In Pale Battalions (9 page)

“Wednesday then. Not the Red Lion, though: I know the proprietor.

The gateway leading from the Market Place to the Bishop’s Palace.

It’s called the Bishop’s Eye. Ten o’clock, Wednesday morning.”

So it was agreed. After he’d gone, I began to doubt my own word. He wouldn’t turn up, or I wouldn’t. Somehow, our next encounter couldn’t really happen. When Tony brought you two back from the park, tumbling and clamouring for tea, I began to think I might have imagined Willis’s visit altogether, might have fashioned his very existence from my desire to know the truth.

Yet I knew it was not so. I knew pretending I wouldn’t see him was only an excuse for telling Tony nothing. Not that Tony would have forbidden me to meet Willis. It was not fear of his reaction that made me keep it from him—it was fear of my own. To want something so badly, so hopelessly, for so long, to convince yourself at last that not only can it never be yours but that you no longer truly desire it anyway, then to have it offered you, unlooked-for, un-heralded, unsought: I could only cope with the prospect if I kept it secret.

I went through the street party on Coronation Day in a trance, a trance that did not end until ten o’clock the following morning. I’d arranged for Mrs. Jeffries to come in all day so I could be free. I walked down Milton Lane through the warmth and sunshine of a placidly ordinary day in June. The neighbours I nodded to had no idea of the appointment I was about to keep. In the Market Place, workmen were up ladders taking down bunting from the day before, stallholders were setting out their wares. And, in the turreted shadow of the Bishop’s Eye, Willis was waiting for me.

“I’m glad you came,” he said. He looked gaunter still, and more sombre, in the bleached morning air.

“Did you think I wouldn’t?”

“No. I knew you would.”

We walked through to the Bishop’s Palace and began to follow the footpath round the moat.

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“To begin with,” he said after we’d gone a few yards, “I should tell you that Willis was not always my name. My real name is Franklin. I don’t suppose it means anything to you. The reason I no longer use it lies at the heart of my story. And what I’m about to tell you I’ve never told anyone else, nor ever will.” We walked round the moat, then up Tor Hill and back, then round to the cathedral. We walked and talked for hours. His story was, as he’d warned me, a long one. But I didn’t mind listening, didn’t even notice how tired I was becoming. He had come to me from the padlocked past and now I would follow wherever his words took me.

one

What shall I tell you about your father? Shall we descend together the spirals of his soul? Alas, we cannot. All that I can do is tell you what I know.

What I know, of course, is not the same as what other people may know. What I know is one man’s knowledge of another, a facet, a view, a flawed memory of that brief time when we walked together in this world; a memory, for all that, of the finest man I ever knew.

We met as fellow officers in the Great War: in a time and place where all beauties save friendship were ground into mud and blood, where there was no hope save what men like your father preserved for men like me.

For I was not exceptional. I cannot claim foresight or wisdom beyond my years, then or now. The war was a great adventure, something not to be missed. Just imagine believing that, as I did, in 1914. I was a fool, but what twenty-two-year-old man is not? Did foolishness deserve such a reward? I think not.

So let me tell you about the war—and about myself. I’d just come down from Oxford when it began and I was spending the summer at my uncle’s house in Berkshire. He was a chartered accountant, a tedious but prosperous man who funded my education after my father deserted us and my mother broke down. I never for-gave my uncle his generosity, nor he my fecklessness. I remember him taking me every week—with his unsmiling sense of duty—to 60

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visit my mother at the asylum in Reading. Every week she was worse. Every week I wanted to see her less.

A scholarship to Oxford seemed a merciful release from all that: a breath of fresh, heady air. I was easily intoxicated, easily taken in by the glamour and bombast. I suppose it was a wonderful time to be male, clever and British. But, God, I paid a heavy price for it. We all did.

My mother died during my second term at Oxford and when I came down there was nothing—except my own lack of means—to tie me to my uncle. When the war came in early August, it was a godsend. I remember going up to town when the news came and celebrating—yes, celebrating—with some college friends. I’d been in the OTC at Oxford, so I was confident of getting a commission, and one of my uncle’s friends was a retired colonel in the Hampshire Light Infantry, which made them the obvious choice. My uncle put in a good word for me—I think he was pleased to see me go.

