The Moon Field

by Judith Allnatt

  He took the tea over to the table and set it down. ‘Here you are, sir.’

  ‘Thank you, Farrell. Have one yourself,’ Edmund said without looking up. ‘And sit. I shall be through these shortly and you can take them to the quartermaster for me.’

  ‘Thank you, sir. Of course, sir.’ George filled another mug and sat down at the far end of the table, feeling his body collapse like a sack into the chair, the ache subsiding in his legs, the relief of taking the pressure off his blistered feet. He cupped his hands around the blessed warmth of the mug and sipped the scalding sweetness as if it were very heaven.

  ‘I shan’t beat about the bush, Farrell,’ Edmund said as he folded the reports and put them into a pouch. ‘You know you’ve had a lucky escape. It mustn’t happen again. You understand?’

  George nodded.

  ‘You need to be scrupulous in future. That goes for everything: following orders to the letter, alertness on sentry duty, keenness to get the job done – it’ll all be noted, you know.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ George thought of Captain Hunton’s beady eyes.

  Edmund sighed and took a long draught of tea. He weighed up Farrell’s condition: pale-faced, grey circles under his eyes, glance sliding towards the window when the noise of the barrage swelled. He looked in bad shape. If he set him to delivering ammo or rations to the lines straight away, he didn’t fancy his chances. It only took a small mistake, a moment’s inattention, forgetting to keep your head down …

  ‘What was your job in Civvy Street?’

  ‘I was a postman.’ George was startled, wondering where this line of questioning might lead.

  ‘Hmm. I’ll have to put you on fatigues. Sergeant Tate will tell you what to do,’ Edmund continued, thinking aloud. ‘But whenever we can we might as well find you something appropriate, since delivery is your forte – you can run messages for me, fetch and carry mess rations, that sort of thing.’ Edmund rubbed the bridge of his nose as if to smooth away his tiredness. ‘Of course we may be in the line very soon. It could be from tomorrow.’ At once, he felt that he could kick himself. He remembered how jumpy Farrell had been the time he’d taken a look at his newspaper and he had thought he was suffering from cold feet about active service. Yet … he had acquitted himself well in bayonet practice, he could shoot and he didn’t hang back from unpleasant tasks; he had volunteered to help shift the wounded when they had been back at Étaples. Weak nerves just didn’t quite fit. There was something though … whenever Edmund ran across the lad he noticed a watchfulness, and an uneasy habit of gnawing on his lower lip as though he was acutely apprehensive of saying something wrong. Was he really as terrifying as all that? He had hoped that all his men might view him as reasonable; he worked hard to be approachable. He must try to get to the bottom of it; he would take a special interest from now on.

  George was thinking about the officers’ earlier discussion and their consensus that now everything the Germans had would be thrown at them as they strove to break through and take Ypres. Edmund, seeing his worried frown, said, ‘Is there anything you’d like to ask me?’ attempting his best tone of encouragement.

  George said, ‘Well, yes there is, sir, actually. In case … if something were to happen, how do I make sure that my pay will get to my family?’

  Edmund considered the platitudes that he could spout: that one shouldn’t expect the worst, that as long as you followed orders you couldn’t go far wrong, that you had as good a chance as the next man did. He said, ‘Most men make a will in the back of their pay book: you know, give names and addresses of where their pay is to be sent and any personal bequests.’

  George nodded. ‘I saw that there was a page for that. It’s just, well … so you would leave your pay book with your things, I mean, not carry it on you …’

  ‘Precisely.’

  ‘Else it might not be – you know – found.’

  Edmund looked at the boy, Farrell, with his earnest face, trying so hard to be a man.

  ‘Indeed. One’s commanding officer has a responsibility to write to relatives and to pass on any personal effects. I would, of course, carry out that task if that were my sad duty.’ Edmund’s voice softened. ‘Rest assured.’

  There was a silence.

  In an attempt to lighten the moment, Edmund said, ‘Keswick, wasn’t it? Your home town?’ Then, as a thought struck him, a thought that brought him for a moment sweetly close to Violet: ‘I don’t suppose you know the Manor House out on the Carlisle Road?’

