The Eleventh

Mr Gamage of the Legion had a cardboard wreath and a stopwatch.

He was waiting on the crest at Arlington at four o’clock on Monday, in the last of the light, by the chain, a short, wide, very old man in a dark overcoat with a row of medals on it, small ones, the kind you wear on a coat rather than a tunic, and a beret, and a stick he did not lean on, and the cardboard wreath under one arm and the stopwatch in his other hand on a cord round his wrist; and when Frederick came up the last of the path from the car, with Castellanos ten yards behind and his mother ten yards behind Castellanos, Mr Gamage looked at him the way Mrs Lockyer had looked at the yard on the first day.

“You’re the schoolboy,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

“Not sir. I was a sergeant. Sergeants are not sir.” He had a voice like gravel being raked. “Mr Gamage. Of the Legion. I’m the one who does the wreaths. Fifty-one years.” He held out the cardboard wreath. “This is a practice one. It’s the right size and it’s the right weight and it’s made of cardboard and a bicycle tyre, so you can drop it. You can’t drop the real one.”

Frederick took it.

It was heavier than he had expected. It was a ring of cardboard, painted green, about two feet across, built round an old bicycle tyre to give it weight, with a stand at the back, two legs of wire, so that it would stand up on its own against the Tomb, the way the real ones did; and it had a sort of handle on the back, a loop of webbing, that you put your hand through.

“Both hands,” said Mr Gamage. “In front of you. At the height of your belt. Not your chest; you’re not carrying a cake. Not your waist; you’re not carrying a bucket. Your belt.” He watched. “Lower. There.”

Frederick held it at the height of his belt.

“Now,” said Mr Gamage. “Come and look at what you’re carrying it to.”

---

The Tomb was on the crest, at the top of the long slope of the cemetery, with the river beyond and below it and the capital beyond the river, white, going grey in the dusk, with the lamps coming on along the Axis; and in front of the Tomb there was a mat, a long strip of black rubber matting, worn smooth, along which the sentry walked, twenty-one steps and a turn and twenty-one steps; and in front of the mat, at a distance, there was a chain.

It was an ordinary chain. That was what surprised him. It was a heavy black chain, hung between short black posts, about knee high, the kind of chain you might put round a car park; and it ran across the front of the crest in a long straight line, and behind it, now, at four o’clock in the afternoon on the tenth of November, there were perhaps two hundred people standing, in coats, in silence, waiting, as they waited every evening on the tenth, for the Last Post and Taps.

On the far side of the chain there was nobody at all except the sentry on the mat.

He was walking. Frederick watched him. He was a young man, very tall, in a dark blue uniform with white gloves and a rifle on his shoulder, and he walked twenty-one steps along the mat, slowly, exactly, the way Castellanos took stairs, and stopped, and turned to face the Tomb, and stood, and Frederick counted, without meaning to, twenty-one seconds; and then turned again, and changed the rifle to the other shoulder, and stood twenty-one more; and walked back. He did not look at the people at the chain. He did not look at anything. He looked at a point in the air in front of him, about level with his own eyes, which was not anything at all.

“On the Eleventh,” said Mr Gamage, beside him, very quietly, “the wreaths are laid at the foot of the Tomb, on the steps, below the lid. One at a time. In order.” He pointed with the stick, not at the Tomb, but at the grass in front of the chain. “Everybody who lays one comes up from the seats to the chain with whoever’s with them. And at the chain they stop. And whoever’s with them stops. And from the chain to the Tomb they go on alone.” He paused. “Twenty paces. The last twenty. Alone. Every one of them. The Governor-General, the Prime Minister, the Chiefs of the services, the Governors, a widow. Alone.” He looked at Frederick. “You too.”

Frederick looked at the twenty paces. It was a stretch of grass, cut very short, from the chain to the foot of the steps below the Tomb. It did not look like very much.

“Why alone?” he said.

Mr Gamage thought about this for a while.

“Because he’s alone,” he said, and nodded at the Tomb. “Nobody knows who he is. Nobody stood with him at the end. Nobody knows where he fell or who he was with. So the last twenty paces, you go to him the way he went.” He leaned on the stick, for the first time. “That’s the reason they gave in 1921. It’s the only reason I’ve ever heard that I didn’t want to argue with.”

---

“Now,” said Mr Gamage. “The order.”

He took a card out of the pocket of his overcoat, a small white card, much handled, with typing on it, and read it, although Frederick could see he did not need to.

