A Whispered Name

by William Brodrick

  ‘And if that’s right,’ conceded Martin, ‘he must have walked or hitched a lift to Elverdinghe … some twelve miles north-west.’

  ‘He wasn’t going to Elverdinghe,’ corrected Anselm reluctantly, for he didn’t like playing the front runner. ‘That is where Flanagan was caught. If you carry on the trajectory, he was heading here … back to Black Eye Corner.’

  ‘But he got drunk.’

  ‘Which is far too convenient,’ insisted Anselm, repeating his earlier point. He’d glimpsed what may have happened. ‘He brought the bottles with him.’

  ‘Where from?’

  ‘Étaples … I’m not sure,’ suggested Anselm. ‘But he didn’t find them in a barn.’

  ‘Why bring alcohol halfway across Flanders?’

  ‘Because it gave him an excuse. Something to say when the army finally caught him. Because he could use a hangover to hide the time he’d spent with Doyle. I mean it’s almost convincing –’ Anselm became earnest, giving substance to a speech he didn’t believe – ‘Flanagan had ploughed through the mud and hail to save an officer’s life; he’d snapped under the strain of the noise and the death of his leader – that was a nice touch – and then he’d got lost and drunk in the howling night.’ Anselm shrugged his shoulders. ‘Flanagan came back knowing he’d get caught. He was banking on a merciful court.’

  Martin slipped his jacket back on. He checked the buttons at the cuffs and squared his shoulders. ‘So what is the picture that emerges?’ he asked, humbly. ‘Why are you troubled by the evidence … the neat story given to the court?’

  ‘Because it reads like something planned,’ said Anselm. ‘Because I think that Joseph Flanagan was in control of that trial. That’s the picture I see.’

  2

  Evening came and Anselm wandered back to his B&B feeling like one of those students of mysticism who inhabit a charnel house. Everywhere he’d looked, everything he’d touched, concerned the dead. He’d bought three books on the Battle for Passchendaele. A quick glance had revealed only two points of agreement: the maps and the immense scale of the slaughter. The dispute was restricted to blame and merit. In the late afternoon Anselm had sought Martin’s advice once more.

  ‘Why have two identity tags?’

  ‘One remained on the body and the other went to records. Sometimes you couldn’t bury the dead. Sometimes they were laid in a common pit, so …’

  Anselm had guessed the rest. The tag gave a name to the remains: to help the War Graves Commission, to warn a farmer in the years to come.

  ‘… and, in fact, they still turn up.’

  How did you get both of them, Herbert? Anselm had thought, letting the receiver drop. Why wear them? Why offer them to a man called Flanagan?

  Anselm simply could not escape the shadow thrown by the past, even now, when he entered a corner shop stacked high with bright magazines, cheap toys, brown fruit and endless tins. Despite a strong attempt, he failed to engage with the headlines and the cheap abundance, or the banter of the man propped by the till. A capital trial was loud in his mind like a play on the radio. He came out of the shop empty-handed, pondering Flanagan’s last words to the court. ‘I didn’t run off,’ he’d said.

  Then what did you do?

  The question remained with Anselm, even as he sat in the dark of his room, mumbling the psalms for Compline, only vaguely conscious that his brothers in Larkwood were chanting the same ancient words. During the Great Silence, that deep monastic quiet that Anselm carried within himself, he tried to imagine everyone from Major Glanville, who’d been grieving for his brother, to Private Elliot who’d burned his cheek … those faceless names on the page, a convocation of the damned with six weeks left to live. But he thought most of Herbert, a monk who’d often slept through Compline, whose Great Silence filtered through to the morning light, when he’d rise, and smile with quiet gratitude for his life. How had this advocate of the heartbroken ever sat as a judge in the kingdom of death?

  Chapter Thirteen

  Judgement

  1

  The memory of the pink nimbus in the mirror wounded Herbert’s mind. Another kind of cloud seemed to settle upon him, violently contrasting with the strips of sunlight upon the tiled floor. For a while he couldn’t engage properly with Glanville’s admonitions. The president repeated everything he’d said at the beginning, including the Army’s decision that the assumption of innocence would not apply, only this time, mid-sentence, Chamberlayne appeared with a copy of the actual text. Oakley studied it with a grimace and Herbert turned away, drawn to the lingering beauty in his mind. He sought the window for another torturing glimpse. A cough from Glanville came like a reprimand.

