Pack Up Your Troubles

Book 6: War at Home

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

Genres: World War I; Historical Romance

Synopsis

The sixth and final book in the War at Home series by the author of The Morland Dynasty novels.

Set against the evocative backdrop of World War I, this is an epic family drama featuring the Hunters and their servants.

Release date: August 15, 2019

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 400

Sample

December 1918

A truck with the Red Cross symbol painted on its sides and roof pulled up in front of the Gare de l’Est in Paris, and two men and two women got out. The women were middle-aged, with cropped hair under sensible hats, wearing long boots under army-style greatcoats. The two men were younger and, as goodbyes were said, seemed half reluctant and almost tearful.

One of them, Morgan, went for another round of handshakes. ‘I feel so guilty,’ he moaned.

‘Nonsense,’ said Laura Hunter, briskly. ‘You’ve done your duty. The war’s over. Of course you must go home.’

‘Your mothers will be longing to see you,’ said Lady Agnes Daubeney – always called Annie.

‘Anyway, we sent the telegram yesterday, so you have to go,’ Laura added. Privately she wondered how easily they would get a train to Bar-Le-Duc. The railways were still heavily occupied with moving the military, and the Gare de l’Est in particular was the starting point for Strasbourg for the Army of Occupation. But longing for home would find a way.

At the last moment, Jean-Marie rushed back to bestow a caress on the ambulance’s battered bonnet and cried, ‘Au’voir, Mathilde!’ in a choked voice, and then they were gone.

Laura laughed. ‘You’d think she was a family pet being put to sleep.’

‘Don’t mock. I feel attached to her too,’ said Annie.

‘She’s served us well, the good old girl,’ Laura agreed. ‘Now we’d better go and get her stripped out.’

Matilda was one of Lady Overton’s X-ray ambulances, paid for by public donations. Each ambulance had been given a woman’s name, and women of the same name all over the country had been invited to donate whatever they could. The lure of the namesake had proved irresistible: there was a Margaret, an Alice, a Helen, a Gladys, a Bertha . . .

Annie and the boys – young Frenchmen excused military service because of disability – had learned to operate the X-ray machinery at the military Radiological Institute in Paris; Laura had joined them as their driver.

‘What an adventure it has been,’ Laura said, as she drove towards the Hôpital de la Pitié. The purpose of the Overton ambulances was to X-ray wounded soldiers as close to the Front as possible. In the latter stages, the conflict had changed from the static war of trenches to a war of movement, in which the enemy could be anywhere, and danger could strike from any direction. For six months Laura had been driving through twisting and largely unsignposted lanes, finding the Front by following the noise of artillery, picking a way through shell holes and the rubble of ruined villages, dodging German aeroplanes, which, at that stage of the war, would strafe anything.

It had been exhilarating, perhaps the most exciting thing she had done. But come the Armistice, trade, as she put it, had fallen off. Then Lady Overton had received an urgent plea from a Paris hospital for X-ray equipment, and had decided that since Matilda was out there, and not really needed any more, she should donate hers. So the mission was over.

‘What will you do now?’ Annie asked, watching the battered streets of Paris reel past. There were shuttered shops, shell-damage, boarded-up buildings, rubbish blowing along gutters and weeds sprouting from cracks in façades. But life was beginning to return.

‘I don’t know,’ said Laura. ‘What about you?’

‘I’d really like to go home,’ Annie confessed. ‘See my family. Rest. We’ve hardly stopped all year. And I don’t feel awfully well.’

‘You don’t look quite the thing,’ Laura said, with a sideways glance. ‘Have you still got that rash?’

‘Yes. It doesn’t bother me much. It’s the constant tiredness that pulls me down.’

‘You should go,’ Laura said firmly. ‘And you don’t need to sound apologetic.’

‘But don’t you want to go home?’

‘Not yet,’ said Laura. ‘It doesn’t feel finished to me. And what is there at home for me in any case? I’m horribly afraid women are going to be forced back into the box now the war’s over. I can’t see them letting us have any more fun.’

Annie smiled. ‘I’m sure you’ll find something,’ she said. She knew of Laura’s colourful past. This war had been a liberation to restless spirits like hers. ‘I don’t exactly long to go back to dusting the drawing-room and arranging flowers myself. I’d like a rest – but after that, perhaps you and I can start on a new adventure.’

‘Come and find me when you’re ready,’ Laura said. ‘Ah, this is it. I wonder where they want us. Round the back somewhere, if I’m any judge.’

