The Children's Book

by A. S. Byatt

  Julian Cain was in the fighting round Thiepval and Thiepval Wood in July 1916. It was a pretty wood before the battle. It was a hopeless place to attack through and men went wild and mad and were lost there. There was a pretty château, which the shells pounded, and there were trenches whose parapets were reinforced with the deliberately built-in bodies of the dead. Julian was blown backwards by the explosion of a shell and lost consciousness, lost his mind, he thought, when he found himself lying on the earth near a field ambulance and could not remember who he was, or how he had come there. He had a shallow wound across his skull, and scattered shrapnel embedded in his flesh. He said, when they came to dress his wound, “Who am I?” and the orderly went through his pockets and told him he was Lieutenant Julian Cain.

  He remembered, for some reason, very clearly, the Wood in Through the Looking-Glass, where things have no names, neither trees, nor creatures, nor Alice herself. He lay there, swimming in morphine, and thought about names. The dead who were buried had their names on temporary grave-markers, which were often blown to bits in the endless gunfire. Their name liveth after them for evermore. He had a drugged vision of names, like scurrying rats searching the battlefield for the flesh they had been attached to, like the prophet Ezekiel’s valley of bones. You thought a name had a life but men you met in the trenches were not solid enough to have a named life that went before and after in what they had always thought was a normal manner. Men and their names were provisional: he realised he learned their names with a kind of dull grief, because there were already so many he did not need, any longer, to recall, because they could not be recalled, they were spattered and scattered in the churned-up mire that had been green fields and woodland. You could write poems about vanishing names. He did not want to write poems about beauty, or sorrow, or high resolve. He would—if his wits held and he did not stop one—try to write a grim little poem or two about naming parts, and naming the battlefield. Thinking of Alice, some book lover had named trenches for the stories: there were Walrus Trench, Gimble Trench, Mimsy Trench, Borogrove, Dum and Dee. There was Image wood somewhere. Where had that come from? He had seen Peter Pan Trench, Hook Copse and Wendy Cottage. They were some other joker’s poetry but he could weave them into cat’s-cradles of his own, these ephemeral words in a world where nothing held its shape in the blast. You built your hiding-hole out of blocked dead men, and you called it End Trench, or Dead Man’s Bottom, Incomplete Trench, Inconsistent Trench, Not Trench, Omit Trench, or Hemlock Trench. The medical orderly came past and said they were taking him to a field hospital. Was he trying to say something, perhaps. Names, said Julian. Names. Names are getting away from things. They don’t hold together.

  They gave him morphine. He wondered, as he drowned, if there was a morphine trench.

  There was so much, so much of what was his life, that he wanted neither to name, nor to remember. Waking, he forced it down. In sleep, it rose, like a floodwave of dead and dying flesh, to suffocate him.

  • • •

  In the field hospital Julian thought from time to time about the English language. He thought about the songs the men sang, grim and gleeful. We’re ’ere because we’re ’ere because we’re ’ere because we’re ’ere.

  Far, far from Wipers I long to be

  Where German snipers can’t snipe at me.

  Damp is my dugout

  Cold are my feet

  Waiting for the whizz-bangs

  To send me to sleep.

  I had a comrade

  None better could you find

  The drum called us to battle

  He marched by my side.

  Poetry, Julian thought, was something forced out of men by death, or the presence of death, or the fear of death, or the deaths of others.

  He started making a list of words that could no longer be used. Honour. Glory. Heritage. Joy.

  He asked other men for names of trenches. They came up with Rats Alley, Income Tax, Dead Cow, Dead Dog, Dead Hun, Carrion Trench, Skull Farm, Paradise Copse, Judas Trench, Iscariot Trench and many religious trenches: Paul, Tarsus, Luke, Miracle. Many trenches were named for London’s streets and theatres, and many more for women—Flirt Trench, Fluffy Trench, Corset Trench. Julian collected them in a notebook, and started stringing them together, but his head ached. They naturally formed into parodies of jingles

  Numskull, rumskull

  Hear the bullet hum skull

  Now I’ve got my bum full

  Of shrapnel tiddly um.

