Chapter Text
April 1916
The Western Front
The news comes in a rare lull in shooting. Meriting no official announcement, it spreads through the trenches like fire and hearsay. Battle on the streets of Dublin. Hundreds killed. Rebels surrendered. With blood and faeces and vomit and death heavy in the air they breathe, it’s hard to imagine a place without gunfire. The cities of the empire under siege? Isn’t the whole world?
“Fucking Irish,” the lads say. “Acting like it’s nought to do with them, with good men shedding blood for the empire.”
“It’s their land, too, don’t they bloody know it?” John’s shoulders ache and all he can smell is the putrefaction of British bodies on foreign soil. People have been dying for two long bloody years, and he sees little sense in creating an enemy in the barracks beside you, but others feel differently.
John can’t intercede when some of the lads grab O’Donnell, grab him and strip him and tie him to a support beam around the back of the mud-walled hovel they call HQ. Can’t, or won’t – he tastes salt-bitter in the back of his throat and starts forward, but his sister’s voice pounds in his head – don’t Johnny, don’t, it makes it worse, them thinking you’re weak and all – and his feet fall, heavy and sticking in the wetness of the trench.
Just a bit of a laugh, a lark, that’s all, bile rising in his mouth and his fists clenched too tight as O’Donnell kicks and fights and is pinned down. Five men, five brave soldiers, five mouths spitting and five pairs of boots aiming sharp kicks.
“Fucking Paddy coward.” O’Donnell’s hands, red. His chest mottled purple – the cold and the bruising mired. Five against one – two, John’s mind supplies, could be two – and O’Donnell is the coward? He steps forward, feet light in the squelching wet mud, and calls, and five heads turn to him; O’Donnell’s lolls heaven-wards, like he isn’t in his body.
“The Hun does enough to get us killed,” John says, forced conviviality, “I’m sure you don’t need to help him.” They look between John and O’Donnell, back to John again, and there is a bit of shame vying with the heat in their blood, their eyes diverting from him.
The sound of footsteps around the corner finally sends them off, not John’s presence, unimposing as it is, and they leave, the last shoving him none-too-gently with a shoulder as he passes through the narrow alley; John’s hands fumble on the ropes, stiff in the cold air. O’Donnell doesn’t look at him. John’s throat burns, hot and raw. He pushes John’s hands away once the rope falls and leans to gather his clothes. The grimace, involuntary, is quashed quickly, and he turns his back and leaves.
After that, the fighting starts up again and there’s no time to remember that the many reaches of the empire don’t fight as one. News comes through of the executions – Pearse, a poet, Plunkett, a newlywed, Connolly, already on the brink of death. “No less than they deserve,” the lads say, and go back to firing.
It passes by like a dream, a dream where even the blood flows mud-grey and sluggish, a dream where John’s gun lives in his hand like a part of himself, his stomach always hollow and his feet always wet and his mind always, always, gloriously alive.
In the dank tunnels that serve, barely, as barracks, they sleep fitfully, bunks pressed together, shoulder to foot. At night, the walls swallow screams, and John wakes with dirt in his mouth as the very earth shakes and shudders.
There’s dice, though, and cards, and they have little enough money to bet but it passes the time. John’s never played, his father’s sermonising and threats not worth the petty entertainment, but finds his hand quite deft at both. “If I’d your luck, Johnny Watson, I’d play the horses,” Murray says, at his shoulder as John sweeps another hand.
“What horses?” he says, and laughs, for they’ve no cavalry, the only horses at their outpost nags to draw the ambulance and the supply cart.
“Well,” says Murray, slapping his knee, “I suppose we could bet on which bag of bones will keel over next.”
John shakes his head, picking up his cards and glancing at his hand. “You’re too soft-hearted for that, Murray.”
Murray screws up his face, indignant for a moment, before sighing. “Aye, I suppose.”
Smiling, John bumps Murray’s shoulder with his own. “Now, are you going to watch or not?” He’s soundly beaten Murray at every hand they’ve played, and he’s determined to teach the man to hold his own.
