Less than two weeks after his return to the front he found himself in an assault on the north Cambrin salient. It was one of those early winter skirmishes that no one would remember. It began with a bombardment to soften the German trenches and cut the wire. Most of the shells were shrapnel and relatively ineffective. Following the bombardment the better part of two battalions left their trenches and proceeded into no man's land. The Germans responded with six surviving machine guns and cut them to shreds.

After an awful muddle at the wire Gray led two platoons across the sodden slopes before crossfire forced them into the shell craters. He spent the afternoon dispensing morphia and tossing an occasional grenade. Toward dusk the survivors returned, not in a panic but stolidly, benumbed, as if from a football match. Bursting shrapnel took a few more lives. There was some consolation when word reached the line that a particularly odious captain had died—apparently from heart failure after a shell fragment had grazed the back of his neck.

By the end of the year the war had degenerated into a stagnant slaughter, and frustration began mounting all along the Western Front. Commanding officers were continually leaving in disgrace as one offensive action after another failed to break the deadlock. For a while there was much talk about the crack Canadian units, and certain basic tactical changes. Then after still another stalled offensive, it seemed that everyone was talking about traitors and spies —the traditional excuse for military incompetence.

As for Gray, his thoughts were of Zelle, no matter the cold or the mudflats and shell craters, or the corpses and the blood.

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty

IF only she had stayed away from the war, if only she had stayed away and lived like other lonely women, collecting rags for the Red Cross, sewing bandages and knitting mittens. If only she could have kept herself out of it for a year or two, then possibly even the ones like Dunbar would have ignored her . . .

Dunbar. At the outset of the war his days were consumed with menial tasks. The nights were worse. For the first month he worked with an Admiralty cipher team, helping piece together a network of merchant seamen, drafting two or three estimates of German industrial capability and lunching foreign representatives that no one else would tolerate. On slack afternoons he kept himself occupied with the telegraph intercepts, and on solitary evenings he read or walked. Women continued to elude him.

It was not until late October that Dunbar returned to the question of Zelle. He and Southerland met in a Kensington chophouse, an inconspicuous place where no one of importance ate. It was raining, and Dunbar had a cold. The tabloids carried headlines of a disaster at sea, but it was local events that especially troubled Southerland.