Post of Honour (42 page)

Chapter Ten

I

T
he influenza epidemic ran its course from Whin to Sorrel and across the Valley to the county border, striking down about one in four and killing some of the very young and the elderly. Arthur Pitts of Hermitage died that autumn and so did Marlowe, the sexton, whose two boys had been killed, one in France and one at sea. Sam and Joannie Potter lost their youngest, a baby of eighteen months, and Cissie Potter, now Cissie Bellchamber, lost the child sired by Jem, the Bideford Goliath. Before that, however, there was a brief season of hope, when the country rang with news of the collapse of the famous Hindenburg Line and it really did begin to look as if the end might be round the corner. Then, just as the harvest was being gathered in, the Valley folk noticed a stricken look on the face of the Squiress and could only suppose that she had received confirmation of Squire’s death and, for some reason, was loath to broadcast the news. They were not long in discovering the truth. The latest telegram to reach the Valley concerned not the Squire but his protégé, the boy whom they remembered him treating as a son from the days of his first coming among them, and although most of them were fond of Ikey they were none the less slightly relieved, for there was still hope that Squire would turn up, just as old Smut had returned from the dead a year or so ago.

Claire tore open the telegram with fumbling, sweating fingers. It told her that Major Palfrey, MC, of the Tank Corps, had died of wounds in a base hospital early in August and the heavy blow made her reel for somehow she had almost as much faith in Ikey’s survival as she had in Paul’s. A day or so later a letter arrived from Ikey’s Commanding Officer. Ikey, he said, had named her next-of-kin and it might comfort her a little to know that he had received his wounds actually in the Hindenburg Line, a few days after playing an important part in the decisive victory over the Hun. It did not comfort her at all. Apart from her own grief she realised how deeply Paul would mourn the boy and how much a part of the family he had become since that far-off day when he had unexpectedly sided with her in the matter of young Simon’s renunciation of fox-hunting. She might have derived a little comfort, however, could she have known that Ikey Palfrey was one of the very few serving soldiers on the Western Front who had at least seen his theories of the war completely vindicated before his death and also, in the few moments of consciousness vouchsafed to him after his transfer from Field Dressing Station to hospital, had been able to direct a nurse to mail a letter that had been several days in the writing.

On August 1st his had been one of the reserve squadrons of a massed tank attack on what looked like an impregnable section of the line, protected by formidable wire-belts and, as far as the attackers were aware, manned by resolute troops armed with the new anti-tank guns and well supported by artillery. Yet it cracked like a stick when the tanks waddled over it and Ikey’s squadron, brought up for a heave against the support line, was equally successful for the ground was dry and the heart had gone out of many of the defenders. The advance went on all that week until the tanks were probing Proyart and Le Fisque, and the entire German defence line seemed to be crumbling.

A day or so later, feeling rather like the junior partner of a huge, floundering enterprise saved from bankruptcy by policies devised and initiated by him, Ikey went off to explore part of the famous line and descended into a deep, concrete-faced dugout, drawn there by curiosity and the lure of souvenirs. That evening he could view the war as something virtually over and done with and he felt himself on the threshold of a new era in which the long roll of dead would have to be justified by the living and a new social structure more flexible than its predecessor. The sense of achievement made him pleasantly relaxed and reflective. It also made him criminally careless.

He directed his electric torch into the bunk recesses of the vast shelter, seeing a litter of abandoned blankets and items of kit and then, hanging on a bulkhead near the door, he saw the pickelhaube, the famous dress-helmet of the German Army symbolic of the very early days of the war, its patent leather and metal-tipped spike gleaming in the rays of his torch. Pickelhaubes were greatly prized as souvenirs and as he looked at it he suddenly thought of old Horace Handcock, the Valley patriot, who had been breathing fire and slaughter at the Germans ever since the dreadnought race of 1908 and the thought of old Horace made him smile for it occurred to him that Horace, crowned by this helmet, would caricature a fat German feldwebel. He had the same self-important gait, the same prominent blue eyes and thick, brick-red neck and Ikey made up his mind on the spot to present Horace with the pickelhaube as soon as he got home.

He stood up and unhooked the helmet from the nail on which it hung and there was a blinding flash, a roaring in his ears and then an advancing wall of blackness that lifted him and blasted him clear across the dugout. The pickelhaube was a very obvious booby-trap and as a man who, off and on, had served on the Western Front since November, 1914, he should have known better. Much, much better.

II

A
nother and equally freakish stroke of bad luck came close to depriving the Valley of one of its most celebrated soldiers in the last few hours of the war.

Smut Potter, who had sniped at Germans in the flooded trenches east of Armentieres as long ago as autumn, 1914, had then spent almost a year masquerading as a French idiot in German-occupied Péronne and had since survived Passchendaele and battles in open country that followed the break-throughs, was shot and crippled by a machine-gun bullet on the morning of November 11th, only three hours before the cease-fire.

