Two Storm Wood, page 8
Her right hand found the entrenching tool. Her fingers closed around the handle. She gritted her teeth and swung the spade around, clearing a space around her. She got to her knees. More rats, fat like guinea pigs, were coming out of the walls.
Kitty was paralysed, too scared to run. She lost her footing and fell. Rats darted over her back and neck. She shrieked and writhed, hands flailing.
Amy swung the entrenching tool again and again, clearing one step at a time as she advanced towards her friend, harder and faster, feeling the blade connect with flesh and bone, crushing and slicing, hearing the rats’ rasping screeches as the steel cut into them.
She hauled Kitty to her feet and dragged her up the last few steps into the daylight. A big rat reared up on its hind legs. She took its head off with a single, pinning thrust. And then they were outside again, running along the trench, dodging round the traverses, scrambling up a ladder to higher ground.
Amy was up first. She stumbled forward, breathing hard, her body shaking. In front of her lay a swathe of rusty barbed wire. A stocky Chinese man in a khaki overcoat was standing on the other side, staring at her, his mouth open.
Amy looked down at herself. Her coat was dark with filth, the belt undone. Her hat was gone, and her hair had come loose. She reached behind to tidy it, only then noticing the blood on her gloves. Letting the entrenching tool drop, she wiped them hastily on her coat.
The man went on staring. Gingerly Amy touched her face: it too was wet with blood.
Ten
‘Most of them are still tagged, sir.’ Corporal Reid consulted his notebook. ‘Twenty-seven so far. Eleven without. Good uniform detail. No officers.’
The pits behind him held the remains of New Zealanders killed the previous summer. The Huns had buried them two deep, as they often did when rushed, although sometimes enemy officers were separated from the other ranks out of respect for military hierarchy. All of them would have to be searched for effects, labelled and bagged, before removal to a concentration cemetery on the Serre road. Already forty bags lay on the ground. The smell of disinfectant was heavy in the air.
‘Make sure we don’t miss anything.’ Captain Mackenzie shivered. The rain was easing, but if anything, it was darker. Night came quickly on the Ancre, as if reclaiming the land by right. ‘I want something from every …’
‘Yes, sir?’
Mackenzie’s attention had been drawn to a small group of figures in the distance, approaching from the west. ‘Pass me those field glasses, will you, Corporal?’
Reid had liberated a good pair from the corpse of a German lieutenant. The sole of the dead man’s boot had just been visible, bobbing up and down at the bottom of a flooded shell hole. Mackenzie had let him keep his prize. Bodies recovered from water were the hardest to deal with. Often the flesh had the consistency of butter, and sloughed off the bones as it was moved. Reid had volunteered to search for the tags, though this courtesy was far from automatic where the enemy was concerned. Lieutenant Arnholt’s name was duly recorded, and his skeletal remains bagged up for removal.
Reid handed over the glasses. Mackenzie turned them on the strangers advancing towards them.
‘Those aren’t women, are they, sir?’ Reid asked.
‘No, by God, they’re ladies. And a Chinaman with a mule.’
One of the women had no hat. Mackenzie wondered if she was a servant. She was petite, with dark hair, and young, like her mistress.
‘What do they want, sir?’ Reid said.
‘They must be lost. Very lost.’
Mackenzie looked at the scene that surrounded him: the lines of canvas bags, many still open to the sky; two men in the trench below, levering out a body with their shovels, a mop of black hair on the grinning skull slowly surfacing through the mud. ‘Cover that up. And tell the men to stand down.’
They were running short of canvas. Reid had hardly accomplished his task when the party arrived. The Chinese NCO saluted. He was a quartermaster with one of the labour companies working to the south of them: a small, thin-faced man with deep lines in his cheeks. He explained that the ladies were English and had come to look for their dead husbands.
For a moment Mackenzie thought he must be making a joke. ‘From England?’
The hatless woman’s face was flushed and dirty and she was out of breath, as if she had that very minute stepped out of a fight.
‘My name …’ She cleared her throat. ‘My name is Vanneck – Amy Vanneck. This is my friend, Catherine Page. She’s looking for her brother.’
