The First of July (25 page)

“Good luck,” I said, and meant it. But when I turned, he was fumbling at the straps holding the bike and was standing with his cap off, looking puzzled and wiping his brow. I knew, just like that, we had to get the weight off him. I eased the bicycle off. It fell with a metallic protest, the top wheel spinning. Slowly Isaac’s knees bent and very tidily he folded up, almost like the bicycles themselves when they were being folded for carriage.

There he lay, knees drawn up, his eyes slightly open and unfocused, his breathing slow and noisy. A longer gap. Then another breath. I patted him on the cheek, but there was no response.

“Isaac,” I said, “get up. Bloody well get up.”

Nothing. I lay on my front on the bank and crawled up it. There was firing, but not toward our current position, although plenty where I was supposed to be delivering my message. I thought the ridge would allow me enough cover for a while, though after that I’d be in the thick of it.

I looked back to Isaac. I’d have to leave him and hope the first-aiders picked him up. His face was waxen. I took his legs and pulled him, as smoothly as I could, into a tiny patch of shade and then moved his cycle. It was hard work, for all that he was light. Plenty passed us, but nobody helped me.

But then I thought, what about his message? Possibly I could deliver both, but I needed to know which was more urgent. It was an offense to read them, but I had to make a decision. I presumed mine was the priority, as it was going to the front line. I opened Isaac’s message and it was about altering the gun elevation to give cover for a late-afternoon advance, the morning’s having stalled. I thought of the poor b
*****
s who couldn’t get through the wire and who’d be having our own shells land on them if the message didn’t get through. Then I saw that the battery commander was a Captain Chatto. Of all the times to remember a name, now was not the best, but it was an odd one and “my” Chatto, who had sent me off on the cyclist’s path, was a gunner too. Would I have thanked him for my present position? Well, he wasn’t to have known, back in Duke Street, how it would turn out.

I opened the other message. The one that was sending me to the front line. It was from the quartermaster’s office:

To Whom it May Concern: Please draw outline of Corporal Johnston’s foot and confirm size thirteen boot required.

Isaac’s occasional breaths sounded as if they were drawn through thick liquid. His lips were sticky with what looked like blood and mucus. His bright eyes were just glistening slits through almost-closed eyelids. I unscrewed his water bottle and tried to give him a sip, but it just ran away. A handful more soldiers came from the direction I was supposed to be going in. Two were dragging a third, whose tunic was dark and wet. The others were pale, and the last, who was trailing behind, had lost most of his uniform as well as his helmet. The group had to part to walk either side of us. One looked down at Isaac.

“Can’t you move him?” he said. “He’s plumb in the way.”

“He’s ill.”

“He’s blithering dead.”

I put my hand up to Isaac’s mouth. I couldn’t feel or hear a breath. I touched the side of his neck, wondering if that was a faint shiver of a pulse but knowing it was my own heartbeats I could sense.

“Isaac,” I said in a whisper. “Isaac. Please.”

I pulled on his hand as if to wake him from sleep.

“Isaac,” I whispered and put his hand back across his chest. My jaw ached and my eyes burned as I looked down on my friend. Thinking that he had, in his way, fought to the end. Thinking that really he’d had enough of it. Maybe he’d turn out to be the lucky one.

I would have said a prayer, but who knows what words his people used. So, with my hand on his arm, I said:

Samuel Meyer, 14 Meyer Street, Stepney, London East.

And I said it three times.

Then I took his red tag from around his neck. He had the six-pointed star that they wear too, but that he kept with him. I left him with his cycle, the two of them curled up, facing each other, and looked back only once to make sure it was true.

I stood for a second. I touched my bayonet, then found myself stroking Nora’s crossbar because I knew now, for certain, that I would abandon her sooner or later. Then I shrugged Nora back into place. I thought of dumping her once and for all. I could say back at the depot that she’d been blown off my back, but it didn’t seem right. Not yet.

I set off as fast as I could, because the message of Isaac’s that I was carrying seemed likely to save other men’s lives. If I hadn’t been in the Army, I might have thought the other message was some secret code, but I knew for certain that they simply didn’t want to issue a pair of large boots. They’d have to make them specially. They’d cost. I expect Private Johnston was hobbling his way toward Montauban and the Germans, his monster feet crammed into size tens even now; judging by the size of them, he’d be a nice big target. For all the supply section knew, he’d already be dead and they’d wouldn’t have wasted money on a pair of size thirteen boots.