“The Crown’s wreath,” he said. “First. The Governor-General. Then the Prime Minister. Then the Leader of the Opposition. Then the services: Army, Navy, Air. Then…” He stopped and looked at Frederick over the top of the card. “Then you.”

“Before the polities.”

“Before the polities. Before the Governors of forty-odd States and Provinces and Duchies and whatnot, all of whom have been laying a wreath on the Eleventh since 1921 in an order that was settled by a committee and that I have had to defend every year of my life against every one of them.” He put the card away. “And then the High Commissioners of the sister realms. And last, the family. A family chosen by the Legion. Somebody who’s lost somebody.” He looked at the Tomb. “This year it’s a woman from Duluth. Her boy was in the Navy.”

Frederick held the cardboard wreath at the height of his belt.

“Mr Gamage,” he said. “Why me?”

Mr Gamage looked at him.

“Why is it me?” said Frederick. “The schools’ wreath. It’s never been laid before. It’s new. It’s this year.” He had read it, in the letter, in August, from the Legion, that had come with the timetable and the homeroom and Frederick Hanover on the envelope; a letter on the Legion’s paper that had said that the Legion, in consultation with the Household, proposed that from this year the schoolchildren of the Realm should lay a wreath of their own at the Tomb on the Eleventh, and that it should be laid by a schoolchild, and that the Legion would be honoured if he would lay it. “Why not somebody else? Somebody from a school who’s… who’s just at a school.”

Mr Gamage looked at him for a long time, in the dusk, on the crest, with the sentry walking behind him on the mat and two hundred people standing in silence at the chain.

“You’re at a school,” he said.

“Yes, but…”

“You’re at a school in the Realm. In the seventh grade. In a homeroom with a man who says your name in the same voice as everybody else’s, I’m told.” Mr Gamage’s face did nothing. “That’s what the wreath says. The schoolchildren of the Realm. It doesn’t say the Prince of Columbia. The Crown’s wreath says the Crown. That’s the Governor-General. That’s first. Yours is the children’s. And it goes before the governments’ because that’s where the Legion put it, on purpose, because in 1921 when they settled the order there were children in this Realm whose fathers were in the ground over there in France with no names, and the Legion thought, and I think, that those children should come before any Governor.” He tapped the ground with the stick. “It was arranged for a schoolboy. You’re a schoolboy. That’s all it is.” He paused. “And if one year you stop being a schoolboy, somebody else carries it.”

Frederick looked at the twenty paces.

“Now,” said Mr Gamage. “Walk it.”

---

He walked it.

He went to the chain, with the cardboard wreath at the height of his belt, and Castellanos went with him, ten yards behind, and at the chain Castellanos stopped. Mr Gamage lifted the chain off its hook at one post, the way you would unhook a rope at a cinema, and Frederick went through the gap, onto the grass, alone, and Mr Gamage hooked it back behind him.

He walked.

He walked the way he walked everywhere, which his mother said was too fast and his father said was too long, and he got about six paces before Mr Gamage said, from the chain, in the gravel voice, not loudly:

“Stop.”

He stopped.

“You’re not late for a train,” said Mr Gamage. “Come back.”

He came back. Mr Gamage unhooked the chain and let him through and hooked it again.

“Again. Slower. Half that. And don’t look at the Tomb, you’ll walk into it. Look at the foot of the steps. There’s a place. A worn place. On the second step. Everybody looks at it. Look at it.”

He walked it again. He looked at the worn place on the second step. He got about eleven paces.

“Stop.”

He stopped.

“You’re counting,” said Mr Gamage.

Frederick stood on the grass with the cardboard wreath.

“How did you know?”

“Your lips move.” Mr Gamage did not smile. “Don’t count. If you count, you’ll get to twenty and you won’t be there, because your twenty’s not my twenty, and then you’ll stop, and you’ll be two feet short, and you’ll have to take another step, and everybody in the Realm will see you take another step.” He leaned on the stick. “Don’t count. Walk till you’re there. You’ll know when you’re there because the step’s in front of you. Then you stop. Then you bend, from the knee, not the waist, and put it down, on the step, against the stone, and let go, and stand up. And step back. One pace. And stand. And count three.” He paused. “You may count three.”

From the gravel path behind the chain, Castellanos said, very quietly, in the voice for sight lines:

“Twenty-three, sir.”

Mr Gamage turned round.

Castellanos was standing on the path with his hands folded, looking at the grass between the chain and the Tomb.

