Starlight (The Four Lights Quartet Book 1)
‘The trench raid episode is a starkly realistic evocation of the terrors of trench warfare. Gritty and well researched, this novel avoids the common clichés that surround novels about the Great War. Starlight contrasts life on the Home and War fronts in a way that allows the reader to experience the emotional conflicts and problems experienced by a combatant moving between home and safety and the trenches and comradeship and danger.’
Andy Robertshaw,
Director of The Royal Logistic Corps Museum
‘Terrific. I was utterly engrossed by the slowly and delicately budding love affair in Cornwall and the intercut descriptions of the war. I loved the characterisations and the details of life and loss in the trench. I really felt I was there. I just thought it ended too soon. I wanted to know more. I was gripped throughout.’
Fiona Bruce
BBC Presenter
Copyright © 2011 Fergus O’Connell.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced by any mechanical, photographic, or electronic process, or in the form of an audio recording; nor may it be stored in a retrieval system, transmitted, or otherwise be copied for public or private use – other than for “fair use” as brief quotations embodied in articles and reviews – without prior written permission of the publisher.
ISBN 978-0-9569706-1-9
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Editing by Dan Leissner
Book design by Fiona Raven
Digital Edition September 2011
Published by Paper & Celluloid
The Boathouse, Moatstown House
Athy, Co. Kildare, Ireland
www.PaperAndCelluloid.com
Part way through the writing of this,
my beautiful and extraordinary wife Clare,
died tragically. Starlight is in her memory.
Contents
Endorsements
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Epigraph
Part 1
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
Part 2
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
Part 3
54
55
56
57
58
59
Acknowledgements
When I set out for Lyonnesse,
A hundred miles away,
The rime was on the spray,
And starlight lit my lonesomeness
When I set out for Lyonnesse
A hundred miles away.
What would bechance at Lyonnesse
While I should sojourn there
No prophet durst declare,
Nor did the wisest wizard guess
What would bechance at Lyonnesse
While I should sojourn there.
When I came back from Lyonnesse
With magic in my eyes,
All marked with mute surmise
My radiance rare and fathomless,
When I came back from Lyonnesse
With magic in my eyes!
Thomas Hardy
Part 1
1
End of September 1918. Late afternoon.
It was Helen’s birthday. Lieutenant Lewis Friday, who counted himself as her lover, was spending the day at the bottom of a ten foot deep trench in Northern France. He had done the same last year in a trench less than fifty miles to the rear of where he was now. At this rate it would take at least ten more of Helen’s birthdays before they got to Berlin and the War would be over. Nineteen twenty eight. He put the thought out of his head.
There had been no change in the weather. The white, dripping fog, which had been there when dawn broke, had not lifted at all. Instead it lay above the trench, unmoving in the still air. It was as though Death had snagged his shroud on the barbed wire.
Everything was wet – the mushy wooden revetting, the soggy sandbags, the slimy mud walls of the trench. The duckboards were covered in mud, ankle deep, with the consistency and suction of wet concrete. The sponginess under foot spoke of ghastly horrors buried in the trench. Lewis assumed it had been used as a grave at one time or another. The French were always doing that but since the Somme the British had done the same. There were just too many bodies so that if the men were tired and hungry or under harassing fire and there was a ready made grave, why not use it? There was a spot along the trench where, when he stood on the duckboards, they pivoted slightly acting as a bellows pumping out puffs of vile-smelling air. He preferred not to think of what lay beneath.
The fog meant that he couldn’t see beyond the parapet and that made Lewis very frightened. He had a constant vision of giant men in grey suddenly appearing out of the milky whiteness, standing with one booted foot on the sandbags above him and shooting down into the trench as though shooting rats in a barrel.
In reality, it was unlikely that this would happen. The Germans had all but ceased attacking but all it took was one over-zealous commander. Just in case then, the British had put sentries out in no-man’s-land as well as the usual ones on the fire step. Not that they would see much in this. As an added precaution, he had ordered his men to tie empty bully beef tins to the wire to act as alarms in case anybody did try to get through. That still didn’t stop him being frightened.
He had just returned from inspecting his section of the line and was turning a corner of a traverse when he collided with a man hurrying in the other direction. As they pulled back from each other, Lewis recognised Byrne, one of the battalion runners.
‘Sorry, sir,’ said Byrne, breathless and trying to salute.
Given how on edge he was, Lewis was tempted to be angry. Instead, he said, ‘Got a rendezvous with a young lady, Byrne?’
‘Nossir. Sorry, sir.’
