Then the casualties began to occur, the first of them, Roddy, John Rudd’s boy, who had written home in September, ‘We are looking for Von Spee: when we find him we shall go to the bottom!’ thus fulfilling John’s prophecy regarding the emptiness of boasts regarding the Navy’s invincibility. After that came news of Walt Pascoe’s death in Gallipoli but although Paul regretted Walt, whom he had liked, he did not waste much time on his widow, one of the few local women who seemed to be enjoying the war. After that, in May, 1915, came news that Tom Williams and his nephew had been torpedoed and of the near-riot that occurred in the churchyard when Tom was seen to put flowers on the grave of the German seamen buried there. Then a letter came from the old German Professor, who wrote from America to say that his only son, whisked into the Kaiser’s Army whilst on holiday, had been killed in Champagne. It was foolish, perhaps, to mourn the death of an enemy yet Paul did regret a boy whom he had always regarded as a charming, friendly lad with a splendid physique and courtly manners. He did not and could not see Gottfried Scholtzer as a ravisher of Belgian women and bayoneter of infants notwithstanding the report that the Germans had just used poison gas at Ypres. For all that reports of the use of poison gas as a weapon of war between civilised nations helped to set Paul thinking along new lines, for it began to seem to him that unless the war was won, and that within a reasonable period, civilisation would go to the devil and, what was more to the point, all prospects of the Valley resuming its pre-war rhythm would disappear for his lifetime. In this context he said to Rudd, ‘You can count me in from now, John! It might be the craziest thing that’s ever been allowed to happen but it has happened and as I see it we’ve no choice but to win,’ and old John, sucking his pipe, had replied, ‘The longer it goes on the less chance there is of a negotiated peace. For my part I don’t think it’s possible; everybody’s blood is up and it won’t cool until all European males between eighteen and forty are dead, or home with a limb missing! There’s another thing, too. Win or lose don’t deceive yourself into thinking it can ever be the same again, here or anywhere else! All the wrong people are getting killed and all the flag-flappers are making money. Thank God I’ve had most of my life. Chaps your age will have to adjust themselves to something very different when the bloody thing does run itself into the ground!’ In a year or so there were many who subscribed to this theory but in the early summer of 1915 John Rudd’s views were regarded as eccentric and even his wife Maureen derided them.
And so the barricade began to tumble but there was no major collapse of Paul’s defences until the Will Codsall episode. Once again it was a Codsall who supplied an unpleasant jolt to the Valley.
Will came home on leave in April and everyone was shocked at his appearance. He had left the previous August a thick-set, bumbling, broad-shouldered man, with a mild, friendly and slightly bucolic approach to all. He returned a shambling scarecrow, with a vague, shifty expression behind his eyes and a jumpiness that made his callers nervous when he handled his rifle and shot rats in the yard. Few could forget that Will’s father had died raving mad and to those who remembered Martin there seemed a disturbing resemblance between Will and the man who had taken to staring out to sea and had one day gone home to murder his wife. Will mooched about, answering questions of ‘What was it like?’ vaguely and unsatisfactorily, beginning sentences and leaving them unfinished but everybody made allowances for the fact that he had gone through a bad time after being rushed into the line in October and seeing most of his Paxtonbury cronies blown to pieces. They cheered up when Will, fortified by a few pints of ale, worked himself up into a ferocious mood at The Raven and described in detail, and with seeming relish, how he had brained Germans with spades and shot them down at close range when they advanced in close formation outside Ypres. Then, on the night before he was due to return, Paul was summoned from his office to find a tense Elinor Codsall awaiting him in the hall and Elinor, who seldom wasted words, went straight to the point regarding her fears for Will’s sanity.
‘ ’Er’s goin’ just like ’is old man!’ she declared, ‘and I’ve ’ad a rare old do with him, I c’n tell ’ee, Squire! Tiz no good carrying on about ’ow ’ee got ’isself into this ole pickle be joinin’ they Territorials backalong. The fact is he’ll do someone a mischief if us don’t tell they Army people there’s alwus bin daftness in the Codsall family! He’s talking about staying on yer and hiding hisself, same as Smut Potter did time he crowned Gilroy’s keeper! Says he’s done his bit ’an won’t taake no more part in it and if I hadn’t got un half-slewed with cider he’d ha’ been gone by now an’ us would have had the police over yer to march un off to prison!’
