Field Service

by Robert Edric

  Further along the platform, several men came out of the goods shed to see what was happening.

  ‘Of course,’ Guthrie said eventually. ‘My apologies. Perhaps you misunderstand me, Captain Reid. I simply—’

  ‘What did she say to you?’ Lucas said to Guthrie.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘The unfortunate girl – Mary Ellsworth – what did she say to you when you saw her with Caroline Mortimer?’

  ‘I don’t … I mean, she was clearly overcome by the occasion. She said very little. As you might imagine, the conversation was mostly between Caroline and myself.’

  ‘I’ll bet it was,’ Lucas said. ‘And so all this self-righteous indignation today is on your own account and not hers?’

  ‘This is intolerable,’ Guthrie said, looking to Reid for his support.

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ Lucas said. ‘I’ll ask you again – what did Mary say to you?’

  Guthrie remained silent for a moment. ‘She told me she was grateful for everything Captain Reid and his sergeant had done for her. She’s little more than a grieving child. Of course she was grateful.’

  ‘Now she’s a child,’ Lucas said to Reid. ‘He’ll be telling us next she doesn’t know her own mind.’

  ‘I’ll say no such thing,’ Guthrie said. He turned his back on the two men and walked away from them towards Benoît’s office, where he stopped and looked along the tracks.

  Reid waited until Lucas looked at him and then he shook his head. ‘Stop pushing him,’ he said.

  And then, before either of them could speak again, Lucas’s arm started to shake. With his other hand, he reached up and pulled Reid closer to him so that he was hidden from Guthrie, who continued looking in the other direction. Then he clasped his shaking arm and held it tight at the elbow.

  ‘Talk,’ he said to Reid, his voice betraying a slight stammer. ‘Just talk.’

  And so Reid resumed talking to him, his voice low, telling him of the problems the delayed train was likely to cause him. And then, when he could think of nothing else to say on the subject, he warned Lucas of the problems he was creating by his continued hostility towards men like Guthrie, Jessop and Wheeler, and the likely consequences of this. And as he spoke, he saw that Lucas’s trembling arm slowly became still and that he was finally able to release it.

  ‘Finished?’ Lucas said, smiling.

  ‘Forget I said it,’ Reid said. He motioned to Lucas’s arm, and in response, Lucas raised and then swung it.

  ‘The MO says it’s nothing. Apparently, time is a great healer.’

  ‘It’s been—’

  ‘I know,’ Lucas said. He took out a cigarette and lit it, holding it up for Reid to see. ‘See?’ The rising smoke wavered only slightly in the still air.

  Along the platform, Guthrie turned and came back to them.

  ‘The train’s coming,’ he said. He pointed to the distant thin plume of steam. ‘Edmund sent word to me that there would be some Surreys on board.’

  ‘Is that why you’re here?’ Reid asked him.

  ‘It is.’ Guthrie unfastened his pocket and took out a Bible, from which hung a slender scarlet ribbon.

  ‘Do you want to say something before we unload them?’

  Guthrie looked around them. ‘Perhaps in the shed,’ he said.

  ‘Of course.’ Reid left him, calling for Drake and the others to assemble on the platform.

  The train itself finally appeared and drew level with its marker outside Benoît’s office. By Reid’s reckoning it was forty minutes overdue.

  Benoît reappeared and went immediately to Ernaux. He spoke briefly with the man and then came to Reid.

  ‘No bodies,’ he said. ‘No bodies and no coffins.’

  Reid looked at Guthrie, who was already standing in prayer at the platform’s edge. ‘Then what?’

  ‘Stones. Two wagons filled with headstones. According to Ernaux, there are a hundred of them. It took a long time to load them. No one expected them.’

  ‘Including me,’ Reid said. ‘The first weren’t scheduled to be here for at least another week.’

