The Wraiths of War E-Book

Mark Morris

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

In the final volume of the thrilling dark fantasy trilogy, the Obsidian Heart, Alex Locke is still searching for his missing daughter. He is transported far into the future and then back into the past and the horrors of the First World War trenches, as gradually he pieces together the strange truth about the obsidian heart and his lost daughter.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Also by Mark Morris

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

One: God

Two: Your Country Needs You!

Three: Cosmic Balance

Four: Changing History

Five: Basic Training

Six: The Witch

Seven: No Man’s Land

Eight: Trench Warfare

Nine: Heidrich and the Heart

Ten: Home is Where…

Eleven: In Limbo

Twelve: Big Moment

Thirteen: Nightcap

Fourteen: Find Him

Fifteen: Punch and Judy

Sixteen: A Screech of Rage

Seventeen: The Crossroads

Eighteen: A House of Nightmares

Nineteen: Into the Future

Twenty: The Missing

Twenty-One: The Great Barnaby

Twenty-Two: Wonder Woman

Twenty-Three: Moving On

Twenty-Four: Friday 10 December 1948

Twenty-Five: Visiting Hours

Twenty-Six: All Our Yesterdays

Twenty-Seven: The Same Rain

Twenty-Eight: The Belly of the Beast

Epilogue: Tuesday 2 October 2012

Acknowledgements

About the Author

ALSO AVAILABLE FROM MARK MORRIS AND TITAN BOOKS

OBSIDIAN HEART

Book One: The Wolves of London

Book Two: The Society of Blood

Obsidian Heart Book Three: The Wraiths of War

Print edition ISBN: 9781781168745

E-book edition ISBN: 9781781168776

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

First edition: October 2016

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Mark Morris asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

Copyright © 2016 by Mark Morris

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No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

To Gary and Emily McMahon, with love.“I got some bad ideas in my head.”

ONE

GOD

As soon as I opened my eyes, I thought: I’m dead.

Around me I could see only white. I could hear no sound. When I took a breath the air smelled of nothing at all.

Is this what death is? I thought. A white nothingness? No pain? No sensation?

Or maybe I was in limbo. Maybe I was awaiting sentencing, poised between one direction or the other.

I didn’t know whether to panic or just lie there. I didn’t know whether I was even capable of panicking – or of any emotion, for that matter.

I felt… empty. Did I even still have a physical body? I could see, and I could breathe, but was that only a memory? Were my senses the equivalent of phantom limbs? And if so, how did I feel about that – assuming I could still feel, of course?

Nothingness was better than pain, wasn’t it? Well, wasn’t it? My last memory was of excruciating agony, of vomiting blood as my body turned inside out.

Anything had to be better than that. I’d suffered enough in my life to know that when it came to a choice between suffering and death, death was preferable.

But that was when I’d thought of death as oblivion, not awareness. Maybe, though, this was what death truly was? Eternal awareness. But awareness of nothing.

The thought was terrifying. Or at least it would have been if I’d thought myself capable of terror.

I decided to close my eyes, and was thankful to find I could do so.

When I opened them again, God was sitting next to me.

He was smiling. He had white hair and a white beard. Blue eyes in a wrinkled face.

‘Hi,’ I said, only mildly surprised to find I could speak. ‘Is it good news or bad?’

‘Good,’ God said. He was wearing a nice suit. It fitted him really well. It was a pale blue-grey colour that made me feel calm.

I sighed in relief – or at least in my head I did. ‘Thank fuck,’ I muttered, and then realised I’d sworn in front of God. I clenched my teeth in apology.

‘Sorry. That just came out. It’s just that I’m glad I’m not going… down there. I mean, I’ll admit I’ve done some dodgy things in my time, but overall I think—’

‘I’m not who you think I am, Alex,’ he said. ‘I’m not God.’

My mind felt like thick soup stirred slowly in a pot. I tried to think about what God had said. Was he trying to catch me out? I smiled – in my head, I smiled.

‘You must be God,’ I said, trying my hardest to remain respectful. ‘If you’re not him, how did you know that was who I thought—’

‘You’re still woozy from the procedure. Look again.’

