Field Service (15 page)

‘It will matter to those who knew him and who might one day come to see his grave,' Reid said.

‘Quite. Of course. You're perfectly right. And that's why we must all endeavour to do our best for the poor chap. In fact, just the other day we were discussing the likely numbers where visitors were concerned. Here, everywhere.'

‘Did you come to any conclusions?' Reid said.

‘Not really. Hard to predict a thing like that. It's Edmund's belief that most of the families – lower ranks, Kitchener's boys, that is – won't have travelled very far from where they were born. Hard to see how they'd manage to get all this way. I suppose to most of them, all of this will seem like—'

‘A foreign country?'

‘Quite, quite. Parliament is already talking about setting up funds to assist the most needy. I daresay people might come once, but after that, only the better able and better travelled will continue to visit.'

‘Then let's hope Parliament comes to the right decision,' Reid said.

‘Quite,' Jessop said again, the word like a palm held to Reid's chest. ‘Besides, there are also all the Dominion chaps to consider. Imagine the problems
those
particular families will encounter.'

‘Do we know where Etherington was from?'

‘No idea. Like I said, Edmund's your man for the paperwork. Royal Warwick? Could have been anywhere. I think perhaps the Black Country somewhere. Probably another of those boys only too glad to turn his back on the factory floor, eh?'

‘Probably,' Reid said. He looked along the curving line of the lane, through its pattern of alternating bright sunlight and deep shade where the trees still stood. In parts, it was like looking along a tunnel.

‘So I can inform Edmund that you're fully apprised and likewise prepared?' Jessop said.

‘Of course,' Reid said, sensing that the man was at last ready to leave.

‘And all this Prezière business,' Jessop finally said, glancing away as he spoke.

‘The graves are ready and waiting.'

‘And Lieutenant Lucas …'

‘Gave me most of the paperwork yesterday,' Reid said.

‘Good, good, excellent.'

‘So you can inform Colonel Wheeler – Edmund – that both Lieutenant Lucas and I have followed his instructions to the letter.'

‘I merely intended to ascertain—'

Reid laughed at the words and Jessop fell silent.

Then Reid turned away and walked back to the cemetery entrance.

Jessop walked quickly to catch up with him, determined, Reid supposed, to have the final word.

‘As a fellow officer,' Jessop said to Reid's back, ‘I shall not, of course, repeat any of what—'

‘Do whatever you please,' Reid said, unwilling to turn and face the man again.

‘Good, right,' Jessop said. ‘Then perhaps Chaplain Guthrie might get better sense out of you when—'

‘Guthrie? What's any of it got to do with him?'

Jessop smiled at the remark and all it revealed. ‘Perhaps if you'd allowed me to finish speaking.' He caught his breath. ‘Colonel Wheeler thought it only right and fitting that someone – in this instance, Jonathan Guthrie – say a few words at the interment.'

‘And Guthrie, naturally, jumped at the chance.'

‘I would prefer to say that the chaplain acceded gracefully to Edmund's suggestion. But yes, he will attend and officiate at the burial. Or if not at the actual burial itself – you know how keen the Commission is to keep all these things until the proper time – then at least at the man's delivery to you, at the final part of his journey.'

‘His journey?'

‘Here, to you, to the cemetery,' Jessop said. He swatted the flies from his face. ‘Damn things,' he said.

‘You get used to them,' Reid said.

‘
You
might.'

The two men arrived back at the cemetery entrance, where a solitary block of stone marked the beginning of its proposed gate.

Jessop put on his cap, straightened it, ran a finger along the curve of its brim and then turned and walked back to his car.

Reid walked more slowly to join him.

‘I shall need one of your chaps to crank the engine,' Jessop said. He climbed into the driving seat and sat rigidly with his hands on the steering wheel.

Reid went to the engine and turned its handle.

‘Not you, for God's sake,' Jessop shouted to him. ‘I meant for one of your diggers to come.'

