Field Service

by Robert Edric

  She considered this. ‘The place was much larger than I’d imagined. I suppose that’s to be … well …’

  ‘We’ve found a good spot for the women,’ Reid said.

  ‘Drake showed me. I asked him when the bodies were coming, but he didn’t know.’

  Reid closed his eyes in thought. ‘Wheeler thought sometime in the next month. I’ll let you know as soon as I hear anything more definite. It’s a plot beside the stream, close to one of the paths. Wheeler also said there was talk of a separate memorial for them.’

  ‘Oh? Is that likely? I don’t think—’

  ‘Like almost everything else, nothing’s been decided for certain yet. If I hear anything more … To be honest, at present Wheeler’s more concerned about the imminent arrival from Neuville of an executed man.’

  ‘Is he against it? Personally?’

  ‘He gives that impression. The Commission overall has been in favour of their inclusion from the very start.’

  ‘I imagine most of the poor souls …’ She tailed off.

  ‘Besides,’ Reid said, ‘Parliament has spoken. And I daresay all our elders and betters are growing weary of the constant outcries and assaults they must for ever fend off.’ He stopped abruptly and then signalled his apology to her for this gentle outburst.

  Neither of them spoke for a moment, and then Caroline touched his sleeve briefly and said, ‘Did you know someone?’

  Reid nodded absently. ‘I knew of a man. A boy. Ninth Devons. He’s buried at the Dartmoor cemetery. He’d already absconded six times before he was caught and charged and tried. Twice while on Active Service. He was given every opportunity. It seemed to me at the time that everyone involved simply ran out of patience with him. He was barely old enough to be here. They should have done the decent thing and sent him somewhere out of harm’s way.’

  They were interrupted by the appearance of Mary Ellsworth, who came quickly, running almost, round the corner of the lane leading to the rear of the church. She seemed surprised to find them so suddenly in front of her.

  Reid rose to greet her and offered her his seat, but she stopped a few yards from them and came no closer. She seemed wary of the pair of them. Or perhaps wary of Caroline Mortimer only because she was in Reid’s company.

  Caroline, too, rose from the bench. She went to Mary and held both her hands. She told her to join them.

  ‘I didn’t know where you were,’ Mary said accusingly.

  ‘I told you yesterday. I was at the service.’

  ‘I meant afterwards. I was waiting for you to return.’

  ‘I met Captain Reid. We were talking.’

  Mary Ellsworth looked back and forth between them as though doubting what Caroline had just told her.

  ‘Is something wrong?’ Caroline asked her. ‘Has something happened?’

  Mary pulled herself free and took several paces away from her. ‘I wanted to see you, to talk, that’s all,’ she said.

  Reid sat back down, hoping to put her at her ease.

  ‘Are you coming?’ Mary said to Caroline.

  ‘Soon,’ Caroline said. ‘I wanted some air.’

  Clearly angry that the older woman had not done as she’d asked, Mary Ellsworth turned and walked briskly away from them.

  ‘Perhaps you should go to her,’ Reid suggested as Caroline watched her leave.

  ‘I’m not her guardian,’ Caroline said, though not unkindly. ‘I’ve been away, in Amiens. I only returned last night. She wanted to come with me, but I told her I had work to do and that she ought to stay here.’

  ‘Work in connection with your nurses?’

  She shook her head. ‘The bodies of six women were found in a grave at Acheville, beyond Arras. The Registration officer in Amiens sent word to me. It turned out they were nuns and novices from a convent in Liège. Their own graveyard was lost to them during the war and these six had been buried in the plot at Acheville. They’d all been exhumed and identified by the time I arrived. I could have returned immediately, but the few remaining sisters invited me to stay the night and I accepted. Mary can be very demanding.’

  ‘I can imagine. Has she found out anything more about her fiancé?’

  ‘Nothing positive. The resident superintendent at Vignacourt—’

  ‘Vesey – Peter Vesey,’ Reid said. ‘I know him.’

