Field Service

by Robert Edric

  ‘Compared to a proper funeral and burial?’

  He nodded. ‘Does she know any more?’

  ‘Such as? Oh, I see. Apparently, Jessop was able to tell her that her fiancé’s identity had been confirmed and that he’d previously been interred close to where he’d died. The body arrived in Saint-Quentin two days ago. She insisted on me coming to see you.’

  ‘And if I say no, she’ll come anyway?’

  ‘I imagine so,’ Caroline said.

  ‘Will you be with her?’ he said.

  ‘It’s what she wants. She turned up at my room already wearing a veil.’

  ‘Is she still there?’

  ‘I imagine so. I told her I’d go straight back to her.’

  Reid looked at his watch. ‘Go back to her. Give me some time to get the train unloaded. Bring her closer to eight. I’ll need to find out what else is being sent. I’ll sort something out with Drake.’

  ‘Of course. She’s grateful for anything you’re able to do. As am I.’

  Collecting up his case and satchel, Reid held open the door for her and she left the room ahead of him, descending the stairs to the street, where they stood together for a moment longer before parting.

  ‘One thing,’ Reid said after she had taken several steps away from him. ‘You must persuade her to stay at the station. Afterwards, I mean, when I leave with the coffins for the cemetery.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘It’s important,’ Reid said. ‘It’s difficult enough work for the men, without—’

  ‘Without a woman wailing in grief while they’re labouring?’

  ‘Yes, exactly,’ Reid said, angry at this unthinking remark.

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to sound so crass,’ she said. She reached towards him.

  ‘No, I know,’ he said, and before she could answer him – apologize further, perhaps – he turned and left her for the station and the men already gathering there.

  12

  LATER, APPROACHING EIGHT, Reid went to join the two women where they waited in Benoît’s office.

  Mary Ellsworth rose immediately at his appearance in the doorway.

  ‘A few more minutes,’ he told her, careful to keep himself between the woman and the door.

  ‘Monsieur Benoît treated us to his coffee,’ Caroline said.

  Benoît, who had been sitting with the two women, dismissed this kindness with a wave. ‘It is … an occasion,’ he said.

  Caroline looked at Reid and he nodded slightly to let her know that everything was going to their vague plan.

  ‘My sergeant will let us know,’ Reid said. He could hear behind him the noise of the men removing the last of that morning’s cargo from the train. He saw that while Benoît’s and Caroline’s small cups were empty, Mary Ellsworth’s remained full to the brim. Caroline rose beside the woman and took it from her, emptying it in a single swallow as Benoît rummaged in a drawer.

  ‘Monsieur Benoît was telling us about his son,’ Caroline said, indicating the photograph on Benoît’s desk.

  ‘Ah, yes – he, too, had a fiancée,’ Benoît said.

  Reid tried to remember if he already knew this. ‘Of course,’ he said. He took the photo Benoît handed to him. It was of a boy and a girl, neither of them looking older than fourteen or fifteen.

  ‘It was taken a year before the war started,’ Benoît said. ‘She now lives in Roubaix. She was married a few months ago. A Belgian, a miner.’

  It seemed to Reid that a lifetime of loss, despair and regret were let out in a single breath.

  ‘She’s very beautiful,’ Caroline said. She took the picture from Reid and showed it to Mary, but the woman remained too distracted to look. She, too, listened to the voices of the men on the platform.

  Reid regretted having come away from the work so soon. All the time he had been with the others, he had expected either Mary Ellsworth alone, or Mary and Caroline together, to appear among them, demanding to see the body of Mary’s fiancé.

  ‘Seventeen bodies,’ he said. ‘Only six unidentified.’ He wondered why he’d said it, what it might signify to the women.

  ‘Are the unidentified treated any differently?’ Caroline asked him, glancing at Mary, just as a teacher might glance at a shy child reluctant to ask its own questions.

  ‘Not at all,’ Reid said, understanding her motive, and grateful for the opportunity to fill the small room’s awkward silence with something other than more silence. Even by leaving the door open, he sensed that some of its tensions had already been released.

