Chapter 23: And His Kingdom Was Full of Darkness

YPRES TO BRANDHOEK, FLANDERS, BELGIUM

November 1917

Freddie and Winter slept through the day and woke up at dusk, alone in a greasy cellar whose low ceiling shook with shellfire. A welter of empty bottles rolled and clinked on the floor amid broken glass, and there was a smell of damp earth. Had Freddie actually thought it was grand? Gothic? Full of untouched wine? Christ, he’d been off his head.

Faland was gone. They might have imagined him too. Except that a single candle had been left burning, a guttering stub, the only thing that kept the darkness from swallowing them. Winter sat up stiffly, tipped his head back against slimy brick.

“He’s gone,” said Freddie.

“I’m glad.” Winter didn’t open his eyes.

“He helped us.” Freddie heard the edge of bewildered protest in his voice. It was as though Faland had taken that otherworldly cellar with him. In the damp chill, both seemed equally unlikely: the civilian with his listening silences, and the safe place, set apart, where they’d spent the day.

“I don’t—” Winter’s eyes were glassy and his lips cracking with fever. “I don’t think it was for kindness.”

Freddie thought, Why else? We’ve nothing he could want. But he said nothing. He picked up their damp, filthy shirts. “We ought to go ourselves,” he said. He could wonder about Faland later. When Winter was safe at last.

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· · ·A gray river of wounded stumbled toward the back area, mingling with troops coming up, the world shrouded in renewed darkness, stabbed through with electric light. Winter and Freddie walked with their heads down, in the margin of the road. No one looked at them. No man had an eye for anything beyond his footing in the slime, or an ear for anything but incoming shells.

Freddie and Winter were past caring about shellfire. Either they’d cop it here or they wouldn’t. Winter walked as though in a dream, and despite the ambient noise, Freddie fancied he kept hearing the dead man’s splashing footsteps.

“Has he gone?” Winter asked once. The night held them close in an icy hand. “I don’t think he’s gone.”

“Gone?” Freddie was imagining those footsteps. He was.

Winter answered himself, “No, he’s not gone. The dark country’s empty now. All the devils are here.”

“A little further,” said Freddie. “A little further.”

It wasn’t far from Ypres to Brandhoek. Not in miles. But their way stretched on and on, slowed by the limping press of wounded, and every puddle had to be tested to make sure it wasn’t a shell hole ten feet deep. They had not gone half the distance before Winter was weaving drunkenly, his face set in determination. Freddie, supporting him, had the impression that if they stopped, Winter wouldn’t be able to go on again.

But Winter did go on, on and on, his eyes staring blind and raindrops running down his jaw, brilliant as sequins in the intermittent light. Freddie stayed with him, and he kept his eyes only on Winter, so he’d not try to make out the dead man’s face in every human wreck that came alongside.

They came, still alive, to Brandhoek when the night was at its darkest, when the road was at its most chaotic. The hospital was no shining beacon in the storm, it was merely a series of sheds and marquees, grimy white, lit by the lanterns of its quick-moving staff. Freddie saw the place in slices. The ammunition dump. Triage tent, toolshed, flagpole.

The men.

Acres of wounded men, lying out in the rain, while nurses in mackintoshes went from stretcher to stretcher. There was no room inside.

But Freddie was too tired to worry, too tired, almost, to understand what he was seeing. The only question in his head was how to find Laura in the frenzied darkness. His eyes darted from place to place; his only thought was Where.

So he didn’t see it at first.

And even then, his shuddering brain didn’t understand.

Winter understood before Freddie did. His hand closed on Freddie’s upper arm, and then Freddie saw. Some of the marquees were smashed. There were raw shell holes in between. Guns still boomed away at no great distance. “Oh, Christ,” he whispered. “Oh, fucking hell. They took fire…Laura. Let me go.”

“Wait, Iven,” said Winter. “Wait.”

They bombed a hospital,his mind gibbered. They bombed a hospital. All the absurd rumors he’d ever heard about Germans over the years came back magnified a thousandfold: They hang priests as clappers in their own bells, they chain the gunners to their machine guns…He rounded on Winter with something very near hatred. “Let me go.”

Winter let go and Freddie ran. Winter didn’t follow. Freddie saw marquees freshly sandbagged, men on stretchers borne into makeshift surgical bays, orderlies loading men onto train cars.

Laura ought to be easy to find. She wasn’t the tallest, or the broadest, but he would see the staff orienting themselves around her steady presence. He would hear her snapping orders, joking, see her face determined, her hand on some poor sod’s forehead…

But he couldn’t see her. Maybe in one of the marquees? They weren’t all wrecked. There were plenty of nurses around. They were all right, weren’t they?

Where would she be? His searching eyes fell on the head sister. Her uniform was unmistakable, her veil. He even knew her name. Laura had written about her often enough: Kate White. In the cold white light of her lantern, she looked shattered. He threw caution aside and plunged into the maelstrom of people, and came up alongside her. “Sister, where is Laura? Laura Iven, where is she?”

Kate White just looked at him. He could only imagine what he looked like: an insane stranger, filthy, pallid as a corpse. “Gone,” she said after a pause.

Freddie took the word like a fist between the eyes. “Gone?”

“I— Yes. A shell…”

He tried to muster another question, but his mouth had gone dry. The word gone echoed in his brain. Sinking horror collected somewhere in his stomach. He was still trying to frame his next question, but Kate White beat him to it.

