by Robert Edric
Reid waited where he stood and watched the car go. He wiped the sweat from his brow and face and then ran a hand through his hair. The same restless, chattering birds that filled the air above the cemetery also flew back and forth along the narrow lane, gorging themselves on its riches.
18
THE FOLLOWING DAY, Reid went with Alexander Lucas to the barn at Prezière to see for himself the bodies that were to be delivered to him. The two men had spent the previous evening together, when Reid had told Lucas of Jessop’s errand, and when Lucas, in turn, had suggested the visit to Prezière. The coffins for the bodies would arrive at Morlancourt station separately, and the purpose of the visit was for Reid to ensure that the condition of the corpses would not present him with further problems upon them finally being delivered into his care.
The two men arrived at the ruined hamlet shortly before dawn.
Reid saw that the bodies had been separated and laid out individually, each with as much of its uniform and kit as had been found, and with all metal buttons and insignia attached.
The barn was smaller than Reid had anticipated. Its roof and the upper half of three of its walls had collapsed, and heavy tiles, rafters and masonry had fallen into the space where the bodies had originally been laid.
Lucas told him that the walls had continued to collapse when they’d started their work and that this had delayed them. But now all the bodies had been lifted clear of the walls, fully identified and laid out prior to their removal.
Reid went first to the corpses, and Lucas followed him. He gave Reid a cloth to fasten around his nose and mouth. Reid knew that many of Lucas’s men had worn full masks during the worst of the work, but in the two years since the men had died, the worst of their corruption and putrefaction had long since passed.
Even at that early hour, a small group of Lucas’s men was gathered a short distance beyond the ruins in what remained of the farmyard.
‘Wheeler’s sending lorries tomorrow,’ Lucas said. ‘In the absence of coffins, he wants the remains bagging up today ready for loading. There’s a road from here to Villier, and the railway there connects to Morlancourt. Are you ready to take them?’
‘Most of the graves are dug. I’m hoping the rest will be completed today. Bodies from elsewhere are being held back in Saint-Quentin for the time being. We’ll cope.’
‘Glad to hear it. We’ve been ordered to leave here ourselves within an hour of the bodies going.’
Looking at the corpses now, Reid guessed that they could be transported, buried, and their graves filled and levelled in a single day’s work.
Lucas went to his men and returned with a cardboard folder.
Reid looked at this final documentation and saw that some of the sheets had been marked at the top right-hand corner with a pencilled cross. He remarked on this to Lucas.
‘It was how I indicated the suspicious deaths,’ Lucas said. ‘Whatever Wheeler insists on having delivered to you, I still wanted to do something to … I don’t know … something to signal to anyone who might look at the sheets in the years to come that something had happened to those particular men, at least.’
‘All they’ll see will be the pencil crosses,’ Reid said. ‘It won’t necessarily signify anything to them.’
‘I know. But I wanted there to be something, however slight or ambiguous or uncertain.’
Reid understood him perfectly and so said nothing.
‘It was something we all decided on,’ Lucas said, indicating the watching men.
Reid had always envied Lucas this easy rapport with his workers, many of whom had volunteered for the work they now undertook, and who stayed longer with their units. He continued looking through the forms.
‘Half of them?’ he said.
‘Approximately that. Twenty. All with head wounds, and all with the worst of the burning.’
‘Do you think the others were retrieved from the battlefield and added to their number to try to hide what had happened to them?’
‘It’s a possibility.’
‘Has Wheeler – anyone – seen the completed documentation yet?’
‘You mean has anyone seen the crosses? No.’
‘What will you say if he asks you about them?’
‘We thought about that. I’ll say that they were the corpses we were able to identify immediately, that the others took a little longer.’
‘Knowing all the doubts you’ve already raised, he won’t believe you.’
Lucas lit a cigarette and gave one to Reid. ‘To tell you the truth, I’m past caring what Wheeler does or doesn’t believe. Besides, once the bodies are buried and the final pieces of paperwork are buried even deeper in the Commission Records Office, then who is ever going to know or be able to confirm or even guess what the crosses signify?’
‘I suppose so,’ Reid said.
The two of them walked the full length of the corpses and then back again, looking down at the remains of each man.
Lucas stopped at one body and drew back the tarpaulin which covered it. ‘This is the eighteen-year-old,’ he said.
There was little left to show what the boy had once looked like. A head, a torso, arms and legs, all still clothed and held together, and all of this looking to Reid exactly like the khaki-clad skeleton it had become.
In earlier days, countless bodies – identified and otherwise – had been delivered to him like this, but more recently, and especially after the second depot at Saint-Quentin had been established, all of the bodies and remains he received were hidden from sight. It surprised him now to realize how long it had been since he’d looked at an actual corpse like this, and he understood immediately and forcefully what it was that separated him and his own workers from Lucas and his team.
Standing close together, neither man spoke for a moment.
And then Lucas cleared his throat and said, ‘Anyhow, we’ve done what we do; now it’s your turn.’
Reid closed and resealed the folder he held.
The two men left the bodies and went to sit together on a stack of timber. As the sun appeared more fully on the horizon, birds started calling and then flying around the ruined buildings at the far side of the yard.