  ‘You bury them amid the known?’

  ‘We do. They lie with their comrades, with the men who would have been familiar to them. The hope is that their families will come and decide for themselves where their own lost son or husband or brother might lie.’

  ‘I imagine many will take great comfort from believing they know where they are,’ Caroline said. Everything she said was more for Mary’s sake than her own.

  ‘There was originally some idea of using different stones, but the Commission decided that they should all be the same.’ Reid looked at Mary as he said this, but it was clear to him from that same distracted gaze that nothing either he or Caroline now said penetrated her concern.

  Just as he was considering what he might say next, Drake appeared beside him in the doorway.

  ‘Sir.’ Drake saluted sharply, and Reid returned the rare gesture.

  ‘Are we ready?’ he said.

  ‘We are, sir. I’ve told the men to draw the lorries and carts down the road a pace or two so that there’s no noise while the ladies …’

  ‘That’s considerate of you. Thank you.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘Yes, thank you for everything,’ Caroline said. ‘You must all be very busy men without … distractions like this.’

  ‘It’s nothing, Miss,’ Drake said. ‘In fact, I think—’ He stopped abruptly.

  ‘No, please, go on,’ Caroline prompted him. She moved closer to the man.

  ‘I was going to say that, in a funny sort of way, I think the men … I think they appreciate being able to do something like this.’

  It surprised Reid to hear Drake speaking like this, but he said nothing.

  ‘You mean to be able to connect what they’re doing here – all their hard and dirty labour – with what it will come to mean to the people who actually knew the men they’re burying?’ Caroline said to him, again more for Mary Ellsworth’s sake than her own, and again looking to the woman to add something of her own. But still Mary remained silent.

  ‘That’s it exactly,’ Drake said. ‘Some days, we take twenty unidentified bodies off that train and dig twenty holes, lower them in and then cover them over with no real sense of … of …’ He faltered, suddenly self-conscious in front of Reid at what he was trying to explain. He looked at Mary Ellsworth. ‘Being able to do this for the girl, well …’

  Mary finally turned to look at him, and Drake fell silent and bowed his head.

  ‘We understand you perfectly,’ Caroline said to him. ‘And I’m certain that your kindness here today will be a great consolation to a great many people for a considerable time to come. Mary?’

  ‘Yes,’ Mary Ellsworth said. She drew down the veil that had been folded back over the small hat she wore.

  ‘Good,’ Drake said, and then, ‘Right.’ He saw the photograph Benoît held. ‘Your boy?’ he said to him.

  ‘And the girl who became his fiancée,’ Benoît said, handing the picture to him.

  ‘I see.’ Drake looked at the two children and then handed the precious possession back to the old station master. ‘It’s a grave loss for you,’ he said.

  ‘I bear up,’ Benoît said absently.

  ‘Of course you do,’ Drake said. ‘That’s what men like you and me do – we bear up. Mostly because we know there’s nothing else for it. We bear up; that’s what we do.’

  Benoît slid the picture into his pocket. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘We bear up because other
s cannot. Perhaps they too will find that same strength in the months and years to come, but for now, so soon afterwards, they do not possess it, and so we – men like you and I, Sergeant Drake – we bear up and we provide that strength for them.’

  Reid translated all this for Drake, who nodded in agreement at everything Benoît said.

  ‘That’s right,’ Drake said. ‘That’s exactly right. We play the waiting game, you and me, Benoît. We wait and we wait and we wait for everything to finally right itself and then we make sure everyone else is still standing upright.’

  Reid translated again.

  ‘We bear the true weight of the world on our shoulders,’ Benoît said. He held a hand over his pocket and his heart.

  ‘We do that,’ Drake said. ‘We bear that sorry weight. And who knows, it might only get lighter by a solitary ounce every passing year, but we still go on bearing it.’ He clasped Benoît’s shoulders with both hands, and Benoît stiffened and held up his chin at the unexpected gesture.

  And once again, it seemed to Reid, he saw precisely what made Drake the good sergeant that he was.

