Strange Meeting

Part Two

‘Mounted officers should avoid passing and re-passing infantry more than is absolutely necessary.’

And so they had only seen one another twice that day, at the second halt early in the morning and then as the Battalion was going into Feuvry, and Hilliard happened to ride by. He had passed Barton and then glanced back over his shoulder, seen his expression and frowned. Barton knew at once what he thought. John saw that he was more affected by the sight of this town than he had been by the dead German pilot in the burned-out plane, and he was shocked.

But until then he had enjoyed the march from Percelle, though it had taken him a long time, more than an hour, to relax, in his position behind B Company, for he was anxious in case he should overlook anything for which he was responsible, in case, through his fault, something went wrong.

The hard feeling of the road under his feet pleased him and he did not mind that it was hot and dry, with the line of the horizon shimmering and shifting ahead. He had spent so much of his life walking. The year before he left school he had gone with his younger brother to the Camargue, they had taken tents and lived on bread and cheese and walked for miles every day over that flat, pale, sinister countryside.

He enjoyed the sight of the men moving together, enjoyed the sound of their singing.

‘The men are lucky,’ Hilliard had said, ‘in some ways they’re better off than we are. In some ways, I envy them.’

‘What do you envy?’

‘They get along, they have one another the whole time. They’re all friends. Don’t you notice that? It’s easier. They just get along.’

‘Don’t we?’

‘It isn’t the same.’ Hilliard had hesitated, unable to explain, that this friendship of theirs, so immediately, simply achieved, was rare, could not be taken for granted, or seen elsewhere. Among the officers there was not the natural camaraderie to be found among the men. They had so much work to do individually.

The men were singing.

Captain Sparrow was riding a long way behind.

‘The length of an average march under normal conditions for a large column is fifteen miles a day. INFANTRY USUAL PACE. Yards per minute – 100. Minutes required to traverse one mile – 18. Miles per hour including short halts – 3.’

The sun shone. Later on in the day, when they hit the main road to the front, they found it crowded with horses and motor bicycles and men.

‘What is it, Hughins?’

‘Only the usual, sir. Blisters. They feel like mushrooms.’

‘Oh.’ Barton remembered what you did with blisters, how you took off shoe and sock, and burst them carefully or, better still, got someone else to do it for you, and then covered the place up with clean lint. They had always been getting blisters, as children.

Hughins was loosening his boot gingerly, trying to screw the thick sock around inside. For who could sit here at the roadside halt with bare feet, and have his blisters pricked delicately by someone with a clean needle and a steady hand, who had lint to spare?

‘Nothing a nice hot mustard soak won’t put right when we get to the hotel! And I rub them with rum as well – works wonders, sir.’ Hughins seemed old to Barton, old enough to be his father, though he could not be. He was a handsome man, but he had warts on his chin.

‘Well – let me know if they get any worse.’

‘Oh yes, sir, I’ll shout. I could do with a nice week in hospital. Or even a ride on a horse!’

They lay on their backs and their faces burned darker than ever in the mid-day sun and their cigarette smoke plumed gently upwards, wavering blue.

ADVANCE!

He enjoyed marching. He did not mind how far they had to go, did not have blisters like Hughins. Did not think ahead. They passed through a village in which people were still living and some girls waved to them from windows.

The men sang.

‘I wouldn’t mind having a shilling for every letter you’ve written since I first met you, Barton.’

He had wished, then, for some way of conveying the idea, the knowledge of his family, complete and whole, to John Hilliard, of bestowing it like a nugget, something to be held out in the palm of his hand. There they are, take them! For when he talked about them all, perhaps he got it wrong, perhaps John received no true picture of how it was. Just as he himself could not imagine the coldness in Hilliard’s family, the distance that seemed to exist between all of them.

‘It’s different for you. You find things easier.’

Did he? Yes, he supposed so. Certainly he found this friendship easier, he had accepted it at once, even as he recognized its rarity. It had startled him. He had stood in the apple loft at Percelle and heard the footsteps of the man they had all talked about and who had now come back, Hilliard, whose name had been mentioned in despatches and had been wounded, who was only a year older than he was and about whom the C.O. thought so highly, whose belongings were here in this room he had already come to think of as entirely as his own. He had been curious, apprehensive for some reason. What will he be like?

Then, John Hilliard’s head had appeared in the space at the top of the ladder, the pale hair and the very long neck, he had looked across at Barton, a quick, cautious look. Then at once it had been all right, and more than that. He did not know what. But whatever it was, he took it much more in his stride than John, whose face looked uncertain so often, who glanced at him and then away again quickly, as they were walking. Barton felt the need to reassure him.

‘Goodbye, Dolly, I must leave you…’

‘Do you always tell them everything you think and feel? In your letters?’

‘Yes,’ Barton had said. For why not? What else should he do? What was there to be kept back?

John had frowned, unable to understand.

The countryside began to change. There were fewer valleys and fewer trees and many of them were split by shells. It was drier, with a different kind of dryness. There seemed never to have been any water here at all. The fields were full of old shell craters, and the sides of the roads were covered in white-grey dust from all the passing of carts and horses and motors and men.

B Company were singing verses made up by Fyson to a hymn tune, and the verses became more obscene and libellous as they went on, until Barton called out a warning, not because he minded but before anyone who did mind should hear them, and for a time after that they marched in silence, their ranks uneven. They were tired. He called to them to close up. He thought they resented him. Hughins was limping.

Behind, some of A Company had taken up ‘Dolly Grey’.

They heard the whine and crash of a shell, coming out of nowhere, and the whole column ducked, though they did not stop marching, and the shell was not near. One of the horses had shied into a ditch and was being spurred out. Barton felt suddenly anxious.

They were going towards the town of Feuvry. He could see a pall of reddish dust hanging over the buildings, from shattered bricks and shell.

Feuvry had been occupied by the Germans in the summer of 1914, and relieved by the B.E.F. and evacuated – and then shelled ever since, until it was almost derelict. It was disliked, the name of it was disliked by the whole army. A superstition had attached itself to Feuvry. The men groaned, glanced at one another uneasily, hearing that they were to stay there.

But when he had asked about it, Hilliard had shaken his head, for he had never been there himself. So they only knew what they had heard, what the men said. Barton was not sure what to expect. Perhaps something like Percelle on a large scale, red-brick buildings with roofs caved in, crumbling walls already overgrown with convolvulus. He had grown fond of Percelle even as it was, the village looked as though it had tumbled down after years of neglect, rather than been damaged by shell fire.

He was not prepared for Feuvry. As the column marched in and turned down what was left of the main street, going towards a square, Hilliard had ridden close by. Had seen that Barton was appalled by Feuvry, as he had not been by the sight of the dead pilot in the crashed plane.

The men were swaying on their feet, were seeing nothing, were not singing.

Feuvry.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Finishing a letter.’

‘Tell me, did you manage to get a dozen or two written while you were actually marching?’

‘Certainly!’

They were in the tiny back washroom of what had once been a tall, perhaps even rather stylish house – the wallpaper which was left was elaborate and expensive-looking. Now, the windows were boarded up, and the basin had gone: above their heads, the plaster and wood of the ceiling sagged down and when the guns vibrated they were showered with flakes and splinters. The room smelled stuffy, with the grease from their candle and with old dirt and dust. There was nothing in it at all, apart from what they themselves had brought except for an old stone flower-urn, ornate and quite undamaged, with a little, greenish soil still in the bottom.

It was late by the time they had seen Garrett, who was across the street in what had been a school. The cupboards hung open and, inside on the shelves, books were piled up, bundled with string and covered in dust. Names were written in pencil on the plaster at desk level:

Barton wondered where they all were.

Coming back, a shell had soared over their heads and they had raced for a doorway. Barton’s head and limbs were aching now. His eyes smarted, in the smoke from the candle.

‘For heaven’s sake…’

‘All right. Sorry.’

He had just written:

Hilliard had pulled his blanket half over him. Barton put the letter away. Footsteps on the stairs. None of the rooms in this house had doors.

‘Sir?’

Hilliard sat up at once. ‘What is it?’

‘I’d be glad if you could come, sir. It’s Harris.’

The Sergeant was invisible in the doorway. His voice sounded both apologetic and urgent. Hilliard was pushing off his blanket.

‘Let me go,’ Barton was on his feet. ‘You’ve been at it since we got here. You’d far better get some sleep.’

For he had seen John trying to work himself into a state of exhaustion, his face had been pale and stiff, and Barton had realized that he had had time to think all day, riding the horse, going back to the front, remembering. There had been no marching to tire out his body.

‘I’ll go.’

Besides, if there was something wrong, he felt in a mood to be at the centre of it, to see at once how bad everything could be. He was not tired, in spite of the physical aching. But Hilliard was behind him.

‘Harris?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Where is he?’

‘He’s gone down into the cellar, sir. We’re not using it – but he’s in a bit of a state.’

They were going away.

‘You’d better stay here, Barton.’

He lit the candle again and watched the light flicker yellow through a gap in the ceiling. It was perfectly correct, John was in charge of the platoon, it was his job to go. All the same he resented it. ‘You’d better stay here.’ He had wanted to take charge. The idea was new to him and he thought about it, for he was not ambitious, did not want to lead, he had been perfectly content, was content. He had no illusions about himself as actual or potential soldier, no convictions about his duty in this war, no real desire to be here at all; except that he would not want to leave Hilliard, now. Yet he had wanted to go behind Sergeant Locke, down the stairs, to be responsible.

He reached over to his tunic for the letter and pencil.

I’ll send this off tomorrow, before we leave here. It’s very late now, but…

The room was filled with greenish light for a second, and then there was a whine and the crash of an exploding shell. He had no idea how close it had been but nothing had come as near as that before.

Now, it was quite dark again. He seemed to be all right. Much further away, guns boomed – a different sound.

‘Are you all right?’ Hilliard was in the doorway.

‘Perfectly, thanks. The candle went out.’

‘Do you think you could come down?’

‘What’s happened?’

‘Nothing – not really. It’s Harris.’

‘Yes?’

