White Feathers (17 page)

Lucy’s pretty face was flushed and she looked distracted. She thrust the baby at her mother-in-law and beseeched, ‘Could you please take him for a few minutes? I’ve been trying to feed him but he’s been …’, and here she glanced at Andrew and her cheeks grew even redder, ‘… well, he’s been biting me and his teeth are so
sharp
! I’ve told him not to bite and now he’s having a tantrum but he has to learn.’

Andrew thought it was high time his grandson was weaned, but he understood that Lucy’s insistence on continuing to breast-feed the child gave her more than a little comfort and perhaps some sort of connection, no matter how tenuous, to James, whom she had not seen for over a year and a half.

He said, ‘I’ll take him, Lucy, if you like.’

In his view Tamar spoiled Duncan, and in a household populated mainly by women, he saw himself as the rightful dispenser of masculine discipline. He took the child from his mother and cradled him in his arms. Duncan’s face was very red and angry-looking, and he was now bellowing his head off, but
there was not a single tear in his blue eyes; it was plain to Andrew that the boy was having them all on. After years of raising Keely he was good at spotting this sort of manipulative and opportunistic behaviour in children, and prided himself on being immune to it. But he wasn’t.

‘Are you a thirsty wee man, are you?’ he crooned. ‘Aye, well, you mustn’t bite your mam. It isn’t polite.’ And he wandered off across the lawn where he put Duncan down to see how many unaided steps he might take today.

Tamar and Lucy looked at each other and rolled their eyes. ‘Did he hurt you?’ Tamar asked.

‘Yes,’ Lucy replied reproachfully, ‘the little ferret. He can be very impatient sometimes. And I’m sure he understands when I tell him no, but it doesn’t seem to have any effect on him.’ She blinked as her eyes filled with tears. ‘I wish James were here. Things would be so much easier.’

Tamar stood up and brushed off the seat of her pants. ‘I know, dear. I wish they all were. But they’re not, and we just have to accept that for now.’

The following morning, when Ian did not appear at the breakfast table at his usual time, Tamar’s unease rose up in her like a particularly nasty surge of indigestion as she recalled his excessively fond goodnight to her the previous evening.

‘You’ve not seen Ian this morning?’ she asked Lachie as he sat down.

‘No, I haven’t. I’ve just come down,’ he replied. ‘Why?’

‘He’s normally up and about by now but I haven’t seen him.’ She glanced up as Andrew came in and asked, ‘Have you seen Ian this morning, dear?’

Andrew stopped in his tracks and looked at her sharply, and in that instant they both knew. He went out again and Tamar could hear him pounding up the hall stairs. When he returned he had
a note in his hand, which he flung angrily at the table; it fluttered to the floor.

‘What is it?’ asked Lachie sharply.

Andrew replied stonily, ‘He’s gone.’

‘Oh,’ said Lachie, knowing full well what his brother-in-law was talking about: Ian had been going on about enlisting to anyone who would listen for months now.

Tamar bent and retrieved the note from under the table. She read:

Dear Mam and Da,

I expect I’ll be on the train to Wellington by the time you read this. I’m sorry I wasn’t able to break the news to you face to face, but I’ve enlisted. I did it last week but couldn’t bring myself to tell you because I knew how upset you’d be.

It’s for the best — I don’t think I could live with myself if I didn’t go and I would always be asking myself, why didn’t I?

I’ll write, and will try to get home for a quick visit before I go over seas.

I love you both and hope you can be proud of me.

Your loving son, Ian

France, August 1916

Ian pressed his face against the grimy glass of the troop train and watched as the French countryside rolled past. It was coming into autumn here and rain had fallen steadily since they’d arrived, but the land looked clean and crisp because of it.

He was one of a number of reinforcements who had been
temporarily stationed over the past few weeks at Sling Camp, the main New Zealand base in the heart of the great Salisbury Plain, and was extremely pleased to be shot of the place. It was damp, dismal and desperately bleak, the only sign of welcome a huge, shallow kiwi carved into the chalk of the bare hills rising behind the camp. The food was mediocre at best, the rats tenacious and the huts cold and draughty. Long route marches and remorseless training were daily occurrences, with endlessly repeated drill, rifle and trench-digging practice, Lewis gun instruction, wiring, bomb-handling and gas-mask drill. Recreational facilities were sparse, and once a man had visited Bulford and Tidworth villages a couple of times, and perhaps the ancient town of Amesbury if he had an interest in history, there was very little else to do.

