By the Green of the Spring Read online

  By the Green of the Spring

  JOHN MASTERS

  To the victims of the Great War

  among whom were the survivors

  Contents

  Aftermath

  Chapter 1. January 1, 1918

  Chapter 2. The Western Front: Wednesday, February 13, 1918

  Chapter 3. Rawalpindi, Punjab, India: late February, 1918

  Chapter 4. France: mid March, 1918

  Chapter 5. London and Kent: Thursday, March 14, 1918

  Chapter 6. The Somme: Thursday, March 21, 1918 – the Vernal Equinox

  Chapter 7. The West Swin, Thames Estuary: Thursday, April 18, 1918

  Chapter 8. Hedlington, Walstone: Wednesday, May 8, 1918

  Chapter 9. Walstone: Wednesday, May 22, 1918

  Chapter 10. The Western Front: Thursday, August 1, 1918

  Chapter 11. The Western Front: August, September, 1918

  Chapter 12. Hedlington and Walstone: late September, 1918

  Chapter 13. Walstone., Kent: Sunday, October 13, 1918

  Chapter 14. London: October, 1918

  Chapter 15. The Western Front: November, 1918

  Chapter 16. Armistice Day, Monday, November 11, 1918

  Chapter 17. To the ‘Khaki Election’, December 14, 1918

  Chapter 18. London and Kent: January, 1919

  Chapter 19. Flanders: January, 1919

  Chapter 20. London: February, 1919

  Chapter 21. The United States of America: March, 1919

  Chapter 22. Hedlington, Kent: April, 1919

  Chapter 23. North-West Frontier, India: May, 1919

  Chapter 24. The Great Air and Road Races: June, 1919

  Chapter 25. Dublin: Friday, July 4, 1919

  Chapter 26. Cologne, Paris, London: August, 1919

  Chapter 27. Vale of Scarrow, Kent: September, 1919

  Chapter 28. Fort Defiance, Arizona: Thursday, September 25, 1919

  Chapter 29. England and Germany: October, 1919

  Chapter 30. Hedlington: Wednesday, October 22, 1919

  Chapter 31. Hassanpore, India: October, 1919

  Chapter 32. England, Arizona: November, 1919

  Chapter 33. England: December, 1919

  Chapter 34. Kent: Christmas, 1919

  Family Tree

  A Note on the Author

  Aftermath

  Have you forgotten yet? …

  For the world’s events have rumbled on since those gagged days.

  Like traffic checked while at the crossing of city-ways: And the haunted gap in your mind has filled with thoughts that flow

  Like clouds in the lit heaven of life; and you’re a man reprieved to go,

  Taking your peaceful share of Time, with joy to spare.

  But the past is just the same – and War’s a bloody game … Have you forgotten yet? …

  Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you’ll never forget.

  Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at Mametz –

  The nights you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on parapets?

  Do you remember the rats; and the stench

  Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench –

  And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with hopeless rain?

  Do you ever stop and ask, ‘Is it all going to happen again?’

  Do you remember that hour of din before the attack –

  And the anger, the blind compassion that seized and shook you then

  As you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your men?

  Do you remember the stretcher-cases lurching back

  With dying eyes and lolling heads – those ashen-grey

  Masks of the lads who once were keen and kind and gay?

  Have you forgotten y et? …

  Look up, and swear by the green of the spring that you’ll never forget.

  Siegfried Sassoon (March 1919)

  Chapter 1

  January 1, 1918

  As the arc of night passes westward over Europe, its veil of darkness is drawn across a continent in ruins. The war, that started with the assassination of an Austrian Archduke late in June of 1914, has engulfed most of the world. The United States is fighting now, alongside Great Britain, France, Italy, Portugal, and a host of lesser Allies. Russia, Holy no longer, has been knocked out, freeing more of Germany’s still giant strength to be used against France and Britain on the Western Front. The ramshackle Austro-Hungarian Empire is struggling for its life among those savage peaks and high valleys which are its common border with Italy. France has suffered tremendous blows at Verdun in 1916, and all but collapsed in 1917; but has held. The British have bled themselves white attacking on the Somme in 1916 and at Ypres in 1917.

