Starshine Read Free

summer of that year, playing football and cricket in Aston Park and, of course, taking Polly rowing on the lake in Handsworth Park.
    Polly was exactly their age and she lived in the terrace house between them at number 64, Turners Lane, Aston. Neither of them could remember a time when the girl had not been at their side.They had formed an inseparable trio, going everywhere together. As children, when the boys played their way home from school by rolling marlies in the gutter, Polly came too, jumping, skipping alongside and talking continually. As they grew older, Polly quietened a little but stayed close, doing what they did, insisting – to their embarrassment – on holding their hands as they walked, bowling at them at cricket and keeping goal in the park kickabout. She grew to be tall, slender and pretty in an unconventional way, with soft brown hair, high cheekbones and strange, green eyes that seemed to shine in the dark. As the boys went through their teenage years, growing tall (less so in Bertie’s case) and filling out, Polly appeared to segue almost imperceptibly from tomboy into striking young woman. She remained unusual, however, in spurning the friendship of her own sex and the approaches of other boys and staying one of the trio, joining Jim and Bertie as they in-puffed their first Woodbines and heroically matching them as they drained their first pints of mild beer.
    She had seen them off at the station when they had enlisted, but now it was mid-October and the boys had to concede that the war that was to be over by Christmas perhaps was going to take a little longer. The two and a half months that had passed since they had enlisted had been marked by major setbacks to the Allied cause. The Germans had marched through Belgium, despite valiant resistance by the little Belgian army, and the French army had been forced to retreat from Mons, under cover of a last-ditch stand by the British, and Jim had read that only an heroic victory by the French at the Battle of the Marne had saved Paris itself from being taken by the enemy. Now the British Expeditionary Force – the largest army that Britain had ever sent abroad, but still tiny compared to the force facing it and depleted by the bitter fighting at Mons – had been redeployed to the north-west to take its position on the left flank of the mighty Frencharmy, now swollen to more than four million men. The British, then, occupied a key position between the French and the Belgians in a line that extended some thirty-five miles in a curve to the east of Ypres, against eleven German infantry divisions and eight cavalry divisions.
    The long file of men were now approaching the front and a smell very different to that which Bertie had recognised earlier now assailed them. It was an odour sweet and sickly and came from the bloated corpses of mules and horses that emerged starkly from the darkness every time a star shell illumined the sky ahead of them. They no longer walked in a straight line, but threaded their way between shell holes half filled with water that reflected the light of the flares.
    ‘Hey, Jimmy,’ whispered Bertie hoarsely, ‘it’s not just horses that are dead. There are bodies in them holes.’
    ‘Quiet!’ The sergeant major’s urgent whisper came from the front.
    On they went, now in pitch darkness that was only occasionally lit by a flare or, even less frequently, the flash of cannon fire. It was impossible to see even the man in front, and the track that had once been firm was now uneven and spongy, causing them to stumble and curse and grope for the shoulder ahead. There was no smoking and no conversation. Jim Hickman felt that they were a ghost army advancing to … what?
    Eventually they halted, just as the clouds above receded to reveal a watery moon. A sergeant whom they recognised as the veteran from the cattle truck strode along the line touching each one and giving them a whispered number. Hickman was the last to be numbered and