The Somme Stations

We pressed on through the haunted wood, and after a while it fell out that I was walking with Dawson, the others having disappeared from view ahead of us. His face was filthy – looked as though his muddy moustache had spread over all of it. Some shells were falling quite near; every so often you’d catch the force of one, and feel a little winded, as though you’d just run ten yards.

Dawson said something I couldn’t catch, and I saw he was indicating a bloke on a white horse in the trees. He looked as though he’d always been there. He was calling to us.

‘You there!’

Dawson said to me, ‘That’s not a very military form of address, is it?’

We walked up to the bloke, and we both saluted (in a ragged sort of way) since he was on a horse after all, and he wore a cap instead of a tin hat. It seemed odds on that he was an officer. In fact, he was just about as perfect – up there on that horse – as any toy soldier. He had a waxed moustache; his well-pressed uniform was offset by a gleaming thin white rope about one shoulder – a lanyard. He took out a paper, and struck a match, the better to read it, and by the light of this flame, I saw his red cap cover. He was a member of the Military Mounted Police – a monkey, as they were known to the men – and he had three stripes on his sleeve. Compared to him, the regimental police in our own battalion had just been playing at the job.

‘Are you the 17th Northumberland?’ he said. He spoke like a machine. ‘I’m looking for a Captain Quinn. Quinn of ‘E’ Company.’

I knew he’d come about William Harvey. I saw in my mind’s eye the sodden dead boy, left out to dry on the sea wall at Spurn… and the bug-like eyes. The matter had followed us to France, and it broke in on me for the first time that I had no more means of proving my innocence than any other man in the section. All that could be said in my favour was that I had no obvious motive for killing Harvey.

We indicated the direction of the tavern, and the ruin next door that would be housing Quinn. The bloke turned his horse and went off that way, and we trooped after. Dawson smoked in silence as we walked and I thought how this wasn’t like him: the smoking was, but not the silence.

When we got back to the billet, we saw Quinn, sitting on his own horse (he’d evidently just got back with it), talking to the Military Policeman on his. They were in between the tavern and the ruin next door. Every so often the horses would twitch or start at the wilder noises coming from the front line. As Dawson and I made for the tavern, I could make out Quinn’s voice.

‘My men have had a very hard time of it today,’ he was saying, ‘or so I should imagine. I myself was in Albert trying to find a horse, and then lunching with the adjutant.’

Well, at least he was honest about it. Another thing: it was funny to hear him say ‘My men’.

Inside the tavern, I discovered that orderlies from battalion HQ had visited earlier in the day and not only located a stove, but filled it with coal. A dixie of the usual sort of stew was boiling away on it. Everything was now focused on that stove. The men had shifted their couches towards it, and tunics and trousers were draped over chairs and stools and pushed towards it for drying. Two hurricane lamps burned on the bar, and all the blokes were stripping off prior to going out back where, Oamer promised, there was a pump and a bucket. The twins, I noticed, wore nothing underneath their rough tunics. Roy Butler smoked while contemplating the hard muscles of his stomach; he didn’t seem proud, just interested. Their brother, on the other hand, was combing his hair in a fragment of mirror that he’d got hold of. Scholes was sitting on his couch, and taking his penny whistle from his pack. There was quite a happy undercurrent of conversation because at least we were all out of the rain. The fact that something a bit heavier might fall on us at any moment seemed generally forgotten about. Scholes began to play his whistle – just a short burst of something fast and complicated. When he’d finished, Oliver Butler, stowing his mirror back in his pack, said, ‘It’s good, is that. Carry on.’

He could be a decent sort sometimes, and I noticed the expression on Scholes’s face. Chuffed, he was – and perhaps for another reason as well: he’d gone to the front line and come back, proved himself up to the mark.

But his happiness didn’t last, for Oamer walked in just then, went directly over to Scholes and had a word in his ear. Looking dead white, Scholes put down his whistle, and walked out of the tavern.

I collared Oamer as he followed Scholes out, saying, ‘What does that red hat want?’

Oamer replied without stopping, ‘Spurn. New evidence come to light.’

That was at seven o’clock. At quarter past seven, Scholes came back, sat silent on his couch, then took his whistle from his sack and didn’t play it but sat there holding it. At twenty past, Oamer returned. The twins were to go over to the next-door ruin for their turn at being questioned.

‘What’s this about?’ barked Oliver, as his brothers were marched off.

When they’d gone, Oliver Butler turned his anger on Scholes: ‘What did you tell him that he’s called Roy and Andy in?’

Scholes just shook his head, could barely bring himself to speak. At length, he said, ‘He’s had a report from our regimental police.’

‘What’s his name?’ said Butler.

‘Thackeray,’ Scholes muttered, ‘Company Sergeant Major Thackeray.’

‘What did he say?’

‘That he thinks William Harvey was done in by one of us; that he doesn’t mean to let the matter drop, just because we’ve come out here. That no man will be promoted within our section until he’s got to the bottom of it all.’

‘What did he want with you?’

Scholes just shook his head, still staring at nothing.

‘Why does he want to see the twins?’

‘Why do you bloody think?’ said Scholes. ‘Because they’re not right in the head.’

‘They’re my brothers,’ said Butler, furious.

‘That’s your look-out,’ said Scholes, and he thought: yes, that’s just what it is. Oliver Butler is perpetually looking out for his brothers. Scholes had had enough of our stares. He picked up his whistle, and quit the room, with Butler looking daggers into his back.

At seven-thirty, the twins returned, grinning – but then that meant nothing in their case – and Oliver took them into a huddle in the corner. He wanted to know if they’d been seen separately or together. Evidently, they’d been seen separately. Young Tinsley had taken refuge in the Railway Magazine. Dawson lay flat on his couch, which was next to mine. I looked a question at him.

‘I’m looking at that bottle, mate,’ he said, indicating with his stockinged foot the poster behind the bar, ‘and I’m thinking I’d like to go large on whatever wine is left over in this place.’

‘Like a drop of wine, do you?’

He nodded.

‘Beer for preference, but I do like a drop of white wine. Van Blonk,’ he said, ‘Point blank… Or cider, of course. I like a drop of that.’

He gave me a queer smile, the meaning of which I would only understand later. I wondered if it was only beer that turned him into the other Dawson, the wild man, as he’d been turned on Spurn Head – and only John Smith’s bitter at that.

‘Not bothered about the red cap?’ I said.

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Now this is you with your detective hat on. No, I’m not bothered about him. He’s part of the future, and I don’t really think about the future.’

‘Because you might cop it at any moment, you mean?’

‘No,’ he said, after a while. ‘As a general rule I don’t think about the future.’

He reached under his couch and caught up his water bottle; he passed it over to me.

‘Cider,’ he said, ‘from the basement. It’s dark down there, but I found a crate of this.’

I took a pull. After receiving another nod from him by way of encouragement, I took another, longer one. It was a strong brew of cider, and it affected me directly.

‘So even in the past you didn’t think about the future?’ I said, giving it back.

Dawson nodded. ‘Even then.’

Oamer returned, and this time he marched Tinsley out. When he’d gone, I walked over to his couch, and picked up the Railway Magazine he’d left lying there. I wanted to see the words that always appeared at the foot of the back page – and they appeared in full this time: ‘The Railway Publishing Co., Ltd., 30, Fetter Lane, Fleet St., London, E.C. Telephone – 2087 HOLBORN’.