In Pale Battalions - Retail

by Robert Goddard

  Hernu’s Farm, on a mild day towards the end of February: an innocent day of deceptive warmth. It shines now in my mind like a jewel. The men were resting in the barns and fields. Corporal Quinlan was throwing sticks for old Hernu’s dog and Hallows was sitting in a wicker chair in the watery sun, smoking a cigarette and reading a letter which had recently come with a valentine from his wife. A couple of roosters were pecking at his feet for corn. Guns thumped lazily at the edges of a still afternoon. I rested on the shafts of a hay cart and tried to lighten my friend’s mood.

  ‘How is your wife?’ I asked conversationally.

  He looked up. ‘Very well, I gather.’

  ‘She must miss you.’

  ‘Yes. As I do her. Count yourself lucky to be single, Tom. At times like this, it’s best. I often think of what might happen to Leonora if I died out here. Perhaps I should say: when I die out here.’

  ‘You must cut that out.’ Mine was a good-humoured rebuke, but he had offended an unwritten battalion rule: speak of death if you must, but not your own. That was held to be self-fulfilling prophecy.

  He smiled wryly. ‘Sorry. It’s just that sometimes I think this might go on for ever.’

  I said nothing. I had thought the same myself.

  ‘Perhaps the Americans coming in would tilt the balance. Do you think they will?’

  I shrugged my shoulders. ‘If the Lusitania wasn’t enough, what could make them?’

  ‘I don’t know. The Americans are … strange people. Without history, without … obligation.’ His point eluded me, as he seemed to notice. ‘Sorry.’ So many apologies were uncharacteristic. ‘We had an American houseguest at Meongate over Christmas. He gave me one or two … two insights.’ His concentration seemed to drift, then he looked at me intently. ‘There’s a big push coming this spring, Tom. I’m certain of it. Should I not … come through, would you be prepared to visit my family – tell my wife what happened?’

  ‘Of course. But must we be so gloomy on such a fine day?’

  ‘I suppose not. But remember – this is what they call a false spring.’

  How right he was. Winter returned to Picardy and we with it, to the frozen trenches. In early April, I was given a month’s home leave. I said goodbye to Hallows at the company dug-out one morning of scattered snow. He left off trying to coax a stove into life and walked out with me down the track towards Albert. His farewell was a jaunty one, but still there was that undertow of a bleak mood I couldn’t catch.

  ‘Take care,’ I said, shaking his hand.

  ‘Safe journey,’ he replied, as if to deflect my sentiment. ‘Bring me back an Easter egg – and some spring weather.’

  ‘I’ll do my best.’

  Then he was gone, back into the dug-out.

  Home leave wasn’t the joy it should have been. The train to Le Havre and the crossing to Southampton: they were the best, because they represented – in their prosaic way – freedom, at least for a while. But being back in England? That was a different matter. It no longer seemed like home, it no longer seemed to be a place I could understand. The newspapers were fighting a different war from the one I’d been in and nobody wanted to hear the truth from my lips. I argued with my uncle, prowled the Lambourn downs and wrote to Hallows, telling him how I felt. In London it was no better – if anything, worse. I began to wish my leave away, much as I knew that, as soon as I was back in France, I would regret it. The war had made me homeless.

  In May 1916, just over a year after my first arrival, I was in Le Havre again. Another long train journey, clanking me back across a rain-sodden Normandy towards a fate that waited patiently. At least I was looking forward to seeing Hallows again: I really had brought him his Easter egg.

  The battalion had moved to billets in the village of Louvencourt. I located the command post in an old granary and reported to Colonel Romney.

  ‘Welcome back, Franklin,’ he said stiffly. ‘You’ll rejoin C company, of course. You have a new CO.’

  ‘New, sir? Captain Hallows …’

  ‘Bought it down the line. Didn’t you know?’

  I said nothing. I saluted limply and walked out into the street. Hallows was dead and I hadn’t known. To Romney it meant nothing: just another name, another casualty. I couldn’t believe it, couldn’t imagine that Hallows was gone. I had that absurd gift – an Easter egg – in my pack, but he would never taste it now.