  Throughout most of the Commission sites, the original wooden crosses and other temporary markers were being replaced by engraved stones, and whenever he saw these elsewhere it never failed to surprise Reid what a great difference they made to the sites they adorned. At Bray Hill almost all of the dilapidated markers had been replaced, whereas at the nearby Brontay Farm cemetery – as at Morlancourt – not a single clean, white engraved stone had yet been set in the ground.

  Lucas came to join the two men.

  ‘They’ve sent us headstones,’ Reid said.

  Lucas looked along the line of the train. ‘No Jessop?’

  ‘No passengers,’ Benoît said. ‘Ernaux says the weight is too much for the axles.’

  Lucas walked along the carriages calling for Jessop.

  Seeing that something was wrong, Guthrie came to Reid and Benoît. ‘I was told that men of the Surreys would be arriving today,’ he said.

  Benoît waited for Reid to answer for him, which he did.

  At the end of the platform Reid saw Drake and a dozen others approach one of the wagons. Drake climbed on board and then reappeared a moment later, cursing loudly and kicking the side of the open doorway.

  15

  LATER, SHORTLY BEFORE work at the cemetery was due to finish for the day, Drake sought out Reid and told him there was something that required his attention. The sergeant was caked from his chest to his feet in pale mud, which had dried in the heat and now flaked from him where he rubbed at it. He stood beside Reid, his hands on his knees, panting to regain his breath.

  Reid waited. He knew Drake had been overseeing work on the graves close to the intermittent stream along the cemetery’s eastern edge.

  Eventually, Drake stood upright and spat heavily.

  ‘More problems with the water?’ Reid said.

  ‘Every foot we dig out on those two far lines’ – he pointed to the distant holes – ‘just fills up again. We’re getting nowhere fast.’

  Reid had already allocated the graves for Alexander Lucas’s imminent arrivals, and he wanted the graves to be ready when the bodies from Prezière arrived.

  ‘Digging deeper just encourages the water to come in faster,’ Drake said. ‘It’s even started to appear in some of the roadside graves.’ He swung his arm to the shallow holes at the bottom of the slope. ‘The sides are crumbling.’

  The two men set off walking towards the stream. A group of two dozen diggers had already stopped their work there and were sitting along the line of the banked hedge.

  ‘And then there’s him,’ Drake said to Reid as they approached, indicating a man who stood with a bicycle at his feet.

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘A local. He seems to know everything there is to know about the place. Everything’s “low” this and “low” that.’

  ‘It means water,’ Reid said.

  Drake stopped walking. ‘I’d never have guessed.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Reid said.

  ‘I heard enough of them screaming for it after the cock-up at Bouchoir to know exactly what it means,’ Drake said.

  They arrived amid the gathered diggers, and the Frenchman came directly to Reid. Reid recognized the man from Morlancourt, but did not know him. He held out his hand to him, and the man took it and shook it vigorously and then started talking and hardly drew breath for five minutes. The diggers along the hedge mostly ignored him, smoking and talking among themselves.

  When the man had finished, Reid said to Drake, ‘He’s telling me that a stream rises and floods here every winter. It’s a tributary of the Somme. It floods without fail and covers all this area. Apparently, it’s been far worse since the canal and its feeders were damaged. It was never this bad in the summer months before. He says the water’s backing up as far as the railway.’

  ‘Meaning we’ll never be rid of the problem here?’ Drake said simply.

  Reid shrugged and
let out a long breath.

  The Frenchman pulled Reid to one side and pointed towards the open country to the north.

  ‘He reckons there’s a second intermittent stream which appears and runs from the Ancre to the Somme along our western edge.’

  The Frenchman continued his emphatic gesticulating.

  ‘Apparently, we’re digging the new graves across the likely flow of that stream. According to him, all we’re doing here is exposing the buried flow. However hard we try to keep the water out, it’ll just rise up again.’ Reid tried to calculate where else on the restricted site he might now relocate the flooded graves. Whatever he decided, it would be one more delay, and one more cause of conflict between himself and Wheeler.

