Field Service (16 page)

The journey to Prezière had been a revelation to Reid. Back at Morlancourt, and even more so to the west of the place, there remained little to see of what the war had left in its wake: a few old supply roads gouged across the growing crops; a few pieces of abandoned transport and artillery in the corner of a field or parked up alongside someone's newly rebuilt home. But beyond Péronne, and especially towards Saint-Quentin, the landscape showed little
except
what had happened there two years previously. Villages and hamlets still lay in ruins; vast swathes of land remained unclaimed and were still pocked with deep holes. Whole woods and copses, though growing again and green in places, lay felled and tumbled and rotting.

At Temple, they had passed a field in which lay seven tanks, all of them tilted and trackless and already half sunk into the soft ground. At Averne, the metal bridge still lay where it had collapsed into the canal. And beyond Calat there remained an unexplored cemetery where dozens of crosses and rifles still lay planted in the earth. Someone, somewhere, Reid supposed, knew that the place existed and was keeping watch over it prior to it being examined and its bodies exhumed.

On every road they had come along as they travelled towards Prezière there were warnings of unexploded ordnance and uncleared mines. At most junctions and crossroads, unexploded ammunition and spent casings stood stacked in mounds as tall as houses.

At Railly they had been forced to wait in a queue of nighttime traffic while a crew of mine-clearers had led their teams of horses across the road. An entire field was filled with coils of rusted wire, and in its corners stood giant smoking pyres of the planking and boarding retrieved from the nearby trenches, their dense, sooty smoke rising into the air as dark and solid as ink spilled in water.

Eventually, Reid rose and told Lucas he ought to return to Morlancourt. The two men arranged to meet there later in the day.

As he was being driven out of the yard, Reid looked back through the open rear of the lorry and saw Lucas return to the corpses. He watched as he stopped at the skeleton of the boy he had uncovered, and then as he knelt beside it and drew the tarpaulin back up over the remains as carefully and tenderly as a father might draw the bedclothes over his sleeping child.

CAROLINE MORTIMER SAT
alone by the church gate where she and Reid had sat together a week earlier. He approached her along the empty street on his way to the station. The previous day, upon his return from Prezière, he had learned that the nurses' bodies she awaited would now be arriving in Morlancourt later than she had previously been told. They were currently in the mortuary at the hospital in Daours. The curt message Reid had received from Jessop said only that the delay had been caused by ‘unforeseen circumstances'. It was another of those phrases with which he was long familiar, and which he had quickly learned never to query. He sensed something of the man's malice following their encounter two days earlier.

Caroline looked up at his approach. She held a letter in her lap and pushed this into her pocket as Reid's shadow finally arrived beside her.

‘No Mary?' he said to her. Since the arrival of her fiancé's body, the younger woman – or so it seemed to Reid – had hardly left Caroline's side, causing the pair of them to remain apart.

‘She's gone,' Caroline said, surprising him.

‘Oh?'

‘I went with her to Saint-Quentin yesterday. She was hoping to travel on to Boulogne today.' It was a short and straightforward enough journey to make.

‘I didn't realize that was what she intended doing,' Reid said.

‘I doubt if she
intends
anything much these days. She said she'll come back when the cemetery is finished and finally has its official opening.'

‘I see.' Caroline's remark reminded Reid of the delayed arrival of the nurses. ‘Your nurses are coming later than I'd anticipated,' he said.

‘I know. I saw Captain Jessop in Saint-Quentin. Quite by chance. He told me you were falling behind in your work here. He called them “our fallen roses”. Does it help, do you think – all this mawkish phrase-making?'

‘Sometimes. Perhaps. I hear the same few phrases repeated often enough. Popular appeal, I suppose.'

‘For people who have no idea of the truth of the matter?'

‘I suppose so.'

‘Captain Jessop told me that Colonel Wheeler had no intention of sanctioning the delivery of the women until he was certain you were ready for them.'

