by Robert Edric
Lucas pointed to a corner table and then went to the bar alone, returning with a bottle and glasses.
‘I went to Amiens,’ he said eventually, draining his glass and sitting with both his palms pressed to the table.
Reid considered what he was being told. ‘In connection with more retrievals?’
‘To see Muir and apply to him directly for leave. I received another message from Elizabeth’s mother.’ Gregory Muir was Lucas’s own Graves Registration Officer, now Wheeler’s superior in the Commission.
‘Is your wife no better?’ Reid asked him. He wondered at Lucas’s change of heart. He refilled both their glasses. The air in the bar was thick with dust and smoke. A pall of this already hung above the tables containing the room’s few other drinkers, a group of local men quietly playing cards.
Lucas shook his head. ‘It’s not just that. My daughter is now ill.’
‘With similar symptoms? I mean—’
‘It seems so,’ Lucas said.
‘I’m sure that—’
‘And the War Office, according to Muir, is refusing all requests for compassionate leave for the next two months.’
‘On what grounds?’
Lucas shook his head at the question. ‘Apparently, if I’d applied when I first heard my wife was unwell …’
‘What? You would have been successful?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘But there are always exceptions,’ Reid said.
‘Muir assured me he had every sympathy, but that the War Office is being very insistent. The only men being allowed back are those at the end of their time who have no intention of ever returning here.’
‘What are they afraid of?’ Reid said.
‘The way Muir told it, it all made perfect sense, and he made it perfectly clear to me, given the circumstances, that I was the one behaving unreasonably.’
‘Did he say when the restriction would be lifted?’ It was beyond Reid to suggest to Lucas that he might now change his own mind and accept the office work back at home that Wheeler would be only too happy to arrange for him. He wondered at the man’s insistence on staying this long. He wondered, too, at the true nature of the balance that had been tipped now that Lucas’s daughter was ill and not just his wife.
‘He told me that over three hundred men died of the influenza at Amiens hospital alone during that first winter,’ Lucas said.
‘Influenza? But this is a different thing entirely, surely? They must know that much, at least.’
‘Perhaps,’ Lucas said. ‘And perhaps they’ve just finally decided to stop taking chances. Perhaps it really is as simple as that. Or perhaps the Army doesn’t want to lose any more of its labour force while the weather’s so good and while so much remains to be done. The autumn and then the winter will be here soon enough. You can see their point.’
‘Not where men like you and I are concerned,’ Reid said. ‘You, especially. Surely, Muir could acknowledge that much, at least?’
‘Because I deserve special treatment? He waved the War Office order in my face. You know as well as I do how these men pick and choose their responsibilities.’
Neither of them spoke for a moment, and then Reid said, ‘Some of them behave as though they wish the war were still running its course.’
‘I came to that conclusion a long time ago,’ Lucas said. ‘I was with Muir a month before the end, when everything looked cut and dried, when he announced to the room that it seemed a great pity to him that we seemed to be losing the will to continue fighting with our earlier vigour – they were his words – and that it was an equal pity that the retreating Germans couldn’t be “forced to bleed” for a few months longer to secure a proper peace afterwards.’ He raised his glass. ‘To “proper peace”.’
Reid left his own glass on the table. ‘What will you do?’ he said.
‘What can I do?’ Lucas said loudly, causing the nearby card players to pause in their game and look across at him. He signalled his apology to them and the men returned to their game.
‘Perhaps you should have gone to Wheeler first,’ Reid said, already knowing how the suggestion would be received.
‘If you say so. All the time I was talking to Muir he was fiddling with a pair of white kid gloves, stretching them over his fingers, tamping them tight. He told me he’d only just received them, a gift from his wife on their wedding anniversary, don’t you know. When he knew I wasn’t going to persist with my request, he relaxed and asked me what the shooting was like hereabouts.’
‘The shooting?’
‘He led his local hunt back at home. He has a painting on his wall of Saint George slaying the dragon. I imagine it’s a great reassurance to him.’
‘I daresay he sees himself up on the horse.’
‘I’m sure he does,’ Lucas said.
After a further brief silence, Reid said, ‘What, exactly, have you heard about your daughter?’
‘Only that she has a fever and is unable to eat or drink. The same early symptoms as Elizabeth. The letter was four days old again. It wasn’t that long ago that we had mail from home within a day.’
‘No urgency now, I suppose,’ Reid said.
‘None whatsoever. I bumped into Jessop in Amiens. When he insisted on me telling him why I was there, he told me I should have gone to him first, that he could have saved me a wasted journey. Perhaps I should change my request and ask to accompany you into the desert instead and search out my bones there.’
‘Which you would stand considerably less chance of ever identifying.’
‘Perhaps not. But, then again, perhaps identification isn’t the great be-all and end-all men like Wheeler and his crew keep insisting it is.’ Lucas turned in his chair and called for the barman to bring them another bottle.
When the man had done this, and as Reid paid him, Lucas said, ‘You remember your sergeant remarking that he’d spoken to a man called Anderson? Battle Police?’
‘Who’d known you? At Ginchy?’ Reid struggled to remember what else Drake might have said, but nothing came to him.
