Gallipoli Street (31 page)

He took her quickly, her cries spurring him on; their passion burned their skin and filled their senses. He felt her name draw from his throat as the intensity exploded and he climaxed within her, unable to stop, drawing himself to and fro. She rolled him onto his back and traced his arms and shoulders with her mouth and lower, down his stomach, and soon he was ready again. Rose took control this time, riding on top and finding her passion in full force. Soon it was her turn to cry out and she clenched and shuddered over and over as he drove hard and fast, grabbing her firmly and joining her.

It was some time later, as they lay naked and sprawled, his hand tracing circles on her breasts, when he finally spoke. ‘I can never give you up now.'

Strange that he should choose the same words that Gregory had once used at Greenshades, Rose mused, and strange how different they made her feel when she felt the same way.

Bolougne, 23 July 1916

Twenty-three days. Twenty-three days and twenty-three nights that were distinguished by light and dark and little else. Man after man, torn, ripped. Pale and dying. Alive and tortured with pain. Dead.

The town was filled to capacity, as was Calais, and still they came. Later ‘the Somme' would be a name synonymous with loss as they came to know the true extent of the cost. Hundreds of thousands more would die and many more would be wounded, but for now great chunks of the glorious British army lay in shattered threads on the fields of France. Some were sent mad from the terror of the constant rain of shells – bombardments so severe news reports told they could be heard from England. Others were victims of a new torment: poison gas. One young man clung to Emma the whole way in the ambulance, shaking and in shock, constantly crying out his poor mate's name, only to die as they reached Boulogne. Others were stretchered into hospitals only for doctors to find them already cold on the table. Often they never found out which injury killed them.

The new Australian troops had been thrown to the slaughter at Fromelles, a woefully misjudged attack that left many of them exposed in open fields at the mercy of German machine guns. Five thousand casualties and no ground taken. Rose knew she would never be able to wipe the images of stilled young faces and near-new uniforms from her mind.

She'd stopped being able to eat, being able to sleep. Rose was living a nightmare that had rudely interrupted her beautiful dream, and what little time she had to think of Clarkson was shared with duty now as she hurtled along towards more mutilation and death. Brief stolen moments of fear as she scanned the skies as she drove, searching for his plane, in constant dread of death streams lining the blue.

He was caught just as she was in an exploded world, the beasts locked in ferocious battle now, teeth bared and tearing in bloody madness.

Still, somehow he had managed to send her a message. Just a small box with a single chess piece inside. Someone would sit to play one day and wonder where on earth the queen had got to.

She was pulling into the station, returning with more wounded from the front with Emma and Beatrice, when Private Ben Hill ran towards them.

‘It's Pozières. Heavy losses. We need to get up there now.'

The girls didn't comment, just helped unload in practised haste and jumped back in with Ben, heading towards the French village in silence. After Fromelles they dreaded what carnage they would find.

Clarkson searched the late-morning sky as Captain Roger Standing came up behind him. ‘He's down.'

Clarkson looked to the ground, forcing emotions away as he struggled to accept it.

‘Major says you're not to go up for a few hours. Says he knows you're on no sleep for days and he needs you alert,' he continued, clearing his throat as his own eyes filled. ‘Try and get some rest, Clarkson. There's nothing else we can do now.'

Clarkson stared at the plumes of smoke that billowed on the horizon. ‘He may still be alive.'

Standing nodded, patting Clarkson's shoulder before moving back to barracks and leaving him to his thoughts. Rookie's face imprinted itself on his mind; the image of him waving, his smile enormous beneath his goggles as he and Rose watched him fly over them that day.

He shook his head and strode towards his car. Damn doing nothing and damn sleeping. Rookie could be there, lying in the fields near Pozières, waiting for someone to find him and take him to the clearing station. To where Rose most likely was.

Gregory flattened himself against the wall, heaving. Why the hell had they chosen his regiment, the British 17th Warwickshire, to support these bloody mad Australians? They fought wars like they did everything else. Rash, undisciplined and reckless.

A bomb exploded nearby and he saw Second Lieutenant Pankhurst's body fly past, landing in a lifeless heap in the rubble, a great gash across his neck and chest. Stupid fool, he thought, angry and repulsed at the same time. How had they got so bloody close? Why had he listened to Pankhurst when he'd suggested cutting through this part of the village? Gregory's heart pounded and he decided there was only one thing for it.

‘Retreat!' He called to his party.

‘But, Captain–'

‘You heard me, move back!' Gregory yelled. He'd done everything he could to stay alive in this damn war and he wasn't about to die now.

Clarkson pulled over, trying to take in the sheer scale of the wounded and the desperate efforts of those trying to save them at the clearing station. Hundreds of maimed men, perhaps thousands. All was in constant flux: stretchers, ambulances, white cotton covered in blood. Dead bodies. A savage scramble for life under deafening shelling that promised more death.

He drove around it, scanning the fields nearby, hoping for some sign of Rookie's plane. There was nothing. Only farmland littered with the incongruous articles of war. He parked the car, unable to progress any further, and made his way across to the front of the station, where the men were being stretchered in from aid posts. And there among it all, checking each passing casualty, issuing instructions and covered in the blood of her boys, was his Rose.

The bombs were echoing deep in her core. Rose well understood how the men continued to shake like leaves after days of it crashing through their nerves. The wounded kept coming, some not even on stretchers, just carried, often by other wounded.

‘Take him to the right and bandage that gash hard, here.' She pointed where the blood continued to pour out from the man's shin, knowing he would likely lose his leg.

Cut, burned, gassed, shot. It came in a blur as she worked.

Clar
kson.

Everything else didn't seem real then, like she was standing inside one of her own dreams, knowing she would wake up. He was here. Something was whole and alive. Death wasn't clutching at him. Not yet.

He came and took the corner of the next stretcher, winking at her and giving her his slow dazzling smile. Rose smiled back and, somehow, it was all she needed.

They worked together, the tall pilot and the redheaded ambulance driver, doing what they could to hold the lifeblood inside the Australians that afternoon. It wasn't what either of them would ever have imagined they would choose to do – bear witness to atrocity and gruesome suffering for hours on end. But there was nowhere else either of them would have chosen to be. The beasts had sliced with their claws and ripped great chunks of flesh in a frenzy of killing and the giant lay bleeding, torn and decimated at their feet. They would do whatever it took to save the pieces that were left.