‘I can’t get him to move. Nobody can. The men have tried, I’ve said what I can think of, but he isn’t… he’s taken himself down there and he won’t come out. He doesn’t seem to hear us at all.’

‘What’s he doing?’

‘Nothing. He’s in a corner. He’s been there for a couple of hours apparently. They’ve been trying to persuade him to come out.’

‘Is he ill?’

‘I don’t think so. He won’t say anything.’

‘Can’t he be left there?’

‘Not in his present state, no. And he’ll have to come out in the morning. I shall have to get Franklin if he won’t budge for us.’

‘No. We’ll cope.’

They made their way down the unsteady staircase and along the passages of the house. Around them in the darkness the men lay, sleeping or listening. They picked their way between the blankets. Down in what had been the kitchen, the floor was stone and there were neither doors, windows, nor boards at the gaps. There was the whine of another shell and the sound of bricks crashing down, somewhere in the north of the town.

The other men of the platoon who had tried to help had now been sent away, only Sergeant Locke stood in the cellar, holding a candle. It smelt down here, a fouler smell, there might once have been latrines or rats. A stone ledge was let into the far wall, like a fireplace but without any chimney leading up from it. Harris was huddled inside like a foetus, his hands up near his face. He was not moving but making a continuous, agonized noise, a cry or a moan and yet neither of those. Barton remembered watching him play football in the orchard at Percelle. He was perhaps eighteen, stocky and red-headed. He had a harmonica, which he used to accompany their songs in the evening.

‘I thought you might know what to say to him better than I do.’

For a moment the three of them stood in the small pool of light in the dank cellar, looking towards the soldier, hearing him. The guns roared again and the boy’s voice rose a pitch higher. Barton remembered that Harris had come to the camp on the same train as Hilliard. Had taken scraps across the yard to the farm dog, each evening.

‘It might be better if I stayed with him on my own for a bit, mightn’t it?’

They hesitated.

‘If you can get him to go back upstairs, sir, he’ll calm down, he’ll be all right when he’s with the others again, they’ll see to him. If we can get him out of here.’

‘Yes,’ Hilliard said. ‘It’s no use crowding in on him, you’re quite right. I’ll go back. Call me if you want help. Sergeant, will you wait at the top of the stairs?’

‘Sir.’

Barton nodded. ‘I’ll bring him up.’ Hilliard’s face relaxed. They went away, out of the cellar and up the steps, to the noise of the guns in the distance.

Oh God, he is two years younger than me, he is Edward’s age, he knows no more about it than I do, we have neither of us seen anything, only heard, only heard. We can imagine it, that’s all. And I have to tell him that he must get up and go back, must pull himself together, and that tomorrow he must march on with the rest of us. In the end, he has to be ordered to do that.

He went forward quietly. The cellar floor was uneven. He stopped close beside the ledge, set down the candle. He could see Harris’s face, strangely altered with fear. He wondered how it would be with him when they got to the front line and into the trenches and into battle.

He put out his hand and found Harris’s wrist and held it. He I remembered the time when he had fallen out of a willow tree near the beck and lain on the ground and seen his own blood and cried out from fear at the sight, and Edward had held his wrist like that then, though he too had been afraid of the blood. Nevertheless, it had comforted them both.

For a moment the noise went on, the terrible, high moan. Harris’s pulse was thudding. Barton did not move his hand. He said, ‘I’ll stay here. It’s all right.’

He wondered what Captain Franklin would have done.

In a pause from the sound of the shelling, he heard a man bumping as he turned over on the floor overhead.

‘Harris?’

The boy’s teeth began to chatter. The skin of his wrist felt hot under Barton’s touch. For a long time neither of them moved. Then Harris lurched up, and forwards, his head touched his knees and he began to cry, not lifting his hands to wipe his face. Barton waited. The crying went on and on. Then, quite abruptly, stopped.

‘I can’t go,’ Harris said. Whispered. He looked up into Barton’s face. ‘I’m afraid.’

‘Yes.’

He wanted to weep, then, he felt old, he thought that he had seen and heard all that he ever needed to see, all the fear there could be, that he, too, could not go.

‘You wait, you don’t know anything, you haven’t seen anything yet. Barton. You wait.’

Now, he had. And they were only here in Feuvry, three miles or more away from the front line. Only here.

‘What’ll happen to me, sir? What’ll happen to me? I can’t go.’

Barton stayed in the cellar for a long time with Harris, patiently hearing the tale of misery and fear, and there was nothing he could do about any of it, he was distressed at his own inadequacy, there was none of it that he had not felt or imagined himself. Harris had spent much of his time at Percelle listening to the stories all the men had been telling about that summer’s offensive, the tales of death and horror had lodged in his mind and bred fear, until today, after the march and the heat and his tiredness, he had broken under the strain of them.

But in the end, somehow, Barton got him to come out, to agree that he must go back upstairs among the others, for then nothing would be said or done to him, and that, tomorrow, he would march on again, up to the front line.

He heard his own words and they echoed in his ears and he wondered at them, for they were meaningless, false, they gave him no comfort – how, then, could they do anything for Harris? He was only certain that Franklin must not have to be informed. He said as much.

‘You do see that it would be better not, don’t you?’

Silence. Then, ‘Yes, sir.’

‘If you come up now, it’ll all be forgotten.’

‘Sergeant Locke….’

‘Won’t say anything.’

‘I’m…’

Silence again for a long time. Harris still had his knees hunched up to his chest. It was dark in the cellar now, the candle had long since gone out.

‘It’s pretty late and we do have to get going first thing in the morning. We need to sleep.’

Harris still hesitated, shivering. Then, slowly, he got down from the stone ledge. The guns were still roaring. Barton wondered what was happening at the front line. There were rumours all over Feuvry, and their own Battalion repeated them. Nobody knew the truth.

They felt their way back up the steps, hands groping along the walls. It occurred to him that the best thing for Harris would be alcohol – rum issue had been hours ago, he would have to go upstairs for his own flask.

Barton told him to wait inside the front room of the house where most of his platoon lay sleeping, and continued on, in the darkness, up the next two flights of stairs. He was more than half-way there, because he felt his foot come up against the broken section and made a note to take care, when the shell came and the blast of it threw him backwards down the flight. He threw his arms up over his head to shut out the appalling noise.

STANDING ORDER No. 107. Major General Tebbits. Commanding 1st Division. 1.8.1915.

The village of BEAUTERRE (Ref. Ordnance Map 48, 4 Miles S.E. of ARTUN) will not be used for the purpose of overnight halts by infantry troops. Billets are to be found in FEUVRY (Ref. Ordnance Map 47).

‘David…’

‘If I’d left him in the cellar and taken the brandy down to him. If we’d all just left him.’

‘If we’d left him he would have stayed there until tomorrow morning, we would have had to fetch Franklin who would have ordered him out, and if he hadn’t moved then, he would have been court martialled.’

‘He’d have been alive, Hilliard, he’d still have still been alive.’

‘For that matter, if you’d stayed with him yourself for a couple of minutes longer in that room you would have been killed as well. And that is true of hundreds of men everywhere in this war every single day – if, if, if, might, might, might.’

‘For Christ’s sake you sound like one of our politicians! Have you heard yourself?’

Hilliard came across the room and stood beside him at the boarded-up window. The sky showed through the gaps, grey, as the dawn came up.

He said, ‘I’m only telling you the truth because that’s how it is out here.’

He had been terrified that Barton had been killed when he had heard the noise. ‘Look, David, I know perfectly well how you feel…’

‘Do you?’

‘Yes.’

Barton was silent. In his head he still heard the noise of the shell, he could still feel himself being flung down the stairs. He still saw Harris’s face.

‘You cannot and you must not spend any more time blaming yourself, saying if only this and if only that. It’s useless.’

‘Yes.’

‘If you go on doing it, you will be useless.’

‘Yes.’

But then Barton thought, he is one of them, he thinks the way they think after all, he sees the things they see. He tells me that I know nothing. I have seen nothing, but that is no longer true. Already, he has put Harris out of his mind, the night of September 19/20 is an incident, a report will be made on it, one man has gone from the platoon. That is all.

In fact, seven out of the nine men killed had been from their platoon. The shell had hit the front of the house, coming down into the corner of the room in which they slept and close beside where Harris had been standing, waiting for Barton to come back with the brandy. Four other men had been wounded by shrapnel and falling masonry.

But wasn’t Harris better off? For would he not have gone through terror after terror in the front line, only to meet with a death less sudden, more painful, more clearly foreseen? He had been spared all that. He had been alive – and then dead.

Or else he might have lived, to see the end of this war. which everyone in England told them was imminent, would be before Christmas. If, if, if. Might, might, might.

Garrett had asked Hilliard to write to the men’s relatives, as soon as they got into the support line the following day. He had been told nothing about the business with Harris in the cellar.

‘You could write the letter about Harris,’ John Hilliard had said, as they came out and made their way back to the shattered house and the remaining men of the platoon who were clearing up with grey, cynical faces, who had been so abruptly reminded of where they were, that it had all begun again. ‘You can write to his parents.’

‘Yes, I want to do that.’

‘You needn’t tell them anything about the fact that he…’

‘Oh, for Christ’s shake, John, what do you take me for?’

The light was getting paler. They had had no sleep at all. Around them, the shadows of their luggage, boots, rifles. The conversation with Harris repeated itself over and over in Barton’s head, there were his own, meaningless, comforting words, used to get the soldier out of the cellar and up the stairs, to his death.

Hilliard was looking at him.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘I don’t know. You…’ Hilliard wondered how he could tell him. That his face had changed, in the space of a day and a night, that his eyes had taken on the common look of shock and misery and exhaustion, that the texture of his flesh was altered, was grained and worn.

‘It had to start somewhere, didn’t it? But could it have started worse?’

Hilliard said, ‘When the shell came I’d heard you on the stairs just before it… I thought you were dead. When the noise stopped, I could hear a man calling out. I thought it was you. I was sure you were dying or dead.’

