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Highlanders had attempted to advance, in vain, suffered heavy casualties and had stumbled back to their own trenches. They were sprawled everywhere, exhausted from lack of sleep, their uniforms filthy with grey muck. A faint miasma of mustard gas hung in the air, so they had to be ready to pull on their gas masks at any time. Flies as big as barrage-balloons, heavy with blood, buzzed around them. Most of the men were numb, some were shell-shocked. The injured lay around, staring at their awful wounds, their innards exposed to the daylight. Some cowered in corners, whimpering or muttering to themselves; some swatted wildly even when the flies were not near them, while others ignored the real flies that buzzed at their eyes. All of the soldiers were by now used to the stink of the corpses lying around them. Maggots had almost come to seem a development of human life rather than a corruption.
    Rachel pictured these horrors.
    Then the plump-faced soldier with the shrewd eyes began to talk about a certain man—he looked at her knowingly as he said that—who volunteered to carry a message across a dangerous stretch of no-man’s-land to some stranded gunners. He told how the volunteer climbed the ladder in the dusk. How he paused for a moment at the top of the trench to peer ahead, then slithered over the edge and began to crawl forward. How he reached the rolls of barbed wire and got up into a low crouch and began to run. How he hurdled the barbed wire and the scattering of corpses and skirted round the deep shell craters. How he was only fifty yards from the gunners in their dug-out when a flare exploded in the sky overhead and a sniper’s shot rang out. How he stumbled and fell. How he lay still for a moment, then began crawling forward. How he had to rise to his feet to cross the final rolls of barbed wire. How a machine gun began to chatter. How he slumped over the barbed wire, his body jerked this way and that as though being worried by a large, invisible dog, till the chattering stopped.
    – 4 –
    IN THE YORK INN, Rachel Vanderlinden knew what was coming.
    “The man who died,” said the plump-faced soldier, “was Rowland.”
    She couldn’t think of anything to say.
    “We weren’t able to get to the body for weeks,” he said. “It just lay there among all the others and rotted.” The shrewd eyes narrowed and he said: “He died for you.”
    That jolted words out of her. “What?” she said. “I don’t understand.”
    “He got into a fight with a man called McGraw. Floyd McGraw. He’s the man responsible for Rowland’s death. Rowland always treated him like a friend and told him things you only tell a friend.” He said this slowly and emphatically.
    “What do you mean?” she said.
    “You know what I mean,” the plump-faced soldier said. “Including the fact that Rowland wasn’t his real name.” He watched her over the rim of his tankard as he took another drink. “So then, that day, after the advance failed, the two of them got into an argument. They were exhausted and hungry and their minds weren’t working properly. McGraw started needling him.”
    She sat silent, waiting for the blow.
    “McGraw said a woman who’d done what you’d done was a whore,” he said.
    She tried to disguise from those astute eyes how shocked she was at that word.
    “He called you a whore,” the soldier said again. “That’s what they were fighting about. And the officer came along and separated them. He said he wouldn’t charge them if one of them would take the message out to the engineers in no-man’s-land. McGraw was afraid, but Rowland volunteered.”
    Rachel Vanderlinden sat stunned, stricken with guilt. She’d survived the past three years by convincing herself that at least he had died for a glorious cause. And now, this.
    “I didn’t tell you this to make you feel bad,” the plump-faced soldier said. “Isn’t it a thousand times better for a man to die for the woman he loves than for a cause