The Care and Management of Lies

  Tom had no reply. He crawled along the ground to the sentry position, the low stump of a shelled tree. He moved to one side, then lay down on his stomach, his Lee Enfield pointed towards his foe. His eyes, now accustomed to the dark and focused on the German trenches, were searching for shadows across no-man’s-land, the telltale sign of an enemy raiding party on the move under cover of night.

  Was it minutes passing, or hours? Did he see something move? Yes—rats. He’d never tell Kezia about the rats, the size of them, like cats, and the way they feasted on the dead. They said—the boys who’d been up the line a few more times than him—that the rats didn’t wait until the cease-fire, until the stretcher bearers from both sides came out to collect the dying. No, they said the rats, especially those big black bastard rats, would be eating a man even before he met his maker, that you could hear them gobbling up intestines while men with just seconds of life left in them called out for their mothers. Keep still, it’s only the rats moving. Tom knew he would be here again, running past this very spot, the next morning, God willing he made it through the night. And God willing he was able to run that far. Was Knowles trying to kill him, or make an example of him? And why him? He’d never been one to be singled out—mind you, he’d never been anywhere much to be noticed in his entire life, just the college, then back to the farm, and the farm was his. His mind seemed to jump like electricity, a spark bounding from thought to thought. Yes, the farm was his. We’re not serfs with a lease any more, thanks to old man Hawkes. Tom smiled, then widened his eyes. What was that? He fingered the trigger. No, better not. Don’t make a sound—the minute they know where you are, they’ll fill you full of holes.

  Tom felt like two people, one on watch, and one telling him what to do. One looking back and one forward. And looking back, he saw Kezia, in the kitchen, preparing his dinner. He could smell the lavender in the linen cloth as she shook it across the table, and felt the soft fabric as he took up the napkin, pulling it across his lap—embarrassed for himself and the womanness of it all. Table napkins! Yet he felt more of a man for having Kezia by his side, a wife who loved him enough to cook a meal even when he wasn’t there. He thought of the duck, of the succulent meat falling dark from the bone. He saw it on his fork, pushing into the sweet plum stuffing, and then into the gravy, filling it with a mouthful of flavors. In his mind’s eye Tom ate that meal, felt his stomach stretch to satiety and his eyes grow heavy. She goes a bit silly with that sherry, my Kezia, thought Tom. Was that a noise? No, it’s only Kezia clearing the plates. He didn’t have enough room for the apple and cinnamon, and the fresh cream, but perhaps, perhaps just a bite . . .

  The string tugged at his leg.

  “Still watching, Gravy?”

  “Sir?” Tom tried to shout a whisper, keeping his voice low.

  “Just checking. You can come back to the fire step.”

  Tom crawled backwards, his eyes still searching.

  “Right then. Young Mott here is on watch now. You can go to quarters, Gravy.”

  “Sir!”

  “And remember, Private Gravy. I’m watching you.”

  “Sir.” Tom saluted, and quick-marched to the dugout.

  Fresh orders arrived by runner before dawn, informing Hawkes that the attack had been canceled, pending further intelligence. They were to continue their pressure on the Hun but wait for further instructions, which could come as soon as this afternoon.

  Hawkes looked at the runner, his grey eyes outlined by rolls of skin. He was a lad who had to depend only upon the speed with which his legs could carry him to avoid death. Killing a runner was a prize shot for a sniper. The young soldier waited for a reply. Hawkes nodded, and wrote a quick note to the effect that the message had been received, and that he awaited orders. He also awaited the engineers, who were supposed to be laying telephone wire. He hoped they’d turn up before this boy was shot for his trouble.

  The runner took the envelope, ran back through the zigzagging front-line trench, to the turning marked “Maidstone Market,” and from there to the second line, and then the reserve trench, past the advance dressing station, and out onto the land. Hawkes listened to him splash-splash away, until he could no longer hear his boots meeting the mud with speed in his heels. Then he turned back to his desk and lit a cigarette. He had been in the midst of writing a letter when the message arrived. “I regret to inform you . . . ,” it began. Hawkes sighed and picked up his pen, but instead of continuing the letter, he spoke aloud the words in his mind, another message that would not be laid down on paper.

