A Whispered Name (24 page)

‘Indeed
I cannot.’

Duggie
nodded at Herbert and Angus, and both subordinates fell into step.

Outside
the air was heavy and Herbert began to sweat. As Tomlinson promised, the
bombardment had been turned up every day The volume had gradually increased, as
had the tension in the camp. The men were brittle. Duggie, however, exuded a
sort of professional nonchalance. He sauntered among other men’s anxieties with
a wink and the strike of a match over his pipe.

‘Well,’
said Duggie. ‘Do you know why two Irishmen took a breather when they should
have been giving Fritz a headache?’

Herbert
had given up, wearied by thinking and his efforts to draw Flanagan out of
himself. ‘He’s told me everything from his life on Inisdúr to the day of his
recruitment. And that’s where he’s stopped. Nothing about Neuve Chapelle, Aubers
Ridge, and the rest. Nothing about active service. Just more and more about his
bloody island of rock and mist and dried out weed …’

The
barrage suddenly jumped a grade and Angus whined. Herbert wanted to kick the
dog. Fear was contagious. It had to be stamped down. A match popped and the CO
lit his pipe.

‘What
the hell is Flanagan doing here?’ asked Herbert.

‘The
same as you and I,’ replied Duggie. ‘He’s doing his bit. Or he was.’

Herbert
agreed with Duggie but there were other facets to Flanagan’s motivation. He
tried again. ‘I sometimes wonder if it’s really of Ireland that he speaks, or
some inner world. He joined up for all the right reasons, but the most
important impulse is an odyssey to a slip, away from three fields.’

Herbert
kicked a stone and Angus ran after it, obedient to some half-remembered ritual.
He brought it back, slobbering and defiant.

‘People
enlist for all sorts of reasons.’ Duggie took a puff on his pipe. ‘It’s not
always a rush to the Colours for England’s sake, or Belgium’s, for that matter.
They run away from home, from prison, from an ordinary boring life. But in the
end initial motivations don’t matter. War plunges everyone into a drama about
good and evil. For once in our lives the choice becomes clear. The lines are
drawn and we dig in. Sometimes when I’m very very drunk I wonder if no-man’s-land
is our natural territory … the place we come to when we leave our childhood
behind. It’s the Blighty we’ve lost, it’s the English meadow in our memory that’s
not really England. It’s the world as it ought to be, and our life only makes
sense in winning it back at any cost, if we redeem it from an invader.’ He
struck another match and tugged at the air. ‘When I’m sober, it’s back to
basics. My satisfaction lies in that to the best of my limited ability I’m
doing what I can to bring this ghastly war to an end. But the other stuff helps
me through. Poor Flanagan: he’s never been drunk, so he’s never known the
consolation of madness.’

They’d
attained the abbey The gate was half-open and Herbert saw the white door at the
end of the flagged path. For a moment he wanted to go inside. Ignoring the
impulse he moved on, drawn by a racket in the carpenter’s barn. Fresh
deliveries of timber were stacked high — inside and out the other side, visible
through an open door on to a field of yellowing wheat. The saws were under way Some
extra hands had been brought in. They were measuring with a tape and ticking
with a pencil while others took the marked wood to one of four benches where
the lengths were cut to size. In the middle, arms folded, stood the master,
lips pursed. Angus stared, shivering and uncomprehending.

Satisfied
that he’d avoided Pemberton’s telephone call, Duggie returned resolutely to
base. As soon as Herbert, Duggie and Angus entered the room, however, it was
clear that Chamberlayne was rattled. ‘The Brigadier’s been on the line,’ he
said. ‘He was very sympathetic. Wants to see you immediately This arrived ten
minutes after you’d gone.’ Chamberlayne held out another telegram.

Duggie
read it in silence and folded the paper in four. ‘Call a parade at five this
evening, he ordered, sharply ‘Herbert, take another long walk.’

