Marius finished, ‘He must know him.’

‘And if he’s spoken to him recently, Father Gaulle will know about us.’

‘Father Gaulle must be Benedict,’ Marius groaned.

Aimee looked at the door. ‘And this isn’t a safe place. It’s a prison. We’re trapped.’

Chapter Six: ‘The dead live on in the memory of the living’

Chapter Six

‘The dead live on in the memory of the living’

30 August 1918: Cléry

Father Gaulle stepped over the puddled cobbles of Cléry and hurried up the slight hill to the farmlands to the north. His black priest’s robes flapped around his ankles and his face was set hard as one of his statues. The row of cottages were like a gap-toothed mouth where German shells had landed as the British escaped to the west five months earlier.

The wrecked road up to the ridge had been roughly mended. Smashed gun-carriages, lorries, wagons and cart wheels had not been cleared from the ditches and the fields. They lay twisted and rotting where they had been abandoned.

The priest stopped for breath and looked back. The bridges over the Somme had been blown apart then patched every time one of the armies had fled and the other had followed. Graves with simple wooden crosses were clumped in corners of common land. German and British shared the cold, wet clay.

The farm that Father Gaulle was making for was about the same size as the Fletcher farm back in Bray and the barn was being used as a hospital. This one was full of British soldiers wounded in the fight for Peronne.

There were nurses and doctors hurrying around the men – some groaning, some chatting, some snoring and some too far gone to make any sound. The smell was as bad as any cattle byre and the disinfectant made it all worse.

The nurses didn’t seem to notice but Father Gaulle’s nose curled up. One of them smiled at him brightly. ‘Have you come to give the last rites to the dying?’ she asked.

‘No, I’ve come to find a Sergeant Grimm... I brought him in three days ago to have his ankle treated?’

‘Ah, the walking wounded are in the tents in the field.’

‘Thank you,’ the priest said with a small bow.

‘Aren’t you going to pray for the dying?’ the nurse asked.

‘Not today, Fraulein,’ the priest said and his eyes looked sad. As he turned away those eyes became stone hard again. ‘If they are British dying they can go straight to hell without my help,’ he muttered.

Sergeant Grimm was sitting on a cot bed playing cards with a young soldier, gambling for matchsticks. He looked up and nodded to Father Gaulle.

‘Good morning, Sergeant,’ the priest said in English.

‘Good morning, Father. I hope you are well?’ Silver Hand replied.

The priest didn’t have time for polite chat. He said, ‘Sergeant, can you take a walk with me?’