Davenport squeezed his hand again. No return came.
Two minutes later, after a frenzied effort to resuscitate the pile of splayed and shattered meat and bone that the IED had created out of Tom, the emergency physician pronounced him dead.
The helicopter slowed its frantic pace.
Three
* * *
They lined up in three ranks behind the church, immaculate in their service dress. Their drill boots were polished harder than they had ever been. The whole squadron was there; they had come down by bus from the barracks that morning. They had had their medals parade the day before and after today would all be going on leave. As the rest of the congregation went in the front in dribs and drabs the younger soldiers thrust out their chests to show off their first medals. Frenchie and Trueman were inside the church with Constance.
Brennan went down the ranks. His long rack of medals gleamed in the sunshine, and when he spoke to one of the boys it was not with parade-ground harshness but quietly and kindly. He came to Dusty and Dav. Davenport’s arm was still in a sling, but he had struggled into his uniform for the service. Brennan looked down at them, both even shorter than he was. Dusty’s eyes blazed defiance, as if willing tears to dare to come. Brennan smiled. ‘You all right, boys? Stay strong for me in there. Stay strong for the boss.’
‘Yeah. We’re OK, sir.’ Davenport spoke for both of them. Dusty found that no words came from his mouth. ‘We’ll be fine. Just, just I never been to a funeral before.’
Brennan nodded. ‘I understand. They’re shit, fellas. Not going to lie. People take them the wrong way. People stand up and try to speak as though it’s a celebration of life. Which is bollocks. The whole thing’s a fucking tragedy. So listen, if you get in there and you want to cry, then crack on. I ain’t gonna stop you. In fact, I’ll probably be joining you.’ He broke off and looked at the ground. ‘I’m proud of you boys. I’m proud of what you both did that day. My little lions. Remember. For as long as you live or as long as you’re in this man’s army, remember that day and use it. Use it so that one day you will be able to rescue other boys from being carried away in coffins. Remember Mr Chamberlain. He was one of the best.’
Dusty was still unable to speak, and scrunched up his freckles against crying. Davenport gulped but was still resolute. He managed to whisper back, ‘We will, we will, sir.’ Brennan walked on down the line and picked off pieces of fluff from forage caps or smoothed out creases in jackets. He finished and stood in front of them. He spoke firmly but not loudly.
‘Well, guys, I wish we weren’t here. But thank you. Thank you all for looking so smart. It means a lot. You look smarter than I’ve ever seen you. Mr Chamberlain would laugh to see you now like this, dolled up to the nines. Last time he saw you all you were the Dust Devils, up to your nuts in scrapping. And that was one hell of a scrap. I ain’t seen many days like them ones. Not even the Iraq invasion. I know this ain’t very profound, but I take comfort from knowing he was surrounded by us when he was taken. That’s a proper soldier’s death.
‘I wish we weren’t here, fellas. But since we are, I want you to sing your hearts out when you get in there. Raise that roof. Mr Chamberlain would want it that way. I’ve known a lot of guys die in my time. Most of you lot think I’ve been in uniform since the Crucifixion. Well it ain’t quite like that, but I’ve seen a bit over the years. And I ain’t seen many officers like Mr Chamberlain. So let’s do him proud. Right, fall out.’
They turned to their right, marched three paces and then in a gaggle filed around to the front of the church and went in to take their seats.
The inside of the church was cool. In the front row was Constance. On one side of her was Sam, on the other Trueman. Trueman’s wife was also in the church with their daughters, a few rows back. Just behind Constance sat the officers, Will with them. A Mentioned in Dispatches oak leaf gleamed on his Afghan medal ribbon; he had just been awarded it for his actions the previous summer in PB Mazeer. In the middle, in front of the altar, was the coffin. It was shrouded in a Union flag and had a simple bouquet of daffodils on it next to his Afghan medal, which had been inscribed ‘25186816 Lt TLR Chamberlain KD’. The coffin was weighed down with bags of sand to make it feel like there was a whole body inside; missing its limbs, his cadaver was far lighter than it should have been.
