第19章 What the Living Owe the Dead

The enquiry sat for eleven days at the railhead at Marlefield, and Milly gave her evidence twice, once to the colonel and once to a major from the division who had a bad chest cold and a worse temper, and each time she took the document out of the lining of Ted's boot and read it aloud in the flat voice she had practised in the tannery, because a flat voice is harder to disbelieve than a broken one. They hanged no one. That surprised her, at first, and then it stopped surprising her, because the Army was in the middle of the largest battle of its history and had no appetite for a public scandal about its own paper. Cradock was tried and convicted and sentenced to a long term of penal servitude, and was marched away down the Marlefield road in the rain between two provosts; Quarles was cashiered and sent home, which is the Army's way of removing a man from history without admitting that he was ever there; the six buyers were dealt with quietly, four of them sent up the line to battalions that were going over the top within the month, which was, in the end, the only sentence the whole business ever needed to impose. And Kedge, unmasked, was returned to his own battalion for desertion in the matter of a name, and no one at Argentonne ever heard what became of him, which was, Milly thought, the most appropriate ending a clerk of his kind could have. Danforth was kept on. That decision cost Colonel Sandoe a letter of explanation to the division, because a clerk who lets a register be stolen is a clerk who has failed, and the letter said that the clerk's failure had been the occasion of the discovery of a grave fraud, and that the Army does not, as a rule, dismiss men for failing honestly and then helping. Danforth cried when he read it, in the corridor, and then went back to his desk and began to write the register out again from the beginning, page by page, from the notes in his own memory and in Milly's book, until the record at Argentonne was as true as a record can be made by two people who were there. The fourth row from the hedge got a name. It was wired for and paid for by a subscription among the men of Ryecroft's company, and it was carved in wood because stone was not to be had that winter, and it read *H. Ryecroft, Pte*, and the number, and the battalion, and the eleventh of August, 1916. Denbigh came up from the coast for the morning it was set, on crutches, and stood at the head of it with his cap off while the padre said the words, and afterward he asked Milly to write her own name in the book of the burial ground as a friend of the deceased, and she did, and it was the only time in the whole affair that she was glad of a pencil. Her transfer order was rescinded in the last week of October. The Commandant told her so over the counting-house table with the order in her hand and an expression that was almost, for Ashwell, a smile. "Number Seven has a crumpled wing and no driver of your sort," she said. "You will stay. I have told the railhead that we cannot spare you, which is true, and that you are the best driver in the column, which is a lie Hilda Fairhurst will never forgive me for." And on the last day of October, a letter came. It was from the Army, and it was printed in the same regretful type as the other three, and Milly carried it out to the yard before she opened it, because that was the habit now, and she stood by the crumpled wing of Number Seven in the dark and read it twice in the light of a match. It said that her brother, Private Edward Passmore, previously reported missing, was now confirmed as a prisoner of war in Germany, wounded but recovering, and that further particulars would follow in due course. It was the first piece of paper in the whole of France that had ever brought her good news, and she stood there a long time with it in her hand, and did not cry, because she had not cried since the second week of the war and had begun to think the capacity had left her; but when Hilda came out and asked her what it said, she found that she could not get the first word out, and Hilda took the paper from her and read it and put her arm round her shoulders without saying anything at all. He was alive. Somewhere in Germany, in a camp with a wire fence and a stove, Ted was alive, and had a name, and the name was on a list that somebody had found and somebody had entered, and the entering of it was the whole difference between a mother watching a road forever and a mother with a door still open. Milly thought about that a great deal, in the weeks that followed, because it was the same arithmetic she had been doing all autumn, seen from the other end. Before the enquiry ended, Milly asked the colonel the question that had been sitting in her chest all autumn, and the colonel, who had grown careful of her by then, answered it as carefully as it could be answered. There was no way to know how far the trade had spread. There was no way to know how many stations had a Cradock and how many Cradocks had a Quarles, because the thing had been built so that no part of it could see the whole, and a clerk at a dressing station in Flanders might sell a name to a sergeant who sold it to a quartermaster who sold it to a captain in a place where nobody had ever heard of Argentonne. The only reason the trade had broken at all was that one dead man had learned to add and one driver had refused to forget, and the colonel said, without pleasure, that the Army did not have many of either. "Then it will go on," Milly said. "It will go on," the colonel agreed. "It went on before the war, in a smaller way, with pension lists and muster rolls, and it will go on after the war, in a larger way, with demobilisation and graves. What you have done is stop one station in one district in one autumn. That is more than most people will do in the whole of their lives, and less than you wanted. That is the shape of every honest account anyone ever keeps." She thought about that for a long time afterward, and decided that the colonel had been right, and that being right did not change what she was going to do. What the living owe the dead, she had decided, is not grief. Grief is free and it is endless and it costs nothing and it changes nothing. What the living owe the dead is an accurate account. They owe them a name on a cross and a number beside it and a line in a book that a stranger a hundred years from now could read and know that a man had been here and had not been nothing. She had kept the notebook because she could not bear to forget. Now she understood that she had kept it for a larger reason, and that the larger reason did not care whether one girl in an ambulance lived or died, and would go on being true after the war had taken everything else. ---