Soldier No More (10 page)

The schoolmaster sat back as though released from a spell. “I don’t think poor Captain Roche understands a word we’re saying, Clarkie. He can hardly be expected to fathom our ancient and exceedingly byzantine history.”

There was an irony in that, though whether it was accidental or deliberate it was hard to estimate, thought Roche: it had been out of that byzantine family history and into genuine Byzantine history that ‘Master’ David had eventually plunged himself, as to the manner born.

But meanwhile his role was to draw Ada Clarke out in whatever direction Wimpy indicated.

He looked at her expectantly, as one desiring enlightenment. “Mr— Major Willis … brought the champagne down here … ?”

Mrs Clarke sighed. “The Master was always very strict with Master David when there was a party up at the house, you see, sir—“

“Strict?” Wimpy cut in. “He banished the boy at the drop of a hat, more like.”

“No, sir. That’s not quite fair. Some of those parties, they were …” Mrs Clarke searched for a word descriptive of Major Nigel Audley’s entertainments, “… not suitable.”

“ ‘Adults only’,” supplied Wimpy. “There is an element of truth in what Clarkie says—or doesn’t say … This was the thirties, you have to remember, dear boy—gangsters in America, and Herr Hitler’s little experiment in Germany, and Uncle Joe in Russia, killing off everyone in sight… and Mussolini in Italy, and Kim Philby reporting the war in Spain for
The Times
—and for Uncle Joe, of course …”

And unemployment in England,” said Roche.

“And unemployment—for the unemployed,” agreed Wimpy. “And for Nigel Audley and William Willis MA there was ‘gather ye rosebuds while ye may’—and for dear Lottie Templeton too, for that matter… no one could say her nymphomaniacal instincts weren’t well-advised in the circumstances—the jolly old winged chariot collected her in the Blitz in 1940, didn’t it, Clarkie? I rather lost touch with her after Jack Wallace-White succumbed to her charms …?”

“No, sir. It was a V-l in 1944,” said Mrs Clarke. “She was driving a mobile canteen for the Church of Scotland, down in Camberwell it was.”

For the Church of Scotland?” Wimpy echoed her incredulously.

“That’s what Colonel Deacon told me, sir. He said it was on account of her husband—him that was killed in the desert, I think … or was it that one, or the other one?”

Wimpy nodded. “Jack was certainly killed in the desert—Sidi Rezegh in ‘41. But the Church of Scotland … well, I suppose that was because all Jack’s money was tied up in whisky distilling … and if Laurie Deacon said so, then it’s not to be contested.” He grinned at Roche. “That’s Mr Laurie Deacon MP, QC
et cetera
now—he was one of the gang then, a smart young barrister who’d just taken silk … in fact, it was probably him in that summer house with Lottie, the blighter—Clarkie?”

Ada Clarke pursed her lips. “That’s not for me to say, sir, Mr William.”

“Or was it Georgie MacGibbon? He was killed at Kohima, Clarkie, so he won’t mind if you tell me!”

Ada Clarke shook her head. “All I’ll say, sir, is … it wasn’t you.”

Wimpy stared at her, and then nodded again, slowly. “Fair enough … ‘It is knightly to keep faith—even after a thousand years’.” His eyes came back to Roche. “
Puck of Pook
’
s Hill
—Kipling’s your set author for this exam, old boy, and don’t ever forget it. We all knew it backwards—I read it to young David in this very room, by God! And the last party we ever had—do you remember that, Clarkie?—September the second, 1939—do you remember that—?”

“It was a Saturday, sir. I remember that because my Charlie was in uniform, and you brought him along with you—you and the Master, Mr Nigel, you were all in uniform—and I pressed three uniforms that night… those blooming battle-dresses with the pleats down the back—I had to put soap along the inside of them, to set the creases right—like knife-edges, they were, when I’d finished with them… and you all got horrid drunk that night—and my Charlie too, with you, what never got drunk normally—
I remember!”

Wimpy’s eyes glittered. “That’s right.And young David was banished— as usual—and I came down here … I came down here while I could still walk, that is … and I found him sitting in front of the window, and he was reading
Puck
—the chapter where the Saxon chieftains come to the young Roman officers under flag of truce and invite them to plunder Britain together instead of fighting each other on the Great Wall—I remember too!” The eyes came back to Roche, but this time they no longer saw him. “And I went back to the house full of whisky and Kipling—they turned the Saxons down, of course, the young Romans did … ‘The Wall must be won at a price’… and I looked at Nigel and Georgie and the rest of them, and I said, like the Saxon said, ‘We be a goodly company; I wonder what the ravens and the dogfish will make of us before the snow melts’.
I remember
.”