A quiet, nervous chatter filled the church as the last mourners arrived. Just as the padre, who was officiating with the local vicar, was about to shut the door he saw a taxi pull up at the gates to the churchyard, a girl jump out of it and in high heels run awkwardly up the path. She was wearing a simple black dress, with a long black woollen shawl and a black hat. The padre smiled a greeting and everyone watched her as she walked in.
Cassie was mortified to see there was only one space, almost at the front. A soldier with gold teeth and a completely bald head shuffled along to make room for her, and she sat next to him. She glanced around her, the doors now finally shut and a hush settling on the congregation as the service spiralled towards its start. She looked to Constance in the front row, who stared forward from behind her veil, stony-faced. She was watching the coffin and didn’t seem able to take her eyes off it. And then she looked back and caught Cassie’s eye. Cassie didn’t know what to do, but Constance’s face lit up and sparkled a smile at her. Cassie started to cry.
The service began. They sang ‘Abide With Me’ but Cassie wasn’t able to manage any of it. The man next to her, who introduced himself as Adrian Brennan, let her hold his arm. Halfway through the service a good-looking, dapper officer went up to give the eulogy. She wondered who he might be.
Frenchie climbed the stairs of the pulpit and looked out over the congregation. He was almost directly above the coffin, and Tom’s medal caught his eye and fixed him for a moment so that he had to catch his breath. He looked down at Constance, smiled weakly and nodded. He began.
‘Good morning. My name is Chris Du Boulay or, as Tom would have called me, Frenchie. I was Tom’s boss in the army. There are many things that one has to face up to doing as a soldier, but saying goodbye to your friends is definitely the hardest. It is the price you pay for an extraordinary privilege. You get to work with the finest people, and get to know them in a few short weeks and months better than people you have known for years, and you get to share with them in discovering life at its most fun, at its most savage, at its gentlest and at its most awful. I was able to know Tom for only one short year of his short life, but feel that in that year I came to be rewarded by an extraordinary proximity to the best officer I ever worked with and one of the finest men I have ever met.
‘He was a model soldier, Tom. His soldiers loved him, and when I say loved I do not mean he was merely popular; I mean that they showed him a reverence that bordered on the religious. He never saw it – he was far too modest – but I saw it from the very start. The men who make up his beloved 3 Troop are a closed, fiercely tribal group of soldiers who it is almost impossible to break into, and yet I lost count of the number of times they came up to me and praised their leader behind his back. The most telling point, I think, came in the darkest days of Afghanistan, just a day before his death. In the middle of a firefight I was talking to Lance Corporal Gatunakanivu and I asked him how he was doing. By that point we were two days into a very hard and fierce battle. Lance Corporal Gatunakanivu just looked at me as though I was mad, and said, “Why do I need to worry, boss? We have Mr Chamberlain. He gets us through everything.” His soldiers loved him. And he loved them.
‘But Tom must be allowed to speak for himself. There is little I can say that will augment the image you already have of him. A lot of you will not have known him in a military context at all. A lot will have shared schooldays with him, or holidays, or university days. A lot of you will simply not really know where you know him from; just that you do know him and you liked him and you wanted to come and honour his memory and say thank you to him for lightening up our lives.’
He took a piece of paper fr
om his pocket. His fingers trembled, but as he smoothed out the folds of the letter he grew calmer. ‘Constance, Tom’s mother, wants me to read something to you. It is a letter that Tom wrote to her the evening before he was killed. It arrived at Tom’s home ten days later. I have it here, and Constance has said I should read it out to you. It is all Tom’s voice, and I will only add to it that this letter sums my friend up so much better than any words I could ever say. So I will just let him speak.’
Objective Round House (Basically a run-down compound, neither round, nor indeed much of a house if we’re honest.)
Dear Mum,
This will get home after me, knowing how slow the post is, but I want to write now just to capture this one moment. It’s a really good one and I thought that a letter would do it justice.
