by Robert Edric
‘I know,’ Lucas said. ‘I looked.’ He held Reid’s gaze for a moment and then laughed.
‘I was in Amiens, General Headquarters,’ Reid said, ‘when the Ploughman Order came in.’ It was a story of his own, something to maintain their failing momentum.
Lucas shook his head.
‘At harvest time. Back at home. They suddenly found themselves short of ploughmen. They wanted two thousand of the men finding within days and shipping back home.’
‘Don’t tell me – ten times that number suddenly appeared.’
‘Something like that. Someone at the War Office came up with a great idea for finding out who was telling the truth. A draught horse was found, and everyone who claimed to know how to plough a field or to work a harvester was told to harness it up. I think they found forty men, fifty at the most.’
‘I saw perfectly sound horses being slaughtered at Boulogne, and again at Étaples,’ Lucas said. ‘They’d served their purpose. There was some talk of giving them to the French farmers to help them get themselves up and running again, but I doubt it came to much.’
After that, neither man spoke for a while, both settling close to the dangerous silence which surrounded them.
Other men came out into the rear of the bar and sat in the yard.
Eventually, Lucas said, ‘Are you still bound for the howling wastes of Araby?’
‘I imagine so,’ Reid said.
‘I heard from an old Graves Service man that we are obliterating graves in Persia to prevent them from being desecrated by religious zealots there.’
Reid had heard the same at one of Wheeler’s meetings. ‘It sounds a different place completely,’ he said.
‘Just make sure you know what you’re getting yourself into before Wheeler pushes the last of his scattered little pieces into place and then gets himself crowned. The same man who told me about Persia said the Forestry Commission had already approached Wheeler to play a major part in their own set-up, and that he had turned them down. Not much glory in planting and chopping down trees, I don’t suppose.’
‘No.’ Reid refolded the map and gave it back to Lucas.
Lucas waved it away. ‘No use to me. Will you go home, do you think? Before being posted.’
‘I don’t know. I haven’t even heard anything definite yet.’
‘Jessop wants me to go to Chaulnes,’ Lucas said. ‘Apparently, a lot of temporary grave sites were overrun there before the Germans ran out of steam down the road. All the records were lost, and whatever’s still there will have to be done from scratch.’
‘Perhaps they’re just trying to keep you busy.’
‘Perhaps they are. To keep my mind off things, presumably.’
Unable to hold back any longer, Reid drained his glass and said, ‘Your daughter.’
Lucas closed his eyes for a moment and then opened them and looked back to the canal.
‘I know,’ he said.
And again, both men fell silent.
‘I might try the Forestry Commission myself,’ Lucas said, but with little conviction in his voice.
‘I thought you planned to resume—’
‘Perhaps that’s just it – plans. What good are most of them now? I daresay I’m not the only one being forced to reconsider what lies ahead, how things might once have turned out.’
‘No, I suppose not.’
‘Besides, all those trees, forests – and how long does it take for a tree to grow? – it sounds more … more restful. They’re talking about planting up hundreds of thousands of acres of the things. It sounds medieval – the twentieth century, and we still need all that wood. It almost sounds as though we’re denying the future.’
‘Or as though we’re planning for it,’ Reid said, the thought and words arriving simultaneously.
‘I suppose so,’ Lucas said.
‘Drake reckons it will all be down to aeroplanes the next time around,’ Reid said. ‘Aerial bombardment.’
‘What, no battlefields? I wouldn’t try selling that one to the desk-top generals back at the War Office just yet.’
Both men laughed.
‘You needn’t worry about me,’ Lucas said afterwards, unexpectedly, and as Reid considered what to say next.
‘No, I know.’
‘This war’s a long time finished.’
‘So everyone keeps telling us,’ Reid said.
In the bar behind them, someone put on a gramophone, and a woman’s singing voice drifted out to them, occasionally muted and intermittent in volume, as though blown out to where they sat on a changing wind. And then the noise of the bar fell silent for a few seconds and the woman’s singing came to them as clearly and as warmly as though she were sitting beside them at the table and they were her only audience.
31
TWO DAYS LATER, Sunday, the day before the ceremony, Reid was woken by someone banging on his door and calling his name. Opening the door, he was confronted by one of his own labourers, who said breathlessly that he’d been sent by Drake to fetch him and to tell him that all the other workers had also been unexpectedly woken and taken to the cemetery several hours earlier. It was not yet nine in the morning, and Reid and his men had worked until late the previous evening.
At the end of that day’s work, Reid had told Drake that, with most of the preparations finished, they might rest for a day and then resume an hour or so earlier on Monday morning. The arrival of the nurses was scheduled for later than usual, at ten, to give Wheeler and all the others time to get to Morlancourt.
The man told Reid that he’d come in one of their lorries and that the vehicle was waiting for them in the street below.
Reid dressed and went down with him.
Arriving at the cemetery twenty minutes later, he saw that work had already started on the erection of the marquee alongside the path leading from the entrance towards the site of the eventual memorial. Men were setting out chairs and others were hammering stakes into the ground all around the structure. The marquee stood on a raised platform, and yet more men laid and hammered the plank floor.
