An Eagle in the Snow

  “Shall I light another match, Barney?” he asked me. “Or you all right now?”

  “Think so,” I told him. In fact I had by now completely forgotten about the dark.

  “You want me to finish my story, son? Don’t want to wake her up, do I?”

  “Didn’t Billy get a medal for doing all that?” I asked.

  “He did indeed, son,” he went on. “And not just one. He kept on getting medals too. Like his pals said, Billy only had to sneeze and they’d give him a medal. They joked about it, teased him fit to bust sometimes. But he didn’t mind, because he knew that deep down they were proud of him, because he was one of them, and he didn’t pretend any different, no matter how famous he became. And he did become famous too. Had his picture in the paper more than once. The newspapers made a bit of a fuss of Billy every time they gave him a medal. But he didn’t take no notice of all that, and neither did his pals.

  The army wanted to promote him, give him a stripe, make him a Lance Corporal. But he didn’t want that. He told them, thank you very much, but he was quite happy as he was, being a Private, like his pals. But they kept on giving him medals, whether he liked it or not. Sometimes it was for going out and rescuing one of his pals under fire. And then once when there weren’t enough stretcher bearers to carry back the worst of the wounded, he carried one of his pals on his back, three miles or more it was, all the way back to the Field Hospital, the shells landing all around him. He got another medal for that too.

  But Billy didn’t do it for the medals. He just wanted it to end, get out of uniform, to stoke his boiler in that hotel, sleep in his cold little attic room again and draw his pictures. That hotel he had hated so much seemed like a paradise to him now. He wanted to forget all about the fighting and the trenches, all about little Christine by the side of the road and the sadness in her eyes. He wanted not to have to think any more of his pals lying there stretched out on the ground looking up into the sky with empty eyes, unseeing eyes. He didn’t care about living or dying by now. He was tired, so tired. We all were. We just wanted it to be over, for there to be peace. The quicker the better for all the little Christines, for all the soldiers, for all of us.

  Which was why Billy done what he done that day at the end of September 1918 – just a couple of weeks before the end of the war, though of course he didn’t know that at the time. No one knew when exactly it would end, but everyone knew by now that peace couldn’t be far off. Every day now the army was on the move, getting up out of the trenches where we had been stuck for so long, advancing everywhere, and everywhere Fritz was falling back.

  It happened near a village called Marcoing – never sure how you say that name – ‘Marcong’ we called it. That’s the trouble with foreign names – French, Belgians, they don’t pronounce their words like we do, which is fair enough, I s’pose, when you come to think about it. Anyway, Billy and all of us were trying to capture this little village. We didn’t know it, but Fritz was well dug in, in their trenches, in amongst the buildings too, what was left of them. And they were letting us have it, firing at us with everything they’d got – machine guns, rifles. Some of the lads were hit at once, the rest of us took cover. Not Billy, of course. He crawled forward, got as close as he could and threw his bombs, which knocked out the machine gun. He was wounded, but that didn’t stop him. Then, fired up by his example, the whole Company was up and at them. There was a lot of killing that day, and it wasn’t pretty. It never is. Don’t let no one ever tell you different, son.

  But the battle wasn’t over yet. We had to get across the canal to attack Fritz on the other side. They were firing at Billy all the time from across the canal, but he didn’t pay no attention to that. He just got on with what he had to do. He was laying planks across the canal, to make a sort of bridge, so we could get over. We were firing and firing, keeping their heads down as best we could. And that’s how we got across that canal, on Billy’s planks. But Fritz wasn’t finished yet. They came at us from all sides, trying to drive us back into the canal.

  Billy wasn’t having none of it. He weren’t going to retreat. So Billy and all of us, we stuck it out. Billy was wounded twice more, but nothing was going to stop him now. He was going to finish the war here and now, by himself if necessary, get it done, for good and all. It was kill or be killed, that’s all there was to it. And they were the enemy. After a war’s over, you can talk about the rights and wrongs of it, but in the middle of a battle, soldiers don’t ask themselves those questions.