  I got the full story later from the CSM. They were to have pulled out of the Mametz sector on the first of May. The night before, Hallows had gone out with Sergeant Box to check the wire: he wanted to leave it in good order for our successors from the Surrey regiment. Neither man returned. There were gunshots heard in their reach of no man’s land and a couple of flares went up. It was assumed they had run into a German patrol. Certainly the Germans started letting fly at something, which ruled out a rescue party that night. There was no sign next day and then the battalion had to withdraw. A couple of days later, news caught up with them in Louvencourt: one of the Surrey patrols had found a corpse half-submerged in a flooded shell hole. They couldn’t bring him in, but they’d taken his pocket-book and now sent it on to us. It was Hallows’. The CSM still had it, stained with blood. He told me the men had been very upset. ‘They’ve took it ’ard, sir. Very ’ard.’

  Not as hard as me, I felt sure. With Hallows went my faith even in the nobility of survival. We were set there – under the perversely brightening skies of spring – on the grinding road to certain death. Whether it came suddenly, literally out of the blue, or stealthily by night, or in the lumbering schedule of some set-piece slaughter, seemed not to matter. The new company commander, Captain Lake, transferred from the first battalion, was too optimistic by half about the pending offensive. He had little time for me and I less for him. I wrote a long letter to Hallows’ widow and made sure it was on its way before we moved to our trench sector by the banks of the river Ancre. I wondered if I ever would keep my promise to Hallows about visiting his family; on the whole, I rather doubted it.

  June wore on. A long bombardment commenced to soften up the German lines, a prospect I viewed with all the scepticism of a veteran of Loos. Zero day was fixed for June 29th, then put back – on account of bad weather – to July 1st. Lake’s briefing, hedged around with none of the warnings Hallows would have given, airily anticipated seizing the ridge east of Thiepval as part of the big push. Those of us who knew how well defended that ridge was knew also that our number was up.

  July 1st dawned bright with a promise of roasting heat. Lake led us over the top at 7.30 a.m. The men had been instructed to walk steadily across no man’s land towards lines whose occupants were by then supposed to have been shelled out of the way. Naturally, they had not been. Instead, they were ready and waiting to machine-gun the bunched ranks of slowly advancing troops. Round Thiepval, the sloping ground compounded our plight. I was hit before I had gone ten yards. Ahead of me, I saw Lake go down, and dozens more with every moment I watched, shorn like wheat by the scything fire. Surprised to find myself still alive, I crawled back to our trench. You could say I was lucky. Lucky to be hit before I’d gone far and to finish with nothing worse than a smashed shoulder. Yet no man who fought on the Somme that day should be called lucky. Ill fortune attended all our parts. With Hallows gone, I am not sure I much cared whether I lived or died. Perhaps that is why I survived.

  A week later, I was in a hospital bed in London. England, in the summer of 1916. That, I suppose, is where my strange tale has its true beginning.

  TWO

  I WAS NOT in bad shape. Towards the middle of August I was transferred from hospital to a guest house in Eastbourne, taken over for convalescent officers. We were an odd collection, glad to be recovering but reticent about returning to France. Things had been going badly on the Somme – there was no other way they could go. The daily roll of honour read like a petition against inhuman generals. I picked my way along the seafront past old ladies and young men in Bath chairs, thinking – som
etimes – that I could hear the guns across the Channel. Who, in the brightly painted charm of an English seaside resort, could believe that it was really happening?

  Cousin Anthea paid me several visits. What was I going to do? Spend some time in Berkshire? Discussing the Somme with my uncle was a ghastly prospect, yet I would have to make up my mind: my shoulder was healing well and I would soon be discharged.

  Early in September came salvation: a letter – un-solicited – from a benevolent society for injured officers, whose patron, the Countess of Kilsyth, arranged, so I gathered, for victims of the war – provided they were of suitable breeding – to be farmed out to the country houses of her titled acquaintances for rest and recuperation. I sat in a deckchair on the guest house balcony reading the letter with some relief, relief which became surprise when I turned to the attachment, a note from the particular household I was invited to join. The vellum letterhead read: Meongate, Droxford, Hampshire. It was from Lord Powerstock: ‘Having heard so much of you from my late son, I am hopeful that Lady Kilsyth will send you to us.’ And she had. I was to keep my promise after all.

