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Tom shrugged. ‘I can at least send a note to Division headquarters that we tried.’

‘Fair enough, sir,’ Ferguson agreed but he didn’t sound convinced, even with his expression carefully schooled.

As Tom reached for his rifle with a sigh he heard the telltale sound of artillery arriving.

‘Sounds close, lads,’ Ferguson yelled and these were the last words that Sergeant Tom Fletcher heard before he used the chaos to slip over the parapet with the small patrol crew and lope behind them. He waited momentarily for explosions to light the sky directly above him so he could hunt for those innovative new shell casings. It took three blasts before he found two, managing to clasp one of them just as his enemy got its range accurate. It was as though in those intervening seconds before the next artillery and killing blast arrived Tom knew his decision to keep his promise to his superiors meant he would break an oath to Rose Fletcher to stay alive – no heroics.

His world exploded with all of his highly attuned senses instantly engaged; a shower of crimson, bright and wet, accompanied the snarling report of guns and the dreaded smell of cordite mixing with human waste and all things rotten. He could feel the cloying mud of northern France swallowing him into its bleak grey grave as he lay stunned and motionless. Tom tasted the giveaway sweet and salty tang and no sooner had he swallowed a gulp than his throat filled once more with his lifeblood.

The drain of Europe was opening to him and it was his turn to pass into its depths. The ground beneath him felt unstable too, gobbling him into it as an old trench collapsed beneath him.

There was no pain, more a sense of letting go, although his body fought the urge. The first of his senses to steal away from him was his hearing and he was accepting of it, given that the sound of guns, of men in pain and the fearsome roar of war turned initially distant and then quietened. This allowed Tom’s internal battle to rage silently while his heart fought bravely to beat as Death weakened each courageous spasm of that once-relentless muscle, which surely believed it had many millions more beats in it. While Death travelled through, callous and silent, now stealing his sense of smell, he realised he could no longer feel his legs, his arms, or even the mud that consumed him . . . and, curiously, it felt like he was escaping the war and didn’t mind this oddity of disappearing sense by sense.

Nevertheless, as Tom’s pulse weakened and he struggled to clear the bubbling in his throat, two notions irked him, each hovering like a dark grey rat with a beady gaze that jeered: ‘We’ll save you for later, but why not gnaw on these thoughts, Tom, as you die?’

The first rat mocked that his beloved mother would now have to grieve over two sons and neither of them had given her the long-hoped-for grandson yet so the family name might continue. The second rat taunted viciously about his stupidity at not tasting the chocolate from the King’s Tin as he slipped towards death with hollow, red-rimmed eyes staring up at the grey dome above. Finding a last blockade of strength, he banished the grey demons in his mind and forced his last thought to be about beauty and he conjured the girl packing the King’s gift for him. She blew him a kiss.

Nevertheless, the resonating emotion that Tom Fletcher took with him as the mud of northern France sucked him deeper and rain fell harder was a deep regret that some other lucky bastard would catch the kiss blown by the girl in the factory.

8

3 OCTOBER 1918

Harry Blake thought his injury in March this year had meant he’d never have to set foot on a battlefield again, yet here he was limping around Artois, where some of the fiercest fighting of the war had taken place. He’d rejoined the 20th Battalion London Regiment, part of the 141st Brigade and 47th Division in Calais from where they were liberating towns and villages as they moved through the region. The big one would be Lille. To reclaim that major city for the French would require a parade, surely? The phrase ‘Great War’ had caught on and it’s how he suspected most British would refer to the vast number of battles and the bloodshed that had occurred right across Europe as far to the east as the Dardenelles.

At this moment, though, Harry found himself in an abandoned battlefield near Fromelles pondering the thrilling notion of the war ending and that he was part of the broom that was sweeping the Germans backwards and out of France, sending them scuttling to their homeland to await Europe’s collective wrath.

Harry wondered whether he would still be in the thick of fighting the seemingly never-ending war, had the Americans not joined the Allies last year. Fresh and eager, they’d made the difference and were the reason why fighting was now sporadic. The Germans were on the run and facing vast pressure from the people at home, beginning to starve due to the British naval blockade of German ports. Defeat was inevitable and Harry didn’t think anyone, not even the re-energised Allies, could face another winter of war; there was high hope final victory would be achieved in the next few weeks.

He brought his mind back to his regiment’s clean-out through this northern region; part of their job was to mark any fallen soldiers for full identification, retrieval, notification to families and ultimately for a proper burial. He’d wanted this role more than any other but did he really think he could find his beloved brother, missing from this very region since mid-1915, and presumed dead? He had to try . . . at least believe that he could find him. He had to be able to get into bed in the future when the demons visited and remind himself that he had done all that was possible to locate Ed.

