A Whispered Name

by William Brodrick

  Anselm closed his eyes, begging for words, but nothing came. The soldier cried and cried, and Anselm gazed out on to the birches, the yew and the oaks. The lawns were neat and bordered by flowerbeds covered with mulch and bark. A gardener leaned on a rake. And this poor man beside me shot Joseph Flanagan.

  Mr Shaw dropped his hand and dried his face on a pressed handkerchief.

  His wife of sixty-three years had passed away and he’d never told her of that early morning on the 15th September. He had three sons and two daughters. All of them were married, and they all had children. They’d all done projects at school. They’d all taken his medals into the classroom. He’d even lent one teacher his bayonet. The British Legion had been his friend and family. And to none of these – not one – had he spoken of that unforgettable day, his sharpest and most enduring memory of the war.

  ‘You know, Father, I’ve felt like some kind of murderer all my life. There’s no escaping the killing. You’re left with what you’ve done. But for a very long time I was angry with the Army, for what they did. They picked us, you know. They were punishing us as well.’

  ‘In what way?’

  Mr Shaw asked for some more tea, though it was cold. He ate a biscuit, the crumbs falling on his regimental tie. The gardener’s rake scraped gently on the grass.

  ‘There’s ten men to a section, see? And in my section was a lad my age who was always in trouble with the Sergeant, the Lieutenant, the Colonel, everyone. He’d twice deserted. On the third occasion, he wasn’t found. It was the best thing that happened to the unit. He should never have been in the army – it was obvious to us lot, but they wouldn’t let him go. Said he was fifteen but no one believed him. But when he finally got away, who did they ask to shoot a deserter, a couple of weeks later? Us lot, The Lambeth Rifles. Most of the firing party was taken from this lad’s section, and there were a thousand men to choose from. That order must have come from on high because our CO was very upset about it. They were sending us a message, even though most of our company lay dead on Pilckem Ridge.’ He sipped his tea, leaning forward over the saucer. ‘Owen Doyle he was called.’

  I’ve held his tags in my hands, thought Anselm. Herbert had worn them … Herbert, who’d helped put Flanagan on that chair …

  ‘… the fact is, you see, he was one of our own,’ continued Mr Shaw. ‘And even though he was a deserter, we wouldn’t have wanted him tried and shot. But do you know what happened? The lad was killed in a bombardment. You escape a firing squad and then something hits you out of the sky. That’s war for you, Father.’

  Fresh emotion disfigured the old man’s face: agony, indignation, confusion, compassion; they all belonged to a youth from 1917 but were raw once more, decades later in a nursing home. Anselm had to say something. He had to reach out to that youth who’d never forgiven himself.

  ‘Mr Shaw, I can be very rude if necessary,’ said Anselm.

  The old man looked at Anselm, head lifted back to get his focus right.

  ‘I have listened to all kinds of misconduct, but until today I’ve never met anyone who accused themselves so wrongly.’

  The old soldier squeezed Anselm’s wrist with affection and pity, saying, ‘You were right, Father, you don’t know what war is like. Thank God, that’s what I say. It brutalises a man. And though the peace comes, you remain brutalised. You bury it from shame, but it’s always there. And the remorse is all you have to show that you’re still a human being.’

  It was not quite a reproof. But Mr Shaw had showed him the true weight of a veteran’s burden. It wasn’t all about minnies and trench foot and bloated rats. The men who’d marched every November to the cenotaph had carried stories that didn’t quite fall into step. There’s a romance to hardship and patriotic suffering, but the idea of a concealed self-disgust that won’t abate … well, it ruins the ending. It takes away the jubilation of winning; it gives sorrow a seat beside remembrance. It darkens a life.

  ‘Let there be shame, and remorse, then,’ replied Anselm, feeling an enormous privilege for having met this man. ‘But let there be peace of heart, also.’

  As if it were a deal, the old soldier shook Anselm’s hand.

  The gardener had put away his rake, and the light had begun to fade.

