The First Casualty (22 page)

THIRTY-SEVEN

At home with the nervous

Finally the troop train crawled into the railhead, which was the dispersal point for the whole Ypres salient. The men had arrived at the place they called Wipers, arguably the most loathed destination of any part of the British line, certainly the wettest, a place around which there had been nearly continuous fighting for the entire war. As the train approached, a fellow with a harmonica began to play a mournful tune. A number of the men took it up in gentle, sombre tones. Like so many soldiers’ songs,’ this one had begun life as a hymn but it was a hymn no longer.

‘
Far, far from Wipers I long to be

Where German snipers can’t get at me
.

Dark is my dugout, cold are my feet
.

Waiting for whizbangs to send me to sleep
.’

On disembarking, Kingsley parted from the soldiers with whom he had entrained. They were heading directly up to the front, towards Ypres, whilst he must begin his investigation at the scene of the murder, the NYDN centre at Merville on the River Lys, some six kilometres from the front line.

Despite the fact that the war was already some three years old and the areas of combat had not changed significantly since the early autumn of 1914, transportation and communications to the rear of the fighting remained primitive and highly inefficient. Kingsley watched, astonished, as men who had just been subjected to a day and a night crammed into horse trucks were formed up with full kit and ordered to march immediately to the front, over what he could see was the most appallingly broken ground. Like most civilians, Kingsley had grown used to the numerous photographs published at home of cheery Tommies loaded into double-decker buses, waving to the camera as if on a spree. The reality was very different. The army of Sir Douglas Haig,’ like every army before it,’ travelled up the line on its feet, and in this most modern of wars the armies of the great industrialized nations arrived at their trenches exhausted.

Kingsley was more fortunate. He had put his red tabs and captain’s pips back on and was able, with the authority they gave him, to find transport to Merville. This was, after all, the dispersal centre for the whole line and Kingsley was heading for a Royal Army Medical Corps facility. It did not take him too long to find an ambulance that was heading his way.

‘Hop in the back if you want,’ the medical orderly at the wheel shouted down, ‘but don’t expect much conversation.’

Kingsley climbed into the back of the canvas-covered truck and found a place amongst the patients. For a moment he almost wished that he had walked. The atmosphere was stifling but it was not the fug of unwashed men sitting about him caked in mud and blood that oppressed him so; it was their faces. It was their eyes.

Kingsley had known instantly that things were not right when not a single man returned his greeting as he climbed into the truck. The silence that met him was far more intimidating than the sound of the guns, which had been clearly audible ever since he had got off the train. Kingsley should have been expecting it, of course; he knew exactly what kind of facility it was towards which he was heading and he knew that many shell shock victims were mute. All the same, these silent men who had withdrawn inside themselves, staring at nothing with their empty, startled expressions, unnerved him. It felt to Kingsley, as they bumped along the cobbled road in their ill-sprung vehicle, that he was sitting amongst the living dead. He was ashamed to realize that these poor wretches scared him.

Suddenly, there was a scream.

Kingsley nearly jumped through the roof. One of the silent men was silent no longer: he screamed and screamed, bawling incoherent commands at the top of his voice, scratching at his face with his nails before falling to the floor of the truck and writhing at the feet of his impassive comrades. In a moment the fit was over, the man lay where he had fallen, and there were no further disturbances for the duration of that most uncomfortable ride.

When the journey ended, Kingsley had never been so glad to leave a truck in his life. The eighteen hours in the horse truck had been far preferable to the hour he had spent with these lost men, and he resolved that at the end of his investigations at the NYDN centre, when the time came for him to return to the railhead, he would either find a place in the front of a truck beside the driver or he would walk.

‘Warned you they weren’t very sociable,’ the orderly remarked as he dropped Kingsley off at the front of the château.

It was a magnificent building, the first beautiful thing that Kingsley had seen in France and the first truly French thing as well. Even Boulogne, what he had seen of it as the train rode through, had been more like an extension of Britain than a French town, with its hotels bearing English names and signs offering fish and chips and India Pale Ale. Now, though, Kingsley felt that he was truly in France and he could not help his thoughts turning to Agnes,’ who had loved France,’ adored it, or at least she had adored Paris. Or at least she had adored the shops and cafés in Paris and of course the Eiffel Tower. She had
quite
liked the art galleries and could stomach Sacré Coeur but she thought Notre Dame simply the gloomiest place on earth and had declined even to ascend the towers, saying that she had no desire to seek out the company of gargoyles. Kingsley smiled at the memory of their trips together to that most beautiful of cities and how they would clash over the day’s itinerary at breakfast each morning. She would vote for shops and cafés,’ he for art and history. He missed her terribly.

He looked about him. Two games of football were under way in the grounds of the château and a drill sergeant was taking a gentle PT class. Lawn tennis and croquet were being played, and a course in motor mechanics appeared to be in progress around and underneath a magnificent Renault limousine. In spite of all the activity, there was something strange and listless about it all, as if the participants, or most of them at least, were simply feigning interest whilst waiting for some other thing of which only they were aware. Kingsley watched a fellow in striped shirt and footer bags kick the ball to a similarly dressed team-mate: although the pass was good (if rather slow), the second man simply let the ball roll by without even attempting to block it.

‘Not what you’d call spectator sport, is it, Captain?’ a woman’s voice behind him said. ‘But then I imagine the very best players might be put off their game a bit by spending a year or two in hell before kick-off.’

Kingsley turned to find himself facing a woman in her early twenties wearing the uniform of an RAMC staff nurse.

