Post of Honour (20 page)

The Valley mourned him as a hero and Elinor mourned him as a grotesque sacrifice to local big-mouths like Horace Handcock, the Valley’s unofficial recruiting agent; they were all wrong, for Will was neither Hero nor Sacrifice. He had been executed as an Example!

The trial occupied far less time than the Whinmouth inquest on Will’s father and mother all those years ago. A row of granite-faced senior officers heard another officer and several witnesses describe how, during a local attack ten days previously, one of a party of bombers who captured a section of German trench threw aside his rifle, ran back across no-man’s-land, scrambled into and out of the British trench and went on running until he was arrested by a couple of Red Caps well beyond the supports. On the way he felled two men who tried to stop him and one was now a casualty with a broken jaw.

The sentence was death. It could hardly be anything else for a man who had thrown away his arms in action, and Will, asked if he had any comment, uttered four short words. To his judges they amounted to a confession for he said, in a low voice, ‘They was right there!’ The President of the Court, who had won a VC on the North-West Frontier, winced at hearing such a craven admission, particularly as there had been no Germans in the trenches when Will fled except, of course, any number of dead ones. How was Will to explain that it was the dead who had caused him to fly; not the German dead but two dead civilians, sitting side by side on the firestep of the captured trench and both shouting at him, which was very odd for Martin, his father, had a rope round his neck and Arabella, his mother, was headless.

It is doubtful whether Will understood his sentence or the plea of mitigation made by his defending officer. He felt more secure inside the buttery, which did service as a condemned cell, than he had felt for a long time. The door was barred and there was a sentry outside so that neither Martin nor Arabella could approach him. When they marched him out, blindfolded him and stood him against the wall he may have thought they were playing some kind of game for in the few moments before the volley he discovered that he could see through the bandage and was not much surprised to see Elinor climb the broken farmhouse wall, swinging a pail full of eggs and calling in her shrill voice to laggard hens. It was early but the sun was warm and beat on his face and neck and he wondered, although not urgently, what she could be doing there in a foreign farmyard, and how she came to look so slim and young, not the least as she had looked when he parted from her a month or so ago, with a tense, pinched face and a thickening figure but as she had looked when he used to slip across the Deepdene to do his courting. Then the sun must have burst for pieces of it exploded all around him and he knew he was in the line again and under bombardment and called to Elinor to look what she was about for shells could kill civilians as well as soldiers.

The provost, biting hard his stringy moustache, looked down at the body and said, under his breath, ‘Poor sod! Any road you’re out of it, chum!’ and then barked at the firing-party who filed away, one of them reeling like a drunkard.

That same day in the House of Commons the Foreign Secretary was asked how many executions for cowardice there had been in France during the last ten months. He replied that, according to his information, none at all. His information must have been out-of-date. There had been four that month in Will’s division alone and there were many divisions within a hundred miles of the place where Will was shot. Perhaps it was to keep the record straight that they sent a telegram saying Private Codsall had been killed in action.

A month or so later the Valley learned that Jem Pollock was dead but this time the telegram was followed by a letter giving circumstantial detail. The letter, written by Jem’s company commander, was addressed to ‘next-of-kin’ but as nobody in the Valley knew Jem’s next-of-kin it found its way to Paul.

It told a graphic story. Apparently Jem had been attached to the Engineers for the purpose of tunnelling under the German lines near Cuinchy, where the two systems of frontline trenches sometimes came within forty yards of one another. Rumours of his enormous strength had reached REs responsible for the shaft and for more than a month Jem shovelled away in safety while, overhead, men were killed at the rate of about one every five minutes, for the Germans had gauged the mortar range to the nearest yard. Then it was discovered that the Germans were tunelling directly opposite. When Jem laid aside his spade he could distinctly hear the chink of tools and sometimes a man coughing. The officer came along and listened with him and then left to telephone HQ for instructions but while he was gone the sounds from the German tunnel ceased and the sergeant left in charge ordered work to recommence. It was an unwise decision, for the German shaft must have progressed far beyond the British and they exploded their mine soon after dawn, a day before the British were scheduled to explode theirs and Jem, just going on shift, was about twenty yards down the tunnel when it went up. All the men in front of him were buried alive but the entrance of the British tunnel had been riveted with steel rails and held for a matter of about fifty seconds, before slowly subsiding like a gently squashed matchbox. It would not have remained open that long had not Jem instinctively reached up and braced himself against a key crossbar, an act that enabled the five men behind him to run back into the trench and crouch under the crumbling firestep. One of them reported what had happened and Jem’s name was sent in for the Military Medal which he did not get because none of the witnesses had been officers. He was, however, toasted that night by the survivors, who thought of his death as almost biblical so that, in a sense, the Goliath of Bideford was transposed into Samson of Cuinchy who died supporting the pillars of a crumbling temple. The men who drank to him that night knew little or nothing of Jem’s past so that they could not be expected to appreciate the roundness of Jem’s end. All his life he had both paraded and used his strength for the benefit of others. In the jobs he held before joining the travelling fair his muscles had been at the disposal of North Devon craftsmen and in the fair ground he had drawn crowds and more than paid his way. Later, when he forsook the gypsy life and settled in the Dell, his strength had been at the disposal of the Potter girls and he had spent it freely, in the fields by day and in their beds at night, so that the Dell was rescued not only from weeds but from the threat of dwindling population. Then, when he went to France, he used his strength unsparingly on behalf of the Pioneers and there was still enough left over to save the lives of five of his comrades.

