by Dee Yates
‘Were there many killed?’ Duncan probed.
Tom stared into the fire until the heat brought tears to his eyes and he blinked wearily. ‘Some… some… but, if it’s all the same to you, I’d rather not talk about it.’
‘Aye, pal. If that’s what you want…’
‘I’d rather hear about what’s been happening on t’ farm. Any problems? Are the flock all well?’
‘Aye, as far as I can judge. We’ve had a bit of snow, but nothing too bad. We’ve missed you though. I hope you’ll be back to stay before too long.’
‘So do we all,’ Tom replied grimly. ‘I was hoping my leave might come at lambing time, but we’ll be back in t’ thick of it long before that.’
‘How long is your leave, Tom?’ Ellen lowered herself onto the hearthrug and put an elbow on her husband’s knee. He reached out and began to stroke her hair.
‘We have five days, that’s all. So it’ll be up to you to help your father and Kenneth with the lambing this year.’
‘Same as I always do, then. Though it won’t be easy with Netta into all sorts of mischief, as soon as my back is turned.’
‘You’ve been busy this last month or two, haven’t you, lass?’ Duncan gave her an innocent smile. Her heart missed a beat. She knew she should have warned him to keep quiet… but then, if she had, it would have implied there was something she wanted to hide.
‘Have you, lass? What have you been doing?’
‘Oh… er, just helping the army captain along the valley.’
‘The army captain? What army captain? What’s an army captain doing in the valley?’
‘Didn’t you tell him, lass?’ Duncan said, turning to his daughter. ‘I thought you would have said. They were camped over there.’ He nodded his head in the direction of the recent encampment.’
‘Who were?’
‘Prisoners… prisoners-of-war.’
Tom’s hand paused on top of Ellen’s head. He looked at her, bewildered.
She shrugged nonchalantly. ‘I thought it would only upset you if you knew, so I didn’t bother telling you.’
‘What were they doing here?’
‘Och, they’re not gone yet… not for a long time, are they, lass? They’ve only moved further down the road a mile or so. They’re laying the tracks for the railway and improving the road.’
‘Why are they doing it and not our own lads?’ Tom said angrily.
‘Because all our own lads have gone off to fight them,’ Ellen replied evenly.
‘So how come you were helping the army captain? How could he possibly want your help?’
Ellen’s heart sank.
‘She was looking after a sick prisoner, weren’t you, lassie?’ Duncan said, helpfully.
‘You mean you went in, where there were captured Hun holed up… and actually looked after one?’
‘Something like that.’ Ellen squirmed her head away from his grasp and turned to face him. ‘I was paid for it though. I thought you’d be pleased. It brought in a bit of money.’
‘Pleased!’ Tom’s eyes flashed and his voice rose in anger. ‘Pleased that you’re here looking after the enemy when my comrades have been dropping like flies all around me at their hands.’ He pushed her roughly away and dragged himself out of the chair. Crossing to the window, he stared across the pasture land to the other side of the valley.
Ellen shook her head in warning at her father, who looked as though he had been going to correct the finer details of the story. Duncan shut his mouth and examined his hands.
Abruptly Tom spun round. ‘Don’t you ever do anything like that again, do you hear me?’ he shouted. ‘I forbid you to have anything to do with any of them. As if it isn’t bad enough them building on our land, spoiling our pasture, ruining our peace. I forbid you to go near them again… and that’s an order.’
Flinging open the door, he strode into the hall, wrenched his coat off the peg and left the house, banging the door so loud that Netta, already startled by his shouting, burst into tears.
*
Ellen was taking washing off the line when she saw him descending the hill in the distance. Nell bouncing by his side, full of energy despite the long climb. She eyed him with apprehension. The pleasure at his homecoming had evaporated and now she felt a gathering of fear in her stomach. She smiled cautiously at him.