  That was no good. But in that direction was something that could still be done. Rupert Brooke was gone, dead of an infected spot on his lip, in Greece, a year ago. He had written about Dining-Room Tea and about honey or some such thing in Grantchester, unimaginable now, and about war as a release from the life of half-men and dirty songs and dreary, and fighting as “swimmers into cleanness leaping.” These children, Julian thought, had been charmed and bamboozled as though some Pied Piper played his tune and they all followed him, docile, under the earth. The Germans had sunk the liner Lusitania, and Charles Froh-man, the impresario who had staged Peter Pan, had drowned with gallant dignity, apparently reciting the immortal line which had been judiciously cut from wartime performances: “To die will be an awfully big adventure.”

  Writing about mud and cold and sleet and lice and rats appealed to the real genius of the English language. It would be good to include shit and fuck and words current at schools and repressed in the unimaginable social life of respectable England. Maggot was a good English word. Someone contributed “ Bully craters.”

  He recovered, and went back to his regiment. They went to take over the captured Schwaben Redout. Here were the deep German dugouts and the powerful fortifications, Schwaben Redout, Leipzig, Stuff and Goat (Feste Staufen and Feste Zollern) and the Wonder Work, or Wunderwerk, about which poems should be written. Julian went underground, and found, on a lower level, a little door in a wall, which led to dark galleries, packed with boxes of shells and equipment, and beyond that a way to two well-shafts, with windlasses and buckets, whose depths could not be gauged by the eye, and seemed to go down and down interminably. Julian walked through storerooms full of piled bombs and tins of meat, of black and gold helmets and leather mask respirators: he was briefly reminded of the storerooms under the South Kensington Museum, with their order and disorder.

  He came to a spacious hole which was lined with gilt-framed mirrors and full of heaps of the thick grey overcoats whose stuffy smell was part of the pervasive smell of these trenches. The mirrors must be booty from the now-crumbled château. There were, in this room, books, stacked in upright crates as a bookcase. Julian took a copy of the Grimms’ Märchen, for Griselda, who would like to hear that he found it in an underground hall of mirrors. He caught sight of someone else, standing quietly in a corner, a thin, grim-looking, middle-aged man with a scarred face and weary eyes. He raised his hand to greet him, and saw, as the other raised his hand, also, that he had failed to recognise himself. He found another way out, opened the door, and found that it was largely blocked by the bundled body of a very dead and decomposing German. He retreated, and found his way up to the air.

  A few days later, he was sent out at night, with a patrol to attack a German strongpoint. As they lay in a crater under a steady thumping of bombs, he felt his leg crack. When he stood up, he could not. His men dragged him, limping and falling, back to another crater, and eventually to their own dugout.

  This time he had a “Blighty one.” He was invalided back to England, among the walking wounded. The bones in his feet were crushed, which he had not immediately felt, because of the cracking of his tibia. In the end, the British surgeons could not save his foot, and took it off. Months later, he limped into the house in Chelsea, where the two little girls were running to the door, and nearly brought him down. He was rather upset when both Imogen and Florence began to weep wildly. There were delicious smells—toast, roasting coffee, a bowl of lilies, lavender and, as he bent awkwardly to kiss his
half-sister and niece, the smell of clean flesh, and washed hair.

  He dreamed he was being buried alive in a dugout, and could not free himself from the weight of earth, steadily increasing. He dreamed of things he had packed away and forbidden himself to remember. Florence made him hot apricot tarts and Chinese tea, with jasmine and its own pale, mysterious, clean smell, in Chinese porcelain cups. They sat him in a chair with a footstool to rest his leg, and their eyes were always just brimming over.

