“He’s going to court-martial Snout,” said Daniel, his face white.
“Small room, so let’s limit the numbers,” said the Brigadier. “You and I, Colonel, are technically enough to provide the necessary tribunal. I assume you have no qualms about dispensing discipline and seeing justice carried out?”
“No, sir,” said the Colonel. “But perhaps Captain Wheaton can join us as well? I believe three officers are preferred if they are available?”
“Very well,” said the Brigadier, but he did not look pleased to be challenged. “And you there, medical man,” he said, indicating Hugh. “We’ll need a medical man to examine the prisoner and to pronounce death after any execution.”
“I would like to speak for the prisoner, sir,” said Hugh. “He is entitled to be represented.”
“If you wish to do so, you’ll act as medical officer too,” said the Brigadier. “Otherwise we have no room for you.”
“Very well,” said Hugh.
“The officer who was struck must come down,” said the Brigadier. He looked particularly smug as he pretended no personal recollection of Daniel. “The chaplain can earn his keep, and my aide will take down the proceedings and fill out the papers. I think we are ready?”
Snout looked if anything younger than he had done in the early summer, when his biggest worry had been Latin declensions and money for sweets and cigarettes. He was thinner from the harsh winter, and his battered face had the lost expression of a child woken from sleep. His hands were bound with rope, and Hugh wondered that anyone could think it necessary to restrain this exhausted slip of a boy.
The Brigadier’s aide sat the boy in a chair and removed his cap. Then he bound his ankles to the chair with a second rope.
“Sir, is that really necessary?” asked Harry Wheaton. “He is no danger to us.”
“If the sentence is death, we shall carry it out immediately,” said the Brigadier. “No sense risking a whole firing squad in this bombardment.”
The chaplain disguised a choke as a clearing of the throat, and Daniel gasped, while Colonel Wheaton hurried to add, “Nothing will be decided until we have heard the evidence, of course.”
“Merely a precaution,” agreed the Brigadier. “Best to bind a prisoner while he’s docile.”
The recitation of events was brutally swift, the Brigadier’s reaction to mitigation equally concise.
“It matters not that you were unhurt, Lieutenant Bookham, or that you have a leader’s natural inclination to protect your man,” said the Brigadier. “He was seen to strike you, and to ignore the striking of an officer would be disastrous to discipline and possibly lose us the war.”
“I submit he is underage and should not have been allowed to serve,” said Daniel.
“Again, not an excuse,” said the Brigadier. “You must agree with me, Colonel?”
“The boy volunteered with the full permission of his family,” said Colonel Wheaton. “Else I would not have taken him. Were there a petition from them for his return, I would consider it, but…”
“But there is not, so we have no grounds to consider him protected from usual military regulations,” said the Brigadier.
“Sir, as a medical officer, I find the boy to be unfit to stand this tribunal,” said Hugh. “I believe he is suffering from neurasthenia due to a blast from shelling.”
“If we excused the behavior of every soldier who has had his ears rung by an exploding shell, we should have no army left at all,” said the Brigadier. “I believe this anxiety has caused the boy to wander off several times?”
“It has, sir,” said Harry Wheaton. “But he is a good lad and would not have gone if he had been in his right mind. We can all attest to his good character.”
“A deserter as well as a mutineer,” said the Brigadier. “I’m sorry, but I find the evidence to be crystal clear in this case and the boy to be a malingerer and to be guilty of striking his superior officer in front of the ranks. He must be made an example of. Colonel Wheaton?”
“I very much regret that the boy’s actions were so public as to be impossible to ignore,” said the Colonel. “I agree he is guilty, but I do recommend clemency.”
“As do I,” said Harry Wheaton. “The Brigadier’s actions last night brought great honor to the regiment and boosted morale for all ranks. I trust the Brigadier will continue his wise and just course this grim morning.”
“So we are unanimous,” said the Brigadier. “Unfortunately, the clemency last night must not be extended lest it become known as weakness. I must be responsible for the discipline of my command, and as such, I sentence this boy to be executed.”
“No,” said Hugh. “It is monstrous.”