‘Jessop was also at Ginchy. There was an occasion when he was waiting for me and a reconnaissance party to get back to one of our observation posts before an assault the next day. We’d been out all night, the best part of ten hours. Myself and nine others.’
‘What happened?’
‘We were caught by a lucky German flare and then machine-gunned. Somebody in our trenches had loaded tracers by mistake, and when they returned fire, they aimed them directly over us.’
‘Alerting everyone to the gun’s position?’
‘And ours directly ahead of it. The tracers had probably been intended for anti-aircraft fire.’
‘What happened?’ Reid said again, already guessing.
‘I lost five men, all killed,’ Lucas said. ‘The rest of us took shelter in a sunken lane, a hundred yards from our line, much the same from theirs. Nothing happened after that. A few more flares – ours, mostly; someone hadn’t told the idiot firing them that we were still out there trying to keep our heads down. Two of the men I lost made it to the lane and then died there of their wounds. One man – my sergeant, a man called Howitt – was shot in the neck; the other – Howitt’s cousin, as it happened – was hit twice in the stomach. You can imagine the wounds and the men’s chances. They were both dead within minutes of me strapping them up. Those of us who were left sat with them for the rest of the night and then came back to our line an hour before dawn. I daresay if we’d waited where we were, then the following day’s assault troops would have found us soon enough.’
‘Either that, or our barrage,’ Reid said.
‘I don’t think one was ever planned. It was open countryside, still farmed. I doubt the place had ever been even lightly shelled. When I got back, I went to write my report, sat down at a table in the farmhouse where I was billeted, and fell asleep. Jessop found me and woke me two hours later. I’d missed stand-to. The assault had been and gone, and I’d missed that, too. N
ot that anyone except Jessop seemed to notice. The assault had found only empty trenches. No one was injured; no one was even fired on. The men who’d taken part walked back singing from the old enemy line. Jessop said he’d seen the same thing happen elsewhere. He said the Germans, expecting to see us first thing, would fall back, and that they’d then creep forward into the line after we’d returned to our own trenches. When we received the order to go back and occupy the same supposedly empty trenches the following day, then they’d be waiting for us. To make sure this wasn’t what was happening at Ginchy, Jessop said I’d been ordered to go back out on a similar patrol that same night. I told him to find someone else. I’d been out four times in the previous week. Apart from those five men, I’d already lost two others only days earlier. The sector had been quiet for months. I told Jessop that all we were achieving with the patrols was to stir things up. Muir was our CO at the time and Jessop sent for him.’
‘What did Muir say to your objections?’
‘My refusal? What could he say, especially in front of Jessop? He told me I was disobeying an order and that there would be consequences.’
‘What happened?’
‘Jessop insisted I be written up on a charge of Cowardice in the Face of the Enemy.’
‘And did Muir agree with Jessop in laying charges?’
‘Not a bit of it. Bloodthirsty he might have been, but Muir was never a man for digging out trouble where it didn’t exist. His first instinct was to throw the thing out – to deal with it himself – but Jessop was insistent. The Battle Police came for me less than an hour later. It didn’t help matters that I’d fallen asleep where I sat at the table. While they were handcuffing me, Muir said he’d get in touch with General Headquarters, and that in the unlikely event of a Field Court ever being convened, then he’d speak in my favour, along with the few remaining men who were with me that night at Ginchy.’
‘I take it the court was never called,’ Reid said.
‘Muir finally managed to get the whole thing thrown out. It seems Jessop had done the same thing twice before. Two men are still in military prisons because of him. The matter was further helped by the fact that when we did finally get back to the German line, and contrary to what Jessop had suggested, they’d withdrawn even further than on that first night.’
‘And now you think Jessop is still whispering into Wheeler’s ear?’
‘He can’t help himself,’ Lucas said. ‘So you see where I stand.’
‘In no real position to push Muir into doing anything for you.’
‘Something like that.’
‘And Jessop will presumably have repeated to Wheeler everything he already knows about you.’
‘I daresay it’s a card Wheeler is happy to keep up his sleeve until the need to play it arises. After the Armistice, Muir waited until a few days before he was due to return to England and then sought Jessop out to tell him exactly what he thought of him. He did it in front of a crowd of others, and when he’d finished they applauded him.’
‘And you? At Ginchy, I mean.’
‘Muir sent me out of the line for a month. I went to Boulogne to take charge of a new depot there. When I got back, I found that Jessop had also been transferred. Our paths never crossed again until he turned up all spick and span, sitting alongside Wheeler in Amiens.’
Reid wondered why Lucas had told him none of this before, but knew that these were the stories some men – those men like Lucas – quickly left behind them as they prepared to return to the paths of their other lives. It also occurred to him that this might have been why Lucas had turned up at the station on the day the executed man was delivered there. It was beyond him to ask.
Several new customers came into the bar and sat at the tables closer to them. Reid and Lucas exchanged greetings with the men, who then began their own sparse, subdued conversations.
In the short time they had been there, the smoke in the small room had thickened considerably, and was drawn in elaborate, shifting patterns around every movement. The cloud across the dirty ceiling had sunk lower, and was now pierced at the front of the bar by the thin rays of the falling sun.
