Field Service

by Robert Edric

  Part Two

  13

  ALEXANDER LUCAS WAS waiting for Reid at Amiens station. They had both earlier attended another of Wheeler’s meetings, at the close of which Wheeler had called Reid to him.

  Now, approaching Lucas on the empty platform, Reid carried the rolled charts Wheeler had insisted he take with him back to Morlancourt. They were copies of the plans that had been made of the recently confirmed cemeteries at Cerisy and the Lancashire Dump cemetery at Aveluy Wood, and Reid still wondered what use they were likely to be to him at the much smaller Morlancourt.

  Lucas took one of the rolled sheets, opened it and studied it. He was as mystified as Reid as to why Wheeler had given him the plans. His best guess was that Morlancourt was now being considered for expansion. It had happened elsewhere, where the number of bodies retrieved had exceeded expectations.

  The suggestion alarmed Reid and he was unable to conceal this.

  ‘Or perhaps he now wants something as grand as Cerisy at Morlancourt,’ Lucas said, amused by Reid’s reaction to his deliberate provocation.

  ‘The bigger cemeteries will hold ten times the number of men,’ Reid said. ‘The ground at Morlancourt isn’t anywhere near suitable for that kind of expansion.’

  ‘If you say so,’ Lucas said. He sat with his bare feet on the cold stone of the platform, his boots and socks on the bench beside him.

  ‘I thought at first he wanted to talk about the planting,’ Reid said.

  ‘At Morlancourt?’

  ‘In these plans, the gardens and beds are drawn in and the plants all named.’ He turned the sheet to show Lucas, who continued to show little real interest.

  ‘He could have told you anything you needed to know in the meeting itself,’ Lucas said. ‘God knows, it was filled with every other kind of irrelevance.’

  Both men were unhappy at having wasted another day at Wheeler’s insistence. And now, because of the further delay, they had missed the regular train back to Albert and were waiting on the chance of an engine from distant Abbeville passing through the station on its way to Paris. Lucas had already spoken to the station master, who had promised him that if an engine did come, he would signal for it to stop.

  ‘Holly, box, rowan, lilac, dogwood, privet, syringa, laburnum, laurel and cherry,’ Lucas said, reading the names from the plan. ‘How very English.’

  ‘That’s the point,’ Reid said. ‘Besides, I imagine they all grow easily enough over here, too.’

  ‘I once turned up in Péronne,’ Lucas said, ‘to find hundreds of Zouaves there, all of them picking cherries in an orchard. They’d been ordered to assemble in a nearby field and then they’d seen the harvest underway and had decided to get involved. Hundreds of men in full uniform up rickety ladders and shaking fruit from the trees.’

  ‘They’re planting the colonial cemeteries with trees and shrubs from the colonies,’ Reid said. ‘Maples, eucalyptus, acacia, that kind of thing.’

  ‘Here?’ Lucas said, and then, ‘A year ago we retrieved a party of East Kents – the Buffs – from Guillemont, their pockets and knapsacks bulging with cobnuts. Someone who’d known the men said they harvested the things back at home. I’d never heard of them. They were all killed in a late cut-up at Guillemont in a stand of trees there. Apparently, the runner with the order for them to withdraw never came closer than three miles to them.’

  ‘Where are they now?’ Reid asked him.

  Lucas shrugged. ‘I handed them over to your people and that’s the last I saw of them. Perhaps Wheeler just intends you to start preparing for your own planting at Morlancourt.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ Reid took the plans back, rolled them up and tied them securely.

  A small train passed on the far track, its open wagons filled with French soldiers. The men waved and shouted to the few others waiting in the station as they moved slowly through it. They were all young men – what the French called ‘bleuets’ – and in all likelihood had seen nothing of the war, only its aftermath.

  ‘Have you heard anything from home of late?’ Reid asked Lucas.

  Lucas looked away.

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to pry.’

  ‘You aren’t,’ Lucas said. ‘It’s just that things between the two of us – Elizabeth and me – have been … what should I say? – unsettled? – for some time now.’

