Shamrock Green (48 page)

The sunken road south-west of the village was the first objective.

English riflemen would move in behind to consolidate ground taken. Brigadier Crozier had explained it in detail. Crozier was a small man, almost dwarf-like. He strutted through the shallow trenches, undetected by the enemy, to remind each man that this was the chance they'd all been waiting for since training days. Gowry wished he could be more like the brigadier, a bred-in-the-bone soldier, defiant in the face of death.

The road lay five hundred yards beyond the Germans' front-line trench. There were several concrete strongpoints and dugouts among the ruins. At noon a salvo from the heavy artillery would signal the beginning of the attack. You could hear nothing through the infernal racket of German shelling. When you pulled yourself to your feet the sound of the bombardment seemed as dense and all-enveloping as fog. The morning was fair, though, cloud high and puffy, like shell bursts frozen in the stratosphere.

When the signal came Gowry scrambled to his feet. One man, quite far along the grid, went down immediately, then another. There would be no attack for them, no glory. Gowry heard the chant of Irish pipes, thin and fragile in the uproar, saw Crozier raise his arm, heard the crack of a revolver. He clawed at the earth and hoisted himself over the parapet.

The shelling was hard ahead. Squalls of machine-gun fire. He walked forward, a nice, neat, steady pace. He felt as if he were walking into a sea of absolute sound. Then he was running. They were all running. From the corner of his eye he could see the little brigadier running too, fat legs pumping, mouth wide open. Gowry opened his mouth and yelled. The chap beside him buckled and fell. Another chap a half step ahead flung up his arms as a little palmate explosion of dirt blew him off his feet. Gowry shouted louder and ran faster. Jerries were swarming out of the trench like rats from a trough. He went at them with the bayonet, all detachment gone, just another wild Irishman, swept along on the skirts of the pipes, stabbing and butting and running with the pack.

Jerry was surprised and disorganised. Jerry fell back. Jerry fell down. Jerry lay dead on the ground, dead in the rubble. Jerry bled and squealed and surrendered. Jerry begged for mercy –
Kamerad, Kamerad
– or sullenly surrendered his arms. Jerry was passed over, passed back, funnelled away into the ranks of the riflemen, into shell holes and shelling and bullets from Jerry machine-gunners behind the quarries north of Trônes Wood. Shot, bayoneted, brained, poor old Jerry got the worst of it in that mad Irish rush on Guillemont in the half-hour after noon.

When he reached the top of the road Gowry walked on corpses as he might have walked on cobblestones.

‘Good man,' said the brigadier.

‘Stand firm,' said the sergeant.

‘Dig in,' the corporal told him.

‘Bugger off,' said a voice in Gowry's head.

In his excitement he would have gone on running, alone at last, away along the road to Ginchy if someone hadn't dragged him on to the slope of the sunken road and shouted in his ear:
‘Stop.'

Panting, sweating, splattered with blood, Gowry obeyed.

The objective had been achieved, it seemed.

Yes, the objective had been achieved.

*   *   *

He was working with the others, strengthening the parapets in expectation of a German counter-attack when a Connaught sergeant came up and tapped him on the shoulder.

‘You McCulloch?'

‘Yes, Sergeant, I am.'

‘You that pal o' Maurice Leonard?'

‘Yes.'

‘The bus-driver?'

‘Who told you I was a bus-driver?' said Gowry.

‘Maurice. Said you had a shine for his old mother. Said you drove the bus out for to see her whenever you could. Thought it a great joke, old Maurice.'

‘Maurice – Sergeant Leonard's dead.'

‘Sure an' he is, but I'm alive an' kicking an' I got a job for you.'

‘Job? What sort of job?' Gowry said.

‘Spot o' the old drivin'.'

‘I'm not Transport.'

‘You are now, son,' the sergeant said.

*   *   *

The nut had been cracked. Guillemont had been taken. The Irish volunteers had written their name in the footnote of history. Now, just an hour after jump-off, the Munsters were passing through the Connaughts and by two or two thirty the 6th Royal Irish would advance on Wedge Wood. The victory had not been achieved without heavy loss, however, and when Gowry was led down a chain of captured German trenches he saw why the sergeant had been sent out to find a driver. The trenches were littered with wounded, more wounded than Gowry had ever seen in one place before, many dead among them, many dying. The medical orderlies who had come up from the rear were few in number, for they had been caught in crossfire off the quarries. Evacuating the wounded would not be easy, for the casualties would have to be carried across open country to a clearing station a thousand yards beyond Trônes Wood.

