The Wild Dark Flowers (29 page)

He kept his head down for the first few yards. Vaguely, absurdly, he wondered what had been planted here before the war. He wondered what would be planted here when it was all over, if it would ever be over. They would be good crops, he thought. They’d come up strongly. There would be wheat here, or barley, or potatoes. Or maize. Or meadow grass.

He lifted his head and, for a strange moment, he thought that all the way ahead of him was a meadow full of wild dark flowers. Dark blue streamers, like irises, or reeds at the edge of a river. And then he realized that it was not flowers at all, but other men—mere sketches of men now in the ground mist—as they swayed and staggered. Wild dark flowers bending to the ground.

He looked down again, tripping a little, trying to gain a foothold. And it was then that he saw, to his amazement, a line open up in the earth ahead of him. Little sprouts of soil as if something were trying quickly to grow. Time had shot forwards into the future; something had been planted and was coming up frantically, just like the beanstalk in the fairy tale.

For a split second he stared at the sprouting line in fascination to left and right. He couldn’t see where the German front line was. He was surrounded by the sprouting seeds. And then they hit him.

It was then that he knew that they were not seeds at all, but machine gun bullets raking the line of men.

*   *   *

I
t was midday, and he was lying in a shell hole eighteen inches deep with the pack on his back as a pillow, and after a while he stopped wiping away the rain. At first he’d put himself facedown where he fell, and put his hands over his head, but after a while the filth from the ground was suffocating him, and so he turned and lay to face upwards.

Two men were lying beside him. At first he had thought that they were all lucky; being hit by the machine guns had been like going over a tripwire. It must have been almost funny to look at, all falling down in a row as if they were falling over their own feet.

Then, looking more closely, he decided that they hadn’t been lucky after all.

It reminded him of music-hall dancers he had seen a while back doing a show; he tried to think what it was called. French dancers, just outside Paris where the very first train had stopped. It was meant to be a dirty dance, but he couldn’t see anything erotic in it. They hadn’t been very good dancers; it wasn’t the Moulin Rouge, just a village concoction, and some of the girls well past their prime. They flashed their skirts, but a man had no desire to see what they were flashing, poor ducks. They were only trying to get some money. When they had stopped, their faces fell into lines scored by hunger. Poor old fairground ducks in a row.

The three of them that were now in the shell hole had been like that: dancing, but not very good at it. It was hardly surprising. Nothing in their training had shown them how to dance fast enough to dodge a stream of bullets aimed at their knees.

Raining and dancing, raining and dancing.

He’d got a bullet in his hip. Another, bouncing off someone else’s body, had scored his neck. The man alongside him had been the best dancer in that tripping line, hopping about like a clown before he fell. Strange, how men reacted in different ways. Some simply threw up their arms; they made a sound as if the air had been punched out of them. Some danced, like his mate here. Some just plain fell flat on their faces, like him. And all three of them had all ended up in the same place: this ten-by-six rectangular hole, showered with debris of all kinds.

Just after they fell, he’d realized that the British bombardment had shifted a bit. The sound was different.
They’re moving up
, he thought, and was glad for a few minutes, because he thought that it meant that the advance was working, and that the guns were moving forwards to back them up.

But after a while he realized that the orders were to try to crush the German front lines again. Probably the first bombardment had made no impact. He could hear the machine guns still stuttering routinely. God, did the Germans ever run short of fucking ammunition? It seemed not. Nor did the gunners ever pause for breath. On and on it went, and as it pattered on he could hear more whistles, more shouts. More men advancing. More falling. More screaming.

Somewhere nearby, a voice was calling “Maud, Maud . . .” There would be a pause for a few seconds and then it would come again. “Maud, oh Maud . . .” After a half hour the voice stopped.

“Thank Christ for that,” he muttered.

The sun climbed in the sky. He began to feel a raging, piercing thirst. He turned his head, looking down to see his trousers dark red on the left-hand side. He couldn’t feel a thing. The foot there was crumpled underneath him, but he couldn’t feel that either.

He looked to his right.

