Post of Honour (26 page)

He looked more closely at her and realised that this was a fact. Claire said, ‘Then his first duty is to you, Rachel, and not to a theory!’ and once again Paul felt grateful for his wife’s grasp of essentials. He said, ‘Leave me to deal with Keith and when Ikey comes home on leave I’ll get him to talk to him. He’s due in a day or so unless leave is stopped. Meantime Keith can work on the Home Farm. Can Rachel move in with us, Claire?’

‘Certainly,’ Claire replied, ‘and the sooner the better. It’ll suit a plan I’ve had in mind for some time now.’

She did not tell them what her plan was and it was months before they found out but Rachel, very relieved, accompanied Paul to the Home Farm where he told Honeyman to make room on the staff for Keith. They moved in bag and baggage within twenty-four hours, making a home out of a ruinous cottage adjoining the tack-room where Lovell’s coachman had once lived.

Feeling that the reins of the place were slipping out of his hands, and that the spirit of the Valley was being poisoned by the stresses of war, Paul rode over to Four Winds and had a frank talk with Eveleigh on the subject of the buxom land-girl. He found him truculent and unresponsive.

‘You baint heard my side o’ the business,’ the farmer growled. ‘Marian’s not been a wife to me for close on a year now and I’ll be honest, Squire! I’m a man as works hard, eats hearty and damn’ well needs a woman night-times! Alwus ’ave and please God alwus will! I wouldn’t have thought to get Jill yer if things had been as they were between me an’ the missis but they baint an’ won’t be again. She holds me responsible for Gilbert being blown to tatters and Harold runnin’ off an’ enlisting, although you know same as I do that they’d ha’ gone be now in any case! As for Rachel, and that four-eyed scholar she wed, I don’t give a damn what happens to ’em, so long as they get from under me feet! Jill stays here as long as I’ve a mind to keep her and that’s all I’m disposed to say about it!’ and he stumped off to his work leaving Paul to find his own way out of the house. He saw one of the dairymaids in the hall and asked her if her mistress was available.

‘No,’ said the girl, carelessly, ‘ ’Er’s table-rapping in Gil’s room.’

‘She’s
what
?’

‘Table-rapping! ’Er’s at it all the time now. ’Er says if ’er keeps at it long enough ’er’ll get through to Gil and vind how he’s going on beyond the veil! It’s a real carry-on I can tell ’ee, Squire.’

Paul began to understand why Eveleigh had sought solace in the barn and on the way out he passed the land-girl Jill forking hay in the yard. She gave him a smirk and the time of day but he did not acknowledge her greeting. It might have been fancy but, as he climbed on to Snowdrop and clattered out of the yard, the atmosphere of the place seemed so stale and sinister that he pushed the grey into a trot and had just reached the bridge when he saw a motor turn off the moorland road and accelerate along the flat beside the river. As it drew level he saw that the driver was Ikey and without knowing why his heart gave a tremendous bound and he shouted as the car slowed and stopped.

‘We weren’t expecting you yet, Ikey,’ he said. ‘Claire will be delighted! You look very fit, far more yourself than most of the youngsters who come home from time to time.’

Ikey grinned and Paul thought how much of the impudent gamin had survived the successive strait-jackets of public school, hill-station, and Armageddon.

‘It’s having had the sense to join the artillery, Gov,’ he joked, ‘the PBI do all the slogging and we chaps just sit around and make things tough for ’em by tickling up Fritz every now and again. I’m back in Blighty for several weeks, special course at Aldershot. Very nice and very secret!’ and he winked.

Paul laughed, feeling cheered already and cutting through the paddock cantered ahead to give Claire the good news. That night, however, after everyone had gone to bed and they were sitting over their brandy, Ikey was not so flippant, warning Paul that within a month or two there was going to be a push to end all pushes on the Western Front and that, in his opinion, it was likely to be far more costly than Neuve Chapelle and Loos.

‘The point is, will it be successful?’ Paul demanded, ‘will it break the deadlock and hasten things to a finish?’

‘ “Ah, that I cannot say”,’ quoted Ikey, ‘ “but ’twas a famous victory”!’ and then, seriously, ‘Let’s say it stands a better chance than anything we’ve tried so far. We’ve got some surprises and we shall certainly rattle old Fritz, the poor old sod but I can’t say more than that, not even to you, Gov. Now, to hell with the war. What’s happening on the home front?’

Paul did not think he could be seriously interested but Ikey listened attentively when Paul recounted the Valley news and seemed particularly struck by the information concerning Keith Horsey.

