Human Traces

by Sebastian Faulks

  There was no wild boar at the restaurant, but there were ribbon strips of pasta with hare, which Luca told him were the next best thing; there were also numerous dried and cured meats to start with and, after the pasta, veal from the mountain pastures cooked in sage and butter. Luca tried to pay, but Daniel insisted. ‘I wouldn’t have ordered all that wine if I had known,’ said Luca.

  ‘Too bad,’ said Daniel. ‘You are the best friend I have had since . . . Well, since Billy Reader, a man who was with me in France. And before that, Freddy, who is now alas the Enemy.’

  When they had drunk coffee, Luca said he had some private business to attend to, and that he would meet Daniel at the post office at four, when the van would take them back to Thiene.

  With red wine and coffee competing in his system, Daniel felt a little disorientated, especially without his companion. He sat down on a bench opposite the hospital for neurasthenics and tried to gather his thoughts. He had believed himself settled in his ‘cottage’ in the mountains; he had found a role for himself in the army and the respect not only of his men but perhaps even of his commanding officer. It was very beautiful at that altitude, it was serene, and the Austrian guns held no fear for him. Yet as he watched the patients shuffle out from a side door of the hospital, he had an uneasy feeling.

  In another life, or in a part of this one that he no longer remembered, he had been one of them. Perhaps after Passchendaele, his ‘shell shock’ had turned to madness and his hospital had been for the insane. Or maybe it was merely that having spent his life with lunatics, he knew too well that bitter world that lay across reality at its awkward, unforgiving angle, where voices were true and memory was false. It was not that he had himself been mad, it was just that he could too easily imagine the lives of the patients. That must be it . . . In any event, he was pleased to see Luca again and to be on the way home.

  That evening, at the osteria in Granezza, where Luca was billeted for the time being, Daniel met a young woman called Laura, who lived in Padua but was helping the Italian war effort because she spoke French and enjoyed being in the mountains. She worked in the battalion commander’s office as a secretary, but sometimes joined the other officers for dinner, where she was treated with exaggerated courtesy.

  Daniel sat next to her and stared into her dark brown eyes, fascinated. She wore a tailored army jacket and a blue scarf with her black hair loose to her shoulders; she spoke French to him and occasionally placed her hand on his for emphasis. She laughed a good deal and seemed pleased to talk to someone new, as though the good manners of the Italian officers had become wearisome to her and she wanted to confide in someone the powerful secret feelings that living so close to death had stirred in her heart.

  Daniel returned in a dream to his cottage by lorry at midnight, to find Jack Turney in his bed complaining that he had caught flu.

  One morning in mid-June Daniel was awoken by the loud crash of an Austrian gun. He sat up in the darkness and knocked his head against the roof of his cave. The Austrian artillery never started up this early and they never shelled his part of the line. A moment later, there was another crash and bits of earth tumbled from the ceiling of his cottage. He put on his helmet and went outside. Shells were crashing into the mountainside all round and the reverberations were magnified by the rocks, so that they echoed from one peak to another, making a continuous roar. He picked up a rifle and ran to the trench where his platoon were hastily assembling, cramming on helmets and peering forward into the mist of the plateau that prolonged the darkness of the night. A number of his men were off sick with influenza and had been sent into a reserve position; many of those remaining were weakened and feverish. The noise of the bombardment made it impossible for him to gain any sense of what was going on, but in the comparative quiet between shell explosions he began to hear the rattle of machine-gun fire and rifles coming from the French part of the line.

  ‘Christ, Christ, Christ,’ he said, suddenly seeing through the yellow mist a line of Austrian infantry coming towards the line. ‘Fire! Fire!’

  His depleted platoon, sweating and surprised, had hardly had time to reload before they were fighting with bayonets against the Austrians who piled through the thin defence of wire, then set up machine guns with which to enfilade the British position. With no chance of communicating with Denniston and no idea of what was happening in other parts of the line, Daniel signalled to his men to withdraw at once to a prepared position about ninety yards further back in the woods.