Reid saw by the number of workers that, in addition to his own depleted labour force, others had also been brought to the site. A line of lorries blocked the narrow lane and others were scattered across the open ground. It was the busiest Reid had ever seen the cemetery, and it seemed to him then, surveying the activity all around him, that it was a different place entirely from the quiet fields and slope and copse he had been working on almost daily for the past four months.
Going to the marquee, Reid sought out Drake, whom he found amid a group of thirty or so labourers, only a few of whom Reid recognized.
At his appearance, those same few men came to him with their complaints before Drake shouted them to silence.
‘They’re mostly from Saint-Quentin,’ Drake told Reid, indicating the unfamiliar men all around them. ‘Wheeler laid on a special train. One of them gave me this.’ He took out a folded sheet and handed it to Reid.
It was a list of instructions outlining the work still needing to be completed in advance of the arrival of the nurses. It was signed by both Wheeler and Muir, and informed the reader that someone from the Commission would be arriving at the site later in the day to check that everything had been satisfactorily carried out.
‘You weren’t aware of anything?’ Drake asked Reid, his voice low.
Reid could only shake his head. He wondered who had compiled the list for Wheeler, and Guthrie came to mind.
‘It would have been better coming from you,’ Drake said. ‘You know all the extra hours our own lot have been putting in this past week. This was the last thing they needed. I told one of the sergeants from Saint-Quentin to get on with everything using just his own blokes, but he said Wheeler had insisted on us all being brought out here for the day. No one’s saying that things don’t need to be ready and waiting for tomorrow, but the overall feeling is that it’s all a bit much and that we would have managed everything in the morning. It’s Sun
day, for Christ’s sake.’
‘It would be pointless trying to contact Wheeler now,’ Reid said, knowing precisely how the man would respond.
The canvas sections of the marquee were already rising into place and being bound together.
‘I’ve told the other sergeants to keep their men away from the graves and paths,’ Drake said. ‘They were everywhere when I got here, walking over the ground we’d already prepared. In fairness, most of them didn’t have the first idea why they were here, and some of them didn’t even know it was a cemetery until they started wandering round. I got some of our lads to put up ropes to keep the nurses’ plot off limits.’ He motioned to the men driving stakes into the ground around the waiting graves.
‘Will everything get done?’ Reid asked him.
‘The marquee’s the biggest job. It’s all starting to look a bit too much like a summer fête for my liking.’
Reid smiled at the remark. ‘With Wheeler as Lady Bountiful, cutting the ribbon and declaring the whole thing open and then handing out the prizes?’
‘He’d certainly fit the part,’ Drake said.
‘He wants to send me to supervise work in Mesopotamia,’ Reid said.
Drake considered this for a moment. ‘I see. Well, I suppose we’ll all be moving on somewhere or other when the time comes. I wouldn’t mind a spell in that neck of the woods myself.’
‘Perhaps you could come with me,’ Reid said, remembering what Drake had told him about his own original posting.
‘Perhaps I could. But until then we’ve got this lot to sort out.’
Reid saw again how the man had laid his calming hand over everything, how his presence and simple reasoning had created a kind of order and acceptance amid the confusion of the day.
‘I think our biggest problem now is that,’ Drake said, pointing to the horizon.
‘The rain?’ Reid said, seeing the darkening of the sky.
‘You can feel it coming,’ Drake said. He tipped his head back and breathed deeply. ‘There’s already a chill. And look …’ He pointed to where the roof of the half-erected marquee was already rippling in the rising breeze.
‘Do you think it’ll get here sooner rather than later?’
Drake shrugged. ‘It already looks thicker and darker than it did an hour ago.’
The cloud across the horizon was sunlit along its upper edge, but lower down it completely obscured the land in that direction. Reid guessed the horizon to be twenty miles distant.
He finally turned back to the men still gathered nearby and made a short speech explaining the necessity for what they were doing. He reminded them that they were all – himself included – serving men, and as such were expected to obey the orders of their superiors. It was an unpopular remark to make and served only to unsettle the crowd further. He finished by saying that it would be unfortunate if, after all their earlier work, the following day’s ceremony were to be ruined for the want of this one final effort. And again it was something he regretted saying, guessing that to his unhappy audience he was starting to sound like Wheeler.
Before any of them could respond to the words, Drake ordered them all back to their work and the men turned and dispersed.
‘Will you stay?’ Drake asked him when they were alone.
‘Of course.’
‘They’d appreciate that. It’s why I sent for you.’
‘Perhaps Wheeler intended me to spend the day in Saint-Quentin with him and all the others, making the final preparations there.’
‘You’d be more use here,’ Drake said, at once exposing and dismissing Reid’s lack of conviction. ‘Besides, it looks like either Wheeler or Jessop will be turning up here later to make sure everything’s done.’
‘Jessop, most likely,’ Reid said. ‘Wheeler will save his own appearance for the big day itself, to the sound of trumpets, and no doubt behaving as though he built the whole place himself.’
‘He certainly likes his entrances,’ Drake said, and then saluted Reid and walked back to the labouring men.
