A Spell of Swallows

by Sarah Harrison

  This army runs on tea. You boil the water and make a brew from just about anything—grass, leaves, even tea leaves if you can get them. We keep on hearing that supplies have arrived, rations a-plenty, but they’re all sitting in the Shatt, being unloaded by two men with a teaspoon and a rowing boat . . . When the stuff’s on land that’s only the start. It’s got to get from A to B on wagons pulled by those blasted mules, and sand or sludge, either way, the wheels sink. There are teams of fighting men spending their time just laying duckboards and corduroy roads so the wagons can roll. It’s not the best use of soldiers at the front, and it’s not quick, either. One thing we’re getting expert at is waiting.

  We had a bit of a run-out against the Turk the other day, and experienced the difficulties for ourselves. It was all quite exciting to begin with. You get sick of hanging around, being bored makes you jumpy, especially with the Buddhoos up to their tricks after dark, galloping about, wailing like banshees, firing randomly—showing off mostly, the only damage is on the nerves, but that doesn’t make for a peaceful night.

  Jarvis is in charge of our lot, ‘D’ Company. He’s well liked. Sometimes I feel a sort of pride, as if I’m responsible for him, his superior, instead of the other way round. Silly really. I can see him as captain of cricket at his school, firm but fair, an encouraging word for everyone, leading from the front. Untested in battle conditions as far as I know, just like the rest of us. Anyway, we set off in pretty good order at o-fuck-hundred hours; about five a.m. to be precise. Objective was a small forward group of Turks well dug in at a disused factory building ten miles up river. We’re given to understand that we have the advantage in numbers, but they have a well-defended position. The general feeling is: let’s get at them.

  The first few miles aren’t bad, the sun’s not up and the ground’s load-bearing. There’s even a sort of track, a stony unmade road that we can follow, nice easy marching. But as the sun rises everything else starts to go downhill. The track peters out. We’re coming into a marshy area, one of the nastiest terrains it’s ever been my misfortune to encounter—a thin, baked crust on top of treacherous slop, like ruddy rice pudding. The crust’s got these great cracks all over it, and every so often it’ll give way and you’re up to your knees in slime. There’s a kind of long, sharp grass growing all over it, something like rushes, and we’re finding out why they call them ‘blades’: the edges can cut you to ribbons.

  We keep on marching, but getting slower. By seven o’clock the sun’s well and truly up and we’ve got four miles to go. It’s flat as pancake, lots of nothing in all directions. We keep on thinking we can see the factory, but it’s a mirage. We can’t get used to them. The horizon shimmering and creating shapes that aren’t there. Sometimes it looks like the entire Turkish army bearing down on us. And then it dissolves, and there’s nothing. I don’t know what’s worse, the apparitions or the emptiness. The heat’s indescribable, everyone’s gone quiet. The pace has slowed to a crawl, the column has to keep stopping so the stragglers and the gun carriages can keep up. Stopping seems like a good idea till you do it, and then you realise that where the desert sun’s concerned you’re better presenting a moving target. When you stand still it’s like the sun’s actually pressing down on you. And then when you start marching again every bite and blister and stiff muscle and corner of chafed skin hurts like hell.

  The man next to me is Stan Maidment, from Nottingham. He’s one of those big, weak men—tall and broad, but soft. They say the human body’s three-quarters water, and with him I believe it. He’s suffering. I can almost hear him drying out. During one of our stops I glance at him and he’s got that look I’m beginning to recognise. Like a dog. I saw a greyhound once, came off the track and died of a burst heart. Just before it went, this was the look it had: eyes red, not seeing, mouth open, like its brain had switched off and its body was panicking, fighting the inevitable. I’m not saying Stan’s about to drop dead just yet, but he has the look. He doesn’t care any more where we’re going, what we’re going to do, whether he’s going to get shot or not. He’s punch-drunk. The next step’s quite enough of a challenge. As we trudge on again and I’m listening to his thin, dry breathing, I wonder what Jarvis will say in the letter to his mother. ‘Died in the service of his country’? One thing she’ll be pleased about, he’s stopped biting his nails.