There was a kind of justice surrounding the circumstances in which Smut got his Blighty and got it far too late to show a profit except in the way of a small disability pension. In the four years he had been in action he had killed, or had a hand in killing, over a hundred Germans some of whom were notched on his rifle stock although he stopped keeping score after they had trained him to use the Mills bomb. He had collected a wound or two here and there but never one serious enough to keep him out of the line for more than a month or so and this he had in no way resented. He liked Army life, balancing the bad items against the good, the loss of sleep, danger and discomfort against the acquisition of an enormous variety of goods all of which he redistributed to his friends and favourite officers. He had lost his stripes three times for drunkenness but had always regained them in the next push and like most front-line soldiers, fought without rancour, looking on the war as a kind of gigantic poaching expedition and the men in the trenches opposite as homicidal but impersonal gamekeepers.

There had been rumours of an armistice for a week or more as he entered upon his fifth winter of active service but Smut did not take them very seriously. From what he had seen of Fritz lately there was still a good deal of fight left in him and, as it turned out, he was right about that. On the final day of the war his battalion was advancing on a village east of Valenciennes, where a wounded German officer told them the enemy rearguard had gone back before dawn. So they went in, some hundreds of them and were milling about the Square when two well-sited machine-guns opened up and Smut went down with a bullet in his hip. He would have been hit again, probably fatally, had not his poacher’s sixth sense somersaulted him into a doorway where he was protected by the bodies of less experienced men while the last-ditch Germans, including the wounded officer, were rooted out and despatched with bayonet and bomb. The orderly who dressed Smut’s wound commiserated with him, pointing out that hostilities were due to cease that very day but Smut, lying on a stretcher awaiting transportation down the line, was philosophical, deciding that he had had more luck than any one man deserved and that luck did not use a calendar. While the wounded were awaiting ambulances to take them back to the advanced Field Hospital an airman on the stretcher beside him died. With a good deal of wriggling, and a certain amount of agony, Smut managed to acquire the airman’s fur-lined boots, reasoning that they would almost certainly be looted by the RAMC orderly who removed the body and that boots such as these would come in handy on the soggy fields above the Dell.

During his long spell in hospital at St Omer Smut’s thoughts returned to Madame Viriot, the baker’s widow who had sheltered him during his spell behind enemy lines. In retrospect she seemed a homely, friendly and industrious body. He remembered then that she had talked about setting up a bakery in the Valley after the war and ordered him to get in touch with her at Lille as soon as the opportunity presented itself. He was not much of a hand at writing so he dictated a letter to a VAD and, in due course, Madame arrived in person, quite beside herself with delight at being so miraculously restored to her stray Tommy. As soon as Smut could hobble about on crutches they were married by the Mayor of St Omer, an occasion for much merrymaking by the patients and hospital staff. Then, to Madame Potter’s chagrin, the authorities began to make a ridiculous fuss about her accompanying her husband back to England before numerous formalities had been completed. The business proved so protracted that in the end she was left behind to cope with it, while Smut was shipped across the Channel to await discharge. He limped home to the Valley, a civilian once more, in the spring of 1919, and when he told his friends that he had married a Frenchwoman, and that she would soon be starting a bakery in Coombe Bay they thought it was just another of Smut’s leg-pulls. They soon discovered that it was not for Madame arrived a fortnight later, with a mountain of baggage and commercial instincts that proved disastrous to George Endicott, whose bakery had run down during the war and was now offered for sale. Madame got it for two hundred pounds and within weeks of moving in was putting inches on the waistlines of Coombe Bay housewives. She did not expect Smut to contribute to the running of the business, except for driving the old delivery van that she herself had assembled from a number of derelict vehicles rusting on the dump behind Nun’s Bay camp. She was inclined to think that Smut had done his bit by ridding France of a hundred or so of the hated Boche and was entitled to rest on his not inconsiderable laurels that included the Military Medal. Smut took his good fortune for granted at the time but came to appreciate it when he ran across war comrades who were having the greatest difficulty in getting jobs and settling back into civilian life.

‘I got to admit,’ he would tell his cronies in The Raven, ‘that I struck it cushy the day I met my ole woman! Them Frogs are diff’rent in all kinds o’ ways but ’specially so when it comes to marryin’ an’ settlin’ down. Now take Marie! She’s boss from first light ’till lights out but from then on its me who takes over and a Frenchwoman wouldn’t ’ave it no other way! In public you minds your Ps and Qs with ’em but soon as the shutters is up it’s three paces be’ind fer the wimmin, just like the Wogs! Seems to work, too, seems to keep ’em happy and hard at it, although I offen wonder how we’d ’ave managed if Marie hadn’t bin well past puppin’!’

He was to find out; before 1919 was done Madame Potter was proudly announcing to all her customers that the Ostend fortuneteller had been wrong after all. She was, by her reckoning, forty-two and had enjoyed, just as prophesied, three husbands but now (the Virgin be praised) she was
enceinte
,
which Smut sheepishly translated as ‘in the family way’.

‘He will be a boy!’ Madame declared with a whirl of gesture, ‘and he will grow up to kill hundreds of the Boche like his father!’

III

H
enry Pitts, the Valley immortal, faced the end as he had faced the beginning, with mild surprise, with a touch of awe, with patience, amiability and the slow rubbery smile so seldom absent from his genial face.

Most of the men fighting on the Western Front were bewildered by the abrupt cessation of gunfire at 11 a.m. on the morning of November 11th, but they soon adapted themselves to it. It was otherwise with Henry Pitts; the occasion made a deep and lasting impression on him.