Private Peaceful (13 page)

“What about witnesses?” I ask him. “You should have had witnesses. I could have said. I could have told them.”

“I asked for you, Tommo, but they wouldn’t accept you because you were my brother. I asked for Pete, but then they told me that Pete was missing. And as for the rest of
the company, I was told they’d been moved into another sector, and were up in the line and not available. So they heard it all from Sergeant Hanley, and they swallowed everything he told them, like it was gospel truth. I think there’s a big push coming, and they wanted to make an example of someone, Tommo. And I was the Charlie.” He laughed at that. “A right Charlie. Then of course there was my record as a troublemaker, ‘a mutinous troublemaker’ Hanley called me. Remember Etaples? Had up on a charge of gross insubordination? Field Punishment Number One? It was all there on my record. So was my foot.”

“Your foot?”

“That time I was shot in the foot. All foot wounds are suspicious, they said. It could have been self-inflicted — it goes on all the time, they said. I could have done it myself just to get myself out of the trenches and back to Blighty.”

“But it wasn’t like that,” I say.

“Course it wasn’t. They believed what they wanted to believe.”

“Didn’t you have anyone to speak up for you?” I ask him. “Like an officer or someone?”

“I didn’t think I needed one,” Charlie tells me. “Just tell them the truth, Charlie, and you’ll be all right. That’s what I thought. How wrong could I be? I thought maybe a letter of good character from Wilkie would help. I was sure they’d listen to him, him being an officer and one of them. I told
them where I thought he was. The last I’d heard he was up in a hospital in Scotland somewhere. They told me they’d written to the hospital, but that he’d died of his wounds six months before. The whole court martial took less than an hour, Tommo. That’s all they gave me. An hour for a man’s life. Not a lot, is it? And do you know what the brigadier said, Tommo? He said I was a worthless man. Worthless. I’ve been called a lot of things in my life, Tommo, but none of them ever upset me, except that one. I didn’t show it, mind. I wouldn’t have given them the satisfaction. And then he passed sentence. I was expecting it by then. Didn’t upset me nearly as much as I thought it would.”

I hang my head, because I cannot stop my eyes filling.

“Tommo,” he says, lifting my chin. “Look on the bright side. It’s no more than we were facing every day in the trenches. It’ll be over very quick. And the boys are looking after me all right here. They don’t like it any more than I do. Three hot meals a day. A man can’t grumble. It’s all over and done with, or it will be soon anyway. You want some tea, Tommo? They brought me some just before you came.”

So we sit either side of the table and share a mug of sweet strong tea, and speak of everything Charlie wants to talk about: home, bread and butter pudding with the raisins in and the crunchy crust on top, moonlit nights fishing for sea trout on the Colonel’s river, Bertha, beer at The Duke, the yellow aeroplane and the humbugs.

“We won’t talk of Big Joe or Mother or Moll,” Charlie says, “because I’ll cry if I do, and I promised myself I wouldn’t.” He leans forward suddenly in great earnest, clutching my hand. “Talking of promises, that promise you made me back in the dugout, Tommo. You won’t forget it, will you? You will look after them?”

“I promise,” I tell him, and I’ve never meant anything so much in all my life.

“You’ve still got the watch then,” he says, pulling back my sleeve. “Keep it ticking for me, and then when the time comes, give it to Little Tommo, so he’ll have something from me. I’d like that. You’ll make him a good father, like Father was to us.”

It is the moment. I have to do it now. It is my last chance. I tell him about how Father had died, about how it had happened, what I had done, how I should have told him years ago, but had never dared to. He smiles. “I always knew that, Tommo. So did Mother. You’d talk in your sleep. Always having nightmares, always keeping me awake about it, you were. All nonsense. Not your fault. It was the tree that killed Father, Tommo, not you.”

“You sure?” I ask him.

“I’m sure,” he says. “Quite sure.”

We look at one another and know that time is getting short now. I see a flicker of panic in his eyes. He pulls some letters out of his pocket and pushes them across the table. “You’ll see they get these, Tommo?”

We grip hands across the table, put our foreheads together and close our eyes. I manage to say what I’ve been wanting to say.

“You’re not worthless, Charlie. They’re the worthless bastards. You’re the best friend I’ve ever had, the best person I’ve ever known.”

