Fallen Skies Read online

  “Poor bloody infantry as usual,” Stephen had said, leaning on the gate and looking westward across the flat fields, where the sun was setting in a dusty haze of scarlet.

  It gave him a sense of distance from his fear of the war to know that although this soil had claimed thousands, even millions of lives, it had always been farming country. The Perots could trace their ownership of the farm back to the eighteenth century and beyond. A Perot had been working the land when Marlborough had come riding in—and then ridden home again. Stephen felt that he could be a part of the land, one of the peasantry who watched the armies ebb and then flow. He felt free of his uniform and free of his allegiance and free of his fear. A Perot had been watching this horizon throughout all the battles and they had meant little in the end but temporary disruption. Stephen, watching the sun go down over his Juliette’s fields, felt himself at one with the men who stayed at home and let the armies do their bloody business and then disband.

  He toyed with the idea of staying at the farm after his marriage to Juliette. The Perots were old, they had no sons. They would welcome Juliette’s husband as a worker. They would welcome him as the son they had never had. Stephen, starved of affection from babyhood, thought of the way Madame Perot rested her hand on his shoulder when she served him his dinner, and how old Perot would slap his shoulder when they had completed a task. Stephen smiled at the thought of telling his parents that although they had sent him to his death he had found a life so rich and so contented that he would never come home again. Not only would he never fight again for King and Country, he was prepared to lose his King and Country for the greater joys of a few acres of arable land, a small trout river and a little wood of sound trees.

  He loved the skies over the Flanders plains. The land was so flat that the horizon stretched forever, he could even see the gentle curve of the earth. Storms would darken the horizon and roll slowly with great towers of clouds towards the farm. There was always time to pack up the tools and get under cover before the first drops of rain began to fall. And then, sheltering in the barn, there would be Juliette, smiling and warm, and splashed with raindrops which she would let Stephen kiss away from her face and neck.

  Every hour he could spend away from the trenches or from the camp behind the lines he would ride over to Little England to see Juliette and to work as her father ordered. His fellow officers stopped teasing him about his Belgian bint after Stephen had sharply told them that he and Juliette were planning to marry. There had been a shocked silence, for the Belgian girls encountered by the officers were generally working whores in brothels. But Stephen’s look had been so fierce, and his temper was known to be so uncertain, that no-one ventured another comment.

  After a while, it was regarded as rather romantic that when the rest of them took a day’s leave lying on their cramped camp beds or getting angrily drunk in the estaminet, Stephen and his batman would hitch a lift, or borrow a couple of horses, or commandeer transport, to get themselves out to the farm they called Little England. Stephen never invited anyone to go with him, and for those left behind it became a place of mystery—a place where there was peace. A place where the world had not changed, where plants and crops still grew, where the land beneath your boots was green and fertile and not a slough of mud.

  Stephen stirred in his sleep beside Lily and sighed. His dream changed and shifted. Half a dozen half-seen, dreaded images slid into his dream. He saw again the surreal picture of the dead horse blasted by an explosion so it hung, like some demented fruit, from the branches of a tree. A mangled chest, a rolling head. Stephen moaned and Lily half-woke, and put a hand on his shoulder and shook him gently.

  Stephen turned on his side and went deeper into sleep. He suddenly heard someone shout, shout loudly at him.

  “Winters! I’ve just heard. They’ve broken through. They’re past your place, Little England. The 4th fell back a day ago. The line is this side of the farm now, and they’re still retreating. The Germans will have gone through Little England.”

  Stephen’s breath came faster as he remembered the cleansing leap of rage, and at the same time his deep longing for Juliette. The whole of the Allied army was in chaos. Brigades were split from their communications, platoons were lost in the withdrawal. The big push had come not from the English and the French but from the Germans, who were suddenly rolling forward in an unstoppable advance. The stalemate of the trenches was smashed and the armies were moving rapidly. The English were falling back to the coast in a desperate retreat to get home, the French frantically grouping and regrouping in an attempt—which anyone could see would fail—to save Paris. Unbelievably, after the years of stuck warfare and the fields sown so liberally with bodies of the dead, the British were losing, and were in rapid retreat.

  Not Stephen. There was nothing for him in England, least of all as a returning reluctant soldier in an army that had lost. There were nightmares and a dull office job. There was the cold silent house and a crippled father. There was his mother’s unbearable grieving for Christopher and her scant joy in his survival. Stephen rejected that future for himself and swore that he would rescue Juliette or kill her murderers. He did not wait to report to his CO; he simply started running, back down the road, in the darkness, and then down the little lanes towards Little England.

  It was a while before he even realized he was not alone. Four men had come with him, and Coventry. He led them at a rapid pace—running and then walking to catch their breaths, and then running again. He was reckless of scouting parties; he did not even fear the main German advance. He was too angry to think of his own safety or of anything except getting to the farm and protecting it with his life.

  They ran down the lane and Stephen felt the cold haft of his knife slipped into his hand by Coventry. The lights were on in the little farmhouse. He halted his men and gestured them to be silent. He crept around the back, moving like a shadow in the darkness. He meant to steal up to the window and peep in, to see if the place was occupied by Germans, and how many there were, and what the odds would be. But when he heard the rich delightful laugh of a woman’s voice his anger suddenly overtook him and he kicked in the door, knowing that Juliette was already dead and the Germans and their whores were defiling her home, the home he had thought would be his.

  He was firing as the door flew open, and the men behind him were firing too in a great explosion of bullets which stormed into the room as they rushed in behind them.

  He saw Juliette as she rose from the German’s lap, her face a mask of surprise and terror. She turned towards him as a bullet thudded into her belly and her chest and flung her, arms outstretched like a thrown doll, into the wall at the side of the range. As she fell her head lolled into the open range and her hair frizzed and sizzled and her face burned red and then black and the kitchen was filled with the smell of cooking meat. Perot’s wife had been at the sink; a bullet took her in the back. She was crawling across the floor towards Juliette when Stephen bent down and put a bullet behind her ear. The German seated at the table with his jacket undone and Juliette on his lap was killed outright. His body was a mess of red blood and red wine from the smashed bottle on the table.

  Old Perot stumbled up the stairs from the cellar and Coventry whirled and put a bullet neatly between his eyes, a real marksman’s point. They could hear a scream from the other Perot girl upstairs, and the stumbling sound of a man half-falling in haste down the wooden stairs. Two of Stephen’s men sent a hail of bullets up the stairs and they heard a scream and then his falling body.

  They ranged through the house then, like avenging tyrants. There were three other German officers, who had been quartered at the farmhouse for three days. There were two other women with them. They were shot where they lay, one young boy so exhausted by the rapid advance over the last few days that he barely woke as Stephen raged into the room and shot him and the woman in his arms.

  When they had finished, and come back to the kitchen, Stephen found he was trembling with a deep sexu