2

Herbert did not take a
long walk. He arrived at 4.50 p.m. as the men were being knocked into shape. He
knew a lot of their faces now This was the reconstituted NLI. They were going
to support a major offensive on the Menin Road. The four Companies were formed
up, each flanking a central square of well-stamped ground. With the other
Company commanders, Herbert stood in the centre, hands behind his back, legs
slightly apart. His eye sought out Flanagan. He was at the corner of a front
row, placed there by Mackie, who stood to one side. At 4.58 p.m. Duggie
arrived, followed by Chamberlayne and the Assistant Provost Marshal, a man
called Hooper. They strode resolutely to the line of officers waiting on the
middle ground.

The
bombardment cracked on and on, like millions of plates shattering on a tile
floor.

At 5.00
p.m., Duggie nodded at the RSM. Joyce straightened his neck and boomed, ‘Private
Flanagaaaaaaaaaan. One step forwaaaard.’

Flanagan
obeyed, head erect, teeth visible.

Joyce
took off Flanagan’s cap and placed it under his arm in a single sweeping
gesture, at once dignified and momentous.

Hooper
held out a sheet of paper and began his recitation. ‘On the first of September
nineteen seventeen, four-eight-eight-eight Private Joseph Flanagan of this
regiment was tried by Field General Court Martial at Oostbeke on a charge of
desertion and found guilty.’

He
stopped so that all the men could fix their eyes on the prisoner, and reflect.
Far away the barrage hammered and pumped iron, endless amounts of iron, into
the trench systems beyond the Salient. Everyone listened, their nerves raw.

‘The
sentence of the Court was death.’

Hooper
breathed in to raise his voice higher, to get above the shells. ‘The
Commander-in-Chief has confirmed the sentence and it will be carried out in
Oostbeke tomorrow morning at five forty-five a.m., eleventh instant.’

The ranks
moved as if a wind had been thrown off the hop frames. Heads swung left and
right. Flanagan stared ahead, as he’d done at his trial. That grimace of a
smile didn’t change. Oh God, begged Herbert. Come down from heaven.

Blinking
as if grit had struck him, Herbert watched a three-man escort march over to
Flanagan’s Company lines. The Islander was in a daze. He had to be positioned
and pushed by Mackie as if he was drunk. Herbert couldn’t watch any more. He
glazed his eyes … and saw the white shutters on the chipped brick walls, the
black and white tiles, the parquet flooring, and the rose wallpaper. He flung
his head to one side, and saw something worse: the waxy yellow light behind a
cellar vent a foot or so above the ground. When Herbert had calmed himself
Duggie and Chamberlayne had gone, and the men had broken formation, released by
the barked commands of the Sergeant-Majors. No one approached him. Except
Joyce.

‘Excuse
me, Sir.’ His voice was tight and his lips barely moved. The air shot through
his nose.

‘Yes,
Joyce?’

‘It’s
not your fault, Sir.’ Air fired again like pistons out of synchronisation.

‘Thank
you.

‘Good
day Sir.’

‘Yes …
good day Joyce.’

Herbert
tracked the stamp of explosions. For the first time since he’d come to the
Western Front, it was simply a racket in Belgium. A greater fear had taken hold
of him.

3

Herbert did not eat that
evening. He kept away from the officers’ mess, knowing that the talk would be
stiff and charged. They’d argue about the rights and wrongs of military punishments,
of their need and their shame, of the Australians who didn’t have the death
penalty but who fought just as well. He’d heard it all before, but never, never
on a subject so close to home. He felt stranded. There was one road in
Oostbeke. In one direction lay the tents and huts, the men on every side. In
the other, stood the abbey … he found his feet heading towards the open gate
without a bolt or a lock. He pushed open the door and stepped into the smell of
wax and incense. Almost stumbling, he hurried to the accusing space between the
two carved statues: the man and the woman of wood: the place where he’d felt
the disappointment of his parents. He looked at them again, first left and then
right. There was no blame there at all. Their faces were kind and smooth, their
eyes closed in confident supplication. He’d entered another kind of space
altogether.

