Field Service

by Robert Edric

  Reid signalled his apology to her.

  ‘Besides,’ Caroline went on, ‘Captain Jessop said Colonel Wheeler was already considering the benefit to the Commission – its appeals for funding and resources, say – of giving the newspapermen what they’ve come to see.’

  Reid began to sense what she might be telling him.

  ‘Is he considering sending them here?’ he said. ‘To report on your nurses?’

  He knew by her hesitancy in answering him in her usual open way that his guess had been right.

  ‘Believe me, I did nothing to promote or encourage the idea,’ she said. ‘It’s the last thing I want.’

  ‘Hence the delay in delivering the bodies,’ Reid said absently.

  ‘Colonel Wheeler and Captain Jessop had clearly given the matter some consideration before I encountered him,’ she said. ‘He imagined I’d be pleased at the prospect of letting the newspapers report the burials.’

  Reid wondered if Jessop had deliberately kept this from him at their recent encounter, or if his own remarks then had deterred the man from telling him what had already been decided.

  The previous day, a note had arrived from Wheeler telling Reid to make the ground at Morlancourt appear ‘presentable’ in case anyone should turn up there unannounced. Reading this, Reid had imagined that Wheeler was referring to the unwelcome tourists; now he saw that the cryptic instruction might have related to something more specific.

  He told Caroline about the note.

  ‘Captain Jessop seemed to believe that you now have a cemetery that might soon reveal its final form to anyone with the vision to see it.’

  ‘The vision?’

  ‘I suppose he meant imagination. He said that at least the disarray and turmoil of the early work is over. And that now you’ve started setting your stones in place, even though they are as yet in the bare earth, then it wouldn’t require too much extra effort to gain some idea what the place might look like when it’s finally completed.’

  ‘The man has no idea whatsoever of the “extra effort” required to do that.’ He imagined announcing the news to his workers.

  ‘I promise you, I did nothing to encourage the idea.’

  Reid resisted telling her that Jessop would have given no consideration whatsoever to anything she might have said on the matter.

  ‘He said that a small piece of prepared ground might be presented to the newspapermen as an oasis amid the wilderness, and that the occasion of the arrival of the nurses at such a place would give the story so much more impact.’

  ‘Wheeler used to refer to the plots as “battlefield gardens”,’ Reid said. ‘I think that was another of Jessop’s inventions.’

  ‘I daresay Colonel Wheeler will give you plenty of notice if any of this does come to pass,’ Caroline said.

  ‘I daresay,’ Reid said. It all now seemed an inevitability to him.

  The pair of them stopped talking to exchange greetings with an old farmer who was leading his solitary cow along the lane towards the fields beyond the church. The man brought it into Morlancourt each morning to sell the milk directly from the animal’s udder at the doorstep.

  Caroline clearly already knew the man, and when he took out a small metal bowl and half filled it with milk and offered it to her, she accepted it and drank it, savouring each mouthful. The man nodded vigorously at her every word of praise. He explained to Reid that these ‘last drawings’ were considered the finest the cow had to offer and that they were a cure for most minor ailments. He made the gift even more precious by adding that, before her recent death, his wife of almost fifty years had always insisted on the milk being saved for her. He then told Reid that his wife was now in heaven, tending to their two sons, and that since her death a year after the war’s end, he had always thought of her when he had drawn and sold this last of the day’s milk.

  When Caroline gave him back his bowl, he leaned close to her and told her that not so long ago – before the war – the young newlywed women of Morlancourt would pay whatever he asked for the milk because it helped them beget their children.

  Caroline laughed at hearing him say this, but the old man insisted it was true. He laughed with her, rinsed out the bowl in the nearby trough and wiped it across the globe of his stomach.

  The old farmer then left them, following the cow, which continued untended through the slow routine of its day.

  ‘“Beget”?’ Reid said once the man was out of earshot.

  ‘What else would you say?’ A line of the cream lay along her lip and she wiped this away with her finger.

