Field Service

by Robert Edric

  ‘Nothing of the sort. Nothing of the sort. Edmund was merely concerned for the man’s well-being, that’s all.’

  It occurred to Reid to ask Guthrie if he knew of Lucas’s sick daughter, but he said nothing.

  ‘Or perhaps Caroline Mortimer might know,’ Guthrie went on. ‘Perhaps Alexander Lucas confided in her. A woman’s touch, and all that.’

  ‘Or perhaps he’s just gone somewhere to grieve for his dead wife,’ Reid said.

  ‘Quite,’ Guthrie said again. ‘Quite. Though it was Edmund’s belief that the pair of them – Lucas and his wife – had been estranged of late. Still, who are we to speculate? Presumably Caroline Mortimer has said nothing to you concerning the man’s whereabouts?’

  Reid remained silent.

  ‘No, right, I thought not.’

  And before Reid could say anything in response to all this obvious prodding, Guthrie turned and walked back to the waiting car.

  Reid remained where he stood, glad to see the back of the man, and pleased that whatever Guthrie now reported of the work at the cemetery, Wheeler would be satisfied, and neither he nor Jessop would appear until the following day. Only the uncertainty of Alexander Lucas’s whereabouts might now concern Wheeler, but even that would not distract him from the all-consuming business of the day ahead.

  Waiting until Guthrie’s car was lost to sight, Reid walked up the slope, shielded his eyes and looked back out to the distant horizon, where the gathering cloud seemed piled to twice its former height, and where there was now no clear divide between this thickening mass and the land over which it slowly flowed and which it darkened in its wake.

  32

  THE RAIN FINALLY started falling in the late afternoon as work at the cemetery drew to a close. The marquee was fully erected and secured by then, the seating laid out, the completed paths cleared, and all the superfluous building materials and tools moved out of sight of where the burial of the nurses would take place.

  The route of the short procession from the cemetery gate to the waiting graves was roped off, and the graves themselves had been made tidy. Cut turf was laid neatly along their edges and the infill soil was carefully mounded and covered. Crosses were laid at the head of each grave, and buckets of flowers and wreaths were stacked in the marquee.

  Ensuring that the site was fully prepared, that all of Wheeler’s instructions had been followed, and that the drains close to the previously flooded graves were flowing freely in the first of the rain, Reid returned to Morlancourt.

  A contingent of the men from Saint-Quentin would stay overnight at the site, using the marquee as a shelter. Canvas beds and provisions had already been delivered to them. Before leaving, Reid warned them about the earlier flooding, but it was clear to him by the way these strangers listened to him that they were unlikely to leave their shelter if the flooding resumed.

  Wheeler had instructed that these men, and not a party of Reid’s own, should undertake this night watch, and Reid regretted this. Everything Wheeler now said and did made ever clearer to Reid his own loosening bonds and evaporating authority over the place.

  He arrived back in Morlancourt at seven, heralded by the dull tolling of the church bell, and was surrounded briefly by the evening’s gathering worshippers walking through the rain with umbrellas and avoiding the edges of the road which were already running with water.

  He went first in search of Alexander Lucas, and, unable to find him, then went instead to Caroline Mortimer’s room.

  She let him in and gave him a towel for his face and arms. His jacket was saturated and she took it from him and hung it over a chair, where it dripped on to the thin carpet.

  He told her about the work at the cemetery and what he had heard from Guthrie concerning Lucas.

  ‘Do you think he’s trying to get back to his daughter?’ she said.

  ‘What else?’

  ‘He wouldn’t be so stupid. Surely? Besides …’ Her voice tailed off.

  ‘Besides, Wheeler wouldn’t be so inhuman as to deny the man – not after everything Lucas has just been through, everything he’s done on Wheeler’s behalf?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Sorry,’ Reid said, knowing even as he’d spoken that her thoughts now were on the arrival of her nurses and the events of the following day.