  But once a battle’s over, well, that’s a different matter. And by now the fight was over. There were dead and wounded all around us, our lads some of them, but mostly theirs. That’s when you look at what you done. We had won, but it didn’t feel like winning, never does. No joy in it. No triumph. All we felt was relief. We were alive – for the time being anyway. We had got away with it.

  We had taken prisoners, lots of them, over thirty, if I remember right. Exhausted they were, hungry, looked more like ghosts. ’Spect we all did. The officer surrendered to Billy, saluted and handed him his pistol. Like all of us, he knew it was Billy who had won this battle almost single-handed. We checked them all over to make sure they had no hidden weapons, no grenades, knives. We had nothing to say to them, and they had nothing to say to us. We gave them cigarettes. They didn’t seem such a bad lot. Young, some of them, just boys they looked like. You felt a bit sorry for them. It was quiet all around, so quiet, like a calm after a storm.

  Then we see this Fritz soldier coming out of the smoke, no more than twenty yards away, he was, and he’s holding a rifle, not pointing it at us, holding it. Then he just turns and walks off. Billy shouts at him to stop and he does. There’s half a dozen rifles pointing at him, but Billy tells us not to shoot. Pointing his pistol at him, he orders the Fritz soldier to drop his rifle, showing him what to do. But the soldier just stands there holding it, like he’s in a daze. A little fellow, bareheaded he was, no cap, his uniform covered in mud. He stands there, looking back at us, staring, like he’s looking through us. You can see in his face he’s just waiting for the bullet. He pushes his dark hair back off his forehead with the flat of his hand, stands straight, rifle at his side. But he won’t put it down, and we’re all ready to shoot him. That’s when Billy says it.

  “No,” he tells us. “Don’t shoot him, lads. There’s been enough killing done today. They’re beaten. He’s going home, let him go home. He’s not going to shoot us, not now. War’s over, and he knows it.” And then Billy walked towards him, calling out to him: “Go home, Fritz, it’s over. The war is over. Go, before I change my mind.”

  Then he lifts his pistol high and fires it into the air, deliberately over the soldier’s head. The Fritz soldier just nods, looks at him for a moment or two, lays his rifle down, turns and walks off, and we watch him go, glad we haven’t killed him, because we all knew as we stood there that Billy was right, that there was no point in killing another one. To all of us, that soldier walking away, going home, meant only one thing – that the war was over and done with, and that soon we’d be going home ourselves.

  Billy bent down and picked up the spent cartridge from the ground. “That’s the last shot I’m ever going to fire in this war,” he said. “And it wasn’t in anger, and it didn’t kill anyone. I’m going to keep it always, to remind me.”

  For what he did that day at Marcoing they gave Billy the Victoria Cross – and they don’t hand those out very often. Most of the people who get one are dead already, killed in action. By rights, Billy should have been too. But, as he always said, he had his lucky black pebble from the beach at Bridlington, so Lady Luck was on his side. After a month or so in hospital he was right as rain again – well sort of, as good as. He always walked with a bit of a limp after that. Anyway he was all fit and spruced up in his uniform at Buckingham Palace a few weeks later to receive his Victoria Cross, which was pinned on his chest by King George V himself.

  The King said he was a great hero, that the country was
proud of him. But he told the King that he was wrong. “To be a hero,” he said, “you got to be brave, sir, and I weren’t any braver than anyone else.”

  He wanted to tell him that he didn’t do it for King and Country, that he did what he did for little Christine and for his pals. Just get the war over with, that’s all he had in mind. But he weren’t brave enough to tell the King that. Afterwards he always wished he had been.”

  The stranger fell silent. I could feel Ma was still fast asleep, hear her breathing beside me. But now, with the story over – or that’s what I thought – I found the blackness suddenly closing in on me. I wanted the story to go on, to take my mind off the darkness around me. “Is that all?” I asked him.

  A sudden flame flared, lighting the carriage, lighting his face from under his chin. He was half smiling.

  “I wish it was, son,” he said. “There’s more, I’m afraid. Lots more. But only three more matches.”

