The Return of Captain John Emmett (26 page)

'Why did you have to defend Hart anyway?'

Brabourne shrugged as he lit his cigarette. 'Well, somebody had to. He was in my regiment. My father died when I was young but he'd been a barrister. KC in criminal law. Mostly to please my mother I was supposed to be going the same route. I was a pupil in chambers: Paper Court, strings pulled, shoehorns applied. Outcome, disappointment all round. I hated it and suddenly the war came and there was a way out. So I'd had some experience of advocacy, though not much. Fat lot of good it did Hart. Frankly they were only giving lip service to the conventions anyway.'

'Was the court martial fair?' asked Laurence. He wasn't sure whether any of this was relevant to John but having heard Byers' disturbing version of Hart's execution, he wanted to get a sense of the whole episode.

'Fair? What a question. It was a full-field, general court martial, of course, as he was an officer. Would he have been convicted in a peacetime court? No. Would he have been shot if he were a private? Probably. Did guiltier men than he escape prosecution? Undoubtedly. Were there grounds for leniency? Certainly; the board made a unanimous recommendation for mercy. And I gather some, at least, were appalled to find the sentence had been confirmed. Were they out to make an example of somebody? Unquestionably.

'But was the sentence unjust in the circumstances?' He appeared to think it over. 'No, not really. But hard? Very. The evidence was hardly substantial. It was the handling of the whole affair that was cruel. They took six weeks to decide to act against him in the first place and that hiatus had persuaded him that there wouldn't be any court martial. In the event, he had less than two days to prepare a defence, though proper procedures were just about followed. A court martial isn't really an inquiry. It's not like a court case at the Old Bailey. There's no real cross-examining, just statements with an assumption the truth is being told—except by the defendant.'

He stopped and examined his cigarette, which was burning fast, and then drew on it almost experimentally. 'About a hundred years old,' he said, 'my brother got them in Turkey.' He paused for a moment. 'You know how it all came about?'

Laurence shook his head. 'I don't know anything about what he did.'

Ah.' Brabourne said nothing for a while. The cigarette looked close to catching fire completely.

'Do you have the time for this now?' Laurence asked.

'I'll tell you what,' Brabourne said. 'I do need to meet someone actually. Old friend now at the Bar. Come with me. Have a quick drink at the Cock. He's invariably late.'

He stood up without waiting for a reply, took what looked like an old naval duffel coat from a hook on the back of the door and let Laurence follow him down several flights of stone stairs.

***

They came out of the square and turned right into Fleet Street. Brabourne kept talking all the while.

'In a nutshell, Hart vanished when he should have been fighting. He started off in the rear. The CO instructed another junior officer to tell Hart to take some reserves forward to the green line. He didn't order Hart directly; every aspect of Hart's orders that day was equivocal. He should have got off the charge simply on that count. Anyway, they came under heavy fire and the group dispersed, some taking cover, some wandering about. Hart wasn't the only man to get lost. He told an NCO that he was going back to HQ for more orders. The trouble was that on his way back he met another junior officer who told him to go forward again with a dozen stragglers. There was bad blood going back months between Hart and this man. In court Hart argued—
we
argued—that technically Hart had seniority and the other officer had no right to give him orders, but it didn't look good. Hart not only refused to go forward again, but just turned round and walked away from battle by himself, in the opposite direction from his battalion and in full view of a handful of men.'

Brabourne was moving briskly, dodging pedestrians, and when he pulled ahead sometimes his words were lost. Eventually he stopped to cup his hands round a match. As he did so, three different sets of bells began to ring the hour. Laurence looked up with sudden pleasure at the congestion, even of churches, in the heart of the city. Although Brabourne appeared not to have noticed, he said, 'There was a time St Bride's and York Minster were the only churches to have a twelve-bell peal.'

Brabourne went on, 'Something else seems to have happened on that walk back: when Hart was found, he'd discarded part of his uniform despite the bitter cold. He said a shell had landed near him, opening a small mass grave, and that rotten fragments of bodies hit him. Who knows the truth? I didn't. There were graves everywhere, theirs and ours, rotting bodies everywhere, come to that. It might have happened that way. His story was semi-coherent. It was generally believed that he was trying to disguise the fact that he was an officer while keeping his head down until the worst of the attack was over.

