Post of Honour (38 page)

When the rector had finished there was a silence such as Claire had never heard in the ward. At first she thought it was due to embarrassment but then, looking at the man she thought of as ‘Jumbo’, she realised that this was not so, for he was looking at Parson Horsey with a respect that she had never seen him bestow on any visitor, commissioned, civilian or clerical. It was as though, at any moment, he would embarrass them all by applauding but to Claire’s relief he continued to stare straight at the little man standing between the two beds. Horsey used the pause to grope under his surplice and his hand re-emerged holding a small packet of letters tied with tape. He shuffled them carefully, selecting one with the air of a man who considers himself unobserved and then, clearing his throat once more, he said, ‘The chap who wrote that was killed at the beginning of this month. The night before he was killed, however, he wrote two letters and one of them was passed on to me by his wife. I hope you will forgive me if I read this letter to end this little service. It isn’t very long but I think it helps to clarify the motives of many of the conscientious objectors. You see, this chap was classified as a CO who felt strongly enough about his beliefs to go to face gaol for them. At the last minute, however, a friend home from France persuaded him to enlist as a stretcher-bearer. Now I don’t know what you think of conscientious objectors; not much I imagine and therefore I would be less than honest if I failed to tell you this man once came to me and asked my advice and I told him he ought not to compromise in any way. I told him that partly because he was a brilliant scholar, the kind of man who might have something useful to contribute to the world after the war, but on reading this final letter of his I see very clearly that I was wrong. Perhaps you will agree, perhaps not, I don’t know. I’m not nearly as sure of anything as I was a year or so ago.’

He laid the packet of letters on the makeshift altar and took the one he had selected from its field service envelope. While he was doing this Claire looked round the hut expecting some kind of reaction to an introduction that she found utterly uncharacteristic of the Horsey she had watched begin so many half-apologetic sermons in the parish church on pre-war Sundays. There was no reaction and Horsey began reading:

‘This is the first anniversary of my arrival in France and it seems a good time to jot down a thought or two that I should have put on paper months ago but somehow never seemed to find time, either before or since the Ypres fighting. First, please don’t bother to send the books you promised. I shouldn’t have a chance to read them and in any case it seems a shame to subject a book to the kind of treatment it gets out here. It was thinking of books, however, that led me to think of the places they belong—libraries, schools and universities where, on looking back, it seems to me I spent so much time and largely wasted time at that because, in making out what you might call my first annual report, I see that a man would have to be a fool not to learn more in one week out here than he could cram into a lifetime in a university—that is, regarding essentials! Do you remember that old poem, the one in which Abou Ben Adam tells the recording angel to write him down as a chap who loved his fellow-men? Old Ben Adam could survive out here and might even enlarge himself but I doubt if poor old Shelley and Keats would last a week without going crazy!

‘Well now, from annual reports to balance sheets. I’ve done some balancing up since we came out of the Passchendaele show and it’s a pretty rum set of figures. On the debit side—carried forward from last year and the year before that—is death, blood, mud, lice, fear and boredom and on the other side?—call them hidden credits, sheer wonder at what a terrific pounding the average chap can take without breaking; the strength of the bond between men who survive the same near-miss three days in a row and, above all, the comforting thought that Hell can’t be so bad after all for this is Hell right enough but men can still laugh in it—laugh and sing and are doing both right now in this half a cellar, the one group over a game of pontoon, the other accompanied by a concertina. End of annual report and presentation of balance sheet—with time to say, in the light of the last half-inch of candle, that I’m glad I’m here, even though I don’t retract a word of anything I ever said about the stupidity and brutality of war for if I hadn’t come here I should have gone on cuddling my resentment behind prison bars and thinking myself no end of a martyr whereas here every poor devil is a martyr and there aren’t enough stakes to go round! Some will survive, perhaps enough to draw up a fresh set of rules for the nations that used to call themselves civilised. Candle’s going out. Good night. God bless.’