  “I think your ma must be sleeping.” The stranger spoke softly, leaning forward. “Don’t want to wake her, do I?”

  “I’m not asleep,” said Ma, her eyes opening. “I’ve been listening to every word. Good story too, so far as it goes. But you haven’t told us what happened to this Billy fellow, this friend of yours, after the war was over.”

  The match was burning down. He shook it out, plunging the carriage once more into darkness. “I was coming to that,” he went on. “Just wanted to make sure you wasn’t both fast asleep, that I wasn’t talking to myself.”

  “How long we going to be in this tunnel, Ma?” I asked. The darkness was really getting to me again now. Once that match had gone out, it was so dense, that darkness, so impenetrable. And I knew he only had three more matches left. “How long?” I said.

  “Till it’s safe to come out, I suppose,” she said. “That plane can’t hardly hurt us in here, can it, Barney? Safe as houses, we are.” She patted my hand and squeezed it. “Isn’t that right, mister?”

  “Safer, I hope,” the man replied. “Houses aren’t very safe these days – not in Coventry anyway – if you know what I’m saying.”

  “You’re right enough there,” said Ma. “Barney’s dad was in the last war too, y’know,” she went on. “Not in the trenches like you was, like that Billy. He was in Palestine. He was there with horses. He knows horses. No one could handle Big Black Jack like he could. He’s good with horses, isn’t he, Barney? Growed up with them, worked with Grandpa delivering coal. Got a few medals too – not a Victoria Cross like your friend, mind. But we lost them too, in the bombing, like everything else. Only got what we stand up in, and a few bits and bobs in that suitcase above your head. Still, we’re alive, and there’s plenty that aren’t in Coventry.”

  “That’s true enough,” the stranger said. “Don’t think anyone knows how many were killed. Thousands, that’s for sure.”

  “Don’t bear thinking about,” Ma went on. “Let’s not talk about it, eh? Don’t want to upset the boy, do we? So, what happened to this Billy then when he came home from the war? Where’s he now? Has he joined up again this time like Barney’s dad did? I didn’t want him to, you know. Over forty he is. Too old to go, I told him, but he wouldn’t listen.” I could hear Ma’s voice wavering, heard her opening her handbag and knew she was taking out her handkerchief. I think the stranger must have known it too because he went right on with his story.

  “Billy wanted to join up, course he did,” he began, “but they wouldn’t let him, on account of his bad leg. Those old wounds of his never really healed. They said he was too old anyway, so they wouldn’t pass him fit. He tried again and again, showed them his Victoria Cross, his Military Medal, his Distinguished Conduct Medal, all of them. But they wouldn’t listen. They turned him down. And I can tell you, that upset Billy more than just about anything that ever happened to him before. And he had good reason to be upset, believe you me; and that’s because he had more reason to want to join up than anyone else in this whole country, and that’s because, as far as Billy was concerned, this whole war is his fault.”

  “What do y’mean?” Ma asked. “How could it be? It’s lousy Adolf Hitler’s fault, we all know that.”

  For some time, the stranger didn’t reply. “That’s true enough,” he said. “And that’s the trouble. I’d best tell you how it happened, I suppose, how come we’re sitting here in this tunnel, how come there’s a war on and what Billy has to do with it.” He seemed to be thinking about what he was going to say for a very long time, before he began again.

  “Well, after the last war was over, it turned out that Billy Byron was just about the most decorated Private in the whole British Army; a great hero, who’d done this and done that. They made a huge fuss of him, but all he wanted was to be left alone. ‘Bravest of the brave’ the newspapers called him, but he knew he wasn’t, that the bravest of the brave had never come home, never worn any medals. They asked him to help carry the coffin of The Unknown Soldier into Westminster Abbey, with the King there and hundreds of thousands watching. On parade, with his medals on his chest, the whole army was proud of him, the regiment was proud of him, his pals were too. But Billy didn’t feel proud. He couldn’t help thinking about how it had been out there, the killing and the dying. There were reminders all around him. Every time he saw a soldier or a sailor sitting on a street corner begging, with no legs or blind, or both; every time he saw a woman pass him in the street wearing black, it made him remember all he didn’t want to remember.

