He blew out a breath, his eyes far away, seeing France nine years before. “One boy I remember, he couldn’t have been more than twenty-one, a shining example of English manhood. He arrived with his papers in October of ’15, and instead of keeping him back until his regiment came off the front line they just passed him on. I was there when he reported for duty. The sergeant had just brewed tea, and was handing me a tin mug when we heard the noise of someone sloshing along the duckboards. We stuck our heads out from under the scrap of tarpaulin the sergeant had rigged as a shelter from the rain and saw this sopping-wet creature with a shiny new hat and mud to the thighs, stumbling up the trench. He spotted us under the flap and waded over to the dugout.
“And then the young fool stood to attention to return the sergeant’s salute. Straightened his back, and a sniper took him, right through that pretty new officer’s cap.
“And do you know, the sergeant laughed. It sounds utterly callous, but it was such an appalling irony, to see this fresh-faced, blue-eyed boy stand up proud to do his patriotic duty, before either of us could stop him. I still see it: The boy’s hand comes up and—pop! God takes off the top of his head. What could the sergeant do but laugh? And God forgive me, it was such a shock, for a moment I couldn’t help joining him. Twenty-one years of education and responsibility going into an erect spine at the wrong instant. God’s sense of humour can be brutal.
“That was the volunteer army. It got so the sight of a newly applied set of officers’ pips made my stomach heave, we lost so many young officers. It made me rage, that all their expensive training didn’t include the basic skills of survival. Not a gentlemanly trait, I assume, self-interest. They sent us children, and we offered them up to Moloch, and they sent us more. I had a boy die in my arms whose cheeks had less down on them than a ripe peach. He was fourteen, and the recruiter who’d accepted the lie about his age should have been shot.”
Hastings’ words had welled up like poison from a lanced boil, but at this last phrase he stumbled, remembering why we were here. After a minute he started again, the flow slower now but inexorable.
“We had three executions in the units I served with. I witnessed two of them. The first was a foul and bitter affair, a regular soldier in his late thirties who’d been drunk, got in an argument with his sergeant, and shot him. The man was charged with murder, and executed three weeks later. That was in April of 1915. Two of the men on the firing squad broke down during the summer, had to be transferred to less active duty before they were charged with some dereliction of duty as well. One of the men returned to the Front the next spring, the other I heard died of septicaemia from some minor wound left untreated, a year or so later.
“The second execution was in the winter of 1916. A private standing watch fell asleep on duty, and although he might have got away with ninety days’ field punishment, he’d been warned twice before. So they shot him. Pour encourager les autres, you know. I was off having a couple of rotted toes sawn off, so I didn’t have to sit with that one.” Hastings drew a shaky breath, and went on.
“Your duke’s nephew came to my attention in the late spring of 1918. Not that anyone knew he was a duke’s nephew—more than that, son and heir to one of the great dukedoms of the realm. Had I but known, oh, had he but told me! If he’d given me the name, I could have stopped it in a moment. But I knew him as Hewetson, and only found out the other name later, long after he had died.”
“Why do you suppose he did not tell you?” Holmes asked, the first interruption to the narrative either of us had made.
“God!” Hastings cried out. “I’ve asked myself that a thousand—ten thousand—times in the past five and a half years. Had I prodded him to tell me his story, had I performed my sworn duty as God’s servant wholeheartedly instead of taking relief in the boy’s lack of distress, he might have told me before it was too late. Instead of which I was a craven coward, pathetically grateful that he was not screaming and wetting himself with terror as my first executed prisoner had been.
“But I am getting ahead of myself.
“He joined the regiment in, oh, it must have been late March, a quiet boy with dark eyes and a limp. I was only too glad to see a bit of wear and tear on his uniform, since it meant I wouldn’t have to wince in anticipation every time I heard a sniper’s gun across the line. He knew enough to keep his head down, he wasn’t burdened with all kinds of unnecessary equipment, he was oblivious to the stench and the rattle of guns beyond our range. He had the makings of a soldier, in other words, and the men responded in kind.
“He’d been wounded, that was clear, not only from the limp and the bits of rock embedded under the skin of his face and hands, but from the dark look that came into his eyes during a bombardment. The men were hunkered down in the trenches one long night, and I was working my way along the lines when I came upon him, tense as a humming wire but working hard to keep it from his men. I stopped to talk to him for a quarter-hour or so, which was when I learnt that he’d been raised in Berkshire, and that he’d already been buried once in a mud-soaked trench that took a direct hit. He dismissed it with a couple of brief but chilling phrases—‘drowning in cream-of-man soup’ is the one I still hear in the night—and said he thought it statistically unlikely that he’d take another direct hit, which was why his men were sticking so close to him.
“In truth, his men were near him because despite his youth, despite his apprehension, there was a core of steely authority in him that drew them like so many magnets. They clung to him, both protecting him and drawing strength from him. Hewetson and I talked for a short time—of birds’ nests and fox hunting, I think it was—while the men pretended not to hear; when I moved on, the boy’s tautness had eased a fraction and there was a greater degree of calm and unity of purpose in that one small section of trench. I could, you see,” Hastings added, “perform the task that I had been placed there for.”
