The Somme Stations (33 page)

‘What the hell’s going on? We told the Control to hold you back.’

I saw behind them a figure with a lamp, moving more slowly, and looking half concerned: Oliver Butler, ‘the Control’, who had been told to keep us back. But I was melting into the ground where I lay. I thought: I have one more chance to make a movement before the pain becomes intolerable, but I discovered that I was wrong about that.

When I was half awake, but still under the gas, I looked through a gap in the curtains and saw, in the dawn light, Ilkley Moor, a good deal higher than it had been before, and moving towards this house, and towards me, closing in. It then came to me that this was a great bank of cloud, with a ragged top, but I was still not quite thinking straight, because it seemed very clear that this bank of cloud was called the Western Front, and so the Western Front was coming to Ilkley.

I shifted my position a little, and saw on the bedside table, alongside my pocket book, which was stuffed with letters of recent date from the Chief, a packet of cigarettes. But a smoke was just then out of the question. I knew that I had surfaced, so to speak, only briefly from my long sleep. But at the sight of the carton, I recollected the matter that had plagued me ever since I had come to ‘Ardenlea’, namely the lighting of a cigarette – heard, not seen – at a late stage on the journey back to Albert from Amiens, with Alfred Tinsley sitting before me, and the train crashing over points.

The uppermost parts of cloud were now breaking away from the Western Front, looking first like sea waves, and then floating clear. I was aware of a bad pain in my leg, but it was remote, more like a pain I might be reading about rather than actually suffering. It was time to go back to sleep.

On waking, or rather not quite waking, I saw there was only the Moor beyond the window – the Moor at its normal height,
under a sky that threatened snow. The wife came into the room, and it was comical to watch her trying to make an entrance so quietly. She sat down on the visitor’s chair, and I could tell that she did not quite know what to do, so she rose up, and kissed me, then sat down again, looking slightly embarrassed. I liked the grey-blue of her dress, the darkness of her eyes, but it seemed best to contemplate them from a half-sleeping state. This was like a sort of deal made between myself and my bad leg. If I did not provoke it, then it did not provoke me.

The wife looked restless. She had more energy than was required for almost any situation in which she might find herself, and I was sure she must have had enough of this gloomy house and its silent, shaking men. She was eyeing me closely. Perhaps she thought I was shamming, not really asleep and so, just in case, she began to speak:

‘I have just spoken with Hawks, the surgeon, Jim, and he assured me that the operation had been a complete success.’

She looked at me uncertainly for a while. She didn’t know whether to carry on with her speech or not, but in the event she did so.

‘I told him, “That’s what you said that time”, and he replied, “Your husband was very unlucky in what happened to him in the previous operation.” I said, “He certainly was.”’

At this, the wife bit her lip, or not exactly that, but somehow gave me the idea by her expression that she regretted saying that to Hawks, and also regretted telling me that she had said it. She carried on:

‘He’s right this time though, Jim. I know he is.’

Another pause, then she said, ‘Well, I think I will go for crumpets at Betty’s Tea Rooms today! I’ve been meaning to do that ever since I came here!’

But it was forced jollity, and the next moment, she was almost in tears as she said, ‘There is a man called Thackeray coming to see you, I am not allowed to be here when he does.
But Hawks will be with you,’ and she stood up in a flurry, with a rustling of her skirt, adding, ‘… because Hawks is an officer, and there must be an officer present for what the man Thackeray has to say.’

She turned to the door very noisily and was gone.

It might have been an hour later, or five hours later, that Thackeray was standing at the foot of my bed. Hawks was at the side of it, in the visitor’s chair. I recall, as though by way of preparation, Thackeray talking to Hawks, saying, ‘There are some good men in here’, by which I supposed he did not include the men from the New Armies. He explained to Hawks that the task he was about to perform might have been given over to another military policeman, only he – Thackeray – had had to escort an important German prisoner from France to the York Castle, where he was to be held from the duration of the war. So he was killing two birds with one stone. At this, he turned to face me, stood to attention, and started with the killing.

He asked me some quick questions, machine-like. The one he liked best, I could tell, was: ‘Why did you take hold of a German rifle after your train crashed at Flers?’I believe he enjoyed greatly both the question and my answer: ‘I’ve no clear notion.’ He then told me my name and my rank. I had thought he was already standing to attention, but he went up straighter still in order to say that he was charging me with the murder of Fusilier William Harvey … and he gave the date and the place, the place being Spurn Head. He asked if I understood and I heard myself saying yes. Thackeray looked at Hawks, and Hawks nodded on my behalf, but Thackeray wasn’t done yet, and he started all over again. He was now charging me with the murder of Fusilier Alfred Tinsley. Once more, he gave a date, and the place: Flers, France. He had instructed a member of the regimental police of my own battalion to guard me during my convalescence. I was to obey without hesitation his
orders, and the instructions of the staff of ‘Ardenlea’. Presently, I would be visited by my counsel, a man supplied from the Army Legal Corps. I would, when fit enough, be removed to the military wing of Armley Gaol in Leeds, to await court martial. Thackeray then walked around to the side of the bed with a tremendous squeaking of boots that seemed to cause some pain to Hawks, handed me the charge sheet, and was gone.

Hawks remained behind, and removed the bandage from my leg. I saw the patch of iodine, and the bristling cat gut, like barbed wire, and I did not much care for the sight, so I distracted myself with talking in – no doubt – a dazed sort of way. I told Hawks that Thackeray had found a motive for me vis-à-vis the boy Harvey. I had arrested his father on York station. The prosecution had not been proceeded with, since Read – the father – had fallen severely ill before the matter could come to the police court. But word of the arrest had spread, and the disgrace stood. It was Thackeray’s belief that Harvey had come to know of it. It was also Thackeray’s belief, I explained to Hawks, that on the stormy night in Spurn, when I had been up late in the building called the Hope and Anchor, Harvey had picked a fight with me over this, and that we had come to blows on the sea wall. He – Thackeray – had found it telling that I had at no stage volunteered the information about my arrest of William Harvey’s natural father. Furthermore, I had admitted to having cut my knuckle on Spurn. I had said I had done this before the arrival of Harvey on the peninsula, and this Thackeray did not believe.

