The First of July (32 page)

Read The First of July Online

Authors: Elizabeth Speller

Tags: #Historical

BOOK: The First of July
4.12Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
Chapter Forty-Three

Jean-Baptiste, France,
July 2, 1916

J
EAN-BAPTISTE CLAMBERED DOWN THE ROOF
outside his window, clutching his sabots and the water bottle and hoping the roof was sound and that nobody would wake. When he reached the gutter, the drop was slightly more than he’d guessed; but directly below him was a row of what were probably onions, so he thought he would have a soft landing.

He looked back at the two windows next to the one he’d left and was surprised to see a pale face at one. He started for a second before realizing it was the mute girl, the maid, and she was only staring, not moving to raise an alarm. He dropped to the ground, landed heavily but continued, limping slightly, through the bare garden onto the back lane and then on down between the houses, always aware that there might be a jumpy British soldier with a gun somewhere in the shadows. The town was noisy: lorries grinding their way up the main street behind the houses he was passing. Shouts and metallic clatter offered a useful cover for his own movements.

He reached the outer wall of the convent easily. It was in darkness. He went up to the front gate, attempting to open it soundlessly. It was possible that the sisters, with all their praying, might be about, but it occurred to him that there were hardly enough of them to be everywhere in the big building and at night they were likely to be either in their beds or in the chapel. But the gate was locked. Not surprising, with soldiers in the town,
Protestant
soldiers, he thought, and the idea pleased him. He took off his, or at least Bully Laporte’s, sabots and placed them, neatly together, at the gate.

The side walls were the same height as the gate, but he remembered from childhood that an oak tree grew so close to the wall that one boy had dared climb up it to look in and reported that he had seen two nuns in their drawers. They had all believed it at the time. Would the tree still be there? He saw almost immediately that it was and that, if anything, the branches seemed closer to the boundary. Nor was it hard to climb; but once he was on the wall, the drop on the other side onto a paved courtyard was intimidating. He sat astride the wall, glad the moon was not full, and checked to see whether there was any change in level, where the drop might be lower. Some sort of structure seemed to stand in the farthest corner.

As he eased himself along, it became clear that a shed was indeed tucked away there, but he couldn’t tell whether the roof was sound. But he had no alternative way down; so when he reached the spot where the wall passed behind it, he braced himself and lowered himself onto the roof. It held. From there it was an easy scramble to the ground. Still nothing stirred. He looked up. He was on the northern side of the building; two windows were open on the second story. How many nuns were in there? Did they have a night watchman, as they used to before the war?

The babies’ nursery was around the corner, he thought, and the doors to the outside were shut. He reached out, fearing that they too were locked and wondering whether babies were woken easily by breaking glass. But the latch opened easily and he peered in, just in case a nun sat up with the little ones all night. There was nobody—he could just pick out small sleeping forms; one was snoring gently. The room was stuffy and smelled of ammonia. He walked quietly but quickly to his brother’s cot. The little boy was fast asleep, lying on his back, one arm thrown up. Jean-Baptiste went to another cot and picked up a blanket the baby had kicked off. He then picked up his brother, held him close while he wrapped him, clumsily, but without rousing him.

The child started to wake up as he crossed the yard. He prayed that he wouldn’t cry and that the front gate had been locked only from the inside, leaving the key in the lock. Someone must have heard his prayers, because he was through the gate in a second. The little boy struggled a bit but seemed to want to be carried sitting up. Even in the near-blackness, Jean-Baptiste could see that his dark eyes were wide open now and watching him.

“It’s going to be all right, Leo,” he said softly. He picked up the sabots, and they were off into the night.

