A Whispered Name (15 page)

Herbert’s
face showed the accusation: why not tell me this beforehand? And Duggie’s
silence demonstrated the CO’s own uncomfortable position: he’d done Pemberton’s
bidding: he’d passed on to Herbert the subtle pressure for a conviction. Duggie
scratched on a blood spot on his cheek, as if to flatten the louse responsible.
‘First, it would have been wrong for me to coach you, though I do so now;
second, I thought you already knew; and third — and at least I was right in
this one respect — I didn’t expect you to think in a legal way’ His
disappointment surfaced again, only this time he made a grin. ‘I thought you’d
disgrace yourself and my regiment.’

For the
first time since he’d joined the 8th (Service) Battalion, Northumberland Light
Infantry, Herbert cast a smile upon his past. Angus seemed to laugh, too.

Chapter Sixteen

1

The young man’s ingenuity
was admirable. But not as pitiful as his limitations, his desperation and his
incompetence. His lack of inner resources was evident on every page.

Anselm
had decided to revisit all the Doyle material because he was, from one
perspective, the central figure in the drama. His relationship with Flanagan
was the key to the trial. His tags were the key to Herbert’s message.

6890
Private Owen Doyle enlisted in 1915 at the age of eighteen. He’d joined a
London regiment based in the East End. His Battalion came to France in the
spring of 1916, when he was deployed behind the lines in various non-combat
maintenance operations. He deserted after two weeks but was caught three days
later dressed as a farmer. A Field General Court Martial condemned him to
death, the sentence being enthusiastically endorsed at every level of command, until
it hit the desk of the C-in-C who finally determined upon a term of
imprisonment to be suspended for the duration of the hostilities. Returned to
his unit, he then saw action on the Somme — although not for long, because he
deserted once more, this time reaching Boulogne with a forged pass. Once again
he was caught, convicted, condemned to death and reprieved, a second suspended
sentence being imposed with the heavy implication that lenience had run its
course. Whatever else, Doyle was a resourceful young man, for upon this his
second arrest he’d been found on the docks wearing a stolen naval hat and
greatcoat. He’d been very close indeed to stowing away and reaching home. His
third desertion had, in one sense, been successful. Warned for the front, he had
vanished the night before his unit advanced into action — the 26th August 1917.
There was no record of him being caught or reprimanded in any way The gap in
the facts was enormous: somehow Doyle was back with his unit by September,
meeting his death near Glencorse Wood on the 15th at the age of twenty.

It had
been a pinched life: the greater part of three years spent scratching behind
the skirting boards of France and Belgium. He’d been a forger, a thief and a
mannequin in someone else’s uniform. To quote a tart line from one of his
commanding officers, he’d been a ‘worthless soldier and a worthless man’.

A man
who was central to the trial of Joseph Flanagan.

Anselm
simply could not imagine what had bound such different men together in a
mortally dangerous enterprise — an enterprise that appeared to be senseless:
they’d both come back. And that conclusion placed the trial back under
scrutiny If Anselm had one certainty it was that Flanagan had returned to the
front expecting to be tried by Field General Court Martial.

How,
then, had he escaped, given the mounting odds against him? With that question
in mind Anselm sought Martin’s company.

‘It’s an odd trial, and it
must have been odd at the time,’ began Anselm, sitting down on a chair
surrounded by cardboard boxes, books and research papers laid out on the floor
like stepping stones.

Martin
had changed his kit but it was still a uniform. A camel jacket. No buttons at
the sleeve. A crisp pink shirt. He reached between two piles of books for a bunch
of index cards held by a paperclip.

‘I’m
thinking of those people outside the review process, those not called at the
trial, the people who actually spoke to Flanagan on the night of the
twenty-sixth. If the trial was strange for them, as it is for me, then maybe they
wrote something down … a memoir, some letters—’

‘Or a
sermon,’ Martin slipped in.

He wasn’t
being rude. He was sending Anselm a warning signal, an oblique reference to
Herbert who had been unable to speak of his experience.

