Post of Honour (35 page)

They were denied this distinction. The chosen sector was opposite Cambrai and at the insistence of the tankmen the attack was preceded by the briefest of bombardments. At first it looked as if Ikey’s reckless prophecy would be fulfilled. In a matter of hours the tanks, with cheering infantry in close support, had advanced a distance of four miles, tearing just such a gap in the German lines as Douglas Haig (and before him Sir John French) had been promising since the spring of 1915. The tank experts had reckoned, however, without the price of Passchendaele. There were no fresh divisions left to exploit this astounding advance and when the Germans counter-attacked there was nothing for it but to withdraw and yield up two-thirds of the territory won. At the close of the battle all that remained on HQ maps to demonstrate the usefulness of tanks on the Western Front was a blunted salient a mile or two wide that ultimately became as big an embarrassment to troops in the line as the famous ‘prestige’ salient at Ypres.

Yet Ikey enjoyed his private victory. Inside the inferno of the leading tank he sweated and stewed as they rumbled forward’ over first, second and third lines of defence, barriers that would have cost the lives of a hundred thousand men on Somme and

Passchendaele estimates. He came through it all unwounded and sent in a detailed report on the engagement but with the advance of winter, activities in the new Flesquieres salient came to a standstill and he was sent back to Etaples for a three months’ technical course and here, to his mild astonishment, he learned that he had been promoted major.

His elevation, following closely upon the strain of the autumn battles, completed the profound psychological change in Ikey that had begun with the news that his wife’s reason had succumbed to the shock of what most people would have called her awakening. Paul had told him the truth in a long, tactfully-worded letter but even Paul was largely unaware of the forces and stresses that had persuaded Hazel to appoint herself beacon-lighter to the doomed men of the Valley and, as Ikey saw it, every other Valley in Europe. Ikey, who understood her processes of thought better than anyone, not excluding Meg Potter, saw Hazel’s act of madness as a protest, an instinctive protest against the more cynical and infinitely more lethal madness of civilisation and although, all things considered, he joined Maureen in regarding her death as an unlooked-for mercy, the events that had led up to it confirmed him in his steadfast belief that Hazel had been more sane than most people were nowadays; among this majority he numbered the patriots on both sides of the lines and, more particularly, the politicians and generals directing the Allied war effort.

For a long time now, ever since his first term at High Wood and up to, say, the beginning of the Somme offensive, Ikey had been armoured against fate by his ironic sense of humour and, even more effectively, by his social neutrality for it was this that set him apart from even the most detached of his fellows. He had never wholly rejected his childhood in a Thames-side slum but neither had he wholly accepted his status as the adopted son of a country squire and an officer in the forces of the Crown. He continued to maintain a foot in each camp for while his natural adaptability enabled him to survive the narrow atmosphere of the mess and polo ground, Hazel Potter had safely anchored him to his original habitat. He enjoyed, as it were, a unique look-out post in a private no-man’s land. He found the position amusing and sometimes absorbing from an intellectual standpoint and it had special advantages in his dealings with the men who came under his command. He could communicate without patronage and they were not slow to recognise as much, so that among the other ranks he was always the most popular officer in every unit in which he served. He was also, because of his lifelong habit of taking a situation apart and studying the pieces individually before putting them together again, an accomplished professional and his seniors soon came to rely on him to a degree than encouraged their built-in contempt for technicalities that was a feature of the pre-war army. Ikey was not slow to exploit this trust and when he found himself in France, where professional ability often meant economy in lives, there was considerable competition for his services. His transfer from the artillery to the Tank Corps had cost him the goodwill of his superiors but because he was convinced that tanks, and tanks alone, could break the deadlock in the West, he had persisted and ultimately been successful. He never regretted the transfer. The officers of the Tank Corps were mostly ex-civilians, unhampered by the prejudices of gunners who had soldiered in India, and here Ikey found his creativeness given free rein. He also discovered that at last he could communicate without having to keep tongue in cheek.

