The Valley of Bones

SNOW FROM YESTERDAY’S FALL still lay in patches and
the morning air was glacial. No one was about the streets at this hour. On
either side of me in the half-light Kedward and the Company Sergeant-Major
stepped out briskly as if on parade. Some time in the past – long, long ago in
another existence, an earlier, less demanding incarnation  – I had stayed a
night in this town, idly come here to cast an eye over a countryside where my
own family had lived a century or more before. One of them (rather a hard case by
the look of it, from whom Uncle Giles’s failings perhaps stemmed) had come west
from the Marches to marry the heiress of a small property overlooking a bay on
this lost, lonely shore. The cliffs below the site of the house, where all but
foundations had been obliterated by the seasons, enclosed untidy banks of
piled-up rock against which spent Atlantic waters ceaselessly dissolved,
ceaselessly renewed steaming greenish spray:
la mer, la mer, toujours
recommençée
, as Moreland was fond of quoting, an everyday
landscape of heaving billows too consciously dramatic for my own taste.
Afterwards, in the same country, they moved to a grassy peninsula of the
estuary, where the narrowing sea penetrated deep inland. There moss and ivy
spread over ruined, roofless walls on which broad sheets of rain were
descending. In the church nearby, a white marble tablet had been raised
in
memoriam
. Those were the visible remains. I did not remember much
of the town itself. The streets, built at constantly changing levels, were not
without a bleak charm, an illusion of tramping through Greco’s Toledo in
winter, or one of those castellated upland townships of Tuscany, represented
without great regard for perspective in the background of
quattrocento
portraits. For some reason one was always aware,
without knowing why the fact should be so inescapable, that the sea was not far
away. The poem’s emphasis on ocean’s aqueous reiterations provoked in the mind
a thousand fleeting images, scraps of verse, fragments of painting, forgotten
tunes, disordered souvenirs of every kind: anything, in fact, but the practical
matters required of one. When I tried to pull myself together, fresh daydreams
overwhelmed me.

Although they had remained in these
parts only a couple of generations, there was an aptness, something fairly
inexorable, in reporting under the badges of second-lieutenant to a spot from
which quite a handful of forerunners of the same blood had set out to become
unnoticed officers of Marines or the East India Company; as often as not to lay
twenty-year-old bones in the cemeteries of Bombay and Mysore. I was not exactly
surprised to find myself committed to the same condition of service, in a sense
always knowing that part of a required pattern, the fulfilment of which was in
some ways a relief. Nevertheless, whatever military associations were to be
claimed with these regions, Bonaparte’s expressed conviction was irrefutable – French
phrases seemed to offer support at that moment –
A partir de trente ans on
commençe à être moins propre à faire la guerre.
That was exactly
how I felt myself; no more, no less. Perhaps others of the stock, too, had
embarked with reservations on a career by the sword. Certainly there had been
no name of the least distinction for four or five hundred years. In mediaeval
times they had been of more account in war; once, a long way back – in the
disconcerting, free-for-all manner of Celtic lineage – even reigning,
improbable as that might now appear, in this southern kingdom of a much
disputed land. One wondered what on earth such predecessors had been like
personally; certainly not above blinding and castrating when in the mood. A
pale, mysterious sun opaquely glittered on the circlet of gold round their
helmets, as armed men, ever fainter in outline and less substantial, receded
into the vaporous, shining mists towards intermediate, timeless beings, at once
measurably historical, yet at the same time mythically heroic: Llywarch the
Old, a discontented guest at the Arthurian Table: Cunedda – though only in the
female line – whose horse men had mounted guard on the Wall. For some reason
the Brython, Cunedda, imposed himself on the imagination. Had his expulsion of
the Goidels with great slaughter been at the express order of Stilicho, that
Vandal captain who all but won the Empire for himself? I reviewed the
possibility as we ascended, without breaking step, a short, very steep, very
slippery incline of pavement. At the summit of this little hill stood a
building of grey stone surrounded by rows of spiked railings, a chapel or
meeting house, reposing in icy gloom. Under the heavy portico a carved scroll
was inscribed:

SARDIS
1874

Kedward came smartly to a halt at the
entrance of this tabernacle. The Sergeant-Major and I drew up beside him. A
gale began to blow noisily up the street. Muffled yet disturbing, the war horns
of Cunedda moaned in the frozen wind, as far away he rode upon the cloud.

‘This is the Company’s billet,’ said
Kedward, ‘Rowland is meeting us here.’

‘Was he in the Mess last night?’

‘Not when you were there. He was on
his rounds as Captain of the Week.’

I followed Kedward through the
forbidding portals of Sardis – one of the Seven Churches of Asia, I recollected
– immediately entering a kind of cave, darker than the streets, though a shade
warmer. The Sergeant-Major formally called the room to attention, although no
visible presence stirred in an ominous twilight heavy with the smell of men
recently departed, a scent on which the odour of escaping gas had been
superimposed. Kedward bade’ the same unrevealed beings ‘carry on’. He had
explained earlier that ‘as bloody usual’ the Company was ‘on fatigues’ that
week. At first it was not easy to discern what lay about us in a Daumier world
of threatening, fiercely slanted shadows, in the midst of which two feeble jets
of bluish gas, from which the pungent smell came, gave irregular, ever-changing
contours to an amorphous mass of foggy cubes and pyramids. Gradually the
adjacent shapes contracted into asymmetrical rows of double-decker bunks upon
which piles of grey-brown blankets were folded in a regulated manner. Then
suddenly at the far end of the cave, like the anthem of the soloist bursting
gloriously from a hidden choir, a man’s voice, deep throated and penetrating,
sounded, rose, swelled, in a lament of heartbreaking melancholy:

‘That’s where I fell in love,
While stars above
Came out to play;
For it was
manaña,
And we were so gay,
South of the border,
Down Mexico way …’

Another barrack-room orderly, for that
was whom I rightly judged the unseen singer to be, now loomed up from the
darkness at my elbow, joining in powerfully with the last two lines. At the
same time, he swung his broom with considerable violence
backwards and forwards through the air, like a conductor’s
baton, finally banging it with all his force against the wooden legs of one of
the bunks.