Back in the barracks, they bunk down for the night next to each other. John never sleeps during the nightly bombings, and Murray’s taken to talking to him through the night. John hasn’t told him that it’s not necessary, that he doesn’t much mind the raids. Not like the heavy artillery or the infantry advances, with men blown to pieces in their very steps.
So John knows well about Ada, Murray’s sweetheart, who, to hear him tell, is the kindest, prettiest, most warm-hearted girl in all of Dartford, and Murray’s family, whose long letters bring them frequent updates on life back at home.
He doesn’t offer up details of his own family, and it’s just as well Murray’s too kind to be curious. His parents, dead, and good riddance, and he hasn’t spoken to Harry in six years, he recalls guiltily. One day, Murray’s mum writes of how blessed she is to know her son’s out there, fighting, and still alive, and John’s chest tightens. He pens a few lines to Harry the next evening, sending them off to her last known address, but doesn’t expect a reply.
He makes it through the Somme and then Passchendaele and then Lys, through his friends’ blood on his hands and his own in his eyes, and it’s not like he thought war would be. Though they say this is the war to end all wars, so perhaps it’s not like wars are meant to be at all. Sometimes supplies are short and he thinks the pain in his stomach will kill him before the Germans do, and sometimes they march until his feet peel and bleed, and sometimes they don’t go anywhere for months, small skirmishes achieving no gains in ground. It seems the rest of their short, brutish lives will be carried out knee-deep in grimy mud, shovelling the trenches out and restacking sandbags.
Harry does write back — she’s in Liverpool now, not London, and the letter’s arrival was delayed for months — and it’s short, succinct, but it ends with love, and John wonders if he has family left, after all.
++
1918
London
In June he’s given leave, a week only, and goes to London. It’s not as he remembers it, from those few short months between leaving home and signing up. It’s less glittering, the people he passes more care-worn and dark-eyed, and John’s boots click on the cobbles.
He sees Harry, who comes down for a half day from Liverpool. He almost hadn’t sent her notice of his leave; their letters remain impersonal and infrequent, but when she draws him to her chest and fists her hands in his jacket, he’s nearly glad he did. Then she pulls away and slaps his face.
“God,” she says, “you stupid boy.”
“Jesus, Harry.” He rubs his cheek, pulls her into an alcove off the main street. “What are you doing?”
“I ought to kill you,” she says, colour high in her cheeks, “I just want to — oh, strangle you, you idiot.”
“What are you on about?” She smacks him again, this time in the arm. “Bloody hell — Harry, really.”
She drops her hands finally, shaking her head, and looks away. “You didn’t — you signed up, and you didn’t tell me. And I didn’t — you know I didn’t know until that first letter.”
“That’s what this is about? Harry, that was four years ago. Jesus.”
She smacks him again, cuffing his ear. “This is four years coming, then. I ought to kill you myself.”
“The Germans are doing a fine job trying,” John says, dryly, and her face screws up a bit. “Harry, I don’t —” She shrugs off his hand at her shoulder, shaking her head.
“And if they do?” she says, harshly. “When it started, I thought, he’s just sixteen, he’ll be safe, it’ll blow over before he’s even of age. And then you — you didn’t let that stop you, you damn foolhardy idiot.” Her voice cracks on the last word and John looks down, shamed.
“I hadn’t seen you in two years. I didn’t think you — cared, anymore.”
“Of course I — you know I couldn’t stay.” She doesn’t say any more, but John well remembers his father’s hand, and belt, and stick, and his voice raised, vibrating through the walls, and Harry, silent.
“I know,” John says, and meets her eye. He touches her elbow, briefly. “Come on, let’s go.”
“There’s a fine tea shop two streets up,” Harry says, wiping her eyes discreetly. “Their cakes are — divine. Or, they were, before —” She smiles, tightly, and takes his arm.
