The Children's Book

by A. S. Byatt

  Griselda Wellwood was with them. Newnham College was supporting the doctors. Griselda—after a brief training as a VAD in Cambridge—went with them as a kind of liaison officer provided by the College, someone who spoke fluent French and German, and could help out with patients and authorities. Nurses with next to no French were asking wounded soldiers “Monsieur, avec-vous de pain in l’estomac?” Griselda helped both patients and nurses.

  A hospital was set up in Claridge’s Hotel, in Paris, allotted by the French. Rooms were cleared, wards were set up, sterilising equipment and an operating theatre were installed and wounded men came in, steadily, French, British, German, to be nursed, to be operated on, to be protected, by severe Sisters, from curious flocks of visiting elegant ladies. To die. There was a quiet mortuary, in the basement. The surgeons amongst them had previously operated almost exclusively on women. They learned quickly.

  Dorothy became skilled at amputations. Griselda made herself useful when, at Christmas, there were parties, and entertainments. The men put up a Union Jack with the legend: “The Flag of Freedom.” The suffragists were not amused. The men became aware of this and the flag was changed. “Freedom” became “England” and the doctors were told that the men were “all for Votes for Women.”

  They put on plays. Wounded, shell-shocked, bandaged, tremulous, they put on plays. Some were farces and some were not. The Deserter was a precise representation of the court martial of a deserter, with bullying sergeant-major, bounding lieutenant, relentless judge-advocate. The accused was the hero, and died courageously, on stage, in front of the firing-squad.

  The wounded men applauded, from beds and wheelchairs. Dorothy touched Griselda’s arm.

  “Are you all right? You don’t look well.”

  “It’s the execution. I have a horror of executions. They did it so matter-of-fact. But their sympathy was with—with him.”

  Dorothy said, quietly and grimly, that if what they had seen, and what they had been told, was a true description of events out at the Front, most men would be driven to desert. She said “They said it would be over by Christmas. It isn’t. They don’t know now how or when it will end. I’m glad you’re here.”

  Griselda said “What do you think made them put it on? Does play-acting help them look it in the face? Or cut it down to size? It is gruesome.”

  “We can’t afford to think about what is gruesome. You take a temporary bandage off a wound, and what is under it is gruesome and there is nothing you can do. They mostly know, not always. You know, Grisel, I am simply not the same person I was last year. She doesn’t exist.”

  “I’m glad we are with the women. They are so intent on—on managing perfectly—that they just go on. Most of us, most of the time.”

  “It’s early days,” said Dorothy.

  52

  Philip Warren was still in Purchase House. The gardener and the handyman had gone to the war, and there were weeds in the drive and the grass was wild in the orchard. Seraphita sat in semi-darkness, semiconscious, and waited for the day to end, coming briefly to life in the early evening, when safe sleep was on the horizon. Pomona had surprised both of them by going into Rye and volunteering to become a nurse. She was in a hospital in Hythe, changing dressings, emptying bedpans, smoothing sheets, which she did well. She turned out to be good at calming the dying, answering what they said, nonsense, rage, fear, calls for mothers, with a grave, gentle respect that was mostly helpful. She was good also with the bereaved, or about-to-be bereaved. She slipped dreamily around and yet made things temporarily clean and wholesome. She said to Philip, when she came home for a day, and lay, physically exhausted, in the orchard wilderness, that she felt useful, and needed, for the first time in her life.

  “It’s unbelievably disgusting and when you can do it you feel—oh, I expect, like nuns used to feel, when they deliberately did horrible things. I’ve got good at knowing which muscles to lift things with.”

  She hesitated.

  “You know, Philip—this house—my funny family—they feel like a dream and I’ve woken up. No, they feel like two dreams—one full of beautiful things—pots and paintings and tapestries and embroideries, and flowers and apples in the orchard—you know—and one full of interminable boredom and waste, and—things that were not right but were all that happened—I know you know. I’ve stopped asking you to marry me. I’ve woken up.”

  Philip thought that among her wounded men she might find someone to love her. Because she made his bed more comfortable, and cleaned his body.

  It was not because of Pomona that Philip decided to volunteer for the army. He thought about it. He looked at his work, at his drawings, at his jars and vessels, shining quietly. He had, over time, found many of Benedict Fludd’s secret caches of receipts for glazes, in holes in the wall, interleaved in books, Palissy’s memoir, Ruskin’s Modern Painters. He had mixed them, tried them, varied them, adjusted them. It was long, and slow, work, it was patient and sometimes frustrating, but he was a man who knew something, a man with a craft, a man who had wanted something single-mindedly and had got it. There were not so many men in the world who could say that.

  He was thirty-five. He was not an eager boy. He came from a class which was cautious. He knew there was a good chance of his dying, and the pots dying with him.

  He went, he thought, because the world had become a world in which his work was no longer possible. This thing had to be shared and sorted out and finished. It was something he appeared to have no real choice about being part of. He did not—after all his reflections and searchings—really know why. That was how it was.

  He went to see Elsie and Ann.

  “I thought you would,” said Elsie, when he told her. “You might go and see Mrs. Fludd, now and then.”