They walked out of Corbie, not along the main road, which was heavy with traffic, but back down the track to the river. It was dark and rough going and Leo was heavy. Jean-Baptiste stumbled a few times, but he could soon hear the water. The little boy occasionally muttered syllables that Jean-Baptiste could not understand, but he seemed to take this nocturnal adventure in his stride. Only once, as an explosion sounded close to them, less than half a kilometer away, Jean-Baptiste judged, did he worry about the great responsibility he had taken upon himself. It was hard enough contemplating a dangerous journey alone; but with a small child, how could he keep them both safe? But what was the alternative for either of them? Once on the river, he felt, they would be safer. The river would take them with it.

He had to stop and put the boy down a couple of times, and Leo clung to his knees while he drank from the canteen. How did the young, slender mothers he’d seen before the war cope with their babies on their hips all day?, he wondered.

He followed the river west until he saw the island. He set Leo down with some relief and walked over to the willow that had harbored
Sans Souci
while everything else in his life had fallen apart. He unhooked the bailer and emptied the boat of black standing water and its mulch of leaves. Before the war, it had been a matter of a few minutes to launch it, almost skimming the grass as if to return it to its home on the water; but the boat had settled into the mud and vegetation for at least two years now and wouldn’t budge. He crawled around it on his knees, suddenly desperate to free it, tearing at the most obvious obstructions. Then he reached up, lifted out a rowlock and dug around the keel with its metal prongs, careful not to damage it. It was still dark now, but he needed to be well clear of Corbie before the nuns woke the children. By dawn, anybody might see him.

He pulled again, bracing his feet against the roots of the tree, and the boat creaked. He had a sudden vision of it all falling apart, into a pile of planks; but just as he was having serious doubts, it started to move and, once it started, he found himself trying to keep hold of the gunwale to prevent it launching itself and floating north without them. He couldn’t risk putting it into the river and leaving it for an hour to make sure it was sound and had no leaks. He had to chance that even if it did, he could bail more quickly than it would take on water. Behind him, Leo was becoming restless. He kept moving away, or picking up dirt, so that Jean-Baptiste had half his eye on the boat and half on the child. He gave the boy a little drink of water and handed him some bread. Leo gnawed at it but seemed as interested in playing with it as he was in swallowing it. He said something that sounded like “bread.” Jean-Baptiste smiled. “Yes, bread,” he said. “Clever boy, bread. You eat it so that you’re strong.”

A single flare shot into the air to the east. He had no choice; he couldn’t control the boat on the water and the child on the land at the same time, so he threw his sabots into the boat, then reached forward, scooped the boy up, lifted him in too, and, standing with one foot in it and one against the bank, he thrust it away from the shore. With a last creak, the boat made a final splash into the water, some of which broke over the prow, and was immediately pulled into the current. Again, he felt a surge of anxiety, but he knew this boat, this river. Picking up an oar, he pushed
Sans Souci
free of the obstructions that projected from the bank and into the side channel down the length of the island.

He moved his brother onto one of the two blankets on the duckboards of the boat, where he thought he would be safest, and tucked the other blanket around him. The boy was alert, watching him continually. He made little noises from time to time, but was strangely unperturbed by this sudden change in his fortunes. The boat had left the midstream island behind it now, carried smoothly on the current. He wasn’t sure if the sky was lightening to the east, or whether the strange color of the night clouds was simply a byproduct of the fighting, but he hoped to have made some distance by daylight. Tomorrow they would reach Amiens. They could rest by day, find food, perhaps. Every kilometer he rowed was farther from the battlefields and farther from the sisters. His brother would never return to the orphanage. He owed that to his mother and to Dr. Vignon. The Somme would take them northwest. Laporte had said it was impossible to reach the coast, but Laporte was dead and nobody knew the habits of the river like Jean-Baptiste. It might be impossible for a heavy barge, perhaps; but with a light, shallow-bottomed rowing boat, over many weeks, surely it could be done.