Procedure? What procedure? I stared at him. His face looked familiar. But maybe that was because God looked like someone we all knew when we finally met him. Aren’t we all supposed to be created in his image, after all? Aren’t we—

Then the clouds parted and a shaft of light beamed straight down, and everything became clear.

‘Fuck,’ I said again.

God shrugged as if to say: Sorry to disappoint you.

‘When do I grow that beard?’ I asked.

The older me, who I’d mistaken for God, shrugged. ‘A few decades down the line.’

‘Bloody hell,’ I said, ‘you’re old. You’re the oldest I’ve ever seen you.’

‘Why do you think I left it so many years before coming back to this moment?’ said my future self. ‘It was to delay these insults for as long as possible.’

But he was smiling. He wasn’t really hurt by my comments, he’d been expecting them. After all, he must have spoken them himself years back, when he was me.

‘So I’m not dead then?’ I said, and realised that although I was pleased, I also felt wearied at the prospect of more life, more struggle.

‘Not now,’ my future self said. ‘You were, though. Technically. For about thirty-two minutes.’

‘Thirty-two minutes?’

‘Give or take.’

Fuck. I’d been dead. Another thing to tick off the bucket list. The thought struck me as funny, and I sniggered.

‘So where am I now?’

‘A better question would be when.’ He paused, as if giving me the opportunity to brace myself. ‘You’re in the future, Alex. 2097.’

Whoa. I wanted to say it, but the information hit me like a punch between the eyes, making my thoughts spin.

Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. I’d known that with the heart I could travel through time. I’d used it to go back into the past, so it was only natural that it could also be used to go the other way, into the future.

Even so. The future. The great unknown. It seemed more impressive than the past, somehow, and more frightening. From the perspective of the present the future didn’t exist, whereas the past did. You could read about the past; there were records, artefacts, photographs, graveyards full of people who had lived and died…

The future, though, had no bones to make it real.

‘2097,’ I said, as if testing whether, by speaking the date, I could make it seem more real. I couldn’t.

My future self looked sympathetic. ‘I know exactly how you feel. Give yourself a minute. Let it sink in.’

I looked up at the white ceiling. I was becoming more physically aware of myself now, but I still felt disconnected. I thought about raising my left arm, and then, with a slight mental effort that was normally so natural I didn’t even have to think about it, I turned the thought into a command, at the same time tilting my head to look down the length of my body.

I was covered with a pristine white sheet, making me think of a body in a morgue. I watched as my arm rose into view. I looked at my hand and flexed my fingers, then curled them into a fist.

I felt okay. Despite my last memory before waking up here – the pain, the vomiting – I appeared to have suffered no lasting ill effects from my use of the heart.

Unless I was partially paralysed. Or under heavy sedation to allay the pain.

‘What’s the damage?’ I asked.

My future self spread his hands, as if to say: See for yourself.

‘It was extensive,’ he said. ‘But you’re fine now.’

‘Fine? How can I be fine? I thought I was dead?’

‘You were. But future technology is a wonderful thing. Death is no longer fatal – or not always anyway.’

I tried to process what I was hearing.

‘So what are you saying? That I’m… bionic? Like Steve Austin in The Six Million Dollar Man?’

‘Nothing so crude. I seem to remember that when I was your age, I’d at least heard of nanotechnology; I knew the basic principles. Am I right?’

I nodded. ‘Technology on a tiny scale, yeah?’

‘Not just tiny,’ he said. ‘Atomic. Molecular. We’re talking quantum-realm mechanics here.’

I shrugged, irritated at my future self’s slightly patronising attitude. Had I always been like this? ‘Whatever. I was never much good at science, as you know. But long story short, I’m guessing it was nanotechnology which saved my life?’

My future self confirmed it with a slight raising of his wiry white eyebrows. Then he lifted his hand, in which he was clutching something I recognised.

My notebook.

The one in which I jotted down all the dates and times a future version of myself had appeared, so that I’d know what I needed to do when the time came. It also contained other, less specific details of things I knew I needed to do, like set myself up in Victorian London so that everything would be in place when I arrived, and pay off my older daughter Candice’s boyfriend’s debt to the drug dealer who might otherwise endanger Candice’s life.

