A Time for Courage (53 page)

‘Strange, ain’t it, Hannah,’ he drawled. ‘Mighty bloody strange way to fight a war.’ His voice was bitter.

She watched as he sipped his cocoa, his large body slumped in the chair, one leg lifted over the other and she knew that she wanted him because he was good and kind and beautiful and so she banked the fire with ash and went to him and took the mug and placed her hand in his, feeling the cocoa warmth still there.

‘I love you, Joe. Come with me, we have waited too long already.’ He did not move but his face was tense as he turned to her.

‘Marry me,’ he said.

She nodded. ‘Yes, but I can’t wait for that any more. We have so little time.’

She pulled his hand and he came with her, pausing at the door, pulling her to him.

‘But you still haven’t got the vote,’ he teased. ‘Weren’t we supposed to wait for that, my Cornish girl?’ He was smiling but his voice was shaking and his hands were moving over her body. The room was dark behind them, the mugs were on the table where they had left them.

Hannah took his face between her hands. ‘Don’t you worry. That’s on its way. The women will have earned it by the end of this stupid mess.’ She kissed him then, hard, before leading him from the room and up the stairs.

Her room was dark and she did not light the lamp because to do so would mean drawing the blackout blind and she wanted to watch the moonlit sky and the stars which were vivid and seemed so close tonight. She stood at the window and felt his arm around her, his breath on her hair and it was quiet and calm as she turned and lifted her face to his. This time their kisses were not soft but urgent.

His fingers were quick as he undid her buttons and carried her to the bed, where she lay and stroked his hair as he took her clothes from her body and kissed her breasts and shoulders and lips. As he stood and unbuttoned his uniform his body was white in the moonlight and big and strong as he moved towards her, sitting on the bed and running his finger along the line of neck and cheek, and chin, drawing her loose hair gently into his hand, bending his head to kiss it, breathe in its scent.

‘Are you sure, my darling?’ he asked and his voice was unsteady though hers was level and sure as she took his hand and kissed it.

‘Yes, I’m sure, my love, my darling love.’

He held her then, close to his body and he was warm, his hands were sure as he stroked her and she felt the wind on the moor and the sound of the gulls and then he brought his mouth down to hers but for a moment it was not his face she saw but the dark one of her father with his nicotine-laden breath. She made her eyes close and her body stay loose as Joe’s mouth touched hers gently, then harder now and with the taste of him came enough power and strength to take the other face, and push it from her.

I will not allow you to destroy this moment or any part of my life ever again, she told the echoes of his darkness, and now she let her body rise to Joe and banished her father from her life for ever. It was only Joe who would fill her body, her mind and her life and she cried out and clung to him, calling, ‘Stay with me, Joe.’

He replied, ‘I always will, my love.’

Harry sat in the garden at Penbrin. It was 1915 and the September sun was warm and the sumach glowed rich red in the gap in the elder hedge. Its bark was as smooth as the fur of the guinea-pigs which he had bought for the children who stayed here. He looked again at the letter he was writing to Hannah. He wrote of the gardener’s boy who had been killed at Ypres, of the guinea-pigs who had borne more young and, at last, of the fact that he could not stay out of the war any longer but would still not bear arms. I’ve written to Uncle Thomas, he continued, and he’s arranged that I should enlist as a medical orderly. So you see, Hannah, my days with you have helped to prepare me for my war. Don’t worry about Penbrin and the convalescents here because Eliza and Sam are stepping in. Keep sending those who need to come because they can spill over into Penhallon. Mrs Arness will keep things going over there.

If anything should happen to me I have lodged my will with my solicitor and you are the sole beneficiary. If I come back I thought we could start your school together, perhaps enlarge Penbrin. Joe would like that too. If something happens, go on with the idea anyway. I shall be here, all around you.

He sat back and the wicker chair creaked and then settled. He would not write of Esther, she was not allowed outside his head now. The larks were soaring in the distance, carving clean clear lines against the blue of the sky. Would she be wearing his ring as she slept with Arthur?