  Now it seems to be more stopping than starting, and when we do move it’s a snail’s pace. Trudging, not marching. The sky’s not blue, it’s off-white, like a duck egg, and the sun’s bright white in the middle of it. All around us is the dust we’re sending up, and further away the whole horizon’s a mirage. I hope someone up in front’s got a map, because we don’t know where we’re going. Communications are terrible, a couple of little planes rattle to and fro doing recces, and the worrying thing is, we rely on them. If they get it wrong we could find ourselves attacking an empty building while the enemy comes round from the back, laughing their heads off. The blokes in the planes draw maps, freehand. An officer goes round and says: ‘Anyone here nifty with a pencil?’ and the first artistic types to put their hands up land themselves a cushy number. Jarvis says it’s one hell of a responsibility and he wouldn’t want it. I find myself wondering if they embellish things a bit—put in figures in turbans, palm trees, a camel or two . . . Must be a temptation.

  Right now I don’t care as long as the main features are all there and in the right place. We could be going round in circles for all we know. Right then one of the planes flies over, and a man just in front of us waves. A sort of reflex I suppose, like waving at trains. What do we look like to those men, up there? A huge dusty centipede crawling through the desert. Pity they can’t tell us whether we’re on course, ‘left hand down a bit’, that kind of thing. I suppose if we were heading in the wrong direction they’d find some way of letting us know, heading us off at the pass—if there was a pass.

  We stop again. This time the order comes along from the front, so it’s not for stragglers. Looking back I can just make out the mules pulling the gun carriages, about three-quarters of a mile away. The only reason I can see them is because they’re not immediately behind, but over to the left as I stand facing this way; to the east, in other words.

  Sowe must have turned a corner. What corner? What for?

  Stan lists a bit in my direction. I put up a hand to steady him so he doesn’t fall on top of me—even in his sorry state he could crush a few ribs.

  ‘All right Stan?’

  He mumbles something.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I’m not going to make it.’

  What am I supposed to say? Might as well be realistic.

  ‘None of us are, chum.’

  ‘I can’t go on . . .’

  He means it, and I believe him. Anyway, given that ‘making it’ and ‘going on’ mean our first proper scrap with the Turks, why worry? It’s a choice of two evils.

  ‘Then don’t,’ I say. ‘Stay here. The wagons’ll be along in due course.’

  Hark at me, like a guard on a railway platform. And I’m taking a liberty making out there’ll be more than one wagon. There won’t be, and the MO won’t be pitching his tent, either, till we’re within striking distance of the objective. Leaving Stan here’s going to be the equivalent of burying him up to his neck in sand and playing a blowtorch over him. He’d be better off catching a nice clean bullet and knowing no more, as they say.

  I prop him up with both hands and hold him upright till he feels steady and I can let go, like balancing a telegraph pole on its end. There’s a mutter coming down from the front end of the column, like the spark running along a fuse. The man just in front of me turns round.

  ‘Can you credit it?’

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Ditch. Empty,’ he adds. ‘Not full of Turks.’

  It turns out it’s a big drainage ditch. Another sign of the madness of this place; when it’s not cooking it’s awash. The water comes down from the mountains up there to t
he north and the whole place is flooded. Noah was from round here.

  The trouble is there are no stones, and no trees. Nothing solid underfoot no matter how far you dig, and no materials to shore up the ditch, or to build a bridge with, and men and horses are getting stuck. It’ll be ten times worse for the big guns and the other wagons and they haven’t even got there yet.

  We’re bogged down, in a desert. Tommy, as ever, is philosophical in adversity and in some cases even begins to make tea.

  Captain Jarvis comes riding down the line. There’s dollops of yellowy scum all over his horse and its nostrils are gaping, but Jarvis himself looks very brisk as if he’s out for a turn in Rotten Row.

  ‘We’re having to make an earthwork, men,’ he announces. ‘Take this opportunity for a rest, we can’t say when the next one will be.’ And on he goes.

  I give Stan Maidment a little downward push on the shoulder, that’s all it takes. He slithers down in a heap. I take off his neckerchief, sprinkle a bit of water on it out of his canteen and put it over his eyes and forehead, with his pith helmet balanced over that to keep the moisture in for a couple of minutes.

