Chapter 14 Sister Farlow's Testimony

Milly found Sister Farlow in the doorway of Ward C at ten o'clock on the night of the twelfth, and for a while neither of them said anything at all. The ward was quiet. The bed by the window was full again, because the beds were always full, and some other man was sleeping in it, and whatever Boyle had known was now in two places: in the ground behind the church, and in the small hand at the back of Millicent Passmore's notebook. "I am not going to write anything down," Farlow said, before Milly could speak. "No," Milly said. "You are going to say it to a colonel, in a room, with a witness. That is all. You will not have to write a word. I will write the words, and you will read them, and you will say whether they are true." "And if they are true?" "Then a dead man is a man with a name again," Milly said, "instead of a grave with a word on it, and a boy who would have had his hand back by November is a boy who was murdered, instead of a case of septicemia." Farlow looked down the length of the ward, at the sleeping men, at the paper bird that someone had finally thrown away and someone else had made again and pinned to the wall. "I have a son," she said. "In the artillery. I have not seen him since 1914." "I have a brother," Milly said. "He has been missing since July, and the War Office sent me three letters, and the third one said his records were being checked again. Somebody has looked at his name, Sister, and found that it does not sit quite straight on the page. I do not know yet what that means. I mean to know." Farlow was silent for a long time. Then she said, "The drug cupboard key was on the ring in the sister's room that night, and the ring was on the hook by the door, and I was in the bed behind the screen with my eyes shut, and I heard the door and I heard the cupboard and I heard a man breathe, and I thought, if I open my eyes I will be a witness, and if I am a witness I will be a body in a ditch in Belgium by Christmas. So I kept them shut. That is my account, and it is a coward's account, and I have been carrying it for three weeks." "Then put it down," Milly said. "Not the cowardice. The cupboard, the key, the hour, and the man's breathing. The rest is between you and whatever you believe in." Farlow looked at her. Then she crossed the corridor to the sister's room and came back with a sheet of paper and a pen, and, standing at the table where the dressings were recorded, wrote a short paragraph in a strong, square hand and signed it *Bertha Farlow, Nursing Sister*, and dated it the twelfth of October, 1916, and handed it to Milly without a word. Milly folded it into her tunic. It was not enough, on its own; it would need a room and a colonel and a man with the power to sign. But she had it, and she had Danforth, who that afternoon had promised, with the miserable courage of the small, to keep the register safe and to swear to the two versions of the twenty-first of September; and she had Denbigh and Ryecroft's copy of the ledgers; and she had, in her own hand, the ninety-one and the seven. Two nights later, someone went through the tannery while the column was on a run. Milly came back at three in the morning to find the door of the harness room open and the contents of her kitbag spread across the floor, and nothing taken, and nothing, so far as she could tell, even looked at, except that the oilcloth wrapper of her notebook had been lifted out of her kit and laid on the bench, and put back, and left a half-inch to the left of where it had been. They had not found the notebook, because the notebook was not in the kitbag. It had been in her tunic all night, against her ribs, which was the only place in the world that was really hers. But they had found the wrapper, and the wrapper was a message, and the message was plain enough: we know what you keep, and we know where you keep it, and next time we will not be so careful. She did not sleep. She sat in the dark of the tannery with the notebook in her hands and made her decision, which was the one Hilda had put in her mouth two days before. She could not keep the paper safe alone, and she could not produce it alone, and she could not wait for the fourteenth to be over and hope the market would stop. She had to go up, then and there, to the one authority in the whole of that country who was outside the little kingdom of the establishment, and the only such authority she could reach in a fortnight was the inspector who came down from the railhead once a month to check the returns. The inspector's name was not Quarles. That was the point. Quarles was the market's officer; the inspector answered to the division, and the division answered to the Army, and the Army, whatever else could be said of it, did not like a sergeant who kept a private ledger and did not share it. It was not justice, and Milly had stopped expecting justice. It was arithmetic, and arithmetic was a thing she understood. She wrote it all out that night in the small hand, on three sheets of paper, in the order a stranger would need it: the register and the returns for the twenty-first of September; the seven signatures of dead men in the effects ledger; Farlow's short account, signed and dated; Ryecroft's own summary, copied fair; and the name of B. Kedge, put beside the photograph of a battalion outside a church hall. It made a document of eight pages. It was not truth, exactly; truth is not the kind of thing you can carry in a tunic. It was the road to truth, and it was the only road she had. The inspector was due on the sixteenth. The delivery at Vallencourt was set for the fourteenth. Between those two dates there were forty-eight hours in which the market could destroy whatever evidence a girl and a notebook might hope to bring to a room, and Milly, sitting in the dark with the pages in her hand, did the last sum of the night and did not like the answer. There was a rough justice in it, she thought, standing at the counting-house door in the grey light before the Commandant came down. All her life she had been taught that a good account is a true account, that a column which does not add up is a warning, and that the person who checks the sum is never the person who profits from it. She had never once imagined that the rule would follow her to France, or that she would turn out to be the only person in a district of twenty thousand men still doing her sums. But there she stood, with a notebook and a broken knuckle, about to ask a Commandant of volunteers to take an interest in a death the Army had already written down as a wound. What she did not have was time. On the fourteenth, six names would change hands at Vallencourt, and if the market moved before the truth did, then the truth would be standing in a room with its evidence in its hand while the men who had bought the names were already walking, with new papers, away from the line. ---