The outer tube I think was steel — duly corrugated — but wooden inner tubes made the mess-hut and the one I shared with my host voluptuously snug and weather-proof. It was the wildest and wettest night of all the winter, but not a drop or a draught came in anywhere, and I am afraid I thought with selfish satisfaction of the many perforations in our own thin-skinned hut. An open fire was another treat to me; and I remember being much intrigued by a buttery-hatch in the background. It reminded me of the third act of The Admirable Crichton.
There were only four of us at dinner, or five including a parrot who hopped about saying things I have forgotten. All the other three were temporary Guardsmen; that I knew; but to me they seemed the lineal descendants of the bear-skinned and whiskered heroes in old volumes of Punch. I suppose they were colder in their Balaclava huts, but I warrant the other atmosphere was much the same. We should not have had Wagner on a gramophone before Sebastopol; but they would have given me Veuve Cliquot, or whatever the very best may have been in those days; and if I had committed the solecism of asking for more bread, having consumed my statutory ration, the mess-waiter of 1855 would have put me right in the same solicitous undertone that spared my blushes in 1918. The perfect blend of luxury and discipline would have been as captivating then as now and ever, and the kindness of my hosts a thing to write about in fear and trembling, no matter how gratefully.
But there would have been no duck-boards to follow through wind and rain to my host’s warm hut, and I should not be looking back upon as snug a winter’s night as one could wish to spend. How we lay talking while the storm frittered its fury upon the elephant’s tough hide! Once more it was talk of schooldays, but not of mine; it was all about Eton this time, and nearly all about a boy there who had been most dear to us both. He was now out here in his grave; but which of them was not? Of the group that I knew best before the war, only he whom I was with to-night! I lay awake listening to his even breathing, and prayed that he at least might survive the holocaust yet to come.
A BOY’S GRAVE
(February, 1918)
Somewhere in Flanders there was a ruined estaminet, with an early trench running round it, that I longed to see for the sake of a grave in a farm-yard not far behind. The grave itself was known to be obliterated. Though dug very deep by men who loved the boy they laid there at dead of night, and though the Sergeant (who loved him most) could say what a strong cross they had placed over it, the grave was so situated, and the whole position so continuously under fire, that official registration was never possible, nor any further reassurance to be had. The boy’s Division went out of the Line, and at length went back into another sector; but more than one officer who knew his people, and one brave friend who had only heard of them, searched the spot without avail. For two years it was so near the enemy and so heavily shelled that the fear became a moral certainty that everything had been swept away; then the boy’s father chanced to meet his Army Commander; and that great human soldier ordered the investigation that bore out every dread. Nothing remained to mark the grave. And yet I longed to see the place; the tide of battle had at last receded; at least I might see what was left of the trench where the boy had fallen, and have something to tell his mother on my return. So I had set my heart, originally, on working for the Y.M.C.A. in Flanders. Had I been given my way about that, very little that I have now to tell could possibly have happened.
It was ordained, however, that I should go to France, and a long way down the Line, an impossible journey from my secret goal. To be honest, I had a voice in this myself, and even readily acquiesced in the arrangement; for there were sound reasons for taking the first opening that offered; and on reflection I saw myself the unsoundness of my first position. After all, I was not going out for secret or for private ends; and even in Flanders, what means or what authority should I have had for hunting among graves, marked or unmarked? What guide could I have hoped to get to show me all I wished to see, and what could I have seen or done without a guide? Already the new plan spelt a providential exclusion from a sphere of futile mortification and divided desires: to France I went, and with an easy mind. And in France the first people I saw, in my first hut, as customers across the counter, were the boy’s old Division!
I suppose the odds against that must have been fairly long. Of all the Divisions in the B.E.F. only three were plying between our town and the Line; and of those three that Division was one. It was, moreover, the one that we saw most of in the Ark. Theirs were the pink barracks just outside our gates; it was their cinema that lay across our bows in the mud; their motley Battalions that could make the hut a Babel of all the dialects in Great Britain. The boy’s Brigade was up the Line when I arrived; in a few days it came down, and under the familiar regimental cap-badge how eagerly I sought the faces that looked old enough to have three years’ service! They are the veterans of this war; but few, it seemed, were left. Did I discover one, he had not been in B Company. I grew ashamed of questioning. It was not before the Brigade had been up the Line for another sixteen days, and come back again, that a little hard-bitten man aroused fresh hopes and passed all tests. He had not only been in the Regiment at the time, but in B Company; not only in B Company, but in the boy’s Platoon; there when he fell; one of the burial party!
We had a long talk in the inner room. It appeared there were two other survivors of the old Platoon; the Sergeant, as I knew to my sorrow, had died Company Sergeant-Major at Passchendaele. Of the other two, one in particular, now a bandsman but in 1915 a stretcher-bearer, could tell me everything: he should come and see me himself. He never did come, and I saw no more of the little man who promised to send him. Once again they all went up the Line, and by the time that tour was over I had deserted the hut near their barracks. The little man called there and left a message; it was to say he was going on leave for three weeks, and the Battalion were going away to rest. When they all got back, he would bring the bandsman to see me without fail.