‘I ought to have written to him,’ he said. ‘He wrote several times to me. I wouldn’t like Old Beanpole to imagine I thought less of him for telling those bloody hearthrug patriots to look elsewhere for cannon-fodder! I’ll go over and see him first thing in the morning.’

‘What strikes me as odd,’ Paul said, ‘is that you chaps aren’t anything like so emphatic about the war as the people at home. You don’t foam at the mouth about the Germans and I get the impression you half admire people like Keith Horsey. Is that cussedness on your part or is it general among men on active service?’

‘General I’d say, at least below the rank of colonel but I don’t see why it should surprise you. Fritz lives under the same hellish conditions as we do and you can’t help admiring his guts. Most of the chaps feel more akin to him than to the people at home and I daresay he feels the same way. You can’t live a week out there and go on believing all the bloody nonsense people write and talk back here, not unless you happen to be on the staff that is!’

‘But if things are as bad as that,’ Paul said, ‘isn’t there a chance of it petering out of its own accord?’

‘Not a snowball in hell’s chance, Gov,’ Ikey told him cheerfully, ‘but if you ask me why I couldn’t give you a short answer. It has to do with self-respect, regimental pride, the habit of discipline and even the warrior cult thousands of years old but more than any of those things it’s probably reluctance to let other chaps down. I suppose that sounds facetious but it isn’t, it’s just that we’re all so closely involved with each other and, in a way, with Fritz. I don’t think things are like that on the other fronts, or at sea, but out there, in that great sprawling mud-bath where, to show the top of your head is certain death, a man ceases to have anything in common with ordinary civilised people. They’ve stopped believing in the war, or in the way it is regarded in London or Berlin, but they’ll go on sticking it until one side breaks. Do you find that impossible to understand?’

‘Not entirely,’ Paul said thoughtfully and he did understand in a way, in fact he went to bed thinking he had learned more about the war from Ikey than from any other source over the last eighteen months.

Ikey crossed to the Home Farm the next morning and he and Keith went off together, high up to the source of the Sorrel, which had always been Ikey’s favourite place on the estate. Here, where the river was no more than a shallow stream winding through thickets of brambles and shoulder-high ferns, he identified the locality with the first poem he had ever read, ‘A Boy’s Song’ in Mary Willoughby’s
Poetical Reader
. Paul never heard what they talked about that day but whatever it was it had an immediate effect upon Keith’s thinking, for on his return he announced that he intended to volunteer for a stretcher-bearing unit, formed from conscientious objectors who had refused to carry arms and soon after Ikey left to begin his course he said good-bye to a tearful Rachel, and to Paul and Claire, and returned to the North. A month later Rachel received a letter from him from France. Two months after that she gave birth to a stillborn child and left the Valley for good.

III

T
he Somme offensive, following swiftly upon Jutland, fulfilled Paul’s gloomiest forebodings regarding the blank page at the back of the estate diary. In a single week, the first of July, a string of family names were entered under ‘Casualties’ by the dogged Claire, who had made a vow to keep the record up-to-date even though the task depressed her almost as much as it would have depressed Paul.

The first two names written in were Jutland casualties, Tom Williams and his nephew Dan, both lost aboard the battle cruiser
Queen Mary
.
Within a fortnight Smut Potter was posted as missing, believed killed, and after Smut came the death of Evan Morgan, son of Eph Morgan, the Coombe Bay builder, and then Tremlett, the hunt servant, both killed on July 1st. Later the same week Nick, second of the Timberlake boys, Jeff Marlowe, son of the sexton, Will Salter the thatcher’s son, Jim Willis, the wheelwright’s younger son and two others, were killed, bringing Valley casualties up to fourteen. Despite these appalling losses the general news was encouraging. London papers, arriving a day late, told of spectacular advances, enormous German casualties and the capture of innumerable prisoners but long before the first of these prisoners appeared in a small POW camp, sited a mile or so north of Shallowford Woods the note of triumph had gone from the leading articles and Paul began to suspect that, as Ikey had prophesied, Fritz had been badly rattled but far from defeated. By harvest-time the familiar deadlock seemed to have been resumed, with no hope whatever of the war ending with a flourish of cavalry trumpets.

It was the establishment of a prisoner-of-war camp beyond the northern rim of the woods that led, indirectly, to the next outburst of Valley hysteria, an incident that pushed Paul that much nearer despair.

The camp was not a large one. It held no more than two hundred carefully-seeded Germans, mostly Saxons, selected from larger camps for timber-felling in the area. They worked in conditions amounting to freedom for none showed the slightest inclination to escape and Paul gathered, during a conversation with one of their reservist guards, that they considered themselves fortunate to be out of it and still sound in wind and limb.

