The Gates of Rutherford (28 page)

Octavia burst out laughing. “What nonsense!”

“It isn't nonsense.”

“But for shame, darling! You can't love anyone else. You have just got married. You
wanted
to be married.”

“Actually,” Charlotte murmured, looking down now at their hands, and then gently disengaging hers, “I didn't want to marry at all. I was afraid of it. I was trying to make myself . . . as I thought you'd want me to be. But I'm not. And that's all there is to it.”

Octavia stared in disbelief. One of the ragged boys wheeled across the grass close to them, pointing his fingers in their direction and miming gunfire. “Go away, you little brute,” Louisa told him.

“Lady lady, la-de-da!” he yelled, pulling a face. He made one more gesture at shooting the three of them, and continued his mad gallop.

“Charlotte,” Octavia said. “You must go home. I don't know who this other man is, and I don't wish to know. Your duty is to Michael. He needs you, and you are his wife.”

“I shan't go home again.” Octavia heard the old Charlotte in her daughter's voice: the truculent, obstinate child. “I've come to tell you what has happened, not to be told that I am wrong.”

“But of course you are wrong,” Octavia exclaimed. “Nothing could be more wrong!”

“Mumma,” Louisa breathed. “Don't.”

Octavia stared from one daughter to the other. “Don't?” she asked, amazed.
“Don't?”

•   •   •

S
he always wondered, afterwards, where exactly the conversation would have gone if there had been time to pursue it. She might have found out a great deal more, even if the revelation of it was something she could never understand.

But there was no time.

There was suddenly the most enormous and strange sensation. It was as if the city had somehow imploded; a crushing silence that seemed interminable, but lasted a fraction of a second, and then a ground-shaking thud. All three of them felt the air press on their eardrums, and then release. They looked instinctively towards the sound, or lack of it. There was a distant roar, and then another. A series of repeated thunderous impacts, as if giants were patrolling the city and slamming their feet into the ground with each step.

They saw smoke rising then—a fast upward-circling stream—out of central London. Again came the crushing, plunging sense of impact. Octavia could feel the shuddering repeated in her chest like an echo chamber. Her heart seemed to repeat the sound, hitching and staggering for a moment. Everyone around them had stopped what they were doing: everyone looked towards the smoke.

“What is it?” Louisa whispered. There had been an explosion in a munitions factory at Silvertown earlier in the year, and Octavia had heard something distant at the time, some vast rocking disturbance; but this was different. It was much closer, for one thing.

She gasped as they heard a line of explosions stitched in a line from Liverpool Street eastwards. Then, and only then, they heard the aircraft above them. The crowd in the Gardens began to run towards the river. And, for what reason they couldn't explain,
Octavia and the girls ran too, crossing the grass, running through the gates. Traffic on the Embankment had slowed. A horse-drawn cart was slewed across the road, with the driver climbing down from his seat and rushing forward, trying to catch the reins that had been pulled out of his hands by the frightened horse.

All at once, Octavia thought of their own Rutherford horses that had been taken from them. She thought of Wenceslas, imagined him in some miry battle, petrified. She thought of Jack Armitage who, in another place, had probably tried to calm many horses like this. She thought of Harrison, and John. And she thought of Harry.

“Oh please,” she whispered, unaware that she was saying anything at all out loud.

They looked up towards Tower Bridge and saw six ungainly shapes in the sky: Gotha bombers, with their seventy-foot wingspan. “They've come down in height,” Charlotte said. “They want to see what they've done.”

Or what they're about to do,
Octavia thought.

The crowd watched in strained silence, the women clutching their children. All traffic had now stopped; everyone looked towards the bridge in the distance. Farther out, they heard more explosions, still heavy but more distant drumbeats. “That's not in the city,” Louisa said.

“It's going east,” Charlotte answered. “Poplar . . . Rotherhithe . . .”

The six Gothas were rapidly going out of sight, but the rumble of their engines shook the road. They seemed to be flying slowly, almost in a leisurely fashion. Taunting the city underneath them.

Octavia wondered if they were following the river or railway lines. What was farther east from here? She tried to think. St. Paul's, Fleet Street. The Wren churches. St. Clement Danes, founded eleven centuries before. The art collections of the Tate; the Tower of London. A fierce patriotism overwhelmed her. They could not be touched. Not destroyed. Not these precious things. The heart of England.

“The docks,” Louisa breathed. “That's where they're going. They'll bomb the docks.”

The Port of London and the West India docks were certainly in the direction that the Gothas took, but after a while they heard nothing more, only the faintest drumming of the engines, until that too was eclipsed.

It was as if the whole of London was standing still, holding its breath.

T
here was a village called Vlamertinghe to the west of Ypres.

Jack Armitage was standing ready. A railway line here among the dozens of scattered camps, and beside the muddy ruin of a road. Strange how roads kept coming back to him, their even surfaces and the hedges at the side of the banks beside the church. Roads within dreams, roads that seemed like extraordinary other worlds.

