by Peter Rimmer
"Not like Africa," said the colonel.
Robert was sure he had heard right but could think of no answer.
"I got as far as the signpost to Elephant Walk. You stayed there, I believe… Thank you, Lane… They were a bit short of officers so they let me back into the army. Not the same regiment of course. My father saw to that. While we drink our tea, you can tell me every bit you know about this part of the front. It's the first time I have commanded a battalion, so I need your help, Major St Clair."
"Captain St Clair."
"No, I changed that. I want you to be my adjutant."
"But what about…"
"He's going back to England. Poor chap's a bit shot through. That sort of thing."
"He's wounded, sir?"
"Not exactly. Needs a rest."
"And I'm not shot through?"
"You're not the type, St Clair."
The adjutant who was 'shot through' came back from the end of the inspection. Robert drank the rest of his tea and went up the fire-step to have another look. He had never been singled out before. And he didn't like it.
Later Robert read the mail from home. There was one from his father. There was one from his mother. There was one from Lucinda but this time no mention of John Heynes, her dead Irish Guardsman. They were all numb. The whole family. Most of the men had letters from wives and girlfriends. He would have liked that. But what worried him most at the moment was why Colonel Bowes-Leggatt wanted him as his adjutant. One of Robert's secret claims to fame in life was always keeping himself out of the way. No one at school had even thought once of making him a prefect. His trick was to be always there, but always invisible. It was the best way for Robert to go through life. And how the hell did the colonel know he had ever been in Africa let alone on Elephant Walk? It made him uncomfortable. He did not like surprises. And he didn't like people knowing things about him they were not meant to know about. He had never heard of a lieutenant colonel with an adjutant the rank of major.
Wally Bowes-Leggatt was not sure whether the army was trying to get him killed, or give him the chance to remove the block from his father's escutcheon. The war had certainly killed off Captain Craig, the rotter who had run off with Poo, and through Wally made a fool of the great General Bowes-Leggatt, first Earl of Fenthurst. Smeared the reputation of a great British regiment by seducing a fellow officer's wife. That much Wally had found out back in England at the end of August '15, after he had sold the lion skins with the lion heads still attached to them to a taxidermist in Johannesburg, the lions that had killed Jackson, at what proved to be the end of Benny Lightfoot's African safari and his sexual pursuit of Tina Pringle. Craig had been put on the front line the moment hostilities broke out and had lasted a week. Wally, back in the army, had lasted over a year, but how he wasn't so sure. Though like everyone in life, he told himself, there had to be a percentage of luck. And up till then luck had not been his in any quantity.
The old regiment had turned up their noses at him, but after the fiasco at Gallipoli and the decimation of the British regular army in Flanders, by September 1915, when Wally reapplied for his commission, the army was so short of trained officers, they would have taken him back for a far worse crime. To Wally, the East Surrey Regiment was as good as any other regiment, and now he was a lieutenant colonel, commanding the 2nd battalion, having spent the last year with the 1st battalion outside Amiens. The army had even given him a Military Cross for his afternoon alone in a shell hole surrounded by dead soldiers, using one of the dead soldier's .303 rifle to pick off German soldiers on their abortive way to the British front line in the counter-attack. Wally's platoon had been killed in the British assault leaving Wally stranded in the shell hole. Some said he should have been put up for the Victoria Cross, but they were the ones who knew nothing of Poo's indiscretion and the general's, Wally's father, embarrassment. Six months later the army had promoted him to major. Now he was an acting lieutenant colonel. If he won them the war they might just forgive him his trespasses. Anyway, he told himself when they gave him the Military Cross, at least the years drinking his way around Africa had not been totally wasted. He could still shoot the eye out of a leopard at one hundred yards, even if the leopards wore grey uniforms and tin hats. An eye was an eye, whatever was wearing it. The yellow eye of a leopard or the blue eye of a German.