The formality of her words struck Mackenzie as absurd, as if they were all of them standing in a drawing room somewhere in the Home Counties. It crossed his mind that the women might be insane.
‘Her brother?’
‘His grave. Its location has been lost. Somewhere near Rosières.’
Had they noticed the lines of bags lying behind them? Did they know what they contained? The mule began nudging at a clump of grass a few feet away.
The dark-haired woman held out her hand. Instinctively he took it. ‘Captain James Mackenzie, Twenty-first Middlesex.’
Her gloves were dirty and torn. A bloody nail showed through a hole. As his grip tightened, Mackenzie detected a distinct tremor. The other woman said nothing.
‘Forgive me, but has something happened?’ Mackenzie said.
The quartermaster explained the women had wandered into some reserve positions west of Beaumont-Hamel and had disturbed a colony of rats. ‘The lady kill some,’ he said, nodding towards Miss Vanneck. His mouth widened into a grin. ‘That blood on her face – rat blood.’
‘It was …’ Miss Vanneck dabbed self-consciously at her cheek. ‘It was stupid of us. We should have—’
‘There are hordes of rats by the river, I don’t know why,’ Mackenzie said, aware that he too was falling into a conversation, in spite of the circumstances. ‘Other wildlife too: feral dogs, foxes, even some wild boar. Nature rushes in where men fear to tread.’ He took the hip flask from his coat. ‘Can I offer you some brandy? It’s rough, but it steadies the nerves.’
Miss Vanneck shook her head.
Mackenzie unscrewed the top. ‘I insist.’
She hesitated before taking a long swig. Kitty sipped cautiously, before grimacing and handing back the flask. Corporal Reid and Sergeant Farrer were staring, along with every other man in the squad. Mackenzie searched their faces for some sign of pleasure at the unexpected presence of English ladies, but found none.
‘Now, if you wouldn’t mind, Miss Vanneck,’ he said, ‘please explain to me what in God’s name you’re doing out here.’
Mackenzie dismissed the quartermaster and led the women into a tent that had been pitched a short distance away. Corporal Reid went with them. The nervous energy was still coursing through Amy’s system. She told herself to calm down. What were a few rats? A nuisance, at worst. She raised a hand to her heart. The tiepin was still in its place, a hard lump beneath the heavy fabric of her coat.
‘The front lines were here, give or take a mile, for most of the war,’ Mackenzie was saying. His bearing was wary and nervous, and there was a sickly pallor beneath his weather-beaten cheeks. Still, it seemed he was not ready to dismiss them just yet. ‘You’ve seen the devastation. We’ve recovered about a thousand men so far, most of them listed as missing, or graves destroyed. Graves Registration in Péronne has a record of every field burial – names, dates and locations. We know where to concentrate our efforts, but every square yard has to be checked. It takes time.’
‘My fiancé was in the Manchesters,’ Amy said.
‘We’ve found a few men from that regiment. Which is to be expected. It’s one of the largest in the country.’
‘He was a captain in the Seventh Battalion: Edward Haslam. He went missing in August.’ Amy fumbled in her pocket for Barnard’s letter. ‘This is from the colonel of the regiment.’
Mackenzie looked surprised. No doubt he was wondering how she had managed to elicit a personal response from a major general. He looked over the contents of the envelope. ‘I’m sorry, but to my knowledge we’ve not found any remains that match these criteria. Am I correct, Corporal Reid?’
‘I think so, sir. Not of the rank of captain.’
‘Corporal Reid is our company clerk. He has an excellent memory for these things.’
‘You’re really sure?’
‘As sure as I can be. Many of the remains we find …’ Mackenzie searched Amy’s face, looking, she sensed, for signs of discomfort. ‘They’re not identifiable. We can often tell the rank and regiment, depending on the condition of the uniform: buttons, flashes. If we’re lucky we can tell an officer from his boots, or from the Bedford cord on his breeches. It depends. In damp ground, things become difficult for us quite quickly.’
Amy swallowed. They were talking about Edward – the man she had loved, and loved still – in terms of buttons and bones, and scraps of cloth, all of them decaying to nothing, as if he had never existed at all, except in her mind.