  Reid waited. Some men spoke endlessly of home and their families, whereas others hardly mentioned those things. Lucas was one of the latter. Some men believed that by talking endlessly of those other lives, they maintained a strong connection to them; others seemed equally determined to keep the two existences as far apart as possible.

  ‘If Susan hadn’t been born …’ Lucas said finally.

  ‘What, you would have separated? Divorced?’

  Lucas rubbed a hand over his face. ‘It’s possible, yes.’

  ‘Are things …?’

  ‘I was last home four months ago. Ten days. We seemed to do nothing but argue with each other. About everything. Perhaps not argue, exactly, but nothing seemed right; everything seemed to have changed. Everything seemed off-kilter between us. Apart from which – and I don’t know which I took the hardest – my daughter seemed hardly to know me. Everything I tried to do with her, everything I said to her, seemed only to make her apprehensive, wary of me.’

  ‘And you think it’s all this,’ Reid said. ‘Your work here?’

  ‘That’s certainly what Elizabeth believes, though in truth it was probably more of a convenient excuse for both of us than anything more …’

  ‘But it must have some bearing, surely?’

  ‘I’m sure you’re right. Of course it must. Although I daresay the simple fact of my absence doesn’t help matters.’

  ‘No,’ Reid said. ‘I suppose not. Have the two of you decided anything?’

  ‘Not really. How can we while I’m still over here and she’s there? The best we could manage to agree on was to wait until I was back for good and then see what remained to be salvaged.’

  ‘For the sake of your daughter?’

  ‘For Susan, yes. It all seemed a bit ridiculous to me at the time. Hundreds of thousands of families having to make do without husbands and fathers, and there we were talking about things as though we were planning – I don’t know – an outing somewhere.’

  Everything Lucas said made it clear to Reid that he wanted to say as little as possible on the subject. Reid wanted to ask him if he ever spoke to his wife about the work he undertook there, but the question was beyond him.

  ‘They put up a tin chapel at Guillemont,’ he said eventually. ‘The Royal Kents. I saw it when the Commission was choosing its plots.’

  ‘It was already there when we were retrieving the bodies,’ Lucas said. ‘They sprang up in lots of places. Wayside pulpits.’

  ‘They painted it white,’ Reid said. ‘The chapel at Guillemont. Whitewash, I suppose. Someone had hung copies of paintings – Old Masters – on its walls.’

  ‘I remember. We took the first few corpses inside. Until it became obvious that we’d need considerably more space, that is.’

  They were interrupted by the station master, who came to Lucas and confirmed that a train from Abbeville would definitely be there in ten minutes. Lucas thanked the man and gave him a cigarette, which he took and slid behind his ear. Lucas then offered him several more, which he also took. He saluted the pair of them before returning to his duties. Both Lucas and Reid returned the gesture.

  ‘I was at Étaples soon after Guillemont,’ Lucas said, watching the man go, picking up the thread of their conversation and keeping it on the same cold course.

  ‘That place,’ Reid said.

  ‘I saw a boy walk into the sea there. In full uniform and with all his kit, his rifle in his hands. All too much for him.’

  ‘He drowned, you mean?’

  Lucas nodded absently. ‘I sat and watched him at a distance. I shouted to him, to anyone who could hear me, but he just kept on walking until he went
under the waves. They found him washed back up later the same day.’

  ‘There were forever stories of that place,’ Reid said. ‘Most of the men I put out of the line on Excused Duties were sent there for a week or so. God knows why.’

  ‘Probably because it showed them there were worse places to be than the front itself.’

  ‘It’s a possibility.’

  Neither man believed this.

  ‘A good number of the men recruited into the Retrieval units came straight from the Excused Duty rosters at Étaples at the time of the Armistice,’ Lucas said.

  ‘I was always glad to see the back of them,’ Reid said. ‘Did you know the circumstances of the boy who drowned?’

  ‘Not really. Only that he was young, and that that place was all he’d ever known of the war. Apparently, he’d arrived from Dover less than a fortnight earlier.’ Lucas leaned forward and sat with his elbows on his knees, his head down. He looked at his bare feet. ‘My heels are cracked,’ he said, and then laughed. ‘From standing in water. I’ve been given some ointment by the MO. He told me I should get fresh air to them as often as possible. I did try explaining to him how difficult that might be.’