'The trigger for Hart's absenting himself was undoubtedly the squabble over who had the right to give who orders. Puerile. This other chap—who was supposed to be in charge of ammo, not giving tactical orders—rushed back to report him. Pathetic and lethal. It was tit for tat really. Hart had reported him a while back for smuggling a woman into their shared quarters, said he couldn't sleep.'

Laurence recognised so much of what he was hearing: antagonisms, feuds, intolerance born of sheer fatigue, but rarely with such a fatal outcome. In his own regiment, Pollock—said to be the fattest, least fit soldier ever to be sent into action, and who was rumoured to have needed to have his uniform made specially—had been mocked relentlessly as he blundered and wheezed through his duties, always trying to deflect jokes made at his expense by being the funny man. To his shame Laurence had tried not to notice.

'But if Hart had gone straight back,' Brabourne continued, suddenly crossing the street at an angle between two motor buses, 'it would probably have passed over.' A car narrowly missed Laurence and the driver hooted his horn at him.

'When he drifted in the next day, his failure to account for his absence led the acting CO to put him under arrest. What happened to Hart between the moment he walked off and his eventual return to the battalion is anybody's guess. I don't think he planned to get out of a tough situation. I think he genuinely lost his mind. Just for a while. But that wasn't the majority view; they thought he was simply in a funk.'

Laurence nodded. In military offences that he'd witnessed, a lot depended on interpretation. However, the cases he'd dealt with did not involve officers, nor did they carry the death penalty.

They were outside a narrow building with a lead-paned bow window.

'Ye Olde Cock Tavern, no less,' said Brabourne, pushing open the heavy door. 'Dickens' favourite.'

The place wasn't busy and they took a table near the fire, facing each other on blackened oak settles. Brabourne insisted on buying the beer.

'There were two things that prejudiced the case,' Brabourne continued, tapping the end of a match on the table to emphasise his points. 'Firstly, Hart had never wanted to be there. He wanted to be in the navy. And he kept on and on asking for transfers, which, as I said before, didn't gain him any friends and of course the navy never took the casualties the army did. So rather than a genuine wish, I think, to be at sea, this looked like further evidence of cowardice. Secondly, the regiment was struggling. Very low morale. There were rumours that a handful of men had gone over to the Germans in the next sector. Junior officers were terrifyingly inexperienced as well as bickering among themselves.'

Laurence remembered how Byers had levelled the accusation of inexperience at Brabourne himself.

'But the real disaster for Hart was that one NCO, who spoke as a witness and had seen him arguing with the other subaltern, said he didn't even look as if he was in a funk; he simply looked as if he'd rather be off out of it. There was something a bit dodgy about that NCO and the other junior officer: they used exactly the same words and phrasing in their statements. In a civilian court we'd be on to that like a shot—obvious collusion—but such refinements didn't impinge on military proceedings.

'And of course his vanishing trick had left his men exposed and at risk. If his behaviour was genuine, then he was deranged. If he was faking it, then his acts were several miles beyond unbecoming of an officer and a gentleman. They thought he was faking it.

'Ultimately he
wasn't
quite a gentleman. It wasn't a particularly smart outfit, for God's sake, but he didn't have the background of the other officers and they let him know it. In fact, to start with, his unpopularity was what coloured my decision to defend him. I didn't think anyone else would even try. Not that I did him any good.'

Laurence watched the man's face. It was bleak. His cigarette burned away between his unmoving fingers. Laurence felt uneasy, as he had when talking to Leonard Byers, knowing that he was returning people to events they would prefer to put behind them.

'I thought Hart would get off, or at least get a lesser sentence, and Hart certainly thought so. I mean, in the entire war only two other officers ever went before a firing squad and one of those was for murder. Officers were found guilty of serious offences from time to time but the sentences were always commuted.
Nearly
always.'

Charles had said the same, Laurence recalled.

'But as the witnesses spoke, I realised he hadn't a hope. It wasn't the facts, meagre as they were. They just didn't like him. He didn't fit in. His commanding officer said he didn't trust him and everyone else took his lead. As for Hart, he wouldn't, or couldn't, even speak in his own defence. They sentenced him to death almost as a matter of course. Still, they made a fairly vigorous recommendation for mercy, on the grounds of his age and lack of experience. For all the good it did.'

