第10章 The Night Convoy

The order came down on a night in the first week of October, when the rain had turned to something colder and the road had lost the last of its pretence at being a road. There had been a raid at Vallencourt and the clearing station at Argentonne was full, so the overflow was to be pushed back to the base the same night, and the column was to carry the worst of it to the railhead at Marlefield and bring the empties home. It was a long run on a bad road in the dark, and Ashwell would not send the girls out alone, so the six ambulances went in convoy with Marchbanks riding ahead on a motor-cycle with a lamp that worked, and Hilda at the tail, and Milly somewhere in the middle with three stretchers and a driver's prayer. They were two miles short of Marlefield when the shelling found them. It was not aimed at them; it was the usual blind, tired evening hate, the guns throwing iron at a crossroads because the map said something was there. But a shell does not need to be aimed at an ambulance to kill it, and a splinter took Milly's offside front tyre, and the Ford swung and dug in and would not go on. "Go!" Milly shouted at the next driver, and the next driver went, and Hilda stopped behind her and would not be sent, and between them they got the three stretchers out and into Hilda's ambulance and sent it on, because a full ambulance with one driver is worth more than two drivers and an empty one. "Now what?" Hilda said, from the cab, before she closed the door. "Now I change a wheel and follow," Milly said. "Go on. He is bleeding. Go." Hilda went. Milly got the jack out and set to work in the dark with the shells coming down somewhere to the left, and it took her twenty minutes and a broken knuckle and a great deal of swearing she had learned from Marchbanks, and when it was done she was too tired to drive and too cold to sit still. There was a farm a hundred yards off the road, what was left of one: a long byre with the roof half on and the house beside it with a hole in the wall you could put a cart through. She pushed the Ford behind the byre where it could not be seen and went in to get out of the wind, and it was while she was standing in the dark of the house, listening to the guns and trying to decide whether to light a match, that she heard the voices. Two men, in the byre, with a shielded lamp. She could not see them and did not dare move closer, but the walls of these places are thin and the wind was in the right quarter, and she heard every word. "The next lot goes from Vallencourt on the fourteenth," one voice said. It was a small, neat voice, and she knew it at once, and her blood went cold. "Six names. Four are paid for. Two are held for the officer." "And the cards?" "Destroyed at the dressing station. The men are entered as reinforcing. There is a clerk at Vallencourt who will do it for the usual." "And the sergeant at the school?" "Is mine," Cradock said. "Only the woman is a nuisance, and the woman will be dealt with. She broke her wheel tonight, I am told. It is a shame what the roads will do to a girl." The other man laughed, low. "Quarles will not like a nuisance." "Quarles will not hear of it," Cradock said. "The captain is at the railhead, and the railhead is a long way from a broken axle on a dark road." Milly stood in the ruin of the farmhouse and did not breathe. Then the voices went out into the wind and were gone, and she heard the byre door scrape and the two of them walk off up the road toward Marlefield, and she stayed where she was until she could no longer hear footsteps, and then a while longer. When she came out, the guns had died down, and the road was empty, and somewhere in the east the sky was going grey. She had a broken knuckle, a fixed wheel, and two facts she had not had an hour before: that on the fourteenth of October six names would change hands at Vallencourt, and that Sergeant Cradock had decided she was a nuisance to be dealt with. By the time the wheel was changed her hands had lost all feeling and the shelling had moved north along the road, and she could hear it going the way you hear a storm going, leaving behind it a silence worse than the noise. She stood up in the dark and put her weight against the Ford and tried to think about the next hour and not the last, which is the whole art of surviving a war, and she had almost decided to drive on when the voices began in the byre. She did not move. There is a kind of stillness a person learns in a place like that, a stillness that is neither courage nor caution, and she stood in the ruin of the farmhouse with one hand on the cold wall and became part of the wall. The two men spoke the way men speak when they believe themselves alone: not loudly, but without care, as though the words were safe because the night was loud. The first voice was small and neat and familiar. The second was heavier, in an accent she could not place, and it laughed once, low, in a way that made her skin crawl. "Quarles wants the two held," the heavy voice said. "Quarles wants a great many things," Cradock said. "Quarles wants them at the railhead by the fifteenth. He will not have them, because a name delivered at a railhead is a name on a list, and the list is where the trouble lives. We deliver at Vallencourt, to the men, in the dark, and the men walk back to their units with new cards, and by the time anyone wonders, the cards will have passed through four hands." "And the woman?" "Broke her wheel an hour ago, south of the crossroads," Cradock said, and the neatness of his voice was terrible because it was so calm. "It is a bad road. There has been a great deal of shelling. It is a wonder more of us are not killed on it." She waited until she heard the byre door scrape and the footsteps pass away up the road, and then she waited a hundred more heartbeats in case they came back, and only then did she go quietly out to the road and start the Ford and let it run a long way before she put it into gear, because a starting engine carries across a quiet night like a shot. It is not given to a person to know, in the middle of a war, which of the hours she lives will turn out to have mattered. Milly had driven that road a hundred times in the dark and had thought nothing of it. But when she thought about that night afterward, which she did often, in the years that came after, she understood that the whole of the thing had turned at the moment she stood still in the ruin of the farmhouse and did not light her lamp and did not start her engine and did not run. A less tired woman would have driven on and heard nothing. A more frightened woman would have hidden in the ditch and heard nothing. It was precisely because she was neither, because she was only cold and slow and careful, that the market spoke to her for a quarter of an hour in the dark of a byre and told her the date. She drove home slowly, in the first light, with the cold of the byre still in her bones, and she did not go to bed. There was a ledger to find, and a fortnight was not much time, and for the first time since the summer she had something the register could not take away from her. She had the date. ---