The Blasphemer: A Novel (15 page)

‘Imagine lining up to collect your rifle and being handed a set of bloody bagpipes instead.’

Macintyre adopts a Scottish accent. ‘Hang on, Sarn’t, can’t I have a rifle like everyone else?’

Andrew slips into Scottish as well: ‘Nae, laddie, it’s the pipes for yous.’

‘But why, Sarn’t?’

‘Because Fritz hates the sound of them. Drives him mad with rage. But this is good, see, because he uses up all his ammo trying to shoot the piper.’

‘Oh … I see.’

There is laughter, but it soon dries. The men return to their mugs of tea and their private thoughts. The cook arrives with a pot of cold Maconochie’s stew and disappears again in search of a dixie stove to heat it on. Macintyre sharpens his bayonet. ‘You scared, Andy?’

Andrew starts guiltily. ‘No.’

‘Well, I am.’

‘I heard they shot some poor toerag this morning. He’d been trying to get over to the German line, getting himself took prisoner. Court-martialled him yesterday.’

‘Where you hear that then?’

‘Cookie. He heard it from the CSM. They always do it before a big attack. Encourages the rest of us.’

‘I heard that one of the rifles in them firing squads has a blank in it. You don’t know which one it is.’

‘That’s not true.’

‘It bleedin’ is.’

The day has darkened. The clouds overhead are bulging and inky black. A moustachioed captain appears at the mouth of the trench, his young face framing old eyes. ‘This Oxford Street?’ Without waiting for an answer he makes his way forward, followed by a muddy-faced unit wearing the insignia of the Sheffield Pals. He turns to address them. ‘You’re going to have to wait here for a minute, men, while I find out from BHQ where they want us to go.’ He turns to Andrew’s platoon. ‘Where’s your officer?’

Five extended arms silently direct him to the dugout.

Macintyre offers a cigarette to one of the new arrivals and they
light them off a single shielded match. An official photographer, as identified by his armband, begins setting up a wooden box on a tripod, an Imperial quarter-plate camera. ‘Come on then, you two,’ he says, pointing at Andrew and a man from the new unit. ‘Big smiles for the folks back home.’

Andrew feels a comradely arm move around his shoulder. He smiles tensely at the camera, the whiteness of his eyes exaggerated by the dried mud splashes on his face. A fissure in the cloud affords a moment of watery sunlight and this coincides with the clatter of the camera shutter. As the two men pull apart, their eyes meet briefly. They grin shyly at one another and return to their own platoons.

The photographer asks Andrew his name.

‘Private Andrew Kennedy, Eleventh Shropshire Fusiliers.’

‘And his name?’

‘Don’t know.’

As the photographer heads over to the other platoon, the captain emerges from the dugout. ‘Right, men,’ he says. ‘On we go. Next stop Piccadilly.’

‘Piccadilly is back that way,’ Colour Sergeant Major Davies says, cocking a thumb over his shoulder.

‘Is it? Right, men, about face, back the way we came.’

Andrew lays his head on a sandbag and tries to get some rest, but once again sleep proves impossible. There is a constant rattle of discarded tin cans moving against each other. The rats are turning them over. The parachute flares they saw in the distance the night before are overhead now. One rocket hisses waveringly into the air directly above them. It leaves a trail of smoke as it begins its spinning descent. Andrew can hear Germans singing ‘
Wacht am Rhein
’ and calling out in nasal voices: ‘Hey, Tommee!’ and ‘Wake up, Tommee.’ He gives up trying to sleep and rewraps his sodden puttees, working up from ankle to calf. Star shells are also illuminating the waiting night, silhouetting the corkscrew spikes across no-man’s-land.

An hour before the attack, the weather sours. Black rain. And as the squall intensifies, so does the British bombardment. The German guns answer back, though none of their shells is landing near the waiting infantry. What does land, with a clatter, feet away from where Andrew stands, is a mortar bomb, a ‘plumb pudding’ fired in error from a British reserve trench thirty yards behind them. Andrew stares at it, transfixed. Heat waves are rising off its metal casing. It is the size and shape of a football, with its solid tail still smouldering. A powerful smell of cordite reaches his nostrils, but the bomb does not explode. Other men who have also been staring at it dive for nearby funk holes, and Andrew joins them. Colour Sergeant Major Davies pounds around the corner and orders an evacuation of the trench. They wait in a communication trench for an engineer to arrive and take out the fuse. In shock at their near escape, the men begin laughing. Even the CSM manages a smile. ‘Well, there you go, lads,’ he says. ‘Charmed bleeding lives.’

