In Pale Battalions (10 page)

Yet a part I had still to play. And, true to the conditioning of Army discipline, I would have led my platoon into the poisoned air of sacrifice without, or at least despite, hesitation, had Hallows not called a halt. He came down the trench towards me, his face full of anger at generals far away.

“There’ll be no second wave, Franklin. Secure this section but do not advance.”

“Have our orders changed, sir?”

“No. But I’ll send no more men into that.” He gestured towards no-man’s-land. “I’ve sent to Romney for definite instructions.

Meanwhile, we wait.”

As he moved off, my sergeant, who’d overheard, whispered to me: “Reckon he’s saved us from the high jump, sir.” He was right.

Now word came from HQ. A further attack was postponed. We busied ourselves moving the wounded, then waited.

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The waiting continued for ten days. Looking back, I am surprised I could have tolerated such a spell—without proper shelter—in that foul slaughter-ground. Sporadic bombardments continued. A few successful gas discharges were at length managed, but the advances they encouraged were swiftly repulsed, with heavy losses.

Our own company remained in cautious occupation, as if Hallows’s mood was known and not to be tested. By night, he led rescue parties to bring in the wounded. By day, he comforted and cajoled us. This was a different man from the one whose weariness and cynicism I’d distrusted earlier, or, rather, the same man seen through my changed eyes. This was the John Hallows who became my friend.

I recall standing with him at the junction of a communication trench just after stand-down one morning—the first of October—looking out across the cratered field of death towards the German lines. I asked—almost rhetorically—“Why are we here?” “Haven’t you heard what the men sing, Franklin?” he replied.

“We’re here because we’re here because we’re here.”

“But that isn’t enough.”

“For them, it has to be. For you and me, reason is scarcely appropriate. Whyever we came—duty, honour,
noblesse oblige
—won’t measure up to this butchery called battle. Will it?”

I shook my head. “No. But there’s no way out—is there?”

“None. We are trapped in the mechanical insanity of a nation at war.” Then he laughed. “Excuse me. I never thought to hear such words from my own lips. Like you, I dare say, I thought enlistment was the right thing to do. I did not understand, you see. And now it is too late.” We talked often in the days ahead, as if to talk was an antidote to what we saw around us. I suppose Hallows was glad of an educated ear and I was glad, I know, of his confidence. He told me of his home in Hampshire, his father—Lord Powerstock—who would be appalled to hear his view of warfare, and his young wife, who would not be. He told me what he thought of the high command and their prosecution of the war. He told me what he made of a beautiful world that could permit such ugliness. He told me, in short, of himself.

In the middle of October, our battalion was withdrawn from the front line for Divisional Rest near Abbeville. It was a three-day march away, but we were all happy to go, happy to leave the war 66

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behind—at least for a while. We were billeted in the village of Canchy and could afford, at last, to relax. There, in leisurely surroundings, Hallows and I had many a philosophical debate over a bottle of wine in the cosy
estaminet
of M. Chausson, many a soulful tramp over the fields towards the Forest of Crécy, where another band of Englishmen had once fought—and won—a famous battle.

Hallows told me that in his village church in Hampshire there stood the tomb of a knight who had fought at Crécy all those centuries before.

“I went and looked at it the day before enlisting last year,” he said. “As the son of the squire, I was expected to join promptly and I didn’t resist, but I went to see that Plantagenet knight beforehand for some kind of . . . benediction. I wondered how it had been for him. I wonder still. And do you suppose he ever wondered . . . how it would be for me?” “Hardly.”

“No? Well, maybe you’re right. But, then again, the past is closer than you think in a place like this. There was a trench sector near Ypres where the German lines were only about thirty yards away and, every day, we could see them moving amongst their workings: grey, glimpsed figures not unlike the wolves in winter that knight of Crécy must once have been taught to fear.” Wolves in winter: strange thoughts for such as us, thoughts we’d been led to by the exigencies of war. For that Hallows made me grateful. The war, whatever else it did, expanded us, made him more than just a smug and landed son, made me more than just a priggish young man. In France, we encountered the elemental. In France, we began to question what we’d been trained to expect of life.

