Through the netting Stanley saw the huge canopy of stars and felt the crisp night air on his face. If only Tom would write. He’d surely write once Lara Bird told him everything. She’d have told him everything by now. Whatever Tom might do about Stanley’s having enlisted, it would still be good to hear from him; to hear, too, how Da was. Perhaps Lara Bird would write again soon, to tell him that she’d seen Da, that he was all right. How often, he wondered, could you expect a Biology teacher to write to you? Perhaps too, if she wrote, she’d send something else to eat.
Bones whickered in his sleep. Stanley grinned to himself, thinking that Bones might be dreaming of plovers or of Fidget’s pigeons. It would be a job keeping Bones off those pigeons. ‘True, faithful and brave, even to the last beat of his heart,’ Colonel Richardson had said. Stanley knew then, as he mouthed these words, that however much he wanted to see Tom, he had a duty to Bones, too; that he must be true and faithful; and that whatever Tom wanted his little brother to do, Stanley would stay with Bones. And if they got a chance, they’d show Corporal Hunter – they’d show him what they could do.
31 March 1918
A few miles to the east of Villers-Bretonneux
Lying at the full extent of his lead, Bones’s muzzle twitched with playful menace, every nerve in his giant frame taut. No bigger than a ping-pong ball, a field mouse was tapping on a dry leaf with a forepaw. Stanley tightened his grip on the lead, feeling a neighbourly affection for this plucky, unknowing creature. In every crevice of this sinister land lay enough steel to throw the earth’s bowels to the sky, to cast the tiny mouse a thousand feet high.
‘No,’ said Stanley again, to warn Bones off the field mouse. He, Keeper Ryder, of the 2nd Devons, of the 18th Division, had had nothing better to do, for eight whole days, than watch Bones patrol a field mouse. Bones liked to divide his attentions between the mouse and the pigeon basket. Corporal Hunter liked his Fuller-phone, and he liked pigeons, and he saw no point at all in dogs.
In the afternoons Stanley would play rummy with Fidget. They used the playing cards Joe had sent, and that pack made Stanley miss Joe every time he saw it, but he’d won yesterday. His luck, at cards at least, had held from Longridge to the Somme. Fidget might have the pigeons Hunter found so useful, but Stanley always had the best hand.
Stanley rose to get Bones’s brush. Bones leaped up, forgetting the mouse. He responded to Stanley’s every movement, even to the movement of his little finger, in case it were a sign that he was needed. His readiness – eagerness – to be sent, did his master require it, even to the ends of the earth, made Stanley’s heart ache. If only the Corporal would give them a chance.
Stanley glanced over the parapet as he rose. A magpie was loitering in the weeds immediately ahead, his lurid coat iridescent and gross in the arid glare of the sun, a malevolent gleam in its carnivorous eye. Each day had been hotter and whiter than the day before, the plain more menacing, more forebidding with each passing hour, as the two enemies watched one another, each dreading the assault they knew would come but neither knowing when. By day the plain was so still, while by night men scrambled over it like badgers, burrowing, tunnelling, laying cables.
That plain was drained of colour in the glare of the sun. No hedgerows. No thrushes, no leaves, no trees. Only magpies. Magpies and bluebottles. Both as lurid, as gluttonous as each other. This was a funny sort of place to fight over. Not like the hills and sudden clefts and ancient walls of Longridge. Longridge was country worth fighting for.
Each brush stroke sent up a cloud of grey dust. When Bones was clean, his yellow stripes shone like gold. Stanley blinked away the dust in his eyes and began to trim the fur between Bones’s paws, while Bones lay prostrate, purring, his neck and head straining mousewards. Stanley waved his scissors at a cloud of midges. If it wasn’t the flies that bothered you here, it was the midges. Or it was Fidget. Fidget, always there, on his fire step, always ready to regale them with some bad news. Trigger would have been better company. Stanley wondered if his dogs were being used.
He wiped the sweat from his brow.
‘It’s too quiet, altogether too quiet,’ said Fidget, blowing a smoke ring from his Woodbine into the camouflage netting. ‘I don’t like the quiet. It means it’ll be coming any minute now, Stanley, the attack on this front. We’ve got nineteen infantry divisions, and he –’ Fidget waved his Woodbine in the direction of the enemy – ‘he’s got sixty-four. He shelled Paris again, did you hear, on Palm Sunday, and again on Good Friday. They were in church, Stanley, on their knees in prayer, when they died.’
It was best to ignore Fidget and his doomsaying, his rumour-mongering, though Stanley noticed that the infantry did listen to Fidget. In the Signals Service you knew much more than the infantry who were never told anything, so Fidget’s words were repeated like Chinese whispers up and down the line. Rumours were traded at rations time, gaining currency with each repetition, and most of them were started by Fidget.
‘Today, Fritz is busy south of the railway line. Pushed the French back, pushing us back. But here – he’s too quiet in this sector. It’s going to be bad, Stanley, that’s why Haig’s sending more troops, Australians, New Zealanders, whatever he can get his hands on – they’re all on the way up here.’
Three days of menacing, sinister silence followed. The heat had built, day by day, minute by minute. Bones grew restless, irritated now, by the closed pigeon basket. The field mouse having gone elsewhere, Bones had only the pigeons with which to amuse himself. A linesman was passing along the trench with a reel of cable. Bones growled. Stanley looked at him anxiously. Bones hadn’t growled for such a long time, but now he was as scrappy as a caged tiger. There was a swerve and a glitter to his eye today. Stanley glanced at the unused Field Message book, the green Army Book number 153 in which he was supposed to record his active duty, on the shelf next to the candle. Corporal Hunter liked to occupy Stanley with small jobs like the heliograph or the Aldis lamp.
Just beyond Fidget, the Devon Messenger was setting up his red and white flags and opening his black steel box. He came up each evening at rations time with the mail. Wherever he opened the box, that was the Battalion HQ Post Office. If the box was open and the flag up then the Post Office was in operation.
Stanley watched the Messenger, thinking how nice it would be to have more buns and honey. You only got parcels when you were back at base but he could write a card to Lara Bird now, to thank her and to ask how Da was. Then perhaps she’d send some more.
Stanley unearthed a postcard from his pack. It was rumpled and furry round the edges, only passable to send to your teacher if you were writing from a trench. Eleven days had gone by since he’d received her letter. Tom would know everything now. Stanley turned the postcard over and over in his hands. In England he’d wanted so much to get away that he’d never worried about Tom’s reaction. Now he was in France he couldn’t stop worrying about it. Would Tom force him home through the official channels? Was Tom still at home now or had his leave ended? Stanley put the postcard away. He wouldn’t write a card to Lara Bird after all. He’d wait till he heard from Tom.
Stanley and Fidget walked past the Post Office and joined the queue in the kitchen, heads bent.
It was very low, Cook’s trench, you couldn’t stand up in it. Two men in front were talking.