At zero hour, the ground undulates as a mine explodes half a mile away. Where Andrew is standing, he can feel its shock waves in his bones. The barrage that has been raging for three weeks stops abruptly. The dense silence that follows pounds in Andrew’s head, pressing against his eardrums. He thinks there is ringing in his ears, but it is the first wave going over the top – dogs trained to respond to a whistle – and the sound is followed by the
zup-zup-zup
of distant machine-gun fire. The British bombardment begins again, with shrapnel shells arcing through the sky overhead, and Andrew and Macintyre take it in turns to look through a periscope at the long, jagged line of flames bursting from the ground fifty yards in front of the advancing troops. What was it they had been told? Advancing troops must follow the flames ‘like a horse follows a nosebag’. Running. No longer weighed down by 66lb of kit. Lessons have been learned. The creeping barrage has begun. The
German machine gunners will not survive it.

Ten minutes pass as the men of the 11th Battalion listen with colour-drained faces to the continuing patter of enemy machine guns. A commotion is heard in the trench ahead of them. Muffled shouting. Boots being sucked by mud. Stretcher-bearers wearing Red Cross armbands appear with a wounded soldier. Andrew steps to one side to let them past. There is no blood on the man.
‘What’s his trouble?’ someone shouts.

‘That mine,’ the second stretcher-bearer says over his shoulder.

‘He was bracing himself and the shock wave snapped his legs. Daft bastard.’

‘Lucky bastard,’ Macintyre corrects.

First light has still not punctured the nimbus clouds when the CSM gives the order to move up to the next trench. With the rain ricocheting off their helmets, the men scuttle like crabs, crouched over and moving from one side of the trench to the other as they follow its dogtoothed line. In the darkness up ahead there is scuffling and shoving. They make way for a steady stream of stretchers bearing wounded men from the first and second waves. Their eyes are cloudy, their skin pale. Andrew can smell the vapour of warm human blood following in their wake and, like a bullock spooked in an abattoir, he begins to shake. When a corporal with a blood-spattered face pushes blindly past him, he gags.

When they reach the front trench, the quartermaster comes round with an earthenware flagon marked SRD – ‘Service Ration Depot’ officially,’Soon Runs Dry’ unofficially – and pours rum into shaking tin cups. As soon as he has drained his, Andrew yawns uncontrollably. Feeling as if his bowels have turned to water, he wishes he had been able to go this morning. He opens and closes his hands to relieve the tingling sensation in them. He feels numb. More than anything he feels he needs more time – another year, another month, another day, even another hour. To take his mind off the attack he rechecks his kitbag. He unpacks his three days’ rations, his folded waterproof sheet, his water bottle and entrenching tool, his four grenades, his ammunition pouches and his bandolier, before packing them all back in again. His box respirator is missing. He realizes he has it around his neck. Without taking it off, he tries to wipe clean the goggles set into the Phenate-Hexamine helmet, making the glass squeak – they are clouded over from the inside and will not come clear. The cloudiness reminds him of the wounded men he has seen. Their eyes.

When the order comes to stand by the scaling ladders, Andrew’s pulse quickens and he feels his testicles contract. He is breathing
heavily. Macintyre hears him and tries to smile reassuringly, but the smile comes out as a grimace. Andrew can see the fear entering his friend’s heart too. ‘Lice,Will,’ he shouts. ‘Chats is the name for lice.’

‘Right,’ Macintyre shouts back. ‘Thanks.’

Andrew sees the CSM pacing up and down, shouting orders, but he can no longer hear him. Blood is roaring in his ears. He needs to urinate. A feeling of inertia is creeping over him. He’s no longer sure he will be able to climb the ladder. All his fears, he knows, lie over these sandbags – fears not of pain but of annihilation, of ceasing to exist, of unimaginable emptiness. Yet for weeks he has been willingly drawn to this moment, pulled towards this line – on the overnight crossing from Southampton to Le Havre, on the cattle train from Étaples, on the road to Ypres, along the trenches to no-man’s-land …

The name terrifies him. No-man’s-land. A land where men do not belong.

‘Fix bayonets!’ the CSM orders in a rising growl.

There is a scrape of steel along the trench. Andrew’s hands are shaking again and it takes him several attempts to align the hilt of his bayonet to the rifle’s lug. He leans forward on to his rifle to set the weapon firmly and give it a quarter turn. His eyes close. When he opens them again he sees a rat squatting behind an ammunition crate. He stares at it. It stares back, its eyes two black beads. It runs a paw over its snout, as if scratching an itch. Andrew closes his eyes again. He can taste vomit in his mouth. He spits it out and opens his eyes. The rat has gone.

