No Man's Land

by Reginald Hill

‘Sally.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I love you.’

  The door closed behind him.

  6

  Morning.

  First light.

  Wilf Routledge shut his eyes against it, but there was no keeping it out. He tried to stand up, but failed. His legs were like bits of four-by-two, limp and strengthless.

  Not fear. Fear had gone with the whisky, washed away with the whisky. But his strength too, that had been washed away.

  He felt sick. He struggled against it, didn’t want to be sick, didn’t want to stain his uniform.

  Then he thought of the stains it would bear shortly and he let out a wild laugh. Curiously, that seemed to do the trick. His nausea retreated.

  A man looking down at him, an officer, with a red-cap thug at either shoulder.

  ‘I’m Captain Denial, Assistant Provost Marshal. Can you stand?’

  He returned blank for blank.

  ‘Do you hear me? Can you stand?’

  Blank.

  The captain said, ‘Pick him up. Carry him out.’

  ‘What’ll we do with him out there, sir?’

  ‘See if the air helps. If not, take a chair.’

  The air cold on his face, cold as if it had come blowing down off Bleak Fell into Outerdale. He drank deep. It gave him strength, strength where it was needed, in the spirit. But not to his legs.

  ‘Bring a chair.’

  They brought a rickety upright kitchen chair. They sat him on it and bound him to it. His head was lolling. He tried to keep it upright.

  ‘Captain,’ he croaked.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Captain.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Tell Josh …’

  ‘Yes …’

  ‘Tell Josh … I’m sorry … I’m sorry …’

  The head slumped to hide the fast-flowing tears.

  It rose once more just before the fusillade. The weeping eyes looked over the blurred line of men to the rising sun beyond. Looked into it without blinking.

  Surely … yes! Surely that was Bleak Fell he could see! The familiar ridge, the peaks and hollows picked out by the rising sun …

  Morning.

  First light.

  Last light.

  PART THREE

  RETURNS, DEPARTURES

  In Germany the potato crop failed in 1916 and in the hard winter that followed, the turnips used for cattle fodder became a staple of the common man’s diet.

  At the Front, the German Army straightened its line between the Scarpe and the Aisne by withdrawing to the strongly fortified Siegfried-Stellung, known to the Allies as the Hindenburg Line. The area of withdrawal was devastated. This, with the ground fought over during the Somme campaign, left a tract of ravaged land up to twenty miles deep behind the Allied line – the Desolation.

  The British Army meanwhile had bolstered its claim to being a democratic institution by executing two of its officers, one in December 1916, the other in January 1917.

  1

  ‘Awake! Awake! and greet the happy morn!’

  Lothar von Seeberg lay in his hospital bed and dreamt that he was a boy again, wrapped in an eiderdown in his own room at Schloss Seeberg in the Harz mountains, waking up on Christmas Day to the joyous carolling of his brother, Willi.

  Suddenly the eiderdown was dragged off him. He opened his eyes to see and his mouth to curse the unmannerly nurse who had so shattered his dream. And in the twinkling of an eye, almost swooned with delight as he reversed dream and reality.

  Yesterday, only yesterday, it had been a hospital bed, in the Military Infirmary in Frankfurt to which he’d been transferred from France after many months of relapse and recovery. But yesterday, only yesterday, his mother and sister-in-law had come to collect him and take him to Schloss Seeberg for Christmas.

  But nothing had been said about Willi coming home too. Now here he was, incredibly dashing in his elegant Rittmeister’s uniform, a smile on his lips as he sang the rousing old carol.

  ‘Oh Willi, Willi!’ said Lothar, putting his arms around his brother’s neck and embracing him so tightly his wounds began to sting. ‘I can’t tell you how glad … oh Willi!’

  Now followed a time of pure bliss, marred hardly at all by the absence of their father on state business, and only ending with the return of Willi to his regiment in Galicia early in January. By now Lothar was beginning to heal quickly and thoughts of his own return to active service bothered him. But with his recovered health came other, nearer problems.