Harry attempted to ignore the familiar sucking sound of the mud as it tried to hold him, dragging him deeper. In time these fields for as far as his eyes could see would lose their scorched-earth appearance but for now a wasteland they remained, with the bodies of far too many men enriching their soil. He stood, hands on hips, looking across the naked land, saddened by its destruction.

This is how the moon must look, he thought absently before he returned to frown at the large sheet unfolded in his hands. According to the maps the landscape here undulated softly and yet the rich earth appeared entirely flat with mud the colour of wet cement.

He’d visited this region as a child, knew it from his history lessons to be like an avenue of invitation to invading armies that had frequently traversed over centuries, from the era of the Celts to the Germans of 1918, who figured they too should own this part of France. Over time it had been divided up repeatedly and it was really only a hundred years previous, during the Congress of Vienna, that the original French boundary was re-established.

Its temperate climate made it an easy place to live and it was close enough to the British coast that on a clear day you could see the famed white cliffs of Dover from Port Calais. Where he stood in this moment though used to be woods, he recalled. He’d holidayed here a few times as a boy when his parents had spent time in Paris. He’d been placed with a French family, friends of friends of friends probably. He hadn’t minded; his parents were going to be doing grown-up things in Paris and he was happy to ride bikes and pick blackberries. The bonus was he enjoyed the youngsters he found himself plonked among and his French improved out of sight as a result. By the time his parents came to reclaim him after a month, he was as brown as a nut and chattering in the language of his new mates. They’d played hide-and-seek as eight-year-olds; by ten their imaginations were fired by Dumas’s stories of The Three Musketeers in this very region. He’d easily pictured himself as D’Artagnan as he and his local friends would wage duels or track quarry to the Lys River that Harry had crossed only the previous day. In fact, if memory served him right, some of the final chase by the rampaging musketeers for Milady took place in and around Fromelles.

By the time he’d turned twelve and was back for another holiday, his French friends had cousins staying from the south – pretty girls with bronzed skin and a desire to play a game he knew back home as kiss chase. Harry had gone to an all-boys’ school so this game was not seen outside of fun in the park. In fact, he’d only played it once at a birthday party and found it tame, supervised by adults who did most of the chortling with looks of adoration as their youngsters pressed a sticky kiss on the equally chubby cheeks laden with cake icing of another child if they were caught. This game in France, however, and with the southern girls, was an amorous one and to a serious, near twelve-year-old English lad from Sussex, it was nothing if not deeply erotic. When he had caught dark-haired Antoinette, with eyes the colour of the azure waters off Nice, where she came from, he hesitated. A sudden rush of blood and longing meant he didn’t want to plant only a peck on her cheek the colour of a ripe peach, with the same velvet feel against his lips. And clearly she knew this. Antoinette was nearly fourteen, he learned later, which would explain why there was nothing chaste about her lingering kiss on his slightly chapped mouth. When she pulled away she laughed but Harry had wanted to dissolve into her arms, never letting go. Desire had caught him, threatened to humiliate him. He’d melted away behind the trees to wait for that guilty embarrassment to dissipate as her laughter echoed through the woods.

He wouldn’t have said no to learning more if she had offered to show him how to . . .

‘Sir?’

He cleared his throat and glanced at his watch, banishing the guilt that surged through him at being caught daydreaming. It was just past nine-thirty and the thin autumn sunshine this morning was pleasant on his back.

‘Sorry, Corporal, miles away. It doesn’t take much imagination to see how fierce the fighting was here.’

‘Yes, sir. It’s been a vicious battlefield as we gained ground and lost it repeatedly.’

‘I gather the Germans pushed us aside here only earlier this year.’

The man at his side nodded, and cut through the air horizontally with his arm. ‘They swept us back several miles.’

Harry shook his head. Right now it was hard to fully appreciate the relatively small stretch of ground they’d fought over, and the lives lost so ruthlessly and pointlessly in holding it.

‘Three years ago this was no-man’s-land . . . right where we stand,’ he murmured, frowning at the map. His companion nodded sadly, saying nothing. ‘There have to be men below this spot, Corporal, because there are too many who were in trenches just about here —’ he pointed, ‘who are unaccounted for. We know the Bavarians buried about two hundred and fifty Allied soldiers over there,’ he mused, gesturing south. ‘That’s Pheasant Wood, although it doesn’t look like that right now. It was a particularly fierce winter in 1915 and the trenches weren’t stable in this region. They were collapsing constantly. So men would have gone over the top just about where we stand and would have died here, not recovered, according to what we know.’