‘Put one up!’

Bolts are drawn back and .303 bullets loaded into Lee-Enfield chambers. Andrew presses his back teeth together to stop them chattering and, quite unexpectedly, gravity falls upon him.

I’m not going to let the CSM down. I’m not going to let Dorothy down. I’m not going to let Will down.

He holds out his hand towards Macintyre. It is no longer trembling.

Macintyre takes it in his and presses it hard. Comrades shaking hands. ‘When we go over, Andy …’

‘What?’

‘Try not to trip me up with your big clumsy feet.’

Andrew manages a smile. If this is to be the hour of his death, he thinks, he will meet it with a steady eye. Like a man. Like a soldier. He feels the heat of the rum and, with it, a surge of adrenalin. A new bombardment begins. It is more nerve-jarring than previous ones and so heavy the air liquefies – a heavy liquid, dense and metallic. Andrew tries to imagine he is back at home in Shropshire, caught in a lightning storm. He also tries to count the gaps between the flashes and the rolls of thunder like he did as a child, but the explosions are so loud he is unable to get beyond three – so loud that for one moment he cannot even recall his own name. Private something. Kennedy. Private Andrew Kennedy, 11th Battalion, Shropshire Fusiliers. There are no gaps in the thunder now anyway. It is rolling in unbroken waves. And the displacement of air caused by the shells overhead catches the whole of the line in a hurricane. At every report Andrew feels as if his scalp is being removed. Under his boots the earth is shuddering, ecstatic tremors that carry up his legs. In his confusion he imagines he sees the top of the parapet moving. It is only the terrified rats fleeing. They have become hysterical. Andrew looks at Macintyre and realizes what he feels for his old friend, at this minute, on this day, is something approaching love. Something beyond love. Macintyre shouts at him but his words are drowned out. Andrew can see his friend’s lips move and tries to shout back but he cannot hear himself. He wants to tell Macintyre that they will keep together. Instead, he grabs his hand again. They will go over the top hand in hand, as they had gone to Sunday school. Andrew watches the subaltern stand on a firestep, a Webley revolver in one hand and a whistle in the other. He watches the whistle reach the officer’s lips and his cheeks puff out as he blows. But he does not hear the sound. Others do and begin scrambling up the ladders. As Andrew follows them, still holding Macintyre’s hand, the weight of his kitbag almost pulls him backwards. Then it comes to him: anger. He hears a voice saying: ‘
Shit, shit, shit
.’ The word is repeated again and again. He realizes it is rising from his own throat, increasing in volume until it turns into
a shouted noise, a battle cry. They are all doing it, hundreds of them along the line as they scale the ladders. They are swearing to give themselves courage, as they have been trained. Dogs responding to a whistle.

London. Present day. Three weeks after the crash

THOUGH SHE WAS LEFT-HANDED, THE SLING AROUND HER LEFT ARM
meant Nancy had to hold her toothbrush with her right. In the days that had passed since the seaplane fell out of the sky, she had learned to do this with dexterity. She had also learned not to turn her head more than was necessary. As she brushed, she studied her reflection in the bathroom mirror. Her eyes were still puffy from sleep, or lack of it, and her neck and shoulders were still creased – the imprint of tangled sheets. They still had a ghost of a tan.

Daniel was also studying her reflection, from the doorway. ‘It stimulates the brain,’ he said.

Still facing the mirror, Nancy waited until her toothbrush clicked off automatically before answering. ‘What does?’

Daniel took a bite out of his toast and chewed on it slowly, holding the plate near to his chin to catch crumbs. ‘Brushing your teeth with your wrong hand. It’s like showering with your eyes closed.’ He took another bite and spoke with his mouth full: ‘Why don’t you let me brush your teeth for you, until your shoulder is better?’

‘I’ve told you, I can manage.’

There was accusation in the tone of her voice. Daniel hesitated before speaking again. ‘How did you sleep?’ he asked.

Nancy ran a finger over the bump that marked the break in her collarbone, dabbed her finger into a contact lens carton, used a
finger from her other hand to pull down the skin below her eye, tilted her head back and inserted the lens. After she had fitted the other one, she washed her hand, turned the tap off and jiggled her fingers dry. She was still staring at her reflection, running out of silence. ‘I didn’t.’