The Invisible Mile

by David Coventry

  ‘Has he written again?’

  ‘Louvière. No. But I have made enquiries.’

  ‘What news?’

  ‘They want to take it off. His leg. The doctors want to take it off. They are making noises that it has to come off. But he makes noises back at them. He’s lying in hospital with a rotting leg while riders come and go. Friends, old friends. Riders who don’t ride this race. Family. His wife’s family. Children lurking, staring. This is what I imagine. Then: crimpled tissue, snipped nerves. God – you know? There’s always something. Some part of you, it is always turning to a ghost.’

  We drive through a village and the morning is starting to grow out of the farmland, the buildings silhouetting. I believe we are lost. She won’t stop to talk to the men who stand at their horses, smoking cigarettes in the blue morning. She turns left then right so we come out at an angle to the road in. The sky seems to shrink into the eastern corner of the stratus, the hemisphere merging with solar streams off the sun. Everything starts small, everything starts in the verges.

  She starts saying names: Roisel. Moislains. Marquaix. Every few miles a new name. Tincourt-Boucly. A set of houses sparse, separated by haystacks and furrowed ground. Red brick house. The wood store, the thatch and faggot lying in the grass. A patch of burnt earth where cut scrub was set alight. Buire-Courcelles. Doingt. The steeple, always the steeple. The rise in each hamlet. Shops and stores. Fence and hedge. Dogs sniffing. Trees, their tops blunted. People slowly rising from their beds and the morning smoke in the chimneys for coffee and bread. Shutters pushed back to let in the sun. ‘Péronne,’ she says.

  The main road is a collection of smashed things, beaten and bombed and set alight. Here a brick oven, here a brass knob, here a pile of ash where people have since come and burned what they can’t bear to retain. Beams and stone, the shape of houses and businesses. Things remain but only need a push to send them on their way. It’s as if this is their true state, rendered so we might see the materials of each old structure, how simple they really are. There are houses still standing, occupied and fulfilling traditions of life and custom and the rest, but mostly it is piles of rubble and the skeletons that seem so simple to reduce to wood and brick. To stand at their side and whistle the right frequency and it would all go down. And how simple it would be to see them all collapse. But none of it is simple. Simplicity is just our desire for composition, for things to be true.

  Store signs still readable, one clinging to the shell of a bakery, another to what was an apothecary. I see dogs and cats and horses and birds, the sounds of birds.

  We find ourselves beside a woman in her middle age. She has her hands coated in dust. Celia speaks. The woman ignores us, shuffling in her business until I hear the familiar ‘Nouvelle Zélande’ and she stops. She stammers. She shows us her hands, fingers well used to digging. She says to Celia, and Celia translates for us. ‘She says, “I come here most mornings. I was there, across the road when the shells hit. My daughter was in here. I ran at the blaze, a foolish woman.” She says, “Isn’t that me, a foolish woman running at the blaze?” That’s what she says.’

  Harry asks if she comes here every day and Celia turns to the woman and speaks once more. I listen to them speak, the way Celia becomes the other in the shift of her tongue. I realise both women are perhaps the same age, separated by the effects of circumstance. ‘She says, “No. Maybe sometimes in a month. Once a month, two, three. Depends on the time of the year.” She lives with her brother in Driencourt, which is near.’ Celia kisses the woman. We each kiss her cheek four times. We hold her in our arms, a quiet warm through her bosom and the sense we are here and will remain here for some time. Harry stands beside her unmoving. They look at each other, slowly disentangling from the complication of what it means to gaze and gaze back. We make our way along the street and what is left of the town. Things broken and piled in remote mounds. I smell buttery bread and I turn back to the car and the others follow. It’s only a ghost, but I look back for the sign for the former bakery. The woman is looking at the ground, kneeling in interest.

  It takes time to find it, though it was always close. The river, the real river for which all of this was named. It’s beautiful though I suspect full of more broken things. Desolation in the hush and willow. I’ve heard how the land gives up hidden items once lost in the mud: guns, grenades, artillery, a truck sunk in the depletion hole. Men with blowtorches come and make off with metal. Nothing is going to be moved in one piece. The river is a deep winding thing. Trees hang their branches low to touch its ambulatory waters. No one is around to say what might lie beneath. We stare for a long time. The source of a name, and such a name as quiet and beauteous as the Somme.

