The Tryst

silent you could hear the birds singing. Then the officers blew their whistles and off we went. I wasn’t afraid. We’d been told that the enemy had all been killed by our bombardment. My chief concern was to act the part and not disgrace the uniform I had tricked my way into. I tried hard not to fall like a lot of the others. We were all carrying heavy packs and I supposed they must have lost their footing somehow, but I remember saying to myself, “Here I am, a mere boy, and if I can carry on then you should be able to!” Then I felt something pluck my arm. It might have been someone tugging at my sleeve to attract my attention, except there was no one near. The next moment I tripped over someone lying on the ground and fell headlong like the rest. When I started to get up, I saw to my surprise that there was no one left on his feet, although just a moment before there’d been hundreds and hundreds of us walking up the hillside. I thought that there might have been an order that I hadn’t heard. “Do what the others are doing” was the general rule of Army life, I’d learned, so I decided to stay where I was. My arm ached, and when I rubbed the place my hand came away all red and sticky, as if I’d been eating blackberries. I realized then that I’d been hit. It didn’t bother me much at the time. I’d seen worse at home, like that time the miller’s son got his leg caught under a millstone they were changing. What I didn’t understand, though, was where the bullet had come from, if the enemy were all dead. I thought perhaps I’d caught one of ours going the wrong way. I could hear all manner of yelps and groans around me, mixed in with the twittering of a lark overhead. I thought I could hear a woodpecker too, and that was strange, for there were no trees near.

‘The slope we were lying on, smooth and bare, reminded me of the hillside above the village. The sun grew hotter and hotter. I couldn’t understand why we had been ordered to lie down, and after a while I called to the man I’d tripped over and asked him what was going on. I got no answer, so I crawled over to him. The dust all around started kicking up, the way it does when the first big raindrops hit during a summer storm. That was another strange thing, for there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. When I got close enough, I saw why the man had taken no notice of me. Young as I was, I’d seen dead men before, and I knew he was dead. Then another man nearby started to lift himself up on his arms, making a kind of noise that made me look at him. I hailed him, but then the woodpecker sound started up again, and all of a sudden the man’s face just disappeared, the way your reflection does if you drop a stone in a pond. It was then that I finally twigged what had happened. The enemy hadn’t all been killed. They were sitting pretty in their trenches, and as we advanced they’d opened fire with machine-guns and cut us down. And the men lying on the ground around me weren’t obeying some orders I hadn’t heard. They were wounded or dying or dead.

‘By now the sun was scorching, and when I tried to reach the water bottle in my pack I got hit again. What was making the dust kick up, I learned, was bullets. The enemy had snipers on the lookout for any movement and one of them got me through the foot. After that I could do nothing but lie still, or as still as I could with the pain, pretending to be dead. Later on, great clouds of smoke came billowing across from our side, and I saw men running forward inside it. Another attack had started, and I hoped for a moment to be rescued. But straight away that damned tap-tap-tapping started up again, and when I looked again the men were gone. After that the enemy laid down a barrage into no-man’s-land, where I was. Shrapnel started flying all around, along with other things. I saw what I thought was a glove bounce on the ground just in front of me, and when I looked again I saw that it was a man’s hand cut off at the wrist. When it finally started to get dark, I set off to try and crawl back to our lines. At first I tried to avoid the bodies that were lying everywhere, but in the end I just dragged myself over them, planting my hands on their stomachs and my feet in their faces. They weren’t all dead, either. Many moaned and moved when I touched them, and one even begged me to shoot him, just like a child pleading for a sweet. It came on to rain, which made everything slimy and the going even more difficult. As day broke, I realized that I was still a long way from safety.