Barton turned his head and smiled, and then his face changed again, the old, self-deprecating expression over it, and mixed with that, concern for what Hilliard had been feeling. He said, ‘I never thought I might have been dead.’ Though that was not true.

‘No. It’s only when you see it happen to someone you’ve just been talking to, or think about it in the middle of doing an ordinary job in a safe place.’

‘Dread.’

‘Yes. But you can get another feeling, too – a peculiar sense of detachment, immunity. None of this has anything to do with you, only with the others.’

‘Harris didn’t have that feeling, down in the cellar.’

‘No. He was afraid.’

‘Does it often happen? Do men often simply break down at the thought of it?’

‘No. I’ve only seen one man in Harris’s state before – he was worse than Harris. But it was in the middle of a particularly bad attack and he’d just lost his brother, he’d seen him killed by a mine.’

‘I said things to Harris that wouldn’t have given hope or comfort to a dog.’

‘Yet they did.’

‘Did they?’

‘They must have done. You persuaded him to come out.’

‘Oh yes. I suppose that was some sort of achievement, John!’

‘Stop that!’

‘Why did you come upstairs for me? Why couldn’t you have stayed and talked to him yourself?’

‘It was pointless, I wasn’t getting through to him, I wasn’t even getting him to listen. I don’t think he so much as realized that I was there. I knew it would be different with you, that you’d succeed where I couldn’t.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. Does it matter? I was right, that’s the point.’

‘I touched him, I held on to him. That’s what he needed. That was all he needed. It wasn’t what I said to him.’

‘You could do it for him,’ Hilliard said slowly, ‘and I could not. It’s what you do for me. You listen and you’re there. That’s all. It’s the same thing.’

Barton lifted his head. The skin beneath his eyes was chalk white and crossed finely, like tissue paper. He looked exhausted. ‘You’re still alive. That’s the difference,’ he said. ‘Harris isn’t.’

Hilliard wanted to put his hand out and touch him. And could not.

Coulter came up the stairs to wake them.

And so we came on here and now we are in support trenches behind the front line. After what happened last night I don’t believe that I can ever be badly shaken again. I have, for instance, been quite unmoved by the sight of unburied bodies lying about here, just as they lay about in Feuvry. They are all along the sides of the road, and out in the fields, in shell craters, and piled up on top of the trenches like sandbags. Some of the ones in the craters are Germans. Doesn’t the enemy have the right to a decent burial either? But why ask that, since so few people have any sort of burial at all during the offensive – scarcely during the whole war, it seems. No time, no time. And yet some of the men say there is all the time in the world, the days drag along. But I have been ashamed of myself for getting so thoroughly hardened so quickly. John says I am not, that this is just a sort of numbness after shock, everyone gets it at first. I wonder. Perhaps I do not know myself at all. I was so appalled at the broken buildings and so little worried by the broken bodies. That cannot be good.

I have been reading Sir Thomas Browne, who comforts me, because I learn great truths, which I have read and passed over before, simply because I had nothing to relate them to, in my own experience. ‘Christians have handsomely glossed over the deformity of death by careful considerations of the body, and the civil rites which take off brutal terminations.’

Well, that is not true here.

I have never in my life been so tired as I am today, and the difference seems to be that it is not a healthy tiredness. John feels it too. We both look at one another’s faces and remark and change and know. We don’t bother to say anything about it. The rest camp, the orchards and the quiet lane and the path alongside the stream, all have receded far away, they seem like some dream country which we inhabited long ago: though I cannot truly believe that we were ever there, and that we were so contented and had no quarrels with anyone, and that the sun shone so kindly.

Though it has been shining here again today, there seems to be no sign of any move into real autumn weather. The men are glad of that, they tell me about the horrors of rain which brings the mud, and I listen and believe them, so I’m glad that it is dry, even though this means water rationing. And everything smells so much worse, too, under the sun.

Since we got here we have done nothing but work. Until this evening, at least. And now I have to write that letter to Harris’s parents. They live in Devon. I am putting it off. John is sitting opposite me making his way slowly through the other letters about the dead men. Captain Franklin came in to see how we were getting on – I could see (and feel) John bristle the moment he came through the curtain. He really is not so bad, though, just a cold fish. John’s face gives nothing away except his own tiredness. But how angry it makes me that we should be sitting here doing this at all, because the whole accident was so pointless, the men were doing nothing except sleeping and waiting for today. I am glad there has been so little trouble for you with bombing, after the early scares, because shells are frightening, and they make the most shocking noise. But I suppose one would rather be catapulted out of sleep into death than to have to sit and watch it creeping up on one. Though one or two of those men did not, in fact, die at once, they were half blown to bits but lasted various lengths of time, waiting for the ambulances to come. I’m sorry to pile on these agonies but I need to tell you. I shall only keep back what might worry you unduly. But then, in your heart of hearts you will know, all of you, and we have never kept even unpleasant truths from one another.

We have a reasonably comfortable dugout in this trench. John says it is more than ‘reasonably comfortable’ which shows only how much I have yet to find out! You come along the trench, which is quite narrow and zig-zags crazily, so that you lose your way after a yard or so, in all the right angles – and the dugout is cut into the bank. We have a corrugated tin roof, and sacking in front of the door. Someone kindly labelled it, years ago, with ‘Chez Nous’ written on a broken bit of wood, and nailed up. It remains. Inside, it’s surprisingly spacious, we can both stand up and stretch our arms out without quite touching! There are two bunks (hard) and a table of sorts. And all the paraphernalia we brought with us, of course. You’ve no idea how much one has to carry with one in the army. Not to mention all the clothes one wears and the bits and pieces strapped about one’s person. Still, one thing we do have here is a gramophone. There is another at Battalion H.Q. which the C.O. uses to play drawing room ballads, sung by bass baritones. But this was quite unexpected treasure – nobody knows who originally owned it, but now it goes with the other fixtures and fittings. I suppose someone brought it down and then was killed and it was never returned or auctioned off. There is a small and very curious selection of records. I wonder if you could manage to send some of mine out? Only a few, and I shall have to think about exactly what, because they’ll be heavy and I don’t want us to be even more loaded. I’d like to take the gram. into the front line trench but John laughs a hollow laugh and points out that we’d never manage to hear a thing. Also that it does belong here. I take the last point, but one of our Lewis guns sends cheery salvoes over every few minutes and I have proved that there is only one point, as they actually fire, at which you simply cannot hear the music at all!

Now – I seem to have written myself out of the awful depression I felt when I sat down. Reading the last paragraph, I sound almost cheerful. Well, and Coulter has just come in and he is always enough to make anyone perk up. We’re still sharing him, especially after the losses of yesterday. One of those men was to have been my batman here. I wonder when we shall get replacements. John says one of the hardest things is having to get used to new faces, new faces. Some you never get to know at all, they don’t manage to impress themselves on you. Nobody could say that of Coulter though. But he isn’t ‘a card’. The platoon does have one of those, a man called Fyson, who is not bad if he’s kept under, but he becomes rather tedious, especially as his stories and jokes are both fearfully obscene and very un-funny – unpardonable combination!

As I have worked myself into this better frame of mind, I must write to the parents of Private Harris and get it over. And I really do want to write. Only it will be such a deceit. I have learned a great deal about deceit, since coming to this war.

Then it will be the beginning of my first night in a trench. There won’t be much to do. We were to have begun with carrying parties to bring up all the stuff we need to mend our wire and get the trench cleared up and the sides strengthened, but because of last night’s loss of sleep, all that has been put off until tomorrow. It makes me wonder how long we are all intended to be here. Rebuilding trenches will be rather like repairing a house – presumably people are going to be staying in it. I should have thought the object was to get out as quickly as possible and move into the enemy trenches ahead. It doesn’t look as though anyone expects us to move for the rest of our lives. But really there is no telling what is supposed to be going on.

I hope we manage to get some sleep. I seem to have gone beyond tiredness, into a kind of daze. I need to sleep.

Glazier is doing tonight’s duty because he was in a different billet last night and they missed the direct shelling.

But it was after all, an easy beginning. For two weeks, they stayed mainly in the support trenches, and fell into some sort of routine, they were getting used to things, it was quiet enough: there was time to play the gramophone.

‘Boring,’ Barton said once.

Hilliard raised his eyes from the pile of ration returns. ‘I’d rather that. So would you if you’ve got any sense.’

‘Come on, John! Where’s your yearning for excitement? The sound of battle “where ignorant armies clash by night”. Doesn’t that stir your blood?’

‘No. And that isn’t especially funny either…’

‘You know, you haven’t much sense of humour, have you?’

Hilliard considered for a moment. A man went past the flap of the dugout, whistling. No, he thought, no, I have not, and David has, it is one of the things I most envy in him. Once, he himself had simply been called ‘a bloody prig’. He had a glimpse of himself down all the years of the past, stiff and reserved, anxious to please – but humourless. Barton burst out laughing. ‘All right, all right – don’t look so stricken!’

Hilliard smiled, went back to the ration returns. And felt, as he was writing, a sudden, warm pleasure, a sensation of being comfortable here, at home and in comparative peace, doing dull, easy jobs in Barton’s company. He was happy. Barton was still reading Sir Thomas Browne.

For some time longer it went on like that, and the weather, too. September passed and there was still sunshine, hot in the middle of the day and with the smell of autumn on the damp, misty mornings. The men were in good spirits.

‘Cushy trenches,’ Hilliard overheard one of them say – Hemp, the pastry-cook from Brighton. Hilliard repeated the phrase to Coulter as he stood outside the dugout one morning shaving from a tin mug of lukewarm water, looking at himself in the mirror he had propped up against a sandbag. The sky was a thin, flat blue and high overhead a lark hovered and trembled, singing.

‘Cushy trenches!’

Coulter looked troubled.

‘Well – aren’t they?’

‘Maybe, sir.’

‘I think they’ve passed us over, forgotten us.’

‘They’re getting it badly up at Chimpers, sir.’ Chimpers – the village of Chimpres, not more than five miles away. Hilliard remembered it from the early days of June. There had been very little left of it even then.

‘Again?’

‘So I hear, sir.’

‘You do manage to hear a lot, Coulter!’

