A Whispered Name

by William Brodrick

  Whatever the nature of that meeting, at 3.49 a.m. Doyle was registered as injured at the NLI Aid Post – the place Flanagan had left an hour and half earlier with two field dressings. ‘One of the important questions is what was said at this accidental meeting. I’ll return to that in a moment, but now, I think, we should hear something about the person Flanagan met: Owen Doyle, or, to be precise, John Lindsay. He was born in nineteen hundred and one. Would you please turn to page thirty-two in the bundle.’

  Everyone did.

  ‘These are entries taken from a Punishment Book.’

  The key date was August 1908, Anselm said, when Owen Doyle died from TB. Before then Lindsay’s offending was broadly limited to comportment and cleanliness; afterwards he graduated to theft and all manner of insolence. ‘Here, aged seven onwards, we no longer have a scamp but a very angry boy. We next hear about him in the courts.’ And with that cue, Anselm left the narrative in Martin’s hands.

  The Military Specialist began a quick preamble, explaining that upon Anselm’s call with the name of Lindsay, he’d checked the borstal records and found a mine of information. Much of it had been faxed through and formed part of the bundle. His refined enunciation gave strong contrast to the Prior’s Glaswegian brogue.

  ‘John Lindsay’s criminal record lacks variety and imagination,’ said Martin, as though he was assessing a cadet for promotion, ‘but the boy can’t be faulted for application or perseverance. Almost without exception it is shopbreaking and theft. He did the same butcher’s four times, on the last occasion being apprehended by the proprietor who’d been waiting with a meat cleaver. Lindsay was, I suspect, incompetent. He probably stole from himself and smiled with half his face for having got away with it.’

  Martin took out a reproduced photograph from a folder and held it up. ‘This was taken in nineteen fifteen after he received a three-year custodial sentence from a court in Bolton.’

  It was, Anselm agreed, a face that could try to deceive itself: one eyebrow rose while the other was level; he was old while still a youth. The black hair was smooth, the forehead marked and rough.

  ‘Lindsay, however, did not serve that period of detention,’ continued Martin. ‘He escaped from the court and was never seen again. Interestingly, the borstal authorities guessed correctly. The file contains a note to the effect that Lindsay, like so many others, had probably enlisted under a false name. We now know that he joined the army in London at the end of that year, on December twenty-ninth, giving his age as eighteen.’

  ‘When he was, in fact, fourteen,’ added Sarah. She’d carried out the calculation as soon as Anselm revealed Lindsay’s date of birth. Like a tutor marking an essay, she’d written the number in a margin and circled it twice.

  ‘Which itself is interesting,’ began David, addressing the Prior. ‘Conscription came into force in January nineteen sixteen. Underage enlistment would have been very difficult after that date, because a birth certificate was required and the National Register was used by the authorities to summon the flower of England.’ Turning to Anselm, he said, ‘This Lindsay dashed for cover and made it just in time. But from then on, he was in serious trouble. As far as the army was concerned his age was that given on attestation.’

  A general discussion broke out. But Sarah did not contribute. Sitting beside Anselm, she’d discreetly opened the Manual of Military Law. The cover was only half raised so Anselm couldn’t see what had caught her interest.

  Surely Lindsay could have revealed his true age, argued the Prior. He’d need someone to vouch for him back home, replied Martin. No point, added David. The War Office wrote various orders to weed out the young, but there were tens of thousands of boy soldiers. It was an open secret. Martin agreed, tentatively observing that they grew easily into the job. According to the records they were good at it, too. Top class snipers. Adapted easily to trench conditions …

  … and all the while Sarah stared at something in the Manual. She let the cover fall and then looked at the ceiling, pursuing her thoughts.

  ‘… I don’t justify it,’ Martin stressed to David, very calmly, ‘but one has to look at the time from its time and against the demands of the time. The point is, Lindsay never revealed his true age at either court martial. You can’t blame the army if they didn’t know.’