‘There's always
someone
to blame for these delays,' Reid said.

She reached up to him and told him to sit beside her, which he did.

‘The graves have been dug and waiting for a few days now. I imagine Wheeler considers us to have other priorities.' The first of the bodies from Prezière were due to arrive at Morlancourt later that same day.

‘Don't worry,' Caroline said. ‘I'll wait as long as it takes. Mary tried to persuade me to return home with her. She told me I was wasting my time being here.'

‘It might have been for the best,' Reid said. ‘I mean, now that we know the women are all gathered together and waiting to come.'

‘You make it sound as though they were going on an excursion.' She smiled at the thought.

‘I only meant … Did Jessop say how long the delay might be?'

She shook her head. ‘All Mary wanted was for me to go on telling her what to do. She wants constant reassurance, that's all, like a child, until she finds the strength to stand on her own two feet again.'

‘It might take her years,' Reid said.

‘I don't doubt it. I was at Netley hospital shortly before coming back out here, so you might say I've seen the men for whom all of this will
never
truly end.'

Reid looked along the lane towards the seemingly deserted station. He guessed from the wisps of smoke rising from its low chimney that Benoît was already at his desk and awaiting the train. He felt reassured by the constancy of the man.

‘I suppose you could have gone home and then returned when the nurses' arrival was confirmed,' he said. ‘Things are usually a lot more predictable these days.'

‘I'd prefer to stay,' Caroline said firmly. ‘There are too many frayed edges to all of this. Do you know what I mean? Too many things left unfinished, undone. No, I'll see the women where they belong and
then
I'll go home.'

‘Of course,' Reid said.

She held his arm. ‘I know none of this is any of your doing,' she said. ‘Of course I know that. It's just that … I don't know … Saint-Quentin was full of women like Mary. Women, whole families, young children even. All of them just as lost, and all of them wandering and searching.'

‘For something they may never find?'

‘Some of them, yes. Captain Jessop said they were becoming a real nuisance. He said most of them expect the Commission to arrange for them to travel to see the graves. Apparently, they prefer to visit in groups, organized parties. They're holding up the work in some places. He said that the problem was that no one on the Commission had the authority to refuse them permission to visit wherever they wanted, only to warn them of the dangers that remain. He said that sometimes those dangers just added to the thrill of the visits. Apparently, it makes some of the women—'

‘Feel closer to their lost loved ones?' Reid's scepticism was clear.

‘I suppose it gives them
something
.'

‘Four French schoolchildren, six- and seven-year-olds, were killed at Avesne two days ago,' Reid said. ‘Their first day back at their rebuilt village school. An unexploded mine sitting in the foundations. Four years, it must have been there.'

‘I heard about it,' Caroline said.

After that, neither of them spoke for a moment.

Then Caroline said, ‘Captain Jessop also complained that they were being hounded by newspapermen wanting to write stories about what was happening with the cemeteries. There's a great demand from home.'

‘To go with all the unrest, I daresay,' Reid said.

News of the protests and near-riots, the continued shortages and labour strikes and the rising number of the unemployed filled all the English newspapers, which reached Morlancourt a week late.

‘Captain Jessop seemed to think it would be a good idea for the newspapermen to be somehow organized and presented with their stories, rather than wandering around independently and writing whatever they choose.'

‘Meaning what?'

‘Meaning, I suppose – and I'm sure this was Captain Jessop's feeling too – that some stories were more worthy of being told, of serving a higher purpose, than others.'

‘A higher purpose?'

‘Of satisfying the need of people to be told what's happening.'

‘More dressing-up and telling people only what they want to hear.'

‘It would all be for the—'

‘Don't say it,' Reid almost shouted.

‘Don't say what?'

‘That it would all be for the greater good.'

‘I was going to say that it might all be for the benefit of those who
wanted
to see what was happening to their loved ones, who needed to see that their deaths were finally being commemorated in some way.'

