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milk?
I slid away gratefully to the kitchen, located some more promising milk in
the cooler portion of the pantry, and found that he had left the kettle
simmering away. In bare minutes I was back, and Holmes thrust the hot, sweet
tea into the man s hands.
The gentler stimulant did its work. When the cup held only a sludge of sugar
at the bottom, Hastings drew a shaky breath and handed it over to be refilled.
When that cup was halfway down, he summoned the strength to begin his tale.
 They were such children, by that point in the War red-cheeked and
frightened, trying so hard to keep a brave face, for themselves and the
others. In the early days, of course, that wasn t the case. I offered my
services as soon as war was declared, so I saw the first days of the
Expeditionary Force. Those men, they were hard as rocks, with no more
imagination than the mules that pulled the guns. Tommy Atkins at his
best Kipling would have known them in an instant.
 And then over the winter the new generation of Tommies began to arrive, in a
trickle at first, then in numbers. Strong young men from factories and farms,
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undergraduates and lower clerks, idealistic and patriotic and oh, how they
died. The government trained them for their fathers wars, taught them how to
handle themselves in honest battle, and then shipped them off to hell in the
trenches.
He blew out a breath, his eyes far away, seeing France nine years before.
 One boy I remember, he couldn t have been more than twenty-one, a shining
example of English manhood. He arrived with his papers in October of  15, and
instead of keeping him back until his regiment came off the front line they
just passed him on. I was there when he reported for duty. The sergeant had
just brewed tea, and was handing me a tin mug when we heard the noise of
someone sloshing along the duckboards. We stuck our heads out from under the
scrap of tarpaulin the sergeant had rigged as a shelter from the rain and saw
this sopping-wet creature with a shiny new hat and mud to the thighs,
stumbling up the trench. He spotted us under the flap and waded over to the
dugout.
 And then the young fool stood to attention to return the sergeant s salute.
Straightened his back, and a sniper took him, right through that pretty new
officer s cap.
 And do you know, the sergeant laughed. It sounds utterly callous, but it was
such an appalling irony, to see this fresh-faced, blue-eyed boy stand up proud
to do his patriotic duty, before either of us could stop him. I still see it:
The boy s hand comes up and pop! God takes off the top of his head. What could
the sergeant do but laugh? And God forgive me, it was such a shock, for a
moment I couldn t help joining him. Twenty-one years of education and
responsibility going into an erect spine at the wrong instant. God s sense of
humour can be brutal.
 That was the volunteer army. It got so the sight of a newly applied set of
officers pips made my stomach heave, we lost so many young officers. It made
me rage, that all their expensive training didn t include the basic skills of
survival. Not a gentlemanly trait, I assume, self-interest. They sent us
children, and we offered them up to Moloch, and they sent us more. I had a boy
die in my arms whose cheeks had less down on them than a ripe peach. He was
fourteen, and the recruiter who d accepted the lie about his age should have
been shot.
Hastings words had welled up like poison from a lanced boil, but at this
last phrase he stumbled, remembering why we were here. After a minute he
started again, the flow slower now but inexorable.
 We had three executions in the units I served with. I witnessed two of them.
The first was a foul and bitter affair, a regular soldier in his late thirties
who d been drunk, got in an argument with his sergeant, and shot him. The man
was charged with murder, and executed three weeks later. That was in April of
1915. Two of the men on the firing squad broke down during the summer, had to
be transferred to less active duty before they were charged with some
dereliction of duty as well. One of the men returned to the Front the next
spring, the other I heard died of septicaemia from some minor wound left
untreated, a year or so later.
 The second execution was in the winter of 1916. A private standing watch
fell asleep on duty, and although he might have got away with ninety days
field punishment, he d been warned twice before. So they shot him.Pour
encourager les autres , you know. I was off having a couple of rotted toes
sawn off, so I didn t have to sit with that one. Hastings drew a shaky
breath, and went on.
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 Your duke s nephew came to my attention in the late spring of 1918. Not that
anyone knew he was a duke s nephew more than that, son and heir to one of the
great dukedoms of the realm. Had I but known, oh, had he but told me! If he d
given me the name, I could have stopped it in a moment. But I knew him as
Hewetson, and only found out the other name later, long after he had died.
 Why do you suppose he did not tell you? Holmes asked, the first
interruption to the narrative either of us had made.
 God! Hastings cried out.  I ve asked myself that a thousand ten
thousand times in the past five and a half years. Had I prodded him to tell me
his story, had I performed my sworn duty as God s servant wholeheartedly
instead of taking relief in the boy s lack of distress, he might have told me
before it was too late. Instead of which I was a craven coward, pathetically
grateful that he was not screaming and wetting himself with terror as my first
executed prisoner had been.
 But I am getting ahead of myself.
 He joined the regiment in, oh, it must have been late March, a quiet boy
with dark eyes and a limp. I was only too glad to see a bit of wear and tear
on his uniform, since it meant I wouldn t have to wince in anticipation every
time I heard a sniper s gun across the line. He knew enough to keep his head
down, he wasn t burdened with all kinds of unnecessary equipment, he was
oblivious to the stench and the rattle of guns beyond our range. He had the
makings of a soldier, in other words, and the men responded in kind.
 He d been wounded, that was clear, not only from the limp and the bits of
rock embedded under the skin of his face and hands, but from the dark look
that came into his eyes during a bombardment. The men were hunkered down in
the trenches one long night, and I was working my way along the lines when I
came upon him, tense as a humming wire but working hard to keep it from his
men. I stopped to talk to him for a quarter-hour or so, which was when I
learnt that he d been raised in Berkshire, and that he d already been buried
once in a mud-soaked trench that took a direct hit. He dismissed it with a
couple of brief but chilling phrases  drowning in cream-of-man soup is the
one I still hear in the night and said he thought it statistically unlikely
that he d take another direct hit, which was why his men were sticking so
close to him.
 In truth, his men were near him because despite his youth, despite his
apprehension, there was a core of steely authority in him that drew them like
so many magnets. They clung to him, both protecting him and drawing strength
from him. Hewetson and I talked for a short time of birds nests and fox
hunting, I think it was while the men pretended not to hear; when I moved on, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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