  A moment later, they heard the clanging of points being switched and turned to watch the Paris-bound engine moving slowly and laboriously towards them, spurting smoke and steam as it came, scraping and grinding, and then letting out a long, exhausted wheeze as it finally stopped alongside them.

  The station master reappeared and spoke to the driver. He beckoned to Lucas and Reid and indicated for them to climb up on to the driving platform. The engine pulled no carriages and so they would return to Albert alongside the driver.

  ‘We could stay on the thing all the way to Paris,’ Lucas said, leaning out of the cab to look along the tracks ahead of them.

  ‘We could,’ Reid said, the words more mouthed than spoken.

  Beneath them, the station master blew his whistle and waved a flag, and the engine pulled away from the platform as slowly and laboriously as it had arrived and resumed its broken journey.

  14

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING, Reid again waited with Lucas, this time at the Morlancourt station for Reid’s daily train. Lucas had spent the night in the town and was now on his way to resume the retrieval of the bodies at Prezière.

  The train was uncharacteristically late that day, and by twenty past seven had still not arrived. At Reid’s urging, Benoît telephoned Saint-Quentin, only to be told that the engine had departed late – he was not told why – and that it was currently somewhere between La Boiselle and the halt at the old Gallaton junction. He conveyed all this to Reid, who in turn told Drake and the waiting men.

  Lucas had been sent word the previous evening that Jessop would be arriving in Morlancourt to accompany him to Prezière with the intention of reporting directly to Wheeler on the work there. When Lucas had attempted to raise the subject at the previous day’s meeting, Wheeler had refused to include it on the agenda. Lucas had screwed up the note telling him of Jessop’s arrival and had thrown it into the gutter where he and Reid were sitting outside a bar.

  ‘Perhaps everything sounds better to Wheeler coming from one of his own,’ Reid said to him now. He stood at the edge of the platform and looked along the line towards the distant signal box.

  Lucas sat with his head down. Reid guessed he was nursing a hangover, and that this coloured the resentment he felt at Wheeler’s behaviour.

  It was the first time in three months that the train had not arrived on time, and whatever the reason for the delay, Reid knew that the whole of his schedule for the day ahead would be disrupted.

  ‘Sit down,’ Lucas said to him angrily. ‘You’d have been told if there was anything seriously wrong.’

  Reid doubted this, but said nothing.

  ‘Perhaps it’s late because Jessop wants a leisurely breakfast,’ Lucas said.

  It was an apology of sorts.

  Further along the platform, Benoît emerged from his office and came to them.

  ‘The train is still beyond Gallaton. I spoke to the signalman there. Ernaux told him that there had been a delay in the loading, something unexpected. If they’re beyond the signal, then they’ll be here in’ – he looked at his watch and pursed his lips in calculation – ‘fifteen minutes.’

  ‘Good-oh,’ Lucas said, settling himself back against the cool wall, stretching his legs, closing his eyes and folding his arms across his chest.

  ‘Yes, “Good-oh”,’ Benoît said, amused by Lucas’s response.

  ‘And Ernaux said nothing else about the delay?’ Reid asked him.

  But Benoît just shrugged. It would have been impossible for him to have contacted the train itself at one of its manned halts and to have spoken to the guard directly.

  ‘You heard the man,’ Lucas said. ‘Fifteen minutes. You can stand down, the bloody show’s been delayed.’

  Reid smiled at the remark and went to join him in the shade of the station canopy.

  Benoît returned to his office, promising to let Reid know if he heard anything more.

  ‘I heard about the boy,’ Lucas said. ‘Your little funeral service.’

  ‘It was Drake, mostly,’ Reid said.

  ‘The man who told me has got two brothers soon to be buried over at the Suzanne Number Three. He said he wanted to imagine the same kind of thing being done for them there. He’s a good man. Every leave I give him, he goes straight to the cemetery to see where they’ll be. He’s the last of the family. He’s talking about staying over here when his time’s up.’