  In his invalid state it had been easy to think of Sylvie as a sister. She was in fact a distant cousin and had been a frequent visitor to the castle since childhood. To the Seeberg twins she had indeed seemed a kind of sister, though adult tongues had early forecast that she might one day make one of them a suitable bride. But Lothar was astounded when he came back from Heidelberg one summer to hear the news that Willi and Sylvie were betrothed. Only then did the truth of his own feelings burst in upon him. He returned almost instantly to Heidelberg, where he added to the list of his wild excesses fornication on a scale which brought forecasts of his early demise from exhaustion or disease.

  The marriage took place just before the war broke out. Lothar had seen little of Sylvie since, but now, daily in her company, he found it each day more difficult to hide his feelings.

  There was a spot by the lake, a deep pool in a narrow bay formed by the arms of two rocky crags. Here they had picnicked and swum as children, slipping into the water from a narrow ledge at the foot of the crags. Here they came one February morning, shivering in the cold air and recalling those hot summer days.

  ‘Oh, those were happy times, Lott,’ sighed Sylvie.

  ‘They’ll come again,’ Lothar assured her.

  She turned to him, smiling. Her foot slipped on the damp rock and she cried out in alarm and fell forward against his body. Instinctively he put his arms around her and drew her tight. It might have passed for a fraternal embrace if he had kept it brief, but his muscles seemed to contract like springs. She turned her face up to his and for one swooning moment he thought she was offering her lips to be kissed. Then he saw the bewilderment of her expression and realized that his groin was pressed so hard against her abdomen that his excitement was unmissable.

  He broke away instantly.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I haven’t … I’m not …’

  ‘Poor Lott,’ she said gently, putting her hand on his arm. And then with a little smile she added, ‘We must find you a … friend.’

  She thought it was just a generalized lust! A soldier’s healing body, too long deprived of female company! Or perhaps, Lothar saw with sudden insight, this was what she knew it was best for them both to pretend. Thereafter he took great care to avoid over-closeness, and so did she, and this was a little barrier between them.

  A short time later, he travelled to Blankenburg for an Army medical board. There he was certified fit to return to duty, but not directly. First he was to go to Berlin to be invested with his Iron Cross. Such a presentation was normally done by some handy general at Headquarters behind the front line, but Lothar could see his father’s hand in this. It was a heavensent opportunity for the Count to show the Berlin establishment that though his younger son might be a madcap eccentric, with anti-social ideas, when it came down to it he was also a true German hero.

  Both amused and annoyed, Lothar returned to Seeberg eager to share the joke and his indignation with Sylvie.

  But as he entered the Schloss he felt a heaviness, drank in a silence which filled him with foreboding and blanked every other thought out of his mind. The old head steward was not in his place to receive his hat and cape. A maid came out of his mother’s drawing-room, saw him, cried out and fled, sobbing. He pushed the door open and went in. His mother was seated on a tall, uncomfortable ornately-carved chair in dark oak against which her white face lay like a paper mask.

  She looked at him. Something like hope flickered in her eyes, but died almost b
efore it showed. She closed them and tried to speak. No words came, only a piping noise like a distant bird.

  But no words were needed. Lothar knew without benefit of words what was being said.

  Willi was dead.

  It had been an almost spent bullet, fired probably aimlessly, probably a mile away, dropping out of the sky to where Willi was standing at his ease, chatting with friends, and with just sufficient force to pierce the skull to the brain.

  Lothar raged against the futility of it, the absurdity of it, the bloody outrageous criminality of it; he raged against generals, against politicians, against God; he went to see Sylvie and found her being tended by a doctor. She was in a state of whitefaced, dumb shock. He had seen men like this at the front. She had no powers of response either to his words or his touch or the sight of him. He left her and went out and rode one of the poor nags in the stable to the point of exhaustion.

  When he returned to the castle, he went straight to his bedroom with a bottle of brandy and set about drinking himself insensible.

