Field Service (21 page)

‘I'm not sure,' Reid said absently. ‘A hundred – fewer. There's no definite—'

Complete the finishing touches.

‘There you are, then,' Wheeler said, as though his argument were already won.

Reid struggled to remember what remained to be done at the cemetery. The bodies coming to him now – the nurses and those retrieved from Prezière excepted – were mostly ‘prior retrievals', gathered in from the surrounding district. The men from Prezière would in all likelihood be the last large consignment of new discoveries. It was the same in all the cemeteries, so long after the war's end. It was why the Commission's work on the giant monuments and the much larger national cemeteries was now of such interest to Wheeler.

‘And the remaining graves required are already plotted, at least, if not actually dug?' Wheeler said, drawing Reid back from these thoughts.

It was why Wheeler had wanted to see the plans: so that everything might now be handed over to someone else.

‘Yes,' Reid said. ‘More or less.' He felt like a man being pushed in his chest, never allowed to regain his balance and to push back.

‘I often cite your work at Morlancourt to all our more recent appointees,' Wheeler said. ‘“Go and see him,” I tell them. “Go and see Reid. Any doubts on how to proceed – go and see old Reid over at Morlancourt.”' He smiled at the remark, at the rhyme of the words.

It was another of the man's tactics – to confuse and divert with easy flattery.

‘And so you'll consider my proposal?'

‘For me to leave?' Reid could still not fully grasp what was being asked – demanded? Ordered? – of him.

‘For you to continue your excellent work elsewhere, to share your expertise with those in sore need of it, and to give to others what you have selflessly and tirelessly given at Morlancourt, yes.'

‘Selflessly
and
tirelessly,' Lucas said, returning to them with a drink in his hand.

‘Lieutenant Lucas,' Wheeler shouted at him, his temper finally breaking, ‘I would appreciate it if – as very much behoves even a junior officer of your rank and distinction – you could keep at least some of your uncharitable thoughts to yourself. You fool no one, Lieutenant Lucas, no one. Yes, you, too, have worked selflessly and tirelessly on our behalf, I
know
that, we
all
know that. But there is only so much leeway, so much slack, that I am prepared – that I am
able
– to grant, even to you. I am by nature a tolerant man, Lieutenant Lucas, but I should perhaps give you notice here and now that my tolerance has its limits. Your behaviour today …' He stopped speaking, letting the remark hang.

‘Then I apologize unreservedly,' Lucas said eventually.

‘And mean nothing by it,' Wheeler said calmly. ‘Captain Reid?'

‘I'll consider it,' Reid said.

‘That is all I ask,' Wheeler said, finally turning away from Lucas, and afterwards ignoring him completely.

‘I still have things to do,' Reid said.

‘Of course you do, of course. No one is suggesting that a new position be found for you tomorrow. Of course you have things to do. All I need to know is that you are agreeable to the notion. No one is suggesting that there is any true urgency in the matter. As you can well imagine, the work in these outer realms – Mesopotamia, wherever – proceeds at a considerably slower pace than it does here. No one is asking you to pack your bags tonight.'

Mesopotamia? Had Wheeler even made that much clear before?

For a moment, Reid wondered if that was exactly what Wheeler
was
now suggesting to him – that the transfer
had
already been arranged and confirmed elsewhere, as though his own acceptance of the idea of relocation was just the final stamp on a mound of otherwise completed and waiting papers, and as though this
fait accompli
were considerably more imminent than he could ever imagine.

‘I have Caroline Mortimer's nurses to take care of,' he said, the thought and words coming to him simultaneously.

‘Of course you do,' Wheeler said. ‘And you are precisely the man for the job. Precisely the man. I daresay Mrs Mortimer herself would countenance no other. And I daresay she will be as happy and as relieved as the rest of us when the work here is done and she, too, is finally able to return home, to move on to pastures new.'

He waited for Reid to agree with him, but Reid, still absorbing everything he had just been told, remained silent.

And then, with no indication that he was about to leave, Wheeler walked briskly to where he had been sitting at the head of the table, picked up his cap and cane and case, and left the room.

