Post of Honour (41 page)

It came without pain, without even realisation. Just a soundless explosion like the red-gold wink of distant shell fire at night and then an eternity of dreams, some troubled, like the recurring dream of his fever in hospital sixteen years before, some tranquil, like the memory of long summer afternoons in the Valley, with Claire coming down the goyle to Crabpot Willie’s shack wearing an old-fashioned sun bonnet and waving as she approached yet never seeming to reach his side.

They had just made one more lurch south-westwards towards Soissons, no longer really an army after days of marching, counter-marching, of losing touch with their flanks, and being pounded by artillery and whipped by machine-gun fire that seemed sometimes to come from the rear. They retired, still struggling, a rabble of British, French poilus, and French civilians caught up in the backward heaves of the shattered divisions and it was Paul’s quixotic concern for a wounded poilu that brought him down.

He had never shared the British contempt for their allies, seeing the French not as ragamuffins, whose trenches were filthy and uninhabitable, nor yet, romantically, as the inheritors of the Austerlitz tradition but as a nation of peasants and small craftsmen, like the people of the Valley who had been cruelly used by their militarists and politicians. Their countryside, parts of which reminded him vividly of the Valley, had been fouled by the passage of armies and their dwellings reduced to rubble by the cannon of both sides. And all this time their blood had been poured out like dish-water in the Ardennes, in Champagne, and in witless offensives like that of General Nivelle, the previous summer. Yet somehow they fought on, doggedly and savagely, little swarthy men, for the most part, with blue-black whiskers and dark, burning eyes and lately, or so it had seemed to Paul, they fought without hope.

Some such thought must have crossed his mind when he saw the poilu making a feeble attempt to apply a field-dressing as he lay on the blind side of a grassy hummock. They were retiring over fields not yet reduced to the grey morasses of the north, a rolling countryside where hawthorn blossomed and wild flowers grew. Two Northumbrian privates were humping the company’s surviving Lewis-gun and clumsy ammunition buckets, so Paul was comparatively unencumbered. The Frenchman rolled his eyes upward as Paul knelt beside him. His shoulder had been laid open by shrapnel that was still scything down from a battery behind the hill and as Paul raised him, grunting under his weight, another splinter whanged through the poilu’s helmet, scattering his brains and ricocheting into Paul’s temple. They fell together, locked in a grotesque embrace and the Northumbrians, leaving their stray MT officer for dead, ran down the slope to find cover in a farmhouse, promising each other that they would go back for his papers and identity discs as soon as it was dark.

They never did of course, for dusk found them caught up in the mass exodus from Soissons and it was a German stretcher-party that found Paul still breathing at dawn the next day and conveyed him, with some of their own stretcher cases, to the Soissons infirmary.

He owed his life to the presence there of a Leipzig brain specialist called Quirnheim. Bored with abdominals and fractured limbs the man took a mild interest in the case, extracting the splinter but telling his orderly that the English lieutenant would almost certainly die during the next twenty-four hours. When, on his rounds the following day, Paul was seen to be alive the specialist’s interest in the patient revived. He took a closer look, skilfully removed another half-ounce splinter from a shallow wound forward of the left ear and told the grinning orderlies that the Englishman evidently possessed an even thicker skull than his commander-in-chief, Sir Douglas Haig, and thus stood a chance of recovery. Quirnheim had no opportunity of following the case through for the tide of war swept back through Soissons and all the seriously wounded were left behind when the Germans abandoned the railhead to counter-attacking French and Americans. He lay in a ward alongside twenty to thirty other critical cases and in late July the Americans moved in, so that there was nobody who could identify him, his discs having been mislaid, his uniform burned and his few personal belongings looted.

The war rolled away to the north-east and days passed before a few muttered words, overheard by an American nurse, identified him as an Englishman, after which he was moved to a private ward and given individual attention. His ultimate emergence from the coma astonished and delighted the American surgeon, who, in the period ahead, was prone to take as much credit for Paul’s recovery as his countrymen took for the overthrow of the German Empire. It was not until he was being invalided via Paris to England that a British doctor told him he probably owed his life to two factors, one French and one German. The shell-splinters, it seemed, had spent most of their force on the poilu’s head but without Quirnheim’s skill in replacing a section of bone with a silver plate the largest of them would have caused death. The information made Paul thoughtful. In later life he always felt diffident about the Croix de Guerre the French Government ultimately awarded him for his puny share in the Chemin des Dames battle; neither could he bring much enthusiasm to the post-war Hang-the-Kaiser campaign.

