Post of Honour (34 page)

‘No,’ he said, ‘I value it and so does Claire although I could never be absolutely sure of that until I came out here. We never put it to the test, I suppose.’

‘Oh,’ she said, smiling as the colour in her cheeks faded, ‘that’s rubbish! She’s woman enough to have valued it from the beginning for I do remember that much about her! “Ripe” was the adjective I used, I believe, and you plucked her at the right time judging by that letter! I suppose you carry a photograph?’

He showed her snapshots taken with Simon’s box camera, pictures of Claire alone and members of the family individually and as a group. He noticed that she studied the one of Simon intently but unemotionally.

‘Is he troublesome, like his mother?’ she wanted to know and Paul said no, not troublesome but far more introspective than the twins and even more sensitive to reproof than the six-year-old Mary.

‘He’ll be thirteen now. Have you any plans for him?’

‘No,’ Paul told her, ‘except that he’s bright enough to go on to ‘Varsity if he wants to. He has your passion for facts and your wonderful memory. He’s very good at history and writes a good essay, I’m told.’ Then, seeing that she was interested, ‘Look here, Grace, Claire isn’t the least bit inclined to jealousy. When you get leave why don’t you run down and see him? Or, if that would embarrass you, why don’t you have him to stay? He knows all the essentials about what happened.’

‘Not quite all,’ she said, ‘and neither, for that matter, do you. Anyway, I don’t take my leaves at home, I use them to practise my other occupation.’

‘What on earth is that?’

She looked at him steadily. ‘Saluting men who are about to die,’ she said. ‘Youngsters mostly, some of them young enough to shock you but all young enough to need a little mothering.’

He was not shocked or even embarrassed. Somehow it was precisely what he would have expected of her essentially generous nature. ‘I don’t write them Claire’s kind of letter afterwards,’ she went on, smiling, ‘but if I’m honest I get as much out of giving as they do taking and sometimes more! It keeps me sane, anyway.’

‘Damn it,’ he burst out, ‘you’ve been out here far too long! Why the hell don’t you apply for a rest? They can’t keep you the way they can us.’

‘I’ll rest when it’s all over,’ she said, ‘or maybe before, if I’m unlucky. In the meantime I get satisfaction from the thought that at last I’m of real use to someone,’ and as though she did not wish to prolong the discussion she stood up and crammed on her ugly cap. ‘Come on,’ she said, ‘if I don’t show up one of the kids will be hauled out of bed to drive my ambulance,’ and marched out, leaving him to pay the bill.

When he regained the street she was sitting in the sidecar and the engine was warming up. He said, stuffing the change into his pocket, ‘How are you off for money, Grace? If you wanted any I hope you’d have the sense to ask for it.’

‘Now what,’ she said, ‘can a woman buy out here? There’s nothing worth having in the few shops that are open and no shortage of escorts with money to burn! Even at Advanced Base we’re outnumbered twenty to one. Get moving, Paul, but in case I forget when you drop me off thank you for everything.’

‘Will you meet me again, same time same place next week?’

‘Certainly I will, that’s the best meal I’ve had in months and the best wine too! They probably know you tip well.’

‘Then next Thursday,’ he said, revving up and they bumped off over the pavé in the direction of the hospital.

She rushed away as soon as they drove into the compound although it still wanted twenty minutes to midnight. He saw her flit like a shadow between two Nissen huts and disappear with a casual lift of the hand.

He got a message to her six days later and arranged to call at dusk and take her into Béthune again. He was surprised to realise how keenly he looked forward to meeting her and on the way to the hospital amused himself going over all the things he had forgotten to ask her. When he inquired for her at the transport section, however, a little Cockney driver, her voice muffled by adenoids, told him that Driver Lovell, ‘ ’Er Ladyship,’ as she called her, was on duty having volunteered for an extra run to the Field Dressing Station because she, the informant, had a heavy cold. ‘I woulden’ve let ’er go,’ the Cockney girl said, ‘but I was asleep, see? We was busy las’ night and I slep’ on. She did her trip earlier today an’ scrubbed out an’ all but she’s like that! Proper sport ’Er Ladyship is!’

‘When is she likely to get back?’ Paul inquired.

‘Oh, any minnit now,’ the girl replied, ‘she’s bin gone since dinner-time. I come out to scrub the crate for ’er. Least I c’n do, ain’t it?’

