Field Service (3 page)

Neither of them spoke for a moment, and then Reid said, ‘And you?'

‘What unwelcome burden am
I
about to become to you, you mean? I can see Captain Jessop has told you very little.'

‘Nothing at all,' Reid said.

‘I see. I was a nursing sister. VAD. I'm here because of the nurses.' She paused. ‘Colonel Wheeler assured me you knew I was coming.'

‘He makes a great many assurances.'

A month earlier, at one of his regular meetings with Wheeler and other Commission members, the subject had been raised of the burial of twenty nurses, killed at various field hospitals and currently being gathered together so that they might be buried and then commemorated together. The larger of the Morlancourt cemeteries had been mentioned as a likely resting place for the women, but as far as Reid was aware nothing definite had yet been decided. A great many decisions were left unmade at these meetings, and Reid often came away from them feeling he knew considerably less about what was happening in the plots under his supervision than when he'd arrived.

Caroline smiled at the remark. ‘Sorry. Please don't worry, I won't get in your way. I knew most of the women personally – women, girls – and I was contacted by the Commission eighteen months ago in the hope that I might be able to help with all the gathering-in and identifications. I have almost complete records for a great number of dressing stations. I was here for over four years, on and off, and our records are better than most. I daresay Colonel Wheeler imagined it would be one less job for him – you – to have to do.'

‘I daresay,' Reid said. ‘There was mention of twenty women.'

‘Twenty-six are currently confirmed,' Caroline said. ‘I'm still searching for another seven.'

‘There are discrepancies everywhere you look,' Reid said.

Caroline laughed. ‘I'm sure there are. Discrepancies.' She reached out and held his arm for a moment. ‘I'm sorry,' she said. ‘I didn't mean to sound so callous.'

Reid motioned to the fallen trunk of a long-dead tree and they diverted from the narrow path to sit on it.

‘If I might be allowed to check my own records against the bodies the Commission has already designated for burial,' Caroline said.

‘Of course.' So far none of the nurses had arrived at Morlancourt, and as yet no part of the cemetery there had been designated to accommodate them. It was something he would raise with either Wheeler or Jessop the next time he was in Amiens.

‘I do, of course, realize that the odds are heavily in my favour,' Caroline said. ‘I doubt if our “missing” or “unidentified” will pose any real problems for you.'

‘No, I suppose not.'

He told her the proportions of each category still being delivered to him from the Commission's depots. The numbers surprised her.

‘As many as that?' she said. ‘I'd always imagined—'

‘I think we all did,' Reid said. ‘The fact is, the bodies that come to us intact and identified
and
with all their relevant paperwork attached are a relative rarity. In the beginning, perhaps, but these days we struggle more and more to make any valid connection. In addition to which, the mix of reinterments and new recoveries varies every week.'

‘I see.' She watched him closely as he said all this.

‘The Graves Registration people have teams of men still tracking and tracing and looking for every verification that might help identify someone, but all too often …'

‘That “someone” doesn't actually exist?'

‘“Human remains”. Perhaps part of a uniform, hopefully some attached and undamaged insignia. The uncorroborated evidence of a man's comrades, perhaps, but that, too, is an increasing rarity.'

‘And so your priority now is simply to gather in and then to decently bury whatever might remain,' she said.

‘We know the
names
of all the missing. They'll be commemorated somewhere, somehow, eventually.'

‘Just not necessarily in the grave Mary wants to kneel beside and grieve over.' Caroline put a hand to her mouth. ‘That sounded uncaring of me.'

Reid shook his head. ‘In the years to come there will be thousands like her turning up here and at all the places like it, and most of them will be searching for something they'll never find. I imagine the real trick for them will be to shape and then to temper their expectations.'

Every grave would at least contain
someone
; there would be no so-called ‘duds'.

In the distance, a train passed along the line towards the vanished hamlet of Merissy, slowing where the station had once stood, and both of them turned to watch its progress. The driver sounded his whistle at the lost stop and a thin plume of smoke rose briefly above the tracks.

