He’s doing well. Talented and energetic, he’s already building a name for himself as one of the most able young men in the company. Though Tom works hard, he joins up with Alan every weekend and they spend their time together either dancing and socialising in London, or riding and shooting in the country.
And Guy?
These days, Guy seems altogether less significant. The enmities of childhood appear to have faded. If the old hatreds haven’t exactly disappeared, they don’t make a lot of difference now. Tom is in London. Guy seems to be anywhere but. Guy is a soldier, a major, with a particular aptitude for staff work. Tom and Guy don’t see much of each other, aren’t likely to see each other much in the future. When their paths do cross, they are coldly polite.
But, meantime, summer 1914 is a golden one.
It’s one to be enjoyed, a time when the best thing in the world to be is a young Englishman with the future a sparkling ocean at his feet. Tom and Alan hardly feel the need to signal anything to each other, but if they did, they’d send the same signal as the British admiral in Kiel. ‘Friends in the past and friends for ever.’
The trouble with archdukes is that if you have one and you lose one, you can’t just say to hell with it, we’ll get another. So Austria, who happened to own the archduke in question, sent an ultimatum to Serbia, who stood accused of supporting the anarchists. Roughly speaking, the ultimatum said, ‘We’re very upset about our archduke and we’d like you to do some serious grovelling.’
So Serbia grovelled.
Serbia was little and Austria-Hungary was big, not to mention the fact that the Austrians and the Germans were best of friends and the Germans were well known to fancy a spot of military adventure. So Serbia grovelled. Profusely. Unreservedly. Embarrassingly.
But, unfortunately, if you fancy a spot of military adventure – if you’re all geared up for it, looking forward to it, been promising Auntie Helga a postcard from Belgrade – then a conciliatory reply isn’t necessarily enough to hold you back. So Austria declared war.
Now the trouble with starting wars is that your neighbours are apt to get a little nervous. Russia sat right next to strong Austria and mighty Germany, and it seemed that there was about to be a war on her doorstep. This made Russia a little twitchy, so she mobilised her troops, all six million of them.
Whoops! Here was Austria-Hungary hoping for a nice little war in its back garden, when all of a sudden the biggest country in Europe has mobilised its massive population and placed it on a war footing. Germany called on Russia to demobilise, but, as the Russians looked at it, that was a bit like the fox inviting the chicken to come out of the roost. Russia told the Germans to get lost, and Germany too got ready for war.
Now the trouble with Germany mobilising its army is that the French feel kind of twitchy. The French are a generous race with a well-deserved reputation for hospitality, but when you’ve had a few thousand uninvited guests marching through your capital city only a few decades before, you can be excused for getting nervous. What’s more, France had an alliance with Russia, and the Germans and Russians weren’t looking too friendly these days. Germany asked France to abandon her alliance with Russia, but France said no.
The way Germany saw things, if war was coming then it made a whole lot of sense to stay one step ahead of the game. And, say what you like about the Germans, when they set out to do a thing, by golly they do it thoroughly.
Looking back on it, neither Tom nor Alan nor anybody else could have explained why one more assassination in the assassination capital of the world should have triggered the largest armed conflict in world history. But, explicable or not, that’s precisely what happened.
Needing a quick victory in the west to ensure decisive gains in the east, Germany sent its troops into Belgium, destination Paris. The British – deeply reluctant to go to war, but equally reluctant to hand Europe over to the Germans – asked Germany kindly to leave Belgium alone. The Germans said no, and Britain too was at war.
May 1915.
The night sky rumbled with a general low thunder and the horizon sparkled with the flashes of shells bursting miles away to the north. The largest French farmhouse seemed to have given up the notion of farming anything and had turned itself into a kind of hotel instead. In the spacious kitchen, three or four wooden trestle tables were crowded with soldiers, each paying half a franc for a vast plateful of fried potatoes together with a scrap of bacon and a glass of watery beer.
Alan and Tom, only just arrived in France, blinked at the light and the noise, and stretched their legs, cramped after a two-day journey by boat, train and cart. They weren’t left alone for long. A pale-faced man – a corporal, from his uniform – came running up to them.
‘Mr Creeley, sir? Mr Montague?’
The twins nodded. They had signed up shortly after the outbreak of war. After months of training in England, and still longer months of sitting around in a gloomy transit camp outside Manchester, they had finally arrived in France. They were second lieutenants and would each command a platoon of soldiers as new to the game as they were. The two men were uncertain of their soldiering skills, sobered by the strangeness of the fiery horizon.
‘Company Commander wants to see you, sirs,’ said the NCO. ‘Wants to know why you didn’t arrive yesterday. We move up to the line tomorrow morning.’
The NCO ushered the two men into what had obviously once been the farmhouse’s creamery – idle now that there were no cows to make the milk. An oil lamp hung from a hook in the beamed ceiling and a uniformed major was bent over some papers, booted feet across a map-covered chest, drinking coffee. He looked up.
‘Filthy stuff, French coffee. D’you have any? English, I mean?’
The newcomers shook their heads. ‘Bacon, sir,’ said Alan. ‘And marmalade.’
‘Uh.’ The major grunted. ‘Coffee. Best thing to bring.’ He put down his paperwork with relief and stood up. He was surprisingly tall, and had muscular in-swinging arms that made him look a little monkey-like: strong and potentially dangerous. He stretched out a hand. ‘Wallace Fletcher.’ They shook hands. ‘Take a pew.’ The pew in question was a couple of planks over a collection of milk churns. ‘Why the hell weren’t you here yesterday?’
Alan began to explain, but Fletcher shut him up. ‘Military organisation. Contradiction in terms. Wonder is you’re here at all. We go up into the line tomorrow, relieve C Company.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Mr Creeley?’
Tom nodded. ‘Sir.’
Fletcher screwed up his face, appeared to assess his new subordinate, and made a grunt of reluctant approval. Then he looked at Alan.
‘Then you must be Montague, eh?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘You don’t have a