“Sentence to be carried out immediately, due to exigent circumstances.” The Brigadier looked to his aide, who was writing down the proceedings in an official log. The aide paused as if unsure how to document the sentence. “Immediate,” confirmed the Brigadier. “Get the boy some rum and let the chaplain speak to him.”
Snout had remained quiet through the proceedings, looking about him in a dazed manner. Now the aide brought him a flask and helped him to drink from it. He screwed up his face at the taste but drank with the greedy experience of a soldier who knows how the daily rum ration wards off the cold for a little while. The chaplain pulled up a chair next to him and began to speak a psalm in a quiet voice.
“You were very effective yesterday, Captain,” said the Brigadier quietly to Harry Wheaton. “Would you volunteer? I will call together a firing squad if necessary, but to risk twelve men under this bombardment seems inefficient.”
“He put down a dog yesterday,” said Daniel fiercely. He did not address the Brigadier as “sir,” and he stepped towards him with a look of determination.
Hugh stopped Daniel with an outstretched arm.
“I beg you to reconsider,” said Hugh. “The medical evidence is clear, and his age alone demands mitigation.”
“Not much difference between a dog and a traitor,” said the Brigadier calmly. “Deserters, malingerers—they are rabid curs and must be put down before they infect the rest of the pack.”
“Have you no compassion?” asked Daniel in the strangled voice of a man swallowing a violent emotion. “Must you strike at the boy to hurt me?”
Hugh stepped in front of Daniel and pushed him back by both shoulders. “Shut up!” he whispered, his voice fierce. “You will not give him the pleasure.”
“I’ll ignore your lieutenant’s insults because I don’t have all day; I have a war to run,” said the Brigadier sharply to Colonel Wheaton. “Can the Captain carry out the sentence, or must we risk the lives of twelve men in a firing squad?”
“The boy asks for Mr. Hugh,” said the chaplain. “Is one of you Mr. Hugh?”
Hugh gave Daniel a warning shake and went to Snout. The boy was weeping now, tears running silently down his neck. Hugh knelt and wiped his face with a handkerchief.
“I want my mama,” said Snout. “I want to see my mama and my sister, Abigail, Mr. Hugh.”
“I know, Snout, I know,” said Hugh.
“I just want to go home, Mr. Hugh.”
“You will be going home, Dickie,” said Hugh, taking the boy’s bound hands in his own. “I think it will be just a moment and then you’ll be walking down the hill to Rye and your mother and father will be waiting at the door for you.”
“Will Wolfie be there, do you think?” asked Snout.
“I know that dog will find you if he can,” said Hugh. “I will be here with you, Dickie. Lieutenant Daniel is here. Captain Wheaton is here too.” Hugh looked up to see Daniel wiping his eyes and Harry looking away to hide his distress.
“That’s enough,” said the Brigadier. Even he looked pale, as if either his conscience or his bilious stomach were bothering him. “Perhaps the squad is the more appropriate way. I can see the Captain is overcome.”
“I’ll do it,” said Hugh. Death was inevitable and to wait for a firing squad would be an agony.
His heart threatened to break in his chest, but he had seen patients die every day. He knew what it was to prolong suffering, and he had learned when to just hold a hand and let a man go. “I’m a medical doctor. It will be painless and quick.”
“For the love of God, no, Hugh,” said Daniel. He stepped between Hugh and Snout and pushed Hugh away with a roughness that sent him sprawling into some bags of potatoes.
“Oh, God, I hate these pals’ battalions. Everyone knows each other and no one wants to shoot his neighbor’s gardener,” said the Brigadier. “Stand aside, gentlemen. I’ll finish this myself.”
As he took his pistol from its holster, Daniel threw himself in front of Snout, and the Brigadier’s aide ran to pull him away. They pulled at each other in the fierce, awkward way of real fighting in an enclosed space. Snout was toppled to the ground, still roped to his chair. The Brigadier stood waving his pistol, more in the direction of Daniel than of Snout, and Hugh cried out lest he shoot Daniel, by accident or design. The Wheatons, father and son, seemed mesmerized and unable to move, as if seeing the entirety of the impact this day would have on their future careers. At last Hugh was grateful to see Colonel Wheaton stepping in front of the Brigadier.