Horsey repeated his shuffling act with the flimsy sheets and then, retrieving the letters on the table, returned the one he had read to its sheaf. Nobody spoke and nobody moved. Not a cough or a shuffle broke the silence, until Claire heard a dry, indeterminable sound on her left and turning saw Mrs Handcock’s handkerchief go to her nose as she blew and then blushed because everybody turned to look at her as though, by looking, they diverted attention from any emotional display on their part. Mrs Handcock, Claire recalled, would be one of those present who remembered Keith Horsey as a shambling adolescent drifting about the Valley with his long nose stuck in a book, a boy who had later married (or been married by) pretty Rachel Eveleigh of Four Winds, in defiance of her presently whoring father, but Keith’s anonymity did not diminish the impact of Parson Horsey’s sermon. Looking at him, and again at his congregration, Claire realised that here was a man who would never fear or falter again. She knew this, and the men knew it, but neither she nor they could have expressed in words precisely what he had told them that was new and therefore absent in any other sermon they had ever heard, or any sermon Horsey had preached in the past. She was aware of something else too—the enormous margin of error present in the snap judgments one sometimes made of other human beings.

II

C
orporal ‘Jumbo’ Bellchamber, one of the few enlisted men present when Parson Horsey preached on conscientious objectors, came face to face with the rector a month later at a double wedding in the parish church. On that occasion Jumbo was a groom, together with his inseparable companion, Lance-Corporal Georges Brissot. The occasion was the only cheerful one in the Valley that season, a time when General Ludendorff and his highly-trained infiltration squads demonstrated that there was, after all, one way of breaking the deadlock in the West.

The Bellchamber-Brissot alliance was one of those improbable partnerships that sometimes emerge from service in the field. For a long time now they had never operated apart and it was therefore entirely fitting that they should take, as brides, two other inseparables, Cissie and Violet Potter, who had privately agreed that it was time they looked to the future and made a grab while there were still eligible men alive in the Valley.

They might have done worse. Jumbo, although wan and short of breath after three years in France ending with double pneumonia and pleurisy, was still more or less whole, whereas his big, swarthy, mild-mannered friend had a cork foot but, to offset this disadvantage, practical experience in farming dating from pre-war days in the province of Quebec. Brissot’s injury had left him with an ungainly, bobbing limp, that gave people the impression he was forever on the point of tumbling head over heels but otherwise he was quite a catch, being strong, genial and capable of running a small farm. It was after Jumbo had discovered that the two Potter girls were in a position (once respectably wed) to obtain the lease of the Dell from the Squiress that a casual association developed into courtship and sundry slaps, chuckles and squeals were replaced with long, sighing glances and heavy breathing on the few occasions when Cissie and Vi could retreat to their familiar refuge in the laurels at the top of the drive.

Although Jumbo was barely half the size of his companion he was senior partner in the alliance, his ascendancy over the French Canadian dating from very early in the war, when the two had met by chance in the yard of an abandoned French farmhouse, near Château Thierry. Georges was a civilian then, who had been visiting French cousins when Von Kluck’s hordes swept across north-eastern France and the visitor had been overlooked when his relatives decamped ahead of the British rearguard. Jumbo was a stray too, having been sent with a message to a British corps on the right, where he lost himself in a maze of unsignposted roads. He took refuge in the barn of the farm where Georges was stranded and they did not meet until a patrol of four Uhlans rode into the farmyard in search of forage. From an attic window the French Canadian watched all four German cavalrymen fall to the rifle of a single British straggler who had installed himself in a loft.

Georges was dumbfounded by the speed at which it happened. Down they went—one, two, three, four, just like wooden ducks at a shooting booth, the saddles emptying so quickly that Georges was persuaded the entire British Army had returned to rescue him. When he realised that his saviour was a single, bow-legged little soldier he was so impressed that he never recovered from the shock. From then on he was Jumbo’s man and after helping him recover the Uhlan’s horses on which they caught up with Smith-Dorrien’s footsore column, he joined the Cockney’s unit as interpreter, later enlisting and sharing his friend’s varying fortunes through Neuve Chapelle, Loos and the Somme. They emerged from these disasters unscathed but the weather at Passchendaele was too much for Jumbo, despite a remarkable toughness, resilience and unfailing optimism. Then a carelessly-handled dud shell gave Georges the privilege of prolonging the alliance indefinitely, so that they found themselves wintering at Shallowford, where Jumbo’s high spirits made him a great favourite with the Potter girls, who had always preferred the noisy, boisterous lovers.