  There are no more fleet actions at sea, only in the air. The war is waged over cities, under the earth, under the sea. Women die, rent by bombs. Children die, starved. On the battlefields men die by the millions, under machine-gun bullets and artillery shells.

  The year of 1918 must be the year of decision, for the enormous strength of America is flowing to the battle at an ever-increasing pace. If Germany is to win on the field, it must be soon, for she is bleeding from manpower loss, from blockade. And the peoples of the world … can they stand another year?

  Walstone, Kent: Tuesday, January 15, 1918

  John Merritt sat back in the first-class compartment, watching the familiar countryside slide by, now clear and green in the winter sun, now hidden by drifting puffs of brilliant white lambswool steam from the engine up ahead … familiar, in that he could recognise the places – there was the spire of Whitmore church pointing heavenward out of bare trees to the south; there was the Scarrow meandering down the shallow valley; there was the very place he had once walked with Stella, shortly after they were married, watching the moorhens in the reeds … yet all unfamiliar, too, because he was wearing the single gold bars of a 2nd Lieutenant of the United States Army, and the crossed cannons of the Field Artillery; because, having been gone barely nine months, England itself seemed strange, this carriage so small, the compartment so pokey, the grass out there so green even though it was mid-winter, the oast houses on the slope so like cowled monks. The brakes were moaning apologetically, the train slowing, the engine piping a short, high whistle … again, how strange!

  He rose, smoothing down the long front of his greatcoat, took his peaked cap off the rack and set it square on his head, found his woollen gloves and slowly pulled them on to his big hands, lifted his rolled officer’s valise off the rack, and put it on the opposite seat. The train eased to a stop opposite a long wooden signboard – WALSTONE.

  John stepped down, a tall serious-looking young man with dark brown hair and grey eyes, a new maturity in him marked by tiny crows’ feet at the corners, and lines sharp but as yet shallow in his cheeks. His father-in-law was there to meet him; even taller, nearly thirty years older, thin, sandy, the face thoughtful, to the point of sadness – Christopher Cate: squire of Walstone, father of Stella. He stepped forward now, hand outstretched – ‘Johnny!’

  John pulled off his right glove, took the other’s hand, and shook it formally. He had grown very fond of his father-in-law, and admired him; but there was always a constraint. He would have liked to have hugged him, but in addition to the old English reserve there was now the unresolved problem between them: what had happened to Stella?

  Christopher said, ‘Betty wanted to come, and your Aunt Isabel, but …’

  ‘Is she here?’ Johnny exclaimed. ‘How is she?’

  ‘Three toes were slightly frostbitten when she was in the lifeboat, and the doctors in London think she might lose one of them sooner or later, but … she’s here. That’s what matters
.’

  John nodded. Isabel Kramer was his aunt – his father’s widowed sister; and he knew that for nearly two years she had been in love with Christopher Cate and he with her; but Mrs Cate had vanished underground with the Sinn Fein in Ireland soon after the outbreak of war … so Christopher and Isabel could not marry. But this was the first time the man he called Father Christopher in his letters had openly acknowledged their love.

  A young woman in breeches, farmer’s jacket, and felt hat came forward to take his valise and he exclaimed, ‘Oh now, miss …’ But Cate said, smiling, ‘This is Bertha, head groom and stable staff, all in one. Norton joined the Garrison Artillery a week ago. He’s past the age for conscription but he said he felt he had to do his bit, so …’

  The girl had taken the valise and was leading the way off the platform into the station yard. They climbed into the trap, Bertha cracked the whip, and the pony set off at a steady trot towards the Manor. Neither Cate nor John spoke, for what they had to say was personal and painful.

  At the Manor they at once went indoors, as Garrod the maid came forward to take John’s valise. They turned into the drawing-room and John paused. His sister Betty was running towards him with open arms; behind her he saw his Aunt Isabel in an armchair, a big walking stick leaning against the arm. Beside her stood a man he did not for a moment recognise – weather-beaten face, Royal Navy uniform, three straight gold stripes on his sleeve – a commander … then he remembered; it was Tom Rowland, Mrs Cate’s brother, Stella’s uncle.