I hear Charlie starting to hum softly. It is
Oranges and Lemons,
slightly out of tune. I hum with him, our hands clasping tighter, our humming stronger now. Then we are singing, singing it out loud so that the whole world can hear us, and we are laughing as we sing. And there are tears, but it does not matter because these are not tears of sadness, they are tears of celebration. When we’ve finished, Charlie says: “It’s what I’ll be singing in the morning. It won’t be God Save the ruddy King or All Things bleeding Bright and Beautiful. It’ll be
Oranges and Lemons
for Big Joe, for all of us.”

The guard comes in and tells us our time is up. We shake hands then as strangers do. There are no words left to say. I hold our last look and want to hold it forever. Then I turn away and leave him.

When I got back to camp yesterday afternoon I expected the sympathy and the long faces and all those averted eyes I’d been used to for days before. Instead I was greeted by smiles and with the news that Sergeant Hanley was dead. He had been killed, they told me, in a freak
accident, blown up by a grenade out on the ranges. So there was some justice, of a sort, but it had come too late for Charlie. I hoped someone at Walker Camp had heard about it and would tell Charlie. It would be small consolation for him, but it would be something. Any jubilation I felt, or any of us felt, turned very soon to grim satisfaction, and then evaporated completely. It seemed as if the entire regiment was subdued, like me quite unable to think of anything else but Charlie, of the injustice he was suffering, and the inevitability of what must happen to him in the morning.

We have been billeted this last week or so around an empty farmhouse, less than a mile down the road from where they’re keeping Charlie at Walker Camp. We’ve been waiting to go up into the trenches further down the line on the Somme. We live in bell tents, and the officers are billeted in the house. The others have been doing their very best to make it as easy as they can for me. I know from their every look how much they feel for me, NCOs and officers too. But kind though they are I do not want or need their sympathy or their help. I do not even want the distraction of their company. I want simply to be alone. Late in the evening I take a lamp with me and move out of the tent into this barn, or what is left of it. They bring me blankets and food, and then leave me to myself. They understand. The padre comes to do what he can. He can
do nothing. I send him away. So here I am now with the night gone so fast and the clock ticking towards six o’clock. When the time comes, I will go outside, and I will look up at the sky because I know Charlie will be doing the same as they take him out. We’ll be seeing the same clouds, feeling the same breeze on our faces. At least that way we’ll be together.

I try to close my mind to what is happening this minute to Charlie. I try just to think of Charlie as he was at home, as we all were. But all I can see in my mind are the soldiers leading Charlie out into the field. He is not stumbling. He is not struggling. He is not crying out. He is walking with his head held high, just as he was after Mr Munnings caned him at school that day. Maybe there’s a lark rising, or a great crow wheeling into the wind above him. The firing squad stands at ease, waiting. Six men, their rifles loaded and ready, each one wanting only to get it over with. They will be shooting one of their own and it feels to them like murder. They try not to look at Charlie’s face.

Charlie is tied to the post. The padre says a prayer, makes the sign of the cross on his forehead and moves away. It is cold now but Charlie does not shiver. The officer, his revolver drawn, is looking at his watch. They try to put a hood over Charlie’s head, but he will not have it. He looks up to the sky and sends his last living thoughts back home.

“Present! Ready! Aim!”

He closes his eyes and as he waits he sings softly.
“Oranges and Lemons, say the bells of St. Clements.”
Under my breath I sing it with him. I hear the echoing volley. It is done. It is
over. With that volley a part of me has died with him. I turn back to go to the solitude of my hay barn, and I find I am far from alone in my grieving. All over the camp I see them standing to attention outside their tents. And the birds are singing.

I am not alone that afternoon either when I go to Walker Camp to collect his belongings, and to see where they have buried him. He would like the place. He looks out over a water meadow down to where a brook runs softly under the trees. They tell me he walked out with a smile on his face as if he were going for an early-morning stroll. They tell me that he refused the hood, and that they thought he was singing when he died. Six of us who were in the dugout that day stand vigil over his grave until sundown. Each of us says the same thing when we leave.

“Bye Charlie.”

The next day the regiment is marching up the road towards the Somme. It is late June, and they say there’s soon going to be an almighty push and we’re going to be part of it. We’ll push them all the way to Berlin. I’ve heard that before. All I know is that I must survive. I have promises to keep.

In the First World War, between 1914 and 1918, over 290 soldiers of the British and Commonwealth armies were executed by firing squad, some for desertion and cowardice, two for simply sleeping at their posts.

Many of these men we now know were traumatised by shell shock. Court martials were brief, the accused often unrepresented.

It was only in 2006 that the authorities recognised the injustice these soldiers suffered. A conditional pardon was granted in November 2006.