The Wraiths of War

by Mark Morris

  ‘It’s not as if you’ll know much about it if I get blown up, though, will it?’

  He shuddered. ‘Suppose not. But… just don’t, all right?’

  ‘I’ll do my best.’

  I watched the leaves drifting down from the trees. The sky was a grimy, unyielding white. I hadn’t learned much coming here, but even so I now felt calmer, more focused on the way ahead. Looking at my future self, I allowed myself to at least begin to believe that things might turn out okay. Misplaced optimism, maybe, but it was optimism all the same.

  I said, ‘Just let me know one thing about the future.’

  Before I could go on, my older self said, ‘No. No way will I tell you how Breaking Bad ends. Do you think I want to spoil it for myself?’

  I laughed, and he laughed along with me. We finished our cigarettes, then turned and headed back to the car.

  TWENTY

  THE MISSING

  Later that day I went back to the War.

  When I say ‘that day’ I am, of course, using the term in its loosest sense. Because since waking up, my day had already encompassed five dates – May 10th 2007, three November 2nds (2012, 2017 and 2018) and October 14th 2018. So to put it more accurately, the day I left to head back to the War was the day I’d woken up on that morning – November 2nd 2012.

  Before heading back after speaking to my future self, though, I first jumped ahead to November 2nd 2018 and (to avoid creating a possible anomaly, the ripples of which might do who-knew-what damage) left the clothes I’d borrowed back where I’d found them. Then, wearing only the T-shirt and boxers I’d woken up in that morning, I went back to the morning of November 2nd 2012. Once there, back in what I thought of as my own time, I felt more than tempted to hang around for another day – to have a last long soak in the bath, eat good food, and sleep in my comfortable bed for one more night. However, I knew if I stayed even a day longer, it would become that extra bit harder to leave, and therefore that extra bit easier to convince myself to stay a few more days, or maybe a week… perhaps even a month…

  Only a couple of minutes after arriving back, therefore, I steeled myself, then changed once more into my mud-caked army uniform. The mud had dried now, but it still whiffed a bit, plus it flaked off in chunks as I walked, leaving a dirty trail on the floor behind me. Once I was ready, I walked with heavy steps and a heavy heart along the corridor to Clover’s room and knocked on the door.

  ‘Yeah?’ she said, conveying in that one word the fact that she’d been plucked from sleep, but was instantly alert – or at least trying to be.

  I opened the door and stuck my head round. ‘I’m off,’ I said.

  She sat bolt upright, her sleepy eyes widening, her maroon hair sticking up in tousled tufts. ‘What do you mean – “off”?’

  ‘I mean I’m going back to the War. There’s no time like the present.’ I grimaced at my own joke.

  ‘When will you be back?’

  ‘From your point of view, hopefully in about five minutes. But just in case I’m not, I came to let you know where I was going. And to say goodbye.’ Another lump of dried mud detached itself from my trousers, powdery particles of dirt puffing up as it hit the carpet just inside Clover’s room. ‘And also to tell you, you might need to get the hoover out.’

  Clover swung her legs out of bed, graceful as a ballet dancer, and crossed the room towards me. She was wearing a white T-shirt with a picture of Daffy Duck on it, and blue-and-green tartan pyjama bottoms, and as she got to within a couple of metres of me she held out her arms.

  ‘I wouldn’t,’ I said. ‘I’m pretty rank.’

  ‘Bugger that.’

  She wrapped her arms around me and hugged me tightly, tucking her head under my bony chin. As I hugged her back, I said, ‘Not only is your hair the colour of plums, it smells like them too.’

  She tutted. ‘That’s raspberry, not plum, you plum.’

  ‘Well, I knew it was something fruity.’

  She laughed, and then fiercely said, ‘You look after yourself, okay? Don’t do anything stupid.’

  ‘You’ll see me again in five minutes.’ Hopefully.

  ‘Yeah, but you won’t see me. Or Kate. You’ve got a tough couple of years ahead of you. So keep yourself safe.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘You’d better.’

