A Whispered Name (36 page)

When
evening came, Herbert withdrew once more from the society of his brother
officers, each of whom was eager to know what had happened in the clearing at
dawn. Had the poor blighter been scared? Did he have to be carried? What about
the firing party? These questions he’d deflected, hiding the violence of his
emotions, for these were the men with whom he would shortly fight and probably
die. One might as well fall as friends. So Herbert sat alone in the gathering
gloom of his billet, among the spikes and claws of farm machinery whose
function he could not understand. A single window looked on to the road that
led to Oostbeke. And, black against the loaded sky Herbert saw the lumbering
figure of Father Maguire. In one hand the priest held a bottle.

The chaplain sat at the
makeshift table. It was made of planks laid across two petrol canisters.

‘Well,’
snapped the priest, resolved. ‘Will you help me break my vow?’

He
pointed to a stool on the other side, as if it was time for men to be men.

Herbert
took his place while reading the label: Old Orkney Chamberlayne’s preferred
tipple, though the night’s squalid duty had driven him to rum.

‘No
thanks, Father,’ replied Herbert, ‘I’ve got enough on my conscience.

The
priest looked very disappointed. ‘You keep it, then: The stern reserve had
weakened; even the short, wiry hair seemed soft. ‘Joseph asked me to give you
this.’ He placed an envelope on the planks.

‘Who’s
Lisette,’ asked Herbert, recoiling inside himself.

‘A
widow in Étaples. She’s hiding Owen Doyle as we speak.’

Herbert
reached for the Old Orkney and pulled out the cork. He poured a large measure
into a tin mug and then put the bottle out of reach on the floor. ‘I shouldn’t
really know that:

‘No,’
replied the priest, ‘any more than you should know that I marked the boy
injured before they went to Étaples.’

‘Why
did you do that, Father?’ Herbert was not reproving; he was simply weary,
utterly worn out by the sight of good people being forced to do what was wrong
for another kind of right.

‘Because
Joseph would have gone anyway’ replied the priest. ‘Because I thought it might
buy the time. Because I hoped, with time, he’d get back, and live.’

They
were bound together: two men sharing their culpability in a necessary crime.
The priest had sent him on his way; the officer had imposed the penalty when he
got back. Neither of them could avoid what they’d done. Ah, dear God, thought
Herbert. Who among us is ever free?

‘Joseph
would like you to explain to Lisette why he did not stay with her, why he
returned to the battalion.’

Herbert
felt a thump inside his temples. ‘Me? But I sent him into that clearing.’

The
priest nodded. He had nothing to add, nothing to help him on his way But I don’t
really know, cried Herbert in his mind. He wouldn’t desert his comrades: that
was one answer. But it only scratched the surface. He’d saved a kid, yes. But
even that description wasn’t sufficient. Flanagan had walked willingly towards
his death. And however much the war had dehumanised him, Herbert had not
reached that stage of freedom. Flanagan had taken one step beyond the hostilities,
into a different landscape that only he could see, that to Tindall was a mirage
caused by a jingling of the nerves. But Flanagan had glimpsed the peace. He’d
seen bodies without regard to nationality, the land without boundaries. Perhaps
the world without its history. Herbert couldn’t fathom the man. ‘Who did we
bury this morning?’

Father
Maguire leaned his elbows on a plank and rested his chin on one hand. Eyeing
the bottle on the floor he said, ‘A lad from Inisdúr.’

The
chaplain spoke as if he’d never heard of him, or the strange island that gave
him birth.

Chapter Forty-Six

Anselm drove away from the
Birches Nursing Home, and Mr Shaw, in a torpor that seemed to absorb the light
in his mind. He could not feel or think anything. By late evening he was
roaming along quiet Suffolk lanes, passing through unfamiliar villages, his
eyes alert for the solemn memorials he’d long ago ceased to notice. They were
everywhere, usually in a market square or at the confluence of important
roads. Some had three or four tiny wooden crosses on a bottom step, grouped
together as though for comfort or company Anselm saw them all as if for the
first time. Abruptly he parked in a silent street of a village he did not know
before a monument he’d almost missed.

