Field Service

by Robert Edric

  Entering the dim and cavernous space, Reid sensed immediately that something was wrong. The men, rather than wandering among the coffins and boxes and calling to each other of the regiments and units they recognized, were all still gathered together at one end of the building.

  Several of them were shouting at each other. Jackets and caps lay on the ground and over the cases where they had been thrown.

  Reid called for Drake, his sergeant, and was relieved to hear the man’s immediate reply. Everyone turned to look in Reid’s direction, and most fell silent at seeing him. He went to them, again calling for Drake.

  Drake pushed roughly through the small crowd and presented himself to Reid. Neither man saluted.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Reid said.

  ‘The usual,’ Drake said. He fastened the buttons on his tunic as he spoke. ‘Nothing another few minutes wouldn’t have seen sorted out.’

  ‘And by “the usual” you mean …?’

  ‘I mean some smart alec who insists he should be back at home and sipping tea from a cup and saucer rather than still being stuck out here humping corpses and digging graves all day.’

  Reid considered his response to this common complaint. Drake might have recently signed on for another seven years, but most of the men now allocated to the Commission were peacetime enlisters, none of whom had seen Active Service. And it was always these men – the men who, as Reid saw it, had the least connection and commitment to the work at hand – who complained the loudest.

  ‘No one is here who has not been rightfully sent here,’ he said, shouting, and hearing the distorted echo of his words in the roof high above him. Narrow shafts of sunlight fell to the bare ground through the holes where lost tiles had not been replaced.

  Beside Reid, Drake turned to face the surrounding men. ‘Hear that?’ he shouted. ‘And that’s an actual officer speaking. You might not want to listen to me, but you’ll do yourselves no favours by ignoring him.’ He turned to Reid and smiled.

  Rather than prolong this encounter, Reid lowered his voice and said, ‘Is it anything – anyone – in particular?’

  ‘Bloody newcomers,’ Drake said. ‘The usual toy soldiers getting their hands dirty for the first time.’

  There was some laughter at this. The men in the shed ranged in age from recently delivered nineteen-year-olds to those like the thirty-year-old Drake who had been out there for the past six years. Reid had long since ceased trying to understand how some of these men had found their way to him via the Commission while others were sent out and then called back home without ever leaving their coastal barracks. He wondered if another of his speeches was required, but decided against this. Drake, as usual, was the key to the situation, and he knew from experience that any matter of discipline or discord was best left to the blunt instrument of the sergeant.

  ‘Would anybody like to add anything?’ Drake shouted after a long silence. ‘Anybody else want to come crying and telling tales to Captain Reid here?’

  No one answered him. He was their sergeant. No one ever answered him.

  ‘Good. Because he’s a busy man. You want him to shed tears over you when he’s got all these other poor mothers’ poor bloody sons to take care of?’ He waved his arms at the building around them. Every word he shouted came back in that same distorted echo. The mounded coffins and cases lay like a barricade across the open doorway.

  ‘Is that all?’ Reid asked him.

  ‘For now,’ Drake said. ‘If you’ve got the Registration stuff then we can get started.’

  ‘Of course,’ Reid said, and pulled the papers from his case.

  Around him, the men slowly dispersed and started their day’s work.

  3

  REID ENCOUNTERED THE two women later that same day. It was early evening, and he was walking along the track between his lodgings and the small wood at Depot Meadow when they appeared ahead of him, rising from the broken line of the embankment and coming directly towards him.

  The younger of the two saw him first and stopped walking, reaching out to hold the arm of her companion. It was clear to Reid that his sudden appearance had alarmed her for some reason, and he paused and raised his hand to them, hoping that they might recognize him from earlier.

  Having received a wave of acknowledgement from the older woman, Reid continued to where they now stood and awaited him.

  ‘I’m Captain Reid – James,’ he said.

  The younger woman nodded.

  ‘We were hoping to see you,’ the older one said. She held out her hand to him.

