by Jana Petken
“They’re giving us money?”
“Yes, darlin’, and if Mam agrees, the amount will be equally divided between her and us kids. That’s what Dad would have wanted. I’m going to Dublin to meet with the board to finalise the details. I would like you to accompany me.”
Jenny was still digesting the news. Patrick had not yet mentioned how much money was involved, but for some strange reason, all she could think about was her father and how much she loved him. “I’ll go. Of course I will. Patrick, how much money are we to receive?”
“Ah, now let me hold on to that surprise until we see Mam.”
After lunch, which had been hastened along by the news, the three of them left for home. Arriving at Minnie’s house, Jenny was shocked to see an ambulance and police van parked right outside Minnie’s front door. Patrick was already running towards the gate. Jenny lifted her skirts and tried to keep up with him, and behind her, Anna was stumbling in boots with high heels.
Jenny’s mind was screaming her granny’s name. Minnie was dead! Her granny was gone.
Two police officers stood in the hallway. Jenny thought she heard her mother weeping in the parlour. She ran past the officers, talking hurriedly in low voices to Patrick.
Patrick gripped her arm. “Don’t go in there,” he said.
“I need to go to Mam!” Jenny pulled her arm out of his grip and rushed into the room.
Minnie was rocking back and forth in her chair. Sobs racked her tiny body. She saw Jenny and shook her head. “I don’t know what happened. She went for a lie-down. Oh, my girl is dead! Jenny, your mam is dead …”
Jenny’s mind froze. “Minnie, who was it that went for a lie-down?” Then she felt her heart shatter and the quickening pulse in her neck making her feel dizzy. Mam? Mam’s dead?”
Patrick walked in, held her by the shoulders, and then pulled her to his chest. She looked up at him. He was crying.
“Patrick, it’s not our mother? It can’t be.” She gasped in disbelief.
Patrick pulled her tighter to him. “She died in her sleep. I’ve just spoken to the doctor. He’s still upstairs. He thinks it was a massive stroke. She’s gone Jenny...”
“I took her a cup of tea. She had a lie-down. It was just a lie-down!” Minnie cried.
Patrick said, “They’re going to take Mam to the hospital now.”
Jenny screamed. Her legs buckled, and were it not for Patrick holding her up, she would have fallen to the floor. The noises in the room became muffled and distant. Unable to think or feel anything but the heavy load of grief, she felt as though she were floating above a scene that she was not involved in.
Anna knelt in front of Minnie’s chair with her head resting on Minnie’s lap. Patrick was kissing Jenny’s head and stroking her hair. Jenny realised that she was sobbing like a baby. Everyone was crying. She pushed Patrick away and sat in her mother’s chair, curling her body into a tight ball. A thousand and one images of her mam came to mind: laughing, crying, fighting, scolding the boys with her finger wagging in the air, and finally that row where she, Jenny, had said the most terrible, ugly things.
Patrick had left the room, called away by the policemen, who were leaving. Jenny staggered to the door and watched the ambulance men carrying her mother’s covered body down the stairs on a stretcher.
Patrick came to stand with her. “Darlin’, do you want to see Mam before she goes?”
Jenny answered, “How could this happen? Why, Patrick? Tell me why all these bad things are happening to us!”
Going back into the room, Jenny took Minnie in her arms. “I can’t look at my mam, Granny,” she wept. “Not today. Please don’t make me look at her dead face …”
Chapter Fifty-Four
Kevin couldn’t hear much apart from high-pitched ringing and his own panting breath. His ears were blocked with mud, eyes stung with smoke and gunpowder, and layer after layer of caked dirt covered his skin like a thick theatrical mask. The area around Passchendaele was hauntingly insidious. Black trunks and sparse leafless branches sank into the mush. It was an eerie, hellish ground, killing thousands of men who stepped upon it. He continued to push forwards behind the troop. His stretcher-bearers were with him, to his left and right, but they had no ambulances to transport the wounded. Only when they reached the German line, now free of the enemy, could they begin their work.