There
was no central focus for the community. A few old weavers cottages and shops
were stretched out along the road with a few tight lanes meandering between
gable ends. It was a place to pass through rather than linger, the mullioned
windows seemed to say But on the way out, set back from the road within a low
box hedge, Anselm had seen a tall granite cross and a small bunch of paper
poppies in a jam jar.

Wrapped
in his monk’s rough cloak, Anselm stood in silence reading the inscriptions on
the plinth. There were nine names in all for the Great War of 1914—1918, though
he hadn’t seen as many houses in the village. Strong Suffolk names, conjuring
up slow and steady men. Farmers, perhaps, because grain and beet fields rose
gently behind the cross towards the skyline. Or weavers, from up the road.
Anselm looked around, as if for help. Behind him was a half-timbered cottage
with shell-pink plaster between the beams. There was an old well surrounded by
fuchsias and, in the distance, a restored windmill gently turned its arms. They
creaked across the century This was the England those Suffolk men had fought
and died for, as well as the mills and mines they’d never seen in Lancashire.
As Sarah Osborne had said, they’d ploughed on for God, king, country empire,
justice, freedom, and for their waiting families. And here in a village whose
name escaped Anselm’s notice, four men from the same home had not returned.

Reading
over the names of these nine noble men, it suddenly struck Anselm as
inappropriate that Harold Shaw would never be commemorated in stone. He
deserved an inscription for public memory. As did all those who’d fought and
survived. But with Mr Shaw, along with three or four thousand others, there was
a rough edge to their determination, and it required compassion rather than
memorial, for there could be no public remembrance, They had been obliged to
shoot one of their own and live in the aftermath … which was, in Mr Shaw’s
case, the question he’d whispered to Anselm out of the blue, when they’d been
talking happily of cheeky grandchildren and declining standards at school: ‘Why
didn’t I shoot wide, Father? That’s the rub, then and now. Why didn’t I shoot
two inches wide?’

Martin had been right,
thought Anselm, driving aimlessly between wild hedges, past the warming lights
of low houses. He’d said that Flanagan’s trial had taken place in an interlude
— or some such phrase — during the battle for Passchendaele. Thousands of men
had died, and thousands more were about to die. Between these two apocalyptic
harvests, one man had sat in a schoolroom at Oostbeke, his life in the balance.
This had been Joseph Flanagan’s moment. Martin didn’t think that he’d survived.
And neither, for different reasons, did David Osborne. Both of them had been
right. But everyone had been so utterly wrong: Joseph Flanagan had made a very
different kind of sacrifice known only to himself. Herbert had probably learned
of its scale in the early hours of the morning, when it was too late, and when
an eighteen-year-old Harold Shaw was waiting in a barn near a copse of trees.

Instinct
took Anselm along certain lanes, guiding him towards the familiar shambles of
rooftops belonging to Larkwood Priory the place where Herbert had come to rest
in his own aftermath. A place he had helped to build. Twinkling lights from the
corridor lit up a row of rounded windows. A single steeple pierced the night
sky releasing a faint shower of stars over St Leonard’s Field, the bluebell
walk, and the lake with a statue of Our Lady at its centre. Looking at it now,
Anselm knew with depth and certainty that while Larkwood was Herbert’s lasting
memorial, it belonged also to Joseph Flanagan: the man whose name would never
lie among the great fallen. Upon leaving Mr Shaw, Anselm had sat in his parked
car and checked the Battalion War Diary for the early morning of the 15th
September 1917. There was no reference to the execution. It had been business
as usual. Drill for all Companies. Musketry. A cancelled football practice.
Flanagan wasn’t even there for the attention of a thin-skinned censor.

