25Apr

White Feathers: Coffee Pot Book Club Blog Tour

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Excerpt 3:

The Pigeon Van Scene

Late July, 1916. Eva’s friend Sybil Faugharne and her companion Roma Feilding are on a mission to drive a van full of pigeons northwards to Belgium. They encounter the front line.

‘You wanted to see what it was like,’ Roma said. ‘Well, here it is.’

‘Heavens,’ Sybil said, shocked, ‘there’s not even a blade of grass.’

She was right: no grass, nor any leaves on the trees, which were barely trees at all, merely stumps. No life, not even the song of a bird. Swathes of land churned, dead, bleak, like the surface of the moon seen through a telescope, full of craters and holes. Barbed wire on sticks, stretching on for miles and miles. The light hitting colourless land, and the tormented, broken ground absorbing it all.

They were approaching the front line.

‘Shall I close the window?’ Roma said. She was sitting on the right-hand passenger seat.

‘Oh, do!’ said Sybil heartily. ‘It stinks.’

Roma only shuddered in reply and wound up the window. The overlying odours were cordite, cresol, ammonia, sewage. But the underlying odour was death, on a mass scale. It hit their nostrils and nearly burned them out it was so rank. Even with the windows closed, Sybil couldn’t stop coughing.

‘Can you keep quiet, please?’ snapped Major Arnold Stephens from behind the wheel. ‘I’m trying to drive a van full of ruddy pigeons here.’ As if to corroborate his irritation, some of the birds set to squawking. Stephens had been charged with conveying an assignment of messenger pigeons from Lieutenant Colonel Osman in the Home Office to the front line at Nieuwpoort. Osman was a notorious pigeon-fancier, and his idée fixe about employing pigeons in the war effort had begun to pay off, with officers noting approvingly that the little buggers appeared impervious to mustard gas and were not hampered in carrying messages by the shelling of communication trenches.

Although Sybil and Roma rarely went on driving missions, and most of these involved the transportation of the sick and wounded from various requisitioned chateaux around the area to safety at Dunkirk and beyond, they had been roped in to help with unloading the cages. Their vehicle was a supply truck, painted in camouflage, to which was attached a van the size of a wagon, and on top of that again the cages of pigeons. The whole thing looked like a top-heavy, triple-decker bus.

Apart from the pleasant diversion of having Roma’s leg smack bang next to hers (Sybil was no longer under any illusion as to what drove her to follow this girl wherever she went), the journey was a little frightening, and very tedious. The van moved at an excruciatingly slow speed and had already stopped several times. The major insisted that neither Sybil nor Roma be involved in fixing any of the mechanical problems – that was men’s work. ‘Men’s work’ had got them the fifteen miles from Dunkirk to the Belgian border – in just over three hours.

Further, Major Stephens’ conversation was as constant as it was dull. He shared details of his occupation as an artillery observer that nobody had requested. It was all to do with calculations and indirect fire and something called an azimuth, which sounded to Sybil like nothing more than an angel of Satan. As he droned on, Roma nudged her, and Sybil looked down at the seemingly disorganised cluster of notes on her lap. She had written: ‘His MO appears to be a Battery of Boredom: from it, he will fire six-inch howitzer shells of Pure Monotony, followed by a rapid machine-gun fire of Interminable Facts until the Germans will scream for mercy – anything, anything but to have to listen to this man for a moment longer!’

Sybil had to stuff her knuckles in her mouth not to laugh out loud; she ended up snorting the laugh through her nose and sounding like a pig, which made Roma laugh too.

‘I don’t know what they’re doing, letting giggling society girls out on a dangerous mission like this,’ said Stephens primly.

As if in agreement, the sky in the distance lit up with a shell. Stephens braked violently, and half the cages lurched to the right. Behind the partition, the pigeons squawked with distress.

There’ll be enough white feathers in there, Sybil thought to herself, to shame a whole army. That reminded her: she had not managed to answer Eva’s letter yet, because it had arrived at the same time as a far less welcome communication from Clive. Viscount Faugharne had written to tell Sybil that he wanted a divorce. Her licentious behaviour, abuse of his finances and refusal to perform the services ‘befitting a viscount’s wife’, whatever that meant, had decided him.

‘Since you have effectively deserted me for a bit of wartime spills and thrills,’ he wrote, ‘I cannot serve you papers. It would be too dangerous for my lawyers to chase after you. But I have instructed my man Markham to have our London property cleared of all your things.’

It was a poorly written screed, blots of ink everywhere. Clive liked writing even less than she did, that was for sure. But divorce was very hard for a woman to shake off. And ‘licentious behaviour’? Was Clive talking about Roma’s motorbike? Because she hadn’t been keeping that sort of company with anyone else.

‘No great loss,’ she murmured aloud, just as the vehicle came to yet another shuddering halt.

‘What now?’ Roma asked Stephens, not hiding her irritation.

‘“What now” is that I have to point Percy at the porcelain,’ he said, closing the van door and disappearing around the side.

‘Vulgar fellow,’ Sybil muttered.

‘Sybil,’ Roma said, her eyes suddenly beseeching, ‘do you think—?’

They were interrupted by a WHEEEEE! then a dull thud and a sudden uprising of light on the road ahead. Carts, vans and horses scattered, people dashed about like ants.

Instinctively, Sybil grabbed Roma and flattened them both against the van seat, Roma grunting as her tailbone hit the gearbox.

After a few seconds, Sybil cautiously lifted her head.

‘Another one!’ cried Roma beneath her as a high note tore through the sky, descending in pitch… and then another, right next to them. An explosion sucking all the air and sound, abrupt as a full stop.

‘Where the hell is Stephens?’ Sybil wondered. ‘I hope that last one didn’t get him.’ She sighed and pulled herself up until she was kneeling on the seat. ‘I’d better go see he’s all right. Old Fritz seems to have taken a break for the moment.’

She did not see immediately, and then she did.

He … Major Arnold Stephens … was lying flat on his back several yards away from the van, his chest blown open by the shell, ragged ends of ribcage sticking up. A black space where his internal organs had been blown out, half the intestines remaining, half in a bloody mess around him. The entirety of his innards, from neck to groin, open to public view. His face just about left intact, though part of his left jawbone had gone.Sybil had never before seen the kind of injuries from which there could definitely be no recovery. She struggled not to be sick. Her teeth were chattering in her head. ‘I’m not a society girl,’ she addressed the mangled corpse, somewhat hysterically. ‘I’m going to be divorced. So now you know.

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