  I stay standing. We’re already a sitting target, without adding to it. A wagon, a real bone-shaker, trundles past from the rear with some men riding on the back, presumably engineers or sappers off to help with the earthwork. It’s hard to imagine. I went to Margate once with my father, and sand’s the most useless stuff there is. It slithers and slides, it’s got no substance. Even when you get it wet and manage to make a castle, one finger-touch and the whole thing collapses. And our brave boys are going to make a bridge out of it? A bridge big enough and strong enough to support nearly a thousand men, fifty horses and mules and half a dozen wagons?

  They do it by simply filling in a fifty-yard stretch of the ditch, an area between two bends so the sand can’t so easily fall away at the sides. This heroic exercise (and I’m not joking, it is heroic) takes an hour, which is pretty good going, but all that time our numbers are going down as men fall over with heatstroke, and doubtless the Turks now know we’re on our way and are lined up with guns primed to greet us.

  By the time the order comes down to fall in and start marching, Stan’s too far gone. Out cold I’d say if that didn’t sound like a bad joke. Nothing we can do but leave him there with another sprinkle of water on the handkerchief. I don’t expect to see him again. At least he’s not alone—there’s dozens of casualties sprinkled along the route, like litter thrown out of a train. I wonder where the Buddhoos are, they’ve got a reputation for looting, scavenging and ripping open bodies, not always those of the dead.

  We march on for about a mile, and then another halt’s called, this time so that the guns can be brought up and got over the ditch first. They have to line up their sights on the target, and that can take a while. Will the Turks play cricket and wait for us all to get into position before letting us have it, is the question . . .

  We’ll never know the answer because we never get that far. The gun carriages rumble past in a cloud of dust and grit, and an hour after that we hear that the second one’s sunk in the earthwork, which has collapsed under its weight. The mules floundering about are only making things worse, so they have to be unharnessed and dragged out separately—I had my share of mules in the harbour at Basra and don’t envy the poor bastards who have to deal with them now.

  Realising we’re having our difficulties, the Turks send out a raiding party, assisted by fifty or so Buddhoos who were probably the ones who alerted them in the first place. The gunners and the rest who are held up in the collapsed trench are stuck, poor bastards, the rest of us are told to make an orderly withdrawal. Which we do, during the hottest part of the day, sniped at from both sides and passing the men fallen along the way. I don’t spot Stan, I can’t tell him from all the others, but the MO’s outfit is on its way, travelling against the flow of traffic, so maybe he’ll make it.

  People say what a terrible waste of life war is, meaning all those young men dying in battle. At least they’re doing what they signed up for—having a go at the enemy. Today we marched eight miles into the desert, stopped, started again, got bogged down and marched back, sustaining over a hundred casualties and at least as many dead in the process, many of them from heatstroke, finished off by the Buddhoos. Now that’s what I call waste.

  Jarvis is shaken. He makes no bones about it.

  ‘It was a fiasco, Ashe,’ he says. ‘A bloody fiasco.’

  ‘Yes sir,’ I say. ‘Better luck next time.’

  Chapter Four

  Felicity Delamayne cornered Vivien after evensong the following Sunday.

  ‘He was up at the house,’ she announced. ‘That rather strange creature—your Mr Ashe.’

  ‘Poor man,’ said Vivien carefully. ‘You see what I mean—about his face.’

  ‘But he’s doing fine!’ Lady Delamayne seemed not to have been in the least perturbed by Ashe’s appearance, ‘He delivered some shooting kit Sidney ordered from Waring and Gillow.’

  ‘So he’s found work?’

  ‘Driving the station van.’

  ‘Yes, he said he could drive . . .’

  ‘There you are then. When did he tell you that?’

  Vivien glanced across from their position near the font at Saxon, who was bidding farewell to the small congregation. ‘He called a few days ago looking for work.’

  ‘How extraordinary. And what did your husband make of that, I wonder?’

  ‘Saxon was working, I didn’t bother him with it. We did discuss it afterwards, and there’s nothing for him at the moment.’

  ‘I should think not.’

  ‘If there was,’ said Vivien firmly but with her voice still lowered because she feared she might be traducing Saxon, ‘we would definitely consider him. He’s very personable, in spite of—in spite of everything.’