At the
gatehouse, Anselm left the engine running while he manhandled the gate. As he
leaned against the ironwork, he thought: Who had come and wept near Herbert’s
grave? Edward Chamberlayne, the only survivor of the trial? Anselm couldn’t
think of anyone else. But why had Herbert called him Flanagan? The old man had
kept back from the cemetery of white crosses and trees, his face hidden by a
thick white beard; he’d been dressed out of season in a heavy jacket woven from
wonderful greens and blues. He’d almost vanished into nature. Kate Seymour had
been disenchanted but he’d been broken.

The
questions and impressions tailed Anselm into the chapel like stray cats crying
out for attention. No sooner had he sat down than they fled, scared off by the
appearance of someone else in Anselm’s mind: Owen Doyle. The photograph had
been a stark image, and Anselm saw it now in the darkness. The scarred
forehead. The raised eyebrow He’d been old yet young. And he’d come back to the
front where his commanding officer had turned a blind eye to his absence …
that’s what must have happened. What was the point of sending Doyle to another
common-or-garden chair? The regiment had already been punished. Twelve men like
Harold Shaw had just been sentenced to a lifetime’s remorse.

Unable
to pray Anselm simply waited for the memories of the day to fall away like so
many autumn leaves. As they tumbled down, a feeling very like grief welled up
from his depths. His image of Herbert had changed. It was no longer simple or
clean. Like a betrayal, he acknowledged the disappointment on Kate Seymour’s
face and his compassion for the unknown man was roused to flame. In his spirit,
he reached up to a kind of wintry heaven, his heart’s eye on the monumental
sacrifice of Joseph Flanagan. He’d saved Owen Doyle who, two weeks later, would
die near Glencorse Wood.

Part Five

Chapter Forty-Seven

Farewell to Arms

1

There’d been a promotion
at Division so there was an opening for a man with soft hands, explained
Chamberlayne. They’d sent a Brigade Major to check that his nails were cleaned
and trimmed before confirming the appointment. His self-mockery was bitter and
sincere. He pursued the theme while packing his things into a crate for
vegetables.

‘A
going-away present,’ said Herbert, plonking the Old Orkney on the table.

Chamberlayne
picked it up and read the label. ‘Where did you get this from?’

‘Father
Maguire.’

‘The
teetotaller?’

Herbert
nodded.

Chamberlayne
put the bottle in his crate. ‘To he who gives,’ he said solemnly ‘much will be
given. Isn’t that how it goes?’

‘Something
like that:

Detailed
orders had come through from Division. At midnight on the 19th instant the 8NLI
would join sixty-five thousand men from eighteen brigades for an assault at the
Gheluvelt Plateau. The rehearsals were over: it was time for the show. They’d
be alongside the East Yorkshires, Glanville’s lot — who, incidentally had
caught a sniper’s eye two days back. Stood up after breakfast and got a clip
around the ear. The weather reports had also been leaked to Duggie. Rain was
expected. This was hardly a secret. Clouds had been banking. The 8th was
heading back to the mud and the mist and the screeching iron. The preparations
had ended just when the sky turned black. It would be last August all over
again.

‘I’m
glad you’re out of it, Edward.’

Chamberlayne
didn’t reply.

‘Perhaps
after the war we can meet up in Piccadilly and have a dreadful time.’ Herbert
didn’t resent the string-pulling. These things happened in the army as he well
knew. And he didn’t share Chamberlayne’s scorn for the staff away from the
line. General Osborne could hardly lead the charge with Lionel taking up the
rear. Someone had to hang back and think through the aggressive gestures of an
army, to make it a battle and not a brawl.

‘If I
ever get back to England,’ said Chamberlayne, ‘I shall be taking a package boat
to Canada. I have an uncle in British Columbia. He makes a fortune watching
strapping fellows cut down trees that he bought for a song. I’ve been led to believe
he needs a man of talent rather than application. It is a long way from
Piccadilly They call it the New World. I might even change my name. I’ll send
you some syrup. They bleed the stuff from trees, would you believe that?’