The army’s immediate objective was a ridge which sat east of the city of Ypres. For weeks and months, the British and Canadians had tried to take it. It overlooked a village and was close to the railway junction at Roulers, which was vital to the supply system of the German Fourth Army. Afterwards the plan was to advance to Thourout-Couckelaere to close the German-controlled railway running through Thourout. Success was imperative. They could not afford to fail, Kevin had heard repeatedly during discussions in the officers’ dugouts. Without that supply route, the war could stagnate for years and the British people would starve, not the Germans.
He heard the screams, like a song of banshees, not far ahead of him, yet he was compelled to move on towards the sound. Thousands of men were surging ahead of him, heads down, rifles and bayonets fixed, and their backs breaking with the weight of heavy kitbags. There was no going back to the shelter they had left. The officers were ordering the men forward.
Canadian soldiers were flanking the British. They were being hit the hardest by artillery pounding them. Kevin saw everything that was going on around him except for the bullets that randomly struck men as they ploughed through the mire. He was not at the spearhead of the attack; that was much farther up the line. He was relatively safe compared to the infantry, who had gone over the top an hour earlier than he had. But still, shells exploded to his left, right, and a few yards in front of him. It felt as though the whole world were crashing down on top of him.
Eventually, he reached the old German line that Fritz had held for so long. Falling to his knees, he stared disbelievingly at what met his eyes, and then he vomited with shock and horror. The drainage ditches had been destroyed by artillery and had turned the boggy area into a quagmire of quicksand-like mud. Where were the parapets and walls? he wondered. All he could see was a network of concrete pillboxes and bunkers laced together with barbwire. The dead were everywhere, dragged to slow deaths in the mire. Some men were hanging from wires, wounded and screaming. Men were trying desperately to free them. Kevin tried to rise to his feet to help, but he was stuck in a muddy hole. His legs and arms had sunk as he’d knelt there.
He looked at the carnage surrounding him: British, German, French, and Canadian dead, half in and half out of the waterlogged shell holes. Some bodies had sunk beneath the sludge and only their hands and boots stuck out of it. Mesmerised, his eyes flicked wildly to the bodies. Rotting faces stared blindly at him from coverlets of mud, and decaying buttocks heaved themselves obscenely from the filth. Some of the dead had been lying there for some time. Skulls littered the ground, grinning up at those who had joined them. Kevin vomited repeatedly. The stink was unbelievable.
The evidence of previous British Fifth Army attacks was pitifully obvious. Men who had never returned after a raid and those who had participated in failed surges were laid out before him. He stared, unable to drag his eyes away. Many of the dead had been there for weeks and months, he noted, and would lie and rot and disintegrate foully into the muck until they were an inescapable part of it. They couldn’t possibly be retrieved. For sixteen months, he had seen, heard, and felt the horror of war, but never had he witnessed anything so shocking.
“Sir!”
Kevin stared up at the faces of three British soldiers, and then he suddenly realised that most of his body was submerged. Still on his hands and knees, he looked down to see only his shoulders visible above ground. “Fuck! Get me out of here!” he shouted back to the men.
“Lift your arm and grab my rifle,” the man closest to Kevin said.
Kevin tried to lift his arm, feeling as though he were pulling up a ton of rocks. He finally fr
eed it, and it surfaced. Holding it out, he shakily gripped the end of the man’s rifle. In turn, the man held on to the rifle of the man behind him, and together they pulled Kevin free.
Kevin, cleaning the thick mud off him, looked at the men through the layers of dirt on their faces. They were Royal Army Medical Corps. Standing wobbly on his feet, he ordered them to move forward.
“We’ve captured a German trench farther up the line, sir. Fritz left it in pretty good condition, but it’s going to be difficult to evacuate the wounded until we take that ridge,” one of the soldiers said.
“We’ll deal with the wounded as best we can when we get there – I just want to get to hell out of this spot. I can’t bloody breathe,” Kevin said. Panting at first, he now felt the added discomfort of tremors running through his body. He was exhausted. His body felt like the slush he’d just escaped from.
