Post of Honour (15 page)

‘Us’ll pay our respects to Tamer’s grave, boy,’ said Williams, ‘and us’ll lay some flowers there mebbe, for come to think on it Tamer shares that grave wi’ the Germans us fished ashore dade time o’ the wreck and I dom reckon anyone’s give a thought to any one of ’em zince!’

Daniel followed his uncle’s reasoning although privately he thought him sentimental. Everybody knew there were a few good Germans and a lot of bad Germans and that they had been fortunate in encountering one of the few good Germans with a punctilious sense of honour. He was ready to admit that they owed their lives to the tow and the rum but he did not see how laying flowers on the graves of Germans drowned when he was a boy had any bearing upon their recent experience. As usual, however, he was prepared to defer to Uncle Tom in all matters affecting the sea and said, ‘Arr, Uncle Tom, us’ll do what you say! Come to think on it, I dorn reckon anyone has given old Tamer a thought for years never mind they Germans along of him!’

He was probably right although, at that precise moment, two men of the Valley were thinking of Tamer’s kin in the person of his daughter Pansy, wife of Walt Pascoe.

Four months guarding the Sweetwater Canal, the victim of sandstorms, suffocating heat, sand-dusted bully beef, thirst, flies, scorpions, boils and the whining importunities of Egyptian hucksters had encouraged Walt Pascoe to regret the impulse that had led him to exchange corduroys for khaki and the Sorrel Valley for the Sinai Peninsula so that when his unit was hustled off to Alexandria to embark for Gallipoli he went with alacrity, happy to leave the riddle of the Sphinx unsolved. On the troopship he had the luck to encounter an old friend, one who helped to ameliorate the pangs of homesickness that Walt had endured ever since he ate tinned Christmas dinner in a temperature of 105 degrees in the shade. He was trying to find bedspace on the overcrowded deck when he heard his name shouted from among a group of soldiers wedged in the bows and he recognised Dandy Timberlake at a glance, for Dandy still wore his four-inch waxed moustaches that had given him a quasi-military look even in peace-time. The two greeted one another boisterously and teamed up for the voyage, celebrating their reunion with several bottles of warm, weak beer.

All day and much of the night as the troopship ploughed its way across the eastern Mediterranean they beguiled the hours with nostalgic talk of the Valley and Valley personalities and had she been able to hear them exchanging confidences and Wild Woodbines Pansy Pascoe’s sense of humour might have been tickled, for she would have recalled an occasion, shortly before her marriage when Walt had blacked Dandy’s eye for slipping his hand down her neck in Codsall’s stubble field, and another, years later, when Dandy had walked her home through the violent thunderstorm that concluded Squire Craddock’s Coronation Fête. Neither occasion was referred to during the endless flow of reminiscence but Walt remembered the fight in the stubble field and Dandy remembered the night of the Coronation Fête and both felt guilty for behaving so churlishly towards a comrade-in-arms, now bound for the same battlefield. Walt hoped that Dandy had forgotten the cornfield squabble and Dandy derived some consolation from the fact that, even if the fourth of Pansy’s children did look more of a Timberlake than a Pascoe, he had been the means of contributing, albeit anonymously, to Pansy’s separation allowance. They parted temporarily at Mudros but met again under even more cramped conditions in a gully under Achi Baba, about a month later. From then on they were inseparables until a Turkish sniper shot Dandy through the lung and Walt, his concern for the wounded man overcoming his caution, was cut down by a burst of machine-gun fire at less than two hundred yards range. Dandy was not mortally wounded, but his long convalescence, first at Mudros and later at Alexandria, was not made easier by reflecting how and why Walt had died. He thought about it a long time and it made him feel mean, small and treacherous. When he was well enough to sit up he composed a long letter to the widow which puzzled her a good deal for as well as recounting how Walt died the letter hinted that he was prepared to wait in the wings indefinitely as a possible replacement and she never thought of Dandy Timberlake as the marrying kind. In her fashion Pansy had loved Walt, and in the lighthearted way of the Potters she regretted him, but she had plenty of reminders of him under her feet and life was very hectic in the Dell just then, so she did not read into Dandy’s letter all she might have done. In any case it would have seemed to her ridiculous that Dandy’s conscience should trouble him on Walt’s account, or on account of Timothy, her youngest boy. After all, Walt had been blind drunk that particular night and one could not reasonably expect a bachelor to walk three miles in pouring rain pushing a pram-load of another man’s children without receiving some kind of reward for his chivalry.