“Who are you?” she demanded. “Are you wounded?”

Even as she spoke, a chorus of shouting erupted from one of the wards.

She swore and turned toward the commotion. “Stay there, then.”

Freddie stood as though rooted to the spot. Gone gone gone.Ask her if she’s dead. Ask her that, you coward. She said “gone.”

He stood there like a pillar of salt. Despair and madness whispered, Gone means dead. The Rapture, remember the Rapture? Mother always talked about the Rapture. The good are taken up, and only the sinners are left. And who was better than her? She’s gone.

Before Kate White could come back, before Freddie could think what on earth he meant to do, a hand closed about Freddie’s arm.

It was Faland.

Freddie, too much in shock to speak or even be much surprised, looked from the thin fingers to the angles of his face, the hair dark with rain. As improbable at Brandhoek as he’d been in Ypres—more so. His calm was almost eerie; who could be calm when the whole world had— Faland said, “Stand there long enough, little poet, and you’ll be back with your platoon by nightfall and your German left to die with the rest.”

Freddie was too shaken to say What are you doing. He stammered, “I— No. I don’t know now. My sister’s gone.”

Faland said, “Unfortunate. And you’re going to stand there, lamenting?”

What were words? What was the world? Freddie said, “I promised Winter…” Then he remembered. He’d left Winter alone. All that way, and he’d left Winter alone. Chest heaving, he wrenched away and plunged at once between the wards, through curtains of lamplight and rain, back into the night. He didn’t see if Faland followed. He hardly believed that he’d seen him at all.

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· · ·Winter had sunk to the ground. But he raised his head when Freddie stooped beside him. His eyes darted beyond him, into the darkness. “No,” he whispered. “Iven, no. Not him.”

Freddie half-turned, but there was no one near. Freddie didn’t have an answer. He didn’t have anything. Laura was gone.

What to do?

In that extreme of stress, an idea came to him.

He stripped off his own jacket, with all the scraps of belongings that he still possessed in its pockets. He wrapped the jacket round Winter’s shoulders. He was too cold to feel colder, although the rain plastered his shirt to his skin. He pressed his tags into Winter’s flinching hand. Kate White wouldn’t do anything for a nameless German. But she had real authority. She might do something for Laura. And if the nameless German appeared to know the fate of Laura’s only brother…

Winter whispered, “Iven, what are you doing?”

“I’m going to save your life. Pretend not to understand English, all right?”

“Please,” Winter whispered. “Don’t—”

Freddie plunged back into the vortex of the hospital. He found Kate White again, her hair sticking to her cheeks with rain, a smear of blood on her forehead. “Sister, there’s a German prisoner out there with the wounded.” She was already shaking her head to dismiss him, but he forged on. “He’s got the jacket and the tags of a bloke called Wilfred Iven. He don’t speak much English. But he showed them to me. Said he was to give them to a nurse called Laura Iven. I didn’t know what to do with him.”

“Iven—” Kate White whispered, and then her exhausted gaze sharpened. “Out there? Take me to this man. Quickly.”

Kate followed Freddie out, through the wreckage of men on stretchers, to the place where Winter knelt, head bowed. She summoned orderlies in her wake, and dropped down at once beside Winter. Took his pulse, touched his forehead, looked at his wound. Shook her head. “Get him up,” she said to the orderlies. “Now. Where did you get these things, sir?” The question was directed at Winter. She had Freddie’s jacket in her hands.

Winter said nothing. Freddie didn’t know if he was conscious. Kate turned her head, but she sought for Freddie in vain. He’d slipped out of reach of the lantern, behind the shield of the rain and the darkest part of the night. Don’t ask who I am. I’m nothing, I died on the Ridge. Think only of him. He’s the only one who can tell you what you want to know. If you save him. You have to save him.

Only then did he realize that Faland hadn’t been a figment of his shattered mind. For Faland was there again, with him in the sheltering darkness, near enough for Freddie to see that one of his eyes reflected the glittering point of the lantern, and the other did not. He was watching the little lamplit tableau: the nurse and the wounded man. “Well, you are a clever boy, aren’t you?” he murmured. “Think she’ll save him for her dead friend’s sake?”

“My sister,” whispered Freddie in a voice he hardly recognized. “Laura.” The orderlies were rolling Winter onto a stretcher. Kate was bending to take the tags clutched in Winter’s hand. Freddie’s tags. All that was left of Private Wilfred Charles Iven. She slipped the tags from Winter’s failing grasp, although he made a faint sound of protest. She said, “Come on, you’re not going to die on me, sir. Get him up. Gentle with that arm.”

And then they carried Winter away through the rain. Just like that he was gone. Just like Laura. Everyone was gone.

Freddie was alone. The purpose that had driven him off the Ridge left him suddenly; he swayed like a puppet with cut strings.

But he didn’t fall. A hand caught his elbow. “What now?” said Faland, still beside him. “Off you go, back to barracks? Or to Bedlam more like, considering the look on your face.”

Freddie didn’t answer. He had nothing. What future waited for him but to lie down in the mud and let the drowned man take what was his? “I’m already dead,” he whispered.

“Straight to perdition, then?” Faland said lightly. “Well, it can hardly be worse, can it?” And when Freddie turned his head to look, Faland smiled.