  I didn’t want her to see me leave, so I went back to my room, shedding more dried mud en route, and took the heart from my pocket. I pictured myself back in No Man’s Land close to the Allied trenches, my intention being to arrive about fifteen minutes after I’d assured Frank I’d be back.

  It worked like a dream. One second I was standing in my warm bedroom in 23 Ranskill Gardens, and the next I was in pitch darkness, lying on my belly in freezing-cold mud. Although it was what I’d been hoping for, I gasped both at the stink and at the icy shock of it. Immediately I felt the familiar time-travel nausea rising in me. I lay still, riding it out, waiting until the nanites had kicked in and done their work. Then I slowly raised my head.

  Directly ahead of me, like a thick line between the black mud and the black sky, was a kind of dun-coloured bank or ridge. I puzzled over it for a moment, and then realised that what I was looking at were the heaped sandbags lining the top of the Allied trench.

  Which meant I was lying in the muddy hollow just beneath the trench itself! Perfect! It wasn’t exactly home, but even so I could have wept with relief. I wondered whether Frank would hear me if I called out, but I decided not to risk it. Slipping the heart into my jacket pocket, and checking that my notebook was still in my breast pocket where I’d put it, I began to slither on my belly up the side of the hollow towards the raised hummock of sandbags.

  Somewhere out in No Man’s Land my past self would be crawling towards the German lines, which meant that gunfire from the enemy side would soon be blazing across the muddy wasteland between our two trenches. Did the fact that I was here mean that ‘his’ mission would be as successful as ‘mine’ was, that it would follow exactly the same pattern, or was there still the potential for things to go wrong? My uncertainty meant that the next few hours would be jittery ones for me. If I managed to make it through to dawn without winking out of existence, then I guess I could assume that things had worked out okay.

  Reaching the sandbags, I took a deep breath, then crawled up and over them. Although there was no light for the Germans to see by, I still felt horribly exposed with nothing to hide behind.

  I was groping for the top of the ladder on the inside of the trench when a black shape emerged from the gloom below and thrust upwards, jabbing me hard in the chest with the muzzle of a rifle.

  ‘Who’s there?’ Nervousness turned the question into a wavery snarl.

  Lying across the sandbags, my top half hanging over the trench, I raised my palms, hoping that even in the dark it would show my hands were empty.

  ‘It’s me, Frank,’ I hissed. ‘I said I’d be back, didn’t I?’

  The pressure on my chest eased as Frank lowered his rifle. ‘Is that you, Alex?’

  ‘No, it’s the Archbishop of bloody Canterbury,’ I said.

  He grabbed my arms and directed them to the top rung of the ladder, then grabbed my muddy boots as I scrambled up and over to stop me from slipping all the way down the side of the trench and into the filthy water at the bottom. As I secured myself on the ladder and climbed down it, he danced around me like an excited puppy, clapping me hard on the back, his teeth white as he grinned.

  ‘Bleedin’ hell, it’s good to see you! I was starting to think you were gone for good. Changed your mind, did you?’

  ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘Well, you can’t have been gone more than ’alf an hour – though it seemed a bloody age from down ’ere, I’ll tell—’

  Then his voice cut off as his eyes widened. I’d produced the heart from my pocket and was holding it up for him to see. In the meagre lamplight it seemed to sparkle as if inset with tiny crystals.

  �
��Blow me!’ he breathed. ‘You ain’t gone and found it?’

  ‘It wasn’t that far away,’ I said. ‘Told you I knew where it had landed.’

  He continued to goggle first at the heart, then at me. He rubbed at his forehead, leaving a fresh smear of dirt. ‘If I hadn’t seen it I wouldn’t’ve believed it,’ he muttered. ‘You’re a bleedin’ wonder, you are. Find a bedbug in a mattress, you would.’

