The Wild Dark Flowers (16 page)

A group of men, some in uniform, turned to look at her. She strode over to March. “What is happening?” she asked.

He touched the brim of his hat. “’Tis the requisition for the horses,” he said.

“Where is Jack?” she asked. “Where is Josiah?”

March hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “Bottom meadow.”

She knew exactly what Jack thought of his horses. Growing up, he had told her stories about each one. Such silly stories about how they fitted into fairy tales. This chestnut was the prince’s horse from Cinderella, and so on. He had been ten years older than she and she had hung on every word with her usual naïve trust. She had sat with him once while Grey Ghost was shoed, and he had reassured her that the horse felt no pain.

But her mother had gently told her, when she was older, that it was not appropriate for her to sit with the staff and chatter. “But Harry sits with Jack all the time!” she had protested. “Harry is a boy,” her mother had replied. The frustration and injustice of it had rankled with Louisa for days.

She looked from one face to another. The captain had saluted her, but she had not acknowledged it with any grace. He seemed to her rather pompous, standing there in his ill-fitting uniform with his thin fringe of a moustache and his dry, obsequious manner. He was puffed up with his own importance.
Perhaps you enjoy your moment of power
, she thought sourly. She glanced at the lorry. “You’ll take them in that?”

“Yes, madam.”

“How far?”

“We’ll go to Crewe today.”

“Crewe!” Louisa exclaimed. “But that must be over a hundred miles.”

“A hundred and fifty,” March muttered.

“But why Crewe?”

“For the train,” the captain explained. “And then on to the south coast.”

She stared at the lorry. “But these horses have never traveled so far,” she said. “Some of them were born here on the farms.”

No one said anything. A cold sensation of horror began to crawl over Louisa: she felt the hairs rise on her arms. “And then on to France, I suppose,” she said. She stepped towards the captain. “What happens to them, out there?” she asked quietly.

“There are more than a million,” the captain said. “These chaps here are lucky, you know. Over a hundred and fifty thousand went to France in the first few weeks of the war.”

She held his gaze. “And how many have come back?” she asked.

There was no reply. She turned on her heel and walked across the yard. Four ponies that she knew by sight were being led out of the field as she drew level; she stopped to let them by, unable to look at their docile, obedient expressions. They were just sleepy farm ponies, she thought. There was no verve, no spirit in them such as one saw on paintings of army horses. Ponies like these didn’t charge, or paw the ground, or have the least capacity to look glamorous. They had never been trained to anything but a plow or a wagon; half of them shied away at the sound of cars.

When the last was through, she started to run. “Ma’am!” March called out. She ignored him. She ran down through the grass. It was just getting to knee height; in a few weeks’ time it would soon have its first cut for hay. All kinds of flowers grew in it; the jodhpurs she had dragged on in such haste became covered with the yellow pollen of buttercups. She saw Josiah coming her way; he held up his hand. She stopped next to him, out of breath, trying to see over his shoulder to where the river was fringed with trees.

“Is Jack down there?”

“Aye, miss.” Josiah was pulling at the collar of his jacket in an uncharacteristic gesture of unease. “He won’t bring the Shire up.”

“Oh,” she murmured. But it was no surprise to her. “They’ll come down and get it if he won’t bring it, you know.”

“I know,” Josiah agreed.

The two looked at each other. “I’ll speak to him,” she said. “Go up and tell them to wait a little.”

Josiah opened his mouth as if to object; then he clamped it shut and walked away. She watched him go: an old man trudging as if he had the weight of the world on his shoulders.

She went on down to the river.

She soon saw Jack there in the shallows, holding Wenceslas on a loose rein while the great Shire drank the cool water of the river. The idyll of it stopped her in her tracks for a moment: it was like something out of a Constable picture, so quiet, and dappled with a slanting light.

Jack glanced at her as she approached them. She stood on the bank and looked down at him.

“It’s time, Jack,” she said softly. “Will you walk back up with me?”

He said nothing for some moments; then, “He don’t like noise.”

“Yes,” she said. “I know. He hates Harry’s sports car, doesn’t he? But then, there’ll be no sports cars in France, and no idiots like Harry driving them at breakneck speed.”

Jack still said nothing.

“They’ll treat him awfully well,” she told him. “There is a special veterinary corps out there, you know. And they’re needed, Jack. Lorries and cars and things can’t cope with cratered roads. Horses and mules are the only things that can get to the front. I read that in the newspaper.”

