The Gates of Rutherford (29 page)

“Church of England.”

“And from where?”

Ah, that he couldn't say. He tried to, but the name of the village and of Rutherford stopped in his throat and choked him.

The padre looked away again, affecting not to notice. “I come from the inner city myself,” he said. “Birmingham. New Street.” He went on talking about his parish. Slums and poverty and kindheartedness. It was what kept the average man going, he said. Not God but kindheartedness. Decency, that sort of thing. Not bravery so much. He wondered if anyone were truly brave.

“I don't know if I care so much about men as I care about horses,” Jack admitted. “They never let you down.”

“Indeed they don't,” the padre acknowledged. “But they have what some would call human instincts, wouldn't you say? To be afraid, and so on?”

“Being afraid isn't humanity,” Jack replied. “Not what I'd rightly call humanity. Tis just reaction. Can't help it. Neither can men. But to slog on. That's a human trait, maybe.”

“Yes . . .”

“Endurance, like.”

“Yes indeed . . . and faith. Faith in their owners.” He paused. The sky above them was a subtle duck-egg blue streaked with lazy streamers of high clouds. It was lovely. “And have you a faith?” the padre asked.

“Not no more,” Jack said. It took a lot to admit it. He was not sure that he ought to, and especially not to a man of the cloth. But
it came out anyway. He felt it so much, so deeply. The conviction of it. “I always went to church, every Sunday.”

“Do you think you might again?”

“I don't know, sir. After what you see here. What we do.”

“But God's love remains the same, whatever is done.”

Jack shook his head. The sensation of swaying and rocking was subsiding a little. “There's no love here. And no humanity either.”

They walked on a little way, arm in arm. Jack became embarrassed at this and asked to sit down. They slumped together on a stone platform. It was some time before Jack realized what it was. He looked behind them at the tented camp, and from side to side.

“Looking for something?”

“A gate. A farm.”

“I'm afraid if there was a farm, it has long gone,” the padre said. “But there is what remains of a chateau along the road. Pretty blasted, but standing.”

“They will have had farms.”

“Will they? Yes, I suppose so.”

“Cattle. Dairy farm.”

“What makes you say that?”

Jack patted the long oblong stone. “Tis for the milk,” he said. “Churns on the side of the road, stood here for the carts to take to dairy.” He gazed upwards, into the distance. “Must have been a dairy around here, too. Be a house with cool floors. Next a railway track. Milk for Paris, maybe.”

“How interesting,” the padre murmured. “I can tell you are of country stock.”

“Yes,” Jack murmured. “Country.”

“I expect you believe in that.”

“How do you mean, believe?”

“You believe in that life. A country life. The turn of the seasons. The dependency of it. That the year comes around. Harvest, and such like.”

“That I do.”

“Then there's your belief, your faith.”

“Hard not to believe in what's before your eyes.”

“And in your blood, your upbringing.”

“Aye.”

The padre smiled. It was getting much darker now. The evening light was almost gone. “Are you hungry?”

“I am, I think.” It hadn't occurred to him until that moment, and then his stomach growled. He couldn't think when he had last eaten. Yesterday? Or two days? He had had maconochie—pork and beans, he thought. Filthy horrible pork and beans, the one dish he disliked. And milk biscuit pudding. He had no idea what was in that. Raisins or biscuits that had been boiled down to a pulp.

There had been cooks just behind the lines, and one of them a poor squawking boy with a high-pitched voice who was scared to death. He would have regular hysterics. He'd seen the boy being slapped. Slapped, tripped up. Facedown in the dirt, with a ladle in his hand. He would throw himself down whenever he heard a shell come too close. The opinion was that he would get used to it, and be like the rest of them, laboring on trying not to flinch, trying not to listen, trying not to watch.

“Let me get you something.”

“I can't have you do that, sir.”

“I'm getting some for myself,” the padre said. “When I come back, you can tell me more about the place you come from.”