Ever since we got back from leave it’s been pretty busy, and we’re now two days into this operation up in the north of Loy Kabir. We started it at dawn yesterday, and it’s been quite a lick. We’ve done a mile and a half and have got one mile to go tomorrow. It’s been a long grind, without any sleep at all, but we’re having a lull at the moment in a compound before we head off tomorrow to complete the mission. It’s dusk and yet again we have an absolutely beautiful sunset. Spring is well under way and the evenings are getting warm again. I’m writing this in a T-shirt, which would have been madness a few weeks ago. The air is getting thicker and you can smell the blossom and flowers among the dust.
The wagons are parked up, and there’s not really much to do. I’m watching the boys conducting a left-handed throwing competition. The rules are fairly basic: all you have to do is throw a rock as far as you can with your left hand. Clue’s in the name, I suppose. Every time they play it I am in hysterics. I’m watching them now. They are squabbling, arguing, always with a smile or grin while doing so. They are the best of friends, and it has been my great fortune to have been accepted into their tight-knit gang. They are from all over the place, all ages, sharing neither background nor future, just the present. At the moment Jessie is chasing GV around and throwing stones at him for mocking his northern accent. Two guys who had not the slightest thing in common, from opposite sides of the globe, now like brothers who have known each other for years. And that is the really strange thing. You know I’ve never minded being an only child, and I don’t, I really don’t. I have always just enjoyed it being you and me, with Dad watching over us, as our little gang. But now I’m with these guys, it has been like giving me the chance to have brothers, for a tiny, finite, six-month period. And in a few weeks it will all be over and we’ll be split up again. After the medals parade we’ll go on leave, come back and then immediately move on to different jobs, and we’ll never be together as a troop ever again. We’ll see each other obviously, but never in this simple group of twelve. And so I know it’s not going to last, but it’s still wonderful, this little family we have fostered over the tour. In a kind of alternate reality way, this has become another kind of home. The padre said something about that back at Christmas, and now I know what he meant. I used to think out here that I’d never been so far from home in my life, but now I realize that I never really left it.
And while I’m on my soapbox, I think, looking at the lads now, I might have come to a tiny, tiny, bit of a firm idea about the whole question of what we’re doing here. I think it is what I think, anyway. Here goes.
This war out here has cost huge, huge sums, in treasure and blood. We’ve spent a lot, we’ve lost a lot, we no doubt appear – and probably are – arrogant beyond belief in the way we have assumed we can step in, from our rock in the North Atlantic, and teach these guys how to run themselves better. I cannot argue with that. But, but, but, and this is a big but, one that studying the lads over the past months has helped me to reach, there is one argument, however illogical, in our favour.
You just have to bring the whole thing down to a street and liken Britain to a bloke, a perfectly normal bloke, walking down it. He’s a bit rough, he’s a bit cocky, but essentially he’s a decent guy. Across the street he sees a little old lady getting mugged. Despite himself and against all logic, the man runs across the road (probably getting knocked down by a car while doing so) to help her. And when he gets there, the muggers start beating him up. After five minutes the fight breaks up, and he leaves it bloody and bruised. The granny is more or less OK, and probably doesn’t even say so much as thank you (in fact she most likely whacks him over the head with the handbag he’s saved for her). He crosses the road again and carries on down it.
The point is that, despite losing his own wallet, getting a black eye, a broken nose and some cracked ribs, the man would do exactly the same thing the next time he saw it happening. And that is how to see Britain in all this. The kind of mug who sees another country in trouble and while probably completely misunderstanding or misreading the situation (Oh dear, Iraq) or underestimating the effort needed (Step forward, Afghanistan) nevertheless steps up and goes to help. This is the kind of mindset the lads have. They swear, they fight, they’re not necessarily saints, but when it comes to it, they step forward every time. That is why I am so proud to know them.
