by Anna Hope
“How? How did she guess?”
He opens his palms. “I don’t know. But she said his name. She said ‘Michael.’ ”
Evelyn can hear the sound of pans in the room next door, and the hushed, twining voices of the mother and child.
“And I’m thinking that all I have to do is tell her the truth. Because you can bet she doesn’t know it. She doesn’t know any of it. You can bet your brother didn’t write the truth in his letter to her.”
“What do you mean?”
“I killed him,” he says. “I killed her son.” He rocks backward and forward, cradling his useless arm. “And it was your brother made me do it.”
For a moment it is as though time has stopped. Then a sound comes from her, a strangled laugh. “That’s ridiculous. He—Ed—he would never do a thing like that.”
“How do you know?”
“He’s a—good man.”
“Really? How are you so sure about that?”
She closes her eyes briefly. She shakes her head. What can she say?
He always loved me. He used to look up to me. He was my ally. He made me feel like the braver, better part of himself.
I just know.
Rowan’s voice is raised now; he is almost shouting. “Why are you here, then, if you’re so sure about that?”
She shakes her head. “I’m sorry, I suppose—I’m not.”
She doesn’t want to hear this. Whatever it is he has to tell. And yet she knows she must—that they have unleashed something, the pair of them, and now they cannot move until it is done.
Rowan lights another cigarette, sits hunched over himself, spitting his words into the space between them.
“The minute we got close to the line I knew that my feeling was right: It was going to be bad. We went up through Albert. All of the houses were boarded up. It was like the plague had been through there. There was an angel, hanging off the church, holding a child in her hands. It looked like a woman,on the front of a sinking ship.
“They had us waiting by that church for hours. There was something up with Michael. He was shaking. I sat down beside him. ‘All right, chum?’ I said. He looked at me. He started to say something. I think he was trying to talk about what had happened to them all, before. That they’d come through here before they went to the front. He wasn’t all there, though. He wasn’t making much sense.
“No one liked it if you talked. No one liked it if you got windy around them. So we’re all sitting there, and people start hearing him chattering and start going, ‘Shut him up, can’t you.’ You can tell they’re getting rattled. And I says to him, ‘It’s not the time. We’ve got to go on. You know that. I’m sorry, but I can’t listen to you. We’ve got to go on.’ He was quiet again, after that. I thought he was all right. They brought us some tea from one of those field kitchens and we had a bit of grub, too, and a smoke. He was quiet. We waited till it was late, and when it got dark we went up toward the line. There was no moon, and that was good in a way, because moons were bad.”
“Why?” she says. “Why were they bad?”
He looks up at her, scornful. “Because the other side could see you, then, couldn’t they? Full moons were the worst.”
I have made a pact with the moon. On clear nights she will bring me to you.
Evelyn shivers. Stupid. Of course.
“After we’d been marching for a long time, it must have been about two, three in the morning, we could smell that we were getting close.”
“How?”
“Because it stank. Like hell. And the mud started up. We were marching on duckboards. If you fell off, then you’d drown. You could hear men, horses, stuck in there, crying out. You just had to walk past. You had to hold on to the man in front of you and keep going. You couldn’t go very fast. But when we got closer you could feel the men who were leaving the bit of line we were going to take over.”
“How?”
“They were coming toward us, pushing past in the dark. They were moving as fast as they could. You could just tell they couldn’t get away from there quick enough. We’d have to crouch down, so as we didn’t fall in when they went past us, and we’d whisper to them, in the dark, asking them what it was like. You wanted to know what it was like where you were going. And they just said, ‘Cushy mate, cushy.’ ” He stops. “But that was what they always said.”
“You couldn’t see anyone’s face in the darkness, but sometimes the Germans would send up one of those Very lights. Like big red fireworks. They’d send them up from time to time so they could get a good bit of a look at us. Michael was marching right behind me. I happened to turn around just as one went up, and I saw his face. He was standing, staring, and there was a hand, just in front of him, sticking out of the trench wall. I’d brushed past it myself, but I hadn’t seen what it was.”
“How?” Evelyn leans forward. “How did it get there?”
“They’d do that, with the trenches. If it was a bad bit, that they’d been fighting over for a long time, and they had to dig themselves in again, they had to cut through the corpses. They had no choice. But it tips him, and he starts to make this sound. It’s low but he doesn’t stop. Sort of like, ‘Oh—oh oh oh oh oh.’ ”
Even here, even sitting in this room, it sounds awful. Even here, she wants him to stop.
“Everyone’s whispering at him to shut up. But he carries on. It’s as if he can’t hear them. ‘Oh oh oh oh oh.’ Captain Montfort comes pushing back from the front of the line and grabs him and tells him that if he doesn’t stop he’ll slice his fucking neck open and that’ll shut him up for good. And that does it. That shuts him up. We start walking again. But I can hear him shaking. It’s like the words have gone inside him. I can hear his pack, shaking against his back.
