The Wraiths of War (5 page)

(Much later I discovered that both of Alf and Edith’s boys were killed in the War – William, the younger son, in the summer of 1916, and twenty-seven-year-old James, who would be an officer in the Devon Light Infantry at the time of his death, in September 1918, just a couple of months before the cessation of hostilities.)

Alf and Edith had been kind to Frank and me – Edith, in particular, had treated us almost as surrogate sons – and it had been a wrench to leave them, particularly as it meant sharing a draughty hut with twenty-two other sweaty, smelly blokes. Even then, though, the camaraderie in barracks might have made up for it, if it hadn’t been for one thing – or rather, one person.

He popped up like a bad penny the day we left London to begin basic training. Frank and I were sitting in the carriage of the train taking us from Paddington to Plymouth when the door flew open so violently that everyone jumped. Before then the mood had been raucous but friendly. In our carriage, aside from Frank and me, we had a barrister, a builder’s labourer, a dentist, a butcher, a bank clerk and an engineer.

The bank clerk, Douglas Meadows, was a weedy lad with buck teeth and big ears. He was also a natural comedian, and had kept us in stitches with a string of jokes and funny stories. It was while he was in the middle of one of these that we were startled by the opening door. The bulky, scowling figure that appeared in the gap was like a thunder cloud. A thunder cloud with red hair.

‘Well, well, look what we got here,’ he barked. ‘A couple o’ nancy boys.’

It was Ginger, who Frank and I had humiliated the day we’d been standing in the queue at the recruiting station. We hadn’t seen him since, and in fact I’d more or less forgotten all about him. I sighed and looked at Frank, who rolled his eyes. Although I was wary of Ginger, I wasn’t scared of him – I’d faced far more frightening foes in the past few months – but I thought he might prove troublesome all the same.

Doug Meadows, cut off in mid-spiel, swallowed and blanched, and for a few seconds there was silence. Then the barrister, Bartlett Trent (a great name for a secret agent), said with a brightness which he clearly hoped would lighten the mood, ‘Hello, old chap. Can we help you?’

Ginger’s head swung round. ‘No, “old chap”, I don’t believe you can. So why don’t you shut your fucking mouth before I knock your teeth down your throat?’

Although the eight of us sharing the carriage barely knew one another, our common cause had created an instant bond. Jerking upright in his seat, Joe Lancing, the butcher, snapped, ‘There’s no need for that, old cock. We’re all fighting on the same side here, if you hadn’t noticed.’

‘Yeah, you want to save that anger of yours for the Hun, mate,’ Stan Little, the builder’s labourer, chipped in.

There were nods all round. Ginger still wore a sneering expression, but now Frank sneered right back at him.

‘You know what this is?’ he said, circling his finger to indicate our eight-strong group. ‘This is what’s called making friends. You ought to try it, chum, otherwise you’ll have a tough time of it once we get where we’re going. It’s not gonna be a picnic over there, you know. In fact, by all accounts, it’s bleedin’ Hell on Earth. So I reckon to get through it you’re gonna need all the friends you can get.’

Doug Meadows looked alarmed, as if he hadn’t contemplated what might actually happen once basic training was over. But everyone else was nodding.

‘The lad’s right, mate,’ Stan Little said. He was a rugged, round-faced man with a scrubby moustache and a missing front tooth. He held out a hand that looked as if it had been moulded out of red clay. ‘So why not drop whatever beef you got with these two and put it there?’

Ginger looked at the proffered hand, and for a second or two I thought he was going to accept Stan’s offer. Then he glanced again at Frank, and I guess the memory of the day when the two of us had put him on his arse in a crowded street must have again risen to the forefront of his mind. The scowl crunched back on to his face and his lip curled.

‘You’ll get what’s coming to you, sonny,’ he barked, pointing at Frank. Then he shifted his attention to me. ‘And so will your bum chum. You just see if you don’t.’

I should have ignored him. But his stupidity irritated me. And so, before I could bite back on my words, I said, ‘You want to be careful you don’t get so angry that you spit your dummy out, mate.’

Admittedly it wasn’t much of a riposte, but it was enough to rile Ginger. His eyes widened, his nostrils flared, his face went as red as his hair, and he lunged at me, his hand reaching for my throat.