  Mr Shaw leaned back, hands folded on his chest in a habitual gesture of contentment. He talked fondly about his wife, Nora, who’d been a nurse at a Casualty Clearing Station. They’d fallen in love as he recovered, he said. She’d changed his dressings. Brought him this and that. He’d given her a right old run around. When he was much better she pushed him here and she pushed him there. It was only as the conversation progressed that Anselm realised Mr Shaw had no legs. A coal-box had hit him and his pals in the summer of 1918. Above-knee amputations had been carried out in the field. He should have died but he didn’t, thanks to the doctors. And Nora, who told him he was still a man. Anselm smiled at photographs of his children, and their children, and their children. In many of them Mr Shaw was seated, his heavy medals pulling his dark suit out of shape.

  The nurse who had made the tea led Anselm to the front door, singing the praises of their oldest resident. He was a sprightly soul, wasn’t he? Full of fun. Cheered up the place when it rained.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Who Did We Bury?

  1

  Herbert’s arms were wrapped around a tree, his face pressed against the ivy. He watched the firing party about turn and head back down the track, followed by Tindall, his face ashen. Four men emerged from the trees on the far side of the clearing. Two of them were carrying a stretcher, the other two had spades. Huddled around the chair, they loosed the knots at the feet and hands and the body slumped on to Father Maguire, who laid it gently on the straw. One of the soldiers cut off the gas mask and threw it aside. The chaplain then knelt with a purple stole around his neck, his thumb turning in a silver pot of ointment. Slowly he marked Flanagan’s forehead while the OC Firing Party stared down at his boots.

  Herbert stepped into the clearing and approached the group around the body.

  ‘I’ll do the formalities,’ he said quietly.

  The officer didn’t raise his head. Under his breath he just said, ‘Five forty-six a.m.’ With a turn of the heel he marched away from the splattered chair and the heap on the wet straw. Father Maguire rose at once, looked at the body for a long moment, and then went after the firing party. Even in this place of utter abandonment, thought Herbert, awed, the chaplain remains anxious for the living.

  Under the gaze of the burial party, Herbert knelt down, his hands open on his thighs. Blurring his eyes, he fixed his attention slightly to one side, using peripheral vision to guide his hands. Mechanically, he unhooked the envelope flap from the chest pocket. Faltering and feeling dizzy, he reached towards the neck and felt for the identity discs. He pulled the cord free from the shirt and raised his gaze, staring savagely at the rich green of the woods. After a few gentle tugs – excruciating because Herbert felt the weight of Flanagan’s head – the tags came free. In a trouser pocket he found three small shells.

  Stumbling backwards, he let the burial party get to work. Two of them put the body on the stretcher and moved it a few yards away while the others piled up the straw with their feet. The NCO in charge, a Corporal, struck a match and tossed it on the pile. The flames rose quickly, black smoke rising high out of the clearing. It woke Herbert to the moment: the birds were singing. He had no recollection of them having stopped or having started again. Lowering his gaze, he fell into an anaesthetic trance: the chair kept its shape while the fire raged. It was as though it refused to burn, or could not be burnt. Flames licked up the legs and ran along the back struts. The wood blackened and the varnish boiled. But the chair kept its shape. Of a sudden, the Corporal brought a spade crashing down on to its spine. The blaze made a gust of success and Herbert covered his face.

  Herbert hadn’t noticed that the other three soldiers were marking out a plot on the ground. They were planning to dig a
hole right there in the middle of the clearing, at the site of execution.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  The three Privates looked at each other uncertainly. ‘We’re going to bury him, Sir.’

  ‘Not here,’ replied Herbert hotly. ‘There’s a cemetery down the road, and a church. Dear God, man, where’s your humanity?’

  The Corporal came over, opening a sheet of paper. ‘Sorry, Sir, orders is orders.’ He started to read. ‘“Retrieve mask. Burn straw and chair. Grave to be four yards distant. Depth—’

  ‘To hell with your orders,’ snapped Herbert, snatching the paper and tossing it on to the fire. ‘Tell whoever wrote this that I wouldn’t allow it.’

  ‘But he’s a Major, Sir.’

  ‘I don’t care if he’s the angel Gabriel.’