‘They probably used to nest in the barn,’ Lucas said.
‘When I was a boy, my farmer grandfather told me that each autumn all the swifts and swallows and martins on his farm used to burrow into the earth and then transform themselves into toads, waiting to hop back out into the daylight the following spring.’ Reid smiled at this sudden memory of the old man, who had died when he was eight years old and already away at school. ‘He said that the birds spent the winter as toads buried in the ground, and then, come the spring, they transformed themselves back into birds again and shot up into the air. Apparently, it was what one of the Greek philosophers believed happened. No one could account for where all the birds disappeared to each autumn, see?’
Lucas leaned back where he sat. ‘It sounds a bit like us,’ he said.
‘What does?’
‘Burrowing ourselves into the ground and transforming ourselves into different creatures completely for the past few years.’
‘Toads?’
‘Why not? What did most of us do except burrow ourselves into the ground to make ourselves as safe and as inconspicuous as possible, and then sit there trembling and fearful and waiting for the sun to shine again?’
‘And transform us back into men?’
‘Most of us,’ Lucas said. He motioned to the bodies. ‘Let’s face it,’ he went on, ‘we are changed creatures – there’s no getting away from that.’
‘No, I suppose not,’ Reid said.
‘For good or ill, we’re none of us the men we once were. And nor can we now ever be the men we might once have set out to be.’
Reid said nothing.
‘I’ve just had a dozen release forms come through,’ Lucas said. ‘Twelve of my best workers. Some of them are over there now.’ He nodded to the gathered men. ‘All tw
elve of them will be home by this time next week – sooner even. I’m glad for them, but I’ll be sorry to lose them.’
‘You’ll end up with a workforce like mine,’ Reid said.
‘I know.’
Both men laughed at this.
‘Home,’ Lucas said. ‘Walking in and out of their own front doors, in and out of their own rooms, picking up the morning newspaper and worrying about the weather and the football results as though none of this had ever happened to them.’
Neither man believed this.
It was clear to Reid that Lucas’s thoughts remained with his own family, his wife in particular, and that the uncertainty of what might now be happening to her weighed on his mind.
‘My grandfather also said that to have the swallows and swifts return to their old nests in your eaves and gutters each year brought good luck to your home,’ Reid said.
Lucas watched the birds flitting over their heads. The first of the day’s insects had appeared in the warming air. ‘Whatever luck they might once have brought here …’ he said.
The journey to Prezière had been a revelation to Reid. Back at Morlancourt, and even more so to the west of the place, there remained little to see of what the war had left in its wake: a few old supply roads gouged across the growing crops; a few pieces of abandoned transport and artillery in the corner of a field or parked up alongside someone’s newly rebuilt home. But beyond Péronne, and especially towards Saint-Quentin, the landscape showed little except what had happened there two years previously. Villages and hamlets still lay in ruins; vast swathes of land remained unclaimed and were still pocked with deep holes. Whole woods and copses, though growing again and green in places, lay felled and tumbled and rotting.
At Temple, they had passed a field in which lay seven tanks, all of them tilted and trackless and already half sunk into the soft ground. At Averne, the metal bridge still lay where it had collapsed into the canal. And beyond Calat there remained an unexplored cemetery where dozens of crosses and rifles still lay planted in the earth. Someone, somewhere, Reid supposed, knew that the place existed and was keeping watch over it prior to it being examined and its bodies exhumed.
On every road they had come along as they travelled towards Prezière there were warnings of unexploded ordnance and uncleared mines. At most junctions and crossroads, unexploded ammunition and spent casings stood stacked in mounds as tall as houses.
At Railly they had been forced to wait in a queue of nighttime traffic while a crew of mine-clearers had led their teams of horses across the road. An entire field was filled with coils of rusted wire, and in its corners stood giant smoking pyres of the planking and boarding retrieved from the nearby trenches, their dense, sooty smoke rising into the air as dark and solid as ink spilled in water.
Eventually, Reid rose and told Lucas he ought to return to Morlancourt. The two men arranged to meet there later in the day.
As he was being driven out of the yard, Reid looked back through the open rear of the lorry and saw Lucas return to the corpses. He watched as he stopped at the skeleton of the boy he had uncovered, and then as he knelt beside it and drew the tarpaulin back up over the remains as carefully and tenderly as a father might draw the bedclothes over his sleeping child.
19
CAROLINE MORTIMER SAT alone by the church gate where she and Reid had sat together a week earlier. He approached her along the empty street on his way to the station. The previous day, upon his return from Prezière, he had learned that the nurses’ bodies she awaited would now be arriving in Morlancourt later than she had previously been told. They were currently in the mortuary at the hospital in Daours. The curt message Reid had received from Jessop said only that the delay had been caused by ‘unforeseen circumstances’. It was another of those phrases with which he was long familiar, and which he had quickly learned never to query. He sensed something of the man’s malice following their encounter two days earlier.
Caroline looked up at his approach. She held a letter in her lap and pushed this into her pocket as Reid’s shadow finally arrived beside her.