  The Prior called the meeting to order with a gentle patting of the table. He’d felt the growing heat. He knew that frayed tempers simply frayed judgement, and friendships. ‘How old was John Lindsay, then, at the time he met Joseph Flanagan in no-man’s-land?’

  ‘Sixteen,’ replied Martin.

  ‘And he would have been shot, if caught?’

  ‘Without much doubt,’ said Martin after a short delay.

  The Prior joined his fingertips, elbows on the table, a characteristic gesture somewhere between prayer and thinking.

  ‘This, then, is the boy that Joseph Flanagan took to Étaples. I believe that young Lindsay had told Flanagan his age, and that he’d twice been condemned, seeking no help but just a measure of understanding. Only, of course, he didn’t know what sort of man was listening to him.’ He knotted his fingers and laid his chin on his thumbs. ‘Anselm … what do you think he was like?’

  Uncertainly, because it is always difficult to talk of inner journeys, even ones that are not your own, Anselm sketched out Flanagan’s possible route: a gradual … weakening, or maybe an awakening … that had begun with the burial of the dead in the spring and ended with the chance meeting with Lindsay. ‘In June he goes back into the line and immediately suffers a kind of relapse. To his superiors it’s “nerves” again but I wonder if Flanagan simply saw things differently. Faced with what was once familiar, he shivers – for it is no longer the same thing in his eyes. But, oddly, he has not, in fact, lost his courage: remember, having got to Étaples, he came back to the battle from which he’d apparently run away. The only explanation, then, is that Flanagan chose to save Lindsay, and returned to face the probable consequences … the very consequences that would have finished off Lindsay once and for all.’

  No one spoke.

  ‘The June reference is interesting,’ volunteered David, not wishing to break the hush. He leafed through the bundle and then, for a moment, he read quietly. ‘Yes, here we are. Page twenty-six. This is Flanagan’s Battalion War Diary. He was at Messines. The greatest man-made explosion in history took place at ten past three in the morning on the seventh of June.’

  Tunnellers, he explained, had placed twenty-odd mines beneath the German positions, in all about a million tons of high explosive Ammonal. When they were simultaneously detonated Elgar heard the explosion in his Sussex garden. ‘It must have been apocalyptic.’

  Anselm vaguely remembered some phrases from Flanagan’s defence at his trial. He opened his own bundle and, without introduction, read out the passage noted by Major Glanville, the court’s president, who would presently meet his own death. ‘“It was terrible dark, raining like it did back home, when a load comes off the sea, after weeks of the gathering. The sky and the waves would join up, so, and then for days it would pour, or rather everything returned to water. The land was part of the air.”’

  The land was part of the air. Anselm repeated the phrase to himself several times, as he had done since that first, surprised reading at the national archives. The April burials had turned out to be a tilling of the inner soil. But at Messines, Flanagan had seen something very different: he had seen the innocence of his infancy rise into the air; and when it came down again, he was an utterly changed man; and a man resolved.

  ‘I think there is greatness here,’ said the Prior, letting his smoulder ing gaze move around the room. ‘Joseph Flanagan saved a boy’s life and when he faced a trial for his own, he said nothing.’

  David was thinking hard, one hand against his balding head. With a glance at his daughter he said, ‘I think there’s an additional perspective, and it must have been apparent to Flanagan at the time, if not anyone else.’ He spoke deliberat
ely, faintly nodding at each person around the table. ‘This is the story of an Irishman who saved an English boy from the British Army.’

  The only sound in the parlour came from the woods close to the monastery. Anselm looked into the blue and green shadows, not quite hearing the singing of the birds. ‘And yet,’ he said, ‘Doyle was to die while Flanagan survived.’

  In a gathering-in voice, a final voice, a strong voice that submitted itself to those who listened, the Prior said, ‘Has anything been left unsaid? Have we misunderstood any matter of importance?’

  Silence and a shaking of heads united everyone present.

  ‘Does anyone have an idea of the step we might take next?’ The Prior’s eyes were sharp with hope.

  Doubt passed remorselessly from Martin to David. They lifted empty hands and apologised, for the Prior had a way of asking questions that made you want to have an answer.