Reid watched him go and was considering what to do next when he saw a car coming along the lane, navigating its way past the lorries there. Imagining this to be Jessop coming to make his inspection, he went to meet the vehicle. Arriving at the gateway, he was disappointed to see Jonathan Guthrie climb down from the passenger seat.
Guthrie looked around him for a moment, clearly pleased with what he saw, and then he noticed Reid and hesitated for a moment before raising a hand to him.
Reid went to him. ‘I imagine Wheeler told you I wouldn’t be here,’ he said.
Guthrie shrugged at the remark. ‘Edmund said you might consider yourself badly treated. Without cause, I might add.’
‘And the men?’ Reid said. ‘How did he think they might consider themselves treated? All this could have been arranged and undertaken days ago.’
‘I imagine he didn’t want to interrupt your own daily routine. What does it matter?’
‘Have you seen him? Today, I mean.’
‘I held the early service in the military chapel,’ Guthrie said, smiling. ‘Edmund was in attendance along with a great many others.’
‘And now?’
‘I believe a luncheon has been planned for the members of the Commission and their invited guests.’
‘I meant you,’ Reid said. ‘Why are you here?’
Guthrie smiled again at the question. ‘I daresay you have already made your mind up on that account, Captain Reid. And, yes, I would far rather be at that luncheon than here. I imagine you already know there is bad weather in prospect.’
‘Naturally,’ Reid said.
‘If you must know, I am here because Edmund has asked me to officiate at the ceremony tomorrow, and I came – yes, to ensure that the work was nearing completion, but also so that I might best prepare myself for my own duties. I wanted to see where the graves lie in relation to the marquee, where my congregation – my audience, if you will – will be seated. I take my duties concerning these poor women very seriously, Captain Reid. Others might be content to leave things to chance, but not I.’
‘And by “others”, presumably you mean me.’
‘Not at all, not at all. I have the greatest respect and admiration for all that you and your workers have achieved here. As does Edmund. As, I’m sure, does everyone else already gathered and waiting. There’s an official reception. The War Office is insisting. It may not yet have occurred to you personally, Captain Reid, but there are a great many things to be considered here other than the burial of the unfortunate nurses. There are a great many other straws blowing in this particular wind.’
‘Politics,’ Reid said.
‘If you like. We are none of us immune from these things. Not you, not I, and certainly not Edmund. All talk now is of doing the right thing by both the deceased and the bereaved.’
‘Because they’re the ones still voting?’
Guthrie shook his head. ‘I sometimes wonder if we haven’t asked too much of you and all the others like you. I wonder if our demands on you shouldn’t have ended with the war itself. Please, forgive me. All I’m trying to say in my own clumsy way is that the world now needs men with vision – men who see more clearly than you and I the shape and the needs of the future.’
Everything the man said betrayed his sense of superiority and his own rising ambition.
Reid wanted him to do what he needed to do and then to leave. He wanted to return to Drake and his own men and to talk to them and instruct them on their work as he had always done.
‘I honestly believe,’ said Guthrie, ‘that it is men like Edmund who—’
‘Who see that future more clearly? And certainly more clearly than anyone here, say?’
Guthrie looked around him. ‘They are honest, working men,’ he said. ‘Just as they were once honest, dutiful soldiers. Nothing more and nothing less.’
Reid could not bring himself to respond to this.
Guthrie clearly felt something of Rei
d’s rising anger, for he too fell silent, again looking at the men around him, before eventually saying, ‘Surely we are all working towards a common goal here – I mean the nurses, and all those others already interred and embarked upon their own Eternal Sleep.’
Everything the man said seemed at once dismissive and provocative to Reid.
He, too, looked around, and he saw in that moment how much more finished the cemetery now looked – how the paths and lawns and flower beds and stones had all finally started to take on a satisfying shape of their own. He found it hard to remember the bare, unworked ground of only a few months earlier. What he was finally looking at, it occurred to him, was what all those others would see for the first time upon their arrival the following day.
‘Have you heard anything certain about the coming of the rain?’ Guthrie said, distracting him from his thoughts.
The coming of the rain.
‘No, nothing. Except that it’s definitely on its way.’
Reid watched as the roof of the marquee was finally completed and as the whole structure was pulled taut by the gangs of men hauling on its ropes and hammering its stakes deeper. He saw the red cross at the centre of its white circle on one of the gently billowing panels.
‘I see,’ Guthrie said. The man hesitated for a moment and then added, ‘I don’t suppose you’ve seen Alexander Lucas this morning, by any chance?’ He continued looking around him as he spoke.
‘His wife died,’ Reid said. ‘He only heard on Friday. I saw him that evening, not since.’
‘I was sorry to hear about his wife. We all were. I only ask because it seems no one has seen him since the day he received his terrible news. Edmund heard of the death and tried to contact him directly. You do know, I suppose, that before this sad event, Lucas had applied to Muir for compassionate leave.’
‘Which he was denied,’ Reid said.
‘Quite,’ Guthrie said. ‘Though I daresay with reason. I can’t begin—’
‘And now Wheeler’s convinced that – what? – that Lucas has taken matters into his own hands?’