So I set off toward the trees, but by an indirect route. I don’t trust open ground, and I didn’t like the silence from the wood. So this is it, I’m thinking, I’ll get this over and then I’ll get back and have a think about Isaac. Now I’m just François Faber and it’s 1909 and I’m carrying my cycle to the finish.

But somewhere between the two—between the lane and the woods, out in the sunlight, somewhere not far from the river, Isaac had said, but a long way from anywhere you’d want to be—I see the German and he sees me and when it counts I can’t disentangle myself, or the rifle I haven’t fired since training, from Nora’s embrace. There’s just time to think you’ve had it this time, Frank Stanton, and so I do.

Benedict, France,
July 1, 1916, Midday

T
HE CYCLIST BOUGHT IN WITHIN
minutes of them seeing him emerging where the track broke off. Their gun far back, deep in the trees, was silent; Benedict had given the order to cease fire at 0728 hours to allow the infantry to move forward. The infantry boys were, for a while, blasting away with the Lewis, drawing German fire on the copse, which severed the telephone wire.

It had been gloriously cool under the trees but hot in the clearing where the gun stood in freshly dug chalk. Two of the gunners had taken their shirts off, their backs oily. These were thin, sinewy men, and every time they lifted the shells, you could see every muscle working. Their bodies were young, perfect machines, every action coordinated. He let himself see the beauty in them.

He’d been about to send one of them back for further orders. He could easily spare a man, and it could only be a matter of time, he thought, until the next shell came closer. He’d noticed German spotter planes coming toward them, but on every occasion RFC pilots had scared them off. They’d been even quicker with the German balloons, which were hardly in the air before falling in a mass of flames. Were any of these planes Theo, he had wondered?

That’s when he saw the messenger through his field glasses. The cyclist. The ridiculous cyclist, carrying his cycle on his back. He was emerging from a track that was protected by a raised bit of earth and a stunted hedgerow. He looked to either side before coming out slowly into the open, his body bowed. Smith had seen him too. He moved forward slightly, though still within cover of the trees, and waved to try to show their position.

“Stupid fucker, ’scuse my French, sir,” Smith said. “He’s still got his blooming rifle strapped to the machine. What the hell’s he thinking?”

The man came on, stumbling a bit on the uneven ground, looking up once as a small plane came over. It was only fifty yards between the track and the edge of the wood.

The messenger paused—he’d obviously seen something he didn’t like. He was fumbling around with the gun clips.

“Keep going,” Benedict said, as much to himself as anyone else.

The cyclist stepped forward, warily now; he was within hailing distance and had obviously seen Benedict and Smith, as he altered direction down into a slight declivity; but then, from the far side of a single crater, a handful of gray shapes appeared. Germans, carrying their rifles, and looking momentarily surprised by the single figure in front of them. Perhaps they had come to silence the gun, and here was a madman, standing still in the middle of the field with the protruding bicycle, looking like some Indian god with extra limbs. Benedict took out the nearest German with a single revolver shot. Smith’s rifle fired beside him and two more went down.

“Christ,” he said. “Down!” he shouted to the messenger. “You’re not a bloody scarecrow.” Shots were being fired in their direction now.

Two Germans were crawling to the shelter of the crater. Smith fired again and the Germans kept their heads down.

“Get down!” he yelled to the cyclist. “Don’t just stand there, you blithering fool!”

It was as he shouted, or he thought it was then, that suddenly everything about them, the wood, the gun and the half-naked gunners, the Germans, the hapless messenger and his message, disappeared in a rush of sucking wind and falling earth and a numbness that slowly became a terrible, roaring pain in his ears and chest, and burning in his arm.

Later, his face stinging, he was aware of his nose and mouth being full of earth, and he coughed to clear them, his tongue clearing grit off his teeth. He couldn’t have been out long, as while he began to realize what he was and where he was, there was still a patter of falling earth and leaves and, as he tried to turn, he was covered by a layer of twigs.

A hand touched him. It was Smith, squatting beside him, his mouth moving. His words were distorted. Smith’s face was cut and scratched, one eye closing already, but he looked substantially uninjured. He was feeling for Benedict’s pulse, turning him over.