In the newly taken trench, Kevin began treating the wounded and organising his men. A regimental aid post had been quickly set up behind the front line in a communication trench, and a steady stream of wounded were arriving, either walking or being carried by men in their units. The ground was layered with wood and groundsheets, and still the injured sank into the mud.
Kevin was well aware that this was just a patch-up centre where first aid could be carried out. The medical officer’s equipment was supplied by the advanced dressing station, which was much farther behind the lines, but a full quota of supplies had not yet arrived from them. Gathering his men, he told them to be conservative in their treatments, and then he proceeded to read out the list of equipment on hand.
“Do we have comforts?” a man asked.
“Yes, we’ve got some brandy and cocoa but no Bovril or biscuits. And remember, men, you know the drill. We don’t have space for wounded men to linger here. The object of the exercise is to patch these soldiers up and either return them to their duties in the line or pass them back to the advanced dressing station. We have horse-drawn ambulances now at our disposal as well as hand carriages and wheeled stretchers, compliments of Fritz. So let’s get going.”
Chapter Fifty-Five
Danny staggered along the communication trenches blinded by the blood pouring from his forehead. Supported by Jack, he stumbled in semi-darkness, falling over a few times and dragging Jack into the muck with him. He wanted to cry, to cleanse his mind of what had just happened. Most of their unit was gone. His friends were dead, their lives snuffed out in no man’s land as they crossed in a full-blown attack to take this line.
Along with the images of the dead flying through the air and then hitting the ground hard and in pieces came the moment he was hit. Heavy artillery had been bombarding them continuously from the moment they left their trench. Thousands – tens of thousands, it seemed – raced forwards against the mighty explosions, and not once did he see a man turn around and run back from whence he came.
His head had stung, and a sharp pain coursed all over it and into his face. He’d passed out face down on the ground. He recalled feeling hands gripping his shoulders and then being swung into the air like a sack of coal. In his semi-conscious state, he’d briefly seen the two men who carried him. One of them was Jack and the other was Stan, a friend in his unit. Stan was hit in the head and fell like a brick, pulling Jack and Danny to the ground with him. Again darkness overcame him, until he awoke, half in and half out of a trench, to Jack’s voice grunting with exertion. Somehow, he’d gotten them both into the safety of the deep-walled channel alive.
Danny sat on the ground swaying, his backside encroaching on another man’s legs. Hundreds of wounded men surrounded him, with no space between the bodies, sitting, standing, lying, and dead. Jack left for the front-line trench. Danny closed his eyes, trying to block out the pain and the dizziness that were making him see men with two heads, four arms, and bodies darting back and forth. He didn’t know how badly he was injured. He gingerly put a couple of fingers to the wound and felt the long horizontal laceration across his head, just above his eyes. At the very least, he would need stitches, he thought, and then he succumbed to unconsciousness once again.
Men shouting awakened him. He had fallen onto another soldier’s lap. The man in question was dead. Danny struggled to sit up. Looking around him was a sea of panicked faces, and he still felt giddy, moving as slowly as a drunken old man. Unable to focus, he stared for a moment at the blurry figures of the men on the fire steps. At first, the sound of a man’s voice was muffled. He was looking through the periscope, and it was difficult to hear what he was shouting. Then Danny’s ears cleared and his mind focused on the words being relayed along the line.
“There’s a greenish-yellow cloud rolling along the ground out in front. It’s coming this way!”
Even in his semi-conscious state, Danny was aware that they were under a gas attack. The conditions were perfect, with a slight breeze blowing from the enemy’s position. Once their cylinders had been opened, the gas would float with ease through the air. He panicked, yet he was still moving too slowly. He had no more than about eighteen or twenty seconds in which to get to his smoke helmet and fit it properly on his head and face. A voice in his mind was screaming at him to hurry. Dazedly his half-closed eyes flicked slowly from left to right, and he saw that pandemonium reigned all around him. Soldiers began adjusting their respirators, bombers ran here and there, men turned out of the dugouts with fixed bayonets to man the fire step, and all available reinforcements poured out of the communication trenches. The Germans had a habit of first attacking with gas and then following that up with a manned assault.