  When Drake released Benoît, he turned to Mary Ellsworth and held up his arm for her. Mary quickly slid her hand beneath it and allowed herself to be led outside.

  Reid shared a glance with Caroline, who watched Drake and Mary and smiled at them.

  Then she came to Reid and waited for him to present his own arm to her, which he did, and which she held. She then beckoned for Benoît to do the same with her other arm.

  They left the office and walked out on to the silent platform. Caroline slowed the pace of the two men she held, allowing Drake and Mary to draw ahead of them.

  They reached the dim and cavernous space of the goods shed.

  Inside, they gathered back together.

  Drake released Mary Ellsworth and came to Reid. He indicated where the solitary coffin now stood at the far end of the room on a makeshift trestle.

  Moving closer, Reid saw that the full name of Mary’s fiancé, his service number, regiment, and dates of birth and death had all been recently stencilled neatly on the coffin lid. All the usual chalked details from the Saint-Quentin depot had been scrubbed away. In addition to this, someone had laid a clean white handkerchief beside the man’s name and placed on this a small bunch of wild flowers – mostly daisies, which grew in abundance along the verges between the station and the cemetery.

  Mary Ellsworth said, ‘Oh,’ at seeing all this.

  Reid expected her to go quickly to the coffin and perhaps to embrace it, but instead she held back. She turned to Drake. ‘I … would you …?’ She wanted him to go with her.

  ‘My pleasure,’ Drake said. She again held his arm and the two of them went forward alone.

  ‘The man is forever a surprise to me,’ Reid whispered to Caroline.

  ‘No – you underestimate him, that’s all,’ she said. ‘He hides himself.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ Her remark had sounded simultaneously dismissive and kind.

  ‘Or perhaps Mary’s fiancé had a sergeant just like him and the boy wrote to her telling her all about the man,’ she said. She continued to hold the arms of both Reid and Benoît.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Reid said.

  Closer to the coffin, Drake and Mary Ellsworth stopped walking, and the woman finally went forward alone. She touched the casket and then walked from one end of it to the other. She laid her hand on the stencilled name for a moment, and then on the clean white cloth and the flowers. Her quiet sobbing echoed slightly in the high, empty space.

  Eventually, Reid, Caroline and Benoît walked to the box and waited in a line beside Drake.

  From where they stood, Reid could see the other men beyond the station, gathered in silence to watch the small, impromptu ceremony now taking place there.

  ‘Perhaps you might say something, sir,’ Drake said to Reid, who was unprepared for this.

  ‘I don’t know. Do you think …? I didn’t know the man.’

  ‘I’m sure she’d appreciate something,’ Caroline said.

  Reid detached himself from her and moved closer to Mary Ellsworth and the coffin. He saw where a solitary cart and its two horses waited on the road.

  Mary Ellsworth turned at his approach. ‘Please,’ she said.

  ‘We forget,’ Reid said, clearing his throat. ‘We forget at our peril, and to our eternal shame, what sacrifice this man’ – unable to read the stencilled details from where he stood, he tried hard to remember the name Caroline had told him two hours earlier – ‘what all these men who now pass through this place made on our behalf. They came and they fought and they died and were injured in ways far too many for us to count. They came here and they did all this because they had a reason to do it all. Many because they had a duty to fulfil, and just as many others because they knew that what they were fighting for – what they were fighting to protect – was at the very heart of everything they believed in, everything they possessed, everything they held dear. They fought and they died to protect and to keep safe for others everything that was dearest and most precious to them – everything that, without which, their own lives would have become unbearable – unliveable, even – and without all true purpose.’ He paused.

  Beside him, he saw Caroline nod and then lower her face to the ground. Beyond her, he saw the wetness on Benoît’s cheeks and chin.

  At the coffin, Drake now stood alongside Mary and held her arm again.

  ‘And what we do here, today – what hundreds of other men do in hundreds of other places just like this one – what we do here in our work is to honour and to serve these men in a way no others can. Many thousands – millions, in fact – will have no real idea of what these men endured, how they fought, and how they suffered and died, but many of us here – many of us entrusted with this work – will know precisely what they endured and how they suffered and how they died.’ He paused again, wondering if he’d said enough, or if even more was required of him. He knew that, in all likelihood, he would only repeat himself.