  ‘He apparently had four graves assigned to men with the same surname, but none of their details matched up with Mary’s fiancé. Same regiment, but different companies and dates.’

  ‘It’s more common than you’d imagine,’ Reid said.

  ‘So, once again, her hopes were raised and then dashed.’

  ‘Did she go to Vignacourt?’

  Caroline shook her head. ‘When I told her I wouldn’t be able to accompany her, she insisted on coming to Acheville with me. I told her to go alone, that the journey would be straightforward. To be honest, I didn’t want her with me at Acheville. If the women there had turned out to be nurses, then I would have had things to do. You know how it is. It’s why she’s angry with me now. I don’t blame her. I doubt if she truly knows herself what she wants or expects from any of this.’

  ‘She’d be better off back at home,’ Reid said.

  ‘Wherever she was, I doubt things would be any different. Besides …’

  ‘Besides, you appreciated your time alone at Acheville?’

  ‘I did. I promised I’d return before I left for England. The place is half-destroyed, but the nuns are carrying on with their lives there as though nothing has happened. It has always been a nursing convent. I went to prayers with them. I knelt on the bare earth and listened to them whispering and murmuring all around me for an hour. They are growing vegetables again, and breeding ducks and rabbits. They collect frogs from nearby ponds. The oldest of the six dead was ninety, the youngest only fourteen. The sisters dug their new graves and reburied them. Several of them worked in the hospital in Arras. I had French nuns with me at the casualty clearing station at Abbeville, and later at Roisel. They were afraid of nothing, those women.’

  ‘Unlike—’

  ‘Yes, unlike Mary, who now, it seems, is afraid of almost everything she encounters.’

  It wasn’t what Reid had been about to say, but he let the remark pass.

  After this, she held out her hand to him and said she ought to go after Mary. Less than ten minutes had passed since her abrupt departure.

  ‘Of course,’ Reid said, rising again. He’d hoped they might have spent longer together, but again he said nothing.

  ‘Will you come and visit me?’ she said.

  ‘Of course.’

  She took a step away from him, then turned and saluted, and he had already half raised his arm when she laughed and lowered her own.

  He watched her go, seeing her pass in and out of the light and shadow of the lost buildings as she moved along the street, pausing occasionally to exchange greetings with the few villagers still gathered there.

  8

  TWO DAYS LATER, Reid was waiting on the platform when Alexander Lucas and a dozen or so others climbed down from the train carrying that day’s deliveries. Lucas saw him and came to him through the congregating men.

  ‘En route to Prezière,’ he said. ‘Jessop’s arranging for transport from here. I spoke to him earlier. According to him, the lorries should already be waiting.’ He looked beyond the station to where Reid’s men were again gathering on the verge.

  ‘Nothing so far,’ Reid said.

  ‘Which is precisely what I expected.’ There was neither anger nor disappointment in Lucas’s voice.

  They were then approached by Drake, who complained that Lucas’s men were getting in the way of the train being unloaded.

  ‘And the station master in Amiens complained that we were in the way of your coffins being loaded,’ Lucas said.

  Drake smiled and shook his head.

  Reid told him to set their own men to work.

  ‘I have half a ton of equipment. Picks and sp
ades, mostly,’ Lucas said. ‘I’ll tell my crew to stay out of the way until your stuff’s off.’

  ‘The driver will insist on sticking to the schedule,’ Reid warned him.

  ‘And then spend three hours back in Amiens doing nothing?’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘Most of what we need will be on the lorries,’ Lucas said. He shouted instructions for the dozen or so others who had come with him.

  ‘Is that all of you?’ Reid asked him, surprised to see so few men.

  Lucas left him briefly and went to the rear of the train, where he now told his own labourers to help the men unloading the coffins. There was friendly competition between the two groups.

  When Lucas returned, he took Reid’s arm and guided him into the empty waiting room. Sparrows flew from side to side across the low ceiling. The room was dimly lit, cool in the morning shade, and filled with the dust which rose from its bare boards.

  Lucas sat opposite Reid on one of the simple benches and the two men lit cigarettes. It was clear to Reid that Lucas had brought him away from the others for a reason.