The man whom he had first thought had survived with him—when they had first fallen, and he’d thought that they were lucky—was looking back at him. His mouth hung open as if he were in the act of saying something. He had a slightly surprised look, and one hand was at his own throat, clamped tight around what was left of the area between chin and shoulder. The whole of the front of his chest was drenched. He had died quickly, probably in less than a minute; the artery had gone, neatly sliced away.

The third man lay beyond him. For a very long time, he had been slumped in the corner, and Harrison had been fairly sure that he was dead, too; but in this very moment, he opened his eyes. He looked about himself, dazed. “What happened?” he asked.

“The charabanc’s got a puncture and we thought we’d have a lie on the grass,” Harrison replied.

“Ah,” the man said. “The comedian.”

“You’re the bloke from Smithfield.”

He recognized him now; a couple of days ago they had been talking, and the man had told him that he worked in the meat market in London. He’d boasted of carrying a beef carcass on one shoulder.

“Go on, or go back?” he asked now.

“What’ve you got?”

The man looked himself over. He held up his hand. “This.” He had lost three fingers. Harrison could see that the knee of one leg was a bloodied mess. “And . . .” He felt about, scratching the edge of his scalp. “Something caught me under here.”

“We’d better wait for orders,” Harrison said.

“Orders?” the man repeated. “You’re bleeding barmy, mate. Can’t you hear what’s out there? Hundreds of us stuck in no-man’s-land.” Harrison looked closely at him. The man was crying quietly as he spoke: an unstoppable reflex reaction to his pain. He seemed unable to prevent his tears, and didn’t bother to wipe his face.

“Then we go by the last order. Press on. Or you can,” Harrison told him. “I’ve got no propulsion.” He pointed at his hip. “But if you think you can walk with that fucked-up knee, you’re the one who’s barmy.”

“I’m not waiting here,” the man said. His voice hitched and broke, but his face was set in an expression of bewildered fury.

Neither of them moved.

“Wait for the guns to stop,” the man said, eventually.

“Yeah, mate,” Harrison replied. “Like that’s going to happen anytime soon, right?” He searched about himself, around the back where his pack should be. “Cigarette somewhere.”

“Against orders to light up here.”

Harrison smiled grimly at him. “Think anyone would notice a trickle from a smoke?”

The other man sighed. “Nah. Throw it over.”

By extraordinary effort, he had managed to get a light; it took him a full minute to strike it, light it, and drag on it. Then, he threw it across the shell hole, and it fortuitously landed on the other man’s chest. He grabbed at it and put it gratefully to his mouth. “Thanks,” he said. But after a while, he added, “Bit wet, though. Had better.”

Harrison grinned at him. “Don’t mention it,” he murmured.

*   *   *

S
oon, any attempt to talk was obliterated. A shell came down within ten feet, lifting them up from the ground, dumping them back, rolling the dead man onto Harrison’s shoulder, his hand finally loosened and flopping over his waist like a lover’s embrace. Harrison’s mouth was full of soil. The lip of the hole they were lying in had been smoothed out, and a new ridge of clay had been pushed above them.

The man he’d been talking to now lay buried almost up to his neck in the earth, with just one shoulder and his head showing. There was nothing that Harrison could do but look at him, while the other man stared around himself. At last, seeing Harrison’s gaze, he gave a thin smile and, with excruciating slowness, winked at him.

“All right?” Harrison asked.

“Fine and dandy,” came the reply. “Just fine and dandy.”

*   *   *

I
t was early afternoon before he realized that the sound of the guns had stopped.

There was nothing anymore: no machine guns, no shelling from either side. From what seemed a long way off, he could hear a lot of voices. It sounded like more men were being brought up to the front.

You might as well run a flag up and tell them you’re there
, he thought bitterly. He wondered what the new men thought, looking out onto the ground between them and the Germans. All they would be able to see would be a mess of bodies and shifted earth, and, beyond that, thick and uncut yards of wire. They would send them over soon, he supposed. Another attack. Another wave of walking dead.
Christ have mercy.