Paul accompanied her back to Periwinkle where he found a half-stupefied Will in the kitchen. Will had drained a gallon jar of home-brewed cider but he was not uplifted by it. Although he could hardly stand he was sour and intractable, declaring with idiotic persistence that he had no intention of returning to the colours but would ‘lie up somewheres ’till tiz all over!’ Paul tried to reason with him but in the end he had to fetch Doctor Maureen, who suggested getting Will’s leave extended. She made out a certificate to the effect that he was suffering from chest trouble and got it countersigned by the camp doctor, who was under an obligation to her for helping him free of charge during an epidemic during the winter. The Army doctor then examined Will and contacted his base at Paxtonbury with the result that Will was put to bed and remained there for a fortnight, after which he was, so the camp doctor assured them, regraded for duty at the base and was unlikely to be sent back to France for some months. The night before Will left home for the second time he called on Paul and at first seemed almost himself again but Paul was disturbed by his declaration, made on leaving, that he had seen his father on the battlefield. Under careful questioning he admitted that it was only Martin’s ghost he had seen and Paul put this down to some form of hallucination brought on by shock and exhaustion and was relieved to learn that Will could now anticipate a few weeks’ rest at base. Neither he, nor Will, nor the camp doctor were aware at that time of the tenuousness of the Ypres defences, after the counter-attack that had followed the German use of gas. Will reported to base on Saturday night; thirty-six hours later he was back at Le Havre and a month later the second of the dreaded buff telegrams arrived in the Valley. Will Codsall, the first man in the Valley to go to war, had been killed in action.
The Valley mourned him as a hero and Elinor mourned him as a grotesque sacrifice to local big-mouths like Horace Handcock, the Valley’s unofficial recruiting agent; they were all wrong, for Will was neither Hero nor Sacrifice. He had been executed as an Example!
The trial occupied far less time than the Whinmouth inquest on Will’s father and mother all those years ago. A row of granite-faced senior officers heard another officer and several witnesses describe how, during a local attack ten days previously, one of a party of bombers who captured a section of German trench threw aside his rifle, ran back across no-man’s-land, scrambled into and out of the British trench and went on running until he was arrested by a couple of Red Caps well beyond the supports. On the way he felled two men who tried to stop him and one was now a casualty with a broken jaw.
The sentence was death. It could hardly be anything else for a man who had thrown away his arms in action, and Will, asked if he had any comment, uttered four short words. To his judges they amounted to a confession for he said, in a low voice, ‘They was right there!’ The President of the Court, who had won a VC on the North-West Frontier, winced at hearing such a craven admission, particularly as there had been no Germans in the trenches when Will fled except, of course, any number of dead ones. How was Will to explain that it was the dead who had caused him to fly; not the German dead but two dead civilians, sitting side by side on the firestep of the captured trench and both shouting at him, which was very odd for Martin, his father, had a rope round his neck and Arabella, his mother, was headless.
It is doubtful whether
Will understood his sentence or the plea of mitigation made by his defending officer. He felt more secure inside the buttery, which did service as a condemned cell, than he had felt for a long time. The door was barred and there was a sentry outside so that neither Martin nor Arabella could approach him. When they marched him out, blindfolded him and stood him against the wall he may have thought they were playing some kind of game for in the few moments before the volley he discovered that he could see through the bandage and was not much surprised to see Elinor climb the broken farmhouse wall, swinging a pail full of eggs and calling in her shrill voice to laggard hens. It was early but the sun was warm and beat on his face and neck and he wondered, although not urgently, what she could be doing there in a foreign farmyard, and how she came to look so slim and young, not the least as she had looked when he parted from her a month or so ago, with a tense, pinched face and a thickening figure but as she had looked when he used to slip across the Deepdene to do his courting. Then the sun must have burst for pieces of it exploded all around him and he knew he was in the line again and under bombardment and called to Elinor to look what she was about for shells could kill civilians as well as soldiers.