‘I’ve written it all down,’ he said. ‘Dates and times, both yours and mine; the details of this place; everything you’ll need when you get to where I am. It’s an important one, this, Alex. Forget it and we won’t be here.’

‘All right,’ I said – snapped, in fact. ‘I know. You don’t have to spell it out.’

Unexpectedly he laughed. ‘I know exactly what you’re thinking. And you’re right. I am a condescending twat. It comes with age. And experience.’ He gave me a meaningful look, though whether it was laden with pity or envy I couldn’t tell. ‘You’ve got such times ahead of you, Alex. Such times. That’s if you play your cards right, of course.’

‘Any pointers?’ I asked. ‘Any advice?’

He drew in his lips so tightly I couldn’t see them through his beard. His shoulders hunched in apology.

‘Can’t say a word. I mean, who knows where we’ll be if I do, eh? Or rather, where I’ll be.’

I rolled my eyes. ‘No surprises there. All right, at least tell me about this nano stuff. Where are we, by the way?’

‘Stuttgart.’

‘In Germany?’

‘Do you know of another one?’

His retort was more teasing than sarcastic. I said, ‘But why here in particular?’

‘Because it’s the global centre of excellence for the application of medical nanotech.’ He winked. ‘Nothing but the best for us, old son.’

‘So what is it, this nanotech? Does it mean I’ve now got millions of tiny robots running around inside me?’

‘We,’ he said, tapping his chest. ‘They’re still in here.’

The thought made me feel queasy. I raised my hand again and stared at the back of it, as if half-believing I might actually see the nanites jumping under the surface of my skin like fleas.

‘So where are they?’

‘Everywhere,’ he said, as if enjoying my discomfort. His smile widened. ‘Don’t worry, you’ll get used to them – or the idea of them, at any rate. And they do nothing but good. It’s all thanks to them you’re here talking to me.’

‘So what do they do exactly? Apart from bring you back from the dead?’

‘They repair you. Anything goes wrong with your body, they rush in and make it right again.’

‘Anything?’

‘Within reason. As long as your injuries aren’t too severe. I mean, you get your head lopped off or you get smashed to bits by a tube train, that’s your lot. But anything less drastic, they’ll keep your system ticking over and undertake instant repairs. They’re a preventative measure against cancer, heart attacks, strokes…’ He wagged his finger at me. ‘But that doesn’t mean you’re immortal. The nanites have their limits, plus they won’t last forever. Even they’re not immune to entropy.’

‘What about when I use the heart?’ I asked.

His smile reappeared. ‘That’s the beauty of it. You can use it more or less with impunity now. It will still make you feel ill, but the nanites will repair you, and quickly. This is the freedom I know you’ve been looking for. The magic formula. The big turning point.’ His smile became a grin. ‘Feels good, doesn’t it?’

I stared at him in wonder. Yes, it did feel good. More than that, it felt wonderful. It opened up a whole new vista of possibilities.

‘So what do I do now?’

He grabbed my hand, and at first I thought he was going to squeeze it, or clasp it between both of his, but then I felt something hard and cold and weighty being pressed into my palm.

I knew what it was immediately. The obsidian heart. It moulded itself to the cup of my hand as though that was its natural resting place.

‘You go on,’ he said. ‘You pick up your journey where you left off, and you go on, and you get through it.’

He said nothing more, but I could see in his eyes just how tough this next stage of my life would be, and how it troubled him, and how he pitied me.

‘Is it going to be really bad?’ I asked.

His face seemed to sag, as though he’d been trying his best, but was no longer able to hold back the terrible weight of memory. At first I thought he wasn’t going to answer me, and then finally he said, ‘If you’re careful, and if you’re lucky, you’ll get through it.’

There was a part of me that wished I had died. A part of me that wished I didn’t have to do this. But I had no choice. If I wanted to keep my life on track, if I wanted to prevent a catastrophe that would affect not just me personally, but those I loved, I had to travel back in time, almost two centuries, to 1914.

I had to meet and befriend a man called Frank Martin.

I had to fight alongside him in the trenches of the First World War.

I had to watch him die, and then I had to use the heart that I now clutched in my hand to bring him back to life.