  I’d become very fond of Frank during the time we’d spent together. We’d been through a lot and he was genuinely like a little brother to me. But in the circumstances I couldn’t honestly say it was good to see him again. And paradoxically, despite our closeness, there was always a sense of distance between us – on my part anyway. I didn’t exactly hold him at arm’s length, and I didn’t shut off my feelings towards him (I could never be so cold), but at the same time, because I knew what was going to happen to him, I didn’t feel I could allow myself to get too close. True friends have no secrets from one another, so in that regard foreknowledge is a terrible thing. Knowing Frank’s fate made me feel terribly sad for him – not to mention terribly guilty. And although I maybe wouldn’t have been able to save him even with the knowledge I had, what was infinitely worse was knowing that for the sake of others – most especially for Clover and myself, as well as for the integrity of the timeline in general – I couldn’t afford to save him. When the time came I would have to let him die, and then, using the heart, drag him back into the half-life that he was living when I’d first encountered him.

  But there was a lot of crap to get through before that happened – around twenty months’ worth, in fact. I won’t give you a blow-by-blow account of that period of my life, not only because I still find it hard to talk about, but also because much of it isn’t relevant to this story. When I look back on the War, something I try to do as little as possible, I’m beset by a jumble of images and memories and impressions. Some are specific, and some are more general, and it’s these that – if you’ll allow me – I’ll share with you.

  We moved around a lot – that’s one thing I remember. Before ending up in Ypres in August 1917, we were marched up and down the line of the Somme what felt like every few weeks. We fought in Arras and in French Flanders. We dug gun pits near Agnez-les-Duisans in the boiling July heat of 1916. In the late spring of 1917 we even had a little three-month sojourn to Italy to hold the line at the Piave River – a posting so quiet and uneventful compared to what we’d been used to that it almost felt like a holiday.

  Mostly, it has to be said, the War was a battle not against the enemy, but against the weather and the awful conditions, and our own responses to the complex combination of boredom, misery and mortal terror that occupied our every waking moment. As I’ve said before, we were constantly filthy, wet, cold, hungry and exhausted – a state of mind and body that, in itself, has a grindingly accumulative effect. We were beset by rats and crawling with fleas, and most of us suffered terribly with dysentery, trench foot and a constant barrage of flu-like infections (though I fared better than most because of the nanites beavering away in my system). For all these reasons, those precious days – around three out of every nine – that we spent away from the front, recuperating in our billets, became blissful, almost heavenly interludes. During those all too brief times we’d relax by playing football in the afternoons and watching shows given by concert parties in the evenings. We’d eat huge amounts of egg and chips (proper food!) and occasionally we’d head into the local village to find an estaminet (a shabby pub or café), where we’d be sold cheap wine at inflated prices.

  We knew we were being ripped off – and by the very countrymen whose land we were protecting! – but we didn’t mind. We were just happy for the respite, happy to be able to do small, simple things, like walk upright, wear soft caps instead of uncomfortable steel helmets, and strike a match in the dark to light a cigarette without the fear of being picked off by a sniper.

  The actual periods of direct conflict – not including the bombardments, which were both frequent and terrifying – were few and far between. We would shoot at the Germans from our trenches and they would shoot back at us, but unless you were stupid enough to stick your head above the parapet (which many were), or just incredibly unlucky, such tit-for-tat exchanges were generally not all that dangerous.

  The bombardments, of course, could be dangerous, but only if the enemy managed to score a direct hit with a shell, which he didn’t do all that often. Such a strike was akin, I guess, to hitting a bull’s-eye in darts. Rare, but not impossible.

  How rare? Well, it only happened twice during my two and a half years or so in the trenches, but on both occasions it was devastating. The first time Joe Lancing and Barty Trent were killed when a shell landed right next to them while they were on guard duty. The second time a much larger shell landed smack bang in the middle of our section of the trench, and although most of us were taking cover in our cubbyholes, five men were killed outright, including Reg Coxon and Geoff Ableman, and three died later from their injuries, including our good mate Stan Little, who had both of his legs blown off. I survived, of course, as did Frank and Jock McDaid – though Jock was hit in the face by a piece of shrapnel, which left him with a jagged scar on his temple and restricted the sight in his right eye for the rest of his life.