Jack watched him go. He considered getting up and hiding himself. He couldn't be seen here being waited on by an officer. Droves of men still passed, and they would see. Although he watched a few lads passing now, and he saw something strange in their faces. They glanced at him, and then looked away. A few of them gave him a pitying smile.

What was the matter with them? he wondered. He was all right.

Just the jittering. Just the swaying. He was all right.

•   •   •

P
adre Carlyon went to his own mess.

As he went in at the door of the shell-spattered outhouse—for this was what his mess was now—he flung down his hat. “I say, Portman,” he asked the nearest man. “What's the supper?”

“Stew, sir.”

“Bully beef stew?”

“No, sir. Braised beef and potatoes.”

“Pudding?”

“Peaches.”

Carlyon smiled. “Peaches, eh,” he murmured. “What a feast.”

“We found a tree in the garden, sir.”

“Did you? That's excellent. Bring me two portions of both, there's a good fellow.”

“
Two
portions?”

“That's right. Two portions.”

The orderly hurried out. In the ruin of a garden behind, the cook was producing miracles on a single stove pitched among the bricks and weeds. The steam and smoke drifted in at the door. There was a young officer fast asleep on the floor, wrapped in his greatcoat. Poor show, some would say. But Carlyon had no such presumption; he guessed at what the man had been through. He moved quietly back to the entrance and leaned against the doorpost and stared at the landscape.

He'd been talking to the wounded at the clearing station all day. They blurred into one seamless scene in his mind. Hands that reached for cigarettes. Silences that masked the agony of the wound. The only one he recalled clearly was the man coming in from the St. Julien road, an officer of the Worcesters. He'd asked Carlyon if he could
reach under the stretcher and move the gas helmet wedged underneath him. Carlyon had been horrified—and it wasn't easy to horrify him anymore—to find that the gas helmet had been pushed into the man's spine by a molten piece of shrapnel. The two were sealed together in the shattered back.

“I can't remove it just now,” he had told the man kindly. “Ah,” the officer had replied. “Thank you, at any rate.” His voice was a solid, monotonous line. As discreetly as he could, Carlyon had given him a blessing, and the man smiled at him, knowing what it might mean. A small pained smile, a whisper of gratitude.

Soon after someone else had come in, another man whom the officer had known since their early days of training, it seemed. Carlyon had stood at the end of the stretcher while they clasped hands. It had been hard to tell what was life and what was death; perhaps the grip on the hands had slackened. In any case, in less than a minute, the friend laid the hand on the blanket, and closed the officer's eyes with a gentle brush of his fingers. Standing up, he had caught Carlyon's eye. “Known him some time,” he whispered. And Carlyon saw something else in that face that he himself knew only too well. Love deeper than words. Perhaps a love that could never have been spoken about at all at any time. The other man went out: Carlyon watched him wander about for a moment or two, as if disoriented. Then he disappeared into the foot traffic of the road.

•   •   •

A
s Jack sat looking out into the growing dusk and the interminable movement on the road—slow and staggering, he thought—he narrowed his eyes to focus, and Louisa came into his line of sight. A pale glimpse of her weaving between the trucks, the men. She seemed very careless of the place, smiling as she always did.

He straightened up, leaned forward. “No,” he murmured.

Her hair was loose down her back, tied with a spare bit of ribbon. She reached up and brushed it back. Her hands moved lightly. She was so white in the gloom. So white.

The last time that he had seen her, he asked her if she intended to cut her hair. She had looked up at him. “What would you say if I did?”

“Nay, it's not my business.”

She'd touched his face. “I'm your business, Jack.”

He had stroked the fine, fair strands away from her face. “And you're mine.”

It had been last summer. The last time that he had had leave. She was at Rutherford, and he had come home. The first night he had spent with his parents in Grooms Cottage. His mother had kept looking at him as if he might dissolve in front of her; as if she wanted to grab hold of him and not let him go, or to try and feel that he was real. She had sat for quite a while just holding his hand in hers and turning it over repeatedly as his father spoke. It had been as if she'd been trying to convince herself that he was still real flesh and blood.