The provost, biting hard his stringy moustache, looked down at the body and said, under his breath, ‘Poor sod! Any road you’re out of it, chum!’ and then barked at the firing-party who filed away, one of them reeling like a drunkard.
That same day in the House of Commons the Foreign Secretary was asked how many executions for cowardice there had been in France during the last ten months. He replied that, according to his information, none at all. His information must have been out-of-date. There had been four that month in Will’s division alone and there were many divisions within a hundred miles of the place where Will was shot. Perhaps it was to keep the record straight that they sent a telegram saying Private Codsall had been killed in action.
A month or so later the Valley learned that Jem Pollock was dead but this time the telegram was followed by a letter giving circumstantial detail. The letter, written by Jem’s company commander, was addressed to ‘next-of-kin’ but as nobody in the Valley knew Jem’s next-of-kin it found its way to Paul.
It told a graphic story. Apparently Jem had been attached to the Engineers for the purpose of tunnelling under the German lines near Cuinchy, where the two systems of frontline trenches sometimes came within forty yards of one another. Rumours of his enormous strength had reached REs responsible for the shaft and for more than a month Jem shovelled away in safety while, overhead, men were killed at the rate of about one every five minutes, for the Germans had gauged the mortar range to the nearest yard. Then it was discovered that the Germans were tunelling directly opposite. When Jem laid aside his spade he could distinctly hear the chink of tools and sometimes a man coughing. The officer came along and listened with him and then left to telephone HQ for instructions but while he was gone the sounds from the German tunnel ceased and the sergeant left in charge ordered work to recommence. It was an unwise decision, for the German shaft must have progressed far beyond the British and they exploded their mine soon after dawn, a day before the British were scheduled to explode theirs and Jem, just going on shift, was about twenty yards down the tunnel when it went up. All the men in front of him were buried alive but the entrance of the British tunnel had been riveted with steel rails and held for a matter of about fifty seconds, before slowly subsiding like a gently squashed matchbox. It would not have remained open that long had not Jem instinctively reached up and braced himself against a key crossbar, an act that enabled the five men behind him to run back into the trench and crouch under the crumbling firestep. One of them reported what had happened and Jem’s name was sent in for the Military Medal which he did not get because none of the witnesses had been officers. He was, however, toasted that night by the survivors, who thought of his death as almost biblical so that, in a sense, the Goliath of Bideford was transposed into Samson of Cuinchy who died supporting the pillars of a crumbling temple. The men who drank to him that night knew little or nothing of Jem’s past so that they could not be expected to appreciate the roundness of Jem’s end. All his life he had both paraded and used his strength for the benefit of others. In the jobs he held before joining the travelling fair his muscles had been at the disposal of North Devon craftsmen and in the fair ground he had drawn crowds and more than paid his way. Later, when he forsook the gypsy life and settled in the Dell, his strength had been at the disposal of the Potter girls and he had spent it freely, in the fields by day and in their beds at night, so that the Dell was rescued not only from weeds but from the threat of dwindling population. Then, when he went to France, he used his strength unsparingly on behalf of the Pioneers and there was still enough left over to save the lives of five of his comrades.
Paul, musing over the officer’s letter, hoped Jem would get the medal and rode over to the Dell to pass the story on to Cissie and Violet whom he found pregnant and rather depressed. As Violet put it, ‘He were a gurt handful was Jem, and us’ll never see the like of him again, Squire!’ He took the letter away with him and it was pasted into the back of the estate diary by Claire. She must, Paul thought as he watched her, have travelled a long road since the day she had railed against Ikey’s marriage to a Potter, for when he told her that Violet had borne Jem a strapping boy, now aged six, she said, ‘I’ll fix the letter by the corners so that when he’s old enough I’ll be able to take it out and give it to him.’