Spring, 1915, found Smut at the celebrated Bull Ring at Harfleur, not far, as the gull flies, from the scene of his triumphs in the Armentieres sector but far enough to deprive him of prey whilst improving his stalking techniques. At Harfleur they taught him new but less precise methods of adjusting the imbalance between the Kaiser’s hordes and the British Army, showing him, for instance, how to use a Mills bomb and a light machine-gun. He was an apt and attentive pupil, for although neither weapon demanded the degree of skill that had won him a reputation as a rifleman, he was the first to concede that they were likely to prove more lethal when he returned to the line. He was probably the happiest man in all the huge, dismal camp for, unlike most of his comrades, the ties that had bound him to his native heath had all but broken. The only thing awaiting Smut across the Channel was a couple of greenhouses and it seemed to him unlikely that people would worry overmuch about a shortage of petunias, lobelia and fuchsia so long as this gigantic spree endured. Meanwhile, for the new Smut, or rather the old one reborn, there were many compensations. The area was rich in merchandise of a kind that did not have to be watered or kept at an even temperature, all manner of things that careless people left lying around to be carted away and used, given away, or disposed of at a modest profit, loot as varied as sides of bacon, cases of spirits and French wines, items of harness, automatic pistols taken from dead German officers, high-grade German binoculars, boots, tins of jam, periscopes, torches, blankets and sometimes even a mule that had stayed within earshot of someone who knew how to persuade it to follow him without recourse to oaths and blows. To Smut Potter the untidy landscape about Harfleur was a kind of university wherein he was fed, clothed, housed, and even paid to perfect new skills and enlarge his mental horizon. For now he spoke a fluent patois that could engage and sometimes captivate the most grasping estaminet patronne. He could drive a Ley land lorry over bad roads at night without headlights or pilot a motor-cycle combination across a turnip field without clinking bottles stowed in the sidecar. He could strike an advantageous bargain with a Scotsman or a Yorkshireman who, in their home towns, had been the despair of professional salesmen and he could exact by way of toll almost any privilege from admiring company officers who often benefited directly from his highly developed sense of local loyalty. There was talk, now that spring had arrived, of an advance that would harry Fritz back over the Rhine in a matter of weeks but Smut hoped that the enemy would not be in too much of a hurry to depart. The prospect of resuming life as a reformed character had no attractions for him. He did not see how he could avoid becoming a poacher again once the Kaiser was accounted for and thought it likely that he would sign on for as long as they would have him and stalk other of the King’s enemies, Arabs perhaps, or cannibals of the kind who had once engaged the attention of some of the time-serving men now instructing him. He liked everything about his present life, its constant movement, its boon comradeship, its glorious uncertainties and in this strange contentment he was not alone among enlisted Valley men.

Fifty miles south of the camp where Smut was perfecting new killing techniques the Bideford Goliath, sometime Lord of the Dell, had also had the seal of official approval placed upon dormant skills. As a private in a pioneer company Jem’s weight-lifting techniques were invaluable. They had first advertised themselves when.an ammunition limber slipped off the greasy pavé into a shell-hole and might have passed beyond recovery had not Jem, standing close by, grabbed a trailing rope, anchored it round a stump and held it there as nonchalantly as another man checks the flight of a frisky terrier. Others hurried to his assistance and the limber was hauled out but the story of his feat passed from mouth to mouth throughout the sector and soon assumed Homeric proportions, bringing to Jem the kind of notoriety that Samson must have enjoyed among the Israelites. After that he was watched every time he shouldered a load of iron staples to carry up to the line and it was remarked that, not only was he capable of shifting roughly twice as many as the strongest of his comrades could bear along a slippery communication trench, but also that he was, or seemed to be impervious to shell-fire. When a whizz-bang or a five-nine came crashing out of the sky, and others flung down their loads and flattened themselves in the mud, Jem seemed only to contract a little, carefully shifting his load to interpose between flying shrapnel and the upper part of his hulking body. He never winced. He never cowered. And he never got hit. Soon he became a kind of talisman so that men were comforted by his presence and under their admiration his personality began to flower. Once again he could take pleasure in the popularity he had enjoyed as a youngster in the booths of the travelling fair and had savoured, briefly, as Master of the Dell. He had never demanded much of life, no more than a full belly, a little affection and public acknowledgement that he was the strongest man in the world. Here, in a Pioneer battalion a mile or so east of Béthune, these simple requirements were his and like Smut he thought it improbable that he would willingly return to the Dell and readdress himself to the hopeless task of guarding the virtue of his two wives. This was not to say that he had resolved, like Smut, to prolong his service with the colours. There were things he missed, among them the evening Peace of the Valley, and the tang of the sea meeting and mingling with the scent of freshly turned soil, but he did not miss Ciss or Vi as much as he had anticipated. The spasmodic chatter of machine-gun fire in and about the cluttered pitheads was a fair substitute for their clacking tongues and the occasional whoosh of a five-nine, a split second before impact, sometimes recalled their fierce, raucous laughter. On the whole, and on thinking it over carefully, he preferred the overtones of war, so long as projectiles fell on the extreme front line, or the back areas, whence came all these miles and miles of wire and all these millions of pit-props and iron pickets.

