Up at the Front

"Your bus is wheezing a bit, miss,' said Colonel Wynne-Candy, 'I'll have my driver look it over.'

Kate, not attuned to the eccentricities of internal combustion, thanked the officer, whose staff car was mired at the side of the road. He had pulled over to let her ambulance past and suffered the consequences of gallantry.

There had been near-continuous bombardment all day. The enemy had brought up big guns and were hammering the Allied trenches. It would be heads down in the lines.

She looked up at a slate sky empty of all but cloud. To the east, the gloom was reddened by fire.

'A boy in the air?'

The round-faced colonel, cheerfully retained from the Boer war, was not the jolly fool he seemed. Kate shivered as she tried to shrug. She could usually put ideas into words, but was too involved in the business with Edwin to explain it easily.

The lad'll be a lot safer with Richthofen down.'

The Red Baron?'

'Word over the blower this morning. Not official yet. Boche won't admit a thing but our ears in Hunland have picked up a whisper. It seems Allied mastery of the air has been reasserted.'

Kate wondered if Edwin was disappointed. He had shaped himself into a weapon so he could go after the creature who had nearly killed him. Or maybe he had succeeded? No, he had not bested the Red Baron. In her blood, she would have known.

'Almost a pity, ain't it?' Wynne-Candy mused. 'The war will seem a spot less colourful. Richthofen gave our fellows something to shoot for.'

Something to shout at, she thought.

A projectile whizzed into the mud a couple of hundred yards away and burst. Kate and Wynne-Candy cringed in a light patter of wet dirt.

'That's an overshot', the Colonel said. 'No harm to anyone.'

A smoking crater marked the site of the shell-burst. There were more of them dotted about behind the lines than usual.

'Enough misses like that and our supply lines will be jiggered.'

'You have a point, miss.'

Wynne-Candy's driver, a muddy Cockney, reported on the ambulance, grumbling in the colonel's ear.

'I say, that's not on.'

Wynne-Candy was shocked.

'I'm sorry to have to tell you, miss, but some unsportin' type seems to have taken a pot shot at you.'

The driver put his finger into a hole in the bonnet.

'Probably an accident. Any proper German officer who found one of his men sniping at an ambulance would have the bounder shot.'

The driver told her the engine was unharmed. With a good clean, the ambulance would run smooth as silk.

'Not easy, keeping things clean in this country,' Wynne-Candy said, looking about the plain of mud. 'Now, miss, be on your way. Boys are waiting at the front for a sight of you.'

With a khaki coat three sizes too big, a nest of hair plastered with mud spatters and a bad case of the distractions, she suspected she would not pass for an angel.

She bade the colonel farewell and got back into the ambulance. When the army bought these vehicles, the assumption was that drivers would be six-foot-tall men. It had then been inconceivable that all those who fit the description would be required for the front and the position would have to be filled by a tiny vampire woman. She sat on three pillows and leaned forward to reach the steering wheel, which seemed a yard across. Wooden blocks tied to the foot-pedals brought them within range of her short legs.

Every part of the ambulance rattled. Through the smeared windscreen, she looked at the sky. Even with the Red Baron gone, there were monsters up there. She sensed the tug of Edwin like a toothache. What he had taken from her would take months to recover. She felt she was half a person, fading into ghostliness.

Like a proper Victorian, she was throwing herself into duty. If it had been possible, she'd have picked up a rifle and fought the war. Genevieve, in her long life, had sometimes passed for a boy and served as a soldier: with Joan against the English, with Drake against the Spanish, with Buonaparte in Russia. Genevieve, of course, had done everything. Without meaning it, she went through life making other women feel inadequate. By 'other women', Kate meant herself.

In 1918, though she was stronger than most living men, the best Kate could do was drive an ambulance. The next war would be fought by men and women, vampire and warm. If she survived, Kate might be in that one. And the next. And the next.

Richthofen dead. She should follow the story. It would be news.

The road sank into the ground, banks rising to either side. She entered the maze of trenches. Corrugated iron grumbled under the weight of the ambulance. The main road was only just wide enough. Every time she made this trip, the route was different, as old avenues were blocked and new ones blasted.

Another shell exploded, out of her sight, but quite near. Clods pattered on the tin roof of the cabin. It was just earth, not shrapnel.

She was still a reporter, despite setbacks. She would try to learn more about the Bloody Red Baron. There were always the Musketeers of Maranique: Bertie, Algy and Ginger. They would talk to her. They were so good-natured they'd probably sent Christmas cards to the Kaiser during the truce of'14.

