The Somme Stations

room. The fact that Butler had left it for me meant he’d told Tom Shaw it was on my say-so that he was being questioned over the murder of Matthew Waddington; that I had found him out. It also meant that Butler had then regretted having told Shaw this and was charitably equipping me for what was to come… or that he wanted me to do the job of dealing with Shaw… or that, having meant to do for me himself, and having funked it, he couldn’t stand the sight of the thing, or… I gave it up.

The end result anyhow was that he was leaving things in the balance, as he had at Flers. He would assist a man’s fate, but he wouldn’t become it.

The next day, I received a parcel, forwarded from Old Man Wright, the clerk in the police office at York station. Inside it was a letter from Mrs Tinsley, of Albemarle Road, York, and five years’ worth of Railway Magazines. The numbers for 1911 to 1914 were bound in red cloth with gold lettering. The ones for 1915 came loose. November 1915 was in the envelope in which Mrs Tinsley had received it from the back numbers department of the Railway Magazine offices in London, and she explained that she’d sent off for it to make good the missing number. There was a good deal in the letter about what a tremendous chap I was, according to the letters Tinsley had sent home.

Tinsley had been only a kid but he’d had a philosophy of life, which said that you ought not to try and avoid trouble, but should put yourself in its way – only then did you deserve whatever good things might occur in your life. It was a philosophy I admired, and it was for this reason that I left the revolver in the bottom of the trunk while continuing with my programme of walking the Moor.

Or it might be that I was suffering ‘a depression’ – a condition much talked of among the soldiers of ‘Ardenlea’.

‘Ardenlea’,

Ilkley,

Yorkshire.

November 4th, 1916

Dearest Lillian,

I’m sorry not to have been back for the children last night. There has been another drama here, in the place where ‘life passes in a pleasant dream’ (you will remember).

I arrived at mid-afternoon yesterday, to be told by the Matron that Jim was out on the Moor – and this in the falling snow. I went straight out there myself. It was becoming rapidly dark, but I saw Jim progressing slowly on his crutches. He was halfway up towards the bathing place that sits on the lower Moor here. I then… I then saw what appeared to be a scene from a play or a film – a scene from one of the ‘Westerns’ that Jim takes me to at the Electric Palace, and the world of this drama was black and white, with small black figures against the snow, just as the world of the films or bioscopes is black and white.

I watched a small man I did not know (he was just a shadow to me, but I could see he was small, and very fit) making quickly towards a small man that I did know, namely Jim. The first man had his arm held out, as though pointing at Jim and accusing him… only it was a gun that he held, and I thought: this man means to shoot my husband, and I found myself thinking that this was extremely bad manners, and that I would on no account stand for it. I made a move in the direction of the man, and then I saw the flame as he fired the gun. With the stage melodramas, and in the Westerns, you hear the bang but you do not see this great leap of orange flame, and it shocked me so that I called out some wild words I cannot now recollect.

And yet it was as though my Jim did not know his part in the play or the film, for he remained upright, and it was the man with the gun who had fallen at the very moment of firing. It was then that I saw a third man on the Moor: Weatherill, the Chief Inspector. He had shot the man who had fired at Jim.

He – Jim’s Chief – was making slowly towards Jim with his own gun carried loosely, while I ran pell-mell in the same direction, and some of the fitter men from the house came streaming up the hill after me, having heard the shot. The faster I moved, the slower the man Weatherill did, and I saw him come to a stop in the falling snow, and light a cigar.

The first small man – the stranger – had completely missed Jim, but had been terribly wounded by Weatherill’s shot. He was carried into the house, and when I saw him in the light I realised that his coat was quite soaked in blood, so that when they took it off him, and lay it down on the floor of the hall, the blood continued to flow from it, just as it was flowing from the man himself.

Oldfield, the Matron, telephoned through to the hospital for an ambulance as Weatherill screamed questions at the man, who was obviously in agony. I saw on the floor a paper that had dropped from his coat. It was half covered in blood, but I could make out that it was a certificate from the railway company addressed to ‘Thomas Shaw, Engine Driver’. In spite of the blood, I caught it up, and did not know whether to give it to the shot man, or to Weatherill, or to Jim. In the event, I gave it to Jim. It began, ‘You are hereby informed that your services are required in connection with the working of the railway. You will not, therefore, at present be required to join the army…’

Jim and Weatherill then left with the man in the ambulance. Jim’s guard here, Brewster (I have told you of him before), was quite happy to let Jim go, and it is clear that what this man Shaw has to say – if anything, for he seemed hardly capable of speech – could have an important bearing on Jim’s case.

Not much else is clear, I’m afraid.

I will write to you again tomorrow, dear.

You will of course not mention a word of this to the children.

With love,

Lydia.

In the library of ‘Ardenlea’, a fellow was giving a Gramophone Concert for the benefit of the invalids. The fellow – whose name I do not recollect – had a lot of gramophone records and a lot of very strong opinions about them. First of all, he liked all his gramophone records – there wasn’t a dud amongst them, evidently – and he was particularly keen on the symphonies among them. The symphony was the highest expression of the musical art. He had just given part of ‘something new from Elgar’, with whom he was on terms of the closest friendship, or so you would have thought from his talk. At the end of it, he lifted the needle and said, ‘Well, that’s woken you all up.’ But it hadn’t. The two men nearest the fire – two Marines, late of the Chief Mechanical Engineers’ Office at York, who’d been shelled and badly burned in the same armoured car – were fast asleep, in spite of all the loud parts.

But then it was a very good and soothing fire that was burning in the library.

The symphony man was now taking out a record by Brahms. He blew the dust off all his records before playing them, even though there was quite obviously no speck of dust on them.

‘Now Brahms, gentlemen,’ he said, ‘was German.’

‘Poor show,’ said Major Dickinson, but he did not wheel himself out of the library, which he very easily might have done. In fact, he and the record man nodded at each other, just as though this little exchange had gone perfectly to plan.

The man put the needle down on the record, and sat in the chair he had placed next to the gramophone. He bent his head as the music started, as he always did, out of respect to the composer, as I supposed. But I did not care for Brahms, who was even keener on the quiet-then-suddenly-loud business than Elgar. The man’s music seemed to go with clattering of one of the nurses as she came in with the cocoa, and it reminded me that a library ought to be silent.

I lit another cigarette and removed myself mentally from the library…

… That morning, the wife had come into my room with her portmanteau in her hand, and an opened envelope tucked into the belt of her skirt, and I could see it was an army envelope. ‘Sorry for opening this,’ she said, being not in the least sorry.

She held the envelope over the counterpane of the bed, upended it, and three little cloth squares fell out directly. The letter floated down a moment later. Well, the pieces of cloth were diamond-shaped rather than square, and I showed the wife how they would fix onto a tunic sleeve.

‘Captain Stringer,’ she said, and she stood back, marvelling at me.

‘A field commission,’ I said, ‘they’re pretty rare.’