Someone had found a man prepared to say in court he had committed adultery with Prudence. They had been booked into a London hotel together and the concierge was in on the perjury. Wally had received his divorce, and Poo had gone back to live with her schoolmaster father in the Lake District. Wally doubted if she would marry again. Her youthful flash of sexual attraction had gone by the time Wally saw her again in the divorce court. He had not spoken to her. He had not felt sorry for her. He had felt nothing. A stranger carrying his name and then losing it. He had not even felt sorry for the rotter, dead for more than a year.
But even up to the very end the regiment's name came first. He had not been allowed to cite Captain Craig as a co-respondent. It had been the army condition for letting him join the East Surrey Regiment.
But one thing he had not done was to go home and see his father. His mother he had met in London to thank her for the remittances she had made to him in Africa. He had not even bothered to make contact with his brothers. In everyone's eyes but his own, he was wrong to have lost his wife. It was his fault. And to them, it always would be.
After the war, if he survived, Wally had made up his mind to go back to Africa. Only this time he would not drink. He would offer himself for hire as a white hunter. Back in England, deposited in the Naval and Military Club, were the two cases of matching Purdey rifles. He was going to pay his dues to England and the army. Then he was getting out. They did not want him except in the hour of need, and that for Wally Bowes-Leggatt was too much of a one-sided bargain.
What made him smile as he sat down in his own dugout after appointing Robert St Clair his future adjutant was the man's complete non-recognition.
"Pass the hash, Jim," he said to his adjutant, "and don't start arguing again. You need a rest. Your bloody hands shake. You jumped when Mortimer put down the tin plate of hash. I told you. Shot through. Nothing to be ashamed of. You earned the rest."
"I'm still a good officer."
"That I don't deny. At the moment. The mind can only take so much, Jimmy boy. I know."
"Why on earth St Clair… The only miracle he's performed is staying alive."
"I have my reasons. And staying alive is not the worst of talents… He was a schoolmaster at one point in his life."
"Is that in his army report?"
"No, it's not, as a matter of fact, old boy."
"When do I go back, sir?"
"An hour before dawn tomorrow morning… What did Mortimer put in this bloody hash?"
They had all been drunk when they met and paralytic drunk when they parted. One of the rules of a drinking companion was not to have a memory. The end of the evening was still a blur and where he slept that night a mystery to Wally Bowes-Leggatt. Whether anyone would equate the unshaven drunken bum with a half colonel in the East Surrey Regiment was debatable.
He had been out of money as usual. His mother's cheque was always sent to a bank in Johannesburg and he was still in Salisbury. The other two were booked into rooms at Meikles Hotel. They were not going back to Elephant Walk that night. Using his charm, Wally had insinuated his way into their company. There was more than one white bum in the downstairs bar of Meikles Hotel and everyone knew Harry Brigandshaw. Some of the night was still hazy in his memory. He had even remembered the man's name. Most of that night, he remembered he had talked to Robert. Learned the story of his life. Said nothing about himself in return. In those days, it was Wally's payment for his drinks. A stranger listening to a stranger's problems with life.
Maybe one day he would tell Captain St Clair they had met before. But he doubted it. He knew the man intimately from
that one night of opening up his soul. And Wally had liked what he saw… The man knew himself and his own limitations. And just maybe Robert could teach him the secret of surviving the war… For all of them.
Twice that night the battalion came to full alert. Flares were fired along the line, white light vividly defining the smashed earth, tangled barbed wire and body parts. A hand, frozen, had been sticking out of the mud for weeks, thirty yards from Robert's fire-step. They all hoped it would be blown away. No one knew if the hand was German or British. Just the hand with six inches of a bare arm and no part of a uniform. Someone had fired a machine gun at nothing Robert could see and then the flare had gone out and the night was pitch black. In between Robert slept in a dugout on a raised length of duckboard. He even had one brief dream but when he woke to the stand-to he could not remember a thing. Each time he woke he was hungry. Each time he went straight back to sleep after the stand-down.