‘Well, the view hasn’t changed, thank God,’ he said, cheerily enough. ‘And the sheep are in fair condition, aren’t they, Nell?’ He patted the dog’s sleek coat and she gave him a lick of friendship.
Ellen let her breath out slowly. ‘Like Father says, it’s no’ been such a bad winter. It should be a good lambing. I wish you could be here for it.’
‘Me too. I miss the farm. I miss the peace and quiet. I… Well, it doesn’t matter.’
Ellen dropped the clothes into the basket at her feet and, stepping quickly over to him, put her arms tightly round his waist. ‘We’ve missed you too… Netta and me. I don’t want you to go back.’
Tom said nothing but put his arms round her shoulders. They clung together in the fading light, Tom staring out across the valley.
‘Who’d have thought it… I come home for a week’s break from the enemy, to find they’ve set up home not a mile along the road.’ He sighed heavily. ‘Happen it’s not such a bad idea, if the reservoir’s got to be built, that their labour is used to build it. Better than them sitting around using all our resources till the war ends.’
‘I suppose there are some of our own men in enemy hands?’
‘Yes, I expect there are… though there’s no way of knowing how many.’ He shuddered. ‘I don’t know whether it’s better to be blown to smithereens than captured by the Hun.’ He broke off abruptly.
Ellen looked up at him. He was still staring into the distance, his face suggesting he saw pictures of war rather than the peaceful valley before him. ‘Are there many getting killed?’
‘What?’ His eyes focused on her. ‘What did you say?’
‘Are many dying? Tell me about it… what’s it like out there on the battlefield?’
Tom gave a short laugh and she caught the bitterness in it. ‘Oh, you don’t really want to know… like the farm on a bad day,’ he said but his attempt to make light of what he had been going through didn’t fool her. She felt aggrieved that he had been away all this time and yet what he had been doing remained a secret. She was his wife, wasn’t she?
She slowly tried to draw away from him but, as though sensing it, he tightened his grip.
‘What’s the matter? Bored with me already?’
‘Don’t be silly.’ She stood on tiptoe and kissed his cheek. ‘It’s only that there’s tea to get and Netta to put to bed and Father’s sore shoulders to rub.’
Tom gave a brief laugh. ‘Well, I hope there’ll be some time left for me after all that because there’s one thing I’ve been dreaming about all the way home and I don’t mind showing you what it is.’ And he bent his head and began to kiss her mouth like a parched man stumbling upon an oasis in the desert.
*
It was not, of course, what he had been dreaming about all the way home. To begin with all he could think of were the pals he was leaving behind… those whose bodies lay rotting in the mud… and those who were still fighting and who would most likely not be there when he returned.
It was only later, when he had stepped off the boat and his churning stomach had begun to settle and the wish to die had receded to the back of his mind, that he began to think of home comforts. Naturally such thoughts had kept him going during the long months in the mud of the trenches. Time and again, he had drawn from the inner pocket of his greatcoat the picture, increasingly dog-eared, of his wife and child. He had stared at Netta seated on Ellen’s lap, arms outstretched, laughing. Six months old. By the time he saw her again, she would be more than twice that age and he would hardly know her. And she would have no knowledge of him at all.
There were times as well, when he was alone, that he w
ould delve into his pocket and withdraw another photograph, that of a girl with dark curly hair drawn back and intense eyes in a serious face. The eyes seemed always to be looking at him and every time he withdrew the picture from its envelope, his heart would turn over at their penetrating gaze. He did not look at her often, for the action was invariably followed by the despair of knowing that she would never be his.
Often his conscience smote him, not because she was there, in the place properly reserved only for his young wife and baby, but because of the possibility, nay, probability, of his death. If this should happen, his pockets would be searched by his commanding officer and photographs and other mementoes returned to the family. And he would not have Ellen suffer more than she would already do on receiving news of his death. But still he could not bring himself to dispose of this picture of his first love. So she remained, and when he replaced her photo, he always made sure that it was she, and not Ellen, who was closest to his heart.