Best runner in the battalion, Lewis had heard. Byrne had only been here a couple of months, so he was probably just turned eighteen – a fact attested to by his podgy cheeks and smooth chin. But the deep hollows beneath his eyes, and the eyes themselves told another story.
‘Permission to continue spreading a rumour, sir?’
Lewis smiled a fraction. He liked Byrne. He reminded Lewis of himself when he had first come here – calm, reasonable, rational, keeping a tight lid on his emotions. He had tried then to view the War as a series of problems to be tackled and solved. One problem at a time. Live in the now. Don’t think about the future.
For a while, it had worked. The problem might be just trying to stay warm – assuming you couldn’t stay dry – in a waterlogged trench with your feet and legs permanently under a foot or two
of water. And this was ignoring the fat rats, the lice, the constant weakness from lack of sleep and bad food. But then a shell would land on the line killing or wounding some men and collapsing part of the trench. So now the problems came. Evacuate the wounded. Bury the dead, assuming there was something to bury. Otherwise clean up the bits, stick them in a sandbag and try to find some place to bury them where they might stay buried. And while this was going on the Germans might send over gas. So you had to get your respirator on. Which made any kind of movement or seeing or breathing or giving orders or any other fucking thing immensely difficult. And what if, in the midst of all that, an attack came? Or there was more shelling?
You prioritised and dealt with the problems, one at a time, in rapid succession. But there seemed to be no end to the problems. Every day brought more than yesterday, so that eventually the never-ending problems wore you down. There were too many. They came too frequently. And sometimes, while in the midst of one problem, half a dozen more emerged that had to be solved at the same time. Each day of doing this took away reserves of strength and energy that could never be replaced by sleep or food or time out of the line. Lewis knew he was getting very close to the end of his tether. Maybe he was already there.
‘Permission granted, Byrne.’
‘Rumour is the Germans are finished, sir.’
‘Been on the phone to the Kaiser, have you?’
He often exchanged banter like this with the men. Some took to it more than others. Byrne seemed to enjoy it.
‘Nossir, rumour is that the Germans are deserting in droves.’
‘Ah. So we’ll be seeing a white flag any day now, will we? Very good, Byrne. Let me know if they call you back, won’t you?’
‘Yessir. Excuse me, sir. Must go.’
‘Carry on, Byrne.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
Byrne saluted and disappeared at speed around the bay.
Rumours. There were always rumours. But this one? Lewis dared not think about it. After all this time. That it might actually end. Could it be true?
It was late afternoon and the light was starting to fail. It was as though somebody had punctured the sky and the colour was draining out through the hole. The soggy air was glacial and the clothes Lewis wore – long underpants, vest, tunic, trousers, puttees, greatcoat, leather, fleece-lined gloves, muffler, woollen cap and steel helmet – seemed little protection against it. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d changed them and knew that he stank. His socks were wet and he couldn’t feel his feet. Lice patrolled his underwear, needling his groin and armpits, crossing unreachable areas of his back, goading him to scratch and give himself trench fever. He arrived at the entrance to his dugout. He should really have gone down into it but felt safer out here. In the dugout he would be cornered. At least out here he could run. He didn’t want to die now. Not now. Not if these really were the last few days.
He took a cigarette from his case and placed it his mouth, noticing again the slight tremor in his hand. He couldn’t remember exactly when it had begun but now it was always there. It caused the yellow match flame – bright in the gathering gloom of the trench – to shiver as he positioned it beneath the end of the cigarette and lit it. The shaking wasn’t going away. He took a first deep, calming drag.
When he had come to France last year it had seemed like an impossible ambition that he would live more than a couple of weeks. He remembered those first shocked, stunned days. The unbelievable violence and squalor around him. Impossible to believe that men could live – and die – like this. Looking back on it now, he was astonished that he either hadn’t been carried off in a straight jacket screaming, or killed outright, given that he had made so many mistakes. But he had learned that you could get used to anything. And the letters from Helen, the link to her, had carried him safely through those first few days. So that gradually he had the feeling that she was watching over him – just as she had said she would.
And so Lewis learned the craft of soldiering in the trenches. He quickly realised that it wasn’t courage or daring that would enable him to survive. Of course there was a certain randomness to war – especially this war of artillery – against which there was no defence. So you needed luck. But there was also something much more mundane.
You needed attention to detail. Because there were lots of things that could get a man killed. Carelessness, a head raised an inch too high above a parapet. Thoughtlessness, no harm in lighting a fag here – what red glow in the dark? Lack of forethought – which way is the way back to our lines when both sides look the same at night, a silhouette of stakes and wire and rotting corpses, against a starlit background?