With the X-ray equipment carefully stripped out, Matilda felt much lighter, and jounced and leaped over the uneven cobbles with renewed vigour and increased rattling. Laura headed back to the lodgings they had secured the night before, rooms in a cheap hotel in the Montmartre area, chosen because there was a garage and workshop at the end of the road, where the vehicle could be sheltered. She dared not leave it out in the street for fear it would be damaged.

They travelled in thoughtful silence, until Laura said, ‘You know, the day is still young. Or young-ish. If you pack up quickly when we get back, I can drive you to the station, and I bet you could get on a train today. You could pick up a night crossing at Calais and be home by tomorrow morning.’

‘What a restless creature you are!’ Annie laughed.

‘No sense in kicking your heels in Paris when you could be hugging your mother and sleeping in a proper bed.’

‘Are you so anxious to be rid of me?

‘Immeasurably. I can’t bear to see a fellow-creature suffering.’ She inched the accelerator closer to the floor, and Matilda flew off an irregularity in the road and came down with a thump. ‘And when you get home, show that rash to a doctor.’

‘I hate our doctor. He’s an old fool.’

‘Go to Endell Street and see one of the lady doctors. Or find a dashing RAMC chap on leave and corner him. But see someone. I don’t like the look of it.’

‘I will. But are you sure you’ll be all right on your own?’

Laura laughed. ‘I’m forty-six years old, and I have a rifle. No harm can come to me.’

She spent a couple of days cleaning out Matilda and thoroughly overhauling her engine, while she waited for a reply to her query to Lady Overton as to what to do with the empty ambulance. A telegram came, saying, ‘No further use for it. Do with it as you please.’ And on the same day came a message from Major Ransley, saying he had a few days’ leave and proposing they met in Paris. ‘There’s a wonderful little restaurant I used to frequent in my salad days. I’d love to take you to it.’

If it’s still there, Laura thought. And if it’s still open. And if it’s still wonderful. But it would be good to see him again. In the latter stages of the war they had both moved about so much it had taken great concentration to keep track of each other, let alone to meet. Laura wondered what difference the Armistice would make to them; whether and when he would go home, and what she would do with her life in either case.

So now, two days later, here they were in a café in a side street off the boulevard Saint-Germain, facing each other across a small table. Laura said, ‘It’s wondrous to think that four weeks ago we were all jigging about in the street, kissing complete strangers with excitement . . .’

‘Speak for yourself,’ said the major, genially. ‘As I remember, I was in the middle of an amputation when the Armistice was announced. Poor devil,’ he added. ‘I don’t know why it seems worse that he was wounded at the last minute like that. A limb lost is a limb lost. His name was Strickland, and he was only nineteen.’

‘Please tell me you don’t remember the name of every “poor devil” you operated on.’

‘I should hope not,’ he said. ‘There were so many. Leaves of Vallombrosa come to mind. You were saying?’ She looked blank. ‘You were telling me about your promiscuous kissing of strangers.’

‘Oh! Yes. I was going to say we were all so excited then, but now I feel flat, and vaguely uneasy. What happened to the euphoria?’

‘You have to remember,’ Ransley said, pouring more wine, ‘that it was not peace, only a cease-fire.’

She considered the implications of the statement. ‘Do you really think the Germans might start up again?’

‘A lot of the top brass fear just that. Some believe it was a mistake to let them march back by battalions, in uniform, with guns. We should have made it clear to them that they’d been beaten. Sent them back under guard on trains and lorries.’

‘Why does that matter so much?’ Laura asked. ‘Or is this just one of those differences between men and women that we shall never understand?’

‘Partly – but it’s also a matter of what the politicians and newspapers will make of it back home in Germany. We know they couldn’t have lasted much longer, that they were thoroughly trumped, but the top chaps of the new German republic won’t want it to be seen in that way. Their pride and their jobs will depend on painting a rosier picture. I’m afraid they may just use the armistice as a breathing space to regroup.’

She nodded slowly, thinking, All the more reason, then, for me not to go home. But she said, ‘I’m astonished you found this place again.’

‘I have a very good sense of direction,’ he said, in wounded tones.

‘And even more astonished it has the same proprietor.’ He had greeted Ransley like a long-lost son, with tearful embraces and a flood of French. ‘You must have come here a lot to have made such an impression on him.’

