Chapter 13 The Cross at Vallencourt

Rowland Denbigh came up from the coast on the twelfth of October, on a lorry that ran the last forty miles of a road he had last seen in the opposite direction, and by the time he reached Argentonne it was dusk and he was grey with the journey and with something else. Milly met him at the gate. She had expected a big man, because a man who is written about as a friend of an unremarkable man is usually large in the memory; he was not large. He was the thin man from the photograph, older by three years and thinner still, with his right arm strapped across his chest and a look about him of a person who has been holding himself together by arithmetic. "You have his face on a card," he said, before she had spoken. "Show me." She showed him the half-photograph. He stood quite still in the yard light and looked at it, and then he turned his own tunic back and showed her, stitched into the lining, the other half: the same two men, the same dog, the same church wall behind, torn along the same line. "He kept the half with me in it," Denbigh said. "I kept the half with him. That is the kind of men we were. Now tell me what happened to him." She told him as they walked to the burial ground, and he took it without interruption, which she had not expected, and which told her more about him than any amount of breaking down would have. She told him about the ninety-one and the clean card and the wax-pale face in the ambulance, and the word UNKNOWN on a cross in the fourth row from the hedge. At the mound he knelt, as well as a man with a strapped arm can kneel, and stayed a long while with his hand flat on the earth, and when he stood he was a different colour, though his face had not changed. "He was not a buyer," Denbigh said. "That is what everyone will think, and it is a lie. He had found the ledger. He was going to write to the adjutant, and then to the staff, and he had it all copied out in his own hand, and he gave the copy to me to keep because I was going back to the base with the shoulder and he thought a copy in a hospital would be safer than a copy in a trench." He touched his tunic. "It is in here. He found the ledgers because he could add, and a man who can add will notice when nine men die and only eight guns stop." He looked at Milly. "You are the woman who keeps the book. He wrote to me about you. He said, there is a girl on the ambulances who writes down every name, and if I am killed, go to her." "I did not know him," Milly said. "I only carried him for four miles." "That is four miles more than most of us get," Denbigh said. He borrowed a knife and a piece of chalk from the burial party's shed, and cut into the wooden cross, under the word UNKNOWN, a line that read *H. Ryecroft, Pte*, and the number, and the battalion, and the date. It was not official and it was not legal and it was going to be found and painted over, and it was, for the moment, the only true record of the man anywhere in France. The cemetery behind the sugar factory had grown since August. There were two hundred graves now, in rows, with a path down the middle and a wooden notice at the gate which said, in a soldier's careful lettering, that this ground had been given to the dead by the people of France and would be kept until the end of the war and after. Milly had driven past it a dozen times and never once stopped. It had seemed, from the road, like a place that belonged to other people. It did not seem so now. She walked the path beside Denbigh with the rain off and the last of the light in the sky, and she read the names as she passed them, because she could not help it, because reading names had become as automatic to her as breathing, and every third or fourth cross was a name she recognised from the road, a man she had carried or a man she had seen carried, and there was a comfort in it that she had not expected: the comfort of a list that did not lie. Whatever else the machine did to these men, the ground kept them honestly. They stood a long while at the grave, and Denbigh told her the rest of it, in the flat voice of a man who has decided that the truth is a debt and must be paid in full. Ryecroft had been the battalion's best clerk before the war, a schoolmaster's son from a small town who could add columns in his head and had kept the pay-book of a whole company without a mistake. When the market began, in the spring, it was Ryecroft who noticed first, because a man who has kept a book all his life knows the feel of a false entry the way a gardener knows the feel of a stone in the soil. He had said nothing for a month while he gathered proof, and he had written it all down in a fair hand, and he had been about to take it to the adjutant when the order came for the push. "He gave me the copy because I was going down the line with the shoulder," Denbigh said. "He said, if I am killed, you will know what to do with it. And then he went up, and then he was dead, and then they told me he was alive, and I sat in a hospital bed on the coast for six weeks with the copy in my tunic and no idea in the world how to use it. I am not a clever man, Miss Passmore. I am a man who can hit a target at three hundred yards and hold his drink. That is the whole of my education." "It is more than most men manage," Milly said. "And it is enough. What I need from you is not cleverness. It is your memory, and your name, and your nerve, in a room, in front of a man who can sign." Denbigh looked at the cross he had cut, at the name of his friend in the wood, and he said, "I can do that. I have been waiting two months for somebody to ask." They walked back toward the village with the guns quiet for once, and the smell of the sugar factory rose around them, sweet and rotten at the same time, like everything else in that country. They walked back in the dark. Denbigh gave Milly a folded paper, copied in a careful clerk's hand she did not recognise and would come to know: Ryecroft's own summary of the ledgers, seven names, two dates, and the initials of the man he could not name because he was an officer. At the bottom, in Ryecroft's hand, was a sentence that Denbigh had not read aloud, and that Milly read twice in the lamplight of the tannery before she put it with the photograph and the notebook: *If I am dead and the lists still lie, then the market is bigger than one clerk, and you will need more than a paper to stop it. You will need a room, a witness, and a man with the power to sign.* ---