Wolves in winter: appropriate images, since winter was indeed drawing in. By the end of November, we were back at the Front.

A different sector this time, further south, beyond Albert, but much the same, in many ways. Trench warfare was still horrible, but no longer novel. I adjusted to the grimly cold trench tours interspersed with withdrawals to the relative cosiness of a nearby farm; adjusted, if you like, to the business of war. Not that it ever became easy. Snipers and night raids continued to take their toll.

Though Hallows taught me to be careful, care was not enough.

Sudden death—above all, the sight of death—became commonplace.

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Just before Christmas, Hallows went home on leave. I saw him off on the train to Le Havre, knowing how badly I would miss him.

He’d become for me a guide in the dark, a reassuring presence, above all a friend. And friendships forged in war are made of strong stuff. Not that I was alone in missing him. The company had come to rely on him. They grew nervous in his absence, as if his physical presence alone made them safe. About this time, I emerged at the other side of my adjustment to the war. Its initial shock had faded.

Yes, it was possible for men and nations to do this to one another.

Now tolerance faded also. I’d been in France for nine months, long enough to learn that what was happening there was neither patriotic nor even necessary: it was merely criminal.

When Hallows returned at the end of January, I saw that he too had changed. It wasn’t merely the usual post-leave depression. No, that wasn’t it. Something else, something back home, had got to him. Others had told me how devastatingly fatuous the domestic view of the war was. I knew he’d been prepared for that, prepared to say nothing of the truth because the truth, by a fireside in England, would seem incredible. So that wasn’t it either. What it was he wouldn’t say—not even to me. But Christmas at home had worried him. That much was obvious. And worries like that were often fatal in France. They made a man careless.

Hernu’s Farm, on a mild day towards the end of February: an innocent day of deceptive warmth. It shines now in my mind like a jewel. The men were resting in the barns and fields. Corporal Quinlan was throwing sticks for old Hernu’s dog and Hallows was sitting in a wicker chair in the watery sun, smoking a cigarette and reading a letter which had recently come with a valentine from his wife. A couple of roosters were pecking at his feet for corn. Guns thumped lazily at the edges of a still afternoon. I rested on the shafts of a hay cart and tried to lighten my friend’s mood.

“How is your wife?” I asked conversationally.

He looked up. “Very well, I gather.”

“She must miss you.”

“Yes. As I do her. Count yourself lucky to be single, Tom. At times like this, it’s best. I often think of what might happen to Leonora if I died out here. Perhaps I should say:
when
I die out here.” “You must cut that out.” Mine was a good-humoured rebuke, but he had offended an unwritten battalion rule: speak of death if 68

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you must, but not your own. That was held to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

He smiled wryly. “Sorry. It’s just that sometimes I think this might go on for ever.”

I said nothing. I had thought the same myself.

“Perhaps the Americans coming in would tilt the balance. Do you think they will?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “If the
Lusitania
wasn’t enough, what could make them?”

“I don’t know. The Americans are . . . strange people. Without history, without . . . obligation.” His point eluded me, as he seemed to notice. “Sorry.” So many apologies were uncharacteristic. “We had an American houseguest at Meongate over Christmas. He gave me one or two . . . insights.” His concentration seemed to drift, then he looked at me intently. “There’s a big push coming this spring, Tom. I’m certain of it. Should I not . . . come through, would you be prepared to visit my family—tell my wife what happened?” “Of course. But must we be so gloomy on such a fine day?”

“I suppose not. But remember—this is what they call a false spring.”

How right he was. Winter returned to Picardy and we with it, to the frozen trenches. In early April, I was given a month’s home leave. I said goodbye to Hallows at the company dug-out one morning of scattered snow. He left off trying to coax a stove into life and walked out with me down the track towards Albert. His farewell was a jaunty one, but still there was that undertow of a bleak mood I couldn’t catch.

“Take care,” I said, shaking his hand.