In the morning, he was told to report to the new colonel. What he knew about army administration was limited. Filling in forms had never been one of his priorities. In triplicate. Why always in triplicate he never understood. Most of the equipment got blown to pieces in the end and nobody counted the carnage and sent back a form.
He was on his way down the trench that zigzagged, so a successful German attack could only fire twenty yards each way, each zigzag defendable even if Fritz was just round the corner. Private Lane was behind him. Each carried their own equipment. Some officers made their batman carry everything. Robert could see ten yards ahead in the gloom of first light. The drizzle was still coming down, the sky heavy and low, just above their heads. They had not yet had their breakfast. The heavy guns were firing at each other again. Robert could hear the shells bursting high above his head. Today, he thought, the gunners are firing at each other. Or trying to. They were both just out of each other's range. Maybe supplies were coming out for both armies. They were shooting at the supply line. Robert doubted if anyone on either side knew what they were doing.
Both sides increased the ferocity of their bombardment. The lull was over. New supplies of heavy ammunition had replenished the stocks of both armies. Discarding the high flyers, Robert trudged on, slipping once off the duckboard into the mud and filth. The smell no longer nauseated. The rogue shell came from the British guns. Robert picked out the sound a fraction of a second before Private Lane and threw himself onto the half frozen mud at the foot of the trench on the British side. The explosion blew Lane and the duckboard high in the trench, high up into the new day, high above the devastation, pulling apart the higher the pieces rose and then came down. Robert was covered from head to foot in the body parts of his batman. Shells were still passing overhead. Someone shouted for the stretcher-bearer. All the time Robert kept telling himself he had not had his breakfast. His right foot began to hurt, and when he put his hand down to find out why, there was nothing there. Then they lifted him onto a stretcher and someone gave him morphine. Then he passed out.
By realising quickly enough the shells were coming in from the British guns, and diving into the corner of the trench nearest the British reserve trench, he saved his own life. The shell had been incorrectly filled at the factory and had come down a mile short of the gunner's target.
Robert never became a major in the British Army. He never became Wally Bowes-Leggatt's adjutant. And he never found out that the drunken bum he had spilt his heart out to in the middle of Africa was the colonel in charge of his last battalion.
When Robert reached home in the spring of 1917 he was unable to walk without a pair of crutches. Lucinda met him at the railway station. Again, as so many times in the past, he was the only passenger to disembark at Corfe Castle. Old man Pringle was nowhere to be seen, though the flowerbeds had been recently turned and weeded. Yellow crocuses were growing on the grass bank behind the waiting room. The sun was watery, but it was out. The train puffed up and wearily pulled its way out of the station on the way to Swanage. Robert could see his younger sister was crying.
"Thanks, Cinda. Can't walk home this time, even in the sunshine." He was trying to make a joke.
Lucinda burst into heaving tears. Silly, Robert told himself. All of John Heynes had gone forever. All Robert had lost was his right foot. Once the stump had healed properly they'd give him a wooden foot with a hinge. They had shown him one in the hospital. Some day he would walk again the lanes of England. Slowly. But he would walk again.
Acting Lieutenant Colonel Bowes-Leggatt died a week after Robert came home on a hospital ship from Calais. When they told his father, the great general smiled. His son, after all, had died a hero. No one had besmirched the family name.
Halfway through the smile, his wife slapped his face in front of one of the servants. The servant reported the words of the Countess of Fenthurst, as the earl stood dumbstruck, feeling the stinging side of his face.
"She said, 'Now are you satisfied?'" the servant had said in the servant's hall. "What do you think she meant?" The man had just joined the servant's hall, badly gassed in the Somme offensive. The rest of the servants, the men too old to go to war, kept their thoughts to themselves. They were more interested in keeping their jobs, the good food and the comfortable rooms. If his honour meant more to the old general than his son's life, so be it. They did not have to like the man for whom they worked.
"Never, ever repeat what you just said," ordered the butler.