  When the Frenchman had gone, Drake called for the men to gather closer, and Reid then repeated to them everything the man had just told him. Few of them showed any real interest in his concerns so late in the day.

  Some, imagining they were about to be told to work for longer, called out in tired frustration, causing Drake to shout for silence.

  Sensing their mood, and wishing that the Frenchman had come to see him much earlier in the day, Reid assured them that their day’s work was finished.

  ‘Leave the flooded graves alone. I’ll look at my plans and work out where to dig next.’ Several of the men cheered at this, prompting another rebuke from Drake. But even as Reid said all this, he knew that any alteration to either his plans or his schedule – both now closely watched by Wheeler – would be difficult to achieve.

  ‘All on the word of a Frenchy?’ one of the unhappy men shouted.

  ‘He knows what he’s talking about,’ Drake said. ‘Besides …’

  ‘Besides, what?’ Reid said.

  ‘He showed me his ribbons,’ Drake said. ‘He was in it from start to finish. There won’t be many like him.’

  ‘I see,’ Reid said.

  ‘It still doesn’t give him the right to come here and start shouting the odds to us,’ the same man said. ‘Not a Frenchy.’

  ‘This is his country, his home,’ Reid said.

  The man seemed surprised by the remark. ‘So?’ he said.

  ‘Which means—’ Drake began to say.

  ‘Which means he’s already long back at home, while we’re still here digging away and still with no real sign of our discharge dates,’ the man said.

  It was a brave interruption, but Drake knew better than to respond to it.

  It had been the original intention of the Commission to employ considerably more local workmen on the cemeteries, but at Morlancourt this had never happened, and instead the Army’s time-bound regulars and peacetime conscripts had been directed to the work.

  The cemetery-making, especially on that part of the old battlefield, had exceeded all expectations, and only once the work had started had the labour shortfall been fully appreciated. Men were frequently moved from site to site as required. Some smaller plots were begun and completed in a continuous effort; others were laid out and then worked on at intervals.

  Recently, it had been revealed that where local diggers were employed – usually farmers and their labourers unable to return to their lost farms – those men were paid at a higher rate than the soldiers, and this too had caused unrest. It was why, Reid knew, his own workforce often worked so slowly, and why, like today, they quickly voiced their complaints at any additional burden placed upon them.

  ‘So everything gets altered on his say-so?’ another man called to Reid.

  ‘No – on my say-so,’ Reid said.

  Few were convinced by the answer.

  Before Reid could say any more, the Morlancourt church bell sounded in the distance, signalling the end of the day’s work. Across the whole of the site, the labourers started to gather up their tools. Barrels of water stood by the cemetery entrance and men hurriedly washed themselves, dipping their heads into the barrels and scooping the water over their shoulders and chests with their cupped hands. They dried themselves in the day’s heat and with their vests and shirts.

  The men around Reid walked away from him in twos and threes, and he watched them go.

  ‘Everything is a source of grievance to them,’ he said to Drake.

  ‘They’re soldiers. What do you expect? Worse – they’re soldiers without a war. Besides, most of them are hardly even that – soldiers – and none of them had any of this in mind when they signed up and learned how to salute.’

  ‘No,’ Reid said. ‘I suppose not. Though I still wonder at their mistrust of the French.’

  ‘It’s not all the French,’ Drake said, smiling. ‘Most of them get up to Saint-Quentin at the weekends.’

  Reid understood what Drake was telling him and laughed.

  ‘Besides,’ Drake went on, ‘some of us old hands have good reason – to mistrust the French, I mean.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I was at Noyes,’ Drake said. ‘The French withdrew from our right flank in the night without saying a word. Left us out in the open. I only got back by the skin of my teeth.’

  ‘And losses?’

  ‘Too many. The French were two miles back in their own reserve lines when we next saw them.’

  ‘I see.’

  Drake looked slowly around them at the half-flooded graves. ‘Wheeler’s going to be none too happy with this little set-back. No bodies today means they’ll probably send more than usual tomorrow and the day after that. It’s going to put us even further behind, not getting them into the ground regularly.’ He lit a pipe and sucked hard on it, filling the air with the sharp aroma of its tobacco.

