remember him displaying – and called him Absalom.
The son who betrayed his father.
Then he had used that one final word.
Coward.
Any further exchange seemed superfluous.
So Donald Chichester had gone off to be trained for his war, watching at a distance as the others wrote letters to their loved ones or bargained feverishly for two-day passes home. When the training was over and their war was about to begin, they had hung despairingly out of the windows of their embarkation train until distance and smoke had finally smothered all sight of the families they were leaving behind. Through it all, Don sat back, gently mocking the overflowing affection, and twisting deep inside.
The 6th had left England in emotion and arrived at Cherbourg in chaos. They had then driven to their billet three hundred miles away in Flines-les-Râches on the Belgian border. It was raining. The British Expeditionary Force had arrived.
It continued to rain. In fact, the weather proved to be abominable, the autumn one of the wettest on record followed by a winter where the snow lay thick and everything froze solid, including the radiator in every ambulance. But so long as German radiators froze too, Don was happy. Even when they attempted to dig sanitation pits and discovered that the water table lay beneath their feet, turning their main dressing station into a quagmire, Don was content. The war was worthless, and every step he took in the fetid mud served only to confirm it.
The conditions caused disease, of course. All drinking water had to be treated with sterilizing powder, a process which usually left the water tasting so disgusting that many Tommies decided to drink the foul French water instead, with predictable results. There were many other ailments. Training accidents. Traffic accidents. Afflictions of the feet. Bronchial troubles brought on by the fact that most of the soldiers had only one uniform, which had to be dried out while being worn. And venereal disease, as the British soldiers grew tired of their phoney war and succumbed in ever-growing numbers to boredom, drink and the local doxies. The follies of Flanders. Just like their fathers before them.
As the dismal months of phoney war stumbled on, there was an ever-increasing number of men who complained about the uselessness of it all, how it was a mindless war and not worth fighting. Wrong place, wrong time, and an awful bloody idea. Just what Don had argued.
That was, until the early hours of 10 May. Things changed. Dawn broke through a cloudless sky, and breakfast at the field dressing station where Don was posted found the officers squinting into the rising sun. They were muttering about reports of air activity. A church bell began ringing insistently in the distance. Something was up.
A sense of anticipation crept amongst those around him, a nervous excitement he was unable to share. The distance he had always known stood between him and the other soldiers once more began to assert itself.
‘There’s going to be a shooting war after all, Chichester,’ the sergeant snapped. ‘Not that you bloody care.’
An hour later, the sergeant was back with new orders. They were moving out. Two hours’ time. Into Belgium. Problem was, none of their training had had anything to do with Belgium. They’d been preparing themselves for a war just like the last one, a steady, solid, stay-where-you-were war. A war fought from behind those tank trenches and pillboxes they’d spent their months in France building. They hadn’t even been allowed to recce inside Belgium, it was off limits to everyone, they’d been told, and particularly the Germans.
So it was with renewed confusion that the unit prepared to get under way. Don packed the surgical kit, checked his medical bag, counted the field dressings and knocked down the casualty tents until he thought he was ready, but then he was instructed to help load additional supplies from the officers’ quarters into one of the ambulances. A desk, several filing cabinets, a typewriter, a small library of Michelin guides, two tea chests of crockery, a fishing rod, a case of sherry, three new uniforms and a pair of highly polished dancing shoes: all were piled on board. Only then did Private 14417977 Donald Chichester, Nursing Orderly Grade 3 and noncombatant Conscientious Objector, drive off to war.
The three men gathered at the tall window to mourn, their cheeks fired by the setting sun as they sipped at glasses of champagne. The wine was warm. It always was in the Foreign Office.
‘A day for our diaries, eh?’ suggested the Minister in whose elegant office they had gathered.
‘The darkest day in English history,’ the second man suggested, practising a line for the entry he would make that night. Henry Channon was known by all as ‘Chips’. He was the Minister’s parliamentary aide, an envied and potentially influential position, but it would be for his keen-eyed diaries rather than for his notoriously blunted political wits that his reputation would endure.
‘Will any of us survive?’ the third and youngest of the companions enquired. ‘Jock’ Colville was only twenty-five yet for seven months had been a private secretary to the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain. It had given him a ringside seat at the bonfire of hopes, conceits and monstrous complacencies that a few hours earlier had finally consumed his master. Chamberlain was no more, his resignation handed to a reluctant monarch, and now many more sacrifices would be required.
‘Has it come to that? A struggle to survive? Oh, I do so love being part of all this. I should miss it so,’ Chips muttered wistfully.
‘I was rather thinking of the war,’ Colville countered.
‘Ah, but we seem destined to fight on so many fronts,’ the Minister added, his eyes wandering northward across the gravel stretches of Horse Guards Parade to the white sandstone of the Admiralty building beyond. ‘Rab’ Butler was the second most senior Minister in the Foreign Office, a man of considerable intellectual powers whose career had embraced both ambition and Neville Chamberlain. He was talked about as a future leader. Inevitably it made him enemies, and perhaps the most significant of all his enemies was the man across the way in the Admiralty – a man who, less than an hour ago, had taken the King’s commission to become the new Prime Minister.
‘They say he cannot last. That he will soon be gone. Even that Neville may be back,’ Channon suggested.
‘To save us all from disaster,’ Butler intoned.
‘From the Luftwaffe.’
‘From Mr Churchill,’ Butler corrected.
‘Such a vulgar man,’ Channon muttered, replenishing their glasses.
Butler’s lips drooped in distaste. He had extraordinary lips, weak, as though constructed of wax that had strayed too near the flame and been melted. His eyes also drooped. It gave him an air of ingrained disapproval.
‘But Churchill’s a man with experience of war,’ Colville reminded them.
‘There is nothing to be gained either from war or from Winston Churchill,’ the Minister all but spat. ‘The fate of our country has been placed in the hands of the greatest political adventurer of modern times. A half-breed American whose entire life has been littered with failures for which other people have paid.’
‘And now poor Neville.’
A pause.
‘What will you do, Jock?’ Channon asked the younger man.
‘I think I might apply for a transfer to the armed services. The RAF, perhaps.’ He seemed unaware of his implied rebuke to Butler. If war was not an answer, what was to be the point of fighting it? But the Minister had more advice to offer.
‘No. Wait, Jock. Don’t draw stumps just yet. This game isn’t over. Let Winston have his day dabbling at war. And when he falters, and then fails, as he always has, the country will need men like us. More than ever.’
‘And after Winston?’
‘Pray that it will be an Englishman. Perhaps Neville once more. And if not him, then Halifax. But better Neville.’
The sun was almost set, its embers sprinkled wide across the spires and cupolas around them. The