Reid signalled his apology to her.

‘Besides,' Caroline went on, ‘Captain Jessop said Colonel Wheeler was already considering the benefit to the Commission – its appeals for funding and resources, say – of giving the newspapermen what they've come to see.'

Reid began to sense what she might be telling him.

‘Is he considering sending them here?' he said. ‘To report on your nurses?'

He knew by her hesitancy in answering him in her usual open way that his guess had been right.

‘Believe me, I did nothing to promote or encourage the idea,' she said. ‘It's the last thing I want.'

‘Hence the delay in delivering the bodies,' Reid said absently.

‘Colonel Wheeler and Captain Jessop had clearly given the matter some consideration before I encountered him,' she said. ‘He imagined I'd be pleased at the prospect of letting the newspapers report the burials.'

Reid wondered if Jessop had deliberately kept this from him at their recent encounter, or if his own remarks then had deterred the man from telling him what had already been decided.

The previous day, a note had arrived from Wheeler telling Reid to make the ground at Morlancourt appear ‘presentable' in case anyone should turn up there unannounced. Reading this, Reid had imagined that Wheeler was referring to the unwelcome tourists; now he saw that the cryptic instruction might have related to something more specific.

He told Caroline about the note.

‘Captain Jessop seemed to believe that you now have a cemetery that might soon reveal its final form to anyone with the vision to see it.'

‘The vision?'

‘I suppose he meant imagination. He said that at least the disarray and turmoil of the early work is over. And that now you've started setting your stones in place, even though they are as yet in the bare earth, then it wouldn't require too much extra effort to gain some idea what the place might look like when it's finally completed.'

‘The man has no idea whatsoever of the “extra effort” required to do that.' He imagined announcing the news to his workers.

‘I promise you, I did nothing to encourage the idea.'

Reid resisted telling her that Jessop would have given no consideration whatsoever to anything she might have said on the matter.

‘He said that a small piece of prepared ground might be presented to the newspapermen as an oasis amid the wilderness, and that the occasion of the arrival of the nurses at such a place would give the story so much more impact.'

‘Wheeler used to refer to the plots as “battlefield gardens”,' Reid said. ‘I think that was another of Jessop's inventions.'

‘I daresay Colonel Wheeler will give you plenty of notice if any of this does come to pass,' Caroline said.

‘I daresay,' Reid said. It all now seemed an inevitability to him.

The pair of them stopped talking to exchange greetings with an old farmer who was leading his solitary cow along the lane towards the fields beyond the church. The man brought it into Morlancourt each morning to sell the milk directly from the animal's udder at the doorstep.

Caroline clearly already knew the man, and when he took out a small metal bowl and half filled it with milk and offered it to her, she accepted it and drank it, savouring each mouthful. The man nodded vigorously at her every word of praise. He explained to Reid that these ‘last drawings' were considered the finest the cow had to offer and that they were a cure for most minor ailments. He made the gift even more precious by adding that, before her recent death, his wife of almost fifty years had always insisted on the milk being saved for her. He then told Reid that his wife was now in heaven, tending to their two sons, and that since her death a year after the war's end, he had always thought of her when he had drawn and sold this last of the day's milk.

When Caroline gave him back his bowl, he leaned close to her and told her that not so long ago – before the war – the young newlywed women of Morlancourt would pay whatever he asked for the milk because it helped them beget their children.

Caroline laughed at hearing him say this, but the old man insisted it was true. He laughed with her, rinsed out the bowl in the nearby trough and wiped it across the globe of his stomach.

The old farmer then left them, following the cow, which continued untended through the slow routine of its day.

‘“Beget”?' Reid said once the man was out of earshot.

‘What else would you say?' A line of the cream lay along her lip and she wiped this away with her finger.

He was about to say more when she closed her eyes briefly, and he knew to remain silent. She had told him during their first encounter that she had no children of her own.