  “She doesn’t know who’s there and who isn’t. But I will.”

  Philip’s medical was satisfactory. He went to training camp in Lydd, and in the autumn of 1915, went out to Belgium and the battlefield.

  In the autumn of 1915 the two Robins were in trenches on what had become a static front line around the Ypres salient. Ypres was shattered; its houses burning, its ancient Cloth Hall in ruins. The grand attempts to advance on the enemy had given way to a life in dugouts and foxholes. Shells came over, woolly bears and black crumps made craters and changed the earth from minute to minute. Fighting was mostly raids on the enemy trenches, from which many men did not return. They crept and flitted across No Man’s Land, and were spotted by machine-guns and picked off. At night in No Man’s Land, stretcher-bearers, including Charles/Karl, looked for the living in the sweet stink of the dead, and stumbled amongst severed hands, legs, heads and bloody innards. The living often begged to be put out of their pain, and Charles/Karl for the first time considered killing, and once, as a head with no face screamed weakly at him, did shoot.

  The Robins were nimble at raiding and had a good company commander whom they trusted. They sat in the door of the dugout and ate Maconochies, a mixture of tinned meat and vegetables. They scratched; they were infested with lice; everyone was infested with lice. There was a smell of old exploded shells, and a smell of death, and a smell of the unwashed, and a sweet smell of dispersed lethal gas, British gas which had floated back to its source when the wind changed. The Robins opened letters from home, from Marian Oakeshott, and Phyllis, and from Humphry, who sent gossip about Lloyd George and best wishes to Robin Oakeshott, if they were still together. Robin Oakeshott said casually

  “He visited us a lot, in Puxty. He used to laugh and laugh with Mother.”

  Robin Wellwood said “He’s a good man, in his way.” He added casually “Randy, though.”

  “I think he was—that is, I think he is—my father,” said Robin Oakeshott.

  “So do I.”

  They considered each other, with mutual relief and embarrassment. Robin Wellwood went into the shelter, to fetch cigarettes. There was a singing howl, and a shell exploded in the trench. A splinter of it took off most of Robin Oakeshott
’s head. Robin Wellwood took one look, and vomited. Men came running, stretcher-bearers, men with a blanket to cover up what they could, men with buckets and mops to cleanse the dugout. Robin Wellwood sat and shook. And shook.

  He developed a permanent tremor down the right side of his face, in his neck, along his arm. His hand shook as he cleaned his gun. The commanding officer considered sending him back behind the line, to recover. Robin said tersely, in an unrecognisable voice, out of a constricted throat, that he was fine, thank you.

  Two days later he stood up, in his new-fangled tin hat, which like most of the men he wore at odd angles, on the back of his head, like a halo. He was not the first, or the last, to be killed by the very skilful German sniper behind the stump of a ruined tree.

  Later in the war, it was decided that brothers should not serve together, just as all the men of one village should not serve together.

  Marian Oakeshott came again—by train and fly, this time—to see Olive Wellwood. Olive made tea. Tea for survivors who were not surviving well. Both of them thought, but neither of them could say, that grief felt different when it had to be shared not only with each other, but with mothers all over Britain. Marian Oakeshott had gone to see Frank Mallett, with the telegram in her hand. “The English don’t howl,” she said to Frank Mallett. “Maybe they should,” said Frank Mallett. So Marian Oakeshott cried out, at the top of her voice “My son, my son, my son,” and the church echoed it. Then, a little rigid, she went back to being a kindly schoolmistress. She went to visit Olive, but hoped to see Humphry. Humphry was shut in his study. Olive said “My letter says he was killed instantly.”

  “So does mine. So do they all.”

  And indeed, their letters turned out to be identical, with the same phrases of admiration, affection, for their boy, of sorrow and regret for his death.

  “Go and talk to him,” Olive said to Marian.

  Marian stood outside the study door. From inside came sounds of sobbing. Marian tried the door, which was locked.

  Harry Wellwood was twenty in 1915. His reaction to Robin’s death was to say that he must join up. Olive, who had not wept for Tom, who had not wept for Robin, suddenly began to weep with extraordinary violence. She repeated two words. “No” and “Why?” Over and over. Harry, a gentle creature, scholarly and, since Tom’s death, rather silent, said that everyone was joining up, he felt horrid sitting at home. Humphry, who had gathered himself together enough to go back to writing articles on the conduct and misconduct of the war, gave his son some figures. British casualties were so great that it seemed likely that conscription would be introduced, probably early in 1916. Harry would have to go then. He could wait. “Your mother needs you,” he said, looking at Olive’s wet, mottled red face. Harry did not reply “My country needs me,” though the Kitchener posters were everywhere. He said “People look at me. People who have lost their sons. It doesn’t feel right to stay here and be comfortable.” Humphry said almost viciously that winning the war would solve none of the political problems of Europe and thousands and tens of thousands had already given their lives for no advantage. Harry said “There are no men my age in the village or in the town. I need to join.” Humphry said “There are no individuals. There are just herds and flocks. It takes courage not to run with the herd.” Harry smiled icily. “More courage than I’ve got.”

