Post of Honour (43 page)

Sergeant Pitts, DCM, was sitting on the firestep of a hastily dug trench in a turnip field, north-east of Mons, when the guns stopped firing. He too had heard rumours of an armistice but like his neighbour Smut he refused to take them seriously for by now he was completely absorbed in the war and it was not often that he thought of the Valley, or his wife Gloria, or even of his beloved saddlebacks in their sties under Hermitage Wood.

At eleven o’clock when it sounded as though every gunner and every rifleman in the Western Front was competing for the honour of having fired the final shot of the war, Henry’s mind was more humbly engaged. He was trying to open a tin of bully beef with a very blunt bayonet and concentration had temporarily erased the rubbery smile from his face. Watching him, one on either side, were his two special pals, Corporal Watts and L/Corporal Eley, the one a former Blackburn cotton operative, the other a Cockney, who was entered on the battalion strength as bookmaker’s clerk. They missed Henry’s smile. It was like the sun going out and its absence augured badly for the peace for each of them had come to regard it as a Company barometer, indicating fair weather or foul in terms of light, heavy or medium strafing. The magic hour, and its accompanying explosion of firearms, seemingly left Henry unmoved for he could usually only think of one thing at a time but it stirred the imagination of his two companions. About five minutes past eleven L/Corporal Eley began to jump up and down like a child seeking permission to visit the lavatory. It was only when the racket had died away, and a rocket or two was soaring from the German lines, that Eley’s fidgetings distracted Henry to the extent of causing him to rise, cock an ear in the manner of a man who suspects himself the victim of a practical joke, and say, ‘Be it true then? Do ’ee reckon there’s aught in it, after all?’, and without waiting for an answer he unslung his rifle saying, ‘Reckon I’ll get up over an’ take a look!’

At once they began to remonstrate with him. To a cautious man like Watts, one of the very few survivors of Kitchener’s 1915 drive for recruits, it seemed madness to make a target of oneself on the strength of information supplied by officers a few months out of school and he laid a restraining hand on Henry’s shoulder. ‘Nay lad!’ he pleaded, ‘don’t be so bloody daaft! Give ’em an’ hour or so to cool off!’ but by now Henry’s rubbery smile was back again and he said, impatiently, ‘Oh, giddon with ’ee, Bert! Hark to the silence! Tiz all over, baint it?’, and clawed his way over the parapet rising to his full height and standing there, the only living thing above ground in all that vast, dreary landscape.

He remained there for almost a minute and they gazed up at him unbelievingly, expecting, any second, to accord him the honours due to the last man killed in the war. Nothing happened, so presently Henry squelched purposefully out into no-man’s-land, walking with his familiar splay-footed gait that anyone born in the Valley would have recognised a mile away. What astonished him most was the absence of shell-holes in his path until he remembered that Fritz had been leap-frogging back so rapidly that the area had never been subjected to heavy bombardment or cluttered with belts of wire. He was half-way between the lines when he saw a large, grey blob emerge from the earth and begin to plod directly towards him and in the first wake of the blob came another, smaller blob, looking like a trail of disconsolate snails evacuating a cabbage patch. He stopped then and waited, aware that his mouth was dry and his stomach mutinous, as though he had swallowed a quart of canteen beer in a great hurry. The leading blob was now only some thirty yards distant and Henry identified it as a German sergeant approximately his own build, a big-boned, broad-shouldered man, very plump about the jowls so that his coal-scuttle helmet adorned his head like a small extinguisher on a fat Christmas candle.

The German did not seem as unsure of himself as Henry but advanced steadily and close behind him came half-a-dozen other Germans, still in file and led by a very thin officer, who seemed to walk very slowly, as though he found the clay too heavy for his boots. Then Henry noticed that the sergeant was smiling and pointing with his left hand to his right palm which held something that glittered and then raising his other hand to his mouth.

‘Well Christ A’mighty!’ Henry said to himself, ‘I reckon he wants to trade fags for them bliddy cap-badges he’s holding!’ and he hurried forward, fumbling in his tunic pocket for his Woodbines.

