A Whispered Name (32 page)

The
Military Specialist began a quick preamble, explaining that upon Anselm’s call
with the name of Lindsay he’d checked the borstal records and found a mine of
information. Much of it had been faxed through and formed part of the bundle.
His refined enunciation gave strong contrast to the Prior’s Glaswegian brogue.

‘John
Lindsay’s criminal record lacks variety and imagination,’ said Martin, as
though he was assessing a cadet for promotion, ‘but the boy can’t be faulted
for application or perseverance. Almost without exception it is shopbreaking
and theft. He did the same butcher’s four times, on the last occasion being
apprehended by the proprietor who’d been waiting with a meat cleaver. Lindsay
was, I suspect, incompetent. He probably stole from himself and smiled with
half his face for having got away with it.’

Martin
took out a reproduced photograph from a folder and held it up. ‘This was taken
in nineteen fifteen after he received a three-year custodial sentence from a
court in Bolton.’

It was,
Anselm agreed, a face that could try to deceive itself: one eyebrow rose while
the other was level; he was old while still a youth. The black hair was smooth,
the forehead marked and rough.

‘Lindsay
however, did not serve that period of detention,’ continued Martin. ‘He escaped
from the court and was never seen again. Interestingly the borstal authorities
guessed correctly. The file contains a note to the effect that Lindsay like so
many others, had probably enlisted under a false name. We now know that he
joined the army in London at the end of that year, on December twenty-ninth,
giving his age as eighteen.’

‘When
he was, in fact, fourteen,’ added Sarah. She’d carried out the calculation as
soon as Anselm revealed Lindsay’s date of birth. Like a tutor marking an essay
she’d written the number in a margin and circled it twice.

‘Which
itself is interesting,’ began David, addressing the Prior. ‘Conscription came
into force in January nineteen sixteen. Underage enlistment would have been
very difficult after that date, because a birth certificate was required and
the National Register was used by the authorities to summon the flower of
England.’ Turning to Anselm, he said, ‘This Lindsay dashed for cover and made
it just in time. But from then on, he was in serious trouble. As far as the
army was concerned his age was that given on attestation.’

A
general discussion broke out. But Sarah did not contribute. Sitting beside
Anselm, she’d discreetly opened the
Manual of Military Law.
The cover
was only half raised so Anselm couldn’t see what had caught her interest.

Surely
Lindsay could have revealed his true age, argued the Prior. He’d need someone
to vouch for him back home, replied Martin. No point, added David. The War
Office wrote various orders to weed out the young, but there were
tens of
thousands
of boy soldiers. It was an open secret. Martin agreed,
tentatively observing that they grew easily into the job. According to the
records they were good at it, too. Top class snipers. Adapted easily to trench conditions
…

… and
all the while Sarah stared at something in the Manual. She let the cover fall
and then looked at the ceiling, pursuing her thoughts.

‘… I
don’t justify it,’ Martin stressed to David, very calmly ‘but one has to look
at the time from its time and against the demands of the time. The point is,
Lindsay never revealed his true age at either court martial. You can’t blame
the army if they didn’t know’

The
Prior called the meeting to order with a gentle patting of the table. He’d felt
the growing heat. He knew that frayed tempers simply frayed judgement, and
friendships. ‘How old was John Lindsay then, at the time he met Joseph Flanagan
in no-man’s-land?’

‘Sixteen,’
replied Martin.

‘And he
would have been shot, if caught?’

‘Without
much doubt,’ said Martin after a short delay.

The Prior joined his
fingertips, elbows on the table, a characteristic gesture somewhere between
prayer and thinking.

‘This,
then, is the boy that Joseph Flanagan took to Étaples. I believe that young
Lindsay had told Flanagan his age, and that he’d twice been condemned, seeking
no help but just a measure of understanding. Only of course, he didn’t know
what sort of man was listening to him.’ He knotted his fingers and laid his
chin on his thumbs. ‘Anselm … what do you think he was like?’

Uncertainly
because it is always difficult to talk of inner journeys, even ones that are
not your own, Anselm sketched out Flanagan’s possible route: a gradual …
weakening, or maybe an
awakening
… that had begun with the burial of
the dead in the spring and ended with the chance meeting with Lindsay ‘In June
he goes back into the line and immediately suffers a kind of relapse. To his
superiors it’s “nerves” again but I wonder if Flanagan simply
saw
things
differently Faced with what was once familiar, he shivers — for it is no
longer the same thing in his eyes. But, oddly he has not, in fact, lost his
courage: remember, having got to Étaples, he came back to the battle from which
he’d apparently run away The only explanation, then, is that Flanagan chose to
save Lindsay and returned to face the probable consequences … the very
consequences that would have finished off Lindsay once and for all.’

No one
spoke.

‘The
June reference is interesting,’ volunteered David, not wishing to break the
hush. He leafed through the bundle and then, for a moment, he read quietly ‘Yes,
here we are. Page twenty-six. This is Flanagan’s Battalion War Diary He was at
Messines. The greatest man-made explosion in history took place at ten past
three in the morning on the seventh of June.’

Tunnellers,
he explained, had placed twenty-odd mines beneath the German positions, in all
about a million tons of high explosive Ammonal. When they were simultaneously detonated
Elgar heard the explosion in his Sussex garden. ‘It must have been
apocalyptic.’

Anselm
vaguely remembered some phrases from Flanagan’s defence at his trial. He opened
his own bundle and, without introduction, read out the passage noted by Major Glanville,
the court’s president, who would presently meet his own death. “‘It was
terrible dark, raining like it did back home, when a load comes off the sea,
after weeks of the gathering. The sky and the waves would join up, so, and then
for days it would pour, or rather everything returned to water. The land was
part of the air.