“Safe journey,” he replied, as if to deflect my sentiment. “Bring me back an Easter egg—and some spring weather.”

“I’ll do my best.”

Then he was gone, back into the dug-out.

Home leave wasn’t the joy it should have been. The train to Le Havre and the crossing to Southampton: they were the best, because they represented—in their prosaic way—freedom, at least for a while. But being back in England? That was a different matter. It no longer seemed like home, it no longer seemed to be a place I

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could understand. The newspapers were fighting a different war from the one I’d been in and nobody wanted to hear the truth from my lips. I argued with my uncle, prowled the Lambourn Downs and wrote to Hallows, telling him how I felt. In London it was no better—if anything, worse. I began to wish my leave away, much as I knew that, as soon as I was back in France, I would regret it. The war had made me homeless.

In May 1916, just over a year after my first arrival, I was in Le Havre again. Another long train journey, clanking me back across a rain-sodden Normandy towards a fate that waited patiently. At least I was looking forward to seeing Hallows again: I really had brought him his Easter egg.

The battalion had moved to billets in the village of Louvencourt. I located the command post in an old granary and reported to Colonel Romney.

“Welcome back, Franklin,” he said stiffly. “You’ll rejoin C company, of course. You have a new CO.”

“New, sir? Captain Hallows . . .”

“Bought it down the line. Didn’t you know?”

I said nothing. I saluted limply and walked out into the street.

Hallows was dead and I hadn’t known. To Romney it meant nothing: just another name, another casualty. I couldn’t believe it, couldn’t imagine that Hallows was gone. I had that absurd gift—an Easter egg—in my pack, but he would never taste it now.

I got the full story later from the CSM. They were to have pulled out of the Mametz sector on the first of May. The night before, Hallows had gone out with Sergeant Box to check the wire: he wanted to leave it in good order for our successors from the Surrey regiment. Neither man returned. There were gunshots heard in their reach of no man’s land and a couple of flares went up. It was assumed they had run into a German patrol. Certainly the Germans started letting fly at something, which ruled out a rescue party that night. There was no sign next day and then the battalion had to withdraw. A couple of days later, news caught up with them in Louvencourt: one of the Surrey patrols had found a corpse half-submerged in a flooded shell hole. They couldn’t bring him in, but they’d taken his pocket-book and now sent it on to us. It was Hallows’s. The CSM still had it, stained with blood. He told me the men had been very upset. “They’ve took it ’ard, sir. Very ’ard.”

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Not as hard as me, I felt sure. With Hallows went my faith even in the nobility of survival. We were set there—under the perversely brightening skies of spring—on the grinding road to certain death. Whether it came suddenly, literally out of the blue, or stealthily by night, or in the lumbering schedule of some set-piece slaughter, seemed not to matter. The new company commander, Captain Lake, transferred from the first battalion, was too optimistic by half about the pending offensive. He had little time for me and I less for him. I wrote a long letter to Hallows’s widow and made sure it was on its way before we moved to our trench sector by the banks of the river Ancre. I wondered if I ever would keep my promise to Hallows about visiting his family; on the whole, I rather doubted it.

June wore on. A long bombardment commenced to soften up the German lines, a prospect I viewed with all the scepticism of a veteran of Loos. Zero day was fixed for June 29th, then put back—on account of bad weather—to July 1st. Lake’s briefing, hedged around with none of the warnings Hallows would have given, airily anticipated seizing the ridge east of Thiepval as part of the big push. Those of us who knew how well defended that ridge was knew also that our number was up.

July 1st dawned bright with a promise of roasting heat. Lake led us over the top at 7:30 a.m. The men had been instructed to walk steadily across no man’s land towards lines whose occupants were by then supposed to have been shelled out of the way. Naturally, they had not been. Instead, they were ready and waiting to machine-gun the bunched ranks of slowly advancing troops. Round Thiepval, the sloping ground compounded our plight. I was hit before I had gone ten yards. Ahead of me, I saw Lake go down, and dozens more with every moment I watched, shorn like wheat by the scything fire.