Private Investigations

by Victoria Zackheim

  REMEMBERING THE PAST

  – Charles Todd –

  BOTH OF THE SERIES OF BOOKS THAT I WRITE WITH MY mother, Caroline Todd (Inspector Ian Rutledge and Bess Crawford), are set in Britain in the Great War, 1914–1918, and its aftermath. Our characters are living people to us, and their world has in many ways become our world. After over thirty books, we feel at home there. And we try to get our facts right. Careless research in a historical mystery does a disservice to those who tell us, “I didn’t care much for history in school—but I love history with a story.” For such readers, a fiction book is often the key to looking deeper and learning more. The cold, hard facts in a five-hundred-page work on the past aren’t entertaining, Downton Abbey is. But aside from the history book vs. the historical mystery debate, there’s something else to consider. What has living in that other world of our setting taught—or cost—or brought us over time?

  We decided it was important to take a look at that question. And what we discovered has been a very personal journey as well as an insight into what touches our readers.

  Research of course is the backbone of writing about the past, and we’ve used every resource we can find. Memoirs, newspaper accounts, firsthand histories of the war—all these give us a picture of what life was really like in this period. And when the written record is not enough, we go to England to do our research on the ground.

  It’s amazing what can be found in unexpected places. A postcard of a village street in 1910 or a watercolor of the churchyard in 1920 show the unpaved streets and the few motorcars, intermingled with carriages and hay wains and farmers’ carts. The dark clothes of the people on the street are a reminder that the British government had to order the nation not to wear mourning—there were so many casualties that black was making that fact too obvious to everyone. It was, the government thought, bad for morale. Still, in a society not that far removed from Victorian behavior and a queen who had mourned her own husband for decades, it must have been difficult to lose a loved one at sea or in the trenches only to be told that one could grieve only in private.

  When we are traveling, the stories that people tell us when we show an interest in the past are often heartbreaking. What is shocking is the number of men who suffered from shell shock and took their own lives, caught between what was seen as shameful cowardice and a lack of medical insight into their condition. We’re only just beginning to understand PTSD today, never mind back in 1916 or ’17 or ’18. There were stories about Uncle John, who was “odd,” or a grandfather who reacted wildly to sudden noises, or a cousin who spent the rest of his life in a dark room, unable to join the family for a meal or even a special event. And behind these, it’s easy to see the pain no one understood. It simply wasn’t talked about to anyone.

  There are also stories of “Aunt Dora” or “my grandfather’s sister,” who never married because the man she was in love with or engaged to never came home from the war. Such women, spinsters, were often called upon to nurse the elderly or take care of the children or do the volunteer work of the village. Sometimes they taught or found another respectable occupation. One was postmistress, because the postmaster had been killed or gassed or had his jaw shot away. Widows became housekeepers to a rector, and those women with the confidence to go out on their own might choose to work in a milliner’s shop or open a small tea shop if they had resources they could call on. With a generation of men dead, many women were condemned to a lonely old age, with no children or grandchildren to care for them. And this doesn’t touch on the children who grew up without a father. There are stories about how wild this lad was, with no father to control him, and others about that lad who had to leave school to make a living for his mother and brothers and sisters.

  Women earned the vote at war’s end, not from marches and being force-fed in prisons while on hunger strikes but because of what they had done for the war effort. From growing vegetables to feed an island population to nursing at the front, from driving omnibuses to setting fuses in artillery shells, women showed the government what they were capable of. But the question has long been: Would it have mattered, what they had shown the world, if enough men had returned to make them redundant, unnecessary in the postwar era?

  And that’s the problem. History books can tell us how many men died on this or that day, how many shells were fired, how many aircraft were shot down, how many tanks burned. What the books can’t tell us are all the personal stories that were the lynchpin of those statistics. It is left to the author writing about that time to show the pain and grief and hardship firsthand. Twenty thousand British casualties on the first day of the Somme Offensive sound horrific enough, but it is the woman who lost two sons and a brother on July 1, 1916, who brings home the real cost of that bloody battle.

  To get at the reality from our own point of view, we had to find out firsthand what trench life was like by walking one of the remaining ones and realizing how narrow—and how short—it was (what did a man of six feet do when the trench was barely up to his chin?) and how the mud and blood and bits of bodies underfoot caused the rather awful disease of trench foot for many soldiers. Wet shoes, wool socks, no chance to bathe—these conditions encouraged not only trench foot but lice as well, and fleas from the rats.

  We had to clamber over tanks to get a feel for what it was like for four or five men to fight inside what was little more than an oven on treads. And go up in an airplane of the time to see what it was like to know there was only cloth and lightweight wood between you and the ground several thousand feet below. There was no parachute. To survive took skill, and many pilots never survived long enough to acquire it. Experiences such as these reveal more about the war than how many divisions were called up at Passchendaele or when the tank was introduced.