The little room was silent for a moment, full of memories in which Roche had no part to play, except as an archaeologist. Then the schoolmaster blinked and focussed on him again.

“Pure melodrama, old boy! Because when the snows melted we were all still there, large as life and useless as a box of lead soldiers. The war didn’t start off at all the way we expected—we’d readied ourselves up for battle and sudden death, and all we did was parade-ground drill and route marches for nine months.” He grinned. “My first war wounds were two dislocated thumbs falling off a motor-bike and a broken collar-bone playing rugger!”

“Ah—but it made up for lost time after that, the war did,” said Mrs Clarke grimly.

“Very true, Clarkie,” Wimpy nodded, no longer grinning. “And the ravens and dogfish did get most of us in that party by ‘45, sure enough—only Laurie Deacon and I came back, in fact … and Laurie hardly counts, because he went straight into Intelligence—or straight in via the Judge Advocate’s Department, anyway, and after that he knew too much to be allowed to risk his skin.” He paused. “And Charlie, of course.”

Ada Clarke sighed. “Only half of my Charlie came back, sir. He left half of hisself back in Dunkirk … and I sometimes think it was the half I knew best—“ she caught herself quickly, with a half-glance at Roche, the stranger “—but you’re right, sir—you and Mr Deacon and Charlie …
and
Master David, of course—we mustn’t forget him!”

“We certainly mustn’t,” agreed Wimpy, not looking at Roche.

“I never thought to see him go, that the war would go on so long, to take him as well as Mr Nigel—and I was sure that he was going to get killed too, he was that keen and pleased to go, being just a boy and not knowing any better … You know—“ she embraced them both with a proud look “—I pressed his battle-dress just the same as I did for you, sir … and Mr Nigel … except Master David had a better one, what he’d got from a Canadian friend of his, he said … that last leave he had, before the old Wesdragons went off to France—“ she nodded at Roche to emphasise the occasion “—that was just right after the Normandy landings they went—he was in the tanks, Master David was.”

“The ‘Wesdragons’ being the West Sussex Dragoons,” explained Wimpy, almost as proprietorial as Mrs Clarke.

“That’s right, sir. It’s the cap badge, you see—Master David explained it to me. It’s supposed to be a horse, because they used to be on horses in the old days, but it doesn’t look like no sort of horse that ever lived, it’s that badly done. So they reckon it’s part horse and part dragon—the dragon being the proper badge of Wessex. It’s all part of tradition, and tradition’s very important, to my way of thinking—like doing a thing the old way, like it’s always been done, which is the way it ought to be done—the proper way … And, of course, he said, a dragon’s just right for them in their tanks, because it’s all covered with scales—like in the window in the church, of St. George and the dragon—and they’d got all these iron plates to keep the bullets and suchlike out, you see.”

“Huh!” murmured Wimpy. “All except 88-millimetres, and the odd
Panzerfaust
, anyway … and suchlike.”

She frowned to him. “What’s that, sir?”

Nothing, Clarkie, nothing—just a thought, that’s all.” Not so much a thought as a memory:
they were practically wiped out in the bocage, south of Caumont
….

Roche observed the two very different faces, the sharp ferrety features of the schoolmaster and the red-cheeked middle-aged countrywoman, as they watched each other, sharing overlapping recollections of past fears—fears they had shared for very different reasons, the one because he knew the perils lying in wait for young tank commanders, the other because she had seen so many of them march away, never to return. And there was a third face, the one in the file, to be superimposed on those unrealised fears, hard and young and arrogant, quite unlike either of these—quite unlike the young ‘Master David’ he might otherwise have imagined from their evident affection, and yet the face which united them nevertheless: a broken-nosed, rugger-playing face.

“Ah… well, he did come back, sir, Mr William.”Ada Clarke might not know a
Panzerfaust
from a hole in the road, but she had understood Wimpy’s meaning in the end.

“He was invulnerable, certainly.” The schoolmaster’s agreement was strangely grudging. “But it was also a post-war version of him, Clarkie.”

