‘Cor blimey, but it’s a different world out here from what it is in England, ain’t it, Mr Blackstone?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ Blackstone agreed. ‘It certainly is.’
‘It changes people, you know. I met a couple of blokes I used to knock around with down on the Old Kent Road. Well, they’ve been over here for a few months, and they’re not the same blokes I knew at all.’
‘They wouldn’t be,’ Blackstone said.
‘We’re about the same age, them and me,’ Mick continued to babble, ‘but, you know, they seem a lot older than me now.’
‘It’s the war,’ Blackstone told him.
‘Everything’s different,’ Mick marvelled. ‘Even the bull! I’ll give you a for instance. You know that Lieutenant Fortesque of yours?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, he caught a few of the lads trying to stuff another lad’s head in the cesspit. Not to drown him in shit, you understand — they’d never have done that — it was just like, playing a trick on him.’
‘I know about that,’ Blackstone said. ‘His name was Blenkinsop.’
But Mick was too intent on telling his story to let the fact that Blackstone had already heard it deter him.
‘Anyway, if an officer had caught them at that in England, all the lads would have been on a charge — no question about it. But Fortesque just told them they shouldn’t treat any of their comrades like that, specially one that was going to be his new servant. Well, you could have knocked them over with a feather when he said that, ’cos they thought he’d been planning to give the job to another of the lads, who was called Danvers.’
‘Tough on Danvers,’ Blackstone said.
‘Tougher than you might think,’ Mick said. ‘Danvers was transferred to another platoon, and was shot in No Man’s Land a few days later. And if he’d been Fortesque’s servant, you see, he wouldn’t even have been out there.’
It was just as he’d suspected when he’d first seen Mick sitting on the wall, Blackstone thought. All that the young soldier had managed to collect so far was gossip.
But he was not entirely displeased, because Archie Patterson — who was one of the best coppers he’d ever worked with — was a perpetual collector of gossip and, just once in a while, it turned out to be useful.
Mick took a drag on his cigarette.
‘Anyway, when the lads told me how this Lieutenant Fortesque had handled things, I thought they were doing it to show me how soft he was, and how much they despised him for it,’ he continued. ‘But that wasn’t what they were telling me at all.’
‘No?’
‘Not at all. Quite the opposite. First of all, they said he seemed so disappointed in them that they’d felt ashamed of what they’d done. But they also said he showed them his hand in a mitten.’ Mick paused. ‘I haven’t got that quite right, have I?’
Blackstone smiled. ‘He showed them that inside his velvet glove there was an iron fist?’ he suggested.
‘That’s right,’ Mick agreed. ‘What they meant was that he’d made it quite clear to them that if they ever tried anything like that again, they’d be in the glasshouse before their feet could touch the ground. They went away respecting him for the way he’d handled things — and from that moment, they said, they’d have followed him to hell and back, if he’d asked them to.’
Blackstone nodded.
If he’d been in those privates’ place, he’d probably have felt the same, he thought — because a good officer, in his experience, was one who played things strictly by the rule book when it coincided with his own judgement, and tossed that same rule book over his shoulder when it didn’t.
‘That Lieutenant Hatfield’s a different kettle of fish altogether,’ Mick continued. ‘The lads have got nothing but contempt for him.’
‘Why’s that?’ Blackstone asked — suddenly interested.
‘Because he’s a bully — because he picks on the lads for no reason at all,’ Mick said.
Blackstone frowned. Hatfield had his weaknesses — plenty of them — but he would never have marked the man down as a bully.
‘Did Lieutenant Hatfield do something specific to earn this reputation?’ he asked.
‘Yer wot?’ Mick replied, mystified.
‘Why do the men think he’s a bully?’
‘Well, for a start, the day before your Lieutenant Fortesque was murdered, Hatfield put a couple of lads on a charge when he must have really known they’d done nothing wrong.’
Privates Clay and Jones are sitting in the trench. Jones is writing a letter at Clay’s dictation, because though Clay is by no means a stupid man, writing is not one of his strong points.
‘Tell her that when I get home on leave, I’ll take her out dancing, if that’s what she wants,’ Clay says.
‘Sounds a bit flat, that,’ Jones tells him.
‘So what do you think I could say?’
‘How about, “When I come home to your loving arms, my darling, I’ll take you dancing and whisk you off your feet.” Doesn’t that sound better?’
‘It does,’ Clay replies happily. ‘You’re a bit of a poet on the sly, ain’t you, Jonesey?’
Absorbed in their task, neither hears the officer approaching, and it is only when Hatfield bellows, ‘Sergeant!’ that they even realize he is there.
The sergeant strides up the trench. ‘Sir!’
‘These men have just insulted me, Sergeant,’ Hatfield says.
‘Have you just insulted the officer?’ the sergeant demands.
‘No, Sarge,’ Clay protests. ‘We didn’t say nothing to him. We was just talking to each other.’
‘Does he take me for a complete fool?’ Hatfield demands — and though he is trying to sound angry, it is not really convincing. ‘He called me a useless bastard. I heard him distinctly.’
‘I never. .’ Clay begins.
‘Is he calling me a liar now?’ Hatfield interrupts.
‘Are you calling the officer a liar now?’ the sergeant demands.
‘No, Sarge,’ Clay says, ‘but I never. .’
‘I want both these men putting on a charge,’ Hatfield says. ‘They’ll pay dearly for insulting me — I can promise them that.’
‘Lieutenant Hatfield had them brought to the lock-up here in St Denis,’ Mick said. ‘And the funny thing is, they weren’t even his own men — they were from Lieutenant Fortesque’s platoon.’
Strange that Hatfield should have done that, Blackstone thought.
It did not reflect well on an officer when an enlisted man dared to insult him, which was why some of the weaker officers would pretend not to hear — yet he had chosen to make a big issue out of it.
‘Were they charged?’ he asked.
‘No, that was the strange thing,’ Mick said. ‘The next morning they were released, and told to report to Lieutenant Maude.’
‘You’re sure that was who they were told to report to?’ Blackstone asked. ‘It wasn’t to Lieutenant Hatfield, who’d had them arrested, was it? Or Lieutenant Fortesque, who was their platoon commander?’
‘It was Maude,’ Mick said firmly. ‘I mean, think about it, Mr Blackstone, Lieutenant Hatfield couldn’t have seen them, could he — because that would have been like admitting he’d been wrong to put them on a charge.’
‘True,’ Blackstone agreed.
‘And as for Lieutenant Fortesque,’ Mick continued, ‘well, he was dead by then.’
‘Of course he was,’ Blackstone said. ‘Carry on.’
Maude is sitting at the table in his dugout, a glass of whisky in his hand, when the sergeant marches Jones and Clay in.
‘Lieutenant Hatfield has been thinking over the incident which occurred yesterday, and has decided he may have misheard what you said,’ he tells the two privates.
‘Honest, sir, I would never have-’ Clay says.
‘Shut your mouth, Private Clay!’ the sergeant screams.