  He watched the water dripping from his jacket to the floor. A loud murmur of conversation and laughter rose up from the room below.

  ‘Newspapermen,’ Caroline said. ‘Dozens of them.’

  ‘I understood they’d be coming from Amiens with Wheeler and his party in the morning.’

  ‘So did he, I imagine. They’re a law unto themselves, those men. They’ve been talking to people all day. I gave a so-called interview to one of them myself, but he didn’t appear particularly interested in what I had to say. He kept asking me if I had some words of consolation for the people back at home. He thought at first that I was here because of my dead husband.’ She closed her eyes briefly at the memory of the man.

  She went on talking, but like those journalists earlier, Reid only heard half of what she was telling him. His own thoughts were still with Alexander Lucas and the likelihood of him being caught and the consequences of that.

  Caroline poured them both brandies and they sat together at her open window looking out at the street below. A small balcony extended a few feet from the window and the rain collected on this and ran over its edge. An occasional gust of wind blew the water in on them, staining the cloth on the table.

  The day had lost little of its earlier heat, and the rain grew heavier still. The previously sunlit sky seemed to darken in an instant and the thunder and lightning of the long-approaching storm finally arrived. Almost eight hours had passed since Drake had first pointed out the distant cloud to Reid, and he was grateful that the worst of the weather had held off this long.

  Caroline counted the seconds between the flashes of lightning and the rolls of thunder. The rain fell even more heavily, and it poured off the roofs of the buildings opposite them in unbroken streams. The street below became a shallow, fast-flowing river.

  Reid flinched at a louder than usual peal of thunder, and beneath his palms he felt the small table shake.

  ‘Are you concerned for the waiting graves?’ Caroline asked him.

  Reid looked down at his hands. ‘They’ll drain if the rain stops for long enough,’ he said.

  A group of men ran shouting across the street and he recognized several of his own labourers among them.

  ‘Guthrie clearly thought I knew more than I was telling him,’ he said.

  ‘About Alexander?’

  ‘He’s probably already told Wheeler that he believes I’m involved in some way.’

  Caroline went to the cabinet beside her bed and took a small album from its drawer. She came back to the table and put it in front of him, drawing the table further into the room beyond the reach of the splashing rain.

  Reid opened the album and looked at the photographs it contained. They were mostly of women, individually posed and in groups, all in their nursing and auxiliary uniforms, and often standing with small groups of the men under their care, some also in uniform, some in pyjamas, and some wearing items of both.

  ‘Are they the women coming tomorrow?’ he said.

  ‘Not all of them. But some of them are in there.’

  She put her finger on the face of a solitary woman standing amid a group of twenty grinning men, most of whom wore clean white bandages, and some of whom stood with crutches. All of those men able to hold a thumb up to the photographer did so, but the men standing closest to the young woman looked at her rather than at the camera.

  ‘She’s coming,’ Caroline said fondly. ‘Margaret. She was twenty. An auxiliary volunteer. That was taken at Le Havre. Every one of those men loved her in his own way. She was killed at a place called Pernois. The clearing station there was shelled. She lost a foot and a hand and died of her injuries three days later.’

  She took her
finger from the page, folded it into her fist and held this to her cheek.

  ‘You’ll say something for them all at the ceremony?’ Reid said.

  ‘Jonathan Guthrie has already told me where I’m to be fitted in. Apparently he’ll be saying a few words first. He feels certain our two eulogies will complement each other perfectly. He wanted to know if I could let him have a copy of what I’d be saying. He seemed disappointed that I didn’t have something prepared.’

  ‘He’ll have been working on his own speech for days.’

  ‘Weeks.’

  ‘He’ll no doubt do his usual God and King and Country stuff,’ Reid said.

  ‘To which I’ll add my simple woman’s touch afterwards.’

  ‘You knew them,’ Reid said. ‘All he ever knew was how to spread his worthless blessed balm over everything. As though that ever—’ He stopped abruptly.

