A Foreign Field

 

The train whistle, a single undulating tone like the cry of an albatross, mournful and atavistic. The station platform, Sarah on the tips of her toes, hands on his shoulders, the feminine scent of her, her lips poppy red, reaching up. Her heart against his chest as soft as the palpitations of a dove. A bond he never wanted to break.

 

A farewell kiss. Her breath on his cheek like the wings of a butterfly, a whispered caress. 

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"Come home to me, Billy Prentice. You hear me?" 

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Her voice barely a whisper, a canticle only he could hear. The moment gone in an instant. Replaced by the sound of equine terror, riderless horses returning from a valley of death, eyes whiter than a gull's wing, flanks steaming, nostrils flaring. The Crimea in all but name, man and steed beset by cannon fire. The clop of hooves lost in the wet earth.   

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In the trench, at the bottom of the mired pit, the Captain’s whistle, urgent and hectoring. "Quick, boys.  Kill the Hun! Now’s the time!"

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But the boys were just that, barely out of childhood, and some of them were already dead. The fingers of the German snipers were warm that morning, not numbed through weeks of frost. While others, comrades he barely knew, were on their knees searching for their courage, praying for the first time in their lives. He didn’t want to die on his knees. He didn’t want to die at all. But it was more of a threat to his courage, already a threadbare thing, to stay where he was than to follow the others. 

 

"Come home to me, Billy."

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He shook himself free from the paralysis that held him fast, as if from a dream in which he'd been kept tightly bound, a prisoner of his own limbs. The wooden ladder splintering his fingers, sharp needles sinking into his fists, as he climbed into the maelstrom, rifle sling across his back, its weight like a heavy broadsword. His bloody hand prints evidence of the stigmata that will never leave him. 

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The wound he feared most was the one that would take his eyesight, condemning him to wander in perpetuity in the country of the blind. But when the moment came, it was his ears that failed him, his hearing snatched away in the bombardment. The same tectonic onslaught that raised a curtain of soil and dust to head height before him, as if the sky were crumbling, disintegrating under the weight of the artillery barrage.  

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"How do we cross No Man’s Land, Billy?"

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"One step at a time, Sergeant."

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"That’s right, Billy. But be quick about it. You need to be on the other side before the devil knows you’re out there."

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He moved forward. One step at a time.

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It was no good trying to run. Barbed wire, excremental mud, an overturned wagon, the bloated corpse of a horse, all lay before him. Absurdly he found himself in an uneven and dwindling line of men all of whom seemed to be dancing across the wasteland, picking their way over each new obstacle. Hunched over as if against a storm, or wading through the sea. For almost fifty yards he carried the rifle before him like a shield, and for a while it seemed to deflect the bullets, creating a pentacle that kept him safe from harm. But the closer he got to the enemy guns the more the air solidified around him, slowing him down. Pointing him out as a target.  

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The bullets made a neat line across his chest like the needlework his mother had been so good at, unstitching him. Unmade, unravelled as if from the inside out, he fell to the ground where so many others already lay. It wasn’t the first bullet that killed him but the fourth, erasing the soft chambers of his heart like numbers swept from a blackboard, the script reversed as if it had never been written. The formula of his life resolved, his genetic code deciphered and packed away, like a prayer book at the end of Sunday service. 

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"Prentice! How many rounds in the belt of a Vickers machine gun?"

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"Two hundred and fifty, sir." 

 

 "Well done, lad. Go to the top of the class."

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"I’d rather wait here, sir."

 

His head on her lap, on the soft pillow of her thighs, the nearness of her body beneath the white linen dress. His lips so close to hers in the meadow where they’d first made love. The first and only time before his call-up papers had arrived. The unwelcome summons that had snatched his future away, a spectre at the church door on the day of a wedding. His uniform carrying the aroma of freshly cut hay all the way to France, the scent of the English countryside a token of all he'd left behind.    

 

Kitchener jabbing a bony finger in his direction, the hand of the Reaper: "Britons! Join Your Country’s Army!" And in gilded finery, bedecked with medals, the Reaper’s apprentice: Butcher Haig, bony fingers sipping from a silver tea-set in his requisitioned chateau, while his soldiers drink bloody rainwater from the imprint of a horse’s hoof.

 

Inside his head, despite the concussion or maybe because of it, a familiar refrain. One he’d sung himself not so long ago.

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"It’s a long way to Tipperary, 

It’s a long way to go."

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But not so far now, even on legs as broken as his. Polexaed by the calcified ruin of his spine. 

 

"Come home to me, Billy." 

 

Suddenly he could hear again, blinking up at the riven sky, illuminated even in daylight by phosphorescent flares. By sulphurous emanations that stung the eye. 

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"A three day pass. You’ve earned it, Prentice. Any plans?"

         

"I’m going home, sir."

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The whistle of the shell passing overhead. The salvo fragmenting, distorting, becoming a sound he knew well. The single undulating note that reminded him of the sea. The siren song that had lured him away, the abyss beneath him vanishing as if it had never been.  

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"You brought me back, Sarah. Your love brought me back."

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She was waiting for him on the platform when the pale soldier disembarked from the train.

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Home at last.

 

 

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