This time Fletcher’s grunt was disapproving. He picked up one of the sheets of paper from the stack in front of him and read out loud. ‘“It has come to our notice that in a number of companies the daily practice of rifle cleaning is not being correctly attended to … All company commanders … blah blah … regulation procedure … blah blah … inspections … blah blah. Please submit a report detailing … blah blah blah blah blah.”’ Fletcher dropped the paper with disgust. ‘Signed Major Guy Montague.’
There was a long moment’s silence. Alan was plainly uncomfortable. Tom, on the other hand, enjoyed the moment – or at least he did until it dawned on him that Guy was in France. He wasn’t precisely in command of Tom, but he was out here, in a position of authority, obliged to interfere. Once again, Guy’s shadow had come to fall over his life. Tom felt a surge of anger at the thought.
‘Want to know what the bloody trouble is?’ said Fletcher, at last.
‘Sir?’ said Alan.
‘My men keep firing their bloody rifles.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Makes ’em dirty. The rifles obviously, not the men. Men couldn’t get much dirtier.’
‘No.’
There was a pause. Then Alan began to defend his brother. ‘I believe my brother has no desire to –’
He would have continued, but Fletcher interrupted. ‘Oh, doesn’t matter. It’s all balls. I just tell ’em what they want to hear. Shiniest rifles in France. Cleaning drills five times daily. That sort of thing.’ He sat down, put his feet back on the chest, and started his second cup of the coffee that he so detested. ‘You’re new boys, I take it?’
‘That’s right, sir,’ said Alan.
‘You’re not going to be too bloody useless, I hope?’
Alan’s eyes jerked in surprise at the question and the tone, but before he could find an answer, Fletcher interrupted again.
‘Don’t worry. Training’s a waste of time. The only soldiers in the battalion are me, the CO, the adjutant, two youngsters from Sandhurst, and a sergeant-major who thinks the whole New Army idea’s a bloody joke. Here’s all the training you need. If you see Fritz, kill him. Keep your own bloody head from being shot off. Keep your men out of trouble. And let the CO go on thinking he’s Lord God Almighty. Got it?’
There was a silence.
‘And the coffee,’ said Tom.
‘Damn right. And mind the bloody coffee.’
Their introduction to the front line came all too soon.
‘Chalk. Lucky sods. Cushy first posting.’ Major Fletcher jabbed the bank at shoulder height and released a shower of white soil into the trench floor. ‘Dry as a stallion’s tit, even when it rains. You should see the bloody clay pits we lived in over winter. Two feet above the water line, three feet below. And Fritz taking a pop at you every time you tried to build the parapet an inch or two higher. Only buggers who enjoyed it were the rats.’
Alan kept silent. He and Tom were both shocked. They were shocked at the mud, the vermin, the maze of trenches, the danger that lurked in every gun slit, every weakness in the fortifications, every whistle of passing shells.
A little way beyond the dugout, lodged in the wire eighteen inches off the ground, there was a severed head. According to the British Tommies who had taken over this stretch of line, the head had once belonged to a French soldier killed by a shell blast. It would have been easy to release the object one night and dispose of it, but it had come to take on a kind of superstitious importance amongst the troops. The skull was known as Private Headley, and was treated as a regular member of the battalion. Food was tossed out to it, drinks thrown at it, even lighted cigarettes hurled as a kind of good luck offering.
‘And here’s your digs,’ said Fletcher, introducing Alan and Tom to their dugout. ‘You’ll want to get some more earth on that bloody roof of yours. It’s not going to stop a direct ’un, not built like it is at the moment. Any food, hang it up. If it’s on the floor, Brother Rat will have it and that’s against regulations. Corpses for them, food for us. Got that? Good men.’
Fletcher went, leaving the two young men alone in their new home. Tom looked at Alan. Alan looked at Tom.
Tom cracked a smile. ‘Well, brother, here we are.’
Alan nodded. ‘Yes. Here we are.’
They sat down on their beds, running their hands over the rough wooden walls, feeling the weight of earth above their heads. They remembered Fletcher’s comment that a direct hit would kill them both. They thought about the summer before and how impossible it seemed that that life would ever return.
But there was something else in the atmosphere as well. Something positive. The shocking reality of their new home made them feel more strongly than ever the bond between them. They had arrived on the front line, only a few dozen yards distant from an enemy that wanted to kill them. Their task was to do the same to the enemy. But they were brothers. More than brothers, they were twins. It seemed like no power on earth could break them apart.
The two men sat on their beds, stared at each other, and began, for no reason at all, to laugh and laugh and laugh.
It was nine weeks later.
Tom and Alan were novices no longer. They knew how to protect their men, how to harass the enemy, how to lead a patrol out in the dangerous silence of no man’s land. They had experienced rats, discomfort, shelling, gunfire, and the loss of men they knew. But one thing was still unknown to them. They hadn’t faced serious action and all that does to a man. Not yet.
But that was about to change.
Tom drew back the sacking that curtained the men’s dugout. The smell of unwashed bodies and burnt cork raced out, followed by the quieter odours of kerosene and tobacco smoke. Half the men already had their faces blackened, the other half were fighting over a single shaving mirror or letting their mates do it for them. One man had his face marked with love-hearts and messages to his girlfriend. Another had his face covered with obscenities.
‘Widdecombe,’ snapped Tom, ‘get this man’s face properly blacked. And you, Tinsey, get away from that chalk unless you want to make Fritz think you’re a blasted ghost.’
The men fell quickly into order, under Tom’s eye. He counted them. There were eight.
‘Corporal, how many men d’you make it?’
‘Eight, sir.’
‘Where the hell is the
