Liam's Story

by Ann Victoria Roberts

  Crossing the road to their hotel, Stephen and Zoe were, without realizing it, in line with the Menin Road. Glancing each way for traffic, they suddenly saw the Memorial, massive, white, bridging the narrow street before it like a classical version of one of York’s ancient gates. They both paused, a car slowed, but neither of them noticed. Mesmerized they wandered to the far pavement, and then along the street, unable to focus on anything else.

  ‘I don’t know why, but I always imagined it standing on its own, like the Arc de Triomphe, but out in the countryside.’

  ‘Yes, me too,’ Stephen murmured, thinking of the memorial at Thiepval, grim and isolated amongst its woods and fields and cemeteries. This was just as imposing, but more pleasing, integral with the town’s old defences, and overlooking a peaceful moat. There were trees on the ramparts, shedding golden leaves into the water below, and traffic passing back and forth beneath the enormous tunnel of the archway itself.

  Like the city of York, Ypres formed the hub of several main roads, and the one to Menin was as busy now as it had ever been. There was something reassuring about that, a sense of life and continuation in a place that had seen so much of death. It seemed singularly appropriate that Liam’s name should be here amongst the living, in a place that had so much in common with his childhood home.

  Almost every regiment and unit of the Empire had seen service here, passing along a via dolorosa of Ypres’ ruins to front lines that straddled the Menin Road. Those who passed through and did not come back, those who fell and were denied the privilege of a marked grave, were remembered here. 55,000 names: Australians, Canadians, South Africans, Indians and West Indians, with more than forty thousand British soldiers amongst them.

  Stephen and Zoe stood beneath the great vault of the central arch, gazing up at those high walls, smooth blocks of white stone, each bearing so many names, so many regiments. Above them, sunlight streamed through open roundels, while to either side twin arches faced each other across the road, with steps leading up to more walls, more names.

  They found the Australians at last, and among the Machine Gun Corps, Liam’s surname and initials at eye-level, carved into the stone. Familiar, yet strange, and as Stephen reached out to trace those fading letters, he was possessed by a sharp sense of his own mortality.

  Embracing Zoe with sudden need, he realized more sharply than ever how fortunate he was to be alive, to have her love, and, just as importantly, her understanding. And what they shared, which seemed so much a part of Liam’s gift to them both, was a living, growing thing which had its roots embedded firmly in the past. But its branches were now reaching out towards the future.

  For Robert and Louisa, who began all this, time and fate had decreed something other than natural fulfillment, while the legacy bequeathed to Liam and Georgina had cast a blight on happiness, ended by Liam’s untimely death. For Stephen and Zoe, however, sharing the same blood, the same inheritance, there were no such tragedies, no such impediments.

  With arms around each other, they went back to the hotel. A couple of hours later, as a beam of sun glinted through her hair on the pillow, he said softly: ‘I feel so much at peace, as though everything, at last, is right. Not just you and me, but everything to do with us. Even those odd coincidences seem to have slipped into place. He wanted us together, didn’t he? And he wanted us to come here.’

  ‘Yes, of course he did.’

  Kissing the fingers she raised to his lips, he smiled into her eyes. Dark lashes cast shadows against her cheek, and it seemed to him that she knew so much, understood with greater depth the things he was just beginning to see. Yet she did not try to tell him, did not attempt to push him down roads with which she was already familiar; she was content, instead, to let him discover things for himself. Wondering whether she was fey, or simply very wise, he smiled again, remembering his first impression of her, that she was like a misty Irish morning, soft, gentle, and slightly mysterious. And when the sun shone through, she sparkled, as her eyes were sparkling now, full of light and love and an uncanny knowledge of what was in his mind.

  ‘And do you know what I want?’

  She tried to suppress a smile, but her eyes gave her away. ‘No, tell me.’

  ‘I want us to have children.’

  That was something Stephen had never said before, because as a man who lived very much in the present, he had never wanted to look that far ahead, or in that particular direction; but here, with Zoe, he was beginning to see the importance of the future. Their future, his and hers, with a family of their own.

  ‘But not this very minute,’ he said laughingly a few minutes later. ‘I’m selfish enough to want you to come to sea with me, a couple of times at least.’

  ‘And I want to enjoy living in your flat…’

  ‘Our flat,’ he reminded her.

  ‘I want to enjoy that glorious view for a little while, before we have to think in terms of a house and garden, and domestic bliss!’

  ‘You’re sure you won’t miss London?’ It was a question he had asked several times, and when he asked it, he did not really mean London, but her flat on Queen’s Gate, the one that had belonged to Robert and Georgina.

  ‘I won’t miss London at all, I’ve told you that, and as for Queen’s Gate – well, yes, I will miss it, but it’s not something I want to cling to at the expense of my life with you. It’s part of the past,’ she said softly, ‘like Robert and Georgina. But I won’t ever forget it, just as I won’t forget them.’ With a sudden smile, she said: ‘Anyway, it doesn’t belong to me, it was only ever on loan, so to speak...’

  ‘At the right time,’ he murmured.

  ‘Oh, yes – like everything else, it was at the right time...’

  They enjoyed a satisfying meal that evening in a tiny restaurant across the square, a place that, like their hotel, seemed full of English visitors here for the following day’s anniversary. At the next table they spotted the same two middle-aged men seen previously at La Boisselle. Recognition and warmer greetings led to a fruitful conversation. The two men were battlefield pilgrims of some twenty years’ standing, one an ex-soldier whose grandfather had died leading his men on the first day of the Somme, while the other’s great-uncle had been killed at Passchendaele. Their knowledge of both areas was comprehensive.