He had become conscious of the details, of how everything could be broken down into its constituent parts and how these parts needed to be understood and made as simple and as idiot-proof as possible. His men liked him for it. He became known as an officer who knew his onions. They felt they were in safe hands with him. Well, as safe as could be, anyway. That’s why there had been no problem earlier today when he had looked for men to take the bully beef tins out into no-man’s-land. They saw the sense of it – a detail that might turn out to be all important.
So the War might end. The Germans were clearly in a bad way but could it really, actually, end? Could it really happen that he could go home, be with Helen, they could get married, have a future. Maybe have a child. A son. Or a daughter as beautiful as Helen. Life. Long years stretching off into the future. Years of being with her when, so far, the time he had spent with her could be counted in weeks. He hardly dared hope.
He was lighting another cigarette, his hand shaking even more, when he heard the sound. It was like the dull tinkling of mess tins or the sound of cow bells in an Alpine meadow. Jesus Christ – the bully beef tins. The Germans were coming.
2
‘Like to read a book, Lewis?’
‘Yes please, Mum. I’ll get one from my shelf.’
It was something they often did together, during the long afternoons after lunch and before Dad came home. He was four and it was winter. A blazing coal fire burned red and yellow in the grate. Mum had lit it before lunch so that the room was warm and cosy. Outside the wind rattled the window panes and threw squalls of rain at them. It sounded like handfuls of gravel were being thrown against the glass. They had already done their lists, sitting at the dining room table. Mum had written ‘cat’ and then Lewis had written a whole lot of other words – ‘rat’, ‘sat’, ‘bat’ and so on. Then Mum had tried ‘dog’ and again Lewis had written a list of words that sounded like it. They had done nine or ten lists like this.
‘These are words that rhyme,’ she explained. ‘That’s poetry.’
‘Sometimes, he would say words that she said weren’t words at all. So ‘dog’, ‘bog’, ‘log’ and then ‘rog.’ Then she would laugh or tickle him and say, ‘That’s not a real word.’ Sometimes she would say words that weren’t real words too and they would both end up convulsed with laughter.
‘No, don’t do that,’ she said. ‘I have one here from my shelf.’
‘A grown-up book?’
‘Well, sort of, but I think you’ll like it.’
Lewis settled himself on Mum’s lap. She had thick dark hair the colour of chocolate. When he touched the skin of her face, which he often did, it reminded him of peaches. She smelt of flowers and the drawers in her bedroom. She opened the book’s black cover.
‘Treasure Island,’ she said. ‘By Robert Louis Stevenson’. He loved her voice. When she read it was like music. She turned some more pages, laying her fingertips on the pages she had turned, then catching the corner of the next one with her thumb, lifting it up and turning it over. She had long fingers that seemed to stroke the pages. Mum played the piano. She pressed down gently on both pages of the book with the palm of her hand. She wore two rings on her third finger, one with a stone and one that was just a ring.
‘Part 1, The Old Buccaneer.’
She turned another page.
‘Chapter one. The Old Sea Dog at The “Admiral Benbow”.’
‘Oh, it’s about a dog,’ said Lewis excitedly.
‘No, it’s not about a dog,’ she said. ‘It’s about a pirate, a sailor. A sea dog is another name for a sailor.’
‘Like Dad,’ Lewis said, looking up at her.
‘Yes,’ she agreed, lifting her eyes from the book and looking into the fire. She had green eyes. ‘Like your father was.’
She was silent for a heartbeat. Then she said, ‘Anyway, I think you’ll like it. Here we go.’
Here we go. It was like sliding down the side of a mountain.
‘Squire Trelawney, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17––, and go back to the time when my father kept the “Admiral Benbow” inn, and the brown old seaman, with the sabre cut, first took up his lodging under our roof.
I remember him as if it were yesterday.’
Outside the wind howled and the rain continued to spatter on the glass. The clock on the mantelpiece ticked in the background. Mum’s voice was soft when she was telling the story but she would do the voices. A bluff, man’s voice for the captain. Her own voice returned when telling the story. The pages rustled gently as she turned them.
They were still in the first chapter when she read about Jim Hawkins’s father being sick – a sickness that eventually ‘took him off’. Before Lewis could think too much about this, Mum began to sing the captain’s song in the captain’s voice. ‘Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest – Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!’
‘Why were they sitting on the dead man’s chest, Mum?’ he interrupted.
It was hard to imagine how so many people could fit on such a small space. She looked at him, puzzled for an instant, and then understood.