  I reached Droxford railway station in the late morning of a fine Indian summer’s day. No other passengers got off on the raked-gravel platform, though the train waited whilst crates of watercress were loaded. I walked out through the booking hall in a state of trance. Behind me, a whistle blew and the train moved out. A ticket collector, red-faced from doubling as a porter, caught me up and took my ticket with a smile and a comment on the weather. Then I was alone on the forecourt, wondering what to do next. I’d been told I would be collected, but there was no sign of anybody. The train chugged off along the valley and silence began to settle around me in the heat. A swarm of gnats hung beneath the carved eaves of the station building. Somewhere, a dove was cooing.

  Then, along the lane, there came on the gentle breeze a jingle of harness and a clopping of hooves. A pony and trap came into view, making fair speed, and wheeled into the yard. It stopped beside me, the pony pulling up with a stamp that raised some dust. Dust that hung and drifted, a little like gas … but settled more quickly. I looked up at the driver: a stout, barrel-chested old man in faded blue frock coat and pale breeches, straw hat shading a white-whiskered face flushed with rather more than just the heat of a summer’s day.

  He greeted me with patrician good cheer. ‘Good morning, young man. You must be the famous Lieutenant Franklin.’

  ‘Hardly famous. I …’

  ‘Spare me the false modesty. I’m too old for it. Haven’t I come to collect you rather than leave it to a servant? Come. Hop aboard.’ His twinkle-eyed humour was infectious. He wasn’t at all what I’d expected.

  I stowed my bag and climbed up beside him. ‘Forgive me, but … are you Lord Powerstock?’

  ‘Bless you, no.’ He loosed a rumbling laugh, then twitched on the reins and started us back down the lane. ‘What do you think of Lucy’s bells?’ He gestured towards the pony’s head. There were little silver bells fastened to the bridle, tinkling as we rode. It was the same sound I’d heard on his approach – a puzzling sound, somehow out of place in the Hampshire farmland.

  ‘Very nice,’ I said lamely.

  He laughed again. ‘They’re troika bells. From Russia. A personal gift from the Czar.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘No. Not really. But they are from Russia. I did business there once.’ He looked at me and winked. ‘When I was your age. A long time ago.’ He paused and bowled along the lane without speaking for a while. Then he began again, as if remembering something he’d been about to say. ‘Lord Powerstock? That’s a good one. No. I’m a skeleton in his cupboard, though a fleshy one, as you see. Charter Gladwin’s the name: a sort of relic of family history.’

  ‘For a relic, you manage this pony well, sir.’

  He laughed again, as he did often, with ease, unforced and bubbling, like wine overflowing a recharged glass. ‘Always defer to age, young man. It’s an excellent policy, though I never followed it myself. After all, who else in these parts is likely to be able to remember the old Queen’s coronation?’

  ‘Nobody – I imagine.’

  ‘Exactly. But you’ll be wanting to know what I’m to do with young John – Captain Hallows. Well, I’m his grandfather. My daughter was his mother. Now they’re both gone. Just me left. Comical, ain’t it?’

  ‘Well, I hardly …’

  ‘No. You’re right. Not comical. A damn shame. I liked John. A fine young man. Good few of ’em being lost out there, I dare say.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said grimly. ‘There are.’

  ‘Poorly equipped, badly led, sadly wasted. Ain’t that the size of it?’

  ‘You seem well informed, sir.’

  ‘Not at all. It’s what they said about the Crimea. I didn’t think much could have changed.’ He laughed and, this time, despite myself, I laughed with him.

  The lane was rising now, taking us between high hedges over the swell of a gentle down and away from the line of the railway. We were leaving behind the water meadows of the curving Meon and climbing through sheep-cropped pasture and shady hangers of oak.