For once, his batman did not return the smile.

‘What’s up?’

‘I don’t know, sir. Just a feeling.’

Hilliard glanced at him and was alarmed. It was not like Coulter, who was a cheerful man and usually grew more cheerful, at least on the surface, the more immediate the danger. But he himself had come to respect these forebodings, to know what they might mean, and it was not only Coulter who had them. All through the spring and summer he had come across men who were experiencing ‘just a feeling’ – that today it had their number on it, they would not come through. He remembered Armstrong urgently telling him about a letter which he carried in his breast pocket. If he was killed he wanted Hilliard to be sure and take the envelope and send it home as soon as he could, it had ‘something special’ in it. Armstrong had been in France since the beginning, had gone, with Garrett’s Battalion, through the early battles, Ypres, Loos, and then the whole of the Somme, and had remained quite unscathed. He led a charmed life, the others said, bombs fell within inches of Armstrong and missed. Once he had stuck his head recklessly over the parapet and been rewarded with a sniper’s bullet, which had whistled through his hair and stuck in the earth of the trench behind him. He had volunteered for night raid after night raid, three times he had been one of only a handful of men who had returned safely. He survived and a superstition had grown up around him. If you stuck with Armstrong you would be all right. But on the morning they were waiting for a barrage that began their attack on Belle-Maison, he had been beside himself with trying to impress upon Hilliard the urgency of the letter which he carried. He had ‘had a feeling’. Hilliard had taken little notice though he had promised to take and send home the letter if the time came. Armstrong went over the top with the first wave and was hit almost at once, Hilliard had seen him crumple after no more than thirty yards.

But Armstrong had not been the only one. And there were other men who felt quite differently, who had suddenly known confidence that they would be all right this time. It was as though they were surrounded by an invisible steel cage, impenetrable by shell or bullet, so that they pushed ahead through a surge of fire and knew, were sure, that they would be safe, if only because they were marked out for death at some later date.

Once, Hilliard had been led over the open ground and then along a treacherous sunken road to the 8th Division trenched in the middle of a heavy raid, and the runner who led him had known exactly where and when to leap and duck, run or stay still, he had said afterwards, ‘I knew it was all right today. I had a feeling.’

That had been Baxter, who was still alive, Baxter, with the four front teeth missing and hair shaved as close as a convict’s. Hughin’s brother-in-law. A year ago, Hilliard would have scoffed at such forebodings and superstitions, ‘the feelings’ of the men in the line. Not now.

Now, Coulter was saying little, his face was worried.

‘Well, it’s quiet enough here for the moment. Don’t start putting the wind up everyone.’

The man looked hurt and reproachful. He knew more than the officers about the importance of morale.

‘Have you finished with the water, sir?’ He spoke politely, and the distance opened between them for a moment. Hilliard wanted to make amends, and could not think how.

He went inside. ‘Coulter’s got the wind up.’ The dugout was dark and stuffy after the bright sunlight of the trench. Barton was getting ready to go down the line and take a foot inspection – though, because the weather was dry and the spirits of the men were so good here, they looked after their feet well, obeyed regulations to the letter, changed their socks and oiled themselves as regulations dictated, they had the time and inclination, there were no problems with infection. Barton was tightening the laces on his own boots.

‘What makes him think that? Has anything happened?’

‘No.’

‘Perhaps it’s just too quiet for him all of a sudden. You know how he’s always longing to have a go!’

‘Maybe.’

‘Why is he bothered today, especially?’

Hilliard shrugged. ‘He’s got a feeling.’

To his surprise, Barton, who did not share his knowledge about the way the men thought, did not know the truth which so often lay behind their forebodings, looked worried himself. He sat on the edge of his bunk for a moment, entirely still.

‘I should think Coulter knows what he’s about,’ he said, ‘doesn’t he? He keeps his ear to the ground, he always seems to know what’s going on, long before we do.’

‘Yes.’

‘I should think he’s worth taking notice of.’

‘There’s nothing we can do.’

‘We can listen to him.’

‘We haven’t heard anything.’

‘But it is too quiet.’

‘Yes. I feel jittery myself, now and then.’

Barton looked concerned.

‘No, it’s all right. And this does happen, you know, and it can go on for weeks and months. Especially if they’re concentrating on another bit of the line We could perfectly well have a whole spell like this, mending the trenches, mending the wire, messing about with report forms and rifle inspection and nothing else at all.’

‘And you think we will?’

‘How should I know?’

Barton looked at him carefully. In the end, Hilliard moved quickly towards the table, the pile of letters waiting for censoring. ‘No,’ he said, ‘on the whole I agree with Coulter.’

Barton got up and went out and he looked cheerful then, looked almost relieved. John Hilliard realized that he knew so little about him, there were so many thoughts and feelings he could not share, reactions he was unable to predict. Was Barton tired of this suspended existence? Just as the men had become irritable and restless in the camp at Percelle. Did he want ‘excitement’ as he had teased Hilliard earlier, want something, anything, to happen? And if so, why? For he had no feelings about the justness of this war, no anger against the enemy, no desire to fight and kill for the sport of it and no reason for personal vengeance, unless you could count the death of Private Harris.

Hilliard did not know. But this was superficial, nevertheless, for the ease they felt in one another’s company was so great now. Hilliard had never shared so much of himself before, never been so simply content. There were times when he caught Barton’s glance, or walked behind him down the trench, when they sat in their dugout in the evening, reading or doing paperwork, listening to the gramophone, when Barton laughed suddenly, teasing him – at those times, he felt a welling up of pride and pleasure and love. Then, he wanted to say something, though he never did.

The letters from Barton’s family included him always and automatically now, there were long paragraphs from these people he knew and yet had never seen, addressed entirely to him, and he read and re-read them and could not believe that he had been so easily accepted, was part of that charmed circle, of Barton’s life and family, of his past and present. It was as though he had been standing in a dark street looking into a lighted room and been invited in. He had ceased to feel any alarm at the arrival of the letters, with their messages and questions for him, he ceased to want to draw back from their intimacy. So that, when he received a letter all of his own from Barton’s mother and then, almost immediately afterwards, from one of the married sisters, he had flushed with amazement and pleasure, had brought out the sheets of thin white paper again and again, to read when Barton was not there, unable to believe in them, unable to take in the fact that he meant something to them, that they had written to him. He stared at his own name on the envelopes.

They had begun so. And at the end of Barton’s own letters, the messages.

He said again and again, ‘They don’t know me. They don’t know me,’ holding the envelopes, looking at the writing upon them, feeling the smoothness of the letter paper between his fingers.

As always, Barton laughed, ‘Of course they do!’

‘They haven’t seen me, we have never met.’

‘Oh, that’s practically superfluous by now.’

‘They…’

‘What?’

But he could not say. He only lay awake, and heard Barton turning over in his bunk and listened to his breathing, and thought about these people, thought, let it go on, let it go on. He did not mind Barton’s teasing now, had even come to want it, did not mind anything he said or did. It was enough that he was here with him. In the night he woke and heard the guns and his heart thudded, he sat up and said aloud, ‘Jesus God, don’t let him be killed, don’t let him be killed.’ And did not even mind, at that moment, that Barton might have woken and heard him. ‘Don’t let him be killed.’

Barton had not woken.

‘David…’

‘All right. I’m ready.’

‘I wish you weren’t going.’

‘Why?’

‘I mean – I wish I were going instead.’

‘Do you? Whatever for?’

Hilliard stammered, ‘It’s only that you…’

‘What?’ Barton looked up, grinning. It was late in the morning. Warm again. Barton was to go up into the front line, led by Grosse, and along to an Observation Post from which there was a good view of the ridge and Barmelle Wood, and the few ruined walls to the west of that, which were all that now remained of Queronne. The whole site was held by the enemy. He was to make a map and bring back as much information as he could about the area.

‘Why you?’ Hilliard asked now.

‘I’m better at drawing.’

Hilliard felt his heart swollen with fear. He thought, he does not know what it could be like, he doesn’t know. It was, apparently, a straightforward job, no more dangerous than anything in the front line now. But how dangerous was that? It had been clear and quiet and still here all day. When the order came down and Barton had gone to see Franklin, Hilliard had sat at the table in the dugout and trembled with fear. He would rather go himself, he would rather anything. As usual, Barton had laughed at him, and he had seemed excited, too, proud to be given this job. When he was getting himself ready there had been a gleam in his eyes of something like real pleasure.

Hilliard thought, he won’t come back. Anything can happen between here and there, one small thing is enough. The front line had been under heavy fire all week.

He won’t come back.

Perhaps this was the feeling that Coulter and the other men got when they were sure, when they knew. And they had generally been right, hadn’t they? Perhaps this was it.

He wanted to go to Franklin and demand to be sent on the job himself, though he knew he could not, and that it was all insane, for sooner or later Barton had to come up against a real danger, the risk was constantly there of his being hit, wounded, mutilated, blown to bits. Or simply shocked, as he had never been shocked before, by some appalling sight or sound.

But Hilliard had never known this kind of fear, not even on his own behalf during the summer, and certainly this agony of feeling on behalf of someone else was entirely new to him, he could not cope with it all. All that morning he had scarcely been able to look at Barton, and yet when he had looked, had not wanted to take his eyes away. For he was there, now, across the tiny, dark space of the dugout, everything of him was there, his skin and flesh and bone, whole and unblemished, he was there, calm and confident and cheerful, his manner as always easy, amused. Hilliard could still reach out a hand and touch him if he chose. He was there. Later, he would not be there.

He shook his head, and in a second of absolute clarity, he saw that nothing mattered except Barton and what he felt for him: that he loved him, as he had loved no other person in his life. The reason for this and the consequences of it were irrelevant, the war was irrelevant, something for them to get through. Nothing else could be truly important again. Nothing else.

Acknowledging this for the first time, he felt as though his head had been rinsed through with clear water, and he was no longer perturbed, he had seen and accepted it all. Everything else was far away. He looked down at the pile of ammunition returns on the table in front of him, at the black lead pencil and the box of matches. At his own hand. And then the fear hit him again, broke over him like nausea. If Barton were killed what would he do? What would he do?

