White Feathers (22 page)

More than anything else, however, his men wanted to know how to deal with fear, and he often lay awake thinking about the lives of which he was supposed to be in charge, because on some days it was all he could do to manage his own dread. But captains, and to an
even greater extent lieutenants, were thin on the ground now and any junior officer who could still walk and talk often found himself propelled up the hierarchical ladder, whether he liked it or not.

As the men seemed to be enjoying themselves he decided not to interrupt them with news of tomorrow’s inauspicious-sounding assault. He turned and headed back to his own dugout instead, the one he shared with Ron Tarrant.

He found Ron sitting on his cot, having a drink; at least he was still pouring his whisky into a tumbler before tossing it down his throat. Their bivvy stank like a brewery, with a faint but pervasive undertone of unwashed bodies.

Ron looked up. ‘Want one?’ he asked, proffering the bottle.

James nodded and subsided onto his own cot.

Ron’s hands were shaking, an affliction that had appeared after his arrival at Gallipoli last year. Involuntary trembling was not an unusual phenomenon, and no one thought any less of a man if his hands shook from time to time, but Ron had soon begun to behave in less acceptable ways. He had been very unlucky with his health and had succumbed to every possible malady. He claimed a delicate stomach, a problem he’d apparently suffered since childhood, and as a result had been forced to spend a lot of time in his dugout, or even in the rear, recuperating. And he certainly had looked ill on those occasions — pale, sweating, dry-mouthed and often writhing in pain — but James and many others had managed to soldier on through similar ailments and the question was soon being asked, although not openly, why Ron Tarrant couldn’t do the same.

To his extreme embarrassment, James had developed severe haemorrhoids after repeated bouts of dysentery, and often found himself sitting in the soggy squelch of his own blood, but the problem had never stopped him from performing his duties, although the pain almost drove him to distraction at times. He refused, however, to even contemplate being carted off the battle
field just because he had a backside full of piles.

The irrefutable fact of the matter was that Ron Tarrant was a coward. Everyone knew it — including the enlisted men who called him ‘Captain Windy’ behind his back — but more wretched than that was the fact that Ron himself knew it, and the knowledge of his own inadequacy only made his behaviour worse. He wasn’t essentially a bad man, and genuinely loved the army, but the humiliating realisation that he was not cut out for active service had shattered and embittered him. Some of the other officers had discreetly complained to Major Lydon about Ron’s inability to present himself for duty six mornings out of ten, but Lydon, perhaps subconsciously sensing the presence of a kindred spirit, had retaliated with, ‘No, no, fine fellow. Dodgy guts, that’s all’, and had refused to entertain the matter further.

Initially James had felt sorry for Ron — no man could be blamed for experiencing fear in the face of the horrors they had all endured over the last eighteen months — but his sympathy had been tainted with a vague sense of anger at his own profound misjudgment of the other man’s character. He had truly believed that Ron Tarrant was a hero in the making, and so, clearly, had Ron; now James had begun to doubt his own motives for initially fostering their friendship. Had he hoped that Ron’s almost certain future as a military prodigy would somehow rub off on him? And if he now abandoned his friend, what did that say about him, about his ambition and his own moral integrity?

But then Ron’s conduct had gone beyond that of a man who was simply frightened: he had become a deliberate shirker who was now a serious and dangerous liability to the men he commanded. When this happened, soon after the battalion arrived on the Somme and it became apparent that the ferocity of the fighting would surpass even that at Gallipoli, James had gone from doubting himself to covertly despising the other man, taking a
perverse comfort from the fact that he was able to carry on.

In his heart James knew his attitude to be almost as discreditable as Ron’s, but it was easier to damn than to take the time and emotional effort to consider what could turn a potentially excellent officer into a useless and even dangerous one. Above all, James feared that if he did think too much about it he might discover that he himself was just as susceptible to failure.

And there was the matter of the depression that had descended rather shockingly on him at Gallipoli, a paralysing and grindingly persistent dread that corroded both his waking and sleeping hours and left him with a dry mouth and a constantly racing heart. His state of mind had improved after the withdrawal from the peninsula, but when the division had rejoined the battle in France his deep despondency had returned almost immediately; in fact it had deteriorated and was now accompanied by occasional but violent episodes of weeping.