They worked in gangs of six under the supervision of Sam Potter, the woodsman, and Sam, having free access to such splendid muscles, was not above allocating one or two of his charges to do urgent work on the estate, besides the felling and shaping of pitprops in the plantations between the border of Periwinkle in the west, and the boundary of High Coombe in the east. When Elinor Codsall complained to him that her patch of pasture under Hermitage Wood was reverting to moor and stood waist-high in brambles and nettles, he readily agreed to lend her a prisoner for a week or two to get it cleared. Soon the man arrived, a tall, broad-shouldered Württemberger, with a great moon face not unlike Will Codsall’s and hands like raw hams that assaulted the briars and docks as if they had been collectively responsible for uprooting him from his farm near Ludwigsburg and setting him down on alien soil.

Nobody seemed to think it ironic that he should be clearing the land of a man at whom he might well have shot a year or so ago and that under the eye of his widow, who trudged to and fro among her shanty-town of hen houses on the opposite slope of the hill; nobody, that is, except Elinor herself, who was morbidly fascinated by the spectacle of the German’s great broad back and the swift gleam of his scythe blade as it caught the sun in one of its wide, expert sweeps. Soon she found herself looking for him and sometimes wondered what Will would have said at having a German soldier working his way across the tussocks over which he had walked so often on his way to the fringe of the wood. His lumbering movements, Elinor thought, were strongly reminiscent of Will’s, particularly when he stooped and gathered great armfuls of weeds to carry to the fire, and one day, impelled by nothing more than curiosity, she took him a stone jar of cider to refresh him at noon and thought, as he clicked his heels and bowed from the waist, that this was something Will would never have done, not even to a Lovell. He could speak a little English and she asked him his name. When he told her it was Willi, Willi Meyer, she walked swiftly away but after that, during the hot spell, she took him his cider each day and sometimes a hard-boiled egg and a crust of home-baked bread spread with butter from her churn. He seemed pathetically grateful for these modest gifts but whenever she approached he always dropped his scythe or billhook and stood stiffly to attention as though she had been an inspecting officer. Each time she saw him he seemed to have grown more like poor old Will and even the children must have thought so, for they often crossed the dip and climbed the hillside to talk with him and play about him as he worked and he was always careful to warn them to stand well clear of his scythe, although he beamed at them and sometimes made faces that produced squeals of laughter and excited jumpings up and down. There were four children, the elder, a boy, Mark, two girls, Queenie and Floss and the baby Richard. Elinor was glad to let Mark take them all out of her way as soon as he had finished his morning chores. He was a slim, serious-minded boy, with his mother’s neat build and Grandfather Willoughby’s beaky nose and grey eyes. When dinner was ready Elinor usually called to them from the farm wall on the opposite slope and she had summoned them one hot morning and seen them run down to the rivulet, when she heard a sudden outcry and saw the Württemberger throw down his scythe and dash down the hillside, moving at considerable speed for so clumsy a man. She ran down the slope to join them and was horrified to learn that Mark, in jumping the brook, had landed almost on top of a sleeping adder, curled on a slab of sandstone and had been bitten in the ball of the thumb. There had been one or two cases of snakebite in the Valley in the past year and one child, over at Coombe Bay, had died before she could be treated but it looked as though Willi Meyer had some experience in this field for he acted with commendable speed, sucking the puncture for a full minute, then whipping out his pen-knife, sterilising the blade in a match flame and scoring a deep double cut before sucking again. Then, still moving so quickly that he appeared almost to be turning somersaults, he threw the boy on his back, knelt on his forearm and made a tourniquet with his bootlace, twisting it until the leather bit into the flesh. Doctor Maureen said later that the German’s first-aid had undoubtedly saved the boy’s life for it was nearly an hour before she was located and could use the serum she had sent for after the fatal Coombe Bay case. Mark was out and about again in a week and boasting of his experience but Willi’s skill and initiative made a deep impression on Elinor, who could not help thinking it strange that her son’s life had been saved by one of the men who had helped to make her life and work meaningless. After this incident she made a habit of giving Willi a hot meal at the farm and gradually an undemonstrative friendship developed between them. He learned English rapidly, and seemed deeply interested in everything about the farm, particularly her methods of crossbreeding fowls to produce a good laying strain and soon they were on mildly convivial terms, discussing farm and family problems. He told her a good deal about his own farm in Württemberg, and how the South Germans always resented the domination of the Prussians and had only supported the war because Germany, as a nation, felt herself encircled by enemies. It was a point of view Elinor had never heard expressed and she thought, privately, that if most Germans were anything like the amiable Willi Meyer then the war was even more stupid and wasteful than she had supposed, and her husband’s enlistment had been his first act of insanity.