  Benoît took out a handkerchief and wiped his face.

  ‘In the years to come, this land will return to how it once was, how it once looked, and a great many of its recent upheavals and tragedies will be forgotten. But what will never be forgotten will be the men – men such as Andrew Copley here,’ the name came to him as he spoke – ‘who gave their own lives so that the lives of those countless millions of others might now resume their rightful, peaceful course.’

  Mary Ellsworth half turned to him at hearing her fiancé’s name.

  Reid listened to the quiet drumming of his words in the space above him.

  ‘Men never die where they live the fiercest,’ he went on. ‘And they live the fiercest where they are loved the deepest – in the hearts of those who love them who they leave behind.’ They were lines from a poem he had learned at school, but whose title and author he could not remember. He stopped talking and lowered his eyes to the ground.

  Caroline held his arm again.

  Benoît lowered his own eyes and mumbled a prayer.

  At the coffin, Mary Ellsworth took a few paces back, and Drake retrieved the handkerchief and the flowers and gave them to her. Then he took something small from his pocket and gave that to her, too. He stood close to her for a moment, as though he were about to clasp her like he had earlier clasped Benoît, and then pull her to him and embrace her. But instead, he simply said something quietly to her and then turned and marched back to the others.

  ‘They were fine words,’ he said to Reid, stopping and turning on his heel.

  ‘I didn’t really—’

  ‘They were fine words. You said what needed to be said. You did what mattered – what counted – and you did the pair of them proud.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Mary Ellsworth finally came back to them, and Caroline went to her and held her.

  ‘Thank you,’ Mary said first to Reid, and then to Drake, who closed his eyes briefly and then turned to t
he distant coffin and saluted.

  Seeing this, Reid did the same, followed a moment later by Benoît.

  Mary did nothing to clear the tears running down her face.

  Waiting until the two women had walked back out on to the platform, Drake called to the men on the waiting cart to come in and collect the coffin.

  ‘You went to a lot of trouble,’ Reid said to him. ‘I appreciate that. As, I’m sure, does Mary.’

  ‘It seemed only right,’ Drake said. ‘I held back one of the carts instead of a lorry because the horses seemed more fitting.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘It’s only a pity that we can’t do something similar for the rest of them,’ Drake said.

  ‘Their time will come,’ Reid told him. Then he asked Drake what he had given to Mary at the coffin.

  ‘I gave her a cap badge from one of the boxes of insignia they occasionally send us. He was in the Fifteenth Battalion, West Yorkshires.’

  ‘And did you tell her it was actually his, her fiancé’s?’

  ‘I did. So may God and all His angels forgive me for that.’

  ‘She’ll treasure it,’ Reid said.

  ‘Good,’ Drake said. ‘Because there won’t be much else to keep her going, and especially not after she gets back home.’

  The blunt remark surprised Reid. ‘Oh? You seem—’

  ‘I am,’ Drake said. ‘My sister lost her bloke. They were going to be married, too. Twenty-First Entrenching Battalion. I never liked the man, myself, too bloody full of himself, but I saw what it did to her. Three years ago, Third Ypres. She was twenty-nine.’

  ‘I see,’ Reid said. ‘And did she …?’

  ‘Did she what? Did she get over it? Never. You see her now, you’d swear she was nearer fifty than thirty.’

  Mary Ellsworth, Caroline, Benoît, and now Drake. Reid saw how tightly all these other small wreaths were woven.

  The men loading the coffin called to Drake, and he left Reid and went to them. He climbed on to the cart with them, and Reid watched as the driver turned the horses to face the lane leading to the cemetery. The clatter of their hooves on the hard surface sounded long after they had gone from his sight. Bright sunlight obscured the countryside beyond and left its own black suns at the centre of his vision. Rubbing his eyes, he went to join the others waiting for him on the platform.