by Robert Edric
‘And not the circumstances of their deaths?’
‘I think we all know where that particular line was long since drawn.’
Reid didn’t fully understand the remark, but said nothing.
A dragonfly appeared in front of him, iridescent blue and emerald green, hovering motionless and then flicking itself away from him.
After a silence, he said, ‘Will it delay you?’
‘I’m not sure,’ Lucas said. ‘I daresay Wheeler will only breathe easy when everyone’s been boxed up and handed over to you. “The earth must bear its secrets,” and all that. Besides, who among us is still truly looking for answers or for explanations?’
‘Perhaps,’ Reid said.
After a further silence, Lucas said, ‘Jessop let slip that the old man lost his nephew out here – July ’sixteen – and that he was making discreet enquiries about having the boy’s body repatriated so that his sister could bury him in the family plot. The family plot – that sounds like a good solid ending to the story, don’t you think?’
‘I doubt if the Commission—’
‘Wheeler is the Commission,’ Lucas said angrily.
But Reid knew that Wheeler, because of his position, would be more bound than most to abide by the rules concerning repatriation. Besides, it had long since been decided that all recovered bodies would be buried as close as possible to where they had fallen, and wherever possible in the company of their dead companions. In the early days, as all these rules and practices were still being decided, wealthier families had petitioned the War Office and had then made their own private arrangements to retrieve their dead. Almost from the start, the Commission had been keen to prevent this. Wheeler, Reid knew, would have no say whatsoever in what happened to the body of his nephew.
‘It might be wise for you to become answerable to someone other than Wheeler,’ he said to Lucas, knowing how evasive he sounded. He knew, too, how unlikely Lucas was to act on this advice.
‘I know,’ Lucas conceded. ‘But I gave the man my word that I’d do all I could. He’s as powerless as the rest of us in the matter, I know that.’
‘I could alter some of my schedules and let Wheeler know that we are ready and waiting here,’ Reid said. ‘I could make the burials a priority.’
Lucas nodded at this. ‘I imagine he just wants everything done by the book. I – we – need to go through the usual motions for him, that’s all.’
‘Can you trust your men to say nothing?’ Reid said.
‘Most of them don’t care one way or another. All they want to do now is to wash their hands and get back home. They might all be serving men, but not many of them act like soldiers. I lose two or three every week when the Monday Orders arrive in Calais.’
‘Same here,’ Reid said.
They were distracted briefly by the appearance on the far bank of several men carrying wicker baskets, who rose to the skyline and then followed the canal in the direction of the lock at Ancre. Reid recognized several of them from Morlancourt and he called to them. They were eel fishermen lifting the traps they had set the previous evening. Two of the men held up the sacks they carried. The sacks swung and twisted with the writhing of their living contents.
‘They sell them,’ Reid told Lucas, adding that his own landlady had already served eels to him.
‘When they finally prised open the lock gates in Albert,’ Lucas said, ‘the water fell only slowly and they pulled out hundreds of the things – thousands – three and four feet long, some of them, and thicker than a man’s arm.’
‘I suppose—’
‘They’d been feeding on disintegrating corpses for months. It was the submerged bodies that had jammed the gates. The locals said bubbles had been rising all that time. We were called in to take away the remains – French, mostly. Believe me, we were only too glad to hand them over.’
‘The creatures here are barely a foot long,’ Reid said, causing Lucas to laugh.
The fishermen and their baskets were now in the far distance and out of earshot, their outlines melting into the haze already rising off the land. In places, thin wisps of steam rose from the surface of the canal.
‘So what do you make of friend Guthrie?’ Lucas said.
‘He came out to the cemetery,’ Reid said. ‘Apparently, he’s planning some kind of ceremony for the West Surreys about to be buried there.’
‘Oh, he does like to raise his blessed palms in benediction over everyone and everything he encounters,’ Lucas said, again doing nothing to disguise his dislike of the man.
