Chapter 17 The Man in the Barn

She left Argentonne at first light on the fourteenth, in Number Seven, with her transfer order in her pocket and Hilda beside her and the road to Marlefield running west and the road to Vallencourt running off it a mile before the crossroads. They went off it. Vallencourt in the early morning was a village with no roofs and one church tower and a farm at the western end with a big stone barn that had somehow survived three years of shelling, and it was in that barn, at the back, behind a wall of loose hay, that Milly found the man who had bought a name. His name was Cyril Mabb, and he had been in the barn for two days, and he had not eaten in one of them. He was a small, thin, wincing man of about thirty in the uniform of a battalion he had never served in, with a pay-book in his pocket that said he was somebody else, and when Milly came round the hay with her lamp he did not run and he did not fight, because he had come to the end of the place where running was possible. "I am not a soldier," he said, before she had asked him anything. "I am a clerk from Leeds and I was called up in the spring and I was sent up here in the summer and I was so frightened every day that I could not eat and could not sleep and could not hold a rifle, and a man in the canteen told me there was a way out and I took it, and now I have another man's name and another man's pay-book and I am going to be shot anyway, and I would rather be shot than go up that trench one more time." Hilda, at the barn door, watched the road. Milly sat down on a crate of nothing with the lamp between them and asked him, quietly, to begin at the beginning. He told her how it worked, and his account matched her own in every particular and added one thing she had not known. The men who wanted a name did not come to Cradock. They did not know Cradock existed. They came to a sergeant in the canteen, who came to a corporal in the pay office, who came to Cradock, and no man ever saw more than one link of the chain. The names came from the graves; the cards came from the dressing station, where a clerk would strike a dead man's line from the roll and enter a living man in his place; and the money came from wherever money comes from, which is to say from men who have it and men who owe it and men who can borrow it in the confidence of a war that will excuse any debt. "And the officer?" Milly said. "The captain at the railhead?" Mabb went the colour of the hay. "I have never seen the captain," he said. "Nobody sees the captain. There was a room at the railhead on the fifteenth of last month, and there were two men in it who paid, and a man behind a desk, and the room had a fire, and I was taken in by the sergeant and told to say nothing and look at the floor, and I did, and the only thing I saw through the whole of it was the desk." "What was on the desk?" "A book," Mabb said. "A black book with brass corners. The man behind the desk wrote in it with a gold pen, and when he had finished the sergeant gave me a paper and the paper had my new name on it, and I walked out of the room a man who did not exist." Milly sat quite still. A black book with brass corners, kept in a room with a fire, written in with a gold pen, containing the names of the sold and the names of the bought. It was the one document in the whole district that no fire could explain away, because a man who keeps a private ledger of his own crimes does not keep it to burn; he keeps it to blackmail, in case the war should turn against him, and a blackmailer's ledger is the only kind of man's book that is ever really safe, because its owner will defend it with everything he has. "Where is the room?" Milly said. Mabb looked at her and looked at the barn door and looked at the bit of the road he could see through it, and then he gave her the answer, and the answer was a mile from where they sat, on the railhead side of Vallencourt, in a farmhouse that had been taken for an officers' mess and that had a stove that worked and a fire that was always lit and a door that was always closed. "There are six of them coming tonight," Mabb said. "I was to be one, but I lost my nerve and ran, and they will have found another, or they will have five. The sergeant comes at ten with the papers. The captain comes at eleven, if he comes. I do not know if he comes. I only know that I would rather die in a ditch tonight than be in that house when the door opens." Milly stood up. "You are not going to die in a ditch," she said. "You are going to come with me, and you are going to say all of that again, in a room, in front of a man who can sign, and then you are going to be a witness instead of a deserter, which is the difference between a ditch and a cell, and between a cell and, if you are very lucky, a farm in the west with a wife and a dog and nobody who knows your old name at all." She sent Hilda up the road with a note to the Commandant before they left the barn, because a plan with one string to it is not a plan at all, and Hilda, who had never in her life been given an instruction she did not improve upon, improved on this one by also sending word to the railhead by the field telephone at the dressing station, which she was not authorized to use and used, and which meant, though Milly did not learn it until much later, that the colonel knew about the farmhouse by ten past ten. Then there was the matter of what to do with Mabb. A deserter in a barn was one man's private disaster; a deserter in the cab of an ambulance was the market's evidence, and Milly had learned by now that a witness is worth more alive than dead and worth more than his own fear if you can keep him from running. She told him the truth, which was that he was going to be afraid for several more hours and that afterward he might not be afraid for the rest of his life, and Mabb, who was small and wincing and had already run as far as France would let him, looked at her for a long moment and then did the bravest thing Milly ever saw a frightened man do, which was to stop trembling and get into the ambulance. They drove to the crossroad and parked behind a wall and sat there through the long afternoon in the cold with the light going out of the sky, and Milly took out the notebook and read the eight pages over one more time, and then closed it and put it away, because there is a point past which reading a thing again does nothing but frighten the reader. Mabb stared at her. "Who are you?" he said. It was Hilda who answered, from the door. "She is the woman who keeps the book," she said, "and the book is the only thing in France tonight that is on your side." ---