Half-an-hour passed but the ambulance did not show up and Paul occupied the time amusingly enough pumping the Cockney driver about Grace. He soon realised that she was the acknowledged leader of the section, not only on account of her long service overseas (she was the only original member of the section still serving) but because she made everyone’s problems her own, writing letters to parents, interceding with the MO on defaulters’ behalf and generally mothering the group, especially new arrivals. ‘Mindjew,’ the girl said, with a wink, ‘she’s a rare one for the boys! Never withaht one and we younguns don’t stand a look-in! Goes all the way too or so they say, ‘though she’s old enough to be mother to some of ’em who come sniffin’ round! But what I say is, who cares? I mean, it ain’t as if she’s got anyone waitin’ back in Blighty, is it? And you don’t get no ’elpin’ ’and from the ’oly sort, do yer? Catch one o’ the Sacred Virgins standin’ in for someone else’s run to Casualty Clearing!’

The Sacred Virgins, he learned, were WAACs who, according to the Cockney, had reputations for ‘leading men up the garden path an’ slamming the summer-’ouse door in their dials!’ Paul was still chuckling at this when a despatch-rider roared into the compound reporting a shambles a mile or so up the Messines road. A lone-flying Gotha, he said, had taken a crack at a convoy and there had been a few casualties. The road was temporarily blocked and two ambulances were required at once.

The Cockney girl had a vehicle ticking over in a matter of minutes and there was a good deal of scurrying to and fro. Paul, who was off duty until midnight, abandoned his Douglas and jumped up beside the girl shouting to the convoy leader that he was a transport officer and would help clear the road. Twenty minutes later, just as dusk was falling, they came to the scene of the incident. Two Leyland lorries, full of captured material from the Ridge, had been blown off the road, their crews killed outright by an aerial bomb that had cratered the pavé midway between them. Close behind the wreck of the second lorry an ambulance lay on its side and orderlies were trying to extricate a screaming patient from inside. Two other patients, deaf or unconscious, lay on stretchers close by. The ambulance driving cabin was empty. Suddenly the Cockney girl became frantic. ‘Where’s ’Er Ladyship?’ she kept asking hurrying men, who brushed her aside as they lifted the stretchers into the first ambulance, and then he found her, about twenty yards back along the road, a small, huddled form under a muddy blanket, guarded by her orderly nursing a broken collar bone.

Paul lifted the blanket and looked down at the calm, waxen face for a moment. It was dirty but not disfigured in any way and the orderly, another Cockney, told him he had already examined the body but could find no wound to account for death.

‘Muster bin blast, sir,’ he told Paul, despondently, ‘seen it happen offen enough. Do fer anyone with a bad ticker, an’ I always reckoned she weren’t strong enough fer the job. Game tho’, by Christ! Bin on the run four months with her an’ never see a woman with ’er nerve!’ He was sorry, Paul noted, but not overwhelmed and why should he have been? If he had been helping her to shuttle wounded to and fro for four months he must have seen scores of men die on this stretch of road. Paul replaced the blanket and the Cockney driver, who came running as soon as she was told, burst into tears, rocking to and fro like a child with a grazed knee. Then, quite abruptly, she pulled herself together and got Grace and the orderly into the second ambulance as an RAMC sergeant arrived to take charge. Paul, feeling numb, went back to help the pioneers’ trouble squad fill in the crater and make the road usable. While he was directing the work the sergeant rejoined him.

‘That driver, sir,’ he said casually, ‘a WAAC over there says you knew her?’

‘Yes, I knew her,’ Paul said, ‘she was a very old friend of mine. I was to have taken her out to dinner in Béthune tonight. We would have been there now if she hadn’t volunteered for someone else’s run.’

‘That’s the way it goes,’ the sergeant said, philosophically, ‘it don’t never do to volunteer, sir!’ and Paul said bitterly, ‘A stray bloody Gotha! What the hell is a Gotha doing over here in daylight, for God’s sake? I’ll never stop hating those bastards!’

The sergeant looked at him quizzically for a moment, as though trying to assess his grief and then said, gently, ‘It’s not
them
so much, sir. Save your hate for the bloody fools up yonder who sandwiched the Red Cross between lorries carrying captured machine-guns and ammo!’ and he moved off, shouting to the pioneers to get a bloody move on if they didn’t want to cause a pile-up a mile long.

