by Tom Remiger
‘Why on earth would you do that?’
‘I suppose to focus their minds, but keep it safer…I’m trying to say that Cousins might not have believed the danger to have been as great as it was.’ Breen watched the delicate sway of the trees. He imagined their suthering, and he tailed off, making a small hopeless gesture.
‘I don’t understand. He must have retained enough doubt to try to stay within the margin of error.’
‘You’re probably right,’ said Breen.
When Tiger took his turn giving evidence, he scotched the notion that Cousins didn’t know the ammunition was live.
Clark volunteered that Tiger had reminded them of this as they lined up for the crawl. ‘He said, sir, that since the bullets they’re using are bloody real, keep your bloody heads down.’
The evidence, nothing but rumour, that Cousins hadn’t the strongest nerve was piled up. Witnesses realised that providing an anecdote was a quick way to get an afternoon off. They talked about his resentment of the army, his unhappiness with the conditions in which he found himself. ‘I thought we were fighting for freedom,’ he had said to one man, ‘so where’s our fucking freedom?’
Captain Sinclair’s evidence lent the most weight. He had to be persistently questioned before he revealed that Tiger had talked to him about Cousins: Tiger had wanted him to be reverted back to the ranks. He was worried he would panic at some crucial moment.
‘And you took no action on Lieutenant Jackson’s request?’
‘I told him to wait until something definite happened.’ Sinclair was sweating up there before the row of officers. All three were looking at him. Breen could see dark circles beneath his armpits.
‘But you must have given credence to the lieutenant’s complaints? He would have known the deceased better than you, yes? It was, I think, Field Marshal Wolseley who said that a platoon commander ought to know his men better than their mothers do.’
‘It seemed better to wait,’ said Sinclair.
In the long silence, Breen tried to remember Wolseley, that eminent Victorian general, saying any such thing.
‘I liked Cousins,’ Sinclair said. ‘He had guts. I was very reluctant to move him.’
The silence dragged on until Tiger, quite improperly, spoke up. ‘No blame can attach to Captain Sinclair. He explained his reasoning to me fully at the time.’
‘And what,’ asked the president of the court, ‘was that reasoning?’
The officer to his right played with a pencil.
‘Beyond the general principle of the thing, he was concerned about the social structure of the battalion.’
‘The social structure?’
Neither Tiger nor Sinclair spoke. The officer to the president’s left, an engineer, looked at them for a bit.
‘The social structure of the battalion,’ Tiger said eventually, ‘was complicated by Cousins’ antecedents. He was generally popular, but beyond that, his maternal uncle, Major Faulding, is the commander of A Company.’
The inquiry’s only recommendations were that more wire be strung in such exercises, regardless of shortages; that all officers be reminded of the importance of considering the men under their command as individuals, and on the strength of their behaviour rather than their connections; and that flags not be damaged by wire in misguided attempts to make them more visible.
There was a sense of something remaining unsaid. The rider that no blame attached to him left Captain Sinclair in a filthy mood, but there were no consequences for anyone. ‘Trust Tiger to come out of one of his own blokes having his head blown off looking better than when he went in,’ said Bluey.
And that was the end of the brief military career of Corporal Daniel Cousins, late of Winton.
5
That week, Breen had the job of censoring the company’s mail. He always tried to put it off as long as he could, and then only skimmed the letters. It was intriguing, at first, to glimpse the private lives of others, but then each letter started to sound the same.
Going through the stack of flimsy-paper letters on Friday night, Breen paused. One of the letters was from Cousins. He would have to read it anyway, of course, but it was strange. The man who scrawled it was dead, and yet the letter was still there.
Cousins wrote in the careful and rather beautiful script of someone who had finished his education at primary school and whose handwriting had not broken down under the pressure of exams and essays. He wrote in blue ink. There were splotches of it across the thin paper. The recipient was his brother, a miner named Tom. The letter began in much the same way as a dozen others. All the writers had shared a ten-per-cent leave to London, and seemed to have had exactly the same experience.