‘Mr Barton?’

‘Yes. Hallo, Grosse. I’m ready when you are.’

‘Right, sir.’

Grosse was from Glaziers’ platoon, one of the best runners in the Battalion, though he was large and clumsy looking, with huge hands and feet and an enormous, wide head. He stood in the doorway. Coulter came up behind him.

‘The C.O. would like to see you, Mr Hilliard, as soon as you can.’

Hilliard stood up at once, grateful for the interruption, for now he would not have to watch Barton go, hear his footsteps retreating behind those of Grosse along the trench, would not have to sit here and stare at his papers for hours on end, waiting. They both went out of the dugout together without speaking again, turned their backs and went in opposite directions.

Battalion Headquarters was in a half-derelict cottage standing on its own at a crossroad half a mile from the support trench. Behind it, in a field which had one been ploughed and then overrun by the army, so that it had deep ruts, dried and caked in the sun. There was a trampled path, the grass was brown-yellow. In one corner, the rusty remains of a plough.

Looking behind him across the countryside Hilliard saw no signs of life except the white dust from the guns in one direction and in the other from the trucks coming up the road. The lines of sandbags forming the trench parapets were pale brown and grey in the sun. The landscape was flat and featureless here, apart from a few trees, which had been split and stunted by shells through the previous summer. The guns fired from the enemy lines and then their own replied, and in the lull that followed, blackbirds sang and sang.

He wondered why Garrett had sent for him, whether it was a routine matter or whether Coulter had been right, and ‘something was up’. But nobody else had been summoned, so far as he could tell.

‘They wanted a plan of the whole section of country just there. I thought young Barton would do it. I thought he’d make the best job of it. He’s got a good eye, hasn’t he? Yes, I should think he’s got a decent eye. It’ll be experience for him.’

The C.O. pushed a box of small cigars across the table towards Hilliard. He looked ill again, the effects of the boost given to his morale by the move out of rest camp had vanished. His skin was a bad colour, yellowish grey, so that Hilliard wondered if he might not, in fact, be physically ill. But the bottle of whisky was on the desk beside him.

‘I wanted to have a word with you, Hilliard. I thought it would be as well to put you in the picture – in so far as I have a picture, that is.’

Hilliard wondered why. When something big was coming up there were full briefing conferences. But Garrett had always singled him out, had liked to confide in him, tell him things, even trivial, irrelevant things, had asked him for his opinion, he seemed to place some kind of confidence in him. Now, he shuffled some maps on his desk, stared at them, took up a pencil and began to circle it in the air above one of them as he talked. ‘You’ll hear all about the details when they come in, but I’ll tell you what all this is about. You’re going up into the front line in a couple of days. Not sure exactly when. I suppose you’ve heard what’s going on up there?’

Hilliard did not reply. And he did not want to hear, not today.

Barton had been gone almost an hour now.

‘Oh, I know the rumours that get about, and rumour doesn’t always lie, not out here. Well, it’s merry hell at the moment, though it’s rather worse ten miles or so further east. I don’t know exactly why – we haven’t been doing much. The Boche seem to have got the wind up. But what we can expect pretty soon is the date of an attack they’re planning for the 2nd to make on Barmelle Wood. They want to have another go at it. The Hampshires tried to take it in July and the City of Londoners last month – perhaps you know? They lost a hell of a lot of men. The trouble with that place is it’s on a ridge, and they’ve got perfect cover, they can simply look down and take their time until they see us coming up, and it’s just bloody good target practice for them – that’s all. The Hampshires lost most of their men before they’d gone a hundred yards. You can’t advance up a slope like that, no matter how good your barrage is, and get away with it.’

But this had been the pattern of the whole summer here, Hilliard thought, this was how the Big Push had come, and failed, this was what it was all about.

Garrett did not pause or glance up at him, but gradually his voice had taken on an edge of sarcasm and of disbelief in the ignorance of those who were planning this new offensive in precisely the same way as the old, those who were so many miles away. His contempt for the men who looked at maps and moved pins about upon them was scarcely veiled at all. Hilliard was still surprised, even knowing the C.O. as well as he did, surprised that he should allow himself to talk like this before a lieutenant. But 1 July had changed him, he no longer cared greatly about anything, except for the men under him.

‘Well, you know what all this will mean. Preparations once you get into the line, all day and all night, fatigue parties, wire parties, reconnaissance raids.’

Hilliard’s heart sank.

‘Yes.’ Garrett lit another of the cigars. ‘I know what you’re thinking.’ He paused, then, in a burst of real anger, said, ‘Those bloody raids are a waste of time, arms and men, and I have said so until I am sick and others have said so and we might as well save our breath, save our breath. You know all about it.’

Hilliard did.

‘Well – there it is. There’s more of it to come. I don’t suppose it’s much of a surprise to you? No. Meanwhile, of course they want to know everything about the German line here, everything about Queronne and the Wood, everything about everything, and apparently all the information they have got from aeroplanes will not do for them. So our contribution is this little trip of Barton’s, out to the o.p. After that, up we go.’

How little did Garrett really care about the war now? Had he told all the others this? Did the Adjutant know? And Glazier and Prebold. No, he had told them nothing, Hilliard was certain of that. Garrett had been to the conference at Divisional H.Q. and heard the plans for this new operation on their section of the line, had been angry and wanted to talk to someone outside his immediate personal staff. He liked Hilliard and trusted him. It made no difference that he was so far junior in age and rank and experience. Hilliard was on his side. Garrett took the risk. He was a democratic man.

‘Well, there it is,’ he said. ‘And the chances are that everyone will have completely new orders this time tomorrow. You know how they chop and change us about. But for the moment, that’s the operation.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Barton will be up there by now.’

Suddenly Hilliard realized that there was more to it than a simple desire for his company, that Garrett had brought him here to get him away, pass some of the time for him. He saw and understood. Hilliard felt a surge of gratitude.

The Colonel’s batman brought tea, with bread and butter on a plate.

‘Privilege,’ Garrett said wryly. ‘You see, Hilliard? This is what rank gets you – sliced bread and butter and tea in a pot. Privilege!’ He raised his cup. Then said, ‘Young Barton’s got a cool head, hasn’t he?’

‘I – yes, sir. I think so.’

‘Reservations?’

‘Not exactly. It’s only that he hasn’t seen any action yet and he’s… I wonder how much things will affect him, how much he’ll take to heart.’

‘He’s a sensitive young man, yes.’

‘Yes.

‘That’s no bad thing.’

‘Oh no.’

‘I doubt, you see, if emotion will cloud his judgement. He’s a valuable sort of man to have around. He keeps us going, but there’s more to it. He makes us think twice, Hilliard – helps us not to take it all for granted, to become too cynical. He has some quality we’ve been lacking – gaiety, composure, and sensitivity. He’s a good man.’

Hilliard was surprised at Garrett’s perception and sureness of judgement, surprised that he had seen below the surface of Barton’s good humour and charm to what lay below. He felt a keen pleasure, hearing it, wanted the C.O. to go on with his praise and approval. If he could not be with Barton, then he could hear his name spoken, hear the best things said about him.

‘Who’s taken him up there?’

‘Grosse, sir.’

‘All right?’

‘He’s a good runner, yes.’

‘I don’t want to lose young Barton through some stupid accident.’

Hilliard clenched his hands together under the table. He won’t come back, he won’t come back.

He felt giddy.

‘We’ve had enough silly bloody accidents.’

Garrett drained his tea and looked about for matches. ‘You’d better go back,’ he said, and now he seemed abstracted, no longer sure why he had sent for Hilliard or what he was going to do next. But as an afterthought, as Hilliard reached the door, he said ‘Keep quiet about all this of course.’

‘Certainly, sir.’

‘I suppose they’ll change their minds, as I’ve told you, we shall find ourselves shunted off somewhere or other. It may all come to nothing.’

But it will not, Hilliard thought, and knew that Garrett knew it would not. Sooner or later, they would be going up to Barmelle Wood, the ridge, Queronne – they were on the plans, to be attacked and captured now, since they had not been taken that summer. There would be the long, tedious preparations by night, the waiting and the orders and then, over the top. They would take the place of the Hampshires, who had failed here in July, and the City of London Regiment, who failed last month. For some reason known only to those seated round the tables with their maps, this particular place mattered so much.

So tomorrow, then, or the day after, or at the beginning of next week, sometime, they would leave their dugout with the comfortable bunks and the gramophone, and march a mile along the communication trenches, and up the road to the front line, and into the thick of daily shelling and nightly raids, they would spend hours without sleep, fetching and carrying up and down the dark winding trenches, hours writing more and more reports, and the atmosphere would be more strained and tense than ever. It had been the same in July.

Yet it would not be the same as July, they had been excited then, they had planned for the coming battle, which was to be the last, the battle to end the war, they had been confident and purposeful, jubilant even, they had not minded the tiredness and the heat and the slow, tedious work of preparation, the accidents and the danger.

1 July had come and gone. And all the days after. It was not the same now. But it had all begun again.

Hilliard dropped down into the trench, and began to walk along towards the dugout. The smoke was going up from the cooking fires ahead. It was quiet for the time being, the guns might not have been there, hidden towards the east.

Coulter came round a traverse. ‘There you are, sir. The Adjutant wants to see you. Some trouble over kit inspection.’

‘All right. Thanks, Coulter.’ He paused. He did not want to go on. He wanted to stay here, in the sun.

Coulter said casually, ‘I take it we’re not expecting Mr Barton back until dark, sir?’

‘No.’ Hilliard forced himself to take a breath, to relax. ‘No, of course.’

He went to find Franklin.

When they began to make their way along the front line trench, Barton felt excitement churning in the pit of his stomach. It was his first real job, one for which he was entirely responsible, he had nobody, not even John, behind him. Only the runner, Grosse, guiding his way.

He had not been prepared for the full extent of the noise, which was deafening when the shells came over. They were falling very close but they were mainly the heavy sort, which came with a sudden roar and at such speed that escape was impossible. You could do nothing about them, moreover, could not predict in advance where they might land, and so you simply went on, trusting to luck.