Herbert
fell on his knees and a violent pleading broke from his mouth. ‘God of the many
things I cannot understand, please save him. Show yourself in this man’s story.
Please, I beg you, save him.’

Herbert
had nothing else to say Vaguely comforted, he left the abbey At the end of the
narrow corridor open to the sky he saw the figure of Father Maguire, hiding
this side of the gate, his face pressed into the stone while he wept.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

1

‘It was a disturbing
visit,’ said Anselm to the Prior. ‘They quarrelled on every question of
importance regarding the executions as a whole, yet each voice without the
other would have been incomplete.’

They
were sitting in the cloister on a ledge between two columns. The garth trapped
that alluring stillness that had drawn men as varied as Herbert and Bede.
Above, cloud streaked the sky like a half painted ceiling.

‘This
is where things stand,’ said Anselm. He’d brought some structure to his
research which gave an interpretation to the court martial. ‘External factors
crowd around the Flanagan file — political events in Ireland, the Ypres
campaign, mutiny, eugenics, racism —and against those momentous problems, you’d
think that Flanagan would be shot. But
internal
factors disperse their
importance. Someone weeded the file, not because he was dead but — I think — to
hide the fact that he was alive. Reading between the lines of General Osborne’s
diary it seems that such an unlikely survival was thanks to Herbert’s
intervention.’

It was
tempting to say more. To share his thoughts on the ‘nine-on-ten, one-in-ten’
mercy-brutality argument. To dwell a moment on the increased chances of
receiving a death sentence if one was Irish. To ponder the dark universe behind
the statistics. But upon such questions Anselm’s mind had imploded. He’d found
himself, appropriately drawn away from the men of percentages to a man of
flesh.

‘Ever
since Martin suggested that Flanagan was the stronger personality, as opposed
to Doyle, I’ve been trying to conjure up the essence of the man. And there’s
something extraordinary to be seen, and it’s plainly set out in the court’s
transcript. When giving his defence he talked of rain “coming off the sea after
weeks of the gathering”; he said, “the land was part of the air” —’ Anselm
shook his head in astonishment — ‘this is a
trial.
The man’s fighting
for his
life
… what does he say? “And cold I was and wet.”‘ Anselm
rubbed a thumb and finger as if feeling silk, or showing its unearthly cost. ‘There’s
an exceptional
sensibility
to Joseph Flanagan. A frailty. And this is
the man who, five months earlier, helped bury two thousand three hundred and
fourteen English and German soldiers in four days. Try and picture it. Dragging
bodies for hours on end … by the arms, by the legs … in April, the month of
early sunshine. The experience must have affected him deeply this poet who’d
seen the land and sky join up and turn to water. Come June his nerves are
wrecked by an explosion that removes not his friends, but his
enemy.’

‘You
think April and June lead to the trial?’ asked the Prior, already convinced.
His arms were folded tight, his dark eyes trained on the rich grass and moss.

‘I do,’
replied Anselm, emphatically ‘The next time we know anything about Joseph
Flanagan, he’s a deserter. Only not in an ordinary sense. He’s been to Étaples
and back. And the evidence against him, without any reference to the trip, is
like a
script.
I believe something profound happened to Flanagan in
April and it came to a head in September when he met Doyle. But what did they
say to each other? More to the point, what did
Doyle
say?’

Anselm
and the Prior looked at each other helplessly The trail into the past had come
to an end on these, the most important questions of all. There was no way of
finding out the answers. And there was nothing else that could be done to
advance their understanding of the trial or Herbert’s message.

‘At
times like this,’ said the Prior, ‘I always sit tight.’ Like Herbert in his
Cortina, thought Anselm.

They’d swung their legs
into the garth. Facing a new direction, they’d left behind the claims of Herbert,
Joseph Flanagan and Owen Doyle. Released like boys, they dreamed up
excruciating product labels for the jars that would shortly be filled: Honey
from the Rock. The Baptist’s Choice. The Promised Brand. While they laughed,
freely Anselm found his face growing stiff. He had a horrible feeling that the
Prior might not be joking.