Post of Honour (32 page)

‘You stay vile I brebare the bapers of my sister’s husband, Jules!’ she announced, in her thick Flemish accent. ‘Then you vill work until the poilus return to cut the Boche into bieces!’

It was not until several days later, when she dragged him from hiding in the flour store and brandished a set of papers half-covered with official stamps that he understood his refuge was to be permanent. Madame Viriot’s brother-in-law, it seemed, had decamped shortly after the Germans arrived in the district and had left his identity papers behind, together with wife and family, who afterwards obtained permission to go south to other relatives. In a strictly rationed area like Péronne Madame Viriot exercised considerable influence in official circles and it had been a simple matter to bribe civil authorities into converting Smut into the absent Jules Barnard. When Smut protested that his French was unequal to so great a strain Madame Viriot said, disdainfully, ‘Poof! Jules was half the idiot! I shall give out that he has returned from the war all the idiot!’, and thereafter she coached her protégé to such good effect that Smut was able to move about quite freely, indulging a hopeless stammer, a distressing twitch and a mild, cherubic grin. He rather enjoyed the charade and in any case was glad of a rest after more than twenty months in and out of the line. His obligations in the bakery by day were not as exacting as those by night, in Madame’s vast, canopied bed, for Marie Viriot, husbandless for two years, was a virile woman and used her stray Tommy with an energy and dexterity that Smut found astonishing in one so ponderously built. He did not mind, however. He was well-fed and well-housed and when he was not at work derived a good deal of pleasure from watching the enemy’s second-line troops sweat and bustle in their efforts to withstand the interminable British pressure on the Somme. By the time the attacks had petered out he was accepted everywhere as a bonafide French idiot and could walk about the town without much risk, under cover of his distressing stammer and carefully cultivated twitch. He soon reverted to his war-time trade and brought home a variety of carelessly guarded rifles. He collected information too of a sort, the names and numerals of German drafts passing through to the front, the type of transport used to shift stores and ammunition and the approximate location of ammunition dumps and long-range howitzer batteries, more than enough to have got him shot had he shown more diligence as secret agent. He was happy enough, save for occasional bouts of homesickness. The monotonous, featureless landscape around Péronne, he decided, must have been depressing in peace-time but war had converted it into a half-rural, half-industrial slum, housing a sullen population harassed by German regulations and fear of death from air-raids and the long-range shelling. Once, early in the new year, he gave expression to his disgust for the French provinces, telling Marie that, après la guerre, she would do well to sell up and take refuge across—the Channel where trees sometimes grew and occasionally the sun shone for a week at a time. He was startled by her reaction to this innocent remark. She bounced at him, held him firmly by the ears, planted kisses on both cheeks and exclaimed, rapturously, ‘It iss the brobosal of marriage you make! I accept! We will go to your native place and establish ourselves as pastry cooks! Did not the fortune-teller in Bruges tell me I should haf the three husbands but no little ones? Come now! Embrace Marie, Tommy!’, and she crushed him to her buttressed bosom while outside the thin, slanted rain fell and fell, and limbers moving up to the front passed in endless procession.

Early in March rumours began to circulate of an imminent German withdrawal to a new line many miles to the east and soon afterwards all able-bodied civilians within the requisite age limit were faced with a choice of going into hiding or being forcibly evacuated. It was time, Marie announced, for Jules Barnard to disappear again so Smut was salted away in the flour store once more, remaining there while the town emptied. He had, by now, a very high opinion of Marie’s ingenuity and naturally expected her to evade the evacuation order. But at the last minute something must have gone wrong for she suddenly appeared in his hideout with news that she was being moved to Lille and that a demolition squad would blow up the bakery at six o’clock the following morning. She did not seem to resent the wanton destruction of her property so much as her enforced separation from Smut, declaring that the French Government would be obliged to pay her compensation after the war and that she had already made out the bill. She made him memorise her new address and gave him back his uniform, which had been boiled, mended, and pressed against the day of liberation. She then issued final instructions, telling him to convert the flour store into a bomb-proof dugout, strong enough to resist the blowing up of the adjacent bakery and to be sure to write to her through the Red Cross as soon as he was free. If he failed in this respect, she said, she would hunt him down wherever he was, commencing the day the war ended.