She could not go much further in the ambulance. There was a station where the wounded were gathered, laid out on stretchers. Casualties had been light recently. The Germans were preparing their offensive. That would be a military hurricane. Rear positions were deserted as every man and gun the Allies had in France was put into the front. It occurred to her today's heavy bombardment was to soften up the Allies. The offensive - Kaiserschlacht, they called it - was very close.

She wrestled with the brakes and the ambulance lurched to a halt. Hopping down, prepared for horrors, she sank up to her puttees in squelching mud. Under a canvas lean-to, the stretchers were all occupied. She had room for five patients, but there were at least fifteen men ready to be shipped back to Amiens.

The officer in charge of the post was Captain Tietjens, a decent man eroded by years in the mud. He recognised Kate under her layer of dirt and offered to get her a cup of tea. At the front, vampires took char with a squirt of rat's blood.

'No thank you,' she said, not wishing to use any of the meagre supplies. 'I've a parcel of scroungings under the seat. Some tea, a chunk of usable bread, a packet of humbugs. A few other things.'

She handed over the precious goods, which had cost almost the last of her money. She was a vampire, she could forage for herself. Tietjens made the parcel disappear: he would dole it out to the deserving cases.

Most of the wounded were Americans, a new development. The influx of Yanks was depended upon to block the offensive. Already, fresh troops were seeing action.

A doughboy, bent like an ancient crone, knelt by a stretcher, holding hands with a fearfully wounded comrade. The boy on the stretcher seemed to be only an upper body: below his hips, the blanket lay flat, soaked with sweet blood. Embarrassingly, her fangs popped.

The wounded man's friend looked at her, too numb to be afraid. It was Bartlett, the doughboy who had tried to pick her up in Amiens. He was changed. The cocky eagerness was blasted away: he seemed at once a lost child and a mad old man. From his mind, she took impressions. She wished she had been able to shut herself off.

'Bloody hell,' she said.

In weeks, Eddie Bartlett had lived through a million years of war. Apart from the half-man on the stretcher, Bartlett was the last of the group of friends who had been at the cafe in Amiens. He was practically the last of the boys who had come over together on the boat.

She wanted to offer herself to Bartlett. He could have her body, her blood, anything. She wanted to make things better.

Tietjens and she were the only personnel spare to lift stretchers into the ambulance. With extreme reluctance, Bartlett let go of his comrade's white hand to help.

'Hang on Apperson,' he said. 'Gotta parlay-voo, buddy.'

Carefully, the three of them got the first casualty - an American sergeant with rag bandages round his eyes - into the ambulance. When they came to Private Apperson, the boy was dead. Tietjens looked to Kate and shrugged.

The air was full of a whistling that hurt her ears. Tietjens, oddly, reached out and touched her hair.

She was about to apologise for having left her best bonnet at home when the whistling exploded. A wave of sound shocked Tietjens off his feet and threw him against her. They were both slammed against the ambulance. The sound was followed by heat. Then a great deal of earth. Something had hit very near. She saw a trench wall collapsing, slowly, on to the remaining stretchers, burying wounded men.

Tietjens was pulling something out from Apperson's bedding, robbing the dead.

Kate struggled towards the wounded. The next shell burst and she was knocked down again. Her back stung and she knew she was hurt. Tietjens was close behind her.

The officer jammed Apperson's tin helmet on her head. Seeing the sense in it, she fastened the strap under her chin. The rim rested on her spectacles, pressing them into her nose.

She dug with her hands, like an animal, trying to shovel the sliding loose earth off the face of a coughing warm doughboy. The more dirt she shifted, the more tumbled down. There was no room to pull the man out of the path of the earthslide.

As she dug, her claws came out. She scratched the earth. Her mouth was distorted by her fangs. She was reduced to the basest of monsters. The boy looked at her with panic and began to struggle, thinking she was attacking him. When he opened his mouth to scream, dirt fell into it, choking him. She thumped his chest, and he coughed up mud. She tried to tell him she was helping him, but could only snarl and hiss.

There was more whistling, louder and concentrated. Glancing up at the slice of sky visible from the trenchbed, she saw dozens of trails and sparkles.

Din, flame and force lifted her off the ground. The ambulance had taken a direct hit. Blood was in her mouth. The vehicle jolted into the air and came apart, screaming metal, spilling dead men. A hundred tons of mud flew up and fell down. Kate shut her eyes and her mouth as the grave-earth closed over her, pressing her down. There was sudden, shocking silence.