There was a good deal about which he might have thought, and he wondered why he did not do so. There were memories: last night’s quiet beach, the faces of his family, Henry Partington. Or there might so easily have been anger, at the things he had heard and read in England about the conduct of the war: he could have despised the Major, who was going blind and fed his dog and felt out of things, who would have thought something of Hilliard if he had gone for the cavalry. Or could have pitied him.
He wondered, too, why he did not think ahead, as he had done yesterday, about his own platoon, and what had been going on and what would go on during the coming autumn. He thought nothing. A few yards off a man in a frock coat fidgeted with a carnation in his button-hole and, when he was satisfied with the set of it, took out a handkerchief and because of grief or heat, wiped his eyes carefully, before he walked away.
It was like being under water or some mild anaesthetic, everything around Hilliard and within him was remote, people parted and moved and reformed in bright, regular patterns like fragments in a kaleidoscope.
After more than an hour he felt a strange contentment begin to seep through him. He was quite relaxed. He had left Hawton, where he had been so unhappy, and his future movements would be decided for him by other people in some other place. He had only to follow. There would be no more anxieties about what he should or should not let himself say to them at home, or about whose names he might read in the lists in the newspapers, about how he could bear to sit in the sour-smelling room with the Major, tensed with dread of the night to come, of his dreams and the open window letting in the scent of roses.
‘What would you like for lunch, John?’
‘Is there anything I can get you from the library?’
‘Do you want to be woken for church in the morning, or shall I leave you?’
‘Is your leg healed enough for you to try and swim?’
‘Your father says you’ll be back by Christmas, it will certainly be all over. Is he right? Do you agree with him?’
‘Shall I marry Henry Partington? Do you approve, John?’
‘What would you like for dinner, John?’
No more of that. He would only get their letters, as faint reminders of some other world. Instead, he would be making entirely possible decisions, about maps and marches and the conditions of rifles and feet, he would be taking simple orders about life and death.
He felt a moment of singing happiness.
Most of the men stayed on deck for a long time, watching the lights and rooftops of the town disappearing behind them. The boat was very full and it was easy, he now realized, to pick out the ones who had been here before, so that he ceased to worry about the silver-topped cane. Instead, he lay down across two wooden-slatted chairs, using his valise as a pillow, and, after a while, slept. He did not dream. Around him men talked and played cards, drank and read and sang, or were alert, silent.
When he awoke, he saw the sea immediately in front of his face through glass, and the sky, white as a gull’s belly, and, for a moment, it seemed that he was asleep on the beach at Hawton, that nothing had passed between his last walk there in the moonlight and this dawn. But when he sat up he saw the houses of Cherbourg. His back was aching. He was very hungry.
‘Mr Hilliard …’
‘Coulter! Good evening.’ For a second, he had not remembered the man’s name, but he was delighted to see a familiar face, to feel that he was almost home.
‘How are you, sir?’
‘Better. Very well, thanks. I was expecting Bates. Where is he?’
Coulter frowned, shaking his head, but for a moment, Hilliard did not take in his meaning.
‘Excuse me for just a moment, sir, there are some men I’ve to look out for. We’ve had reinforcements this week – not before time. If you wouldn’t mind holding on, sir.’
They were standing in the early evening sunlight, on the grass beside the train. No station, no buildings, only a stopping place, this. Other men peered down at them through the smeared windows, waiting to travel on. Hilliard had only a rough idea of where he was. The train had taken over seven hours but that meant nothing, they had stopped and crawled, stopped and crawled. Only once he thought he recognized a town they went through and then a village, a part of the countryside, white châteaux with green shutters glimpsed through some trees.
The message for him at Cherbourg had been that his battalion was at a rest-camp, twenty miles behind the front line. So they must have come down after Pourville Wood. More than that he could not know. Except that he had expected his own batman, Bates, to meet him and take him on, and here was Coulter, whom he scarcely knew – a small man with a crumpled, old-young face. Hilliard tried to remember something about him.