It was impossible to think that roads ran quietly somewhere on earth. Vlamertinghe had been a quiet place once. Now a thousand men walked back to the front, and a thousand walked away from it. Jack waited by the side of the line with the travois, waiting to get onto the single-gauge railway track, and he watched them go by. Those that came from Ypres sang, some of them. Those that were going to Ypres looked at them stony-faced.

There was a veterinary station at Vlamertinghe, as well as the dressing stations and hospitals. His officer had been taken to one such hospital three days ago; a hut with bleached sheets for walls.
The road to Messines was still shelled by a long-range gun. Like a grim circus it provided explosions that hurt no one—no one, that is, until one landed among the men and horses. Trying to crowd out of the makeshift lines, untying the hysterical geldings he had only just attended to, Jack had elbowed his officer by mistake in the smoke. “Get on,” he had said, bumping the man behind the knees so that he stumbled. He hadn't seen that it was his CO until then. The man grabbed his arm. “I'm blinded,” he said.

So he was. So he was. They took him up to the dressing station and then on to the bleached white walls and Jack had stood outside. A piece of the shell had almost taken the top from the officer's head. They struggled with him, but it was all for nothing. An Eton man and Oxford man, he had volunteered when he was nineteen, had no brothers, had no sisters. A brilliant only child. Jack had liked him. He had replaced his CO from near Arras, who had been taken away to Paris for some high secret position.

Jack didn't care much for secrets, nor for the thought of Paris, nor for Eton or Oxford. But he had liked his officer very much. He had a sense of humor. He was liberal with the whisky that most officers kept for themselves. And so when the nurse had come out and had shaken her head, Jack had felt exhaustion wash over him. “He's for Vlamertinghe, I'm afraid,” she said.

As it turned out, she had been wrong. The vast cemetery in the village was being closed to make way for another railway line big enough to carry heavier trains, and to make sidings. Instead, his officer's body was taken up the line to Brandhoek. Only yesterday, Jack had learned that the man had been mentioned in dispatches. For bravery under fire. For men. For horses. For England. For taking the troop through the blood of Messines and bringing back German horses that had survived the explosions. Bloodied and wild-eyed beasts solid with shock.

As he waited, Jack thought he might sing a little song. It was ridiculous, perhaps a kind of madness; but he had to do something. Something to disengage his mind, to step outside what he was doing, what he had seen. His officer's face or half a face; the hemlock growing at the side of the road. Sing a little song. That was the ticket. His mind wandered, as loose as the wind that shuffled the dust. Loose and grey. Like fog or shadows. Or was it hemlock? Perhaps it was fool's parsley. It grew here like it grew at home. You had to know what it was, it was so like ordinary cow parsley. It could burn the throat. The flowers were irregular. You had to know that. If you didn't know that, you were poisoned. Perhaps they were all poisoned and that was what the trouble was. Blinded, poisoned, and all by some horrible sort of accident. He would sing a little song.

But he couldn't remember any.

“What's the matter with you?” asked a voice.

He looked up. There was a sergeant standing at his side. “They don't load themselves, you know.”

Jack saw the wounded being handed down. Some were going in the open truck that was being pulled by a broken-down Clydesdale. Another was on his way to Jack, holding up his thumb, the universal symbol of going home. “All right, mate?”

Yes, all right.

“My knee,” the man said. He huffed as he was put into the travois. A contraption made by force of circumstance to accommodate the many: two poles slotted into a pair of wheels that fitted the track, and a mule hitched up to the poles. “Going to bounce me all the way there?” the man asked, grinning. He laid his head down. “Fucking bounce me then, mate. I don't care. Just get me out, all right?”

“All right. Are you Australian?”

“Aussie, yeah.” He raised his head now that they were walking, snail's pace, along the single gauge line. “What's the story with your
bloody generals? Bloody officers? Fuckers don't know what they're doing.” And head down and asleep within seconds.

No more they don't, Jack thought. He's right about that.

Take me back to dear old Blighty. Put me on a train to London town.
That was a song, he thought. He was sure it was. It had just come into his head. Unless he had written it because of the trains and the road. But he didn't write songs. He would sing a little song.

No songs. Just the rail.

He could see the Clydesdale up ahead. The horse wasn't long for this world, he guessed. One day soon it would lie down. He'd seen it happen. They laid down, and they didn't get up. It wasn't a wound, unless it was the kind of wound that doesn't leave a mark. It was deeper than flesh. It was just weariness with being alive. Something went out, flickered, and was gone. The horse would lie down. They would haul on the reins. Kick it perhaps. But it would be immobile. They sank to their knees, buckled over like wet clay. And they went away, went out like a light, went back to their fields and lanes and the warm seclusion of some stable on some farm. High in the hills perhaps. Or down by the sea. Lungs full of salty air instead of the brackish remains of chlorine.

They just went out, you see? Like songs.

He would sing something.

But you had them in your head, and then they were gone.

