A Whispered Name (6 page)

From
somewhere behind — among the shadows, the rain and dismemberment — Herbert
heard splashing and the low grunts of a working party. The engineers were back,
laying the route to Passchendaele.

2

Still on his hands and
knees, Herbert followed some stretcher-bearers back to the old front line. He
pushed and slopped his way through the grid of communication trenches jammed
with bulky shadows clinking and steaming like cattle. At the reserve trenches
he made for the RAP — Regimental Aid Post — a dugout covered by an oily canvas
flap. Outside the entrance a length ofWilson canvas had been hitched between
the parapet and the parados, creating an improvised corridor. The entire trench
was jammed with the wounded. Blood spouted black and shiny into the faces of
the helpers, their hands flapping as though a fire raged out of control. The
whimpering, the cries, the gurgling and the swearing filled the horrendous gaps
between each explosion. Grinding his teeth, Herbert slumped to the ground and
entered oblivion, a pit so very different from sleep.

He woke
to the stab of a hypodermic needle. Somehow he’d been moved under the shelter
and dumped upon a crate. The artillery had died down. Captain Oliver Tindall,
the Regimental Medical Officer, was mumbling to the RC Chaplain from Brigade,
Father Maguire.

‘…but
I always wanted to be a vet,’ said Tindall, resentfully ‘My father pushed me to
become a doctor. Said it was more worthwhile.’ He’d become the unit’s RMO six
months earlier, freshly qualified from medical school. At the time, his
predecessor had lain freshly dead in a crater, along with the then Anglican
chaplain, who was yet to be replaced. With a steady hand, the priest held a
lantern over the wounds while Tindall fiddled roughly with a bandage.

‘It’s
the same job.’ Herbert heard his own voice. There was a pause, as if he’d
interrupted a confession.

‘No, it
isn’t,’ objected Tindall.

‘What’s
the difference?’ asked Herbert, looking up.

The
medic’s mouth tightened. A firm nose descended from a prominent brow. The chin
had a deep cleft in the centre. He glanced at the priest as if for support.
Embarrassed he said, ‘You’ve got a soul.’

‘Ah,’
said Herbert, stupidly His head dropped and his eyes glazed at the mud lit by
the lantern, at the caked puttees wrapped around his shins.

Tindall
groaned. He’d forgotten to bring a safety pin. His feet splattered into the
darkness and, after a moment, Herbert felt a hand on his neck. It stayed there,
warm and heavy. He wouldn’t look up: he’d shot a man who didn’t drown: he wouldn’t
face a priest, now or ever again. Shadows jigged and the roof flapped in a
freezing swell. When Tindall returned empty-handed he did what his predecessor
would have done in the first place: tear the bandage and tie a bow. Once the
left hand had been treated Herbert was sent to the Advanced Dressing Station
further back from the line; there he’d be registered again and sent further
away to a Casualty Clearing Station. He didn’t see the need, but the system had
kicked in: he’d been tagged by the RMO and a form had been filled out. If he
left the tramlines thereafter, it was called desertion. Everyone knew the
rules of the game and what happened when you broke them.

When
Herbert splashed out of the corridor, a thin shimmer of light had given shape
to the low seeping cloud. Suddenly shells whooshed and whined overhead, aimed a
mile or so away to shake up the reinforcements, but Herbert’s stomach still
lurched to one side. In front of him, a thin figure grovelled against the
trench wall, a crimson dressing held with both hands against his eyes. He was
sobbing.

‘Don’t
worry,’ said Herbert, watching the shoulders heave, ‘you’re out of it now You’re
going home.’

He
reached over but the soldier recoiled at the first pat. Herbert dredged up some
pity from the obscurity of his soul, for the collar bone had felt small and
flimsy even through the weight of his uniform: and while all bones were flimsy
and ready to splinter, that sudden sensation of a bone still growing had
stirred a recollection in Herbert … of playing fields and bruises to the
shin. He looked at the shorn head, and the shadow above the vertebrae where it
joined the skull. That terrible awareness of what men were made of — brains,
lungs, a stomach, jelly — revealed itself, yet again, as a blasphemy These were
things no man was ever meant to see. Again Herbert stared at the nape of the
soldier’s neck. What are we doing bringing our youth to a place where it is
better to be blind?

