by Robert Edric
‘The order emerging out of chaos. No – the order you are bringing out of chaos.’
‘Another of those too-grand notions,’ he said. ‘Another illusion.’
‘Perhaps,’ she said. ‘But it’s what so many now crave.’
‘I suppose so,’ he said, knowing she was right.
Behind them, the church bell at Bray pealed the hour, and they both sat without speaking until this finished and as the simple dying note then faded to silence.
4
THE NEXT MORNING, following his usual duties on the platform, Reid was beckoned by Benoît into his small office. The station master closed the door behind him and indicated the only two chairs the cramped and overcrowded room contained.
Reid, again understanding the need for these courtesies and observances – especially upon the stage of Benoît’s own small part in the drama of the changing world around them – sat down and laid everything he carried at his feet. Benoît then offered him coffee, which he accepted with forced enthusiasm. The drink was invariably thick and dark and bitter, and it was all Reid could do to sip it without screwing up his face. Benoît took great pride in his coffee, and to have refused him this particular pleasure would have been close to an insult.
Eventually, his preparations finished, Benoît put down his own cup and saucer and leaned towards Reid, both hands on his knees.
‘I have heard alarming things,’ he said.
‘Oh? Concerning?’
‘From Ernaux.’ Ernaux – this link with that restless wider world – was a constant source of alarming news.
‘I was with him a few moments ago,’ Reid said. ‘He said nothing to me.’ Reid spoke French well enough to understand most of what Benoît said to him, but he occasionally struggled with the man’s growled accent, with his colloquialisms, and with the lost words and abbreviated language he commonly used. It had long been clear to him that Benoît, despite Reid’s occasionally faltering replies, believed he, Reid, understood perfectly everything he was told.
‘He works regularly at the Doullens depot,’ Benoît said. ‘And sometimes further afield. At Abbeville and Beauvais.’
‘Has something happened there?’ Reid was keen to start work, knowing that the men now gathered beyond the station yard would do little until receiving his instructions.
‘Ernaux says that in the Saint-Quentin yards there are many unidentified French corpses and remains that are assigned identities that cannot truthfully be said to be their own.’
‘I see,’ Reid said. He wondered at the nature of Benoît’s concern and considered what to say to him.
‘Ernaux says that bodies at Saint-Quentin have become little more than an inconvenience for our own administrators.’
‘I’m sure everything is—’
‘He believes it is a great conspiracy.’
‘Conspiracy?’
‘Of silence. Of convenience. Of greater powers holding sway.’ Everything Benoît now said was framed in this melodrama.
Reid remembered his conversation with Caroline Mortimer and wondered what similar cold and evasive reassurances he might offer the man.
‘I daresay a great many things are done these days for reasons we may not yet understand,’ he said.
‘According to Ernaux, the workers at the Abbeville yards throw the sacks of remains from the carriages to the ground as though they were sacks of potatoes. There is no proper accord, no respect.’
‘I know,’ Reid said. He doubted if the story were true, but could not suggest this. ‘So perhaps we are more fortunate than most, here in Morlancourt, in being able to afford our dead the respect and dignity they deserve.’ Despite sounding like another of his tired speeches, it was a good answer and he could see that Benoît appreciated it and the compliment it contained.
‘Of course,’ Benoît said.
In an attempt to steer them on to another path, Reid said, ‘I was sent an order last week warning me against interring German remains by mistake. Forty graves at the French national cemetery outside Serre were dug up because someone – presumably another of your own officials – believed German remains had been buried there in error.’
‘I suppose there are some mistakes none of us can afford to make,’ Benoît said, shaking his head.
‘Precisely,’ Reid said. He knew that Benoît and Ernaux had worked together throughout the war and that the bond between them was strong. Whatever Reid said, he would be careful neither to contradict nor insult the guard.
‘The station master at Froissy told Ernaux they had a train pass through there yesterday carrying nothing but bones.’
‘Bones?’
‘For one of our great ossuaries. You English lay out your pretty cemeteries like cloths at a picnic, while we French pile up our skulls and bones in a few vast charnel houses for the grieving relatives to visit.’ He shook his head again at the unhappy thought.
This divergence in practice was frequently discussed among the senior members of the Commission, and Reid had been instructed never to comment publicly on the subject. A great many reciprocal but fragile arrangements and confused understandings still existed between the two countries’ Commissions and their architects.
The French had their own cemeteries, of course – locally, there was the military ground alongside the line at Bray, at Cerisy, and the recently commissioned burial plot on the road north of Etinehem – but it was invariably the ossuaries which attracted the most attention and caused the greatest disquiet among the French themselves. Reid already knew how Benoît felt about these plans.
‘I imagine they’ll make memorable monuments,’ Reid said. But Benoît was not convinced of this, and so said nothing in reply.
Reid knew the old man was remembering his own lost son, badly injured at Verdun, who had then died less than a month later in the hospital at Mantes la Jolie on the Seine. Benoît and his wife had retrieved the boy’s body and brought it back to Morlancourt for burial at their own expense. Benoît had told Reid all this in the smallest detail the first time the two men had exchanged their histories.