  Zoe asked what it was that drew them back, time after time, and for a moment both seemed surprised by the question. Between them they provided several reasons, from pair of understanding wives to the beauty of the countryside and the welcome of local people. Ultimately, however, they both agreed that what really brought them back, year after year, was the very special atmosphere.

  ‘There’s something about the place – both here and on the Somme. I don’t know whether you’ve noticed it yet, but you probably will, in time. It’s not the sadness you’d expect – far from it. It’s a sense of tremendous peace. Very healing, somehow,’ the ex-soldier said unexpectedly, and without a trace of embarrassment. ‘I often come here feeling as though I’ve got the weight of the world on me, but I go away again quite restored.’

  The other man nodded, while Stephen and Zoe glanced at each other. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘we have noticed it.’

  As Stephen squeezed her fingers, she knew what he was thinking, that after the shocks and stress of several months in the Gulf, he had not truly recovered himself until the last few days. He was more relaxed and at peace now than she had ever known him. So was she; and in her heart she knew that it was not simply because they were happy with each other. It went far deeper than that. It was both curious and reassuring to realize that other people felt it too.

  Stephen mentioned their particular interest in the initial stages of the Australians’ advance, and in return received clear instructions on how to approach the area. The ex-soldier, with his appreciation of aims and strategy, was able to clarify the separate objectives and achievements, and to indicate roughly the place where Liam must have met his end.

  Next morning, after an early
cup of coffee, Zoe stuffed their pockets with chocolate and biscuits before setting off at first light to drive out towards Polygon Wood.

  Against a brightening sky streaked with pink in the east, the great, dense stand of oaks and conifers loomed dark and brooding across a landscape wreathed in low-lying mist. It was eerie and beautiful, and also faintly chilling to realize that on a morning such as this the battalions had formed for their advance. To their left, mist clung in tattered shrouds to the shivering green and gold of Glencorse Wood, while isolated farmhouses appeared like ghostly mirages across the fields. They parked the car and walked along a narrow country lane towards what had been marked on their map as the second objective. The line came down at an angle, just beyond another lane which joined this one between Nonne Bosschen and Polygon Wood, and led back towards the Menin Road.

  The junction of the two lanes formed the apex of a triangle, and as they came to the corner the sun came up in all its glory, flooding sky and mist with light. Polygon Wood seemed to float before them, a dark island on a milky sea, while they waded waist deep through the clinging, shifting fog. They passed an isolated dwelling, and further on, a group of houses with barns and outbuildings, some new, others that might have been built on or near the fortified remains of old farms.

  From the information they had, it was hard to be sure of even an approximate place, but somewhere close to this lane, a sniper’s bullet had caught Liam as he raised his head. Somewhere near here he had been buried.

  It doesn’t matter. The words came into Zoe’s mind even as she dwelt on the tragedy, even as the pair of them looked round at fields and farms and back at the looming darkness of Polygon Wood. None of this matters. It came again, so clear that she looked up at Stephen, almost convinced that he had spoken. For a moment his blue eyes, catching the sun, were brilliant; and then he smiled and shook his head and slipped an arm around her shoulders.

  ‘No,’ he said huskily, ‘I don’t suppose it does matter. Not now. Not to him, anyway.’

  She knew what he meant. Seventy years ago today, as the sun rose over these autumn woods and misty fields, Liam had met his death; but for him it had been the beginning of a life that ranged far beyond these Flanders fields. That, she felt sure, was by far the greater part of what he had always been trying to tell them: that life was important, but death was by no means the end. And if love in all its forms was the most essential part of life itself, then love was eternal, all-powerful, and it was with love that he had come to them.

  His power was unmistakable, although whether it was exceptional was a question neither could answer. Whether their love and remembrance of him increased that power, or through them he was fulfilling a destiny denied to him in life, was another imponderable. The only surety was that he was with them now, communicating in his own inimitable fashion.

  A sense of lightness, akin to that Zoe had experienced at the Wandsworth hospital, possessed them both: calmer, less heady, but equally unmistakable. Although they were conscious that he had left them before they reached the car, there was, as before, that lingering sense of clarity and peace.

  Returning to the Menin Gate, they stood quietly for a while, watching a pair of swans amongst the drifting leaves, conscious of past and present and the changes seventy years had wrought. Above them were the old brick and earth walls of the ramparts, and, dominating the Menin Road, that great triumphal arch. And it was triumphal, despite the names of the dead – or even, perhaps, because of them. A triumph of the spirit was invested here, as dazzling as the morning sun, as glowing as the love and hope and blessedness in their hearts.

  Together they placed their wreath of remembrance poppies on the steps beneath Liam’s name, and with hands locked, felt his presence encompass them like a loving embrace.

  After a moment or two they climbed those broad steps to the ramparts above, and from there the world seemed a blessed place, full of light and love and perfect clarity. A great surge of spiritual joy came then, and a tingling of the blood; and in each other’s eyes and faces was a radiance that owed much to what had so long been denied, and what could now be fulfilled. Stephen looked at Zoe and saw for a moment Louisa’s smile and Georgina’s serenity, and in her, he knew, was combined the legacy of the past and all his future promise.

  And Liam knew that too. Liam had always known it.

  Awareness flooded through him then, like a great tidal wave, so clear and absolute that Stephen could only wonder, afterwards, at the completeness of that vision. It was all there, in the lives of Robert and Louisa and Edward, in that diary which was written like a series of notes for the book Liam intended to write when the war was over. It was tied in with his life, and Zoe’s, and the shared experience of this past, astonishing year. Stephen knew what Liam wanted, he wanted it written down for the living to read. It shook him so much that all he could do was reach for Zoe and hold her, very close, against his heart.

  ‘I’ll do my best,’ he whispered as he raised his face to the light. ‘I’ll do my very best.’