone had a tot immediately and the atmosphere became less chilly and formal.

Lysander relayed his cover-story – that he was here from ‘Corps’ to reconnoitre the ground in front of the British and French trenches and to try and identify, if possible, the German troops opposite.

‘They’ve burnt off most of the grass in front of their wire,’ Dodd said, pessimistically. ‘Difficult to get close.’

Lysander took out his trench map and asked him to identify the precise section of the trenches where the British line ended and the French began. Dodd pointed to a V-shaped salient that jutted out into no man’s land.

‘There,’ he said. ‘But they’ve filled it with wire. You can’t get through.’

‘Never the twain shall meet,’ Wiley said, cheerily.

‘Foley’s the man to take you out,’ Gorlice-Law said. ‘Apparently he loves patrolling.’ He was spreading anchovy paste on a hard biscuit and he bit into it with relish, like a boy in the school tuck-shop, munching away. ‘Delicious,’ he said, adding in apologetic explanation, ‘I’m always starving – can’t think why.’

Dodd sent Wiley out to walk the front-line trench and check on the sentries. Lysander topped up their mugs with more whisky.

‘They say it’s bad luck when staff come up to the line from Corps,’ Dodd remarked, gloomily. He wasn’t exactly a ray of sunshine, Lysander thought.

‘Well, I’ll be gone the day after tomorrow,’ Lysander said. ‘You won’t remember me.’

‘That’s all very well, but you’ll have still come up, don’t you see? Right here, to us,’ Dodd said, persistently. ‘So what kind of attack are you planning?’

‘Look, it’s just a recce,’ Lysander said, wanting to tell him he wasn’t a real staff officer at all, therefore there would be no malign curse involved. ‘Nothing may come of it.’

‘You wouldn’t tell us anyway, would you?’ Gorlice-Law said, reaching for another biscuit. ‘Deadly secret and all that. Hush-hush.’

‘Have another drop of whisky,’ Lysander said.

He slept fitfully in his thin hard bunk, kept awake by his ever-turning mind and by Dodd’s long, deep snores. He heard the whistles of the dawn ‘stand-to’ and breakfasted on tea and jam sandwiches brought to him by Dodd’s batman. Foley arrived and offered to show him the front-line trench, to ‘have a gander’ at no man’s land.

The trenches at this, the furthest right-hand wing of the British Expeditionary Force, were narrow, deep and well-maintained, Lysander saw. Dry too, with a duckboard floor and a solidly revetted fire-step and a thick crowning berm of sandbags. Apart from the sentries standing on the fire-step the other soldiers huddled in scrapes and small half-caves hollowed out from the facing wall – eating, shaving, cleaning their kit. Lysander was amused to see that most of them were wearing shorts and their knees were brown – as if they were on a strange sort of a summer holiday – as he followed Foley along the traverses to a net-covered loophole. He was handed a pair of binoculars.

‘You’re safe enough from snipers,’ Foley said. ‘You can see through the net but they can’t see in.’

Lysander raised the binoculars and peered out over no man’s land. Long grass and self-seeded corn badged with rusty clumps of docks. In the middle distance, directly in front of them, was a small ruin – more like a pile of smashed and tumbled stones – and some way off were three leafy, lopsided elms with some of their main branches blasted off. It looked tranquil and bucolic. A warm breeze was blowing, setting the rough meadow that was no man’s land in easy flowing motion, the tall grasses and the docks bending before the gentle combing wind.

‘How far are their trenches?’ he asked.

‘Couple of hundred yards away, here. You can’t see them, the ground rises in the middle, ever so slightly.’

Lysander knew this, just as he knew that the shattered masonry was the remains of a family tomb. This was to be his reference point at night.

‘What about that ruin?’

‘They ran a sap out to it for a listening post but we bombed them out a month ago. They haven’t come back.’

‘I want to have a good look at it tonight, Sergeant. Are there drainage ditches?’

‘A few. Quite choked and overgrown. See that clump of willows – to the right?’

Lysander swivelled his binoculars. ‘Yes.’

‘That’s the start of the deepest one. Runs across our front then dog-legs into Frenchie’s wire.’

Lysander made some token notes on his map – he had his bearings clearer now – and he had his little torch and his compass. He should be all right.

‘What time do you want to go out?’ Foley asked. Lysander noticed the pointed absence of ‘sir’, now.

‘When it’s darkest. Two o’clock, three o’clock.’

‘It’s a very short night. Summer solstice’s just gone.’

‘We won’t be out long. I just have to confirm a few details. You’ll be back in half an hour. We’ll be back,’ he added quickly.

‘Mr Gorlice-Law is coming with us, it seems,’ Foley said. ‘He’s not done any patrolling yet. Captain Dodd thought it might be a nice dry-run for him.’

‘No,’ Lysander said. ‘Just you and me, Foley.’