II

S
mut was enjoying the war and Jem could bear it but less than two days’ march to the south-west was the very first of the Valley volunteers, Will Codsall of Periwinkle, and Will shared neither Smut’s enthusiasm nor Jem’s tolerance for the situation in which he found himself alongside the Albert Canal, whence he and the few survivors of the dismounted Yeomanry had been sent after a hectic four months in sectors further north. The appalling reality of modern war had been brought home to Will before any of his neighbours had crossed the Channel. In October, 1914, the Paxtonbury bunch had been fed into the line to plug gaps torn in professional ranks by the First Battle of Ypres and were at once engaged in a string of ding-dong battles in shallow, flooded ditches running on and on through unpronounceable towns and villages. In those touch-and-go days Will had seen the Paxtonbury group shrink from three score to about a dozen exhausted, lice-infected scarecrows, who regarded themselves as a squad doomed to spend the fag-end of their lives performing the horrid cycle of five days in the line, five in support and five ‘resting’ in areas that came in for nearly as much round-the-clock shelling as those within pistol range of the Germans.

For a man who had never been able to bring himself to drown a litter of kittens Will had acquitted himself well, performing, in those first mad weeks, miracles of enterprise, hardihood and even ferocity. He had seen at least a dozen men fall to his rifle and had used the bayonet, cosh, and crude bomb on many occasions but that was before the day during a trench raid near Rue de Bois when he stopped in the business of tidying up to look closely at a German Corporal he had killed with a spade about an hour earlier. The sight of the faceless thing lying on its back in six inches of churned-up clay opened the door of an attic in Will’s mind that had been kept locked and chained for more than twelve years and soon after that he began to see himself not as Will Codsall, the soldier husband of the brisk and business-like Elinor but as Will Codsall, son of Martin Codsall, whose craving for blood had directed him to cut off his wife’s head with a hay-knife. The dissolution of his self-control was not instantaneous. Even in his present pitiable condition, with nerves raw and brain and body numb after terrible physical exertions and lack of sleep Will was still game enough to coax the spectre back to the attic and slam the door but the odds against keeping him there were great. Soon the whole orchestra and landscape of the battlefield enlisted with Martin and Martin’s obsession, so that Will began to see the churned-up fields not as violated French farmland but as the margin of Four Winds’ duck-pond on a wet November afternoon, and hear the rumble of the guns as an echo of Arabella’s assaults on his privacy as she flushed him out of hiding places during the struggle that had ended in his flight and marriage. It was as though everything about him conspired to re-create and widen the tragedy of long ago and the sense of doom emerging from this vastly amplified projection of destruction caused him to ponder aspects of the murder and suicide that had not occurred to him during the twelve-year lull. He came to believe, for instance, that his father had not been mad at all, or not in the clinical sense but a man who had yielded to intolerable pressures upon his self-control, pressures supplied by the steady lash of Arabella’s tongue, and it was during a pitiless bombardment a day or so after contemplating the man he had killed with a spade that Will understood precisely how his father had felt when he reached breaking-strain. From here it was only a step to personal identification with Martin at that point in his life where he had fired his gun at the Squire’s boy, murdered Arabella in the bedroom and hanged himself in the barn.