  ‘Have there been new discoveries?’ Reid said. ‘At Prezière?’

  Lucas opened the case he carried and took out a rolled map and several folders fastened with string. He unrolled the map and showed it to Reid.

  ‘This is you,’ he said, tapping a finger at the centre of the sheet. ‘And here’s Prezière. At least, here’s where it once was.’

  ‘How many bodies do you expect to recover?’

  ‘Our latest estimate – accounts vary – is between thirty and forty.’

  ‘So many? I didn’t think there’d been any major engagement there.’ Reid studied the map more closely, trying to remember where and when the lines had come and gone in those last confused months. ‘At Hargicourt, perhaps, when everything was overrun. But Prezière? Do you have any witnesses?’

  ‘Apparently, we’re going to retrieve between thirty and forty corpses that were laid out with all their insignia intact inside a barn, which afterwards collapsed on top of them and hid them from sight for two years.’ His scepticism was clear.

  ‘A makeshift morgue, then?’ Reid said.

  ‘Possibly. Our most reliable witness – the farmer who owns the barn, which had been a fodder store on the edge of his land – said that he only returned there in May of this year to find the building with its roof and upper walls caved in. There was no other significant damage around the place and so he left it alone and got on with what needed doing elsewhere on his property. We know the Ninth and Fifth Manchesters and the Second Lancashire Fusiliers retreated over the land sometime during that last Easter, and that the Germans followed them and often overtook them as far west as Albert.’

  ‘So do you believe the bodies were gathered up afterwards and laid there by the Germans?’

  ‘Unlikely. They were making five or six miles’ progress each day by then and stopping for nothing. There was a sizeable depot at Combles and they were keen to get to it before it was destroyed. We’ve learned most of this from our own records and other eye-witness accounts.’

  ‘What, then?’

  Lucas sat in silence for a moment before answering. ‘Wheeler believes we’re retrieving the bodies of men who were taken prisoner and who found themselves rounded up into the building.’

  ‘And who were then killed there—’

  ‘By “means unknown”, yes.’ Lucas rolled up his map.

  Only then did it fully occur to Reid what Lucas was suggesting to him. ‘Surely, you don’t believe …’ he began to say.

  ‘According to the farmer – the man’s supposedly waiting for us there now – the few corpses he was able to make out beneath the rubble appeared to have been badly burned, scorched black.’

  ‘Scorched?’

  ‘That was the word he used. It’s not usually what happens to bodies, however the men were killed.’

  ‘Perhaps the building caught fire and that was why it collapsed in on the men,’ Reid said.

  ‘The farmer says the collapsed joists and other timbers and tiles show no signs whatsoever of the same fire.’

  Neither man spoke for a moment. It seemed to Reid that all further speculation about how the men had died two years earlier was pointless.

  ‘Will the bodies be sent here, do you think?’ he said eventually.

  Lucas nodded. ‘They were originally docketed for Hargicourt, but Wheeler believes it’s best all round if they now come here, and as soon and directly as possible.’

  ‘I doubt—’

  ‘He wants me to retrieve them, identify them – which shouldn’t be too difficult – and then make the arrangements to deliver them directly to you, rather than to one of the sorting depots. He’s already got Jessop working on the paperwork. Once I’ve started work at Prezière, and we all get a clearer picture of what did or didn’t happen there, then Wheeler will set everything in motion at his end. He insists it’s all for the best, and to be honest, I tend to agree with him.’

  ‘Even if what you uncover points to …?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I see,’ Reid said. It was the first time bodies would have come to Morlancourt like this. ‘Does Wheeler want me to do anything?’

  ‘“Let expediency be our watchword.” All Wheeler wants is for you and me to make everything run as smoothly as possible for him. I doubt it’s anything more or less than we do already.’

  ‘Even if you do find evidence of the deliberate killing of prisoners?’

  Lucas smiled at this. ‘I said exactly the same to him. He looked as though he was going to explode.’

