A Whispered Name

by William Brodrick

  ‘Remember, I was a submariner,’ said Martin, scratching his head as if someone else had wrecked the room while he was out. ‘After you’ve lived in a bicycle pump you don’t quite know where to put things once you get the space.’

  The disorder was entirely superficial, Anselm was sure. A controlled reaction to the extraordinary discipline of his former professional life. His attire, tone and manner communicated his defining qualities: seriousness of purpose, respect for the subject of his work, and the utmost reliability.

  ‘Given the nature of your enquiries, I’ve managed to secure some special arrangements: a room of your own, quick access to a photocopier and a telephone if you need help. You mustn’t hesitate. Just dial forty-eight.’

  Anselm took a facing chair, quite certain that Martin was at least fascinated by his presence. He was, after all, a link to the past, however slender; a thread into a troubling court martial that had escaped any simple classification.

  ‘I hope you can find a clue to the meaning of this trial,’ said Martin. He rested his square jaw between cupped hands, letting his pessimism drift across the room. ‘For it has a meaning, of that I’m sure. I just have no idea of what it might be.’

  Anselm blinked as if a shaft of light had shot through the canopy of aspens over Larkwood’s cemetery. Those phrases belonged to Kate Seymour. She’d been here. She’d dialled 48 from a private room. That’s how Martin had discovered that Herbert had been a member of the court martial.

  ‘I can’t make any promises,’ admitted Anselm. He waited politely to see if Martin would confirm the intuition but they were both observing the same discretion: respect for another’s confidentiality. But Anselm wasn’t really bound. He’d been told no secrets. And an open conversation, now, about Kate Seymour, could only help her and the man she represented. ‘Meaning?’ He smiled, ingenuously, seeing Martin gauge the temptation to share what he knew. ‘Forgive me … but how can a trial have a meaning?’

  Twiddling all three silver buttons on the cuff of one sleeve, Martin nodded at the puzzle. He was unflappable. Which wasn’t surprising, given that he could fire an intercontinental ballistic missile if the right person asked him to. When he was ready he asked, innocently, ‘Do you understand how military law operated in the field?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘May I explain?’

  ‘Please do.’

  Somehow the cluttered table had turned. The shadow of Kate Seymour receded and Martin, very much on his own patch, settled back into the chair of a researcher with a client. He spoke with the one-step-back authority he’d brought to the geology of the Salient. He was not going to discuss the troubles of Kate Seymour.

  If a FGCM – a Field General Court Martial – passed a death sentence, he said, hands falling open, the trial bundle hopped up the ladder of military authority: from Brigade to Division to Corps to Army. (A finger counted out the rungs.) At each stage different commanders appended their view on the character of the soldier … the evidence … and whether the death penalty should be carried out. All this paper finally landed on a lawyer’s desk at GHQ who checked the transcript for any procedural errors. Assuming everything was in order, the case went before the Commander-in-Chief. He alone decided if a condemned man was reprieved or not. (Martin’s hand came down the ladder, as if it held the order.)

  ‘When you open the Flanagan file you will see that several crucial documents are missing.’ Martin pulled a cuff into view. ‘Most important of all, there should be a blue Army Form A three. Ordinarily, the C-in-C wrote his decision on the back page. If the man was shot, the officer commanding the firing squad added his own endorsement confirming date and time of execution. In this case, that form has vanished. With it went the doctor’s death certificate … if there was one.’

  ‘But gaps in the narrative don’t add up to a meaning,’ objected Anselm, judicially, recalling that he’d often had to handle interjections of that kind at the Bar. They vouchsafed a percipience to the Bench that was not, in fact, there.

  ‘No, they don’t. But a pattern emerges if we take a wider trawl of the records … a pattern that cannot be explained by accidental loss.’