  It sometimes seemed to Reid as though all these stories were like small white clouds floating and slowly evaporating across a vast warm blue sky.

  ‘I wonder what Jessop really wants,’ Lucas said, his eyes still closed.

  ‘To be told that you’ve retrieved the bodies, identified them, and that they can now be safely registered for burial, I should imagine,’ Reid said.

  ‘Another happy ending, then.’

  Before Reid could respond to this, he was distracted by someone calling his name, and both men looked along the platform to see Jonathan Guthrie coming towards them.

  ‘That’s all we need,’ Lucas said. He pulled his cap low over his brow and pretended to be asleep.

  Guthrie arrived in front of them. ‘No train?’ he said.

  Reid told him of the delay.

  Lucas gave a snore and pretended to wake up. ‘Oh, it’s you, Guthrie. And I was having such a wonderful dream.’

  Guthrie looked at him suspiciously for a moment, and when he turned back to Reid, Reid avoided his eyes.

  ‘Oh? A dream about what?’

  ‘I was back at home, with my wife and daughter, in the garden. It was warm, like today, and we were in the shade, just like here, and my wife was laying out food and drink, and my daughter was climbing on me, insisting that I play with her. I doubt I could ever imagine being happier.’

  Reid considered how this contrasted with what Lucas had told him the previous day.

  ‘Then it was a good dream, indeed,’ Guthrie said, still with a note of suspicion in his voice, as though suspecting Lucas were about to play a joke on him. ‘I envy you, Lieutenant Lucas. I truly do. As, I imagine, do many others.’

  Lucas, unprepared for the remark, could not answer him, caught in his own small deception. He rubbed a hand over his closed eyes.

  ‘How long now until you return to them?’ Guthrie asked him.

  ‘My service commission’s up in eight months, next spring.’

  Reid again sensed his friend’s reluctance to say more on the matter.

  ‘And then what?’ Guthrie said. ‘I mean, what will you return to, your profession?’

  ‘I was an architect,’ Lucas said. ‘Recently qualified. I was what’s called a late starter.’

  ‘I see.’ Guthrie turned to Reid. ‘The train – will the delay affect your work?’ he said.

  ‘I daresay. Perhaps I’ll get Drake to crack the whip a l
ittle harder.’

  Only Lucas laughed at the remark.

  Guthrie stood apart from them. ‘I saw Caroline Mortimer yesterday evening,’ he said. ‘She was with the unfortunate girl. She told me what happened, what you did. The girl herself showed me the cap badge and the flowers she had been given.’ Everything he said betrayed his anger at what had happened in his absence, at his exclusion.

  ‘And?’ Lucas said to him.

  ‘I merely wish Captain Reid here had seen fit to include me in the whole affair, that I had perhaps been given some advance notice of what he was about to undertake – without authority, I might add.’

  ‘There was no time,’ Reid said. ‘I only learned of the man’s arrival an hour before he came.’

  ‘Nevertheless, I might still have been informed. Proceedings might have been delayed. Surely I might have contributed something in my capacity as—’

  ‘Your capacity as what?’ Lucas said.

  Guthrie stiffened. ‘In my capacity, Lieutenant Lucas, as a Man of God. I would have thought that much at least was obvious, even to you.’

  ‘Even to me?’ Lucas said. ‘Of course. And I don’t suppose it ever occurred to you for a single instant that whatever you might have added to the proceedings, Man-of-God Guthrie, would have been precisely what no one else there wanted.’

  ‘I don’t think—’ Reid began to say, before being cut off by Guthrie.

  ‘Why, Lieutenant Lucas? Because once again – and by no one’s consent except your own – you, and you alone, know what is best for everyone concerned? You, and you alone, know best what everyone else needs at times like this?’

  ‘It was all something of a makeshift event,’ Reid said as Guthrie drew breath. ‘Nothing was planned. No one knew what was needed, or even what the outcome of the thing was likely to be. I had no idea that Drake and the men would do what they did. They did it for the girl, Mary, not because … because … The truth is, it was done out of need, out of simple, straightforward need, and out of common decency and humanity. It was done for her, that’s all.’ He stopped abruptly, conscious that he had been shouting.