As a major, a professional, and a man who had been out more than two years he could have adopted a superior attitude towards his fellow-officers without incurring their resentment but he now reserved the professional touch for comic turns in the mess. Yet, deep in his heart, Ikey no longer searched for humour in the present situation. As the months went by, as more and more conscripts were fed into the Mincing Machine, he grew bitter and desperate, not so much against the war itself but against the manner in which it was being waged. There were times when, like Siegfried Sassoon, he was tempted to voice his protest openly in the newspapers or through one or other of the left-wing organisations at home but the habit of discipline was strong in him and he reasoned that the only result of a one-man revolt would be his transfer to a mental ward. This, in fact, had already happened in one or two cases when Authority, unwilling to brand a man with a good war-record coward or traitor, found it convenient to downgrade him as shell-shocked and put him out of harm’s way for the duration.

He was actually discussing one of these cases with fellow-officers in a bar in Etaples towards the end of his course, when his cast of thought was broken and remoulded by a chance meeting with a wounded French officer, employed about the camp as an interpreter.

He had noticed the Frenchman standing apart from the group, a man so hideously disfigured that it was difficult not to look at him with embarrassing directness. He was a tall, slim officer, lacking a right arm, and from his temples to the right side of his chin was what appeared at first glance to be a wide smear of plum jam but was, in fact, a terrible scar partially disguised by skin-grafting. When Ikey’s companions left to go on duty the Frenchman came forward and said, in faultless English, ‘You won’t remember me, Major Palfrey?’ and when Ikey admitted this but invited him to have a drink in any case, went on, ‘I recall you very well! We met in India when I was French attaché, at Cawnpore, in 1912. We had a long discussion one night, on Napoleon’s Russian Campaign. I believe I convinced you that it was not the blunder claimed in the history books!’

Ikey recalled him then and clearly, a handsome, intelligent, friendly individual called Bouvet, an expert on the new French ‘75’, still regarded as the best field-gun in existence. Bouvet said, ‘It is natural you should not recall my face. I was left for dead in the first Ardennes battle and was in hospital until February this year.’

Ikey murmured an expression of formal sympathy and they chatted on their Indian service but he soon realised that the man was impatient to be done with small-talk and express his opinion on Allied prospects and the general conduct of the war. No sooner had he broached the topic, however, than the Frenchman said, ‘Not in here, my friend! We will talk elsewhere I think!’, and led the way to his billet, a small cottage hemmed in by three-storey warehouses. They went in and Bouvet lit the lamp, revealing a room containing very little furniture but a great many books, papers and files.

‘You must not think you British have the prerogative of stupidity,’ he said. ‘I could not help hearing your conversation in the bistro but it is even worse with us. There can be no hope of victory until we have a unified command and younger men at the top.’

‘Well, that’s on its way,’ Ikey said. ‘We already have a Joint Planning Commission and a central reserve and I imagine, as time goes on, it will take over from men like Haig.’

‘As time goes on,’ Bouvet sneered, ‘that is very British of you, my friend!’ and then, pulling his mouth into a hard line that tautened the ravaged flesh of his cheek, ‘But we have no time! The Germans will attack in strength as soon as they can transfer their freed divisions from the Russian front and the result of that attack will be the finish!’

Ikey was familiar with this theory, an access of German strength in the spring after an armistice with Russia, but in spite of himself, he began to defend a more optimistic view, pointing out that the superiority of defence over offence had been proved over and over again in the last three years and that the war would probably end in a stalemate. The Frenchman listened politely but when he had finished he said, quietly, ‘The enemy have their quota of idiots, my friend, but unfortunately their system of command is such that Junkers are ciphers, like Hindenburg, real power resting with the climbers, like Ludendorff. Ludendorff is no fool! Do you imagine he has not profited by the lessons of Verdun, the Somme and Passchendaele? I tell you, he will break through and dictate peace by midsummer! Everything points to that, including our mutinies!’

It was the first direct reference Ikey had heard from a Frenchman of mutinies that had resulted from the total failure of the Nivelle offensive and he was curious to learn more.

‘You know about the mutinies?’ he asked. ‘They were more than a few isolated incidents?’