  He joined up. In 1916 he was sent, with the fresh conscripts and the middle-aged reservists, with the British Third Army to the hills and woods and pretty villages of the Somme. It was calm there. They were known as the Deathless Army. Harry practised his French, and once, in Albert, collecting provisions, he ran into Julian Cain, who was in the trenches opposite Thiepval. He told Julian that the Robins were dead—“killed instantly, within two days of each other,” he said. Julian smiled benignly. “Keep an eye out, young Hal,” he said. He did not say, though they all knew it, that they were building up to an important attack. They were constructing railroads and communication trenches, with good revetments and duckboards to walk on. They were practising communication by field telephone and signals. They were exercising their bodies, to make them hard and healthy. They would flow out of the trenches, over No Man’s Land, and take the Germans by surprise, driving them back, and then there would be real warfare again, with marching and galloping armies, charges and feints and acts of courage, the generals believed.

  Julian had taken to writing poetry. It was not poetry of despair, nor yet—not yet—savage poetry of anger. It was not poetry about the glorious hour, the glorious dead, and the high calling, either of perfect gallantry or of bugles and fifes. It was poetry about trench names, which in themselves were poetry.

  Harry’s battalion was part of III Corps which, in the small hours of July 1st got ready to attack. The British bombardment of the German positions in the villages of Ovillers and La Boisselle had been loud and heavy. The plan was to make a breakthrough in the German defences through which the Cavalry would sweep forward. The gunners of III Corps were cautious about their wire-cutting. They could not cut distant wire, and had not enough ammunition to be sure of cutting what was nearer. Nevertheless, before the attack, the artillery gave up on the wire, and began shelling more distant Germans, which was part of their plan to make way for the Cavalry. Nevertheless the brigades moved forwards. Between the two villages ran Mash Valley, which was No Man’s Land. It was wide. It was eighty yards wide. A mine which was intended to bury the Germans in their dugouts and confuse their response to the attack had been discovered by the Germans, and the miners captured.

  Harry waited. He was standing next to an old corporal, Corporal Crowe. Harry thought in bursts, and between the bursts was numb and placid, as though nothing was real. He did not think about the King or the Flag though he did briefly think of the quiet North Downs. He thought: I am young and full of life. His teeth chattered. Corporal Crowe patted his shoulder, which he did not like, and said everyone was frit, no exception. Very brave men, he said, had filled their trousers, a miserable thought which had not occurred to Harry and added to his alarm. I am young and full of life. I have a gun and a knife and must fight. Corporal Crowe handed him a water bottle which turned out to be full of rum, and told him to take a swig. Harry didn’t like rum. It upset his stomach. But he drank quite a lot, and felt vaguer, and giddier, and sick.

  They were told to advance. The German shelling was precise. Hundreds of men died behind their own front line, or struggled back to the medical post. Harry got out of the trench in one piece and so did Corporal Crowe. They started to walk forward towards the black stumps of a wood on the skyline. There was noise. Not only shells and bullets, whistling and exploding, but men screaming. They stumbled over the dead and wounded, over men, and pieces of men, and were reduced to crawling, so mashed and messed was the earth and the flesh mashed into it. After a brief time, Harry felt a thump, and found his tunic damp, and then soaked, with his blood. He tried to crawl on, and could not, and other men crawled past him and sprawled in the mud. He bled. He lay still. He knew in the abstract that stomach wounds were nasty. His head churned. He wished he had not had the rum. He wished he could die quickly. He did not. Men crawled round and over him and he came in and out of consciousness. He noticed when there were no more men, and he noticed nightfall, unless the dark was death. It was not. But he was dead by the time he was found by the stretcher-bearers, so they took his identity-tag, and looked in his bloody pockets for letters or photos—there was a publicity photograph of Olive, looking wise and gentle. Then they left him.

  Corporal Crowe made it to the German wire, which was uncut. He was caught up in it, as they shot him, and he hung like a beast on a gamekeeper’s gibbet and died very slowly. In this attack three thousand men were casualties.

  The 2 Middlesex Battalion had 92.5 per cent casualties. On that first day over forty thousand men were killed or wounded. General Haig remarked that this “cannot be considered severe in view of numbers engaged.”

  The Todefright Wellwoods receive
d another telegram. Humphry said “It is bad news” and Olive said “What do you think I thought it was?” She sat in an armchair and simply stared. Humphry said “My dear?” She simply stared. After a time, she heard Humphry, in his study, weeping. It was a strange, childlike, whimpering sobbing, as though he meant to conceal it. She stood up, heavily, and went, and stroked his hair as he sobbed, with his head on his desk.

  “It’s like a knife. Cutting the world up, as though it was a cheese. Or butcher’s meat, that’s a better figure of speech. I do love you, Humph, whatever that means. If it helps. It may not. There isn’t much help.”

  “I love you, too, if it helps.”

  Tragedy had become so commonplace that it was impolite to mention it, or grieve in the open. Olive had the useless thought that she should have protected them, that she had thought of Tom, and taken her attention from these boys, and lost them.