‘Murray. Staff Nurse Murray,’ she said, offering her hand as if challenging Kingsley to shake it. ‘I presume you are Captain Marlowe? ‘

‘Yes. Yes, that’s right.’

‘We were warned to expect you. You’re here to speak to me about Captain Abercrombie, the famous hero who died in battle who didn’t die in battle, and Private Hopkins, who murdered him except he wasn’t murdered. Am I right, Captain?’

‘You are right. They were patients of yours, I believe?’

She was not tall, in fact she was quite short, but she definitely had presence. What she lacked in height she made up for with a kind of tense energy that seemed to exude from her even in what one might have imagined were relatively relaxed circumstances. Her uniform was neat but she was not wearing her cap, which strictly speaking was an offence. Her hair was rather modishly bobbed, like a shiny black helmet with a severe fringe cut straight across her forehead about a half-inch above her eyebrows. She wore tortoiseshell glasses and had on not even the faintest hint of rouge. She was very pretty in a schoolgirlish sort of way. Both bookish and sporty at the same time, like a head girl at a seaside boarding school. The sort of girl who would think nothing of taking an early morning dip in the middle of January before rushing enthusiastically to her first Latin class.

‘Yes, we had them here,’ Nurse Murray said. ‘Like all these fellows they were NYDN, Not Yet Diagnosed but Nervous.
Very
nervous. Don’t you just love the army? They take a fellow who’s been turned into a catatonic mute by being shelled from here to Christmas and say he’s not yet been
properly diagnosed
but he seems
a bit nervous
. The army know these men have been driven crazy, the question we’re supposed to answer is
how
crazy. Or to put it another way, can they still hold a gun? The only diagnosis the army’s interested in is how soon can we shove them back in the trenches. No jolly wonder they’re nervous.’

‘And how soon would Abercrombie and Hopkins have been returned?’

‘Very soon,’ Murray replied. ‘They could stand, they could walk, they had regained sufficient speech to answer to and give a command. What more do you need to fight in this war? Most of the men you see here will be sent back to fight within a month or so.’

Kingsley looked once more at the desultory activities taking place on the beautiful lawns around him. These strange, abstracted men did not appear to have much fight in them.

‘Captain Marlowe?’ Nurse Murray said, a frown wrinkling her brow. ‘May I speak plainly?’

‘But of course.’

‘You will probably think me very rude but I must speak my mind. I always speak my mind and I make no exceptions for military policemen.’

‘I would expect nothing less, nor desire it.’

‘A lot of men seem to find it irritating when women speak their minds, intimidating even, but I can assure you that has never stopped
me
from speaking my mind.’

‘I am sure that it hasn’t.’

‘The woman who does not speak her mind is worse than the man who does not give her credit for having a mind in the first place.
He
merely lets
himself
down,
she
lets down her whole sex. Women have a duty to speak their minds and that is why I always speak mine.’

‘Uhm…right. So. Would you like to sit down somewhere?’

‘I am quite happy to stand.’

‘Right-ho.’

‘I am not a weakling.’

‘No.’

‘Perhaps you are used to women who swoon in the presence of policemen?’

‘Not really.’

‘Female stamina is in fact universally proven to be greater than the male’s. In some societies women not only produce and raise the children but also do all the work.’

‘Yes, I believe that is true.’

‘Do you know why women swoon, Captain?’

‘Well,’ I…’

‘It is because their corsets constrict their breathing. Imagine that, Captain, women abusing themselves in an attempt to change the shape of their bodies in order to be more attractive to men. How appalling. How pathetic. Only society women swoon; working women do not wear corsets.’

‘Mmm,’ well anyway, Nurse Murray, you mentioned that you wished to speak your mind. What was it that you wished to say?’

‘That I don’t like military policemen.’

‘I see.’

‘In fact I don’t like any policemen.’

‘Well, I suppose there’s not much I can..’

‘I loathe them with a furious and righteous passion.’

‘…do about that.’

‘There are no words to describe the contempt in which I hold every single policeman on this earth. British policemen may be better than some but not by much, I think, and they are still policemen in the end.’

She clearly meant it, and although her youthful intensity had a certain charm about it Kingsley decided that he would be wary of Nurse Murray. Something beneath the amusingly severe exterior suggested to him that here was a young woman who was capable of real anger. Clever too, he thought, and probably brave; after all, the RAMC on the Western Front was not a place for sissies and although he knew her to be only twenty-two she had already achieved the rank of staff nurse.

‘If you do not wish to sit, would you mind if we walked a little?’ Kingsley asked. ‘I’ve been travelling for a couple of days now. A boat, a horse truck and an ambulance. I’d really love to stretch my legs in these beautiful grounds, if that’s all right? Particularly since the rain’s holding off.’

Nurse Murray shrugged.

‘Walk,’ stand, sit, jump. Just so long as I have made it absolutely clear that I don’t like policemen.’

Nurse Murray set off at a brisk, no-nonsense pace, leading Kingsley towards a little elm wood that promised a real comfort to Kingsley’s eye after the grimness of his recent journey.

‘Nurse Murray?’ Kingsley enquired after they had walked together in silence for a few moments. ‘I have heard reports of your account of the night on which the murder took place and I confess I found it rather short on detail. Do you think that there is any way that your judgement or your memory might be affected by your attitude to the police?’

‘Well, you’re a blunt sort of chap, aren’t you?’

‘Like you, I speak my mind.’

‘You mean am I lying?’

‘Yes.’