The Return of Captain John Emmett (50 page)

He thought of Eleanor. Her hair, her smell, her comfort. He remembered walking with her in France. He had been sitting on a bench outside the hospital. She came out, put up a hand to the side of his face.

'Oh you're so cold,' she said. She rubbed her hands briskly up and down his arms.

'May we walk?' she said. 'Are you comfortable enough?'

'Of course.'

Her head was swathed in a hood and she had a thick man's coat over her uniform, coming down to her boots. She pulled gloves out of a pocket. Looking at her made him feel warm.

'Come on, race you to—wherever it is we're going.'

She ran ahead clumsily, laughing, and then she was gone. He called her name.

He opened and closed his fingers a few times to get his circulation going. Both hands. Both perfect hands. He poured some brandy on them and rubbed his palms together. She wasn't here. He looked at his fingers, spread widely and white as bone and opened his coat; he was not so cold. Then he unwrapped Miles Somers' scarf, folded it and set it down carefully a little way from his legs. He felt bad enough about stealing the photograph and package from the Somers house, but he didn't want to keep the scarf from its rightful owner too.

Then he took the small comb out of his pocket. He could hardly see the initials but he traced the unicorn with his finger. AM: Agathe Meurice. He set it down softly on the scarf.

He pressed his head back against the stonework and closed his eyes. He thought of other unreal worlds, other decisions, other possibilities: the shadows of faraway lives that had, briefly, crossed with his; of Eleanor, of a mortally wounded soldier trying to speak, and of a small boy startled by the cry of a red kite; but finally of his own hand in the dry comfort of his father's as they gazed up at the summer sky one Suffolk night.

When the shot came, the rooks rose outward from their roost with coarse cries of alarm, but in a few minutes they returned, settling back into the bare branches until the first light of dawn.

'Craven fear is the most extravagant prodigal of nervous energy known. Under its stimulus a man squanders nervous energy recklessly in order to suppress his hideous and pent up emotions and mask and camouflage that which if revealed will call down ignominy upon him and disgrace him in the eyes of his fellows. He must preserve his self-respect and self-esteem at all costs.'

Billy Tyrell, a military doctor and victim of shellshock, in evidence to the Southborough Committee. Report of the War Office Commission of Enquiry into 'Shell-Shock' (London, 1922), quoted by Ben Shephard in
A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Twentieth Century.

Only three British officers were executed in the First World War. On the other hand, over 300 British and Commonwealth private soldiers met this fate, although of the 3,080 death sentences handed down, most were commuted.

My novel is loosely inspired by the executions of Temporary Sub-Lieutenant Edwin Dyett, Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, and of Lieutenant Poole of the West Yorkshire Regiment, both shot for desertion. The novelist A.P. Herbert, who had encountered Dyett while himself a junior officer in the same division, wrote a novel based on the case:
The Secret Battle
(1919). Leonard Sellers has produced an account of the Dyett case in
Death for Desertion,
first published in 1995 as
For God's Sake Shoot Straight.
Further reading in this area includes
Blindfold and Alone: British Military Executions in the Great War
by John Hughes-Wilson and Cathryn Corns, and
Shot at Dawn: Executions in World War One by Authority of the British Army Act
by Julian Putkowski and Julian Sykes. Ernest Thirtle MP published a pamphlet in 1929,
Shootings at Dawn: The Army Death Penalty at Work.
The terrible effect on families of losing husbands and sons in this way is revealed by surviving letters.

There are, of course, a great number of excellent books on the Great War. I am particularly indebted to the following: John Keegan,
The First World War;
Richard Holmes,
Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front;
Max Arthur,
Last Post: The Final Word from our First World War Soldiers;
and Neil Hansen,
The Unknown Soldier: The Story of the Missing of the Great War.
Gordon Corrigan has assembled a critical look at some of the myths of the war in
Mud, Blood and Poppycock.
Dominic Hibberd's biography of Wilfred Owen, Jean Moorcroft Williams' work on Isaac Rosenberg and Nicholas Moseley's book on Julian Grenfell are among many that I have read, as well as Vera Brittain's
Testament of Youth,
a vivid account of her experience as a volunteer nurse on the Western Front.
A Deep Cry: First World War Soldier-Poets Killed in France and Flanders,
edited by Anne Powell, is superb on the lives and deaths of less famous poets. Diaries, novels, plays and poetry of the period, as well as some comprehensive websites, have helped my understanding of the varied experiences of those who lived in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Above all, for a wonderful survey of the Great War in the popular imagination, there is Paul Fussell's classic:
The Great War and Modern Memory.

For the care and understanding of men with shell-shock, I have used several sources of which the most valuable were the papers of W.H.R. Rivers who treated many of these psychiatric casualties, and the publication in 1917 of
Shell-Shock and its Lessons
by two doctors, Grafton Elliot Smith and Tom Hatherley Pear. Daniel Hipp's
The Poetry of Shell Shock: Wartime Trauma and Healing in Wilfred Owen, Ivor Gurney and Siegfried Sassoon
was invaluable in providing the connection between poetry and mental fragility. There was a hospital for shell-shocked officers in Fairford, Gloucestershire (now Coln House School), but Dr Chilvers and his son are entirely fictional. Ben Shephard's
War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Twentieth Century
and Jonathan Shay's
Achilles in Vietnam
were moving accounts of war and mental illness.

Sir Hubert Gough lived until 1963.

I have taken a liberty in placing the Faringdon Folly within the late nineteenth-century landscape. It was, in fact, built by Lord Berners in 1935, although the atmospheric hill upon which it stands is the site of settlements dating back to antiquity. Other locations all exist, although, as far as I know, Wilmington Priory was never used by a nursing order, and the beautiful 'butterfly' window at the church of St Mary and St Peter was lost in a fire a few years ago.

The Darling Committee (1919) and the Southborough Committee (1920—1922) both existed and examined questions of military courts martial and shell-shock, though I have added to their members and to their proceedings. Philip Morrell MP raised questions on these topics in the House of Commons as early as 1918 before standing down for the December election. In 1919 an army officer, Colonel Lambert Ward MP (who had, like Sub-Lieutenant Dyett, served in the RNR), requested that there be no differentiation between the graves of those executed and those killed on active service. Many individuals volunteered to give evidence to the Southborough Committee.

I am extremely grateful for the perseverance of my agent George Capel and her assistants Abi Fellows and Rosie Apponyi in getting the first draft of this book to a state where it could be considered a novel. My thanks too to Lennie Goodings at Virago; her confidence and continued investment in it were hugely encouraging. I also owe a debt of gratitude to her assistant, Victoria Pepe, who read the manuscript first and whose belief in it pushed it forward, and to the sheer stamina of my assiduous copyeditor Celia Levett. George Miller and Katharine Reeve provided technical advice throughout the writing of the book.

The assistance of Richard Holmes was invaluable; he headed off my worst military blunders with patience and good humour. Alwin Hutchinson also advanced my military education. Any remaining mistakes were entirely dreamed up by me.

Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, has, as always, been an inestimable resource for information and ideas, as well as providing the enduring friendships that have sustained my writing career.

Finally, my thanks go to the trustees of the Hosking Houses Trust who provided the 2008 Residency that allowed me to get the bulk of this book written in the peace of the Trust's Church Cottage on the banks of the River Avon near Stratford.