‘I know enough about them to get me court-martialled if I so much as mentioned them to an Englishman!’ Bouvet said, ‘Yet I think it is my duty to mention them to you, if only to convince you that you have no one but yourselves to rely on once the German offensive is launched! The French south of the Somme cannot help you. They will hold the line, perhaps, but it is accepted that they will do no more than that until the Americans arrive in force. By then it will be too late.’

Bouvet then disclosed all he knew of the French mutinies and Ikey was shocked by his account. He learned that whole divisions of French infantry had walked away from the front, heading for Paris, and that the situation had only been saved by the prompt dismissal of General Nivelle, his successor’s decision not to sacrifice another drop of French blood in an offensive, and by mass arrests and an unspecified number of executions. It was one of the methods employed to restore order that appalled Ikey. A small number of men, so Bouvet told him, had been shot but others, ostensibly pardoned, had been sent to a quiet sector of the line and there exterminated by their own artillery, supposedly firing at enemy defences. Bouvet could not say how many had died this way but he thought it was over a thousand and Ikey left his billet that night with his education on modern war complete. He no longer despised the Allied High Command buffoons but thought of them as a group of men from whom nothing could be expected but an eternity of blood-letting. It was this conversation, more than anything of his personal experiences in the last three years, that blasted him from his seat on the fence. The war had to be fought out, he supposed, but afterwards, immediately afterwards there must be a reckoning. The entire social structure of the old world would have to be changed, either by revolution on the Russian pattern, or by some less drastic process but changed anyway if human dignity was to survive. From then on he was committed and took little care to conceal as much notwithstanding the bright new crown over his shoulder.

III

T
he day she received Paul’s letter saying that he had been promised nine days’ leave in October Claire turned her back on patients, children, staff and all other time-robbers, saddled old Snowdrop and crossed the dunes to the gully to satisfy herself that Eph Morgan had kept his word about making the shanty habitable by the end of the month.

All good Shallowfordians had their inner tabernacle on or about the estate and Claire’s preference was for the steep, narrow goyle that gave on to the beach within a couple of hundred yards of the rock-pool where her mother had taught her to swim and where Paul had proposed. She did not go there often but when she did she preferred to go alone.

In the mouth of the gully was a single dwelling, a tumbledown shanty once occupied by a local character known in the Valley as Crabpot Willie. Crabpot had been a very old man when Claire was a child but she recalled him as a shaggy-whiskered old rascal, who lived by catching and selling shellfish, who walked rather like a crab and who was said, on slender authority, to have rounded the Horn on a windjammer. Here he had lived until his death in the early ‘nineties after which his cabin had fallen into decay for nobody cared to live this far from the village or so near high-water mark where spring tides would sometimes lap Willie’s doorstep.

Claire first revisited the area whilst prospecting for a shorter cut to the beach for hospital bathing parties and recalling that the old man had been favourite of her mother’s she turned aside to inspect his former home. She was surprised to find that the main roof timbers and pine floor were more or less intact, and that the shingle roof had been partially saved by overhanging firs marking the edge of the wood on the shoulder of the landslip. It was a secluded, pleasant spot in the summer. Sand had blown in from the beach, half-filling the little cleft and was held there by marram grass and sea holly. Higher up, beyond the pine-needles, grew campion, bugloss, trefoil and wood anemone in a grove of dwarf oaks and the place was sheltered from easterly and south-westerly winds. Claire’s first thought was to convert the shanty into a beach chalet for the convalescents but then she knew that she would resent sharing it with anyone save Paul and another plan began to form in her mind, resulting in her approach to Eph Morgan (then building Nissen huts under Government contract in the paddock) and an appeal to make it habitable as her retreat. Eph carried out an inspection and said the shanty could be weather-proofed easily enough but warned her that the only way she could get the necessary materials was by compounding a felony and signing a form to the effect that the work was a hospital extension. She signed without a qualm and he went to work on the promise of cash payment, hauling materials along the beach at low tide and later helping her transport furniture, bedding and kitchen utensils across the dunes.