Reaching into a waterproof canvas bag slung around his shoulder, Danny gripped one of his two cloth masks. His fingers were weak, fumbling, and shaking so much that he was unable to get a decent hold on the respirator. He looked at it, picturing all the other times he’d put it on, and then, in his mind’s eye, he saw the training sergeant at the basic training camp in Nottingham. Somehow, his mind wandered back there as though he were suspended in that time. And then he began to lecture himself on the smoke hood.
“There are two windows through which to see, Danny,” he mumbled stupidly. “Inside, there is a rubber-covered tube which goes in the mouth. You breathe through your nose … Breathe, Danny. The gas passing through the cloth helmet is neutralized by the action of the chemicals. The foul air is exhaled through the tube in the mouth …”
Slumping onto the ground, he looked up at the grey sky. His head, already throbbing, seemed to burst open from a loud crack in his ear. The dizziness intensified further and he couldn’t seem to get his arms to move. He was paralysed. Everything was swimming, his throat was as dry as a bone, and a heavy pressure on his lungs was making it hard to breathe. He was dying. Any minute now, he’d be gone.
Hands shook Danny awake.
“Don’t move – and hold your breath, Danny!” he heard a voice shout. “For God’s sake, Carmody, hold still!”
Danny stared up and caught a brief glimpse of a masked figure. In the next instance, the man was placing the smoke hood over Danny’s head, adjusting it, and then tucking in the loose ends under his collar. Danny looked through the glass eyes. The trench started to wind like a snake, and sandbags appeared to be floating in the air. There was a horrible noise echoing all around him. He felt hands holding him under his armpits, dragging him along the ground, but all he could think about were the needles pricking his flesh and eyes, and then he felt nothing.
Hours later, Danny stirred. His body and head were covered with his groundsheet. A wounded soldier from his unit sat beside him, free of his smoke hood. He leaned over and removed Danny’s.
“You’re all right, boy. We can take it off now. A wind came up and dispersed the gas. You was out for the bleedin’ count there, Danny. I thought at one point you was dead.”
Danny’s head wound had stopped bleeding, but the pain was dreadful. Groggily he asked, “What happened?”
“The Germans attacked. We repulsed them after a hard fight. Twice they ga
ined a foothold in our forward trench but we counter-attacked. It was over pretty quickly, but the trench is filled with their dead and ours. There were Germans hanging on to our wire with their respirators on, looking like ghouls. Christ, I’ve never seen anything quite like that. It was a bloody horrible sight out there. I came here straight afterwards.”
“What happened to you?”
“I got hit by flying debris. I had bloody rusty nails sticking into my bleedin’ arm, but I still managed to shoot. Some captain told me to sit with you. I suppose they’ll be here shortly to sort out your head. You’re in a right mess. Your face is covered in blisters. Can you see me?”
Danny mumbled, “A wee bit. Not much. I don’t know how I’m still alive. Someone saved my life, I think. He knew my name. Do you know who it was?”
“No. Sorry, mate. Maybe it was the doctor captain who ordered me to wait with you. He told me to keep givin’ you a shake.” The man looked up and waved at someone. “Talk of the devil …”
Danny stared at Kevin beneath swollen half-closed eyelids. How, why, or what Kevin was doing there were the first thoughts rushing through Danny’s mind. He’d not seen hide or hair of the man since London, more than a year ago, and like the rest of the family, he’d thought that perhaps he’d been killed.
Kevin knelt on one knee and began taking equipment from his medical kitbag. “You can go back to your unit, Private,” he said to the man sitting with Danny. “Get some rest and come back tomorrow. That wound will need to be redressed.”
Danny continued to stare at Kevin. After the man had left, he asked, “Was it you, Kevin? Did you put the mask on me?”
“Yes, and it’s Captain Jackson,” Kevin said coldly.