Wenceslas shifted his feet, causing spirals of sand to swirl in the water. Both of them watched the patterns unfolding and then disintegrating, and drifting away.

“It’s not that I don’t want to do our best,” Jack said, finally. “To make sacrifices, and so on. I know it’s our duty.” And he looked up at Louisa with such a complicated expression on his face. “But they never asked for it, the animals. They didn’t have anything to do with it. But we bring them in, and we use them and make them do our dirty work. And they obey us, but they don’t know what it’s for. They go on—they go on into guns and mud and shells and murder, but they don’t know why. That’s the pity of it.” Louisa’s heart turned over.

She stepped down the bank and across the gravelly border to the river, and, looking at the man and his helpless grip on the reins—his hand first pulling and then releasing the tension, a perfect picture of agonized indecision—she walked into the water.

The horse turned its head to stare at her, and she could hardly bear to touch the warm flank. She watched a flicker run along under its skin, a momentary trembling in the muscle. “Dear boy,” she murmured. “Good boy.” She put her hand under Wenceslas’s soft mouth. The horse’s lips searched in vain for the sugar lump or piece of apple that she would normally have given him. “I’ve nothing for you at all,” she told him. “I’m so sorry.”

Jack was staring down still at the water: with his free hand he rubbed his eyes and looked away, then, up the length of the river to the bridge. She put her hand gently on Jack’s shoulder and leaned against him. Such a kind heart this man had. Such kindness. She rested her forehead for a moment on Jack’s shoulder, then turned up her face and kissed him.

The water rippled, the sun danced, the world passed away. She felt him shaking in her arms. “Ah, but no,” he murmured. When they parted, he was looking at her with astonishment.

Then, she put her hand over his on the reins. “Come,” she said gently. “It really is time, Jack. We’ll take him up there together.”

H
arrison, in the farthest corner of the barn, was thinking of harvests. It was pitch black in the hour before dawn. He had no real idea where they were, except that it was near the front: they were going up into reserve, they had been told. They had got here close to midnight, and it seemed to him that he had dreamed almost at once, dropping off halfway through eating, with the hard tack biscuit still in his hand. Dreamed of sun, and not the strong wind and rain that they had marched through that day. Dreamed of the Yorkshire lanes in May: sweet smelling, scattered with flowers.

He woke in the death’s hour just before dawn. An eerie claustrophobic silence seemed to have its own vibrating echo as he strained for the sound of shelling. They had heard it yesterday. Now there was nothing.

Next to him, Nat was awake.

“Here comes another one,” he whispered.

They waited for the noise of the rat snuffling along over the prone bodies of their sleeping mates. It was unaccountable that they couldn’t sleep now. Only a few hours’ oblivion, and then this damned wakefulness. They’d marched up through Givenchy the day before, and something about the pitiful place had stuck in his throat at the time.

They said that there used to be six thousand people there, but now all that could be seen were shattered ruins and the contents of the houses spilled anywhere, soaked, broken beds and cupboards scattered between tremendous holes in the road. He’d seen a photograph of a family, the glass shattered, and the children’s faces peering from the frame spattered with mud. Farther along others like these were churned into a lathered mess of splinters and tattered cloth.

It got worse as they went on, however. They came to the La Bassée canal, bright yellow in color, poisoned by the Hun so that it was unfit for horses to drink, and full of wreckage floating at a snail’s pace. They had walked along the old towpath and seen doors and shattered tree branches and bodies in the water. Harrison had looked at it all and felt nothing but mild curiosity and sadness. War was a sodden, strewn, shapeless affair.

He nudged Nat now. “Ever seen a harvest?”

“In Mile End? Naw. Why, have you?”

“Have you never got out to the country?”

“There’s no country in London.”

“There’s squares and parks.”

Nat laughed to himself. “Up west maybe.” He let out a sigh. “That where you worked, up west, in the city?”

Harrison didn’t reply. He was touched, almost in a ghostlike tremor, by the memory of Rutherford on a summer’s day, and was surprised at his own sentimentality for it. If only, he thought, he could see Jenny again before he had to go up to the front this morning. Just a moment or two; he would trade his next month’s pay to lean back on the kitchen wall and close his eyes against the sunshine and hear the voices of the maids in the kitchen behind him. Instead of which . . . well, there was nothing for it. He was here, and he would face the horror out, if horror was what was in store for him.