It was very quiet. Ahead of him the road ran down, dusty-white, between sloping fields. The trees were as parched as they had been at home, but much yellower, here it was already autumn. The sun glinted on the weather-vane of a church, just visible behind a copse in the far distance, and it was bright as a shell in the night sky. But silent.
‘If you’re ready now, sir?’
Coulter picked up his bags. Behind them, a group of men, all of them new to France. Hilliard saw that they looked tired, though it was only because of the heat and the tedious journey, but they were excited, too, willing and keen. Incredibly young. Coulter had organized them, they began to walk. The train stood where it was.
He wanted to say, ‘Do I look older than that? Do I look as old as I feel?’
‘Glad to see you looking fit, sir.’
‘Thanks.’
‘All right walking now, are you?’
‘Oh, yes, yes. Fine.’
‘It’s not so far away. Mile and a half.’
‘How long have we been down here?’
‘Best part of a week, sir. It’s a nice place, I must say. Very pleasant.’
They passed down the hill between sun-soaked trees, and the gnats and midges hovered in thick, dark clusters. The road narrowed, became a lane. There were dried cart rucks along the edges. A rabbit shot across a few yards ahead of them, and stopped in the middle of the road, ears quivering, waited. It’s like going back to school, Hilliard thought, it’s so bloody peaceful, it’s like going back to school, with a prefect to lead you up the road from the station because you’re new, you don’t know the way, you haven’t been here before. Except that he had.
The rabbit stayed until they came within a few feet of it, before making in panic for the brambles.
‘Where’s the war, Coulter?’
The man smiled. Behind, the new recruits to the Battalion. They were not talking.
‘How many for B Company?’
‘Eight, sir. We had forty, last week, and ten just before we came down.’
‘What?’
‘Not enough. We’re still well under strength.’
‘What’s been happening, for God’s sake?’
‘Don’t you know, sir?’
They rounded a bend. Somewhere he could hear water.
‘Coulter?’
‘You’ll find out about it all, the C.O.’ll tell you, soon enough. He’s been waiting for someone new to tell.’
‘It was hopeless trying to make any sense out of the newspaper reports.’
‘I’ll bet, sir!’
‘They garble everything, it’s all lies, you can’t work out who’s doing what, who’s where – who won.’
Coulter looked at him sideways. ‘Won, sir?’
‘Well – yes, I saw the lists.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Bates?’
‘Oh yes, sir. Most of your platoon. Most of the Company, really, sir. You won’t find many faces you know, sir.’
Bates had been his batman from the beginning. A bad-tempered man, strong as an ox, entirely reliable. Hilliard had trusted Bates, and liked him, too, because the war had not changed him, he was morose as he had always been, he was an Old Army man, apparently indestructible.
‘There’s a
new Adjutant, sir. Captain Franklin – B Company.’
‘Yes.’
He had read Captain Ward’s name in one of the first Casualty Lists after he had returned to England. Ward and Houghton, Fane, Bryant, Anderson and Sergeant-Major Pearcy. And Mason-Godwin, who had shared a hut with him that spring in Training Camp, had gone into the artillery.
‘They gave him the M.C.? Captain Ward, that is, sir. Came through just after you left. Did you know that? A day or two before he was killed. He went up with a mine, sir. See that red roof just to your left, behind the dip? That’s the place. Manor house, it was, and a farm alongside. Yes, very pleasant it is, sir.’
The sky was rose-red, and darkening at the edges as the sun dropped down.
‘Been hot, sir, I can tell you that.’
‘And at home.’
‘Yes, so Mrs Phipps writes.’
Then he remembered about Coulter: that he had no family at all, had been brought up in an orphanage, from which he had run away at the age of eleven, to join the circus. His only letters came from a friend and his wife who travelled England with a team of performing monkeys. Coulter was a happy man, self-sufficient, small and hard as a nut.