What followed was ugly, stupid and embarrassing. In the confines of the railway carriage there was what I suppose you’d call a scuffle. It consisted mainly of a lot of flailing and shouting. Because I was sitting down I couldn’t properly defend myself. I had to resort to hunching in my shoulders, fending Ginger off with my upraised arms while he loomed over me, swinging clumsy haymakers at my head and body. I used my legs too, pistoning out my right foot and catching him on the thigh with enough force to make him grunt and buckle slightly.

Before he could do any real damage, Frank, Stan and, perhaps surprisingly, Bartlett were up out of their seats and doing their best to pin Ginger’s swinging arms to his sides and manhandle him out of the door. With a lot of pushing and shoving and tripping over one another’s legs they eventually managed it, by which time half the train had been alerted to the commotion. Men started to pour out of the carriages flanking our own in such numbers that they were jamming the aisle, their necks craning to see what was going on. Some were egging on the combatants like spectators at a boxing match, while others laughed and clapped.

Not wanting to just sit there, I jumped to my feet, my left ear ringing and my right shoulder throbbing where Ginger had managed to get in a couple of half-decent clouts.

Doug Meadows stood up too and put a solicitous hand on my elbow. ‘Are you all right, Alex?’ he asked.

Looking into Doug’s eyes it suddenly struck me how unprepared he was for what was ahead of him; how unprepared so many of these boys were. Because they
were
boys, a lot of them. Boys who might already have seen their homes for the last time. Boys who in a few months would leave the country of their birth and might never come back. I thought of photos I’d seen of twisted bodies lying in mud-churned battlefields; thought of the rows and rows of pristine white war graves in France and Belgium and Italy. Looking into Doug’s eyes I suddenly felt like weeping.

Because I couldn’t save them all. I wasn’t sure, by resurrecting Frank, whether I’d even saved
him
.

He frowned, as if he sensed something of what I was thinking. ‘
Are
you all right?’

I laughed. It sounded hollow and ghastly in my ears. ‘I’m fine, Doug,’ I said, and clapped him on the shoulder. ‘It was a bit of high jinks, that’s all. Nothing to worry about.’

I almost added:
compared to what’s to come
, but I didn’t. As prepared as I felt Doug and Bartlett and all the other high-spirited young guys on this train needed to be, I couldn’t do that to him. I couldn’t whip away his optimism, illusory though that was, pre-empt the horror of the trenches. The War would do that soon enough.

We didn’t see much of Ginger for the next three months. He was billeted in another village to us, and basic training consisted of so many men split into so many groups – an endless, drab round of drill, drill, drill, interspersed with trench digging, route marching, kit inspections, and instructions on how to skirmish, how to handle a rifle, and how to take cover from observation – that our paths barely crossed. When they did he would throw us filthy looks; he would even, on occasion, go out of his way to pass us by just so he could mutter some blood-curdling threat. Whenever that happened, Frank laughed in his face, and I ignored him.

After our tussle on the train, no doubt Ginger saw my silence as a sign I was running scared of him. The real reasons I wanted to avoid further trouble, though, were based more on calculation than emotion. Firstly, because of the heart and because I was a man out of time, I didn’t want to draw undue attention to myself. Secondly, I didn’t want to make army life even harder and more tedious than it already was by being up on a charge for indiscipline. And thirdly… well, to be honest, I had a certain reputation to uphold.

Purely because I was older than most of the other lads I was training with, I tended to be regarded as a bit of a father figure, as someone who was dependable, dignified, worldly-wise. I didn’t do anything to encourage these views, or play up to them, but because a lot of the guys
did
think of me in these terms, I felt oddly reluctant to disillusion them. These young men, who were in the process of being hastily honed into soldiers, were about to be launched into a horror beyond imagining – and many of them would never see their loved ones again. In a way, therefore, I guess I saw it as my duty to be the rock that they thought I was. A reassuring presence they could depend on and take comfort from.

