He picked up his rifle again and started to crawl on his belly up and out of the crater.

‘I’ll send help to you,’ he told the sergeant. They both knew that by now, many of the trenches that had formerly been neat and effective would be battered beyond recognition. The officers would be facing difficulty in getting up supplies; communication and the movement of medical assistance or ammunition would all be encumbered for many hours to come. The first objective was not aid; it was that the men held on and consolidated their hard-won positions.

Howard looked out and saw little other than smoky shadows, dense and dire. From his low position he could just about discern some English soldiers continuing the advance. One or two of the wounded were crawling without a focus or even recognition of where they were supposed to be heading. He saw it before they did.

‘Get down, get down, take cover!’ he yelled. Reflexively, he leapt out of the crater and started to run towards the English soldiers. He pulled on their arms, frantically trying to drag them back down into the crater. Confused, they struggled with him, scared of appearing to retreat, unsure of his advice.

‘Unhand me, man!’ Howard recognised the voice a fraction of a moment before he caught the man’s face. Aubrey.

The blast shook the ground, like a cat shaking a mouse. Long arms of flame leapt from the shattered earth; savage, merciless heat battered them. Some of them were blown to bits, body parts and flesh raining down. Others were alight, their clothes blazing as they yelled and flailed in agony; men made into living torches for a second or two before they were cinders. Ashes to ashes. Howard smelt flesh burning and realised it was his own. The length of his left leg was on fire. He fell to the floor and rolled in the mud, beating the flames with his hands, hardly noting his palms scorching. If he’d been just a foot further to the left, he would have been totally incinerated. Men writhed in agony, thrashing like fish on a quayside. With smoking hair and limbs, blackened and burnt bodies, those who could walk fell back, forsaking the filthy ground where their dead lay.

Still firing potshots, flinging grenades if they could, the men ran to the trenches that Howard had scrambled through earlier, the same trenches some of them had set off from several bloody hours previously.

47

‘YOU’VE COARSENED.’

‘How lovely to see you, Mother.’

‘Is it your nose? Your lips? Are you drinking?’

‘No.’ Yes. Yes, she drank now. Enough to make life’s sharpness a little less nasty. No more than other women who waited for their loves to return, but more than her mother would deem appropriate.

Mrs Foster held out a slender arm, indicating that Vivian ought to help her from the automobile, although in fact she was perfectly sprightly and in no real need of any physical assistance; clearly she missed the services of a driver or a butler. All that that went with and all that it meant. She cast a glance up at the house, her eyes narrowing a fraction. She cast another around the neat hall and tidy drawing room. She didn’t say anything; she didn’t need to. The slight tightening of her lips, the almost imperceptible rise of her eyebrows, effectively conveyed disappointment.