  ‘Hm.’ Felicity raised an eyebrow and delivered herself of a damning judgement. ‘Well, I don’t care for people who go around knocking on doors. It smacks of begging.’

  Returning to the vicarage, Vivien weighed up this remark, which contained a grain of truth but which did not, she considered, apply to Mr Ashe. He had made an offer of his Services; which she had been unable to accept, His manner had been neither servile nor ingratiating and had not, on either of their two meetings, contained the smallest trace of self-pity. In fact, for someone so badly disfigured, he appeared surprisingly confident and sanguine, as though the outcome of their exchange had been Vivien’s loss. She couldn’t help feeling bitterly disappointed that Ashe had found work elsewhere.

  Sunday supper chez Mariner was an informal affair, but that wasn’t to say that Vivien didn’t take some trouble over it. Tonight it was omelettes Arnold Bennett, a particular favourite of Saxon’s and now a speciality of his wife’s. They could not have managed without Hilda, but her absence brought a sense of freedom.

  Saxon loved to see Vivien cooking, and without Hilda in the kitchen he would venture down into this female stronghold and keep her company. The delicious smell of poached haddock made his mouth water. And his wife . . . Vivien was like a Dutch painting, standing now at the table, now at the stove, with her smooth, flushed cheeks and downcast eyes, her hair tied back in a frayed silk scarf from which one long wavy strand emerged. From time to time she blew at the stray hair, or swiped at it ineffectually with the back of her wrist. At times like these Saxon forgot his irritable wish to see her in smart clothes, coiffed and soignée; she was alluring just as she was, and part of that allure was that she wore it lightly. If she had been armoured in expensive chic she might have attracted admiring glances, (mainly from other women he suspected) but not the senses—or not in the same way.

  Saxon, standing behind her, took it upon himself to catch the lock of hair in his finger and thumb and tuck it back beneath the edge of the scarf.

  She thanked him. She was at a delicate stage in the omelette-preparation, spreading the flaked haddock onto the half-cooked egg mixture. This d
id not prevent Saxon placing his hands on her waist. He loved the feel of her, both the soft indentation of the waist itself, and the sense of her body’s balanced swell above and below. As he touched her she smiled, still concentrating on the task, drawing the edges of the omelette in from the side of the pan.

  ‘I hope you’re ready,’ she said.

  ‘I am,’ he replied, meaning something different.

  Sighing, he slid his hands up to her breasts, which had always seemed to fill his cupped palms perfectly, to have been waiting for them.

  ‘Come upstairs,’ he whispered. ‘There’s time.’

  ‘The omelette will spoil,’ she said, but as she did so she released the handle of the wooden spatula and pushed the pan off the hot plate. Her hands came up to cover his and her head tilted back on to his shoulder.

  ‘Then we can make another.’

  ‘We?’ She turned now, into his embrace, letting her arms hang by her sides, in an attitude of what Saxon took to be calculated compliance. She knew instinctively how to excite him to distraction.

  ‘I don’t care,’ he muttered brokenly. ‘I’ll do anything . . .’

  They were not alone. Standing in the dusk, not ten yards from the kitchen window, John Ashe watched as the vicar untied his wife’s apron, pulling with urgent, scrabbling fingers at the knot behind her back. He noticed how she stood quite still with her forehead bowed into the angle of her husband’s neck in an attitude of curiously knowing passivity, both the foil and spur to his urgency. What was she thinking? Confident that they were too absorbed, and too secure in their supposed privacy ever to see him, he advanced a little closer. The apron finally yielded to Mariner’s fumblings and was thrown aside. He kissed her, not prettily but greedily, his knees bending to enable him to clasp her buttocks, she leaning backwards as a counterbalance, both of them staggering slightly. For a moment Ashe thought they would copulate there and then in the kitchen, standing up, dangerously close to the hot stove, and the still-smoking pan but then, to his surprise, Mariner picked his wife up and carried her to the door. He was a slightly built man and she was tall, but he only staggered a little beneath her weight. Ashe was impressed by the unexpectedness of the scene. Especially that when Mrs Mariner’s head fell back over her husband’s arm, her eyes remained resolutely open.