It isn't the girl I saw you with at Brighton.

That was one. About a girl in Brighton.

Who, who, who's your lady friend?

He had been brought close to a line where it was thought there'd be no action. The Germans had withdrawn behind a new front line. They named the pieces of it after Wagner, the opera man. So his officer had told him. Siegfried and Wotan. The Wotan part of this line—the Hindenburg Line, the captain said—ran from the coast to
Cambrai. The Siegfried part ran from Cambrai to St. Quentin. And so on. The fighting still remained, though. The shelling still went on. One night, they had been near a line of trenches and the grass was growing fast there. What had been a quagmire in the winter and spring now looked innocuous. Weeds and rats. White bones. Pieces of rusted equipment. They still had trenches, though.

At night, at dusk, the men would get up and walk about. There was never much shelling at dusk just there. They stood and watched the evening performances over Bullecourt. Rumbling guns, and hundreds of Very lights shooting skywards, mixing with flares of white and green and red. The lines of color wriggled about in the sky and lit up the ground underneath.

And then as they were dragging shelters and making temporary operating theaters for mules—half a dozen or more; and a kind of water tunnel for the ones that had mange—one of the companies were told that they had to go out and capture an enemy outpost at a crossroads. It was causing trouble to the passage of supplies. From somewhere behind at the appointed hour, British 18-pounder guns suddenly started up. It was all over then for the makeshift theater; they dismantled it, cursing all the while. A stream of shells passed over their heads while they worked.

Jack glanced up now. The line of travois and trucks had come to a halt. Across the track and half a churned-up field, now dry and rutted with dust and stones, there was a barbed-wire camp. It was full of Germans. In the sunshine they stood and looked out at the humble little line of wounded. They hung on the wire, some of them. He remembered his latest officer telling him that he had been haunted by one corpse that he had seen where the war was hot, out east of Ypres. A man on his back, two hands gripping a strand of barbed wire, and the hands awfully grey. Gripping the wire for all he was worth. Which wasn't much. Not anymore.

The German prisoners said something. Waved and said something in the sunshine, laughing. They were scratching and holding out their jackets. Alive with lice. Like everyone.

He would sing a little song.

What would we want with eggs and ham?

When we've got plum and apple jam. . . .

“
You!” someone shouted. “You!”

He wouldn't look. There were 18-pounder guns, and a man hanging on the wire.

His arms were grabbed from both sides. He woke up then, focused on the hands, looked down at his feet. He'd dropped the rein of the mule that he was supposed to be leading, and he was standing at the side of the track and the mule and the travois were going on without him. A captain from the Staffordshires was staring at him while his soldiers held him upright. “What day is it?” the captain asked.

He would sing a little song.

If he could remember any songs.

If the road got smooth and the grass grew higher.

It grew high in the fields just around June.

•   •   •

W
hen he came to, it was nearly dark.

There was a padre sitting next to his wire bed. Jack gave a great start; he had been dreaming about dropping the reins of the mule. He sat up immediately. He could see the paleness of the road beyond the door, and the endless passing to and fro of men.

My God, I'm dead
, he thought. Padre sitting at my side; men passing along a white road in the summer dusk. Hundreds and hundreds of weary men.

“Private Armitage. Good evening.” The padre held out his hand. “Carlyon.”

Jack took the proffered hand gently, expecting it to be merely air. But the man was real. He looked all over his surroundings and decided he was still alive. In some place he couldn't recognize.

The padre picked up on his confusion. “You're in number ten clearing station at Poperinghe. You've been unconscious for ten hours.”

“Clearing station,” Jack repeated. He felt dull, confused. “But I'm not wounded.”

“Battle fatigue.”

Jack struggled then to get to his feet. Battle fatigue was something not right; it was for slackers, those who couldn't cope. “I'm all right.”

“Lie still. It's an order.”

He did as he was told, fuming with resentment.

“It is a real condition,” the padre told him. “The body shuts down.”

Jack thought then of the Clydesdale that he had considered was dying on its feet. He had looked at the horse and pitied it without knowing it was him, not the horse, that was about to crumple into the road. Still, he felt ashamed. “I can stand,” he said.

“Let's see if you can.”

Jack averted his eyes from those around him. They lay silent, row upon row. They ought to bring those that can't breathe nearer the door like me, he thought. The padre offered his arm. He shook his head to refuse it, then felt the ground swimming up towards him. The padre tightened his grip, and the two of them staggered into the field beyond. After only a few steps, Jack came to a halt. He tried to keep himself still, though he felt himself swaying like a tree in a storm. “Bugger me,” he muttered.

The padre brought out a packet of small cigars. “Do you?”

“No, sir.”

“A man who doesn't smoke. A rarity.”

“Never liked it, sir.”

The padre smiled, lit his own. “Alcohol and tobacco keep many a man standing,” he observed.

“I shan't start it even so, sir.”

“Congregationalist, are you? Teetotal? Methodist?”