A Whispered Name

by William Brodrick

  ‘I’m conceding the match,’ said Duggie. ‘I couldn’t look at that cup if we won it.’

  Angus whimpered, his tongue wet and horribly long. He’d been ‘a parting gift’ from a General and was a familiar figure to the men, almost a mascot. Though he had his own gas mask, he stayed behind moaning when the battalion went into the line.

  ‘By the way,’ resumed Duggie, ‘I’ve just written my recommendation. It’s a bit cheeky, really.’ He drew a pipe from his top pocket and pressed the shank into the corner of his mouth. ‘It’s important not to do things directly, so I’ve advocated imprisonment, but observed, in passing, that when intention is of the essence of a crime –’ he struck a match, puffed and squinted – ‘drunkenness may justify the court taking a lenient view of an otherwise serious offence. And on that basis, I’ve floated the idea that our boy should’ve been found guilty of “absence without leave”, despite the charge of desertion.’ He examined the chewed mouthpiece. ‘If some legal bod picks up the ball the court might be reassembled … which would open the door to the lesser offence, and a different sentence.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Herbert, hot at his own failure to dodge and weave; angry that he and Glanville should have worked harder at Sandhurst; irritated that Oakley hadn’t been the one who’d sat the exam, ‘I don’t quite follow.’

  ‘“Intention” is the key,’ said Duggie, jamming the pipe back in the corner of his mouth. ‘If a steady, respectful soldier absents himself through a drunken frolic, the court can reasonably conclude that he did not really intend to desert. It’s in the manual. Page twenty-three.’

  Herbert’s face showed the accusation: why not tell me this beforehand? And Duggie’s silence demonstrated the CO’s own uncomfortable position: he’d done Pemberton’s bidding: he’d passed on to Herbert the subtle pressure for a conviction. Duggie scratched on a blood spot on his cheek, as if to flatten the louse responsible. ‘First, it would have been wrong for me to coach you, though I do so now; second, I thought you already knew; and third – and at least I was right in this one respect – I didn’t expect you to think in a legal way.’ His disappointment surfaced again, only this time he made a grin. ‘I thought you’d disgrace yourself and my regiment.’

  For the first time since he’d joined the 8th (Service) Battalion, Northumberland Light Infantry, Herbert cast a smile upon his past. Angus seemed to laugh, too.

  Chapter Sixteen

  1

  The young man’s ingenuity was admirable. But not as pitiful as his limitations, his desperation and his incompetence. His lack of inner resources was evident on every page.

  Anselm had decided to revisit all the Doyle material because he was, from one perspective, the central figure in the drama. His relation ship with Flanagan was the key to the trial. His tags were the key to Herbert’s message.

  6890 Private Owen Doyle enlisted in 1915 at the age of eighteen. He’d joined a London regiment based in the East End. His Battalion came to France in the spring of 1916, when he was deployed behind the lines in various non-combat maintenance operations. He deserted after two weeks but was caught three days later dressed as a farmer. A Field General Court Martial condemned him to death, the sentence being enthusiastically endorsed at every level of command, until it hit the desk of the C-in-C who finally determined upon a term of imprisonment to be suspended for the duration of the hostilities. Returned to his unit, he then saw action on the Somme – although not for long, because he deserted once more, this time reaching Boulogne with a forged pass. Once again he was caught, convicted, condemned to death and reprieved, a second suspended sentence being imposed with the heavy implication that lenience had run its course. Whatever else, Doyle was a resourceful young man, for upon this his second arrest he’d been found on the docks wearing a stolen naval hat and greatcoat. He’d been very close indeed to stowing away and reaching home. His third desertion had, in one sense, been successful. Warned for the front, he had vanished the night before his unit advanced into action – the 26th August 1917. There was no record of him being caught or reprimanded in any way. The gap in the facts was enormous: somehow Doyle was back with his unit by September, meeting his death near Glencorse Wood on the 15th at the age of twenty.

  It had been a pinched life: the greater part of three years spent scratching behind the skirting boards of France and Belgium. He’d been a forger, a thief and a mannequin in someone else’s uniform. To quote a tart line from one of his commanding officers, he’d been a ‘worthless soldier and a worthless man’.