  We learned to handle weapons, rifles and sidearms; to feel the weight of the pack a soldier carried on his back even as he raced across No Man’s Land in heavy fire; to try on a gas mask and understand why soldiers at the front had to shave daily so that the mask fit properly when the gas came floating over on the morning wind. A World War I ambulance had no springs, and it must have been terribly painful for severely wounded men to be bounced over ruts and potholes on the way to the nearest base hospital. Sometimes the ambulances were strafed or harassed by enemy aircraft, and at night headlamps had to be kept off, making it even more difficult to find the flattest part of an already nonexistent road. Men died from the battering before they reached help. This is how the truth is told, not only in statistics.

  There were real people out there on the seas, with a sub lurking in the storms. Or in a dogfight in the air. Or in the trenches. Real people at home hoping their loved ones would come back alive—and whole. Leave was not frequent, and some men didn’t see their families at all unless they earned a blighty ticket—a wound that was severe enough to require sending a man back to England to be treated. That meant crossing the English Channel, then a hospital train to London, and finally dispersal by ambulance to the facility that was best able to treat the burns or the gas or the gangrenous limb, the stomach wound or shrapnel too close to the spine. If the patient was patched up and returned to the trenches, he often hadn’t recovered fully enough to survive the next battle.

  And adding to all that, there was the Spanish flu epidemic. Only the flu wasn’t Spanish. It is said to have originated in a camp outside Topeka in Kansas. But wherever it began, it spread like wildfire in armies where men were crammed together and under stress, and in civilian populations where a man might leave for his job at eight in the morning and be dead by teatime. It was that fast in many cases, slower in others, but still deadly. There were no antibiotics, no real treatment as the lungs filled with fluids. The nurses and doctors did what they could and then they, themselves, dropped from overwork.

  It wasn’t only the flu. There were concussions from shell blasts; trench-foot amputations that made it impossible for a man to walk, much less charge; rat bites; gangrene; and infections from bits of dirty un
iform being carried into a wound. There were a few antiseptics and fewer early X-ray machines to pinpoint where the bullet or bit of shell was lodged. The various forms of gas were particularly damaging to exposed skin and lungs. Some blistered, some were poisonous to breathe, some were blinding, and others seared the lungs. Early gas masks were rudimentary—the first protection, such as it was, was a handkerchief that a man urinated on and then held to his face. Masks had to have goggles to protect the eyes as well as the lungs. The warning that gas was coming meant literally dropping everything to get a mask in place. It often crept through the morning fog in a low cloud. And if the wind shifted, it could sweep back on the army that had launched it.

  There were flamethrowers as well, useful for taking out a machine-gun nest or clearing a building. Another of the many ways man found to kill his fellow man, from the bayonet to the latest machinery devised by the various armies, led to a comment that we found telling: “The Great War was the price men paid for the Industrial Revolution.” Rifles and artillery, submarines and battleships were improving, tanks were invented, and aircraft came into their own. In artillery alone, eliminating the recoil meant that a shell could be dropped relentlessly in the same spot as often as anyone wanted. Nobel’s smokeless powder made it possible to see the battlefield clearly in spite of the number of weapons being fired at the same instant. The list goes on. When a trench was blown up through tunnels filled with explosives, the first shock wave could kill as many men as actual wounds.

  There was a trend some decades ago to show that this war was not as horrible as it has been painted. The theme was that over time, embellishments made it appear worse. But when the stories of ordinary people flesh out the suffering, they contradict that historical perspective. By the time the Spanish flu adds its dead to the total, and an entire generation of men is wiped out, one hasn’t even considered the refugee problem. The Armenians, the Russians, the massacres, and the horrors need a human face to make them real.

  As one man said to us about serving in Iraq, “Once you’re out of it, you don’t talk about it. And you hope that by not talking about it, you’ll finally forget what you’ve seen and done.” Much of the story of the Great War—the war to end all wars—died with the men who survived it. They didn’t want to bring their nightmares home to those they loved.

  One of the saddest chapters of the war revolves around the missing. Records were kept of the wounded and the dead and men taken prisoner by the enemy. But there were the missing. They were sometimes presumed dead because fighting had been reported at the time, a sector was known to have been blown up, or someone had been seen to fall in the heat of battle, but the truly missing sometimes appear even now in Flanders Fields when a farmer plows up a boot with the remains of a foot in it. All that’s left of someone’s son or father or husband. DNA makes it possible to identify many of these now. But sometimes that, too, is damaged, and there is presently no chance to reconstruct it. Families had to learn to live with missing. Do you plan a memorial or go on hoping he’ll be found one day? Not much hope at sea, but that farmer’s plow has churned up the battlefield. Sadly, many family members themselves died not knowing. And a public memorial had to be raised to the missing, there were so many of them.

  The Commonwealth War Graves Commission tried to find all the bodies hastily buried on the battlefield and remove them to more formal graves with markers. Too many are still listed on the crosses as Unknown, while others have been identified by name, rank, and regiment.

  One good thing is the number of museums that have preserved the past. The National World War I Museum and Memorial in Kansas City. The Imperial War Museum in London. The In Flanders Fields Museum in Ypres. They keep the story alive, save artifacts and bits and pieces of personal gear such as the masks snipers contrived or the uniforms of the various regiments, to present the personal side. Many of the American commanders in World War II learned to fight in World War I. MacArthur and Patton and Bradley, just to name three.