  He was about to say more when she closed her eyes briefly, and he knew to remain silent. She had told him during their first encounter that she had no children of her own.

  ‘Perhaps the milk would have helped me to beget my own sons and daughters,’ she said.

  ‘Is that what you wanted?’

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘But it wasn’t to be.’

  ‘Do you regret it?’

  She considered her answer. ‘It was a loss to both of us,’ she said. ‘But happily neither of us pointed a finger at the other.’

  He struggled for something, anything, to say to her, and she saw this and shook her head.

  ‘I saw Alexander Lucas earlier,’ she said. ‘He said he was on his way to investigate some recently found bodies at La Chapelette.’

  ‘His wife’s unwell,’ Reid said. ‘Or she was. He’s waiting to hear from her. Or from someone to let him know what’s happening.’

  ‘He was with the postman when I saw him. We both received letters.’

  ‘Was it from his wife?’

  ‘I don’t know. He’d only just been given the letter when I saw him. He said he had a lorry waiting for him and that he was already late. He seemed distracted.’

  Beyond the church, the farmer slapped the flanks of his cow, urging it through the gate of a nearby field. The man closed the gate, leaned on it and lit a pipe.

  ‘Wheeler’s been piling on the work,’ Reid said. ‘On Alexander.’ It was all he could bring himself to tell her of the bodies at Prezière.

  ‘Of course. Will he apply for leave, do you think? To see his wife, I mean.’

  ‘I don’t know. He hasn’t said anything.’ Reid had suggested it to Lucas several days ago, and Lucas had said he was undecided about what he might do.

  ‘Surely Colonel Wheeler would look favourably on any such application?’

  ‘Perhaps.’ It was true: there was nothing Wheeler would like better than to see the back of the man. And once Lucas was home in England, strings might easily be pulled by Wheeler to keep him there.

  ‘The men in the hospital at Le Havre petitioned the authorities to have their rum ration delivered to them even though they were out of the line,’ Caroline said. ‘They insisted it would help them in their recovery, that they’d be fit and well and back on Active Service again much sooner if the rum was delivered to them in their beds.’

  Reid smiled. ‘I knew men in the line who were hardly sober from one day to the next for weeks on end,’ he said.

  ‘Perhaps they just—’

  ‘There was no “perhaps” about it,’ he said.

  In the far distance, beyond the signal box, Reid heard the whistle of the approaching train. In another ten minutes it would arrive, and he would be waiting for it. He imagined Benoît walking out on to the platform and looking along the tracks, his watch already in his hand.

  He rose and looked into the churchyard.

  ‘The farmer’s wife and sons are buried in there,’ Caroline said. ‘Mons. It’s why he brings his last remaining cow past the place each morning.’

  ‘And why you accepted his milk today?’

  ‘Of course. Did you not see how slowly he moved going past the graveyard?’

  A second, closer whistle sounded – the crossing beyond the canal – and Reid started to walk away. He stopped and turned back to Caroline. ‘Shall I see you later?’ he asked her.

  She, too,
rose from the seat, looked him slowly up and down, and then straightened her back and saluted him.

  Reid laughed and returned the gesture.

  ‘Dismissed,’ she said to him, and he turned on his heel and marched stiffly away from her, swinging his arms as he went.

  Ahead of him, the smoke of the engine finally appeared above the long curve into the station, turning slowly to steam as the driver finally made the approach to the platform and gently applied his brakes.

  20

  LATER THAT SAME morning, an aeroplane appeared in the sky to the north of Morlancourt, circled the village and then flew low over where Reid and his men were working. Most of the diggers stopped what they were doing to watch the machine and to wave to it as the pilot flew even lower over them, crossing the cemetery from one side to the other and then banking along the line of the road to return. The man himself was clearly visible to everyone on the ground as he leaned over the side of his cockpit and waved back to them.

  Reid was standing with Drake at the edge of the trees when the machine appeared.

