‘She took the bus to Cambridge, to the railway station. But after she left we had an urgent message from the village shop. There’d been a telephone call. He wasn’t coming home after all. Not Simon. A German plane flew over the docks at Calais where troops were about to embark, and machine-gunned them. We were here at home knowing he’d been killed, and there was Elizabeth with her feelings of guilt and remorse, waiting for him at the Cambridge railway station.’
‘Christ,’ I whispered it, but her father heard me.
‘I’ve given up Christ,’ he said. ‘I’ve no time for religion, not since my Lizzie got so quiet, then one day went down to the river and chucked herself in. I know it’s unfair to say it’s your fault, but if you two had never met I think she’d be alive and married to a dentist. There might even be grandchildren, which we’ll never have now, as she was our only child.’
He took the basket from his distressed wife, who went inside without another word. Elizabeth’s father remained for a moment looking at me, then shook his head as if all the answers were beyond him. He followed his wife into the house, shut the door and slid home the bolt.
I stood there paralysed, wanting desperately to try to convey my sorrow, but the house was closed, and their locked door would never be open to me. I can’t remember how long I stayed, but it seemed ages before I could find the strength to move away. Eventually I managed the walk back through the peaceful village to wait at the bus stop. The cheerful bus driver asked if I’d found my girl, but I couldn’t reply. I expect my face gave him his answer, because I was crying. I could never cry for my mates, but I cried for Elizabeth.
The next day I was back at Netley.
EIGHTEEN
Claire was unexpectedly at work, summoned to a problem with the Knightsbridge accountancy firm’s computers. Since there was still no reply from Joanna, despite his persistent calls, nor any word from Charlotte Redmond, Patrick tried not to think of his personal problems. Instead he was focused completely on the crumbling notebook. Trying to decipher pages that were almost incoherent, he felt such a deep kinship and involvement in his grandfather’s life that his own concerns became inconsequential. The entry after the visit to Grantchester was filled with so much bewildered torment that Patrick could feel the anguish.
I told them I don’t want any more leave. Not for me. One day was enough. One terrible day in the village of Grantchester. I wish to God I hadn’t remembered the name. But that’s cowardly, wishing I didn’t know what happened. Poor Elizabeth. Her parents hate me. They think I caused her to die, caused both her and Simon’s deaths. All I did was like her! Was it wrong to like her? To talk and laugh? Two hours in a teashop, that’s really all it was. I feel as though I’ve committed a dreadful crime, but the only thing I did was ask her to have a cup of tea.
So I’m back at Netley. I don’t want the other few days of my leave. I can’t bear the idea. I’d see a Lyons Corner House and feel sick with guilt. I’d walk to Leicester Square and stand where we met; and wonder why I keep on living. What else could I do for the rest of my leave? Be stuck in a hostel for days, not knowing anybody, sit and watch people walk by, see motor buses drive past, feel miserable and alone among the millions of people?
The loneliest place in the world is a big city when you don’t know a single person in it. So I said no thanks to that, and they sent me back to France. The last glimpse I had of the hospital was of this awful great edifice that looked the size of about six English seaside hotels stuck together; the last person I saw was the Scottish quack, standing at the gate watching me leave, the big bearded bastard in his kilt, sending me back to hell. When he raised a hand in farewell, I turned away. I had no wish to bid any sort of farewell to him.
Patrick tried to imagine it, the vast hospital where the wounded were brought by the shipload; the bodily wounded to be healed if possible, while the mentally wounded endured strange and often cruel treatment by doctors who seemed to believe they were shirkers.
His grandfather had hated Netley, but from his notebook one thing was abundantly clear. Totally unfit to fight, he had been sent back into the cauldron that was the battlefield along the Somme. Whatever had finally happened to Stephen had occurred in those last stages of the war, long after he was thought to be dead, somewhere in France during the last months of 1918.
That night after dinner, Claire read the account of the day in Grantchester and wept. Patrick had deciphered more unstable pages, where at times the writing was very uneven now; patches of neat lettering degenerating into a wild scrawl.