  ‘I have a suggestion,’ said Sarah.

  She had been a restrained presence throughout the entire meeting. She’d read the bundle closely enough, but with a subtle dissatisfaction, as if something else ought to be there. And she’d let the spat on boy soldiers run between Martin and her father without contributing a single remark. It was a grave subject, and one that ought to have attracted her attention. Anselm’s conclusion was that her mind had raced ahead to what might be done, and, having seen nothing, she’d become impatient to leave. He’d been quite wrong.

  ‘Why not ask this fellow?’

  She opened the Manual of Military Law and took out the letter that had been found in Herbert’s breast pocket.

  ‘Harold Shaw of The Lambeth Rifles.’

  Sarah passed the envelope to the Prior.

  ‘The address gives the man’s unit,’ she explained. ‘Harold Shaw was in the same crowd as John Lindsay. But this letter ended up in the possession of Herbert Moore, of the eighth Service Battalion NLI. I’d find out why, if I were you.’

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Dawn Breaks

  When Herbert tethered his horse to the railings of the school at Oostbeke, Flanagan’s three-man escort had already arrived. They stood, head-bowed, with the sentry. Burning cigarettes danced like fireflies round their mouths. One of them scuffed a boot back and forth upon the ground. Behind them the building loomed large and black, darker because the sky carried the faint allure of morning. Some stars remained, their presence weak like lanterns on the bows of parting ships.

  Herbert spoke loudly by the door as the sentry fumbled for his keys. He did not want to alarm Flanagan, though he must have heard the escort arrive, the strike of matches and their low conversation. The door closed and Herbert looked towards the bed, wondering what to say.

  Flanagan and Father Maguire were lying side by side on the narrow bed, hand in hand, the priest’s bulk hanging over the edge, one arm touching the floor as if he were dead. They were reciting something in Gaelic, their voices low and measured, a soft pulse sounding with the strange words. Herbert was quite sure that it was the Lord’s Prayer. He fell to his knees and searched for the phrases he’d uttered as a child in Keswick when they hadn’t especially mattered. Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Dear God, what words, what a longing. That something good and pure might prevail here, in this damp cellar; that there was another kingdom beyond no-man’s-land, beyond the shattered stumps and the wet clay. The two men said ‘Amen’. Neither of them turned to face Herbert. They lay in silence, a silence so charged that it almost sent Herbert reeling through the door behind him.

  What was he to say? He’d ridden through the night rehearsing a conversation in another kind of cellar, a General’s vault.

  ‘Let me speak as a soldier,’ said the man who wouldn’t taste his whisky; whose decisions would be tempered. ‘I’ve sent many boys home, when their age has been proved; but this boy – if boy he was – has chosen to remain a man to the army, and he abandoned his regiment. Don’t you see, what Flanagan has done is another capital offence? I could never have recommended mercy if I had known what you now tell me.’

  Herbert looked at his empty glass, longing for it to be refilled.

  ‘Now, let me speak as a man,’ said the soldier. ‘On the day Flanagan lost his nerve, if that’s what happened, I sent a thousand men to their deaths for an objective they cannot possibly visualise with confidence. They went obediently and on trust. In six days from now, upon my orders, those who survived – and many more – will support the attack on the Menin Road. The casualty figures should be here by early evening. You ask me to stop due military procedure to save a man who ought to have been alongside those others who placed their trust in me? I can’t do that – in their name. A sacrifice claims them both.’ He swished the whisky and drank some while it span. ‘It’s not August nineteen fourteen any more, Herbert. Or September. It’s a different war, for you and for me.’

  ‘Yes, Sir.’

  Ah, that September. That was the month when Herbert had failed. Constance and Ernest had berated Maude, who couldn’t tie his laces; and they’d concealed their disappointment; but they’d also found Whitelands in Northumberland. The Keswick gentry had, by and large, been of the Maude frame of mind and they hadn’t kept it to themselves.

