Robert got to his feet. ‘I… I can explain,’ he said. ‘This is entirely my fault.’
‘And all on your own! How did you get all this way into the woods? Did one of the VADs bring you out and then forget about you?’
‘I… I…’
‘You might have done yourself an injury. Come, lieutenant, it’s high time you were getting back. Is this your handkerchief?’
She bent down, no more than a couple of feet away from where Louisa was standing in full view, and picked up a handkerchief lying on the grass. Robert turned to where he had just heard Louisa’s voice come from – where she was still standing – his sightless eyes clouded with confusion.
‘Take my arm, Mr Lovett,’ said the younger nurse. ‘This way. That’s it, lean on me.’
They can’t see me.
It felt like two hands were clutching her windpipe. She could see Robert, and he could obviously hear and touch her, but other people in 1916 – if that was really where, when, she was – couldn’t see her. She sat on the steps and watched as the two nurses led him away through the trees, his head turning back as he tried to make sense of the same thing: why they hadn’t seen her. What did it mean? she wondered. Did this make it all even more mad, or less so?
Well, it didn’t matter much, because the whole thing was certifiably crazy anyway. The only thing that mattered was Robert. She must find a way to persuade him that she’d managed to slip into the little temple just in time. For despite everything, despite the madness that her life had descended into, all she could think was that he mustn’t know the truth. Because being with him had become everything.
She sat on the steps until the light thickened and became the slower, honeyed light of late afternoon. Then darkening clouds chased away the sun and it began to rain. Abstractedly, she got up and went inside the temple – and found herself back in Robert’s ruined hospital room once more.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
High Wood, mid-July 1916
It was beautiful; so unexpectedly and profoundly perfect he felt his heart might break. Robert looked out across the cornfield at High Wood, tears spilling from his eyes, surprised he still had the ability to cry. Perhaps there was something in him that was still human after all. A little way behind stood Private Nesbitt, his signaller. The two of them had come out in advance to assess the lie of the land.
The breeze brushed softly through the ripening ears of corn, as if for the simple pleasure of feeling them part. And the corn, in turn, seemed to shiver with pleasure at its touch. There was scarcely a shell hole to be seen. Nearby, a song thrush spilled its joyous tune. It was warm, the sky mostly overcast, but every now and then a shaft of sunlight broke through and gilded the landscape and heated the back of his neck. Only the distant boom of the guns gave away the fact they were still at the front.
He closed his eyes, drank in the silence. He could almost be back at home in the fields of his boyhood, tramping through the thigh-high buttercups with a jam jar, catching beetles and pretending not to hear Cook at the bottom of the garden calling him back in for lunch. He could scarcely believe he’d ever been that boy. That time increasingly seemed like a fantasy dreamt up by someone else.
It was just two weeks since the great offensive had kicked off, but he felt he’d aged a lifetime. His battalion had been sent further down the line, south of the Albert—Bapaume road, where the attack had been a bit more successful on the first of July. There, the British had not only conquered a little ground but held it – albeit at great cost. Now Sir Douglas Haig wanted to exploit the gains. Things had gone well so far that morning. Instead of a long preliminary bombardment proclaiming loudly to all and sundry the fact that the British were about to attack, there’d been a short, lightning bombardment. Under cover of darkness, they’d been able to take the Germans by surprise and turf them out of three miles of their own second line. Luck had, for once, been on their side. Now they must press their advantage and advance further. There were no two ways about it. This time they simply had to succeed.
‘Here.’ Robert tossed back a packet of Woodbines to Nesbitt. He always kept some with him. They calmed the men’s nerves in a tight spot. He lit himself a Turkish cigarette, then threw back the matches. Normally, he’d have struck the match for the man himself, but his hands were unsteady. Nesbitt looked very agitated.
‘Sit down, Nesbitt,’ Robert said, wiping the dust from his eyes. ‘I think we’ve earned a breather, don’t you?’
The man was a Kitchener’s Army volunteer. He was twenty-one and had worked in a greengrocer’s shop in Kent. He kept making involuntary frowning movements and his breath came quick and rough, like a saw rasping through wood.
‘Not long now and we’ll be in billets behind the line,’ said Robert, trying to sound reassuring. ‘You did well this morning, Nesbitt. The whole company did splendidly.’
‘Thank you, sir.’ Nesbitt looked up at him like a child, frightened but trusting. Best to keep him close by, Robert thought, or he might simply disappear off into the woods. He’d be far from the first to lose his nerve and desert, and several had been shot for it.
Robert could understand the lure of escape. These new men were all civilians, just like he’d once been – farmhands, miners, postmen, chandlers. They’d come to France fired up by vague and noble ideas of ‘doing their bit’, hoping for adventure and a hero’s welcome back home to boot – only to find themselves tossed like dry sticks into the scorching furnace of the Somme. How many of those he’d led over the top on that appalling first day now lay dead, their bodies filling out the bloated stomachs of the rats and flies of Picardy?
‘Have you anyone waiting for you at home, Private?’ Robert asked. ‘Anyone special?’
‘Just my mum and sister, sir.’
Robert knew that already, of course, from censoring the man’s letters. ‘Dearest Mother, dearest Ruby, all is well with me,’ Nesbitt would always begin. He wasn’t the sort to complain about his lot; few of them were. ‘We’re in a quiet sector here, so you’re not to worry…’
Robert nodded. ‘Well, I dare say there’ll be a letter or two waiting for you when the post arrives.’
‘Yes, sir.’
He trained his field glasses on High Wood. How wonderful it was to see trees again: tall and glorious as nature had made them, unmarked by war, the wind sifting through their leaves – not mutilated stumps, eerie forests of stark telegraph poles. And there was no hideous background drone of billions of flies feasting on the bloated black flesh of the fallen, reheated every morning by the sun.
There wasn’t the least sign of activity. Had the Germans, then, been driven out? He hardly dared to hope so. But if they had, then finally, finally they might be on the verge of the breakthrough that had eluded them. If they could take High Wood, they could cut through the German lines, and the advantage, for the first time, would be theirs. The Big Push and all the unspeakable bloody shambles of the last two weeks wouldn’t have been all for nothing.