They looked around the orchard. Nothing.
‘It’s probably the camp kitchen.’
‘We’re too far away and there’s no wind. Besides, it’s a different sort of smell.’
‘I can’t see anything. I suppose the farmers must burn things. It’s autumn – bonfire time.’
They moved on. The stream flowed under a small wooden footbridge and then curved away slightly. If they were not going to be late, they ought to turn back here.
‘I can still smell it,’ Barton said. Then they both caught sight of the fine line of smoke, rising from behind the sycamore copse, a hundred yards or so ahead, nearer the church.
‘It is a bonfire.’
‘No.’
Barton began to run, his legs covering the ground remarkably quickly, so that Hilliard was well behind, going through the thick grass. He heard a shout.
As far as they knew nobody had seen or heard the plane come down. Indeed, there had been very few planes over this area at all during the past few weeks and when one did appear it had seemed unreal, a distant reminder of war.
This one, a small German monoplane, had smashed nose forwards into the field immediately behind the copse. It was badly charred at the front, like some ungainly bird which had been half shoved into an oven. The smoke was dying away, the plane might have been here since early that morning.
‘What do we do?’
‘Go back and report it. Though one of the farmers probably has already. But we’ll have to check.’
It looked an ugly plane. They were about to turn away.
‘Good God,’ Barton said. He had gone much closer and now he stopped. Hilliard moved up to his side.
The pilot was still strapped into his seat but he had slid forward and down. His head was bent over to one side and the eyes were open, looking over in the direction of the trees. He had a plump, young face, with high cheekbones, and the flesh of it was quite undamaged. His front teeth protruded slightly, to rest on the bottom lip. But Hilliard saw that the rest of his body, up to the chest and arms, was almost burned away. He wondered why the plane had not gone up in flames completely and, as it had not, why the man could not have scrambled out.
‘We shall have to report it,’ he said. He had a sudden feeling of acute reality, he was back, now, in the world where such things happened, were normal. This was the first dead man he had seen since his return from France and there would now only be all the rest who were to follow. He felt the old, heavy sensation in his stomach, misery and fear and anger, compounded but also slightly deadened.
But he was used to it. Barton was not. Glancing at his face now, Hilliard recognized in another what he himself had known, the first time he saw a corpse in France. There were only a limited number of responses he could make. He remembered the one that the Sergeant who was leading him up the trench they called Pall Mall had made, when they came upon a heap of perhaps forty bodies piled up together, bloated and black, unburied for weeks, for this part of the line had been particularly bad, there had been a large number of casualties and no time to do anything about them.
He had said, ‘Mind your feet, sir.’
Perhaps Barton was being broken in gently, after all. He did not look as if he thought so. His face had not gone paler but more darkly flushed under the already sunburned skin; he said nothing. Hilliard thought that he would do anything now, anything at all, for him not to have to go, not to see any more of it: he was almost beside himself in a rush of dread on Barton’s behalf.
It had gone much darker, the birds were quiet. The smoke still plumed up from the engine of the German plane, there was the faint tick-tack of cooling metal.
‘Come on.’ Barton jerked his head up. ‘We’d better go back.’
‘David…’
Barton stopped, glanced back. He said, ‘No. It’s all right.’
They both began to run.
Much later, in the apple loft, where all their things stood about in cases and bags, waiting to be moved, he said, ‘Pity, I shan’t be able to think about it in the same way now. I shan’t remember the orchard without remembering that bloody plane.’
‘I suppose we shouldn’t have gone back for a last look. It’s generally a mistake, isn’t it?’
‘Oh, no,’ Barton turned the lamp down. ‘After all, it had to start somewhere, didn’t it?’
Part Two
‘Mounted officers should avoid passing and re-passing infantry more than is absolutely necessary.’
And so they had only seen one another twice that day, at the second halt early in the morning and then as the Battalion was going into Feuvry, and Hilliard happened to ride by. He had passed Barton and then glanced back over his shoulder, seen his expression and frowned. Barton knew at once what he thought. John saw that he was more affected by the sight of this town than he had been by the dead German pilot in the burned-out plane, and he was shocked.
But until then he had enjoyed the march from Percelle, though it had taken him a long time, more than an hour, to relax, in his position behind B Company, for he was anxious in case he should overlook anything for which he was responsible, in case, through his fault, something went wrong.
The hard feeling of the road under his feet pleased him and he did not mind that it was hot and dry, with the line of the horizon shimmering and shifting ahead. He had spent so much of his life walking. The year before he left school he had gone with his younger brother to the Camargue, they had taken tents and lived on bread and cheese and walked for miles every day over that flat, pale, sinister countryside.
He enjoyed the sight of the men moving together, enjoyed the sound of their singing.
‘The men are lucky,’ Hilliard had said, ‘in some ways they’re better off than we are. In some ways, I envy them.’
‘What do you envy?’
‘They get along, they have one another the whole time. They’re all friends. Don’t you notice that? It’s easier. They just get along.’
‘Don’t we?’
‘It isn’t the same.’ Hilliard had hesitated, unable to explain, that this friendship of theirs, so immediately, simply achieved, was rare, could not be taken for granted, or seen elsewhere. Among the officers there was not the natural camaraderie to be found among the men. They had so much work to do individually.
The men were singing.
Captain Sparrow was riding a long way behind.
‘The length of an average march under normal conditions for a large column is fifteen miles a day. INFANTRY USUAL PACE. Yards per minute – 100. Minutes required to traverse one mile – 18. Miles per hour including short halts – 3.’
The sun shone. Later on in the day, when they hit the main road to the front, they found it crowded with horses and motor bicycles and men.
‘What is it, Hughins?’
‘Only the usual, sir. Blisters. They feel like mushrooms.’
‘Oh.’ Barton remembered what you did with blisters, how you took off shoe and sock, and burst them carefully or, better still, got someone else to do it for you, and then covered the place up with clean lint. They had always been getting blisters, as children.
Hughins was loosening his boot gingerly, trying to screw the thick sock around inside. For who could sit here at the roadside halt with bare feet, and have his blisters pricked delicately by someone with a clean needle and a steady hand, who had lint to spare?
‘Nothing a nice hot mustard soak won’t put right when we get to the hotel! And I rub them with rum as well – works wonders, sir.’ Hughins seemed old to Barton, old enough to be his father, though he could not be. He was a handsome man, but he had warts on his chin.