‘I shall no doubt be in touch,' he called back to Reid as he walked away along the corridor. The door to the room swung shut behind him with a solid click.

For a moment, neither Reid nor Lucas spoke.

Lucas fetched them both drinks.

‘Did I actually agree to anything?' Reid said, still uncertain of where he now stood within the machinery of his eventual departure. He looked into the glass he held.

‘You're off to live in the desert,' Lucas said, emptying his own glass. ‘Like Saint Antony the Hermit.' He held up his watch. ‘The train.'

The two men left the hotel and walked to the station.

‘You have to admire the man,' Lucas said at one point along their short journey. ‘He does know how to set his perfect little traps.'

‘And all we know,' Reid said, ‘is how to go on blindly wandering into them.'

‘Quite,' Lucas said, again mimicking Wheeler. ‘Quite.'

‘
THEY ALL USED
to complain about the chloride of lime put in the water,' Caroline said. ‘Every single one of them. Some of the nurses used to fetch jugs from local houses to avoid spoiling the taste of the tea.' She sipped the cup of water she held.

‘At the front it was usually the butter,' Reid said. ‘Tinned butter. Margarine. It used to melt and then solidify over and over. By the time we opened the tins, it was usually rancid. The men used to throw it away, until it attracted vermin.'

They sat together close by the collapsed bridge over the canal, and beside a late-flowering verge which curved back towards Morlancourt.

‘The yellow is charlock,' Caroline said, pointing. ‘And the white is wild chamomile. Some of the older nurses used to boil it up to make tea.'

‘It sounds disgusting,' Reid said.

‘It was. Most of the patients took it, sipped it and pretended to like it, and then threw it away when the women had gone. It was more the act of kindness they appreciated than the drink itself.'

‘I was once ordered to gather up all the sheepskin fleeces in my company and then to burn them because of the fleas they harboured. They were a big thing in the winters. The Army and Navy store sent out tens of thousands of the things. The men who'd worked on the land back at home pushed them under their tunics, wool-side innermost. They were very effective.'

‘Until the fleas.'

‘It was something else you learned to live with. A lot of the men hid their fleeces and went on wearing them. I knew a man in a field survey company who stitched several of the things together to make a cumbersome jacket for himself. He ran an observation group, Royal Engineers. He used to look like a polar bear walking around. The jacket was grey within an hour, and seemed to forever steam. He even had a balaclava made of the stuff. When the order came for them to be collected and burned, he wrote to his MP, telling the man to complain to the War Office on his behalf.'

Caroline smiled. ‘Was he successful?'

‘I'm not sure. He was killed soon afterwards. He was sent out to set off some Bengal Lights to mark a new line of advance. The story that came back to us was that one of them was faulty and that it blew up in his face rather than burning steadily.' He stopped talking. It was always difficult to prevent these seemingly insignificant tales and recollections from moving towards their abrupt and unavoidable endings. Reid drank from the flask he had with him, then offered the spirit to Caroline, which she drank diluted in her water.

‘I was watching a Charlie Chaplin film when I heard he'd been killed,' Reid went on. ‘We were good friends. I was in Saint-Quentin. With the Sixteenth Battalion, Manchesters. I can't even remember why I was there. Funny how some small details stay with you while others disappear completely.'

‘We showed the films in some of the hospitals,' Caroline said. ‘“A tonic for the troops”. At the Tincourt clearing station, we projected them on to the wall of one of the wards. Everyone looked forward to them, staff and patients alike. Some of the nurses were old enough to be the mothers of the boys in their care.'

They sat in silence for a moment.

‘You'll miss the work,' Reid said eventually.

‘Nursing the wounded? I suppose I will. I mean, I do. Not that there aren't … back at home, I mean.'

‘Of course.'

‘A lot of the women said the same. Out here they knew that they were doing something important, something of real value to the men under their care. A lot of them will have found it hard to settle back to their lives at home, carrying bed pans and making beds. I knew women out here who were little short of surgeons when the need demanded, especially in the field stations. I'm a dab hand at removing bullets and shrapnel from flesh wounds myself.'

‘I'll remember that,' Reid said. He resisted the urge to touch his own faint and waxy scars.

The water beneath them was rippled across its dark surface by the evening breeze. Dense reeds along both banks swayed slightly, and Caroline turned her face back and forth in the draught of cooler air, pulling her collar from her throat. A solitary fisherman stood on the far bank and raised and lowered his pole over the unproductive water.

‘I used to sit with the dying men,' Caroline said. ‘Some of them wanted me to be their mother, some their wives or sweethearts. All they really wanted, of course, was someone to sit and talk to them. We were told – instructed – to keep all our conversations cheerful, hopeful. “Optimistic of a good outcome” – I think that was the phrase.'

‘We were all forever hopeful of that, I suppose,' Reid said.

‘Some of them were delirious with their infections. Some of them, I imagine, might even have believed I
was
their mother or sweetheart.'

‘What did you say to them?'

‘Whatever they wanted to hear. I imagine there was deceit on both sides.'

‘Not deceit,' Reid said.

‘What else would you call it? Consideration? Compassion?'

‘Of course it was compassion,' Reid insisted.

‘And after you've done it ten times, twenty, thirty?'

There was nothing Reid could say to this, and so he remained silent. He wondered how much longer the need for all this story-telling, this tying-up of loose, unravelled ends, this release of long-twisted tensions would last. Until they were all returned home? Until a decade had passed? Until another war was started somewhere else? Until the last man and woman of this one had died and been buried and then forgotten?

‘I imagine we mean the same thing, whatever words we use,' Caroline said.

‘I suppose so.'

‘We used to find those French instructions in the men's pockets,' she said. ‘“
Je suis
,” and then their names and outfits, followed by …'

‘“
En cas d'accident m'apportez au …
”'

‘That's it,' she said. ‘We used to joke with them that there seemed to be an awful lot of “accidents” happening out there and that they really ought to be more careful. The funny thing is, most of them used to ask us constantly when they would be well enough to return to their friends back where all these accidents were happening. Their officers used to come to visit them, especially in the forward field stations, and all some of the wounded ever talked about was being back at the Front and doing their “bit”. Even the ones who'd already been told they'd be going home when they were well enough to travel.'

‘Even the men who knew they were dying?' Reid said. He regretted asking as soon as he'd said it.

Caroline considered her answer. ‘
Especially
those who knew they were dying. I suppose they needed to believe it more than most. In Le Havre, I sat with a Highland sergeant. Black Watch. He'd been badly wounded at a place called Zonnebeke, in Belgium.'

‘“The Storm of Zonnebeke”,' Reid said. ‘Third Ypres.'

‘A severe stomach wound. It was a miracle that he'd lasted long enough to reach us at base. Sorry, not a “miracle” – luck, chance, the skill of the medical staff who first saw him in the field and clearing stations. Whatever saved him, he came to us with his records already marked up.'

‘Meaning?'

‘Meaning all
we
could do for him was to make him as comfortable as his injuries allowed.'

‘And could you do that?'

‘To some extent. His wounds meant he couldn't eat or drink. I spent most of my time with him wiping his face with a cold cloth and holding cigarettes to his mouth. His wounds were mostly undressed. The night he died, he told me everything he could remember about his home and his family. He'd worked in the harbour at Portree on Skye. He was also a part-time farmer and gamekeeper. I told him I'd go and visit the place when the opportunity arose.'

‘Was he married?'

‘With six children – all girls bar a solitary son. He was anxious because the boy was almost seventeen and keen to join up.'

Reid did a quick calculation and guessed that the war had ended before the boy was old enough to enlist.

‘It sounded a good life,' Caroline said. ‘He loved his work and his family. He was also an itinerant preacher, and that sustained him, too. I remember him telling me that he knew precisely what had happened to him – his injuries – and what was likely to happen to him now, and that there was no need whatsoever for any pretence on my behalf. He just wanted to talk, to tell me everything that was good about the life he'd lived and all the good he believed he himself had done in the world. He wanted me to
understand
something.'