The Silver Locket (29 page)

Then everybody went on holiday. Alex had assumed this breakthrough would be followed by a mass attack, that the whole German army would be pushed back to Berlin. But nothing happened.

The men and officers grew restless, muttering they’d wasted the only decent chance they’d ever had to have a bash at Jerry. They went out on patrol and took more German prisoners, they bombed the enemy’s trenches and they cut the enemy’s wire. They drilled and went out skirmishing, but still no order to move forward came.

‘What do those halfwits at headquarters think they’re doing?’ Major Whelan stared through the field periscope trained on the German lines. ‘If those idiots on the Staff don’t get a blasted move on, the summer will be over. It’s jolly wet in Flanders in the autumn, and I don’t fancy trying to take those ridges in the rain.’

But Alex didn’t care what happened in the Ypres salient. He was fretting about Rose. She hardly ever wrote to him, and when she did her letters told him everything and nothing. She talked about her work, her friends, she said she’d been to Hazebrouck and Saint Omer for the afternoon.

She’d finally got some leave, but it seemed she’d spent it in Boulogne, with some girl called Elsie. She never talked about their future, so perhaps they didn’t have one any more?

You take too much for granted, Captain Denham. Oh, don’t be silly. I don’t care about being married. Everything she’d said to him was branded on his brain.

He took his tone from her and answered her infrequent letters briefly and dispassionately. He now decided that the girl who’d kissed him with such fervour on a windswept beach, who had defied her family and friends to be with him, was just a mirage, an illusion.

Reality was the cold, disdainful beauty in the horrible pink gown – the heiress who had snubbed him when he’d asked her if she’d dance. She’d marry Michael Easton and break Alex Denham’s heart.

He had very little to do with Michael, who kept out of his way. But he couldn’t help noticing that when Michael looked at him it was with utter loathing – and there was madness in those pale blue eyes.

July was hot and sunny, leave came round again, and Alex wondered if he might see Rose. She hadn’t written for at least a fortnight, so he told himself she must be busy, and it might be difficult for her to get away.

He thought about it for a week or more. Should he come straight out with it, should he confess and tell her he had to see her or go mad? But in the end he wasn’t brave enough, and went back home to Dorset.

He stayed with Henry, who was glad to see him. He went for long, exhausting walks around the cliffs and headlands, never stopping to admire the glorious panorama rolling out in front of him, never resting on a fragrant cushion of wild thyme, never gazing at the green and gold and blue of summer landscape, sea and sky.

He merely walked, head down, and found exhaustion helped to numb the pain.

In the third week of July, the British guns began to fire again, pounding enemy trenches and churning up the ground that Allied troops would have to cross if there should be a battle.

Alex could see it would be difficult to get men, guns and tanks across such horrible terrain. He shrugged and went to check the saps, where his men were mining.

‘At long last.’ Later on that day, Major Whelan came back from brigade headquarters bringing with him maps and battle plans.

‘It’s going to be next week,’ he told his captains as he handed round the maps. ‘A surprise attack, with twelve divisions, huge offensives on all fronts – those ought to get the buggers moving.’

The major grinned, then glanced at Alex. ‘
You
don’t look very offensive, Mr Denham.’

‘Sir?’ Alex had been thinking about Rose, deciding he would not prolong the agony. If he could find the courage, he’d write to her that evening, to say he would let her go.

‘Your lot’s going over first, with Mr Langham’s chaps.’ Major Whelan glared. ‘Alex, are you listening? Look lively, man! We’ll expect your boys to cut the wire and occupy that farmhouse on the right by ten o’clock. You’ll have to work out how you’re going to do it.’

The week before the great assault, the weather changed and it rained every day. The trenches flooded. Latrines and sump holes overflowed, and men had to wade through stinking sewage as they squelched their way into position, ready for the surprise attack on the last day of a hot July that had turned autumnal and depressing overnight.