But even while thinking this, there was no panic or fear in him. He wondered if he were strange in some way; unable to be moved very deeply. Unable to draw close to anyone. After a moment or two, his line of thought was broken as Nat whistled a few lines of “Daisy” through his teeth. Then the Londoner began to sing in a surprisingly melodious tenor: soft and soulful. “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do. I’m half crazy, all for the love of you. . . .”

“Give it a rest,” someone said nearby, and he shut up at once, grinning.

After a moment, he commented in a whisper, “You wouldn’t ask about bleedin’ harvest if you saw where we was,” he said. “Me and the wife. Two kids, we got. Babies, like. But I suppose we got a nice view of the river past the railings—on the roof, if you go up there. Over the roofs to the river.” He seemed to think about this for a while, his eyes growing vague recalling it. “But these buggers—” he listened again for the skittering of the rats, “—all over. In the beds, even.”

Harrison was still lingeringly thinking of Rutherford. “Harvest used to be done by horse and wagon and teams of men,” he said. “Teams of scythes. Then the threshing machines came. The mowers would go round a field and leave a patch of grass in the middle, and then the dogs would go in and fetch out the rabbits and the rats. Seen a terrier with a rat?”

“Naw, mate.”

“Sight to see. One, two seconds. It’s dead. Then the next and the next. Proper-quick dispatch.”

Nat snorted. “Quick as us?”

“Naw,” Harrison replied, mimicking the man alongside him. They laughed. And then they felt him—scratchy little claws on their sleeves, quick as lightning, trying to get up to their necks, following the scent of warm breath. They had tied wire around their wrists and collars, and bunched their greatcoats around their knees so that it couldn’t run up their legs, but it was still going for their faces.

Harrison snapped out his hand and found its tail. The rat bundled itself into a ball, writhing, trying to bite. He threw it into the air, and it landed somewhere out in the rows of recumbent bodies. “Bloody hell!” someone yelled. Harrison and Nat sat with their backs against the barn wall, pleased.

There was a silence of two or three minutes. In that time, the light subtly altered. It was almost four o’clock.

“Coming up dawn,” Nat observed quietly. Harrison felt him turn; Nat’s breath was suddenly on him, fetid from cigarettes. “You saw that church?” he said. “You saw that crucifix?”

He had. It was just outside Givenchy, in the ruins of a graveyard where memorials were knocked flat and coffins uprooted from their resting places. Someone had tried to cover them again with earth in haphazard mounds. The walls of the cemetery were merely rubble. But, in among them, was a crucifix—ten feet high and carved and colored. In the growing darkness of the march, Christ had looked down at them from His own agony. The cross was unmarked.

“They say it happens a lot,” Nat murmured.

“What does?”

“Statues of saints and Mary and all that, staying put, never a mark on them.”

“Well, so what?”

Nat shuffled, drawing up his legs and holding his knees. “Seems peculiar. Protected, like.”

“They’re not protected,” Harrison replied. “Nobody is. It’s just luck.”

“What, God ain’t looking down on some? Those that get away with it?”

“No,” Harrison said. “God is looking somewhere else, if He’s anywhere. Personally, I don’t believe it.”

“What, not believe in God?”

“No. There’s no God.”

Nat said nothing for a while. “Bad luck talking like that,” he said at last.

Harrison sighed. “It’s not luck, and not God. There’s no God here, or anywhere. Just what happens, happens. Got to look out for yourself. That’s all there is.”

He could see a little more of Nat’s face now. He was so spare, so thin, and he looked thinner now that he had been shorn of his hair and his weedy, pencil-line moustache. But he was grinning there in the shadows, showing uneven and discolored teeth. “I believe,” he whispered. “Yes, I do. In Jesus, in God.”

“Good for you,” Harrison murmured.

The sergeant came round as soon as dawn broke. When they lined up, he stood there yelling at them, reserving his loudest shouts for the Kitchener volunteers that had been drafted into the regulars. “Pathetic bleeding sight,” he’d told them. “Square up, because soon enough you’ll be staring at some six-foot Prussian guard. They’re facing right at you where you’re going.” A trembling hiss had gone through some of the men. “That’s right, fucking Prussians. Two words of advice. If you stop a bullet, if you get pipped, then stay still. Got it? Wait where you fall, don’t make a run for it. Second, do what you’re fucking told. No more, no less. All right?” He gazed at them all with distaste. “Get into squads of sixteen. Leave a good space between each squad. Listen to what the lieutenant says; you’re going to Aubers Ridge.”

They obeyed. Outside, the rain of yesterday was over: it was a bright morning. “Nice day,” the lieutenant said, and gave them a sardonic smile.

