Page 30 of The Unknown Birds

Ashley scrambled up the ladder before her nerves could fail her, into the pandemonium above. Not flying, but more like swimming through a murky fishbowl.

She charged through the wall of fiery bullets and smoke so thick it blotted out the sun, rifle in her hand though she dared not open fire. Even Tom’s red runner’s band was lost within the deadly shroud.

Enemy fire brushed past so close it tickled. Shrapnel as fine as sand singed her skin like spattering grease.

She stumbled over the uneven ground, riddled with craters, tripping over fallen rucksacks, fallen people trapped in mud—Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans—they were all just men, all looked the same writhing on the ground in pools of ruby blood.

Ash ran up on Rook’s football, nestled between two dead soldiers whose names she didn’t know. Though her goggles, fogged and splattered, made it difficult to read, she could just make out the words he’d scribbled, no referee.

She kicked it and kept running, running, running, chasing the ball as Rook had told her to drown out the moans and cries which bled together in a sanguine symphony as the whistling, shrieking, drumming artillery searched out each new victim to fall face first until the river ran with blood.

Chapter 11

London, February 1939

When it is peace, then we may view again

With new-won eyes each other’s truer form

And wonder. Grown more loving-kind and warm

We’ll grasp firm hands and laugh at the old pain,

When it is peace. But until peace, the storm

The darkness and the thunder and the rain.

—Charles Hamilton Sorley

To Germany

For days after the lecture, Ash was haunted by dreams of the Somme. Night after restless nightmare, she found herself slogging through God’s thickest mud while fire rained from heaven and grown men wept tears of angels.

Each morning when she opened her eyes, they landed first on the government-distributed gas mask, abandoned on a chair in the corner where she had dumped it the day it arrived, unwilling to contemplate a future where it would be needed.

Still and all, each morning was somehow brighter, the promise that today might be the day she’d go see Rook sweeping away the gloomy cobwebs for a time.

She should have sought him out the morning after her lecture, but she managed to convince herself it was all a dream. She might have gone the day after that, but her feelings were too much a jumble of love and fear and grief. Then a letter arrived from a photographer asking her to turn her lecture into an article to accompany his photographs in Picture Post, and another chance had come and gone again.

Ash prepared for each day like she was going into battle, pulling on first one stocking and then the other, her civilian uniform, like the puttees that wrapped her legs in France. Then she painted on a mask so her students might not see fear written in the shadows beneath her eyes.

Of course they knew something was coming—everybody knew. The children had been issued gas masks too. But they wouldn’t know it from her, on that point she was determined.

Instead, she taught them subtext and poetic form, and she pretended every moment wasn’t in vain, putting one foot in front of the other just as Rook had shown her in the trenches of the Somme.

“I don’t want to write an essay on war poetry,” young Madeline complained. “I don’t want to study poems written by boys.”

“You can choose any poem you like. It doesn’t have to be from the war,” Ash assured her.

“You prefer war poets.”

“Perhaps I do. But if you think they were all boys, then you haven’t been paying attention.”

Deciding the children had been cooped up from too much winter learning, Ash turned them loose to run as fast as lions and fly on falcons’ wings.

“Are we downhearted?” she asked as they escaped onto the playground.

“No, Miss!” they laughed. Silly teacher, always saying silly things.