After a
scratch to the silvered hair around the temples, Martin removed the paperclip
and laid it on a pillar of books. ‘You mean Father Maguire, Captain
Chamberlayne, Lieutenant Tindall …?’ His hand rolled out the rest of the
names in silence.

There
was no point, Anselm now realised. Kate Seymour’s done the journey. Her last
stop was Herbert Moore.

‘I’ll
start with Chamberlayne,’ said Martin to the first card in the pile. ‘He came
back to England in nineteen nineteen and then vanished. Could have thrown
himself into the Thames. Could have emigrated. Who knows? Sent his medals to
the War Office without a stamp. No address given. His brother was a legal
officer at Division. He died in nineteen thirty-seven.’

He
flipped the card on to the table, tapped the rest and resumed the litany ‘Father
Maguire. Applied for a change in Division in October nineteen seventeen. Killed
two weeks later while giving the Last Rites in full view of the enemy
Posthumous MC. Should’ve been a VC. University College Dublin has a handful of
letters. No mention of Flanagan.’

Anselm
let the words wash over him. He’d ceased to listen attentively
The waves of
history,
he extemporised silently
how they crashed and fell
…

‘Tindall
was killed in nineteen eighteen … an only son … Lieutenant Colonel Hammond
bequeathed three diaries to the Imperial War Museum … no reference to …

…
and
now the sands of time hide our calamity,
thought Anselm, completing his
invention. It was bad Tennyson. Or worse early Brooke. When war was made
glorious by a cadence.

‘On the
other hand …’ Martin’s voice had risen. He drew out the last word, letting it
reach an acceptable peak of friendly reproach.

‘Yes?’
apologised Anselm, despondently.

‘General
Osborne left a vast collection of papers, all of which are retained by the family
His great-great—granddaughter, Sarah, is currently writing his biography’
Martin stood up. He brushed close to the wall, avoiding a crate of
ring-binders. ‘I’m sure she’d like to meet you. I’ll make an appointment.’ At
the edge of his desk he paused, unsure of where to go next. ‘Father, can I ask
you a question of real importance … something I’ve wanted to raise since we
met?’

‘Of
course,’ replied Anselm, a little worried.

‘Do you
like beer?’ Martin shrugged inside his jacket. ‘You know … proper bitter?
Roasted peanuts? Crisps? That sort of thing.’

‘Lead,
kindly light,’ murmured Anselm. ‘Lead thou me on.

2

‘How many were shot
altogether?’ asked Anselm in the back room of The Wheat Sheaf, after he’d asked
for the Friendship Plant. The timber floor was stripped and smooth. Paint
peeled off the walls around large etched mirrors. It was a last stand against
the uniformity of plush seats, new brass fittings and beer by franchise. The
only concession was a one-armed bandit. A youth in his late teens stood over
it, yanking the arm. He wanted a big win.

‘For
military offences, three hundred and twenty-one,’ replied Martin. ‘Most of them
for desertion.’

‘How
many were condemned in the first place?’

The
youth pushed in more coins. He drew back the lever and the fruit span.

‘Over
three thousand. So nine out of ten had their sentence commuted.’ It was a
complex subject with no easy summary, his face seemed to add. ‘How the unlucky
one got picked we just don’t know Prejudice. Class. Eugenics. Contemporary
fairness. Who knows? Maybe the state of the war. During the Somme, for example,
the number of executions rose … same with Passchendaele.’ He sipped his beer.
‘In fact, executions soared during September nineteen seventeen and fell
dramatically afterwards.’

The
very month when Flanagan’s case was under consideration, implied Martin with a
tightening of the mouth. He was telling Anselm, gently, to give up this search
for the missing pieces that would lead, inexorably to a dead man. Martin was as
compassionate as he was efficient.

Lights
flashed and the youth slapped the side of the machine as if it were stupid.