  Other types of document ought to have been filled in. Registers of Field General Court Martial; an AF B103 Casualty Form; Regimental, Company and Field Conduct Sheets … and Flanagan’s name was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘And as I explained to your Prior, the puzzle doesn’t end with the trial,’ pursued Martin, leaning back in a kind of controlled slouch. ‘There’s no reference to Flanagan resuming active service, he’s not listed as a casualty, and his name was never carved on a monument. In the twenties, civil servants drew up lists of executed soldiers and memoranda for ministers facing post-war flak … and again Joseph Flanagan is never mentioned. In terms of a paper trail, he literally vanished in September nineteen seventeen.’

  Listening to the succession of truancy, Anselm found himself looking back to where it all began, to the primary source – the file he would shortly examine. ‘Assuming that the original court martial papers formed the basis for the later registers and memos –’ Martin nodded, tapping the edge of his desk as if it were a piano – ‘doesn’t that suggest that the file was weeded by someone in the army … back in nineteen seventeen?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘And that whoever did it knew that anyone looking at what was left would be mystified?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But no one would sabotage a file for the sake of a man who’d been shot.’

  ‘I agree.’

  ‘It might make sense if he’d lived.’

  ‘And he almost certainly didn’t.’

  Martin leaned forward, smuggling his elbows into the available space among his books and papers and the photos of his children. ‘This is why I talk of a meaning. We’re not dealing with a glitch in the administrative apparatus. It was an attack. A deliberate wrecking of the machine to leave an enigma. But as to who attacked the file and why … I’m sorry, but I don’t think we’ll ever find the answers. My guess is that Father Moore could have told us a tale to bend our ears.’ His deep brown eyes found Anselm and didn’t waver. ‘Maybe you’ll uncover his secret. Should you do so, I wouldn’t be alone in thanking you.’

  That was the nearest Martin would go to admitting that Kate Seymour had come to the PRO; and that he knew she’d gone to Larkwood as a last hope. His propriety was inspiring but slightly incongruous. Kate Seymour had not revealed the one secret that mattered: Joseph Flanagan was still alive.

  Martin became ‘at ease in his trainers’ as the French say, showing Anselm ‘the Donk Shop’ (submarine jargon for the engine room) with a mystifying relish. It housed two photocopiers, a computer terminal and a stack of redundant fax machines. In a kind of delirium, Anselm pressed a button that would guarantee the instantaneous annihilation of Moscow. We’ve come a long way from throwing projectiles from a balloon, he mused, following Martin into the room secured for his research.

  An old oak desk faced a window overlooking the lake and the great, weeping tree. Posters of past exhibitions coloured the walls. The focus belonged, however, to a sort of exile standing forlorn in the corner.

  ‘It’s a friendship plant,’ said Martin, scratching his head. ‘Everybody hates it. Remember, just dial forty-eight if you think I can help.’

  Anselm pulled back the chair and sat down.

  A beige file marked ‘Private Flanagan WO 71/001A’ lay on the table beside a telephone. Written in pencil on a faded green sticker was the instruction ‘Closed until 1992’. Anselm opened the cover. The first item that caught his eye was a yellow slip of paper with his name on it – a computer generated ticket showing who was in possession of the nation’s heritage. The second item was far more interesting: another file, labelled ‘Private Owen Doyle’, the soldier whose tags had been worn by Captain Herbert Moore.

  Chapter Eight

  The Court Convenes

  1

  After a desultory breakfast Herbert
left his billet and walked down the misty lane towards the old village school of Oostbeke. He passed the monastery, glancing through the open gate in the wall at the cracked flagstones that led to the white door. Pressing on, he came to a low barn on his right that was open on one side, its back to the direction of the wind. A burly carpenter was hammering together two pieces of wood. The mallet fell like percussion as he sang a song from The Mikado. ‘The flowers that bloom in the spring’ – whack-whack – ‘breathe promise of merry sunshine’ – whack-whack – ‘As we merrily dance and we sing’ – whack-whack – ‘we welcome the hope that they bring’ whack-whack – ‘of a summer of roses and wine.’ Whack. Whack. Whack. Behind the carpenter was a pile of crosses, neatly stacked. To one side an assistant crouched on one knee, slopping white paint on the finished article.