Benedict winced. The pressure on his chest was reducing—it had been a shell, he was certain, and must have been very near to have blown the wind out of his lungs. He coughed up some phlegm. Spat onto the grass. He propped himself up on his good arm; the other didn’t respond, and distantly he felt a deep ache below his shoulder. Tried and failed to see the gun. Where the barrel should have been was nothing at all. It was very quiet and strangely light.

“The gun?” he said, and his own voice reverberated oddly in his head.

Smith shook his head. “Gone,” he mouthed. “All gone.”

Benedict lay back and looked up to see that the canopy of trees, which had protected them in the morning, had been blown away, transformed into a landscape of shattered branches and savage spears of wood, and above that the sun, burning down on them.

“Germans?” he said, remembering the exchange of fire immediately before the big explosion.

“Gone. A mine, I think. Home goal.” A grim smile from Smith.

“Messenger?” Again the word echoed around his skull.

Smith shook his head.

Benedict got up with difficulty, leaning heavily on Smith’s arm. Once standing, he could see through the blasted tract of what had been woodland: there was nothing left of the men from his battery, the men he’d been working with, around the clock, for the last week. The gun barrel had been dislodged. The shells, piled under the trees, had, amazingly, not exploded. Perhaps they were all duds, he thought. There would be an irony in that. But the shell in the breech had clearly gone off. What might be a decapitated and shriveled man sprawled close to his position. A single gunner lay some way away, pinned under a massive fallen tree, only his legs protruding, and grisly fragments of the others hung from nearby branches.

Slowly Benedict felt his nerves starting to deliver messages to his brain. Blood was running down his right hand and dripping down his uniform, and he was ashamed to feel faint, yet he couldn’t raise his arm. He must have swayed, because Smith held him and lowered him to the ground.

Smith gazed down at him, studying the injured arm. Benedict examined his side; he couldn’t get a clear view, but he could see flesh and, he thought, bone, as well as fragments of uniform and welling blood. His ears were singing and his head spun: red blood, a mash of green vegetation, and that blue sky. He turned his head to avoid the dazzling light and the heat of the sun. When Smith had fastened a tourniquet around Benedict’s arm, he gave him a sip of water. Benedict turned away, feeling slightly sick, but Smith mouthed “Bleeding. A lot. Must drink.” He undid Benedict’s tunic and looked relieved that there was no other injury.

He spoke again. Benedict could watch his mouth moving and guess at a few words, but still only one or two syllables were clear.

“Back. Way. Luck,” he heard. Smith pointed. Then he sensed Smith’s arms around him in a sharp smell of sweat. The corporal’s legs braced as he pulled Benedict to his feet and, supporting him, his arm around his waist, started to walk.

Benedict experienced only a moment’s anxiety as they left the cover of the trees and he looked south to where the bodies of the Germans lay. Then he turned his gaze toward the messenger: he and his machine lay crumpled in the sunlight in the center of the strip of pasture. Smith shook his head. Benedict pulled away slightly in the direction of the cyclist, and Smith shook his head again, resisting Benedict’s efforts. He made a slicing motion across his throat.

“No point,” his lips said.

But we must check, Benedict thought or perhaps said, knowing he was being obstinate. Still Smith held his ground, and Benedict struggled to detach himself.

Eventually Smith, looking anxiously down the field toward the distant German lines, relented and they altered their path to pass the dead soldier.

“Jesus,” said Smith.

The man was not dead. Benedict felt the pain leave his own injured arm and fill his body. The messenger was alive, his eyes open, blinking as their shadow fell over him. He was bent backward over his folded cycle. He looked very pale, a little puzzled, and, from the movement of his heels and the fingers of one arm spread to the side scrabbling in the dirt, he was trying to get up. But two spokes protruded clear through his body and one handlebar was partly embedded in his side. Freckles of blood spattered his face. The metal spokes quivered with his every attempted movement, and blood seeped around them. There were already flies feasting on it.

“Lie still,” Benedict said. “You’ve been hurt.” Was he shouting? He could no longer calibrate it. “We’ll send stretcher-bearers.” He wanted to kneel down and help the injured man, but extracting the metal from him, or rather, as he looked down, removing him from the metal frame on which he was impaled, would probably cause him agony as well as hasten his death.