For an
instant, Anselm fell into a reverie. Herbert had refused to view existence as
the play of chance. When the fruit had stopped spinning, Herbert had looked
beyond the bandit and the disappointment. Was that simply naked faith? Or had
it also been informed by an
experience.
Was this the significance of
Joseph Flanagan’s story? Anselm’s mind blurred. He broke the reverie by
returning to the central enigma: statistics had been against the Irishman, as
well as the timing, the warning on drunkenness, and the hole in the page …
and yet he’d escaped. But how? Kate Seymour, of course, knew the answer. Anselm
drained his glass and said, ‘I found a yellow ticket with a woman’s name on it.’

Gently
coaxing now, the youth pulled the lever. He looked like Bede when he sought the
Prior’s permission to travel somewhere.

‘I can’t
discuss other users of the archive,’ Martin declared, with the bogus finality
of a man who realises that the matter is far from over.

‘And I
wouldn’t want you to,’ said Anselm, untruthfully ‘Look … we both know that
Kate Seymour came to Larkwood. You’ve guessed it was a waste of time. You’re
wrong. What you don’t appreciate —and neither does she — is that Herbert left a
message for a man called Joseph Flanagan.’

Martin
showed mild surprise, but Anselm was quite sure that he’d been stunned.

‘Yes,’
pursued Anselm. ‘I didn’t know until she’d gone. Unfortunately she left her
contact details with a monk whose mental powers are antithetical to those of
the elephant, which is to say he can’t remember where he put them.’ Anselm
appealed to Martin with a helpless sigh. ‘I want to fathom the trial of the man
who came with her. A man I saw weeping.’

Martin
raised an eyebrow He’d thought the surprises had ended with the leaving of a
message, not the arrival of the beneficiary.

‘But at
some point I will have to find her … and him.’

To the
sound of a whoop, coins poured from the mouth of the bandit. The player had
beaten the odds.

Martin
raised his glass. ‘I’ll get the admin people to call up her details.’

They
watched the youth pocket his winnings. He was a bit embarrassed now that all
the noise was over. And Anselm felt remotely sad. Other gamblers had once been
shot when they lost.

3

A monk needs his
monastery, regardless of the tensions and occasional anguish of close living.
And Anselm had been away long enough to make him restless for the nave, the
bluebell path, the track by Our Lady’s lake, his hives — all the secret places
that gave him sustenance. On the train back home, rattling away from cafés,
tabloid colour, tinned food and the national archives, Anselm began to doze. In
a dream he saw Herbert in a cold room, though Anselm did not recognise him. He
heard him say ‘Death’ while guns boomed in the distance. There were others
present, all of them standing solemnly none of them moving, each with a
bloodless face. The only person Anselm knew was Flanagan … he’d known him all
his life. His skin and clothes were vibrant with colour and life. Upon seeing
him, a word chafed against Anselm’s consciousness and he woke.

Nerves.

The
word had chafed the man with the red crayon. It occurred twice in the
inadmissible evidence of Lieutenant Alan Caldwell. Flanagan had suffered an
attack of nerves in April, when the unit was away from the firing line, and
later in June. Anselm rummaged in his bag for the photocopied excerpts taken
from the War Diary of the 8th (Service) Battalion, Northumberland Light
Infantry.

The page was organised
into five columns: place, date, hour, summary of events and remarks. Anselm
gleaned that Flanagan’s unit had been camped by ‘Dead Pig Farm’. For the month
of April 1917 the ‘event’ column noted a route march between two villages, a football
practice, company ‘training and preparations for move to forward area’, divine
service, a visit from the Corps Commander, the first round match for the
Lambton Cup … and then, at the bottom of the page: ‘Total number of dead
soldiers (English and German) buried by members of B Company was 2314’.

Anselm
checked the family tree prepared by Martin. Flanagan was in B Company The ‘event’
took four days … which meant — he did some maths in the margin — five hundred
and seventy-eight burials per day; seventy-two per hour in an eight-hour shift.