‘All right, all
right, there,’ shouted the Sergeant-Major, who had at first not disallowed the
mere singing. ‘Not so much noise am I telling you.’

As one’s eyes grew used to the gloom,
gothic letters of enormous size appeared on the walls of the edifice, picked
out in red and black and gold above the flickering gas-jets, a text whose
message read straight across the open pages of a huge volume miraculously
confronting us high above the paved floor, like the mural warning at Belshazzar’s
feast:

‘Thou hast a few names even in Sardis
which have not defiled their garments:
and they shall walk with me in white:
for they are worthy.’
Rev. III. 4.

‘Some of these blankets aren’t laid
out right yet, Sergeant-Major,’ said Kedward. ‘It won’t do, you know.’

He spoke gravely, as if emphasising
the Apocalyptic verdict of the walls. Although he had assured me he was nearly
twenty-two, Kedward’s air was that of a small boy who had dressed up for a lark
in officer’s uniform, completing the rag by rubbing his upper lip with burnt
cork. He looked young enough to be the Sergeant-Major’s son, his grandson
almost. At the same time, he had a kind of childish dignity, an urchin swagger,
in its way quite impressive, which lent him a right to be obeyed.

‘Some of the new intake was taught
different to fold them blankets,’ said the Sergeant-Major cautiously.

‘Look at that – and those.’

‘I thought the lads was getting the
idea better now, it was.’

‘Never saw anything like it.’

‘A Persian market, you might think,’
agreed the Sergeant-Major.

Cleanshaven, with the severely
puritanical countenance of an Ironside in a Victorian illustration to a
Cavalier-and-Roundhead romance, CSM Cadwallader was not as old as he looked,
nor for that matter – as I discovered in due course – nearly so puritanical.
His resounding surname conjoined him with those half-historical, half-mythical
times through which my mind had been straying a minute or two before, the stern
nobility of his features suggesting a warrior from an heroic epoch, returned
with dragon banners to sustain an army in time of war. Like the rest of the ‘other
ranks’ of the Battalion, he was a miner. His smooth skull, entirely hairless,
was streaked with an intricate pattern of blue veins, where coal dust of
accumulated years beneath the ground had found its way under the skin,
spreading into a design that resembled an astrological nativity – his own
perhaps – cast in tattoo over the ochre-coloured surface of the cranium. He
wore a Coronation medal ribbon and the yellow-and-green one for Territorial
long service. The three of us strolled round the bunks.

‘Carry on with the cleaning,’ said
Kedward sharply.

He addressed the barrack-room
orderlies, who, taking CSM Cadwallader’s rebuke as an injunction to cease from
all work until our party was gone, now stood fidgetting and whispering by the
wall. They were familiar later as Jones, D., small and fair, with almost white
hair, a rarity in the Battalion, and Williams, W. H., tall and dark, his face
covered with spots. Jones, D., had led the singing. Now they began to sweep
again energetically, at the same time accepting this bidding
as also granting permission to sing once more, for, as we moved to the further
end of the room, Jones, D., returned to the chant, though more restrainedly
than before, perhaps on account of the song’s change of mood:

‘There in a gown of white,
By candlelight,
She stooped to pray …’

The mournful, long-drawn-out notes
died for a moment. Glancing round, I thought the singer, too, was praying; then
saw his crouched position had been adopted the better to sweep under one of the
bunks. This cramped attitude no doubt impeded the rendering, or perhaps he had
paused for a second or two, desire provoked by the charming thought of a young
girl lightly clothed in shimmering white – like the worthy ones of Sardis – a
picture of peace and innocence and promise of a good time, very different from
the stale, cheerless atmosphere of the barrack-room. Rising, he burst out again
with renewed, agonised persistence:

‘… The Mission bell told me
That I mustn’t stay
South of the border,
Down Mexico way . .

The message of the bell, the singer’s
tragic tone announcing it, underlined life’s inflexible call to order,
reaffirming the illusory nature of love and pleasure. Even as the words trailed
away, heavy steps sounded from the other end of the chapel, as if forces of
authority were already on the move to effect the unhappy lover’s expulsion from
the Mission premises and delights of Mexico. Two persons had just come through
the door. Kedward and the Sergeant-Major were still leaning critically over one
of the bunks, discussing the many enormities of its incorrectly folded
bedclothes. I turned from them and saw an officer approaching, accompanied by a
sergeant. The officer was a captain, smallish, with a black moustache like
Kedward’s, though much better grown; the sergeant, a tall, broad shouldered,
beefy young man, with fair hair and very blue eyes – another Brythonic type, no
doubt – that reminded me of Peter Templer’s. The singing had died down again,
but the little captain stared angrily at the bunks, as if they greatly offended
him.

‘Don’t you call the room to attention
when your Company Commander comes in, Sergeant-Major?’ he asked harshly.

Kedward and CSM Cadwalladar hastily
straightened themselves and saluted. I did the same. The captain returned a
stiff salute, keeping his hand up at the peak of the cap longer than any of the
rest of us.