  Emerging from our cubbyholes after the blast that day, covered in mud, flecked with cuts from flying shrapnel, and with our ears ringing so badly that we couldn’t hear one another speak, was like stepping straight into Hell. The shell had hit the most populated part of the trench, and as a result the boggy, caved-in mud of the walls had turned red with blood, and there were bits of bodies everywhere. I saw arms, legs, rib cages, innards and plenty of things so badly mangled they were unidentifiable. A young officer called Potter who hadn’t been with us long, found part of Geoff Ableman’s crushed head under the twisted remains of the brazier, and screamed over and over, with the whooping shrillness of a child, until Jock silenced him by clamping a muddy hand over his mouth and dragging him away.

  The closest I came to death during my time in the trenches was one winter’s day early in 1917 when there was snow on the ground. We were fighting in French Flanders, and were going through a period where we were starting to make huge territorial advances, driving the Germans further and further back. Maybe we’d become complacent, but we were making another push across open, snowy ground, with the aim of taking what we thought was an unoccupied German trench, when we suddenly and unexpectedly came under fire. Immediately those of us who hadn’t been hit threw themselves to the ground and began to crawl backwards, looking for whatever cover we could find. In the split second between being fired upon and hitting the deck, a bullet zipped across my chest, tearing the breast pocket of my tunic and leaving a scorch mark, before passing under my arm and killing an officer behind me. A few seconds later, as I was frantically crawling backwards, another bullet ripped through my water bottle and buried itself in the mud next to my leg.

  I got away with that one, and so did Frank. Afterwards, safely back in our trench, he grinned and told me the two of us led charmed lives, and that we were one another’s lucky mascots.

  ‘We’ll talk about this day when we’re old geezers sitting in the pub,’ he said. ‘We’ll bore our grandchildren with these stories.’

  I grinned along with him, but my heart felt as if it was being squeezed in a vice.

  One other memory, still vivid in my mind, is this one. On a late afternoon in, I think, the autumn of 1916, just as the sky was deepening to dusk, the rest of the men and I witnessed a distant aerial battle involving around thirty planes from both sides. As the fighters swooped and darted like insects, their machine guns emitting bursts of gunfire that from our vantage point sounded no more significant than a series of rapid, stuttering cracks – like the sound ice cubes make when you drop them into a drink – I remember thinking how like a film this was; a film or a dream. Even when one of the planes went down trailing black smok
e, and hit the ground in a brief fiery flash, I found it hard to equate with reality. I looked around at the men watching with me, and saw a range of expressions on their faces – from mild interest and a dull kind of curiosity, to a kind of atavistic eagerness, and even, in one or two cases, a weird sort of elation. But there was no horror there, no pity, and although that might sound cold-hearted, I found it equally difficult to stir such emotions in my own heart, even though I regarded myself – and still do regard myself – as a compassionate man.

  I was surprised by the depth of emotion I felt, however, when our company finally received orders to depart for Ypres in Belgium in July 1917. That night I wept, though only when I was alone, my muddy, rat-nibbled scarf (which had been Geoff Ableman’s, and had been knitted by his mum) stuffed against my mouth to stifle my sobs. I felt such joy at the thought that my ordeal was finally coming to an end, and that in a few weeks I’d be reunited with the people I cared about most in the world. But tempering my joy was a profound and terrible guilt at the knowledge that my ordeal would end only at the expense of Frank’s life. It seemed obscene to be looking forward to going home, knowing it would be facilitated by a young man’s death. In those last few weeks it became more and more difficult to look at his grinning face, to engage with him, to laugh at his jokes – but I forced myself to do it. I didn’t want him to spend his last days wondering why I was being so off with him, wondering what he’d done to make me suddenly so frosty. I felt torn apart inside. Often I felt as though I ought to prepare him somehow, or reassure him, or warn him. But I didn’t. I stayed as ‘normal’ as I could. And I tried to convince myself that I was doing the right thing, that it was all for the best.

  Passchendaele lay on the last ridge east of Ypres, five miles from a railway junction at Roulers, which was a vital supply line for the German army. The ultimate aim of the Battle of Passchendaele, a campaign launched by the Allies in July 1917, was to control the ridges south and east of Ypres, thus cutting the Germans off from their supplies. To do this we had to be forceful and aggressive; we had to go at them, all guns blazing, push them back. This inevitably meant we would sustain casualties – lots of them. But the entire campaign was predicated on the hope that the Boche would lose a lot more men than we would.