Hilliard lifted the dripping wet shaving brush up to his face.
He could not get used to what the C.O. looked like. He sat on the opposite side of the table, with the wide windows, overlooking the orchard, behind him. It was not dark yet but the lamp was already lit. Perhaps it was that, he thought, perhaps Garrett looked better in the undistorting daylight. But it was not that, not just an expression. Everything about him had changed.
‘Hilliard!’ He had almost cried out his name, and come quickly across the room to greet him, and it was as though he had been sitting here, for hours or days, awaiting his return. Here was one familiar face, someone who had survived.
‘How are you? I hope they haven’t cut your time short? I hope they’ve seen to it that you’re properly fit?’
Yes, he said, yes they had, yes he was fit, no, there was nothing wrong at all, the leg was more than healed. And all the time, he stared at the Colonel.
‘I’m surprised they didn’t send me back sooner – a week ago. It seems you could have done with me.’
Garrett turned and gave him a curious look. But he only said, ‘No. You needed the rest.’
He went over to a cupboard, took out glasses and a bottle of whisky. Hilliard saw other bottles, gleaming darkly behind it. The C.O. had developed a strange half-limp, but it seemed not to be the result of any physical injury, rather of agitation. He moved a hand up to his head, smoothing back the hair nervously again and again, while the other poured drink into the glasses.
‘Soda?’
‘If you have it?’
‘I suppose we do. Yes.’
‘Water will do.’
‘No, no. There’s soda. I saw it. I’m positive there was some soda. It’s Keefe, he moves things, he’s a damned nuisance. Tidies everything. He’s obsessed with tidiness.’
Hilliard had never heard him complain like that, like a peevish old man.
‘You don’t know Keefe.’
‘No.’
‘There won’t be many you do know.’
Garrett was sorting helplessly among the bottles and glasses in the cupboard.
‘This is perfectly all right, sir. Don’t trouble about the soda.’
‘No? Well, I don’t seem to be able to find it. Perhaps there wasn’t any’
‘This is fine.’ Though he had forgotten how strong neat whisky could be against the back of his throat.
‘Keefe moves everything, blast it.’
He came back, fidgeted with some papers, moved the lamp, sat down in the end. Hilliard thought, I have been away five weeks and he is twenty years older, he is… He could not take it in.
From the beginning of his time here he had liked Colonel Garrett, had got on well with him, though without holding him in the same sort of esteem he had held Ward, the dead Captain of B Company. But the C.O. had befriended him, had seen that he was as comfortable as any man could be, that spring on the Somme. He made a point of keeping in touch, of sending for and talking to his subalterns as well as the senior officers, he came down into the trenches frequently.
Garrett had trained as a lawyer before taking his army commission and he still seemed much more like a solicitor than a soldier, though he had been in the army for so long. Hilliard wondered why he was in the army. He knew that Garrett had a wife and four daughters somewhere, in Worthing or Horsham or Lewes. He was not an imaginative man. But careful, a good planner, cool headed. Perhaps all that simply meant, brave.
Within the space of five weeks, and those after two years of consistent service in the Old Front Line, his air of calm and the slight ponderousness had vanished. His face was altered, was thinner, the eyes puffed but the cheeks drawn in, his fingers moved all the time about the rim of his glass, or smoothed down the patch of thinning hair. Mons, Le Cateau and Ypres, and then the first battle of the spring offensive had not shaken him. So what had the past month been like? Hilliard was appalled, he had not dreamed that this could happen and so quickly to a man like Garrett. To a man who was yet not ill or wounded, who had survived for so long by careful management, perhaps, and luck. Well, and he still survived, he was here. An old man in the yellow-grey lamplight.
It was possible to see what this room of the farmhouse had been like as a parlour: there was a wide stone fireplace and an uneven floor, you could imagine old soft sofas and coarse mats, stone jugs full of marigolds and cornflowers. The windows, long and loose in their frames, shaken by past shelling, were open now. The smells of the autumn evening came in, of grass and trees and rotting fruit, and the army smells, tobacco and bullet smoke, horses and cooking.
The guns were booming like summer thunder, away in the distance.
‘You lost Bates, of course.’
‘Yes.’
‘I think Coulter’s a good man, isn’t he? You’ll be all right with Coulter.’
‘Yes.’
For a moment, he wondered whether nothing else might be said, whether Garrett would not want, after all, to go over what had happened, preferring to leave the summer behind him. There were too many names to bring up, too many individual deaths.
Silence. The C.O. jerked his head and looked behind him suddenly, as though he had heard something unusual, and then turned back again. Hilliard could not get over his face, the change in his face. He waited for the usual questions about home.
‘We lost three quarters of the Battalion in a day and a half. Getting on for two dozen officers. Major Gadney, young Parkinson, Ward – all the best. Half of them went because we didn’t receive an order telling us the second push was cancelled. They just went on. You were well out of it. I’m glad you were out of it.’
Hilliard did not speak.
‘I’ve seen nothing like it. Nothing. Not that we were the only ones. They went mad, we might have been a pack of schoolboys in a scrum. Did you hear about the Jocks? Most of them went straight on to the wire. They were on our right, we watched it. The sun was shining, you could see for miles, even through the smoke, we just watched them go. We lost Pearcy and thirty-eight men all in one go. I’d just gone down there, I saw them. God alone knows what was supposed to be going on. I didn’t. I haven’t found out yet. None of us knows. I suppose it’s all on paper somewhere. Nothing came through to us at all, everything went to blazes, telephones, runners. Half the artillery blew themselves up with their own Lewis guns backfiring because somebody hadn’t attended to them properly. Most of Parkinson’s lot went up with a mine. There was a barrage they didn’t tell us about and we couldn’t get word through to them to stop, we were running into our own covering fire. And then they started to shoot machine guns from the left flank, they’d lost their bearings, they thought we were Boche. Not surprising. After an hour or so you couldn’t see a thing. It was a day and a half, two days, of absolute bloody chaos. Bloody pointless mess.’
Hilliard realized that this was what had upset his careful, lawyer’s mind more than anything else, this lack of order and reason. The mess.
‘And then we had another full week without any relief, and most of our support line gone.’
All the time he spoke he turned the whisky glass round and round in his hand, so that the lamplight caught it. Hilliard could not piece the story together, could not picture what might have happened in the battle, any more than Garrett could remember. He did not even know exactly when it had been. It did not matter. He had only to listen.
‘It was about eighty degrees during the day. I’ve never known it so hot.’
He remembered the heat, in the ward of the military hospital. They had pulled down the green blinds but it had felt no cooler. The Field-Gunner had tossed about, crying all day as he cried all night.