It is a long story; but then Coincidence (or what we will) was stretching a very long arm. Coincidence (at least in the literal sense) was indeed stretching out both arms: one of them was busy all this time at distant Ypres. An unknown friend there, remotely connected with the boy’s people, thought he had discovered the boy’s grave. He had written home to say so; the news was sent out to me, and we got into correspondence. He had searched the shell-blasted farm-yard where the burial was known to have taken place, and he had discovered — evidence. Some of this evidence he eventually sent me: a cheap French or Flemish watch, red with the rust and mould of a soldier’s grave: just the watch that a boy would buy at the nearest town for his immediate needs. Now, at the time of his death, this boy’s watch was being mended in London; therefore, the one now in my hands was good evidence as far as it went. A boot-strap had been found as well, and something else that tallied terribly; on the strength of all this testimony, and of an instinctive certainty in the mind of our unknown friend, a new cross already marked the site of these discoveries. He wanted me to see the place for myself, and as soon as possible, in case the enemy should make his expected thrust in that quarter. Nor could I have gone too soon for my own satisfaction. Grave or no grave (for I could not quite share his sanguine conviction), I longed to grasp the hand of a man who had done so much for people he had never met: and to see all there was to see with my own eyes.
But it is not so easy to travel sixty miles up or down the Line. It is a question of permits, which take some getting, and of facilities which very properly do not exist. Military railways are not for the transport of civilian camp-followers on private business; moreover, they do go slow when there is no military occasion for much speed; and I had my work, when all was said. But my luck (if you like) was in again. The first old friend that I had met in France was a friend in a higher place than I may say. Already he had shown himself my friend indeed; now, in my need —— But here the coincidences multiply, and must be kept distinct.
On the very morning I heard from Yp
res — with the watch and the invitation — I was due to visit this old friend in another part altogether. He sent his car for me, the splendid man. I showed him my letter from Ypres.
‘You will have to go,’ he said.
‘But how?’
‘In my car.’
‘Sixty miles!’
(It was much more from where he was.)
‘You can have it for two days.’
I could not thank him; nor can I here. How can a man speak for the mother of an only child, whose grave he was to see with her eyes as well as with his own, so that one day he might tell her all? Without a car, in fine, the thing was impossible. There are no thanks for actions such as this: none that words do not belittle. A day was fixed, ten days ahead; this gave me time to write to the boy’s mother, and gave her time to send direct to Ypres all the bulbs and plants that she could get, to make her child’s bed as gay that spring as he himself had been all the days they were together.
And yet — and yet — was it his grave that had been found? Was the evidence as good as it seemed? I was going all the way to Ypres on the strength of that local evidence only. If I could but have taken one or other of those two men who were there when it happened in 1915! But one of them was away on leave, his three weeks not nearly up; the other, the bandsman who knew most of all, might or might not be with the Battalion; but the Battalion itself was still away. I found that out for certain on the morning of the day before I was to start. They were still resting many kilometres back. I had no means of getting to them, even if I had had the right sort of desire; but the fact was that everything had come about so beautifully without one move of mine, that I was quite consciously content to drift in the current of an unfathomable influence.
That afternoon there came to my hut, for no particular reason that he ever told me, a man I had not met before. He was the Senior Chaplain of the boy’s Division. We made friends, by what steps I cannot remember, but I must have told him where I was going next day. He was interested. I told him the whole thing. He said: ‘But surely there must be somebody in the Battalion that you could take with you, to identify the place?’ I told him there was such a man, a bandsman, but the Battalion was away resting and I was not sure but that the man himself was on leave. Said the Chaplain: ‘I can find out. I know where they are. I can get them on the telephone. If you don’t hear from me again, go round their way in the morning when you get the car. It’s ten kilometres in the wrong direction, but it may be worth your while.’
Worth my while! I did not hear from him again; not a word all that anxious evening to spoil the prospect he had opened up; and in the morning came the car, a powerful limousine, mine for the next two days! My pass from the A.P.M. was for Ypres only, but I did not think of that. In less than an hour we had found those rest-billets among ploughed fields at peace in the spring sunshine; and at the right regimental headquarters, a young Corporal ready waiting in his field overcoat. It was the bandsman: he who had been nearest to the boy at the very last, to whose special care his dear body had been committed. The living man who had most to tell me!
And the first thing he told me showed what a mercy it was to have him with me; but at the moment it came as a shock. I had shown him the watch; he had shaken his head. No watch had been buried with the boy; of that the Corporal was unshakably certain; and he was the man to know, the man whose duty it had been to make sure at the time. Away went our strongest piece of evidence! Then I told him about the boot-strap, always a doubtful item in my own mind; and the Corporal swept it aside at once. The boy had not worn boots with straps; he had worn ordinary laced boots and puttees; exactly as I had been thinking at the back of my mind. He had not been out many weeks, and I knew every noble inch of him that went away. So, after all, it was not his grave that had been found! That would have been a grievous blow but for the transcending thought — it was not his grave that had been disturbed! And we might never have known but for this young soldier at my side who was saying quite confidently that he could show me where the grave really was! One of — at most — three living men who could!
