An Eagle in the Snow, Page 3

  Anyway, it was after that one day off we got thinking. We was right fed up with slaving away in that hotel. Had enough of it, quite enough. Then I met this soldier in the park, by the bandstand, one Sunday – well, we both did, Billy and me. This soldier, he was playing in the band. And we got talking to him, and he said how he’d been all over the world in the army, Africa, Egypt, China once. And where had Billy and me been? Bridlington. Billy’d got no family, nor me neither. We didn’t much like stoking boilers and digging gardens and painting doors and not having hardly a penny to show for it. And that soldier told us you got all the food you could eat in the army, good nosh, and for free too. So the long and short of it is, we signed up for the army. They gave us uniforms and rifles, taught us how to go marching up and down, shoot a bit, how to polish boots and badges and keep our kit just so, and then we’d go marching up and down again. But that soldier in the park had been right, the food was good and regular and free. And soldiering was a whole lot better than working all day, it was, except there was always someone bellowing at us, telling us what to do, and mostly what not to do. Something like the orphanage really, when I come to think about it. But we had lots of pals, and we were all in it together. All a bit of a lark, it was.

  Then one day, we were all packed into trains, with our rifles and in full kit. And a few hours later we found ourselves marching through the streets, the band playing, and everyone cheering us and waving flags. Felt like we was proper heroes, we did. And then up the gangplank we went on to this great ship. All one big adventure, that’s what we thought it was going to be. Only just as soon as the ship put to sea we were all sick as dogs, Billy too. But he kept smiling through – that’s how he was. A cheery old card, always the jolliest of us all, always chipper, and always drawing too. Could hardly write a word, Billy. But my, how he loved to draw!

  I tell you, I’d never seen the sea before. But when I did, I never wanted to see it after! Do you know what? It never stops moving under your feet, and that churns your stomach something horrible. So it were quite a relief, I can tell you, when after weeks of that heaving sea we found ourselves on dry land again, and marching again, even if they were still shouting at us all the time. We were in Africa. South Africa.

  Long way from where your dad is, son. But Africa all the same. We was travelling the world. The sun was shining, and everything seemed to be just tickety-boo, ’ceptin the flies and the belly ache.”

  “Tickety-boo?” I asked him, puzzled. “What’s that?”

  “S’when you feel fine,” he told us, “when there’s nowt to worry about. We were all happy as skylarks, happy as Larrys – tickety-boo. So we did get to go to Africa, just like that soldier on the bandstand had promised we would. We saw giraffes and lions and elephants, and all sorts. You should see the sun out there when it’s setting, huge and red, and so close, you could almost reach up and touch it. Didn’t do no fighting though. So instead they had us doing more marching up and down, more larking about, more sitting about. Happy days, they was, when I think about them now. All the food we needed, lots of pals, and sunshine that warmed you right through. Billy drew whatever he could, animals now mostly, insects and trees and flowers, and the birds of course. Vultures, eagles.

  He was never happier than when he was sitting outside our tent and drawing. You should see Billy’s sketchbooks – there’s just about all of Africa in some of those books.

  Then before we knew it – it was 1914 by this time – we found ourselves back on a ship again, steaming out of Cape Town and homewards across that same heaving horrible sea. We were going home because the war in Europe had started, against the Germans. The Kaiser had a huge great army and so he’d gone marching into Belgium. So to save brave little Belgium we had to fight him. We needed all the soldiers we could get, and that included us. We weren’t worried, excited more like. No more sitting about, for no good reason. No more marching up and down, for no good reason. Billy was keen as mustard, he was, looking forward to it. Well, we all were. We were soldiers, weren’t we? We’d soon sort Fritz out. We did lots of larking about, lots of singing on that ship – when we weren’t feeling seasick, that is. We none of us knew what we were going to, and thinking back, I s’pose that was just as well.”