  “I regret to inform you, Mr. and Mrs. Mott, that your son could not keep his head away from the parapet, no matter how many times he was told, so he was picked off like a ripe fruit. Fortunately, Private Brissenden was close by, and managed to catch most of his brains before they hit the ground; however, he was unable to put them back in again. Sergeant Knowles of course says it was all the boy’s stupid effing fault—well, not to me he didn’t say it, but I heard him. I wonder why it is that the younger men who have just marched up to the front line for the first time feel the need to try to look over at the enemy. Is it part of the adventure they signed up for, this looking out at men their own age with guns? Perhaps you might know, Mrs. Mott, being the mother of boys. How many do you have out here now? Four, wasn’t it? Well, let’s hope the others listen to the men who manage to march back to camp after a few weeks in the trenches—find out the key to staying alive—”

  “Sir!”

  Edmund Hawkes turned around. He did not move with speed, but rather his limbs seemed to unfold as he turned his head.

  “Sergeant Knowles. Very good. I will inspect the men at oh seven hundred hours. Usual run-of-the-mill orders today, Knowles—weapons, kit, and so on. There’s to be sandbagging along the trench, and also a feet inspection, the CO is due here at eight thirty. I want to rotate tonight—we’re expecting some cloud, so we’ll also have to keep an eye out for the enemy. Here’s a list of men who’ll be moving back into the reserve trench, and I want you to bring forward Markham’s company into the service trench. Give everyone a taste of something a bit different. Of course, tomorrow morning they could all be moving up here to the front line anyway, if the balloon ever goes up on this show we’re all waiting for.”

  “Right you are, sir!”

  “That’s all, Knowles.”

  Hawkes was alone again, and this time he picked up his pen and wrote to Mr. and Mrs. Mott, telling them how Private Benjamin Mott had died instantly in the service of his country, that he was well liked among his fellow soldiers, who ensured he was buried with full honors. They missed his quick wit and above all his spirit of adventure.

  He folded the letter and placed it in an envelope—it would likely arrive the day after the Motts received official notification of their son’s death in action. Then Hawkes picked up his notebook. Several lines of verse had been crossed out. He turned the page and began again.

  Glory

  Why should I lay dying here

  In this strange and foreign land?

  Where is the glory?

  I cannot understand

  Why such as I

  Should have to die

  He drew his pen through each line and threw the notebook aside. Stupid, foolish, childish. He closed his eyes and wished he could envision Kezia again, sleeping by the lake, snug in the roots of the old tree. But now all he could see was Private Mott sinking into the mud, and Tom Brissenden kneeling over him, the boy’s brains in his hands, as if he could push them back into his skull.

  Chapter 13

  Women in Horticulture and Agriculture . . . Many women who have lived a great part of their lives in town, and who think with delight of beautiful summer days spent in the country, imagine that they would enjoy life on a farm without really grasping what it means.

  —THE WOMAN’S BOOK

  Kezia left the milking shed at nine. It was later than usual, but there were new workers starting, and she and Danny had to get them used to
handling the heifers. Four women from the village had heard that Kezia would employ them at Marshals Farm and come to the house in search of work. All had husbands in France, and one, Milly Bamber, had lost her brother just before Christmas. She’d told Kezia that his commanding officer wrote that he’d not suffered, and had been killed “just like that.” She’d snapped her fingers to punctuate her words. Kezia said it was a blessing for them all that he’d known no pain. Then she demonstrated milking the cows, starting with Susie and going on to Sunshine, Bertha, and Molly. The two women assigned to milking went about the task with ease, once they’d got the hang of it. There were twenty milkers in all, and they ambled in at six in the morning, and again at four in the afternoon, as if they couldn’t wait for the easing of their heavy udders.