‘He’s overbearing, that’s all,’ Reid said.
‘Holier than thou, you mean?’
‘Which he is,’ Reid said. ‘Holier than us.’
‘He buried them at Fricourt, Varens and Hédaville,’ Lucas said. ‘He used to hold services every morning and then again in the evening for anyone who wanted them.’
It was beyond Reid to ask Lucas what grudge he held against Guthrie. ‘He was with Caroline Mortimer,’ he said.
‘Your nurse?’
‘The bodies of her women will be with us soon enough.’
‘And did Saint Guthrie promise to see them safely delivered up into Heaven, too?’
‘He offered to do something,’ Reid said. ‘For which Caroline Mortimer was grateful.’
‘I’m sure she was.’ Lucas squinted into the rising light. ‘Ignore me,’ he said. ‘It’s been a long night. Wheeler said he’d send us an earth-mover from the Pioneers’ depot. Not that it’ll be much use in a space like that.’
‘The man occasionally shows willing,’ Reid said.
‘Doesn’t he just? And then makes sure everyone knows it. He told me he’d wait a little longer before coming out to Prezière himself. Said he didn’t want to get in our way.’
‘I suppose ultimately—’
‘Ultimately, he’ll do exactly what he’s told to do, just like the rest of us. No one is going to be here for ever. I have men who would set off walking home right now if I told them they could go.’
‘Enough have tried it,’ Reid said.
‘And I daresay a handful succeeded. When I first came out here I had a commanding officer who insisted on giving a map to everyone under his command who wanted one.’
‘Of here, France?’
‘Of this part of the world. Nothing too specific, of course. The coastline, cities, railways, towns, big rivers, that sort of thing. To be honest, the maps looked ancient, fifty years old at least. The point is – and this was why he handed them out – they also showed the southern half of England, London up to the Midlands, and all the Channel ports from Dover round to Plymouth. Something a serving man could look at and see roughly where he was in relation to his home. Something he could put his finger on and then draw a connecting line.’
‘Something to reassure him,’ Reid said. ‘Like the Romans and their lines of sown mustard seed which flowered yellow each spring and allegedly pointed all the way back to Rome.’
‘I suppose so,’ Lucas said.
After that, neither man spoke for several minutes.
The smell from the water grew stronger in the rising heat. Birdsong filled the open land behind them.
Eventually, Reid looked at his watch. It was almost seven. ‘I ought to go,’ he said. There were no bodies arriving that morning, but Drake and a dozen men would already be at the station to await the delivery of their other supplies.
The cemetery lay in the opposite direction to the one they had taken out of Morlancourt and Lucas insisted on driving Reid there.
Passing back through the village, they saw the fishermen sitting at tables on the street, already surrounded by the women of the place, who were taking out the writhing eels and inspecting them, seemingly oblivious to the way the creatures coiled themselves around their hands and forearms. Previously, Reid had seen the men chop off the eels’ heads as they were sold and then watched as they had continued writhing just as vigorously afterwards.
11
T
HE FOLLOWING MORNING, shortly before his departure for the station, Reid was washing when there was a knock at his door. He had spent the previous evening with Alexander Lucas, and he imagined this to be him now. They had arranged to meet later in the day, prior to Lucas returning to Amiens to deliver his preliminary report to Wheeler. But upon pulling open his door, he was surprised to see Caroline Mortimer standing there.
‘You were expecting someone else,’ she said, waiting to be invited into the room as Reid pulled on his shirt and continued drying himself.
He told her about his plans for the day and waited for her to speak.
She looked quickly around the small room and then sat in its only comfortable chair.
Reid rubbed his wet hair vigorously. He looked in the mirror hanging above his basin and saw Caroline Mortimer studying his back.
‘You were wounded,’ she said.
Reid slapped a hand over the two scars high on his shoulder. ‘It was never much,’ he said. ‘Spent shrapnel, that’s all. There and my leg.’