He took another drink and wiped his mouth.

'God knows where my chum is.' He looked around as if his friend might be hiding in an alcove. Laurence drank slowly. He wanted Brabourne to complete his story and was glad the friend was late.

'Then, after he'd been found guilty but we were still waiting for the sentence to be confirmed, I was allowed to see him again. There was nothing to say, of course. Not easy to have a conversation with someone you've failed to protect from a death sentence.'

Brabourne took a deep breath.

'He said his nerves were bad and he wished he could have some books, especially poetry. I seized on poetry as something we had in common; we could hardly talk about the weather or the war. I expect you can see what came next: he turns out to have been one of John Emmett's group of poets. It was only then that I found out that he had written for
Constellations.
I'd read several of his poems. He may have been a pretty inadequate soldier but he was an extraordinary poet.'

Laurence felt his breathing slow, as he began to see things coming together, but he wanted Brabourne to tell it all in his own time. Hart must be Sisyphus. Only one poet in the magazine could be called extraordinary.

'So there we sit, a chilly evening in this room in a French farmhouse, which they've commandeered as a prison. Big old fireplace, black and cave-like: somehow it made the room feel colder, having it there unlit. They'd stuffed barbed wire up the chimney, presumably to deter anyone from attempting to climb out, and when gusts of wind were funnelled down, the wire made this whining sound. It made my hair stand on end. The room smelled of cold soot. A small casement window with wooden slats nailed over it and two guards outside the door, though God knows where he was supposed to run off to. Anyway, he still believed the sentence would be commuted. We both did. I think everybody expected it. I'm freezing, he's wrapped a blanket round his uniform in this damn awful situation, and we're discussing Masefield and Brooke and whether Bridges was a good Poet Laureate.'

He paused, tapped his cigarette packet.

'Bloody business. I'd had nothing more than a summary of evidence half an hour before I had to defend him and they told him the sentence had been confirmed only hours before they shot him. When they told him they had the formal confirmation of his sentence, they added, as if it would make a difference, that he was to be allowed to keep his badges and his rank. I mean, what kind of mind thinks up that nicety?'

After a while Laurence prompted him: 'And you saw him again?'

'The padre and the colonel arrived. I left. Hart was a waxwork. Next time I see him, he's tied to a post.'

'Which poet was he?' Laurence asked, certain that Brabourne would confirm what he already knew. 'Hart? His pseudonym?' He nodded at the magazine. Grey and dog-eared, its typing irregular, it looked like something a schoolboy might produce.

'Hart? He was Sisyphus. Perhaps he saw himself always struggling to no avail. We were all a bit dramatic and self-important at the beginning—we were very young. But by God he could write.'

And the fellow subaltern who reported Hart—the one you said was his enemy?'

'Lilley, Ralph Lilley.'

Laurence felt a surge of disappointment. It was not the name he had expected.

Brabourne picked up the pamphlet of poems Laurence had put down on the table, turned over two pages and handed it back, open. 'Hart,' he said. It was the extraordinary poem Laurence had first seen in Cambridge. 'Streets ahead of the rest of us, wasn't he? He wrote in every edition bar the first.' Then he shrugged. 'But who's to know what dead men might or might not have become? Saints and prodigies in a very few cases, perhaps. Most would have shown an utter failure to fulfil early promise, that's my guess. Without a few howitzers, maybe even that creative response might have failed to ignite. Good thing in my case.'

'At least you tried,' said Laurence. 'My service was an intellectual desert. The only writing I did was letters to next of kin.' He grimaced. 'Art came down to nothing more than doodles of the colonel's extraordinary moustache. During my whole time in service I think I finished only two books:
King Solomon's Mines
and
The Good Soldier.
My wife had sent me her idea of suitable reading matter for a fighting man.' He paused. 'I don't think she'd read them herself, not the second, obviously. But the title sounded encouraging. I had a book on church architecture, but apart from that it was the
London Illustrated News,
always minus the best articles, which previous readers had taken a fancy to and cut out. No poetry magazines. I was no John Emmett.'