Paul, musing over the officer’s letter, hoped Jem would get the medal and rode over to the Dell to pass the story on to Cissie and Violet whom he found pregnant and rather depressed. As Violet put it, ‘He were a gurt handful was Jem, and us’ll never see the like of him again, Squire!’ He took the letter away with him and it was pasted into the back of the estate diary by Claire. She must, Paul thought as he watched her, have travelled a long road since the day she had railed against Ikey’s marriage to a Potter, for when he told her that Violet had borne Jem a strapping boy, now aged six, she said, ‘I’ll fix the letter by the corners so that when he’s old enough I’ll be able to take it out and give it to him.’

He was touched by the thought and kissed her neck as she busied herself pasting the letter into the record. ‘Claire Derwent,’ he said (for he could rarely think of her by any other name), ‘that flare-up we had over Ikey and Lane-Phelps did us a power of good! It cleared the air, like a heavy thunderstorm. I love you, woman, more than I ever did!’

‘Prove it,’ she said without turning aside from her task but he laughed and said, ‘Not me, I’ve got to ride over to Hermitage. There’s a problem blowing up over there, a very tiresome one!’

‘Oh?’ she said, ‘and what’s that?’

‘I’ll tell you about it in bed tonight,’ he said and when she replied, laughing, that knowing him and seeing that spring was in the air she doubted this very much it struck him that since the crisis they had become lovers again and that she could cheer him up with a glance. He rode off reflecting, ‘I’ll soon settle this nonsense of Henry Pitts! He must be older than me and Hermitage can’t manage without him! Damn it, if it comes to the worst, I’ll write to the Agricultural Committee and get him starred for the duration!’

II

P
aul’s attempts to nail Henry Pitts to his farm for the duration proved unavailing. By early September, when everyone in the Valley was working sixteen hours a day getting in the harvest, Henry was plodding up and down a dusty parade ground near Oswestry, with a dummy rifle over his shoulder. By the time the British Army in the field had made good its losses at Loos he was in France.

Henry’s urge to enlist was the outcome of his mid-morning visits to his piggeries, on the north-east corner of his holding. From here, high up on the shoulder of Hermitage Wood, he could look directly down into the basin of the camp parade ground where columns marched and wheeled all day and the hoarse shouts of NCOs reached him like the distant wail of gulls. Henry was fascinated by the patterned precision of their movements, which seemed to be animated by clockwork. He liked best to see a company respond to the command, ‘At the halt, by the left, form close company of pla-
toon
!’ and see the long, snaking column waver, break up, unfold like a spreading fan, reform and come to a tidy halt in front of the saluting base. As a child he had always liked playing with lead soldiers, forming them into assault columns and giving the closest attention to their dressing but here, before his eyes, was a game of soldiers come to life and played on a huge scale. The crispness and precision of their movements was a kind of poetry to him and he revelled in it, day after day, week after week, until it seemed to him that he could never be happy until he identified himself with those khaki-clad automatons, responding smoothly and ecstatically to the bark of their drill-masters. The precise beauty of drill banished all other aspects of soldiering from his simple mind. He did not ponder the possibility of wounds, or death, or discomfort in the trenches, or even prolonged separation from his land and his great tawny wife and plump, tawny children. All he could think of was the synchronisation of arms and legs
en masse
and at last he knew that, no matter what it might cost him, he must absorb himself in it at once.

