Elizabeth Speller - The Return of Captain John Emmett

Laurence nodded. In military offences that he'd witnessed, a lot depended on interpretation. However, the cases he'd dealt with did not involve officers, nor did they carry the death penalty.

They were outside a narrow building with a lead-paned bow window.

'Ye Olde Cock Tavern, no less,' said Brabourne, pushing open the heavy door. 'Dickens' favourite.'

The place wasn't busy and they took a table near the fire, facing each other on blackened oak settles. Brabourne insisted on buying the beer.

'There were two things that prejudiced the case,' Brabourne continued, tapping the end of a match on the table to emphasise his points. 'Firstly, Hart had never wanted to be there. He wanted to be in the navy. And he kept on and on asking for transfers, which, as I said before, didn't gain him any friends and of course the navy never took the casualties the army did. So rather than a genuine wish, I think, to be at sea, this looked like further evidence of cowardice. Secondly, the regiment was struggling. Very low morale. There were rumours that a handful of men had gone over to the Germans in the next sector. Junior officers were terrifyingly inexperienced as wel as bickering among themselves.'

Laurence remembered how Byers had leveled the accusation of inexperience at Brabourne himself.

'But the real disaster for Hart was that one NCO, who spoke as a witness and had seen him arguing with the other subaltern, said he didn't even look as if he was in a funk; he simply looked as if he'd rather be off out of it. There was something a bit dodgy about that NCO and the other junior officer: they used exactly the same words and phrasing in their statements. In a civilian court we'd be on to that like a shot—obvious colusion—but such refinements didn't impinge on military proceedings.

'And of course his vanishing trick had left his men exposed and at risk. If his behaviour was genuine, then he was deranged. If he was faking it, then his acts were several miles beyond unbecoming of an officer and a gentleman. They thought he was faking it.

'Ultimately he wasn't quite a gentleman. It wasn't a particularly smart outfit, for God's sake, but he didn't have the background of the other officers and they let him know it. In fact, to start with, his unpopularity was what coloured my decision to defend him. I didn't think anyone else would even try. Not that I did him any good.'

Laurence watched the man's face. It was bleak. His cigarette burned away between his unmoving fingers. Laurence felt uneasy, as he had when talking to Leonard Byers, knowing that he was returning people to events they would prefer to put behind them.

'I thought Hart would get off, or at least get a lesser sentence, and Hart certainly thought so. I mean, in the entire war only two other officers ever went before a firing squad and one of those was for murder. Officers were found guilty of serious offences from time to time but the sentences were always commuted. Nearly always.'

Charles had said the same, Laurence recaled.

'But as the witnesses spoke, I realised he hadn't a hope. It wasn't the facts, meagre as they were. They just didn't like him. He didn't fit in. His commanding officer said he didn't trust him and everyone else took his lead. As for Hart, he wouldn't, or couldn't, even speak in his own defence. They sentenced him to death almost as a matter of course. Stil, they made a fairly vigorous recommendation for mercy, on the grounds of his age and lack of experience. For al the good it did.'

He took another drink and wiped his mouth.

'God knows where my chum is.' He looked around as if his friend might be hiding in an alcove. Laurence drank slowly. He wanted Brabourne to complete his story and was glad the friend was late.

'Then, after he'd been found guilty but we were stil waiting for the sentence to be confirmed, I was alowed to see him again. There was nothing to say, of course. Not easy to have a conversation with someone you've failed to protect from a death sentence.'

Brabourne took a deep breath.

'He said his nerves were bad and he wished he could have some books, especialy poetry. I seized on poetry as something we had in common; we could hardly talk about the weather or the war. I expect you can see what came next: he turns out to have been one of John Emmett's group of poets. It was only then that I found out that he had written for Constellations. I'd read several of his poems. He may have been a pretty inadequate soldier but he was an extraordinary poet.'

Laurence felt his breathing slow, as he began to see things coming together, but he wanted Brabourne to tel it al in his own time. Hart must be Sisyphus. Only one poet in the magazine could be caled extraordinary.

'So there we sit, a chily evening in this room in a French farmhouse, which they've commandeered as a prison. Big old fireplace, black and cave-like: somehow it made the room feel colder, having it there unlit. They'd stuffed barbed wire up the chimney, presumably to deter anyone from attempting to climb out, and when gusts of wind were funneled down, the wire made this whining sound. It made my hair stand on end. The room smeled of cold soot. A smal casement window with wooden slats nailed over it and two guards outside the door, though God knows where he was supposed to run off to. Anyway, he stil believed the sentence would be commuted. We both did. I think everybody expected it. I'm freezing, he's wrapped a blanket round his uniform in this damn awful situation, and we're discussing Masefield and Brooke and whether Bridges was a good Poet Laureate.'

He paused, tapped his cigarette packet.

'Bloody business. I'd had nothing more than a summary of evidence half an hour before I had to defend him and they told him the sentence had been confirmed only hours before they shot him. When they told him they had the formal confirmation of his sentence, they added, as if it would make a difference, that he was to be alowed to keep his badges and his rank. I mean, what kind of mind thinks up that nicety?'

After a while Laurence prompted him: 'And you saw him again?'

'The padre and the colonel arrived. I left. Hart was a waxwork. Next time I see him, he's tied to a post.'

'Which poet was he?' Laurence asked, certain that Brabourne would confirm what he already knew. 'Hart? His pseudonym?' He nodded at the magazine. Grey and dog-eared, its typing irregular, it looked like something a schoolboy might produce.

'Hart? He was Sisyphus. Perhaps he saw himself always struggling to no avail. We were al a bit dramatic and self-important at the beginning—we were very young. But by God he could write.'

And the felow subaltern who reported Hart—the one you said was his enemy?'

'Liley, Ralph Liley.'

Laurence felt a surge of disappointment. It was not the name he had expected.

Brabourne picked up the pamphlet of poems Laurence had put down on the table, turned over two pages and handed it back, open. 'Hart,' he said. It was the extraordinary poem Laurence had first seen in Cambridge. 'Streets ahead of the rest of us, wasn't he? He wrote in every edition bar the first.' Then he shrugged. 'But who's to know what dead men might or might not have become? Saints and prodigies in a very few cases, perhaps. Most would have shown an utter failure to fulfil early promise, that's my guess. Without a few howitzers, maybe even that creative response might have failed to ignite. Good thing in my case.'

'At least you tried,' said Laurence. 'My service was an intelectual desert. The only writing I did was letters to next of kin.' He grimaced. 'Art came down to nothing more than doodles of the colonel's extraordinary moustache. During my whole time in service I think I finished only two books: King Solomon's Mines and The Good Soldier. My wife had sent me her idea of suitable reading matter for a fighting man.' He paused. 'I don't think she'd read them herself, not the second, obviously.