Field Service (11 page)

From where they stood, Reid could see the other men beyond the station, gathered in silence to watch the small, impromptu ceremony now taking place there.

‘Perhaps you might say something, sir,' Drake said to Reid, who was unprepared for this.

‘I don't know. Do you think …? I didn't know the man.'

‘I'm sure she'd appreciate something,' Caroline said.

Reid detached himself from her and moved closer to Mary Ellsworth and the coffin. He saw where a solitary cart and its two horses waited on the road.

Mary Ellsworth turned at his approach. ‘Please,' she said.

‘We forget,' Reid said, clearing his throat. ‘We forget at our peril, and to our eternal shame, what sacrifice this man' – unable to read the stencilled details from where he stood, he tried hard to remember the name Caroline had told him two hours earlier – ‘what
all
these men who now pass through this place made on our behalf. They came and they fought and they died and were injured in ways far too many for us to count. They came here and they did all this because they had a
reason
to do it all. Many because they had a duty to fulfil, and just as many others because they knew that what they were fighting for – what they were fighting to
protect
– was at the very heart of everything they believed in, everything they possessed, everything they held dear. They fought and they died to protect and to keep safe for others everything that was dearest and most precious to them – everything that, without which, their own lives would have become unbearable – unliveable, even – and without all true purpose.' He paused.

Beside him, he saw Caroline nod and then lower her face to the ground. Beyond her, he saw the wetness on Benoît's cheeks and chin.

At the coffin, Drake now stood alongside Mary and held her arm again.

‘And what we do here, today – what hundreds of other men do in hundreds of other places just like this one – what we do here in our work is to honour and to serve these men in a way no others can. Many thousands – millions, in fact – will have no real idea of what these men endured, how they fought, and how they suffered and died, but many of us here – many of us entrusted with this work – will know precisely what they endured and how they suffered and how they died.' He paused again, wondering if he'd said enough, or if even more was required of him. He knew that, in all likelihood, he would only repeat himself.

Benoît took out a handkerchief and wiped his face.

‘In the years to come, this land will return to how it once was, how it once looked, and a great many of its recent upheavals and tragedies will be forgotten. But what will
never
be forgotten will be the men – men such as Andrew Copley here,' the name came to him as he spoke – ‘who gave their own lives so that the lives of those countless millions of others might now resume their rightful,
peaceful
course.'

Mary Ellsworth half turned to him at hearing her fiancé's name.

Reid listened to the quiet drumming of his words in the space above him.

‘Men never die where they live the fiercest,' he went on. ‘And they live the fiercest where they are loved the deepest – in the hearts of those who love them who they leave behind.' They were lines from a poem he had learned at school, but whose title and author he could not remember. He stopped talking and lowered his eyes to the ground.

Caroline held his arm again.

Benoît lowered his own eyes and mumbled a prayer.

At the coffin, Mary Ellsworth took a few paces back, and Drake retrieved the handkerchief and the flowers and gave them to her. Then he took something small from his pocket and gave that to her, too. He stood close to her for a moment, as though he were about to clasp her like he had earlier clasped Benoît, and then pull her to him and embrace her. But instead, he simply said something quietly to her and then turned and marched back to the others.

‘They were fine words,' he said to Reid, stopping and turning on his heel.

‘I didn't really—'

‘They were fine words. You said what needed to be said. You did what mattered – what counted – and you did the pair of them proud.'

‘Thank you.'

Mary Ellsworth finally came back to them, and Caroline went to her and held her.

‘Thank you,' Mary said first to Reid, and then to Drake, who closed his eyes briefly and then turned to the distant coffin and saluted.

Seeing this, Reid did the same, followed a moment later by Benoît.

Mary did nothing to clear the tears running down her face.

Waiting until the two women had walked back out on to the platform, Drake called to the men on the waiting cart to come in and collect the coffin.

‘You went to a lot of trouble,' Reid said to him. ‘I appreciate that. As, I'm sure, does Mary.'

‘It seemed only right,' Drake said. ‘I held back one of the carts instead of a lorry because the horses seemed more fitting.'