  ‘It’s time to do our duty,’ he said, full of Yorkshire frankness.

  The last word drove Herbert further into himself. Going through the motions he sat on one of the three school desks that had been arranged in a triangle. The others took their place in front of him. Their boots faced inward, inches apart. They looked at each other foolishly. Everyone looked their age – twenty-something and boyish. Pretenders in an adult game. Herbert felt even younger. He thought of his first day in the playground among the mute sons of Cumberland farmers. Herbert was from the big house down the road, an outsider. As he was now.

  ‘Leaving aside the time spent guiding Major Dunne to the RAP,’ said Glanville, ‘this soldier was absent for thirty-nine hours while his comrades were in action. He was found three miles behind his own lines. His defence is that he got lost.’

  They looked from one to the other. Herbert’s expression was forced, his apparent concentration a kind of mime. He’d been slipping away, back to the trench and the gore of the Regimental Aid Post. Flanagan had been there too, moments before his desertion. Herbert had seen him …

  ‘I’m unsure of Elliot,’ said Oakley, dutifully. He looked at Herbert, showing he didn’t quite understand why this witness’s evidence might be important.

  ‘He was the last to see him,’ said Herbert, as if that mattered.

  ‘You can ignore the RSM, Elliot and Mr Sheridan, if you want to,’ said Glanville, cutting through the trees to show up the wood. ‘Flanagan’s statement is all we need.’

  Oakley nodded, satisfied, and Herbert acquiesced: he’d seen the point coming even before his attempt to discredit Elliot, while Flanagan had been confirming the evidence brought against him. The trial was just a public airing of the reasons for the verdict.

  ‘To avoid anyone being influenced by the opinion of his superior officer,’ said Glanville, a hand on each knee, ‘the junior member goes first, finishing with the president.’

  Herbert noted the rose wallpaper, the scratched wood panelling to waist height, and he wondered why the floor was laid with long strips of timber when the hall was tiled. The family home in Keswick had similar tiling, though it wasn’t black and white, as here, but varied like a mosaic. Red, blue, green and white, all waxed by a retired farmer with bad knees. His grandson had been one of the gloomy lads in the schoolyard.

  ‘Guilty,’ said Oakley, obviously.

  ‘Guilty,’ said Herbert, tasting ash.

  ‘Guilty,’ said Glanville, fishing out his pocket watch. A ruby flashed on the chain. He flicked open the cover with his thumb and started counting the minutes.

  ‘We can’t go back in … not yet,’ said Oakley, reading the memorandum once more. His decency was as strong as his sense of duty. ‘It wouldn’t look right.’

  ‘I’m inclined to agree,’ said Glanville, snapping the lid closed. With a stamp of his boots he rose, stretching his long legs. Standing squarely at the window, his broad back blocked the sun sending a huge shadow across the floor. How had he survived? The tall ones always got shot sooner or later. In the head. Snipers got them after breakfast when their prey stood up in the shallower trenches, forgetting that they had to crouch just that little bit more than everyone else. It was called being ‘clipped’. The confusion within Herbert’s skull rolled heavily as though it had substance. Th
is man will die, he thought, casually. A clipper will get him.

  For the next twenty minutes they talked about the show they’d all been a part of – mainly in terms of the weather, because that is how a British soldier handles tragedy.

  ‘God left a tap running,’ said Glanville, swinging one leg on to the other. ‘It rained almost every day last month.’

  ‘All but three,’ confirmed Oakley.

  ‘Just like home,’ said Herbert, on cue.

  No one mentioned the massive casualties. That would have been indecent. And the raising of their memory would have been stained by the purpose of this assembly at Oostbeke – to judge the one that had got away. After a glance at his watch again, Glanville sharpened his pencil with a pocket-knife. Out of the blue he began to reminisce about the day his little brother let a bath overrun.

  ‘The downpour destroyed a seventeenth-century ceiling in the room beneath.’

  He sighed, noted the time on his record of evidence and wrote GUILTY in the third column of Army Form A3. Examining his writing on the pale blue paper, he said, ‘Come on, let’s get on with it.’