‘I daresay you enjoyed your time at home, sir.’
‘Yes,’ Hilliard said. ‘Yes, thank you.’
They turned up the long drive through orchards of pear and apple. The fruit was thick, and brown and much of it lay in the long grass, rotting.
The main building was three-storied and built of red brick, with two large wings at right angles, and a number of barns, stables, and outhouses and, further down the road, some cottages. Beyond and between them, in the fields and orchards, green tents. Smoke was rising from the chimneys in pale, thin plumes. But it was the lull at the end of the day, there was for the time being no other sign of life.
Hilliard felt suddenly tired. But excited, too, he wanted to see everyone, hear everything, even the worst, he felt at home even though he had never been to this place before. He thought, it’s like going back to school.
‘Most of your platoon. Most of the Company, really, sir. You won’t find many faces you know.’
‘The C.O. asked to see you, sir, when you’ve settled in. And there’s a new second lieutenant attached to your platoon. Came three days ago. Mr Barton, his name. He’s sharing with you, sir, we’re a bit short of space here even if we are under strength. And I’ll be serving for both of you, sir, for the time being, anyway.’
Hilliard felt irrationally angry. He wanted a corner to himself, even though he knew that was the one thing you never got, in France. He wanted his own room like the one overlooking the rose garden at Hawton, not an attic or an outhouse shared with another subaltern. A stranger.
They had come into the front yard of the main building. A mongrel-dog, rough-coated and dirty, was lying across the cobbles, chewing a bone, happy to stay in familiar territory and be petted by the army. Hilliard thought how ludicrous it was to be here, in the last of the evening light, standing before these red-tiled, serviceable country buildings, how ludicrous that it should be so quiet, that there should be grass and apple trees and the smell of cooking, a dog and blackbirds. That there should seem, apart from the young recruits behind him and the short, uniformed figure of Coulter, to be nobody here at all, no Battalion, no front line trenches twenty miles away, no guns, no armies in the country. No war.
He followed Coulter, feeling the silver knob of his stick warm and hard in the ball of his hand. The cane was already scuffed and dirty.
Coulter was right about the overcrowding. B and D Companies were together at the farm which was also serving as Battalion Headquarters, but the rest were in the village of Percelle, half a mile down the lane. It had been badly shelled that spring. Coulter said, there was scarcely an unshattered roof over anybody’s head. But because of the good weather and because at last they were away from the front line, here, where it was so quiet, nobody complained.
When Hilliard stood upright in the room he was to share with the new second lieutenant, he cracked his head on a rafter. This was part of the loft, reached by a wooden ladder that came up through the floor. For years, apples and pears had been stored here and although there was no fruit now the juice had soaked and stained the boards, so that every so often, as one trod them, there came up an old, faint smell of cider.
Coulter had left him after having brought up water in an enamel bowl. Above his head the roof light was propped open, showing a square of damson-dark sky. As he unstrapped his case to find soap and razor, he heard, for the first time since his return, the boom of guns. But they seemed very far away, they had sounded more clearly than that sometimes at Hawton, when the wind was blowing off the sea.
The bugle had gone for the men to eat, he had heard shouts and footsteps on the farmyard cobbles below, and once, the grind of a motor, coming up the long drive.
The narrow apple loft might have been a corner of a dormitory. Below, the sounds of the other boys, settling in. It’s like bloody well going back to school.
And then he looked across at the other man’s belongings, resenting their presence. He was not anxious to acquaint himself with this stranger.
BARTON D.J.C B. COY. 2ND BATTALION, THE ROYAL — RGT B.E.F. FRANCE
The lettering was upright and plain and clear, done in black ink. The leather of the valise still shone, the buckles were not yet tarnished. There was a tortoise-shell backed hairbrush and comb, and a slab of Chocolate Menier. A copy of The Turn of the Screw and of the complete works of Sir Thomas Browne, and one of the Psalms, bound in navy morocco. Hilliard reached out a hand towards it, hesitated, drew his hand back.