Each man was loaded with ammunition—two full bandoliers across their bodies; field dressings were stitched into their tunics. Nat fingered the identity disc around his neck. “Let’s get at ’em,” he muttered. “Going ter bag me one. Going ter run him through.”

Harrison looked at him. “Keep it in check,” he said. “We’re not there yet.”

Nat was smiling nonetheless. Harrison wondered if that smile ever really left his wizened little face.

They set off, walking two miles until the swing bridge at Gore. Another two hours, and the firing was much closer. Instead of the distant woolly rumbles they had heard until now, the sounds became distinct punctuations in the brilliantly shining day. Now and again they came upon a group of stones that had once been houses, and negotiated deep shell holes in the road filled with water. Then, barbed wire was alongside the road and, turning a bend, they came upon a wagon. It had been carrying food—it was anyone’s guess what the men were eating who had been waiting for it; they were starving today, Harrison supposed, going without—for the peeled-back tins had been shoved into a heap at the side. Some of the tins looked like flowers with open petals, disgorging a kind of fluid waste tinged with phosphorus. The wagon was on its side, and, as they walked forward past it, they saw the bodies of two horses.

“That’s put me right off me dinner,” Nat observed dryly. Harrison turned around to look at him. The smile was stretched and wavering.

Another mile, and something damned awful wailed to their right-hand side, a high-pitched ear-shattering whine followed by a thump that they felt in the soles of their boots. A spray of earth went up like a fountain five hundred yards away. Nobody said anything; they averted their eyes.

Five minutes later, the lieutenant caught up with their squad. He seemed deep in thought, frowning; he walked forward to the sergeant and there came orders for them all to halt and take cover. They got down at the side of the road in the verge, or where a verge would have once been. “We’re too exposed,” Harrison muttered. “The Hun have got our distance.”

“It was only one shell,” Nat said.

It was not yet seven in the morning, but it was getting warmer. There was another crump. They saw the road ahead explode in a shower of earth. Harrison regarded the way ahead dispassionately. They had been told how random shells sometimes scattered along the lines that the enemy had already measured; the dead horses were proof that they may have done the same earlier that morning, or during the night. Nat shuffled at his side. “You’d think they’d get tired of it,” he muttered. “Why don’t they go ’ome.”

With a blur of black smoke a motorcycle sped up the road and spun to a halt alongside the officer. Nat sighed. “We could brew tea, if they’d let us.”

The warmth in the morning air was wafting a strange mix of smells over them: cordite, dust, and something like nasturtium or lilac.

“That’s gas,” Nat whispered. “Gas shells.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Bloke told me at Boulogne. Oranges, too.”

“It can’t smell of all of them, can it?”

Nat shrugged. “It’s what it is, though. Out there somewhere.”

They watched the courier go, hearing the machine whining through the rutted track long after they lost sight of him. But still there was no movement, no order.

“Where was you working, then, to see harvests?” Nat asked.

“Country house.”

“What, a big ’un?”

“Big enough.”

“What doing?”

“Fetching and carrying.”

Nat was smiling again. “Cushy number.”

Harrison thought about it. “Yes, probably.”

The conversation was interrupted by the lieutenant walking briskly back to them. They were the last two men in the squad. The lieutenant hooked his thumb over his shoulder, back the way they had come. “Harrison,” he said. “Go back and make sure the water cart’s with us.”

Harrison did as he was told, running back around the bend. Just beyond the line of trees—which were cut off around waist height, split to the ground—the water cart was coming, pulled by a pair of mules. He could see two men on the cart talking to each other, laughing about something. He waved his arm at them as if to say,
come on
. They did not wave back, but kept coming at the same seemingly meandering pace.

“Idiots,” he muttered.

He turned back and ran the way he had come, and at that moment he heard another whine—it was so short and seemed high up, the nagging whine of a mosquito—but in the next second there were several deafening crashes. First behind him, and then in front. He stood stock-still in the road.

Then, turning round, he looked at the water cart. No water, no mule—unless that was a mule, thrown over the wire. And no men. He heard his own breath hitching and snagging; knew that he had to go back to the lieutenant. That was his job. That was what he ought to do. Go back and report on the water cart. He felt himself shaking uncontrollably, and cursed himself.
Stop the fuck shaking
, he thought.
Stop the fuck. Stop.
He wondered where the other mule and the other man had gone, then ran towards the bend, heading for his squad.