  A man who was central to the trial of Joseph Flanagan.

  Anselm simply could not imagine what had bound such different men together in a mortally dangerous enterprise – an enterprise that appeared to be senseless: they’d both come back. And that conclusion placed the trial back under scrutiny. If Anselm had one certainty it was that Flanagan had returned to the front expecting to be tried by Field General Court Martial.

  How, then, had he escaped, given the mounting odds against him?

  With that question in mind Anselm sought Martin’s company.

  ‘It’s an odd trial, and it must have been odd at the time,’ began Anselm, sitting down on a chair surrounded by cardboard boxes, books and research papers laid out on the floor like stepping stones.

  Martin had changed his kit but it was still a uniform. A camel jacket. No buttons at the sleeve. A crisp pink shirt. He reached between two piles of books for a bunch of index cards held by a paperclip.

  ‘I’m thinking of those people outside the review process, those not called at the trial, the people who actually spoke to Flanagan on the night of the twenty-sixth. If the trial was strange for them, as it is for me, then maybe they wrote something down … a memoir, some letters—’

  ‘Or a sermon,’ Martin slipped in.

  He wasn’t being rude. He was sending Anselm a warning signal, an oblique reference to Herbert who had been unable to speak of his experience.

  After a scratch to the silvered hair around the temples, Martin removed the paperclip and laid it on a pillar of books. ‘You mean Father Maguire, Captain Chamberlayne, Lieutenant Tindall …?’ His hand rolled out the rest of the names in silence.

  There was no point, Anselm now realised. Kate Seymour’s done the journey. Her last stop was Herbert Moore.

  ‘I’ll start with Chamberlayne,’ said Martin to the first card in the pile. ‘He came back to England in nineteen nineteen and then vanished. Could have thrown himself into the Thames. Could have emigrated. Who knows? Sent his medals to the War Office without a stamp. No address given. His brother was a legal officer at Division. He died in nineteen thirty-seven.’

  He flipped the card on to the table, tapped the rest and resumed the litany. ‘Father Maguire. Applied for a change in Division in October nineteen seventeen. Killed two weeks later while giving the Last Rites in full view of the enemy. Posthumous MC. Should’ve been a VC. University College Dublin has a handful of letters. No mention of Flanagan.’

  Anselm let the words wash over him. He’d ceased to listen attentively. The waves of history, he extemporised silently, how they crashed and fell …

  ‘Tindall was killed in nineteen eighteen … an only son … Lieutenant Colonel Hammond bequeathed three diaries to the Imperial War Museum … no reference to …’

  … and now the sands of time hide our calamity, thought Anselm, completing his invention. It was bad Tennyson. Or worse early Brooke. When war was made glorious by a cadence.

  ‘On the other hand …’ Martin’s voice had risen. He drew out the last word, letting it reach an acceptable peak of friendly reproach.

  ‘Yes?’ apologised Anselm, despondently.

  ‘General Osborne left a vast collection of papers, all of which are retained by the family. His great-great-granddaughter, Sarah, is currently writing his biography.’ Martin stood up. He brushed close to the wall, avoiding a crate of ring-binders. ‘I’m sure she’d like to meet you. I’ll make an appointment.’ At the edge of
his desk he paused, unsure of where to go next. ‘Father, can I ask you a question of real importance … something I’ve wanted to raise since we met?’

  ‘Of course,’ replied Anselm, a little worried.

  ‘Do you like beer?’ Martin shrugged inside his jacket. ‘You know … proper bitter? Roasted peanuts? Crisps? That sort of thing.’

  ‘Lead, kindly light,’ murmured Anselm. ‘Lead thou me on.’

  2

  ‘How many were shot altogether?’ asked Anselm in the back room of The Wheat Sheaf, after he’d asked for the Friendship Plant. The timber floor was stripped and smooth. Paint peeled off the walls around large etched mirrors. It was a last stand against the uniformity of plush seats, new brass fittings and beer by franchise. The only concession was a one-armed bandit. A youth in his late teens stood over it, yanking the arm. He wanted a big win.

  ‘For military offences, three hundred and twenty-one,’ replied Martin. ‘Most of them for desertion.’

  ‘How many were condemned in the first place?’

