The Somme Stations

‘Want a hand bringing it in?’ I said.

‘Aye,’ he said, in a thoughtful sort of way.

‘Hold on, I’ll just go to the jakes.’

Three minutes later we set about it.

‘How’s Cobble Farm?’ I enquired, as we loaded the stuff onto the trestle table.

‘Well, it’s covered in shit,’ he said. ‘Otherwise I like it.’

Two empty beer glasses stood on the table. I thought I’d cleared the lot away the night before – I was certain I had done. Also, I had left the two papers – Quinn’s message and the list of valorous railwaymen – together, but they were now separate on the table top.

‘Bit blowy last night, eh?’ the bloke was saying.

The stove door was open as well, yet I’d closed it the night before. It was all ashes in there – all except a scrap of paper at the front. I fished it out. There were printed words on it: ‘London, E.C.’, then, underneath, ‘Telephone – 2087 HOLBORN’. The address was familiar, somehow. I looked up at the stage. All the kit bags and rifles were there as before.

‘Oh,’ the food bloke was saying, ‘question from the sentry blokes up top: did the kid get here all right?’

‘What kid?’

‘Kid on a bike.’

‘William Harvey? He’s at the farm.’

‘No, pal. I was at the farm, and I had the barn to myself.’

‘He was meant to go there.’

‘Well he thought different. He came by the sentry post here last night, or this morning anyhow – half past midnight sort of time. Said he was under orders to rejoin his unit after completing a special duty. He was on a push bike. Hold on… Did he not pitch up?’

The blokes were filtering in from the back rooms, putting on their tunics: Oamer, Scholes and Oliver Butler. A little while later came the twins and Alfred Tinsley, all fixing their caps on their heads. Roy Butler had a fag on the go. ‘Anyone seen Young William?’ I called out, and we went through it all again. He wasn’t supposed to be here. When Dawson appeared, he admitted to feeling ‘pretty cheap’; otherwise he was amiability himself. Had he seen William?

‘No, mate, I’ve been asleep.’

Half an hour later, breakfast had been eaten at the trestle table, but Oamer did not feel able to light his pipe. By all accounts, nobody had seen the boy, or heard any disturbance in the night. All the blokes looked grave, except the twins, who were out of hand as usual, occasionally laughing. Quinn then appeared, together with his opposite number, Leo Tate. As they entered, Quinn was saying to Tate, ‘And this morning not a cloud in the sky! Couldn’t be more splendid!’

But the moment he saw us, he was in fits, and he told Oamer to fall us in. Quinn held a cap in his hand. It bore the badge of our battalion, and the man who’d lost it would find himself on a charge. Quinn had discovered the cap near the sea wall, or, as he put it, ‘Captain Tate’s revetment’. It was one of the small-sized ones, and it was a disgrace that no name was written inside it, but this was not such a disgrace really: every man was supposed to have written his name on the band of the cap, but the ink would be repeatedly wiped off by sweat. Quinn surveyed us. Every man present undoubtedly had a cap on his head. Quinn enquired, ‘Corporal Prendergast, where’s Private Harvey?’

So Quinn, too, had expected the lad to be with us.

‘If I might have a word with you about that, sir,’ said Oamer.

We were put at ease, and I heard snatches of the conflab. Oamer explained that the boy had come past the sentries in the small hours.

‘Well yes, I know that,’ said Quinn. ‘The sentries told us all about it when Captain Tate, myself and the other officers came back from the village. He’d gone through a little while before.’

I thought: they must have been going some at Kilnsea, to be returning at that hour.

‘He was under a misapprehension as to his orders, sir,’ said Oamer.

‘So it appeared to me,’ said Quinn, ‘so it appeared to me. But he’s not here now, you say? How is that possible? Once on Spurn, he can’t have left it. I mean, the only way off is via the sentries… except by boat, of course.’

He eyed Oamer sadly for a while, before saying, ‘I think we’d better have a scout about.’

As Oamer was giving orders for the search, I saw Quinn looking down at the cap in his hand. He looked up and said to me – since my eyes just happened to meet his at that moment – ‘You know, there’s blood on the inside of this cap.’ I thought of the bit of Latin on the cap badge. Oamer had translated it for me: ‘Whither the fates call.’

Under the high blue sky, we combed the peninsula – us and the RE men both. We searched individually, so that every man was alone with his thoughts, and I wondered how many were inclining my way – towards a suspicion of foul play.

I searched both sides of the peninsula up towards the Narrows, and there were two more of the kids from the school practising semaphore. I watched, mesmerised, as they whirled their great red flags into position and then froze, blank-faced, before whirling them into a different position.

It was about half after midday when I heard the first shout, which came from Scholes. He’d found the bike – it had evidently been lying in a dune a little way inland of the revetment. We all had a look at it for a while, leaving it in place for whoever would be investigating (our regimental military police, as I imagined). Then, on Quinn’s orders, we spread out again for a further search.

The second shout went up half an hour later, and it came from Oamer, who’d been walking along the revetment. He was bending over and looking into the sea. He bent rather than crouched – bent as a woman does, and I could see his great, khaki-covered arse. Walking fast over the dunes towards him, I thought: you don’t normally look at the sea in that way. Oamer was making rather a dainty inspection, of the sort more suited to the examination of frog spawn in a village pond; he was next to one of the iron bollards, the one with a length of rope attaching to it. I followed the rope with my eye as I took up position next to Oamer, and looked where he looked.

In the water, the rope held the just-submerged body of Harvey by virtue of having twisted itself once around his middle. It held him with no effort in the beautifully clear water, which slopped against the sea wall in a relaxed and casual sort of way. The motion of the waves would carry Fusilier Harvey two feet or so away from the wall, then two feet back – out and back, out and back, but never more than two feet either way. Oamer was saying nothing, but breathing hard, either because he was concentrating, somehow, on the body in the water, or just because he was not in the peak of condition. Five minutes later, we had the entire unit around us, and Harvey was stretched out on the sea wall.

The twins, between them, said:

‘Oh…’

‘Muth…’

‘Ah…’

So making ‘Oh mother’ their favourite expression.

Harvey was very dead, and had apparently been given a new head. He looked to have been clobbered mightily at least twice, for he had the appearance of a sort of a bug. His left eye was black and swollen, and the right one was quite lost in a bulge of purple-coloured flesh, from which the lashes sprouted at wrong angles, so that it was like a kind of anemone. This eye, which had winked at me, was now locked in a permanent wink, as though Harvey had just let on the biggest secret of all. As for the rest of him… all that seemed smaller; and the seawater seemed to me to be acting upon him even as he lay on the dry stones, shrinking him fast before our eyes.

Of the kid’s pack, rifle and cap there was no sign.

He was the first casualty of the battalion. Would he figure in the roll of honour? Could it be said that he’d died in the course of duty?

Come two o’clock we were all back in the Hope, drinking tea – all save Quinn, who’d gone off with Tate to make telephone calls. Fried bread and jam was going for those that wanted it, but at first nobody did. People seemed minded to avoid the subject of the actual corpse, so it fell out that Scholes was the star turn, telling