The Stars in the Night

10 October 1917

10 October 1917Harry squinted into the dugout, looking for Alex among the officers crowded together inside, all stinking of wet wool. The skipper was there all right. Harry saw a bandage around his calf as he tugged a boot back on. He looked up as Harry blocked the light.

‘Harry!’ He jumped to his feet. ‘There you are. Good. I was looking for you hours ago. Was the major hiding?’ As he spoke, Alex shook Harry by the shoulders. His fingers bit deep.

‘Found Moran all right, but he sent me back to Ellis. That’s what took so long. You hit? Skip?’ Harry added.

Alex grimaced. ‘Scratched. So you spoke to the artillery blokes? Cracking job on that gun emplacement. Pity we couldn’t get further ahead. It’ll be re-manned by now.’ He bent over his injured leg a moment, testing his weight. Harry said nothing, and Alex turned his head to look up at him. ‘What is it?’

Harry blinked. ‘Sir,’ he said. He pushed back the rim of his tin hat and rubbed his eyes, trying to remember something he had to say. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry it took so long. I couldn’t find you again. I took too long.’

Alex pulled him inside, away from the dugout entrance, and pushed him onto a box. Harry sat forward, elbows on knees.

The skipper crouched beside him. ‘Harry?’ Nothing. ‘Private Fletcher?’ No reply. Alex scanned him up and down, looking for a wound. He was soaked through, but the darker patches on him were only mud. Like everyone else, Alex knew Harry Fletcher to be the steadiest man in the section. He was probably just light-headed from fatigue. He took hold of Harry’s arm, felt him cold and shaking. ‘Harry? Are you all right?’

‘No.’ A shuddering breath. ‘No, sir. I took too long. It’s not all right.’ He looked down at his hands, gripped together. ‘Alex, have you seen Eddie? You didn’t send him after me or anything?’

‘Oh.’ It wasn’t the first word that came to him, but Alex Robertson wasn’t a man who swore very often. ‘No. He wanted to go with you, I remember. He’s too bloody tall for a runner, he knows that. He’s definitely not with the others?’

‘I can’t find them. I had a hell of a time finding you. I’ve seen Brown and Dixon. And Sergeant Wallis going back to battalion aid. He’s not too bad. Somebody said Lloyd copped it, and Lieutenant Kelly. Nobody’s seen Eddie.’

‘Oh. Damn it, Harry, I am sorry.’ Alex sighed. He leaned close in the dark. ‘We stayed where you left us, waiting. We all waited together. A couple of hours, it was. When the barrage moved ahead, we followed it. We got into their first trench but we didn’t have flank support, and Fritz overran us again. We split up to head back. We didn’t leave any wounded, I made sure of that. Eddie was with us, I saw him on the way back. He should have been with Carter’s group … I thought he was with the others.’ The captain shrugged. ‘He might have made it to another part of the line.’

Harry knew what that meant. ‘Or maybe he got hit.’

Alex frowned. ‘True. But we don’t know that. Let’s see what we can find out. We’ll ask along the line. Maybe somebody saw something. We’ll find Carter, he might know. We can check with the medics to see if he was brought in. At the very least we’ll find out something at parade. Harry, don’t give up just yet.’

Harry nodded and stood to let the captain go past him. I should never have left him. I should’ve let some other bastard go back. Where the hell is he? Bloody Eddie! He felt sick. He just had one small, stupid hope that Alex would fix it.

Robertson had to stoop to go through the dugout entrance and stay crouched as he moved along into the next traverse. He’d been with them over a year now. An age in this place. Time for monsters to evolve, and kill, and flee screaming from worse creations. Alex had been there longer than half the men he was responsible for. Time enough for two promotions, and for old hands like Fletcher to count him as ‘one of us’. Long enough to be ‘our bloke’. Long enough to know that the bond between Harry and Eddie was a byword with them all. Part of the unit’s history, like The Landing. Like morning stand-to and bully beef. A known constant in this unpredictable, astonishing place.

This place where everything you took for granted was smashed sooner or later.

Alex was sure they hadn’t left any wounded in enemy territory. He always checked that himself. He’d copped a tiny, spiteful remnant of shrapnel in his leg, but checked his own group in before getting the wound tidied up. Flanagan wasn’t one of them. If Eddie was hit, he was somewhere in no man’s land, and probably dead. Nobody could survive the bombardment Fritz was raining down. Certainly out of reach. Anyone out there, alive or dead, would have to wait.

He hoped Flanagan had tumbled over the parapet further along. Someone in the forward trench would know. There was a chance. Maybe. They struggled on. Alex craned round once or twice to check that Harry was following. He still looked shaken, but he wasn’t alone in that. They passed two men just sitting, staring; they’d come round soon enough, or someone would send them off to the dressing station. Reinforcements were cramming in, beaten hollow by the trek. Alex nodded encouragement to them, returned the odd grin of bravado. More men would make it down after dark. Stretcher-bearers heaved their way to the rear, a yard at a time. A chaplain was padding along where he shouldn’t have been, getting in the way, as usual. But there was no trace of Eddie Flanagan. Not even Carter could say exactly when he last saw him. He was in the advance, he was in the Boche trench; a good man with a bayonet, ‘Irish’ Eddie. But he wasn’t here now.

Alex dragged Harry out of the way of a Lewis gun crew. He spoke in Harry’s ear, above the din. ‘It doesn’t mean the worst. Not necessarily. We’ll find him. He’s probably with the medics now.’

Harry just looked at him.