  Alone of Todefright’s bright boys, Florian returned from the fighting. Phyllis prepared his favourite food, herb sausages and mashed potatoes, and a Queen of Puddings. Olive told herself that she must love him, steadily and well, because he was alive, and her sons were not. She faced, she thought, the fact that she might resent the survival of this one who was not her own, and put the idea resolutely away. She had a small glass of whisky before the fly came in from the station.

  Florian was walking. His appearance was shocking. He was gaunt, and limped heavily, and his skin was puckered and stained and scarred all over. One of his eyelids drooped. His golden curls, which had been shaved off for the draft, were growing back only sparsely and in tufts, and what there was of them looked ersatz, artificial. Worst of all, he emitted a heavy, painful, wheezing sound, having briefly breathed in blown-back English gas.

  Phyllis and Olive made themselves kiss him. He recoiled very slightly. Humphry put a hand on his shoulder, and said “Come in, old chap, you’re home.”

  He had really nothing to say to them. He sat for hours in the window seat, staring out at the garden. Phyllis tried very hard to love him. They were Violet’s children, and shared an unspoken anger that Violet’s death had been so little marked, had been swallowed up in grief for Tom, as her life had been swallowed up in Olive’s. Neither of them was comfortable discussing this. Neither of them had ever discussed feelings. When Phyllis tried—falling awkwardly over whether to say “Violet” or “our mother”—Florian did show signs of feeling. It was an impatient, sullen rage. She made him little presents of cakes and sweet things, which he ate greedily.

  In the day he sat and sat. At night he walked. He could be heard, his limping leg thumping, his wheezing a steady, sinister sound, on stairs and in corridors.

  Olive woke one night as he passed the door and felt pure hatred. It was like living with a monster, a changeling, a demon. Then she hated herself, worse than she hated him. Then she went to find the whisky, avoiding the returned soldier because it was so easy to hear where he was wandering.

  They noticed he was cutting advertisements out of the newspaper. One day he said he had accepted a post as a teaching assistant at Bedales school. He was, he said, with a sad, grim little smile, good at making camps and things like that.

  They said they would see him in the holidays, and he said, “Yes, probably.”

  Phyllis wondered why she didn’t go too. She thought, perhaps she would. Perhaps.

  From

  ROLL CAN AND OTHER POEMS,

  by Julian Cain

  THE WOODS

  When Alice stepped through liquid glass

  The world before her was deployed

  In ordered squares of summer grass

  And beasts, and flowers, and gnats enjoyed

  The power of speech and argument.

  Logic is fine-chopped, roses and eggs

  Insult each other; legs of lamb resent

  Imputed insults. Peppers and salts have legs.

  Clouds scud above, and flying queens

  Like startled birds, and sleeping kings

  Snore unperturbed in serious dreams

  Of knights and dinners—serious things

  That come and go amongst the roots

  Of little lines of sportive wood

  Run wild, where no one ever shoots

  To kill or maim, and beasts are good.

  Alice skips serious from square to square

  Hedges and ditches hold their form

  And make a chequered order there.

  No creature comes to serious harm.

  Our English Alice, always calm

  Interrogates both gnats and knights,

  Reasons away her mild alarm

  At bellicose infants and their fights.

  The foolish armies do not die

  They fall upon their stubborn heads

  And struggle up and fall again

  And when night comes, rest in their beds.

  Reds clash with whites in the great game.

  Their fights are dusty but have rules

  And always end with cakes and jam

  And Providence is kind to fools.

  The woods are dangerous. You lose your way.

  The sky may darken and the Crow

  Make black the treetops, dim the day

  Shatter the branches, blow by blow.

  Crump of a tea tray, rat tat tat

  Of nice new rattle on tin hat

  Saucepan and scuttle flat in mud

  As fire flings past and black smokes scud

  And no shapes hold. I watched a wood

  Mix the four elements so air was flame

  And earth was liquid: nothing stood

  Trees were wild matchsticks, wild fire came and came

  Bursting your ears and eyes. And men were mud.

