Field Service

by Robert Edric

  ‘Even the men who knew they were dying?’ Reid said. He regretted asking as soon as he’d said it.

  Caroline considered her answer. ‘Especially those who knew they were dying. I suppose they needed to believe it more than most. In Le Havre, I sat with a Highland sergeant. Black Watch. He’d been badly wounded at a place called Zonnebeke, in Belgium.’

  ‘“The Storm of Zonnebeke”,’ Reid said. ‘Third Ypres.’

  ‘A severe stomach wound. It was a miracle that he’d lasted long enough to reach us at base. Sorry, not a “miracle” – luck, chance, the skill of the medical staff who first saw him in the field and clearing stations. Whatever saved him, he came to us with his records already marked up.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning all we could do for him was to make him as comfortable as his injuries allowed.’

  ‘And could you do that?’

  ‘To some extent. His wounds meant he couldn’t eat or drink. I spent most of my time with him wiping his face with a cold cloth and holding cigarettes to his mouth. His wounds were mostly undressed. The night he died, he told me everything he could remember about his home and his family. He’d worked in the harbour at Portree on Skye. He was also a part-time farmer and gamekeeper. I told him I’d go and visit the place when the opportunity arose.’

  ‘Was he married?’

  ‘With six children – all girls bar a solitary son. He was anxious because the boy was almost seventeen and keen to join up.’

  Reid did a quick calculation and guessed that the war had ended before the boy was old enough to enlist.

  ‘It sounded a good life,’ Caroline said. ‘He loved his work and his family. He was also an itinerant preacher, and that sustained him, too. I remember him telling me that he knew precisely what had happened to him – his injuries – and what was likely to happen to him now, and that there was no need whatsoever for any pretence on my behalf. He just wanted to talk, to tell me everything that was good about the life he’d lived and all the good he believed he himself had done in the world. He wanted me to understand something.’

  ‘The life well-lived?’

  ‘Perhaps. But it was more than that. He never said it, but he wanted me to understand that he had no regrets, even after what had happened to him. Some of the others who overheard him telling me all this, and who also heard his groans when his pain became unbearable, shouted for him to shut up, to talk about something else.’

  ‘Because they couldn’t accept the fact that he had resigned himself to dying?’

  ‘And that they ought to reconcile themselves to the same thing happening to some of them. Yes. Some of them even wanted me to leave him alone, to make him fall silent.’

  ‘And did you?’

  ‘He died later that same night, approaching dawn. I stayed with him. I remember the rising sun passing across the wall at the end of the ward. He’d told me it was his favourite part of the day. He recited poetry in Gaelic. Even after all this time I can still remember the exact pitch and tone of his voice. When he knew he was close to the end, he thanked me and asked me to let go of his hand. I laid his arms by his side for him. He asked me to pull the sheet up over his stomach and chest. He closed his eyes and died in an instant, in a breath. I said a prayer over him and then sat for a few minutes thinking about his wife and children. He’d lost all his photographs of them back in Belgium. I suppose the truth is, he just wanted someone to know about him, about the man he’d once been before he got caught up in everything here.’

  ‘Of course,’ Reid said. He held her arm for a moment.

  He remembered the occasion when he and a raiding party had entered the empty German trenches at Serre, where they’d come upon an abandoned, wounded man lying on the floor of the trench, calling on them not to shoot him and holding up in front of his face a photograph of his wife and two young children, as though this were his final flimsy protection in the world. Reid had spoken to him, looking at the photograph and then telling the man to put it safe in his pocket. He had finished his work in the trench and then returned to his starting point. He later filed his report and made no mention of the abandoned man.

  He had heard nothing afterwards of the outcome of any of this, and the following day he was withdrawn from the line in the general retreat west.

  ‘One of the visiting officers once referred to the nurses as “God’s Comforters”,’ Caroline said, interrupting his thoughts. ‘I wanted to slap him in the face. No, worse – I wanted to shout at him and to push him out of the ward.’ She continued angling her face into the breeze as she said all this, finally tilting back her head and closing her eyes.

  Reid tried to remember where the Black Watch and other Highland regiments were now buried, but could not recall. It was another of the Commission’s aims eventually to create a giant directory of the burial place or memorial listing of every single man.

  After they had sat together for a few minutes longer, Caroline stood up and said she was returning to Morlancourt.

  Reid’s instinct was to rise and walk with her, but instead he told her he would stay. She leaned over him and kissed him lightly on the forehead.

  Across the canal, the distant fisherman raised his pole into the air and walked away across the adjoining field.

  It was a world of restless ghosts, Reid thought to himself, all of them wandering blindly in unplotted circles around all those other restless, wandering ghosts.

  He remained where he sat for almost an hour longer, and then he too rose from the embankment and returned to Morlancourt in the settling dusk.

  25

  FOLLOWING THEIR RETURN from Amiens, Reid saw nothing of Alexander Lucas for the next few days.