And that character they have is exactly the same character that Britain as a whole has. When someone else is in trouble, no matter what the cost, we’ll end up rolling up our sleeves and going to help out. And, and this I do know for sure, I’d be a citizen of a country like that a hundred times out of a hundred.
Well. There you go. Show this to me when I get home and I will probably laugh and deny I wrote any of it!
It’s getting dark now, and I can’t really see to write.
Only five more days on the ground and then we start getting ready to go back to Bastion to hand over to the lucky, lucky lads taking over. I never thought I’d say this, but a little bit of me is going to miss it out here. But I’m looking forward to coming home more than I could ever miss this place. I am so, so excited about the end of tour.
With all love, and don’t worry – nearly there.
Tom x
Frenchie stopped reading and said nothing more. The seconds seemed to stretch into minutes. Then the vicar dragged the congregation out of their thoughts, and they stood up to sing the next hymn, ‘Lord of the Dance’. Cassie was now feeling terrible. Memories came whirling around her, and the organ music drummed inside her head. She felt dizzy and nauseous, and she wanted a drink of water. Somehow she kept standing. Some of the soldiers were crying. Even the man next to her seemed to be choking back tears as he sang. They came to the penultimate verse.
I danced on a Friday when the sky turned black;
It’s hard to dance with the devil on your back.
They buried my body and they thought I’d gone;
But I am the dance and I still go on.
Cassie swallowed down some bile that had risen from her stomach. She felt feverish and at the end of the hymn sat down exhausted. The service passed in a blur, and she was carried along in a kind of trance for the rest of the morning. Someone else seemed to be operating her limbs and directing her like a puppet on a stage. She walked out of the church behind the coffin; she walked to the grave, into which Tom was lowered by six soldiers, and then she was walking along the road to Tom’s house for the wake.
None of it she could remember later in any detail. Tiny fragments of the morning stayed with her, but nothing else. She remembered very clearly Constance’s hands when the first shovel of earth was thrown down on to Tom’s coffin, snug in its grave, tighten and whiten around Frenchie’s arm. She remembered a group of soldiers take themselves away from the graveside and stand in a circle, where they were led in prayer by the oldest-looking, who stood taller than the others. She was escorted to the wake by one of them, who introduced himself as Lance Corporal Miller. He dragged her towards reality, and she stepped out of her funk as she talked to him.
They didn’t talk about Tom but concentrated on the weather and what Miller was going to do for his leave. He told her about a tattoo he w
as going to have, of a crusader knight, on his shoulder blade. When they got to the Old Mill a marquee had been put up in front of it, and there were waiters serving wine and plates of sandwiches. Cassie and Dusty gratefully fell upon them, and each drained a glass of wine in one without anyone else noticing. Then Cassie started to see things more clearly and was able to start remembering things. They were joined by another soldier, who introduced himself as Trooper Davenport. As they talked she realized these were the boys she had heard so much about, who had shared Tom’s wagon with him. They didn’t seem anything like Tom had painted them; they looked as though they couldn’t hurt a fly. Both were so young.
The sandwiches did her good, although she continued to feel a deep sickness that she couldn’t escape. All around were little groups like theirs, talking politely and, if they laughed, doing so in a qualified manner and quietly. She thought about how funny Tom would have found it, this peculiar study of manners. She saw a steady flow of people coming up to Constance. The bald man, Adrian, who had supported her through the church service, was talking to Constance and making her laugh. Cassie smiled. She went over and joined them, and she and Constance talked for ages.
The time came, and all the guests realized that they had better be on their way. As Cassie prepared to go she remembered the rose bush at the bottom of the garden which Tom would take her to when they visited his home from Cambridge. It was his favourite place in the garden, and she felt that she should see it once more. She walked out of the marquee and through the garden, and there, at the foot of a weeping willow hanging over a stream, was the rose bush. A soldier was there, and he looked up, startled that he had been discovered. He was not crying, but she could tell that she had disturbed him. He looked tough, this one, and had a wild, angry look in his eyes.
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