Once they were clear of Corbie, they would travel through the locks and the river gardens, the marshes and the eel ponds. Maybe the river was unnavigable, maybe there would be military guards, maybe he would have to abandon the small craft and carry his brother overland, maybe he could rest and get stronger until he found another boat and another way north to the great bay and the roar of its breakers and the wail of seabirds. Then, maybe, one day, they would go to England and find Cousin Isabelle. But meanwhile the sea air would be good for his chest, he could do odd jobs and the boy could play on the sand and get some color in his cheeks, and they could both paddle in the shallows as the tide sucked the Somme out to sea.

Afterwards

Deeply regret your husband, Major Sir Henry Maurice Bourne Sydenham, the Somerset Light Infantry, killed in action in France, July 1. The Army Council expresses sympathy. Unfortunately during the morning’s engagement very few of the Company got back without being hit. However, such is War, and it is the memory of these gallant deeds that must remain to us for our consolation. Assuring you of our deepest sympathy in your sad loss.

It is my painful duty to inform you that a report has this day been received that your son 145083 Cpl Francis Percy Stanton 1st Huntingdonshire (Cyclists’) Batt’n, is missing, believed killed, in action, July 1.

There was fierce fighting in the area at the time and there are as yet no further details. The Army Council expresses sympathy and regrets the loss you and the Army have sustained on the death of your son in the service of his country.
Any application you may wish to make concerning the late soldier’s effects should be addressed to the War Office, Whitehall, London SW.

It is with the deepest regret that I have to inform you that your son, Acting Captain Benedict Arthur Chatto, was killed in action on July 2, while attempting to save the life of a brother officer. His death was that of a fine soldier and a brave man and he has been mentioned in a Dispatch for his courageous action.

The King and Queen deeply regret the loss you and the Army have sustained on the death of your son in the service of his country.

Sad news has been received by Mr. Reginald Dawes-Holt of Avalon Court, Bristol, on his return from honeymoon in Scotland. A telegram awaited with notification of the death of his only son, Captain Theodore Reginald John Dawes-Holt, Royal Flying Corps, who was killed in France during the opening hours of the Battle of the Somme. Many casualties were sustained during this heroic action, we hear, and sadly this popular young officer was among them.

Captain Dawes-Holt, whose late mother was the celebrated singer Mrs. Serafina Dawes-Holt, was engaged to be married to Miss Agnes Elizabeth Bradstock, daughter of the Right Reverend the Bishop of Gloucester.
Before taking up his commission, Captain Dawes-Holt, who was educated at the King’s School, Gloucester, was an organ scholar at the cathedral and his early promise had been much remarked upon in musical circles.

Bristol Courier
, July 28, 1916
Chapter Forty-Four

June 30, 1916

I love you more than life itself. Never forget that.

Your Harry

Chapter Forty-Five

Frank, Devon, 1917

T
HERE WERE THINGS I LEARNED
from that war. Too many to list. One is: just because it’s written down and looks official, don’t believe a word of it.

It nearly killed my old dad getting the telegram, but I don’t doubt he had got into the way of enjoying a bit of sympathy. There was plenty who lost their boys and their husbands, but he had no one left at all, of course. Then, six months later, it nearly killed him all over again seeing me turn up. I thought it would just be a pleasant surprise, not knowing the Army had, in the matter of telegrams, let off its barrage too early, which, as we’d learned to our cost, was the usual way with them. I’d been out of it all for weeks, they told me in the hospital, and all that time down as Isaac Meyer, whose name tag they had found on me after Nora had ripped mine off my neck that day. Every week, the rabbi came to sit with me; even when I didn’t know who I was, he stayed, holding my hand. Even when I did, he still came.

Now Dad was as pale as if he’d seen a ghost, which in a way he had. The War Office nearly had the death of the old man on its hands on top of all those young ones.