The man was trying to focus on them, his eyes squeezed up against the pain or possibly the sun.

His lips formed one word: “Nora.”

“It’ll be his girl, I expect, sir,” said Smith, turning his head aside to speak directly in Benedict’s ear.

“Don’t you worry about her,” Smith said in a loud, clear voice. Even Benedict could hear his words. “We’ll get a stretcher out to you just as soon as we can. You keep thinking about Nora and how you’ll soon be home with her.”

Something about the injured man reminded Benedict of somebody. Another of many soldiers he had known and would watch die?

The man was trying to speak, trying to lick his lips. Smith kneeled down and, more tenderly than Benedict would have thought possible, said “Don’t try to speak.” He supported the man’s neck with his hand and gave him a little water.

“Message: Alter range. Wire intact,” said the dying man with a terrible clarity.

Smith stood up slowly and was silent.

The wire. Benedict felt his face contort. The wire. After all that time, all those shells, they’d got it wrong.

He took out his handkerchief. Smith tipped water on it and covered the injured man’s face to give him some protection from the sun. Apart from a smudge of blood, the handkerchief was as beautiful, as stupidly well-ironed, as crisp and unused, as on the day Benedict had bought it in Duke Street a year ago.

They moved away, lurching like a pair in a three-legged race. They had reached the edge of the sunken road, when simultaneously he heard the crack of a rifle and Smith fell away from him. Benedict collapsed, sickeningly, onto his injured arm. Smith was on the ground, a hole visible above his ear, blood pooling under his head. He was clearly dead. Benedict looked back across the field, seeing one of the Germans rising from the crater halfway across. He picked up Smith’s rifle, fired it unsteadily with his left hand, and, to his surprise, the German went down. He felt for a pulse in Smith’s neck. Nothing. The corporal’s pupils were fixed.

“Thank you,” he said softly, and remembered pointlessly that it was Smith’s birthday. Then he staggered on, joining a trail of walking wounded but very alone.

By the time he was seen at a first-aid post, he was light-headed and could no longer feel much pain. He tried to get the orderlies to send out stretcher-bearers to the young soldier, impaled and roasting in the sun all on his own in the middle of a field, but it was chaos. The stretcher-bearers were overloaded; injured and dying men were being carried in from every direction—some on the backs of men only marginally less damaged than those they bore. He could no longer even give clear directions, no longer remember the coordinates of the field-gun position.

His hearing was improving. A blood-smeared doctor told him he’d lost a great deal of blood. His right wrist had been shattered and would need setting, and a piece of shrapnel had taken a large swath of muscle from his upper arm. They would put a pressure bandage on but leave it unstitched to reduce the risk of infection. It looked clean, he said, but time would tell. A nurse strapped up the arm, biting her lower lip. Dark shadows shaped her white face, and ginger curls escaped from her crumpled veil.

“What’s your name?” Benedict said, just for something to say. She didn’t look up.

“Louise.”

An orderly gave Benedict two cups of strong tea, filled his water bottle, and told him to walk back to the rear.

“You won’t be doing any more gunnery for a while, sir. If ever. One for Blighty, I shouldn’t wonder.”

He was lucky and got a lift, squeezed on the tailgate of a lorry, where he held on with his good arm and tried not to be sick. He reported to an unfamiliar and distracted C.O., before going to an aid post. Again he asked for help for the cyclist, but the C.O. didn’t even seem to hear him. “Jesus Christ. What a bloody mess,” he kept saying.

At the casualty clearing station, there were more doctors but so many men waiting, so many almost-tidy rows of injured lying on the ground, as if abandoned, as gray as the blankets covering them, so many soldiers staring into space, that all he wanted to do was run. Pain, his and theirs, eddied around him, searing his flesh and crushing his joints. He heard himself groan. Then he turned away. He was going home, to Harmony Cottage. If Theo was there, well, they were now equal. He just wanted to be back at the filthy shack where he had once been as happy as he had ever known. The pad on his arm was getting wetter. He touched it and his fingers came away sticky. He wiped them on his breeches. It was hot, he was hot, the air smelled purple. He thought of the man in the field and hoped he was dead by now.