  Were severed fingers, bleeding stumps between

  The leafless prongs that had been trees. And blood

  Seeped up where feet sank. Helplessly we trod

  On dying faces, aimlessly we fell

  On men atop of men ground into clods

  Of flesh and wood and metal. Nothing held.

  There was no light, no skyline, up and down

  Were all the same. Our lifeblood welled

  Out of our mouths and nostrils.

  In another wood

  Alice walked with a fawn. They had no name.

  Nor girl, nor beast, nor growing things. Plants stood

  Things flew and rustled. They were all the same.

  Quiet was there, indifferent, good,

  Stupidly good, like that disguised Snake

  In the First Garden, where the First Man named

  The creatures, and knew Sin, and was ashamed.

  In Thiepval, for a time, and in a space

  Extreme of noise made silence. Too much pain

  Took pain away. I too was given grace

  To know unknowing. I knew not my name

  No name of any thing in that dark place.

  I stared indifferent at the stumps of wood

  And stumps of flesh and metal. All was one.

  The man beside me rattled in his blood.

  He coughed and died. And I knew I was done.

  CALLING NAMES

  Little scrubbed boys stand stiff. Their names

  Are called. Archer and Bates. Castle and Church.

  Adsum they pipe. Adsum. Adsunt. Young Field

  Stands next to Devon Minor, Green, and Hill,

  Meadows and Nuttall. They smell clean,

  Soapy and damp, through ink and chalk and dust,

  And polish. Outside English sun

  Muffled in English cloud, rests on the panes

  Of mud-smeared English windows. So to the end.

  Waterstone. Wellwood. Scrape of chairs. They sit.

  Scratch with their pens the tale of Agincourt.

  The leering lords who promulgate the laws

  Of arcane study secrets, call names too.

  Answer, what are you? Boy, get your names right

  Or you’ll be beaten. Say, what are you, boy?

  If you don’t answer you’ll be beaten worse.

  A worm, a maggot? Those were last week, boy.

  A smell, a scapegoat, a smashed snail, a toad

  A broken teacup? Now I’ll beat you, boy.

  You still know nothing, get it wrong, you cur

  You bumboy. Drop your trousers, bend

  Over this chair, and whilst I slash the rod,

  Say after me I’m
null. I’m nothing. I’m

  Zilch, nichts, don’t wince, but bear it like a man.

  And now, in a French field, the bugle sounds.

  Shaven and scrubbed and polished, they salute

  The First Eleven and the First Fifteen.

  Lined neatly up for battle, hear their names,

  Answer the roll call. All these were my men.

  Smiling gold Fletcher, eager Billy Gunn,

  Knight with long shanks and curly-headed Smith

  Shone, full of purpose, and marched out to fight.

  What are they now? Names on a marble slab

  In a school chapel. Names on double disks,*

  One red for bleeding flesh, one green for earth

  In which the flesh is scattered, smeared and mixed

  With other flesh, and lost. Names written out

  On telegrams and letters, which strike at

  The hearts of waiting women, hearing fists

  Knock on the door they daren’t unlock but must.

  I learned them all with gladness, at the start.

  I knew them all, the fearful and the bright

  Impulsive boys and canny men I knew

  And named and named. My head is packed with names.

  Names of dead men. I cannot learn the live

  Names that come late, boys to replace the boys

  Who marched away.

  They come, they go, they smile, they frown. I guard

  My mind’s door. Today they stand and smile

  Numbered and nameless. And they march away.

  And I count up more boys and send them on.

  TRENCH NAMES

  The column, like a snake, winds through the fields,

  Scoring the grass with wheels, with heavy wheels

  And hooves, and boots. The grass smiles in the sun

  Quite helpless. Orchard and copse are Paradise

  Where flowers and fruits grow leisurely, and birds

  Rise in the blue, and sing, and sink again

  And rest. The woods are ancient. They have names