第6章 Two Men, One Number

Milly did not sleep that night. She lay on her bench in the tannery with her boots on, listening to the rain and to Hilda's breathing and to the sum in her own head, and the sum would not come out. The register said that Private H. Ryecroft had been admitted on the twenty-first of September and returned to duty. It said nothing about the eleventh of August, because she had never made it say anything, because she had believed that a quiet word and a pencil in a private book were enough. In the Army, a fact that is not written in the right book does not exist. She had learned that in her first week and forgotten it in her pride. In the morning she went to Lanning. He listened to all of it without moving, his spectacles in his hand, his food going cold on the tray, and when she had finished he put the spectacles back on and looked at her with a tiredness that was older than the war. "I believe you," he said. "That is the trouble. I believe you entirely, and I can do nothing with what I believe. A private notebook is not evidence. A man's memory is not evidence. The register is evidence, and the register says the man is alive, and the man himself says the man is alive, and there is a shilling's worth of paper to prove it and none at all to disprove it." "Then find the truth somewhere the register cannot touch," Milly said. Lanning was quiet. Then he said, "Have you been to the burial ground at Vallencourt?" "I have not." "Go," he said. "If your man died of an abdomen on the eleventh of August, he was buried within the day. If he was buried, there is a grave. Go and find out what is written on it, and then come back and tell me whether the register has a rival." The burial ground at Vallencourt lay behind the ruin of a sugar factory, on a slope that had once been an orchard. It was not yet a cemetery in the formal sense; it was a field with rows, and the rows were filling in, and a man with a measuring tape was laying out where the next rows would go, because there were always next rows. Most of the crosses were wood and most of them bore a name and a number, cut with a chisel or burned with a hot iron. A few bore neither. Milly walked the rows for an hour. She found the August graves by their weathering, and she found, in the fourth row from the hedge, a fresh mound with a wooden cross on which someone had cut a single word: UNKNOWN. Beneath it, in smaller letters: 11 August 1916. Two men had been buried under that date. The other had a name. She stood there a long time. She did not cry; she had not cried since the second week of the war, and had begun to suspect that the capacity had left her for good, like a tooth. What she felt instead was a cold, clear anger of the kind that sharpens rather than blinds. Because she understood the trick now. It was so simple that a child could have worked it. A man dies; his identity disc goes not onto his grave but into a store; his name is crossed off one list and never entered on another; and so he is buried as nobody, and his name is left lying around, loose and ownerless. And somewhere there is a man who wants to be nobody's name in particular, who wants to be a pay-book and a card and a bad finger, and he buys it, and the Army pays him his wages under the dead man's name, and the dead man's mother gets a telegram that says missing, which is the kindest lie the whole machine knows how to tell. A market in names. Ryecroft had said so, and Ryecroft had been dying, and she had thought it was the morphia. It had not been the morphia. She went back to Argentonne and asked Danforth, in as idle a voice as she could manage, whether there was anyone in the battalion who had known a Private Ryecroft. "There is a corporal in Ward C," Danforth said. "Boyle. He came in with a hand wound a fortnight ago and he will not heal, and he keeps asking after a name. I think it may be the name you mean." That evening Milly went to Ward C and found Corporal Ewan Boyle sitting up in the last bed by the window, a pale, cheerful, talkative man of thirty with a bandaged hand and a face that had been handsome before the war and would be honest after it. He looked at her, and she said the name, and something went out of his face, and he said: "So he is dead, then. I thought he was. Nobody would tell me, and then they told me he was alive, and I knew that was nonsense, because Roly would have known." "Roly Denbigh," Milly said. "His friend," Boyle said. "His best friend. And mine, after a fashion. Ryecroft was going to write to him. He had it all written out and he was going to post it the day—" He stopped. "The day he went up. He had found out something, you see. About the lists. And then he went up, and then he did not come back, and I am told he did come back, and I do not believe it, and now you come and say his name, and I think I am going to be sick." Milly sat on the end of his bed. "Tell me what he found out," she said. The burial party worked from a list, and the list was Cradock's, because the burial officer was a busy man who had long ago handed the roll of the dead to whoever would keep it, and whoever would keep it was the man who already kept everything else. So the graves were dug by the list and marked by the list and, when the list was wrong, dug and marked by the list all the same, and a man whose identity disc had gone into a store was laid under a cross that said UNKNOWN and stayed unknown, while his name went on living in a ledger in a warm room by the gate. She searched the rows for an hour in the rain, and the rain ran down the chalk of the crosses until the cut names looked like the writing of drowned men. The officers had stone; the men had wood. Some of the wood had been carved by the dead man's friends, with care, in the evenings, with a clasp knife and a great deal of patience, and those were the graves that made her have to stop and stand still, because the care in them was the only love most of these men would ever be given again, and it had been spent on a piece of wood that one winter would rot. She did not know how to prove any of it, and the not knowing was a stone she carried in her boot. But she was a farmer's daughter, and a farmer's daughter knows that the way to prove a thing about a field is to walk it, and the way to prove a thing about a book is to read every page of it against every other page, slowly, over weeks, until the false line stands up and declares itself. So she began at the beginning, the eleventh of August, and made a column of every man she had carried since, and set her column against the register, and against the returns where she could see them, and against her own memory third, and wherever the four of them disagreed she wrote the disagreement down, because in a country where the paper lies, a record of the lying is the only honest paper left. And Boyle told her, in a low voice, half in the way of a man who is relieved to be asked at last, and half in the way of a man who knows he is saying something that could kill him, about the names and the market and the man with the key. ---