by S C Worrall
‘Bon soir, cheri!’ Women cascade through open windows, their breasts spilling from low-cut blouses, their faces heavily rouged. ‘Vous voulez entrer? You want to come inside?’
Jenkins cranes his head out of the window and wolf-whistles.
‘How about keeping your eyes on the road?’ A wave of frustration sweeps over Martin. He has seen plenty of similar scenes on trips to London. And he knows that the young men carousing and drinking are just getting up their courage for what lies ahead. But this is a world Nancy would not understand, one he cannot share with her. And the scene, rather than erotic or titillating, only serves to accentuate the distance opening up between them.
On the outskirts of Le Havre they head up a steep-sided valley. Ground mist hangs in the hollows. At the top of the valley, the land opens onto gently rolling hills, a bit like the Berkshire Downs, except bigger, more open. A heron flaps across a snow-covered field stippled with green winter wheat. Ducks huddle on frozen ponds.
The French Army has cleared the road but even then they can only drive at 20 mph. There is no heating in the vehicle, and no glass in the windows, so snow is constantly blowing into the cab. Martin wraps his scarf around his ears and spreads a blanket over his legs.
At Saint Roman de Colbosc, an old crone in felt slippers is sweeping the snow off the pavement outside her house. Her head is wrapped in a dark blue wool scarf. As the Panopticon rumbles past, she lifts the broomstick into the air and waves it, whether it is a greeting or a curse Martin is not sure.
‘Are those orchards?’ Cripps points to a field of snow-covered trees on the other side of the village.
Martin peers into the distance. ‘Pear, by the look of it,’ he says. ‘They make some of the best cider in France in this part of Normandy.’
‘My sister lives in Kent,’ says Jenkins from behind the wheel. ‘We go down every summer, with the kids, for a fortnight, and help with the harvest.’ He glances over at Martin. ‘D’you think we’ll be back by August, sir?’
‘I’m sure we will,’ he says. ‘Once the Germans realize we mean business, they’ll pull back to the east.’
As dusk falls, they pull to a halt in the village of Lillebonne. Martin and the rest of the officers are billeted in a windowless orphanage. The lower ranks are distributed around the village in barns.
Martin shares a room with Saunders.
‘Not exactly the Dorchester, is it?’ Saunders tests the bedsprings.
‘Don’t expect there’s room service, either.’ Martin drops his pack and bedding roll on the floor.
Thanks to Hugh’s Michelin guide, they find a decent restaurant where they eat a Normandy speciality: pork chops in a cream sauce, with mushrooms and apples, washed down with a bottle of Graves. Hugh is in convivial form, reminiscing about Oxford and girls they knew as teenagers, but Martin is in no mood for company and, as soon as he finishes his food, he excuses himself and heads back to the billet.
He lights a lantern, slides between the cold sheets with his greatcoat still on, takes out the packet of Nancy’s letters he has brought with him in his pack, and opens one at random, written only weeks after they met. As he reads it, all the discomforts of the day, even the freezing cold, vanish, as he is taken back to the woods above Penn, the sound of a blackbird singing, and the music of her voice, as they lay in the grass telling each other about their dreams.
Dawn cracks the bottom of the sky open, like a flesh wound. After a mug of tea and some porridge, Martin helps Cripps collect some crates, break them into small pieces, then light a fire under the chassis of the Panopticon. The furniture van’s engine has been wrapped overnight in straw and sacking, but the fierce cold has frozen the engine block.
The wood is wet and won’t catch. Cripps fetches some petrol, pours it over the wood and drops a match. There’s a whoosh. Cripps crawls under the lorry to make sure the flames don’t reach too high. They let the fire burn for a few minutes, then Jenkins hops up into the cab.
‘Try the crank now, sir?’
Martin grips the cold metal and pushes down on the crank handle with all his force. It turns a few degrees then springs back, stripping a piece of skin off his knuckles. He grips the cold metal again, steadies his feet, then jumps down on the handle with all his strength. There’s a hiccupping sound. The engine turns over once, then dies.
‘Shall I, sir?’ Jenkins clambers down from the cab.
‘Please.’ Martin lets got of the crank handle and sucks on his knuckles. ‘Bloody thing, nearly took my hand off.’
