Tug of War by Barbara Cleverly Read Free Book Online

known.’
    ‘I expect he did know,’ said Dorcas easily. ‘You’ll find it’s a dastardly Gallic wheeze to put you in your place and, for the French, your place would always be one
step behind and on the wrong foot. It’s manipulation . . . Joe, what are those beasts we’re looking at? What are they doing in the middle of the city and how fast do they
go?’
    ‘Rather splendid, aren’t they? Oxen. White oxen. Eight of them pulling each dray at about a hundred yards per hour and there would appear to be drays as far as I can see until they
disappear round the corner of the Avenue. Look, this one’s dedicated to the wool trade and the next is the biscuit-makers’ float. Champagne houses after that . . .’
    ‘There’s a banner! Reims Magniflque , that’s what we’re seeing.’ She squinted into the distance and read: ‘It’s la grande cavalcade and
it’s celebrating the resurgence of the city after the exigencies of the Great War. Well, it’s quite a nuisance but you have to say – well done them!’ She looked around her
at the cheering crowds, the marching band, the buildings under reconstruction or already rebuilt and still shining clean. ‘Eight years, Joe, that’s all the time they’ve had to
build the city up again from the rubble the German army reduced it to. Look, there’s a picture in my book of the cathedral in flames. September 1914. The Germans were over there,’ she
waved an arm vaguely to the north, ‘and they just took pot shots at it with fire bombs. Some scaffolding around the north tower caught alight and the whole building went up in smoke. Many of
their own German wounded who’d been sheltering in the nave were burned to death along with the nuns who were nursing them.’
    She looked up from her book, face puckering with distress. ‘They’d been here in the city only days before. They’d seen the beauty of the cathedral right there in front of them.
How could they retire a few miles off and deliberately destroy it? I can’t understand.’
    Joe had no answer. He’d felt her increasing sadness as they’d driven south through remembered battlefields and, in the end, had set aside most of the places he’d intended to
see as unsuitable for a sensitive young person. He had not anticipated the force of her reaction to the memorials and had watched, disturbed, as the child had stood in floods of tears in front of
the very first one they had visited, patiently going through all the names, insisting on pronouncing each one in her own private ritual, unable to move on until each man had been faithfully
acknowledged.
    ‘Have you never been this way before, Dorcas?’ he’d asked. She reminded him that her father was a pacifist and a conscientious objector who’d spent the war years in
Switzerland. They had always travelled through Dieppe and Paris and the war was never referred to. Orlando saw no reason to remind his children of this sorry episode.
    In the end Joe had reduced their visits to two places of remembrance. Mons where it had all started and Buzancy, not very distant, where for him it had all finished in that bloody July four
months before the end. He’d chosen Buzancy because it represented the combination, at times uneasy, of the allied forces. French, British and American had all fought here. But, above all,
he’d chosen it because the small stone monument, a cairn in his eyes, had been hastily built up from material to hand after the battle; it was simple and affecting and bore no heartbreaking
lists of the dead. Erected by the 17th French Division in honour of the 15th Scottish, it marked the place on the highest point of the plateau where had fallen the Scottish soldier who had advanced
the farthest. A simple two-line inscription said it all, Joe thought:
    Here the glorious Thistle of Scotland will flourish forever amid the Roses of France.
    Now they’d arrived in Reims, he was determined to put nostalgic thoughts aside. Put out though he was by