He was touched by the thought and kissed her neck as she busied herself pasting the letter into the record. ‘Claire Derwent,’ he said (for he could rarely think of her by any other name), ‘that flare-up we had over Ikey and Lane-Phelps did us a power of good! It cleared the air, like a heavy thunderstorm. I love you, woman, more than I ever did!’
‘Prove it,’ she said without turning aside from her task but he laughed and said, ‘Not me, I’ve got to ride over to Hermitage. There’s a problem blowing up over there, a very tiresome one!’
‘Oh?’ she said, ‘and what’s that?’
‘I’ll tell you about it in bed tonight,’ he said and when she replied, laughing, that knowing him and seeing that spring was in the air she doubted this very much it struck him that since the crisis they had become lovers again and that she could cheer him up with a glance. He rode off reflecting, ‘I’ll soon settle this nonsense of Henry Pitts! He must be older than me and Hermitage can’t manage without him! Damn it, if it comes to the worst, I’ll write to the Agricultural Committee and get him starred for the duration!’
II
Paul’s attempts to nail Henry Pitts to his farm for the duration proved unavailing. By early September, when everyone in the Valley was working sixteen hours a day getting in the harvest, Henry was plodding up and down a dusty parade ground near Oswestry, with a dummy rifle over his shoulder. By the time the British Army in the field had made good its losses at Loos he was in France.
Henry’s urge to enlist was the outcome of his mid-morning visits to his piggeries, on the north-east corner of his holding. From here, high up on the shoulder of Hermitage Wood, he could look directly down into the basin of the camp parade ground where columns marched and wheeled all day and the hoarse shouts of NCOs reached him like the distant wail of gulls. Henry was fascinated by the patterned precision of their movements, which seemed to be animated by clockwork. He liked best to see a company respond to the command, ‘At the halt, by the left, form close company of pla-toon!’ and see the long, snaking column waver, break up, unfold like a spreading fan, reform and come to a tidy halt in front of the saluting base. As a child he had always liked playing with lead soldiers, forming them into assault columns and giving the closest attention to their dressing but here, before his eyes, was a game of soldiers come to life and played on a huge scale. The crispness and precision of their movements was a kind of poetry to him and he revelled in it, day after day, week after week, until it seemed to him that he could nev
er be happy until he identified himself with those khaki-clad automatons, responding smoothly and ecstatically to the bark of their drill-masters. The precise beauty of drill banished all other aspects of soldiering from his simple mind. He did not ponder the possibility of wounds, or death, or discomfort in the trenches, or even prolonged separation from his land and his great tawny wife and plump, tawny children. All he could think of was the synchronisation of arms and legs en masse and at last he knew that, no matter what it might cost him, he must absorb himself in it at once.
He expected opposition from his wife, Gloria, and from his father, Arthur, but although there was an awed hush when he announced his intention to join up no one attempted to dissuade him except Squire Craddock, who was furious. His wife Gloria, the red-haired grenadier of a woman who had forsaken the Heronslea estate to marry him, openly applauded his decision. After Horace Handcock, Gloria Pitts was the most indefatigable patriot in the Valley and thought of any male out of uniform, if he was neither child nor dotard, as a poltroon. Gloria was the first woman in the Valley to engage in the popular pastime of distributing white feathers to civilians and actually slashed one of Martha Pitts’ best down cushions for ammunition. She said, delightedly, ‘Youm really goin’ Henry? Youm actually takin’ a smack at that bliddy Kaiser? Well then, good luck to ’ee boy! And when you comes back on leave in kharki I’ll show ’ee off all round the neighbourhood, you zee if I don’t!’
Martha’s reactions were more restrained. She pointed out that Henry was thirty-six and that they would probably keep him at home, guarding bridges and viaducts, but old Grandpa Pitts, who could recall watching redcoats embark at Plymouth for the Crimea, chose to regard this as an insult on the family and said that Henry would almost certainly return with a Victoria Cross pinned to his breast and a personal letter of thanks from Lord Roberts. They had told him several times that Bobs was dead but he chose not to believe it. Without both Bobs and Kitchener he could not believe in the inevitability of victory.
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