A half-moon shone over the monochrome landscape. Miles away, a few lights marked an unknown hamlet. Had he fallen asleep? His breathing was shallow and his chest hurt slightly. He couldn't really feel his feet. He felt in his pocket for paper and a pencil. Hadn't he had a pencil when he set out? It was gone.
Instead he found the hip flask and, opening it with stiff fingers, he took a drink; it was brandy, which made him shudder but warmed him. He set the flask beside him, felt in his other, heavier, pocket and drew out a package wrapped in cloth, which he set on his lap. The rooks had quietened now. A pale barn owl skimmed across the fields, suddenly swooping to reach its prey. From time to time small creatures scrabbled in the darkness around him. Not rats, he hoped. Then a larger animal passed behind the tower: a badger or a fox, maybe, busy in this other world. He was glad to be here. He knew it was where he should be.
He thought of Eleanor. Her hair, her smell, her comfort. He remembered walking with her in France. He had been sitting on a bench outside the hospital. She came out, put up a hand to the side of his face.
'Oh you're so cold,' she said. She rubbed her hands briskly up and down his arms.
'May we walk?' she said. 'Are you comfortable enough?'
'Of course.'
Her head was swathed in a hood and she had a thick man's coat over her uniform, coming down to her boots. She pulled gloves out of a pocket.
Looking at her made him feel warm.
'Come on, race you to—wherever it is we're going.'
She ran ahead clumsily, laughing, and then she was gone. He called her name.
He opened and closed his fingers a few times to get his circulation going. Both hands. Both perfect hands. He poured some brandy on them and rubbed his palms together. She wasn't here. He looked at his fingers, spread widely and white as bone and opened his coat; he was not so cold. Then he unwrapped Miles Somers' scarf, folded it and set it down carefully a little way from his legs. He felt bad enough about stealing the photograph and package from the Somers house, but he didn't want to keep the scarf from its rightful owner too.
Then he took the small comb out of his pocket. He could hardly see the initials but he traced the unicorn with his finger. AM: Agathe Meurice. He set it down softly on the scarf.
He pressed his head back against the stonework and closed his eyes. He thought of other unreal worlds, other decisions, other possibilities: the shadows of faraway lives that had, briefly, crossed with his; of Eleanor, of a mortally wounded soldier trying to speak, and of a small boy startled by the cry of a red kite; but finally of his own hand in the dry comfort of his father's as they gazed up at the summer sky one Suffolk night.
When the shot came, the rooks rose outward from their roost with coarse cries of alarm, but in a few minutes they returned, settling back into the bare branches until the first light of dawn.
Afterword
'Craven fear is the most extravagant prodigal of nervous energy known. Under its stimulus a man squanders nervous energy recklessly in order to suppress his hideous and pent up emotions and mask and camouflage that which if revealed will call down ignominy upon him and disgrace him in the eyes of his fellows. He must preserve his self-respect and self-esteem at all costs.'
Bily Tyrel, a military doctor and victim of shelshock, in evidence to the Southborough Committee. Report of the War Office Commission of Enquiry into 'Shel-Shock'
(London, 1922), quoted by Ben Shephard in A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Twentieth Century.
Only three British officers were executed in the First World War. On the other hand, over 300 British and Commonwealth private soldiers met this fate, although of the 3,080 death sentences handed down, most were commuted.
My novel is loosely inspired by the executions of Temporary Sub-Lieutenant Edwin Dyett, Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, and of Lieutenant Poole of the West Yorkshire Regiment, both shot for desertion. The novelist A.P. Herbert, who had encountered Dyett while himself a junior officer in the same division, wrote a novel based on the case: The Secret Battle (1919). Leonard Selers has produced an account of the Dyett case in Death for Desertion, first published in 1995 as For God's Sake Shoot Straight. Further reading in this area includes Blindfold and Alone: British Military Executions in the Great War by John Hughes-Wilson and Cathryn Corns, and Shot at Dawn: Executions in World War One by Authority of the British Army Act by Julian Putkowski and Julian Sykes. Ernest Thirtle MP
published a pamphlet in 1929, Shootings at Dawn: The Army Death Penalty at Work. The terrible effect on families of losing husbands and sons in this way is revealed by surviving letters.
There are, of course, a great number of excelent books on the Great War. I am particularly indebted to the folowing: John Keegan, The First World War; Richard Holmes, Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front; Max Arthur, Last Post: The Final Word from our First World War Soldiers; and Neil Hansen, The Unknown Soldier: The Story of the Missing of the Great War. Gordon Corrigan has assembled a critical look at some of the myths of the war in Mud, Blood and Poppycock. Dominic Hibberd's biography of Wilfred Owen, Jean Moorcroft Wiliams' work on Isaac Rosenberg and Nicholas Moseley's book on Julian Grenfel are among many that I have read, as wel as Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth, a vivid account of her experience as a volunteer nurse on the Western Front.
A Deep Cry: First World War Soldier-Poets Killed in France and Flanders, edited by Anne Powel, is superb on the lives and deaths of less famous poets. Diaries, novels, plays and poetry of the period, as wel as some comprehensive websites, have helped my understanding of the varied experiences of those who