‘I was quite a regular at one time. It was a literary haunt in those days. I saw Bazin here, and Daudin – and Zola himself on one occasion.’

‘And did you understand what mine host was saying to you?’

‘Didn’t you?’

‘I got my French in the schoolroom. His was altogether too authentic. And his accent was nothing like Miss Yorke’s.’

Ransley laughed. ‘He promised us a meal fit for a king. And then spoiled it by lamenting that there was nothing in Paris to make a meal out of. I suspect it may turn out to be horse – I hope you aren’t squeamish?’

‘The week before the Armistice, I ate donkey. Or attempted to. You know how old a donkey has to be before it dies, and I’m sure it was too valuable for its owners to kill it before it dropped dead naturally. So horse is a step up for me.’

The meal in fact turned out to be tastier than anything either had had recently in war-ravaged France: a stew that Laura guessed was rabbit, made delicious with lots of onions and herbs, and a sweet omelette filled with quince jam, which seemed like a miracle. They all craved eggs, which had been in such short supply for four years. How mine host had got hold of them they did not enquire, after he delivered the dish with an enormous flourish and what was almost a wink. He had obviously pulled more than a rabbit from his hat, in honour of his old and honoured customer.

‘And the really good thing,’ Ransley had commented, as he studied the wine list, ‘is that a lot of fine pre-war wines have been lying maturing in deep cellars, safe from German shells, and with no one to drink them.’

And so they came, after coffee – vile, eked out in the usual way with chicory and who knew what else? – to the lighting of cigarettes and undisturbed conversation.

‘I ducked, this morning,’ Laura said, ‘when an aeroplane came over. It was only one of ours – on a joy-ride, I suppose.’

‘They’re still going out on reconnaissance flights,’ Ransley told her. ‘Seeing what the Germans are up to.’

‘Over Paris?’

‘Well, that could have been a joy-ride. But I’ve heard they’re sending several squadrons to Strasbourg to be the eyes of the occupying army on the Rhine.’

‘Very well. But my point was, how long will it be before we stop ducking? Or flinging ourselves to the ground when a car backfires?’

He grinned. ‘Did you do that?’

‘Yesterday,’ she admitted. ‘Don’t make me blush. I tore one of my stockings, and if you knew how difficult it is to get replacements . . .’

‘As soon as things are back to normal, I shall buy you a dozen pairs.’

‘And I shall keep them in a drawer unused for ever and gloat over them. But when will that be – normality? Have you heard when you’re going home?’

‘My latest contract doesn’t end until April. And there’s still plenty to keep us busy over here. Accidents and illness keep on happening, cease-fire or no cease-fire. And there are the wounded who haven’t been evacuated yet to take care of, not to mention the prisoners of war starting to trickle back, with multiple sicknesses and untreated injuries.’

‘But you’ve been out here so long, you could get transferred to England if you made a point of it,’ she suggested.

He looked apologetic. ‘Perhaps.’

‘You don’t want to go back,’ she said.

‘Do you?’

‘The FANY aren’t going,’ she mentioned.

‘They have an organisation behind them.’

‘Ah, but I have an ambulance. Lady Overton gave it to me. All it needs is a couple of benches and stretcher frames to be fitted. My present landlady has a son who could do that for me. The poor fellow’s a mutilé de guerre, but perfectly capable of a job like that, and he’d be glad to earn a bit of money.’

‘And then what?’ asked Ransley.

‘Back to Hazebrouck or Pop or somewhere like that. You know there’s never enough transport. I can ferry the wounded, and be a taxi for nurses and officers going back and forth. If you aren’t going home for six months,’ she concluded, ‘I may as well stay.’

He laid his hand over hers. ‘That’s very flattering. You’re staying for me?’

‘Don’t be vain,’ she said impishly. ‘It’s just that it would be poor-spirited not to see it through. And if the Germans should start up again—’

‘Let’s not think about that,’ said Ransley, hastily. ‘Too frightful. Let’s think instead about us.’

‘Us?’ she said warily.

‘Getting married. We can do it over here, you know – it’s quite legal. You said you wouldn’t marry me until the war was over—’

‘You said it wasn’t over – it’s just a cease-fire.’

‘My dear,’ he said, ‘why so defensive? If you’ve changed your mind about me . . .’