"Yes, sir," said the young man. Then the chlorine damage in his lungs made him cough and cough. He went on coughing, tears clouding his eyes from the effort. When he wiped his eyes, the rest of the servants had left the hall to go about their daily work.
By the end of the day he had forgotten all about the slap across the general's face. They had told him in hospital after the gassing that he would cough for the rest of his life. But he was alive. Which was more than could be said for the general's son. When the butler saw him again he was whistling away to himself as he cleaned the family silver with silver polish and an old toothbrush to clean out the pattern of a bunch of grapes on the silver rose bowl. Next to the bunch of grapes the silversmith had forged a cherub. He managed to keep control of his chest until he had cleaned out the dirt around the cherub. Then he began to cough again, heaving up his intestines, right up from the ring of his rectum.
Book 5 – Persuasion and Retributions
Chapter 19: April 1917
Harry Brigandshaw thought he was going to die every time he took to the air to fight. He had talked to God about it and received no reply. There was only silence to his aching question 'why?' If he was going to die why was he born? What was the purpose? If he had had a son he could have seen some of the purpose. A daughter. Something that could go on forever and ever to the end of time. He had never married and now he was going to die.
The De Havilland biplanes had been replaced by Sopwith Camels, the successor on which they had taught him to fly. The latest Camel was faster, better in the turn. The German aircraft were getting better too, their triplanes replaced with biplanes. They turned better too. Slowly, through the months and years of the war, they had systematically killed each other. If they had met as young men they would have gone off to the beer hall and drunk together. If they had met their sisters they would have married them. For all intents and purposes, they were the same people.
Harry had long forgotten his revenge. Not his brother George, but his revenge. He had assuaged his brother's death by killing twenty-three young Germans like himself. Now all he wanted to do was survive and go home. Back to Africa. Elephant Walk. The bush. He wanted to hear the roar of a lion, not the snarl of an aero engine.
Every request for leave had been turned down by Fishy Braithwaite.
"I don't go home and leave my pilots, the young pilots who will be shot out of the sky if I don't show them how to fight. Why should you go on leave? Anyway, your home is too far, and if I let you go there you would never come back again. Leave denied, Captain Brigandshaw."
They never spoke of Sara Wentworth but she was always there between them. Harry knew his nerves were shot to ribbons. Like his plane's tail when he had come back the day before, half its rudder missing. He had been in combat over a year.
"You really don't like me do you Colonel Braithwaite?"
"No, I don't, Captain Brigandshaw. No, I don't."
The spring day was warmer than it had been all year. A perfect day for flying. The squadron, in three flights of six, Harry, commanding A Flight, took off from the same airfield the Germans had strafed when he first arrived. The war in the trenches had heaved around in the mud, grinding away at the youth of France, Germany and England. There were colonials, too. Australians. Canadians. South Africans. New Zealanders. Men from Newfoundland. Rhodesia. And Ireland. Ireland after the Easter uprising in Dublin in 1916. Still, the men of Ireland came to fight for their colonial masters, England. Volunteers. The cynical said for lack of Irish jobs.
Harry flew over them all every day, and they all died the same, wherever they came from. And now the Americans were coming to the carnage. Always turning his head, listening to his instinct, Harry cleared his head of everything other than the sound of his single-engine, the sky above, the ground below. Over the front lines, the squadron split into individual flights. Harry led his five pilots on the dawn patrol. Below there was a hate on. Explosions. Men moving out of the trenches from the German side, a cloud of chlorine smoke drifting in front of them towards the British lines. Wagging his wings, Harry pointed down. They were going to strafe the infantry out in the open. It was all over quickly. One minute he was pointing down, the next his engine took machine-gun fire and the propeller came into his vision, turning slower, dead. The Germans had been waiting for them. It was to be the start of the biggest German offensive of the war. Harry knew he was going to die. Waited for the second burst of machine-gun fire. Instinctively, he banked the Sopwith Camel to fly back over the British trenches. A German pilot waved at him. He was alone on the glide and concentrating. If he missed the landing there would be no coming around again.