So Ian and his cohorts hadn’t been at all sorry to farewell Sling, and had enjoyed the short trip across the Channel from Folkestone to Boulogne in a rather decrepit paddle-steamer, then on to the New Zealand infantry base at Étaples. Yesterday they had entrained for Armentières and hadn’t stopped for any length of time since. The train’s inadequate toilets had backed up long ago and men had taken to peeing out of the windows. They were bored now, and concealing their apprehension regarding their imminent arrival at the front beneath a veneer of irritatingly schoolboyish rowdiness, if the pained expressions on their officers’ faces were anything to go by. But they would reach Armentières soon and join up with the New Zealand Division shortly thereafter.

The Division had been in France since April, and was currently holding a nine-mile stretch of the line south-east of Armentières on the River Lys. The rumours of conditions at the front that filtered back to Sling Camp had been pretty grim, but Ian was relishing the anticipation currently fluttering in his stomach. Back home they had trained hard, honing their shooting skills, drilling and traipsing over the Rimutakas from Featherston Camp back
to Trentham in dreadful weather, then done it all again at Sling, and the time had almost come for them to put their new skills into practice.

When the train finally arrived at Armentières the light was fading but the reinforcements were ordered to march to New Zealand Divisional Headquarters at Estaires, some five miles further south. They got there too late for dinner, causing a swell of grumbling and a stern warning from officers against scrounging or stealing produce from the locals. By the time full darkness had descended the cookhouse had been reopened and was serving warmed-up bully and biscuits and cups of strong tea, but by then the men had been diverted by the fuzzy-edged glow on the horizon interspersed with brighter flashes coming from the battlefield. The rumble of guns was muffled by the atmospherics but the noise of heavy artillery was clearly audible, and Ian was surprised at how much of the sky was lit up. He went to sleep that night, stretched out under his greatcoat with his head resting on his kit, wondering how he would perform once he got into the middle of it all.

In the morning it was raining again, and Ian squelched through sticky, thoroughly churned mud to the latrines, holding his nose against the stink when he got there and piddling on his boot as a result. When he got back to his section everyone was present and accounted for and eagerly awaiting breakfast after last night’s meagre fare. The quality of this morning’s meal wasn’t much of an improvement but at least there was a decent amount of it, and Ian washed down a heaped plateful of porridge with several cups of fortifying army tea; this morning they would be marching into battle and he didn’t want to do it on an empty, nervous stomach.

As they sat waiting for the order to move out, having post-breakfast smokes and checking their gear yet again, he looked around at the men beside whom he would be fighting. Or at least
he hoped that would be the case — they had trained together in New Zealand, but it was highly likely they would be split up and slotted into whichever units needed replacements.

‘Fluffy’ Johnson, so named because his mother had made him a lovely rabbit fur hat and posted it to Trentham with a note entreating him to wear it pulled down over his ears on cool days, was sitting on a crate letting off a series of loud, regularly spaced farts. ‘Sorry, lads,’ he apologised sincerely, ‘it’s me guts. Always plays up when I’m feeling nervous.’

‘Yep, my old mum always reckons better out than in,’ commented Trevor Neill, a soldier with whom Ian had become firm friends since his early training days at Trentham.

Trevor was twenty-two years old, good-looking in a way that seemed to appeal to most women he met, a farm hand in civilian life, self-willed and utterly fearless, a hard drinker and a perpetual optimist. He’d been repeatedly hauled in front of the company commander during training, once or twice for cheek but more seriously for arriving back from leave shatteringly drunk, or not arriving back at all and having to be fetched by the military police, but none of this had even dented his spirit. It was rumoured that while on the mat he had once told the commander to stick his army rules up his arse, but because Trevor was such a good fighting man the major had declined, and quite gracefully too, apparently. Ian thought Trevor was splendid, almost as good a role model as Joseph, and thoroughly enjoyed his rough and ready company.