Caroline brushed small flies from her face. ‘How long have you been here?' she asked him.

‘In Morlancourt? Four months.'

‘And before that?'

‘I arrived in March 1916.'

‘The same month I lost my husband,' she said.

‘Oh. I—'

‘Happily,
his
body was quickly recovered and he was recently reinterred in the Courcelette cemetery beyond Pozières. I was there before going on to Amiens. I daresay your own plot here is in a similar state.'

‘I know Courcelette,' Reid said. ‘The man in charge – Jameson – is doing a good job there.'

‘I was told by the Commission that there might be a nurses' cemetery there, too, but that seems unlikely considering the relatively small numbers involved. Captain Jessop told me that in the beginning there had been a notion to bury the nurses and other medical staff throughout the cemeteries, but that there were now far too many of these – burial grounds, that is – for this to remain a practical option. I suppose I should be grateful that so
few
of us were killed.'

‘Do you know the circumstances of the women destined to come here?' Reid asked her. It seemed a clumsy question and he regretted it as soon as he'd spoken.

‘How they were killed, you mean? I know what the Registration documents tell me – just as you know what yours tell you, I suppose. I know the dates and places and causes of death and suchlike, and I'm long familiar with all those wonderful phrases that have recently been concocted to do their calm and reassuring work. I was reading just yesterday that a committee has been set up to decide on a name for what's just happened.'

‘The war, you mean?'

‘The war itself. All its engagements. They seem insistent on something much grander.'

‘No doubt,' Reid said, and the pair of them smiled.

‘Are you married?' Caroline asked him. ‘Engaged?'

Reid shook his head. He could hear splashing from the river in the distance and the shouting of men, carrying like the whistle of the train on the still air. The men, he imagined, might even be his own labourers.

‘We were watching them work earlier,' Caroline said. ‘It all seemed very confused.'

‘I can imagine. I prefer to look on it as organized chaos.'

‘In the knowledge that out of that chaos will soon come peace and calm and order?'

‘It seems a lot to hope for.'

Caroline Mortimer took a deep breath and said, ‘When my husband was killed, I received several letters from his friends telling me how swift and straightforward everything had been, how little he had suffered. I was even reassured that his body had been unmarked.'

‘I see.'

‘I daresay you wrote similar letters yourself.'

‘Some,' Reid said.

‘Many?'

‘Enough to want never to have to do it again. Enough to want all of this to be over and done with, and for it to truly mean something to all those who need it in order to get on with their lives.'

‘People like Mary Ellsworth, you mean?'

All of us
, Reid thought.
You included.
‘Yes, people like Mary Ellsworth.'

Caroline lit another cigarette. ‘I daresay the same few stories will be told over and over,' she said. ‘About how men died.'

‘A lot will depend on what people want to hear.'

‘The grieving survivors.'

Reid bowed his head. ‘You'll have a grave. You'll know your husband is buried there.' He knew it was a harsh thing to say to her, and so he looked at her and waited for her nod of agreement and forgiveness.

‘I'm thirty-eight,' she said. ‘Mary Ellsworth is barely twenty. I'm twice her age, old enough to be her mother. My husband and I were married for nineteen years.'

‘Children?'

She shook her head. ‘Mary, on the other hand—'

‘She already has a child?'

‘She lost the child she was carrying when she learned of her fiancé's death.'

‘She told you that herself?'

‘I seemed to know everything there was to know about her and why she was here within minutes of meeting her.'

‘Give me the man's name,' Reid said. ‘I'll search the registers for her. I can talk to a few others. A lot of stuff's just arrived at the Commission from the Army Graves people. Does she still have all his details?'

‘Every single one of them. All committed to memory. Everything imaginable. Whereas I …' She hesitated. ‘Whereas I sometimes have days when I cannot even remember what my husband's voice sounded like.'