She saw she had hurt him, and hastened to reassure. ‘I still feel exactly the same about you,’ she said. ‘But . . . Well, it may seem odd, given my unconventional behaviour, but I’d like to get married in the traditional way, back home. My family would be so pleased – they gave up on me years ago. It needn’t be a big affair – that would be ridiculous at our age – but I would like them all to be there. And you have sisters, wouldn’t you like them to be present?’

‘It shall be just as you please,’ he promised. ‘Even if it does mean another five or six months without you.’

‘You’ll be so busy, the time will fly past.’

‘You could be right. The Royal Engineers will be starting to clear unexploded shells next month, and no doubt that will create plenty of new customers.’

She winced. ‘I hope you’re properly appreciated.’

‘Well, strange you should say that. Modesty almost prevents me mentioning it, but if we are to be married –’

‘There’s not a shred of doubt about it.’

‘– then I ought to tell you. I’ve been awarded the DSO.’

Her face lit. ‘My dear! For anything in particular?’

‘Those last few months, running a field hospital close to the line. I’ve been lucky,’ he said abruptly. ‘Four hundred and seventy RAMC officers killed, God knows how many wounded, and I come out of it unscathed, with a gong and a beautiful woman into the bargain.’

‘That,’ she said, her eyes bright, ‘is worth a celebration. What’s your landlady like?’

‘Sour.’ He caught her drift. ‘No bon, I’m afraid.’

‘I think mine will turn a blind eye. The bed’s small and the mattress isn’t up to much, but . . .’

‘Wanton woman!’ he said softly. ‘It’s a good job you’ve agreed to marry me. The world isn’t ready for a wild spirit like you.’

At The Elms, it was the day for Mrs Chaplin, the charwoman. She could usually be relied upon for a bit of tasty gossip, so everybody appeared on time for their lunch, as they called the mid-morning snack. There had been no bacon for breakfast, the delivery girl having fallen off her bicycle again and not arriving until too late, so Cook had put out a bit of cheese to go with the bread, which went down well. Thank the Lord, she thought, that wasn’t short. She was making a big maccheroni cheese dish for their dinner, which dealt with the meat shortage – though Munt the gardener would no doubt complain. But he complained about everything.

Having chewed her way through a first slice of bread, Mrs Chaplin piped up with the magical words, ‘Have you heard?’ and they all leaned forward slightly.

‘Go on, Mrs Chaplin, dear,’ Cook said, topping up her tea.

‘That girl Lillian, as used to work here—’

‘She was a housemaid,’ Cook translated for the scullery-maid, Eileen. ‘Before your time. She left to work in a munitions factory.’

‘Well,’ said Mrs Chaplin, gathering the story back, ‘turns out she’s dead.’ The gasps around the table were gratifying. ‘I had it from my Ben, who had it from Don Spignail when he come in to have a new kidney link put on a collar, and he heard it from his Rosemary that’s a ward-maid up the District Hospital.’

‘Whatever happened to her?’ Cook asked, reserving sympathy until she learned if it was warranted. She had warned Lillian against the munitions factory – but would she listen?

‘Well, they reckoned in the end it was liver disease. And her only sixteen, seventeen next March. They didn’t spot it at once, on account of liver makes you go yellow, and she was all yellow anyway, from the TNT. And then she got all swelled up – in her belly, like – and her dad thought she’d got herself in the fambly way and give her a thrashing, but she swore Bible-oath she weren’t, and in the end she was that sick she had to go to the hospital and they said it was her liver. Swelled up something chronic, she was, and her face all puffy, and they reckoned they couldn’t do nothing for her. She died Friday night, and Rosie Spignail said her liver was that big when they looked at it after, it weighed near-on ten pounds. No wonder they thought she was having a baby.’

‘Good job she didn’t,’ Cook said absently. ‘When those munitionettes have babies they come out yellow as well.’

Ada, the head house-parlourmaid, looked at her reproachfully. ‘You might show a bit of pity. Poor Lillian! What a terrible way to go – and her so young.’

Cook was embarrassed and, like many an embarrassed person, covered it with defiance. ‘Well, I warned her! I told her how it would be. And she wouldn’t listen. Oh no, she had to go and work in a shell factory! It’s not just accidents and explosions kill you in them places, there’s all sorts of sickness. Of course I’m ever so sorry for her. And her parents. Such a pretty girl, she was. But you let it be a lesson to you,’ she added, rounding on Eileen. ‘There’s many a girl thinks herself too good for service and ends up in more trouble than she bargained for. You’ve got a good place here, and don’t you forget it.’