  “Billy was up on deck most of the time – you don’t get so seasick up there, he said – drawing whales and dolphins and such like. But he loved albatrosses best, because they floated on the air, hovering, their wings hardly moving. They stayed still up there for him; made them easier to draw.

  Anyway, soon enough he had to put his sketchbook away, because once we landed we were marching up through Belgium. The war wasn’t going well – we’d been told that much. But we hadn’t seen it. We were still a bunch of happy-go-lucky lads, still larking about, still singing, Billy most of all. Quite a soldier he was, smart, never lagging behind, never out of step, first to volunteer for even the worst jobs.

  The sound of the guns was getting closer all the time. Convoys of ambulances passed us by and we could see they were full of wounded men. And there were carts too, piled high with furniture and belongings, a cow or a horse tied on behind sometimes, and whole families shuffling along the road, exhausted, babies and children crying. That were a pitiful sight, I can tell you. That soon stopped all the singing and the larking about. We marched on through deserted villages that lay in ruins, horses and mules lying dead and swollen by the side of the road. And once, in a roofless church, we saw hundreds of stretchers and empty coffins piled up against the wall. We all knew by now who those stretchers and coffins were likely to be for.

  Later on, when we got to camp, Billy got out his sketchbook and drew those coffins. It wasn’t loping giraffes and soaring vultures, not the big round sun over Africa, nor whales in the ocean, nor albatrosses he was drawing now – it was the face of a wounded soldier in the back of an ambulance, it was a bent old woman leading a horse or cow along the road. And then one evening, he drew the little girl, the girl that was to change Billy’s life forever, and he never even knew who she was, nor where she came from.

  We were all tramping through a village – a place called Poperinghe, it was, just outside Ypres in Belgium – when he saw her by the side of the road, a little girl. She was sitting there hugging her knees, rocking herself, and whimpering. We all saw her as we came marching by. She was barefoot, shivering, and you could see there was no hope left in her. She wasn’t the first we had seen like that. But she looked so alone in the world. Billy was marching along, like we all were. But he suddenly broke ranks, and ran back to her. The Sergeant bellowed at him. Billy took no notice of him. The column slowed and came to a halt, despite all the Sergeant’s shouting and cursing at us to pick up the step and move on. Everyone stood there and looked on as Billy crouched down beside the girl, talking to her, trying to comfort her. There was no comforting her, though.

  Billy didn’t think twice about it, he just picked the girl up and carried her.

  Now the Major was riding back along the column on his horse, yelling at Billy to put the girl down, and get back in line. Billy stood there, calm as you like, while the officer yelled at him, giving him a piece of his mind from high up on his horse.

  “What d’you think we’re here for, Private?” he ranted on. “Do you think we’re here to nursemaid these people? If you want to save that girl, if you want to save them all, you save your strength for the Germans. You drive them back to Germany. That’s the way to save her, and thousands of others like her. Now put her down, Private, and join the ranks.”

  “’Fraid I can’t do that, sir,” Billy replied quietly. “I’ll fight the Germans like you say, but first we got to get this girl to a Field Hospital. She’ll die else. She needs help, a doctor, sir, and we got doctors, haven’t we? She’s as weak as a kitten, sir. I can’t leave her. She’s got no ma, no pa, she’s all alone. This war done that to her. Everyone should have a ma and a pa and a home. She got nothing. That ain’t right, sir. And we got to do something about it. Can’t jus
t leave her there, can we, sir?”

  That silenced the Major. He didn’t argue, nor did the Sergeant. So Billy joined the column again and carried that little girl to the nearest Field Hospital, wrapped up in his greatcoat, and talking to her all the while as he marched. Then everyone stopped to rest while Billy laid her down on a stretcher and held her hand for a few moments. Stretcher bearers came and took her away, into the hospital tent.