  He stayed in the army for a while because they were his family, and he didn’t want to leave them. But in the end Billy decided it was time to put the army behind him, and all the newspapers and the interviews – they wouldn’t leave him alone. The army tried again and again to talk him into staying, but he’d had enough of it all. He handed in his uniform, and left. He kept only a few mementos. He squirrelled away some of his wartime bits and bobs, hid them in a large biscuit tin; photos of his pals, his medals, his lucky black pebble, the pistol the German officer had given him that day after the Battle of Marcoing and the spent cartridge. There were some things he didn’t want to part with. He scarcely ever looked in that tin. He wanted to forget and get on with his life. But at the same time he wanted to remember. He had his sketchbooks too, and they were full of memories.

  He went back to the hotel, because jobs weren’t easy to find, and any job was better than no job, even the hotel job. But he found it had closed down. Then he heard there were jobs in a car factory in Coventry, so he went there and got lucky. He tried to settle into work. But the trouble was that the war stayed in his head, the sights and sounds and smell of it, the sadness of it. It’s the same for all of us who’ve fought in a war. You don’t forget. You can’t. You want to, but you can’t. Billy would lie awake at nights, and he’d see that little girl’s eyes in his mind. He’d find himself saying her name out loud sometimes. “Christine, Christine.” He drew her often, and all the while he was wondering what might have happened to her, whether she’d survived the war, and found somewhere to live, someone to look after her. He tried not to draw those memories of the war. Instead he would walk the streets of Coventry, sketch the people, the children in the streets, the cats, the cathedral, the pigeons.

  He particularly loved to draw the pigeons. But then sometimes, even sitting outside the cathedral where there were always lots of pigeons about, he would find himself drawing a picture of a tank, or a gun, or a Field Hospital, for no good reason – and then he’d be drawing Christine, always little Christine. He couldn’t seem to help himself.

  In the car factory, it had soon got about, of course, that Billy Byron was a bit of a hero from the war – someone had seen his picture in a newspaper. And for a while that set him apart from the others. Most of them had been to the war just like he had, and wanted to forget about it if they could. So once they’d got over the fact that one of their fellow workers had won the Victoria Cross, and once they realised Billy just wanted to get on with his work and have a quiet life, they
didn’t bother much about his medals any more. And that was how Billy liked it. He just wanted to be left alone.

  The years passed, and all the time he was working, or back home in his room, Billy found himself thinking more and more about little Christine. Had she survived? What had happened to her? He had to find out, he had to know. He hadn’t wanted ever to go back to the battlefields in France and Belgium. He never wanted to see them again. But he knew that the only place to start his search was where he had last seen her.

  So off he went, during his week’s holiday in the summer of 1924 to Ypres, to Belgium, looking for that Field Hospital in Poperinghe where he had last seen Christine, all those years before.”

  “He walked the cobbled streets, sat in the cafés, looking for her everywhere he went. Of course she wasn’t there, and nor was the Field Hospital. He couldn’t really remember where it was. The town was being rebuilt. Nothing looked the same at all, except the square in the centre, and the cafés there. Billy showed his drawings of Christine wherever he went. He wandered all the villages around, asking if anyone had known a little orphan girl called Christine. Wherever he went he passed the cemeteries, rows and rows of crosses, thousands upon thousands of them. He found Harold Merton’s grave, and stood there over him in the rain, and tried to remember his face. He couldn’t. But he remembered the moment he died. There were trenches and craters wherever he looked, and many of the houses were still in ruins. But they were busy rebuilding everywhere, and in the fields the grass was growing where there had once been nothing but trenches and wire and mud. There were cows grazing, and sheep. That gave him heart. That gave him hope.

  But no one anywhere had heard of Christine, no one recognised her from his drawings. He was disappointed, but not surprised. They were drawings after all, not photographs, and anyway the drawings were of a little girl. Christine wouldn’t be a little girl any more.