They get tea and cakes, which are quite nice, actually, though a bit small, and sit at a table in the corner. Other patrons nod to John as they take their seats, and he flushes with each gesture. “My war hero brother,” Harry says, and John says, “I’m not.”
“I know you,” Harry murmurs. “You are — you can’t not be — you’re so. Good.” John shakes his head.
“I’m not — I’m not the boy you knew.”
She smiles sadly at him, looks down at their hands, motionless on the table. “You are, though. Just — grown up. You’re a protector, and now you’re off, fighting for —” she gestures, encompassing the cafe. “Us.” There’s a tightness to her voice that she doesn’t quite let free, but John can read the tension. Harry’s never had time for heroics — has never had the privilege of being able to worry about saving anyone other than herself. She could barely do that, John thinks, remembering his father’s tread, heavy on the stairs, and her door creaking open. John hadn’t been any help, not until — he shakes his head, clearing the memories.
“I didn’t —” John says, and Harry talks over him, “It wasn’t your —” They both stop.
“He’s dead, Harry,” John reminds her, in an undertone.
She blinks at him, rapidly, eyes turning wet. “I know,” she says. “Thank you.”
“I didn’t —” John looks round them, rapidly, but all other occupants of the teahouse are engaged in their own business. “I didn’t have anything to do with it,” he whispers, harshly.
Harry smiles, a wry twist of the lip. “I know.” John feels a flush of shame rush over him, and his teacup clatters as he places it back in the saucer. A women at the next table glances at him, and he smiles, tightly.
“Don’t —” he starts and she shakes her head.
“I won’t,” she says, and looks down at her plate. Her teacake has been worried to crumbs.
He stands, desperately needing to be far, far away from tiny china teacups and buttoned-up matrons saluting him. His chair clatters a bit as he rushes to the door, and Harry follows, and neither make excuses, despite their disruptive exit. They walk in silence until reaching the Underground station. At the top of the stairs, Harry turns to him, and clasps his shoulders, and kisses both cheeks.
“Stay alive,” she says, and he nods, tightly, and she bites her lip, and squeezes his shoulders, and turns to go down the stairs.
He bids London goodbye to return to Belgium, and thinks he’d rather like to return, someday, and make it his home properly.
++
The front is much the same, and Murray welcomes him back with a slap to his shoulder and a finger of piss-poor whiskey. There are rumblings of a plan, a push to take advantage of the German’s increasingly weak front defences, but in the meantime it’s more of the same. Guns in the daylight, bombs at night, cards when it’s quiet, fighting when it’s not, and John wonders if his world will stay narrow trenches and blood-soaked mud and ringing in his ears forever.
Then, though, the push begins, thousands strong in a concerted effort to attack Germany’s front lines. The Grand Offencive, and wasn’t it just: Belgians, French, Americans, Englishmen, six miles in a day, then the next, then the next, fighting on empty stomachs but still fighting, still pushing. With each new rush, Murray is at his right side, and when the news comes on the second day that it’s working, that the German lines are breaking down, Murray whoops and pulls John into a hug, and they bed down that night with their blood singing.
They start again at daybreak, guns cleaned and bodies running on little more than adrenaline. They run through mud, boots sticking, squelching, and across the field they see not an unbroken line of troops, but chaos as groups of soldiers break off and run. John turns to grin at Murray, who smiles back, fist shot in the air triumphantly, when the world goes red and Murray falls.
John stumbles to his feet, then falls again. His ears ring and he can’t clearly see his hands in front of him; all is blurred and shifting. He drags himself back to where Murray must be — must be! — until he feels warmth. He blinks and blinks until below him he sees Murray’s face and his own hands, red and liquid, and pressing down, and he’s saying something but he doesn’t know what, and then all goes white, then black.
++
Winter 1918
London
He remembers this: muscles mangled and bones shattered and gangrenous dreams where the fog is of too much pain and not enough morphia, and when he wakes the war’s over. Armistice has happened without him; he’s unnecessary to the war effort in the end, it seems. He returns to England on a canvas cot on a boat full of men far more damaged and far less whole than he, and around him the air is too quiet, filled as it is with the soft sobs of too-young boys returning with minds broken and eyes unseeing.