Gowry leaned on the side of the trench and looked through the battered periscope that the sergeant had commandeered.

‘See it?' the sergeant asked.

‘See what?' said Gowry.

‘The tin lizzie.'

‘Where?'

‘Big crater, left of it, on the bridge.'

‘Bridge?'

‘You thick?'

‘No, no, no,' said Gowry. ‘I see it – I think.'

The little field ambulance was a Ford Model T, purchased from the Americans by the Red Cross. It should not have been there but the drivers of the vehicles were brave to the point of recklessness and made it a point of pride to get as close to the fighting as possible. He had seen wrecked ambulances often enough, torn apart by a single grenade or tipped over and burned out in the bottom of shell holes. The image in the mirror of the periscope was blurred by smoke and dust but the Ford, sitting perkily on the breast of the wheat field, seemed to be intact.

‘What do you want me to do about it?' Gowry said. ‘I'm not a fitter. I don't know how these things work. You need a Transport johnny.'

‘I know I do,' said the sergeant, ‘but what I've got, son, is you.'

‘Jesus!' said Gowry, peevishly.

‘Don't blame me,' said the sergeant. ‘Blame old Maurice's big gob.'

Gowry peered into the slot at the base of the periscope.

There seemed to be a heck of a lot of activity among the shell holes, men crawling about and waving. There was no one within two hundred yards of the ambulance, though, and that was worrying.

He pulled away from the mirror and blew out his cheeks.

The sergeant, leaning on his shoulder, handed him a lighted cigarette.

Gowry took it and looked up at the sky.

Flimsy paste and paper aeroplanes continued to circle overhead. He watched the planes for a moment, dragged on the cigarette, then applied himself once more to the periscope.

The bombardment had eased but the punch-bag slap of mortars continued and the sharp, stinging snap of trench torpedoes – whatever Jerry could find in the dumps behind the bunkers that ringed Ginchy and flanked the battlefield. Gowry saw shells exploding and vertical plumes of dirt rising, and in the distance, more than half a mile off, the relic of Trônes Wood.

‘Who's in the ambulance?' he asked.

‘None o' your business.'

‘Big-wig, is it?'

‘Big enough,' the sergeant admitted. ‘Can you bring it in?'

‘Is it stuck?'

‘How do I know? Can you drive it?'

He had dug out Flanagan's charabanc one wild March day when snow had filled the pass at Raynor and he had rescued Des O'Neill and his little bus with a winch and a towrope from a flooded road near Ardee. He knew about engines and axles and towropes and had heard that the Model T was so tough you could bounce it along on three wheels for ten or a dozen miles over rough terrain. The lizzie looked so lonely and vulnerable, like a child lost in the wilderness, that Gowry felt a strange urge to rescue it.

‘I can drive it,' Gowry said, ‘if I can get to it.'

‘It's behind our front lines, you know.'

‘Is it? Then what's makin' that bloody racket on the flank? Pixies?'

‘None o' your lip, McCulloch. Grab what you need an' fetch—'

‘Where's the crew?'

‘No crew. The crew's had it.'

‘I see,' Gowry said.

‘I'm givin' you an order, McCulloch.'

‘Sure an' you are, Sergeant,' Gowry said. ‘An' I'm obeying it.'

Stripping off his webbing, Gowry rolled up his shirt-sleeves, tightened the strap on his helmet, and went over the top once more.

*   *   *

It was a beautiful afternoon in the Ecole de Saint-Emile. Patients were out in force on the lawns. Some were playing boules, a couple had even ventured on to the tennis court, but the majority were resting in the shade of the trees or, still bed-ridden, enjoyed the late-summer breeze that drifted through the cloisters. It seemed a shame, Becky thought, to be leaving France on such a pretty day, putting all this behind her for rainy old England.

Morphine had taken the edge off her reasoning and under its influence she had become a dreamy optimist, half in love with the progress of her illness and unaware of its seriousness.

