第9章 Grief and Arithmetic

The arithmetic would not leave her alone, and it was the arithmetic, more than the fear, that finally drove her to Hilda. She found her friend behind the tannery with a bucket of water and a rag, washing the worst of the chalk off Number Four, and she stood and helped without being asked, and after a while she said, "I want you to tell me what you saw on the eleventh of August." "August," Hilda said. "That is a long time ago. I saw a great deal of mud, and a great many men, and my own boots, mostly." "The man I carried. Abdomen. I wrote him in at the Warren. I brought him in dead at eight minutes past nine. Do you remember the card?" Hilda straightened, and looked at her, and Milly saw the same thing happen in Hilda's face that had happened in Farlow's, the door closing on something and then, slowly, opening. "I remember a card that was clean," Hilda said. "I remember you remarking on it, because you always remark on a clean card." "Why do I always remark on a clean card?" "Because you are a person who notices when a thing is too tidy," Hilda said. "It is your one weakness. Well. I am Machiavellian on your behalf and honest on my own. What is it you are doing?" Milly told her. All of it, standing in the wet yard with the rag in her hand: the notebook, the ninety-one, the clean card, the man who had walked out of the ground on the twenty-first of September, the grave at Vallencourt that said UNKNOWN, Boyle in Ward C with his paper bird and his hand that would be better by November, and Farlow in the sister's room pretending to sleep because she had a son in the artillery. Hilda listened with the water dripping off her elbow. When Milly finished, she said, "You are going to be killed." "Probably not killed. Moved. Sent to the base. That is how these things are usually done." "You are going to be killed," Hilda said again, flatly, "and I am going to help you, because if I do not, you will do it alone and be killed sooner. What do you need?" "A witness who is not me," Milly said. "Your eyes, on the days when my eyes might be doubted. And somebody who can drive Number Four for an hour, some evening, without being missed." "That last one is easy," Hilda said. "The first one is a promise." Commandant Verena Ashwell kept an office in what had been the tannery's counting-house, a small brick room with a barred window and a portrait of a previous Commandant who had been killed at Ypres in 1915. She was a tall, upright, grey-eyed woman of the sort that had been running things since before the war and would go on running things after it, and she heard Milly out without interrupting, and when Milly had finished she was silent for a long time. "You are telling me," she said at last, "that a sergeant of the medical establishment is selling the identities of the dead to men who wish to escape the line, with the connivance of at least one officer and the silence of at least one clerk, and that a corporal who knew of it has just died of a wound that was healing. Is that your accusation?" "It is my suspicion. I have no proof that a court would take." "Good," Ashwell said. "A person with proof would already be dead. A person with a suspicion may live long enough to find proof, if she is careful and if she has friends." She stood and went to the window and looked out at the yard, where Marchbanks was doing something violent to a carburettor. "The column's position is delicate. We are volunteers, women, and unofficial in every way that matters. One breath of scandal and the Army will thank us for our service and send us home, and then there will be no ambulances on the Argentonne road at all, and the men in the chalk will lie there till morning. I cannot make you stop. I will not pretend I could. What I can do is find you a reason to be at the railhead, once a week, with the effects of the dead, which is a duty the column is sometimes given because it saves the establishment a lorry." She turned. "You see. I keep an account of my own." There was a letter waiting for Milly in the tannery that same evening, and she knew from the envelope that it was from the War Office, and she carried it out into the dark before she opened it, because she had learned that she could hold her face in front of other people but not in front of paper. It was the same as the others. It was regretful and it was printed and it contained no news. But for the first time one of the sentences was different: *the records of the battalion are being checked again.* Somebody, somewhere in the great machine, had looked at a name and found that it did not quite sit on the page. It was almost nothing. It was the kind of thing that a man who was selling names might have reason to arrange, or to prevent, or to fear, and Milly, standing in the dark with the letter in her hand, could not tell which of those it was. What she could tell was that the machinery touched her brother's name as easily as it touched the others. Ted was missing. Missing was the word the machine used for a man it had lost track of. And a man it had lost track of was a man whose name was loose in the world, and there was a market for loose names. Later that night, in the tannery, Hilda found her with the letter and the notebook open on her knees, and for once Hilda did not make a joke of anything. She sat down on the next bench and looked at the names in the back of the book and said, "Six." "Six in the back. Four in the front that I am sure of, and two that I am not." "And a date." "And a date," Milly said. "The fourteenth. Six names change hands at Vallencourt, and if I have nothing but a notebook when that happens, then the men who bought the names will be at the base by the fifteenth and the men who sold them will have burned whatever is left to burn, and all I will have is a book nobody is obliged to believe." "Then do not go to Vallencourt with nothing," Hilda said. "Go with a witness and a paper and a man who can sign. This is not a task for one girl and a notebook. This is a task for a room." She counted it on her fingers afterward the way her father counted sheep at market. A document that cannot be argued with: the effects ledger, with a dead man's signature on it in his own dead hand. A witness with a name and a nerve: Farlow, or Danforth, or both. A man with the power to act on it: not Quarles, not Cradock's friends at the division, but someone from outside, someone who came to inspect the establishment with an authority no local officer could overrule. And a way to be in the right place on the fourteenth with all three of those things at once. It was not much of a plan. It was the only plan she had. She folded the letter into her tunic, next to the notebook, and went in to supper. ---