So far he had managed to keep this to himself, but he was terrified that one day he would publicly lose control. He had never avoided his duties, nor had he wanted to, and neither had he even remotely contemplated a self-inflicted injury — unlike Ron who was under suspicion for attempting to shoot himself in the foot, although he insisted he’d been firing at a rat — but the thought of his peers viewing him as a coward turned his stomach.

Now, in an attempt to avoid one of the embarrassing silences that occurred more and more frequently whenever they were alone together, he said, ‘What did you think about Lydon’s instructions for tomorrow?’

He had noted Ron sitting by himself at the back of the major’s dugout during the briefing, his face blanching as detail after ill-conceived detail of the planned assault was presented.

Ron started, and turned to James a face from which the flesh seemed to be melting day by day.

‘Sounds like an excellent tactical move to me,’ he said, the patently false note of optimism in his voice belying his fear.

They both knew he was lying, but James let it go.

Then Ron said, ‘I only hope the old stomach doesn’t let me down. Been giving me a bit of trouble today.’

James deliberately didn’t look up, unwilling to see the plea for understanding he knew would be in the other man’s eyes, and even less willing to demonstrate his own distaste for it. He’d considered sharing a bivvy with another officer but, despite his repugnance at Ron’s behaviour, he still couldn’t bring himself to embarrass him so publicly. And he wasn’t sure he cared any more, as long as Ron kept his fear to himself.

He said, still without raising his eyes, ‘Get a good night’s sleep then. That should help.’

The following morning James woke well before dawn. The assault was timed to begin just before sunrise and their instructions were to be in place and ready to go fifteen minutes before that. He splashed his face with water but didn’t bother to comb his hair, and sat smoking, watching men plod backwards and forwards in the dark past the dugout, while last night’s bully-beef stew reheated on a tiny kerosene stove. He didn’t feel like eating but knew he should, and his piles were bleeding again.

Behind him he heard Ron stirring.

‘How’s the guts this morning?’ James asked without turning around, too weary to keep the sarcasm out of his voice.

Ron sat up. His hair was wildly tousled and his eyes red and raw-looking after last night’s whisky. He bent over and gave a great crackling retch, although nothing came up.

‘Oh God,’ he groaned.

James did turn then, and said, ‘Not good, eh?’

Ron wiped his mouth then sat back gingerly. ‘I’m all right,’ he replied grimly.

‘So you’ll be coming with us then?’ said James disbelievingly, although he still had the grace to feel a small stab of shame at his deliberate unkindness.

‘Yes, why shouldn’t I?’ replied Ron in a tone that implied he had never once been left out of battle.

‘Oh, well, I just thought with your stomach and that, you know.’

‘No, it’s fine,’ Ron replied, and James recognised the expression on his pale, blotchy face — an uneasy mixture of petulance and bone-deep fear.

They were silent for a moment, then Ron blurted, ‘Look, James, I know what the others are saying about me, that I’m a coward …’

James waited for him to go on, but he appeared to have changed his mind and stayed silent.

The company gathered in the forward trench waiting for the artillery behind them to start the scheduled bombardment. It did, with an almighty roar, and continued for a full ten minutes, a carefully timed barrage designed to pulverise any Germans unfortunate enough to be in the trenches on the other side of No-Man’s-Land. The strategy had been used countless times before during the Somme campaign, but seldom with the hoped-for degree of success.

James crouched at the bottom of the trench with his men, flinching involuntarily every time a shell passed directly overhead. He felt sick with anxiety, but was comforted by the knowledge that he wasn’t alone in that; some men gazed unseeingly ahead, steeling their nerves as they waited for the whistle, others mouthed inaudible prayers, and as usual there were the odd few whose nervousness spilled out via wisecracks and inane prattle. An unmistakable smell suggested that someone had lost control of his bowels.