‘No Mary?’ he said to her. Since the arrival of her fiancé’s body, the younger woman – or so it seemed to Reid – had hardly left Caroline’s side, causing the pair of them to remain apart.
‘She’s gone,’ Caroline said, surprising him.
‘Oh?’
‘I went with her to Saint-Quentin yesterday. She was hoping to travel on to Boulogne today.’ It was a short and straightforward enough journey to make.
‘I didn’t realize that was what she intended doing,’ Reid said.
‘I doubt if she intends anything much these days. She said she’ll come back when the cemetery is finished and finally has its official opening.’
‘I see.’ Caroline’s remark reminded Reid of the delayed arrival of the nurses. ‘Your nurses are coming later than I’d anticipated,’ he said.
‘I know. I saw Captain Jessop in Saint-Quentin. Quite by chance. He told me you were falling behind in your work here. He called them “our fallen roses”. Does it help, do you think – all this mawkish phrase-making?’
‘Sometimes. Perhaps. I hear the same few phrases repeated often enough. Popular appeal, I suppose.’
‘For people who have no idea of the truth of the matter?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Captain Jessop told me that Colonel Wheeler had no intention of sanctioning the delivery of the women until he was certain you were ready for them.’
‘There’s always someone to blame for these delays,’ Reid said.
She reached up to him and told him to sit beside her, which he did.
‘The graves have been dug and waiting for a few days now. I imagine Wheeler considers us to have other priorities.’ The first of the bodies from Prezière were due to arrive at Morlancourt later that same day.
‘Don’t worry,’ Caroline said. ‘I’ll wait as long as it takes. Mary tried to persuade me to return home with her. She told me I was wasting my time being here.’
‘It might have been for the best,’ Reid said. ‘I mean, now that we know the women are all gathered together and waiting to come.’
‘You make it sound as though they were going on an excursion.’ She smiled at the thought.
‘I only meant … Did Jessop say how long the delay might be?’
She shook her head. ‘All Mary wanted was for me to go on telling her what to do. She wants constant reassurance, that’s all, like a child, until she finds the strength to stand on her own two feet again.’
‘It might take her years,’ Reid said.
‘I don’t doubt it. I was at Netley hospital shortly before coming back out here, so you might say I’ve seen the men for whom all of this will never truly end.’
Reid looked along the lane towards the seemingly deserted station. He guessed from the wisps of smoke rising from its low chimney that Benoît was already at his desk and awaiting the train. He felt reassured by the constancy of the man.
‘I suppose you could have gone home and then returned when the nurses’ arrival was confirmed,’ he said. ‘Things are usually a lot more predictable these days.’
‘I’d prefer to stay,’ Caroline said firmly. ‘There are too many frayed edges to all of this. Do you know what I mean? Too many things left unfinished, undone. No, I’ll see the women where they belong and then I’ll go home.’
‘Of course,’ Reid said.
She held his arm. ‘I know none of this is any of your doing,’ she said. ‘Of course I know that. It’s just that … I don’t know … Saint-Quentin was full of women like Mary. Women, whole families, young children even. All of them just as lost, and all of them wandering and searching.’
‘For something they may never find?’
‘Some of them, yes. Captain Jessop said they were becoming a real nuisance. He said most of them expect the Commission to arrange for them to travel to see the graves. Apparently, they prefer to visit in groups, organized parties. T
hey’re holding up the work in some places. He said that the problem was that no one on the Commission had the authority to refuse them permission to visit wherever they wanted, only to warn them of the dangers that remain. He said that sometimes those dangers just added to the thrill of the visits. Apparently, it makes some of the women—’
‘Feel closer to their lost loved ones?’ Reid’s scepticism was clear.
‘I suppose it gives them something.’
‘Four French schoolchildren, six- and seven-year-olds, were killed at Avesne two days ago,’ Reid said. ‘Their first day back at their rebuilt village school. An unexploded mine sitting in the foundations. Four years, it must have been there.’
‘I heard about it,’ Caroline said.
After that, neither of them spoke for a moment.
Then Caroline said, ‘Captain Jessop also complained that they were being hounded by newspapermen wanting to write stories about what was happening with the cemeteries. There’s a great demand from home.’
‘To go with all the unrest, I daresay,’ Reid said.
News of the protests and near-riots, the continued shortages and labour strikes and the rising number of the unemployed filled all the English newspapers, which reached Morlancourt a week late.
‘Captain Jessop seemed to think it would be a good idea for the newspapermen to be somehow organized and presented with their stories, rather than wandering around independently and writing whatever they choose.’
‘Meaning what?’
‘Meaning, I suppose – and I’m sure this was Captain Jessop’s feeling too – that some stories were more worthy of being told, of serving a higher purpose, than others.’
‘A higher purpose?’
‘Of satisfying the need of people to be told what’s happening.’
‘More dressing-up and telling people only what they want to hear.’
‘It would all be for the—’
‘Don’t say it,’ Reid almost shouted.
‘Don’t say what?’
‘That it would all be for the greater good.’
‘I was going to say that it might all be for the benefit of those who wanted to see what was happening to their loved ones, who needed to see that their deaths were finally being commemorated in some way.’