  ‘The house will be in view soon,’ the old man announced. ‘I’ll try to be on my best behaviour when we get there. You’ll have to do the same.’

  ‘I’ll try not to offend anyone.’

  ‘It’s just there’s been a black mood hanging over the place since John died. Not that I’m saying he should be forgotten, but it’s been four months now. Edward – Lord Powerstock – don’t seem able to pull round. As for Leonora …’ He tailed off in tongue-clicking disappointment.

  I recognized Leonora as Hallows’ wife. ‘She’s bound to have taken it hard.’

  Gladwin grunted at that and set his face to the road. We had reached the other side of the down now and were following a straight lane beneath arching chestnut trees. To the left of us ran a high brick wall, breached and patched in places. From the trap, glimpsed between thickly leaved trees, I could see a large house set in its own grounds. A few minutes later, we wheeled off the lane between open wrought-iron gates and up a curving drive through patches of sunlight and shade, then emerged from the trees and crossed open parkland towards the house itself.

  ‘Welcome to Meongate,’ Gladwin muttered. ‘Hope you like the place as much as I do. Between you and me, it’s why I let my daughter marry into the family.’

  It was easy to see what he meant. Meongate stood gracefully in its park, well proportioned without being grandiose, an L-shaped structure of brick and flint, the drive leading past the main frontage of the house whilst a cross-wing at the far end ran away behind the building to form an angle enclosing an ornamental garden. Halfway along the roof of the wing, standing as high as its tall, slender-stacked chimneys, was a single glazed turret supporting a weather-vane. Sun caught the vane’s gilded figure, warmed the brickwork of the house and lit the ivy-framed windows. Here were all the comforting English rural virtues cast in stone and leaf; here – little knowing what awaited me – I came home in Hallows’ place.

  We drew up before the open front door and Gladwin heaved himself down with a great shudder of the trap. A man appeared from the porch to take my bag and Gladwin bellowed good-naturedly at him.

  ‘Not bad, eh, Fergus?’ He flipped open a fob-watch. ‘There and back in just over the half-hour.’

  ‘You’ve been driving her too hard,’ Fergus muttered as he went in with my bag.

  ‘You’re an old woman,’ Gladwin boomed after him. He winked at me as I climbed down and Fergus reappeared. ‘Lucy likes a run – which is more than you do.’

  This time, Fergus only grunted as he led the pony away. We turned towards the house, where a woman was now standing in the doorway to greet us.

  ‘Brace yourself,’ Gladwin said to me from the corner of his mouth. ‘It’s her Ladyship.’

  ‘Her Ladyship?’

  ‘The second Lady Powerstock. The painted lantern of his Lordship’s later life.’


  As in everything, Gladwin exaggerated. The woman I was looking at was an elegant, Italianate beauty not many years past her peak, dark hair drawn up from a classical, high-cheeked face, a floral-patterned dress with a hint of silk shaping itself to a figure that conceded nothing to what I took to be her age. Was there, withal, something – something in the icy edge of her smile – to warn me? I cannot say.

  ‘Lieutenant Franklin,’ she said, holding out her hand in a way that made me bow as I took it. ‘How wonderful to meet you.’ Even while I was saying how pleased I was to be there, she was glancing towards Gladwin and hardening her tone. ‘I understood that Fergus was to meet you.’

  The old man did not respond directly. He grunted and looked at me. ‘I’ll not come in with you, Franklin. One or two things to attend to. Olivia will look after you. We’ll meet again later.’ He plodded away, hands defiantly grasping his lapels and head tossed haughtily back.

  As soon as he was gone, Lady Powerstock led me through the porch into the hall, suddenly dark after the daylight and heavy with the polished wood of a vast, decorated fireplace. A broad split stairway led to a circular landing, from where sunlight seeped down and played in shifting patches on richly patterned carpets and wall-hung oriental rugs: touches of exoticism amid the stillness of a slowly ticking clock.

  ‘I’ll have your bag taken up to your room, Lieutenant,’ she said. ‘Unless you want to go straight up yourself, I’m sure my husband would like to meet you.’

  ‘As I would him.’