Jean had received more combinations, two woollen hats, three pairs of fingerless gloves and six of gloriously thick socks that sadly could not be worn with her uniform, so the wind crept up her skirt, snickering at the very idea that a pair of army stockings might hinder the wind from stealing all Jean’s warmth. But she wore all six pairs of socks at night, as well as double combinations and her overcoat under her thin army blanket, till one evening Hattie appeared in the doorway, her arms filled with newspapers, her face lit with triumph.

  ‘We’re saved, girls! Look what Kipper’s chap has given us!’

  ‘Old newspapers?’ The speaker was Irish, with the accent, clear skin and vibrant red hair of every Irish cliché.

  ‘Anzac trousers! Kipper’s chap was at Gallipoli, and he said as soon as winter came all the Australians stuffed their shirts and trousers and boots with newspaper. Kipper’s chap said he did too, and it saved his life.’ Hattie began distributing a newspaper to every bed.

  Jean wore newspaper between her two sets of combinations. Hattie was right — for the first time in weeks she didn’t keep waking up from the cold. She lined her uniform with newspaper, too, and stuffed it in her shoes, and no longer shivered as she worked. By the depths of winter, she thought, maybe even by Christmas, she’d risk ridicule and wrap her legs in newspaper before pulling on her stockings. But by then they would all be working in their overcoats, and possibly no one would even notice her bulging legs.

  Back in 1914 the newspapers had promised their readers the war would be over by Christmas. There was no chance of leave for her or any of the other women over the holidays — men might stop fighting for Christmas Day, but women still had to be on hand to relay the messages that confirmed they were not fighting.

  Betsy and Buffy planned to make paper Christmas garlands, though all potential Christmas trees had already been turned into pit props to stop the trenches from collapsing or cut into precious firewood. Jean looked forward to a whole day of fun and possibly a change from rice and bacon, as well as sharing hampers from home.

  She was not to have it.

  ‘Miss Jean McLain?’ The major stood in the open doorway of the Signals hut, letting in a blast of cold damp air laced with the ever-present smells of chicory coffee, boiled cabbage, mud and gunpowder that the wind carried hundreds of miles from the battlefield, no matter what direction the wind blew from, for war was all around.

  Jean didn’t hear him with her headphones on, or see him either, her eyes down on the pad on which she was scratching letters. She looked up only when Hattie nudged her, lifted Jean’s headphones off, and placed them on her own head, then took Jean’s pencil as she leaned down to continue the transmission Jean had been transcribing.

  The major stared at Jean. ‘Miss McLain?’ he said uncertainly.

  ‘I am Miss McLain,’ said Jean, trying not to rustle her newspaper underwear.

  ‘I beg your pardon, Miss McLain. I expected someone older.’

  She didn’t bother repeating the lie that she was twenty-one. Everyone had guessed she wasn’t; nor did it matter. Many boys had claimed they were eighteen to be able to enlist, too.

  ‘Will you come with me, please, Miss McLain.’ It was not a request, nor did the major give his name.

  She followed him out into the night. It was impossible not to rustle now, not with two newspapers wrapped around herself, but the major made no comment. The officers here probably know about Anzac trousers, she thought, and had decided to ignore them as a practical necessity, despite knowing the top brass would condemn them as ‘out of uniform’.

  It was nearly midnight, the stars managing a weak twinkle through the ever-present drift of smoke, even though outclassed by the flare of rockets further towards the front. The sentry in the corner covered his yawn and straightened when he saw the major pass. It was said that sentries had learned the art of sleeping standing up with their eyes open.

  The major led her to a brick building where only a few lights still burned and down a flight of steps into a basement and to an office where a WAAC sat at the secretary’s desk. The still unnamed officer opened the door to the inner office, then politely stood back to let Jean enter, gesturing as she hesitated, as for the past six months she had been used to the senior ranks going into a room first.

  This man, it seemed, remembered that she was not quite in the army.