  The first time we were in Kansas City, we entered the displays over a clear glass flooring, like a drawbridge, and under our feet, down below, was a field of poppies, so many dead to each blossom. It brought home, before we saw a single exhibit, that this was also a memorial to the dead. Their war, the things familiar and important to them, the things that kept them alive—or caused their deaths. The aircraft are out near Dulles in the Smithsonian exhibits, and you can see how frail and small they were, housed with their descendants, the Flying Fortresses and fighter planes of World War II. How much courage—or desire to fly—it must have taken for a man to trust his life to some of those early craft.

  It’s hard, writing about the war, not to remember the dead. Stats in history books count the bodies, but they aren’t just numbers when in every village in the UK there is a memorial to men who served their country and didn’t come home. We read their names and realized that families often lost more than one member. And often in the same battle, because these men went to war together and served in the same company. They often died together as well. There were Pals units that made it possible for men to serve together rather than spreading them out over various regiments. It was moral support, of course, courage gathered from the courage of friends, but the consequences were often deadly. These Celtic crosses with names etched in the stone are well kept even today, often with pansies for remembrance and silk poppies for Remembrance Day—what we called Armistice Day until it was changed to Veterans Day.

  It’s different in northern France, rows upon rows of white crosses appearing just off a road you are traveling. Acres of them, it seems, and each one is a man. The grass around them is lush and green and well maintained even now. Once fertile farmland, some of it, and in the spring, you glimpse scarlet poppies among the roadside wildflowers. It’s quiet in these cemeteries. Not many people come here; they aren’t popular tourist destinations. Some of the people driving past might not know which war they represent.

  There are more formal British graves all around the town of Ypres, with regimented but handsome stones behind low walls, and also monuments, often arches and gates, to mark the dead of soldiers of the Commonwealth who died for king and country. Many of them are from Imperial India, a whole gate of them in one place, with the names of those who died in a cold, wet climate far from home. Their ranks and their names are recorded for posterity, but standing under the arches of the gates, you realize how many there are, line upon line of officers and men.

  Also near Ypres, in one of the smaller cemeteries, is the grave of the man who wrote the haunting poem “In Flanders Fields.” John McCrae lies there now, where the poppies grow. Impossible to tell who the men around him are. Just names and ranks and regiments, not whether this man was a solicitor, that one a chaplain, the one over there from the slums of Liverpool or Glasgow. It doesn’t matter; they are all here together, equal in death. You begin to see people, not just numbers of stones. Individuals. The writer in you wonders about them and is touched by them. Walk in these places, and you feel something, if only the cost of war. What makes a man willing to fight for his country—and die for it?

  Outside Nice is a lovely and moving memorial to the heroes of Verdun, the battle that left physical and emotional scars on the French army and the French people. It is to them what the Somme is to the British, Gallipoli to Australians and New Zealanders. It is remembered with pride. As it should be.

  There’s an American memorial to our own dead in Washington, DC. Not very far from the elegant World War II memorial or the haunting Korean and Vietnam memorials is an out-of-the-way Grecian-style round temple. Not very large or impressive, in need of upkeep when last we saw it, and rather lonely. The war to end all wars has been more or less forgotten by those who come to visit the other memorial sites. There will be dozens walking and taking pictures around them, while here only the wind through the surrounding trees makes a sound.

  There are German dead in France from World War I, their resting places marked by somber iron crosses,
row upon row. Dark, sometimes foreboding, always rather sad. You wonder, standing there, if these men would rather have gone home, if only in coffins. But here they fought, and here they died. Perhaps it’s fitting that they are also buried here.

  Travel in Germany, and it’s hard to find a memorial to the dead of the Great War. What happened to them? Were they obliterated in the next war? Or was Germany in such straits that feeding its people mattered more than monuments to those who couldn’t come home to lie among their ancestors and, later, their descendants? Who knows? If there are separate cemeteries, they aren’t pointed out to tourists.

  But we found two of them. Memorials, actually.

  In one town was a plinth with a World War I German helmet atop it, all in stone, with the dates of the conflict. It was in a small triangle of grass where two roads met, and the grass had grown nearly as tall as the top of the helmet, all but concealing it from view. It wasn’t very tall to begin with. A far cry from the smallest obelisk in the tiniest English village churchyard, well-kept and often surrounded by flowers.

  The other memorial was in a church in northern Germany—we’d rather not name it—where we accidentally strayed into a room below the tower. It was extraordinary, poignant, a place you find hard to get out of your mind. It could have stood in a castle, been a part of a palace, with its long plaques setting out the names of the dead. High on the wall are helmets, and there are spears flanking the tablets. An almost Gothic feel, as if it had been designed far in the past, not a hundred years ago. It honored the fallen in somber, shadowy beauty.

  No matter that the Germans started the Great War by marching through Belgium to reach France, leaving death and devastation in their wake. No matter that they started the next war in 1939.