Stanley and Bones dropped ten feet or so underground, the air growing still thicker and closer, and entered a fuggy chamber lit by dim electric light. Wooden posts supported the ceiling and wooden boards lined the walls. Stanley bowed his head under the low ceiling.
Bones collapsed, panting at Stanley’s feet in the narrow entrance. No one turned. There was no noise or movement in the room, the air still with concentration. Signals operators and instrument repairers, wearing headphones and the brassards of the Royal Engineers, sat around a large wireless set. There were lamps for night signals, and a heliograph, the simple, brilliant wireless telegraph that signalled Morse code with flashes of sunlight reflected by a mirror. Beyond this room Stanley glimpsed a smaller chamber, filled with dispatch riders and runners.
Heavy cables were looped around the room and out through the door. At the far end were buzzers and Fuller-phones. Buzzers, Stanley knew from his signalling course at Chatham, were easily intercepted by the enemy, but the Fuller-phones, a portable signalling device, could be used either down telephone or telegraph lines and was safer. A figure stooped, ears towards an amplifier, eyes on a cable map.
‘Corporal Hunter?’ ventured Stanley.
The stooping figure by the cable map turned his head, assessed Stanley, then caught sight of Bones. Corporal Hunter shot up, his head, like Stanley’s, stopping just short of the low ceiling. They were almost the same height, each eyeing the other with bent necks. The Corporal’s eyes whipped down to Bones.
‘For the love of God, a dog?’ The Corporal grasped a handkerchief and swabbed his brow. ‘A dog? A dog and a child . . . ?’
Were Stanley and Bones not needed? Did the Corporal not know what dogs were for? Had he not used them in the line? Stanley saw the equipment, all the cables and buzzers and kit that surrounded the Corporal, and felt misgivings, but Bones sat still, proud and waiting for a command.
Hunter lifted the handkerchief from his brow and looked at Bones, again with disbelief. ‘A schoolboy and his lapdog . . .’
‘The dog’s as good as any man, sir, for the job,’said Stanley, riled.
Hunter looked at him in surprise, but then, shaking his head with pantomime exasperation, dismissed Stanley with an angry wave of his hand. ‘Fidget. Take the boy to his bunk.’
Fidget? Where? It would be good to be with someone he knew. A huddled figure in the corner unfurled itself into a long narrow shape and drifted towards the door – definitely Fidget: the same tall Fidget with the sister who made fruit cakes, the Fidget Stanley had last seen at Chatham. Stanley started forward but Fidget looked away, circumnavigating Bones with exaggerated caution.
‘Creep,’ hissed Stanley, riled again now, as he stepped into the doorway, pulling Bones with him so that they had Fidget cornered, all of them crowded in the narrow entrance – but wounded, too, that Fidget should be taking his cue from Hunter in this way.
Stanley saluted Hunter and turned, and Bones was in an instant on his feet, setting off with a step so willing you’d never know he’d marched all day. Fidget led them up the steps and along the adjoining thirty yards or so of trench, past servants’ dugouts to what was no more than a cavity, scratched into the front wall.
Fidget gave a hesitant grin. ‘Your bunk, also known as a “funk-hole”.’ He laughed and placed a hand on Stanley’s shoulder, rather more friendly now that he was out of Hunter’s sight. Stanley shrugged him off.
Two wooden posts supported an iron ceiling. Two hardboard platforms stood one above the other, covered in sandbags. A small shelf held tins of bully beef, a tin of jam, one of café-au-lait and one of butter, and half a loaf of bread. There was a side shelf with a mirror, matches, candles and a tin of cigarettes. It was good about the jam, the bread and butter, and perhaps he could trade the bully beef and the cigarettes for something else. Opposite the funk-hole was a ledge cut into the trench wall, two or three feet above the trench floor, which ran all along it, facing the enemy. If you stood on the fire step, you could see over the parapet.
Fidget sat on Stanley’s lower platform, on the sandbags, and mocked a sort of bouncing up and down on them. ‘Cushy,’ he said, his too-mobile face contorting itself into an expression of alarmed discomfort. He disappeared into the adjoining funk-hole and reappeared clasping a shovel. ‘You can make it wider.’
Fidget was lingering, not hurrying back to Hunter’s Signal Station. Stanley felt a wave of distaste for Fidget, was hot and tired, and cross about having to sleep next to the man who’d pretended not to know him. Bones meanwhile, tail tense, was stalking something in Fidget’s hole. As Stanley moved to retrieve Bones, he glimpsed the object of Bones’s attentions.
‘Pigeons?’ Stanley spluttered.
‘What’s the matter with pigeons?’ Fidget asked, his expression uncertain, suspended somewhere between pride and hurt at Stanley’s scorn. He manoeuvred himself so that he stood between the huge and ferocious Bones and his little pigeon basket. Stanley laughed again, a little uncomfortably now. However ridiculous an animal a pigeon might be, Hunter would be accustomed to using them as message carriers.
Richardson had said that there were over twenty thousand pigeons on active service. Fidget had been grinning rather sheepishly, but now he rallied.
‘The Corporal finds my pigeons very reliable. I don’t think he sees much need for dogs.’
If the dogs hadn’t worked in this sector, Stanley was thinking, the Corporal would probably always use Fidget’s pigeons, so Bones would never get a chance.
‘A skylark,’ said Fidget in a conversational tone, peering through the netting roof of the trench, his attention drawn by a loud, liquid chirrup. A bird mounted higher and higher on rapid fluttering wings, describing wide circles in the violet sky. ‘They eat skylarks. The French eat skylarks.’
How little, thought Stanley, he knew of France. He’d never thought much about the French, nor about what they ate. Yet here he was, in line, here to defend the men who ate skylarks.
Fidget hovered behind Stanley, searching for something else to say, and Stanley sensed that he wanted to make amends, knew that he’d been unkind. Fidget had always been odd, remembered Stanley, awkward and changeable, but never meant any harm. Fidget was tapping Stanley’s shoulder.
‘It’s not so bad here once you get used to it, and the Corporal’s always rough to anyone new. Come on, I’ll make you some tea.’
Stanley filled Bones’s bowl with water, and was watching the dog slurp when Fidget popped round again. Fidget’s sudden, wraithlike apparitions would take some getting used to.
‘Half a bleeding hour – and bingo. Lukewarm ditchwater.’ He handed Stanley a tin of tea, smacking his lips, and swallowing noisily from his own. ‘Drink it toot-sweet.’ The surface of the tea was strangely unctuous, but Stanley was thirsty and grateful, and put it to his lips. Fidget laughed as Stanley gagged and spluttered.
‘Everything up here tastes of petrol. All billycans are old petrol cans.’
Later, at Rations-Up, when Cook handed out McConochie’s vegetable stew, it too had the same oily sheen, and when Stanley steeled himself to try it, it was gritty and inedible.
Everything grew quiet and dark, the lights of distant villages bloomed in clusters along the horizon. Stanley lay on his sandbag, in his coat and trench boots, his blanket over him, his kitbag for a pillow, still hungry, listening to the comforting sound of Bones’s breathing. Here, less than two miles from the massed weight of the Kaiser’s army, it was good to have Bones in his bunk with him. All night men passed to and fro along the trench, each new movement making Stanley jump out of his skin. Stanley rolled over. Sandbags, as well as Fidget’s startled spurts of sleep-talk, he thought, would take a bit of getting used to.