  Reid guessed her to be in her mid-thirties, perhaps five years older than himself.

  ‘I’m Caroline Mortimer.’ She waited for her companion to speak, but the woman said nothing. ‘And this is Mary Ellsworth.’ She motioned for Mary to hold out her own hand to Reid, which she eventually did, drawing it back after the briefest touch.

  ‘Captain Jessop said we should seek you out,’ Caroline said. She repeated ‘Seek’ and smiled. ‘I imagine you’re a very busy man.’

  Roger Jessop was Wheeler’s senior aide.

  Reid was about to answer her when Mary Ellsworth leaned close and whispered to her companion. After this, the younger woman detached herself and continued walking alone along the path towards Morlancourt.

  Neither Reid nor Caroline Mortimer spoke as she went, and only when Mary was beyond their hearing did Caroline say, ‘Her grief, her distress, remains a great burden to her. Even after all this time.’

  It seemed a convoluted thing to say, but Reid made his simple guesses and understood what she was telling him.

  Caroline then took out a packet of cigarettes and offered one to Reid, which he accepted.

  ‘She’s here searching for the grave of someone she lost,’ Reid said.

  ‘Her fiancé. She’s on an excursion ticket. I only met her yesterday, in Amiens. It was Captain Jessop who suggested we travel here together. I’ve been in communication with him and Colonel Wheeler for some time concerning my own arrival here.’

  ‘I see,’ Reid said. Neither Wheeler nor Jessop had mentioned this to him. ‘I can show her the Registration lists,’ he said. ‘Let her try to locate where her fiancé might be buried or destined.’ He had done the same for others over the past months. ‘Has his body been recovered and properly identified?’

  ‘Missing,’ Caroline said. ‘Three years, apparently.’

  ‘I see.’ He looked along the path to the distant figure. ‘Then she’s likely to be disappointed.’

  Seven out of ten of all the corpses currently being recovered and buried remained unidentified. It was a common average at all the cemeteries in the district. If the man had come from a field hospital or clearing station, then his identity would be known. Otherwise, everything would depend on the work of the Graves Registration units working locally.

  ‘I know that,’ Caroline said. ‘Colonel Wheeler could hardly wait to see the back of the pair of us. She arrived in Amiens with a party of three dozen others, most of whom were going on to the cemeteries at Bray and Suzanne. Only Mary insisted on coming here. She’d heard from one of her fiancé’s friends that he’d been killed close to Ville sur Ancre and that he would most likely be buried there or here.’

  ‘If he was found,’ Reid said absently.

  There was a small communal cemetery at Ville, and two others already starting to take shape closer to Morlancourt itself. It was just as likely that Mary Ellsworth’s fiancé – if his corpse had been both recovered and identified – would be buried in one of those places.

  ‘It’s seldom so straightforward,’ Reid said. The smoke from their cigarettes formed a small cloud beside them, hardly moving in the still evening air.

  ‘I understand that,’ Caroline said. ‘But she needs to do something, to see something of where he was lost to her.’

  ‘Of course.’ It was why most of the women and families came, and the best many of them could hope to achieve. For some it was everything; for others it at least satisfied the
most urgent and painful of their needs.

  Neither of them spoke for a moment, and then Reid said, ‘And you?’

  ‘What unwelcome burden am I about to become to you, you mean? I can see Captain Jessop has told you very little.’

  ‘Nothing at all,’ Reid said.

  ‘I see. I was a nursing sister. VAD. I’m here because of the nurses.’ She paused. ‘Colonel Wheeler assured me you knew I was coming.’

  ‘He makes a great many assurances.’

  A month earlier, at one of his regular meetings with Wheeler and other Commission members, the subject had been raised of the burial of twenty nurses, killed at various field hospitals and currently being gathered together so that they might be buried and then commemorated together. The larger of the Morlancourt cemeteries had been mentioned as a likely resting place for the women, but as far as Reid was aware nothing definite had yet been decided. A great many decisions were left unmade at these meetings, and Reid often came away from them feeling he knew considerably less about what was happening in the plots under his supervision than when he’d arrived.

