Free Sure and Certain Death by Barbara Nadel

‘Frank,’ she said, ‘you have to remember we was all just girls at the time. You was already at the front and . . .’
    ‘Hang on a mo,’ I said. I didn’t understand what she was talking about and I said so. ‘You talking about the Great War, are you, Nan?’
    ‘Yes.’ She put her head down again now. Nan had been twenty-four when the Great War began. She, like me at the time, had been an enthusiastic supporter of it. Dad, who’d lived a bit and seen what had happened with the Boers in Africa, hadn’t been so keen. Nan and myself were proved the fools. Her maybe, as I was shortly to find out, more so even than me.
    ‘So . . .’
    I could see that she was really struggling. Words were there but they just wouldn’t or couldn’t come out of her mouth. Eventually, unable to take it any longer, Aggie said, ‘She was a White Feather girl, Frank. Her and the others, they all did it together.’
    I felt nothing at first. It can be the way of things when a shock is so great it’s almost unbearable. All but one of the mates I joined up with in 1914 died in the trenches and I don’t think I really broke down over any of them. It was all too unimaginable for that. Like this.
    ‘Frank, I . . . We was young and silly and . . .’
    ‘You sent men to their deaths!’ Aggie said to her. ‘You and all them other silly bitches! What did you think you was doing?’
    Nan began to cry again, but Aggie just went on.
    ‘Giving every bloke out of uniform a white feather to tell him you think he’s a coward?’ She put one fag out and then immediately lit up another. ‘Nancy, men not fit enough to walk across London Bridge went off and enlisted because of stupid women like you! They died!’
    ‘Aggie . . .’
    ‘Frank, I have only just found out,’ Aggie said to me breathlessly. ‘She never told no one, and with good reason! Dad would’ve been furious. I’m furious. What you must think of her . . .’
    The White Feather movement, as it came to be known later on, began in September 1914. A retired admiral from Folkestone organised thirty women to present white feathers to any man of serving age they saw out of uniform. All fired up by stories of rape and murder as the Germans invaded Belgium, these women saw themselves as doing essential work shaming cowards in defence of innocent civilians – themselves, they imagined, included.
    The white feather itself, as a symbol of cowardice, comes from cock-fighting. I’ve never been to such a thing myself, but it’s said that some cockerels have white feathers in their tails which they show when they ‘turn tail’ as it were, when giving up a fight. ‘Showing the white feather’ therefore is showing your fear and cowardice in the face of the enemy.
    Once I’d been approached by a White Feather girl, when I was home on leave. I was out of uniform at the time because I wanted and in fact needed to forget about the bloody trenches for the sake of my sanity. It was early 1916, I’d been fighting for just over a year, and most of my mates were already dead. When the woman gave me the feather I was first stunned, then I felt such violence in me that I had to just run away from her as fast as I could. I’d wanted to rip her head off. It hadn’t occurred to me that maybe I might try to explain my situation to her or perhaps even shock her by telling her tales of men drowning in mud and giant rats feasting on corpses. I’d just wanted to end her.
    I looked over at my older sister and saw immediately the fear in her eyes.
    Aggie put a hand on my shoulder and said, ‘Frank . . .’
    ‘You have to tell the coppers about this,’ I said to Nancy.
    ‘What, about me being involved?’
    ‘You’ve got to tell them who was in your . . . your group,’ I said. ‘If that is why these women are being killed . . .’ I stopped to swallow. My sisters both looked at me, knowing that I wanted to say so much more about how that made me feel. ‘Women are in