Not that going was quite as quick or simple as I’d anticipated. It was the autumn before I had my lieutenancy confirmed and then there were six months’ training at Aldershot. I was worried at times that the war would be over before I got there. Amazing, isn’t it?

How could I be so naïve? There was no hurry. The war would wait for me. Meanwhile, an officer’s pay gave me plenty of ways of passing the time and the newspapers gave me all the false confidence I needed.

I got my embarkation orders just after Easter 1915. I’d spent the holiday in London and got back to the officers’ mess in Aldershot on the Tuesday evening to find my name posted for France. Some other subalterns congratulated me and I enthused about seeing some action at last. Looking back, I can’t believe that I did so without reservation, without even a hint of irony. But I did. The following Monday, I was on a troop ship sailing from Southampton. Most of the chaps had tearful farewells to bear. I had only a dutiful wave from cousin Anthea. Perhaps that helped me to be glad to go.

Le Havre, a big bustling town full of troops and movement, was my introduction to France. Most of the men went straight on down the line, but we subalterns were told to report to the divisional depot at Rouen and await orders. We kicked our heels there for a couple of weeks while only rumour reached us. One of our battalions was having a bad time at Ypres. Something strange, something new the

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Germans had used, something about poison gas. We didn’t know what to make of it. Till I was assigned to escort a troop train, that is, going back to Le Havre to meet a hospital ship. Bullet wounds I’d expected, but dozens of the men were physically unmarked. Their coughs—and the yellow pallor of their skins—filled me with dread.

For the first time, I began to understand what war really was.

In the middle of May, another shipload of our regiment arrived from England. I was allotted a platoon and given my orders to join the third battalion at Béthune. It was a twenty-four-hour train ride away but, this time, the boredom and the endless card-playing had an edge: this time we really were on our way and this time I had an inkling of what we were on our way to.

For the present, though, Béthune was another stopping-off point. It was a comfortable little town about seven miles from the Front: for the first time we could hear the guns and see the flares of shell fire by night and here we were instructed to await our company, which was in the process of withdrawing from Ypres. I was billeted with a charcutier and his family near the railway station, could see, every day and every night, the troop trains load and unload, men disembarking fresh-faced and prickeared, jumpily eager for the unknown, while passing them, back from the Front, came files of grey-faced, silent, sullen figures, grim with the weight of my foreboding. Why was I there? What exactly was I so slowly and inexorably being sucked into? I did not know. I paced the cobbled streets of Béthune and waited to find out.

Battalion HQ was a tall, green-shuttered house on the edge of the town. There, one mild morning towards the end of May, I was summoned to report to my company commander, who’d got in the night before. It was your father: Captain the Hon. John Hallows. I’d expected some hard-faced veteran, I suppose, somebody in the image of Colonel Romney, of whom we subalterns went in awe. But he wasn’t like that, not at all. I found him smoking and staring out of a window, a distracted but strangely calm man not much older than me—five years, in fact. He was about my height, a touch broader, with a moustache and a slightly studious expression. He turned from the window to acknowledge my salute, then shook my hand.

“How was it at Ypres, sir?” I said.

“There’s nothing I can say to you, Franklin. It was how it was. I 62

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wouldn’t want to taint you with my impressions. You must find out for yourself. We must all do that.”

“I’m looking forward to getting to the Front.” It was the sort of stupid thing I felt obliged to say.

“Really? Well . . .” His gaze drifted back to the window. “I suppose I did once.”

“Have you been out for the duration, sir?”

He smiled. “No. Since February.”

That shocked me. Three months had sufficed to give this weary cast to his voice and looks.

He was right. I did find out for myself. The company spent two weeks in a rest camp near Béthune, then moved up the La Bassée canal to take over a trench sector near Givenchy. In that time, I got to know Hallows better, as did we all. I’d taken him at first for a regular officer, but he soon disabused me of that. “Just an amateur,” like I gathered—he’d taken over the company in March, when the previous captain had been killed by a sniper. They’d moved into the salient round Ypres and been lucky to escape the worst of the gas when the Germans released it for the first time on April 22nd. Of that he spoke as if restraining his true thoughts. “What’s happening here is not what you’ll have expected—not what you’ll have read about at home.” Already, I did not doubt the truth of his words.

