I imagine you’ve gathered by now that I’m feeling quite buoyant and joyful today. I am. Remember I am worth fighting for, my love. I am worth staying alive for. Come home.

Ever yours,

Vivian

She reread the only risky phrases, You will adore her when you see her and When you come home I’ll cover you with kisses. A surge of nausea and threat sluiced over her like water thrown from a bucket over a cobbled street. She didn’t want to challenge God or fate or whatever with any sort of arrogance or certainty. She didn’t want them to feel the need to teach her a lesson. Yet she could not write if. Risk killing him with ill-wishing. It was all superstition and unscientific, but she dared not dismiss anything. She clung. She lived in absolute terror, wondering how they had endured it. The women whose men had been there for years. Were there such women, or did the men all die too soon?

She never chastised him for not writing.

46

IT WAS RUMOURED by the top brass that even Field Marshal Douglas Haig had reservations about carrying out the offensive in Epehy on 18th September 1918. The British losses that year had been beyond comprehension; how much more could they take? The tally numbed some men and sent others into a state of mania. Howard wondered about the word ‘casualty’. It was insulting; there was nothing casual about it. Sometimes that sort of thing made him furious. Who had decided that was the correct term? It made him want to rip off heads, beat people, scream, kick, punch with anger, the pacifist in him well and truly obliterated. Other times he could see the temptation to drop into the sanitised word, let it catch him. It seemed calming. Almost. Something near peaceful, he supposed. He had witnessed men blown apart – one minute they were there, the next gone – and he’d seen men shot, their bodies slumping into death in an instant. There was something dismissive about these fast deaths, something that might allow those who had never set foot on a battlefield to call them casualties. It wasn’t the correct word for the injured, though. The tortured. The men who screamed in agony, those who had lost their faces, their legs, their hands, which in fact meant they had lost the chance to sit with their children without scaring them, lost the ability to dance, run or – often – work, lost their chance to touch their women’s breasts or thighs. These consequences were not casual, or swift; they were brutal, perpetual.

He began to imagine that at night, if he stayed still and quiet enough, he would surely hear the wives, mothers, sweethearts and children howling from across the Channel, contesting the casualties. Had the generals heard them too? Was that why there was for the first time a hint of caution, the suggestion that the men needed to rest? If so, it didn’t last. Haig had a change of mind when news arrived of the British Third Army’s victory at the Battle of Havrincourt on the 13th. It was in fact a modest breakthrough, but it was something. Haig thought it was worth exploiting the upturn in the Allies’ morale, the assumed plunge in that of the enemy’s. He approved General Rawlinson’s plan to clear German outpost positions on the high ground. They had to go on. Forward, forward, always forward. There was no going back now.