But then Cousins had returned to the letter (heading: NEXT DAY), and Breen, reading attentively, tapped his pen on the desk.
I do not mean to be alarming, but if something was to happen to me I would want you to kick up a hell of a stink, not in action I mean but ordinary time. This army is not a fair place, and a man can’t get a fair go here. I don’t mean only that the sergeant is a prick and the leftenant a bit too up himself for me but that it’s just not right the way a man can be treated and they’re bloody bastards the lot of them always out to get a man who didn’t do them any harm, not really. I have to say that someone you know agrees with me which is a comfort, tho in some ways he is as bad as the rest. Jesus but I would like to show them all and I have already played some tricks on them.
But anyway this is not the place to be burdening you with my troubles altho I must say they would be easier to bear if I had more letters from you and Minnie. Tell me please…
The letter drifted into reminiscences of home, disguised as questions. Breen felt somehow that he had no right to read them, and his eyes passed lightly over half-familiar phrases. At the end of the letter, where others had signed themselves ‘With love,’ or ‘Yours,’ or ‘Yours ever,’ or as loving husbands, fathers, sons or brothers, Cousins had signed himself ‘Yours sincerely’. It was as if he had learnt the basic pattern of a letter and did not know how to change it.
Breen leaned back in his chair. In some ways, the complaints were no different from those of anyone else, but in another, in context, and with that half-formal ending…
‘The bastard topped himself,’ he said. ‘Now, who made him do that? And what in hell am I going to do about it?’
The mail was sacrosanct, the battalion’s great pleasure. To destroy a letter wasn’t on. And yet this letter must have been an act of revenge from beyond the grave, a way to make the bastards pay. He would be failing in his duty to let it go unimpeded. Breen decided that he needed to talk to someone else.
His first impulse was to go up to the room he shared with Bluey, but then he remembered that Bluey was at the pub. Captain Sinclair, however, would be in. He almost always was.
The captain’s room was small. Perhaps it had once belonged to a servant. Now, while everyone else shared the larger rooms, it was his alone. He wore the same battledress everyone did, but with a scarf of soft fabric; it was cold in his room. Breen noticed that his boots were unpolished. There was mud splashed around the sides of the soles. The captain was writing at a desk made out of packing cases. ‘A letter home,’ he said, and Breen followed his gaze to a photograph of his fiancée. He knew she was a schoolteacher.
One couldn’t really think like this, but her existence was a bit surprising to him. The appeal was probably intellectual: two people being bored together. Sinclair turned the photograph towards him with the air of one bestowing a great favour. She had an ambitious face, memorable, without good looks. Breen’s romanticism meant that he saw intelligence and longing stamped on her face as symptomatically as the wrinkles of a smoker.
‘Gorgeous,’ he said.
‘What did you want to see me about?’ The captain turned the photograph face down, as if Breen did not deserve to see any more of her. The other papers on the desk did not look like a letter home.
‘It’s only a little thing,’ said Bre
en. ‘Or it might not be. I can’t tell.’ He handed over Cousins’ letter in its unsealed envelope.
The captain read. He gave the relevant passage close attention—Breen, watching him in the candlelight, could tell when he got to it by the way his expression changed.
‘Well,’ the captain said. ‘What are we going to do about this?’
‘We could just chuck it in the fire and forget about it.’ Breen didn’t believe in the idea, even as he spoke. And when he looked, feeling the chill coming off the stone floor, there was no fire lit.
‘No one’s going to want to revisit the inquiry, to be sure,’ said Sinclair, with an air of having made a decision. ‘Even if it were a suicide—well, they’d call it an accident to spare everyone’s feelings. But I don’t like the idea that a man might have been bullied to death in my company.’
‘There’s no proof,’ said Breen. He knew it was the sort of thing where there was never any proof.
‘Let me have a think,’ said Sinclair. ‘Just leave it on your desk for now, and sort through the others. More strife and sorrow.’
‘You don’t think we should have a chat to Tiger and see if he noticed any bullying?’
