CHAPTER 10
IF IT IS POSSIBLE TO BE HAPPY IN THE MIDDLE OF A NIGHTMARE, then Topthorn and I were happy that summer. Every day we had to make the same hazardous journeys up to the front line, which, in spite of almost continuous offensives and counteroffensives, moved only a matter of a few hundred yards in either direction. Hauling our ambulance cart of dying and wounded back from the trenches, we became a familiar sight along the pitted track. More than once we were cheered by marching soldiers as they passed us. Once, after we had plodded on, too tired to be fearful, through a devastating barrage that straddled the road in front of us and behind us, one of the soldiers with his tunic covered in blood and mud, came and stood by my head and threw his good arm around my neck and kissed me.
“Thank you, my friend,” he said. “I never thought they would get us out of that hellhole. I found this yesterday, and thought about keeping it for myself, but I know where it belongs.” And he reached up and hung a muddied ribbon around my neck. There was an Iron Cross dangling on the end of it. “You’ll have to share it with your friend,” he said. “They tell me you’re both English. I bet you are the first English in this war to win an Iron Cross, and the last I shouldn’t wonder.” The waiting wounded outside the hospital tent clapped and cheered us to the echo, bringing doctors, nurses, and patients running out of the tent to see what there could be to clap about in the midst of all this misery.
They hung our Iron Cross on a nail outside our stable door and on the rare quiet days, when the shelling stopped and we were not needed to make the journey up to the front, a few of the walking wounded would wander down from the hospital to the farmyard to visit us. I was puzzled by this adulation but loved it, thrusting my head over the high stable door whenever I heard them coming into the yard. Side by side, Topthorn and I would stand at the door to receive our unlimited ration of compliments and adoration—and, of course, this was sometimes accompanied by a welcome gift of perhaps a lump of sugar or an apple.
But it is the evenings of that summer that stay so strong in my memory. Often it would not be until dusk that we would clatter into the yard, and there, always waiting by the stable door, would be the little girl and her grandfather who had come to us that first evening. The orderlies simply handed us over into their charge—and that was just as well, for kind as they were, they had no notion about horses. It was little Emilie and her grandfather who insisted that they should look after us. They rubbed us down and saw to our sores and bruises. They fed us, watered us, and groomed us and somehow always found enough straw for a dry warm bed. Emilie made us each a fringe to tie over our eyes to keep the flies from bothering us, and in the warm summer evenings she led us out to graze in the meadow below the farmhouse and stayed with us watching us grazing until her grandfather called us in again.
She was a tiny, frail creature, but led us about the farm with complete confidence, chatting all the while about what she had been doing all the day and about how brave we were and how proud she was of us.
As winter came on again and the grass lost its flavor and goodness, she would climb up into the loft above the stable and throw down our hay for us, and she would lie down on the loft floor looking at us through the trapdoor while we pulled the hay from the rack and ate it. Then, with her grandfather busying himself about us, she would prattle on merrily about how when she was older and stronger and when the soldiers had all gone home and the war was over she would ride us herself through the woods—one at a time, she said—and how we would never want for anything if only we would stay with her forever.
Topthorn and I were by now seasoned campaigners, and it may well have been that that drove us on out through the roar of the shell fire back toward the trenches each morning, but there was more to it than that. For us it was the hope that we would be back that evening in our stable and that little Emilie would be there to comfort and to love us. We had that to look forward to and to long for. Any horse has an instinctive fondness for children, for they speak more softly, and their size precludes any threat; but Emilie was a special child for us, for she spent every minute she could with us and lavished us with her affection. She would be up late every evening with us, rubbing us down and seeing to our feet, and be up again at dawn to see us fed properly before the orderlies led us away and hitched us up to the ambulance cart. She would climb the wall by the pond and stand there waving, and although I could never turn around, I knew she would stay there until the road took us out of sight. And then she would be there when we came back in the evening, clasping her hands in excitement as she watched us being unhitched.
But one evening at the onset of winter, she was not there to greet us. We had been worked even harder that day than usual, for the first snows of winter had blocked the road up to the trenches to all but the horse-drawn vehicles and we had to make twice the number of trips to bring in the wounded. Exhausted, hungry, and thirsty, we were led into our stable by Emilie’s grandfather, who said not a word but saw to us quickly before hurrying back across the yard to the house. Topthorn and I spent that evening by the stable door watching the gentle fall of snow and the flickering light in the farmhouse. We knew something was wrong before the old man came back and told us.
He came late at night, his feet crumping the snow. He had made up the buckets of hot mash we had come to expect and he sat down on the straw beneath the lantern and watched us eat. “She prays for you,” he said, nodding slowly. “Do you know, every night before she goes to bed, she prays for you? I’ve heard her. She prays for her dead father and mother—they were killed only a week after the war began. One shell, that’s all it takes. And she prays for her brother that she’ll never see again—just seventeen and he doesn’t even have a grave. It’s as if he never lived except in our minds. Then she prays for me and for the war to pass by the farm and to leave us alone, and last of all she prays for you two. She prays for two things: first, that you both survive the war and live on into ripe old age, and secondly, that if you do she dearly wants to be there to be with you. She’s barely thirteen, my Emilie, and now she’s lying up there in her room and I don’t know if she’ll live to see the morning. The German doctor from the hospital tells me it’s pneumonia. He’s a good enough doctor even if he is German—he’s done his best, it’s up to God now, and so far God hasn’t done too well for my family. If she goes, if my Emilie dies, then the only light left in my life will be put out.” He looked up at us through heavily wrinkled eyes and wiped the tears from his face. “If you can understand anything of what I said, then pray for her to whatever horse god you pray to—pray for her like she does for you.”
There was heavy shelling all that night, and before dawn the next day, the orderlies came for us and led us out into the snow to be hitched up. There was no sign of Emilie nor her grandfather. Pulling the cart through the fresh, uncut snow that morning, Topthorn and I needed all our strength just to haul the empty cart up to the front line. The snow disguised perfectly the ruts and shell holes, so that we found ourselves straining to extricate ourselves from the piled-up snow and the sinking mud beneath it.
We made it to the front line, but only with the help of the two orderlies, who jumped out whenever we had difficulty and turned the wheels over by hand until we were free again and the cart could gather momentum through the snow once more.
The field station behind the front line was crowded with wounded and we had to bring back a heavier load than we ever had before, but fortunately the way back was mostly downhill. Someone suddenly remembered it was Christmas morning, and they sang slow, tuneful carols all the way back. For the most part they were casualties blinded by gas and in their pain some of them cried, as they sang, for their lost sight. We made so many journeys that day and stopped only when the hospital could take no more.
It was already a starry night by the time we reached the farm. The shelling had stopped. There were no flares to light up the sky and blot out the stars. All the way along the lane, not a gun fired. Peace had come for one night, one at least. The snow in the yard was crisped by the frost. There was a dancing light in our stable, and Emilie’s grandfather came out into the snow and took our reins from the orderly.
“It’s a fine night,” he said to us as he led us in. “It’s a fine night and all’s well. There’s mash and hay and water in there for you—I’ve given you extra tonight, not because it’s cold, but because you prayed. You must have prayed to that horse god of yours because my Emilie woke up at lunchtime, sat up she did, and do you know the first thing she said? I’ll tell you. She said, ‘I must get up, got to get their mash ready for them when they come back. They’ll be cold and tired,’ she said. The only way that German doctor could get her to stay in bed was to promise you extra rations tonight, and she made him promise to go on with them as long as the cold weather lasted. So go inside, my beauties, and eat your fill. We’ve all had a Christmas present today, haven’t we? All’s well, I tell you. All’s well.”