  Caroline laid a hand on his arm. ‘I’ve written again to all their parents,’ she said. ‘Some of them contacted me wanting to know why no one had invited or even told them of the ceremony.’

  ‘What did you say to them?’

  ‘I told them that when this cemetery was completed, there would be another ceremony. They were all simply relieved to know that their daughters were safe and finally being laid to rest.’

  ‘Safe?’

  ‘Accounted for, then. That they’d never be completely lost to them, that they’d be cared for in death and that they were now being afforded everything they deserved. Most of them wrote back to tell me what a great comfort it was to them to know all that.’

  She spun the album to face her and then turned a few pages, stopping at a photograph of two women standing together with their arms linked at the elbow. She pushed the picture back to face Reid.

  ‘It’s you,’ he said, recognizing the taller of the two women.

  ‘And my closest friend. Charlotte. That was taken at the field station at Puisieux. We’d been there together for almost a year. I was there when I received the news of my husband’s death.’

  ‘Is she among … I mean …’

  ‘Sadly, no. She left Puisieux on a routine run delivering the more seriously wounded to Calais. We sent them once a week when they were considered well enough to travel. We usually set off in the late evening and returned the next day, mid-morning. Except she never did.’ She looked hard at the woman’s face as she said all this.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘We heard nothing for a few days and then were told that the ambulances had been caught in a barrage on their way back to us. I spent all those days praying that Charlotte had been ordered to stay on the hospital boat with her charges – it happened sometimes, especially if the journey had made things worse for any of the men.’

  ‘But she’d been killed?’

  ‘Four nurses and two drivers. She’s already buried, at Étaples. I go occasionally to watch everything that’s taking place around her. I wrote to Colonel Wheeler six months ago to ask if she and the others couldn’t be brought here. I thought the notion of all the women being buried together might appeal, especially to a man like him. But he insisted that it was hard enough for him to allocate space to the bodies he didn’t yet know about, without special provision being made for those already buried elsewhere.’

  ‘Perhaps in the years to come,’ Reid said. ‘When everyone has finally been gathered in. The whole of this country for fifty miles in any direction is little more than one giant burial ground.’

  Outside, the torrential rain slackened briefly, but then, after almost ten minutes of silence, the thunder and lightning resumed, and a second storm gathered and flowed across Morlancourt.

  ‘I think the worst has passed,’ Caroline said absently. She took back the album and looked at the photograph of herself and the dead nurse.

  ‘Were you very close?’ Reid asked her.

  ‘I loved her,’ she said. ‘I have no sisters or brothers, and Charlotte was like a sister to me.’ She paused. ‘The pity of it is, I was the one who allocated the nurses and auxiliaries to the Calais convoys. It was always looked on as something of a break for the girls. The ambulances sometimes waited at the coast for a night or two longer than was absolutely necessary – there were always medical supplies to be brought back to us – and knowing this, I always used to allocate the work to those women most in need of some time away from the hospitals. I’d known for weeks that Charlotte was becoming exhausted. She was from Nuneaton, and I remembered her telling me that before coming to France, she’d only ever seen the sea on two previous occasions, both family holidays. There was a nursing depot in Calais so there was always somewhere for the girls to stay and to eat.’

  ‘Did you go on the trips yourself?’

  ‘Rarely. I was always more useful at Puisieux, or wherever else I happened to be. Besides, I was hardly in a position to go myself and leave someone else behind. Even Charlotte took herself off several rotas until I finally insisted on her going. When we heard what had happened to the four girls—’ She turned away from Reid to look over the street below.

  ‘I know,’ Reid said.

  Neither of them spoke for several minutes. Instead, they sat together and watched the distant storm move slowly away from them. In the west, the already clearing sky revealed the light of the day’s setting sun and the promise of better weather tomorrow.

  ‘Will you imagine her among them?’ Reid said eventually.

  Caroline closed her eyes and nodded. ‘Of course.’

