Armistice
Page 1
ARMISTICE
“There’s a raw, urgent power to Stafford’s depiction of the grief and desperation of the postwar world”
Guardian
“This is the story of a heroic quest, a painstaking sifting through the rubble of war by a heroine back at home unafraid to fight her own battles. Stafford’s fans won’t be disappointed”
Observer
“It is a powerful and absorbing first novel. Stafford brings all his characters vividly to life, from his damaged hero and heroine to the egotistical and amoral Anthony, and Philomena’s determined crusade to honour the memory of her lost lover has a poignancy that will linger long in readers’ minds”
Waterstone’s Books Quarterly
“It is a good, light read”
Daily Mail
“Opening with a series of vivid, sharply rendered scenes, Nick Stafford’s debut novel is an unusual and powerful story”
Good Book Guide
Also by Nick Stafford
PLAYS
Battle Royal
Luminosity
Love Me Tonight
Katherine Desouza
War Horse
ARMISTICE
Nick Stafford
New York • London
© 2010 by Nick Stafford
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ISBN 978-1-62365-230-2
Distributed in the United States and Canada by Random House Publisher Services
c/o Random House, 1745 Broadway
New York, NY 10019
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, institutions, places, and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons—living or dead—events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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ARMISTICE
CONTENTS
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
PROLOGUE
This particular November morning we would much prefer to remain hunkered in our captured trench than go over the top again, but orders are still orders even now at this late stage, so once more we plunge side by side across No-Man’s Land in that habitual hunched running position—with Death’s hot breath on our necks we urge ourselves and the others on, praying that it really is going to be all over in minutes at eleven a.m.
Are the enemies’ watches set to exactly the same time as ours? Has that been sorted out?
Run harder this time. Run harder than ever before. Not harder, better. Crouch more expertly. Be invisible, or bullet permeable—hope, believe that you can survive. The end is close enough to see, to smell, to touch. What will peace, what will no-war be like? Not like before, that’s for sure.
Jonathan yelps and lurches sideways into a shallow crater and I dive after him. The toe of his boot has been shot off but his toes are intact, pink under the dirt. He wriggles them and they look—illogically—more vulnerable than the rest of him. Hundreds of rounds phutt from a heavy machine gun splicing the air above our heads and then, aimed lower, they rip spurts from the rim of our friable haven, spitting soil in our eyes. We press ourselves down and curse. There’s a pause.
I can hear Jonathan’s rasping breaths. We twist our necks to look at each other.
“Reloading?” I say.
“Or jammed?” he says.
The pause continues. Mouths agape to drag in maximum air we nod to each other and stumble to our feet and will our bodies on over the clinging, uneven terrain—
When kerrump! A six-pounder. Dive flat. Merge with earth. Peer up. Enemy tank, one of ours, captured British Mark IV grinding toward our left flank, desperate Krauts sheltering in its wake. That’ll be our undoing. We have nothing to touch it.
But then owoooeeeee … pang! One of ours—a twelve-pounder shell—only a glancing blow but tearing tank’s armor, stopping it! And bonus! Metal on metal at that velocity gives birth to shrapnel; savage, spitting, indiscriminate bastard offspring; death multiplied, it scythes the enemy infantry at waist height and lower, some falling like skittles in fast-motion, and some flying up feet-first backward as if a rug has been snatched from under them. All when they land are untouched above the waist but shredded scarlet mush and shocking white bone below. Untouched above the waist but lifeless. Some with eyes open. Like obsolete mannequins dumped round the back of a shop. I blink, still surprised, after all, at the sudden transformation from living to dead, movement to stillness.
But the tank is only wounded, stunned. It appears to shudder, and like a great beast regaining consciousness it groans and lurches into motion again. The six-pounder kerrumps and machine guns clatter. The beast must die.
Me and Jonathan run at it from the flank and poke grenades into the jagged rip in its side, whereupon there are shouts of alarm and when we are a few yards clear, terse explosions, short cries of distress; men inside the tank—I can’t help imagining them—must be sundered and smashed, or slumped and deafened, the latter uselessly pressing their hands to their ears.
Main weapon eliminated, the battle’s shape immediately becomes more irregular. We combatants intermingle, khaki versus gray. Now separated from Jonathan I can see Major Chiltern caught in a pincer movement by two of them. I shout to him but my voice is swallowed up in the cacophony of war. I fire from the hip at one of Chiltern’s predators but my pistol’s pin clicks impotently on a dud round—simultaneous to this I see Major Chiltern judder, penetrated from two different angles and he falls and lies still.
I am surprised at how upset I feel: both those shooters must die.
The dud jams my pistol. I have to clear it. I checked all these bullets personally when I loaded them; what more can you do, clean your weapon, check all the ammo? One of Chiltern’s attackers twists and falls. The second clutches his chest and drops onto his face. I turn and from the angle of Jonathan’s body I can see it is he who has shot them and that he is now hurrying to snap a new magazine into his pistol because for these few moments he is like I am, without a loaded gun—naked, defenseless, blinking in the light. I shout to him and gesticulate wildly because a big man has appeared out of nowhere and is almost upon Jonathan wielding a homemade club bristling with vicious spikes.