The trench was quite deep, cut into the chalk, and at the beginning the sandbags had been renewed and the parapets built up again. But as they went further on, work had ceased, the floor was a mess of rubble, and the sides badly broken. Pit props, shovels and bales of wire cluttered every traverse, and the duckboards, laid in preparation for the coming winter, and the wet weather, were often broken or rotted away.

Grosse went ahead steadily, vanishing every few yards round a traverse, so that Barton felt that he was following his own shadow, felt time and again that he was completely alone. The chalk of the trench was bright, dazzling his eyes in the midday sun. But he was exhilarated, glad that he had been chosen to come here. There was an element of chance, but that did not yet seem to be the same thing as danger.

The shells were whining down often and seemed to be falling in a direct line ahead of them as they walked. Barton came around a traverse and almost bumped into his guide.

‘What is it?’

Grosse had his head slightly on one side. ‘Just seeing which way they’re coming, sir. They’re working them to a pattern.’

There was a pause, and then, from nowhere, the loudest explosion Barton had ever heard, his eardrums seemed to crack and his head sang, the whole trench rocked as though from an earthquake. Just ahead, soil was thrown up like lava, and then there was the sound of it splattering down, mingled with pieces of shrapnel, into the trench bottom. As they moved on a few paces, they heard a scream, which came with a curious, high, swooping sound and then dropped abruptly, became a moan. Then, behind them this time, another shell.

Grosse had thrown himself down, his hands over the top of his steel helmet, pushing it almost into his skull, but Barton had only dropped on to his knees. His heart was thudding.

‘Grosse?’

The man moved, lifted his head. ‘Are you all right, sir?’

‘Are you?’

The runner stood up cautiously, brushing down his tunic. His face was still impassive. He nodded.

‘Shall we go on then?’

But as they rounded the next corner walking towards the spot from which the cry for stretcher bearers had just gone up, they came upon a total blockage in the trench-way, a mess of burst sandbags and earth, shrapnel and mutilated bodies. Blood had splattered up and over the parapet and was trickling down again, was running to form a pool, mingling with the contents of a dixie which had contained stew. The men had been getting their mid-day meal in this traverse when the bomb had landed in the middle of them.

‘Grosse…’

‘Better hold on, sir.’

‘Stretcher bearers!’

Barton said, ‘Is there an officer here?’

A man was crouching, knees buckled and apparently broken beneath him, and he looked up now, his face white and the eyes huge within it. ‘There was, sir.’ He vomited, shuddered, wiped his mouth on his tunic sleeve.

Grosse leaned over him.

It was impossible to tell how many men there had been, and now the shells were landing again, following the line of the trench further ahead. Barton wondered if they were going to meet a scene like this at every corner. He found himself staring in fascination at the shattered heap of limbs and helmets, at a bone sticking out somehow through the front of a tunic, at the blood. He felt numb.

The stretcher bearers came up, and sent back at once for more help, to dig the men out and clear up the mess. The trench parapet had a hole blown out of it like a crater.

‘We could go on, sir,’ Grosse said eventually. His voice was calm.

They went on and for a short way nothing happened, they came across parties of men eating and drinking tea and they made room for them to pass. The shell might not have fallen, such a short distance away, killing perhaps half a dozen soldiers.

They found the C Company Captain and Barton reported his presence to him, he was cleared to continue.

‘Get down!’

He got down though he had heard nothing. But the smaller, minenwerfer bombs were different, they could just be spotted, sailing down like crows through the blue sky. They watched, waited, tried to guess where this one was going to fall, ducked again.

Nothing. After a moment, Grosse got to his feet. ‘Dud,’ he said. From behind, their own guns began to fire towards the German line.

They went on again. He wondered how he was going to sit in the Observation Post and make any sort of accurate map if this heavy shelling went on, and if his eyes were drawn again and again by the sight of the minenwerfers, if he was so tense, trying to gauge each time where they would fall. But he was still somehow unafraid for himself, though his initial excitement had gone long since. Grosse’s face was grey with dust and soil. He supposed that his own must be the same.

They turned another corner. A young soldier was up on one of the firesteps, facing them and about to step down into the trench. Barton caught his eye. As he did so, a shot came and the man toppled rather slowly forwards, to land almost on top of Barton and between him and Grosse.

Barton stopped. Bent down.

The man lay quite still but as Barton looked at him, a shudder and a quick breath went through his chest, and the limbs jerked and convulsed before going still again, the helmet slipped sideways off his head. His eyes were open and his mouth was full of blood. Otherwise, he seemed quite undamaged, his legs lay relaxed as though in sleep. Barton stared down at him. The skin across his nose had peeled with the sun. He had very pale, almost white eyelashes, and a curious mark, like a smoke burn, across his forehead.

Grosse retraced his steps and was standing on the other side.

‘Get a stretcher quickly.’

‘He’s dead, sir.’

‘He was breathing.’

‘He was dying.’

‘Get a stretcher.’

Grosse did not answer. Barton reached out a hand and touched the man’s chest.

‘Stuck his head too far up, I suppose. Daft thing to do. They’re crack shots, they could shoot a bullet through a ring on a pig’s nose at a hundred yards, those Jerry snipers.’ Grosse leaned against the side of the trench, his voice was conversational.

‘For God’s sake…’

Barton looked up angrily. Fell silent. But he did not want to leave the man on the ground. The body was warm, the skin faintly flushed. He had been alive, looking into Barton’s face. Then dead. Nothing. Nothing.

A Sergeant came round the traverse. Barton rose to his feet.

‘You’d better get a stretcher.’

‘Sir.’ The Sergeant glanced down. ‘Private Price,’ he said, shaking his head, perhaps unsurprised.

‘Come on, Grosse.’

But he did not want to go on, he wanted to go back, not because he had lost his nerve, but because he was sickened, for where was he going, why was he to spend an afternoon making a map, playing a game, spying and reporting about a few square yards of country, why had the men standing in the traverse with their meal, and this Private with the pale eyelashes, why had they been alive when he came down here less than an hour ago who were dead now? He had wanted to take up the body of the man called Price and dig a grave and bury him himself, for would that not have been more purposeful, would he not have done the first thing of value since coming into this war? Instead, he was going ahead with binoculars and a notebook and pencils, he was detailed to make a map. To make a map!

He stopped. For a moment it was quiet. He supposed they must take time off for meals over there, too. Quickly, he pulled himself up by his hands and rested his toes on one of the higher layers of sandbags lining the trench, moved up until his head was at first level with, and then protruding over, the parapet. He thought, I have never done such a dangerous thing in my life. But felt calm. ‘Mr Barton…’

He took no notice of the runner. The sun was shining straight into his face, so that when he closed his eyes it was pleasant, it was like sitting outside on the terrace of the house at Eastbourne, basking, soothed as a cat, he felt his skin comforted by the warmth. He half opened his eyes, and the space between the two sets of trenches was pale, in a haze he saw smoke going up, saw grass and a couple of gorse bushes and the shell craters, dried in the sun, saw the enemy wire glittering. There were a few small clouds, very high up in the sky. Nothing moved. He thought, I shall stay here, I shall wait and warm my face in the sun and if they fire, they will fire, if I am killed. I shall be killed. For it seemed not to matter, nobody’s life mattered, he was of no more or less importance than the Private who had just spouted blood at his feet.

He was here to make a map.

Jesus Christ!

He felt hands gripping his legs, hauling him roughly down so that he stumbled and lost his balance and landed awkwardly, on the floor of the trench. A splinter of something went through the soft flesh of his palm.

Grosse was standing stiffly, his face furious, and unapologetic. ‘I’m sorry, sir, but…’

‘All right, all right.’

He got up slowly and made a play of checking that his binoculars had not been damaged. Realized that he must have looked over the parapet and been quite still for several seconds and that no shot had been fired at him.

A heavy shell roared overhead and crumped down quite a way behind the trench. The air smelled of cordite and chalk. Grosse said nothing more. Barton wondered what he was thinking, whether he would tell anyone what had just happened.

‘We’d best go on, sir.’

Barton nodded. It was not for a long time that he came to and realized what he had done. But it seemed entirely reasonable, nevertheless, he felt neither ashamed nor surprised. Something had clicked inside his head, he felt different, he would go back to the support trenches and his own dugout, he would talk to John and read Sir Thomas Browne and listen to the ‘Winterreise’, he would draw his map and make his report, but he would not be the same as when he had set out. Something was new. Something…

He wondered who the dead man had been, remembering the sunburn and the open eyes with their pale lashes, the sudden breath. He wanted to kneel down in the trench, then, and press his face into the soil, and weep, out of misery and rage, he wanted never to get up again.

‘Thank your mother for the almonds.’

‘I’m not writing a letter.’ Barton did not look up. His face was closed, whatever he thought or felt was undetectable.

They had moved down here, five miles behind the trenches, and were in tents and some farm buildings in the middle of derelict countryside. Their first tour had been a quiet one, but the men were tired, they had worked long hours at tedious jobs. Within three or four days they would be back and B Company would go into the front line.

‘Elgar.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Or Brahms. We could have the Brahms Serenade.’

‘No.’

‘What then? Schubert again?’

‘I don’t really feel like music.’

‘Oh.’ Hilliard hesitated, fiddling with the head of the gramophone.

It was mid-aftemoon. In half an hour he’d have to go and supervise the Company taking baths in an iron tank situated beside some disused stables.

Barton went on writing.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Perfectly, thanks.’

Hilliard wanted to cry out, so helpless had he felt for the past week, in the face of this blankness.

Barton had the green-bound copy of Sir Thomas Browne beside him, he was writing something into a notebook. John wanted to ask what was wrong, to offer help, anything. But since he had come back from his day in the Observation Post at the front line, he had been like this, silent, apathetic, withdrawn, as though he had new secrets. Hilliard felt snubbed. Once he had said, ‘What have I done?’

‘Nothing, John. Nothing.’

Now, outside, the men were being drilled by Sergeant Dexter.