  ‘He surely can’t want everything to be ignored or dismissed without at least—’

  ‘Can’t he? Besides, like I said – he may have a point. What good would stirring everything up and causing the men’s families all that doubt and anguish serve? Who among them wouldn’t far rather just know that their loved one had finally been found and then buried here? You can see his point, surely? Besides, he as good as told me that if I couldn’t deal with all of this quickly and quietly, there were plenty of others he could call on to do the work for him. He also hinted that a great deal of what he wanted had been sanctioned by others higher up.’

  ‘In the Commission? The War Office?’

  Lucas shrugged.

  They sat in silence for several minutes, listening to the noise of the men outside unloading the train’s cargo.

  ‘Wheeler will need to provide me with all the necessary paperwork,’ Reid said eventually.

  ‘Jessop’s got everything in hand. We have the names of all the men in the Manchesters and Lancashires who answered the last roll-call before the Germans came running across the fields at Prezière. At least now twenty to thirty wives and mothers will have their uncertainty ended and their minds put to rest.’

  ‘But only because you’ll keep the truth from them and tell them what they want to hear,’ Reid said, immediately wishing he’d stayed silent.

  ‘Of course I’ll tell them what they want to hear,’ Lucas shouted at him. ‘Just as I’ll tell Wheeler what he wants to hear. And just as you’ll tell them all where to come and lay their flowers, where to come to kneel and to cry and to remember their heroic son or husband or brother killed in a painless instant while gallantly fighting for his friends and king and country.’

  Reid was accustomed to hearing these unguarded remarks from Lucas, but seldom had he heard the man express himself so vehemently or within the hearing of others.

  They were distracted briefly by the rising noise of approaching lorries.

  ‘Your transport,’ Reid said. He watched as Lucas clasped his hands together and then released them. ‘How long will it take you?’ he asked him.

  ‘Wheeler’s given us a week. As I say, identification should be straightforward, and that’s what usually takes up most of our time.’

  ‘Even if the bodies are badly burned?’

  Lucas bowed his head and held his face in his cupped palms
. ‘Sorry about that,’ he said.

  Reid waved away the apology.

  ‘Wheeler’s opening gambit was to give us three days.’

  ‘Could it be done in that time?’

  ‘Probably. I told him we needed ten and we settled on a week.’

  ‘Because he knew what he was asking of you and was in no position to argue?’

  ‘Something like that. However long it takes, he wants the first of my paperwork with you by the end of the week. The sooner we start, the sooner we finish. He wants the first of the bodies delivered to you on your smoky little train by this time next week.’

  ‘I’ll allocate the plots as soon as I get the names,’ Reid said.

  ‘I’m sure he’d appreciate that. He even suggested to me that the three of us should get together for dinner one night. A pat on the back for all our hard work under such trying circumstances. He’s probably already preparing a little speech.’

  They were interrupted by a knock on the open door, and Drake appeared. A man in a full, clean uniform stood beside him.

  ‘Ah,’ Lucas said.

  The man came forward and Reid saw the clerical collar beneath his tunic.

  ‘The padre was looking for Lieutenant Lucas,’ Drake said.

  ‘Chaplain Guthrie,’ Lucas called to the man. ‘Come and meet your parish gravediggers.’

  The man looked unhappy at the remark. ‘Captain Reid,’ he said to Reid, holding out his hand and pointedly ignoring Alexander Lucas. ‘I believe your charges await you.’ He motioned outside.

  ‘My charges?’

  ‘He means your bodies,’ Lucas said.

  ‘Of course,’ Reid said. He rose and shook the chaplain’s hand.

  ‘I was about to tell you,’ Lucas said, unable to hide the amusement in his voice. ‘The Commission has recently felt the need for – what? – shall we call it a greater degree of spiritual rigour and religious guidance in all its affairs and efforts.’

  The chaplain looked over Reid’s shoulder to where Lucas still sat behind him. ‘As much as I appreciate your candour and your somewhat unnecessary introduction, Lieutenant Lucas, I am here, as we all surely are, to serve the greater good and to—’