  It proved impossible. At midnight he was still awake, still sober. None the less he stripped his clothes off and got into bed, trying to close his brain like his eyes to the images which beset it.

  Eventually he fell into a light, troubled sleep and when his bedroom door opened an hour or so later, he awoke instantly.

  It was too dark to make out anything but a pale shape moving slowly across the room towards him, but he knew it was Sylvie. His mind and body were too full of the sense of her to be mistaken. She reached the bedside and he said, ‘Sylvie’, as she pulled back the eiderdown. He could see her face now in the thin moonlight filtering through the ill-drawn curtains. It was pale and set and trance-like. And he could see more than her face. Her nightgown was unbuttoned to the waist and the soft curves of her small round breasts gleamed white around the deep-flushed aureoles of her hard and pointed nipples.

  ‘Sylvie, what do you want?’ he asked in a voice edgy with panic.

  She lay beside him, her hand reaching out to clasp his naked body. He felt her breasts soft against his chest.

  ‘Please,’ she said. ‘Oh please …’

  Her voice was unreal, strained with the desperation of a phantom striving to be heard at a seance. Her lips touched his neck, his cheek, his mouth. They were cold but urgent. And still they murmured.

  ‘Oh please … oh please … Willi! Willi!’

  His body was aflame. His mind screamed out in protest, but his flesh shuddered and ached and reached out. His mind made one last effort, flashed one last picture of where he was and who he was and what he was doing. There was a moment of complete and utter horror, an eyelid flicker in the blind face of desire, but what he saw in that flash was enough to set him leaping from the bed. Gathering the woman in his arms, he strode rapidly from his room and down the long corridor to her bedroom door. She hung limply, offering no resistance, no inducement. He laid her gently on her bed.

  She looked up at him with the mildness of despair and said, ‘Lott.’

  He left. The brandy was finished. He dressed and went downstairs and fetched another bottle from the cellar. This one worked, and he was still half drunk when an excited servant burst in at ten the next morning to tell him that Frau Sylvie had disappeared.

  The search did not take long. He led them without thought down to the lake, to the deep pool beneath the crags, and stood in a silence as still as the very rocks as they lifted the slight pale figure from the water.

  He felt nothing. He could neither give nor take comfort. He carried out the duties his place in the home demanded, made arrangements, received the coffin with Willi’s body in it at the railway station, saw it laid in its place alongside Sylvie’s in the castle chapel, and felt nothing.

  But there were feelings deep inside which he dared not trust.

  When the Count arrived from Berlin for what was going to be the most magnificent funeral the district had ever seen, he was met at the station by his son in his artillery sergeant’s uniform with a small travelling bag at his feet.

  ‘What are you doing?’ demanded the Count.

  ‘I’m rejoining my unit,’ said Lothar.

  ‘But the funeral … your medal … the Kaiser himself is going to …’

  ‘Tell the Kaiser his soldiers don’t want medals, they want peace,’ said Lothar contemptuously. ‘As for funerals, Father, out there at the front, every second of every minute of every day there are funerals to attend. If they dug a grave big enough to bury all the dead, they’d have to excavate half of Europe. Don’t you realize that? Don’t you and those idiots back in Berlin even begin to realize that?’

  He realized he was shouting and that he had become the focus of all attention on the platform.

  He picked up his bag.

  ‘Goodbye, Father,’ he said quietly.

  An hour later he was on a train puffing westwards across the chill dead face of Germany towards the dying agonies of France.

  2

  ‘Well, well, well!’ said Sergeant Renton with an excess of cheerfulness. ‘Look who’s here!’

  The truck had moved off, leaving its load of supplies, and standing by them a figure so still that he almost passed unnoticed in the evening gloom.

  It was Josh Routledge.

  His mental collapse had been so bad that even the chronically sceptical army doctors had been persuaded that here was a case beyond either m. and d. or the threat of a charge of malingering.

  So Josh had got his wish and gone back home to England for Christmas.