Caroline rose and came to him where he stood. She pulled away his shirt and then kneaded and stretched the skin around the scars.
‘They were badly stitched,’ she said.
‘They were quickly stitched,’ Reid said.
‘What happened? I’m sorry – none of my business.’
‘It was at Bécourt,’ Reid said. ‘The last March. It seems all we ever did for a fortnight was withdraw, look over our shoulders and then withdraw some more. And by “withdraw”—’
‘You mean—’
‘I mean run, yes. Everywhere you looked during that last spring, there was confusion. Years and years of next-to-no real progress whatsoever, and then that. I was sent to assist in the retrieval of some of our forward guns. Small pieces. The artillerymen were making up their crews, gathering together horses and limbers. We were just about done, only one or two firing pins to be removed, when half a dozen shells fell among us. I was wounded and concussed. I was unlucky, that’s all. I felt very little – at least not until I came to. I was picked up straight away and taken to the hospital at Albert on one of the gun carriages.’
‘A close friend of mine nursed at the place,’ Caroline said. She smiled at the sudden, unexpected memory, and Reid felt her fingers press harder into his shoulder.
‘Not then, I hope,’ he said.
‘No – earlier. She was moved back to the base hospital at Le Havre just before Christmas the previous year.’
‘Is she …? I mean …’
‘Safe at home. She went from Le Havre to Roehampton, and from there back to Southampton, where she started out. She was married six months ago and she’s expecting her first child in four months’ time.’ There seemed a comforting, reassuring order and symmetry to the story.
‘I’m pleased for her,’ Reid said.
‘Me, too.’ She saw his relief, the different story he might just as easily have blundered into.
‘Someone took out the shrapnel – like I say, already spent, by all accounts – and stitched me up. And an hour or so after I’d recovered consciousness we were all shipped from Albert back to Boulogne, to the civilian hospital there. I was more or less left to my own devices for a full month afterwards.’
‘Did you anticipate being sent home?’
‘I’m not sure. I doubt it. But I suddenly seemed a lot closer to leaving, simply by being there at Boulogne.’
‘When we had the time, we sometimes opened up and cleaned out wounds already dealt with at the field stations,’ she said. ‘Too many men suffered from infections afterwards.’
‘No such luxury,’ Reid said. ‘I was examined every day, told I was coming along nicely, and then discharged at the end of the month. By then, the rout had more or less come to a standstill. I was told I was eligible to apply for a further month’s leave, but there seemed little point.’
‘Oh? Surely, a month without—’
‘Three of the men who’d been with me at Bécourt were killed outright by the shells. Another ten were injured worse than me. I’d known most of them for at least the past year. Going home seemed … unnecessary, somehow.’
‘Unnecessary?’
‘I’d seen a lot of men go home and then come back. It made things harder for some of them. Especially the ones with wives and families, children.’
‘Of course,’ Caroline said. She left him where he stood and went back to the chair, sitting beside his unmade bed and looking out at the street below. There were already people moving along it, the sound of hooves and of lowing cattle as the animals were driven to the fields.
Reid pulled on his shirt and straightened his hair with his fingers.
‘And so you went back,’ Caroline said eventually.
‘To a place called Montigny. A long way behind the new lines. We were billeted in a place that had seen nothing whatsoever of the fighting. The rest of the regiment had come on through the old battlegrounds. We were in a line twenty miles further back than where we’d started from two years earlier. My service card was stamped “Recuperation Duties”. I suppose in a way it’s how I eventually ended up here.’
‘Were you able to stay there until everything was over?’