  And that is what we find ourselves doing in the hour we have before we need to turn back: we stare, stare at fields and hillocks, stare at rutted ground where cattle walk and chew. We search for trenches amongst the grasslands and seek evidence but each of us is uncertain and unwilling to make a claim either way. I make my own battlefield. The longer I stare, the longer I look at fields whose names I don’t know, whose particular battles I can’t name, whose dates aren’t written in the pasture, the more it becomes apparent: I know nothing, and the land will not tell me as I’d hoped it might. I am as ignorant as Kitchener’s army in those first weeks of the war when they gathered, marched together to the town halls. Walked to where other teachers and apprentices, baker’s boys and dustmen, butchers and grocers, shepherds and shearers, boot-shiners and plumbers, students and commonplace yearners knew only one thing: to come here, to fight. Barely a soul knew what that would mean. Such scant knowledge and the only knowledge I bring with myself is the thought, ‘How could they have known?’

  It takes minutes before I see anything but the words and the words of histories and newspaper columns and thugs. The whole scene described for me, details of hillock and smoke, weapon and disturbed ground, and it feels as if I know nothing.

  Though I do know things. A kind of knowing. I know that after weeks of endless, unceasing shelling of the German lines the British paused for 10 minutes, waited for 600 seconds, gave respite enough for their opposition to recover before Allied captains blew their whistles and sent their men over the top. One of the phrases that lived past the war: over-the-top. Over-the-top. Repeat it again and again and listen for the machine guns the Hun had quickly remanned and watch as men fall in queer ways, lopsided, heads twisted, arms severed, knees shattered so the leg bends backwards. Imagine the sound, in a pause between the bullets and shells, the choir of the dead in no-man’s-land. A constant repetition, men walking forward and falling. Walking and falling. Walking and falling. Walking and falling. Say it 100,000 times. Walking and falling. Walking and falling. Repeat it until it becomes a mantra. Repeat it and eventually its utterance manufactures staggering men and you see them without your eyes. We stand staring to the north, the sun to our right, our hands up to our eyes like a salute of which neither of us is aware, stone cold in the morning, breathing grey.

  And all this, all: it seems so long ago it can’t have been a mere decade. But it is and there, as if proof, are the trees, the dead trees stubbling the land like stalks of corn after the harvest. Rows of dead wood not yet rotted. And somewhere there is Thiepval Ridge and a chateau that once looked across a much more peaceful land. But I am looking for things that no longer have the physical traits that gave them their names and I fear I will be quite mad if we stay any longer. Walking in the ghost memory of language’s open dreams.

  Eventually we find others are doing the same as us: parking their cars and stepping outside of the vehicles and walking a few steps into the field and staring, each waiting for the day, for the light to tear open the dark and show us the weight of what happened here. We are nothing more than pilgrims, made silent by an unwilling land as we ambulate the Somme. There is no church, just 300,000 dead. 300,000 and the sense that if we stay here we will become stone. Hard pillars wedged into the land, waiting on the real. Waiting on time to
start once more.

  We drive back through the meagre hours we have before the start of the stage, and I know I need his memory. I need Thomas and the memory he once had of this place, this continent. For those long months that he stared at the window, that he stared at the fireplace, that he stared at the wind making trouble with the trees that line the driveway of our parents’ house, that he stared at the pane of glass where his focus seemed at the time to rest – I watched and tried wordlessly to recall with him what he saw. All the damage, all the harm. Then at that moment in Fox under the mountain haunt of damp sky, rain and haze, he put it all in the air. At that moment, the moment he began to talk, the stuff of his silence was made ruin. Walls seemed to merge then collaspe. Something emptied out, something filled. I realise I have lamented the passing of silence and I find myself talking. I feel Celia’s eyes on me and hear the sound of myself making words out of what could have only ever been dreams.