They sat in silence for a while, listening to the distant men and the humming of the insects which filled the air around them.

Then Reid said, ‘You should go to the rise above Sailly.' He pointed ahead of them to where the horizon rose slightly.

Caroline shielded her eyes and looked.

‘It's perhaps a hundred feet high. A mountain in this part of the world.' He, too, peered into the distant haze. In the west, the sun was low in the sky, adding its glare to the land. ‘If you walk up it and then look back towards Albert, you can just about make out the beginning of that order you were talking about.'

‘The order emerging out of chaos. No – the order you are
bringing
out of chaos.'

‘Another of those too-grand notions,' he said. ‘Another illusion.'

‘Perhaps,' she said. ‘But it's what so many now crave.'

‘I suppose so,' he said, knowing she was right.

Behind them, the church bell at Bray pealed the hour, and they both sat without speaking until this finished and as the simple dying note then faded to silence.

THE NEXT MORNING
, following his usual duties on the platform, Reid was beckoned by Benoît into his small office. The station master closed the door behind him and indicated the only two chairs the cramped and overcrowded room contained.

Reid, again understanding the need for these courtesies and observances – especially upon the stage of Benoît's own small part in the drama of the changing world around them – sat down and laid everything he carried at his feet. Benoît then offered him coffee, which he accepted with forced enthusiasm. The drink was invariably thick and dark and bitter, and it was all Reid could do to sip it without screwing up his face. Benoît took great pride in his coffee, and to have refused him this particular pleasure would have been close to an insult.

Eventually, his preparations finished, Benoît put down his own cup and saucer and leaned towards Reid, both hands on his knees.

‘I have heard alarming things,' he said.

‘Oh? Concerning?'

‘From Ernaux.' Ernaux – this link with that restless wider world – was a constant source of alarming news.

‘I was with him a few moments ago,' Reid said. ‘He said nothing to me.' Reid spoke French well enough to understand most of what Benoît said to him, but he occasionally struggled with the man's growled accent, with his colloquialisms, and with the lost words and abbreviated language he commonly used. It had long been clear to him that Benoît, despite Reid's occasionally faltering replies, believed he, Reid, understood perfectly everything he was told.

‘He works regularly at the Doullens depot,' Benoît said. ‘And sometimes further afield. At Abbeville and Beauvais.'

‘Has something happened there?' Reid was keen to start work, knowing that the men now gathered beyond the station yard would do little until receiving his instructions.

‘Ernaux says that in the Saint-Quentin yards there are many unidentified French corpses and remains that are assigned identities that cannot truthfully be said to be their own.'

‘I see,' Reid said. He wondered at the nature of Benoît's concern and considered what to say to him.

‘Ernaux says that bodies at Saint-Quentin have become little more than an inconvenience for our own administrators.'

‘I'm sure everything is—'

‘He believes it is a great conspiracy.'

‘Conspiracy?'

‘Of silence. Of convenience. Of greater powers holding sway.' Everything Benoît now said was framed in this melodrama.

Reid remembered his conversation with Caroline Mortimer and wondered what similar cold and evasive reassurances he might offer the man.

‘I daresay a great many things are done these days for reasons we may not yet understand,' he said.

‘According to Ernaux, the workers at the Abbeville yards throw the sacks of remains from the carriages to the ground as though they were sacks of potatoes. There is no proper accord, no respect.'

‘I know,' Reid said. He doubted if the story were true, but could not suggest this. ‘So perhaps we are more fortunate than most, here in Morlancourt, in being able to afford
our
dead the respect and dignity they deserve.' Despite sounding like another of his tired speeches, it was a good answer and he could see that Benoît appreciated it and the compliment it contained.

‘Of course,' Benoît said.

In an attempt to steer them on to another path, Reid said, ‘I was sent an order last week warning me against interring German remains by mistake. Forty graves at the French national cemetery outside Serre were dug up because someone – presumably another of your own officials – believed German remains had been buried there in error.'