V

C
laire’s fifth child, another girl born early in the morning of July 1st, gave her as little trouble as her sisters, Mary and Whiz. Maureen said, when she returned to the Big House after her morning rounds, that Claire was an example of the law of compensation, ‘carrying with difficulty but bringing forth with despatch’. It was not until the baby was safely delivered, and Maureen, paying her return visit, was enjoying a quiet cigarette before beginning her evening rounds, that the doctor began to understand Claire’s obstinate and utterly irrational optimism concerning Paul. It was not, she decided, simply a pregnant woman’s talisman, for although both she and John considered Paul dead, along with all the others except those three indestructibles, Ikey, Smut and Henry Pitts, Claire’s faith had never faltered. Maureen said, admiring her patient’s composure, ‘You’re an unlikely cuss, Claire! You really have made up your mind that he’ll soon be lounging in here on those long legs of his, haven’t you?’ and Claire said, ‘Yes, I have. He’ll be along soon enough and not all that much the worse for it—but this isn’t just a lifebuoy, Maureen, of the kind all women grab at when they get a “missing” telegram—there’s a link between people who have spent years building up a deep, personal relationship like mine and Paul’s, and yours and John’s. Separation and distance can’t sever it and if death did then one would know. I’m not sure of much any longer but I’m confident of that! Now let me have another look at my baby.’

She struggled into a sitting position as Maureen lifted the child out of the cot and placed her in her arms. ‘ “Now baint her a pretty li’l maid”?’ Claire demanded, ‘ “
baint
her, now”?’ and Maureen, whose familiarity with babies had warped her judgment on these matters, agreed that she was indeed, with features of almost classic regularity, great tufts of hair a shade more blonde than her mother’s and perfectly formed hands and feet. ‘I’m so proud of her I could ask Parson Horsey to ring a peal of bells!’ Claire said and Maureen added glumly that they could reserve that for news of Paul and an end to this idiotic slaughter, for although relieved for Claire, for whom she had always had a deep affection, she was miserably depressed by the hopelessness of life, what with poor old John laid up with the Spanish influenza scourge, half the Valley down with the same epidemic, and twice as much work as she could handle at her time of life. She came home, tired out, at eight o’clock and poured herself a stiff double whisky, carrying it up to sit with John for a spell. She tried to inject him with some of Claire’s irrational cheerfulness, telling him what a handsome daughter the Squiress had just produced but John Rudd was gloomier than ever these days. He had never believed ‘missing’ was more than an indirect way of saying ‘dead’ and she knew that his friendship with Paul Craddock had always meant a great deal to him, as much and perhaps more than their marriage, or their seven-year-old boy, now boarding with Mary Willoughby at Deepdene in the hope that he would elude the ’flu virus.

‘Well, I daresay it’ll sustain her a bit,’ he grumbled, ‘but you know and I know that it’s damned nonsense!’

‘This morning I wasn’t convinced it was,’ she admitted, ‘Claire talked about a thread between two people who grew fond of one another over the years and somehow it seemed to make sense, as though one spins a kind of strand from the heart and a final break registers itself physically.’

‘By God we shall have you table-rapping before long!’ he exclaimed and then, ‘No! It’s better to face facts and make one’s dispositions accordingly!’ For a moment he was racked with a violent fit of coughing and Maureen noticed, with renewed concern, how old and tired he looked.

‘What
kind
of dispositions?’ she asked, after he had taken a sip of his blackcurrant syrup.

‘Oh, don’t ask me now,’ he said irritably, ‘let’s wait until the war’s over! I don’t see how she can run a place this size as a widow even though she won’t be short of cash. Besides, all the heart will go out of her the moment she gets confirmation of his death and she’ll sell up. Before we know where we are we’ll have a damned profiteer moving in and when that happens I’m off, I can tell you! I shall put my feet up and spend the time left to me fishing and reading!’