  ‘He wants to watch himself,’ Drake said as the plane banked again to make a second circuit of the site.

  ‘The telegraph poles?’ Reid said. Though now wireless, the poles still stood along the road, and followed the temporary railway to Bray; nowhere were they either upright or evenly spaced.

  ‘Everything,’ Drake said. ‘I saw a Bristol Five clip the church spire at Carvin, beyond Arras. Folded up like it had been grabbed by a giant hand. It came down in a hundred pieces.’

  ‘Was the pilot …?’

  ‘Killed. Along with his observer. They sent some of us out to pick up the wreckage. The Red Cross came for the bodies.’

  There was still a makeshift airstrip at nearby Quierrieu, and a few aircraft came and went from the place.

  At the first distant note of the engine, Reid had imagined it to be the lorries bringing the Prezière corpses.

  He had made a careful list of all forty-two names and he had this with him now in readiness. He had already announced to the men that the bodies were coming by their unusual route, but had been unable to give them a time. For all their sakes, he hoped the lorries arrived there soon.

  One of Wheeler’s aides had contacted him to say that when the burials were completed, the relevant paperwork was to be given to Wheeler personally at their next meeting.

  Above them, the aeroplane climbed higher in the sky and then turned away from them in the direction of the river.

  The men in the cemetery were slow to return to their work after the diversion. Reid remarked on this to Drake, and the sergeant shouted to those workers standing close to them. The men returned only reluctantly to their labours.

  ‘No one’s exerting themselves on account of what they’ve got coming later,’ Drake said. ‘If Lucas couldn’t bring the bodies first thing, you should have insisted they wait until tomorrow.’ It was a rare criticism from the man, but it would have served no purpose for Reid to try to explain to him what little true authority either Alexander Lucas or he possessed in the matter.

  The waiting holes and their neat mounds of excavated soil lay in four rows close to the cemetery entrance, where the broad path would shortly be divided into several narrower paths reaching in among the headstones like the fingers of a hand. The chalk base of these lesser walkways had already been laid, and if the spreading paths did resemble a hand, then it remained a skeletal one.

  Drake left Reid and walked among the more distant of the men, sending them back to their work. It was another warm day and most of the labourers worked stripped to their waists.

  Almost an hour after the plane had gone, Reid finally heard and then saw the first of Lucas’s approaching lorries. He called Drake back to him and told him to gather the men together and to instruct them on the work ahead. He showed him the simple plan he had drawn up allocating the holes. The men would work in groups – some carrying the corpses from the lorries to their waiting coffins, others lowering them into the excavated graves, and a third group coming along soon afterwards and filling in the holes.

  ‘Will we get them all done today, do you think?’ he asked Drake. It had been another of Wheeler’s stipulations.

  ‘Are you asking me or telling me?’ Drake said, as astute as ever, and then leaving Reid as the first of the lorries negotiated the narrow entrance.

  Reid waited a moment and then followed his sergeant down the slope.

  Four lorries had appeared, three of which were covered. Only the fourth remained open, and Reid was surprised to see a dozen men sitting there holding picks and shovels of their own.

  Alexander Lucas climbed down from the cab of the leading vehicle. He spoke to the driver and then came to Reid.

  ‘I brought some help,’ he said. He called for the men to disembark and then told Reid to employ the newcomers where they were most needed.

  ‘I was contacted last night by—’ Reid began to say.

  ‘Me too. Wheeler wants me to find a telephone and let him know when the burials are underway.’ The nearest telephone was back in Morlancourt and both men knew that. ‘He can wait,’ Lucas said.

  They watched as the first of the bodies were unloaded and carried to the waiting coffins. Even from that distance, Reid could clearly see the names and numbers marked on both the hessian sacks and the casket lids.