No one can — or will — tell him about his injury, and his lip is chewed raw from the pain, which comes from — everywhere. He wonders if, once the ship lands, he’ll be sent home, wherever that is, with a bandage and a prayer. Instead, he’s transfered to Queen Alexandria Military Hospital and sent to surgery by grim-faced doctors.
After that, hours, days, are indistinguishable, until one day he wakes with clarity to the bobbing face of a red-haired nurse. She grins brightly and the sun shining behind her head sets her neat white cap glowing. His leg screams with pain under blueing-white sheets but when he asks to see the wound, the nurse shakes her head firmly. She comes by the next day, arms full of bandages, but when he tries to move the sheets away she stills his hands and frowns.
She unwinds sickly-stained gauze from his shoulder and suddenly it hurts too – searing pain right down to shattered scapula. She doesn’t touch his leg and when she’s gone he feels it, hands searching for torn, ragged edges, for blood and scars that aren’t there.
Around him, boys cry out delusions awake and asleep. No one looks them in the eye. Cowardice, had been the whisper, but the war’s over, so what’s there to be afraid of? The horrors they shriek haunt John too: sometimes the ward, bleached and scrubbed, seems splashed with the blood of his friends.
One night, it’s Jackson, turning to look for John, his teeth a slash of white against his mud-streaked face, before his head explodes into shards of bone and sprays of blood. It’s brighter than John remembers, and he can feel the bile strike his face, wet and slick and cold, and flinches, turns away.
Another, it’s the crumbled remains of a ramshackle telegraph hut, destroyed by a bomb, a hand still clutching the telegraph machine in the rubble.
Most nights, it’s Murray, his blood spraying in bright, macabre fountains from his leg, John’s hands buried in the muscle of his thigh, scrambling for purchase, before all explodes white and quiet. Murray’s alive still; John asked. It takes the nurse three days to track him down, in a convalescence home in Dartford, near his home. John writes to him, or, rather, dictates an oddly formal missive to Miss Morstan, one of the many volunteers who attend the men’s bedsides, their books, kind words, and pretty faces bringing some small measure of the relief. Miss Morstan, most agree, is the prettiest of the lot, and her laugh when John flirts is deep and generous.
“I’ll take you dancing, once I’m out of here,” John says, and means it.
She arches an eyebrow. “I expect you will,” she says, and John imagines her in silks, whirling and laughing until the small hours, effervescent and flushed. He tries very hard not to imagine her out of those silks and flushed from other exertions and fails spectacularly.
Murray’s answer comes in a fortnight. He credits John with his life — I don’t recollect much except you telling me I had to live — had to — because I hadn’t yet learnt to beat you at cards — but John’s own memory contains only Murray’s blood, pulsing out, and John’s own hands pressed to Murray’s mangled leg, the wound slippery and hot, then pain, then nothing.
Murray lost his leg but Ada visits him every day and they’re to be married once he is cleared to leave. John’s to be the best man, if he’s out in time, and Miss Morstan — Mary, she says, call me Mary — finds it all terribly romantic.
He’s glad she only comes mid-mornings, once he’s shaken off the ghosts of the night but before he’s been worked over by the physician’s aids, who help him to stand, and take shaky steps, and exercise his arm until he’s sure it will rip from his body. John’s unharmed leg still aches. He doesn’t say a word, but he can see the worried glances each time he collapses, leg unable to hold his weight. His left hand shakes intermittently; he is like a child learning to hold a spoon, comb his hair, grasp a pen, as the quakes often result in the held object falling, useless, from his crippled hand.
His gun’s been taken away, and his uniform, and he wears striped pyjamas all day, the fabric tinged yellow from sweat and a pale-rust stain round the hem of the shirt from some other soldier’s wound. Are they soldiers, though, really, he and these boys whose hands shake and eyes water and who shout and shout and don’t speak and are silent? They feel more like refugees.