  ‘Please sit down, Miss McLain. Thank you,’ he added to the secretary, who placed a tray with a silver coffee pot on the table, surely a pot brought from home, for it bore a worn crest. The cups were china, not tin, and the plates looked like Wedgewood. The coffee was accompanied by brioche and apple tarts that had certainly not come from the mess.

  ‘Will you pour, Miss McLain?’

  She had never been asked to pour before — it was a task for the senior lady present, and she never had been senior. But she poured without drips from the coffee pot, offered him milk and sugar, both refused, then poured her own cup, and sugared it well, with plenty of milk.

  ‘A brioche or tart, Miss McLain?’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’ She took an apple tart, and bit into its sweet butteriness with delight. It had been eight months since she had tasted butter, she realised. How could eight months vanish with almost nothing to remember them by, except the letters and packages from home, the minutes with her brother, the few free days she’d spent with Hattie or the others?

  She took another bite of apple tart. Wonderful! She lifted up the thin china cup, and inhaled the rich scent, then sipped. The coffee wasn’t chicory and beetroot either, or from a bottle of coffee essence, but fragrant, unlike any she had tasted before. She hoped she’d be able to have a second cup.

  She looked up to find the major examining her. ‘How old are you really?’ he asked.

  Could she tell him the truth? She supposed she had to. ‘I’ll be seventeen in January, sir.’

  ‘I see. Too young . . . and yet I have had excellent reports of you — not just your speed but your extreme reliability. Do you know you have never yet made a mistake, even when there’s been a push on and the work is unrelenting?’

  She looked at him, startled. ‘Of course I don’t make mistakes, sir.’

  ‘Everyone makes mistakes,’ he said dryly. ‘Everyone else, at any rate. You must have a talent for Morse code.’

  ‘I think perhaps I do,’ she admitted. ‘I learned it with my brothers, but I was always faster.’

  ‘A good family,’ he said absentmindedly. She realised with shock that he must know all about her, Papa and the school, William, Arthur and the post office. ‘Miss McLain, what I am about to tell you now must be spoken about to no one, not even your fellow workers on the base. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I have sworn an oath, sir — nor would I speak of any of my work even without an oath.’

  ‘I believe you. Do you know much about the progress of the war, Miss McLain?’

  ‘No, sir,’ she admitted. The shift work and long hours left little time to read newspapers, or even listen to camp gossip. ‘I know the Americans have joined us, and Russia has left because it’s had a revolution.’

  ‘Have you heard of the Hindenburg Line, Miss McLain?’

  ‘It’s a network of German defences, sir, a mass of trenches and barbed wire and fortifications.’

  ‘It’s been almost abandoned recently,’ he said bluntly. ‘General Haig thinks we should strike there now, when the German lines are poorly defended. But this time we will be using an entirely different strategy: a front line of tanks that will destroy all opposition, while our troops occupy the ground behind them. You may be thinking that these new tanks are useless,’ he added, ‘that they did nothing but get bogged in the mud at Passchendaele.’

  She had thought nothing of the sort. She only vaguely knew what tanks looked like: big metal things with treads instead of tyres. She knew nothing of Passchendaele except the casualty lists, which everybody read because every week at least there would be a name you knew: someone’s son or cousin or a man who’d been a boy at the grammar school. It had never even occurred to her that war might be fought with strategies. It had seemed that generals just ordered troops to go places and then they fought.

  ‘This new push might end the war, Miss McLain.’

  She stared at him. There had been many such claims in the past three years, made with more hope than certainty. This man believed this one.

  It seemed as if the war had been going her whole life, instead of only three years. But those three years had been the most important so far, of course: the years in which she had first made her own decisions and had her own opinions.

  What would a world with no war be like? A land of joy, with the men back home, working the fields again, dances and concerts and couples walking hand in hand along the lanes, just as she remembered. Proper weddings with flowers and lovely dresses and the church bells ringing; the boys at school planning careers instead of choosing between army, navy and air force. Jam-making with all the sugar they could want, eating buttered toast at breakfast, real butter and real bread . . .