TWO

YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU!

‘Oi, you! Yes you, you little runt! How old are you then? Bloody Hun’ll have you for breakfast, son, and still have room for seconds.’

The voice was raucous, the tone ugly, and the laughter that followed it uglier still. I stepped to my right, peering ahead of me, up the length of the long queue of men stretching all the way down the street and around the corner from the recruiting station.

It was August 14th 1914, and Britain had been at war with Germany for just over a week. Despite the season it was cold and drizzly, the men who were waiting in line with me hunched against the blustery, side-swiping wind, caps or trilbies on their heads, fags hanging out of their mouths, hands jammed into their pockets. We looked like an audition queue for an Andy Capp movie. The thought made me smile, though if I’d voiced it I’d have been met with blank faces, as it’d be another forty-odd years before the character would make his debut in The Daily Mirror cartoon strip. During the week or so I’d spent in this time period, acclimatising to the unfamiliar surroundings, I had come to the conclusion that the early twentieth century was a time of bad suits and bad haircuts. Most of the clothes the men wore (mine included) were grey and baggy, the trousers sagging at knee and crotch, the waistbands high and so loose that if they hadn’t been held up by braces they’d have been puddling around our ankles. Beneath their shapeless, workaday jackets, a lot of the men wore home-knit jumpers over grubby white shirts, their Adam’s apples bobbing above tightly knotted ties.

The men of Great Britain had greeted the declaration of war with a kind of gung-ho euphoria that was terrifying to behold. From my viewpoint their naivety seemed child-like, no doubt based on the fact that, in this day and age, information about the harsh realities of war was very much at a premium. There was no Internet, no TV, very few movies. There weren’t even many photographs – not ones that were publicly available at any rate – and the newspapers I’d eagerly sought out were composed of little more than dry facts, densely and tediously presented.

People didn’t seem to read books all that much either – not the general workforce, at any rate. The penny serials, or penny dreadfuls, which recounted lurid tales of pirates and highwaymen, had been popular during Victoria’s reign, and were still popular, but even the works of, say, Charles Dickens were priced beyond the pockets of most working people. And though contemporary writers like James Joyce, Thomas Hardy and E.M. Forster were becoming more well known, books still tended on the whole to be heavy, daunting things, used by the rich to line the shelves of their libraries and read only by scholars and academics.

Basically, what I’m saying is that the male population of Britain had no fucking clue what they were letting themselves in for. It was horrible looking at the men queueing with me, many of whom were barely old enough to shave, and knowing that many – most – of them would be heading off to war and never coming back. No doubt they thought of war as a playground game, as a fun and exciting adventure. From the snippets of chatter I picked up, it was clear that the majority of them expected to send Jerry packing without too much trouble, and return home to a hero’s welcome in time for Christmas, grinning and bedecked with medals.

From my modern perspective there was surprisingly little cynicism in these overheard conversations, surprisingly little doubt, and surprisingly little criticism – in fact, none whatsoever – of the powers-that-be. It seemed no matter what your status in life – whether you be king or politician, a member of the privileged classes or a humble working man – the general consensus was that you were all in this together, fighting side by side for freedom and justice, secure in the knowledge that evil would be conquered and good would prevail.

All of which made the belittling comments of the man ahead of me in the queue, and the sneery laughter that followed, strange to hear. It was a bum note in the general atmosphere of camaraderie. As I looked up the length of the queue I heard, but didn’t see, someone (presumably the ‘runt’) respond to the bullish man’s insult. The tone the ‘runt’ used was defiant, but his actual words were obscured by the bluster of the wind and by the fact that he was standing with his back to me, presumably facing his aggressor.

Whatever he said must have been cutting, though, because the laughter that followed his retort was a startled, even admiring, whoop of mirth. The tail end of the laughter was superseded by an animal-like snarl and the bullish man’s voice again, angry with humiliation: ‘Why, you little shit! I’ll give you a hiding you’ll never forget!’

As the queue ahead of me, about halfway between where I was standing and the door of the recruiting station, bulged and rippled, I was already moving, because suddenly I knew that this was it. I’d arrived in this time period wondering how I’d meet Frank, realising I had no idea which recruitment office to go to, and on which day, and at what time.