It takes months for him to heal, to gain back some of his strength, but he does, grits his teeth and doesn’t shout at pretty, wide-eyed nurses, and flirts with Mary, and plays countless rounds of gin rummy with Andrew and Scott and Alastair. He leaves the hospital for a tiny, bleak room in a crumbling house in London. He heats water for his tea and his baths alike on the tiny coal stove, never stoked enough, but it’s London, it is, and he walks and walks and walks, through the parks belonging to His Majesty and the streets belonging to shopkeepers, to flower-sellers and hawkers of all wares – fruit and cigarettes and willing bodies – all the things made scarce by the war. He walks until it’s without a limp or a stick, and bites back the ache that never quite seems to fade from his unbroken leg.
In June, he stands up for Murray in a small parish church in Halstead. Ada is tall and fair-haired and steady-handed, and her smile is bright throughout the brief ceremony. Murray stands for the vows, John’s arm at his elbow, and when they exchange rings, Ada takes Murray’s hands and holds them tight. They both help him back to his chair, and for the rest of the night Murray wheels himself around with Ada’s hand on his shoulder.
All Murray’s family — his mother, grey-haired and shrewd-eyed, his father, straight-backed and smiling, and his sister, dark-eyed and mischievous — thank John for Murray’s life, and John nods, and shakes hands, and wonders if Murray would be standing instead of in a wheelchair if John had done more.
He does take Mary out dancing, and she drinks gin and curses like any sailor John’s met and grins to see him blush. Flushed with the heat and damp with exertion, she’s just as lovely as he’d thought, and when they go outside to share a cigarette he kisses her and kisses her until the cigarette’s forgotten and his hands are at her waist and her leg is between his. She pulls back, leans her head against the brick, and says, “You’re a good dancer, John Watson,” and it’s a blatant lie, and John wants to marry her.
He would, too, but life in London’s not like it was before the war; there are too many boys like John back and not enough jobs. He earns a few shillings at the docks, but with his dominant arm still weak and his grip still troubled by occasional tremors, he’s not up to speed. Most of his rent is won off other soldiers in games of poker, but that’s hardly enough to raise a family.
So when Harry writes to tell him there’s factory work going in Liverpool, John packs up and promises Mary he’ll write.
++
Autumn 1919
Liverpool
Harry shares rooms with a secretary named Clara and works at a flour mill; the first three evenings John’s there she drags him out to a series of pubs, each grimier than the last, and he passes out cold on the tiny settle in Harry and Clara’s sitting room. Harry still makes it out the door in the morning at half five, while John wakes bleary-eyed and stiff, only coming alive with the help of the strong black coffee Clara makes in a pot over the tiny stove.
The first morning, she thumps a heavy earthenware mug down in front of him and sits across the table, chin in her hands and eyes on him intently. He feels unsettled under her direct, uncompromising gaze until she cocks her head and says brightly, “Well. You aren’t at all like Harry’d said.”
John narrows his eyes, lowering his mug. “What’s Harry said?” he asks cautiously.
“Oh, you know,” Clara says, but doesn’t elaborate. She stands, turning the sixty degrees required to reach the hob in the tiny kitchenette. “Do you want an egg? I’m having an egg.”
The egg is large, and smooth, and brown, and John takes its head off with one quick tap. Harry knows people, Clara explains, and dips a piece of bread into her egg; it comes out sticky-yellow and dripping, and she tilts her head back to drop it in her mouth. John watches the movement of her neck as she swallows. Clara drops her chin down again, catching sight of his face, and laughs. “Harry was right about that,” she says, and John colours, laughs with her. “You have that in common, you two.” She smiles, brightly, gives him a wink he doesn’t much understand until the next evening, coming in from the WC to hear a murmur, a laugh, and the soft, unmistakable sound of a fond kiss from behind the half-closed bedroom door.