  On the second day, he received word from Jessop confirming that the bodies of the nurses would be arriving at Morlancourt in a week’s time. Jessop also told him that Wheeler was now organizing a ceremony both to mark the nurses’ arrival and to accommodate the gathering newspapermen. It was no more or less than Reid had expected. Jessop was also at pains to tell him that the ceremony was now deemed necessary by Wheeler on account of all the good it would serve.

  The good it would serve.

  Jessop asked him if he was in full agreement with the plan, and Reid told him he was. It seemed a small enough concession to make. He would have arranged it himself had the occasion not already been taken over by Wheeler and made to serve his own purpose. He would have organized it with Caroline Mortimer, and he felt certain that the pair of them would have arranged something considerably more fitting than whatever Wheeler was now proposing.

  He sought her out soon afterwards and told her everything Jessop had just confirmed to him. She, in turn, showed him the note she had received directly from Wheeler on the subject. Reid read it and saw how much more definite everything was made to seem, and what a prominent role Wheeler himself would play in the affair. Jonathan Guthrie, no doubt, would also take his part.

  ‘More work for you, I imagine,’ she said as Reid handed the sheet of paper back to her.

  ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘The graves are dug; that’s always the hardest part. I suppose you know that Wheeler wants to put on something of a show for the press.’

  ‘I guessed as much by the way he avoids any mention whatsoever of the men jabbing their pencils at him.’ She raised her hand to a group of passing local women, who called their greetings to her.

  ‘Is it what you want?’ Reid said. ‘Most of the cemetery still resembles a building site.’ He was careful not to say ‘battlefield’, which would have been a considerably more accurate description.

  ‘I daresay it hardly matters,’ she said. ‘To them, I mean – the women.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re just angry because the day will now better serve the glorification of Wheeler than—’

  ‘Than the women who deserve that glory ten times more?’

  She smiled at the remark. ‘Listen to yourself, Captain Reid. Glory, indeed.’

  ‘I daresa
y neither of us is in a position to deny the man anything he wants,’ Reid said.

  ‘We never were. When the idea of burying the nurses out here was first suggested, it was dismissed out of hand. We’ve come a long way since then. Besides, who’s to say that letting the journalists and the photographers watch the whole thing and then write their stories and take their photographs won’t all be to the good?’

  ‘Perhaps you’re right,’ he said.

  ‘But you personally will never agree with that?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I know there’s a demand back home for these things to be done, and for everyone who wants it to participate in some way or other. But to my mind that’s not what they’re doing, not truly.’

  ‘Because no one who wasn’t out here themselves will ever truly grasp what’s happening now?’

  Even Reid could see how worn that particular line of reasoning had become.

  ‘Let’s just see, shall we?’ she said, folding Wheeler’s note and pushing it into her pocket.

  Ever since his confrontation with Wheeler in Amiens, Reid had started to prepare himself for his removal to the periphery of the man’s concerns. To Reid, the path that once lay before him in France and then, presumably, back at home, which had seemed so straightforward and definite – preordained, almost – had now suddenly disappeared, leaving only this unknown and unknowable terrain ahead of him.

  ‘Has anyone said anything to you about Guthrie’s involvement in the occasion?’ he asked her.

  ‘Nothing. But you know as well as I do that the pair of them ride around on each other’s coat-tails. Perhaps I ought to get in touch with him and find out what he intends doing.’

  Before Reid could say any more, they were interrupted by the noisy arrival of a lorry, which drew up beside them where they stood on the narrow street.

  ‘My transport to the cemetery,’ he said. He’d been waiting for the lorry when the message from Jessop had arrived, followed shortly afterwards by Caroline. ‘Now that we know what’s definitely going to happen, I’ll get as much ready as possible,’ he said. ‘Wheeler will want the place looking its best.’

  He climbed up beside the driver and sat looking down at her as the man struggled with and swore at his gearstick, which refused to move. He warned the driver about the language he was using.

  Eventually, the lever came free and they started their journey. When Reid looked back, he saw that Caroline had already gone from the street.

  There had been no new bodies on the train earlier, only supplies and an additional forty stones, and these had been unloaded and then taken to the cemetery under Drake’s supervision.

  The sergeant was waiting for him when he finally arrived there.

  Reid told him everything he could about the arrival of the nurses and the ceremony that was about to take place. As usual, Drake knew most of this already. The two men walked together to the waiting graves.

  ‘It’s a good plot,’ Drake said. ‘Get the grass down and the planting finished and we can then put some seating at the back of the graves. It’ll be a good view for anyone sitting there.’

  They went to the spot indicated by Drake, and Reid saw what an overview of the place the slightly elevated site afforded them.

  ‘Will we be ready, do you think?’ he asked him.

  ‘If we’re not, then they’ll have to take us as they find us. What’s Wheeler going to do, call the whole thing off?’

  Reid shielded his eyes and looked at the work going on around them. The flooded graves had been pumped dry and made secure. Mounds of chippings had been delivered to help with the finished drainage.

  ‘We’ll need to prepare some ground close to the graves for the newspapermen to gather,’ he said. ‘Something to make the place look less … less …’

  ‘Less like the unfinished graveyard that it is?’ Drake said, smiling. ‘I wouldn’t worry too much about that if I were you. The photographers will be far more interested in getting their pictures of Wheeler and the other bigwigs all turned out in their pomp and glory. You know how these things work.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ Reid said, reassured by the sergeant’s understanding and acceptance of everything that was about to happen.