I thought that any chaplain who had volunteered for the trenches, at his age, to spend the entire four years in the mud with the common soldiers, had done a greater service than Hastings gave himself credit for. Some toes lost to trench foot or frostbite seemed to me the least of this man’s wounds.
“I made it a point to seek him out from time to time over the next weeks. He never wanted my counsel—indeed, he seemed to cherish most our little talks about matters with no connexion to our current circumstances—but he had much to say about the land, and our responsibility to it. One morning, marching back up the lines towards the Front, I happened upon him, standing at the side of the road to watch two old women trying to nurture a scrap of garden among the shelled fields. When he felt me beside him, he turned, nodded to me, and then gestured at the two bent figures in black. ‘If this war ever ends,’ he said, ‘anyone setting a plough to the entire north end of France is going to risk hitting a live shell. On the other hand, we’ve certainly enriched the soil for them.’ And then he settled his pack and walked on.”
“Dark humour for a young lad,” Holmes commented.
“The only sane response to the continuous, grinding brutality of living for weeks in that hell hole.”
“You would say, then, that Gabriel Hughenfort—or Gabriel Hewetson, as you knew him—was sane?”
“None of us was sane, not after we’d been there for more than a few weeks. But Gabriel was as balanced as any man I knew. He escaped into his memories of rural Berkshire, he read and he wrote for hours, then he returned to duty, strengthened.”
“He wrote, you say. What was he writing?”
“Letters, for the most part. And . . . a diary.”
Holmes and I looked at him, both of us thinking that the family’s collection of letters could not have taken up a great deal of the young officer’s time, and that diary had they none. Before we could ask, Reverend Mr Hastings was explaining, and his next words were even more of a revelation.
“He also had a young woman, I believe.”
“His fiancée in Berkshire, yes. Do we know her na
me, Russell?”
“Susan, Susan Bridges,” I told him. But Hastings shook his head.
“Not the same, not unless Gabriel’s pet name for her was Hélène. Did this fiancée do VAD work in France?”
“I have no idea,” Holmes admitted.
“His young lady was an ambulance driver. She was taller than Gabriel and had bright green eyes, and that’s all I know about her—that and the name. I assumed she was French, by her name, but fluent in English.”
“You met her?”
To my astonishment, Hastings turned red with what looked to be embarrassment.
“I—no, I never met her.”
“Then how—?”
“His letters—I never saw him write in anything but English. Perhaps he feared that the censors would have blacked out phrases in a foreign language.”
His skin returned to its former pallor, but the open manner in which he was meeting Holmes’ eye had an element of defiance in it. For the first time, the old priest was hiding something.
Holmes saw it too, of course, and after a moment’s reflection, decided on an oblique approach instead of direct assault.
“You say he wrote a great deal, to this Hélène person and in a diary. To anyone else that you noticed?”
“Someone in the government, a judge of some—Wait. If his name was Hughenfort, then . . . Not a judge. He was writing to the house. Justice Hall is the family seat, is it not?”
“It is. They received very few letters, however.”
“For some reason, I assumed they were dutiful missives to an aged judicial uncle who had retired to the country,” Hastings mused. “The few I noticed—the men occasionally gave me their letters, to post behind the lines—were thin. I recall wondering once why it was this unnamed occupant of a judicial hall who received his letters and not his nearer family. I’d have thought him an orphan, but for one reference he made to his parents’ difficulties in keeping the house warm. Had I known the size of the house,” he added with a glimmer of amusement, “I might have been less sympathetic.”
“No-one else that you noticed? Any letters he received from sources other than Hélène and Justice Hall?”
“None that I noticed, but then I was only occasionally present for mail call.”
“Do you know what happened to those letters?”
“He may have given them to the officer who visited him the night before he . . .”
“Lieutenant Hughenfort had a visitor?” Holmes asked sharply, then caught himself. “Perhaps, Mr Hastings, you had best tell us what you know about Gabriel’s final days.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The Reverend Mr Hastings settled back into his chair with an air of summoning his energies for the final push. He spread his hands out on the arms, where the upholstery was brown and shiny with wear.
“Gabriel joined us, as I said, in the middle of March, just in time to meet the full German assault. How he even got up the lines to the trenches I don’t know, but he must have slipped in during a lull in the gas. The mortar fire was more or less continuous, but gas depends on which way the air is moving. At any rate, there he was, a fresh face—looking no less weary than the other men but a good deal less filthy. No-one took much notice of him that first week, other than to see that he could hold his own, since we were all too busy with getting out the wounded and trying to keep from being pushed all the way to the sea. The Front retreated in a fifty-mile bulge in three weeks, then slowed, and in the second week of April we were laying down new trenches.
“That is when Gabriel Hewetson and I began to have our conversations about the natural history of Berkshire. When I became aware that we had a rather extraordinary young gentleman in our midst. When I began to regain a sense of my vocation. I’ve often thought that Gabriel gave me more spiritual guidance than I did him, without ever speaking about God.”
I did not know what to make of him as a man of religious sensibilities. His rage against God was powerful, yet the trenches had not killed his faith. I thought I might risk interrupting his flow of words with a question.