‘Pretty much. We were in and out of the reserve lines for the summer, but it was a quiet sector. The truth was that after that last push and long retreat, everybody I’d known for any time was more or less exhausted. We all seemed to have had our own lucky escapes during those hectic weeks, and we were simply relieved to be able to rest and to catch our breath. I was in Montigny from April until August, and then after that we were moved to support the Queen’s Own, west of Amiens. The Australians were there, and a tank corps. When the Armistice came, I was at Caulières, supervising depot work on the Amiens road. I was in another hotel, and the men were billeted in all the surrounding houses. On the day of the Armistice, our senior officers got everyone to assemble on the banks of the old reservoir at Vaux, hundreds of us. We were there at first light and we stayed there until the church in the valley bottom finally struck eleven.’
‘I was in Le Touquet,’ Caroline said. ‘On the day itself we were busy from the night before – thirty serious wounds. Half the men died. We were told to take all the drink off the men coming into the dressing stations.’
‘There was plenty to drink at Vaux,’ Reid said absently. ‘We all waited until the bells started ringing and then everyone celebrated.’
‘Everyone?’ Caroline said, but more to herself than to Reid.
‘No, I suppose not. That evening, I heard that two men had drowned in the reservoir. They drank too much and then went swimming. Hundreds did. The men were discovered missing only the following day. Their bodies were found at the reservoir overflow the day after that. They’d been in a tunnelling company, miners. We were there for another month, until Christmas, and then one by one the companies were disbanded. Most of us, the officers in particular, went from Active Service into the reserve battalions. We were known as “disembodied”. I was home by Christmas Eve and then called back here at the end of the following February.’
‘Here?’
‘Saint-Quentin first. I washed up here three months later to oversee the laying out of the plots between Querrie and Péronne. I only came to Morlancourt earlier this year.’
‘I see,’ she said.
Reid wondered at the seeming simplicity of the story he had just told, the days and the years it enclosed. Only then did it occur to him to ask her why she had called on him so early in the day.
‘I came for Mary,’ she said. ‘Something of a surprise. Captain Jessop let her know late last night that her fiancé’s body has been located and that he is actually being delivered to you here today.’
‘Today?’ Reid had little idea of the identities of the men being delivered to him each morning until he read the dockets that accompanied their corpses. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Captain Jessop seemed certain. Colonel Wheeler had asked him to look out for him. It was alwa
ys likely that he’d be sent here, and sometime soon, but no one knew when. Apparently, his name was on the list sent to Colonel Wheeler yesterday afternoon. Mary’s already calling it a miracle. Before she got the news, she was talking about returning home. To be honest with you, I was encouraging her to go.’
‘I won’t see the list of names until the train gets here,’ Reid said. ‘Ernaux makes something of a point of handing it over.’
She smiled. ‘I can imagine.’
‘I’ve saluted more often on that platform than anywhere else while I’ve been over here,’ Reid said. He finished dressing, buttoning his jacket and then brushing the dried earth from his sleeves and shins. ‘What’s the man’s name?’ he asked her.
‘Andrew Copley,’ she said.
The pair of them fell silent at the sound of footsteps in the narrow corridor outside.
‘That might be her now,’ Caroline said, and she went to the door and looked out before Reid could stop her. But there was no one there and she went back in to him. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘No one saw me – either then or when I arrived.’
‘It doesn’t … I mean …’ Reid said, feeling himself redden at the half-formed lie.
‘She’s been waiting in my room for the past hour,’ Caroline said. ‘She told me late last night about her news. I told her I’d come to see you to ask your permission for her to be at the station when the train arrives. She wants to be with the coffin for a moment before it’s taken out to the cemetery. Can you arrange that for her? I mean, is it allowed?’
Reid considered what she was asking him.
‘Would it have been simpler if we’d simply turned up unannounced at the station?’
‘What is she expecting?’ Reid said. ‘More often than not, the coffins arrive with names and numbers chalked on them. We affix their plates here only once their actual plots are confirmed and ready for them.’
‘She just wants to see it, that’s all.’
‘Sometimes we get caskets containing body parts, and occasionally the Registration people at Saint-Quentin chalk that on the caskets. It can all seem a bit brutal.’