‘Poor Stephen,’ Claire said softly, wiping her eyes. ‘As if he didn’t have enough awfulness to cope with. And poor Elizabeth and her family. God, that war seems so cruel.’
‘This is a bit different,’ Patrick remarked casually, indicating another page he’d bookmarked for her. ‘There’s something here I’d really like you to read.’
‘Will I need Kleenex?’
‘Not for this one,’ he replied, and leant down to kiss the tears on her face. Then he sat beside her while she read.
Hell is the same place, the Somme again, but now I’m with a motley bunch of infantry, none of whom I know. No acquaintances or friends here. I had hoped I might see Sassoon again — his name was Siegfried Sassoon, an English lieutenant who wrote poems, one of which I’d read months ago and written a part of it in my diary. A poem about that fearful place they called Passchendaele.
Claire turned and looked at him. ‘When did you find this bit?’
‘This afternoon. Surprising?’
‘Amazing.’
‘Keep reading.’
I met Sassoon at Netley, because he came there on leave to visit Wilfred Owen, another English poet I’d got to know. They were both in a hospital up in Edinburgh, because Wilfred had shell shock. Sassoon was sent there after he won the military cross for bravery. He was so brave he was called ‘Mad Jack’. But Mad Jack started to hate the war. He wrote a letter to his colonel, with a copy to the editor of The London Times, saying he was opposed to the fighting: that it was immoral, a crime against youth; an infamous war waged and plotted by old men, politicians and arms manufacturers, and he would have no further part of it. They didn’t know what to do with him — he was too famous to imprison or shoot — so they sent him to the nuthouse called Craiglockhart in Scotland.
He still refused to fight, so then they gave him the persuasion treatment, persuaded him it was setting a bad example and was even cowardly to skulk in hospital while others fought for him. They worked hard on him, appealed to his sense of honour, his patriotic pride, so he eventually went back. And on leave he came to Netley to see his friend Owen, and Wilfred was a friend of mine by then. He sometimes read me his poems, and when Sassoon came to visit, he introduced us.
I said I knew his brother, Hamo, at Gallipoli. His younger brother, killed there in 1915. Siegfried said it had destroyed his mother, who has séances to make contact with him, and keeps his room at home exactly as he left it, with clean sheets every week and fresh flowers each day. He asked me if his brother was brave.
‘Too bloody brave,’ I said. ‘Brave and crazy, like you.’
‘Like us all,’ Sassoon replied. ‘Especially the crazy part. But I hope he didn’t let the side down.’
It was such an English thing to say. A decent thing. So anxious for his brother’s good name. I bled for his grief and promised him that his brother certainly did not let the side down. He might’ve been a poet too, I said, because he talked of it, but never had the time to find out.
I hope Siegfried has survived. Wilfred Owen said he was the war’s greatest poet, and Siegfried said that was rubbish — Wilfred was brilliant, remarkable. They each read me a poem, and I told them they were both brilliant; both remarkable. Siegfried’s poem was dedicated to Hamo. Called ‘To My Brother’, it was bitter and very sad.
I’d like to see him again, but it’s so different back in France. Even at a place like Netley, although they had officers’ wards and officers’
quarters, we could still be mates. But back here, he’s now a company commander, I heard, and I’m a private. Officers and men in our army can be mates; in their army that isn’t possible. But for a few days there, we truly were real friends. And I suppose if I could write like them, I’d write a poem about that bearded Scottish bastard, the last time I saw him. Something like this:
Dwarfing the sentries at the gate, making sure
I went safely back to death and war.
If I’m lucky enough to meet Sassoon again, I’ll ask him to knock it into better shape for me.
To Claire it was astonishing. On the page in front of her was an extraordinary link between her favourite poet and her lover’s grandparent. Siegfried Sassoon had become a very special part of their lives. And he had been, she thought, ever since Patrick quoted from his poetry the night of their first meeting.