‘What if he were the one doing it?’
Breen was surprised. ‘That’s not the way I read the letter. The lieutenant’s up himself, that’s all. And besides that…’
‘Yes?’
‘It’s not his way. A man driven to death in his platoon. It’d hurt his pride. That’s not how he sees himself, and he’d go a long way to prevent it. Whatever he felt would be nothing compared to making sure he had the best platoon.’
‘Maybe,’ said the captain.
‘I think, sir,’ said Breen, ‘that maybe you’re feeling a wee bit prejudiced about him.’ He wanted to try to explain, but the captain was a superior officer. He couldn’t understand what it was like to rely on someone to the death; he had to rely on himself alone.
The captain’s tiredness seemed to lift. ‘Tiger ran rings around me at that bloody inquiry, I’ll give him that. But you’re sure you don’t know of any reason to suspect he didn’t like Cousins?’
‘You yourself said Tiger tried to get him demoted.’
‘That,’ said the captain, ‘wasn’t personal. It was startlingly impersonal, to be frank with you. He just proved to his own satisfaction, and more or less to mine, that Cousins was less competent than some alternatives, and so for the good of the platoon he ought to go. Not personal at all.’
‘There’s one thing worth mentioning,’ said Breen, hesitating. He told the captain about Elaine and Tiger and Cousins.
‘Nope,’ said Sinclair, ‘that doesn’t hold up at all.’
‘Why not?’
‘Check the dates. The next day of the letter is still a day before you saw that little piece of entertainment. It’s too early.’
‘Oh,’ said Breen.
‘I mean, have a chat with her if you like, but we might as well skip straight to Tiger, see if he knows anything. And Clark too. Then any cobbers of Cousins, and—’
‘Yes?’
‘Two things.’ He read aloud from the letter: ‘Cousins says, “they’re bloody bastards the lot of them always out to get a man who didn’t do them any harm, not really. I have to say that someone you know agrees with me which is a comfort.” So what does “not really” mean? And who is “someone you know”? I’d try and find that out.’
‘Righto,’ said Breen, slightly bewildered at all the jobs he was accumulating. ‘We could check his stuff, too, before it gets sent back.’
‘Good man,’ said Sinclair. ‘You’d best get back to your desk before anyone worries about you missing. We’ll make a start in the morning.’
‘Sir,’ said Breen.
‘You needn’t say that quite so much,’ said the captain. He smiled. ‘We’re going to have to have a fair bit to do with one another.’
Breen smiled back, feeling insincere. The captain didn’t seem part of his community of intimacy, the thirty or so officers who had been thrown into living and working together in a strange land. Sinclair was separate, not among them yet, marked out like the Australian Holloway—Tiger’s young friend—or Baird, doubly separated by his role as adjutant and his mother’s brown skin.
They would lie on the side of the road during a route march—most of a hundred men, the whole company—and their silent eyes would look first at the fat Englishmen going past the hop-picker’s huts and caravans while their walking sticks flashed out at the heads of thistles, and then at the captain, equally foreign. ‘On with the show,’ one of the lieutenants would say, Breen or Bluey or Tiger, and there’d be a relacing of boots and a checking of buckles while the talk began once again. ‘We’ll be like brothers,’ Holloway had said. ‘Forever and ever.’
6
Early the next morning Breen found Sergeant Clark smoking outside after stand-to. He was alone in the slanting light, looking out in the direction of London.
‘Gidday,’ said Breen.
‘Gidday, sir,’ said Clark.
Breen wondered what to say. Clark waited.
‘Cousins,’ said Breen. ‘I wanted to talk to you about Cousins.’
‘Yes?’
‘Was he happy?’
Clark dropped his cigarette and ground it out. Breen saw that a magpie was watching them. One for sorrow.
‘Remember Burnham, sir? All those details to pick up bits of paper and cigarette packets. And old screaming skull.’
‘I remember.’ Butts in the latrines, the wind coming off the mountains and cutting through their serge uniforms. Queues and unfamiliar bugle calls.