*
Tom rolled off Ellen and lay back panting. His wife murmured and turned towards him and he put out an arm to cradle her head against his chest. He kissed her forehead and drew the sheet over the cooling sweat of his body. He was tired, an exhaustion that at that moment made him feel as though he could not raise himself off the bed, even if all the demons of hell were after him. But, above all, he felt an intense relief. He had been anxious that his efforts at lovemaking would result in failure. He had been so long away from Ellen that she had become almost a stranger to him. His head had been so full of the horrors he had witnessed that, for a while, all else had faded into insignificance. It was not until he kissed her that his need for her eclipsed all thoughts of what he had left and what he had lost.
He slept… and the nightmares returned to haunt him, as they always did. The mud and the water-filled shell holes and the tangles of barbed wire everywhere he looked. The nauseating smell of rotting flesh. The drift of smoke, disguising an insidious and deadly weapon. Men crouched vulnerable and helpless in the trenches while bullets whistled overhead. The silence of inaction, poised for the gunshot that never came, flinching and jerking and ducking, nerves strung so taut that he thought at times he would go mad. And just when it seemed that the enemy were really sleeping, some daft beggar put his head above the parapet and there was an explosion of fire. He could see the sightless stare of one of his pals as he lay sprawled in the stinking mud at his feet with a bullet through his forehead.
And now the order to advance had been given. And they were picking their way over rotting corpses and round craters and their nostrils were full of the stench. At first there was no retaliation and they thought they had not been spotted. And then a shell exploded to his right and another a little further away, and he and his pals veered to the left and ran on, blinded by smoke and the fog that, it had been hoped, would obscure their approach.
Without warning, three of the lads were thrown into the air as a shell landed mere feet in front of them. One second they were there, bayonets fixed, stumbling over the uneven terrain, cursing beneath their breath… and the next, the earth appeared to swallow them up. Tom fell to the ground. At his side another private flattened himself in the mud.
‘It’s hopeless,’ Tom mouthed. ‘Let’s crawl back. There’s no one else left. If we go on we’re done for.’
‘Wait a bit. Wait until they think they’ve got rid of us all.’
So for the next hour the two men lay motionless, feeling the chill of the autumn mud seeping into their bodies. Over them swirled the smoke, mingled with the dense fog. From time to time a distant moan of pain broke the silence.
‘Bastards.’ The word reverberated round and round the inside of Tom’s head.
‘Let’s go.’ It was the soldier at his side. ‘We’ll crawl. Take it very slowly. Watch for any barbed wire.’
So they began. It was endless. And what Tom had seen at body’s length as he had surged forward with the others in his company, he now saw only an inch or two from his face. His numbed fingers welded themselves to his rifle. Fear made him weak. When he thought he could go no further, he glanced up and saw that there was still further to go.
Not knowing if the direction they were taking was the correct one, Tom was amazed when he threw himself over the edge of the parapet and found himself back where he had started. He could almost have believed in a divine providence, if it had not been for the carnage all around him and the shot that, the next second, entered his friend’s back, as he launched himself at the trench. His bloodied body was flung on top of Tom’s, turning the whoop of triumph at their safe return into a scream of revulsion.
‘Tom!’ He was being shaken. ‘Tom! Are you all right?’
He opened his eyes to darkness and screaming. Not the screaming of men but the screaming of a baby. The striking of a match and the sudden flare of a candle startled him and he sat up in panic and stared into Ellen’s frightened face, unable to understand what was happening.
‘Tom, it’s me… Ellen. You were dreaming. You’ve woken Netta with your screams.’
Tom turned his head, staring in horror at his frightened daughter. Memory flooded through him and he pulled back the tangled bedclothes and swung his legs out of bed, cradling his head in his hands.
‘I’m sorry,’ he mumbled. ‘I'm sorry.’
‘It doesn’t matter. Let me take Netta from her cot and calm her down. Then you can get back to sleep. You’re overtired, that’s all.’