  ‘Er … yes, sir. I mean I may do …’ George was thrown into confusion. He thought that if he let slip that he knew Violet, Edmund would ask him all about her. He was no good at lying; his feelings would be bound to show.

  ‘I know people there, you see – the Walters.’

  ‘Oh, I always give the post in at the gatehouse,’ George gabbled. ‘I wouldn’t know the family.’

  ‘The post … of course. So, you sometimes deliver there?’

  George gave the slightest of nods.

  Edmund’s face broke into a smile as he realised that George might very well have carried his letters to his dear girl. ‘Well, well …’ He wanted to say, ‘Fancy that, my fiancée, Violet, lives there!’ He wanted to ask what the house was like so that he could imagine her sitting at a window and about the gardens so that he could picture her walking there. He checked himself. Farrell was one of his men; he could hardly talk to him about such personal matters; he must keep a degree of distance. ‘Well, it’s a small world,’ he trailed off. The boy had that look of apprehension again; he had somehow scared him off once more, despite his best efforts.

  He wound the tape around the pouch containing the reports. ‘Wait here while I drop these in to the quartermaster and have a word with Sergeant Tate.’

  Left alone in the room, George sat still, his head awhirl with uncomfortable thoughts of Violet and Edmund: sitting close at dinner, talking together, dancing. From his seat at the foot of the table he could see, face-on, the item propped up against the green tin: a photograph. Light-headed, as if in a dream, George went to the window and picked it up.

  It was a studio portrait of Violet sitting in a Queen Anne chair with a small marble pillar beside her. She was sitting rather stiffly with her hands clasped in her lap, wearing a pale dress with a rose pinned at the front, between the drooping wings of a wide lace collar. Her dark hair was piled at the back of her head; her skin was pale and her expression blank. The formal setting and dress made her look older and George could see nothing of the girl he knew. When he pictured her, he always saw her in action: walking on the fells, pausing to point out something in the view, her face always mobile – talking, smiling, frowning intently as she looked down into her camera to frame her shot. The photograph made her seem even further away, part of a world to which he could never belong.

  He brought it closer to the light from the window, searching the eyes for the spark that he knew. They seemed flat and expressionless and George thought of her sitting on the uncomfortable seat, facing a stranger with a box and a black cloth and closing her face like a mask.

  Then, about to replace the photograph, George suddenly recognised the scalloped edge of the tortoiseshell comb she usually wore to keep her hair in place. He felt a tenderness fill him. He passed his thumb gently over the picture.

  ‘What the devil do you think you’re doing?’

  Edmund’s voice from the doorway made him drop the photograph as if he had been stung. He wheeled round with his back to the window. ‘Sorry, sir, I …’

  ‘You weren’t thieving, were you?’ Edmund looked at George’s guilty face in disbelief. After he’d protected him from Hunton, this was how Farrell repaid him?

  George held his empty palms out towards him. ‘Of course not, sir.’ He felt his face aflame with indignation at the suggestion. ‘I … I was going to trim the wicks … of the candles … do something useful.’ Anxious to convince Edmund that he’d had no ill intention but unable to tell him the truth, desperat
ely he fished his penknife out of his pocket as if producing the evidence to back up his hastily conceived story.

  Edmund didn’t believe a word of it. What on earth had the boy been at? He could have sworn he’d had something in his hands when he’d come in. He fixed George with a keen look.

  George mumbled another apology and dropped his eyes.

  Edmund let the silence lengthen. At last he said, ‘You’d better cut along and report to Sergeant Tate,’ letting him go.

  Edmund stood deep in thought for a moment. Maybe Hunton was right and harsh discipline was the only thing the men understood. Had he been too soft? He thought that he was a good judge of character but if he’d misjudged Farrell perhaps his lenient treatment would become the evening’s chit-chat; he’d hate to lose the respect of his men.