  Betty kissed her brother on both cheeks, hugging him tight; then John stooped to kiss his aunt, and felt her cheek wet with tears; then the commander came forward, ‘Hope you don’t feel I’m intruding, Johnny … but I am very fond of Stella, too. Always have been. And I’m now stationed in Chatham, only a few miles away.’

  John said, ‘I’m glad you’re here, sir.’ He spoke to them all — ‘My battery commander has given me a week’s leave to try to find her. But first, what happened? How? Why?’

  No one spoke for what seemed to John a long time, then his father-in-law said, ‘She had become a drug addict, John …’ John noticed that now Father Christopher, like his friends at the School of Fire and in the battery, felt that he was no longer ‘Johnny’, but ‘John’: a man still young but aware of tragedy.

  He said, ‘Is there any proof?’

  ‘When she disappeared, and we started making enquiries, the midwife who delivered the baby in October confirmed that she had marks on her arms that could only have been made by repeated injections from a hypodermic needle.’

  John said, ‘What drug was she supposed to have been taking?’

  ‘Heroin,’ Cate said. ‘The night she disappeared – Christmas Eve night – she was trying to get a prescription for heroin filled. The chemist she went to on Wilmot Street, down near the river in Hedlington, was closed, but he lives above his shop, and heard a fight in the street below. By the time he could get down and out there was no one visible except the figure of a woman walking towards the river. He thought there might have been some men running up the street, in the opposite direction … it was snowing, but not hard … He called after the woman, asking if she was all right. For a time she didn’t seem to hear, then she turned and slowly came back up towards him. She said, “Are you the chemist?” and he said “Yes,” and she shouted … shrieked was his word – “I have a prescription! Fill it! It’s urgent!” He took her inside and she gave him the prescription. It was for heroin. He thought it might be forged and started to ask her “Whose signature is this?” when she grabbed the prescription and ran out … Her face was a bit bruised, one knuckle bleeding, and one arm hanging. He hurried out after her, but she was running away up the street, and in a few seconds disappeared in the snow …’

  John said grimly, ‘Has the river been dragged?’

  Isabel muttered, ‘Yes. She may have been thinking of that before the chemist came out … but not afterwards, I’m sure.’

  ‘What did she do, then?’

  ‘Went to London,’ Tom Rowland said. ‘You can disappear in London. You can get anything you want there, if you know where to look.’

  ‘And can pay,’ John said. ‘But a woman can always pay, can’t she?’

  ‘Don’t, don’t!’ Isabel cried.

  John said, ‘We have to face it, Aunt Isabel … What has been done so far, Father Christopher?’

  Cate said slowly, ‘I spoke privately to the Chief Constable … of Kent, that is. He has warned the Police in Canterbury and Hedlington – we don’t have any other real towns – and he has spoken to the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, in London. The drug world is not very large, as yet, the Commissioner told him, and they think they have a good chance of finding her within a few weeks … My dear boy, I can’t tell you how sad I am that this should have happened. I should have seen that something was wrong. I did see, but never guessed the truth. I thought she was lonely for you. I …’

  ‘Don’t blame yourself,’ John said briefly. ‘If anyone is to blame, other than Stella, it is I.’

  Cate said, ‘She took very little money with her.’ He looked full at his son-in-law – ‘You have suffered enough hurt through us. Leave us. Get an American divorce, and wash your hands of the whole beastly, sordid mess. Stella is our responsibility. We will find her and look after her.’

  ‘It’s the foul war!’ Isabel cried.

  John said nothing for a while, staring from one to the other of them. Yes, someone should have seen. But it was no use brooding on that. He said, ‘Thank you, Father Christopher, but I love Stella. Help me find her. And when we do, help me, this time, to understand her.’