That day, after leaving him, she had gone home in the train from Lille, under the channel and then through the orchards and the hop fields of the Kent countryside, thinking of how he had looked as he spoke the few lines. She was unable to forget that moment. By the time the Eurostar reached Waterloo — another memory of Patrick, their shared laughter about the terminal’s impact on French sensibilities — she already knew she must see him again. And Sassoon’s volume of verse had brought them to this moment in their lives. It was uncanny that in this battered notebook retrieved after so long, they should encounter him yet again.
The book was dangerously close to coming apart now, and Patrick was concerned to preserve it. Claire did some further repairs with binding and glue. As long as they saved the pages, she said, even if the notebook fell to pieces as they tried to read it, she could do a proper restoration job after they’d finished deciphering all the contents.
‘And talking of jobs,’ she said, being carefully offhand, ‘I’ve fixed the computer system and told them I’m still on leave. They weren’t especially happy, but I insisted. Besides, I want to go to Georgina’s funeral with you.’
‘I’d like you to. How long does your leave last?’
‘For as long as you want,’ Claire said, then added quietly, ‘until the time comes when you go home.’
Patrick put his arms around her, and realised he didn’t want to think about going anywhere. He just wanted today and tomorrow, and the days that lay ahead with Claire. But there was Joanna whom he couldn’t seem to contact. And there was her news, if true. So this was only a gift of time suspended, and then what? Eventually, inevitably, he would go home to whatever lay in store there. A child? A marriage to repair?
All the while he kept thinking of his grandfather, who had never gone home. And during the days that followed he continued to search through the notebook for the reason why.
NINETEEN
The first I knew about it was when I heard this English voice shouting the news. Something about the French. About them being revolting. I thought it was the usual Pommy whinge against the frogs, because for two armies on the same side who were described as allies, nobody could ever call them friends.
Then another voice yelled out, calling the first voice a stupid booger, and correcting him. Saying the French might be revolting, but that wasn’t the point. They were in revolt. On strike.
We couldn’t believe it. French troops had mutinied! When we heard, it seemed as if the war must soon be over, perhaps a matter of days. If one side wouldn’t fight, how could the war continue? And they were definitely refusing to fight; that was the news that came along the line. They were all telling their commanders they weren’t going into the trenches; not only that, they were not going to shoot anyone — they’d had more than enough. Two million of their comrades dead so far, and another hundred thousand just killed in a campaign that didn’t gain them a yard of ground, devised by their young bastard of a field commander, General Nevelle. Arrogant, they said he was, and ambitious to become a field marshal, no matter how many infantry lives it cost.
For days we thought this had to be just a weird and wonderful whisper on the grapevine, but within forty-eight hours we learnt it was actually true. The French soldiers were bleating like sheep whenever they were given an order, to demonstrate their feelings of being lambs led to the slaughter. That’s how the mutiny had started, with the bleating. And after that we heard whole battalions were in revolt, no longer bothering to bleat, just determined not to fight no matter what the cost. The British brass hats in our sector were in a state of disbelief and absolute rage.
‘The fucking bastards!’ I heard one officer shout — it sounded quite funny because he had this very plummy accent, terribly upper-class to us misfits from all over the place, Poms and Aussies stuck in together, with some N Zedders, a few Boers and other odds and sods. A mixture of Empire troops, we were called, as motley a lot as you’d ever see, but not as motley, according to Colonel Plummy-Accent, as the unspeakable revolting French. It was supposed to be kept a strict secret, and there he was effing and blinding about the treacherous frogs at the top of his voice. ‘Deceitful, underhand two-faced shits! We’re here helping to defend their country, and the bastards decide not to fight!’ he bellowed. His words swept through our lines in a matter of hours. How the entire population of Flanders and Picardy didn’t know, as well as all of Paris, was beyond us.
But apparently they didn’t. Somehow the French High Command managed to keep it quiet. They hurriedly arranged a conciliation meeting at which the hated General Nevelle would address the troops. But the moment he stood up they started a chorus of abuse and catcalling so nothing he said could be heard, and after that they grabbed their rifles and started firing shots in the air.