  Caroline smiled at the remark. ‘Sorry. Please don’t worry, I won’t get in your way. I knew most of the women personally – women, girls – and I was contacted by the Commission eighteen months ago in the hope that I might be able to help with all the gathering-in and identifications. I have almost complete records for a great number of dressing stations. I was here for over four years, on and off, and our records are better than most. I daresay Colonel Wheeler imagined it would be one less job for him – you – to have to do.’

  ‘I daresay,’ Reid said. ‘There was mention of twenty women.’

  ‘Twenty-six are currently confirmed,’ Caroline said. ‘I’m still searching for another seven.’

  ‘There are discrepancies everywhere you look,’ Reid said.

  Caroline laughed. ‘I’m sure there are. Discrepancies.’ She reached out and held his arm for a moment. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to sound so callous.’

  Reid motioned to the fallen trunk of a long-dead tree and they diverted from the narrow path to sit on it.

  ‘If I might be allowed to check my own records against the bodies the Commission has already designated for burial,’ Caroline said.

  ‘Of course.’ So far none of the nurses had arrived at Morlancourt, and as yet no part of the cemetery there had been designated to accommodate them. It was something he would raise with either Wheeler or Jessop the next time he was in Amiens.

  ‘I do, of course, realize that the odds are heavily in my favour,’ Caroline said. ‘I doubt if our “missing” or “unidentified” will pose any real problems for you.’

  ‘No, I suppose not.’

  He told her the proportions of each category still being delivered to him from the Commission’s depots. The numbers surprised her.

  ‘As many as that?’ she said. ‘I’d always imagined—’

  ‘I think we all did,’ Reid said. ‘The fact is, the bodies that come to us intact and identified and with all their relevant paperwork attached are a relative rarity. In the beginning, perhaps, but these days we struggle more and more to make any valid connection. In addition to which, the mix of reinterments and new recoveries varies every week.’

  ‘I see.’ She watched him closely as he said all this.

  ‘The Graves Registration people have teams of men still tracking and tracing and looking for every verification that might help identify someone, but all too often …’

  ‘That “someone” doesn’t actually exist?’

  ‘“Human remains”. Perhaps part of a uniform, hopefully some attached and undamaged insignia. The uncorroborated evidence of a man’s comrades, perhaps, but that, too, is an increasing rarity.’

  ‘And so your priority now is simply to gather in and then to decently bury whatever might remain,’ she said.

  ‘We know the names of all the missing. They’ll be commemorated somewhere, somehow, eventually.’

  ‘Just not necessarily in the grave Mary wants to kneel beside and grieve over.’ Caroline put a hand to her mouth. ‘That sounded uncaring of me.’

  Reid shook his head. ‘In the years to come there will be thousands like her turning up here and at all the places like it, and most of them will be searching for something they’ll never find. I imagine the real trick for them will be to shape and then to temper their expectations.’

  Every grave would at least contain someone; there would be no so-called ‘duds’.

  In the distance, a train passed along the line towards the vanished hamlet of Merissy, slowing where the station had once stood, and both of them turned to watch its progress. The driver sounded his whistle at the lost stop and a thin plume of smoke rose briefly above the tracks.

  Caroline brushed small flies from her face. ‘How long have you been here?’ she asked him.

  ‘In Morlancourt? Four months.’

  ‘And before that?’

  ‘I arrived in March 1916.’

  ‘The same month I lost my husband,’ she said.

  ‘Oh. I—’

  ‘Happily, his body was quickly recovered and he was recently reinterred in the Courcelette cemetery beyond Pozières. I was there before going on to Amiens. I daresay your own plot here is in a similar state.’

  ‘I know Courcelette,’ Reid said. ‘The man in charge – Jameson – is doing a good job there.’

