There is complete silence from the ranks. No one turns their head as we might have done nine weeks earlier. We simply stand there and stare directly ahead. We have been trained.
“I thought not,” he continues. “Well, I might as well tell you that our self-proclaimed conscientious objector has disappeared. Taken himself off in the night like the coward that he is. We’ll catch up with him sooner or later, I can promise you that. If anything, I take a certain pleasure in the fact that when you pass out on Friday, there will not be a coward among your ranks.”
I’m a little surprised by what he has said but don’t think too much of it; I don’t for a moment think that Wolf has absconded and am sure that he’ll turn up sooner or later with a perfectly ridiculous excuse for his absenteeism. Instead, my mind has turned to questions of what will happen on Saturday morning. Will we be dispatched on the train to Southampton immediately and then find ourselves on an overnight passage to France? Will we be in the middle of things over there by Monday morning? Will I live another week? These are far more pressing concerns to me than whether or not Wolf has made a bid for freedom.
I am in Will’s company, walking back later that afternoon from the mess hut towards the barracks, when I sense a great commotion ahead and notice the men gathered in groups, engaged in excited conversation.
“Don’t tell me,” says Will. “The war’s over and we all get to go home.”
“Who do you think won?” I ask.
“Nobody,” he replies. “We both lost. Look out, here comes Hobbs.”
Hobbs, having noticed us walking along, comes bounding over like a slightly overweight golden retriever. “Where have you chaps been?” he asks breathlessly.
“To Berlin, to see the kaiser and tell him to give it all up as a bad lot,” says Will. “Why, what’s the matter?”
“Haven’t you heard, then?” asks Hobbs. “They found Wolf.”
“Oh,” I reply, a little disappointed. “Is that all?”
“What do you mean, ‘Is that all?’ It’s enough, isn’t it?”
“Where did they find him?” asks Will. “Is he all right?”
“About four miles from here,” replies Hobbs. “In the forest where we went on marches in the early weeks.”
“Up there?” I ask in surprise, for it’s an unpleasant, squalid place, filled with marshes and freezing cold streams, and Sergeant Clayton had abandoned it long ago for drier terrain. “What on earth was he doing up there? That’s no place to hide out.”
“You really are quite dim, aren’t you, Sadler?” said Hobbs, breaking into a broad grin. “He wasn’t hiding out there. He was found there. Wolf’s dead.”
I stare at him in surprise, quite unable to take this in. I swallow, considering the awfulness of the word, and repeat it quietly, but as a question now, not a statement.
“Dead?” I ask. “But how? What happened to him?”
“I haven’t got the full story yet,” he says. “But I’m working on it. Seems he was discovered face down in one of the streams up there, his head split open. Must have been trying to run away, tripped over a rock in the dark and fell face forwards. Either the wound killed him or he drowned. Not that it matters either way; he’s gone now. And good riddance, I say, to our resident feather man.”
My instincts kick in and I grab Will’s arm just as he lashes out to punch Hobbs in the face.
“What’s the matter with you?” asks Hobbs, jumping back in surprise and turning on Will. “Don’t tell me you’ve signed up to his rot, too? Not going to turn yellow on us on the eve of our getting out of this place, I hope?”
Will struggles against my arm for a moment longer, but I’m his match in strength and only when I feel his muscles slacken and his arm begin to relax do I release him. I watch him, though, as he glares at Hobbs, pure anger on his face, before he turns around and marches away, back in the direction from which we have come, throwing his arms up in the air in disgust as he does so before disappearing out of sight.
I decide not to follow him and instead return to my bunk and lie on my back, ignoring the conversations of the men around me who are coming up with ever more fantastic theories on how exactly Wolf has gone to his maker, and think about it myself. Wolf, dead. It seems beyond possible. Why, the man was only a year or two older than I, a healthy specimen with his whole life before him. I spoke to him only yesterday; he said that he’d played a geography quiz with Will while they were on duty together and Will had let himself down badly.
“He’s not the brightest card in the pack, is he?” Wolf asked me at the time, infuriating me into silence. “I don’t know what you see in him, really I don’t.”
Of course I know that there’s a war on and that we will each face death sooner than we should in the natural order of things, but we haven’t even left England yet. We haven’t seen the back of Aldershot, for that matter. Our barrack of twenty is already down to nineteen, the slow inevitable crumbling of our numbers beginning before we pass out. And all these other boys laughing about it, calling him a coward and a feather man, would they find as much to celebrate if I had died? If Rich had? Will? It’s too much to bear.
And still I despise myself for what I’m thinking. For while I no longer have reason to be jealous of his friendship with Will, God forgive me but I feel a certain satisfaction that it cannot be revived.
When Will hasn’t returned by nightfall, I go in search of him, as we are by now less than ninety minutes from curfew. It’s our last night together as recruits, for the following day we will pass out and be told of the army’s plans for us, and in celebration of this we have been given the evening off and are allowed to wander at will, with the condition that we are back in our bunks with lights out by midnight or Wells and Moody will know the reason why.
Some of the men, I know, have gone into the nearby village, where a local pub has been our gathering place on those rare occasions when we have been granted liberty. Some are with the sweethearts in the local villages they have got together with over the weeks here. Others have gone for long, private walks, perhaps to be alone with their thoughts. One poor fool, Yates, has said that he is taking a last march up the hills for old times’ sake and has been ragged mercilessly by the men for his ardour. But Will has simply vanished.
I check the pub first but he isn’t there; the landlord tells me that he was in earlier and sat alone in a corner. One of the locals, an elderly gentleman, offered him a pint of ale in honour of his uniform and Will refused, casting an aspersion on his warrant badge, and a fight nearly ensued. I ask whether he’d been halfcut when he left but am told no, he’d had two pints, no more than that, then stood up and left without another word.
“What does he want to go starting fights in here for?” the landlord asks me. “Save all that for over there, I say.”
I don’t respond, simply turn around and leave. The notion runs through my head that Will may have run off in anger at what has happened to Wolf and means to desert. Bloody fool, I think, for he’ll be court-martialled if—when—he’s caught. But there are three separate paths leading from where I stand and he could have taken any of them; I have no choice but to make my way back to the barracks and hope that he’s been smart enough to return there while I’ve been gone.
As it happens, I don’t need to go that far, for halfway between pub and camp, I discover him by chance in one of the clearings in the woods, a small, secluded area that overlooks a stream. He’s sitting in the moonlight on a grassy bank, staring into the water and tossing a pebble casually from hand to hand.