  The Austrians had broken through so quickly that their own artillery barrage had not stopped but was still piling shells into the forest, so that Daniel’s progress was impeded by crashing pines and the shrapnel of exploding rocks. They joined a company of Fusiliers in the reserve trench and managed to hold the line for half an hour with two Lewis guns and as many rifle rounds as they could get off through the woods.

  Soon, however, they found themselves under fire from behind and higher up the slope.

  A messenger came weaving through the trees and shouted in Daniel’s ear: ‘They’ve broken through on the right for half a mile. The flank of the company is being held by cooks and orderlies. You have to retire again. General’s orders. A and C are behind that ridge.’

  ‘Is Denniston alive?’

  ‘Yes, he sent me.’

  ‘All right. Let’s go.’

  In the second withdrawal they met mustard gas curling through the tree trunks and the men became disorientated as they fought for their respirators. There were now Austrian snipers in the woods and it was difficult to know which way they were meant to be going, as machine-gun fire pursued them and rifle bullets ricocheted off the pines. The Austrians must have got word back that they had broken through because their artillery barrage ceased, but not before a final shell buried a British gun emplacement beneath a rockfall. Daniel heard the screaming of the men inside, but could not stop. He thought he saw where his company had regrouped and was shouting to his men to run for it.

  When he dived down into his third position of the morning, he recognised only one man there, a private called Addison.

  ‘Where are the rest of the men, Addison?’

  ‘Don’t know, sir. We was well and truly fucked. Couldn’t see the bastards coming in the mist. I saw the corporal with his head blown off.’

  ‘Corporal who?’

  ‘Turney, sir. Apparently they’re through our line for half a mile, but the Frogs have held off the Magyars in their sector.’

  ‘All right. This is where we hold the line. Get firing.’

  By noon, the ferocity of the assault had died down, though there were still pockets of the Austrian Landwehr behind them as well as in full occupation of the two forward British trenches. At two o’clock a company was despatched to clear the rear, and at four the first counter-attack was begun on Daniel’s right. By five it had been fully rebuffed.

  An hour later, word was sent from Denniston that D company was to be part of the next counter-attack, due in fifteen minutes. Daniel went along the line and urged his men to prepare to go over the top, back through the woods; but the flu-stricken troops were exhausted and pleading for water.

  ‘You can have all you want to drink when we’re back in our own trench,’ he said. ‘Now get up and get ready for the whistle.’

  As they moved forward, the fire came from so many angles that it seemed the trees themselves were shooting at them. None of them had fought in the mountains before, and while it was harder for the guns to find them, the sense of being fired on from all sides was somehow more nerve-testing than the slow plod into death on the plains of Picardy.

  Daniel saw his men hiding behind trees only to find themselves shot at from the side they had thought safe; some just kept running forward, though few of them made it back to their own support trench. Within an hour the counter-attack was called off and they crept back to their reserve position in the rocks, where they flopped down exhausted on the pine needles.

  At eight o’clock a
nother section of the British line was stirred into action and charged forward to regain the ground it had lost twelve hours ago. Once more the woods and mountains echoed to the sound of the enemy machine guns, now well emplaced in their new positions. Daniel wondered vaguely who had his cottage and if his bed and books were now being used by a man from Vienna or Linz.

  When night fell, the shooting stopped and they tried to get the wounded down the mountain to the regimental aid post. Daniel despatched stretcher parties and went with them into the woods to bring back as many men as they could. In the course of the night it became clear that the Austrian success had been limited to a section of the Allied line no more than a mile long, where they had pushed through to a depth of about half a mile and entrenched. It was curious, Daniel thought, that although they were more or less encircled by the enemy, there was something about the summer night at altitude that made it possible to rest; perhaps the men were simply too drained by loss, by fear and illness, and by the physical strain of battle to stay awake. At any rate, soon after midnight, Daniel, lying huddled with the remaining men of his platoon, also fell asleep. He dreamed of Laura, the girl at the Italian base.