‘David…’

‘Yes? What is it?’ But he went on writing, his pen moving evenly over the thin paper, he did not look up.

Hilliard realized how used he had grown to Barton’s openness, to the warmth of his conversation and his constant teasing, to the long letters and the stories about his family, to his sympathy, the way he gave and shared so much. He had, simply, grown used to receiving from him. Now he was afraid, in the face of this new mood which he could not fathom. David’s behaviour had become like his own in the past. ‘Moody,’ Constance Hilliard would say. ‘You were always a moody child, John.’ And so the label had stuck and he had grown used to it, almost proud that he preferred his own company to other people’s and found silence easier than conversation and gaiety. His behaviour stood for everything which his parents mistrusted, for them his character was flawed. Well then, he had wanted to be flawed. But since his meeting with Barton he had begun to question himself. He had changed. And now?

He rubbed his fingers over and over the black ridges of the gramophone, needing help. He said irrelevantly, ‘Huxtable’s got compassionate leave. His father’s dying.’

‘Oh. I’m sorry.’ The writing went on. Barton liked Huxtable, they shared a certain sort of humour. Now, he only sounded polite.

‘I’d better go and sort out the bathing facilities. You should come.’

‘Should I?’

‘Well – it’s an entertainment.’

‘For whom?’

‘Look…’

Barton stopped writing. His expression was perfectly friendly, there might have been nothing wrong at all. But there was something. Something… He did not want to talk. Desperately, Hilliard said, ‘I could move. I could have a word with Garrett – I mean, if you need a break. Perhaps that’s what it is? We’ve been together rather. I suppose you might be able to share with Glazier.’

Barton put the cap on his fountain pen and began to screw it around and around. He said, ‘I’m sorry. Yes. I’m not very good company.’

‘No, it isn’t…’

‘So if that’s what you want, of course, go ahead.’

‘No. I’m thinking about you.’

‘What about me?’

Hilliard felt himself sick with the effort of trying to explain what had never before needed explanation, of trying to break through this tension between them, to help Barton or himself. Do something. He spoke very slowly.

‘I mean that you have been a bit – quiet. Things are different, aren’t they? I thought you probably wanted a break from me.’

‘No.’

‘Oh. I see. I thought…’

‘Oh God Almighty, John, I don’t…’ But Barton pulled himself up, fell silent again. He was still screwing the cap of the pen between his long fingers.

Hilliard thought, he has got to tell me now, it has got to be cleared up, whatever it is. Now, now. Now he would speak. Now…

The thread of the pen broke. Barton put both parts down on the table, stared at them. The silence went on.

Went on too long to be broken then, there was nothing either of them could say. Dared say. They did not move for minute after minute, standing quite apart from one another in the dark little tent.

In the end, Hilliard walked quickly across to the flap, ducked, went outside.

The sun had not been out all that morning and now heavy-bellied clouds were piled up overhead. It would rain.

The men went up, singing, to the communal bath and made the most of it, twenty at a time in the grey, scummy water, but cheerful, splashing and floundering and waving to the war photographer who had been with the Battalion since the previous day. The air smelled of Carbolic and chlorine and of the rain to come. Hilliard stood, pitying them their lack of privacy, the way they were always herded together, and yet envying them too, their carefully ordered life and clear, uninhibited friendships and enmities.

And then he checked himself, for it was more dangerous to think like that, why should this life at war be any more simple, any less full of conflict for the men than for Barton and himself, for Garrett, for any of them? He knew nothing about the men, why should he patronize them? And he thought, too, that none of them knew or greatly liked him, as they liked David. He felt miserable, entirely alone. He wanted to go back to the front.

‘Which of these is right? Which do you really believe?’ For having read them, Hilliard wanted to understand, he was moved by what was written.

‘Why are you reading those?’ Barton was standing in the entrance to their tent.

‘I wanted to see what you’d been writing.’

‘Why?’

‘I thought it might help.’

‘Help what?’

‘I – I suppose I wanted to know what you were thinking.’

‘And do you?’

Hilliard looked down again helplessly at the sheets of paper, the neat, black script. There was silence again. He read, ‘Men are too early old and before the date of age.’

Barton crossed to his side of the tent, and opened his valise. ‘The C.O. wants to see us. Everyone.’

‘Oh. I suppose we’re going back then.’

‘Probably.’

‘It’s a relief.’

‘Is it?’

‘Well – I don’t much like it here. I never liked this sort of halfway house. One foot in the war and one foot out of it. The men aren’t very cheerful.’

Barton shrugged. ‘What difference does it make, John? Does it matter where we are?’

The camp was dreary, badly equipped. It had begun to rain late that afternoon, a thin drizzle, while the men were still bathing. The estaminet in the nearby village was grubby, the faces of the proprietor and his wife sour and unwelcoming. And a mild dysentery had broken out among B Company.

‘I hate it here,’ Hilliard said. He had been tense, the last few days.

‘Yes. We’d better go and see Garrett.’

Barton had walked across to the packing case that served them as a table, put his hand on the papers which Hilliard had been reading, as though to cover them up or take them away. Then he seemed to change his mind, lose interest. He left them as they were.

Hilliard said, ‘I like reading them. I like the pieces you’ve taken down.’

‘Good.’

‘They seem to set it all at a remove, don’t they? And he gives a shape to something shapeless, gives it all a point, somehow.’

‘Does he? What point has it?’

‘I thought – well, isn’t that why you read him? To try and make some sense out of all this?’

‘The war? I shouldn’t think that’s possible.’

‘Perhaps not.’

‘You’ve never really thought it was, have you?’

‘No. So you don’t read this because it helps things?’

‘I don’t know what I do or why, John.’ Barton sounded weary.

‘Why did you take these particular sections out and write them down in a book by themselves? They must mean something.’

‘I really don’t know. It was something to do.’

‘Oh come, that doesn’t sound like you. That isn’t the kind of thing you say.’

‘All right. Perhaps it puts a neat fence around things – tidies them up. I just do not know.’

Hilliard felt again that he had come up against a hard wall, he did not know what to say or how to go further. So often in the time since they had first met he had half-phrased some thought, groped his way towards the precise expression of what he was feeling, and David had at once understood, had picked up his meaning and stated it for him, or expanded it. Not now. Now he blocked everything in the same dull, tired, patient way. He had lost his gaiety and also some edge of understanding. Or was trying to lose them, to numb himself. Now, he asked, ‘Are you ready?’

‘Yes.’ But Hilliard still lingered beside the papers. He said, ‘I wish I could make a pattern out of things like this. Sergeant Hurd keeps a diary. Did you know?’

‘Yes.’

‘Perhaps that’s what he does – makes a pattern. I wish I could make one. Make sense of it.’

Barton shook his head. ‘So do I.’ He turned to go out of the tent.

It was raining heavily. They walked slightly apart. John Hilliard a pace behind, so that he saw Barton’s shoulders and the side of his head but not his face, not his expression. He felt again the appalling sense of his own failure, a misery that he could say nothing, do nothing, that he did not know.

Glazier joined them and walked beside Barton, began to talk about hunting. He was a well-meaning man and rather lazy. Once, David had suggested that he might also be callous, but when Hilliard had pressed him, asked if it were because of the foxhunting, he had shaken his head, said, ‘No. Anyhow, perhaps I’m wrong, perhaps it wasn’t a fair thing to say. I don’t know the man really. It’s just – I wonder if he cares much.’

Yet now he seemed to come alive for Glazier, more than at any time during the past week, he talked with something of his old, teasing manner, laughed, so that Hilliard, a pace behind, felt jealousy rising in him, he began to hate Glazier. But hated David, too, for giving so much of himself away so freely to another: he thought, what has Glazier got, what does he say or do, that I cannot? What spring has he managed to touch?

They separated going into the briefing conference in the dingy cottage which was Battalion Headquarters. Barton sat across the table from both Glazier and himself, hands together, listening and silent. When he caught Hilliard’s glance, he returned it calmly, and then, the second time, smiled, a vague, dispassionate smile. Garrett told them they were moving the following day.

He woke to a sound which he could not at once identify: it was not only the rain which had already churned up the field outside and soaked under the tent flaps, so that their ground-sheets were wet and muddied. There was the soft rumble of water on the canvas. But something else, a tearing noise. He realized that the lamp was on very low, and shaded by a valise which had been propped up on the packing case in front of it.

‘Barton?’

‘Damn. I’m sorry – I hoped I wouldn’t wake you up.’

‘What’s happened?’

‘Nothing and I’ve nearly finished. Go back to sleep.’

Hilliard stretched. His limbs were cramped and he was damp and chilled. There was the close, mouldy smell of wet grass and soil. The tearing noise had stopped. Barton was sitting down, only the top of his head was visible over the upright valise.

‘What are you doing?’

For a moment he did not answer. Then he said, ‘I suppose I found out that whatever I’d been trying to achieve didn’t work and shouldn’t work. I mean that I ought not to have tried at all.’

He spoke very quietly but there was a note of despair in his voice.

‘I couldn’t sleep and I knew why. I’ll feel better now. Look, I didn’t mean to wake you.’

Hilliard was standing. ‘It’s not particularly comfortable anyway.’

‘No.’

‘I’m fairly wet. That would have woken me up before long. I don’t seem to be able to be wet though I get through most other disturbances. I slept for six hours in a trench at Ancerre, with half a hundredweight of earth and a dead man on top of me.’

Barton did not comment.

‘You can get used to almost anything you know.’

‘But should you?’

‘Well, it helps to be able to sleep. You have to sleep when you can.’

‘I don’t mean things like that – sleeping, getting used to the food, the rats and fleas and noise. I mean… other things.’

‘I know.’

‘I thought about you just now. I’ve been sitting here for a long time thinking about you. You’ve had more time to get used to things, haven’t you?’

‘Some things. Yes.’

‘And yet when you went back to England you couldn’t sleep, you had nightmares, you couldn’t even bear the smell of the roses. It all came back then, the men you’d seen die, the noises and the smells. You hadn’t forgotten.’ He seemed to be asking for some kind of reassurance, that this was truly so, that Hilliard had remembered, and suffered for it.