  The youth pushed in more coins. He drew back the lever and the fruit span.

  ‘Over three thousand. So nine out of ten had their sentence commuted.’ It was a complex subject with no easy summary, his face seemed to add. ‘How the unlucky one got picked we just don’t know. Prejudice. Class. Eugenics. Contemporary fairness. Who knows? Maybe the state of the war. During the Somme, for example, the number of executions rose … same with Passchendaele.’ He sipped his beer. ‘In fact, executions soared during September nineteen seventeen and fell dramatically afterwards.’

  The very month when Flanagan’s case was under consideration, implied Martin with a tightening of the mouth. He was telling Anselm, gently, to give up this search for the missing pieces that would lead, inexorably, to a dead man. Martin was as compassionate as he was efficient.

  Lights flashed and the youth slapped the side of the machine as if it were stupid.

  For an instant, Anselm fell into a reverie. Herbert had refused to view existence as the play of chance. When the fruit had stopped spinning, Herbert had looked beyond the bandit and the disappointment. Was that simply naked faith? Or had it also been informed by an experience. Was this the significance of Joseph Flanagan’s story? Anselm’s mind blurred. He broke the reverie by returning to the central enigma: statistics had been against the Irishman, as well as the timing, the warning on drunkenness, and the hole in the page … and yet he’d escaped. But how? Kate Seymour, of course, knew the answer. Anselm drained his glass and said, ‘I found a yellow ticket with a woman’s name on it.’

  Gently, coaxing now, the youth pulled the lever. He looked like Bede when he sought the Prior’s permission to travel somewhere.

  ‘I can’t discuss other users of the archive,’ Martin declared, with the bogus finality of a man who realises that the matter is far from over.

  ‘And I wouldn’t want you to,’ said Anselm, untruthfully. ‘Look … we both know that Kate Seymour came to Larkwood. You’ve guessed it was a waste of time. You’re wrong. What you don’t appreciate – and neither does she – is that Herbert left a message for a man called Joseph Flanagan.’

  Martin showed mild surprise, but Anselm was quite sure that he’d been stunned.

  ‘Yes,’ pursued Anselm. ‘I didn’t know until she’d gone. Unfortunately she left her contact details with a monk whose mental powers are antithetical to those of the elephant, which is to say he can’t remember where he put them.’ Anselm appealed to Martin with a helpless sigh. ‘I want to fathom the trial of the man who came with her. A man I saw weeping.’

  Martin raised an eyebrow. He’d thought the surprises had ended with the leaving of a message, not the arrival of the beneficiary.

  ‘But at some point I will have to find her … and him.’

  To the sound of a whoop, coins poured from the mouth of the bandit. The player had beaten the odds.

  Martin raised his glass. ‘I’ll get the admin people to call up her details.’

  They watched the youth pocket his winnings. He was a bit embarrassed now that all the noise was over. And Anselm felt remotely sad. Other gamblers had once been shot when they lost.

  3

  A monk needs his monastery, regardless of the tensions and occasional anguish of close living. And Anselm had been away long enough to make him restless for the nave, the bluebell path, the track by Our Lady’s lake, his hives – all the secret places that gave him sustenance. On the train back home, rattling away from cafés, tabloid colour, tinned food and the national archives, Anselm began to doze. In a dream he saw Herbert in a cold room, though Anselm did not recognise him. He heard him say ‘Death’ while guns boomed in the distance. There were others present, all of them standing solemnly, none of them moving, each with a bloodless face. The only person Anselm knew was Flanagan … he’d known him all his life. His skin and clothes were vibrant with colour and life. Upon seeing him, a word chafed against Anselm’s consciousness and he woke.

  Nerves.

  The word had chafed the man with the red crayon. It occurred twice in the inadmissible evidence of Lieutenant Alan Caldwell. Flanagan had suffered an attack of nerves in April, when the unit was away from the firing line, and later in June. Anselm rummaged in his bag for the photocopied excerpts taken from the War Diary of the 8th (Service) Battalion, Northumberland Light Infantry.