“Are you hurt at all?” she'd asked him, when his father had got up to go into the garden to smoke.

“No, Ma. I'm very well.”

She'd gazed at him. “You're different somehow.”

Aye, well. They were all different. He'd heard some men say that they would never be able to look at living people the same way again, never be able to just take them the way they were, clothed and fit and clean—not without seeing the other figures. Those that were dirty and cold. Those left out in the otherworld of no-man's-land where they rotted. Or cried. Or simply drifted away, leaving sagging uniforms where bodies had been.

One man had told him that he'd never be able to look at his wife's body again, or those of his children. He was afraid that when he got
home he would have to turn aside from the thing that he used to love and look forward to: bathing the littlest ones and wrapping them in a towel by the fire, and telling them stories while they smelled so sweet and fresh.

The scent of pure innocence. The men longed for it, hungered for it, but doubted they'd be able to stomach it. Not without the memory intruding of the smell of muddy weeks, of the stink of other men, and the indescribable stench of the dead.

“You know what?” the man had said. Just an anonymous soldier whose troop had stopped near the horses, and who had come over to pat the head of the horse that Jack was holding. “I'm afraid to go home at all.”

“You'll feel different when you get there,” Jack said.

“I couldn't lay a hand on my wife,” the man told him. “I keep thinking of it. I'm mired in all this muck. I look at my hands and think, I can't touch her ever again. I can't put my hand on her at all.”

“It'll be different,” Jack had told him.

But he thought afterwards that it was just something to say. Something reassuring. He knew what the man meant. You didn't want to take it back home. You didn't want to infect them with this suffering; you didn't want to open your mouth and tell them what you'd heard. You didn't want to look at them for fear your eyes would communicate the horrors.

And so when his mother had stroked his hand and asked him if he was hurt, he had said, “No, Ma. I'm very well.”

•   •   •

A
h, he watched Louisa now come picking her way across the dust.

Pretty girl, but she was more than that. She was sweet to the bottom of her soul.

The second day that he was home, he had told his parents that he was going for a walk.

“We've told your aunt Annie we'll be along for tea,” his mother had said.

“I'll be back in time,” he answered.

And he'd gone out across the yard, and through the gate. The same gate where he and Louisa had led Wenceslas two years before, to put him on the transport for Remount in Wiltshire. The guilt he had felt at it came rushing back to him as he put his hand on the latch, and the five-bar wooden gate swung back. He remembered how Louisa had helped him then, put the lightest touch on his arm and, later, her hand on the small of his back as they stood side by side to see the transport go.

God gave you things to do. That's what everyone said. “God doesn't give you more than you can carry.” But it wasn't true. Every day he saw men carrying more than they could bear, walking into the ground, grinding to their knees. This padre who wanted to talk to him also wanted him to believe there was something good left in the world. But it wasn't here, if it existed at all.

There was one thing that he kept trying to lay aside. If it was a burden that God had given him, he wished that same God would take it back. Because he didn't want it anymore. In the name of all that was clean in the world, he didn't want it.

They'd been close to Zillebeke. It was only two weeks ago. It was this same part of the line that the officers kept telling them had been abandoned, but by Christ the Germans didn't let it go easily. What they had left behind they had booby-trapped, and what was left after that, they shelled. Especially wherever they thought they might have left stores or ammunition.

The corps had been asked to try to clear up. Troops were tired and decimated, too long without real rest. Some got careless. They
were the ones that decided the Hun had left them alone. They went down into old Boche trenches, and they forgot. Forgot the war was still in those deep and efficient-looking lanes under the ground. Electric light, some of them had. Pumps that took away water. Stoves still warm to the touch.

“Help us with a burial party,” Jack and the other troops had been told as soon as they got there. He had wanted to say no. But of course you couldn't say no. It was your duty, even if you had only ever enlisted to see to the mules and horses.