The Wild Dark Flowers (24 page)

The starboard lookout had grabbed a megaphone. He had turned towards the bridge and was yelling, “Torpedoes coming on the starboard side, sir!” Above him, the crow’s nest lookouts had begun to scramble down, shouting as they went.

My God
, John thought calmly.
They’ve done it.

The twin streaks of foam disappeared and immediately afterwards there was a distant boom like the sound of some vast iron door slamming closed. John turned in its direction in time to see an explosion of smoke and cinders come up through the funnels, rapidly followed by a plume of water at the side of the ship.

“Oh, we’re hit,” a woman cried.

People rushed to the rail.

They’ve hit the coal stores
, John thought. The explosions were far too loud for just a single missile; in fact, he thought he had heard three. The first was the torpedo—but that had been a different noise. The second two . . . something
within
the ship. Something more central; something that had been ignited.

The ship lifted right up at the prow, and slumped back into the sea; it was still shaking. Out of the corner of his eye, John saw that the hanging baskets in the café had been flung to the floor. Clouds of steam were circling on the deck farther down. He thought very clearly—almost slowly—that the stokers must have been killed. It was hellish down there anyway; they could not have survived. And then he thought of the men down in the hold who would be preparing the luggage for disembarkation. There was only an electric lift out of the hold; Lauriat had told him so. They would be trapped down there if the electricity failed.

“Will we sink?” he heard someone say.

“Not the
Lusitania
,” came a man’s voice in reply. “And we’re close to land even if we do.” John looked up and saw the shadowed pencil outline of the Head of Kinsale on the horizon.

Then, he thought he felt the ship tilt.

He grabbed the rail, assuming that it was his imagination. A ship the size of the
Lusitania
would take hours to go down, surely? The
Titanic
had taken two hours and forty minutes to sink.

He found that his hand seemed welded to the rail, his knuckles white. With slow-motion difficulty, he disengaged his grip. A woman rushed past him, holding a small boy in her arms, crying out that her other son was in their cabin, asleep. There were a lot of women and children on this boat, John thought; they were everywhere. Babies and toddlers and nine- and ten-year-olds. Girls in their summer frocks and little boys in sailor suits.

“My God, my God,” he whispered.

He looked up at the lifeboats and realized with horror that, indeed, the ship had tilted. It was at something like a fifteen-degree angle. But how could that be, already? It was only three or four minutes since they had been struck. How could it fill with water so much below that it began to list so much?

An officer hurried past. John caught at his sleeve.

“What’s happening?” he asked. “What should we do?”

“The captain has ordered the lifeboats to be lowered,” he was told. “The ship is not answering the helm. We’ve lost electricity. The steering has locked.”

“Lost electricity,” John repeated, as the man rushed away.

He thought of the men in the hold, and those already in the electric lift.

And, while he was still thinking of that horror, the ship began to turn in a prolonged circle, listing ever further in the mirrorlike ocean.

F
or a moment, Octavia could only stare at William as he lay inert on the floor. Then, she rushed to him, got down on her knees, and put her hands on his shoulders.

“William,” she said. “William—what is it?”

There was no reply. Her husband’s face was slowly draining of the heightened color that it had worn while he had been arguing with her.

“Amelie!” she cried. “Amelie, come here!”

Her maid must have been listening at the door all the while, for she rushed immediately into the room, and gave a gasp when she saw William on the floor.

“Tell them downstairs to call a doctor immediately,” Octavia said. She was trying to loosen William’s collar. “And come back here with whoever you can find. We must get him onto the bed.”

Amelie said not a word. She ran straight out of the door, and Octavia could hear her footsteps running down the stairs—then raised voices. “William, William,” she whispered. She put her fingers on his neck and felt a pulse. It was thready and faint. “Oh my God,” she murmured. Seeing him there, all her previous pictures of him flew out of the window—he was no longer the rigid, slightly overbearing figure she had known, but something faded, helpless, grey.

Amelie came rushing back into the bedroom, pursued by a footman. Together they manhandled William’s body to the bed. “Get me some water,” Octavia instructed. “Let us try to see if he can drink a little.”

“Ma’am, there is the smelling salts—” ventured Amelie.

The little bottle that Amelie found in the dressing room was administered to William. His eyes fluttered once or twice, and then his head jerked violently to one side.

“For God’s sake take that away,” he said.

Each of them let out a sigh. He opened his eyes fully and stared about him. Then, in an instant, he was struggling to get up.

“No, no,” Octavia said. She gave him a firm push back against the pillows. “You must stay quiet, you have had a seizure. The doctor is coming.”

“I can’t stay here,” he protested. “I must go to Harry. I must go to Folkestone.”

“You are going nowhere at all,” she replied, and took his hand.

*   *   *

B
oulogne-sur-Mer. Evening.