  None of us could forget that little girl afterwards, least of all Billy. That girl was what made him do what he did later – he always told us that. It was partly what the Major had shouted at him from high on his horse that day, but mostly it was because of the look in the girl’s eyes as he said goodbye to her at the Field Hospital. They were eyes full of pain, and hopelessness. If he understood her right – and he couldn’t ever be sure of it afterwards – he thought she was trying to tell him that her name was Christine. That was all he knew about her. He drew her again and again in the weeks and months that followed, wrote her name at the bottom of every picture. The more he drew her, the more he thought about her, talked about her, the more sure he was what he should do about her and about all children like her, alone and orphaned by this war.

  He was going to do all in his power to finish this war as soon as possible, to end the hurt, to stop the pain.

  Almost at once we found ourselves in the front line, down in the trenches for the first time. The least said about the trenches, the better. Moles is supposed to live in the ground, worms maybe, but not men. To be honest, not much happened, not at first. The odd shell came over, and there was always snipers, so you had to keep your head down. We was frightened, course we were. We knew Fritz was out there, and out to get us, just a hundred yards away down in their trenches on the other side of no-man’s-land. You could hear them talking and laughing, hear their music playing sometimes. But we didn’t see them, and we knew better than to stick our heads up and have a look. That’s what their snipers were waiting for. First man I ever saw killed, died that way. Harold Merton, he was called, I remember. Only eighteen, he was. Quiet sort of lad, unless he was singing. He loved to sing. Sang in the church choir at home. Manchester lad, he was; supported United. He had a great voice too. One moment I was talking to him, the next he was dead.

  So we sat in our dugout and smoked our Woodbines, wrote letters, played cards, told our stories – much like I’m doing now. Billy drew his pictures, of us sometimes, good they were too – and we ate stew and more stew and more stew, and bread and marmalade if you were lucky, Ticklers marmalade. And we slept, or tried to. Fritz seemed to know just when we were dropping off to sleep and would send a Whizzbang over to wake us up. We had to take our turns at sentry duty, of course, and at dawn every morning we were all on the firestep on ‘stand-to’. That’s when Fritz liked to attack, at dawn, out of the half-dark, out of the mist, out of the rising sun. So we had to be ready for him, bayonets fixed, one round up the spout. And Billy was always out of the dugout first and up on the firestep, ready. It was almost as if he was hoping Fritz would come, as if he couldn’t wait to have a go at them.

  Some nights, when it was dark enough, we’d be sent out on a patrol, with an officer or Sergeant or a Corporal in charge. You had to climb out, crawl across no-man’s-land on your belly, not making a sound, then wriggle through their wire and drop down into their trenches. You had to bring back one of them for questioning, that’s what we was ordered to do. They’d give you a double ration of rum if you volunteered, but even so no one wanted to go, except Billy, and Billy didn’t even like rum. He only liked beer. He volunteered every time, never seemed to bother him. ‘Bonkers Billy’, some called him, but he didn’t mind. He wasn’t bonkers, of course, we all know that, not mad at all, and not brave either. It was like he said. He just wanted to get the war over with as quick as he could, so that no more children would be orphaned, like little Christine in his sketchbook.

  That first time when the whistle blew, and we went out over the top, all of us together, into the crackle and rattle and spit of machine-gun fire and rifle fire, into the shelling and the smoke and the screaming of battle, Billy led the way and we all followed. We was scared stiff – and Billy was too. He joked about it, said he had his lucky black pebble from Bridlington in his pocket, that he’d be all right. But I reckon he’d worked out what we’d all worked out, that it didn’t much matter whether you were first or last out of the trenches, whether you walked or you ran; that once you were up there and out in no-man’s-land, it was just luck. You can’t dodge bullets and shrapnel. They either hit you or they don’t. You either die quick like Harold Merton had, or you don’t. You could get through without a scratch. You could get yourself a little wound, get patched up in the Field Hospital, have a few days recovering, and then be sent back up into the line; or you could get ‘a blighty one’, when it were a more serious wound, and get sent home to hospital.