  The school was set back from the road with a playground in front. Morning sunshine lit the haze around the square brick structure. White shutters, damp with dew, seemed to float upon the walls. A framed air vent at ground level glimmered with an oily light. The prisoner was in the cellar, it seemed. Herbert thought of the Tommy, locked up and trapped. So vivid was his evocation of the damp concrete walls, the window of morning mist, the sound of the sentry’s stamping feet behind the bolted door, that he suffered a wave of nausea. He didn’t want to weigh another man’s worth; to judge the performance of his fibre, as though he were cloth. No one wanted to sit on a court martial, though none would admit why: it brought you close to your own fears, your own weakness, your own capricious nerve – one day strong, another weak. All soldiers feared the incidence of a bad day when, for once, backbone really mattered. If you failed the test, well, no matter who you were, you ended up in a cellar by an oil lamp. He breathed deeply, nodded at the guard and pushed open the heavy door.

  To the left Herbert saw a room lined with benches, beneath which were hooks fixed no higher than his chest. Two greatcoats had been laid out, each with their sleeves joined as though they were carved knights upon a sarcophagus. Herbert brushed against one and it slid to the floor, revealing a book in the inside pocket. The title was visible: Military Law Made Easy. Herbert knew it well. A lifesaver, written by Lieutenant Colonel S.T. Banning. There were exam papers at the back, with answers. Briskly, hardening his mind, Herbert strode down the tiled corridor towards the hum of modulated voices.

  Herbert didn’t know any of the other officers, save the prosecutor – Edward Chamberlayne, the adjutant of his battalion and Duggie’s administrative Captain. He’d been thrown out of Oxford for indolence, a distinction that he wore like a decoration. His eyes were strikingly clear surrounded by a dark line of shadow, a feature that suggested he was a minor principal in an amateur operatic society. He introduced the other members of the court: Major Robert Glanville, the President, and Lieutenant Graham Oakley, the junior officer. They were gathered by a window which, incredibly, still had net curtains. Through the grey lace Herbert could just make out a stretch of distant woodland. Far away the guns thumped like a racing heart.

  ‘Before we settle down to work,’ said Glanville, ‘I’ll just remind you of some basic drill. I’m pure Yorkshire and I’ll make myself plain.’

  Square-faced with a large moustache, the major towered over everyone in the room, his uniform bulging across the arms and chest. There was a far away kindness in his expressions, as though he might announce the founding of a public library or the donation of brass instruments to form a band. For all the Yorkshire credentials, his accent had the smoothness of a Sandhurst alumnus.

  ‘Have either of you sat on a court martial before?’ asked Glanville.

  Oakley and Herbert shook their heads.

  ‘A pity. Have you seen an execution?’

  Another joint shake of the head.

  ‘Good. Now put that out of your mind.’

  Herbert had of course seen a firing party from another regiment heading off in the half-light before dawn. He’d stood beside Duggie several times when Routine Orders were read out by Chamberlayne to the four companies of the battalion, informing them that a court martial had taken place and that the sentence had been ‘duly carried out’. The words always unsettled Herbert. All the details were given: name, rank, regiment, offence, place of trial, date of execution and, worst of all, the exact time – to the minute. It evoked the picture of an officer with a stopwatch and notepad. After each public reading Duggie had said a death sentence would be imposed on anyone who committed a like misdemeanour. The major was wise to have sensed these unspoken memories, and to have named them at the outset.

  ‘First things first,’ said Glanville, hands on hips. ‘This lad will be undefended. It’s our job to make sure he gets a fair crack of the whip. If he has a defence it’s up to us to ferret it out. Understood?’

  Oakley and Herbert nodded.

  ‘Second, the assumption of innocence doesn’t apply. He’s deemed to have deserted his unit. It’s a General Routine Order. Correct, Chamberlayne?’

  ‘Almost, Sir.’ The Adjutant made a bow with his head, as he’d probably done to his tutor at Oxford. ‘As a court, you are bound to assume that the accused intended the natural and probable consequences of his actions. If the accused absented himself to avoid a special or dangerous duty, that act raises a presumption of intention to so avoid. You are entitled to act on that presumption unless the accused can prove otherwise.’

