‘Yes, yes, all right. I shall see about it. Of course I’ll help your son.’

26

THEY HAD MADE it hopeless. It was difficult to follow, difficult to understand, what the military wanted from him. He did not fit in anywhere. The army loathed him. The conchies irritated him. He was friendless. Hopeless.

The absolutist conscientious objectors were an embarrassment to the government. They would cheerfully dig deep holes in heavy clay land and fill them back up again, keen to show they weren’t afraid of hard labour, but they would not accept the work of carrying a stretcher or even bandaging a wounded man; they thought that patching up a soldier to send him back out to fight was as bad as pulling a trigger. The conchies were dismissed as misguided and self-righteous, but everyone from the most ordinary shop girl to the Prime Minister himself was ready to forgive them; they were more than keen to get them involved in the war somehow. They had to be defused; no one wanted their ideas to detonate. Every conchie who picked up a box of shells and placed it on a lorry heading to France was considered a victory. A conscience overruled was cause for celebration.

However, Howard was on a different track. As the powers-that-be at his tribunal had ruled that he did not have a conscience, let alone a right to objection, he was conscripted into the army. No one acknowledged the illegal press-ganging. He’d drilled and picked up a weapon; that was acceptance enough of the status they’d foisted upon him. He was a soldier, and now he was a soldier who had refused orders. Maintenance of discipline was a serious matter in the military. Crucial. Following Howard’s third bout of solitary confinement (the safest way to avoid ideas spreading, which was especially necessary if those ideas undermined morale or questioned authority) and a diet restricted to bread and water (hungry men were generally more cooperative), the prison’s commanding officer came to his cell to explain just how essential and serious the matter of preserving discipline was.

Howard had to stand for the CO. Despite the bitter cold of the underground cell, he did not want to shiver; it was important to him that he didn’t appear afraid. The CO looked directly at him. Intense brown eyes that suggested intelligence and impatience.

‘Do you know what punishment befalls a soldier who shamefully delivers up a garrison to the enemy?’ the CO asked, his enunciation clear, his tone crisp and efficient; suggesting he had an agenda.

Howard knew very little about military law. He was having trouble focusing; his head felt like a knot of cobwebs, his belly an empty barrel. His throat scratched, his tongue felt fat and useless. ‘No.’

‘Death. And what of a soldier who shamefully casts away arms in the presence of the enemy?’ Howard raised his hands an inch or two from his sides, then regretted the gesture. He’d been in the army long enough to know that shrugging at an officer was foolish. ‘Death. What do you think we do with a soldier who leaves his CO to go in search of plunder?’