‘Listen,’ shouted Alex, ‘you go and find Corporal Hartigan. He might know something. I’ll get a message through to the CCS. Come see me after you’ve spoken with Hartigan.’ He gave Harry a shove to set him on his way, but stood for a moment looking after him. Damn and damn. Fritz might have two for the price of one.

* * *

Harry found Darcy Hartigan and squatted alongside him. They kept well down. Darcy was bent almost double, head between his knees. They were lucky to have some cover. Fiery retaliations had answered their dawn advance, off and on, all day. On the upside, most of the parapet was still holding. On the other hand, nothing kept the rain out. As far as they could reckon, this was the eleventh counter-attack.

‘Have you seen Eddie?’ Harry asked. He felt it was a long time since he’d said any other words.

Hartigan grunted. ‘Not lately. We got split up, all of us. It was bloody shocking.’

Harry leaned closer. ‘What happened?’

‘Poelcappelle happened. We saw it. Well, the edge of it.’ Hartigan shook his head. ‘Take a long time to get to f*****g Berlin at this rate.’

‘What happened?’ repeated Harry.

‘I don’t know, Harry. I don’t know anything.’

‘s**t, Darce. Someone’s gotta know something.’ Harry bit down a shorter reply. He took Hartigan’s arm when the corporal lapsed again into silence, a human silence cocooned inside the terrific womb of noise. ‘All right, Smiler? Not hit, are you?’

Darcy shook his head and then got up as far as his knees. ‘No. No, just resting. I’m going back to see where the bloody reinforcements have got to. I’ll keep an eye out for Eddie.’ He got to his feet, still bowed in shelter, and nodded at Harry. ‘We’ll find him.’

‘Thanks, Darce. Take care how you go.’

Harry didn’t notice how Hartigan had steadied. It was one reason his officers valued him, that way he had of spreading calm around him in a tight place, as if he took all the tension into himself; it was something he did without thinking. He didn’t recognise, either, how the others took his lead. If Harry said, ‘Prentice is a dope,’ then they pegged the bloke a dope, no questions asked. If Harry said Robertson was the best sort of captain, then nobody in the section doubted it. He didn’t know they also watched him for signs of the famous temper that broke out every now and then in fistfights. Good man in a fight, Harry Fletcher. Best to stay near him, in the line or out. Just don’t get on his wrong side.

He started back toward the reserve trench. It was full of reinforcements and wounded, each man getting in the way of another man going in the opposite direction, effing and blinding for all they were worth. Harry stopped a lieutenant and then a sergeant for news, but nobody could tell him anything. It was obvious there’d be no pushing on to Passchendaele today. The poor bloody relieving troops looked shattered just getting from reserve placement into the forward trenches. Harry understood that; he hadn’t arrived in a very good state himself. He’d covered the ground three times since midnight, and his legs were threatening to stop taking orders from him. His feet were like cold lumps of marbled meat. He shivered at the thought.

He remembered telling Eddie to keep his bloody head down and sit tight. If only he hadn’t taken so long. All he had to do was let Moran know about the machine gun and get back. But Moran sent him on to the artillery behind, and then he couldn’t find his section when he returned a few hours later. First, they were out there somewhere, and then they were rolling back in. But not Eddie.

He checked the reserve and the support trenches. Nothing doing. He reported again to the skipper but there was no news from the CCS. Alex sent him back to Hartigan; the corporal, now acting sergeant, was still shaky, and the captain wanted Harry close by. After midnight, they chivvied their way past the next lot of relieving troops and dropped into the support trench for a few hours’ rest. They held roll call before dawn. The news was bad all round. Seven dead, fifteen badly wounded, another dozen getting patched up at battalion aid. Eddie was one of three that nobody had any clue about.

Robertson noted down all the information. He wrote ‘Missing believed killed’ beside Flanagan’s name, same for Jackson and Abernethy. It was no use putting ‘missing’; it only made battalion think the man had gone wandering away from the line. It was more to the point to write ‘KIA’, but he didn’t want to do that without being certain. Without tags to send down with the report. Yet Flanagan must be dead, whatever Harry thought. The battalion would eventually get back to him, asking for more information. They could wait, damn them. Wait until they found out something more. Maybe they’d find the bodies.

He wondered how long it would take until Harry acknowledged the truth. It wasn’t easy to convince him of anything he didn’t want to believe. Time would prove it; meanwhile, Alex would make sure he was kept busy. With two sergeants down, he told Harry to step back up to corporal’s duties.

On the 12th, at 05:25, they went forward again. Again they failed to reach the shattered village of Poelcappelle. Harry went ahead with one thought: to look for Eddie on the ground they had fought over on the 9th. But he didn’t recognise any landmarks among the pitted shell holes. He couldn’t even find the ditch where he’d left them, where he’d last seen Eddie. There were plenty of Aussie dead lying half-submerged out there. Not one live man. The Hun machine gun was manned again all right; the bastards had a field day. Harry was almost glad when the order came to retreat.

They regrouped, exhausted and cranky, in the damaged trenches they had climbed out of that morning. Again they left too many casualties behind them. Lack of energy more than lack of conviction limited their damning and blasting of headquarters and all its organisation. They saved some acrimony for bloody Fritz and set about resurrecting their own defences. Hours later, deep in the night, a runner reached their line, directing them to dig in and hold the ground they had gained. Harry compressed his lips amid the general laughter. He asked again for leave to go back, and this time Robertson let him go, a twenty-four-hour reprieve.