Bones was pawing the ground. He raised his head at the guns and barked, then loped forward a couple of easy paces, more like a thoroughbred horse in a show ring than a dog. He drew up, surely, now very close to the guns, lowered his head, lifted his tail and moved into a long striding run.
‘Come, Bones, come, boy, come.’
The dog disappeared from view.
‘Come, boy, come.’
Where was he? Stanley’s eyes ached from the strain of trying to see.
There! He’d done it – he’d gone through the firing line, was gathering speed, making time on the dogs at the front, racing with every fibre in his body, jaws set, legs converging, long striding gait the very image of purpose and intent, near the front now, a flurry of dogs in his wake. Trigger was caught off balance as Gypsy hurled himself at his master in a frenzied muddle of tail and leg and tongue. Bones vaulted forward, and Stanley was on his knees, head against the striped velvet coat, arm around the muscular neck.
‘Good boy,’ Stanley whispered. Bones pulled himself free, shook himself, scattering sunlit spray like diamond confetti, then remembering his duty he assembled himself into an untidy sitting position, hind legs awry and sprawling, flanks heaving. Breathless and panting, he lifted his head for the cylinder to be opened.
‘Good boy,’ said Stanley, bursting with pride for this ferocious and graceful animal, for this animal that was loyal beyond all imagining.
‘Keeper Ryder.’ Stanley jumped at the Colonel’s voice. The Colonel was smiling as he addressed Stanley but his words were hard to hear beneath the babel of barking dogs. ‘He did it your way because he wanted to be with you. You conquered his natural instinct and guided him home.’
Seized by sudden and violent indignation, that Bones should have come so far, yet all to no purpose, Stanley stepped forward, only to be intercepted by the Colonel.
‘I never wanted to send you forward, Ryder, never thought you should go to France . . . couldn’t bring myself to . . . but I’ve no choice. You are needed, your dog is needed. Even with only one dog, you must go.’
Stanley fell to his knees, his cheek to Bones’s giant muzzle.
‘Bones,’ he whispered. ‘Bones, do you hear?’
The Colonel shook his head sadly, fondly, as he looked on. ‘You’ve done well, Ryder, very well. Bones has taken your courage, your sense of honour for his own. He’ll always be true, faithful and brave, even to the last beat of his heart, would – I’ve no doubt – give his own life for you.’ The Colonel pondered, scrutinizing Stanley. ‘Whatever lies ahead for you both, remember that to him, you are all his life.’
With a gentle, paternal shake of his head, he turned and walked away.
9 March 1918
Folkestone
At Folkestone the keepers took a narrow path down the cliffs. Below them on the water sat a white-painted hospital ship, a grey-painted steamer and beyond them, a destroyer and her escort. Stanley eyed the waiting steamer. That would be his ship, ready for her dash across the Channel. Once aboard, he thought, as he stood aside for a group of soldiers climbing upward, there’d be no turning back. With a shock, Stanley saw the lean, drawn faces and sloppy dress of the soldiers and he heard their jeers.
‘Shiny and new . . . but not for long.’
‘Just boys – the Hun’ll go through this lot like a hot knife through butter.’
Stanley placed a reassuring hand on Bones’s head as another laughed, ‘Dogs this week, they’ll be sending the women next . . .’
Stanley looked at his own overcoat, buttoned to the throat, at his immaculate boots and puttees, at the blue and white armlet on his elbow, the crossed flags on his cuff. The dribble of gaunt, skin-and-bone men pushed on past. Did all returning soldiers look like this? Stanley chewed his lips watching, beginning, for the first time, to wonder what lay ahead for him and Bones.
They boarded the SS Victoria and Stanley squeezed himself into the last square inches left on deck. Bones leaned heavily into Stanley’s left side. Like an overlarge child, Bones always sat as close as possible to Stanley, preferably partially on top of him, Bones’s slobbery jaws settling comfortably on Stanley’s arm.
Stanley watched the searchlights playing along the English coast as the SS Victoria took him from all that he’d ever known, across the sea for the first time in his life, to he knew not what. The torpedo boats that flanked either side of the Victoria were there to protect her from the invisible enemy, the German submarines that might be stalking the black water beneath her. Somewhere on that dark coast behind Stanley was Thornley, somewhere there would be Da in his red chair, Da with Rocket at his feet. Stanley felt not homesickness but loss. In spite of everything, if he could, he might, at that second, have flung himself into the treacherous water, swum for home and made one last attempt to recover the father he’d lost.
He shivered and pulled the collar of his overcoat closer around his neck, gazing out on to the black water. Growing eddies of anxiety for what lay ahead rolled aside Stanley’s grief for what lay behind until he fell, finally, into an uneasy sleep.
Just before dawn the SS Victoria dropped anchor at Le Havre. The men disembarked in dark and drizzle, amidst the shouts and curses of officers. Stanley and Bones took their place in the line of men that felt its way around immense stacks of military goods, mules and ammunition dumps that packed the wharf.
Beyond the wharf, in an open space lit with lanterns, guides and NCOs shouted out the names of different regiments, ‘Loyal North Lancs on the right!’ ‘King’s Liverpool on the left!’ Stanley’s unit shuffled into line with the Royal Engineers. He and Trigger were under orders to report to Central Kennels HQ when they arrived at Etaples. Street hawkers circled while they waited, selling sweets and cigarettes.
As dawn broke, a troop of wounded passed, heading for the wharf. They all looked the same in the anxious half-light, all grey-faced, and mud-splattered. In the depths of their staring eyes, Stanley caught something of the horrors they’d seen. He remembered the line in Tom’s card – ‘the world will never be the same again for those of us here.’ No, Stanley thought, defiant, it won’t: the world will never be the same for me, anyway, not only because of what lies ahead, but because of what lies behind. Because of what Da did, nothing will ever be the same again.
However, as the wounded men tramped away, Stanley’s defiance ebbed as he realized that he’d never thought about war close up. He hadn’t come to France for honour or glory, for love of England, for hatred of Germany, but only to be with Tom.
Stanley and Bones were crammed into a corner of a pitch-dark cattle truck labelled in large black letters ‘8 CHEVAUX ou 40 HOMMES’. The train clanked along at walking pace. When it made yet another of its endless, unexplained stops, the doors slammed open to admit more men. Stanley would eat something, now, while there was light to see by. He peeled open his ration of bully beef. The blood red of the bully beef shocked and disconcerted him. His hunger evaporated. The doors banged shut and Stanley sat in the dark again, reassured by the solid bulk of Bones, for the smell of him, for his warmth and for the comfortable, easy manner in which he took each new movement forward.
Stanley’s thoughts turned to Tom and, more practically now, how to find him. Tom would be so surprised to see his little brother in France, in uniform, a keeper with a beautiful dog and a vital job to do.
The train clanged and clanked onward, and as the scale of the war began to dawn on Stanley, he began to accept that perhaps he’d not be fighting alongside Tom, that they might be miles and miles from each other. Tom was in the East Lancashires, but with which corps? Stanley had never asked and now must find out without drawing attention to himself, mustn’t look like a young boy trying to find his big brother.