  ‘Where do we put him then, Sir?’ asked the Corporal. He was unshaven. Stubble covered his face up to his eyes. His breath stank of rum. The other three stared with their mouths open, not from surprise but as if they were dumb beasts. These weren’t the funny grave diggers who turned up in school plays. They were haunted men.

  Herbert looked around. The gas mask glared at him from the trampled grass. This place is contaminated, thought Herbert. It has been fouled. ‘In the trees,’ said Herbert sharply.

  ‘I beg your pardon, Sir?’

  ‘Among the trees.’

  ‘But trees have roots.’

  ‘Yes, they do, Corporal. Cut through them. And go deep … very deep into the land. Is that clear?’

  ‘Well, yes, Sir.’

  The Corporal drew his men away for a smoke while Herbert went back into the woods. He found a place between three different trees that vied for the light. There he sat on the ground and waited for Father Maguire. Leaning back, eyes closed, he noticed that the bells of the abbey were ringing. A single toll that sounded over the wheat fields.

  2

  Chamberlayne may have been sober by late morning but the consequent hangover was very much in evidence. When Herbert told him Brigade hadn’t provided a cross, despite their manufacture in the thousands on site, nor consecrated ground, he reached for the phone intent upon another conversation with Ashcroft at Brigade, and a swipe at Murray who would probably answer the call. Herbert, however, disconnected the line with a tap of his fingers on the stand. ‘It’s better this way,’ he said. ‘Don’t ask me why, but Flanagan would prefer the anonymity of a forest.’

  Herbert drew up a chair to the corner of Chamberlayne’s desk and borrowed his ink pen. Without hesitating he began to endorse the Army Form A3. The anaesthesia induced through watching a chair among flames was still effective. Herbert could feel nothing. He wrote a legal-sounding phrase to the effect that the sentence had been carried out at 5.46 a.m., adding, ‘without a snag’. The burial party had cursed him quietly as they’d hacked at the thick roots and the tight soil.

  As Herbert returned the pen to its tray, Tindall kicked open the door. He stamped across the room clutching a piece of paper.

  ‘No one told me I had to provide the target.’ His face was contorted with accusation.

  Chamberlayne glared back at the RMO, his fists clenched and white.

  ‘Here’s the bloody certificate.’ Tindall threw it on to the desk. The final sentence read: ‘Death was not instantaneous.’ The ‘not’ underlined three times.

  Chamberlayne picked up the chit as though it were a stray sock. ‘Do you have to be so precise, doctor?’

  ‘It’s what happened.’

  Chamberlayne crumpled the certificate into a ball and threw it into a bin at his feet. ‘Try again, I suggest.’

  ‘No, I bloody well won’t.’

  The door smashed shut and Chamberlayne looked wearily at Herbert. Together they listened to Tindall’s angry retreat. Someone must have stopped him because he suddenly yelled out, ‘You’re normal, man. Get back to your Section. You’re just bloody NORMAL. Like me. So get used to it.’

  Chamberlayne held out a languid hand and said, ‘Can I have the tags, please? This wretched business isn’t quite over yet.’

  Herbert drew them out, catching sight of the name as they swung towards Chamberlayne. ‘Hang on a moment.’ He drew them back and stared at the stamp on the disc: 6890 Pte Owen Doyle. ‘What’s Flanagan doing with these?’ he whispered.

  It was obvious really, thought Herbert, sinking inside himself: they’d swapped identities. Doyle was still on the run. If the Military Police stopped him, he’d say he was Flanagan: he had the tags to prove it. Herbert gazed ahead, feeling a shudder of sadness and grief. No one was looking for Flanagan any more. He’d returned to almost certain death, banking on a drinking defence, never really believing it would help him. He’d worn Doyle’s discs because he’d taken Doyle’s place.

  Chamberlayne reached over and read the name. ‘He’s the one who should have been shot.’ He sighed as if an opportunity had been lost. ‘Wishful thinking. It’s the only way to survive, that’s what I say.’ He gulped some water. ‘I’ll need them anyway.’

  ‘No,’ replied Herbert firmly. ‘I want them.’

  ‘So do I. They go to the grave people.’