  Kezia strode out towards the hop gardens, where Bert had started another two local women workers on the dung spreading—the two in the milking shed would join them once their first job was done. One woman was newly widowed, with a baby born after her husband left for France; she’d begged for work, saying she could do with the money. The baby was snug in his carriage at the side of the hop garden, and from the gate Kezia watched Bert and the women for a while. Her foreman was demonstrating how manure had to be spread around the small mounds, known as hills, set about six feet apart in a row and from which each cluster of new hop shoots was emerging. Soon it would be time for stringing the rows, giving the hop bines something to adhere to as they grew. In a few months the young hops would be ready for the women to come again, to weave the shoots along the string, starting them off on their way—and before they knew it, those bines would have reached over ten feet high, some a half an inch thick and as prickly as rope, bearing robust hearty hops ready to be pulled and picked. No doubt it would be almost all women coming from London to do the picking again this year, with perhaps a few elderly men, or some wounded young men. But Tom would be back by then anyway.

  Kezia stopped to speak to Bert and the women, then said she was off to get Ted and Mabel to finish ploughing the ground where the woodland used to be. Another few turns, some manure, and it would be ready for seeding. She strode off again up the hill, and as she went she could feel Bert watching her, so she looked back. Three faces were staring in her direction. She waved, and they waved in return, so she continued on her way to the pasture to halter the horses and lead them back to the barn, where she would set them in the traces and get to work.

  Had she intuited Bert’s thoughts, Kezia might have been surprised, for she often felt wanting in his company, as if she were an imposter—a young woman born to a more sedate way of life, yet taking up the reins—quite literally now—and getting on with a job that had to be done. Despite himself, Bert admired her. The farm was running—if not smoothly, it was clear to him that the bumps were fewer than they might have been. He knew she sat with the ledgers twice a week to make sure the books were balanced, and she came to market with him, where she was becoming known as a quick study and no shrinking violet when it came to pegging a price. She allowed him to advise her, but he’d noticed her questions were more, well—more educated—than they had been before Christmas. He was glad for Tom, that his wife turned out to have something about her, but he was worried too. How would they ever rub along together when he came home from the war? She wasn’t afraid of Mabel any more, for a start. In fact, it was a funny thing, thought Bert, the way that she and the mare seemed to hold each other in some account now. Kezia commended the mare for her loyalty, and the mare seemed to be more pliable than she had been at first. Mind you, Bert always said that Mabel knew what she was about, and if anything, her temper was due to the fact that she couldn’t abide a fool.

  It was true, thought Edmund Hawkes. It was exactly as he’d guessed. You couldn’t fight statistics, and thus far the statistics—numbers not made freely available to the press—indicated that for every five men marched to the front line, only two would come back down the line. Once again the numbers seemed to rise up and throttle him every time he tried to outflank the statistics and return having lost fewer men. He had a new lieutenant now to replace the one he’d lost. What was his name? He’d forgotten already. He never used to forget names, but now he allowed it to happen, almost encouraging a mental fog to shroud his recollection of names. He never failed to remember their faces, though—especially the faces of men in the throes of death. And with each of those deaths, there it was, another letter, another mother who could be proud of her son, who did not suffer but fought bravely for his country, according to Captain Hawkes.

  The new junior officer seemed to have a shine on him, like a freshly minted penny. He was all of twenty and still wet behind the ears. And under the eyes, thought Hawkes. The lad looked as if he’d been weeping, and he wondered if Knowles had tried to wake him up with too harsh a hand before he went up the line for the first time—perhaps in a vain attempt to ensure it wasn’t the last. Hawkes didn’t always care for the methods employed by Sergeant Knowles, but he could see this bomb-cratered world from his perspective. If Knowles was to give the men the best possible chance, they had to be hardened, they had to be quick-thinking, and they had to be more scared of him than they were of the Hun. They had to fight their way into Knowles’ good books, or else rue the day they clapped eyes on him.