  2

  When the members were seated once more, the sentry marched the convicted man back into court. If Flanagan had retained any hope, Glanville snuffed it out by calling for evidence of character. It was the Army way: you weren’t told the finding of the court. Herbert couldn’t remember why. Banning’s lifesaver hadn’t dealt with that one because it didn’t turn up in the exams. But if the members took further evidence, you’d obviously been convicted.

  ‘Here is the relevant conduct sheet,’ said Chamberlayne. Herbert sensed contempt in the courtesy. The dark rings around the prosecutor’s eyes grew still darker. ‘It is without any endorsement of significance.’

  Glanville examined the columns with a degree of surprise. Apart from four days confined to barracks for dumb insolence, his record was clean.

  ‘You’ll appreciate that this soldier saved the life of his Company Commander,’ said Chamberlayne with a hint of irony. He nodded as he might have done when the Dean of his college threw him out. ‘That individual is now in England. You will remember that this soldier’s platoon commander – Mr Agnew – is dead. As a consequence there is no one left to speak upon this man’s character, save a second lieutenant who is currently hospitalised. He has provided this brief statement.’

  ‘Please read it out loud,’ said Glanville. The genuine interest struck Herbert as farcical. It wouldn’t really affect the sentence … and that thought swirled his consciousness and he blinked as if sand had struck his eyes.

  Chamberlayne angled a scrap of paper towards the light. ‘“I have been with the battalion for six weeks. I’m reliably informed that Private Flanagan’s behaviour has always been commendable. He has been with the battalion since nineteen fifteen. As a fighting man he is of average worth. He fulfils his duties without particular distinction. In April he reported to the MO regarding his nerves, though the battalion was out of the line. He made a similar complaint in June. He has never caused concern under fire.” It is signed by Lieutenant Alan Caldwell.’

  ‘Thank you, Captain,’ said Glanville.

  Pointedly, Chamberlayne handed the testimonial to Herbert who, in a show of diligence, studied it with a puckered brow. The handwriting was slanted and neat with two mistakes, one of punctuation and the other of spelling. A flush of nerves in spring and summer, thought Herbert, trying to understand its significance. And a trial in autumn. He passed it to Glanville who licked his pencil and wrote ‘Exhibit A’ in the top right-hand corner. Fastidiously he made a reference on his notes, glancing between the two.

  ‘Have you anything to say, Private, beyond what you’ve told us already.’

  Flanagan didn’t reply. He was among clouds that were losing their colour, above a low tree-line of vivid green, a congestion of living colour, so unlike the desolation of the front, of the torn and shattered land, the endless brown of exhumed soil and the white chalky mud. ‘No,’ he said, staring directly at Glanville. Unintention ally, he’d dropped the ‘Sir.’ And in that one error he showed himself to be, in the smallest possible way, beyond the authority of the proceedings.

  Glanville closed the court and the sentry stamped forward. Herbert hardly saw Flanagan swivel on the heel, but he heard the confusion of boots on the tiles and the gritty flags outside.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ said Glanville rising. His open hand was pointing in invitation to the double doors as though it were time for port and a cigar, and perhaps a measured game of billiards; time for honourable men to talk seriously.

  3

  Oakley flicked through the Manual of Military Law. Finally he settled on the offence. Shortly he moved to the index and then to several other places. Herbert watched, hearing Glanville’s voice from across the room. The big man was facing the window, blocking the light once more. He’d been repeating his already repeated admonitions. Herbert let the words flow over his head. The pages of the manual brushed against Oakley’s sleeve as he turned here and there like a man trying to find directions to a secret way out, a passage he thought had to be there, something he’d read once, unless he’d been mistaken. Suddenly Herbert’s attention shifted to Glanville’s baritone, for he’d gone off script and was saying something new.

  ‘… is their concern and not yours. Mercy is not in our gift. Division has made it clear that morale can slip through want of proper discipline. And we can’t afford to slip in this weather.’

