Remembering it now Hilliard’s stomach seemed to come up into his mouth, he thought, ‘I fail people.’ He did not know what had happened to the Gunner, and it would be impossible to find out. He could not forget the sound of his voice and the sound of his crying.
He got out of bed again, rinsed the tumbler and drank some water. It was lukewarm. Barton was still watching him.
‘Hilliard?’
‘It’s all right.’
‘Tell me what’s up.’
But he had told him too much already. Barton would have enough of his own to cope with as soon as they left here. He must manage by himself over this, as he had managed in the past.
‘Wouldn’t it be a good thing for you to talk about it?’
It was not simply what Barton said but his tone of voice, the chance it offered. With shock Hilliard realized that he wanted to cry out, as the Field-Gunner had cried, to go across the room to Barton, who would listen, would know, as Beth had known on the nights he had crept into her room and slept in the safe darkness beneath her bed.
The surface of his skin went hot as he took in what he had been thinking. Barton had released some anxiety which had been coiled up within him, and there he was now, on the other side of the apple loft, this new person, a stranger, entirely familiar, just as he had been when sitting in the orchard and at the officers’ dining table. He was… What?
Behind him. Barton got out of bed. He went over to one of his cases, opened it and took something out, came back and removed the tumbler from Hilliard’s hand. ‘Not too much,’ he said. ‘but it’s what you need, I think.’ His father might have spoken like that to a patient.
‘Go on.’
Hilliard lifted the tumbler. The brandy was slightly diluted by the water which had been left there and it tasted warm and comforting as some medicine of childhood. He drank it slowly. He remembered the change that came over the men’s faces in the cold early mornings as they drank their rum issue, and the colour came seeping back into the night-time greyness and tiredness of the flesh.
‘We’d better get some sleep now. They seem to wake up pretty damned early here.’
‘When we…’ But Hilliard did not go on, he was overcome with such tiredness that he wondered if he could reach his camp bed. He had been going to say, ‘When we get back to the line.’ The mornings would be even earlier then and the sleep they had had at night even less. But he would not speak about it after all, there was no point.
His last thought after the lamp had gone out was that he did not want Barton to go up to the front line, he wanted to have him stay behind here, put into some administrative job, anything. For he should not be there among the roaring, blasting guns, in such appalling danger, risking his life in the small daily accidents. He thought, we need him, we need what he has to give us. I need him.
For the second night he slept without dreaming.
‘Any time now.’
‘Day after tomorrow.’
‘End of this week.’
‘Well, it can’t last, can it?’
Every day Hilliard heard one man or another prophesying the Battalion’s return to the front line. But no order came through, they stayed on at Percelle and after a time, in the September days, that seemed almost as hot as those of June and July, a vague air of restlessness hung about the camp. The men were on edge, wanting to know something for certain. Nothing was said.
The days were taken up with a succession of drills and parades and inspections, lectures, exercises, demonstrations, physical training, bayonet and trench mortar practices. Many of them were resented simply because of their uselessness. Nothing, Hilliard thought, had ever really been taught him which was a true preparation for the everyday physical life of the trenches, no battle went in practice as it went on paper, and so there was no chance to utilize this or that theory. So much of what they had to do here, shocked as they still were, was fatiguing and pointless.
At night the men sat about smoking, playing cards, writing letters in copy-pencil and going over and over again all their stories of that summer, as if they could not help probing a sore. The new recruits listened, their expressions faintly incredulous, as though they were hearing the adventures of old men, for it was so easy here, among the drooping orchards in the sun, it was all an exercise, tedious but unreal, they could not fully imagine what the others talked about.
But, gradually, the faces of those who had been in France through the summer looked less tired and drained, even than when Hilliard had returned, rest and release from immediate fear, and the leave some of them had had, were like moisture, pulping out dehydrated flesh. They were all sunburned.
Only the C.O. was the same, looked haunted, his eyes and hands continually restless. He sent for Hilliard and talked to him, kept Barton telling one story after another over the dinner table, like a child spinning out the time before having to go to bed.
The early mornings were beautiful, when the orchard trees and beyond them those of the copse and the poplars lining the canal loomed as milky shadows out of a thick mist, until the sun struck down, catching the dew on cobwebs, the air cleared. All around Percelle the life of some of the farmers continued, the soldiers met them coming down the lane from the fields, wearing old corduroy trousers and huge shoes. That spring they had almost all been driven away, Percelle had been in a belt of land that had come under a short spell of heavy cross-fire. But the war had moved on far enough for some return to be made to everyday life, though not to normality, for the army and the shattered houses were still there. It was the older people who came back and carried on.
Five miles southwards, the small town of Crevify had escaped much damage, the café tables still stood out on the pavements in the market square, covered in stiff cloths, coffee was served with hot croissants and meringues and éclairs, and in the evenings, bad beer and wine but good brandy. Hilliard and Barton walked there through the fields and, once, the town band came out and played – selections from musical comedies of the nineties, Russian waltzes and French marches, with the late evening sun glittering on their instruments and ruddying the puffed-out faces of the players. Barton sat back, his legs up on another cane chair, smiling with pleasure at the incongruity of it. He said, as Hilliard had said that first evening to Coulter, ‘Where’s the war?’ But the streets of the town were full of their own Battalion, and the only Frenchmen in Crevify were old.
That was the evening when Captain Franklin had gone walking past alone, and Barton had called out to him cheerfully, ‘Come and have a drink, sir. Listen to the band!’
For although there was something about the Adjutant which Hilliard did not like, Barton would never agree with him. ‘He’s all right,’ he said, as he said about everyone.
Franklin had stopped and looked across at them, the same lack of expression on his long face. His skin was not tanned but reddened by the sun.
‘The beer’s rotten but the chairs are comfortable.’
Hilliard had not thought that anyone in the world could have resisted Barton’s friendliness, the knack he had of attracting all available company. Franklin did not move, but there had been something like disapproval on his face, though in fact he had not looked at Barton but at Hilliard when he spoke. ‘I won’t if you don’t mind. I’m on my way back.’ And walked on slowly. But when Hilliard swore, Barton had only said, ‘Oh, he’s all right!’ as always and then forgot it, calling for more drinks.
It was here at the café table that he wrote so many of his letters. Because, for every one Hilliard sent, his friend wrote four or five, long letters in quick, black handwriting, sprinkled with exclamation marks and, when he was writing to his sisters, with small drawings and doodles in the margins, for their children.