She said, doubtfully, ‘Suppose she never gets confirmation?’ and he growled, as he pulled the bedclothes up to his chin, ‘So much the worse for everybody, especially her! She’ll turn into one of those damned neurotic women like Victoria, sniffing about the place and complaining that someone has moved his toothbrush out of line! I know Claire Derwent, my dear. Without that lanky great dreamer she’d be lost and the children wouldn’t mean a damn thing to her,’ and although Maureen did not relish the thought she believed him for she knew Claire and it had always intrigued her how far Claire’s children had lagged behind in her affections. She recalled how eagerly she had turned her back on the family when Paul had been last on leave and how jealously she had kept him closeted in that love-nest of theirs, down in the goyle. ‘I suppose the truth is she’s got an excessive amount of animal vitality,’ she mused aloud, ‘and he’s the only man with the key to release it. I’ve noticed it often and, to tell the truth, it sometimes amused me. The poor gel almost has an orgasm every time he slips his arm around her waist!’ She sat beside him for a few moments before saying, ‘It isn’t just Paul, John! Everywhere I call nowadays the sparkle and zest has gone, and most of the hope too. How can any of us start fresh again, at our age?’

‘We can’t,’ he said, ‘but that isn’t important. The new arrivals, like that youngster born today will and I daresay they’ll make something better of it! A third of Europe’s population died in the Black Death and ten years later this country alone was exporting enough wool to mine gold for a thousand families like the Gilroys and the Lovells. You, me, Paul, Claire, Will Codsall and the rest, we’re just the latter-day Black Death generation, the unlucky bunch caught at the bottom of the dip. I daresay the replacements will learn from it and if they don’t they deserve all they get! Turn the light down, old girl, I’m going to try and sleep before this blasted cough gets a hold!’ but Maureen’s Celtic curiosity had been awakened, not only by what he had said but by the memory of Claire’s steadfast faith in the face of near certainty regarding Paul’s fate. She said, ‘Wait John—I’ll give you a tablet and some hot milk to quieten the cough and make you sleep—but you’ve said that much, tell me a little more. Where does Paul Craddock’s archaic dream fit into this switchboard pattern? Is there any justification for his stick-in-the-muddery, in an age dominated by machines when the best brains in Europe seem to have lost their way? What I mean is, what made him succeed here? Was it simple obstinacy, vanity?’

He thought a while before answering. It was a question that had occurred to him often over the years for, in its answer he imagined, lay the core of his deep attachment to the man.

‘It isn’t either,’ he said, at length, ‘but something a good deal more uncommon. Fundamental too. Nothing like it has been seen around here in a very long time!’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘I’ve spent most of my life among people with their noses in dirt,’ he went on, thoughtfully, ‘and he was the only one who neither looked on land as property or as a way of life that carried an insurance against hunger. To him it was the flesh and bones of humanity, the only true essential and whatever success he had here was the result of that plus a natural talent for administration inherited from money-grubbing ancestors on some other side of his family! And that isn’t the whole of it either! There was something else that held him in—two things, and kept him from overreaching himself and forfeiting the backing of men he couldn’t afford to lose.’

‘Men like you, John?’

‘Not just me, all the farmers and the craftsmen about here.’

‘Well?’

‘He never once put money before human dignity. All the time I knew him he only made one serious mistake.’

‘Grace Lovell?’

‘No, by God! That wasn’t a mistake! He learned from Grace in all kinds of ways. The mistake was that a person with as much to give as Paul Craddock should go and get killed in a battle that was a damned shoddy affair compared with the one he was fighting. That wasn’t simply his tragedy either, it was a tragedy for everyone in the Valley!’

She saw that he was hot and flushed and at once felt contrite. ‘All right, John, I’m sorry I had to get you worked up at a time like this. I’ll get your tablet and drink, now,’ and she hurried downstairs shocked and confused by his bitterness and by his acceptance of Paul’s death as a fact.

And yet, as she pottered about in the kitchen waiting for the milk to warm, she was conscious of a sudden and inexplicable lift in spirits, so that she said to herself aloud, ‘I wonder? I wonder if there could be anything in that thread-theory of Claire’s?’ She turned off the gas-ring and threw open the window, looking up at the stars in the clear, summer night and as she leaned there anticipation warmed her as it might a child counting the hours to Christmas Eve. ‘Would
I
know?’ she thought, ‘if John had got himself blown to bits in China or Timbuctoo? Would
I
feel a sudden smart, like a half-healed scab coming off? Maybe I would, for who the devil am I to throw everything out the window that hasn’t been laboratory tested? I learn something new about my job every day!’ She poured the milk, dissolved the tablet and went up the narrow stairs a good deal more cheerfully than she had descended them ten minutes before.