In Pale Battalions by Robert Goddard

promise of roasting heat. Lake led us over the top at 7:30 a.m. The men had been instructed to walk steadily across no man’s land towards lines whose occupants were by then supposed to have been shelled out of the way. Naturally, they had not been. Instead, they were ready and waiting to machine-gun the bunched ranks of slowly advancing troops. Round Thiepval, the sloping ground compounded our plight. I was hit before I had gone ten yards. Ahead of me, I saw Lake go down, and dozens more with every moment I watched, shorn like wheat by the scything fire.
    Surprised to find myself still alive, I crawled back to our trench. You could say I was lucky. Lucky to be hit before I’d gone far and to finish with nothing worse than a smashed shoulder. Yet no man who fought on the Somme that day should be called lucky. Ill fortune attended all our parts. With Hallows gone, I am not sure I much cared whether I lived or died. Perhaps that is why I survived.
    A week later, I was in a hospital bed in London. England, in the summer of 1916. That, I suppose, is where my strange tale has its true beginning.
     

two
    Iwas not in bad shape. Towards the middle of August I was transferred from hospital to a guest house in Eastbourne, taken over for convalescent officers. We were an odd collection, glad to be recovering but reticent about returning to France. Things had been going badly on the Somme—there was no other way they could go. The daily roll of honour read like a petition against inhuman generals. I picked my way along the seafront past old ladies and young men in Bath chairs, thinking—sometimes—that I could hear the guns across the Channel. Who, in the brightly painted charm of an English seaside resort, could believe that it was really happening?
    Cousin Anthea paid me several visits. What was I going to do?
    Spend some time in Berkshire? Discussing the Somme with my uncle was a ghastly prospect, yet I would have to make up my mind: my shoulder was healing well and I would soon be discharged.
    Early in September came salvation: a letter—unsolicited—from a benevolent society for injured officers, whose patron, the Countess of Kilsyth, arranged, so I gathered, for victims of the war—provided they were of suitable breeding—to be farmed out to the country houses of her titled acquaintances for rest and re-cuperation. I sat in a deckchair on the guest house balcony reading the letter with some relief, relief which became surprise when I turned to the attachment, a note from the particular household I was invited to join. The vellumed letterhead read: Meongate, Droxford, Hampshire . It was from Lord Powerstock: “Having heard 72

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    so much of you from my late son, I am hopeful that Lady Kilsyth will send you to us.” And she had. I was to keep my promise after all.
    I reached Droxford railway station in the late morning of a fine Indian summer’s day. No other passengers got off on the raked-gravel platform, though the train waited whilst crates of watercress were loaded. I walked out through the booking hall in a state of trance. Behind me, a whistle blew and the train moved out. A ticket collector, red-faced from doubling as a porter, caught me up and took my ticket with a smile and a comment on the weather. Then I was alone on the forecourt, wondering what to do next. I’d been told I would be collected, but there was no sign of anybody. The train chugged off along the valley and silence began to settle around me in the heat. A swarm of gnats hung beneath the carved eaves of the station building. Somewhere, a dove was cooing.
    Then, along the lane, there came on the gentle breeze a jingle of harness and a clopping of hooves. A pony and trap came into view, making fair speed, and wheeled into the yard. It stopped beside me, the pony pulling up with a stamp that raised some dust.
    Dust that hung and drifted, a little like gas . . . but settled more quickly. I looked up at the driver: a stout,