The whistle blew and men began to scale the trench wall and
slither over the parapets. With the toes of his boots digging briefly into purpose-dug slots in the clay, James shot over himself. To either side he could see waves of men following suit and, among them and to his left, Ron Tarrant, now lying motionless on his stomach a yard or so into No-Man’s-Land. James crouched down and scuttled on an angle towards the precarious safety of the ridges and depressions of the cratered terrain that separated the two front lines.

As he passed Ron, still lying prostrate among the mass of bodies that continued to pour over the parapet, he glimpsed from the corner of his eye a hand reach out and grasp the ankle of a soldier named Jenkin, who was scrambling to his feet and preparing to run forward. The hand was Ron’s, and it yanked Jenkin down so that the smaller man’s body fell on top of him. Jenkin, already frightened half out of his wits by the noise and turmoil of the attack, was struggling as if the devil himself had hold of him.

James could see what was going to happen. Jenkin reared up in panic and was instantly struck in the head by a bullet. His body slumped forward, and Ron wrenched the now limp figure back over himself.

Incandescent with rage, James grabbed hold of Ron’s webbing and dragged him back over the parapet, where they tumbled together into the trench, scattering the handful of men still waiting below. James was on his feet instantly. He knew he was screaming, although he couldn’t hear himself. He snatched at Ron, who had curled up in the mud with his arms raised protectively over his face, and jerked him to his knees. The surrounding men had stepped away and were looking on with interest, instinctively aware that something extraordinary was about to happen.

James drew his service pistol and aimed it at Ron’s head. ‘Get up, you murdering
bastard
! Get back out there and bring his body back!’

Ron was crying now. ‘I couldn’t move! My ankle …’

‘
Murderer
!’

‘It was an accident! I didn’t …’

‘
Get up
!’

Ron babbled, ‘I can’t! I can’t
move
! I tried. Oh, God help me, please! You don’t understand!’

‘Oh, yes I do,’ James whispered, and fired the pistol.

He watched detachedly as a small red hole blossomed in the centre of the other man’s forehead and his body collapsed slowly into the mud. Around him his men looked on impassively, then, as the second whistle blew, one by one they scaled the parapet, none of them looking back at the scene below them.

James opened his hand and let the pistol fall next to the body. Then he sat down to wait.

C
HAPTER
T
WELVE

J
ames sat on the neatly made cot. There were temporary bars on the window and a guard outside the door, but other than that his accommodation was not uncomfortable — he was, after all, still an officer. He was scheduled to be tried later that afternoon at a general court-martial convened by the divisional commander. There would be five officers acting as judge and jury, including Major Lydon, as James’s commanding officer, and Lydon’s senior, Lieutenant-Colonel George Chapley.

James was allowed a ‘soldier’s friend’, an officer appointed to support him during the trial, and he and the court had accepted Ben Harper’s offer to fulfil the role. Not that James had said much to anyone at all since the incident. The New Zealand Division was now in the process of being withdrawn from the Somme battleground, but James had been removed from the front line immediately and for the past two days had sat, silent and withdrawn, in this room in a house requisitioned from some French landowner.

But he hadn’t been alone — Thomas had turned up only hours after James’s arrest. Gossip spread like brushfire in the trenches and as soon as Thomas heard, he’d requested and been granted permission to go to his brother. He hadn’t, however, been allowed
to represent him, despite his civilian qualifications as a lawyer. Visiting his brother in a time of need, even if it did involve a charge of murder, was one thing, but representing him, especially if you were a well-known conscientious objector skilled in the arts of the courtroom, was quite another. Besides, Thomas was only a corporal.

He was almost at his wits’ end over James’s stubborn refusal to elaborate on the events surrounding Ron Tarrant’s death. He would say only that he was guilty of killing the man but would provide no evidence of mitigating circumstances or provocation. But it was clear to Thomas that there was something very wrong with his brother: his speech was flat and monosyllabic, and he was unable to pay attention for more than a few seconds at a time. He was also physically unwell, to the extent that a medical officer had been summoned and had diagnosed chronic dysentery and acute haemorrhoids together with advanced neurasthenia, or shell shock.