  ‘Miss McLain?’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir. I was just trying to think what life could be like after the war.’

  ‘This is the time to attack if we want to end it,’ he said quietly. ‘Many of the German troops are still up on the Russian front, even though Russia has withdrawn from the fighting. We need to break through the German defences before they can reinforce the Western Front again. Once we’re past the Hindenburg Line the Germans can’t stop us. There’ll be no trenches or fortifications — we can spread out, spearhead into Germany, with fresh troops from the USA to support us.’

  ‘What has this to do with me, sir?’ Of all the people in this camp, surely a sixteen-year-old girl was the last person a major would want to discuss tactics with.

  He hesitated again. ‘We’re going to be moving fast, Miss McLain, faster than troops ever have before in this war. Once the tanks have cleared the way the troops have to follow close behind them, moving from trench to trench through what used to be the German lines. Good communication will be vital — fast reliable communication. It’s not that we don’t have enough men,’ he said quickly, much too quickly, as if trying to reassure himself. ‘We don’t, however, have enough men who can transmit and receive fast enough, and accurately enough; nor is there time to train them.’

  She gazed at him in shock. ‘You want me to volunteer for the trenches, sir?’

  ‘Theoretically you will go where you’re ordered to, Miss McLain. But there’s no use sending you if you think you can’t do it.’

  ‘I can do it! You said I’m fast, and reliable . . .’

  ‘That’s not what I meant. You will be on the front lines. That’s no place for a woman.’

  ‘But . . .’ She stopped. She had been about to say she had met women ambulance drivers in Rouen who spent months at a time on the front lines, taking their ambulances to wherever the firing was the heaviest, loading the vehicles with wounded, driving them to the nearest aide post then dodging shell holes back to do it all again.

  She had met both official and volunteer nurses who worked just behind the front lines, under almost constant bombardment, and even a woman English doctor who worked with the French army, as the British army would not take women doctors. But Jean had already learned that most men didn’t like admitting that women’s work was vital to the war, or even to the farms and offices and schools they’d left behind. It was obviously hard for this man to concede that women were needed if this ‘push’ was to succeed. Even he did not want to revise his ideas of what women were capable of. He just had no choice.

  ‘You will be sheltering in trenches, with no female companions. You’ll be ankle deep in mud. There will be rats, large as cats sometimes, that will run over your bed at night.’ The major watched her closely, as if waiting for Jean to scream or turn pale. ‘There’ll be shells exploding all around you, trench walls collapsing, snipers firing at anyone who puts their head above the trench, bodies that have lain there for days or weeks. Do you know what a week-old body is like, Miss McLain?’

  She met his eyes. ‘No, sir. But I know what a skeleton is like. My father has one he uses for the sixth form science classes.’ I can shock you, too, she thought. ‘I know what parts of a body look like, when a ship has been blown up by torpedos, when a leg floats past you. I thought it would be red, but it was white, because the sea had washed away the blood.’

  He just nodded. He must have known from her record what she’d survived, that she’d reacted quickly, decisively and correctly, and had kept on doing it, till the fishing boat had picked her up.

  Would I have dived overboard so quickly, if Lieutenant Galbraith hadn’t urged me to? No, she thought honestly. I’d have run down to get orders from Miss Eglamore. I’d have tried to help others to the lifeboats.

  I’d have died, and they would still have died too. She realised she had somehow accepted that all the women she’d travelled with had been below decks, and so must have died, even if their names had not been published.

  ‘Will you go, Miss McLain?’

  She took a deep breath. This would not be Adventure. She had glimpsed enough in Rouen, overheard enough, to have a dim idea of what trench warfare was really like.

  I have no choice, she thought. Not really. I swore an oath to defend my country. Even if I hadn’t sworn, I have to do my duty. The major is right, she realised. I am from a ‘good family’, though I don’t believe we use the word ‘good’ in the same way: mine is simply a family that expects each member to do what is right.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ she said. ‘I will go wherever I’m ordered. I will do my best.’