It was two heroes who saved me from certain death, they said. A French lad, nobody knew his name, who found me, wandering, stuck through with bits of scrap, which was all poor Nora was by then. The French boy cleaned me up, laid me down, and got a first-aider to me. The story followed me, no doubt growing in the telling. Wherever I went, they said you’re the one made it because the French lad swam the River Somme, in the middle of a battle, to get help. Then when nobody wanted to come out and fetch a single soldier who looked like he was a goner, least not on a Frenchman’s say-so, one first-aider volunteered. My second hero. His name I do know: such an ordinary name—Higgs. A searcher who found me, a nurse told me. I could never thank him or have him tell me how it was, as by then he’d disappeared. No record, they said. They’d all disappeared who’d been part of my story; all except me.

So I can’t say for certain what happened. Sometimes I thought I could remember a stranger coming and going, talking gobbledegook. But then most of that, before I finally realized I was in a hospital bed, came to me in bits and really I didn’t know what was real and what I’d been told and what I just imagined.

There was the sun, burning, taking up the whole sky, falling fit to crush me and I thought I was poor Prometheus, who I’d learned about back at the Institute, from the old professor who told us all about the ancient Greeks. Pinned on a rock and every day his liver pecked out by a great bird, and every day it grew back, every hour more agony and he could not die. Nora was that bird. Water. I was that hot and my mouth shriveled up. Scraping through the earth. Couldn’t lie, couldn’t sit. Peck, peck, peck. The bird never left me. Trying to get to the river. Isaac says it’s close. Waterbirds, he says.

Was I in a boat, or was that on the Serpentine, before, with Connie and Nancy?

Somehow, there was always Nora and if I held her close, the pain went, and if I let her fall, the pain shot through me.

One strange thing haunts me. When I was better, when I was in the hospital in Blighty, they gave me my belongings, not that they were many or serviceable, but among them was a handkerchief, officers’ quality. It was one of ours, from Duke Street, that is, with our tiny label, our hand-rolled edges and of the very best kind.

Sometimes I saw that German rising up behind the spoil at the edge of a crater like through a trapdoor in a music-hall stage and both of us staring like we were each other’s nightmare. Him pointing his rifle, but Nora had trapped mine. Do I remember turning my back so the bullets would hit her first? Was that just a dream? Did Nora, who’d done nothing but drag me down ever since I left England, save my life? And what happened then? The medics said it was blast from a shell that blew Nora and me together, as it were. For a while, I was Mr. Longfellow’s iron centaur.

After a day or so, I showed Dad my scars. It’s like a miracle, says he, gazing at the lines across my back; it’s like a resurrection. I looked at him sharpish because he wasn’t a great one for God, but his eyes were fixed on the dark little crater in my side and his hand hovered as if he did and didn’t want to touch it. I tucked my shirt in quick.

That deep injury was the one that had nearly done for me, caused by a brake bar piercing me under my ribs like a blunt bayonet, tearing through muscle and sliding past my liver. The fine lines were spokes that had slid in as easily as giant needles. But on my other side was a greater wonder: the big scar there was in the recognizable shape of the pivot of the BSA Folding Machine. If you knew one well, of course. Bits of Nora were still embedded within me as well as leaving the pivot scar. The Army surgeons said as how they might start finding their way out and not to be unnerved if I felt hard lumps of metal emerging here and there. Poor Nora. Along with that French soldier boy, a deserter, they thought, and the vanishing Higgs, she probably saved my life and all of them left to rust in France.

Dad had tears in his eyes, but I thought that he would soon have me down the pub, lifting up my vest to all and sundry for the price of a beer if he had a chance.

It was hopeless from the start: a waste of machines and a waste of riders.

In the whole time I was a soldier, I bore Nora ten times farther than she bore me. It was an offense to abandon equipment, of course; but although I was tempted, I would never really have left her, not for Fritz to have her.

Other books

Firetrap by Earl Emerson
Long Time Coming by Bonnie Edwards
Earthborn (Homecoming) by Orson Scott Card
Human Interaction by Cheyenne Meadows
Teaching Miss Maisie Jane by Mariella Starr
Solace & Grief by Foz Meadows