  ‘They want their show, that’s all,’ Drake said. ‘It’s all some of them ever wanted.’

  Reid said nothing in reply to this. He continued looking over the site around them. In an enclosure by the entrance, the brilliantly white stones had been stacked in rows, ready to be taken to the waiting graves. Nearby, a cloud of blue exhaust fumes hung above a group of men still engaged in unloading that morning’s cargo. Elsewhere, men worked alone and in pairs, smaller parties than usual now that the majority of the graves had been excavated and the paths, lawns and flower beds were being prepared. The rows of completed graves, their stones already in place, ran in broken lines throughout this apparent confusion. A definite order was finally emerging wherever he looked around the site.

  At the cemetery’s edge, a line of French labourers swung their scythes through the tall grass and undergrowth, the dry stems falling neatly behind the cutters. The smell of wood smoke drifted over the scene from the small fires the men insisted on lighting, whatever the day’s heat, to brew their tea.

  ‘It’s a rare sight,’ Drake said absently. ‘All this. I daresay when the place is finished, you’ll never even know we were here.’

  ‘I imagine that’s the whole point of the exercise as far as some are concerned,’ Reid said. He took the cigarette Drake offered him.

  He saw where the outermost of the pale, narrow paths had been laid, reaching towards the cemetery’s edges like the thinning branches of a tree.

  After a moment of silence, Drake said, ‘Do you think it will ever happen again?’

  Reid wondered what to say to him. ‘I don’t see how it can,’ he said eventually. ‘At least, not like this.’

  ‘I wouldn’t put anything past us now,’ Drake said.

  ‘“Us”?’

  ‘Us. You and me. The men in charge. The men doing their bidding. To my mind, we’ve done it once, we’ll do it again.’

  It surprised Reid to hear him talking like this, revealing a part of himself Reid had never seen before.

  ‘We’re soldiers,’ Drake went on. ‘What else are we for?’

  Reid couldn’t agree with this, but neither could he bring himself to counter Drake’s honest reckoning. He lifted his eyes and scanned the horizon, already lost in the day’s haze. Everywhere he looked, there was nothing to distinguish between the bleached colours of the land and the pale, almost colourless sky above. Birds flew and called above the trees; snatches of noise, of conversation and laughter rose muted and distorted from the men and machinery below.

  ‘Eighty-two degrees,’ Drake said. ‘Benoît. The thermometer in his office. Warmest day yet, apparently.’ He wiped his face on his sleeve.

  The two men walked to where the nurses’ waiting graves lay. Some of the holes still contained a man with a shovel straightening the sides and rims of the cut earth. Elsewhere in the cemetery, the early graves had been dug unevenly from the ground, but these now were receiving all the care and attention of graves prepared in a small country churchyard.

  At the arrival of Reid and Drake, the men climbed out of their holes and congregated at the mound of their discarded tunics and shirts.

  Reid left Drake with the diggers and walked towards the entrance alone. As he passed the other labouring men, and despite his earlier reservations about the forthcoming ceremony, he could not help but feel that, however premature or contrived the occasion might prove to be, it did at least mark a vital junction in his own time and work there – another of those hitherto unsuspected boundaries he was about to cross, beyond which nothing could ever remain the same for him.

  Some men, he knew, embraced all possible change and uncertainty in their lives ahead, whereas others clung with a kind of desperation to the known and the dependable and the endlessly reassuring to support and guide them
. France, Mesopotamia, England – what, really, did it matter where he was, or what work he undertook there, when the world might never again turn soundly on its axis, and when none of its usual checks and balances might ever right themselves?

  What if Drake had been right in his speculation and the same thing were to happen all over again? And then again after that, and again after that.

  He felt the sweat gather and run on his brow and cheeks. He walked to the cemetery’s edge, and then beyond, following a narrow path into the abandoned, weed-filled fields, where he was finally alone and unobserved, and where all he could hear was the humming and droning of the insects he disturbed as he continued his wandering at the height of the day’s stifling heat.

  26

  REID NEXT SAW Alexander Lucas two days later, and when he remarked on the man’s recent absence from Morlancourt, Lucas said simply that he’d been unable to return each evening because of the work he was now undertaking at La Chapelette. It seemed an uncharacteristically dismissive thing for him to say, but Reid, aware of Lucas’s greater concerns, did not pursue the matter.

  Their encounter took place shortly after Reid’s return from the cemetery to his room, where Lucas sought him out and asked if he wanted to go for a drink. Despite Lucas’s abrupt remarks of only a moment earlier, Reid knew immediately that the seemingly casual invitation was much more than that.

  The two men walked in silence to the small bar at the end of the street.

  Reid’s first impulse upon arriving there was to sit as usual at one of the tables which lined the road, but Lucas insisted on them going inside. It was much cooler in the small room, and little of the early-evening sunlight penetrated its half-shuttered windows.