We had a dispatch rider, a young English bloke named Dave, who knew all the gossip. We didn’t need a rumour mill in our sector, we had Dave.
‘So what happened when they started shooting?’ I asked.
‘The general legged it,’ Dave said. ‘Almost pissed himself…and went for his life. What’s that word you blokes use?’
‘Shot through?’
‘That’s it. He shot through like a turkey at Christmas time.’
It was Dave who kept us up to date with what came next. Somehow the troops and the High Command came to terms. The troops were made to realise that if the public got to hear of the mutiny, there’d be country-wide panic. The Germans would simply walk into Paris. So the troops agreed to go back into the trenches, but only to defend their country, not to attack the enemy.
Dave brought us details of what happened then. And what happened was just unbelievable; horrible.
‘These old French generals,’ he told us, ‘once they got them back in order, they weren’t going to put up with any more of their shit. So what’s been going on in their army in the past few weeks is something called decimation.’
What the hell is that? we all wanted to know.
‘Decimation,’ he said, his usually cheery face looking sombre, ‘is picking out every tenth soldier in the battalions involved, taking them out and shooting them. No questions, no trial — just outside, matey, stand against that wall and — pow! One more dead. They’ve killed a few thousand poor buggers like that already.’
We soon found out this was true. What’s more, the units they were concentrating on were mostly black North African troops — Algerians and other conscripts from the French colonies. One in every ten! God knows what our own High Command thought of it. According to some, Haig forbade any mention of it in his cosy chateau headquarters. Which sounds right to me — the old field marshal refusing to even think about it. He’s got so many deaths on his conscience, what’s a few thousand more? Especially as they’re frogs. I keep wondering if Siegfried Sassoon has heard about it, and what kind of poem it might stir him to write. Or is Siegfried as exhausted and disillusioned as the rest of us? Too beaten with the futility of it to feel anger or outrage, just waiting for the bloody thing to end so we can go home and try our best to forget we were ever foolish enough to be here.
It’s late September now. If there
were trees still standing they would be turning to colours of gold and red and amber, those tints of autumn that can look so beautiful, especially to us from the southern hemisphere where the seasonal decline and regeneration is less visible. But of course there are no trees any more. I haven’t seen a living tree, not a green leaf or flower growing since they sent me back here from Netley nuthouse. I think it was three weeks ago, but it seems longer.
In the confusion that exists now, they didn’t seem to know what to do with me, so I was put in with this mixed battalion of Empire troops. A mob from ‘the dominions’ they call us; none of us know each other, and nobody feels as if they belong here. Especially me. I asked if I could be put back with an Anzac brigade, and a British lieutenant said that was out of the question at the moment. He told me that because of the heavy losses at Villers-Bretonneux, some of the Anzac units had been converted.
‘What do you mean “converted”?’ I asked him.
‘Amalgamated and reorganised,’ he said. ‘Not enough men left, so some have been disbanded. We don’t know your old division, but it was probably one of those, which means you have to go with this Empire group till things get sorted out. And don’t ask me when that’ll be, because nobody has the faintest idea.’
He was a reasonable sort of bloke, and in hindsight I wish I’d told him that if I was to die, I’d rather be with my own and not among a mob of strangers. But a fat lot of use it would’ve been. He’d have probably stopped being reasonable, told me to shut up, to do what I was told and await further orders. But the truth is we are all strangers, and in the eyes of these young untried recruits I am an old unwelcome guest, an ageing Anzac soon to be twenty-four years old. I am shell shocked, cynical, very likely mad, and not the least bit like these boys from school.
This place where we’ve huddled in a sprawling network of trenches is near St Quentin, and somewhere not very far away must be the cow shed where I fell asleep, and woke up to find my Angel of Mons. I wonder what’s happened to her, and whether her fiancé or her father returned there. I hope so. I keep remembering my last sight of her, a lonely girl in a ragged dress waving to me until we could no longer see each other. And until I could no longer see the tears on her face.
Barbed Wire and Roses Page 22