  ‘It was spring, not long after winter had started to ease. April. Our airfield was way out west of Ypres, Wipers, whichever vulgarity we make. I say Ypres because I feel like I’m doing the right thing, but at other times I feel the opposite. I have the wrong sounds, and I know I do, but I keep using it. We were at Saint-Inglevert. 21 Squadron. This was out by the coast. These aircraft, the RE8s we flew, they were poor in the air, handled like bad air itself, like a wind tossing paper: dreadful to land and clumsy to turn. But they were our machines. Nobody could take away the fact we could fly. The thing we could do, the thing that so few others had the same right to do, was fly.

  ‘We’d fly over the front 10,000 feet up and see the battle, see it silent. I had a gun pointed between my propellers and the photographer had a machine gun at the back. We’d fire at whatever we fancied. I never hit a thing that I know of.’

  ‘You never flew here?’ Celia asks.

  I shake my head. ‘We had been at Saint-Inglevert for a month when I went down in the dunes. Occasionally the war seem to be winding down. We were wrong whenever we thought that. It was early March, before Ludendorff’s push. We’d be stealthy, flying low over the coastal region staring amongst the dunes for movements. People look like midges. You go to the beach and midges crawl out of the sand and fly. Frustrating and making you slap. But you could always tell a person, a person always stops and looks up. I don’t know what they want us to see. You know at the start of the war, nobody save the French and Germans thought much of the idea of flying, what use it might be in war. And even the Continentals weren’t entirely sure what to do. The first exchanges were men waving at each other, flying alongside and signalling hello. The escalation came about with hand signals, men with hangovers gesturing two fingers. Next came rocks and stone. Men throwing things at each other. Imagine that, throwing rocks as they went past each other at 150 miles per hour. Then pistols, the spotter at the back with a pistol. Then rifles and then machine guns. Then machine guns timed to fire through the props. The history of aerial warfare right there. I know men who’ve survived that whole gamut: they fly machines with one intent to their design, to kill and avoid being killed. And you know, I find it sad, in a distracted way, that the first time most people ever get to see an aeroplane it’s a machine out to cause them harm, to end their lives. They should be things of wonder.’

  ‘How were you hit?’

  ‘Ground fire. The same that brought down the Baron, but I was not him. In fact I’m not even sure I’m a particularly good flyer, but if you stay up, they keep sending you up. I lasted two years, which was pretty good. Luck, I guess. Luck and a good tail gunner. I had four of them, lost two to fighting in the air, dogfighting. One to illness and the other died when I hit the dunes. Broken neck, internal injuries. Trauma. That’s my guess because I never saw him again. I never saw my aircraft again except as some wreckage.

  ‘We were turning back from Middelkerke and saw a friend’s aircraft out off the coast above the Channel, the English Channel. I banked and flew at a mark I made in the sky where we might rendezvous. We fell into formation and offered one another hand signals. Thumbs up. It was towards the evening and we flew towards the sunset, which was a stupid thing to do. Right out of it came three Germans, Fokker DrI Dreideckers, triplanes. Turn on a pin and they split the two of us. I flung my craft port and towards the beachhead and the dunes which were covered in barbed wire and riddled with mineshafts. The far reach of the Western Front, the end of the line. God, you know, but that’s not quite true. The front went on in the Channel, mines, the other kind of mines, prowling ships and men like us airborne and ready to shoot at whoever tried to round the far point of the line. In theory it continued up through England, Scotland, to the pole. I was pursued by two Germans. They played with me. Twice coming alongside and staring as my gunner tried to take aim, then they’d climb, flip and be on my tail putting machine gun spray through the struts. I put her into a dive from 7,000 feet. The machine shuddered as we hit cold air. Screamed, as though I were ripping its skin from its muscle inch by –’

  This is the sound of my voice. My voice rolling forth over the top of my brother’s life at what could have been the end. Fading through the spectacle of aircraft taken from the air, ripped from the air. The memory of another garbled forth. The attempt to make memory in the shape of the other to become this narrator. I censor myself here, for there is no reason not to. No need to make entertainment out of his hurt. Though Celia heard it all. Harry too. I went on into the sand and into the dank water and mud and wire and sheets of fire and six days of crawling and waiting.