  The exchange with Tindall had sharpened Chamberlayne’s temper and he, too, was distressed. He was seeking another fight.

  ‘But they’re not Flanagan’s,’ said Herbert, his limbs taut, his neck lowering in an animal posture of readiness.

  Chamberlayne’s eyes roamed around, seeking a weaker target. He picked up the Form A3 and read out Herbert’s endorsement on the execution. He looked further up the page, back two weeks to Glanville’s entry of ‘DEATH’. Purposefully – and to Herbert’s complete amazement – he crumpled the paper into a tight ball and threw it in the bin along with Tindall’s death certificate. ‘A cat among the pigeons, as my father used to say.’

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘More wishful thinking, old son,’ replied Chamberlayne, reaching for the glass of water, his eyelids dark and swollen. ‘When this file gets to the Judge Advocate General’s office, all they’ll see is what should have happened: the recommendation of General Osborne: a reprieve: some bloody mercy among the havoc of retribution. And on that note, I think I’ll have another drink. Hair of the dog and all that. Care to join me?’

  Chamberlayne drained his glass and then poured them each a large tot of rum. Then, like an afterthought, he added, ‘I’ve a confession to make, Herbert.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’ve got a cushy job at Division. It’s pure nepotism and it’s shameful. My brother pulled a string.’ He drank deeply. ‘I can’t take much more of this war. We shoot people for that, you know.’

  3

  Herbert left Chamberlayne to his paperwork. Walking to his billet, he put Doyle’s tags around his neck, conscious that they would confuse matters if he was found dead in the weeks to come. But that was not a consideration that remotely troubled him. He’d kept the letter, too, being absolutely certain that Harold Shaw, the poor kid who’d handed it over, would not be anxious to get it back. The three shells were like boulders in his pocket.

  There is no grieving in the army. Let loose, it is a species of sentimentality that weakens the moral fibre of a unit. In an officer it would further demonstrate a want of good upbringing. One gets on with one’s duty. So the morning was spent rehearsing for the coming battle, and the afternoon was devoted to the usual round of drill, bayonet practice, musketry and marching. Only the football practice was cancelled. Throughout, the sky carried unimaginable quantities of pots and pans, as Joyce called the barrage. The men were used to it now.

  When evening came, Herbert withdrew once more from the society of his brother officers, each of whom was eager to know what had happened in the clearing at dawn. Had the poor blighter been scared? Did he have to be carried? What about the firing party? These questions he’d deflected, hiding the violence of his emotions, for these were the men with whom he would shortly fight and probably die. One might as well fall as friends. So Herbert sat alone in t
he gather ing gloom of his billet, among the spikes and claws of farm machinery whose function he could not understand. A single window looked on to the road that led to Oostbeke. And, black against the loaded sky, Herbert saw the lumbering figure of Father Maguire. In one hand the priest held a bottle.

  The chaplain sat at the makeshift table. It was made of planks laid across two petrol canisters.

  ‘Well,’ snapped the priest, resolved. ‘Will you help me break my vow?’

  He pointed to a stool on the other side, as if it was time for men to be men.

  Herbert took his place while reading the label: Old Orkney. Chamberlayne’s preferred tipple, though the night’s squalid duty had driven him to rum.

  ‘No thanks, Father,’ replied Herbert, ‘I’ve got enough on my conscience.’

  The priest looked very disappointed. ‘You keep it, then.’ The stern reserve had weakened; even the short, wiry hair seemed soft. ‘Joseph asked me to give you this.’ He placed an envelope on the planks.

  ‘Who’s Lisette,’ asked Herbert, recoiling inside himself.

  ‘A widow in Étaples. She’s hiding Owen Doyle as we speak.’

  Herbert reached for the Old Orkney and pulled out the cork. He poured a large measure into a tin mug and then put the bottle out of reach on the floor. ‘I shouldn’t really know that.’

  ‘No,’ replied the priest, ‘any more than you should know that I marked the boy injured before they went to Étaples.’

  ‘Why did you do that, Father?’ Herbert was not reproving; he was simply weary, utterly worn out by the sight of good people being forced to do what was wrong for another kind of right.