As to the second charge, this all rested – I explained to Hawks, as he re-bandaged my leg – on the fact of Tinsley having been shot and killed by a bullet from a German Mauser rifle. I had been discovered lying wounded from a shell with such a rifle close at hand. Inspection of the magazine showed that one bullet had been fired. An artillery man called Dobson – the one who had told me, as I lay wounded, that ‘the
Control’ (Oliver Butler) had been instructed to hold the train back – had testified to having seen me point the rifle towards Tinsley, although he would not swear that I had
fired
at Tinsley. The evidence for this second charge was stronger than that for the first, but the two were connected, in that my motive for killing Tinsley was taken to be that he knew – and had let
on
that he knew – that I had done for Harvey on Spurn. He had, on the afternoon of his final day, asked Quinn how he might get into touch with Thackeray, and Thackeray believed that I had known of this.

Hawks had no doubt been told most of this already by Thackeray, and so he said nothing in response. He might have wondered how I’d got such a good idea of the case against me at this early stage. Well, I had pieced together the picture using the pointers given by the questions of Thackeray, my own guess-work, and from my correspondence with the Chief. Thackeray had quizzed the Chief about my arrest of the indecent Read. He – Thackeray – had told the Chief that charges were likely, and the Chief had evidently replied that, if brought, they would certainly be defeated, which reply would very likely have done my case more harm than good, diplomacy not being one of the Chief’s points.

My ‘guard’ was a Corporal Brewster, the one I’d thought might have been called Baxter of the two regimental police who’d politely questioned our section after the death of Harvey. He arrived with the snow, and slipped on the doorstep of ‘Ardenlea’ after ringing the bell. He began shamefaced, and so he continued. He had not been in France, but had been kept back as part of a something called the ‘Hull Dock Garrison’. Accordingly, most of the blokes in the house wouldn’t give him the time of day. They’d all heard of the charges against me, but it did not seem as though I was under a cloud. Inasmuch as the charges were believed – and I had no idea how far they were, since a
gentlemanly reserve applied to discussion of them … Well, bad things happened on the front. All men who’d been ‘through it’ knew that, and quick judgements were to be resisted.

Brewster was rather stooped for a military policeman, as though perpetually ducking the shellfire that he’d never been subjected to. Having been cold-shouldered by all the blokes in the house, he came up to my room, and told me that he personally had nothing against me, and that I might move freely about the house on my crutches, and he would see his way clear to letting me roam the grounds once my leg had got a bit better.

For four days, I lay in bed. I wrote to the Chief saying I’d been charged, and he told me to expect a visit from himself at some point in the near future. On my first night downstairs, I sat in the library with my crutches by the side of my armchair and a packet of Virginians Select on my lap. There were a dozen of us in there, and we were watching a fellow from Leeds – name of Ross (although whether that was his first name or his last, I wasn’t sure) – who was an amateur magician, and who performed tricks with cigarettes. This was a species of war work. He toured the hospitals and convalescent homes entertaining the men. He had lost an eye at Mons, and so could not be accused of slacking, and he began by giving an account of how this happened. He then started in on his tricks. All of his audience smoked, so he was well away. He would take a man’s Woodbine, and put it into a packet of, say, Churchman’s, then hold out the packet, and the Woodbine would rise up. After he’d done this a couple of times, I noticed my guard, Brewster, watching from the doorway and grinning in his shamefaced way.

Ross would offer a cigarette from his own packet; he would then turn this packet around, and it would have become a box of matches. He performed a couple of other tricks, just as good, and he was going on very well indeed until he tried a bit
of business with Anderson, who was very badly shellshocked. Well, Anderson could remove the cigarette from the packet as instructed; he was able to inspect it carefully, as also instructed, but the returning of the cigarette to the packet … that was quite beyond him owing to his shaking hand, and so the trick had to be abandoned. Ross seemed to lose heart after that, and he went off shortly afterwards.

Over the next two weeks I began to walk in the grounds, trying to master crutches along with all the other crocks, but my progress was evidently the fastest that Hawks had ever seen, and my target became the lower slopes of the snowy Moor, which lay directly beyond the gates of ‘Ardenlea’, and the white house up there, a place where folk would take spring water baths: it was called the White Wells, and seemed to have been assembled from the surplus snow all around.

The grounds of ‘Ardenlea’ received a fresh dusting most mornings, and a little ritual developed: Anderson and Birch (who was just as nervy as Anderson) would go out every morning and break the ice on the fish pond. They would always be watched by Major Dickinson, who was the most senior man in the place, and who propelled himself in a bath chair, being partly paralysed through shellshock – he didn’t
believe
he could move his legs. Breaking the ice, and so giving the fish what Major Dickinson called – it was a queer expression in the circumstances – a ‘dog’s chance’ of surviving was the highlight of the day for all three, and I had the idea that the job never took as long as they would have liked.

These three men would talk of a stranger who had been seen in the grounds lately. Dickinson (who was a bit nuts, shellshock aside) believed him to be after the fish, some of which were valuable, but the other two reported that he’d been seen looking up at the windows of the house. My own suspicion was that this man was looking for me. I knew he would not be friendly, and I wondered whether Brewster would find himself having
to guard me from him. Brewster carried a gun, and the Chief in one of his letters had urged me to do likewise, for I’d told him of my expectation.