They buried her in a temporary war cemetery near the advanced base hospital and Paul got permission to attend. It was a brief, simple ceremony but they gave her all the honours, including the ‘Last Post’. Apart from the MO and the pioneer diggers he was the only man present. The rest were girls of the transport section and two or three nurses.

He stood watching them shovel the clay into the grave and tried to come to terms with the crazy improbability of the scene; Grace Lovell, once his wife and mistress of Shallowford, neatly tucked away out of sight under a French plain after being killed by the blast of a German Aeroplane bomb. It was closer to fantasy than reality, the kind of twist that tangled the skein of a bad dream, like foliage growing out of a carpet or a coach lurching along on elliptical wheels being driven by a two-headed dog; it was madly and hopelessly illogical and past thinking about.

Before they were done it began to rain, the thin, slanting rain that seemed always to be falling on this plain. He thought, ‘God in Heaven, who could have believed it would end this way when I first saw her standing in the nursery the night I arrived in the Valley?’ and then, as the notes of the bugle opened a sluice on his emotions, he had difficulty in holding himself rigid for he recalled her reply to his advice to apply for a rest—‘I’ll rest when it’s all over, or maybe before, if I’m unlucky!’ Well, she had been unlucky. She had been unlucky the whole of her life, with a father who goaded her mother into drowning herself, a wretched and rootless adolescence, a failed marriage, years of prison and persecution for a principle, and finally a foreign bomb out of the sky. And yet, as he made his way back to his lorry, he remembered to be glad they had met again and, to a great extent, buried the past, and also that he was here to salute her as a great war comrade rather than a woman whom he had held in his arms.

The rain began to fall faster, driving in from the north-west and the group around the grave dispersed. Only the pioneer corporal remained to bank the earth round the wooden cross, inscribed,
‘Driver G. Lovell, WAAC Transport Section. Killed in action, 14.4.17’.

Chapter Eight

I

H
enry Pitts, known in ‘B’ Company as ‘Smiler’, had never quarrelled with mud. It had always puzzled him why people got excited about it when it transferred itself to their boots and clothes, or why so many should go out of their way to avoid contact with it. His mother, Martha, was such a person, and so was his wife, Gloria. As soon as he presented himself at the kitchen door on a wet day they would rush out like a couple of furies, screaming, ‘Dornee bring that mud in, boy!’ or ‘Keep that bliddy mud where it b’longs!’ It astonished him, this almost universal hatred of mud which was, after all, only earth in a glutinous form and as the years passed he developed what amounted to a mild affection for it, partly because it seemed to him a warm, friendly element, lacking the malevolence of rain, hail, snow and the east wind but also because it was his silent ally against the assault of women’s tongues.

Out here, in the autumn of 1917, mud enfolded him on every side and Henry’s comrades had come to regard it as an enemy second only to German trench mortars. When, in the winter of 1916-17, a hard frost set in, and it was possible to walk the length of a communication trench without soiling one’s boots, the men rejoiced in the weather, as though it was an advantage to have to stamp one’s feet for half-an-hour to restore circulation, or wear so many garments that even a waddle round a traverse was an effort. He took issue with them on this, pointing out that, under these conditions, shells were far more lethal than when they pitched into soft, friendly mud but they dismissed him as a lunatic, a man who had been out so long that he had grown to tolerate mud and the curious thing was they were half right about this for when he was alone on watch Henry would sometimes mould handfuls of the thick, yellow stuff into elephants, or snub-nosed howitzers, or cottages, or, if it was not solid enough for use as plasticine, trace patterns on its shining surfaces with a cartridge tip.

It might have been his alliance with mud, or his natural amiability, or his slow, plodding, thoughtful way of making war that enabled him to survive the Passchendaele battle that summer and autumn and not merely survive it but emerge from it as an infantryman whom the Germans could neither kill, wound nor discourage. Men were swallowed up in their thousands during the successive stages of the offensive, falling in groups under murderously accurate machine-gun fire, disappearing in the brimming craters that pocked the landscape, going sick by the hundred or, in some instances, choosing suicide to a prolongation of their misery but Henry survived without so much as catching a cold in the head. When it was over, and the shattered remains of the army was pulled back after, penetrating a mile or two at a cost of about 300,000 casualties, he had not only preserved his bland imperturbability intact but had also won the Military Medal, just like Smut Potter, downalong.