  ‘I was told by the Commission that there might be a nurses’ cemetery there, too, but that seems unlikely considering the relatively small numbers involved. Captain Jessop told me that in the beginning there had been a notion to bury the nurses and other medical staff throughout the cemeteries, but that there were now far too many of these – burial grounds, that is – for this to remain a practical option. I suppose I should be grateful that so few of us were killed.’

  ‘Do you know the circumstances of the women destined to come here?’ Reid asked her. It seemed a clumsy question and he regretted it as soon as he’d spoken.

  ‘How they were killed, you mean? I know what the Registration documents tell me – just as you know what yours tell you, I suppose. I know the dates and places and causes of death and suchlike, and I’m long familiar with all those wonderful phrases that have recently been concocted to do their calm and reassuring work. I was reading just yesterday that a committee has been set up to decide on a name for what’s just happened.’

  ‘The war, you mean?’

  ‘The war itself. All its engagements. They seem insistent on something much grander.’

  ‘No doubt,’ Reid said, and the pair of them smiled.

  ‘Are you married?’ Caroline asked him. ‘Engaged?’

  Reid shook his head. He could hear splashing from the river in the distance and the shouting of men, carrying like the whistle of the train on the still air. The men, he imagined, might even be his own labourers.

  ‘We were watching them work earlier,’ Caroline said. ‘It all seemed very confused.’

  ‘I can imagine. I prefer to look on it as organized chaos.’

  ‘In the knowledge that out of that chaos will soon come peace and calm and order?’

  ‘It seems a lot to hope for.’

  Caroline Mortimer took a deep breath and said, ‘When my husband was killed, I received several letters from his friends telling me how swift and straightforward everything had been, how little he had suffered. I was even reassured that his body had been unmarked.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I daresay you wrote similar letters yourself.’

  ‘Some,’ Reid said.

  ‘Many?’

  ‘Enough to want never to have to do it again. Enough to want all of this to be over and done with, and for it to truly mean something to all those who need it in order to get on with their lives.’

  ‘People like Mary Ellsworth, you mean?’

  All of us, Reid thought. You included. ‘Yes, people like Mary Ellsworth.’

  Caroline li
t another cigarette. ‘I daresay the same few stories will be told over and over,’ she said. ‘About how men died.’

  ‘A lot will depend on what people want to hear.’

  ‘The grieving survivors.’

  Reid bowed his head. ‘You’ll have a grave. You’ll know your husband is buried there.’ He knew it was a harsh thing to say to her, and so he looked at her and waited for her nod of agreement and forgiveness.

  ‘I’m thirty-eight,’ she said. ‘Mary Ellsworth is barely twenty. I’m twice her age, old enough to be her mother. My husband and I were married for nineteen years.’

  ‘Children?’

  She shook her head. ‘Mary, on the other hand—’

  ‘She already has a child?’

  ‘She lost the child she was carrying when she learned of her fiancé’s death.’

  ‘She told you that herself?’

  ‘I seemed to know everything there was to know about her and why she was here within minutes of meeting her.’

  ‘Give me the man’s name,’ Reid said. ‘I’ll search the registers for her. I can talk to a few others. A lot of stuff’s just arrived at the Commission from the Army Graves people. Does she still have all his details?’

  ‘Every single one of them. All committed to memory. Everything imaginable. Whereas I …’ She hesitated. ‘Whereas I sometimes have days when I cannot even remember what my husband’s voice sounded like.’

  They sat in silence for a while, listening to the distant men and the humming of the insects which filled the air around them.

  Then Reid said, ‘You should go to the rise above Sailly.’ He pointed ahead of them to where the horizon rose slightly.

  Caroline shielded her eyes and looked.

  ‘It’s perhaps a hundred feet high. A mountain in this part of the world.’ He, too, peered into the distant haze. In the west, the sun was low in the sky, adding its glare to the land. ‘If you walk up it and then look back towards Albert, you can just about make out the beginning of that order you were talking about.’