Just
then Father Maguire trudged into the open with his arm around a stooped
Private. The soldier was speaking in a strange tongue … it was a musical,
racing hum, with the syllables dragged out at the end of each sentence. For a
brief moment Herbert forgot where he was, so foreign was the sound. He watched
the rapid movement of the lips as if they were an instrument, grateful for
this short reprieve, hardly noticing the man’s humourless smile or the priest’s
panic. Father Maguire’s head was bent, his breath misting as he listened. With
a groan, he splashed over to the boy and pulled out his identity tags. After a
quick check of the name he said, ‘Come on, son.

A
doctor who wanted to be a vet, and a priest who talked of his children:
everything is upside down, thought Herbert. Absolutely nothing makes sense.
With that observation he set off for the Advanced Dressing Station where, amid
the chaos of emergency amputations, screams and final sighs (like a rapture),
his larger cuts were stitched and he heard that half his regiment had been
wiped out.

Chapter Six

The Summons

1

Herbert’s wound was a ‘Blighty’,
one that would take him back to England, if only for a few weeks. Herbert,
however, refused the opportunity and went instead by train from Abeele to Étaples,
far, far away from the guns, and then hitched the remaining thirty kilo-metres
to Boulogne. The rain continued to fall, thinning to a heavy drizzle. Weak
sunshine raised a low mist that shrouded the endless columns of troops marching
to the Salient. In the town he popped into the Officers’ Club, leaving his
contact details on the notice board. Then he took a room in a hotel by the sea
— the room he always took when he was on leave. He didn’t open the door, save
to go downstairs and eat. For hours on end he stared out at the twinkling
waves, his mind drifting to the North East coast, to the sands of Beadnell and
the looming Castle at Bamburgh. Between-times he twice wrote a letter to
Quarters’ mother, Mrs Tetlow, and twice he threw it in the bin. Finally he
wrote to Mrs Brewitt, who’d married Alistair last May when he’d been on leave.
In a way the Major had saved his life, and Herbert said so with imagined
feeling, for he wasn’t sure of any gratitude. When he was drained of emotion,
he wrote to his parents.

Dear Mother and Father,

We’ve come out of the line for a spell and I’m having a few days’
well-earned rest in Boulogne. Lovely view of the sea and, best of all, I can
get up when I want to! Well, what can I tell you about the war from our end? I’ll
let you into a secret: even out in the sticks, dinner is a good show; and we
only have two pots and a frying pan. Seriously though, most of the men are
cheery and keen as punch to do their bit. There are grousers, of course, but
not many and we egg them along — sometimes a little unkindly! Everyone leans
their shoulder to the wheel without asking too many questions. That’s not our
place. It is, as you well know, Father, the only way When one looks at the
sheer size of the army and the sophistication required to direct it
purposefully in a state of war, one cannot reasonably form a judgment on
tactical or strategic matters. So while we in the trenches may not know what
the overall thinking might be, I can assure you we remain determined to see the
business through to the end, come what may As usual, Mother is right: it means
doing as one is told!

I’m now a Captain, by the way.

Your loving son,

Herbert

Every word was true. In a
way he was writing to himself, repeating an important credo. But his parents
needed to hear it also, along with those friends who gathered in the sitting room
in Alwinton. Herbert’s mother, Constance, would read it out loud. The atmosphere
would no doubt be hushed and slightly tense. But everyone’s spirits would be
bucked up by the end, by the rallying call; as were Herbert’s, now He wrote
much the same thing whenever he put pen to paper. He padded out his testament
with snippets of daily routine, never referring to gas or bones or the guts
upon the wire. Not because it was forbidden by the censors, but because the
censors were right: it wouldn’t help anyone.