“His,” said Castellanos. “Twenty-three of his. At the speed you want. I counted them on the second go. He’ll do twenty-three from the chain to the step.” He looked at Frederick. “If you need to know, sir. Which you don’t. Because you’re not going to count.”

Mr Gamage looked at Castellanos for some time.

“You’ve done this before,” he said.

“No, Mr Gamage.”

“You’ve counted something before.”

“Stairs,” said Castellanos, and looked at the grass.

---

At five o’clock, in the dark, the Last Post sounded, and after it Taps.

Frederick heard them from the path behind the chain, among the two hundred people, with his mother on one side of him and Castellanos on the other, and Mr Gamage a little way off, with the stick, standing very straight; and the buglers were somewhere he could not see, beyond the Tomb, on the far side of the crest, so that the sound came over the top of the Tomb towards them out of the dark, and went on past them, down the long slope of the cemetery towards the river and the lights of the capital beyond it.

He had heard the Last Post before. He had heard it on the radio and at the Cenotaph in London when he was seven, standing beside his father in a coat that was too big for him. He had never heard it in the dark.

It went up, and up, slowly, and held, and came down, and stopped on the last note and held it, and the last note went on and on over the crest and down the slope and out over the river until you could not tell whether you were still hearing it or only remembering it; and then it was gone, and the second bugle began. Taps: plainer, and lower, and shorter, the call the Realm kept for everybody who had not served in one of the old red-coated regiments, which was nearly everybody. It did not climb. It went once round, like somebody saying goodnight at a door, and stopped; and then there was nothing on the crest at all but the sound of the sentry’s feet on the mat, twenty-one steps and a turn, in the dark.

Beside him, his mother had put her hand on his back, flat, between his shoulders. She did not move him on. She just left it there.

---

The real wreath was in a box in the north wing hall on Tuesday morning, and it was made of paper.

He had not known. Nobody had told him. He had assumed, without thinking about it, that it would be like the others, the ones he had seen in photographs, the Crown’s wreath and the governments’, which were made of red silk poppies on a ring of laurel, by the Legion’s own workshop, and were beautiful, and identical, every year. But the box was open on the hall table when he came down at seven, and Dame M was standing beside it in the grey suit, and the wreath in it was not silk at all.

It was paper. Red paper poppies, hundreds of them, folded by hand, in every shade of red there was, from scarlet to something nearer purple to something nearer orange, each with a black centre, some with a green paper leaf and some without, wired onto a ring of laurel; and every one of them was different, because every one of them had been folded by a different person.

“The Legion wrote to every school in the Realm,” said Dame M. “In September. It asked each school to fold one poppy, and send it. One from each.” She looked at the wreath. “Eleven thousand four hundred and six schools. The Legion’s workshop has been wiring them onto the ring since the middle of October. They ran out of laurel twice.” She paused. “It weighs a great deal less than the cardboard one, sir. Mr Gamage asked me to tell you.”

Frederick looked at the wreath.

He looked at the poppies. Some of them were beautiful: folded with great care, by somebody who knew how, crisp, with every petal the same. Some of them were not. Some of them had clearly been folded by a very small child with a great deal of glue. One, near the bottom, was blue, which was presumably a protest, or a mistake. One had a face drawn on its black centre.

And one, on the left side, about a third of the way round, was not a poppy at all. It was red, and it had a black centre, and it had been wired on with as much care as all the others; but it had been folded by somebody who had not been able to work out the folds, and had kept folding anyway, over and over, until what came out was a sort of tight red ball, round, and lumpy, with petals going in every direction like the leaves of a vegetable.

It looked like a cabbage.

Frederick looked at it.

“Dame Margaret.”

“Sir.”

“Did Ellicott send one?”

Dame M looked at the wreath.

“Every school sent one, sir,” she said. “Ellicott’s was folded by Mr Abernathy’s homeroom. On the twenty-fourth of September. I am told there was a vote about who should fold it.” She paused. “I am told the vote was won by a boy who said that he had the most experience of folding things, because he wrapped all his family’s Christmas presents, and that this was not true, because his sister does, and that nobody found out until it was too late.” She looked at the cabbage. “The Legion’s workshop telephoned the Household about it, sir, in October. They asked whether it should be replaced with one of their own. They said it was the only one of eleven thousand four hundred and six that they had not known what to do with.”

Frederick looked at her.

“What did you say?”

“I said,” said Dame M, “that it was from the school the wreath was arranged for, and that it was to go on, and that it was to go on where the boy carrying it could see it.”

