Chapter 7 The Returns

The returns left Argentonne every evening at six in a canvas bag on the ration wagon, and they were the cleanest thing in the whole establishment, cleaner than the wards, cleaner than the water, cleaner than any man's hands. Milly learned their shape because Danforth showed her, one evening when Cradock was at supper and the corridor was empty and the young clerk had decided, in the way of a man who has been carrying something too long, to put a little of it down. The register and the returns were two views of the same day. The register recorded what happened; the returns recorded what was to be counted. On the page for the twenty-first of September, the register held seventeen walking wounded and one admission for observation. The returns held sixteen names and no admission at all. A man had simply not existed for the length of a wagon ride to the railhead. "It is not always a whole man," Danforth whispered. "Sometimes it is only a number, or a letter in a name. Mostly nobody notices. Who counts the letters in a name? Who counts the men twice?" "Who decides which man?" Milly asked. Danforth would not answer that. But he did not need to, because they both knew the answer, and the answer had a key and a lantern and a small tidy smile, and the answer's name was Cradock. The store by the gate was the whole secret of it, when you thought it through. Nothing in the establishment was guarded so carefully as the long low room with the iron door, and nothing was thought about less. Inside it were the effects of men who had died at Argentonne: their tunics, their boots, their letters, their photographs, their pay-books, their identity discs. Each man's estate waited there until it could be sent home or sold or written off. And each estate included the two things that made a man a man in the eyes of the Army: a name, stamped on a disc, and a number, written in a book. Take the disc. Leave the grave unknown. Keep the name in the ledger until a buyer comes. Then sell it, and write the sale in another ledger, the one nobody sees, the one with the key. The buyers were not only criminals. That was the part Milly had not expected. Boyle, in his low voice in Ward C, had described them: a paymaster's clerk who had gambled away the mess funds; a sergeant-major who had taken a bullet through the thigh in 1915 and would rather sell his mother than go up again; a young officer's servant who had been promised a farm in Canada by a man who turned out to be no one at all. Men bought names for different reasons and paid in different coin, and the coin was not always money. Sometimes it was silence. Sometimes it was a favour owed. Sometimes it was the address of a mother who would grieve less for a missing son than for a living coward. And above Cradock, or beside him, there was someone else. That was the other thing Boyle had said, and Danforth had confirmed with a nod and no words: the buyers with money to spend did not come to a quartermaster sergeant. They came to an officer. There was a staff captain at the railhead at Marlefield, a man with an expensive greatcoat and a way of being everywhere, and his name was Quarles, and men spoke of him the way they spoke of bad weather. Milly went back to the tannery that night and took out the notebook and looked at the number at the top of the last page: ninety-one, and then, below it, in the small hand she used for the second list, three more names that should have been and were not, and now a fourth, the name of Corporal Ewan Boyle, who was not dead yet but who had told her a dangerous thing and was lying in Ward C by a window. This is the arithmetic of the machine, and it is worth setting out, because it killed more men than the shells did. Every day, at every dressing station and every clearing station and every base hospital, a man is entered, and every entry is a line, and every line is added to the other lines, and the sum is called the strength. The strength goes up the line to the division, and the division sends back what the Army calls an establishment, which is the number of men a unit is permitted to have, and the difference between the strength and the establishment is how many replacements a unit may ask for, and how many it may ask for is how many it gets, and how many it gets is how many it can put into the trench on the morning of an attack. A unit that loses a man and does not lose a line is a unit that will still be told it is at full strength on the day it is ordered over the top. And a full-strength unit that goes over the top with a hole in its ranks has been quietly sentenced to death by a pen, in a warm room, a hundred miles from the guns. The returns were how that sentence was pronounced, and the returns were Danforth's labour, Cradock's signature, and, somewhere above them both, an officer's silence. It was the shape of a machine so ordinary that it did not look like a crime. Nobody in it had to hate a man in order to kill him. They had only to write his number down wrongly. The officer's name was Quarles. He was a staff captain at the railhead at Marlefield, and Milly saw him for the first time on the tenth of October, when he came out to Argentonne on an inspection that was not really an inspection, in an expensive greatcoat with a fur collar and boots that had never been within a mile of the line, and walked the wards with an expression of grave concern that never once reached his eyes. He was a handsome man and he knew it, and he had the trick of remembering your name and using it like a coin, so that for a moment you felt you had been paid. He stopped at the foot of a bed and asked a boy where he was from and how he was keeping, and the boy, who had a chest wound and a fortnight to live and did not know it, answered with a kind of bewildered gratitude. Quarles nodded and moved on. At the door he turned and looked back along the ward, and for a fraction of a second his face was not the face of a concerned officer but the face of a man counting the beds. Then he was gone, and the boy was still answering questions put by a man who was no longer there. Danforth told her later that there was a ledger which never left the railhead, a private book that Quarles kept in his own case and that no quartermaster was permitted to see, and that in it were entered the names that had been sold and the names of the men who had bought them, with a figure in pounds against each purchase. He did not know the figures. He knew only that certain men in the establishment had been approached, and that one of them had refused, and that the one who refused had been transferred up the line within the week to a place from which men did not often write home. She did not know it then, but she was already too late for Boyle. She would learn that in the morning, and she would learn, in the same hour, exactly how far the market's reach extended, and how cheaply the machine could make a man vanish when he had told the wrong woman a true thing. ---