‘You could have missed him,’ Amy said. ‘This place is a wilderness. It all looks the same.’
‘To the untrained eye, perhaps.’ Mackenzie handed back the letter. ‘We’ve developed certain procedures to deal with it.’
‘Procedures?’
Mackenzie and his company clerk exchanged a look. Clearly they weren’t used to being questioned by civilians.
‘We divide each location into plots, five hundred yards square, mark the corners with flags. The company’s divided into squads – thirty-two men per squad ideally. Each squad takes a single plot and goes end to end.’ Mackenzie hesitated, as if checking to see if the women had heard enough. ‘If they find anything, they mark it with another flag: blue for forty bodies or more, yellow for smaller numbers. That’s how it works.’
‘Have you enough men?’ Amy said.
Mackenzie dismissed Corporal Reid. ‘I won’t deceive you: we could always do with more volunteers. Keeping the squads at full strength can be … a challenge.’
‘How short are you? How short of men?’
‘The army offers double pay for this kind of work. Even so, it takes its toll. Hardened veterans can’t manage more than a month. They can’t sleep, you see. Quarrels break out over nothing. They’re sullen, withdrawn. Sometimes they just walk away. But we manage. We stick to the procedure and we carry on. We won’t quit until we’re done.’
‘Or until the War Office recalls you,’ Amy said.
For a moment there was silence, broken only by the sound of men working outside: voices of command, the rasp and clank of shovels: small sounds, not the sound of a mighty effort, a nation toiling for its glorious dead.
At last Kitty spoke up. ‘Do the men – the dead – do they have things on them, bearing their names? Something that can be checked?’
‘Every unidentified body is searched for personal effects. Here, you can see for yourself.’
Mackenzie picked up a stout wooden box and planted it on a table in front of them. It was reinforced with iron bands and latches. He threw open the lid to reveal rows of thick brown envelopes, each one secured with a string fastener. He picked one out and emptied the contents onto the table. Amy stepped closer. In front of her lay a wristwatch, one strap missing, the glass clouded; a small brass chocolate tin, embossed with the image of Princess Mary; a pencil and the fragment of a photograph. Through the stained surface a young woman was just visible, with a child seated on her lap.
‘We send these to the Imperial War Graves Commission,’ Mackenzie said, ‘in case further information comes to light.’
Amy picked up the photograph and looked on the back. Something had been written, but the fragment was illegible. ‘This must be his wife. Someone must know her name.’
‘I expect someone does,’ Mackenzie said. ‘But how would we go about finding such a person? Scores of battalions fought here over the years. Where would we begin?’
‘If this were in England, wouldn’t the police try and find her?’ Kitty said. ‘Just to know who had died?’
Mackenzie took a cigarette case from his pocket. ‘Sadly, this isn’t a crime, Miss Page. It’s war.’
The woman in the photograph sat stiffly, an uncertain smile on her face. She would be in England now, raising her child alone, still clinging perhaps to some sliver of hope. They would have no grave to visit, or even the certainty that a grave existed. They would have to make do with a form from the War Office, filled in by a clerk.
Mackenzie seemed to read Amy’s mind. ‘We can only do our best. We’ve identified almost half the bodies we’ve found, which is more than most companies do. The fact is, many of the missing will never be found. Their remains are scattered too wide or buried too deep. Or they’ve been left too long.’
Amy did not want to hear any more. It was all guesswork anyway, a matter of numbers and probabilities. Edward’s story might be different. What did Mackenzie know?
‘Are there many German dugouts on the Serre Ridge?’ she asked.
The captain frowned. ‘There were hundreds once. Serre was an enemy strongpoint.’
‘And tunnels?’
‘Yes, but most of them have been destroyed.’ Mackenzie placed a cigarette between his lips. His movements were tense, awkward, as if it took an effort of will to maintain the veneer of propriety. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘I heard …’ Amy looked at the broken wristwatch. Her finger moved over the glass. ‘I heard men hid down there sometimes – lived down there, in no-man’s-land.’
‘You mean, deserters?’
‘Is it true?’
‘No.’
‘Just a rumour then?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Why would anyone make it up, if there wasn’t some truth to it?’