‘The trick is to hold it like this.’ Jenkins positions his hand carefully under the crank handle. ‘Otherwise, you can break your thumb.’
He spins the crank. The engine leaps into life and they set off. Clouds of snow and ice fly off the roofs of the lorries in front of them, obscuring Jenkins’ view of the road. At Neufchâtel-en-Bray they descend a steep hill. The viaduct spanning the valley is covered in black ice, and as Jenkins brakes, the Panopticon starts to slither towards the edge.
‘It’s like a bloody skating rink, sir!’ shouts Jenkins, steering the wheel in the direction of the skid.
On the other side of the viaduct, the road rises steeply. Jenkins guns the engine and makes a dash for it, but halfway up the hill, the engine stalls. Jenkins slams the brakes on, but can’t hold it. With a bang, they slide backwards into the lorry behind them. Martin and Cripps jump down from the cab and open the rear doors to let the others out.
‘Everyone all right?’ Martin goes from soldier to soldier.
‘Except for the shovel that landed on my head,’ jokes Topper.
‘At least it’s hollow.’ Martin winks. The others cheer.
There’s only minor damage to the vehicles. Jenkins cranks the handle, the Guy diesel catches. Martin and the rest of the men put their shoulders to the cold metal and push. The Panopticon’s tyres spin wildly on the frozen cobblestones then begins to roll backwards. ‘Topper! Wedge some of those four-by-fours under the tyres!’ Martin shouts.
Topper and Cripps ram the wooden posts under the wheels. The wheels continue to spin wildly, then rubber grips on wood, and the lorry comes to a juddering halt.
‘Get some shovels and picks out of the back,’ Martin orders. ‘See if we can clear some of this snow!’
They work together, in silence, shovelling the snow and slush out from around the tyres and under the chassis. But there is a layer of black ice underneath. Martin takes a pick and chips away at it, breathes in ragged gasps.
An officer from the Ordnance Corps, the branch of the battalion that deals with vehicle issues, appears at his side. He wears a black balaclava but despite its protection his face is raw with the cold, like a slab of uncooked steak. ‘Want a tow, laddie?’ He points to his lorry. ‘Our wrecker’s got chains.’
‘Wrecker’ is slang for a breakdown vehicle. Martin helps attach a rope between the vehicles and start the engines. The chains bite into the snow. Martin holds his breath. The rope tightens. The transport officer drops his hand, and the Panopticon jerks forward. Topper pulls the four-by-fours from under the tyres, throws them into the back, and leaps in. Martin feels the tyres spin, then grip, as the lead lorry drags the Panopticon up the hill, like an ant hauling a carcass back to its nest. As they reach the crest of the hill, a loud cheer goes up.
Martin sits in the cab, smiling. Getting the lorry out of trouble is the first emergency he has had to deal with on foreign soil. His men are beginning to trust him, gel as a team.
They climb steadily onto a snow-covered plateau. Only one lane has been cleared, so the convoy has to hug the centre. A few snowed-in farms are just visible over the snowdrifts. On either side of the road, snow-covered fields roll away to the horizon, like a white ocean. In this vast emptiness, the long line of camouflaged vehicles, snaking eastwards, looks like a fleet of Dinky toys. There are no trees. Just the occasional thorn bush. The cloud cover is almost the same colour as the snow now, and it is hard to tell where the land stops and the sky begins. No
thing moves. Not a horse. Not a person. Not a bird. They have arrived in Picardy.
Martin can still remember the lists of battle dates he learned in prep school: 1346, the Battle of Crecy; 1356, the Battle of Poitiers; 1914–18, the Battle of the Somme. Picardy is where the fighting always happens. As though on cue, a huge mausoleum looms out of the fog: an open arcade lined with Ionic columns, a massive archway leads through to a snow-covered graveyard. The British and Commonwealth cemetery of Pozières.
The convoy pulls over at the side of the road so the men can pay their respects. Martin looks across the snow, remembering his Uncle Robert’s poems about the war. Under the snow lie the bodies of nearly three thousand Commonwealth soldiers. Panels set into the walls surrounding the mausoleum record a further fourteen thousand Commonwealth casualties. A single German soldier is also buried here.
