At one point, a voice from the darkness said “If you don’t stop coughing, I swear I’ll spike you on my bayonet.”
And then another merry lad said “We could let Spook get captured by Jerry, and then he could drive them all mad with his cough. He’d be a secret weapon. Tire them to death.”
I spent that night feeling low. It seemed to get light only an hour or two after darkness fell, and I got up and went out for a ciggie, though it was a habit I was finding hard to acquire. It was warm, but a fine drizzle was falling. All the time the guns. What hell they were laying down over there in Fritz’s luxury trenches, with their electricity and cuckoo clocks, I thought. At least I hoped they were. Or mostly I hoped so, but sometimes I thought there might be some Manfred or Wolfgang over there as had worked his way up to the counter of a great shop in Berlin and thought he’d got it made and now, well, now was all he’d got.
It was edgy waiting, like it always was, even when it wasn’t you going out. I wondered if the boys were in position ready to go all this time.
I went over and unfolded Nora, glad the ground was drier and I had a chance of getting messages through. Nora felt warm. I checked her tires, though I’d done it the evening before. Checked the chain, which was clean and oiled. Spun the pedals. Looked in my tool kit. As I was standing there, Lieutenant Pierce appeared out of the darkness. I held the handlebar with my left hand and saluted with my right arm. Not a wobble; the training sergeant would have been proud of me.
“At ease,” he said.
Here we go, I thought. Let battle begin.
“Don’t worry,” he said, as if I might be feeling left out. “We’ll be needing you a lot in a day or so. They’re trying to run extra trenches across no-man’s land, make it easier for the You Know What. I’m afraid you’ll mostly be bringing shopping lists back; a bit of an errand boy. The wires are a mess there and the signalers have got other priorities.”
We exchanged a look, man to man.
So here I am. Errand Boy of the Western Front. But tomorrow I have to cycle to Amiens, Mr. Pierce says, which will be a matter of real roads, fifteen miles of them.
Mostly I’d be better off being a runner instead of lumbering around with a heap of metal, but mostly in the Army if you’re down as a cyclist you stay a cyclist until the end. Which I sometimes think will be sooner rather than later, slowed down as I am by poor old Nora. Sometimes I think of old Dick Wilson and how I came by Nora and her being at war and what he’d think of Hercules being swapped for Nora and a form with a quartermaster’s moniker on it and a regimental rubber stamp.
Kitchener’s been drowned while leaving Scapa Flow. His ship struck a mine. One up for Fritz.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Jean-Baptiste, Amiens,
June 1916
HE WAS ON WATER. THAT was certain. The river had taken him back.
Before he woke up for good, Jean-Baptiste remembered bits of time. Men weeping and shouting. Pain. Smells. Foreign women: the first one, all in white, he had thought was an angel and wondered if fish-breath Doré was here too. The arches of heaven rose above him. Then a woman came and they held him down when he fought and put something over his nose and mouth and first his head and then his body spun as he died again.
Time had dissolved and everything became confused. There was his mother, but she turned and was a nurse in blue, hurried but kind-faced, and there was Godet being lifted from the bed beside him, his head wrapped in dark bandages. But it was not Godet, just another dead man. After that the doctor. Vignon. No, not Vignon but Wiener, Wiener, that was it, the German spy, in the uniform of a Frenchman. Of course, like all spies he was deep in their midst, and ruthless, and, thinking of him, Jean-Baptiste was afraid. But he closed his eyes tight and the doctor faded too and he was being lifted and the movement hurt and made him feel sick.
He remembered nothing of how he’d gotten to the hospital nor at what point he’d realized where he was. Once he was traveling in some kind of vehicle and strapped down. The movement had made him vomit. He was hot and confused and he had no recollection of being transferred from that bunk but some time—days?—a week?—later, he had come to. It was the middle of the night, or so he assumed, as it was dark but for an oil lamp and a woman with her head down, writing.
Around him were men, sleeping or groaning—sometimes the woman, a nurse, he now saw, got up and went to one of the blanketed heaps and offered water or a few soothing words. But he had known, instantly, that he was on the river. Beyond the smell of sickness and chemicals, he could smell river. He put out a hand and laid it flat on the wooden wall beside him. There was something like a shiver just detectable beneath his palm; he was in a big boat, a barge, he guessed, judging by its dimensions, but once you’d been on the water you recognized its rhythms.