Though
an officer in the 8th (Service) Battalion, Northumberland Light Infantry,
Herbert and his family hailed from Keswick in Cumberland. Upon his own
estimation, Herbert had been blithely content until his eleventh year. At that
young age he’d put his foot down about Stonyhurst in particular and boarding
school in general. He wouldn’t go and, much to his surprise, his parents failed
to demur. Consequently Herbert went to the local school in Keswick and was
generally miserable. His hands were a bit too soft for the farming lads. As
though it was an object lesson in life, his parents would not let him revoke
that initial decision. Upon completing his education Herbert did the family
thing and joined the regiment — the 22nd Lancers. He’d just been gazetted a
Second-Lieutenant when an Archduke was shot in Bosnia. The papers said the
Serbs were involved. ‘Who in blazes are they?’ muttered Ernest, Herbert’s
father. He was outraged at the assassination. The done thing was a clean
fight. In Keswick the shooting was simply table talk about barbaric people and
distant places. ‘That would never happen in England,’ said Constance, checking
the index of her atlas, not for one moment anticipating an eruption that within
weeks would shake the surface of Derwent Water. She’d barely paid homage to
Herbert’s uniform when he joined the British Expeditionary Force that sailed to
France in August 1914. The boys were expected home for Christmas but events
sent another ripple across the lake. Herbert was back by September. According
to Colonel Maude, his Commanding Officer, Herbert ‘had failed to demonstrate
the qualities of character that had secured the renown of the regiment’.

‘Let’s
not talk of it, darling,’ said his mother in the drawing room that overlooked a
pebble beach that skirted the water’s edge.

She was
shattered but would never say so; and, not being prepared to say so, she couldn’t
touch on the subject at all. Her hair was wonderfully sculpted, matching the
fulsome contours of a white lace blouse with endless buttons on the front.
Herbert marvelled that his father ever managed to get past them. To do so
required the resolve that had held the line at Mons. And even that brave stand
was a prologue to retreat.

‘Maude
should never have been commissioned,’ grumbled Ernest, swishing the decanter.
He was an understanding man with heavy whiskers upon each cheek. But he was
shattered, too. The Moore men had served in the Lancers for three generations.
Only the buttons and braid had changed. ‘He was my staff captain in South
Africa. Couldn’t tie his own damned laces.’

The
Moores, on the other hand, knew a thing or two about laces and buttons and brass.
Without any reference to Herbert, a pow-wow was organised by his parents.
Herbert only knew of it when Sir Ralph arrived, a long-standing family friend
and military colleague of his father. General Sir Ralph Spencer Osbourne VC cut
a short, compact figure. His lower jaw was slightly advanced; a pencil moustache
gave emphasis to his upper lip; hair parted in the centre confirmed an air of
precision not vanity. He stood in the drawing room, hands behind his back, not
facing Herbert.

‘I’m
the first in the family to break regimental crockery,’ said Herbert evenly
accepting another level of shame.

‘Least
said, soonest mended.’ Sir Ralph kept his eyes on the lake, his fingers lightly
slapping each other.

Into
the ensuing silence was ushered another visitor dressed in a morning coat. A
man with a sallow face and the quiet step of an undertaker.

‘He’s
what your father calls the Loss Adjuster,’ explained Constance outside, while
the men talked. ‘We’re going to show Mr Maude what this family is made of:

The
matter was never referred to again.

One day
over tea, Constance announced that she’d found a magnificent property in the
North East: Whiteland Manor, near Alwinton. An estate, she explained, with
meadows banking the river Coquet. ‘Altogether beautiful,’ she concluded. ‘And
yielding a reasonable rent, too.’ Though it was four in the afternoon, Ernest
reached for the decanter. He loved Keswick and the beach of stones by the lake.

So the
family moved to Northumberland. Within three months of settling into the huge,
grey-stoned manor, the Moore family had shown Colonel Maude their substance and
mettle. In a daze, Herbert went to the tailors in Alnwick where he was measured
for a uniform befitting a Second-Lieutenant of the Northumberland Light
Infantry ‘Forget the Lancers,’ whispered his mother once more blushing with
pride. ‘You can start a new tradition: