Field Service (28 page)

‘Naturally,' Reid said.

‘If you must know, I am here because Edmund has asked me to officiate at the ceremony tomorrow, and I came – yes, to ensure that the work was nearing completion, but also so that I might best prepare myself for my own duties. I wanted to see where the graves lie in relation to the marquee, where my congregation – my audience, if you will – will be seated. I take my duties concerning these poor women very seriously, Captain Reid. Others might be content to leave things to chance, but not I.'

‘And by “others”, presumably you mean me.'

‘Not at all, not at all. I have the greatest respect and admiration for all that you and your workers have achieved here. As does Edmund. As, I'm sure, does everyone else already gathered and waiting. There's an official reception. The War Office is insisting. It may not yet have occurred to you personally, Captain Reid, but there are a great many things to be considered here other than the burial of the unfortunate nurses. There are a great many other straws blowing in this particular wind.'

‘Politics,' Reid said.

‘If you like. We are none of us immune from these things. Not you, not I, and certainly not Edmund. All talk now is of doing the right thing by both the deceased
and
the bereaved.'

‘Because they're the ones still voting?'

Guthrie shook his head. ‘I sometimes wonder if we haven't asked too much of you and all the others like you. I wonder if our demands on you shouldn't have ended with the war itself. Please, forgive me. All I'm trying to say in my own clumsy way is that the world now needs men with vision – men who see more clearly than you and I the shape and the needs of the future.'

Everything the man said betrayed his sense of superiority and his own rising ambition.

Reid wanted him to do what he needed to do and then to leave. He wanted to return to Drake and his own men and to talk to them and instruct them on their work as he had always done.

‘I honestly believe,' said Guthrie, ‘that it is men like Edmund who—'

‘Who see that future more clearly? And certainly more clearly than anyone here, say?'

Guthrie looked around him. ‘They are honest, working men,' he said. ‘Just as they were once honest, dutiful soldiers. Nothing more and nothing less.'

Reid could not bring himself to respond to this.

Guthrie clearly felt something of Reid's rising anger, for he too fell silent, again looking at the men around him, before eventually saying, ‘Surely we are all working towards a common goal here – I mean the nurses, and all those others already interred and embarked upon their own Eternal Sleep.'

Everything the man said seemed at once dismissive and provocative to Reid.

He, too, looked around, and he saw in that moment how much more
finished
the cemetery now looked – how the paths and lawns and flower beds and stones had all finally started to take on a satisfying shape of their own. He found it hard to remember the bare, unworked ground of only a few months earlier. What he was finally looking at, it occurred to him, was what all those others would see for the first time upon their arrival the following day.

‘Have you heard anything certain about the coming of the rain?' Guthrie said, distracting him from his thoughts.

The coming of the rain.

‘No, nothing. Except that it's definitely on its way.'

Reid watched as the roof of the marquee was finally completed and as the whole structure was pulled taut by the gangs of men hauling on its ropes and hammering its stakes deeper. He saw the red cross at the centre of its white circle on one of the gently billowing panels.

‘I see,' Guthrie said. The man hesitated for a moment and then added, ‘I don't suppose you've seen Alexander Lucas this morning, by any chance?' He continued looking around him as he spoke.

‘His wife died,' Reid said. ‘He only heard on Friday. I saw him that evening, not since.'

‘I was sorry to hear about his wife. We all were. I only ask because it seems
no one
has seen him since the day he received his terrible news. Edmund heard of the death and tried to contact him directly. You do know, I suppose, that before this sad event, Lucas had applied to Muir for compassionate leave.'

‘Which he was denied,' Reid said.

‘Quite,' Guthrie said. ‘Though I daresay with reason. I can't begin—'

‘And now Wheeler's convinced that – what? – that Lucas has taken matters into his own hands?'

‘Nothing of the sort. Nothing of the sort. Edmund was merely concerned for the man's well-being, that's all.'

It occurred to Reid to ask Guthrie if he knew of Lucas's sick daughter, but he said nothing.

‘Or perhaps Caroline Mortimer might know,' Guthrie went on. ‘Perhaps Alexander Lucas confided in her. A woman's touch, and all that.'

‘Or perhaps he's just gone somewhere to grieve for his dead wife,' Reid said.

‘Quite,' Guthrie said again. ‘Quite. Though it was Edmund's belief that the pair of them – Lucas and his wife – had been estranged of late. Still, who are we to speculate? Presumably Caroline Mortimer has said nothing to you concerning the man's whereabouts?'

Reid remained silent.

‘No, right, I thought not.'

And before Reid could say anything in response to all this obvious prodding, Guthrie turned and walked back to the waiting car.

Reid remained where he stood, glad to see the back of the man, and pleased that whatever Guthrie now reported of the work at the cemetery, Wheeler would be satisfied, and neither he nor Jessop would appear until the following day. Only the uncertainty of Alexander Lucas's whereabouts might now concern Wheeler, but even that would not distract him from the all-consuming business of the day ahead.

Waiting until Guthrie's car was lost to sight, Reid walked up the slope, shielded his eyes and looked back out to the distant horizon, where the gathering cloud seemed piled to twice its former height, and where there was now no clear divide between this thickening mass and the land over which it slowly flowed and which it darkened in its wake.

THE RAIN FINALLY
started falling in the late afternoon as work at the cemetery drew to a close. The marquee was fully erected and secured by then, the seating laid out, the completed paths cleared, and all the superfluous building materials and tools moved out of sight of where the burial of the nurses would take place.

The route of the short procession from the cemetery gate to the waiting graves was roped off, and the graves themselves had been made tidy. Cut turf was laid neatly along their edges and the infill soil was carefully mounded and covered. Crosses were laid at the head of each grave, and buckets of flowers and wreaths were stacked in the marquee.

Ensuring that the site was fully prepared, that all of Wheeler's instructions had been followed, and that the drains close to the previously flooded graves were flowing freely in the first of the rain, Reid returned to Morlancourt.

A contingent of the men from Saint-Quentin would stay overnight at the site, using the marquee as a shelter. Canvas beds and provisions had already been delivered to them. Before leaving, Reid warned them about the earlier flooding, but it was clear to him by the way these strangers listened to him that they were unlikely to leave their shelter if the flooding resumed.

Wheeler had instructed that these men, and not a party of Reid's own, should undertake this night watch, and Reid regretted this. Everything Wheeler now said and did made ever clearer to Reid his own loosening bonds and evaporating authority over the place.

He arrived back in Morlancourt at seven, heralded by the dull tolling of the church bell, and was surrounded briefly by the evening's gathering worshippers walking through the rain with umbrellas and avoiding the edges of the road which were already running with water.

He went first in search of Alexander Lucas, and, unable to find him, then went instead to Caroline Mortimer's room.

She let him in and gave him a towel for his face and arms. His jacket was saturated and she took it from him and hung it over a chair, where it dripped on to the thin carpet.

He told her about the work at the cemetery and what he had heard from Guthrie concerning Lucas.

‘Do you think he's trying to get back to his daughter?' she said.

‘What else?'

‘He wouldn't be so stupid. Surely? Besides …' Her voice tailed off.

‘Besides, Wheeler wouldn't be so inhuman as to deny the man – not after everything Lucas has just been through, everything he's done on Wheeler's behalf?'

She nodded.

‘Sorry,' Reid said, knowing even as he'd spoken that her thoughts now were on the arrival of her nurses and the events of the following day.

He watched the water dripping from his jacket to the floor. A loud murmur of conversation and laughter rose up from the room below.

‘Newspapermen,' Caroline said. ‘Dozens of them.'

‘I understood they'd be coming from Amiens with Wheeler and his party in the morning.'

‘So did he, I imagine. They're a law unto themselves, those men. They've been talking to people all day. I gave a so-called interview to one of them myself, but he didn't appear particularly interested in what I had to say. He kept asking me if I had some words of consolation for the people back at home. He thought at first that I was here because of my dead husband.' She closed her eyes briefly at the memory of the man.

She went on talking, but like those journalists earlier, Reid only heard half of what she was telling him. His own thoughts were still with Alexander Lucas and the likelihood of him being caught and the consequences of that.

Caroline poured them both brandies and they sat together at her open window looking out at the street below. A small balcony extended a few feet from the window and the rain collected on this and ran over its edge. An occasional gust of wind blew the water in on them, staining the cloth on the table.

The day had lost little of its earlier heat, and the rain grew heavier still. The previously sunlit sky seemed to darken in an instant and the thunder and lightning of the long-approaching storm finally arrived. Almost eight hours had passed since Drake had first pointed out the distant cloud to Reid, and he was grateful that the worst of the weather had held off this long.

Caroline counted the seconds between the flashes of lightning and the rolls of thunder. The rain fell even more heavily, and it poured off the roofs of the buildings opposite them in unbroken streams. The street below became a shallow, fast-flowing river.

Reid flinched at a louder than usual peal of thunder, and beneath his palms he felt the small table shake.

‘Are you concerned for the waiting graves?' Caroline asked him.

Reid looked down at his hands. ‘They'll drain if the rain stops for long enough,' he said.

A group of men ran shouting across the street and he recognized several of his own labourers among them.

‘Guthrie clearly thought I knew more than I was telling him,' he said.

‘About Alexander?'

‘He's probably already told Wheeler that he believes I'm involved in some way.'

Caroline went to the cabinet beside her bed and took a small album from its drawer. She came back to the table and put it in front of him, drawing the table further into the room beyond the reach of the splashing rain.

Reid opened the album and looked at the photographs it contained. They were mostly of women, individually posed and in groups, all in their nursing and auxiliary uniforms, and often standing with small groups of the men under their care, some also in uniform, some in pyjamas, and some wearing items of both.

‘Are they the women coming tomorrow?' he said.

‘Not all of them. But some of them are in there.'

She put her finger on the face of a solitary woman standing amid a group of twenty grinning men, most of whom wore clean white bandages, and some of whom stood with crutches. All of those men able to hold a thumb up to the photographer did so, but the men standing closest to the young woman looked at her rather than at the camera.

‘She's coming,' Caroline said fondly. ‘Margaret. She was twenty. An auxiliary volunteer. That was taken at Le Havre. Every one of those men loved her in his own way. She was killed at a place called Pernois. The clearing station there was shelled. She lost a foot and a hand and died of her injuries three days later.'

She took her finger from the page, folded it into her fist and held this to her cheek.

‘You'll say something for them all at the ceremony?' Reid said.

‘Jonathan Guthrie has already told me where I'm to be fitted in. Apparently he'll be saying a few words first. He feels certain our two eulogies will complement each other perfectly. He wanted to know if I could let him have a copy of what I'd be saying. He seemed disappointed that I didn't have something prepared.'

‘He'll have been working on his own speech for days.'

‘Weeks.'

‘He'll no doubt do his usual God and King and Country stuff,' Reid said.

‘To which I'll add my simple woman's touch afterwards.'

‘You
knew
them,' Reid said. ‘All
he
ever knew was how to spread his worthless blessed balm over everything. As though that ever—' He stopped abruptly.

Caroline laid a hand on his arm. ‘I've written again to all their parents,' she said. ‘Some of them contacted me wanting to know why no one had invited or even
told
them of the ceremony.'

‘What did you say to them?'

‘I told them that when this cemetery was completed, there would be another ceremony. They were all simply relieved to know that their daughters were safe and finally being laid to rest.'

‘Safe?'

‘Accounted for, then. That they'd never be completely lost to them, that they'd be cared for in death and that they were now being afforded everything they deserved. Most of them wrote back to tell me what a great comfort it was to them to know all that.'