The Wild Dark Flowers Read Online Free

enough,” he agreed. They were all puffed up with pride, flushed and happy. They swatted each other’s shoulders, and joined in with the singing. Someone had started “Rule, Britannia!” and “The Flower of the Valley.” They had come out of the pub laughing.
    It had been no laughing matter, however, when Nash got back to Rutherford and went to see his mother in the village. She had three sons and four daughters; her husband, his father, had died some years before, and three of the daughters were in service. There was another family a few villages along, the children of his father’s first wife. They were all grown up—he and Arthur and his sisters were much younger. Fifteen children in all when the two families were added together; but the man responsible—his loving, quiet Dad—was long gone, buried in the churchyard when David had been only five. His mother was left to bring up her own six children alone, and she was a bitter, thunderous storm of a woman, free with her pinches and twists and slaps.
    Still, to his complete surprise, she had said nothing when he showed her the enlistment papers, and told her that Arthur had done the same. She just held on to the doorframe, and her eyes filled with tears. It bothered him no end, shocked him; he tried to hold her hand, but she turned away and carried on with the clothes washing at the stone sink. “We’ll be back before you know it,” he’d told her, trying to be cheerful. “I’ll bring you back something pretty from France.”
    She glanced at him. “Did you have to take Arthur with you?” she asked.
    “He wanted to go more than me,” he told her.
    She had shaken her head as if she didn’t believe him. His youngest sister, Gertie, came to the door of the outhouse, and stood there sucking her thumb and scuffing her shoe on the flagstone floor. She was not quite right, poor addle-headed Gertie; and she was the only one that mother would have with her now. “I’ve got to go, I’ve got to be part of it,” he said. “There’s a poster up in the village. It says you’re either a man or a mouse. I can’t be called a coward, Mother.”
    “I’ve seen it,” she murmured. She stopped scrubbing and stared at the wall. “Why can’t you wait till they call you?”
    “They might not call,” he said. “It might not come to that. It might be over quickly, and then I’d forever be thinking that I should have gone.” He patted Gertie’s head, and she looked at him like an adoring dog. “Besides, Lord Cavendish says it’s our duty to go.”
    His mother snorted derisively. “What does he know?” she muttered. “He didn’t fight in the last lot. I can’t see him fighting in this one.”
    “He’s something in the War Office, though,” David said.
    “Is he,” she retorted sarcastically. “How very fine for him.”
    “And their son has already gone. The Flying Corps has gone with the BEF.”
    She didn’t reply.
    He and Arthur had first been taken to a place called Ormskirk, south of the Lakes, on the way to Liverpool. They had spent all winter training. Then they went digging trenches in the flat open ground of Carlisle Racecourse, and then back again to their tented camp. Endless square bashing, endless marches, endless yelling and stamping and cleaning. They were used to following orders, though; they had both been in service since they were boys. It wasn’t so different to get up cold and damp and warm yourself by running, heaving, and carrying.
    They were told that France was like this flat countryside, and muddy, too. That was all right, they told each other. A bit of mud never hurt anyone. It was a poor soldier who couldn’t stand mud and rain. And what they liked most of all—for they stayed together, trained together—was that they were part of something bigger, and they were all one. One big marching army. One body, with one idea and one purpose.
    When they had joined up, everyone had said that the war would be over by Christmas, and