Chapter 20 The Next Convoy

The autumn turned to winter, and the great battle along the Somme guttered out at last in mud and rain and the ordinary, unbearable business of holding what had been taken, and the road to the Warren froze hard in the middle of November and thawed again for Christmas, and the column drove it morning and evening as it had always done. The market at Argentonne was finished. That much the winter confirmed. There were no more signatures of dead men in the effects ledger, because the effects ledger itself was a new one, ruled fresh, with the old one entered as destroyed by fire; and there were no more names walking out of graves, because the names were checked now by a clerk in the pay office at the railhead who had been sent out from the division with instructions and no friends. Cradock's little kingdom by the gate was gone, its key handed to a new quartermaster sergeant who counted the boots twice and slept badly. It was, as far as any of them could tell, over. It was not over. The next convoy came down from the forward line on the second day of the new year, in the freezing dark, twenty-one men strung along the duckboards and the stretchers coming behind, and Milly met them at the Warren with the engine running and her notebook out. She was working her way down the walking cases with her pencil while the stretchers were loaded, taking names and numbers the way she had taken them a thousand times, and she was three men from the end of the line before she understood what she was looking at. The label on the third man from the end said *Macfarlane, D.*, and the number beside it, and a battalion she knew. Milly had seen that name before. She had seen it in the effects ledger at Marlefield in October, written twice, once in blue ink and once in black, the name of a man who had died at Argentonne in September and whose effects had been signed for twice by two different men on two different days. She had copied it into the small hand in the back of her book. She had sat with it for a fortnight and had never found out what it meant, because the ledger had burned and the men who might have known were gone. And here it was, on a living man, walking down a road a hundred miles from the grave it belonged to, in the first week of the new year. She looked at the man's face in the lamplight, and it was the ordinary, tired, wary face of a soldier who had been in the line and did not want to talk about it, and she held his card up to the light, and it was clean. It was clean, and correct, and signed; and the man said his name when she asked him, and the name he said was Macfarlane, and he said it without a flicker, because by now he had said it so many times that it had become as true to him as his own. Milly wrote it in the book. She wrote it in the front, in the ordinary column, where the living men went. Then she turned to the back, to the small hand, and under the name she had copied from the burnt ledger in October she wrote a single line: *same name, alive, January 2nd.* And she stood there in the frozen yard with the pencil in her hand and the breath smoking round her face and understood at last what she had been refusing to understand since the fire. The market had not been broken. It had been pruned. The men at Argentonne had sold a district, and the district had been burned, and the burning had only taught the men who ran it that a station is too small a thing to hide a trade in. A name that was worth ten pounds in October at Vallencourt was worth twenty in January somewhere else, at some other clearing station, in some other district where no woman kept a book and no clerk kept two registers in his head. She finished the convoy. She drove the twenty-one men up the road to the school and saw them into the wards and watched Danforth write them in, and then she went back to the tannery and sat down on her bench with the notebook open on her knee, and after a while Hilda came and sat down beside her without asking what was wrong, because Hilda could read her face the way she could read a road. "It is not finished," Milly said. "No," Hilda said. "There will be another station, and another sergeant with a key, and another captain with a black book, and there will be men who want to be somebody else as long as there is a war to be somebody else's way out of." "Almost certainly," Hilda said. "What are you going to do about it?" Milly looked at the notebook: the ninety-one names in the front, from the summer, and the small hand at the back, and the last line, written only an hour ago, which had turned out to be the first line of something much larger than she had known. She thought about the inspector who had come and gone, and the division that had buried a scandal to save a battle, and the whole enormous machine that counted men and could not count them twice, and she knew, with the flat certainty of a person who has read a ledger, exactly how much one driver with a notebook could do against it. Not very much. Not nearly enough. And more than nothing, which was what would be done if she put the pencil down. She told Denbigh about it the next day, in the yard, because Denbigh was the only person alive who had stood in that room at Vallencourt and had heard the black book read aloud, and because a thing you have seen needs a second witness if it is to be believed even by yourself. Denbigh listened with his cap in his hands and his bad shoulder hunched against the cold, and when she had finished he did not say, as Hilda had, that it was finished, or, as the colonel had, that it was too large for one person. He said, quietly, the thing she had not expected from a man who could hit a target at three hundred yards. "When I was in the hospital on the coast," he said, "there was a boy in the next bed with no legs and a photograph of his wife, and a man came round the wards asking names and numbers for a new roll, a proper one, one that would be kept, and the boy gave his name and the man wrote it down and it was the first time in a year the boy had heard his own name said out loud in the right order. That is what a name is. It is the one thing a man has that the war cannot take. And there are men out there with a black book who sell them like boots." "What do you want to do about it?" Milly said. "I want to find the next station," Denbigh said. "I have one shoulder left and no education, and I can read a pay-book as well as any clerk, and I have nothing else to do until this war ends. If you go, I go." "You will be killed," Milly said. "Probably," Denbigh said. "Everybody is. It is only a question of whether the book is right." She turned to a clean page at the very back, and wrote the date at the top of it, and beneath the date she wrote the words that she would still be writing, in a dozen yards of mud and a dozen ruined villages, long after this winter and this war had passed into the hands of the clerks who keep the other books: *They have started somewhere else. Find out where.* Outside, the guns were quiet, and the road to the Warren ran east into the dark, and somewhere down it a convoy was already coming, and somewhere beyond the convoy a man was already paying for the name of a man who was dead.