He heaved himself out of the chair, walking across the dried grass, pulling at the overblown roses and the bursting seeds of the marigolds, scooping up straw which had blown across from the hutches. The children were shrieking there, playing touch-tag around the hutches, their hair flicking as they ran. One boy sat on the back step and played jacks. Harry heard the click-click of the stones and for a moment felt the stronger heat of the South African sun, saw the flat veld and Baralong. He had never heard from his friend and he missed him.

He turned and looked back at the house, at the open windows and the sweet peas, lemon balm and lilac which filled the vases in each room. He could hear the coughing of the gassed fusilier and then his squeaky voice as he talked to his wife. Don’s lungs were damaged, they all knew that, but they did not know whether he would live. Harry doubted it. He looked out again across the moor. Would there be such beauty where he was going? He doubted that too.

A late October sun was shining when he disembarked at Le Havre from the troopship as a non-combatant. He was directed to a long low shed where he threw down his kitbag along with the others before lining up at the cooker with his mess tin and spoon. The guns were pounding dimly in the distance and before they slept they unloaded stores from the ships and brushed aside the small boys who pimped for their sisters.

The next day he was glad to move up the line, travelling in the troop train whose forty-five carriages carried nothing but khaki-clad men; singing, sleeping, grunting, cursing. At Bethune he was attached to a platoon as stretcher-bearer because he had asked to be sent to the front, not assigned to hospital duty. He listened as the men and boys talked and laughed marching from the village to the Cambrin trenches through the unlit streets, nudging at the flashes of gunfire which lit the sky and shook the earth, wincing at the noise which rolled like thunder over and through them. The cobbles of the village roads turned their ankles and now the mud of the dirt tracks dragged at their legs and talk died as they saw the real nature of war.

Flares rose from the front and curved over trenches, yellow and green and the noise grew too loud to talk. They passed the batteries and ducked as their own shells whizzed over their heads. He and Bob, the other stretcher-bearer, did not carry guns but a rolled-up stretcher, morphine and water bottles.

He looked at the lurching batteries as they pounded the enemy and heard the hissing shells overhead as they marched forward and west to the trenches, away from the belching guns. He saw the red flash, heard the hollow bangs and tried not to think of the German husbands, sons, brothers they had crushed and destroyed. One private turned to him.

‘How about that then, Harry?’ His face was filled with fear, his voice with the bravado of his eighteen years. Harry felt old.

‘Makes a lot of noise,’ he said. ‘It’ll frighten away the burglars.’ Tim laughed and turned back to his mate.

They marched until they reached a village with its broken trees standing like rotted teeth.

‘There are no birds any more,’ an old woman said to Harry, clutching his arm.

It was not dawn yet and so the only chorus was the guns. Was she right? Would no bird sing as the sun lifted in the east? He looked around. The buildings were half-ruined, the church spire was jagged and incomplete and, of course, there were the dismembered trees.

They were given respirators and field dressings as they queued outside an old doctor’s surgery, and Harry’s legs felt tired, his calves ached from the marching, his shoulders from the knapsack, his ears and head from the noise. The sergeant handed him a gauze pad filled with chemically treated cotton waste.

‘Should sort that gas out, eh?’ said Bob and Harry nodded but he heard Don’s cough again, his squeaky voice and knew that he had been wearing the mask when gas filled the trench and lay heavy within its sides. So it would not sort the gas out, would it? But he said nothing.

They moved on again now, clinking and stamping from the village along the straight, crowded road, bypassing lorries and horses before entering the trenches which ran for what seemed like miles. As he walked in the darkness his feet slipped on mice and frogs which had fallen down the sides and could now find no way out. With the dawn came the light and he saw that the earth was dull red and that duckboards lay along the bottom of the trench, nudged by the water which lapped at its sides.

Still they marched and in front of him Tim changed his rifle to his other shoulder, and ahead Harry could hear their guide calling out the warnings. ‘Hole here!’

They flattened themselves into the sides and eased round the sump pit which was supposed to drain the trench but did not.

‘Wire low!’

‘Wire high!’

They eased themselves over or under the field telephone wires whose pinioning staples had dropped from the damp crumbling mud of the trench walls. The gunfire was closer but they hardly noticed any more. Can one become attuned so swiftly, Harry thought.