The engine spluttered and fell silent.

It started at the third attempt and Reid stepped away from the car as the fumes from its exhaust drifted towards him.

Jessop waited a full minute before letting out the brake and slowly steering the car forward. He called to Reid, but Reid could not hear him above the noise of the engine, and instead of replying to whatever Jessop had shouted, he held out his arm and pointed to the left, in the direction of the Albert road. Jessop acknowledged this and carried on driving.

Reid waited where he stood and watched the car go. He wiped the sweat from his brow and face and then ran a hand through his hair. The same restless, chattering birds that filled the air above the cemetery also flew back and forth along the narrow lane, gorging themselves on its riches.

THE FOLLOWING DAY
, Reid went with Alexander Lucas to the barn at Prezière to see for himself the bodies that were to be delivered to him. The two men had spent the previous evening together, when Reid had told Lucas of Jessop's errand, and when Lucas, in turn, had suggested the visit to Prezière. The coffins for the bodies would arrive at Morlancourt station separately, and the purpose of the visit was for Reid to ensure that the condition of the corpses would not present him with further problems upon them finally being delivered into his care.

The two men arrived at the ruined hamlet shortly before dawn.

Reid saw that the bodies had been separated and laid out individually, each with as much of its uniform and kit as had been found, and with all metal buttons and insignia attached.

The barn was smaller than Reid had anticipated. Its roof and the upper half of three of its walls had collapsed, and heavy tiles, rafters and masonry had fallen into the space where the bodies had originally been laid.

Lucas told him that the walls had continued to collapse when they'd started their work and that this had delayed them. But now all the bodies had been lifted clear of the walls, fully identified and laid out prior to their removal.

Reid went first to the corpses, and Lucas followed him. He gave Reid a cloth to fasten around his nose and mouth. Reid knew that many of Lucas's men had worn full masks during the worst of the work, but in the two years since the men had died, the worst of their corruption and putrefaction had long since passed.

Even at that early hour, a small group of Lucas's men was gathered a short distance beyond the ruins in what remained of the farmyard.

‘Wheeler's sending lorries tomorrow,' Lucas said. ‘In the absence of coffins, he wants the remains bagging up today ready for loading. There's a road from here to Villier, and the railway there connects to Morlancourt. Are you ready to take them?'

‘Most of the graves are dug. I'm hoping the rest will be completed today. Bodies from elsewhere are being held back in Saint-Quentin for the time being. We'll cope.'

‘Glad to hear it. We've been ordered to leave here ourselves within an hour of the bodies going.'

Looking at the corpses now, Reid guessed that they could be transported, buried, and their graves filled and levelled in a single day's work.

Lucas went to his men and returned with a cardboard folder.

Reid looked at this final documentation and saw that some of the sheets had been marked at the top right-hand corner with a pencilled cross. He remarked on this to Lucas.

‘It was how I indicated the suspicious deaths,' Lucas said. ‘Whatever Wheeler insists on having delivered to you, I still wanted to do something to … I don't know … something to signal to anyone who might look at the sheets in the years to come that
something
had happened to those particular men, at least.'

‘All they'll see will be the pencil crosses,' Reid said. ‘It won't necessarily signify anything to them.'

‘I know. But I wanted there to be
something
, however slight or ambiguous or uncertain.'

Reid understood him perfectly and so said nothing.

‘It was something we all decided on,' Lucas said, indicating the watching men.

Reid had always envied Lucas this easy rapport with his workers, many of whom had volunteered for the work they now undertook, and who stayed longer with their units. He continued looking through the forms.

‘Half of them?' he said.

‘Approximately that. Twenty. All with head wounds, and all with the worst of the burning.'

‘Do you think the others were retrieved from the battlefield and added to their number to try to hide what had happened to them?'

‘It's a possibility.'

‘Has Wheeler – anyone – seen the completed documentation yet?'

‘You mean has anyone seen the crosses? No.'

‘What will you say if he asks you about them?'