Then I’d realised it didn’t matter. Frank had told me it would happen, which meant that therefore it would. It was a fait accompli – or maybe even a Fate accompli. All I had to do was act on what little information I had, and destiny would do the rest.

Thinking back to my conversation with Frank on the tube after he’d rescued me from the trap that Benny Magee had led me into in Queens Road Cemetery in Walthamstow, I recalled him telling me he’d been born in Lewisham and that he’d been training to be a draughtsman when war had broken out. I’d therefore headed to the Lewisham recruiting office, rather than the one closest to my house in Kensington, in the hope our paths would cross. Frank had also told me, during that same tube conversation, that he’d died (or would die) at Ypres in 1917 at the age of twenty. As 1917 was still three years away, that meant Frank would currently be seventeen. So like a lot of the men eager to head off to war he’d be little more than a kid. Younger even than my eldest daughter, Candice.

As I hurried towards what seemed to be a scuffle in the queue ahead, the knot of men surrounding it swelled even further, then broke apart. A few of them staggered back as two bodies hurtled sideways on to the pavement. One was a tall, burly guy in his twenties with red hair jutting from beneath the brim of a grey cap, and a complexion like lumpy, freckled cheese. The other, flailing and scrapping like a cornered cat, was Frank Martin. The burly man had him round the throat and had lifted him clean off the ground.

At seventeen Frank was even weedier than the version of him I’d known in my own time. His thin, slightly ferrety face was bright red through lack of air, and his dark hair was drooping over his forehead in oily strands.

To give him credit, though, he was making a good job of fighting his corner. The red-haired man was twice as broad as Frank and a good eight to ten inches taller, but Frank was lashing out at him as he hung in the air, landing punches wherever he could – which, to be honest, were mostly ineffectual thumps on his assailant’s tree-trunk arms and bulging shoulders.

Almost casually the red-haired man drew back his free arm, as if to let loose an arrow from a bow, and curled his meaty fingers into a fist. From my perspective the fist looked about the size of Frank’s head, and the arm about to propel it forward looked as if it would give the fist more than enough momentum to knock Frank’s block clean off his shoulders.

By now I was running fast enough for the wind to catch hold of the brim of my hat and whip it from my head.

‘Oi, Ginger!’ I yelled. ‘Try picking on someone your own size!’

Fist poised, the red-haired man was caught momentarily off-guard. He half-turned so suddenly that he stumbled, inadvertently both loosening his grip on Frank’s throat and drawing him closer.

I’ll say this for Frank – he had bloody good reflexes. Making the most of his opportunity, he kicked out at his assailant, his foot making a solid thock as it connected with the ginger man’s shinbone.

His attacker’s face contorted and he let loose a girlish howl of pain. His grip on Frank’s throat slackened further, allowing Frank to wriggle free. Instead of making a break for it, though, Frank drew back his arm, jumped up and socked the ginger man in the eye. The man’s head snapped back and his cap fell to the pavement. I was still running at him full-pelt, and before he could recover I thrust out both hands and shoved him as hard as I could.

The bloke was as compact as an ox, and if he hadn’t already been tottering I might have done no more than jar my arms. But because he was off-balance over he went, a look of dumb incomprehension on his face, his arms windmilling behind him. He landed on his arse with a coccyx-crunching thump that made me wince. Sitting there, legs and arms akimbo, he resembled an over-sized baby. When I glanced at Frank, he looked at me and grinned. His face was flushed, his tie was askew and one side of his collar was sticking up in the air like a crumpled white bat’s wing, but he looked utterly gleeful. I’d never seen him grin like that before, and it was an expression both joyous and heart-rendingly painful to see.

We were only able to enjoy the moment for a couple of seconds, though. As stunned as Ginger had been by the way the tables had been turned on him, he recovered quickly. With a roar he scrambled to his feet.

‘You fucking sods! I’ll have the fucking both of yer! Yer dead men!’ he bellowed.

As he lumbered towards us, I tensed, poised between fight and flight. Although I was as tall as Ginger, he was a lot heftier than me, and despite coming from a rough neighbourhood and having the kind of face that sometimes made people uneasy (apparently my default expression, as I’d been variously told in the past, was moody and intense) I wasn’t much of a scrapper.