  The page was organised into five columns: place, date, hour, summary of events and remarks. Anselm gleaned that Flanagan’s unit had been camped by ‘Dead Pig Farm’. For the month of April 1917 the ‘event’ column noted a route march between two villages, a football practice, company ‘training and preparations for move to forward area’, divine service, a visit from the Corps Commander, the first round match for the Lambton Cup … and then, at the bottom of the page: ‘Total number of dead soldiers (English and German) buried by members of B Company was 2314’.

  Anselm checked the family tree prepared by Martin. Flanagan was in B Company. The ‘event’ took four days … which meant – he did some maths in the margin – five hundred and seventy-eight burials per day; seventy-two per hour in an eight-hour shift.

  Anselm next checked the month of June. The battalion was evidently in the firing line because there were lists of casualties and the factual entries were brief. One, however, caught his eye: ‘Mines detonated at Messines. Extraordinary sight. German front line completely vanished.’

  Anselm tired suddenly. He packed away his papers and leaned his head against the window, letting the ra-ta-ta-ta, ra-ta-ta-ta soothe him. Without knowing why, he felt he’d stumbled upon something important. The question that framed itself was not, however, of an investigative character. It was anthropological: what would it do to a man to handle so much death in spring?

  Part Three

  Chapter Seventeen

  The Family Silver

  1

  After the trial Seosamh Ó Flannagáin (as Joseph understood himself) was taken back to the cellar. ‘Go hifreann leat,’ he muttered as the bolt went home – ‘To hell with you’. Joseph thought in Gaelic, he dreamed in Gaelic, his world was Gaelic; but English was his tongue, now, making him a man distant from himself and from the land for which he hungered; a land whose worth he hadn’t grasped until he’d left it far, far behind.

  He’d been condemned, he knew it. If you were convicted, they asked about your character and if they didn’t call you back after the recess … well … it was death, that quietest of words. In Gaelic: bás. That was the last you knew of the affair, until one fine day on parade you were told whether the Big Fella had ‘commuted’ your sentence to ‘field punishment’ or ‘penal servitude’. Those strange expressions had never reached the tiny school on Inisdúr. There was no music to them.

  When all the voices up top had died away the sentry rattled the lock and Corporal Mackie stuck his head around the door. ‘C’mon, out, you Irish …’ He couldn’t find the word, so he threw Flanagan his cap (removed before the trial) and, feeling very
silly, they marched from the school to the battalion’s billet a mile or so down the road. They passed the carpenter clouting wood with a mallet and the abbey where Father Maguire said his prayers.

  ‘Your only chance is drink,’ the chaplain had said in Gaelic, with an oath that would have shocked Flanagan’s mother. ‘If anything goes wrong, get drunk.’

  And things had gone wrong, badly so. That’s why he’d come back with three bottles of wine. Lisette had brought them up from the cellar. But one sniff had turned him against the chaplain’s counsel: instead, he’d poured the stuff all over, head to foot, and what an awful stink it had raised. The bite in the air had reminded him of the French fishermen who, from time to time, had called into the small harbour back home, huge lads from Brittany who wouldn’t touch a drop of porter. A strange lot they were. They played football barefoot with a cabbage.

  ‘If you get caught, you’ll be tried,’ Father Maguire had said, leaning close in the trench, the smell of tobacco strong on his breath, ‘and if you’re tried then it’s death, unless you can give mercy a decent yoke. So get drunk, son.’

  His Gaelic was like an islander’s, though he was a mainland clod, from Dingle. He’d learned the tongue on An Blascaod Mór, among the weavers, before he’d heard the Voice.

  The chaplain had stalled to ponder his own advice, turning his face to the rain. ‘The thing is, you’re Irish.’ He’d muttered that to himself in English, as though it was a problem all of its own, as though it was a dark water that lapped against Flanagan’s chances.

  Corporal Mackie didn’t speak. They marched in silence past hundreds of faces, pale among the steaming tents. Occasionally men stared, some with pity, others with disgust. The sounds of drill – hollering and the thud of feet – came from a trampled field beside a barricade of hop frames. Mackie stomped right, then left, then right again, his arms swinging stiff like bits of driftwood, old spars off the beach. He stopped at a low farmhouse with a courtyard and a few crazed chickens. As if a bell had been rung Lieutenant Colonel Hammond appeared from a doorway. He led Flanagan away from Mackie towards the corner of the courtyard, where a dog lay panting.