Then the Germans came forward at a run and suddenly he was surrounded by infantrymen of a Saxon regiment and his Woodbines disappeared in a flash as the Germans pressed upon him a variety of badges and emblems, including a matchbox holder emblazoned with a double-eagle and the legend
‘Gott Mit Uns’
that Henry recognised as having begun life as a belt buckle. The German officer now came up with them and Henry saw that he was a very sick young man and was breathing hard, as though he had run a mile. In contrast to the plump sergeant the officer’s helmet was too big for him, making his face look cavernous and pinched. He could hardly have been more than twenty and he looked, Henry thought, as if he was consumptive. The sergeant said something in German and the officer translated, flashing a pale smile at the Englishman. He spoke in rather lisping accents that reminded Henry of the occasional nob like Roddy Rudd and Bruce Lovell, who had strayed into the Valley from time to time.

‘The sergeant asks if you will shake the hand,’ he said and Henry, impressed but embarrassed, said that he would gladly shake hands and did so. He had always respected the German front-line troops and, like most of the infantry, dismissed most of the atrocity stories as newspaper twaddle. Then the sergeant said something else and the officer, after a spluttering cough, again translated, telling Henry that the sergeant said he looked as though he was a farmer. Henry was so delighted at this that he seized the Saxon’s hand again and shouted, ‘Youm right first time, Jerry! Now for Chrissake ’ow did ’ee work that one out?’ and after some difficulty, arising perhaps from the officer’s unfamiliarity with the Valley dialect, the officer said Henry’s hands had given him away whereupon Henry turned enthusiastically to L/Corporal Eley, who had come up at a run to harvest more cap-badges in exchange for the half-opened tin of bully, exclaiming, ‘Damme, Bert, theym smart as paint, baint ’em? Smart as paint they be, the whole bliddy lot o’ them!’, and Eley said he had never doubted it and searched his pockets for more Woodbines.

They stood there for perhaps ten minutes before officers came out from the British lines and ordered them back, announcing that an edict from Divisional HQ had strictly forbidden fraternisation. Henry was unfamiliar with the word ‘fraternisation’ and said so but when it was explained to him by a lieutenant of ‘B’ Company he was indignant. ‘Why damme,’ he said to Corporal Watts, in an uncharacteristically heated voice, ‘the bliddy thing’s over an’ done with, baint it? That Fritz was a farmer like me, an’ that poor toad of a lieutenant, the one who could speak our lingo, was half-dead a’ready! Whyfore shoudden us pass the time o’ day with ’em?’

He continued to brood on the fraternisation ban. It seemed to distress him far more than all the straffing and discomfort he had undergone in the past and his natural respect for officers, particularly front-line officers, began to fade, together with his enthusiasm for the war. He remained aloof from the unofficial celebrations (including a spectacular firework display of coloured flares from both sides of the line) and his mind continued to dwell on the bovine, broad-shouldered Saxon, who had instantly recognised him as a fellow farmer. Somehow it never occurred to him that the men he had been fighting all this time were identical, men who, in better times, plodded about tending pigs, herding cows, ploughing up land and banking swedes for winter cattle feed. He had thought of them, if at all, as a race of efficient robots whose trade—if they had one—was war, who had never lived anywhere but in holes in the ground and whose tools included mustard gas and shrapnel. The encounter in no-man’s-land undermined his entire philosophy of war and now, looking back, it seemed to him a very stupid, profitless business and he wanted nothing so much as to be done with it and go home. His dourness puzzled his platoon commander and also his intimates, men like Watts and Eley. Throughout all the bad times they had been able to look to him for reassurance, waiting for his slow, rubbery smile to indicate that the barrage had shifted further back, or north and south along the line but now his essential cheerfulness had deserted him and in its place was impatient pessimism.

They never really got to the bottom of it, although, from time to time, he tried to explain what had wrought such a change in his outlook and when, in late November, they followed the Germans across the winter landscape and entered Cologne he could be seen almost any day distributing pieces of chocolate and tins of plum and apple to clusters of pale, listless children at the street corners, thus openly defying the fraternisation order that he would describe as ‘a bliddy lot o’ red tape that dorn maake no zense no’ow!’

In late January he was weeded out on account of his age group and sent home for demobilisation and about a month later, when there was a light flurry of snow over the Valley, he detrained at Sorrel Halt and came tramping over the moor to the river road. It felt strange to be swinging along without the usual Christmas tree of equipment hanging about him and until he got used to the feeling he did not know what to do with his left hand that had always gripped the sling of the rifle hooked to his shoulder. Then the sky cleared a little and a fitful winter sun gleamed over the Teazel watershed, pin-pointing a million beads of moisture on the broad blades of the river rushes and he stopped to contemplate the scene, comparing it with the porridge aspect of the Salient. ‘By Jesus,’ he said to himself, ‘I’m bliddy glad to be back! I’d clean forgotten how diffrent it was!’ and he marched on, unconsciously adjusting his route march stride to the slow, splay-footed tread of a countryman crossing the ridges of a ploughed field.