Alex’s four lieutenants led their men into the front line trenches. At three o’clock the Allied barrage lifted and the first wave of infantry set off across the swamp.

Alex’s men got over without taking casualties. The four platoons went forward, moving through the shrouding mist and darkness.

When they’d rehearsed it, this manoeuvre had looked quite straightforward, and he was confident they’d reach the farmhouse, where a hundred Germans were supposed to be dug in. They would flush them out and take them prisoner. Or if they resisted shoot them, finishing them off with bayonets.

The driving rain made staying in the rehearsed formation hard. They couldn’t see each other, and Alex was afraid that if the weather didn’t improve they’d lose their way.

They should be going due east, which sounded simple, but it was difficult trying to find their way in this dense fog, or make sense of the destroyed terrain.

Burdened by their sodden packs and clothes that soaked up water like so many sponges, the men slogged through the greasy mud that came up to their ankles, then to their knees, then to their thighs.

The German guns had opened up. Men were falling all around and others coming up behind them couldn’t help treading them into the mud. Men who’d been blown up and landed on the German wire flapped like ghastly washing as machine gun bullets peppered them.

The company was well spread out and hopefully still making for the farmhouse. But the mist was even denser now, and all Alex saw were looming shapes. The noise of battle, the relentless rat-tat-tat of gunfire, the whining of the shells flying overhead was deafening, drowning out the screams of men who fell. So he thought he had imagined the sharp yell of panic on his left.

He knew he shouldn’t stop. It was up to stretcher bearers coming up behind him to rescue wounded men. Then he heard the scream again.

He squelched a few feet back into the mist, then almost walked into the crater into which the man had either fallen or been blown.

The second wave of infantry was coming over now, and Alex knew a man trapped in the mud would certainly be trampled, trodden down by his own side. There was just a minute, maybe less, before the two of them were overwhelmed.

He held out his right hand. The soldier grabbed it, but the sucking mud refused to let its victim go.

‘I can’t get out,’ he gasped, and the sheer dead weight of him threatened to pull Alex in as well.

He knew the voice. He recognised the face beneath the mud. ‘You’ve got to help yourself!’ He glared at Michael Easton. ‘Push your feet against the side and try to walk up, can’t you?’

Michael floundered helplessly, and Alex thought he’d have to let him drown, but then he managed to brace himself against the marginally more solid rim, and Alex hauled him out.

‘You’ll be all right,’ yelled Alex, as Michael dripped and shivered. ‘Come on, we’ve got to catch up with the others, they’ll be miles ahead by now.’

Michael didn’t move, so Alex slapped him. ‘Come
on
!’ he shouted. ‘Listen, Easton! If you don’t shift yourself, I’ll shove you back into the hole and watch you drown!’

‘Bastard.’ There was too much noise to hear, but Alex saw him mouth the word, and a second later Michael took a swing at him.

Alex parried it, then punched him hard. A thin streak of blood gleamed red on Michael’s muddy cheekbone, but he gulped and gasped as if it were a mortal wound. He fell at Alex’s feet and lay there shuddering and whimpering like a child.

Alex heard the second wave of infantry approaching. If he stayed here, he would be mown down. He pulled Michael upright, then heaved his wet, dead weight on to his shoulders in a fireman’s lift.

He began to stagger across the swamp towards the ruined farmhouse, doubting if he’d reach it and telling himself that he must be the biggest fool alive.

Chapter Eighteen

‘I suppose it’s raining?’ muttered Elsie, from the relative comfort of her camp bed.

‘Yes, I’m afraid it’s tipping down. I’d stay in bed if I were you. You’re not on shift until this afternoon.’ Rose pulled on her galoshes, slung her mackintosh cape around her shoulders, then sloshed across the fields towards the wooden huts that loomed out of the mist and rain.

The summer had been warm and sunny, and wounded men had sat outside the huts or big marquees, their faces turned towards the healing sun. The more adventurous had gone for walks around the ruined countryside. But now torrential autumn rains had turned the whole of Belgium into one vast sea of mud.