  In Laburnum Lodge John felt that he was under water, the light filtering through depths of sea above. The curtains of the morning room were drawn back to reveal rain falling straight from a windless sky, an unshaped mass of unmoving, dark cloud above. There was no fire in the grate, for it was not a cold day … only damp, raw, and wet. Stella’s grandfather, Harry Rowland, Member of Parliament for the Mid-Scarrow Division of Kent, was sitting in his usual big chair. He looked older … well, of course, he was, nine months older; but he looked more than old – he looked shrunken. Opposite Harry, in a straight chair, sat Alice Rowland, his daughter, Stella’s aunt; and to the left, side by side on a big sofa, John and Louise Rowland – Harry’s second son and his wife.

  Alice said, ‘I blame myself, John’: she, too, had noticed the change in him. ‘… I saw quite a bit of her, until – ’ she gestured towards where her left leg had been before it had been blown off last August in an explosion at the shell factory where she had been working.

  Harry said, ‘I’ve spoken to the Commissioner, Johnny.’ The old eyes were sad, the beard thinner and whiter than John remembered – ‘They’re doing all that can be done. They’ll find her.’

  ‘It’s the war!’ Louise broke in fiercely. ‘It’s taken Stella just as surely as it took our Boy.’

  ‘Stella hasn’t gone for good,’ Alice broke in, looking at John.

  ‘I don’t mean that!’ the little woman with Yorkshire strong in her accent cried. ‘I mean that she would not have done it … how could she? … if the war hadn’t perverted everyone’s values, destroying the good, the sane, the kind – elevating the cruel, the depraved?’

  ‘Louise has joined the No Conscription Fellowship,’ Harry muttered, aside.

  John Rowland sat silent beside Louise, hands resting on his lap, eyes staring dully at the carpet. John remembered him as a bluff gentleman farmer, proud of his farm, of his son Boy, his daughter Naomi, of England. Then he’d joined the anti-war movement, but now … he was no more than a husk; all the energy seemed to have passed into his wife, the dead Boy’s mother. The German shell that killed Boy had killed him too, really.

  Alice said, ‘How can we help, John? Just tell us.’

  John said, ‘When we find her … or she comes back … help her. Love her. I’ll be over there. She’ll be alone again.’

 
‘Oh God, the war!’ Louise cried, her voice full of hatred.

  The car in the ditch, the three bodies sprawled in and under it, blood congealing in a pool on the ground, Margaret Cate and her three companions hurried up the field, picked up hidden bicycles and, twenty minutes later in the dark of the January evening, slipped into the backyard of a house in a long row of such, in Cashel, Tipperary, hid the machines in the toolshed, hid the weapons under the floorboards of an upstairs bedroom, and repaired to the house’s kitchen.

  ‘We got him,’ Michael Collins said. ‘He was the one in the back. Yours, Lady.’

  One of the other men said, ‘The driver was Tim Fergusson. He was a friend of mine.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Michael Collins said. He made no other apology. There was a war on. One of the men stoked the stove and put on a kettle. Collins picked a copy of the Irish Times off the scrubbed deal table and said to Margaret, ‘Did you see this?’

  ‘The notice? Yes.’

  She’d seen it that midday, when the paper arrived – a notice in the Agony column, reading Stella Merritt, née Cate, 21, missing from her home in Hedlington, Kent, since Christmas Eve 1917; 5'6", full figure, brown hair, blue eyes, small mole right cheek, thought to be in London: a substantial reward will be paid for any information leading to her discovery; anonymity guaranteed. Write Box 8905.

  Margaret said slowly, ‘That’s my daughter … she’s run away.’

  ‘Same as you did?’

  ‘I wish it was the same. But it isn’t. I don’t know what it’s all about. I suppose they’ve put the notice in the Irish Times so that I can write and they’ll tell me …’

  ‘Why don’t you? We can arrange it so they’ll never trace the letter.’

  Margaret hesitated. She saw her daughter as she had been when she cut the ties that bound her to her children: young, lovely, virginal … a child just become a woman. She hardened her heart; it was too distracting from her real concern, which was the freedom of Ireland. If it had been Laurence now, the son of her womb, her only son …

  She said shortly, ‘No … Thanks all the same.’