The Sons of Adam (18 page)

‘Well, sorry anyway. It was ungentlemanly.’

She snorted out through her nose and began to clear away his tray of food.

‘You must think me very stupid,’ he said.

She stood upright, leaving his tray where it was. ‘Yes. Yes, I do. So far in this conversation you’ve called yourself a brute, ungentlemanly and now stupid. In the past couple of days, you’ve said sorry because you had dressings that needed changing. You’ve apologised for causing trouble – by which I assume you meant being honourably wounded in the service of your country. And when I tried to pay you the compliment of noticing your Military Cross you told me that you hadn’t earned it. So far, Captain Montague, I’m beginning to conclude that you’re a great nincompoop.’

He smiled. ‘Sorry.’

‘Sorry again? What is it this time?’

‘Very well then, not sorry … Miss Dunlop, may we start again? I’m Captain Alan Montague and I’m perfectly delighted to make your acquaintance.’

She bobbed in an exquisite curtsy and offered him her hand. ‘Charlotte Dunlop,’ she said. ‘Do call me Lottie.’

For six weeks, Alan recovered. At first he was embarrassed that he should be cared for so intimately by a friend and guest of his parents. Then, later, as he became well enough to be pushed round the hospital in a wheelchair, he began to understand what Lottie’s day-to-day job involved. The wing of the hospital in which she worked dealt with some of the worst cases coming over from France. She handled men who had lost both legs, who had been blinded or deafened, men whose lungs had been three-quarters destroyed by gas, who coughed black blood each time they tried to breathe too deeply. Compared with the things Lottie saw each and every day, Alan’s personal embarrassment at being bathed seemed so trivial.

They became friends.

At the end of her daily duties, Lottie came to find Alan, bringing two steaming great mugs of tea and a slice of cake from home. He learned how she had been on holiday in France when the war broke out. She’d extended her stay, ‘not wanting to travel back while the fighting was still going on – my goodness, how strange it feels to remember that now’. Staying in a hotel at Boulogne, she’d encountered some of the wounded men of the original Expeditionary Force and stayed to help. She’d been appalled by what she’d seen to begin with – ‘I must have been a very sheltered little girl, I’m afraid. I hadn’t imagined … I hadn’t even imagined what it could have been like’ – but came to find something like a vocation in her bloodstained trade. ‘I came back from France for Mummy and Daddy’s sake, but I insisted on at least coming here –’ she meant the Centre for the Very Seriously Wounded – ‘as I couldn’t stand to have become one of those ghastly debs who take a few temperatures and change a few dressings, then think they’ve earned themselves a letter of thanks from the King.’

And he, in return, told her all about himself. He found he was able to speak to her about the fighting with something approaching candour. After all, for every horror he had seen, she had heard of things every bit as bad. She had even, he reflected, witnessed more deaths at close quarters, since perhaps one-third of the men who passed through her hands were too badly injured to survive and her job kept her by their sides until the bitter end.

‘When you were concussed, you used to moan a lot in your sleep,’ she said. ‘You called out for mother – everyone does,’ she added quickly, ‘everyone – but also for Tom. That would be Tom Creeley, I suppose? The boy you grew up with.’

‘Yes, though that doesn’t quite say it. Tom was my twin. I couldn’t have been closer to him if he’d been my flesh and blood. For a few days after his death, I quite lost my head. I almost willed myself to die.’

She nodded. ‘That’s quite common, actually. It
is
a phase. It does pass.’

‘It has passed, I think. I miss Tom every moment – does that sound absurd? It’s true, though – but I don’t feel that my life has to end because of it. Actually, I’m getting rather keen on life.’

She smiled at him. Her smile seemed like the most beautiful thing in the world.

‘Me too, my dear captain. Me too.’

The escape attempt was a complete success and a total failure.

One morning in May 1917, Tom found an opportunity to throw a handful of grit into the engine that drove the soda factory’s principal conveyor belt. The machinery choked and died. Sabotage was instantly suspected, and prisoners were informed that working hours would be extended until dusk that night. It was what Tom had wanted.

That evening, as he and Mitch Norgaard passed a wood on their way home, they broke from the column of prisoners and ran for their lives into the sheltering trees. Some shots rang out. Still they ran.

Norgaard was hit once in the leg. He could have stopped. Tom would have stopped there with him. But the thought of further captivity was too much for the noble-hearted American. ‘Freedom!’ he shouted. ‘Freedom!’ He ran on and Tom ran with him.