‘We thought about that. I'll say that they were the corpses we were able to identify immediately, that the others took a little longer.'

‘Knowing all the doubts you've already raised, he won't believe you.'

Lucas lit a cigarette and gave one to Reid. ‘To tell you the truth, I'm past caring what Wheeler does or doesn't believe. Besides, once the bodies are buried and the final pieces of paperwork are buried even deeper in the Commission Records Office, then who is ever going to know or be able to confirm or even
guess
what the crosses signify?'

‘I suppose so,' Reid said.

The two of them walked the full length of the corpses and then back again, looking down at the remains of each man.

Lucas stopped at one body and drew back the tarpaulin which covered it. ‘This is the eighteen-year-old,' he said.

There was little left to show what the boy had once looked like. A head, a torso, arms and legs, all still clothed and held together, and all of this looking to Reid exactly like the khaki-clad skeleton it had become.

In earlier days, countless bodies – identified and otherwise – had been delivered to him like this, but more recently, and especially after the second depot at Saint-Quentin had been established, all of the bodies and remains he received were hidden from sight. It surprised him now to realize how long it had been since he'd looked at an actual corpse like this, and he understood immediately and forcefully what it was that separated him and his own workers from Lucas and his team.

Standing close together, neither man spoke for a moment.

And then Lucas cleared his throat and said, ‘Anyhow, we've done what we do; now it's your turn.'

Reid closed and resealed the folder he held.

The two men left the bodies and went to sit together on a stack of timber. As the sun appeared more fully on the horizon, birds started calling and then flying around the ruined buildings at the far side of the yard.

‘They probably used to nest in the barn,' Lucas said.

‘When I was a boy, my farmer grandfather told me that each autumn all the swifts and swallows and martins on his farm used to burrow into the earth and then transform themselves into toads, waiting to hop back out into the daylight the following spring.' Reid smiled at this sudden memory of the old man, who had died when he was eight years old and already away at school. ‘He said that the birds spent the winter as toads buried in the ground, and then, come the spring, they transformed themselves back into birds again and shot up into the air. Apparently, it was what one of the Greek philosophers believed happened. No one could account for where all the birds disappeared to each autumn, see?'

Lucas leaned back where he sat. ‘It sounds a bit like us,' he said.

‘What does?'

‘Burrowing ourselves into the ground and transforming ourselves into different creatures completely for the past few years.'

‘Toads?'

‘Why not? What did most of us do except burrow ourselves into the ground to make ourselves as safe and as inconspicuous as possible, and then sit there trembling and fearful and waiting for the sun to shine again?'

‘And transform us back into men?'

‘Most of us,' Lucas said. He motioned to the bodies. ‘Let's face it,' he went on, ‘we
are
changed creatures – there's no getting away from that.'

‘No, I suppose not,' Reid said.

‘For good or ill, we're none of us the men we once were. And nor can we now ever be the men we might once have set out to be.'

Reid said nothing.

‘I've just had a dozen release forms come through,' Lucas said. ‘Twelve of my best workers. Some of them are over there now.' He nodded to the gathered men. ‘All twelve of them will be home by this time next week – sooner even. I'm glad for them, but I'll be sorry to lose them.'

‘You'll end up with a workforce like mine,' Reid said.

‘I know.'

Both men laughed at this.

‘Home,' Lucas said. ‘Walking in and out of their own front doors, in and out of their own rooms, picking up the morning newspaper and worrying about the weather and the football results as though none of this had ever happened to them.'

Neither man believed this.

It was clear to Reid that Lucas's thoughts remained with his own family, his wife in particular, and that the uncertainty of what might now be happening to her weighed on his mind.

‘My grandfather also said that to have the swallows and swifts return to their old nests in your eaves and gutters each year brought good luck to your home,' Reid said.

Lucas watched the birds flitting over their heads. The first of the day's insects had appeared in the warming air. ‘Whatever luck they might once have brought here …' he said.