‘Of course.'

‘It's only a pity that we can't do something similar for the rest of them,' Drake said.

‘Their time will come,' Reid told him. Then he asked Drake what he had given to Mary at the coffin.

‘I gave her a cap badge from one of the boxes of insignia they occasionally send us. He was in the Fifteenth Battalion, West Yorkshires.'

‘And did you tell her it was actually his, her fiancé's?'

‘I did. So may God and all His angels forgive me for that.'

‘She'll treasure it,' Reid said.

‘Good,' Drake said. ‘Because there won't be much else to keep her going, and especially not after she gets back home.'

The blunt remark surprised Reid. ‘Oh? You seem—'

‘I am,' Drake said. ‘My sister lost her bloke. They were going to be married, too. Twenty-First Entrenching Battalion. I never liked the man, myself, too bloody full of himself, but I saw what it did to her. Three years ago, Third Ypres. She was twenty-nine.'

‘I see,' Reid said. ‘And did she …?'

‘Did she what? Did she get over it? Never. You see her now, you'd swear she was nearer fifty than thirty.'

Mary Ellsworth, Caroline, Benoît, and now Drake. Reid saw how tightly all these other small wreaths were woven.

The men loading the coffin called to Drake, and he left Reid and went to them. He climbed on to the cart with them, and Reid watched as the driver turned the horses to face the lane leading to the cemetery. The clatter of their hooves on the hard surface sounded long after they had gone from his sight. Bright sunlight obscured the countryside beyond and left its own black suns at the centre of his vision. Rubbing his eyes, he went to join the others waiting for him on the platform.

ALEXANDER LUCAS WAS
waiting for Reid at Amiens station. They had both earlier attended another of Wheeler's meetings, at the close of which Wheeler had called Reid to him.

Now, approaching Lucas on the empty platform, Reid carried the rolled charts Wheeler had insisted he take with him back to Morlancourt. They were copies of the plans that had been made of the recently confirmed cemeteries at Cerisy and the Lancashire Dump cemetery at Aveluy Wood, and Reid still wondered what use they were likely to be to him at the much smaller Morlancourt.

Lucas took one of the rolled sheets, opened it and studied it. He was as mystified as Reid as to why Wheeler had given him the plans. His best guess was that Morlancourt was now being considered for expansion. It had happened elsewhere, where the number of bodies retrieved had exceeded expectations.

The suggestion alarmed Reid and he was unable to conceal this.

‘Or perhaps he now wants something as grand as Cerisy at Morlancourt,' Lucas said, amused by Reid's reaction to his deliberate provocation.

‘The bigger cemeteries will hold ten times the number of men,' Reid said. ‘The ground at Morlancourt isn't anywhere near suitable for that kind of expansion.'

‘If you say so,' Lucas said. He sat with his bare feet on the cold stone of the platform, his boots and socks on the bench beside him.

‘I thought at first he wanted to talk about the planting,' Reid said.

‘At Morlancourt?'

‘In these plans, the gardens and beds are drawn in and the plants all named.' He turned the sheet to show Lucas, who continued to show little real interest.

‘He could have told you anything you needed to know in the meeting itself,' Lucas said. ‘God knows, it was filled with every other kind of irrelevance.'

Both men were unhappy at having wasted another day at Wheeler's insistence. And now, because of the further delay, they had missed the regular train back to Albert and were waiting on the chance of an engine from distant Abbeville passing through the station on its way to Paris. Lucas had already spoken to the station master, who had promised him that if an engine did come, he would signal for it to stop.

‘Holly, box, rowan, lilac, dogwood, privet, syringa, laburnum, laurel and cherry,' Lucas said, reading the names from the plan. ‘How very English.'

‘That's the point,' Reid said. ‘Besides, I imagine they all grow easily enough over here, too.'

‘I once turned up in Péronne,' Lucas said, ‘to find hundreds of Zouaves there, all of them picking cherries in an orchard. They'd been ordered to assemble in a nearby field and then they'd seen the harvest underway and had decided to get involved. Hundreds of men in full uniform up rickety ladders and shaking fruit from the trees.'