“Well, you wouldn’t expect him to be the same, would you, sir?” Ada Clarke chided him sympathetically. “Growing up in the war…just waiting to take part—watching the other boys go before him, like young Mr Selwyn in the RAF, that was killed … and then seeing all those terrible things in those camps, that they showed on the films on VE-Day—“ she turned to Roche suddenly “—I remember going to the Odeon Cinema in town that day, with Jim’s wife Mavis, my sister-in-law … my Charlie didn’t want to go, ‘cause that was after he’d been invalided out, and he never wanted to see war films after that, only films with Betty Grable, and it was a war film that was on that day—I can’t remember what it was—it was an American one, though … but I went with Mavis, anyway.” She nodded at Roche, as though it was necessary to quote Mavis as corroborative evidence. “And in the interval the lights went up, and the manager—the cinema manager— comes on the stage and says ‘Will all mothers with young children under the age of fourteen take their children outside—and all children, and anyone of a nervous disposition please go outside with them—because we’re going to show these newsreel films that it’s better they shouldn’t see. And then they can come back afterwards when it’s over.’ And so Mavis had to go out of course, because she had young Jimmie with her—“

“Young Jimmie who’s in the army now, is that?” inquired Wimpy politely, with only the merest hint of irony.

“Not in the army sir—a Royal Marine Commando, he is.”

“That’s right—of course! He was the one who went in at Suez last year?”

“Port Said, sir. And that mad he was when he came back—wouldn’t stop talking about it, even though my Charlie didn’t like it, and went off and wouldn’t listen! But he says to me, young Jimmie does, ‘We were winning, Auntie—going through them like a dose of salts—and they wouldn’t let us go on!’—that mad he was! You should have heard him, sir!”

Wimpy nodded. “Yes. Perhaps I should have.”

“Doing very well, he is. A sergeant now, and he’s thinking of putting in for a commission and making a career of it.”

“In spite of Suez?” Wimpy caught himself. “Sorry, Clarkie—you were in the cinema on VE-Day—?”

“Yes, sir … Well, of course, young Jimmie was only a nipper then—he was eleven years old, or thereabouts, must have been—so Mavis has to take him out. And she wasn’t very pleased, either! ‘You tell me what happens, Ada’, she says … And … then they showed these films of the camps, where all the people were dead, poor souls—with arms and legs like matchsticks, and the bones showing through … just skin and bone, they were—I never saw anything like it in my life. Great piles of them, with the legs and arms hanging out—you couldn’t hardly credit it, not unless you’d seen it—like scarecrows, poor souls.” Ada Clarke shook her head, still only half-believing the evidence of her own eyes after a dozen years.

“Yes, Clarkie?” Wimpy jogged her gently.

“Yes, sir. Well… I thought—I can still remember what I thought, like it was yesterday—“ she looked at Roche. “I thought ‘he hadn’t any right to do that, did Hitler’. I mean … killing people, that’s bad enough, when they haven’t done you any harm—but doing
that
to them … that’s not
right
.”

Roche waited.

“And then I thought—it’s funny, but we had this German couple to stay at the house, friends of the Master, Mr Nigel—before the war…and they couldn’t have been nicer … and I thought, they couldn’t have known about this, not Herr Manfred and Frau Clara—they wouldn’t have stood for it—they would have put a stop to that if they’d known about it, they would.”

Out of nowhere, unsought and unbidden, the memory of the report on the Siberian camps and the recent Hungarian deportations came to Roche. It wasn’t true to say that he hadn’t believed the report; rather, he had accepted it on a level which had somehow rendered belief irrelevant to his own personal existence, his own reality.

But he had stood for it. Or … he had not stood against it: he had felt as anonymous, as removed from cause and effect, as guiltless as a bomb-aimer far above a darkened city, Hamburg or Dresden or Coventry or Moscow, just doing the duty which had fallen to him—which had to be done by someone—and armoured by the belief that the end must sanctify such means.

Yet now … even now he didn’t know how he had argued himself into that original dishonesty, except that it had somehow been inextricably mixed up with Julie, and that her doubts had become his certainties … even, he didn’t know how those certainties had become doubts again; or even if they were doubts—or that it was simply the accumulation of his own fears which was finally shooting him down, forcing him to descend into the fires of his own making.

“And then I thought—I can still remember thinking it, seeing our boys there in the film, in that awful place, with all the dead people—I thought ‘Lord, I hope Master David isn’t there, seeing such things right there in front of him …’ “ Mrs Clarke trailed off, blinking at Roche for a moment, then taking hold of herself. “It’d be enough to turn anyone’s mind, that.”