He expected opposition from his wife, Gloria, and from his father, Arthur, but although there was an awed hush when he announced his intention to join up no one attempted to dissuade him except Squire Craddock, who was furious. His wife Gloria, the red-haired grenadier of a woman who had forsaken the Heronslea estate to marry him, openly applauded his decision. After Horace Handcock, Gloria Pitts was the most indefatigable patriot in the Valley and thought of any male out of uniform, if he was neither child nor dotard, as a poltroon. Gloria was the first woman in the Valley to engage in the popular pastime of distributing white feathers to civilians and actually slashed one of Martha Pitts’ best down cushions for ammunition. She said, delightedly, ‘Youm really
goin’
Henry? Youm actually takin’ a
smack
at that bliddy Kaiser? Well then, good luck to ’ee boy! And when you comes back on leave in kharki I’ll show ’ee off all round the neighbourhood, you zee if I don’t!’

Martha’s reactions were more restrained. She pointed out that Henry was thirty-six and that they would probably keep him at home, guarding bridges and viaducts, but old Grandpa Pitts, who could recall watching redcoats embark at Plymouth for the Crimea, chose to regard this as an insult on the family and said that Henry would almost certainly return with a Victoria Cross pinned to his breast and a personal letter of thanks from Lord Roberts. They had told him several times that Bobs was dead but he chose not to believe it. Without both Bobs and Kitchener he could not believe in the inevitability of victory.

Paul argued that food-growing was just as important as killing Germans and that Henry, as a professional farmer, would almost certainly be rejected by the authorities. Henry countered by saying that his eldest boy was already big enough to take his place and Gloria, outraged by the Squire’s attempt to snatch the halo of patriotism from the Hermitage, said she would never hold up her head if theirs was the only farm in the Valley that failed to contribute a man to the forces of the Crown. Seeing how determined they all were Paul withdrew his opposition and because of his personal regard for Henry did not write the threatened letter to the local committee with the result that Henry, fearing rejection in Paxtonbury, travelled to Bristol and enlisted in the Gloucestershire Regiment. Within a matter of hours, he was being taught the simplest of those great sweeping movements he had witnessed from his vantage point beside the piggeries.

His only grouse during his training period was that it was a long time before they issued him with a real rifle and until they did, until he could smack his huge, horny hand against a real gunstock, it seemed to him that he was only playing at soldiers. In due course, however, he got his arms and equipment and came home on embarkation leave about Christmas-time, when the Valley was under a light mantle of snow and everything looked lifeless and forlorn. Everything, that is, except his wife, Gloria, who shrieked with excitement when he marched into the yard, the living justification for an entire handful of white feathers for now she could say, as she distributed them, ‘Get on an’ join, boy! My Henry’s rising forty and he’s out there, so what be you doin’ in corduroys?’ Her delight in him was such that, had Henry been given more than a short leave it is doubtful whether he would have had the stamina to hump his fifty-six-pound pack into Paxtonbury on the morning of departure. Their relationship up to then had been cordial but humdrum, for man and wife habitually worked a thirteen-hour day and Gloria, with three children, had more than once declared that she had no intention of cluttering herself with more. Now, however, she had the immense privilege of actually sharing a bed with a real live soldier, a man trained and eager to slaughter Huns and she was determined to do her part by sending him off to war fortified against a period of celibacy. She had never heard of the Roman custom of introducing harlots into gladiators’ quarters on the night before the Games in order to give them memories worth fighting for but it was in precisely this spirit that she refused to let Henry rise at the customary hour of six-thirty and perform his usual duties about the farm. She clasped him to her capacious bosom and enfolded him with her great, muscled limbs, so that it was sometimes past nine o’clock when they came down to breakfast and Henry began to wonder if life in the trenches could demand more of a man. He went off on Boxing Day with something like relief but all the way to Paxtonbury he chuckled reminiscently over his experiences of the last few days. ‘Gordamme,’ he said to himself, shifting the weight of his pack as he braced himself for the stiff climb to the crest of Blackberry Moor, ‘I never knowed ’er had it in ’er, for ’er was always inclined to ration a man after our first tacker showed up!’ Then, as he swung into the rhythm of a step that was brisk and satisfying after the countryman’s peace-time plod, he began to whistle, ‘Plum and Apple’ and ‘Do Like a Nice Mince Pie’, alien songs to a Valley man and learned during his training period. Probably no man ever went to war in better heart.