  ‘It’s an easy thing to do,’ he said.

  ‘I know.’ She finally closed the album.

  When Reid next looked at her he saw that she was crying. The tears ran in lines over her cheeks and dripped from her chin on to the backs of her outspread hands.

  33

  ONLY LATER, ALONE in his room, did Reid finally understand how impossible it was for him to do anything to help Alexander Lucas. There were a few people he might telephone – men he and Lucas had known in either Albert or Amiens – but it was unlikely that any of them would know any more than he did about Lucas’s disappearance or his whereabouts now.

  In all the months he had known Alexander Lucas, Reid realized, Lucas had spoken of none of these other men except in connection with his work in the Retrieval unit. Besides, any enquiries would have to be put through the Army Exchange in Saint-Quentin, and in all likelihood the operator there would have already been instructed to report any call made by Lucas or his friends. A call in the middle of the day might have gone unnoticed, but certainly not one at almost midnight. Whatever he attempted, Reid would only make things worse for Lucas.

  He tried to remember the names of the men he had met in Lucas’s company – his labourers at Prezière, for instance – but could not. Besides, Lucas’s team there had already moved on or been disbanded.

  His best hope, he realized, was if Lucas contacted him. But that, too, was unlikely. Perhaps detaching himself this completely had been Lucas’s intention all along, at least since either making his application to Muir or receiving word of his wife’s death. And perhaps it had already occurred to both Wheeler and Muir to keep a close eye on Reid himself in the hope that he might lead them to Lucas.

  An hour later, the storm had moved beyond the barely perceptible horizon, and though the far distant clouds were lit occasionally by a sudden flicker of lightning, there was no longer any thunder to be heard. The rain had long since lessened and then slowly ceased, but water still ran in the street outside and dripped from the roof of every building.

  Unable to sleep, Reid sat at his window and looked out into the darkness. There was a vague brightness in the sky to the east, which never fully darkened through those summer nights, but closer to Morlancourt it was difficult to distinguish where the buildings and ruins of the place now stood. It was as though the world all around him had no true form or structure in the night, and as though, despite the dim light across the horizon, there was now no end to this shapeless world and the darkness in which it lay.


  A solitary lantern shone in the window of a building further along the street, and Reid recognized this as the bar he had visited in the company of both Caroline and Lucas. He watched the light for a few minutes, but there was no movement around it – no shadows of late drinkers coming and going from the place, no sudden silhouette cast fleetingly on a wall – and so Reid came away from the window and sat at his small table.

  Despite the storm, the night was humid, and where the heavy rain had fallen against his window and the wall around it, dark patches had appeared on the plasterwork. He touched his palms to these stains and felt the dampness against his fingers. He understood then, in that instant, that living through a long and deteriorating autumn and then an even longer winter in Morlancourt would be a different thing entirely to the summer he had just spent there, and he felt a sudden and unexpected sense of relief at the realization that he would know nothing of the place during these other, harsher seasons.

  Eventually, exhausted after his long and unexpected day’s work, Reid fell asleep where he sat at his table.

  He slept fitfully for several hours and then woke when some movement almost tipped him from his chair.

  The room around him lay in complete darkness.

  He pulled off his jacket and his shirt, kicked off his boots and lay on the bed. He fell back to sleep, and this time he lay undisturbed until the early dawn, when he woke again and heard the usual muted cacophony of the town all around him. He opened his eyes and then lay without moving, gathering his thoughts and considering everything that had just happened and everything that was about to take place in the day ahead.

  34

  AN HOUR LATER, the sky was again blue and cloudless, and at nine in the morning, as Reid made his way to the station, the air was already warm. Gutters still dripped with the night’s rain, and the dykes along the roadside were filled with debris and flowing water. A light mist floated above the distant canal, and deep puddles lay along the lower reaches of the lane where it approached the railway. Following the storm, the verges seemed much greener than usual, and the exposed soil of the fields beyond much darker.