‘There was a large shell-hole nearby, so I crawled in there so as to be safe from the sniper fire. My water was all gone and I had a raging thirst, so I was glad to see that a puddle of rainwater had formed at the bottom of the hole. I was about to drink when I noticed what I thought for a moment was my own reflection looking back at me. It was a corpse. He must have crawled into the hole for shelter the previous day and then drowned when the rain came on. I sat there all that day, alone in the shell-hole, staring at that dead man guarding the water that he didn’t need and I couldn’t drink, and listening to the shells exploding all around. I asked myself why he had died and I was still alive. There seemed to be no reason to it. Every time a shell went off, the water rippled, blurring his features. I expected to be blown to shreds every moment, or cut apart by shrapnel. But it didn’t happen, and when night fell I tried once more to make my way back to our lines. By then I was almost mad with thirst, and I must have gone badly astray, for the next morning I found myself lying out in the open less than fifty yards from the enemy trenches. I could hear them calling to each other in their foreign lingo. Once in a while they loosed off a few shots when they thought they saw movement. They’d shoot at the corpses too, just for fun. The dead had begun to swell up and change colour by now, and I was afraid that the enemy would know I was alive by that. To keep my mind steady, I concentrated on watching this scrap of khaki cloth I could see, snagged on the barbed wire. It must have been part of the uniform of one of our lads who’d made it that far. All day long I watched it flapping about in the wind like some bird caught in a snare and struggling to free itself. As soon as it grew dark I set off again. Luckily it was a clear night this time, and by keeping an eye on the stars I was able to keep moving towards our lines. At daybreak I saw figures moving nearby. I didn’t know if they were living creatures or ghosts, still less whether they were from our side, but I called out as loudly as I could and they came running. It was a British stretcher-party on the lookout for casualties from the previous day’s action.’

The old man picked up the brass-handled poker, opened the stove and stirred the coals for some time. Steve glanced surreptitiously at the clock, which showed ten to six.

‘Well, we’d better finish,’ the old man sighed at last. ‘There’s not much left to tell, though it’s the hardest part. The stretcher-bearers set me down among the other dead and wounded, and I was so exhausted that I fell asleep, lying there on the duckboards. That was nearly the end of me, for I woke with my face underwater and such a weight on my back that I thought for a moment I must drown like a rat in our own trenches. But somehow I managed to twist myself free. A pile of the dead had fallen on top of me, as though they resented me outliving them. Later on, when I was carried back through the trench system to the rear, I saw what became of the corpses, and then I understood why we’d been set to dig those great pits before the battle. The officers had told us that the enemy would all be dead and we could just stroll across to their lines. I realized now that that was just a story, or why dig mass graves in readiness? After that I was moved from one dressing station and casualty station to another. What kept me going, despite the pain of my wounds, was the thought that now I’d be sent back home to England, having done my duty. But I was wrong. It seemed that I’d got off too lightly. To get a ticket home you needed to be more badly hurt. As soon as I was up and about again, I received orders to rejoin my unit, or rather a unit with the same name and number, for the one I’d served with had been wiped out almost to a man. The new troops were all fresh recruits who avoided me as though I had some disease. They knew well enough what had happened to us, although the officers tried to keep it secret. Twenty thousand men killed in a single day, and twice that number left mangled for life. We’d gone innocent to the slaughter, but these men knew what awaited them. I was a living reminder of that, and they wanted nothing to do with me. At that particular moment there was a lull in the fighting, so I had a lot of time to myself. My thoughts turned increasingly to home. How safe and tranquil it all seemed! I thought for the first time that I’d been happy there. I often used to think about the night I’d watched from the roof of the Hall, moving through the moonlit landscape in my thoughts. I realized that I’d been seeing it all for the last time, and that was why I’d felt so sad, because it was a leave-taking. That led me on to think about Maurice’s death, and the story Aubrey Deville had told about this. And suddenly, in a flash, I saw the truth!’

He glared fiercely, challengingly, at the boy.

‘Now then, you’re very clever, but I wonder if you’re clever enough to guess what the clue was that everyone had missed all along until I stumbled on it? A clue so blatant and obvious it was staring us all in the face all the time and yet we ignored it? Can you, eh?’

Steve shook his head. He hadn’t been expecting this. The old man grinned from ear to ear with satisfaction.

‘His name!’ he crowed. ‘Aubrey Deville. Deville! Take away the last two letters and what does it spell?’

The clock whirred like a slow-flying insect and struck six times.

‘D,E,V,I,L!’ the old man shouted. ‘It was he who lured Maurice Jeffries to his death that night, by means of black magic! And when he followed him to the trysting-house, it was not to try and save Maurice from his fate. On the contrary, he went to gloat over his creature’s act of self-destruction! Don’t you see!’