‘I suppose you and I understand these things better than most,’ Benoît said eventually.
‘I suppose we do.’
‘Ernaux and I, we are just old men doing what all old men must do – grumbling about a world that has changed beyond all recognition, and which has finally slipped beyond our control and understanding. And soon the work here – your work – will be completed and the line closed and the world will change again.’
Reid said nothing in reply to this, merely nodded, relieved that Benoît’s lament required nothing more of him. He was distracted briefly by a line of men moving past the office window, running from where that morning’s cargo had just been unloaded back out into the sunlight beyond the platform’s end.
‘They are anxious to start their work,’ Benoît said.
Reid heard Drake shouting at the men to move faster. There was no purpose to this seeming urgency, just another of the sergeant’s irresistible impulses finding its target. Most of the men laughed and shouted to each other as they ran, paying little attention to Drake.
‘I should go,’ Reid said.
‘Of course.’
‘Thank you for the coffee.’
Benoît smiled at this. ‘But you would much prefer a cup of your Earl Grey tea?’
Reid retrieved his papers and rose from his chair. He remembered the monthly packages of tea his mother had sent to him, the sudden sharp aroma as he peeled away the packaging. ‘Not at all,’ he said.
Eight coffins and the additional remains of seventeen men had been delivered to him. A smaller cargo than during the previous weeks, and perhaps the cause of the men’s high spirits now.
‘Ernaux also heard from one of the drivers that deliveries to the cemeteries between Villers-Bretonneux and Moreuil are ended and that the few bodies still intended for Moreuil and Morisel will now be redirected either here or to Cerisy,’ Benoît said.
‘I daresay it was
bound to happen.’ Reid knew from recent reports which burial grounds were to be restricted in their construction, and which were destined for seemingly endless expansion. Some places, he knew, had only ever been intended as small, almost intimate collections of graves – the graves of individual regiments, say, or of men who had fought and died together at a particularly notable engagement – whereas other burial grounds had been altered and enlarged in accordance with need.
He wished he had been better informed by the Commission of their eventual plans for Morlancourt, but all his recent queries on the matter had been met with either uncertainty or diversion. He read nothing untoward into these responses; they merely confirmed in his own mind that many of his superiors knew as little as he did about how and when their great shared enterprise would be completed.
What he did know for certain, however, was that the cemetery at Moreuil was about to be expanded rather than declared finished, and that the land at Morisel had recently been acquired for a German burial ground. He revealed nothing of this to Benoît, unwilling to contradict anything Ernaux might already have told him.
He waited in the doorway as the last of the men ran past him, some of them offering casual salutes as they continued along the platform.
Then Drake came to him and reported that everything was loaded and ready to be taken to the cemetery. He called to Benoît over Reid’s shoulder. Even after six years in France, Drake spoke only a dozen or so words of French, and, however brief or amicable the exchange, he invariably pronounced each one of these as though it tasted sour on his tongue.
5
ONCE A FORTNIGHT, Reid was summoned by Wheeler to attend a Commission meeting either in Amiens or, more recently, as its ruins were finally cleared, in Albert. The latter was closer and easier to reach from Morlancourt, but wherever these meetings were held, Reid regretted the time they wasted and the delays they caused him. By his own reckoning, a morning or afternoon once a month would have achieved just as much.
He went to the gatherings primarily to report on all that he and the other cemetery-builders had already achieved, and to offer vague predictions and qualified recommendations for the weeks and months ahead.
The day’s business was usually followed by an extended meal – Godbert’s and Chez Joséphine in Amiens were the current favourites – at which Reid’s attendance was also obligatory, and at which Wheeler and others among the Commission’s grandees held forth with self-congratulatory speeches concerning all that was currently happening.
The sole benefit of these outings was that Reid was able to see Alexander Lucas, his counterpart and liaison officer in the local Investigation and Retrieval branch of the Graves Registration department. It was Lucas’s task to discover lost or forgotten graves – usually by collating information supplied to him by the returning local inhabitants and from letters sent to the Commission by men who had long since returned home and who had only lately responded to the War Office’s appeals. Alexander Lucas was then responsible for the retrieval and identification of the newly located corpses prior to their reburial, usually now at Morlancourt and the surrounding plots.
Reid and Lucas were the same age, but Lucas was already seven years married and with a five-year-old daughter. The two men had not served together, but had later discovered that they had both been in the hospital at Boulogne at the same time, and had afterwards taken part in actions at Chaulnes and Maricourt. It was at Maricourt that Reid had received his leg injury, following which he had been sent home on two months’ leave. Alexander Lucas, meanwhile, had been invalided from the Army for four months following the Armistice, returning first to Southampton and then to Napsbury. Following a further month of convalescence in the Peak District, he had finally returned home to Nottingham to his wife and daughter.
Upon his recovery, Reid had applied to be considered for a post in either the Imperial Commission or the Graves Registration Service, both of which were only then calculating their approaches to the work ahead.
For three months following his own return to France, Alexander Lucas had been appointed to oversee the work of the Retrieval units in that part of the Somme valley, and it was during this time that he and Reid had met and become friends.