Into disaster.

As appalling luck would have it, a group of German guards on their way home from camp was passing through the woods. Tom and Norgaard ran almost into them. A shot cracked out. Norgaard was hit again and fell dead. The rifles swung around to Tom.

He thought seriously about running on. He thought about choosing death by gunfire over death by starvation. He thought about it, but decided against. He raised his hands, and – wearily, wearily – plodded towards the guns.

This was the success: that Mitch Norgaard would never know captivity again.

Here was the failure: that Tom would, as likely as not, never know anything else.

Tom’s punishment was lenient: one month in solitary confinement on half-rations. When, at the end of the month, he was brought before the camp commandant, his legs were thin, his arms scrawny, his belly jammed tight with hunger. He had lived almost a year in prison. He supposed he would die there.

The commandant frowned.

‘No punishments. Satisfactory work record. Not so sick as many. Why try to escape? You were lucky not to be shot.’ The commandant spoke German, a little quicker than Tom could easily understand.

‘Lucky? Why lucky?’ said Tom. He was dizzy from long confinement, lack of daylight, and the delirium of near-starvation. The German word for stomach shoved its way into his mind.
‘Magen. Mein Magen.’

The commandant snorted, then turned to one of the
Wachposten
at his side in order to issue a series of rapid instructions. Then, using French, he spoke to Tom. ‘I have changed your work detail. We need more help on the farms. You will be ready at five o’clock, to be on the farm by six thirty. You will give me your word of honour that you will not attempt to escape again. Understand?’

Tom understood – and on that day Tom’s war ended, or at least the brutal uncertainty over living or dying.

As the commandant had known, it was easy for any man working on a farm to keep himself alive. If Tom sowed barley, he ate a handful of the grain. When he split turnips for the sheep, he kept a moon-shaped slice for himself. When he carried the tubs of porridge to the pigs and calves, he slurped up some of the mixture from the bottom, where the oats were thickest. In autumn, at harvest time, he chomped on fresh apples, concealed some of the waxy potatoes in his tunic, had a pocket of wheat bulging in his trousers.

For the first time since being taken prisoner, Tom remembered what it was like to be happy.

To be happy and to survive.

Alan too survived the war.

When his health returned, he went back to France. But not to the front line. Not to the fighting. With a rare flickering of intelligence, the War Office had the sense to transfer Alan to an outfit known as the Military Fuels Procurement Office in Paris.

Alan had had very little idea of what was involved until he got there and met his superior, a cheerful lieutenant colonel with a quick smile and a booming laugh.

‘Secret of success,’ said the lieutenant colonel. ‘Fritz thought he was going to win this war because his railways were better. We know we’re going to win, because our motor transport is better. Our lads came to France with just eighty vehicles to call their own. By the end of next year, we’ll have two hundred thousand, between us and the Frogs. That’s not to mention hundreds of tanks, thousands of aircraft, plus whatever the Yanks bring with ’em. But you know the best part about it all? It’s this. There’s no point Fritz trying to build lorries to keep up with us, because he’s got no oil to put in ’em. That’s our job here. Getting the fuel to the boys who need it. If we get it right, we’ll win the war.’

The lieutenant colonel was right. The work was important, even critical. And as every month went by, he was proved ever more correct. Increasingly, the Allies had a mobility that their enemy couldn’t match. Mobility and, with new American troops arriving by the week, manpower. And so Alan passed the rest of the war. He was harassed, overworked, hopelessly busy – but safe. Blissfully, gloriously, wonderfully safe.

As far as he could be without either Tom or Lottie, he was happy.

For weeks before the longed-for peace had finally arrived, Tom’s prison camp swirled with rumour and counterrumour. Down on the farm where he worked, only the essential jobs were done, everything else neglected. For the first time, Tom learned about the defeat of Austria-Hungary, the surrender of the Turks, the mutinies at Kiel dockyard.

At the end of that day, when it was time to return to camp, Tom remained seated. ‘I’ll stay here,’ he said. ‘Why not?’

It was strictly against regulations. The
Wachposten
– whose rifles were leaning placidly in the corner of the room, with ammunition clips hung on a peg to stop the cats from getting at them – looked at the farmer, who looked back at them and shrugged. If the war was ending, what did they care? What did anyone care?