The trenches of the La Bassée sector were home for us that summer. It is odd to speak of such a grim and dangerous place as home, but so it became: the crafted labyrinth of trench and dug-out, sap-head and fire-stop, was our abode, reached from Béthune through a landscape of smashed roads and ruined villages. To me it was new—and wholly awful—to see a summer land laid waste by man, but to many others it was, God help them, what they had become used to. Army life does not encourage too much contemplation. The mind concentrates on survival. At least for a while. And the mind of a young officer—even in such dismal surroundings—turns to thoughts of adventure and a little personal glory. My platoon were a glum collection, so I felt obliged to set a debonair example. Those summer nights near La Bassée I did more than my share of patrols and won for myself a properly warlike reputation.

Hostilities were muted at the time and the risks I was running were greater than I knew.

As for Hallows, I became a little suspicious of him. His quiet ef

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ficiency and softly spoken fatalism were not what I had expected.

Always grateful for intelligence, he seemed indifferent to what I considered my daring displays and at times discouraged too much night work. I put to him once a hare-brained scheme for a raid on the German line at its closest point: my idea was to ginger things up a little. He dismissed the idea, kindly but firmly. “Remember, Franklin,” he said, “we are responsible for men’s lives: they are precious commodities, whatever this war might suggest to the contrary.” I took his caution for want of spirit and thought the less of him for it. I did not see how sitting on our hands would bring the breakthrough we all desired. But Hallows had already despaired of a breakthrough, already seen it for an illusion sustainable only in the rarefied atmosphere of GHQ. For him, the welfare of his men was now paramount. He would risk it only at the insistence of others.

Insistence came soon enough.

By early September, rumours of a big Franco-British push were rife in our sector and there was a good deal of optimism about the outcome. New drafts of men, replenished reserves of shells, a chance to turn the gas on the Germans. Victory seemed suddenly within our grasp. Victory, of course, was the greatest and grossest illusion of all.

The high death toll kept it alive, perversely, because deluded newcomers always outnumbered the dwindling survivors who knew better.

Our preparations were impressive—to me. Each day saw consignments of gas cylinders being taken up to the front trenches.

Each day rumour congealed into fact. On September 21st, heavy bombardment of the German lines began. It was held there would be few left alive in them to resist us. In reality, our artillery was merely serving notice of our attack, notice which the Germans were not about to disregard. On September 23rd, Hallows came back from battalion headquarters with our orders. He gathered the platoon commanders in a dug-out, distributed maps and read the detailed orders for an attack to be launched at dawn on September 25th, preceded by a discharge of gas. Our objectives were impressively detailed; their very precision filled me with hope. Until, that is, Hallows’s summing-up.

“Those are our orders, gentlemen. Candidly, I must tell you that our chances of fulfilling them are negligible. The enemy is expecting us. Nothing I have seen of the gas companies makes me think 64

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they will manage an effective discharge. The wind conditions on the morning of the 25th will be all-important, but how can we guarantee that they will be the same all along the Front? I put that question a few hours ago to Colonel Romney. I received no answer.

God help us all.”

September 25th dawned grey and damp. There was no breeze to speak of, though speak of it we did. Privately, I had criticized Hallows for his defeatism. Now his words came back to me. History books have since told me more of the Battle of Loos than I knew at the time, but all they have done is vindicate Hallows. I now know that the gas company commander refused to discharge in our sector because of the still conditions until General Gough directly ordered him to do so. What I knew at the time from the relative safety of a support trench was that a terrible commotion ahead represented the chaotic certainty of failure. Dozens were stretchered back past me, yellow-faced from our own gas. Those who escaped its effects were gunned down by ungassed Germans. When my platoon moved up to join the second wave, we found the front line a scene from Hell: corpses piled and fallen, gas hanging and drifting in pockets, German guns still firing, figures still flitting and voices shrieking out across the shell holes. On that day, in that place, the patriotic adventure ended for me. This was carnage, refined by military science into an obscenity of slaughter. This was something in which I wanted no part.