I hold my breath while Jonathan by a fraction avoids the first blow aimed at his skull, then twists, eluding the second to his neck, and sways, in control now, in the opposite direction, so that the third blow, destined for his shoulder, swishes past. Jonathan hoiks his pistol up, rams it into the German’s chin—it should be a knock
-out blow but the man takes it without going down and when Jonathan wields his knife the blade only nicks his opponent’s cheek instead of slashing his eye or his nose or his cheek or his lips over bared teeth right open, and now Jonathan and the German close and try to kill each other face to face.
I want to go to help Jonathan but my way is barred by a child so pale and thin that he might be an apparition, who appears to be no more than twelve years old, in a uniform far too large for him, who tremblingly points a rifle, far too heavy for him, directly into my face. The fleeing Kaiser has sent his children against us.
The shouts begin to go up: “It’s over! Der Krieg ist vorbei!”
The child is soiling himself—the tell-tale wet patch spreads down the legs of his grimy uniform and I fear that he is trembling so much he might discharge his rifle by accident. Out of the corner of my eye I can glimpse white being waved and for a moment I think it is men waving their own exposed bones and offal hoping that someone will know what to do with it. I close my eyes and shake my head to dislodge that picture and see cloth, whiteish cloth—how absurd it would be to die at a terrified child’s involuntarily twitched hand just as the war is ending!
I try to smile reassuringly and to hold the child’s gaze as the sounds of war subside. The boy begins to tentatively lower his rifle—it’s probably too much for him to hold up any longer—and to me this seems good, the first good thing to happen, the first after-the-war good moment, but then I hear a crack from behind me and the boy collapses and is still. I half turn, just glimpse—ah, there you are, coming at me like a coward, and there’s another crack and I fall backward and sideways, down on my front, looking at an ant going about its business, scaling peaks in the muddy earth.
I can smell blood and metal and decay.
Mud presses into my nostrils, seeming to want to invade me, to begin burying me already.
I can feel my blood pumping warmly out of the exit hole in my chest.
I have an image from school—geography—a cross-sectional diagram of the water table, the surface of a saturated subterranean sea—but now it is the blood table—all the blood from all the men and women who’ve leaked their lives into this contested earth, and mine is adding to it, fast-rhythmically gushing—I must get up! I try to place my palms on the ground and push but only succeed in inhaling fragments of the land we’ve been fighting over. I automatically cough as my vital organs stutter and hiccough, gasping for fuel. Through my ear to the ground I can sense running feet pounding the ground.
I have a vision of myself and Philomena, and Jonathan, and the fiancée that he will acquire some day; all going about together, by the sea, living it up, dressed all in white, possibly back here in France, but definitely by the seaside, and no expense spared. I try to grasp this vision, to anchor myself to it, but it is slipping, agonizingly, away from me, out of reach.
Someone picks me up—it is Jonathan—and I feel myself begin to shake, and I can feel Jonathan holding me, and I think that I can see Captain Dore to the side of Jonathan, looking on anxiously.
More images of Philomena flash before me at machine-gun speed, as if my memory is rapidly discharging its final rounds. One day: her in a white blouse and long skirt on her bicycle, giggling as she struggles up a hill; her letting out a small cry as she slips naked into the freezing waters of that hill pond, her back arched away from the cold; later her warm breath in my ear as she moves slowly on top of me—was that the best day of my life?
Past tense?!
No! No! I think I cry.
Jonathan is holding me and I can see him calling but his voice is as if from afar. “Dan. Dan. No. No. Daniel Case: can you hear me? Dan!”
If I am about to die I know that I have to tell Jonathan … It is imperative … If there is just one more sentence, or phrase, or single word left to me to utter then I know what it—I must tell Jona—If I can just spea—Or if I can just make a—indica—slide my eyes toward—move any part of my bod—
CHAPTER ONE
Some men had started a war, other men went off to fight it; the living were left with the mess.
She’d left a note at work. “Back the day after tomorrow. Nothing to worry about. Sorry. Philomena.” Her train slowed down and the smoke from the funnels fell and swirled about the carriages rather than streamed above them, thus her first views of central London, of Euston, were wreathed in vapor. Philomena’s hands, which had lain together in her lap, lifted slightly and parted, and began to describe small, slow shapes in the air. They seemed to move independently of the rest of her, they had recently begun to do this, as if responding to a quiet, sad orchestra playing inside her, or if moving more swiftly, betraying her anxieties. Jo should be seeing her scribbled note about now. Should she have told her where she was headed? She didn’t know where, exactly. London, yes, but she had nowhere yet to stay tonight, and the note was written in a rush, on an impulse; she’d had to come. Philomena knew no one in the capital. All she had was three names and two addresses of men she’d never met. Who weren’t expecting her.
