‘You do see that it would be better not, don’t you?’
Silence. Then, ‘Yes, sir.’
‘If you come up now, it’ll all be forgotten.’
‘Sergeant Locke….’
‘Won’t say anything.’
‘I’m…’
Silence again for a long time. Harris still had his knees hunched up to his chest. It was dark in the cellar now, the candle had long since gone out.
‘It’s pretty late and we do have to get going first thing in the morning. We need to sleep.’
Harris still hesitated, shivering. Then, slowly, he got down from the stone ledge. The guns were still roaring. Barton wondered what was happening at the front line. There were rumours all over Feuvry, and their own Battalion repeated them. Nobody knew the truth.
They felt their way back up the steps, hands groping along the walls. It occurred to him that the best thing for Harris would be alcohol – rum issue had been hours ago, he would have to go upstairs for his own flask.
Barton told him to wait inside the front room of the house where most of his platoon lay sleeping, and continued on, in the darkness, up the next two flights of stairs. He was more than half-way there, because he felt his foot come up against the broken section and made a note to take care, when the shell came and the blast of it threw him backwards down the flight. He threw his arms up over his head to shut out the appalling noise.
At the foot of his report to Brigade Headquarters on the incident of the night of September 19/20, Col. G. T. C. Garrett commanding 2nd Battalion at Feuvry, gave it as his opinion that the town was unsuitable for billeting purposes. The lives of nine of his men had been lost. Those of other regiments to be billeted in the town in future would be unnecessarily at risk. Overnight halts might more safely be made at Beauterre, two miles further south.
STANDING ORDER No. 107. Major General Tebbits. Commanding 1st Division. 1.8.1915.
The village of BEAUTERRE (Ref. Ordnance Map 48, 4 Miles S.E. of ARTUN) will not be used for the purpose of overnight halts by infantry troops. Billets are to be found in FEUVRY (Ref. Ordnance Map 47).
‘David…’
‘If I’d left him in the cellar and taken the brandy down to him. If we’d all just left him.’
‘If we’d left him he would have stayed there until tomorrow morning, we would have had to fetch Franklin who would have ordered him out, and if he hadn’t moved then, he would have been court martialled.’
‘He’d have been alive, Hilliard, he’d still have still been alive.’
‘For that matter, if you’d stayed with him yourself for a couple of minutes longer in that room you would have been killed as well. And that is true of hundreds of men everywhere in this war every single day – if, if, if, might, might, might.’
‘For Christ’s sake you sound like one of our politicians! Have you heard yourself?’
Hilliard came across the room and stood beside him at the boarded-up window. The sky showed through the gaps, grey, as the dawn came up.
He said, ‘I’m only telling you the truth because that’s how it is out here.’
He had been terrified that Barton had been killed when he had heard the noise. ‘Look, David, I know perfectly well how you feel…’
‘Do you?’
‘Yes.’
Barton was silent. In his head he still heard the noise of the shell, he could still feel himself being flung down the stairs. He still saw Harris’s face.
‘You cannot and you must not spend any more time blaming yourself, saying if only this and if only that. It’s useless.’
‘Yes.’
‘If you go on doing it, you will be useless.’
‘Yes.’
But then Barton thought, he is one of them, he thinks the way they think after all, he sees the things they see. He tells me that I know nothing. I have seen nothing, but that is no longer true. Already, he has put Harris out of his mind, the night of September 19/20 is an incident, a report will be made on it, one man has gone from the platoon. That is all.
In fact, seven out of the nine men killed had been from their platoon. The shell had hit the front of the house, coming down into the corner of the room in which they slept and close beside where Harris had been standing, waiting for Barton to come back with the brandy. Four other men had been wounded by shrapnel and falling masonry.
But wasn’t Harris better off? For would he not have gone through terror after terror in the front line, only to meet with a death less sudden, more painful, more clearly foreseen? He had been spared all that. He had been alive – and then dead.
Or else he might have lived, to see the end of this war. which everyone in England told them was imminent, would be before Christmas. If, if, if. Might, might, might.
Garrett had asked Hilliard to write to the men’s relatives, as soon as they got into the support line the following day. He had been told nothing about the business with Harris in the cellar.
‘You could write the letter about Harris,’ John Hilliard had said, as they came out and made their way back to the shattered house and the remaining men of the platoon who were clearing up with grey, cynical faces, who had been so abruptly reminded of where they were, that it had all begun again. ‘You can write to his parents.’
‘Yes, I want to do that.’
‘You needn’t tell them anything about the fact that he…’
‘Oh, for Christ’s shake, John, what do you take me for?’
The light was getting paler. They had had no sleep at all. Around them, the shadows of their luggage, boots, rifles. The conversation with Harris repeated itself over and over in Barton’s head, there were his own, meaningless, comforting words, used to get the soldier out of the cellar and up the stairs, to his death.
Hilliard was looking at him.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘I don’t know. You…’ Hilliard wondered how he could tell him. That his face had changed, in the space of a day and a night, that his eyes had taken on the common look of shock and misery and exhaustion, that the texture of his flesh was altered, was grained and worn.
‘It had to start somewhere, didn’t it? But could it have started worse?’
Hilliard said, ‘When the shell came I’d heard you on the stairs just before it… I thought you were dead. When the noise stopped, I could hear a man calling out. I thought it was you. I was sure you were dying or dead.’
Barton turned his head and smiled, and then his face changed again, the old, self-deprecating expression over it, and mixed with that, concern for what Hilliard had been feeling. He said, ‘I never thought I might have been dead.’ Though that was not true.
‘No. It’s only when you see it happen to someone you’ve just been talking to, or think about it in the middle of doing an ordinary job in a safe place.’
‘Dread.’
‘Yes. But you can get another feeling, too – a peculiar sense of detachment, immunity. None of this has anything to do with you, only with the others.’
‘Harris didn’t have that feeling, down in the cellar.’
‘No. He was afraid.’
‘Does it often happen? Do men often simply break down at the thought of it?’
‘No. I’ve only seen one man in Harris’s state before – he was worse than Harris. But it was in the middle of a particularly bad attack and he’d just lost his brother, he’d seen him killed by a mine.’
‘I said things to Harris that wouldn’t have given hope or comfort to a dog.’
‘Yet they did.’
‘Did they?’