The men take off their caps and stand looking across the neat rows of grey headstones. Topper plays the ‘Last Post’ on the bugle, then they move on. Thiepval and Courcelette, Delville and Warlencourt. There are cemeteries left and right. The killing fields of the Somme, a vast bone yard stretching from Ypres in the north almost to the Swiss border.
They trundle on across the snow-covered plain. It feels as though they have not just crossed a battle line, but that this is a caesura that separates the past from the future. Aunt Dorothy, Roseen, Nancy – they are in another world now, a world that is receding. And as they drive on across this immense river of the dead, he feels the ghosts of the previous generation reaching out to touch him.
It is a landscape that has existed in Martin’s imagination since his uncle, Robert Graves, inscribed for him a copy of his famous antiwar novel, Goodbye to All That, on his thirteenth birthday. A haunted place, as vivid and as terrifying as a Grimms’ fairy tale. At school, he would have nightmares about the trenches, the clouds of poisonous gas floating across the mud, the corpses impaled on the wire. He would wake in his dormitory bed, screaming. Now his generation is here, too.
1 FEBRUARY 1940
Wahagnies, France
The handle of the shovel judders against his palm. Rain sheets down, sloshing about in the bottom of the trench. His boots squish in mud that has the colour and consistency of melted chocolate. The sou’wester over his head is soaked. The hand-knitted scarf Nancy gave him in Southampton hangs round his neck, like a wet towel. He lifts the shovel and throws the sodden earth out over the top.
It’s ten days since they arrived in Wahagnies, a drab mining village to the south-east of Lille, where they will remain until further notice. Martin is torn between wanting to do his duty for his country and his men; and his frustration that he has been torn away from Nancy. He thinks of her every minute of the day; remembers their walks above Penn; their trips to London. Every detail is etched in his memory, like an engraving. He only has to close his eyes and he can see her by him, hear her laughter, feel her lips on his.
At night, before he goes to bed, he reads and rereads the letters he has brought with him, seduced all over again by her bubbling prose and quicksilver emotion, waiting anxiously for a new letter with each day. For a week, none came. It was the longest he had not heard from her since they met. Each day felt like an eternity. When he had been with her, time had raced by in a flurry of happiness, minutes became seconds, hours felt like minutes. Now time moves at a different speed, as though a magnet has been lowered over the hands of his watch, holding back the time.
Martin’s platoon sergeant, Joe Cripps, bangs a post into the ground with a sledgehammer, takes out a tape measure, stretches it up the face of the timber revet supporting the trench wall, sucks in his cheeks, then gives the two-by-two another blow. Martin looks on, admiringly. An Oxford education has not equipped him with the practical skills he needs here, skills Cripps and the rest of the men know far more about than him. But he is determined to win their trust and with each new skill he masters he feels he is growing into his new role as an officer in the Army.
‘Why do they call it Wah-Niss?’ Cripps puts down the sledgehammer. ‘When it’s spelled Wahagnies?’
‘It’s German.’ Martin slams the shovel back into the cold earth. ‘Waha was one of the original inhabitants.’
‘So this is Wahaland?’ Cripps grins. ‘They can keep it.’
Martin laughs. ‘Gnies means farm or cultivated land. Hence, Wahagnies.’ Martin calls down to his men digging, ‘Bit deeper there, lads. Orders are: six feet deep.’
The trench stretches, like a scar, either side of the road leading to the forest of Phalempin: a gloomy tract of pine trees surrounding Wahagnies. Their commanders are convinced that the Luftwaffe may attack this way, from the north. So, the trench will be topped by sandbags and guarded by two 40 mm Bofors anti-aircraft guns and a nest of machine guns.
‘Some lads down at the farm were saying last night that Jerry is only fifty miles away.’ Topper’s blond hair is plastered against his head from the rain. ‘Is that true, sir?’
‘I don’t think anyone knows.’ Martin flings another shovelful of wet earth out of the trench, slams his shovel back into the ground, takes out a cigarette, hands one to Topper, then flicks open his Ronson lighter. The flint is damp and he has to spin it with his thumb several times before it catches. ‘The only thing certain is that they are out there somewhere.’ He looks up into the brooding sky. ‘Coal and steel. That’s why the Germans came here in 1914. And that’s what Hitler wants now.’ Martin looks at his watch. ‘OK, lads, let’s break for lunch. Back here at 2 p.m., please.’