The double proposal was put to the girls the day that Jumbo received his discharge, Georges having been invalided out a month or so before. Until then, Georges had never thought of marriage or settling in England for good but he accepted all his friend’s decisions and reposed complete and utter trust in his judgments, despite the fact that Jumbo’s speech was still largely incomprehensible to him. Georges spoke and understood English well but the Cockney idiom defeated him. He could never learn, for instance, that a ‘butcher’s’ meant a ‘look’ or that when Jumbo announced he was ready to climb stairs and retire to bed he did not say so in as many words but said he was ‘hitting the apples-an’-pears fer a kip’. Thus his announcement that marriage to the Potter girls would be an investment in the future bewildered him. Jumbo said, after studying his discharge papers. ‘This is it, cock! We’re both aht on our ear and we gotter get weavin’ bloody quick, mate! I did think o’ going fer moonishuns where they say you c’n earn a fortune but seein’ as ol’ Jerry ’as nearly shot ’is bolt, I don’t reckon we’d ’ave time ter dig ourselves in before we start scrambling fer jobs with all the other bleeders in Civvy Street! Do yer fancy a nice bit o’ country, like this here?’

Georges, understanding nothing but the final sentence, said that he found the locality very much to his taste, for it reminded him somewhat of wooded areas on the shores of the St Lawrence. Jumbo took this for unqualified assent, saying, ‘Right! Then, Bob’s your uncle! Them two bints ’ave got a farm, an’ since they’re only working ’ere while they look for a couple o’ mugs to run it we’d better get stuck in before some other greedy baskit catches on! Since there ain’t a pin to choose between ’em ser far as looks goes we’ll toss for ’em an’ after that you leave me to do the torkin’!’

They tossed, Jumbo winning Cissie and Georges Violet. When a local busybody pointed out that, although well over thirty and unwed, the girls had already raised a small family between them Jumbo was indignant, not with the brides-to-be but with the informant. ‘What of it?’ he demanded, unconsciously reiterating the claim of Edward of York, ‘I’m a bachelor and I reckon I’ve got ’arf a dozen running around somewhere! Besides, they’re bringing us house, farm an’ furniture as a bleedin’ dowry, ain’t they? Gor blimey, who’s askin’ for jam on it?’

It was Parson Horsey’s impressive performance in the ward that inclined Jumbo in favour of a church wedding and the ceremony was probably the best attended in the history of the church. Everyone was there, including Claire, all her family, and a motley guard of honour representing half-a-dozen regiments from the convalescents. Later the happy foursome repaired to the Dell to fortify themselves with a quart or two of Meg’s hedgerow wine before beginning the task of spring-cleaning the decrepit farmhouse.

Claire wrote an amusing account of the ceremony to Paul that same night but it was a long time before the Squire of Shallowford was aware that the Dell, always the odd man out among his farms, had entered upon a new era under Anglo-French management. He never, in fact, received her letter, for the Potter girls were married on Saturday, the sixteenth of March and five days later the entire British line opposite St Quentin had collapsed, Ludendorff’s stormtroops gaining as much ground in twelve hours as combined French and British offensives of the war had won in three and a half years.

There was another matter that would have interested him in the letter Claire posted the day after the Dell wedding; this concerned her personal handling of yet another Four Winds’ crisis, events having reached a point where intervention on her part seemed essential.

Everybody in the Valley knew that Farmer Eveleigh kept a mistress but the scandal had died down after Marian Eveleigh had pulled herself together, turned her back on the spirits and spent all her working days at the big house where she was regarded as the most reliable local hand on the staff. One day in early March, however, Claire had found her weeping and distraught and persistent questioning uncovered the cause. Eveleigh, Marian said, had now taken his land-girl mistress into the house, offering his wife a choice between the room formerly occupied by the boys and the cottage lodging vacated by the land-girl. The affront to a woman who had borne Eveleigh six children and lost looks and figure in the process, so outraged Claire that without even consulting John Rudd, she checked the terms of the Four Winds’ lease, borrowed Maureen’s Ford and drove to the farm at such speed that Old Honeyman, herding sheep along the river road, had to scramble up the bank to avoid her onrush. She went in by the back door without stopping to knock and finding no one in the kitchen stormed upstairs shouting Eveleigh’s name. He came out of the bedroom, his face covered with lather and razor in hand, standing gaping at her and looking, she thought, very seedy in his long-sleeved woollen vest and dangling braces. It was some time since she had seen him for he had kept clear of the big house since Paul’s last visit and Claire, who admired his pluck and capacity for work without being able to like him, was surprised at the change in his appearance. He looked like an ageing man who was over-eating, drinking too much and possibly over-worrying. She went straight to the point, making no apology for her presence on his landing at eight-thirty in the morning.