The door still caught in his hand, he takes two steps backward and eases it shut. In the hallway, he leans against the wall, tattered wallpaper under his fingertips, and remembers his father’s voice in his head, distant. “You disgusting little invert — you — you filthy bitch —” his words punctuated by slaps. Harry had left shortly after, when he was twelve and she sixteen, and he hadn’t had time to dwell on it.
He lets the door slam open when he steps back inside, and Harry comes out of the bedroom with a bright grin, and they head to the King’s Head. He doesn’t tell Harry what he’d heard.
The boarding house is women-only, so John finds a bedsit a few streets away. Harry’s not wrong: there are jobs going in the sugar refineries, but John’s one of hundreds interested, and he spends most of his days queueing just for a chance to put his name in. After a fortnight, he stops trying. Luckily, Harry knows most everyone in town interested in any dealings slightly less-than-savoury, and he soon enough finds himself in games each evening, making enough back to survive but not so much that he leaves sore losers. They’re queer folk, Harry’s friends, but they part with their money as easy as anyone.
During the day, he takes to walking, like he had in London, but Liverpool fits him like a borrowed glove and he finds little solace in traversing its streets. His leg aches more and more and he writes to Mary less and less as the only words that come fall heavy and bitter and the ink smears on the page at the unpredictable quakes of his hand. Her answers, too, come further apart and shorter until the last one comes, short and straight-forward, with tears blurring the ink. He wonders if the man she found is whole, unscarred, and doesn’t begrudge her happiness.
Two days later, there’s an advertisement in the Daily Post looking for men prepared to face a rough and dangerous task.
++
The recruiter at the dingy dockside office merely glances at his discharge papers and character reference. “Sound of body?” he says, quite suddenly.
“I — yes,” John answers, shifting his weight. The man looks him up and down, narrowing his eye.
“Says here you were shot.”
“That’s correct, sir. In the shoulder.” John lifts his arm, rotates it. “Patched me up well in London.”
“So they did. You have a wife, lad? Children?”
“No sir.”
“Good.” He glances down at John’s papers once more, then copies his name into a ledger. “Pay is ten shillings a day and ye ship out in a fortnight.”
John frowns. “Ship out, sir?”
The man looks up from his ledger. “To Ireland. Didn’t you know?”
John thinks back: he’s heard some talk of unrest on the island, and he remembers, distantly, that day three years ago when news of a rebellion reached them at the front, but most in Liverpool, most in his set — and Harry’s — are far more preoccupied with immediate, pressing concerns like their next meal. “I didn’t realise it was so — that intervention was required.”
“Ah, it’s nothing too taxing. The police have got themselves a wee bit over their heads, need some good English folk to sort them out. Policing and the like.” John feels deflated, somewhat. He’s not cut out to be a copper, he doesn’t think. Still, ten shillings a day.
“Will we see you on Monday, then?”
John nods. “Yes sir.”
“Good lad,” the man says, showing his teeth for the first time in a grimacing sort of grin. He hands John back his papers and gestures to the next man in the queue.
John goes to a pub and gets a drink, contemplating how to tell Harry that he’s leaving again.
++
She doesn’t take it well, as predicted. She punches his arm and tells him he’s a damn fool, and when he tells her he didn’t have any other choices, she shouts that that’s no excuse to do something stupid. She paces their tiny sitting room until Clara makes tea and forces her to sit down.
“I’ve heard it’s more dangerous than they let on,” Clara says softly, and Harry looks mutinous.
“More than France?” John asks. “More than Belgium?”
Clara tilts her head. “I’m not sure,” she admits, “but be careful.”
John nods. “It’s just police work,” he says, stifling his own misgivings. Harry snorts, as if she can read his thoughts.
“It’s not and you know it,” she says, sharply. “You wouldn’t want it to be, anyway.” John looks up at her; she bites her lip, but her expression softens. “You’re a damn fool.”
“I know,” he says, smiling, and Harry sighs.