The men clamber out of the trench to wait for the food lorry. Martin mounts his motorbike, a camouflaged Norton 16H with a sidecar, and heads down the road towards the forest. He’s arranged to meet Gibbens for lunch at a nearby estaminet, as restaurants are known in this part of France. At the next crossroads, he pulls up in front of a gabled building with whitewashed walls and a red-tiled roof, fronted by three windows framed by blue shutters. From an iron rod jutting from under the roof is a sign: the silhouette of a wolf, cut out of a sheet of metal. According to legend, the forest of Phalempin was once filled with wolves. The king of France himself would come here to hunt. In those days, the building was a hunting lodge. One day, the king caught a particularly large wolf and to commemorate his feat he had it hung on a chain from the eaves. When the lodge became a restaurant it was named, in dialect, Le Leu Pendu, The Hanging Wolf.
Martin pulls the Norton up onto its stand and walks into the restaurant, peeling off his dripping coat and hat. Waiters weave between the tables with trays balanced on their shoulders. The Madame, a chisel-faced woman with flame red hair, bustles about, uncorking bottles of wine, refilling bread baskets, flirting with the men.
Gibbens, the doctor, and Hugh Saunders wave Martin to a table at the back of the room. Elliott Viney and several of the other officers are already eating at other tables. Martin greets them then sits down. ‘Sorry I’m late.’ Martin puts his dripping helmet and goggles on the floor and unwinds the scarf from around his neck. ‘It’s pissing out there!’
‘Get some of this inside you.’ Gibbens pours Martin a glass of wine. Before he volunteered, this young, highly qualified doctor was working at St Thomas’ Hospital, in London. Now, his cap is emblazoned with the insignia of the Royal Army Medical Corps: a green and red badge depicting the rod of Asclepius, the Greek god of medicine, enclosed in a laurel wreath. Beneath it are the words In Arduis Fidelis, Faithful in Adversity.
Martin raises his glass. ‘Cheers!’ During the months of training in Sussex and at Newbury, he has come to feel that the doctor, with his gentle eyes and kindly face, has also become a close friend. The fact that they have now been forced to share a giant, double bed in their farmhouse billet, has only brought them closer together.
‘Not exactly Chateau Alix Corton.’ Gibbens smacks his lips. ‘But definitely gluggable.’ The doctor points to the blackboard menu. ‘I hear the venison is good.’
Martin picks up a slice of bread from the basket and slathers it
with butter. ‘How was your morning?’
Gibbens breaks off a piece of bread and chews. ‘At half past six I was dragged out of bed by one of my orderlies.’ He grins. ‘Called to a farm. Absolute hovel. Drunken farmer, slatternly wife, backward son and daughter-in-law. Sick baby wrapped in a wet blanket!’ He shakes his head. ‘When I told them he had to be brought to the Regimental Aid Post, they started shrieking! No idea what they were saying. Could have used you.’
A waiter appears at his elbow. ‘Vous avez choisi, messieurs? Have you chosen?’
‘Vous avez de la soupe? Have you got soup today?’
The waiter points to a steaming tureen on the next table. ‘Potato and leek.’
Hugh and the doctor nod. Martin orders. ‘Alors, trois soupes et deux venaisons, s’il vous plait.’ He points to the empty carafe. ‘Et encore une demie de vin. And another carafe of wine.’
The venison is superb: dark brown on the outside and pink in the middle, served with a delicious wild berry jus, over a bed of creamy mashed potatoes, with braised endives on the side.
‘They’re bloody useless at fighting.’ Hugh grins. ‘But no one in Europe can hold a candle to the French when it comes to cooking.’
‘Someone once explained the secret of French cooking to me in three words.’ Martin slices a piece of venison, spears it with his fork, dips it in the pile of mashed potatoes, then lifts it to his mouth. ‘Butter. Butter. Butter.’
Hugh and the doctor burst out laughing. ‘It’s true! But, amazingly, the rate of coronary disease is far lower than in the British Isles.’