‘No. So you don’t read this because it helps things?’
‘I don’t know what I do or why, John.’ Barton sounded weary.
‘Why did you take these particular sections out and write them down in a book by themselves? They must mean something.’
‘I really don’t know. It was something to do.’
‘Oh come, that doesn’t sound like you. That isn’t the kind of thing you say.’
‘All right. Perhaps it puts a neat fence around things – tidies them up. I just do not know.’
Hilliard felt again that he had come up against a hard wall, he did not know what to say or how to go further. So often in the time since they had first met he had half-phrased some thought, groped his way towards the precise expression of what he was feeling, and David had at once understood, had picked up his meaning and stated it for him, or expanded it. Not now. Now he blocked everything in the same dull, tired, patient way. He had lost his gaiety and also some edge of understanding. Or was trying to lose them, to numb himself. Now, he asked, ‘Are you ready?’
‘Yes.’ But Hilliard still lingered beside the papers. He said, ‘I wish I could make a pattern out of things like this. Sergeant Hurd keeps a diary. Did you know?’
‘Yes.’
‘Perhaps that’s what he does – makes a pattern. I wish I could make one. Make sense of it.’
Barton shook his head. ‘So do I.’ He turned to go out of the tent.
It was raining heavily. They walked slightly apart. John Hilliard a pace behind, so that he saw Barton’s shoulders and the side of his head but not his face, not his expression. He felt again the appalling sense of his own failure, a misery that he could say nothing, do nothing, that he did not know.
Glazier joined them and walked beside Barton, began to talk about hunting. He was a well-meaning man and rather lazy. Once, David had suggested that he might also be callous, but when Hilliard had pressed him, asked if it were because of the foxhunting, he had shaken his head, said, ‘No. Anyhow, perhaps I’m wrong, perhaps it wasn’t a fair thing to say. I don’t know the man really. It’s just – I wonder if he cares much.’
Yet now he seemed to come alive for Glazier, more than at any time during the past week, he talked with something of his old, teasing manner, laughed, so that Hilliard, a pace behind, felt jealousy rising in him, he began to hate Glazier. But hated David, too, for giving so much of himself away so freely to another: he thought, what has Glazier got, what does he say or do, that I cannot? What spring has he managed to touch?
They separated going into the briefing conference in the dingy cottage which was Battalion Headquarters. Barton sat across the table from both Glazier and himself, hands together, listening and silent. When he caught Hilliard’s glance, he returned it calmly, and then, the second time, smiled, a vague, dispassionate smile. Garrett told them they were moving the following day.
He woke to a sound which he could not at once identify: it was not only the rain which had already churned up the field outside and soaked under the tent flaps, so that their ground-sheets were wet and muddied. There was the soft rumble of water on the canvas. But something else, a tearing noise. He realized that the lamp was on very low, and shaded by a valise which had been propped up on the packing case in front of it.
‘Barton?’
‘Damn. I’m sorry – I hoped I wouldn’t wake you up.’
‘What’s happened?’
‘Nothing and I’ve nearly finished. Go back to sleep.’
Hilliard stretched. His limbs were cramped and he was damp and chilled. There was the close, mouldy smell of wet grass and soil. The tearing noise had stopped. Barton was sitting down, only the top of his head was visible over the upright valise.
‘What are you doing?’
For a moment he did not answer. Then he said, ‘I suppose I found out that whatever I’d been trying to achieve didn’t work and shouldn’t work. I mean that I ought not to have tried at all.’
He spoke very quietly but there was a note of despair in his voice.
‘I couldn’t sleep and I knew why. I’ll feel better now. Look, I didn’t mean to wake you.’
Hilliard was standing. ‘It’s not particularly comfortable anyway.’
‘No.’
‘I’m fairly wet. That would have woken me up before long. I don’t seem to be able to be wet though I get through most other disturbances. I slept for six hours in a trench at Ancerre, with half a hundredweight of earth and a dead man on top of me.’
Barton did not comment.
‘You can get used to almost anything you know.’
‘But should you?’
‘Well, it helps to be able to sleep. You have to sleep when you can.’
‘I don’t mean things like that – sleeping, getting used to the food, the rats and fleas and noise. I mean… other things.’
‘I know.’
‘I thought about you just now. I’ve been sitting here for a long time thinking about you. You’ve had more time to get used to things, haven’t you?’
‘Some things. Yes.’
‘And yet when you went back to England you couldn’t sleep, you had nightmares, you couldn’t even bear the smell of the roses. It all came back then, the men you’d seen die, the noises and the smells. You hadn’t forgotten.’ He seemed to be asking for some kind of reassurance, that this was truly so, that Hilliard had remembered, and suffered for it.
‘You know I hadn’t. I told you – I’ve told you more than anyone.’
‘Yes.’
‘David, what have you been doing tonight?’
He moved across the tent and looked over the valise at the packing case-table. The green-bound copy of Sir Thomas Browne, and the notebook into which Barton had earlier copied the quotations, lay in a pile, torn into small pieces, the leaves ripped from the binding. There were only a few pages still left intact, he had almost finished when Hilliard woke.
‘You can’t make a pattern out of it, you cannot read a book and get comfort from fine words, and great thoughts, and you shouldn’t bloody well try.’
‘I don’t know…’
‘I do. I’ve got to face it, it is wicked and pitiless, it is all one Godawful mess, and how can I sit here and let that man, that great man, lull me into a kind of acquiescence? Be romantic about it? Is that right? Is that how he would want to be used?’
‘You were reading the Psalms, too.’
‘Yes. Or the Psalms or anything. You asked me if it all “helped”. Well, if it did it should not have done so.’
Hilliard sat down on the canvas stool beside him. He said, ‘Hasn’t your father used anaesthetic? And why do we give the men rum issue?’
‘For God’s sake…’
‘Isn’t it the same?’
‘No.’
‘I wonder.’
‘No, John. It’s one thing to numb yourself against some kind of pain, to get up courage for an ordeal. This is different, this is a question of basic attitude. I’ve been trying to set everything apart, make it grandiose, give it a point and a purpose when there are none.’
‘Perhaps the men wouldn’t agree with you – not all of them. Coulter thinks there’s still a reason for it all, for him it is a just war, he’ll go on till he drops.’
‘I’m not Coulter.’
‘You’re not being fair to yourself, all the same.’
But it is all right, Hilliard thought, now it is all right again, at least we are talking, he will let me get through to him. He felt enormous relief and a kind of gratitude.
‘I told you about what it was like in the summer and when I went home afterwards. I think that was a good thing, for me anyway, because you made me talk and it was what I needed. I couldn’t talk to anyone else.’
‘No.’