  They didn’t keep him in hospital very long. Demand for beds was great; treatment for psychiatric disturbance was basic; while they would have been reluctant to send a gibbering idiot out into the world, a physically fit young man who could dress himself, feed himself and respond to simple commands and requests was clearly just occupying valuable space needed by the really sick.

  The fact that he could not laugh, could not smile, never initiated or developed a conversation and spent much of the night awake and silently weeping did not occupy their concern even when it caught their attention. Home was the best place. A few weeks at home would be the perfect restorative.

  Home had been a hell worse than that first day on the Somme.

  His young brother and his sisters had greeted him with delight but even that had been muted by the atmosphere of grief and shock which lay around the old farmhouse.

  His father had shown him a letter from the Infantry Records Office.

  I am directed to inform you that a report has been received from the War Office that your son, Private Routledge, Wilfred, was sentenced by court martial to suffer death by being shot, and this sentence was duly executed on 12th December 1916.

  I am sir,

  Your obedient servant.

  It was signed illegibly.

  His father wanted to know what had happened.

  Telling him was agony.

  His mother only wanted to know if it was true. And when he told her it was, she had turned away with a pitiful cry of ‘Why? Why Wilf?’ which had torn his barely mended sense of self apart.

  The trouble was there was nothing in him to resist the notion that it would have been better if he had died and Wilf had lived to bring home the news. Wilf; handsome, tall, merry, strong, laughing, lovable Wilf; the leader, the man of ideas, the man for all seasons and all sexes; Wilf the golden lad.

  He forgot the morose, self-centred, backbiting, aggressive Wilf of the last half-year and thought only of his dearly beloved brother as he had always seemed, and he could not quarrel with those who reacted as if he had a case to answer in still being alive when all that talent and promise lay dead. At home, no such reproaches were spoken, but his mother’s endless, unremitting grief and his father’s long brooding silences sent him early to his bed or late out into the frosty darkness where the drystone walls ran like a sandbagged parapet down to the eerie light of the distant lake. And finally one day, his little sister Ruth, six years old, drawing
her conclusions from what she had overheard and what she could see, asked him innocently why he had left Wilf all by himself in France to die.

  The next day, he asked to go before a medical board and because they were very busy, and very patriotic, and concerned only with muscle and limbs and lungs, they avoided looking into those light blue eyes which were a window on to a landscape of despair and passed him fit to return to duty, to France and to the arms of his comrades.

  ‘How’re you doing, Josh?’ went up the welcoming cry.

  ‘How’s all them lovely little pushers back home? I hope you gave ’em one for me!’

  ‘Dump your gear here, Josh. Plenty of room. This isn’t a bad billet, quite cushy in fact. Fancy a fag?’

  There had been no formal agreement to make a fuss of Josh, but now spontaneous expressions of welcome and goodwill showered on him from all sides.

  It was Renton’s belief that the boy hardly noticed. He took his place in the platoon and did his work, and replied if spoken to; but there was something not there, some part of him was either dead or absent, and this slight figure who lived among them was as spectral as those ghosts which must crowd the air above no-man’s land.

  He expressed no interest in or curiosity about the Cumbrians’ new situation. They had moved recently to the town of Arras which had been wrecked by shelling and deserted by nearly all its inhabitants long ago. But its cellars had been interlinked and joined up by tunnels to a huge honeycomb of caves just outside the town.

  This electrically-lit underground complex was still being developed and Josh and his companions found themselves put to work unloading crates which seemed for the most part to contain either ammunition or tinned soup. These were then stored in newly prepared chambers under the eagle eye of a Supply Officer who carried a grand blueprint of the whole and was often heard expounding the dire consequences of putting a tin of Maconachies into the hands of a soldier expecting rifle bullets.

  ‘I know which I’d bloody prefer,’ muttered someone. The same wag, when an old regular complained that this wasn’t fit work for a fighting man, said, ‘You do my fighting, dad, and I’ll stack your boxes.’