‘They're planting the colonial cemeteries with trees and shrubs from the colonies,' Reid said. ‘Maples, eucalyptus, acacia, that kind of thing.'

‘Here?' Lucas said, and then, ‘A year ago we retrieved a party of East Kents – the Buffs – from Guillemont, their pockets and knapsacks bulging with cobnuts. Someone who'd known the men said they harvested the things back at home. I'd never heard of them. They were all killed in a late cut-up at Guillemont in a stand of trees there. Apparently, the runner with the order for them to withdraw never came closer than three miles to them.'

‘Where are they now?' Reid asked him.

Lucas shrugged. ‘I handed them over to your people and that's the last I saw of them. Perhaps Wheeler just intends you to start preparing for your own planting at Morlancourt.'

‘Perhaps.' Reid took the plans back, rolled them up and tied them securely.

A small train passed on the far track, its open wagons filled with French soldiers. The men waved and shouted to the few others waiting in the station as they moved slowly through it. They were all young men – what the French called ‘
bleuets
' – and in all likelihood had seen nothing of the war, only its aftermath.

‘Have you heard anything from home of late?' Reid asked Lucas.

Lucas looked away.

‘I'm sorry, I didn't mean to pry.'

‘You aren't,' Lucas said. ‘It's just that things between the two of us – Elizabeth and me – have been … what should I say? – unsettled? – for some time now.'

Reid waited. Some men spoke endlessly of home and their families, whereas others hardly mentioned those things. Lucas was one of the latter. Some men believed that by talking endlessly of those other lives, they maintained a strong connection to them; others seemed equally determined to keep the two existences as far apart as possible.

‘If Susan hadn't been born …' Lucas said finally.

‘What, you would have separated? Divorced?'

Lucas rubbed a hand over his face. ‘It's possible, yes.'

‘Are things …?'

‘I was last home four months ago. Ten days. We seemed to do nothing but argue with each other. About everything. Perhaps not argue, exactly, but nothing seemed right; everything seemed to have changed. Everything seemed off-kilter between us. Apart from which – and I don't know which I took the hardest – my daughter seemed hardly to know me. Everything I tried to do with her, everything I said to her, seemed only to make her apprehensive, wary of me.'

‘And you think it's all this,' Reid said. ‘Your work here?'

‘That's certainly what Elizabeth believes, though in truth it was probably more of a convenient excuse for both of us than anything more …'

‘But it must have
some
bearing, surely?'

‘I'm sure you're right. Of course it must. Although I daresay the simple fact of my absence doesn't help matters.'

‘No,' Reid said. ‘I suppose not. Have the two of you decided anything?'

‘Not really. How can we while I'm still over here and she's there? The best we could manage to agree on was to wait until I was back for good and then see what remained to be salvaged.'

‘For the sake of your daughter?'

‘For Susan, yes. It all seemed a bit ridiculous to me at the time. Hundreds of thousands of families having to make do without husbands and fathers, and there
we
were talking about things as though we were planning – I don't know – an outing somewhere.'

Everything Lucas said made it clear to Reid that he wanted to say as little as possible on the subject. Reid wanted to ask him if he ever spoke to his wife about the work he undertook there, but the question was beyond him.

‘They put up a tin chapel at Guillemont,' he said eventually. ‘The Royal Kents. I saw it when the Commission was choosing its plots.'

‘It was already there when we were retrieving the bodies,' Lucas said. ‘They sprang up in lots of places. Wayside pulpits.'

‘They painted it white,' Reid said. ‘The chapel at Guillemont. Whitewash, I suppose. Someone had hung copies of paintings – Old Masters – on its walls.'

‘I remember. We took the first few corpses inside. Until it became obvious that we'd need considerably more space, that is.'

They were interrupted by the station master, who came to Lucas and confirmed that a train from Abbeville would definitely be there in ten minutes. Lucas thanked the man and gave him a cigarette, which he took and slid behind his ear. Lucas then offered him several more, which he also took. He saluted the pair of them before returning to his duties. Both Lucas and Reid returned the gesture.