The big bang came precisely at six a.m. and for a few minutes it seemed to Smut that Marie Viriot would be widowed a third time. The plaster ceiling of the store descended in an almost solid mass and only five layers of flour-sacks, reinforced by a girder, saved him from being buried alive. He poked a small hole through the debris but remained hidden all that day and the following night. Early on the second day he heard what he recognised as the sound of cheering and donning his uniform made his way across the ruins of the bakery to the street. By that time it took a great deal to excite Smut but he was more stirred by what he saw in Péronne that morning than by any experience that had come his way in the past. The advancing allied troops were Highlanders and they came swinging into the town to the bagpipe strains of ‘Scotland the Brave’. Smut was still capering with excitement and cheering himself hoarse when he was arrested by two Red Caps as a deserter and clapped in the lock-up to await interrogation. After that it seemed to him that he told his story approximately five hundred times but in due course he was welcomed back to the rump of his unit. It was, he noted sadly, full of strangers. Only the adjutant, one former lieutenant now a captain and five men of his original company recognised him. All the others had been killed or wounded in the last ten months. The adjutant, however, was delighted to see him and promised to recommend him for a Military Medal on the strength of his experiences. He also re-enlisted Smut as his personal servant. He had had a string of servants since the previous July and had mourned Smut every time one of them returned from Battalion HQ with nothing but demands for returns on how many tins of plum jam had been consumed during the last ten days or what instructions were being given the men on keeping their feet dry. Smut had never bothered with this kind of thing but he had seldom returned without a bottle of whisky or a pound of candles.

IV

T
he day he received Franz’s letter, telling him that he was now a sleeping partner in a firm producing grenades, pistol ammunition and other familiar articles, Paul had just returned from a night haul up to the support lines, behind Messines. He read the letter carefully, partly because its unconscious irony fascinated him but also to make quite sure that Franz had no commercial links with heavy pumping equipment, for that, Paul decided, would have been too grotesque. He had now been hauling pumping equipment up to Messines on thirty-five consecutive nights and had been strafed every night but two, when they had to turn back owing to traffic jams.

Paul’s section had been assigned to the group of Engineers responsible for the fabulous mine-galleries running directly under the ridge, mines that promised to provide the loudest bang since the beginning of time and blast away a whole section of the high ground from which the Germans dominated the area, pin-pointing every cross-road and trench junction, every artillery position and, or so it seemed to the Transport men, every yard of pavé over which they moved. He had been in this sector ever since he had arrived in France in January and he already knew it as well, or better, than he knew the Sorrel Valley. It was a landscape that fascinated him, perhaps because, for so long now, he had been preoccupied with landscapes. The starkness and emptiness of this one was so awful that it sometimes took on a kind of beauty, like engravings of Blake that he remembered having seen in one of the books left behind by the unknown Lovell who had a taste for art. It was not a merely tortured landscape where nothing grew and not a single building of any kind remained whole; neither was it a lifeless landscape for over it, at widely-spaced intervals, little figures crawled and motor and horse transport moved at funeral pace. But for all the unlikely symmetry of some of the ruins and the presence of half-a-million human beings, it had a kind of bloated emptiness, like the mottled remains of a half-eaten crab stranded above the Coombe Bay tide-line and everything that crossed it was contaminated by its foulness, its utter and stupid uselessness. At all events this seemed to be so, until one stumbled across groups of men in dugouts or billets. Then, hearing them laugh or cough, or noting their watchful eyes and cumbersome moments, Paul discovered by degrees that many of them seemed to have found fulfilment in their troglodyte lives here and in the terrible intensity of their personal experiences during their spells up the line or in one or other of the offensives. They had acquired, almost incidentally, the maturity he had been seeking so long in the Valley and their communal life presented the kind of perfection he had been striving to create in the community of the estate but without getting anywhere near the ideal of comradeship and interdependence of this array of clerks, labourers, factory workers and schoolboy officers, in their faded, mud-stained tunics and clay-caked boots and puttees. It was this sense of discovery and his absorption into the fellowship that converted Paul’s initial pessimism into a secret optimism, an optimism that grew a little every day as he moved to and fro across the lunar landscape for it seemed to him that, if this almost holy relationship between Englishman and Englishman survived the war, no obstacle likely to be met with in peace could defeat or discourage him. Had it not been for this Franz’s letter would have made him sick with shame.

The old man had not intended to sound so cynical. His letter, in essence, was no more than a business bulletin informing a shareholder that the firm was doing well under the current demand for scrap and the end products of scrap. Paul remembered that even in a sideshow like the Boer War, Franz and his father had made modest fortunes so that it was surely inevitable that ten such fortunes could be wrung from Armageddon. He was also sufficiently balanced to appreciate that his instinctive disgust on hearing that he personally was profiting from the war was frivolous and emotional. A British shell shortage would spell defeat and defeat in the field would almost certainly entail the loss of another half-million lives, even if its ultimate consequences were not as terrifying as prophesied in Fleet Street. He looked at the final page of the letter again and re-read the old rascal’s tailpiece, this time with a sour smile, Franz ended—
‘So keep your head low, my dear boy, and every time one comes over inviting a Teutonic response remember it means another threehalfpence, to your credit, another droplet to pour into that bottomless pit of yours in the West!’