  ‘This will be the last work most of them do,’ Lucas said, meaning his own men. ‘When I asked Jessop about my replacement teams, he told me to be patient. I told him that I’d already been sent the dockets for the fresh retrievals at La Chapelette. He told me to leave it with him,’ – he mimicked Jessop’s voice – ‘that he’d see what he could do. Why does the bloody man always have to make everything sound as though he’s doing you a great favour, and as though it involves twice as much effort from him as it ever does from you?’ He took off his cap and ran his hand through his hair.

  Waiting a moment, Reid said, ‘I saw Caroline earlier.’

  ‘By the church?’

  ‘She said you’d received another letter.’

  ‘I did. From my wife’s mother again. Posted four days ago. Elizabeth’s been taken into hospital. They’re convinced now that it’s scarlet fever, though no one seems to be very certain about much else.’

  ‘Unless—’

  ‘Unless she’s keeping the worst of it from me, yes.’

  It wasn’t what Reid had been about to suggest, but he let this pass. He heard Lucas’s concern in everything he said.

  ‘Is your daughter still well?’ Reid said.

  ‘Susan. Yes. So far, anyway.’

  ‘Caroline was wondering if you’d considered applying for leave.’

  ‘At first. But then all this Prezière business piled up in front of me and I wanted to see it through to the finish.’ It was an excuse, and Lucas did nothing to disguise this.

  ‘And now?’ Reid said.

  ‘I don’t know. What would I achieve by going home? What good would I be? Besides, now that I’ve done Wheeler’s dirty work for him, you know as well as I do that he’d be more than happy for me to be left over there and chained to a desk for the rest of my time.’

  ‘And so you’ll go to La Chapelette and retrieve the bodies there?’

  ‘I suppose so. Certainly somebody has to. Besides, I’ll be home for good in a few months’ time.’

  ‘Of course you will.’ Their conversation petered out in these further half-veiled excuses and diversions.

  Both men turned to watch as the lorries were unloaded and as the coffins were carried to their graves. Lucas’s men seemed to imbue Reid’s workforce with something of their own enthusiasm and he saw how much they had achieved since the lorries’ arrival.

  ‘I went to La Chapelette yesterday,’ Lucas said eventually.

  ‘Is it a new discovery?’ Reid said, happy for the subject to have changed.

  ‘Our primary findings suggest between eight and twelve bodies, and not the two we were initially told. I
n addition to which, they’re going to be considerably more difficult to identify than the poor sods at Prezière. We’ve already got our people going through the records of the place.’

  ‘What do you know?’

  ‘Local witnesses who came back said they’d been told that pits had been dug and bodies and parts buried all together after the retreat there. Pioneer Battalion troops, by all accounts. And some Ulster Division men, though God knows what they were doing there. Apparently, most of the deaths were the result of a barrage. I’ve already told Jessop that we’ll need longer than the two days he’s suggesting. I also told him I’d looked at the rosters and that, currently, I was the man best qualified to get the job done.’

  Reid wondered if Lucas wasn’t overstating the case – both for the time required for the retrieval and for his own participation in it.

  ‘I told Caroline that I’d probably taken precedence over her nurses,’ Lucas said. ‘This morning. The delay. She told me I was forgiven and absolved.’

  Reid, in turn, told Lucas about the farmer and his cow, and Lucas laughed.

  ‘When I told Jessop about the extra time I’d need, he spent ten minutes telling me how hard dear old Wheeler is working on all our behalves. Apparently, last week, hard-working Wheeler went back to London to meet the Prime Minister and to address a few of his committees.’

  ‘You think he can see a knighthood shining on the horizon?’

  ‘I wouldn’t be surprised.’

  They were interrupted by Drake, who came to them and told them that all the coffins had been carried to sit beside their allocated holes and were about to be lowered into them.

  Reid told Drake to let the men rest for twenty minutes. He told him to fill the graves furthest from the path and then to work back in the direction of the entrance. He asked if the work would be finished by four, when all the more strenuous labour on the site was usually halted in the heat of the afternoon sun. Drake looked at the coffins and the additional labourers and said he didn’t see why not.