  The General walked Herbert out of his office and down the great staircase. They both slowed at the gate to the lion’s den. Lightly, he said, ‘Were you at Sandhurst with my son, Bernard?’

  ‘No, Sir.’

  ‘I’d have sworn you were the same vintage.’

  ‘No, Sir.’

  ‘You know …’ The General’s face coloured with emotion, but his features remained in place. ‘Bernard won’t be coming home either.’

  Footsteps in the Oostbeke school playground sounded behind the cellar door. Boots struck the steps. The lock turned. Scrambling to his feet, Herbert put both hands against the door, as if to stop its swing. Weak and powerless, he moved aside at the first sensation of pressure. He turned to face the man he’d condemned. Flanagan was on his knees with the hands of the priest upon his head. The prisoner rose, holding his trousers, and he spoke calmly in Gaelic. While Herbert couldn’t understand a word, the sound was majestic. A thump struck his heart with longing: to understand so very foreign a man … his way of talking, his way of seeing the world: the rain gathering off the sea; the veins in the clay. He moaned as the NCO said, ‘Come on, now, lad.’

  As Flanagan came level with Herbert he said, ‘Goodbye, Sir.’

  Herbert nodded.

  ‘I never did quite work out the rules of football, did I, Sir?’

  ‘No, Private, you didn’t.’

  ‘Sir –’ Flanagan came up short and the NCO’s hand appeared on his shoulder forcing him forward – ‘This was my choice, Sir; there’s meaning to it, Sir … for me …’

  Herbert stared, as though for the first time, into Flanagan’s face. His eyes were a sharp blue, his skin pale with faint freckles of bleached orange congregating on the nose; the forehead clear, as if a careless hand had just pushed back the hair. He did not blink; there was no fear behind the iris, no storm upon the distant sea. Herbert dropped his gaze.

  ‘I’m sorry, Sir,’ said the NCO. Herbert saw the two stripes on the sleeve, but couldn’t look any higher. ‘Can’t linger, Sir, you appreciate that, Sir. Can’t have a hitch, can we now.’ He shadowed Flanagan up the steps and Herbert followed. ‘Whoaaa, steady you go, lad.’

  The sky was clean of all other lights save the rinse of morning. Another of those unpredictable pauses in the bombardment had taken place. And instead a strange rush of sound came from the woods over a mile away … birds were singing. The firing party organised by Major Ashcroft at Brigade would be standing nearby, thought Herbert, his eyes smarting; they’d be gathered somewhere out of view to the road and the path that led to the post and the chair. Tindall, who should have been a vet, was among them. They were all smoking in silence, listening to this din rising from the trees.

  The escort formed up: Flanagan flanked by two guards; ah
ead the Corporal; behind Father Maguire. Boots rang out on the flags and the walk began. Unthinking, Herbert tracked them: across the yard, to the gate, on to the road, and then a right turn, on towards the low shoulder of trees. The road was perfectly straight, heading away from the camp. Against the low skyline Herbert saw the rifles at the shoulders, the barrels black against the early morning light. Overcome with unhappiness, remorse and protest, Herbert’s eyes blurred. In the fields on either side, larks had joined the song. He tore at his battle dress, wanting to get at his chest, to bring out the pain. All he could do was listen to this fresh sound, so much worse than shellfire, and follow the steady march towards the break of day.

  And between the guards shuffled Flanagan, one arm swinging free, the other raised as he clutched his trousers.

  Chapter Forty

  The Walk to the Slip

  Flanagan stared ahead at the low line of trees. Larks were singing at his side, and ahead in the woods. Far off the guns thundered beyond Ypres. A sliver of bright light beckoned above the wheat field. It was like the blade of morning, seen on the sea from Inisdúr. Flanagan walked down to the slip once more, summoning the faces of his island people. The blue woven cloth on the men; the brown shawls on the women. Róisín was standing at the window, fiery and proud of her boy’s rebellion; Muiris was alone, facing the fields of lush barley. He wouldn’t let his eyes see a mast or sail on the hooker. Brendan was hiding somewhere, crying.