He looked at the cabbage, on the left side of the wreath, about a third of the way round, where his left hand would be.

He had not been in homeroom on the twenty-fourth of September. He had been at the dentist. He remembered; it had been a Wednesday.

---

On Tuesday the eleventh of November, at about a quarter to twelve, after the Crown and the governments and the services, the schools’ wreath was laid at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier for the first time.

He was in the second row of the seats on the left, between his mother and a General he did not know, with the wreath on his knees, in its paper, in the cold, in a dark coat and a dark suit and a black tie, from half past ten. He saw it in pieces, and the pieces were very clear and had nothing between them, like the stops on a timetable.

The Book, carried up the path by two old men in berets and laid open on the lid of the Tomb, at a page he could not see.

The Regiment of Virginia lining the crest in their dark blue, motionless, a long way apart, so that the line of them went away along the top of the slope like the posts of a fence.

A man from Toledo who had been in the Indochina war, very old, in a wheelchair, who spoke for four minutes in a voice that did not carry and that everybody leaned forward to hear, about a friend of his called Danny, who had been nineteen; and who said nothing else at all, about anything, and stopped, and was wheeled back to his place.

The silence at eleven. Two minutes. The whole of the crest, and the slope below it, and the two hundred at the chain who had become twenty thousand on the grass beyond it, all of it, utterly still, so still that he could hear the flags; and somewhere far off, down by the river, a single car horn, once, and then nothing.

In Flanders Fields, sung last, by everybody, raggedly, in the cold, with his mother beside him singing it in a clear, small, perfectly true voice, the voice she used for hymns and for ja, må han leva; and the General on his other side not singing it at all, but standing very straight with his jaw set and his eyes on the Tomb, and his face wet.

And then the wreaths.

He watched the Crown’s go first, and the governments’, and the services’. He watched each of them go to the chain, and stop, and the chain be lifted, and each of them go on alone, twenty paces, slowly, to the foot of the steps, and bend, from the knee, and lay it down, and stand, and step back, and stand. He did not count. He watched their feet, and how slowly they went, and where they looked, which was the worn place on the second step. Every one of them.

And then a man from the Legion beside the chain, who was Mr Gamage, in his beret and his medals, without the stick, said, not loudly, in the gravel voice, so that it carried along the front of the seats and no further:

“The schoolchildren of the Realm.”

And his mother took her hand off his back.

---

He went to the chain with the wreath at the height of his belt.

He did not feel his feet. He felt the wreath, which was light, much lighter than the cardboard one, and the paper of it under his fingers, and the cold. He felt Castellanos behind him, ten yards, and then not ten yards, nearer, and then stop, at the chain, as he had stopped on Monday, and Frederick heard him stop on the gravel.

Mr Gamage lifted the chain off its hook.

He did not look at Frederick. He looked at the Tomb. He lifted the chain and held it, and Frederick went through the gap, onto the grass, alone, and heard the chain go back onto its hook behind him with a small sound, a click, like a gate.

He walked.

He did not count. He wanted to. He wanted to more than he had ever wanted to count anything; it was the only thing he knew how to do when everything was looking at him, count, the stairs, the trains, the names in the register, Grant, Hanover, Hartigan; and he did not. He looked at the worn place on the second step, the place everybody looked at, and walked towards it, slowly, half his speed, the speed Mr Gamage wanted, and did not move his lips.

He felt twenty thousand people watch him. He felt them the way he had felt the yard on the first morning, a ring of looking going out from him in every direction; and he felt, too, very clearly, that it was not the same looking at all; that they were not looking at him to see what he was. They were looking at the wreath. At the paper poppies, eleven thousand four hundred and six of them, from every school in the Realm, in every shade of red, carried by a boy in a dark coat across twenty paces of grass, alone, the way the man in the Tomb had gone; and he was only the boy who was carrying it, and he understood, halfway across the grass, with a feeling he had never had in his life and had no heading for at all, that this was exactly what Mr Gamage had meant. It was arranged for a schoolboy. That’s all it is.

Under his left hand, a third of the way round, he could feel the cabbage.

He did not look at it. He knew it was there. He could feel it under his fingers, round and tight and lumpy, among the crisp folded petals of eleven thousand four hundred and five better poppies, wired on with as much care as all the others; and he thought of Room 14 on the twenty-fourth of September, while he was at the dentist, and a vote, and a boy who said he had the most experience of folding things, which was not true; and of Kate, who wrapped the presents; and of the boy folding anyway, over and over, at his desk by the aisle, with his whole face concentrating, the way he ate an apple, until it was done.