The trench was not so deep now and they kept their heads low, only Tim forgot and a bullet tore into his throat. Harry caught him as he sagged and his blood spurted on to the man in front and all over Harry’s hand and face. He wanted to rub it from him, this wet sticky mess, and then run and run but instead he called Bob and they put the gurgling boy on a stretcher and returned over and under the wires, round the sump pits, ignoring the frogs and mice until they reached the dressing station where they left Timmy, but he was dead and it was only then that Harry began to shake.

The rain was falling on the canvas of the Red Cross tent as Harry at last washed off the blood, watching as stained water filled the enamel bowl. He lifted his head to the drizzle which was now falling, and it was welcome on his face. He lifted it to the noise which he now knew never stopped. Dear God, what had he come to, what had they all come to? The rain was soaking his clothes now but he did not feel cold as they returned to the trench. They passed men huddled over a brazier and their clothes were steaming in its heat. The coals glowed through the holes and he thought of hot chestnuts and London with its theatres, its restaurants, its noise of trams and cars and horses, not this thump and thud of guns.

The walk back along the trenches seemed longer now without the other men and their boots sounded hollow on the mud-stained boards. He and Bob did not speak and Harry looked up at the sky and wished he could talk in the open, away from the smell of wet earth, excrement and blood, away from the blinkered trench. A fatigue party approached carrying bundles of sandbags and lengths of timber and Harry put out his arm pressing Bob against the side of the trench. Wet earth fell down his neck. As the party passed the rifle of one caught Harry’s cheek and the blow knocked his head to one side; blood trickled to his chin.

‘Serve you right, you bloody conchie,’ the sergeant said, and Harry felt cold but returned the man’s stare. He had a moustache like the father who had disowned him.

‘Yellow, that’s what you are,’ hissed another, his face too close, his teeth rotten like the trees.

Harry did not look at Bob nor Bob at him. They waited until the party had passed and then moved forward, quickly now because their own platoon no longer said that to them any more. Harry knew that Bob’s family did not speak to him because he was a non-combatant, that his father had thrown his clothes out in the street but he knew nothing else. One did not ask other conchies about the paths they had taken, the blows they had received.

As autumn turned to winter the rain continued and they were never dry and this was noticed more by the officers because they had only known comfort and ease. Sometimes the frost cracked on their khaki as they moved and Harry’s hands could not feel the stretcher as they carried those wounded by sniper fire. The battalion frontage was 500 yards long and casualties were many, usually head injuries. The men froze and longed for a ‘push’ which might give them a ‘blighty’, a wound that would be their ticket home, though it would more likely bring them death as it had done to the soldiers at Neuve Chapelle in March, to the 50,000 French at Champagne in February, to the 60,000 dead at St Mihiel, the 120,000 at Arras in May, the thousands and thousands and thousands at Ypres in April and May, at Loos in November. And on and on and on it went and there was no advance, no victory, no sense to any of it, just the slaughter.

It was a crisp cold night when their sergeant forgot to duck below a wire as he followed Harry down the trench on Christmas Eve, and a sniper took off the top of his head. Harry barely noticed the blood which splashed his face. There had been too much of it.

‘Stretcher-bearer,’ he called and Bob came and together they took him back past working parties who were filling sandbags with earth, piling them up like bricks, headers and stretchers alternating. As Harry passed he heard the thud of the spades as they patted the bags flat. He was sorry the sergeant was dead, they had shared cigarettes together and joked about the weather; but slowly he was learning not to like people too much for in time they died and he was too tired anyway.

Sentries stood on the fire-steps, stamping their feet and blowing on their hands. It was only the new men now who ground out the word ‘coward’ into their faces for the others had been through two pushes with them and had seen Harry ease out over the top and bring back the men long before dusk because he could not bear to hear their cries.

Bob slipped on the duckboards and the sergeant’s arm flopped nearly to the ground but he was dead and so it did not matter. The dressing station was full as always and Harry wiped his mouth and leant against a lorry with mud-covered wheels while Bob talked to the doctor. Dusk was drawing near but the ground still shook as shells plunged to the ground as they did each day. He lifted his head and enjoyed the air, the sky, the horizon but knew that in a moment he must return to the claustrophobia of the trench network.