  Someone was shaking his shoulder. It was Denniston.

  ‘Wake up, Lieutenant. We are to launch another counter-attack at 04.30 hours. Having missed out on the last one, D company will be at the front of this show. It is now three. Have your men stand to at four and be ready to go.’

  ‘Sir.’

  Daniel dragged himself up into a sitting position, then stood and went to find the NCOs, shining his new torch, which had survived the day, among the sleeping bodies, looking for a stripe. In the course of the next hour, the men were readied: grumbling, feverish and reluctant. But as the time drew near, they fell silent, knowing what they had to do, knowing there was no way out for them now. As Daniel walked among the men, he saw them take out photographs of home and kiss their children’s faces; the unmarried ones fingered lucky tokens or moved their lips in silent prayer.

  For himself, Daniel felt quite calm. Soon after he had arrived in France, he saw that the way he had lived until that point was no longer possible. As a child, he had clung emotionally to his own life, acting as though it were highly valuable, sacred – or at least unique. He organised each day with passionate care, first to find comfort and to do something well, then, if there was time over, to make himself agreeable to others. In the salient at Ypres, planning was pointless. It was worse than pointless, in fact; it was foolish and disrespectful to those who had died.

  Instead, he tried to cultivate a kind of serenity, to trust to providence and to place a much lower value on his life, because to have too high a care for it was to suggest that he believed his own existence, his own little breathing hopes, to be more important than those of the millions of the dead; and insufficiently to respect the dead, and the lives and loves they had forsaken, was, so far as he could see, the worst of war crimes.

  The minute hand on his watch went through the horizontal and began to drop towards the half hour. He thought of Charlotte and Martha, asleep in London. One of them was at art college, the other had a job teaching infants; to his shame he could not remember which was which. He thought of his father, who had always been so kind to him – severe, sometimes, but encouraging – and saw his dark, anxious face with its fringe of untidy white hair. And he thought of his mother, picturing her as she leaned over him, pretending to be strict, but always laughing; seeing him, apparently, as the source of some never-failing, never-ending comedy of mysterious and cosmic proportion. He smiled at the thought of her. Then Freddy, Billy, Luca and that girl Laura –

  The whistle blew. He jumped and leapt up from the rocky trench. ‘Let’s go!’ he screamed. ‘Let’s go!’

  Edgar Midwinter invited his sister to join him at Torrington for a few weeks in the summer and Sonia arrived in the last week of June. It was planned that Jacques would come over later when business in Paris began to fall off in the summer. Sonia stopped off in London on the way and discovered a notable change in attitude since her last visit. Where previously the people had seemed anxiously patriotic about their soldiers – if unsure of how to treat them when they actually met them face to face on leave – now they seemed openly proud of them and impatient for the victory they felt confident was coming. Thomas and Kitty were living in rented rooms, but hoped to buy a house soon; Thomas was finding it difficult to establish himself in private practice and his money was still tied up in the Wilhelmskogel.

  There was not much to do at Torrington, but Sonia was able to work in the garden and to help Lucy with the domestic arrangements. In the afternoon, she went riding in the fields, along the ridge and down to the river. Then, in the evening, after supper, she usually wrote to Daniel, though she feared to bore him when she had so little to relate. One afternoon, she had returned from her ride and was arranging some flowers on the circular table in the hall, when the front doorbell was pulled. Outside was a telegram boy, whose bicycle was leaning against the front steps of the house.

  ‘Mrs Rebière?’

  He held out a small envelope, then jumped back onto his bicycle and pedalled off down the drive as fast as he could. The telegram was from Paris. Sonia went up to her room and sat down. She placed the envelope unopened on the table beneath the window that looked over towards the duck pond and the church. If she did not open it, then all was still well. Then, not a religious person, she knelt at the end of the bed and prayed. She stood up, wiped her hands down the front of her dress and with shaking fingers unstuck the paper. It was from Jacques. Daniel was reported missing presumed dead following action near Asiago, Italy, June 15th/16th, 1918. Jacques was on his way to England as soon as he could get a boat. He had cabled to the War Office and Infantry Record Office asking them to communicate at once with Sonia at Torrington.