Mackenzie lit the cigarette. ‘You could call it wishful thinking.’ He gestured stiffly at the effects laid out on the table. ‘So many men were lost at the front, I expect it was easier to believe they were hiding than face the fact that they were dead. In battle, losing your comrades is the hardest thing, almost as bad as losing your family.’
In one of his first letters, Edward had talked about the death of his batman, a corporal called Earnshaw. It was the last time he wrote about losing a comrade. After that, the casualties he mentioned never had names. Amy could not tell if he was hiding his grief or if he had lost the capacity to feel it.
‘What about Two Storm Wood?’ she said.
For a moment Mackenzie was still, then he began gathering up the effects and replacing them in their envelopes. ‘What about it?’
‘There is such a place?’
‘Piccadilly is a place, Two Storm Wood is just a name. If there ever was a wood, it’s long gone.’
‘But could men hide there?’ Amy said. ‘Are there dugouts, tunnels?’
‘Probably.’ Mackenzie looked at her. ‘Who told you about Two Storm Wood? Where did you hear of it?’
Amy hesitated. It felt like she was betraying a confidence. ‘I talked to a corporal in the Seventh Manchesters. His name was Jack Staveley.’
‘Staveley? What did he say?’
‘He said Captain Haslam was still on the battlefield, and that I should look for him under Two Storm Wood.’
‘That’s all?’
‘He didn’t explain. He was badly injured. The sister thought he had shell shock.’
‘I see.’ Mackenzie turned back to his task. ‘Well, like I said, these stories are nonsense. You won’t find anything at Two Storm Wood.’
Amy took out the trench map and placed it before him. ‘Where is it? Can you show me?’
‘There’s no point.’
‘Is it near here?’
‘Miss Vanneck—’
‘Please.’
Mackenzie pulled on his cigarette. ‘Two Storm Wood was a strongpoint in the old German line, just south of Serre. Machine-gun nests, wire.’ He slid the map closer. ‘The line pivoted around the place, before running down to the river.’ He ran a finger along a series of pale-red lines. ‘This is it – what’s left of it. A lot of it had been destroyed by the time this was compiled.’ He folded up the map and handed it back. ‘In any case, the whole area’s been searched already. You’d be wasting your time.’
‘I think we should be on our way, Amy,’ Kitty said, ‘before it gets dark. Thank you, Captain.’
‘What happens if you find an officer you can’t identify?’ Amy asked.
‘As I explained, we have procedures.’
‘Edward had a photograph like this one, of me.’ Amy was still holding the photograph of the woman and child. ‘And letters, and a gold signet ring. None of them would give you a name, but I’d know them. Your men might have found them already.’
Mackenzie turned. ‘I’ll make a note to check the records when I get back to camp, so as to set your mind at rest.’ He held out his hand for the photograph. ‘If you leave an address where you can be contacted, I’ll ensure that you’re informed of any developments. You too, Miss Page. Graves Registration in Péronne might have something. I’d be happy to enquire on your behalf. The man in charge, Major Hargreaves, he’s diligent to a fault.’
‘We’re staying with a Madame Desmoulin in Bertrancourt,’ said Kitty, ‘but the poste restante at Amiens might be better.’
‘Amiens it is, then.’ Mackenzie put the envelope back in the box and shut the lid. ‘Now if you’re ready, I’ll have one of my men escort you to your lodgings.’
‘There’s no need,’ Amy said. ‘We found our way here, we can find our way back.’
‘All the same, I really think—’
‘We’ll be quite all right, Captain, thank you. You’ve given us enough of your time.’
Kitty looked puzzled, but did not speak up.
‘As you wish.’ Mackenzie raised the tent flap. One of his men was on the other side. ‘Sergeant Farrer?’
The sergeant stepped aside smartly, eyes cast down.
‘There’s a road from here running straight back to Colincamps,’ Mackenzie said. ‘It’s the easiest way. Bertrancourt is just two miles further on. It’s signposted.’
Kitty stopped in her tracks. A few yards away Mackenzie’s men were loading a long, pale bundle onto one of the wagons. Another dozen lay by the side of the road.