She could hear the elderly guard along the corridor calling: “All change! This train terminates at Euston. London and North Western apologize for the late arrival of this train. All change!” When he passed her compartment he met her eye for a fleeting moment, then she resumed her watch through the glass. The platform appeared below. The train’s brakes screeched intermittently as it slowed more. The couplings clanked as they contracted and stretched, jolted and bumped. She directed her hands to take out, from her worn leather everyday bag, a sheaf of envelopes held together by elastic bands. Locating one, an official letter, she nervously checked the sender’s peacetime address for the umpteenth time and returned it to its envelope. She touched several of the other well-thumbed envelopes in succession, divining which, if any, she should next revisit. As the roof of the station slid overhead obscuring the faint stars in the end-of-the-night sky her eyes welled with tears. “This won’t do.” But another voice butted in, “This might be the way things will be for some time to come.” Voices in her head; was she mad? On the spur of the moment she had decided yesterday evening to travel alone to London, then had been unable to wait for the first train of today, the eight thirty, for that would not have delivered her until lunch time—half a day wasted. So she had caught the last yesterday, the midnight—had banked on sleeping on it, if it felt safe enough. It had, but oblivion proved only fitful, despite the mesmeric rocking of the carriage. Now she felt ragged, but so what? Her life since mid-November had been chaos: breathless lungs racing heart scrambled thoughts, interrupted by periods of torpor; slow, leaden hours with a black dog in a long dark lane.
She wiped her cheeks with the backs of her hands then stood. There was no one to help her down with her overnight luggage from the rack so she stood on the seat and hauled herself up. On boarding at Manchester last night an officious guard had quite unnecessarily shoved the bag up there, wordlessly, scowling, she felt, because of something about her. After he’d gone she’d put on the wedding band, precautionary lump on her finger, sad reminder of what was not going to happen.
As the train glided in, the glass window in the compartment door took a heft to get down before she could reach out for the handle on the outside. She looked along the smoky platform to the ticket barrier, and waited for the train to come to a complete rest. While it still moved some doors in other carriages opened and the air was filled with the sound of shod feet hitting stone platform—crack! Men in suits and ties carrying briefcases forged ahead, as if using the train’s final velocity to launch themselves, stealing precious seconds in what appeared to be a race to urgent business in the heart of the metropolis. Philomena felt herself infected by the rush, tensed as if ready to spring. Trying to relax her body was hopeless—the surge of human energy was irresistible, pointless to buck. She tried to join in but in stepping down onto the platform she stumbled and had to take another three or four steps to balance herself, by which time other disembarkers were nudging into
her from behind. Some veered then converged ahead of her as if she were an obstacle that they must flow around, but the mass swept her up and along, crammed through the narrow gate—breathlessly squeezed—then spewed out into the Great Hall of the station, where it spread and dispersed and she was deposited, sediment, a particle, forgotten.
Everyone but her seemed to know exactly where they were going, but she’d been in a crowd before, just not a London crowd—she wasn’t completely naive as to the ways of crowds. Used to at least the principles of urban navigation, she sped up, dropped her left shoulder, slowed down, paused on her toes to let a man cross, dropped to her heels, dipped her right shoulder, thrust her bag ahead of her to part a way and slipped through the gap. Now she was in an eddy. Here, because she wasn’t having to concentrate on avoiding collisions she became aware of all the voices—hundreds, perhaps thousands of voices reverberating back off walls and floor, amplified by the towering ceiling. Cutting through this hubbub were the specific cries aimed to catch the attention: the newspaper vendors, shoe shiners, coffee and sandwich sellers—just like Manchester only bigger, louder, taller, fuller!
As she had planned en route she purchased a cheap map of central London. Unbuffeted at the side of the stall she unfolded this but immediately felt dismayed by its complexity. Famous names: Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey, Pall Mall led her bewildered eye this way and that but for the most part it was a maze, a blur of routes and names, too much to take in. She folded it and headed out through the station entrance in search of a bus. That was the sensible thing to do. Look at the first address again; find the correct bus. Out came the envelopes. That one was on the top.
Feeling the massive portico as she passed underneath she turned to look up at it. She craned her neck to see to its tip, pale against the lightening sky. The slightly darker shapes of scudding clouds made it appear that the station was swaying—she felt dizzy, reached out a hand to steady herself, unwittingly touched a passer-by, a man in a three-quarter double-breasted in blue chalkstripe, who muttered “sorry” without even glancing at her. More sights and sounds assaulted her senses: the hooves of hundreds of horses on Drummond Street, the engines of motor cars, motor bikes, motor lorries, motor buses—the latter, from competing companies, swooping at queues of passengers as soon as they formed, the drivers in their exposed cabs impatiently sounding their horns, waving each other out of the way. Familiar names on the buses’ sides: Iron Jelloids, Heinz Pickle, Veno’s Cough Cure, like the faces of friends in a crowd of strangers. She consulted her map again and this time was able to locate Euston Station. But where on the map was she going? Her finger shakily traced the names of roads in the index. She found a grid reference. There! But which bus was headed that way?