  The following day came a letter from a Mr R. C. Fowler at the War Office, Finsbury Court, Finsbury Pavement London EC2 on cheap yellowish paper with her name and address correctly spelled in the bottom left hand corner. It offered condolences, but no hope. The missing accounted for a large proportion of the dead in this war; while no burial could take place, these men were honoured in the same way as those whose bodies were recovered. There would in due course be a divisional memorial, he assured her, on which her son’s name would appear, and it would be possible to visit it when hostilities were concluded.

  It seemed that Daniel had slipped through the hands of death once at Passchendaele, but had not managed it a second time. Jacques arrived a week later to find Sonia in a state of shock; although she had shown the telegram to Edgar and Lucy, she had not spoken since the day it arrived. She had nothing worth saying. He put his arms round her, but after a mumbled greeting she remained silent.

  In August, they received a letter from Daniel’s former commanding officer.

  Dear Mr and Mrs Rebière,

  I am writing to offer you my sincere condolences on the loss of your son, Lt D. Rebière. As you will know, he served in my company from the autumn of 1916 and was a dutiful and valued member of the regiment. Like many men who have served the King in this war, he was not by nature a soldier. However, he did not complain or make trouble; nor did he shirk his duties when he served with me in the autumn of 1917 in the Ypres Salient in the most trying circumstances.

  When he had recovered from his wounds, and the battalion was moved to Italy, your son seemed to develop as a soldier, and I was pleased to be able to recommend him for promotion. As a platoon commander, he was dependable, prompt and resourceful. His linguistic ability made him an “ever-present” in night raids across the River Piave and a lesser soldier might have resented this continuous exposure to danger.

  However, it was in the mountains, in our final Italian posting, that the true measure of the man was seen. He seemed to have a keen affinity for the terrain and to know by instinct what was required. At first, he was diffident about commanding men, but he won their trust in the best way that an officer can
: by showing an example.

  By the time of the Austrian offensive in June, in which your son gave his life, I had come to rely on him as my unofficial second-in-command.

  His men loved him, and his inspiring example in our successful counter-attack was an important factor in our victory.

  Yours sincerely,

  John Denniston, Lt.-Col.

  With no body to bury, it was difficult to know what do about a funeral. Jacques returned to Paris in September, but Sonia did not wish to leave Torrington. In October, it became clear that the Allies were close to a final victory and Jacques suggested that any service for Daniel should wait until after an Armistice. In his heart he was hoping that the light of peace might reveal his son still living. The Asiago plateau was cleaned up and the debris of war was taken down the mountain on the snaking roads; every dead soldier from the dozen different countries who had fought there was found and buried. In December, sheep were put to graze; and soon after Christmas, when the snow fell, the Italians ventured out with toboggans and skis.

  Through the regimental headquarters, Sonia was able to be in touch with Denniston, and asked if Daniel had any friends who would like to come to a service at Torrington. He replied that there was an Italian captain called Gregorio and he would try to make contact with him; the others of his original platoon, alas, were all dead.

  It was not until February 14 that the village church tolled its bell and a small group of mourners gathered at the lychgate. In addition to the family, there was Lt.-Col. Denniston for the regiment, Captain Luca Gregorio and, from Carinthia, Freddy, Daniel’s childhood friend, who had survived the war.

  Sonia had prepared a small box of Daniel’s belongings, including the copy of Shelley’s poems that his uncle had sent to Italy, from which various bits of dried flowers fell out; a couple of the toy animals that he had carried in his wicker basket as a child; and his first tooth, which she had kept in an enamelled box on her dressing table and which was the only part of his body that survived.