Rose walked into the hut shaking the rain out of her hair, and found the ward sister sticking pins and tape into a map of Flanders that was hung up in the office, marking the front line. ‘We’re doing well,’ she smiled.

‘That’s good,’ said Rose, who couldn’t help but think about the cost in young men’s lives. They were coming down in thousands from the Ypres salient. Their injuries were horrible and stank of putrefaction, for in the mud of Flanders even trivial wounds became infected. Even a small cut could mean an otherwise healthy limb developed gangrene, and the only way to deal with that was amputation.

It rained and rained, and filthy water swirled around the huts. In spite of off-duty sappers digging trenches to drain off the surplus water, the wards were often deep in muck and slime.

‘This winter’s going to be foul,’ said Elsie, as she and Rose slopped home again at the end of yet another shift.

‘Ghastly,’ Rose agreed, despondently. Living in a flooded tent and working in a flooded hospital, she almost wished herself back on the trains.

Then she thought of Alex and what he must be suffering in the east, and was ashamed. She must write tonight, she thought, a bright and breezy letter telling him about her trip with several other nurses to the coast, where they’d had a freezing swim, their first and last that year.

But it was hard to write to Alex, and getting harder all the time. She suspected – no, she knew – he must have someone else. They hadn’t seen each other since they’d returned to France, and although he’d written in June suggesting they might meet, she had not dared to ask for any leave. The hospital was full to overflowing. A few snatched hours in a café in St Omer and that day trip to Bolougne with Elsie was all the holiday she would have that year.

Celia had written a month ago, and mentioned that he’d been to visit Henry in the summer. Mrs Sefton and a friend had spotted him out walking with the bailiff’s eldest daughter.

‘She is by all accounts a rather forward sort of person, who always has an eye to the main chance,’
continued Celia.
‘My mother wouldn’t be at all surprised to find she’s angling after Alex Denham, even though he’s married. She’s that sort of girl.’

Rose shook her head. The bailiff’s daughter had a pretty face and neat, trim figure. Seventeen or eighteen now, she was in the bloom of youth and beauty. But Rose was a haggard twenty-one, who felt she must look more like forty-five.

Although the German bombs had failed to kill her, they had put their mark on her for life. She had long red weals across her stomach that would never fade, and her face was scarred by flying glass. Once white and soft, her hands were red and ruined. The nails were cracked, the knuckles raw.

She might have been attractive once, but she was not a beauty now.

When she came off shift one evening later that week, she met Elsie trudging through the mud, looking even gloomier than Rose felt. ‘What’s the matter, Elsie?’ she began.

‘I’ve had a letter from my father. God knows how he got it past the censor, but he did. Rose, I feel so tired! I don’t know how I’ll stay awake tonight.’

‘You’ll be all right,’ said Rose. ‘What did your father have to say?’

‘The Germans are moving troops out of the east. The new Russian government has made peace with Germany, so Jerry will soon make mincemeat out of us.’

‘How does your father know?’

‘He’s been on the Staff since last July. It might be just a rumour, I suppose. But my mother wants me back in Kent.’

‘When will you be leaving?’

‘I’m not going home! Both my brothers are still in Flanders, and I won’t have James and Matthew saying I got the wind up.’ Elsie looked at Rose. ‘But I don’t know how we’re going to beat them. Where will we find the men?’

‘I don’t know.’ Rose would never have believed the mighty Allied army could be defeated by a bunch of Prussians. But it seemed it might.

The rumour that the German government had made peace with Russia was all round the wards by eight o’clock the following morning. Two days later, rumour turned out to be fact.

‘We’re bound to be evacuated soon,’ said Elsie hopefully, as she wrung out the hem of her blue dress. ‘They can’t leave us here like sitting ducks, waiting for the Germans to arrive. A nice, warm chateau near the coast. That’s where I’d like to be.’