Fathers and Sons Read Online Free Page A

machine guns and colossal artillery barrages.
    The word ‘carnage’ began to be whispered. It was becoming clear the only soldiers for whom this war would be over by Christmas were dead ones.
    One morning, long after the harvest and as the winter wheat was being sown, a neighbour called at Kiln Farm, clutching a copy of The Times . The man was shaking his head in disbelief as he pointed to a seemingly endless list of British dead and missing. ‘It was so long my uncles said it was obviously a mistake,’ Granddad recalled. ‘It must be a list of the wounded, not those killed in action, and the paper should be ashamed of all the unnecessary grief and suffering it had caused.’
    There was no mistake. As 1914 dissolved darkly into 1915, Geoffrey Madeley began to realise, for the second time in hislife, that events beyond his control were again shaping his destiny. But this time he would meet fate on his own terms.
    One fine morning he put on his best suit, walked into Shrewsbury, and enlisted.
     
    His first military shock was an entirely pleasant one. The King’s shilling was payable on a daily basis, unlike William’s weekly offering, and overnight Geoffrey saw his income increase sevenfold. If he came out of this war alive, he would at least be able to afford something better than steerage class to Canada. He had long been familiar with the principal shipping lines’ transatlantic arrangements.
    Eighteen-year-old Private Madeley spent his first night in the army at Shrewsbury Barracks, and two days later got his marching orders. Far from being packed off ‘tout suite’ to the slaughterhouse across the Channel, he was posted in the opposite direction, to northeast England. Cavalry was still considered to be a battlefield option and that gave my grandfather, with his experience of horses on the farm, an intermission between the harshness of his life so far and the horrors that would shortly follow.
    Sixty-odd years later, when I was working as a television reporter, I filmed a story at beautiful Druridge Bay in County Durham. I mentioned it to Granddad. ‘Isn’t that near where you were stationed for a while during the First War?’
    I can still see the look of delight that spread like sunlight across his face. ‘I learned my horsemanship on those sands!’
    He told me of golden hours galloping along the seven-mile beach. Service life seemed like a paid holiday. And for the first time he had the companionship and friendship of comrades. Life in the army had bonded them all tightly together. Those boys who reminded him of Douglas and John were not blood brothers, but a band of brothers nonetheless. Suddenly, life wasn’t so bad.
    It couldn’t last. Cavalry training was abandoned when the British and Germans realised horses weren’t much use against machine guns. Granddad found himself back on a troop train, this time taking him to the trenches. Stalemate on the Western Front persisted, as did the massacres. The facile optimism of three years before had evaporated and reinforcements like my grandfather knew they were headed for the most efficient killing fields the world had ever known.
    His train pulled in to Crewe Station for its last stop before the embarkation points. As coal and water were taken on by the locomotive crew, men wrote final letters home to be posted at the docks; others smoked cigarettes or pipes and made attempts at gallows humour. My grandfather stared out of the window at another train that had halted at the station.
    It was crammed with troops also bound for France. But there was something different about these soldiers, or at least their uniforms. Granddad suddenly realised they were Canadians, sent to help the mother country in her hour of need. He knew from a recent letter from his mother that his two older brothers had joined up back in Toronto. Could they be on board? The chances were hugely stacked against it, but still…
    Granddad found himself shouldering his way through the packed