‘Although I think I prefer in,’ Trevor added, waving a hand in front of his face. ‘What you been eating, Fluffy?’

‘Same as you.’

‘Well, you stink.’

Fluffy looked affronted. ‘I said sorry, didn’t I? I can’t help it.’

Trevor made a show of getting up and moving away. ‘Safer over here,’ he said as he sat down again at a distance of at least ten feet.

Ian laughed loudly with everyone else, then sobered abruptly as a junior officer hurried towards them.

‘Mount up, men,’ he said officiously, which Ian thought was silly as none of them had horses. ‘We’re on our way in ten minutes.’

There was general milling about as the reinforcements rose and formed a long column in anticipation of the march out, after which they stood about shuffling their feet for another forty minutes. Finally the order came and they headed off, adjusting their step until they found the rhythm and marching with their heads up and their arms swinging.

The road out of Estaires was flat and dreary and rain smothered the countryside in miserable grey mist. Trees were still visible, however, spectral and silent in the fog, some already bare and others harbouring crows that cawed harshly as the men passed. They soon began to encounter bedraggled-looking groups of soldiers, who didn’t even look up as they trudged ghost-like out of the mist towards the rear. Blatting motorcycles also passed them, together with wagons drawn by listless-looking horses, and occasional trucks and ambulances. Here and there on either side of the road were discarded vehicles, tipped onto their sides or bogged down in the mud, and the carcasses of dead horses with teeth bared grotesquely behind shrinking, drying lips. As the column’s smart march degenerated into an unsynchronised plod and the surrounding landscape became increasingly ravaged, the chatter died away, silenced by the scale of destruction.

‘Christ,’ Ian said to Trevor, ‘they’ve had a good going over here.’ He glanced at his friend. ‘You nervous?’

‘Nah,’ Trevor replied cheerfully. ‘Too late to be getting windy now. Why, are you?’

‘Not really,’ Ian replied honestly. ‘It’s worse than I expected though.’

Trevor nodded, because he could only agree.

They reached the reserve line just before lunchtime, a deep trench running parallel to the front line but further back and more or less beyond the range of all but the heaviest artillery. Then, after a short rest and a rudimentary meal, they continued on towards the front. On their way through the trenches of the support lines, situated equidistantly between the reserve and the front trenches, they passed a group of New Zealand troops, crouched hollow-eyed, unshaven and plastered with mud around a billy suspended over a small fire. Ian’s hello was met with grunts but little else.

‘Miserable bastards,’ observed Trevor.

The column was signalled to a halt and they rested, squatting with their backs against the damp earth walls of the deep central communication trench and trying to keep their feet clear of the filthy water.

‘What are we stopping for?’ asked Fluffy.

No one answered. They lit up and waited. Presently Ian noticed a lieutenant sloshing down the trench towards them; he kicked a groove into the base of the opposite wall, settled his heels in it so he wouldn’t slide into the water, and squatted down.

‘We’ll be splitting up when we get to the forward trenches,’ he announced. There were groans of disappointment, which he waved away with an irritated flap of his hand. ‘Come on, you all knew it might happen. We’ve tried to keep as many of you together as we could.’ He then proceeded to designate who was to go where, explained that the column would be moving again in another fifteen minutes and told them for God’s sake to keep their heads down.

When they reached the front line, with its breastworks and deep zigzagging trenches that bordered No-Man’s-Land for miles and miles in both directions, the reason for the marked lack of enthusiasm they’d encountered earlier from the New Zealanders became clear. There was mud as far as the eye could see — on the
ground, in the trenches, all over the troops who peered from dugouts like filthy, glittery-eyed rats, on sinking duckboards optimistically but fruitlessly laid in areas of heavy traffic, and oozing down the sides of the deep, foul-smelling, water-filled craters that pocked what had once been verdant farmland. The whole area was a sea of dense, viscid mud, and it stank of death and, strangely, Ian thought, cat shit, and it sucked at a man’s boots with a life of its own.

They dropped into the main trench and were herded along to their new sections, Ian, Trevor and Fluffy to a unit that had been under-manned for some time. The original section had burrowed back into the trench walls in an attempt to protect themselves from shellfire, although not altogether successfully as one dugout had received a direct hit five days ago and four of their number had been killed instantly.