“When we get into the line they’re shelling it like all hell. We report for duty. The sergeant’s giving out work details. Michael’s sitting all slumped over; he looks like he’s not all there. I try to think of something to say to him, to calm him down a bit, but I can’t. Sergeant tells me to take a message into Captain Montfort’s dugout. He’s screaming down the telephone at someone. What the fuck this and what the fuck that. The bastards who were there before us had all gone in a hurry and no one had left anything there at all. No information, nothing. They’d all just run away.
“ ‘Hind,’ he says. ‘There’s a load of bodies out behind the support trench. Take five men and some shovels and go and bury the poor fuckers. And Hart,’ he says. ‘Take fucking Hart. I don’t want him screaming the place down.’ ”
“And I’m thinking, at least if we’re out of the line for a bit then maybe I can settle Michael. We all get windy now and again. But you don’t want someone who’s windy around you. It spreads.
“I get Michael and four other men and we leave our packs and follow the support trench back. Captain Montfort’s told me where to look, but when we get close we don’t need to look for anything, the flies are everywhere.”
He lights a cigarette from the end of his last.
“We climb out, and we have to keep down, because even though we’re behind the line, we’re not that far back. The ground wasn’t too muddy just there. I don’t know why. Otherwise they would have just slipped into it. But they needed burying. They were still sending shells over, and they were bloody loud, believe me, but the sound of the flies drowned everything else out.” He stares into the empty space before him. “The last lot who were there had just left their mates in the open air to rot.”
“So we tie scarves around our faces and we start to dig. We’re digging just a bit away from where they’re lying. It’s too dark and dangerous to go far. We just had to bury them where they were. There were six of us, and we were digging one grave between two. I’m working with Michael and I keep asking him if he’s all right. He says yes, but he keeps turning around to puke, but then we’re all puking, so that�
��s nothing strange.
“Every so often another of those lights goes up and we have to flatten ourselves to the ground and so we just jump down into the graves that we’re digging. And I’m thinking, This is bloody lovely, isn’t it? Anything happens to us and we’re already buried. They’re only going to have to come and shovel the earth over the top. But then there are the other poor fuckers that we’re digging them for in the first place, and where are they going to go? And I don’t fancy mine much sharing a grave with them.
“We’re trying to look at their tags so as we can write on the crosses. You always had to do that, so they had a chance of being found, after everything, if they hadn’t been blown to kingdom come. Michael’s trying to look at this one’s tag, but it keeps slipping out of his hands. ‘Give over,’ I say. ‘Let’s have a look.’ I bend down and—”
He stops.
“It was a shell that came down. It must have hit about twenty yards from where we were. When I come to I can’t see anything. I’ve got half a field stuffed up my nose and mouth and everything’s blacker than it was before, and I just stand there, spitting, trying to get so as I can see.
“I turn on my torch. Everyone’s standing around picking dirt out of their eyes and mouths. Michael’s gone. I start shouting for him. I search all over, but he’s not there.
“Everyone’s there but him. I shovel a bit of earth over the body I’m supposed to be burying and leave him and I go back with the other men, to the bit of trench that was supposed to be our dugout. But he’s not there. So I go to see Captain Montfort and tell him Private Hart has disappeared.
“ ‘What do you mean, disappeared?’ he says.
“ ‘He’s gone,’ I say. ‘There was a shell and now he’s gone.’
“ ‘I know full well there was a shell.” He says. “Two of the cooks have been killed.’
“I’m shaking my head because I can’t hear very well, and there’s a ringing in my ears that’s louder than anything else.
“ ‘You’ve got blood on your head,’ he says. ‘You’d better go down the line and get it seen to.’
“I’m reading his lips as much as hearing him speak; the whistling’s that loud.
“So I go down the line. And I keep looking out for Michael, seeing if I can see him, but he’s nowhere.”
“But surely …” Evelyn says.
“What?”
“Surely he could have been buried, too? By the shell? Did nobody think to look?”
He shakes his head. “I knew he wasn’t,” he says. “I got down to the casualty clearing post. They’ve got all sorts down there, the shelling’s been so bad, and I’m not urgent, so it takes a while till they can bandage me up. And I keep looking out for Michael thinking if he was hit, then he might have made his way back there. When they finally see me I tell them about the shell and ask if they’ve had anyone in. They ask me which company I’m from and when I tell them they say they had another of ours down there earlier, spouting nonsense and shaking. They’d put him on a stretcher but he’d disappeared. Had he reported back, they said? I said I didn’t know. That’s when I started to feel something really bad.
“When I get back up there to the line, I still can’t see him.
“Night comes and he’s still not back.
“When morning comes and we have a roll call and stand to, I haven’t slept, and he’s still not there, and everyone’s looking at me as though I should know where he is.
“They call me in to see Captain Montfort. He starts screaming at me. He looks as though he hasn’t slept, either. He’s been drinking. You could always smell it on the officers, the whiskey.” His voice is bitter. “We weren’t allowed anything like that. Only rum ration in the morning before going over the top.
“He’s screaming at me, did I see anything? Did I think he was dead in the shell or what did I think?
“And all I’m thinking about is the doctor down at the casualty clearing station and what he said. If it comes out that he told me then I’d be for it. So I tell him what the doctor said. And he goes straight down there, to the clearing station. He’s gone all morning.”