‘I’ll look after the little chap, don’t you worry, sir.’ He smiled. ‘Best to keep the captain happy.’

In the afternoon two RFC spotter aeroplanes flew over the trenches and for the first time Lysander heard gunfire from the German lines. Then there was a distant shouting from somewhere in no man’s land. A solitary voice. The men began to laugh among themselves.

‘What’s he shouting? Who is it?’ Lysander asked Foley.

‘He crawls out most afternoons when it’s quiet and abuses us. You could set your watch by him.’

Lysander stood up on the fire-step and listened. Faintly but distinctly from the long grass came the cry of, ‘Hey, English cunts! Go home, fucking English cunts!’

Lysander thought he could hear laughter from the German lines also.

After the evening ‘stand-to’, he began to feel his nervousness increase again. Once more he silently ran through his instructions, mentally ticked off everything he had to do. Covertly, he checked the two Mills no. 5 bombs in his pack and verified, for the twentieth time, that the detonators were in. Gorlice-Law was full of enthusiasm for the patrol, blackening his face and cleaning and loading and reloading his revolver.

‘We’re just looking at the ground,’ Lysander felt obliged to tell him. ‘I don’t think it’s worth your while.’

‘I only arrived two days ago,’ Gorlice-Law said. ‘I can’t wait.’

‘Well, the first sign of trouble and we run for it.’

Dodd made him clean his face and set up the ‘dining table’ – half a door placed on two ammunition boxes – saying, ‘I don’t intend to sit down to eat with a blackamoor, Lieutenant,’ and they were served up a supper of tinned stew and biscuits followed by tinned plum-duff and the rest of Lysander’s whisky. As it grew darker, Foley arrived with the rum ration. It was strong liquor, Lysander thought, with a powerful odour of molasses and thick like cough medicine. He could see that Gorlice-Law was feeling the effects on top of the whisky – he had a glazed expression on his face and it was visibly obvious when he tried to concentrate – eyebrows buckling in a frown, lips pursed, his speech slow and deliberate.

Towards half past two in the morning, Lysander steered him up the trench to join Foley at the jumping-off point. A short wooden ladder was set against the facing wall opposite the gap in the wire. Foley wore a rolled-up Balaclava on his head, a dirty leather jerkin with a webbing belt around it, shorts, sandshoes and extra socks tied round his knees. He had a revolver in his pocket and a whistle on a lanyard round his neck.

‘Three blasts and we head for home,’ he said, looking at Lysander, askance.

‘What is it, Foley?’

‘You’re fully dressed, sir. Like you were going on parade.’

‘I don’t have any other kit with me.’

Foley had a tin of black candle grease and he painted some stripes on Lysander’s face. He turned to look at Gorlice-Law, who had stripped himself of jacket, webbing and puttees and had thrust his revolver in his belt.

‘You do everything I say, now, Mr Gorlice-Law. Understand?’

‘Yes, Sergeant.’

Foley put up a pink Verey rocket to let the battalion front know that a patrol was going out and they clambered up the ladder and over the sandbags, advancing at a crouch through the wire and on into the engulfing darkness of no man’s land.

It was a moonless night and yet Lysander was still astonished at how quickly he lost his bearings as they crawled through the long grass. After a minute or so he had no idea in which direction he was heading as he followed Foley – with Gorlice-Law bringing up the rear. A white flare went up from the German lines and for a few seconds the world turned brightly monochrome. He had a sudden temptation to stand up and see where he was. They all froze.

‘Where’s the ruin?’ he hissed at Foley as the glaring light dimmed and fizzled out.

‘About fifty yards, diagonal, right.’

‘Take us towards it.’

Foley changed course and they crawled on. A few miles north some kind of ‘stunt’ was taking place – star shells and distant artillery, the throat-clearing expectoration of machine-gun fire. Lysander glanced back – nothing was happening in the 2/10th Loyal Manchester Fusiliers’ trenches, however. Black sleeping countryside. Even the precautionary, exploratory rocket-flares seemed to have died down. Everybody keen on a good night’s sleep.

‘How far are we now?’ Lysander tapped Foley’s ankle.

‘Over that little rise and you’re there.’

It was time.

‘Stay here,’ he said to Foley. ‘Don’t leave him.’

‘No, sir. Don’t go alone. Let me come with you.’

‘It’s an order, Foley. Look after the lieutenant.’

Lysander crawled away from them up the slope – just the smallest undulation, but it gave him enough height to see the pale tumbled blocks of stone from the demolished tomb. He looked right for the ravaged elms and thought he saw their darker shape against the night sky. Ruins, elms, drainage ditch – at least he had physical reference points to aim for in the fluid blackness and the whispering grass all around him.

He slithered down the reverse side of the slope towards the ruined tomb. It must have been quite an edifice, he thought, as he drew nearer, some local dignitary who wanted his family name to last. Well, he hadn’t reckoned for –