On top of the trunk which served as a table beside the camp-bed, a double-folding photograph wallet. The back was to him, he could not see, without touching it, what faces were inside. He did not touch. Instead, he turned away, made preparations to shave. The sound of the motor vehicle going away again. Footsteps. But no one came up the wooden ladder.
Putting his hand into the bowl of water, he found that it was warm, and thought how he would remember once they were back at the front, the luxury of shaving in warm water from a clean bowl. At home, he had not been able to get over it at first, the simple availability of water, for washing, shaving, bathing, drinking – for wasting. He had turned on the taps in the bathroom and splashed drinking water again and again over his face, let it slide coolly down his wrists, wondering at it. For so long, there had been only the tins of green water, stinking of chlorine, to drink, and the grey scum in which someone else had washed before him and the foul water at the bottom of shell holes, before the sun of June and July had come to dry them out. He remembered the men brought in wounded and set down in the bottom of the trench, or being taken up on stretchers, who were crying out not only from pain and fear, but for water. At Neuville, he had sent five emergency messages up the communication trench demanding more water, more water. It had not come. The sixth time, they had sent a runner who was hit, and the water can had burst open and spilled on to the soil beside him.
Hilliard lifted the dripping wet shaving brush up to his face.
He could not get used to what the C.O. looked like. He sat on the opposite side of the table, with the wide windows, overlooking the orchard, behind him. It was not dark yet but the lamp was already lit. Perhaps it was that, he thought, perhaps Garrett looked better in the undistorting daylight. But it was not that, not just an expression. Everything about him had changed.
‘Hilliard!’ He had almost cried out his name, and come quickly across the room to greet him, and it was as though he had been sitting here, for hours or days, awaiting his return. Here was one familiar face, someone who had survived.
‘How are you? I hope they haven’t cut your time short? I hope they’ve seen to it that you’re properly fit?’
Yes, he said, yes they had, yes he was fit, no, there was nothing wrong at all, the leg was more than healed. And all the time, he stared at the Colonel.
‘I??
?m surprised they didn’t send me back sooner – a week ago. It seems you could have done with me.’
Garrett turned and gave him a curious look. But he only said, ‘No. You needed the rest.’
He went over to a cupboard, took out glasses and a bottle of whisky. Hilliard saw other bottles, gleaming darkly behind it. The C.O. had developed a strange half-limp, but it seemed not to be the result of any physical injury, rather of agitation. He moved a hand up to his head, smoothing back the hair nervously again and again, while the other poured drink into the glasses.
‘Soda?’
‘If you have it?’
‘I suppose we do. Yes.’
‘Water will do.’
‘No, no. There’s soda. I saw it. I’m positive there was some soda. It’s Keefe, he moves things, he’s a damned nuisance. Tidies everything. He’s obsessed with tidiness.’
Hilliard had never heard him complain like that, like a peevish old man.
‘You don’t know Keefe.’
‘No.’
‘There won’t be many you do know.’
Garrett was sorting helplessly among the bottles and glasses in the cupboard.
‘This is perfectly all right, sir. Don’t trouble about the soda.’
‘No? Well, I don’t seem to be able to find it. Perhaps there wasn’t any’
‘This is fine.’ Though he had forgotten how strong neat whisky could be against the back of his throat.
‘Keefe moves everything, blast it.’
He came back, fidgeted with some papers, moved the lamp, sat down in the end. Hilliard thought, I have been away five weeks and he is twenty years older, he is … He could not take it in.
From the beginning of his time here he had liked Colonel Garrett, had got on well with him, though without holding him in the same sort of esteem he had held Ward, the dead Captain of B Company. But the C.O. had befriended him, had seen that he was as comfortable as any man could be, that spring on the Somme. He made a point of keeping in touch, of sending for and talking to his subalterns as well as the senior officers, he came down into the trenches frequently.