What a nice-sounding name it was, Harry Cavendish thought. Sur-Mer, Sur-Mer. On the sea. A nice little seaside town, much like those on the other side of the Channel. A straight, sparsely furnished promenade. A great hotel called the Casino, with a vast blue roof near the harbor wall, now converted to a hospital; it reminded him of places like Scarborough. Flat sands, music halls, hotels. The lights reflected on the incoming tide. Mud flats invaded and wrinkled by currents.

He’d played in such places as Scarborough on the Yorkshire coast when he was a boy. Happy times of sand between the toes, his mother somewhere far behind, smothered in a pale summer dress beneath a parasol, in an ornate chair brought by a servant to the sands. He had run about, a little king, while his mother bore the heat for an hour or so before retreating to one of those wedding-cake hotels with their glass roofs and white-painted arches and rose-fringed walks. A fortunate little king, stamping his feet and yelling at his nurse when he had to come inside. A spoiled little king, he now decided; and his sister Louisa trailing after him in her linen bloomers and starched dress and straw hat tied with a ribbon, looking cool and collected and postcard-pretty on the hottest day.

My God, he was glad that Louisa wasn’t here to see Boulogne-sur-Mer today. He hoped that she hadn’t got it into her head to volunteer as a VAD; the experience would break her, shatter her into pieces. She had a determination to get her way, but that wasn’t the same quality that was needed out here. A girl—and there were plenty of upper-class girls helping the troops—had to be staunchly oblivious, enduring, or hearty. Louisa was none of those things.

He lifted himself up on one elbow.

He had been put at the head of a long line of men: stretchers lay on the ground by the dockside. The dock—and the sparsely furnished promenade, and the sands, and the Casino—everything in fact, even the fishing boats, even the steep streets of poor houses, even the pavements—everything was now part of the war. The noise was incessant. Ships were coming in, unloading, disgorging their crowds of uniformed men, or horses, or guns, or stack after stack of pallets; other ships were going out, heavy with the wounded, with wrecks of machinery and men.

Single-track railway lines came up to the dockside; the air was punctuated with their shunting and hissing. The horses that were led down onto dry land shied about, and were occasionally wrestled into order; their manure stank, mingling with everything else that was acrid. Petrol, sweat, misery.

Some horses sensed it: you could see it in their eyes, widened, and their heads rolling from side to side. Some came off the boats looking sickened from sea travel, just like the men. Although the soldiers hid it with jokes, elbowing each other and stamping on the ground to show that it was solid, making retching faces. The horses had no language other than the foam flecking their coats, the rolling back of their lips, or the shuddering of the muscles along their backs.

Harry counted eighty stretchers to his right-hand side. Ten to his left. He looked again at the man alongside him, who up to now had been apparently sleeping. It was a captain, a man with an aquiline face. He opened his eyes now and looked at Harry.

“Afternoon,” came an upper-class voice. “We’ve both been a-kip. Rather a neat trick in this bedlam, what?” He smiled at Harry. “One ought to object to being lumped on the pavement.”

“Not quite Claridge’s.”

The man laughed. “Claridge’s! My God, when I get to London, I shall take a suite and install a nice lady with me.” He winked at Harry. “She’ll have to be my hands, though.”

Harry glanced down. Both of the captain’s hands were so swathed in bandages that they resembled two round white lumps of material.

“I’d shake a paw, but as you see . . .”

“Harry Cavendish.” Harry tapped his compatriot’s shoulder in a friendly gesture.

“John Hooge-Haldane.”

“Ah, Hooge. . . .”

“Of course, by way of irony, where we’re fighting at the moment.”

“Our line is still there?”

“From time to time.” Haldane gave out a great sigh. “The twenty-eighth have been smashed up, I’m afraid. Heavy losses. Ten thousand or more.”

“Ten thousand!”

“They say it’s over forty thousand since the end of April on that salient. The Boche are dug in with barbed wire we can’t cut. And then the artillery . . . there’s not enough shells.”

Harry closed his eyes for a second. “I’ve been out of it,” he murmured. “In a hospital train. Stopping and starting.” He opened his eyes and looked back down at Haldane’s hands. “Are you thirsty?” he asked.

“Damned thirsty.”

Harry had been given a webbing-covered bottle of water: Caitlin had secured it on the train. Water from the train’s own boiler. It didn’t matter. It was water all the same. With some difficulty, he edged it from under his blanket. Haldane didn’t try to move his hands, which reeked of antiseptic, and the bandages were seeping something brownish. It was a hard job to lean over to Haldane’s stretcher; Harry’s legs and hips felt like lumps of clay. Eventually he managed to get a dribble of liquid through the man’s mouth.

“All right?”

“Thanks.”

Harry glanced down at the blanketed shape. There was no uniform, just—rather insanely—a pair of sepia-striped pyjamas.

“They got them from my trunk at Bailleul.”

For a moment, Harry thought this was sheer dementia speaking. He thought that the cultured, clipped voice had said “Balliol.” Perhaps the man imagined himself back at university. But then he realized that it was the name of a French town in Flanders. There was a clearing hospital there—Caitlin had told him; she’d tried to keep him conscious by getting him to recite the ones she had been posted to. Bailleul, Armentieres, Ypres.