He pulled the covers straight and climbed back into bed while Ellen walked up and down the room with the bewildered baby over her shoulder. The candlelight drew monstrous patterns on the wall and Tom stared at them and could not decide if this was the real world or a fanciful dream, and if the real world was the nightmare he had, until a few minutes ago, been living through, just as he had done every night since leaving the battlefields of Northern France.
20
Walking the Hills
At this quiet time in the shepherd’s year, there was little to be done except to walk the hills and make sure none of the flock had got into difficulty.
At first, Tom stayed indoors, dozing in front of the fire. But he soon tired of doing nothing and, after two idle days, suggested that he would help Duncan by checking on the sheep. Ellen advised that he needed more rest, but he wouldn’t listen. He rose early the following morning, ate a hasty meal of porridge and, whistling to Nell, set off briskly across the valley floor to the hills of its southern side.
The frosty ground crunched beneath Tom’s feet as he climbed. Reaching the summit of the range, he surveyed the way he had come: the white cottage in the distance, glistening in the morning sun, the farm to its right and the dark stretch of pine trees that marked the line of the stream as it tumbled down the hillside to feed into the river at its base. Turning east, he made his way along the ridge of hills, checking on the sheep as he went.
As the valley unfolded, he saw the men far below. Strung out in a line, they were fashioning the course of the railway that would cut through the valley to its easternmost end. He watched fascinated, in spite of himself, as the men laboured, looking from this distance, like an army of ants. He resolved to walk back along the road so that he could take a closer look, once he had covered the four miles or so of hills over which the sheep grazed.
It was strange to be walking through the collection of prisoners, whose comrades he had been fighting and killing only a few weeks ago. They belonged to another world, those men in the trenches, but these too didn’t belong. The thought ran again through his head that there was no longer any peace, not even here, in the place that he loved.
He and the men stared at each other in silence. They must know, he considered, that he was a soldier on leave. True, he was no longer wearing his uniform, but why else would he be strolling through the valley, when every other able-bodied man was away fighting for king and country? They looked, he had to confess, much like the soldiers of his own regiment… tired, thin, some of them to the point of ema
ciation, pale faces in which their eyes, ringed with shadow, appeared huge. His progression through the group had the effect of a wave, as the men ahead downed tools on his approach, watched him in frozen animosity as he passed them by and slowly resumed work as he receded into the distance.
One of the group called out and so unexpected was the sound that Tom started and stepped back in alarm.
‘Why do you look at us like that?’ the man snarled. A small man, heavily built, with close-set eyes and bristly hair.
‘Because you’re on our land, that’s why. I’ve every right to look at you and there’s nowt you can do about it.’
Another younger prisoner stepped up to the man who had spoken and murmured in an undertone, nodding in the direction of the farm. The older man laughed.
‘So, you come to find out who your wife nursed back to health in your bed while you were away. How you say it… the cuckoo in the nest.’ He cackled and turned away.
A pulse of anger and humiliation surged through Tom’s body. In an instant he had crossed the rough ground between them and fastened his hand on the man’s shoulder, swinging him round to face him. But before he knew it, arms restrained him. He struggled to get free, but the prisoners who had surrounded him refused to let go. The small mean eyes came close to his.
‘I tell you only the truth,’ he said. ‘If you refuse to believe me, ask that boy who sits over there on the wagon… resting, is he not? Still not fully recovered, unless it is that he was made weak by the time spent with your wife.’ The man looked at the assembled faces in order to share the joke, picked up his spade and swung it onto his shoulder before turning his back on Tom and strolling away.
Tom shrugged out of the grasp of those who had detained him and caught a fleeting glimpse of a younger man, a pale face that looked out of keeping in the excavations. He stepped towards him, then stopped, wheeled round and made for home.
Ellen was preparing dinner when the door was thrown back against the wall, and the smile of greeting was wiped from her face by the look of fury on her husband’s.