  He went over to his bed. His haversack was exactly as he’d left it when he’d got the ink; he was sure it hadn’t been tampered with. The tin was in the same position in the window embrasure, but Violet’s photograph was flat upon the sill. So – it had been the photograph that Farrell had been looking at and had dropped in fright. In a flash, everything became clear: the lad’s discomfort when he’d asked him about delivering to the Manor House, his strange reaction when he had asked if he knew the Walters. Farrell clearly did know Violet and had some boyish crush on her. Perhaps he had delivered letters to her personally; perhaps she had been kind to him and maybe talked to him a little. Well, who wouldn’t be half in love with her? His feelings towards George softened. He wondered whether he should mention him in his next letter to Violet; she might be fond of the lad with his puppyish affection. She might like to know that he was safe and under his care.

  He propped the photograph back up in its accustomed place. What a rum do for him and Farrell to find themselves thrown together like this – but maybe Farrell had been seeking him out? He had behaved strangely right from that first time in the YMCA tent at camp … He thought of George’s anguish of embarrassment when he’d caught him looking at the picture. He would say nothing more about it, would appear to accept the explanation given. In a strange way it was a comfort to have George here, a kind of link to his beloved. Even if there was no prospect of asking him anything about Violet’s home or his conversation with her, it was still something that here in this godforsaken place there was someone who knew her.

  George had left the farmhouse shaking and dizzy with nervous tension. It had been a close shave and he wasn’t sure if he had carried it off. Sergeant Tate, seeing the state of him, sent him off to eat first; then he paired him up with one of the regulars, as part of a carrying party detailed to take supplies down to the fire trench, and George’s anxiety took a different turn. The regular said that his name was White but everyone called him Chalky. They carried a box of ammo between them. After a few minutes, the rope handle bit into George’s palm and he tried to change hands unobtrusively: not wanting to seem soft in front of the old lags. They followed on behind the others who shouldered sandbags full of rations and spades. In the last of the late-afternoon light, they cast long distorted shadows over the ground.

  ‘Like the seven bleedin’ dwarfs,’ Chalky called out.

  ‘What does that make you? Snow White?’ came the quick reply.

  ‘Nah, too big and ugly,’ another chipped in among catcalls and a cry of ‘Show us yer drawers’.

  They entered a wood where spruce and larch mixed with oak and ash. Here and there, branches were splintered and hung unnaturally, like broken limbs. Some of the tall straight boles were gashed, exposing the tawny striations of split wood beneath the bark and some were wholly broken off, leaving jagged stumps and fallen trunks to circumnavigate. All the time the boom and mumble of distant shellfire rolled on.

  Further ahead in the tree-shadows, dark-clad figures moved around small smudges of red light: some bending and straightening as they gathered twigs for their fires, some bent over the punctured tins in which the fires were set, fanning the kindling to make it catch, like acolytes of some ancient fire god. They were bearded and wore balaclavas under their caps so that they seemed to disappear eerily in the dimness as they turned away, only to materialise again as the splash of a white face, or a pair of hands like magician’s gloves, reappeared.

  There was an acrid smell of smoke and something sweeter, nastier, beneath it on the breeze. As they approached, a line of mounds on the left revealed itself as bunkers, raised on posts and roofed with sandbags laid on crossways boughs. From the direction of the enemy lines, pale stalks that bloomed into bright white lights rose into the sky above the wood, transforming everything with powdery light.

  One of the men, seeing that they were carrying sandbags full of rations, called out, ‘Those for us?’

  ‘I wish they were,’ grunted one of the forward party, sliding on the leaf mould and brittle sticks underfoot.

  As they passed on beyond the support line, the smell grew stronger. George saw that there were bodies here and there, sprawled among the broken trees, their faces lent a green pallor by the Verey lights. The men around him paid no heed. They passed among them as though they were as much a part of the natural scene as the leaves that lay in drifts against their backs. The rattle and clatter of bullets in the trees ahead made George wince and shrink into his collar.

  ‘When you’s out in the open,’ Chalky said conversationally, ‘and one o’ them flares goes up nearby, you ’as to stand very still, see, till it’s gone.’

