The Somme Stations

Tinsley returned looking white-faced. He too had evidently been given a roasting. He collected up his rifle on coming back into the tavern, and went off again to do his sentry-go. Next it was Dawson’s turn with the red cap, and when Oamer returned him, he called for me.

Quinn stood outside the small ruin. The red cap, Thackeray, was evidently within.

Quinn nodded as I approached, saying, ‘You will address the Company Sergeant Major as “sir”’, which had me wondering whether one of the blokes had tried to ‘sarge’ Thackeray.

The small ruin held a kind of coffin-like box bed – Quinn’s. Beside it was a rickety table with Company Sergeant Major Thackeray sitting at it. Quinn himself remained hovering outside, and since the door of the ruin was kept open, he would have heard what took place inside. This was a sort of compromise. He would be a witness to the questioning but would not quite sit in on it.

‘You are Fusilier Stringer,’ said Thackeray, in his clattering, mechanical way. ‘Do you have anything to add to your statement?’

‘No, sir.’

‘You were the last man to go to bed.’

‘Yes.’

He stared at me for a while.

‘Do you have any grievance against any man in your section?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Does any other man in your section have any grievance against any other man?’

‘Not that I’m aware of,’ I said.

(Which wasn’t exactly true.)

‘And yet you were involved in a fight during the evening.’

‘More of a scuffle, as I said in the statement. It never came to blows.’

‘Every man had been drinking,’ he said, and I knew at that moment: this bloke’s teetotal. ‘In the fight, you sustained a cut to your right knuckle.’

I nodded. This was rather concerning… but it had been a tiny cut, and Dawson would testify that I’d got it from him, and not through striking William Harvey. Anyhow, I believed he would, and perhaps he already had done.

Thackeray stood, proving there was not a single crease in his uniform.

‘No,’ he said, ‘because you are all pals. You are part of a whole battalion of pals, in fact.’ He was standing, more or less to attention, by the side of the table; even so, his riding boots creaked a little. ‘Chums,’ he said, with disgust. ‘You have left your homes, wives, children, jobs to come to the aid of Blighty in her hour of need; and for no more in return than twice the pay of a regular soldier, and the status of national hero.’

‘Is there a question?’ I said, having decided to stop sirring him.

With a great squeaking and creaking of boots, he sat back down again, saying, ‘You were a policeman of sorts.’

‘Detective sergeant on the railway force.’

‘Where were you based?’

‘York station,’ and at that the moustache fluttered, signifying a laugh.

‘And did your power of arrest extend beyond the ticket gate?’

‘It extended over all the railway lands.’

‘The railway lands’ – and again the moustache went up. ‘That sounds like somewhere in your imagination.’

‘They are set out in The North Eastern Railway Police Manual.’ I eyed him for a while, before adding, ‘It’s not an over-imaginative book.’

‘Why the hell aren’t you in the Military Mounted Police?’

‘I can’t ride a horse.’

‘No,’ he said, after a space, ‘I’m not surprised.’

‘And I wanted to see action.’

‘Alongside your pals?’

‘And others besides.’

‘Your pals and your chums.’ He leant forwards. ‘What do you suppose this is? A war or a social outing?’ He leant further forwards. ‘Even though you are unaccustomed to army life, you are hoping to have the nerve to keep your head up.’

‘Something of that.’

‘Well, a boy is dead, and it appears to me that you or one of your drunken pals is responsible, so you will be seeing some action, that I guarantee, fusilier.’ I thought that might have been it, but he eyed me for a good long while before adding, ‘In his report the doctor said he’d never seen a greater injury of that type. You might think the eye – the right eye – was coming out of the boy’s head. But it went in – all the way into his brain. Do you suppose he saw his brain? Do you suppose he had sight of it just before he died?’

But I was not meant to answer this morbid question.

‘You are free to go,’ said Thackeray. ‘For now.’

When I stepped out, Quinn was still hovering, and looking none too pleased.

An hour later, after our feed, Oamer stood in that apology for a wood, on the dark border of our camp, and lit his pipe. It was his turn for sentry-go. He passed the match to me, and I touched it to the end of a Woodbine.

‘What was the new evidence?’ I asked him. ‘I never found out.’

‘Regarding Scholes,’ said Oamer. ‘It was the manner of his finding the bike… And it was a question of nuance.’

‘Of what?’

‘You recall those children with the flags on Spurn? It seems they have the power of speech after all, and they’ve given their version of events.’

‘But they’d cleared off by the evening,’ I said.

‘But they came back the next day,’ said Oamer, ‘and they saw the search.’

I recalled that he was right; that I’d seen them myself while searching.

‘One of the two – name of Lucy – said she saw a man finding the bike. She was asked about that, and she said, “I saw him pick it up. I don’t know that he found it.” So naturally she was then asked, “Did he look as though he’d found it?”’ Oamer sighed and looked at his pipe. ‘She said “no”, and was quite insistent on the point. The man she’d seen – Scholes – had, it appeared to her, known where the bike was when he made towards it.’

‘Rum,’ I said.

‘It’s quite a subtle distinction for Lucy to make,’ Oamer ran on. ‘But they turn out some bright sparks at the Spurn elementary school.’

‘So the position is that we’re all in it, but Scholes is the number one suspect?’

‘That’s right.’

A thought struck me. I asked Oamer:

‘Were you questioned?’

‘I was… Pleasant sort, isn’t he?’

‘Not a crease in his uniform.’

‘I think that may be the entire point of him. I hope so, anyhow.’

In fact, the point of the red cap, Thackeray, was that he was one of those regular army types who saw the volunteers as merely civilians in uniforms – so many slackers and wranglers, given an easy time of it so as to encourage others to join up.

It was a common sort of prejudice, I believed, and now we’d come up hard against it.

I took over from Oamer as sentry, walking in the wood, listening to the fireworks of the front, and thinking hard. One question particularly bothered me. On Spurn… why would Tinsley have put an edition of his beloved