  Now Hawkes and Knowles had brought back their men—those who remained—and they were in camp for, what? A week? Ten days? Two weeks? During that time Knowles would not cease his nagging for a minute, would not miss a parade or an inspection. It was his discipline that was the true master of this fighting force, this legion of men that Hawkes would march into the eye of the storm once more, taking over the third-line trench, then the second line, and then, finally, the front line—until there was another big show, then those trenches and supply lines would be overwhelmed with stretcher bearers pushing their way through to bring back the wounded before they died, while men alive and adrenaline-riddled would be shoving past to get to the front, their sergeants shouting them onto the fire step and over the parapet into no-man’s-land. No-man’s-land because no man should ever set foot in such a place, and no man could cross it unscathed. As far as Hawkes was concerned, it killed your soul even if your body was intact. He turned to the notebook on the desk in front of him, and began to write.

  To The Armaments Maker

  Then he made a series of dots under the title of his new poem. He wasn’t sure what he had to say to this mythical armaments maker. The words began to roll around in his mind, informed by the only snatches of recollection he would allow himself—Hawkes knew that memory could take you down faster than a German bullet—from the time he’d overheard a couple of men talking as he walked along the trench. Was it a week ago, now? It began with Carter, the bank clerk, a man more dexterous with a row of figures than the inner workings of his Lee Enfield.

  “What I’d like to know,” said Carter, “is who makes money out of this business.”

  “What business?” said the other man.

  Hawkes didn’t know his name. He was new, one of a cluster of new recruits just come up from the second line to replace men lost the night before, when a German raiding party had thrown a grenade into the trench.

  “This business? This war business. What did you think I meant? Being a butcher?”

  Ah, yes, the new lad had been a butcher’s apprentice from Tonbridge. Private Timothy Letts. Hawkes remembered now, remembered hearing the other men joshing. Come on, let’s go to the front! Let’s go over the top. And let’s let Letts go to the estaminet when we’re let out of this mess. Yes, let’s—how about that, Letts?

  Letts had taken it all in his stride—his very long stride, because Letts was a tall boy, which worried Hawkes. It didn’t do to be tall in the trench. His mind came back to the conversation between Carter and Letts.

  “So, what’ve you been talking about then?” said Letts. “Who makes what money?”

  “Well, the way I see it,” said Carter, “this here war’s a business, and pe
ople make money in a business. There’s your suppliers and your sellers, and the money comes and goes. I reckon we go one way and the money goes the other—look at it, there’s the grub, the uniforms, the guns, and just think of the money going into shells and bullets and what not. Your webbing costs money, your boots cost money. Someone’s paying—and it’s probably us, the ordinary people—and someone’s making the money. So, who is it? That’s what I want to know. It’s what we should all know, eh, before we fling ourselves up that ladder and out there where them Germans can pick us off.”

  “I’m doing this for my country. I don’t want them Germans going over there and killing my mum and having their way with my sister.”

  “I’m doing it for my country too, Letts. But I want to know where the money goes. Who gets rich from you saving your old mum?” Carter had paused. “What’s your sister like, anyway?”

  There was some respectful talk about the sister, with Carter trying to wheedle an introduction when he came up for leave, “If I ever get a bloody leave, what with all this.” Then Carter continued his opinion-filled monologue.

  “Now, I reckon it’s not just over here, but what if the whole world was in on it, you know, them as knows? I’ve been on the foreign desk, you know, at the bank, sending all sorts of money here and there across the world, and I’ve worked with your French, and your Germans, because they were all over in London. And I’ve got to speak as I find, I never had a bad word to say about the German on the desk next to me—and he was right sour when he had to leave, because he said he had a good job, and he wouldn’t get the same position in Germany. Now you imagine it, all that money I’ve just told you about, going into the war on our side—well, it’s all doing the same over there too. There’s them Germans—probably that fellow I worked with—and they’ve all got to have uniforms, and guns and webbing, and boots and pay, and grub and horses. Where does it all come from and go to? Who gets the hat with the money, that’s what I want to know.”