The Gates of Rutherford by Elizabeth Cooke Page B

history, and naming all the rivers of Germany, and puzzling over a little Latin. Mathematics he had liked. And botany. But botany was not a manly subject.
    Nevertheless, he learned all the names of the insects on the farm, drawing them. His brother caught butterflies and pinned them, still wriggling, to a sheet, but he couldn’t bring himself to do that. He liked to collect insects in matchboxes. He had a spider once with a black-and-white patterned back. He had ladybugs. He would hold them close to his face and marvel at the depth of the color on their wings; when they finally unhitched the scarlet armor plating, he was fascinated by the complicated black lace that enabled them to fly. He loved the fragile down on butterfly wings. He would lie on his back and let them walk about on his hands and arms, laboring their way along while the sun beat down on them. In his dream now, he felt a matchbox on his palm just like the ones in which he would keep his treasures. He carefully pried it open.
    It was full of lice.
    He felt no surprise, and no loathing. The war had taken loathing away. Lice were a fact. They came from the world into which he had been conscripted. It was not the fault of the lice that a mass of human beings had suddenly presented themselves in filthy conditions. He stared at the creatures, all no bigger than a grain of rice, inside the box—feeling once again their unbearable itch.
    In all the time that he had been fighting, he had never had a bath, never had a change of clothes. The lice were constant, as continuous as the noise, the fear, the shuddering of the guns.
    He looked down at his hands again, and the light went out of the dream. There was a single line across the center of his sight, and above the line was dark blue, and below the line was black. He heard a whisper, an order, that he must go up into the dark blue, and crouch down, and feel his way towards the machine gun post. It was three o’clock in the morning, and he knew that the man who was whispering to him was lost; lost in his mind, insane. But he was his officer.
    He got up and slouched through the mud.
    As he went he saw, bizarrely, crushed in the foul-smelling dirt, a reflection from a piece of metal. The darkness was suffocating and cold, as thick as the mud itself, a miasma, and he tried to see what the metal was—whether it was an unexploded shell, or a weapon, or shrapnel. He peered at it, astonished to see lettering on it:
Crosse & Blackwell Plum and Apple Jam.
The utterly prosaic nature of it touched him, made him want to weep.
    But its presence showed that he was near the British. They threw their cans away. He’d seen them, through his periscope, throw their hard tack biscuits away, too. Biscuits so hard that no one could eat them. He doubted that the British could be as hungry as they were. He had forgotten the true taste of food, and so the sight of the tin, and the thought that discarded food might be down there among the dirt . . .
    He lost concentration, and that was when it began.
    The place was Pilckem Ridge.

Chapter 4

    I t was eight o’clock in the evening, and already dark, before Charlotte and Michael arrived in Dorset. They had taken the train to Sherborne, and a taxicab to the cottage that had been loaned to them by Michael’s aunt. Michael had not wanted to go to a hotel—“to be stared at” as he put it. She didn’t know how he realized such things, and had once said so. He had given his little crooked smile. “The room goes very quiet,” he’d told her. “One feels something like a ripple. Of interest. Of pity. That’s what I can’t bear.”
    Tonight, as the train had approached the country station, she had asked about his aunt. “We shall have to visit her, I’m afraid, despite her being as mad as a hatter,” he explained. “She’s not far away, in the village.”
    â€œIs the village very remote?” Charlotte