He shakes his head. “We were just hanging on in the trench that morning. It was worse than being in battle, being somewhere like that, because you couldn’t move. You just had to hold it. You were stuck. I kept thinking that it was like the worst thing in the world had happened there, and we were just there to look at it. Just there in this hole to look at the worst thing in the world. Because if there was no one there to see it, then no one would ever believe it was possible.”
He stubs out his cigarette. “Not that anyone’s ever wanted to know.”
“I want to know,” says Evelyn softly. “That’s why I’m here.”
He nods, accepting this. “But it wasn’t the worst thing,” he says, lighting another cigarette. “Not in the end.
“Captain Montfort came back in the afternoon. I saw him walk past my dugout. I was on an hour’s kip. But I couldn’t sleep. I just had this feeling in me. Sure enough, he calls me straight in. Private Hart has been arrested. He was found at a farmhouse a few miles behind the line. He had built himself a fire there and an officer from another regiment saw the smoke and found him and put him under arrest.
“He kept me there for a long time. He wanted to know everything about Michael. I told him he was a good lad.”
“Did he listen?” says Evelyn. “Did he listen to you?” She wants her brother to have listened, wants this suddenly more than anything in the world.
He shrugs. “He asked a few more questions. Then he let me go.”
He sits back on the sofa.
“You’d see men,” he says, “strung up on the sides of gun carriage wheels. ‘Field punishment number one,’ they called it. They looked like they were on the bloody cross, with their arms all strung up on either side; and they’d be left like that, on their knees, down by the side of the road. And we were supposed to look at them. The bastards that ran the show, that’s what they wanted: they wanted us to look, to shame them. But we never did. We always turned our faces away when we went past, so as the poor buggers could get a bit of peace.”
Evelyn nods. That’s what I would do. I’d do the same
“That night, if I closed my eyes, I’d see Michael, strung up. I thought that was what was coming, you see.
“Next morning Captain Montfort calls me in again. He says that Hart is going to be court-martialed for desertion. He says he’s allowed someone to speak up for him at the trial. ‘Prisoner’s friend,’ it’s called. He says Hart’s asked for me.
“I ask him when the trial’s going to be and he tells me Thursday. I ask him what the day is today, he tells me Tuesday.”
He looks up at her, and there’s a silence before he speaks.
“And I know what’s going to happen then, I swear. All of it, from start to finish. Like it’s all written down in a book, like the Bible. Like I could skip through and see the last page already, and read the last line.”
Evelyn clenches and unclenches her thumbs. Her missing finger is hurting her. “What happened then?” she says. “What happened at the trial?”
He stands up, walks over to the window, puts his hands in his pockets, and gazes out. “My bit was nothing. I didn’t even get to see him. There was just me and two men with red on their uniforms in a small room. I was only in there a few minutes. I couldn’t get my words out right. I wanted to tell them how they’d got it wrong, how he was in a bad way after the last bit of action he’d seen, but they kept asking about him shouting on the march. Your brother had already told them about it, so they had him pegged and there was nothing I could say and that was that.”
He turns, spits into the grate, and then rests his head on his good arm, leaning on the mantelpiece.
She watches him in the candle flame, guttering now; this small man, his shirt ridden up at the
back, his braces hanging slack by his sides.
“You couldn’t see him, then?” she asks softly.
He lifts his head toward her. He is silent for a long moment. “Not then.”
“Next thing, when we were finally out of that bit of line, they round us all up and they tell us that Private Hart has been found guilty and he’s going to be shot. And all I can hear is that phrase going round in my head: Shot, shot, shot. It’s my fault, I’m thinking, I should have found him. Should have brought him back. And I’m thinking, Have they told him? Have they told him yet? Have they told his mum? Because judging from that cake she sent she’s going to want to come out here and say good-bye.”
He gives a short, bitter laugh.
“Did they let them do that, then?” Evelyn says. “The parents. Did they let them say good-bye?”
Rowan snorts, a look of utter contempt on his face. “What do you think? You think they bus them out to wave before their lads are going over the top? You think they’re going to bring them over for something like this?”
Of course not. She feels bile rise in her throat. She lights a cigarette to try to force it down.
He shakes his head. “But all the time I’ve been thinking, Captain Montfort has been speaking, he’s been reading off a list of names. I don’t hear it properly, though. Afterward they say to me, ‘Bad luck, isn’t it?’ ‘What?’ I say. ‘About the firing squad,’ they say. ‘Bad luck to be shooting a chum.’ And then I realize. I hadn’t heard it. But your brother had read out my name.”
He stares at her.
“Your fucking bastard brother read out my name.”
He is shaking.
She prays it won’t start. Not the fitting. Not now.
“They say to me, ‘You can go and see him if you like. He might like that.’ Like they’re doing me a favor. Like they’re doing him a favor, having me go to say goodbye. All right old chum? Sorry about the shooting. Bad luck it had to be me. Got any last requests? Anything I can tell your mum?
“They said I was supposed to go and see him at seven o’clock. But I didn’t go. I went off into the woods instead. And I just sat there, thinking. What’s he going to be thinking? On his own? I knew I should go there, to see him, but I couldn’t go.”