  ‘Your country cannot ask more,’ he answered.

  Chapter 13

  ROUEN AND ELSEWHERE IN FRANCE, NOVEMBER 1917

  She had thought he would immediately hand her written orders to memorise, then tear up into little pieces to be burned, as they did with the outgoing messages in the Signals hut. Instead, he rang the little bell on his desk and ordered more coffee.

  ‘Please, have another tart, Miss McLain. Will you try a brioche?’

  ‘Thank you, sir. Where will I be going?’

  He smiled. ‘I’m sure you realise why I can’t tell you that.’

  Of course, she thought. If she accidentally mentioned the place she was headed — a girl in uniform — a spy might add that to other information, and the Germans could guess an attack was planned.

  She sipped her second cup of coffee, sweet with sugar, mild with frothy warmed milk, and ate another tart and then a brioche.

  ‘Tell me about your home, Miss McLain. Your father has a house on the school grounds?’

  ‘No, sir, just down the lane, on the edge of the grounds. My mother wished to have a home of her own.’ Papa had bought the house and its two acres with an inheritance from an uncle, but it was Not Done to talk about money. ‘It’s two hundred years old and has a secret passage from the library out into the wall around the sunken garden below the orchard, except it isn’t secret at all, because Arthur and William and I told all our friends and spent half the holidays running back and forth in it.’

  ‘When you weren’t learning Morse code?’

  ‘That was for Arthur’s crystal radio set, sir, then William began to make one too, and they let me help.’

  He blinked. ‘You can wire up a crystal radio set?’

  She smiled over her cup. ‘Not really. I was only nine — Arthur and William did all the fiddly work, but they let me help.’

  ‘They sound like excellent brothers.’

  Jean nodded. ‘Some brothers shut their sisters out of everything. Arthur and William let me play cricket with them and their friends, and even go riding with them.’

  ‘You hunt, Miss McLain?’ He sounded surprised again.

  ‘No, sir. One of William’s friends keeps a good stable . . .’ Or had. The horses had all been taken for the war. ‘We jumped a few gates, that’s all.’ And Mama had sighed when she’d fallen off and come home muddy yet again.

  ‘Do you hear from your brothers often?’

  ‘They write to our parents, and Mama copies their letters to send to me. The letters are really to me too, just as mine back home are to them.’ She wasn’t sure that last sentence made sense, but the major seemed to understand.

  Why is he asking all this? she wondered as she took the last apple tart. He had already decided she was suitable, and she had agreed to go. She blinked at the empty plate, her empty coffee cup.

  He was giving her a final treat, she realised, as he stood up politely to see her out. A farewell to a girl whose gift to her country might be her life.

  Chapter 14

  SOMEWHERE IN FRANCE, NOVEMBER 1917

  She carefully hadn’t asked when she would be leaving, as that would be top secret too, but as she approached the mess hall for a dinner she didn’t really want after the tarts and brioche, she found a middle-aged woman wearing a supervisor’s insignia waiting for her, a suitcase in her hand.

  ‘Miss McLain? I’m Mrs Reynolds, your chaperone. You’ll find your kitbag packed for you and waiting on your bed. Don’t worry about your suitcase. It will be stored here for your return.’ She lifted the watch on a chain on her bosom. ‘The train leaves in an hour, or should. The timetables are fairly useless now, but we had better get there in plenty of time, just in case it does arrive on schedule.’

  Had the major been so sure she’d agree? No, she thought. He’d signalled his secretary somehow. Maybe by asking for the second pot of coffee. This had all been done while she had eaten apple tarts, and while the other women she shared the hut with were working or at dinner.

  Her bed was stripped, just as it had been when she arrived. Her suitcase had vanished. The duffel bag lay on the bed, but when she rummaged in it, she found there was everything she needed, including her sewing things and her washed and ironed napkins. A woman had packed this.