When the shell made a direct hit on the roof, Hugh was aware only of a blinding white concussion and a huge sound cut short by unconsciousness.
—
He didn’t want to wake up. It was pleasant under the weight of the covers, and when he moved it hurt; so how much better to drop back into a deeper sleep. He moved again, and the covers seemed to smother him. He had dirt in his mouth and his nose. He coughed and spluttered and gasped for air. The air smelled of grass and wet earth and bonfires. It was harder now to stay asleep and yet so hard to wake up into pain and a buzzing in his ears.
Distant voices called him. Hands scrabbled at his chest. He surfaced, and all he could see were dark skies. Fat raindrops began to splash on his face. He remembered now that a shell had fallen on the cellar, and he tried to call out, but he had no voice. He could only open his mouth and feel the rain on his tongue. There was a lot of pain as someone lifted his shoulders, and then he could only slip away as many hands pulled him from the sucking earth.
The casualty clearing station was a chaos of stretchers piled in haphazard rows on the ground, in the rain. Patients died before they could be assessed. It had been a large-scale bombardment, almost an offensive, and the casualties covered an entire wheat field. Hugh had woken up in a familiar ambulance to find he was not badly hurt. It was Archie and Bill’s ambulance, and Archie had cheerfully cracked jokes about holiday trips to the seaside as he taped up a couple of broken ribs and patched a nasty cut on Hugh’s head. He could do nothing about the infernal ringing in Hugh’s ears. He had kept his boots in the blast, but somehow lost his trousers, and been laid seminaked on the stretcher. Archie had covered him with a blanket and made ribald comments. Now he sat on a box outside the clearing station and tried to clear his head enough to either offer his help or search the field of stretchers for his cousin and the others.
“Here’s a pair of trousers and a cuppa,” said Archie. “We have to go now, guvnor. Taking a load to the train station.”
“Did you see my cousin? Did they pull any others out of my hole?” he asked. He drank the scalding tea and felt the burn of it in his throat.
“Can’t say for sure,” said the ambulance driver.
“I never imagined angels would look so ugly, but you were a sight for sore eyes,” said Hugh. “Thank you.”
“Who you calling ugly?” said Archie. “Must’ve damaged an eyeball, sir.”
Hugh held a hand to his painful ribs and walked as swiftly as he could bear up and down the rows of stretchers and clusters of wounded men sitting on the grassy field. He knew he had only a few minutes to search before someone would stop him, or before he would feel bound to step in and help the wounded. It was selfish to look for his cousin when so many other cousins, brothers, and sons were bleeding and screaming, but he felt the urgency to find Daniel as a drumming in his head. He was driven along the rows by a horror that he must find him or never be able to face going home.
A loose tourniquet on a stranger stopped him at last. A soldier called out for help for his neighbor, and Hugh, seeing the spurt of an artery, ran to tighten the leather belt on the injured man’s thigh and secure the dressing on his wound with strips torn from his own handkerchief.
“Thanks, sir, he was a goner,” said the soldier who had called out. When Hugh turned to speak to him, the soldier was already dead, eyes empty and a large bloody stain still spreading from a wound to his lower abdomen. Hugh closed his eyes and placed the man’s arms across his chest. He wished there was a cloth to cover his face, but he had to make do with placing the soldier’s cap on top of his hands. In place of a prayer he made a decision to help Daniel by doing his duty to all the wounded.
“Where are the operating tents?” he asked a passing orderly. “I’m a surgeon.”
He worked for ten or twelve hours, standing at a makeshift operating table and moving almost mechanically to stanch, stem, and close whatever wounds appeared before him. His ribs hurt so much he sometimes had to stop and wait for a surge of nausea to pass, but he refused morphine in case it dulled his abilities. The orderlies could hardly boil instruments quickly enough to keep up with the flow of patients, and Hugh, looking up from pushing a lower intestine back through a gaping shrapnel hole, saw with a start that the nurse was not the same one from when he started. He had been unaware of them changing shifts and had just continued to hold out his hand for instruments and slap them back into a waiting palm when he was finished.