Reid travelled to Amiens on that morning’s returning train, the sole occupant of a carriage and four goods wagons. In the beginning, he had often travelled in the cab with Ernaux and the driver, but he had seen how his presence made the men uneasy, and so afterwards he had insisted on riding in one of the carriages, telling Ernaux he had paperwork to complete before the day’s meeting began.
Pulling into Amiens now after the short journey, Reid was pleased to see Alexander Lucas waiting for him on the recently rebuilt platform. It had become Lucas’s habit to wait for his friend like this so that the two of them might spend some time together prior to these unwelcome diversions from their real work.
Reid stepped out and Lucas came to him. Ernaux shouted to them from the cab and Reid called back his thanks.
Because the train would not return to Morlancourt until the following morning, Reid would have to ask at the several Army depots and transport yards in the town if any vehicle was going in the direction of Morlancourt later in the day. He was rarely unsuccessful in this, and most of the drivers were happy to make the short detour from the Bray or Sailly roads, where a good enough surface existed. Recently, however, he and Lucas had spent their evenings together in one of the town’s small hotels, the two of them not parting until the following morning – Lucas to wherever he was currently working and Reid often returning to Morlancourt on the train delivering his own supplies.
Both men had less than a year left to serve. Reid had recently considered extending this, but Lucas talked only of getting to the end of his time and of returning home for good. It was his intention, he told Reid, to resume his work as an architect and eventually to set up his own practice.
Waiting until the engine had pulled away from the platform, the two men went to sit beneath the station awning.
‘What’s that?’ Reid asked, indicating the sheet of paper Lucas held, which he had been reading upon Reid’s arrival.
‘I applied for a mobile bath unit from the dozen sitting unused behind the Royal Warwicks’ ordnance store and Wheeler has denied me.’
‘On what grounds?’
‘On the grounds that it is summer and that there is plenty of clean water elsewhere for my diggers to use. Where? Not where we’re digging, there isn’t. Everywhere might be starting to look dry and solid, but the water’s still there a foot or two down.’
Immediately following the end of hostilities, the corpses and remains were collected together daily in great numbers – hundreds on some days – and the majority of these had come from long-known and properly marked sites, however makeshift. But the fact that so many hitherto unsuspected bodies were still being discovered and retrieved almost two years later had come as a surprise to many in the Commission, and it was why the plans for the laying-out at Morlancourt and elsewhere were now constantly being revised.
‘Where are you working?’ Reid asked.
‘A farmer reported a grave of at least thirty men over at Lihons. Yorks and Lancs. A further twenty somewhere along the Roye road, buried and then lost some time during the March retreat. Oh, and –’ Lucas searched his pockets and pulled out a second folded sheet of paper – ‘we received a report only yesterday of between ten and thirty “unknowns” in your neck of the woods. Place called Prezière. I say “place” …’
‘I know it,’ Reid said. ‘What’s left of it. I think the Lancashire Fusiliers fought there.’
‘That’s who we’ve got written down. A well-digger came across a mass of rotting flesh and equipment. When we’ve finished at Roye I’m coming over for a look.’
‘I’ll find you somewhere to stay,’ Reid told him. Prezière, he knew, was little more than a brick-strewn field, long since overgrown, and with the vestiges of a crossroads somewhere amid the rubble.
‘I don’t suppose you’ve heard anything?’ Lucas asked him.
‘About the bodies?’ Reid shook his head.
‘A man called Clarry,’ Lucas said, again reading from the sheet. ‘Rebuilding his farm at a place called Malesterre.’
The names meant nothing to Reid, but he felt certain that Benoît and the other inhabitants at Morlancourt would know where the place had once been. ‘I’ll make enquiries for you,’ he said.
‘The bodies at Lihons had everything we needed,’ Lucas said. ‘Someone had sealed all their details in bottles. Thirty men, and we had them all retrieved, laid out, bagged and identified in a single day.’
‘I remember them,’ Reid said. ‘They’re docketed for the Lihons national cemetery, but we’re starting to think the French will want the place solely for their own. It’s marked out for behind their old front line.’
‘Does it matter where they go?’ Lucas said, continuing to read from the sheet.
‘I daresay if—’
‘The poor beggars along the Roye road came from every regiment under the sun. Retreating armies. There were Africans among them, infantry and labour brigades. Wheeler is pushing for separate cemeteries.’
‘It’s what the Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders want, too,’ Reid said, remembering another of Wheeler’s recent edicts. ‘The Africans will probably go to Delville.’
Neither man spoke for a moment, both conscious of the short time remaining to them.
Eventually, Alexander Lucas said, ‘Wheeler told me I should instruct my digging teams to carry pails with them so they could find water to clean themselves. Plenty of rivers and canals, he said. What on God’s earth does he think they’re actually washing off their hands after a day in a two-year-old mass grave?’
‘Does he never visit you?’
Lucas smiled. ‘He sends one of his minions – lapdog Jessop, usually, poor man. I daresay your end of things is much more to Wheeler’s liking. I even—’ Lucas stopped speaking and looked down at the sheet he held, which was now shaking slightly, betraying the sudden tremor of his hand. He watched this for a moment until it became still again.