  Glanville turned away from the window and sunlight struck Herbert like a silent explosion. He screwed his eyelids, seeing pink and purple, and the vague outline of the big man. A staff officer at Division had leaned on Glanville – very gently, of course – and Pemberton at Brigade had leaned on Duggie, who’d leaned on Herbert … or had he? Duggie had been ambiguous. All at once Herbert thought of a rugby scrum, when eight men gripped each other in a ferocious bind, ready to push in one direction. He’d been a flanker, a man on the outside edge, the one whose job it was to break away if the ball was lost.

  Glanville sat on a desk lid and made a reflective humph. ‘You know, there was a time when we branded and flogged our boys. And after branding was abolished, flogging increased. But now flogging has gone, thanks to our enlightened reformers.’ He folded his arms, as if to say, But what’s left to us now? In fact, he said, ‘As before the lowest rank gives his decision first, free from fear or favour.’

  Oakley sniffed and flicked through the pages more quickly, returning to the index several times. Glanville watched him with a tremendous pity in his tired, grieving face. Grieving for what? So much, thought Herbert. The grating of the charabancs, the platoons in rowdy chorus, the short journeys up the line, and the all too brief companionship. Oakley let the book cover fall and close.

  ‘Death,’ he said, with a cough. His head, low on the shoulders, threatened to topple and fall to the floor among their boots. ‘He may have saved an officer’s life, but he took advantage of the trust that had been placed in him.’ His eyes moved boldly on to Herbert. A frightened glare acknowledged that he’d showed his hand and that the stakes were high.

  Instantly, Herbert saw everything with stunning clarity: the room, the three desks, his two brother officers. He heard the scrape of the sentry’s rifle as he leant it on the wall, the shoulder strap jingling like a harness. A match struck and someone laughed. Some birds crashed through the fat leaves of a lime tree. And Herbert realised among all these acute sensations – almost painful to receive – that Flanagan’s life lay in his hands. When his turn came, Glanville would say, ‘Death’: Herbert knew it. Oakley had committed himself. The outcome belonged to Herbert. FGCM. Third officer required.

  He paused, breathing heavily, sweat gathering across his back. Duggie had picked him out; he’d recalled him from the seaside. He’d told him to do his duty … as if it were a kind of punishment. Duggie had decided to test Herbert’s metal: by asking him to do what he did not want to do. A rite of initiation. A chance to
demonstrate his utter commitment to the regiment and the Army’s law. He wouldn’t do it. Not in this way … he couldn’t. Herbert wanted to scream, and his throat contracted at the idea that he must speak. Like Oakley running through the manual for a way out, Herbert summoned the face of Major Brewitt from Morpeth and the weeping boy waiting for the RMO. He called them together, along with the greater part of his vanished regiment: he formed a crowd of the righteous behind his closed eyes to bear witness to his coming betrayal, to ask their forgiveness, for he was going to spare this man. And then, as if lit by the strike of a match, Herbert saw Quarters staring out of the blackness of his mind. He was waiting for the shot, eyes wide with terror. Herbert hesitated … as he’d done in the rain when the rifle wavered side to side. Taking a breath, he lunged for a phrase of Glanville’s, that most of them were reprieved. Holding on to that assurance, he squeezed a finger. ‘Death with a recommendation to mercy.’

  ‘Can we do that?’ jabbered Oakley. ‘If we can, well, I follow suit. God, I didn’t know we had the right.’

  Glanville raised a calming hand and said, quietly, ‘Death.’ He leafed through his notes until he found Army Form A3. Turning to the schedule he carefully wrote DEATH beneath the word GUILTY. Leaning back to get an overall impression of the document, as if to judge its neatness, he said, ‘I’ll add the recommendation suggested by Mr Moore.’

  Eleven minutes had elapsed. For a long while they sat in silence, then Glanville explained that his little brother had once let a kettle boil until it melted on the stove.

  4

  The trial was over. Joyce and Elliot were released. Sheridan stood in the playground smoking. Flanagan was left in the cellar. For completeness, Glanville added the court’s decisions to his own notes, duplicating the entries on Army Form A3. The military urge to think in triplicate made him hesitate. Frustrated, he then signed every page of the record, checking his watch as if a train might depart at any moment. His fastidious attention to the passage of time struck Herbert as suddenly heart-rending, for it contained an acknowledgement that his remaining days were few, that they were precious, even here, in this terrible place of terrible duties.