Who had brought him to my side — at the last moment — the very man I wanted — the one man needful?
To be sure, the Senior Chaplain of their Division; but why should the Senior Chaplain, a man I never saw before, have come to my hut in the nick of time to do me this service, so definitely desired? Why should I myself have come to the very place in France where the Division was waiting for me — the one place where I had also an old friend with a car to lend me when the time came? Why had I not gone to Belgium (to be near the boy) as I at first intended? And why, at that very time, should a complete stranger have been making entirely independent efforts to find the grave in Belgium that I yearned to see?
‘Chance’ is no answer, unless the word be held to cover an organic tissue of chances, each in turn closely related to some other chance, all component parts of a chance whole! And what sensation novelist would build a plot on such foundations and hope to make his tale convincing? Not I, at my worst; and there were more of these chances still to come, albeit none that mattered as did those already recounted.
Nor is there very much left to tell that bears telling here. In Ypres I did not find my great unknown friend; he had warned me, when it was too late to alter plans, that he might be called home on a private matter; and this had happened. But he had told me I should find his ‘trusty Sergeant,’ who had taken part in the investigations, ready to help me in every way; and so, indeed, I did. The man was, among other things, an enthusiastic amateur gardener; he had known exactly what to do with the bulbs and plants, which he had unpacked on their arrival and was keeping nice and moist for next morning. But this was not the first thing we had to talk about. The first thing was to impress upon the Sergeant the importance of not letting my witness know that a new cross had been put up, and so to ensure absolutely independent identification of the spot. He gave me his promise, and I know he kept it.
Next morning, under a leaden February sky, the three of us drove north in the car, accompanied by a second Sergeant with digging tools, in case the bandsman located the grave elsewhere and I was bent upon some proof. At the time I did not know why he was with us; later, the quiet little fact above spoke volumes for the good faith of the party. It was completed by a young Catholic Padre from Ypres, so that the only office which the boy had lacked at the hands of his dear men might now be fulfilled.
I am following the course we took upon a military map given to the boy’s father by one of the many officers who had befriended him in his trouble; and I had been prepared for the thickening cluster of shell-holes further on by more than one aeroplane photograph sent from Army Headquarters. O that all whom this war has robbed of their hearts’ delight could know, as this father knows, how the huge heart of the Army is with them in their sorrow! There was the Army Commander, who had done what he could for a man he met but once by chance; it was not much that even he could do, but how more than readily it had been done! And now here in the car, itself a tangible sign of infinite compassion, were these N.C.O.’s and this young priest, with their grave faces and their kind eyes! One’s heart went out to them. It seemed all wrong to be taking men, who any day might be in theirs, to see a soldier’s grave in cold blood. So we fell to discussing the sky, the mud, and such landmarks as remained, quite simply and naturally, as the boy himself would have wished.
‘Plains that the moonlight turns to sea,’ the boy had quoted in describing the plain we were crossing now; but it had become a broken plain since his time; covered with elephant huts and pill-boxes, scored by light railways; the roads on which no man might live in those days, themselves alive with traffic in these, with lorries and men and all the abundant activities of a host behind a host. The car stopped one or two hundred yards from our destination, towards which we threaded our way over duck-boards, through and past these mushroom habitations, till we came to the green open space which was all that remained of the farm. Not a stone or
a brick to be seen; not even a heap of bricks, or a charred beam, or the empty socket of pillar or post; only the two gate-posts themselves, looking like the stumps of trees. But what better than a gateway to give a man his bearings? It led the bandsman straight to a regular file of such stumps, which really had been trees: and in his path stood a white cross, new and sturdy, at which I had been looking all the time: at which he stopped without looking twice, still studying the ground and the bits of landmarks that survived. It was the place.
It was the boy’s grave; and the discoverer’s — nay, the diviner’s — instinct stood vindicated as wonderfully as his evidence had been discredited. Almost adjoining it was a great shell-hole full of water; but it was not our grave that the shell had rifled. Our grave had been dug too deep. It was as though the boy himself had said: ‘It’s my grave all right — but I don’t want you to go thinking those were my things! All that was me or mine is just as they left it.’
So we took off our helmets and stood listening to the young priest reading the last office, in Latin first and then in English. And many of the beautiful sentences were punctuated by loud reports, which I took for our guns if I thought of them at all; for as yet I had heard hardly anything else down south; but after the service I saw little black balloons appearing by magic in mid-air, expanding into dingy cloudlets, and presently dissolving shred by shred. It was enemy shrapnel all the time.
Complete Works of E W Hornung Page 542