“I’m curious, Mr Hastings. I’d have thought that as a chaplain you would have spent more time behind the lines, and yet you seem to have been actually at the front line a great deal. Was this usual?”
“Jesus Christ was the Son of God, but He was also a man—a carpenter’s son, a wandering preacher, a friend of the poor and the downtrodden. Jesus would not have spent that war comforting those already in the comfort of dry beds and hospital wards. When I volunteered, it was with the knowledge that I had to follow His example as long as my strength held out.
“Young Gabriel helped me maintain that strength, for a few vital weeks when I needed it most. And in the end, I failed him.
“We were among the armies transferred south in early May, to a quiet stretch of the Front on the west end of the Chemin des Dames, and it was as if we’d been lifted out of a cesspit during a riot and set down in Paradise. It was disorientating—there’d been heavy fighting there the year before, until the French mutiny, but the villages were still whole, church bells rang from intact steeples, old women went out to work the fields. Cows grazed, chickens scratched. We even slept to the song of nightingales.
“Three blissful weeks of this—broken by the occasional skirmish, of course, but with long stretches of silence to heal the soul. The air smelt of growing things, not of death. Bliss.
“And then, just after mid-night on the twenty-seventh, the Germans decided that our patch was the one they wanted for their break-through, and we were back in the thick of it. Fast asleep, most of us, when the gas canisters landed, and almost before the sentry could get to the nearest shell casing and hammer out a warning, a thousand guns opened up. The ground heaved, trenches collapsed, the sky was aflame.” The memory was so raw in his face, for an instant I thought I saw the fires reflected in his wide-staring eyes.
“A ten-mile retreat that first day, thousands taken prisoner, utter confusion, equipment abandoned, men fleeing in the wrong direction. The next day was worse, with the men beginning to panic. By the time the Germans came up against the Americans at Belleau Wood the first week of June, we fully expected Paris to fall. We took one look at the Yanks, and despaired—they were far too shiny-new to be of any use.
“But by God they held, and the German offensive ground to a halt, and then it was time to march back up the line and dig in again, after our nice quiet holiday.
“Every-one knew now, after four years, this was it. The men had been fighting hard since March, but now the death-struggle began in earnest, every inch of ground bitterly contested. Our men were footsore and exhausted and ready to do it all again, and I’ve never been prouder of them.” He paused briefly to take a swallow of cold tea.
“We’d been jumbled in among the French this time, which made for a certain amount of confusion, but no doubt the rivalry helped maintain spirits on both sides. I was no longer in Gabriel’s regiment, but as I was only a few miles up the road and padres were scarce, I saw him every two or three days. He had been badly shaken by the sudden bombardment down at the Chemin des Dames in May, and spent a couple of weeks twitching and pale. I urged him to go back for medical rest, but he refused. His men needed him, he said. It may even have been true.
“His regiment had been set to hold a hill. One pitiful bump in a flat land, facing another insignificant rise half a mile off held by the Boches. More trenching, more sniping and waiting for orders.
“I wasn’t there when his order came. I don’t even know who issued it, but someone safely back in headquarters decided that Second Lieutenant Gabriel Hewetson needed to rouse his men into a wiring expedition that would show the French how it was done.
“The problem was, it was a full moon on a crystal-clear night. A rat couldn’t have got through the wire unnoticed. Gabriel pointed this out, pointed out that the sniper opposite had a lethal aim, but the order stood.
“His men would have followed him. There was no question in his mi
nd, or in theirs, or in that of the man giving the order. They would have followed him, and they would have died.” He looked down, studying his old-man’s hands; I wanted to stop his narrative to save him the reliving of it. Instead, we waited as he drew a shaky breath, and then went on.
“Gabriel said no. In fact, he specifically ordered his company to stand down.”
“Thus taking full personal responsibility,” Holmes said, to show the man that we understood. The image of the Justice mascot, the ungainly bird ripping its heart out for its young, flashed starkly before me. “What was said at the trial? Did you attend?”
“I did not. It was so fast, by the time I heard about his arrest, he’d already been condemned.”
“What? How long was that?”
“Five days.”
“Five days? Surely that was an extraordinary rush?”
“It was judged to be a precarious time and place, and considering Gabriel’s popularity, his insubordination threatened the discipline of that entire stretch of the Front. Instant punishment was seen as essential. He was executed ten days after his arrest.”
“Ten—” Holmes was without words.
“Did no-one speak up for him?” I demanded.
“The opinion of his men was judged to be emotional attachment.”
“Surely his representative protested?”
“He had no defence.”
“No defence?” Holmes repeated, as appalled as I.
Hastings drew a deep breath. “Normally, he’d have had some kind of advocate. Normally, for a man his age, an officer, and a first offence, he’d have been stripped of his rank, perhaps given field punishment; certainly that’s what Gabriel expected. Normally, between arrest and execution there would have been at least two or three weeks, during which time appeals would be made. But in that part of the Front, in the summer of 1918, nothing was in the least normal. His court martial looked at his offence and heard him plead guilty. There was neither time nor inclination for leniency.”