  ‘– I realised I was still wearing my leather helmet and pulled it off and set it on the high point of the crater and watched as bullets sang through it. I left it there and began to crawl and as I crawled a mist came in, peeling off the sea and rolling into the dunes. The sand was damp and I made my way blind until I was rolling without volition.’

  ‘How long was he there?’ It is Harry. He has woken, or has been awake for some time. We are in a town, Celia has the car idling through the streets, barely touching the accelerator. He sounds half-broken by the sleep he has been in since we left the river and the surrounding fields.

  ‘What?’ I say.

  ‘How long was he there? You’re talking about the ditch. Thomas’s ditch.’

  ‘Six days, I dare to think,’ Celia says. Her voice quite sudden, quite changed. Rounded vowels, the stuttered sound of Kentish England. ‘Six days far as I know. That was what I was told. Your parents sent letters. They mentioned six days.’

  ‘Six days,’ I say. I look at Harry who is looking at Celia, at Celia’s mouth. At Alice’s mouth.

  ‘His parents. They wrote saying that Thomas was found six days after his plane was shot down,’ she says and looks at me. She puts her hand over her mouth.

  ‘I hit something,’ I say. ‘My hand in something wet and stringy. I got my right leg up and looked around. I was in a ditch, quite deep. The walls about eight feet high. There were two bodies in there with me. One buried up to his waist, the other lying on his side, half-covered in dirt and sand. There were splinters of wood, nails and a lantern with cracked glass. It was a collapsed mine. I tried not to look at the men. I was aware of them, their proximity and location in regard to me and one another. Both quite dead.’

  ‘Both quite dead,’ Harry says back at me.

  ‘I was just aware of them.’

  ‘Something wet and stringy,’ Celia says.

  ‘It was the man lying. I touched a part of him. A part that was once him. Skin. Skin pulled back from his leg, his thigh. Peeled up from his knee.’

  ‘My cousin once wrote to me, Harry,’ Celia says. Her voice cold, colourless. She sits up and squints in the low sun. She glances at me once. ‘He wrote to me. This man here,’ she says, turning to my friend in the back and pointing to me. I stare at her mouth, her voice. ‘He wrote to me a few times. I live in London most of the year, I’m from Margate, but that is where I live. He wrote to me there.’ She stops and looks at me.

  I feel the
panic, the tension between silence and speech. I go on: a Judas against my inclination to stop.

  ‘I slept then,’ I say. ‘I started to sleep and dream. I lay there on my side after the concussion of an artillery hit. I phased in and out. Smoke rolled in over me. Black smoke and then it was black because it was night. The days kept switching to the night, it went on. Hunger penetrated everything; I looked in my pockets for anything I might put in my mouth, anything to chew. There was never anything. I bit my nails back to the raw, I chewed the inside of my cheek. I would stare at the dead men, waiting for them to stop being dead men and just men so I could search their clothes for anything. The sky was a dense blue that morning, without cloud and heavy like it could fall. I remember skies to remember moments of change in my life. And then I thought to dig around, to scratch about in the soil, for this was once a mine and inside mines you can find anything. I used a piece of wood to scrape away sand and dirt and look. It was futile, of course. Until I found something, it was futile. I came upon a can of beef, bully beef. How do you open a can of beef in a ditch? I searched for anything metal and saw nothing until I noticed the wooden grip of one of the men’s service pistols on his belt. It was then I touched the corpse, my first corpse. I touched his hand beside it and felt the dead cold. I took the pistol. You know, there is no point to a gun other than to cause damage. You know this more than ever when you feel the weight of it in your hand. They are revolting things no man should ever feel pride in owning. So I used it, I used it as a can opener. I held the can in front and aimed the barrel upwards and away at the rim of the lid and fired and the whole thing jumped out of my hand and I went looking for it in the mud. I found it and saw the bullet had lifted the lid so I could get my finger in there and pull out the meat. It tasted. It tasted – I don’t know how it tasted.’