I glanced at Frank again to gauge his intentions, wondering whether he was of a mind that we should join forces and put this bully down for good. Before it became a decision we’d be forced into making, though, fate intervened, in the form of several other blokes in the queue who started to pipe up on our behalf.

First to speak was a squat, dark-bearded, balding man with a Scottish accent. ‘Ach, they beat ye fair and square, man. I’d accept that if I were ye.’

There were grunts of assent, nods of agreement. Like a cornered animal, Ginger rounded on the dark-bearded man and snarled, ‘I’ll lay you out too, Scotty, if you don’t shut yer trap.’

Now another man jumped in, rangy like me, but pugnacious-looking. In an accent that was pure East End, he said, ‘You have a go at him, mate, and you’ll have to have a go at me too. Like the rest o’ these gents, I’m here today to stand up to a pack of bullies across the sea. But before I give the Hun what for, I’d just as happily stand up to bullies on me own soil.’

The roars of assent were louder this time. Some of the men stepped forward, fists raised defiantly in Ginger’s direction.

Ginger looked from one man to another, his anger turning to petulance and then to uncertainty. He looked to his knot of cronies, who had initially egged him on with their sneering laughter, but they’d lapsed into silence and were now looking at their shoes or huddling into their jackets, keen to disassociate themselves from their thuggish companion.

Ginger looked first at me and then at Frank. ‘You haven’t heard the last of this,’ he said, and stabbed his finger in our direction, ‘neither of you. I’ll have you yet, you mark my words.’

‘Yeah, you and the Kaiser’s army,’ retorted Frank, and everyone laughed.

Ginger’s face went as red as his hair. He clenched his fists, gave us one more murderous look, then stalked away.

A few of the men catcalled after him, but the general mood was one of great good humour. The incident seemed to have stirred the collective blood, to have brought us all together, reminding us – on this unseasonably cold and wind-swept day – that we were here to unite against a common enemy. Conversation swelled and bubbled in the wake of the bully’s departure; hands were shaken; strangers introduced themselves to strangers.

I stepped towards Frank, hand outstretched. ‘Mate of yours, was he?’ I asked, nodding towards Ginger’s retreating back.

‘Bosom pal,’ Frank said. ‘Wasn’t that obvious?’

His hand met mine, and it was warm, his grip strong. He was so full of life I felt like weeping.

‘I’m Alex,’ I said. ‘Alex Locke.’

‘Frank Martin,’ said Frank.

I nodded at a pub called The Crown, which was across the road, opposite the recruiting station. ‘Fancy a pint once we’ve joined up?’

Frank’s grin widened. ‘Why not?’

THREE

COSMIC BALANCE

I mulled it over for a long time before deciding to go ahead. In the back of my mind, though, I always knew that now I had the means at my disposal – i.e. the ability to use the heart without it half-killing me – I’d have to give it a try. If I didn’t, and everything went tits up at some later date, I knew I’d only end up wondering what might have happened if I had. And more to the point, whether, by avoiding what seemed like an obvious solution, I’d made things unnecessarily difficult for myself.

I reasoned too that if it wasn’t meant to be then it wouldn’t work out. And that if it was meant to be, then it would. In short, I’d be putting myself into the hands of Fate, just as I had when I’d gone along to the recruiting station in Lewisham. I’d left the timing of that up to destiny, and things had worked out just fine. I’d met Frank as I was supposed to, we’d joined up together, and now, despite the disparity in our ages, we were great pals.

In fact, it was Frank who I talked the whole thing over with, in a roundabout way, one night in The Globe over a few pints. The Globe was a poky little boozer in Lambeth, not far from the Bethlehem Royal Hospital – or Bedlam, as it was more popularly known.

It had been a couple of weeks since that blustery day when we’d first put paid to Ginger and joined up together. Since then we’d been kicking our heels, waiting for our call-up papers. Such was the enthusiasm among the men of Britain when war had been declared that many recruiting stations had had to temporarily close down in order to deal with the backlog of paperwork that needed processing before the thousands of eager volunteers could become bona fide members of the armed forces.