The
land was part of the air.
Anselm repeated the
phrase to himself several times, as he had done since that first, surprised
reading at the national archives. The April burials had turned out to be a
tilling of the inner soil. But at Messines, Flanagan had seen something very
different: he had seen the innocence of his infancy rise into the air; and when
it came down again, he was an utterly changed man; and a man resolved.

‘I think
there is greatness here,’ said the Prior, letting his smouldering gaze move
around the room. ‘Joseph Flanagan saved a boy’s life and when he faced a trial
for his own, he said nothing.’

David
was thinking hard, one hand against his balding head. With a glance at his
daughter he said, ‘I think there’s an additional perspective, and it must have
been apparent to Flanagan at the time, if not anyone else.’ He spoke
deliberately faintly nodding at each person around the table. ‘This is the
story of an Irishman who saved an English boy from the British Army’

The only sound in the
parlour came from the woods close to the monastery. Anselm looked into the blue
and green shadows, not quite hearing the singing of the birds. ‘And yet,’ he
said, ‘Doyle was to die while Flanagan survived.’

In a
gathering—in voice, a final voice, a strong voice that submitted itself to
those who listened, the Prior said, ‘Has anything been left unsaid? Have we
misunderstood any matter of importance?’

Silence
and a shaking of heads united everyone present.

‘Does
anyone have an idea of the step we might take next?’ The Prior’s eyes were
sharp with hope.

Doubt
passed remorselessly from Martin to David. They lifted empty hands and
apologised, for the Prior had a way of asking questions that made you want to
have an answer.

‘I have
a suggestion,’ said Sarah.

She had
been a restrained presence throughout the entire meeting. She’d read the bundle
closely enough, but with a subtle dissatisfaction, as if something else ought
to be there. And she’d let the spat on boy soldiers run between Martin and her
father without contributing a single remark. It was a grave subject, and one
that ought to have attracted her attention. Anselm’s conclusion was that her
mind had raced ahead to what might be done, and, having seen nothing, she’d
become impatient to leave. He’d been quite wrong.

‘Why
not ask this fellow?’

She
opened the
Manual of Military Law
and took out the letter that had been
found in Herbert’s breast pocket.

‘Harold
Shaw of The Lambeth Rifles.’

Sarah
passed the envelope to the Prior.

‘The
address gives the man’s unit,’ she explained. ‘Harold Shaw was in the same
crowd as John Lindsay But this letter ended up in the possession of Herbert
Moore, of the eighth Service Battalion NLI. I’d find out why if I were you.’

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Dawn Breaks

When Herbert tethered his
horse to the railings of the school at Oostbeke, Flanagan’s three—man escort
had already arrived. They stood, head-bowed, with the sentry Burning cigarettes
danced like fireflies round their mouths. One of them scuffed a boot back and
forth upon the ground. Behind them the building loomed large and black, darker
because the sky carried the faint allure of morning. Some stars remained, their
presence weak like lanterns on the bows of parting ships.

Herbert
spoke loudly by the door as the sentry fumbled for his keys. He did not want to
alarm Flanagan, though he must have heard the escort arrive, the strike of
matches and their low conversation. The door closed and Herbert looked towards
the bed, wondering what to say.

Flanagan
and Father Maguire were lying side by side on the narrow bed, hand in hand, the
priest’s bulk hanging over the edge, one arm touching the floor as if he were
dead. They were reciting something in Gaelic, their voices low and measured, a
soft pulse sounding with the strange words. Herbert was quite sure that it was
the Lord’s Prayer. He fell to his knees and searched for the phrases he’d
uttered as a child in Keswick when they hadn’t especially mattered.
Thy will
be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
Dear God, what words, what a longing.
That something good and pure might prevail here, in this damp cellar; that
there was another kingdom beyond no-man’s-land, beyond the shattered stumps and
the wet clay The two men said ‘Amen’. Neither of them turned to face Herbert.
They lay in silence, a silence so charged that it almost sent Herbert reeling
through the door behind him.

What
was he to say? He’d ridden through the night rehearsing a conversation in
another kind of cellar, a General’s vault.

‘Let me
speak as a soldier,’ said the man who wouldn’t taste his whisky; whose
decisions would be tempered. ‘I’ve sent many boys home, when their age has been
proved; but this boy — if boy he was — has chosen to remain a man to the army
and he abandoned his regiment. Don’t you see, what Flanagan has done is another
capital offence? I could never have recommended mercy if I had known what you
now tell me.’

Herbert
looked at his empty glass, longing for it to be refilled.

‘Now,
let me speak as a man,’ said the soldier. ‘On the day Flanagan lost his nerve,
if that’s what happened, I sent a thousand men to their deaths for an objective
they cannot possibly visualise with confidence. They went obediently and on
trust. In six days from now, upon my orders, those who survived — and many more
— will support the attack on the Menin Road. The casualty figures should be
here by early evening. You ask me to stop due military procedure to save a man
who ought to have been alongside those others who placed their trust in me? I
can’t do that — in their name. A sacrifice claims them both.’ He swished the
whisky and drank some while it span. ‘It’s not August nineteen fourteen any
more, Herbert. Or September. It’s a different war, for you and for me.’

‘Yes,
Sir.’

Ah,
that September. That was the month when Herbert had failed. Constance and
Ernest had berated Maude, who couldn’t tie his laces; and they’d concealed
their disappointment; but they’d also found Whitelands in Northumberland. The
Keswick gentry had, by and large, been of the Maude frame of mind and they hadn’t
kept it to themselves.

The
General walked Herbert out of his office and down the great staircase. They
both slowed at the gate to the lion’s den. Lightly he said, ‘Were you at Sandhurst
with my son, Bernard?’

‘No,
Sir.’