Reid told Lucas about the confirmed delivery of the nurses’ bodies and how Wheeler proposed to mark their arrival.
‘I heard,’ Lucas said, but showed little interest in the matter.
The two men parted an hour later, and rather than return to his room, Reid walked in the last of the day’s warmth to where the railway crossed the Sailly canal. He stood on the metal bridge and looked down into the barely flowing water. The sides of the bridge were still warm to his touch, and he waited where he stood, his hands on the parapet, until the sun finally dropped to the distant horizon and then sank into the land, drawing down the darkness all around it.
27
REID WALKED WHAT he imagined to be the final mile from the Bray road to the cemetery at Fricourt; now that there was a brief lull in his own work, he had been asked by Wheeler to report on the early excavations there. It was a plot of around two hundred graves currently in its laying-out phase, and was expected to contain a mass grave of men of the Tenth West Yorkshires. The surrounding land was open and sparse.
At the junction of the Maricourt road, a field of irretrievable vehicles lay abandoned, overgrown and rusting in the heat – lorries, mostly, but with gun limbers and a few dismantled artillery pieces among them.
As he approached the field, Reid saw men moving amid all this waste – metal dealers, he guessed, from either Bray or Etinhem. A sudden fountain of sparks and the loud banging of heavy hammers revealed where they were already at work salvaging whatever remained of value to them. He paused at the gateway, where others stood with their horses and carts, waiting to take the metal away.
He asked the men if much remained to be retrieved, and they told him, in their usual guarded manner, that they would make scarcely any profit on what little they were able to take. It occurred to him only then, listening to the men decry their labours, that they were there illegally, stealing the metal rather than collecting it under contract from the Army.
‘Have you been sent?’ one of the men asked him suspiciously, confirming this guess.
He reassured them that he had no connection whatsoever with the field of abandoned scrap, and told them of his visit to the nearby cemetery. The men relaxed at hearing this, and offered him water from their clay pots. Reid accepted and gave them cigarettes in return.
‘Where’s your car?’ one of them asked him.
Reid explained that he didn’t have one, and that he’d been given a lift only as far as the lane’s end. They offered to lend him one of their horses, saying that the animal would make its own way back to them if he released it at the cemetery gate.
‘It’s not that far, surely?’ Reid said. He had only visited the place once before – a week after his arrival in Morlancourt – and he guessed it now to be close by the next long bend in the road.
The wreckers shared smiles at this, but did not persist.
‘They tell us these places are full of dangerous ammunition, corroded shells and gas canisters,’ one man said.
‘But only to keep you away?’ Reid said, causing them all to laugh.
Several of their companions arrived, leading horses which dragged large pieces of metal behind them, just as foresters used the animals to clear away felled trunks.
Another of the men told him of the tales they heard of those being killed and maimed by the unexploded shells still being ploughed up as the surrounding land was returned to its original use.
‘Are you not afraid of disturbing something?’ Reid asked them.
‘The whole country has been disturbed,’ one of them said simply. ‘What is this compared to that?’
Reid guessed by the way those standing beside this speaker fell silent and then briefly bowed their heads that they knew something of the man’s own losses during that greater disturbance.
‘Of course,’ he said.
A man arriv
ed dragging an engine behind his horse. The others shouted at him that the engine was worthless, that there were hundreds already salvaged and repaired in every garage and workshop within fifty miles of the place. The remark prompted further loud and prolonged laughter and protestations.
Reid thanked the men for the water and resumed his journey towards Fricourt.
Turning the bend in the road, he was disappointed to see that the village was still not in sight ahead of him, and then surprised to see a car coming along the road towards him.
He stood to one side to let the car pass, but as it came close it slowed and then drew to a stop beside him. Reid was surprised again to see Jonathan Guthrie sitting beside the driver.
‘I was on my way to the plot at Fricourt,’ Reid explained. He hadn’t seen the chaplain since their encounter a week earlier in the company of Caroline Mortimer at the small bar.
‘Walking?’ Guthrie said. He took off the goggles he wore, revealing the circles of paler flesh around his eyes and making himself look both startled and ridiculous.
‘Only from the Bray road.’
‘But still …’ Guthrie looked back and forth along the empty lane.
‘You?’ Reid said.
‘I’ve just been to the same spot,’ Guthrie said, pointing in the direction of the place.
‘The West Yorkshires?’
‘Colonel Abrahams. He’s a friend of my father. Seventh Green Howards. Knowing I was close by, he asked me to pop over and take a look. Infantry, not many, ten or twenty or so. He wanted me to see that they were all safely delivered and then to say a few words. Apparently there’ll be no official opening ceremony as such.’
‘And you were given a car?’ Reid asked him. And a driver.
‘Seek and ye shall find, ask and ye shall receive. Captain Jessop gave me a chit for the transport depot. When I told them I didn’t drive, they threw in the driver.’
The man beside Guthrie leaned forward and raised his hand to Reid.
Reid wondered how much Guthrie already knew of his recent visit to Amiens. He wondered, too, what the man was preparing for the arrival of the nurses at Morlancourt.