  Reid had not yet told him about the likelihood of the bodies retrieved at Prezière coming directly to them, and soon.

  ‘I’ll have another look at our layout,’ he said. ‘There’s still plenty of land over on our western boundary not yet allocated. I daresay we might even make life a little easier for ourselves.’

  Drake laughed at the suggestion. ‘If you say so.’

  The two men walked towards the cemetery entrance and the crowd of men now gathered there.

  ‘What about you?’ Reid said to Drake.

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Your extended service.’

  Drake laughed again. ‘Funny you should ask,’ he said. ‘I was thinking only the other night where I might be posted next, when this little lot is finally over and done with.’

  ‘Do you have any preference?’

  ‘Preference? In this man’s army? Mind you, I’d like somewhere warm, for a change. I was listed for Mesopotamia before I ended up here. I walked down the gangplank at Boulogne with a bag full of tropical kit and dosed up on all sorts of tablets in preparation.’

  ‘Why the change?’

  ‘Who knows? I daresay somebody’s plan had taken a turn for the worse and I was another one of those men pushed into an unexpected hole.’

  ‘“Once more unto the breach” sort of thing?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve seen a lot of breaches in my time. It’s a noble-sounding thing, is a breach.’

  ‘But the reality—’

  ‘Is precisely that. It took us six hours to cover those two miles at Noyes.’

  They arrived beside the men and Drake went immediately to their centre, where he organized them into groups to await the lorries which would soon arrive to return them to their barracks. Some already stood on the mounded stores there, searching the hazy horizon for the tell-tale signs of exhaust smoke.

  16

  IT WAS FOUR days since the first of the freshly engraved headstones had arrived. There had been no further deliveries of these, and so far this first consignment remained stacked beneath a tarpaulin in a corner of the goods shed.

  Reid returned to them for the first time on his way back from the cemetery to his room. He already knew from having visited the smaller, half-completed cemeteries at Bray and Etinhem what dignity the finished, upright stones conferred on those places, what spartan order and sense of completion they brought to the hitherto disorganized plots. />
  He pulled back the tarpaulin and read the names and other details already crisply carved into the smooth, polished surfaces. Portland stone. At Bray, the morning sun caught the chiselled surfaces of the upright slabs and then turned them to different colours throughout the course of the day. At Etinhem, at dawn, the lettering of the stones already planted there seemed gilded by the light of the rising sun. The two hundred French crosses seemed insubstantial by comparison.

  At the bottom of the stones their earlier, stencilled details were still visible. These would be hidden and lost when the stones were sunk into their concrete foundations along the heads of the rows. Most of the graves in most of the smaller cemeteries were now laid out in lines of ten, making each row and then each grave easier to find amid the broader plots.

  Reid was pulling the tarpaulin back into place when he became aware of someone else in the vast space, someone sitting at the table he himself occasionally used to deliver his instructions to the men. At first he imagined this to be Benoît, but as his eyes became more accustomed to the light, he saw that it was Alexander Lucas sitting there.

  Lucas sat with his feet on the table, and as Reid approached him, he saw that the man was exhausted. He had been absent from his room in Morlancourt for the previous two nights.

  ‘I was beginning to think you’d absconded,’ Reid said, drawing up a crate and sitting opposite him.

  Lucas wiped his face with a cloth, doing little more than create a new pattern in the sweat and dirt with which it was covered.

  ‘Orders from above,’ he said.

  ‘Where else?’

  ‘I just got back a few minutes ago. I came in out of the heat.’ He took up a canvas bag from the floor and laid it on the table.

  Reid started to tell him what had happened during his absence, but then fell silent.

  ‘The bodies are ready to come,’ Lucas said. ‘Jessop came today. Wheeler wants you to sign them off.’ He pushed the bag across the table towards Reid.