‘You know I hadn’t. I told you – I’ve told you more than anyone.’

‘Yes.’

‘David, what have you been doing tonight?’

He moved across the tent and looked over the valise at the packing case-table. The green-bound copy of Sir Thomas Browne, and the notebook into which Barton had earlier copied the quotations, lay in a pile, torn into small pieces, the leaves ripped from the binding. There were only a few pages still left intact, he had almost finished when Hilliard woke.

‘You can’t make a pattern out of it, you cannot read a book and get comfort from fine words, and great thoughts, and you shouldn’t bloody well try.’

‘I don’t know…’

‘I do. I’ve got to face it, it is wicked and pitiless, it is all one Godawful mess, and how can I sit here and let that man, that great man, lull me into a kind of acquiescence? Be romantic about it? Is that right? Is that how he would want to be used?’

‘You were reading the Psalms, too.’

‘Yes. Or the Psalms or anything. You asked me if it all “helped”. Well, if it did it should not have done so.’

Hilliard sat down on the canvas stool beside him. He said, ‘Hasn’t your father used anaesthetic? And why do we give the men rum issue?’

‘For God’s sake…’

‘Isn’t it the same?’

‘No.’

‘I wonder.’

‘No, John. It’s one thing to numb yourself against some kind of pain, to get up courage for an ordeal. This is different, this is a question of basic attitude. I’ve been trying to set everything apart, make it grandiose, give it a point and a purpose when there are none.’

‘Perhaps the men wouldn’t agree with you – not all of them. Coulter thinks there’s still a reason for it all, for him it is a just war, he’ll go on till he drops.’

‘I’m not Coulter.’

‘You’re not being fair to yourself, all the same.’

But it is all right, Hilliard thought, now it is all right again, at least we are talking, he will let me get through to him. He felt enormous relief and a kind of gratitude.

‘I told you about what it was like in the summer and when I went home afterwards. I think that was a good thing, for me anyway, because you made me talk and it was what I needed. I couldn’t talk to anyone else.’

‘No.’

‘I haven’t forgotten any of what happened in July, I haven’t accepted any of it. But I still feel better for having told you.’

Barton smiled and his face lost its withdrawn, formal expression. ‘Oh, you should have been a family doctor, you should be a C.O. or a priest! Except that perhaps you would be too conscientious, and I can see through you like a mirror. You are thinking, “What a good thing it will be if only I could get David to spill it all out, how much better he would feel!” Oh, I’m sorry, John, you’ve been trying very hard with me.’

‘Yes.’

‘But I have never felt like this in my life before. You must see that. I haven’t known myself. I didn’t know what to do.’

‘I’ve felt it. I know.’

‘Yes. Perhaps we’re alike then?’

Hilliard hesitated. ‘No,’ he said eventually. ‘We’re not. And it’s a good thing. It’s just that we happen to have had the same responses to a situation.’

‘It was going up into the o.p. that day. I saw eleven men killed. I suppose that doesn’t seem many to you. It was to me, when there wasn’t even anything in particular going on, it was a “routine day”. Eleven men. There might have been more only that I didn’t see them. And there were all those bodies lying out in the shell craters and they’d been there for weeks, months – I don’t know. They were all swollen and black and the flies were all over them. And I had to sit there and draw a map. I saw…’ He stopped.

‘What? Tell me.’

‘No. No, you don’t need me to go on.’

‘But it would be best if you did.’

‘Haven’t you had enough of it all yourself?’

‘That isn’t the point,’ Hilliard said gently, and knew then that he had learned all this from David, learned how to listen and to prompt, and why, even learned a tone of voice. Not long ago he would not have been able to do it. He wondered if there was anything that he had not learned from David.

‘But the worst of it has been that I haven’t known how to face myself. That Private who was snipered – looking at him I could have wept and wept, he seemed to be all the men who had ever been killed, John. I remember everything about him, his face, his hair, his hands, I can remember how pale his eyelashes were and I thought of how alive he’d been, how much there had been going on inside him – blood pumping round, muscles working, brain saying do this, do that, his eyes looking at me. I thought of it all, how he’d been born and had a family, I thought of everything that had gone into making him – and it wasn’t that I was afraid and putting myself in his place down there on the ground. I just wanted him alive again. it seemed the only important thing. I just wanted to stay there and look at him, I couldn’t take it in, that he’d been so alive, and then he just lay, spouting out blood and that was that, he was dead, nothing. Or something. I don’t know. But dead as far as I could see, his flesh was dead, he’d had all that possibility of life and it was gone. Like Harris. A bloody silly accident. If I hadn’t been with Grosse I’d have stayed there, I think I would have lain down and never got up again. I wanted to bury myself. Do something. Only – God, I had to make a map, I had a job to do, so I went and did it and I suppose that took my mind off it. By the time I’d been there an hour and by the time I came back into our dugout, I’d begun to accept it all. I was used to it. A man was dead – eleven men were dead. So? It was happening every day, it was no different because I’d been there. It would go on happening and there was not a thing I could do to stop it. In fact, my being here was helping it continue. I felt nothing then, just nothing any longer. I didn’t think I could be unfeeling, but I was. Callous. Counting the bodies in No Man’s Land and trying to see if they were ours or theirs, guessing how long they’d been dead as a question of academic interest. I had watched stretcher parties scrape and shovel up what was left of half a dozen men, along with what was left of their meal and the side of the trench. I heard a Sergeant tell them to go for more help, to get more tools and put down some duckboards, they weren’t making a good enough job of it. They did. They simply did it. And ever since I’ve heard the shells going over, and thought, that’s so many dead, so many wounded, one or two dozen, that’s next door, that’s the right flank trench, where did that one go, and Oh, Pearce is dead then, I’m sorry to hear that, yes, I’ll write to his wife, give me his papers, I’ll do the form. Last week, the day I went to the village to see the Q.M.S. – that day it hit me, that I’d been feeling nothing, I’d become entirely callous, I was taking it in and not letting myself think or feel anything. I was reading Sir Thomas Browne in order to abstract it. I’d never been so ashamed. You said that you can get used to things.

‘I knew that. But although you were cool on the surface that is only because you are made like that – it is only the surface. You’d told me all about the summer, and how you felt when you went home, about what struck you most when other people there talked about the war and how it had to go on and I knew you hadn’t forgotten, you didn’t stop feeling any of it for a moment. But what was happening to me?What has happened to me?’

He had been tearing and tearing at the paper, the pieces were tiny like confetti in a pile before him. Now, he brushed his arm across them so that they scattered, dropping off the packing case and lying, white as flowers, in the mud.

Hilliard said, ‘But you haven’t forgotten either. You haven’t stopped feeling. You have just told me as much.’

‘That boy…’

‘You can’t feel every man’s death completely and all of the time, David, you simply cannot.’

‘Every man’s death diminishes me.’

‘Yes. So you have just told me the truth, haven’t you?’

‘Have I?’

‘That you are diminished and know as much. And you are changed. And ashamed. That you feel it. Some people would scarcely have noticed how many men were killed, they’ve gone past it, it’s all become part of the day’s work.’

‘That was how I felt.’

‘No, you didn’t, not really. Shock does strange things, you should know that. Some men do not even suffer shock.’

‘What kind of men are those?’

‘Precisely. But all the same, you know as well as I do that if you are here and doing this job, you have to shove things out of the way all the time. We’d never carry on at all otherwise.’

‘Then I wonder if we ought to “carry on at all”?’

‘If you truly believe that you can go and say so to Garrett tomorrow, register as a conscientious objector – lay down your arms. I imagine it would be hard – it was hard enough for your brother, and he hadn’t gone through the business of joining up and serving. But if that is what you feel, then you must do it.’

Barton looked up. ‘It would be funk, wouldn’t it? I went through all that before I came out here. It would be funk.’

‘You hadn’t seen anything then.’

‘All the more reason why it would be funk and seen to be so.’

‘Are you afraid of what else is to come?’

‘I’m afraid of myself. Of what I am becoming, of what it will do to me.’

‘Are you afraid of your own dying?’

Barton’s face lightened at once. ‘Oh, no. I’ve thought about that too. No. I have never really been afraid of that.’

‘It is a brave act of valour to condemn death, but where life is more terrible, it is the truest valour to live.’

Barton smiled. ‘I’ve just torn all that up.’

‘But I have just learned it by heart.’

‘And is it true?’

Hilliard considered. But he found himself thinking instead, whatever was wrong between us is wrong no longer, and will never be so again. He was certain of that.

He said, ‘It isn’t going to get any better. It is not going to stop being more terrible. None of that nonsense about its all being over and done with by Christmas, about our driving them out like foxes from cover. I scarcely believe that it will ever be over. At any rate there is no point in thinking so.’

‘But I asked you if it were true that where life is more terrible it is the truest valour to live.’

‘Isn’t it something you have to make up your own mind about?’

‘Is it true for you, then?’

‘Yes,’ Hilliard said, ‘it’s true. I think so. And you?’

‘I don’t know.’

Barton was looking down at the scattered shreds of paper. ‘What a philosophical night!’

‘No. We have been talking about what is happening, about yesterday and today and tomorrow.’

‘Yes. Do you suppose I ought to gather up the remains of Sir Thomas Browne?’

‘He’s stuck in the mud.’

‘A sort of burial. Fitting.’

‘Yes. Though as a matter of fact I’m rather sorry. I wanted to borrow the book and read it for myself.’

Barton stood up and put his arm across Hilliard’s shoulders, his face suffused with amusement. ‘Don’t worry. I’ve got another copy at home. I’ll get my mother to send it out to us!’

‘Do that.’

A gust of wind blew the tent flap open, blew rain inside.

‘It’s going to be bloody wet and bloody cold,’ Hilliard said looking down at his groundsheet. They ought to finish their sleep, though he had no idea of the time.

Barton let his arm drop, and moved a pace away. He said, ‘I love you, John.’

Hilliard looked at him. ‘Yes.’ He was amazed at himself. That it was so easy.

‘Yes.’