  ‘Do we have to go over open ground to get to the fire trench?’ George asked.

  ‘Just a bit. Not too far.’

  George fell quiet and Chalky added, ‘We’ll be all right; don’t you worry.’

  It had become completely dark and when the flares faded, George could see the stars in clear patches of the sky between the slow-drifting clouds. The view of moon and stars through bare branches made him think of moonlit walks at home. He tried to take himself to that quiet place where the only sound was the soft soughing of the breeze rustling the branches and rippling the lake, thinking that if he could only hold that picture in his head he might feel calmer and make a better show of things. It was no good. The noise, the shocks, the eerie bloom and fade of man-made light, the fact that every hump they passed might be debris or might be a man, kept him firmly in the present: a surreal world become reality.

  As they reached the last trees, there was a droning sound above them that made them drop their loads and crouch, hands over heads. Further back in the wood there was an explosion in the canopy as a shrapnel bomb burst and spread its deadly hail of lead. The others quickly shouldered their loads once more but George fumbled as he tried to grasp the handle, his hands seeming unable to do the bidding of his brain.

  ‘Come on,’ Chalky said. ‘It might get a bit lively in here if the square-heads are trying to stop more support moving up.’

  From the edge of the wood, they looked out over an open field. In the ghostly light George could see, a couple of hundred yards to the left, marked by the mounded earth of the parados, the undulating line of a trench and beyond it a mess of wood and wire entanglements. As the flares died away to the right, against the dark trees he saw the tracery of bullets and in the far distance, from a dark, low ridge, a line of light bulging and swelling on the horizon as a barrage of enemy firepower boomed, roared and was answered by allied artillery in return.

  ‘Right, here we go,’ Chalky said. ‘Watch yer step.’

  They set off, skirting shell holes in which water gleamed. Bending low, with the weight of the box pulling on his shoulder, stumbling over mounded clods of displaced earth, George felt the sinews of his back stretch and strain. A ball of light rose into the air directly ahead and the men in front stopped abruptly, so that George and Chalky nearly knocked into them. A series of pulsing lights on rising stems followed. George froze as the light wavered, powdering his hands, his sleeves, his shoulders as if light were, in itself, a substance: motes as soft as dust. He held his breath and thought bizarrely of playing
musical statues as a child, of his mother playing the piano and then stopping suddenly and turning quickly with a smile to see who was still moving. He screwed his eyes up tight. He mustn’t think of Mother, mustn’t think of home; it would unman him.

  Another droning sound above. Should he crouch? He wanted to drop the box and throw himself flat on the ground but Chalky had said to stay still. Somewhere off to his left, the shell landed; he felt the explosion through the soles of his feet as he was rocked sideways and spatters of earth showered down. Then he was up on his feet again; Chalky was dragging the box and telling him to take the other end. He grabbed it as the lights faded once more and they half ran, half stumbled the last fifty yards to the trench.

  The men in front scrambled in; one slipping and cursing as the sharp edge of a shovel caught him in the ribs. Chalky and George dumped the box on the steep mounded earth of the parados, at the rear lip of the trench, and Chalky climbed in. George crouched at the edge, caught between the naked field behind and his reflex horror of the dark slot in the ground, but hands were reaching up to pull him and he let himself slide down and come to rest in shallow water and mud. Someone slapped him on the back.

  ‘That was a bit close for comfort,’ a voice said in the darkness.

  ‘Think we’ll stay here a bit till it quietens down,’ Chalky said in George’s ear.

  Rationally, George knew that he was safer down there but he disliked the enclosed feeling of the trench. The shallow diggings necessitated by the high water table were built up tall and sheer with sandbags and bits of wood and iron. He didn’t like the steep sides, the rough traverses that cut off each section from the next, the men from the carrying party crammed together, blocking the way along it on either side of him. He felt the familiar panic rising, his breath shortening. He fixed his eyes on the open sky above him, following the drift of the clouds half obscuring the disc of the full moon.