  ‘That’s what I said,’ replied Glanville, ‘only in a more memorable fashion.’

  ‘Of course, Sir.’

  ‘Third,’ resumed Glanville, ‘a couple of years back, a lad pleaded guilty to desertion and was promptly shot the following week. Since then we take a not guilty plea whether the accused holds his hands up or not.’

  As Herbert tried to reconcile the implications of these last two decrees, Oakley said, ‘I’m sorry, Sir … you mean we presume that he’s guilty, make him enter a not guilty plea, and then see if we can find a defence to undermine our own presumption?’

  ‘I do.’ He examined Oakley with a smile – the remote smile, Herbert thought, of a professional soldier faced with the mystification of a volunteer. ‘There’s a logic to it, Lieutenant, if you think about it long enough.’

  Oakley looked like he’d only recently come out of the firing line, perhaps the night before – it left a mark on a soldier for several days: a kind of pallor and exhaustion of spirit. He had a broad forehead and his mouth sloped down slightly at the sides. Not having a neck of any significant length, his head seemed to be balanced on his shoulders.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind my asking, Sir,’ continued the Lieutenant, ‘but why is there no Prisoner’s Friend for the defence?’

  ‘The lad doesn’t want one,’ replied Glanville.

  ‘And a CMO … a Court Martial Officer?’

  ‘There aren’t enough to go round.’ Glanville smiled again, remoter still to the disquiet of the civilian mind. In a soothing tone – or perhaps he was lightly mocking his own masters – he said, ‘Fortunately, we’ve got Mr Chamberlayne to keep us on the straight and narrow.’

  The prosecutor made another bow with his head. (As far as Herbert knew, prior to his expulsion from Oxford, he’d been reading Greats.)

  Herbert strongly suspected that Oakley’s questions were derived from a hasty reading of Lieutenant Colonel S.T. Banning. That showed diligence, at least. But it also demonstrated one of the realities in this endless war: most of the college-trained officers had been killed, very early on, in fact; the volunteers or conscripts who filled their place had little if any idea of military law or procedure. But what did that matter? Desertion was a terribly simple offence.

  ‘A final word of advice … and some encouragement,’ said Glanville. ‘The advice: remember what I said earlier; don’t think about the ultimate sanction. That’s none of your concern. Your job is straightforward: find out what happened according to the evidence. Parliament wrote the law; all you have to do is see if the lad fits the bill. Now the encouragement: if the offence is prove
d, then there will be a sentence, like day follows night – and if it’s death, then it’s someone else’s job to decide whether it’s the right thing to do or not. Your hands are clean either way. It’s nothing to do with you. For what it’s worth, most of them get reprieved. Now, let’s do our duty.’

  Chamberlayne opened a pair of double doors and they all passed into the improvised court.

  2

  A table for the court had been placed centrally between two windows. Upon it was a pile of paper, a pencil, a large red book (the Manual of Military Law) and a small black book (the Bible). To one side was a smaller table for Chamberlayne. The room was high and airy with a fireplace in the corner. Wood panelling shaped like a Greek temple rose from the mantelpiece to frame a cracked mirror. School desks lined a wall as if they were seats for the jury. A chair had been placed in the centre for the accused. At a signal from Glanville, an escort of two soldiers marched Private Joseph Flanagan into the room.

  He was a slight man of average height. Sandy hair with a gentle wave had been neatly parted, revealing a high, smooth forehead. His fine mouth gave the hint of a natural smile, suggesting approachability and an easy temper. Raised eyebrows disclosed the vulnerability of the trapped. To Herbert, he looked vaguely familiar, though he couldn’t place any specific meeting. The soldier’s eyes flicked over the officers that would try him with an expression of knowing dread … like Herbert had seen upon the face of Quarters. With that thought he felt again the kick of the rifle, deep in his shoulder. A flash of mud blanked out the sockets and his mind escaped into darkness.