‘You were one of us, the first couple of weeks. No commission. Do you remember how it felt? No one’s all that happy, in this man’s army. There are good times, bloody good times. But you pay for them. You give up responsibility, and you have to pick up the bloody rubbish.’
‘You’ve been wondering, then?’
‘Of course I’ve been bloody wondering. Sir. Cousins was my responsibility, in a way. More than that, he was one of us.’
Breen didn’t normally feel like a townie, but sometimes he was reminded. His men, his Southlanders. Breen had to try to cross this barrier.
‘Was there anyone—well, making a harder time of it for him?’
‘Cousins?’ Clark looked at Breen oddly. ‘He was popular enough.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘If anyone was giving him a time of it, it’d have been me. The lads liked him. A bit of a joker. Flush with cash. He’d give you a bit of lip.’
‘But?’
‘A piss-poor soldier. He wanted to be liked too much. Would never give anyone a job to do, or do it himself either. Someone has to pick up the bloody rubbish.’
‘So you reprimanded him?’
‘A bit. Doing my duty, like. But—nothing personal. I’d feel bloody guilty if I thought—’
‘Who were his mates?’
‘He wasn’t exactly the sort of man who got anyone close to him, you know?’
‘Well, who might he have talked to if he was worried about something?’
‘You might try Murray Wethers, who was lance. He’s got his job now. But, as I say, he wasn’t the sort.’
‘You didn’t treat him too harshly, did you, Clark?’
A pair of steady brown eyes looked over the round glasses. Breen realised that Clark was quite a small man for a soldier.
‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘Lord, I don’t think so. But I’d have been glad to be shot of him. You know the charge sheet? Conduct to the prejudice of good order and discipline. That was him all over, even if you couldn’t ever quite touch him.’
Breen had the strong sense that there was something Clark wasn’t telling him. ‘Give me an example.’
‘It’s easy to miss a spot here, when you’re shaving, right?’ Clark touched under the corner of his jawbone. ‘So he’d turn up more or less every bloody day with tufts of hair there. I mentioned it to him once or tw
ice, and it just kept happening. And then a couple of others would do the same. No big bloody deal. But enough to make a joke of me.’
‘That doesn’t sound the spirit that makes a man do himself in.’
‘It probably was an accident. It’s just such a bloody strange one. You start to doubting.’
‘You said he was flush with cash.’ Breen was reminded of a friend, now drowned off Scotland: a wild one, alternating between poverty and reckless wealth, calling himself ‘flush’. In first year he had asked without any shame at all if any of the older medical students could help his girlfriend with a small problem, a necessary little operation. He had a fiver in his hand while he spoke, half-drawing it out of his pocket, crumpling it, teasing it out again.
‘I don’t know anything,’ said Clark. ‘Not for sure.’
‘But?’
‘Crown and Anchor. The house gets about eight per cent of what the punters put down. He started on the voyage over, I reckon. Chalk the board on the decks and wipe it away if you see someone coming. And now—’
‘So he was encouraging gambling?’
‘To get to London on leave—you’ve got to show three pounds to support yourself, right? Must be a hell of a temptation if you’re a wee bit short. Have a go at it. Or even just one of those arvos where you’ve nothing to do. You’ve got to speculate to accumulate, you tell yourself.’
‘Ever been tempted?’
‘We’ve all been tempted.’ Clark scratched his face. ‘Look, when I say I’ve been wondering. I don’t think I have, not really. He wasn’t the type. There was too much mischief in him just to give up.’
‘He left a letter,’ said Breen, ‘with plenty of mischief in it. Telling his brother to kick up a fuss if anything happened to him. Seeming to imply, you know, what he was planning.’
‘Maybe,’ said Clark. ‘Your man Tavendale. Popping one into his own leg.’
‘That’s not what the court decided,’ said Breen.
‘Sure, sure. But if Cousins had been fed up—properly fed up—that’s what he’d have done. Get out of it and maybe even get a pension. Not just stand up and die. It wasn’t the man’s way.’