‘Yes, Cook. I know,’ Eileen said meekly. ‘I’d never go off like that. Me mam’d kill me if I went and worked in a fact’ry.’

‘Don’t be a fool,’ Ethel snapped. ‘That’s only munitions factories. Ordinary factories are all right.’

‘Don’t see you movin’ out,’ Munt growled. ‘For all your flighty talk, you keep on stoppin’ here, don’tcha?’

Ethel wouldn’t argue with Munt. She knew the futility of it. She stood up. ‘I got to go. Got to get my baby up from his nap.’

‘It’s not your baby!’ Munt called after her, as she went out.

Ada looked thoughtful. ‘She’s right, though, isn’t she? Some factories are all right to work in. And not all the girls in the shell factories got sick.’

‘I’m just trying to look out for young Eileen here,’ Cook said, cross that her campaign was being undermined.

‘Wish I could see a great big liver, all diseased,’ said the boy, Timmy.

‘You do not,’ Cook snapped automatically.

‘I do too! I ain’t squeamish. I know a boy ’at works at the morgue, down the ’orsepittle. That’s what I want to do when I grows up, with all corpses and legs come off and bodies cut up and stuff.’

Munt leaned over and clouted him round the back of the head. ‘That’s enough o’ that. We’ve had enough of bodies cut up through four years o’ war.’

‘He was such a nice boy when he first come here,’ Cook said, giving Munt a malevolent look. ‘I don’t know what you do to boys, I really don’t. You’re a bad influence.’

‘It’s the war,’ Ada said. ‘Everything goes to the bad. Armistice don’t seem to have made much difference. I wonder sometimes if there’ll ever be an end to it all.’ Her husband had been killed in France: they had only had two days together as man and wife.

Cook agreed. ‘Nobody where they should be or acting the way they should, everything broken down or missing, and we’ve still got all these shortages. And that Spanish flu coming back again, they say. And now this dreadful news about Lillian.’

‘And Emily,’ Ada said. ‘I wonder whatever became of her.’

‘Don’t you worry about her,’ Cook said. ‘That little madam! Goes off home to Ireland on holiday and never comes back. And not a word to me that was like a mother to her. Leaving me to worry about her week after week.’

‘Nothing’ll ever be the same again,’ Ada said mournfully.

Beryl, the under-house-parlourmaid, whose contribution had been to get outside as much bread and cheese as she could before she was stopped, spoke up through a mouthful. ‘What I don’t understand is, if the war’s over, why aren’t the sojers coming back?’

‘Use your sense, girl,’ Munt said. ‘There’s more’n three million men in the army. Can’t bring ’em all back in five minutes.’

‘Could bring back some, though,’ Beryl said.

‘Ah,’ said Munt. ‘That’s where the trouble lies. Which ones?’

‘What d’you mean?’ Ada asked, but he wouldn’t elaborate.

He finished his tea and stood up. ‘Come on, you young limb,’ he said to Timmy. ‘I got digging for you to do.’

In a moment, they were all on the move, Eileen to clear the table, Beryl, sighing, to polish the front-door brass, Mrs Chaplin to carry on scrubbing the larder shelves. Ada lingered a moment to check the linens book and, finding herself alone with Cook, who was staring in a blank way at the calendar on the wall – a present from William last Christmas, it had a picture of an AirCo DH5 on it – said, ‘Heard anything from your Fred yet about when he’s coming home?’

Cook snapped out of her reverie. ‘Not a word. Last thing he said, there was some rumour going round that they might have to go to the Rhine.’

‘It’s a crying shame,’ Ada said. ‘After all that time over there, and they can’t tell them when they can come home. And your Fred’s been out there from the beginning.’

‘Near enough,’ Cook admitted.

‘And there’s the master stuck out there somewhere with his company, and Master William with his squadron . . .’

‘At least they will come home, sooner or later,’ Cook said, laying a hand on her arm. ‘Not like your poor Len.’

‘Or Master Bobby,’ Ada said. ‘I feel so sorry for the missus. This family’s given so much.’

‘You’ve given most of all, Ada dear,’ said Cook. ‘There should be a medal for the likes of you.’

‘Oh, I’m all right,’ Ada said. ‘I must get on – I’ve still got the drawing-room to do.’

And she went quickly away. Too much sympathy wasn’t good for you – and it was a funny thing, but somehow it made the sadness harder to bear.