“Ho-ho,” Haldane said. “My damned PJs.”

“How so?”

“Whole bloody kit burned off me. I had to strip it. Doused in petrol.”

“They’re throwing petrol now?”

A hoarse, coughing laugh. “I didn’t need a Boche to throw anything at me. This was my corporal trying to light a fire.”

Harry couldn’t think of anything to say. It was a joke surely. Then he whispered, “Oh, bad luck.”

“Bloody incompetent bastard,” the man muttered. “Making a laughingstock of me, and a corpse of himself. Whole tent went up.” He made a snorting noise. “Not a gallant wound, would you say? Hardly something to boast about to the dear little folks at home.”

“No, I suppose not.”

“The thing is . . .” he began to cough. He struggled for a few moments, then regained his voice. “You’ve heard of Hill Sixty? We were in the attack of the first of May. They bombarded us and then sent over the gas.”

“I saw some men affected by it.”

“Brutal stuff,” Haldane muttered. “The gas reached the trenches and then they bombed us on both flanks of the battalion. We retaliated of course. . . . And you know, I survived that. The damned fucking irony—excuse my French—is that I survived it and then got struck with this. When there is so much work to do . . . ” His voice trailed away, and then regained its frustrated vigor. “We lost ninety men from the battalion from gas poisoning. Fifty-six in the clearing station.” The coughing restarted.

“Rest, old man.”

But rest did not seem to be on Haldane’s agenda. “The colonel there told me it was chlorine and bromine mixed. D’you know what that does? Makes a man cough up thicker and thicker stuff until it suffocates him. They cough to get rid of it, but it only makes it worse. They drown as they breathe.”

Harry wondered if Caitlin had seen that.

“Got past that. Got back to Bois Confluent. Near there at least. Make my report. Felt that I had done something worthwhile that day, repulsed them. Gave them no quarter for the use of their filthy tricks. French were just up the line. They’ve taken a pasting, I can tell you, worse even than us. I was writing . . . then the bloody corporal . . .”

Haldane started to laugh. He held up his bandaged hands. “I got this trying to tear the clothes from him. Lit up like a regular flare, the fool.” He suddenly turned his head. “What in damnation is that screeching noise?”

Harry looked. “Getting horses onto a train.”

They both looked over. A large grey, a Shire, was refusing to go up the ramp; it hung its head. It must have been seventeen hands high or more. Frustrated, the soldiers gave up on pushing it, and instead passed a large webbing band around it and pulled hard; there were two men on each side, four in all. Still the horse did not move.

“Poor beast,” Haldane muttered.

“Yes. They don’t like it,” Harry agreed. And then tried to sit upright. “By God, I know that horse,” he exclaimed. But so many people were passing between the train and themselves that it was hard to see properly.

“You do?”

“I’m sure that . . .” Harry began. But just at that moment, the Shire began to move, and, in a moment, it had vanished inside, hauled by the straps. Its head was still bowed, half turned away; Harry, frowning, could not now be sure. “Perhaps not,” he murmured. “Not possible, surely.”

Far away, above the noise, there was music coming from the old harbor. Both Harry and Haldane now turned their heads in its direction. “People having fun,” Haldane whispered. “Jolly good luck to them.”

“Yes, Harry murmured. “Jolly good luck.”

Haldane was peering now at the ship on the dockside. “That’s our punt, do you think?”

“Yes, that’s the one.”

“She’s just a banged-up little ferry.”

“She’s our ticket home, though.”

Haldane lay back on the stretcher and stared at the sky. “I would get up and walk around but for these bloody PJs.”

“I don’t know if I can walk,” Harry admitted.

“What, they’ve not had you perambulating?”

“A sort of shuffle off the bunk onto this.”

“On your arse, I’ll warrant.”

Harry laughed. It was probably the first real laugh he’d had since he had left England, coming out of the depths, recalling his shambling and shuffling in front of Caitlin, and the involuntary swearing that went with it. “I impressed one nurse particularly.”

“Oh, we’ve all impressed nurses,” Haldane laughed. “Try having a pee with your hands fucked up like this. The poor dears had to fumble about for the old man and hold it. Pissing by proxy.” He raised an eyebrow at Harry. “And I would say your luck’s right out, old chap. Because unless I’m much mistaken, you’ll have to do it for me soon.”

Harry lay back on the ground too, and the pair of them laughed together until the tears crept out of Harry’s eyes.

“That bloody corporal . . .” Haldane gasped. “I’ve got no fucking fingers left. . . .”

It all seemed, in its horror, so wildly funny.

After a while they stopped laughing and lay looking at each other: a pair of privileged, shattered boys—no more than boys in reality, but with the experiences of lifetimes laid on them—and they stared at each other’s grimed, sweating faces with pained smiles.

“Got a family?” Haldane asked eventually.