It was deep into the night when the flow of the injured finally slowed and Hugh, shaking his head to clear his vision, knew that he was no longer thinking straight. The deep ache in his ribs now brought tears to his eyes. His head throbbed, and his fingers felt numb from the hours of prodding and sewing. He spoke to the nurse and left the tent. He washed his face and hands with strong carbolic soap and freezing water. He took a thick ham sandwich and a cup of tea from a woman running a canteen from the back of a grocer’s van. He was handed a fresh pair of socks and put them on, almost crying with pleasure at the feel of warm, dry wool against his feet. He requisitioned a blanket, and though he was tired almost to collapse, he set out with a kerosene lantern. He walked with the hunched gait of an old man, shuffling through the serried rows of men laid out in tents and in the field, their white bandages bright in the frosty moonlight. He looked in their dirty, broken faces and thought them all his brothers and cousins. And though he asked God to watch over his cousin Daniel, it was enough to be here among Daniel’s fellow soldiers and to have done his best to help them all.
—
In a field containing hundreds of sleeping, or softly groaning, wounded, Hugh found them by the sound of Harry Wheaton loudly calling for a nurse to bring him a bottle of burgundy and a dozen oysters.
“The service in this establishment is perfectly rotten,” said Wheaton as the nurse hurried away. “My friend will have the lobster.” Wheaton was objecting to the mug of oxtail soup and hunk of bread she had left him. He was propped up on a cot, his arm in a sling and his legs covered by a rubber tarp.
“Harry!” said Hugh. “I’ve been looking for you all.”
“You’ve found us, what’s left,” said Harry. “Wake up, Bookham, your cousin is here.” Daniel was lying barely conscious on the next cot, his head heavily bandaged. “They told me to keep him awake,” added Harry. “But he’s always been incurably lazy, haven’t you, Bookham? Always looking for a nap.”
“Daniel, can you hear me?” asked Hugh. He crouched beside Daniel’s cot and felt for his pulse. It was weak but steady.
Daniel’s eyes flickered, and he licked his lips. “Hugh, is that you?” he asked. “I thought you were dead.”
“How do you feel?” asked Hugh. “Can you move?”
“Listen to me, Hugh,” said Daniel. He raised a hand, and
Hugh grasped it. “You must get the boy home. Please promise me you’ll get the boy home.”
“He means young Sidley,” said Harry. He nodded across the aisle, and Hugh went to peer at the boy, who was bandaged across the chest and breathing in irregular gasps. “Got a piece of shrapnel in a lung, they said.”
“Snout, can you hear me?” asked Hugh. The boy opened his eyes and looked at Hugh for a long moment. Then he gave a small smile and closed his eyes again. Hugh hurried back to Daniel.
“I heard the doctors talking,” said Harry in a whisper. “Those who can survive the trip get put on a list for the ambulance trains to the coast. Those that are too weak do not.”
“It’s a new system,” said Hugh. “It keeps the most people alive and saves the very ill from additional pain that will do them no good.”
“Daniel and young Snout are not on the list,” said Harry. “If you have any authority, you had better do something fast.”
“Where are the others?” asked Hugh. “Your father? Lord North?”
“Dead,” said Harry. He turned his head aside to hide any emotion. “My father is gone, Hugh.”
“I’m so sorry,” said Hugh.
“We are the only survivors,” said Harry. “As I told them—such a shame when the court-martial had just found the boy innocent and we were about to leave.”
“Thank you,” said Hugh. He clasped Harry by the arm.
“Of course your cousin had to go and add that the Brigadier threw himself on the lad as the shell was coming in,” said Harry. “Always the weaver of stories. Now Lord North may become a national hero.”
—
The doctor in charge of the casualty station was inclined to be helpful.
“You did sterling work for us today, Lieutenant,” he said. “I will add your cousin to the transport list and give you a pass to go with him to the coast.”
“And my cousin’s batman?” asked Hugh.
“Sorry,” said the doctor. “One officer added to the list is a courtesy; having other ranks jump the queue begins to look like disregard for the regulations. Believe me, we spend too much of our time already turning down impassioned petitions.”
The Summer Before the War Page 45