The steps were in front of him.

He had not counted. He knew he was there because they were in front of him.

He stopped. He bent, from the knee, not the waist. He put the wreath down on the second step, on the worn place, against the white stone, below the lid where the Book lay open, and let go.

He stood up.

He stepped back one pace.

He stood, and counted three, which he was allowed to; and then he turned, and walked back to the chain, where Mr Gamage was already lifting it off its hook, without looking at him, looking at the Tomb; and he went through the gap, and the chain went back behind him with its small click, and Castellanos was there, on the gravel, ten yards away, with his hands folded, and fell in behind him, and they went back to the seats.

“Twenty-two,” said Castellanos, very quietly, at the end of the row, as Frederick sat down.

Frederick looked at him.

“You said twenty-three.”

“I said you’d do twenty-three.” Castellanos looked at the Tomb. “You did twenty-two. You went a little long at the end, sir. At about the fourteenth.” A pause. “When you got to the cabbage.”

---

He went back to school in the afternoon. It had been arranged; he had asked, in August, and the Household had said yes, because it was a school day and he went to school. Castellanos drove him back across the river at half past one, still in the dark suit and the black tie, and he changed in Mr Pavlik’s office behind the gym, among the brooms and the Countess, into the grey trousers and the blue shirt and the navy jumper, and went in, in the middle of fifth period, which was English, and sat down at his desk in the middle of the room, beside Theo.

Theo did not look up. He was writing something. He went on writing it.

“Mr Abernathy wheeled the television in,” he said, to his exercise book, very quietly. “In homeroom. On the trolley. The one from the library with the wonky wheel. At ten to eleven. For the silence.” He wrote. “He had it on all through second period too. He said it was chemistry, because it was a reaction. Nobody knew what he meant.”

“Did you watch?”

“Everybody watched.” Theo wrote. “Lucía cried. During the silence. Not loudly. And Grant. And Devon Price went behind the fume cupboard.” He stopped writing. “And then you came on.”

Frederick looked at the board. The English teacher was writing something on it about metaphors.

“You walked funny,” said Theo.

“I didn’t count.”

“I know you didn’t count. Your lips didn’t move.” Theo looked at his exercise book. “You went slower. And then about two-thirds of the way you went sort of… long. One step. Like you’d seen something.” He paused. “And you put it down on the step and stood there. And the man on the telly said the schoolchildren of the Realm, carried by a schoolboy. He didn’t say your name.” He considered. “Mr Abernathy turned it up when he said that. By about this much.” He held up his finger and thumb, about the width of a fingernail apart.

Frederick looked at the board.

“Theo.”

“What.”

“Did you fold it?”

Theo went on looking at his exercise book.

“Fold what?”

“The poppy. Ellicott’s. In homeroom. On the twenty-fourth of September. When I was at the dentist.”

“Lots of people folded things,” said Theo. “On the twenty-fourth of September.”

“There was a vote.”

“There’s always a vote.”

“Dame Margaret said the boy who won it said he had the most experience, because he wrapped all his family’s Christmas presents. And it wasn’t true. Because his sister does.”

Theo was quiet for a long time. He looked at his exercise book. He did not write anything. At the front of the room the English teacher wrote A metaphor says a thing IS another thing on the board, and underlined IS.

“It looked like a cabbage,” said Theo, at last, to the exercise book.

“I know.”

“Did you see it?”

“I felt it,” said Frederick. “Under my left hand. A third of the way round. All the way across.” He looked at the board. “Mr Gamage said not to count. So I didn’t. I just felt it.”

Theo did not say anything.

He sat very still at his desk in the middle of the room with his pen in his hand, not writing, and his face doing something Frederick had seen it do once before, on the wall, on the Thursday before the half-birthday, when he had been looking at a crack in the tarmac with moss in it; and then he put the pen down, and leaned across the gap between the desks, one elbow on Frederick’s, his head quite close, the way he did it before roll call, and said, in a whisper, not quite steady:

“Distant.”

And Frederick, who had carried the schoolchildren’s wreath across twenty-two paces of grass on the crest at Arlington alone that morning in front of twenty thousand people and the cameras and his mother and a General with a wet face, and had not counted, and had not looked, and had not done anything with his face at all for four hours, put his hand over his mouth in fifth period English, and his shoulders went, and he could not stop them, and he did not try.