By the same mail there was a letter from James Grenfell explaining at some length why he had sided with Asquith in the recent Lloyd George coup that had ousted the great patrician and split the Liberal Party from top to bottom. The seizure of power by the Welsh Wizard had occurred when Paul was still in England and had seemed an event of enormous significance but out here it was very small beer, and although he sympathised with James, who was appalled by the ruin of his beloved party, Paul found it difficult to concentrate on the closely written pages of his old friend. James rambled on about loyalty and integrity, of the importance of holding the Asquith group together against the days of reconstruction and then covered a page railing against the intrigues of public figures like Northcliffe. Over here, where men were being killed at the rate of about twelve thousand a day, the quarrels of politicians crossed the Channel as the echoes of kindergarten squabbles and if soldiers heard them at all they dismissed them as the prerogative of ‘The Frocks’!

He put James’s letter aside half-read and opened Claire’s, the one he had been saving, as he might have saved the icing on a rather soggy cake. It was, he soon saw, one of her cheerful, gossipy letters which disappointed him but he paid it the compliment of close attention and although its content was even more trivial than Grenfell’s it held his interest. She pattered on for several pages; there were now one hundred and four patients at Shallowford; a new attempt on the part of the forestry pirates to throw Shallowford beeches had been frustrated; there had been an outbreak of fire at the camp at Nun’s Bay; the twins, little traitors, had succumbed to German measles but so far Mary, Whiz and Ikey’s boy had escaped; and so on, down to the bottom of the page, where, in a postscript dated the following day, lay the promise of a real letter in the near future, for Claire had written:
‘This is only a hotpotch dearest—jottings I might forget if I didn’t set them doum between times and even this has been two days in writing! I do miss you so. I’ll explain how and why as soon as I get an hour alone late at night, when I can re-read your last letter in the library before going to bed. And talking of bed let’s hope only the enclosed kind of letter is read by censors (are you quite sure you are right about officers’ mail arriving uncensored?) because, although I can write shamelessly once I’ve locked the door I must admit to a blush or two when I get the kind of reply sparked off by the one I wrote last week! Good-bye for a little while, Paul darling, your ever loving, ever yearning Claire.’

The postscripts pleased him and he sat thinking awhile on her strange and, to him, unexpected skill as a writer of love-letters. They came, perhaps, once a fortnight, spaced by two or three gossipy bulletins such as the one he had just received and each time he received one he marvelled at the range and freedom of her self-expression, reflecting how much their relationship had matured in the last few years, particularly since their quarrel over that idiot at the camp and her crazy suspicions regarding Hazel Palfrey. He remembered the Claire Derwent he had met and flirted with when he first arrived in the Valley, a pert and rather vain nineteen-year-old, without a thought in her head beyond hunting and dancing and catching a husband who would spoil her on account of her red mouth and corn-coloured hair. How much of the present Claire had existed when they met and how much was the fruit of the fulfilment she had found in children and her leading social position in the Valley? He took out her last, intimate letter and read it for the twentieth time, astonished to find that it produced the same excitement it had stirred in him when he first received it before going up the line on the night his friend Guy Manners had been blown to bits at Vesuvius Cutting. It was fortunate that he had had her letter to take his mind off death during the twenty-four hours that followed, for out here the memory of friends’ voices and faces was short and Guy was almost forgotten in a matter of days. He now re-read the letter as if it proclaimed some extraordinary dazzling feat on his part, something that was still able to inspire him with almost unlimited confidence in himself and this was understandable, for his pride had never completely recovered from the wound inflicted by Grace’s rejection of him.
‘Oh my darling,’
she wrote, in that clear, rounded fist of hers that recalled the pages of the estate diary,
‘I feel so desolate when I am alone at night in here and when, after torturing myself with longing, I go upstairs to invite an even more intense yearning by seeing your things about the room. Then I tell myself I ought not to be miserable, not really, when I remember the wonderful years we’ve had, and the years that I know with absolute certainty we shall have again! And the odd thing is this reassurance does seem to work, perhaps because I have such sharp and sweet memories of your love in this room right back to the day you brought
m
e here. So, when I’ve locked the door, I am yours again, as completely as if you were sitting on the side of the bed tugging off those long boots (which I keep oiled because Chivers thinks of them as just boots) watching me undress and sometimes being tiresome about letting my hair down, so that it wastes a half-hour in the morning getting it presentable again! Dear God, Paul how I enjoy being a wife to you and basking in your admiration at times tike that. I swear to myself that I shall more than make up for every minute we’re missing! I tike to think we have enjoyed each other far more than most married couples but I think I can still surprise you a tittle! I mean to try anyhow! I won’t ever hold anything back when you take me in your arms again. What I mean is, I’ll do and say everything that comes into my head no matter how abandoned it is! I shall say how I revel in your male gentleness and even more in your male roughness and occasional impatience, which you might be surprised to learn I find rather flattering after sharing a bed with you for—wait, I’m counting!—twenty-one days short of ten years! Good night my darling; I feel so much better for writing this and if you don’t mind having such frightfully immodest letters from a woman old enough to know better I’ll write another every time I feel desperate!’