This Zen-like presence I’d acquired through no fault of my own was put to the test at the end of January. This was when we were moved into our newly erected barracks, and Frank and I discovered, either due to some nasty quirk of fate or because he’d wangled it to get at us, that Ginger would be one of the twenty-four blokes in our hut. In the week since we’d moved in it had been like living with a dangerous dog, one which snapped and snarled and constantly eyeballed us, but which hadn’t yet had the opportunity to launch an attack. Not that either of us expected Ginger – whose real name was John Pyke – to confront us face-to-face. No, as stupid as he was, he’d be more likely to go for the stealth attack. He’d come at us when we were asleep, or sneak up on one or other of us when we were alone and unprepared.

We’d managed to be vigilant and tolerant up to now. We’d stuck together, deflected Pyke’s sneered asides, laughed off his barbed comments as if they were nothing but banter. Frank had even treated it as a prank when he’d discovered a human turd under his pillow, and I’d done the same when I found that my shaving kit had been chucked in the cesspit. But it would surely be only a matter of time before things came to a head. Despite outward appearances I knew that Frank’s blood was starting to boil.

The fact that Stan Little and Joe Lancing were in our hut too was both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because they provided a buffer between Pyke’s hostility and our reaction to it, and a curse because they hated Pyke’s guts almost as much as we did (or rather, almost as much as Frank did; I don’t want to sound superior, but I genuinely regarded Pyke as little more than an irritant). I knew that if something
did
kick off, and Pyke ended up getting a pasting because of it, it would be all too easy for him to make out that he was the injured party; that he’d been singled out, victimised, his life made a misery, purely because he’d had the guts to stand up for himself.

As the aggressor, then, he’d win whatever happened – at least I’m guessing that was the way
he
saw it. The way
I
saw it was that Frank and I had to dig our heels in and not rise to Pyke’s bait on the one hand, and watch our backs on the other. But how easy that would be over the next weeks and months I had no idea. I
had
contemplated taking Pyke aside, speaking to him as an adult, trying to make him see reason; in fact, I was
still
contemplating it. I was contemplating it as I lay in my bed in the hut, surrounded by the nightly chorus of creaks and snores. I was contemplating it when, unexpectedly, I fell asleep.

I didn’t think I was asleep at first, though. I thought I’d simply…
moved.
One second I was lying in bed and the next I was somewhere else. I was no longer lying down, but sitting or standing up, and squinting into a bright light.

Was I about to be interrogated? Had I been drugged? Lost my memory? I braced myself for pain that didn’t come. I felt warm, and instinctively took a step towards the warmth, as though my body was drawn to it.

‘Hello?’ I said, and from the quality of my voice I knew I was outside. I squatted down and touched the ground, felt a solid but shifting surface beneath my fingers. Sand. The grains so fine that when I lifted my hand they slipped beneath my fingers like silk. And now the light was receding as my eyes adjusted to it. The white, somehow pure sun was drawing back, spreading out its heat and its light, exposing my surroundings as if offering them to me.

I was in a desert. No, I was in
the
desert. I had been here before, and I knew what I had to do.

This is a recurring dream
, I thought as I began walking.
I can wake up any time I want, but first I have to see this through
.

The sun beat down. The sand stretched around me in all directions, flat and featureless. My body was soaking up heat, but I felt good, I felt strong. All things moving in harmony, my mind clear, sharp.

Eventually I knelt down in the sand. I had arrived. There were no landmarks to tell me this place was different to any other, but I knew it was right just the same. I was the desert and the desert was me. The world was so new that I and everything in it was one and the same. We were unsullied by… what? Sin? Conflict? Progress? The march of evolution?

Primal sources. Primal sources and primal forces. They linked us. They linked everything.

I pushed my hands into the sand, the grains parting before my fingers like water. I linked my mind to the earth, and I found what I was looking for, and I pulled it out.

As before it was wet with the juices of its birth, and it squirmed and writhed, vibrant with energy, busy with life. I moulded it in my hands, using my core, the engine that drives me, as a template, shaping it in my own image. What I created was raw and ugly and vulnerable, but it was also
life
, beautiful and magical.

When it was complete I dropped it in the sand and walked away, leaving it behind, the first artefact. I knew it would find its way. I knew it would begin its journey here. I knew it would tumble through the centuries, until eventually it would end up where it was meant to be, whereupon we would be reunited, the creator and his creation.