His acquisition of glory was due less to his invulnerability that had become a legend in the unit than a desire to prove a point involving mud, or mud as related to the new-fangled weapon now appearing on the Front and known, for some unexplained reason, as The Tank.

Henry had a profound distrust of all mechanical contrivances on wheels dating from his first glimpse of Roddy Rudd’s motor on its initial trip down the Valley and when he saw his first tank he was derisive, sharing the prejudice of his commander-in-chief, Sir Douglas Haig, and expecting even less of tanks than the most prejudiced cavalryman waiting to advance against an entrenched enemy over ground marked on pre-war maps as
‘Marsh, sometimes passable in summer’
.

‘They contrapshuns!’ he declared, ‘why, dam’ me, I could bellycrawl faster’n a bliddy great snail like that! Theym not only useless theym a bliddy menace to everyone walking in front of ’em! Even the cripples yerabout could cross ahead of ’em, you zee if I baint right when us goes over!’

He was about as right as he could be. On the first day of the assault the tanks got bogged down far short of their first objectives and Henry, passing one stranded in no-man’s land, shouted, ‘Why domee get out an’ push, maister?’ to an infuriated sergeant who found himself the target for half the artillery behind Château Wood. The attacks continued, more or less abortively, throughout July, August and September, and it was during a despairing attempt to push down the Menin Road in the final phase of the offensive that Henry had the satisfaction of passing the famous tank graveyard, where a dozen or more of the helpless monsters lay like a swarm of dying beetles trapped in a pool of syrup. It was this day that he proved his theory, won his medal and was promoted to sergeant.

About half-a-mile east of the tank graveyard the battalion was pinned down by a single, expertly sited machine-gun. The survivors of the first wave had been there all morning and despite urgent appeals to the artillery to silence it the gun was still traversing and keeping everybody immobile in a line of water-logged shell-holes. It was only a matter of time, Henry’s sergeant said, before the German guns located and exterminated them but the machine-gun had already accounted for a score of men who had tried to get within bombing-range and the only thing to do was to stay under cover until one of the tanks could deal with it or cause it to withdraw. This was heresy to Henry who said, emphatically, ‘No bliddy tank’ll get this far, Sarge, and I’ll bet ’ee a tin o’ Goldflake on that! Us’ll have to come at it on the flank or not at all, and it baint very healthy here, be it? You wait on the tank and I’ll zee what us c’n do in the meantime.’

He took a haversack of bombs and set out on a wide detour, moving from hole to hole across the tormented landscape and at length arriving within extreme throwing distance of the gun that was still firing in an arc of about a hundred and eighty degrees; then, suddenly, it stopped firing.

Two years on the Western Front had taught Henry Pitts how to gauge the exact point where risk coincides with what the training manuals called ‘the inherent military probability’ but what Henry would have called ‘plain, bliddy gappy’. His ‘gappy’ told him that the machine-gun, having been firing for over an hour, must be running short of belts and as he saw no signs of reinforcements arriving with replenishments a long silence implied that the gunners, if not helpless, were at least conserving every bullet to stop a concerted rush. He sat there weighing his chances very carefully; then he half-rose and gently lobbed a bomb over the lip of his crater. On the heels of its explosion he heard a short, hoarse cry that did not sound like the bellow of a victim but more like a despairing shout of ‘Kamerad’ and this, in fact, was what he had expected. He waited another moment before extricating himself from the embrace of the mud and plodding across the lips of several keyholed craters in the direction of the gun. No sound came from the emplacement and neither burst nor bullet was aimed at him from the summit of the ridge. For a few seconds he appeared as the only man alive in all that vast, glutinous landscape, a sole survivor of a race swallowed in miles and miles of soft, putrefying mud. At last, as he negotiated a spread of half-immersed corpses, to look down into the shell-hole, he knew triumph. There was the machine-gun team, their hands raised and there, huddled close by, were about a dozen other mud-caked figures too dazed and despairing to surrender, who looked up at him apathetically, hardly recognisable as human beings in their sodden, shapeless clothes and abject postures. The Devil’s immunity must have been working overtime that day. It even succeeded in diverting the artillery and machine-gunners higher up the ridge for not a burst was directed at the group when Henry, a bomb in either hand, shepherded his fifteen prisoners out of the emplacement and back towards the halted British line of advance by the overland route. They got there almost intact. The last of the Germans, a whimpering boy who looked about sixteen, got hung for a moment on wire and yelped like a terrier when a stray bullet struck his hand. The sergeant looked at Henry with awe, too astonished to congratulate him but later, when they were back at the starting-point and digging in against the inevitable counter-attack, he listened with great respect to Henry’s simple explanation of his coup and how it demonstrated the superiority of legs over tanks. ‘Now take what happened outalong, Sarge,’ he said, pausing in his revetting to scrape a pound of mud from his puttees. ‘There I was ’avin’ to maake up me own mind whether or not they was out of ammo and ready to give up. And so I did, an’ you zeed the result. But suppose—just suppose—I’d been one o’ they bliddy contrapshuns, all racket an’ no bliddy brains? Could I have sat quiet an’ worked it out for meself? And suppose I had? Ah, now, there’s the real rub! could I ha’ clawed me way along them ridges without bringing down a box barrage as would ha’ blown us all to tatters? Would ’ee tell me that, Sarge?’

