'Fair? What a question. It was a ful-field, general court martial, of course, as he was an officer. Would he have been convicted in a peacetime court? No.
Would he have been shot if he were a private? Probably. Did guiltier men than he escape prosecution? Undoubtedly. Were there grounds for leniency? Certainly; the board made a unanimous recommendation for mercy. And I gather some, at least, were appaled to find the sentence had been confirmed. Were they out to make an example of somebody? Unquestionably.
'But was the sentence unjust in the circumstances?' He appeared to think it over. 'No, not realy. But hard? Very. The evidence was hardly substantial. It was the handling of the whole affair that was cruel. They took six weeks to decide to act against him in the first place and that hiatus had persuaded him that there wouldn't be any court martial. In the event, he had less than two days to prepare a defence, though proper procedures were just about folowed. A court martial isn't realy an inquiry. It's not like a court case at the Old Bailey. There's no real cross-examining, just statements with an assumption the truth is being told—except by the defendant.'
He stopped and examined his cigarette, which was burning fast, and then drew on it almost experimentaly. 'About a hundred years old,' he said, 'my brother got them in Turkey.' He paused for a moment. 'You know how it al came about?'
Laurence shook his head. 'I don't know anything about what he did.'
Ah.' Brabourne said nothing for a while. The cigarette looked close to catching fire completely.
'Do you have the time for this now?' Laurence asked.
'I'l tel you what,' Brabourne said. 'I do need to meet someone actualy. Old friend now at the Bar. Come with me. Have a quick drink at the Cock. He's invariably late.'
He stood up without waiting for a reply, took what looked like an old naval duffel coat from a hook on the back of the door and let Laurence folow him down several flights of stone stairs.
***
They came out of the square and turned right into Fleet Street. Brabourne kept talking al the while.
'In a nutshel, Hart vanished when he should have been fighting. He started off in the rear. The CO instructed another junior officer to tel Hart to take some reserves forward to the green line. He didn't order Hart directly; every aspect of Hart's orders that day was equivocal. He should have got off the charge simply on that count. Anyway, they came under heavy fire and the group dispersed, some taking cover, some wandering about. Hart wasn't the only man to get lost. He told an NCO
that he was going back to HQ for more orders. The trouble was that on his way back he met another junior officer who told him to go forward again with a dozen stragglers. There was bad blood going back months between Hart and this man. In court Hart argued—
Brabourne was moving briskly, dodging pedestrians, and when he puled ahead sometimes his words were lost. Eventualy he stopped to cup his hands round a match. As he did so, three different sets of bels began to ring the hour. Laurence looked up with sudden pleasure at the congestion, even of churches, in the heart of the city. Although Brabourne appeared not to have noticed, he said, 'There was a time St Bride's and York Minster were the only churches to have a twelve-bel peal.'
Brabourne went on, 'Something else seems to have happened on that walk back: when Hart was found, he'd discarded part of his uniform despite the bitter cold. He said a shel had landed near him, opening a smal mass grave, and that rotten fragments of bodies hit him. Who knows the truth? I didn't. There were graves everywhere, theirs and ours, rotting bodies everywhere, come to that. It might have happened that way. His story was semi- coherent. It was generaly believed that he was trying to disguise the fact that he was an officer while keeping his head down until the worst of the attack was over.
'The trigger for Hart's absenting himself was undoubtedly the squabble over who had the right to give who orders. Puerile. This other chap—who was supposed to be in charge of ammo, not giving tactical orders—rushed back to report him. Pathetic and lethal. It was tit for tat realy. Hart had reported him a while back for smuggling a woman into their shared quarters, said he couldn't sleep.'
Laurence recognised so much of what he was hearing: antagonisms, feuds, intolerance born of sheer fatigue, but rarely with such a fatal outcome. In his own regiment, Polock—said to be the fattest, least fit soldier ever to be sent into action, and who was rumoured to have needed to have his uniform made specialy—had been mocked relentlessly as he blundered and wheezed through his duties, always trying to deflect jokes made at his expense by being the funny man. To his shame Laurence had tried not to notice.
'But if Hart had gone straight back,' Brabourne continued, suddenly crossing the street at an angle between two motor buses, 'it would probably have passed over.' A car narrowly missed Laurence and the driver hooted his horn at him.
'When he drifted in the next day, his failure to account for his absence led the acting CO to put him under arrest. What happened to Hart between the moment he walked off and his eventual return to the battalion is anybody's guess. I don't think he planned to get out of a tough situation. I think he genuinely lost his mind. Just for a while. But that wasn't the majority view; they thought he was simply in a funk.'
Laurence nodded. In military offences that he'd witnessed, a lot depended on interpretation. However, the cases he'd dealt with did not involve officers, nor did they carry the death penalty.
They were outside a narrow building with a lead-paned bow window.
'Ye Olde Cock Tavern, no less,' said Brabourne, pushing open the heavy door. 'Dickens' favourite.'
The place wasn't busy and they took a table near the fire, facing each other on blackened oak settles. Brabourne insisted on buying the beer.
'There were two things that prejudiced the case,' Brabourne continued, tapping the end of a match on the table to emphasise his points. 'Firstly, Hart had never wanted to be there. He wanted to be in the navy. And he kept on and on asking for transfers, which, as I said before, didn't gain him any friends and of course the navy never took the casualties the army did. So rather than a genuine wish, I think, to be at sea, this looked like further evidence of cowardice. Secondly, the regiment was struggling. Very low morale. There were rumours that a handful of men had gone over to the Germans in the next sector. Junior officers were terrifyingly inexperienced as wel as bickering among themselves.'