The sun was getting hotter, it seemed to him; the sky above was a brilliant blue. Ironic. It almost made him smile. Somewhere back at Rutherford that same sky would be blazing down on beautiful fields, on manicured gardens. The same sky . . . the same sky. It couldn’t be, could it? That Rutherford still existed, peaceful and untouched, while the ground here had been churned into a raging and howling mess? He looked back at the pile of shifted clay, and saw that the Smithfield man was staring fixedly at a point on the lip of the shell hole. Harrison wondered what image was in front of him that so took his attention. Was it an image of something like his own, something wonderful, something calm? After a while, he couldn’t stand it any longer. “What are you looking at?” he demanded.

The Smithfield man didn’t move.

He was so thirsty. So thirsty . . . he could drink whatever it was in the bottom of this shallow hole, like he had done once before. But . . . not that . . . that disgusting mess . . . and then he tried to see whatever it was lying there by his feet. A boot. His own boot. But, no . . . not separated from his body. Not lying there like that. He would have felt it. . . .

He thought of putting both his feet in water. That would be good. Sweet, clean water. He’d only been to the sea once, gone with her ladyship when the children were much smaller. He’d liked the vastness of the ocean, its anonymity. You were nobody out there—the sea didn’t recognize names. He would have liked to learn to swim and be carried along by it. That would have been fine.

It occurred to him that perhaps all his life he had just wanted to be washed away. He wondered why that was. Just to be carried off and washed out of his own existence. He had actually disliked everything he was; a servant, a man. He thought of Emily, and Mary, and frightened Jenny, who had quivered under his touch. Perhaps he’d always been empty. It seemed a shame.

He heard someone crying quite nearby, and he thought for a second that it was Jenny come to look at him. “Don’t come down here,” he whispered. “It’s not safe, Jenny.”

He saw her face above him, and a pair of white hands reaching down. “Don’t bother with me,” he told her. “Get under cover. Look after yourself, Jenny. Look after yourself. . . .”

The hands grabbed him. Two pairs of hands. He was being prized from the ground, slippery, unwieldy, covered in filth. “Get hold of his legs,” a voice said.

He tried to focus, and saw that the face belonged to the officer who had ordered them over the top. “I’m all right, sir,” he said. “The bloke from Smithfield, he’s buried . . .”

“He’s dead,” the officer said. And, with a grunting groan, he hoisted Harrison onto his own back.

They progressed, the RMC corporal alongside his officer dragging another man by the arm, stumbling. With vague irritability, Harrison realized it was a man who had been screaming all day somewhere quite close to them. He was screaming still, yelling curses, fighting the very men who were trying to save him in the heat of the afternoon.

As they approached it, there was no noise from the British trench, and Harrison thought that perhaps he had been wrong. There was no one there at all.
They’ve all gone home
, he thought to himself, and the very idea of it made him want to laugh.

“Going home,” he murmured.

“That’s right,” the major said, through gritted teeth. “Wherever that is.”

“Yorkshire,” Harrison muttered. “Rutherford.”

And he thought of turning up at Rutherford again, and his heart gave a great lurch of gratitude. He lay on the major’s back, felt himself being jogged along. There was no pain at all. It was as if he had never been in a war; it was like lying in the back of one of the wagons that brought you from the railway station to Rutherford in those first years of service. He remembered sitting in one, cardboard suitcase between his knees, looking up at the great house as the wagon rolled towards it.

He could see the trees now, and the long green lawns, and the roses on the terrace, and the lake and the river. The great house rose, shimmering in the sunlight, in the middle distance.

It had never looked so good, so beautiful.

“Home,” he whispered, smiling. “Home.”

*   *   *

T
he major and the RMC corporal at last staggered onto the British lines, the corporal throwing the screaming man bodily ahead of him so that he slipped and slid on his knees, landing almost on top of the line of waiting men in the trench.

The crazed man began fighting with them, lashing out with his fists, foaming saliva running out of his mouth. After a furious few seconds, he was pinned by the arms, and then the major was tumbling down, bringing sandbags with him and a stream of brackish and bloody water, falling thudding to the ground. A forest of bodies tripping over each other.