Summoned by his commanding officer, Captain Sir Edward Hunter presented himself at battalion headquarters, which for the time being was an abandoned house in the centre of the village. It was a square, substantial villa, which had once housed a prosperous merchant, his family and servants. The British Expeditionary Force had retreated through here in August 1914, fighting all the way, and many of the locals had fled the advancing Germans. Where were they now? Would they ever return? Nobody knew. France was a land of such ghosts.

The adjutant showed him into what had probably been the morning room, where Colonel Prewitt Dancer was using a small breakfast table as a desk. The room had that knocked-about look one grew used to in places armies had passed through. A great chunk had been broken out of the marble mantelpiece, the wallpaper was torn, there were pale oblongs where the pictures had been removed – for safety, or looted, who knew? – and here and there a drawing-pin flew a tiny flag of paper where some notice had been hastily torn down.

Prewitt Dancer looked up. ‘Ah, Hunter,’ he said cordially. ‘Sit down, make yourself comfortable.’

There was no fire, and it was hardly warmer in here than outside. Edward removed his cap, and unbuttoned but did not remove his greatcoat. He took the spindly dining chair opposite the colonel, who read on for a moment, then tapped the document in front of him.

‘The government’s scared stiff of Bolshevism,’ he said. ‘Germany’s riddled with it, and the French have had their problems, as we know.’

Edward nodded. The previous spring, large parts of the French Army had mutinied, leaving the British holding the war alone. It was believed that red revolutionaries had infiltrated the trenches.

‘But in my experience,’ the colonel went on, ‘the average British soldier is as much interested in politics as he is in Virgil’s Georgics. What does Tommy want, Hunter?’

‘In general, beer and fried potatoes,’ Edward said. ‘At the moment, specifically? To go home.’ It was hard to blame them, he thought. While the war went on, they had complained remarkably little about having to be over here, away from their families: there was a job to do, and they were determined to do it, however long it took. But as soon as the Armistice was declared, they’d expected to go home straight away. Most of them thought they would be on a boat to Dover the next day. They couldn’t understand – and why should they? – the logistics of dismantling the vast war machine.

When the Armistice was declared, Edward’s battalion had been near Mons: right back where the war had begun four long, weary years ago. After a few days of ‘make and mend’, the order to move had come through, and the men had been tremendously excited, assuming they were marching towards the coast, a ship, and Blighty. In fact, they had marched south-westwards to their present position at Landrecies, on the edge of the Forest of Mormal. Why they had been moved, no one, not even the colonel, knew; and no one knew what was to happen to them next. There were rumours, of course, that they might be sent to the Rhine; less credible tales had them bound for Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, even Russia.

Edward’s problem was keeping them occupied, so that the troublemakers – there were always some – could not get a fast hold. That meant maintaining spit-and-polish, inspections and parades; marches and exercises to keep the men fit; foraging and reconnaissance expeditions to tire them out; and football, rugby and concert parties to keep them amused. The barrack-room lawyers among them might try to foment rebellion by saying the war was over and they were entitled to take it easy, that they should refuse to march with full packs, or clean rifles they would never fire; but Edward knew that if they weren’t kept busy and under discipline, they would be even more bored and miserable.

‘To go home, yes,’ Prewitt Dancer agreed, and drew another piece of paper in front of him. ‘I’m afraid we may have trouble about that. I have the first demobilisation orders, and they include two of your men, Higgins and Freeling. Looking at their records, it seems they were coal miners, caught up in the latest comb-out. Which means they have only two months’ active service.’

‘Yes, sir. I know them.’ They were Yorkshire lads, big, slow-talking and friendly.

The colonel went on: ‘The government’s priority is to get the country’s economy running again as quickly as possible, so they’re prioritising what they call “pivotal men” – coal miners, engineers and so on.’

‘One can see the sense of that,’ Edward said warily.

‘Indeed. And clearly those who’ve only recently left civilian employment can be slotted back into place more easily than those who’ve been out here several years. So it will be a case of last in, first out.’

‘Oh,’ said Edward. Of course, now he saw it. The men would naturally feel it wasn’t fair, and that those who had been in longest should be discharged first – especially those who had volunteered before conscription. It would be a poor show if patriotism were punished.

‘The men won’t like it,’ said the colonel. ‘So I’m giving you advance warning to keep an eye on the known troublemakers, and do everything in your power to keep the men occupied. There’ll be some leave warrants coming through, which might help. And I want you to sub