‘I’ll go.’
Besides, if there was something wrong, he felt in a mood to be at the centre of it, to see at once how bad everything could be. He was not tired, in spite of the physical aching. But Hilliard was behind him.
‘Harris?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Where is he?’
‘He’s gone down into the cellar, sir. We’re not using it – but he’s in a bit of a state.’
They were going away.
‘You’d better stay here, Barton.’
He lit the candle again and watched the light flicker yellow through a gap in the ceiling. It was perfectly correct, John was in charge of the platoon, it was his job to go. All the same he resented it. ‘You’d better stay here.’ He had wanted to take charge. The idea was new to him and he thought about it, for he was not ambitious, did not want to lead, he had been perfectly content, was content. He had no illusions about himself as actual or potential soldier, no convictions about his duty in this war, no real desire to be here at all; except that he would not want to leave Hilliard, now. Yet he had wanted to go behind Sergeant Locke, down the stairs, to be responsible.
He reached over to his tunic for the letter and pencil.
I’ll send this off tomorrow, before we leave here. It’s very late now, but…
The room was filled with greenish light for a second, and then there was a whine and the crash of an exploding shell. He had no idea how close it had been but nothing had come as near as that before.
Now, it was quite dark again. He seemed to be all right. Much further away, guns boomed – a different sound.
‘Are you all right?’ Hilliard was in the doorway.
‘Perfectly, thanks. The candle went out.’
‘Do you think you could come down?’
‘What’s happened?’
‘Nothing – not really. It’s Harris.’
‘Yes?’
‘I can’t get him to move. Nobody can. The men have tried, I’ve said what I can think of, but he isn’t… he’s taken himself down there and he won’t come out. He doesn’t seem to hear us at all.’
‘What’s he doing?’
‘Nothing. He’s in a corner. He’s been there for a couple of hours apparently. They’ve been trying to persuade him to come out.’
‘Is he ill?’
‘I don’t think so. He won’t say anything.’
‘Can’t he be left there?’
‘Not in his present state, no. And he’ll have to come out in the morning. I shall have to get Franklin if he won’t budge for us.’
‘No. We’ll cope.’
They made their way down the unsteady staircase and along the passages of the house. Around them in the darkness the men lay, sleeping or listening. They picked their way between the blankets. Down in what had been the kitchen, the floor was stone and there were neither doors, windows, nor boards at the gaps. There was the whine of another shell and the sound of bricks crashing down, somewhere in the north of the town.
The other men of the platoon who had tried to help had now been sent away, only Sergeant Locke stood in the cellar, holding a candle. It smelt down here, a fouler smell, there might once have been latrines or rats. A stone ledge was let into the far wall, like a fireplace but without any chimney leading up from it. Harris was huddled inside like a foetus, his hands up near his face. He was not moving but making a continuous, agonized noise, a cry or a moan and yet neither of those. Barton remembered watching him play football in the orchard at Percelle. He was perhaps eighteen, stocky and red-headed. He had a harmonica, which he used to accompany their songs in the evening.
‘I thought you might know what to say to him better than I do.’
For a moment the three of them stood in the small pool of light in the dank cellar, looking towards the soldier, hearing him. The guns roared again and the boy’s voice rose a pitch higher. Barton remembered that Harris had come to the camp on the same train as Hilliard. Had taken scraps across the yard to the farm dog, each evening.
‘It might be better if I stayed with him on my own for a bit, mightn’t it?’
They hesitated.
‘If you can get him to go back upstairs, sir, he’ll calm down, he’ll be all right when he’s with the others again, they’ll see to him. If we can get him out of here.’
‘Yes,’ Hilliard said. ‘It’s no use crowding in on him, you’re quite right. I’ll go back. Call me if you want help. Sergeant, will you wait at the top of the stairs?’
‘Sir.’
Barton nodded. ‘I’ll bring him up.’ Hilliard’s face relaxed. They went away, out of the cellar and up the steps, to the noise of the guns in the distance.
Oh God, he is two years younger than me, he is Edward’s age, he knows no more about it than I do, we have neither of us seen anything, only heard, only heard. We can imagine it, that’s all. And I have to tell him that he must get up and go back, must pull himself together, and that tomorrow he must march on with the rest of us. In the end, he has to be ordered to do that.
He went forward quietly. The cellar floor was uneven. He stopped close beside the ledge, set down the candle. He could see Harris’s face, strangely altered with fear. He wondered how it would be with him when they got to the front line and into the trenches and into battle.
He put out his hand and found Harris’s wrist and held it. He I remembered the time when he had fallen out of a willow tree near the beck and lain on the ground and seen his own blood and cried out from fear at the sight, and Edward had held his wrist like that then, though he too had been afraid of the blood. Nevertheless, it had comforted them both.
For a moment the noise went on, the terrible, high moan. Harris’s pulse was thudding. Barton did not move his hand. He said, ‘I’ll stay here. It’s all right.’
He wondered what Captain Franklin would have done.
In a pause from the sound of the shelling, he heard a man bumping as he turned over on the floor overhead.
‘Harris?’
The boy’s teeth began to chatter. The skin of his wrist felt hot under Barton’s touch. For a long time neither of them moved. Then Harris lurched up, and forwards, his head touched his knees and he began to cry, not lifting his hands to wipe his face. Barton waited. The crying went on and on. Then, quite abruptly, stopped.
‘I can’t go,’ Harris said. Whispered. He looked up into Barton’s face. ‘I’m afraid.’
‘Yes.’
He wanted to weep, then, he felt old, he thought that he had seen and heard all that he ever needed to see, all the fear there could be, that he, too, could not go.
‘You wait, you don’t know anything, you haven’t seen anything yet. Barton. You wait.’
Now, he had. And they were only here in Feuvry, three miles or more away from the front line. Only here.
‘What’ll happen to me, sir? What’ll happen to me? I can’t go.’
Barton stayed in the cellar for a long time with Harris, patiently hearing the tale of misery and fear, and there was nothing he could do about any of it, he was distressed at his own inadequacy, there was none of it that he had not felt or imagined himself. Harris had spent much of his time at Percelle listening to the stories all the men had been telling about that summer’s offensive, the tales of death and horror had lodged in his mind and bred fear, until today, after the march and the heat and his tiredness, he had broken under the strain of them.
But in the end, somehow, Barton got him to come out, to agree that he must go back upstairs among the others, for then nothing would be said or done to him, and that, tomorrow, he would march on again, up to the front line.
He heard his own words and they echoed in his ears and he wondered at them, for they were meaningless, false, they gave him no comfort – how, then, could they do anything for Harris? He was only certain that Franklin must not have to be informed. He said as much.