  ‘Lap of the Gods’, Billy always said it was, and you couldn’t win this war and get it over with by worrying yourself about it. You just got to get on with it. You see friends die, like poor Harold, and it could give you nightmares, give you the shakes. But every time Billy saw someone wounded, every time he lost a pal, it just made him all the more determined to keep going, to kill or capture as many Fritzis as he could. For him, that was the only way to end the war.

  As it turned out, Billy got himself a blighty wound on the Somme in October 1916. Shrapnel in the leg. At the Field Hospital he told the doctor he wanted them to patch him up there and then so he could get back into the fight. When they said he couldn’t, he tried walking out of the hospital, but they brought him back. The doctor said he was going home, that it were a bad wound, deep and dangerous, that he needed a proper hospital back home. And that was that. So for a while, Billy lay there in hospital back in England, in a big house in the country – in Sussex, it was – with deer in the park outside his window, swans on the lake. All the time, he was willing his leg to heal. He drew the deer, the swans – drew Christine again, drew his pals – to remind him why he had to get back to the trenches.

  When he slept it was little Christine’s face that haunted his dreams. He wanted to get back to the war, and back to his pals too. His pals were his family now, all the family he’d ever had, and he wanted to be with them.”

  “But by the time Billy came back to the fighting a month or so later, a lot of his pals weren’t there. They’d had a rough time of it while he’d been away. Lots of them dead, or missing, or wounded. Faces not there any more, nearly half of Billy’s new family gone, just like that. And Billy blamed himself. He should’ve been there to look out for them, instead of lying in bed in that hospital, in that grand house back home. He belonged here, with them. More and more now, it wasn’t just for that little Christine he was doing his fighting – it was for his pals too, those who were left. He wouldn’t ever leave them again, no matter what.

  So, when in the winter of 1917, near Passchendaele, it was, Billy was wounded again – a bullet in the arm this time – and they tried to send him home again to England, to a proper hospital, he just walked out of the Field Hospital at night-time when no one was about, and made his way back to his pals. When the doctors discovered he was missing, they thought he must have deserted, and the military police went after him to arrest him. They found him in the end in the place they least expected to find him – back in the trenches with his pals. You can’t hardly arrest someone for deserting if he deserts back to the Front Line, can you? So they left him be where he was.

  Over the months Billy seemed to care less and less whether he lived or died. If there was someone lying wounded out there in no-man’s-land, he’d fetch him in. If everything looked hopeless, like Fritz was going to break through the line and surround them, Billy went on fighting, and so did his pals. He wasn’t going to let Fritz win, even when things looked bad, when it looked for a while as if they would. We were somewhere near Cambrai the next spring, close to a canal, as I remember it. The tide of the w
ar had turned. We were winning. We were going forward. We had the Fritz on the run, or so we thought. But Fritz don’t run easy. Say what you like about them, one thing I learnt in that war was that they were every bit as brave as we were. They may have been retreating, but they stopped and fought wherever they could.

  Anyway, one morning, we found ourselves stuck good and proper. They had us pinned down. Machine gun, it was. We couldn’t go forward and we couldn’t go back. So Billy says he needs two men to go with him, and the others should stay where they are and give us covering fire. So they go forward, the three of them “to sort Fritz out”, he says. And that’s what he does. Bonkers Billy goes charging forward with the other two, and somehow none of them get hit. Pretty soon they’re chucking bombs, grenades, down into the German trenches and the machine gun stops firing. And lo and behold, Fritz throws in the towel. They’re putting up their hands and surrendering, twenty, maybe thirty of them, throwing down their rifles, just like that. Dozens of prisoners we took that day, and not a scratch on any one of us. Ruddy miracle it was, begging your pardon, missus.”

  Ma didn’t reply, and I knew from the rhythm of her breathing beside me that she must be fast asleep. I was feeling sleepy too, but I’d been forcing myself to stay awake. I really wanted to hear what was going to happen to Billy in the stranger’s story. The carriage was as black as the tunnel outside the window, but it didn’t bother me, not any more.

  “I think Ma’s asleep,” I told him.