The bleeding had started suddenly and dramatically. She had staggered back from the operating table with blood pouring down her legs. Her first thought as she slumped to the floor was that she had been pregnant and that God was punishing her for loving Gowry by taking the baby away. Silly, of course; she was a trained nurse and would surely have known if she'd been pregnant.

Bobby Bracknell had peered down at her. A surgical mask covered his face and he had a retractor in his hand. On his gown, she'd noticed, was a very neat, very large splodge of fresh blood, like a map of Australia.

‘Oh, damnation!' the captain had said crossly. ‘Will someone please get her out of here. Women! I don't know!' and had gone back to his work while two orderlies had eased Becky on to a stretcher and carried her out.

That same night, very late, Mr Sanderson had performed surgery.

The right kidney was diseased beyond treatment, a little smooth blackened bullet of a thing that the surgeon had dropped into an enamel basin and covered with a strip of gauze. Timorous manifestations were already apparent on the left kidney. Mr Sanderson had expressed amazement that Becky hadn't complained or suffered more obvious symptoms, but, as Angela pointed out, Becky was a modest person and had been ailing since Christmas.

Surgery had been extensive and destructive. Becky had been very ill afterwards, too ill to be shipped out to recuperate or – though nobody dared say it – to die in transit. Here in Saint-Emile she was among friends and had lain for three weeks in a screened bed in a cloister ward.

Morphine had taken away the edge of her pain and dulled her fear. She had slept when the pain allowed and had demanded no prognosis from her colleagues. She seemed not so much defeated as resigned, as if all that had happened while the disease was taking root had been part of a pattern, war and love and sacrifice all linked together.

When Angela read Gowry's letters aloud to her, Becky smiled and nodded but when Angela offered to write to Gowry on her behalf Becky had become quite angry and refused to burden her poor Irishman with her woes. Raising herself from the pillows, straining at the drainage tubes, she'd told Angela in no uncertain terms that she'd be furious if anyone informed Gowry of her changed circumstances, for she only wanted his love, not his pity.

She had, however, dictated letters to her mother and to her sister in Portsmouth, informing them that she'd been knocked out by an infection and would be coming home to recover. She told them no more, not that she'd fallen in love or had undergone surgery or that her days in the sun might be shorter than anyone had ever anticipated.

Then she was ready, ready and wrapped up like a soldier. She had her belongings with her; her uniform too, packed in a brand-new kitbag. The flowers that Mr Sanderson had picked and fashioned into two small posies rested on the blanket, together with fruit Angela had brought and three large bars of chocolate that Captain Bracknell had saved from his last parcel from Fortnum & Mason. Becky had no appetite for chocolate, for anything. She was as thin as a rake, her sturdy little body so emaciated that she looked frightfully pale and interesting, Angela said, like one of the debutantes in
Tatler.

‘When you're well, you'll come back to us, won't you?'

‘Of course I will,' said Becky, in a whisper. ‘If you're still here.'

‘Oh, we'll be here,' said Angela. ‘We ain't going nowhere for a long time yet and if we are moved on, you'll catch up with us.'

‘Are you comfortable?' Mr Sanderson enquired.

‘Yes, I feel like a lady, being carted about in style.'

‘Cleopatra,' Bobby Bracknell said, ‘Queen of the Nile.'

They were not themselves, Becky thought, not the people she had known. Already they had become strangers. Awkwardness had altered them; time and distance would change them even more. There would be a few letters, cards at Christmas, a small celebration when the war finally ended, then they would fade into memory. She would remember them all with affection, though, even despicable Bobby Bracknell, who probably couldn't help himself.

Sister Congreve said, ‘Your records have been forwarded to Rolleston Hospital in London. You'll be met at the docks by an RAMC officer, someone who knows who you are and what sort of treatment you require.' She glanced round at Mr Sanderson, who nodded gravely. ‘After that, it'll be off home to that Scottish island for you, my girl, and a lot of fresh air and porridge to build you up and make you well again.'

‘Meanwhile, take care of your label,' Captain Bracknell told her.

The label was tied to a button of her overcoat. Scribbled on it, in the cabalistic script that only nurses and doctors understood, was a record of her treatment. She had no interest in reading the label. She was in their hands now. The MOs would see her safely home. She had nothing to worry about, nothing. Gowry wouldn't know what had happened to her, how she had changed, how she had let him down. She would become
his
dream,
his
memory, as poignant and mysterious as Robbie had been for her.