IV

P
aul had been home three months then, having been discharged from a convalescent centre in Wales a day or so after the armistice.

His comparatively rapid recovery surprised everybody, including Claire, who had rushed all the way to Rhyl to visit him the moment she had received a letter confirming the wonderful telegram telling her that he was alive and lying wounded at Soissons. Alone in the Valley she was not overwhelmed by this news for she had never, not for a moment thought of him as dead. She was relieved, however, when she found him unmaimed and more or less himself, although he complained of severe headaches that his doctors warned would persist for some months but would grow more and more infrequent as time passed. Although delighted to see her he was somewhat abstracted, as though he could not yet accept the fact that he was not only alive but whole. He remembered very little of the last few months and nothing at all between the moment of stooping to lift the wounded poilu and that of hearing the voice of an American nurse in the ward some ten weeks later. Between headaches he felt fairly fit but he tired very easily and sometimes slept dreamlessly, ten hours at a stretch.

Claire’s two brief visits did a good deal to encourage a steady self-adjustment. He relished the soft, warm plumpness of her hand in his and was touched by her timid hospital smile, saying, ‘Don’t fret, old girl, I’ll be all right when I get out of here,’ and although the doctor warned her that he ought to remain under direct medical care at least until spring she had an uneasy certainty that she was more aware of what was good for him than someone who had never ridden down into the Valley and through the autumn woods about the mere, and that what he needed far more urgently than drugs was the balm of familiar surroundings.

When she returned home for the second time she brought these thoughts into the open during a discussion with Maureen and it was Maureen’s letter to the MO that swung the balance in favour of an early discharge. Less than a month after her second visit news came that he would be arriving on the afternoon train into Paxtonbury and so he did, descending slowly from the carriage and looking about anxiously until he saw the family clustered outside the refreshment room, a rather nervous Claire with seven-year-old Mary holding her hand, five-year-old Whiz holding Mary’s hand, and the twins dancing a jig among a stream of passengers. Mary reached him first and he was touched by the abandon with which she embraced him. He remarked also how pretty and cuddly she looked, with her dark clusters of sausage curls and soft brown eyes, ‘brown an’ mild as a heifer’s’ as Mrs Handcock had once described them. Then he was almost bowled over by the two-pronged assault of the twins, who came at him like a couple of bullet-headed fugitives from a barrage, squealing with excitement, and he thought, fleetingly, ‘I’ve always considered all four of them babies and here they are half-grown children, and each so individual that it hardly seems possible they are all mine and Claire’s!’ Claire stood back, letting the children enjoy their moment and looking, he thought, as though she was going to disgrace them all by bursting into tears. The, pulling herself together, she shepherded them into Maureen’s battered Ford and they bumped off across the moor and down between the banks of crisp, half-dead bracken to the river. All the time the twins chattered gaily while Mary nestled against his shoulder and he thought, as they swung left and along under the paddock wall, ‘It’s a miracle! An absolute bloody miracle to be here again, seeing it and smelling it, with Claire as calm and pretty as ever sitting at the wheel, the twins prattling on about horses and conkers and school, and Mary and Whiz preening themselves but saying little except to tell him that poor Rumble Patrick, Ikey’s boy, had been prevented from joining the welcome home party by ‘the ’flu that everybody caught!’ And then he remembered that he had yet another child, a girl Claire had named Jill, whom he had never seen and his mind leapt back more than a year to the hour of his child’s conception in old Crabpot Willie’s shanty during their second honeymoon, when the war had looked as if it was going on for ever. He felt an immense rush of tenderness and thankfulness for all of them and for everything about him; for the gleaming Sorrel and its sorry-looking autumn rushes, the sprays of late meadowsweet in the hedge, the twenty shades of brown in the avenue chestnuts and the breath-taking peace of a scene unencumbered by rusting wire, unpocked by gaping shell-holes and with every building roofed with thatch and pantiles that still held something of the summer’s warmth.