‘I’ll bet, sir!’
‘They garble everything, it’s all lies, you can’t work out who’s doing what, who’s where – who won.’
Coulter looked at him sideways. ‘Won, sir?’
‘Well – yes, I saw the lists.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Bates?’
‘Oh yes, sir. Most of your platoon. Most of the Company, really, sir. You won’t find many faces you know, sir.’
Bates had been his batman from the beginning. A bad-tempered man, strong as an ox, entirely reliable. Hilliard had trusted Bates, and liked him, too, because the war had not changed him, he was morose as he had always been, he was an Old Army man, apparently indestructible.
‘There’s a new Adjutant, sir. Captain Franklin – B Company.’
‘Yes.’
He had read Captain Ward’s name in one of the first Casualty Lists after he had returned to England. Ward and Houghton, Fane, Bryant, Anderson and Sergeant-Major Pearcy. And Mason-Godwin, who had shared a hut with him that spring in Training Camp, had gone into the artillery.
‘They gave him the M.C.? Captain Ward, that is, sir. Came through just after you left. Did you know that? A day or two before he was killed. He went up with a mine, sir. See that red roof just to your left, behind the dip? That’s the place. Manor house, it was, and a farm alongside. Yes, very pleasant it is, sir.’
The sky was rose-red, and darkening at the edges as the sun dropped down.
‘Been hot, sir, I can tell you that.’
‘And at home.’
‘Yes, so Mrs Phipps writes.’
Then he remembered about Coulter: that he had no family at all, had been brought up in an orphanage, from which he had run away at the age of eleven, to join the circus. His only letters came from a friend and his wife who travelled England with a team of performing monkeys. Coulter was a happy man, self-sufficient, small and hard as a nut.
‘I daresay you enjoyed your time at home, sir.’
‘Yes,’ Hilliard said. ‘Yes, thank you.’
They turned up the long drive through orchards of pear and apple. The fruit was thick, and brown and much of it lay in the long grass, rotting.
The main building was three-storied and built of red brick, with two large wings at right angles, and a number of barns, stables, and outhouses and, further down the road, some cottages. Beyond and between them, in the fields and orchards, green tents. Smoke was rising from the chimneys in pale, thin plumes. But it was the lull at the end of the day, there was for the time being no other sign of life.
Hilliard felt suddenly tired. But excited, too, he wanted to see everyone, hear everything, even the worst, he felt at home even though he had never been to this place before. He thought, it’s like going back to school.
‘Most of your platoon. Most of the Company, really, sir. You won’t find many faces you know.’
‘The C.O. asked to see you, sir, when you’ve settled in. And there’s a new second lieutenant attached to your platoon. Came three days ago. Mr Barton, his name. He’s sharing with you, sir, we’re a bit short of space here even if we are under strength. And I’ll be serving for both of you, sir, for the time being, anyway.’
Hilliard felt irrationally angry. He wanted a corner to himself, even though he knew that was the one thing you never got, in France. He wanted his own room like the one overlooking the rose garden at Hawton, not an attic or an outhouse shared with another subaltern. A stranger.
They had come into the front yard of the main building. A mongrel-dog, rough-coated and dirty, was lying across the cobbles, chewing a bone, happy to stay in familiar territory and be petted by the army. Hilliard thought how ludicrous it was to be here, in the last of the evening light, standing before these red-tiled, serviceable country buildings, how ludicrous that it should be so quiet, that there should be grass and apple trees and the smell of cooking, a dog and blackbirds. That there should seem, apart from the young recruits behind him and the short, uniformed figure of Coulter, to be nobody here at all, no Battalion, no front line trenches twenty miles away, no guns, no armies in the country. No war.
He followed Coulter, feeling the silver knob of his stick warm and hard in the ball of his hand. The cane was already scuffed and dirty.
Coulter was right about the overcrowding. B and D Companies were together at the farm which was also serving as Battalion Headquarters, but the rest were in the village of Percelle, half a mile down the lane. It had been badly shelled that spring. Coulter said, there was scarcely an unshattered roof over anybody’s head. But because of the good weather and because at last they were away from the front line, here, where it was so quiet, nobody complained.
When Hilliard stood upright in the room he was to share with the new second lieutenant, he cracked his head on a rafter. This was part of the loft, reached by a wooden ladder that came up through the floor. For years, apples and pears had been stored here and although there was no fruit now the juice had soaked and stained the boards, so that every so often, as one trod them, there came up an old, faint smell of cider.
Coulter had left him after having brought up water in an enamel bowl. Above his head the roof light was propped open, showing a square of damson-dark sky. As he unstrapped his case to find soap and razor, he heard, for the first time since his return, the boom of guns. But they seemed very far away, they had sounded more clearly than that sometimes at Hawton, when the wind was blowing off the sea.
The bugle had gone for the men to eat, he had heard shouts and footsteps on the farmyard cobbles below, and once, the grind of a motor, coming up the long drive.
The narrow apple loft might have been a corner of a dormitory. Below, the sounds of the other boys, settling in. It’s like bloody well going back to school.
And then he looked across at the other man’s belongings, resenting their presence. He was not anxious to acquaint himself with this stranger.
BARTON D.J.C B. COY. 2ND BATTALION, THE ROYAL — RGT B.E.F. FRANCE
The lettering was upright and plain and clear, done in black ink. The leather of the valise still shone, the buckles were not yet tarnished. There was a tortoise-shell backed hairbrush and comb, and a slab of Chocolate Menier. A copy of The Turn of the Screw and of the complete works of Sir Thomas Browne, and one of the Psalms, bound in navy morocco. Hilliard reached out a hand towards it, hesitated, drew his hand back.
On top of the trunk which served as a table beside the camp-bed, a double-folding photograph wallet. The back was to him, he could not see, without touching it, what faces were inside. He did not touch. Instead, he turned away, made preparations to shave. The sound of the motor vehicle going away again. Footsteps. But no one came up the wooden ladder.
Putting his hand into the bowl of water, he found that it was warm, and thought how he would remember once they were back at the front, the luxury of shaving in warm water from a clean bowl. At home, he had not been able to get over it at first, the simple availability of water, for washing, shaving, bathing, drinking – for wasting. He had turned on the taps in the bathroom and splashed drinking water again and again over his face, let it slide coolly down his wrists, wondering at it. For so long, there had been only the tins of green water, stinking of chlorine, to drink, and the grey scum in which someone else had washed before him and the foul water at the bottom of shell holes, before the sun of June and July had come to dry them out. He remembered the men brought in wounded and set down in the bottom of the trench, or being taken up on stretchers, who were crying out not only from pain and fear, but for water. At Neuville, he had sent five emergency messages up the communication trench demanding more water, more water. It had not come. The sixth time, they had sent a runner who was hit, and the water can had burst open and spilled on to the soil beside him.