The sergeant, himself a Devonian, shook his head and admitted that Henry was probably right but he did not yield the argument unconditionally, saying, thoughtfully, ‘ ’Tiz all a matter o’ the ground, Smiler. On terra-firma tanks could make a clean breakthrough, providing there’s enough of them mind you, but in a bloody mudbath like this they can’t get started, can ’em? Youm right but it baint a fair test, boy! No, it baint a fair test!’, and he went away down the trench to despatch Henry’s fifteen prisoners to Battalion HQ for interrogation. He sent a note along with them, explaining how and by whom they had been acquired, but Henry did not hear about this until much later when, with the exhausted remnant of his unit, he was informed of official recognition whilst debusing his shirt over a candle-flame in a cellar behind Ypres.

II

T
he sergeant’s claim that tanks had not had a fair trial at Passchendaele was advanced by an embittered tank officer in Gough’s Fifth Army that same month. Among the most insistent that tanks should not be judged on their third Ypres performance was Captain Palfrey, now the commander of a squadron of Mark IV tanks, two male and two female, affectionately christened Alfie, Bertha, Charlie and Daisy.

It was given to very few during the twenty-four months intervening between Loos and Passchendaele to see their dreams come true but Ikey was of that minority for the vision he had had whilst artillery-spotting during the 1915 battle had materialised in the later stages of the Somme offensive when, as one of the first tankmen to pilot a Mark I machine into battle, he had cursed the idiotic use of the weapon by High Command. Tanks were dribbled into the line in ones and twos and although their initial impact upon the enemy was sensational, and those reaching the German line swept everything before them, the determination of the strategists to precede every big attack with a barrage that churned up the ground and advertised their objectives, effectually prevented exploitation of the arm. The tankmen were withdrawn as failures when the offensive petered out but instead of despairing they returned to their maps, probing and probing for a sector where they could prove their claim that tanks were the only answer to the Western Front stalemate.

By this time Ikey had been in and out of the line for three years but he was a bad example of the theory that a man’s usefulness declined in direct relation to his length of service in the field. He had ridden out the shock of Hazel’s strange death, had not become an alcoholic or been seriously wounded and after two years’ active service his nervous system was more or less intact although some of his closest associates were beginning to think that he had deluded himself into thinking he was no longer engaged in a war against the Central Powers but against the cavalry-generals in their chateaux fifty miles behind the lines. Before the war Ikey’s attitude to senior officers had been one of ironic and affectionate contempt. His mimicry of those above field rank had been a star-turn wherever subalterns assembled out of earshot of their superiors. With a little make-up he could even look like one as he delivered imaginary lectures by members of the staff, interspersing every sentence with the obligatory ‘Haw-Haw’! and ad libbing long and rambling reminiscences of campaigns fought in Upper Burma and the Sudan.

Long before the end of the Somme offensive, however, he had decided that senior officers were now beyond a joke, especially the over-sixties and their gilded protégés who infested Supreme Headquarters. They had enlarged themselves, he declared, from mere buffoons into homicidal maniacs and should be locked out of harm’s way until the war was over, when they could be trotted out and driven through the streets of London, preceded by a banner with the legend: ‘Victory in Spite of US’. In the meantime he placed his reliance in the improved Mark IV tank and when news came that at long last the tankmen were to be allowed a chance to show what they could do in a sector of their own choosing he was so elated that he told his crews they now had a chance of ending the war single-handed.