The Great Level

by Stella Tillyard

  I point out to you the figures that show the depths we dig must free the land for pasture. Then I lay out the large piece of paper that has the drawings and plans of the sluice.

  ‘This shows the sluice as if it is cut in half. You see here the height of the walls and the placing of the run-off channels.’

  ‘And this?’

  ‘Those are the wooden gates, with the doors set in them; their widths and heights.’

  Full of delight I explain the workings of the sluice, until you move this last page over and stand up.

  ‘I am leaving, Jan.’

  ‘Must you go?’

  ‘Yes, I have work to do tomorrow.’

  We kiss then and draw closer, and a warm happiness spreads through me. I am buoyed up by the success of the works and by your touch. I promise myself that soon I will ask you to come with me wherever I may be called next in my profession, and to come as my wife. Whenever I have approached this subject in the last months you have flown away from me. I have told myself that it is thoughtless to take you from everything you know. Underneath that consideration I have been reluctant. To ask the question I must bear the answer, and I have been afraid. Now I have a greater trust in myself.

  I am safe asleep under the coverlets when someone bangs on the door. The knock reverberates through the cottage so that I jump out of bed, first upon instinct and then with dread running through me.

  ‘Mr Brunt. Open the door; open the door.’

  Instead I open the window and lean out. A figure stands there in the darkness.

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Captain Townley.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Something has happened. Come out.’

  ‘Yes, yes.’

  I feel my way in the dark, finding the door of the bedroom with outstretched arms. Cool black air meets me outside. There is no moon, but a faint streak of green on the horizon. Everything is quiet, as it is in the hour before dawn when no birds sing.

  Captain Townley holds a lantern. He has been running.

  ‘The bank. The bank; oh, Mr Brunt, it is leaking.’

  ‘How much?’

  I am alert immediately, an engineer who knows his work. New embankments, when first tested by a great volume of water, may leak a little. Just as a loose tile in a roof lets rain drip through, so a fissure in a new embankment allows water to trickle out; but just as a drip will not cause a roof to collapse, a trickle will not bring an embankment down.

  ‘I do not know.’

  ‘Where is it coming from?’

  ‘Above the sluice near the camps. Major Wade sent me. He was with the patrol.’

  It is a cold November night and there has been rain for days. The new cut and the old river have overflowed their banks and turned the washes into a field of water. This I look upon with Dutch eyes. I have built the embankment to withstand a volume of water that I calculate can never come down from the tributaries that drain into the River Ouse. There is probably nothing untoward.

  ‘Do not worry Major Wade. I shall ride over to check. Can you find Mr Van Hooghten in town if I go on ahead?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I ride fast along the path by the river. The sky brightens to the east as I go, the sun sending red shafts of light under the rising cloud. It has almost stopped raining and away to the west I can see the fires of the fishermen. They are burning brightly in the half-light of dawn in greater numbers than I have ever seen them.

  My mind is clean and clear, as if it is floating above me. If the bank is still unsettled and water has found a way through, I must deal with it quickly. Rapidly I go over in my mind the tools and materials needed to plug a leak: spades and hatchets, brushwood, turf; even bunches of sedge if things are hard.

  After a few minutes sounds come down the path; a confusion of men’s voices, shouts and replies. In another few minutes I can hear the words.

  ‘Spades here.’

  ‘No, faster.’

  ‘We are doing it as fast as we can.’

  It is evident even before I arrive that Major Wade has summoned help from the camp.

  ‘Over here – over here. More – more!’

  ‘There is another leak – come, come.’

  ‘And over here.’

  I ride faster, my horse’s hooves kicking up the mud along the path. I can see the camp now, not far up ahead, and, from the top of the embankment, I can see men running out of the huts, pulling on their cloaks, looking this way and that.

  The shouting increases.

  ‘It’s coming from underneath.’

  ‘Open the sluice gates.’

  ‘Open the doors in the gates first.’

  ‘No, no; then we cannot open the gates.’

  ‘Yes, we must. The water is too high to open the gates.’

  I pull up my horse and shout back. ‘I am coming. Open the doors.’

  ‘That’s Mr Brunt.’

  I hope against hope that enough water can flow through the doors to lower the levels upstream and let us stop up the leaks. I can see several groups of men, prisoners and soldiers mixed up together. Some work at the bottom of the embankment, some on the drained land beyond. One group is filling buckets with muddy soil, the other pressing it into the leak, pushing it in with branches pulled from willows nearby. On top of the embankment another man stands anxiously, pointing now here, now there, at the trickles of water – more than one I see now, straight away – two or three, not drips but insistent streams.

  I ride up to him, a soldier. ‘Here, take my horse. Ride back to my stable.’

  He calls out to another soldier standing a little way off. ‘Take this horse to the cottage along the embankment there.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And feed him.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then find Mr Renswyck.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  The soldier is no longer insolent, as they have been for so long, but quiet with fear. He takes the bridle, swings himself up and urges the horse gingerly back along the path. I turn back to the other man.

  ‘How many leaks – how many?’

  ‘I do not know, sir. There are more down there’. He points along the embankment. ‘We are doing everything we can.’

  The men begin to shovel earth up at the bottom of the bank, silent now, and desperate. The water is pouring out, bringing mud with it. Are the other leaks as bad? Looking down the bank I see something that makes my heart jump. Four groups of men are working at the bottom of the embankment, spread at intervals – intervals which I know, as an engineer, are more or less equal.

  What I feel then, as I stand there, is a shifting of the ground; a settling like a sigh. The weight of water is incalculable; from a trickle to a rush is a moment. It is moving faster now that the sluice doors have been opened.

  ‘Off, off, get off. It is giving way here.’

  I run down the embankment and push the men away.

  ‘Go go. Get up on the embankment and run.’

  They look up in astonishment. One man shouts, ‘I am not getting up there, you mad Dutchman. What if it all goes?’

  The others catch his fear and they all plunge into the fen, dropping their spades as they go. I have no time to call them back; I run along to the next group, then the next, shouting.

  ‘Get up, get up.’

  None of them obey. I scramble up the steep incline of the embankment and turn to see them running in the direction of the camps. Then I am suddenly tottering. The embankment is trembling, turning to liquid underneath me, taking me with it. Half running, half falling, I manage to stumble along to an area of greater firmness. Everything inside me feels to have disappeared. It seems very quiet, though I can hear a noise like thunder that brings me back again to where I am standing. I turn and see a whole section of the embankment collapse into itself. In a few moments the water has eaten away at its base, taken it under, and surged on through the breach.

  All the pent-up water in the washes seethes and boils, a mas
s of roiling brown that foams grey and white, turning over and over as it is pushed from behind. Rushing through the breach it pulls in more of the embankment from either side, the impacted earth falling in blocks as easily as a child’s sandcastle is washed away by a wave.

  I run back and look across the roaring water to the other side. There another section of the embankment begins to crumble.

  ‘It’s going! It’s going!’

  ‘Get out.’

  ‘Go; go!’

  All around me men are throwing down their spades. Now we can only stand and watch, feeling under our feet the force of nature no longer denied. The water masses and swells out beyond the breach across land. It hurls itself into the newly dug drainage ditches, impeded by the drop, pushed by the water behind, and comes up in great waves that forge onwards. It smashes new fences and takes them with it as it surges on towards the camps. Only a few minutes have passed since the first breach.

  Standing on the embankment, thirty feet above the fen, I strain to see through the spray-filled air. Everything is dim and the outline of the camp is smoky and far away. The air is full with the sound of rushing water and the crack of timber. When the water hurtles up against the stockade there is a crash, a momentary lull, and then down comes the stockade, fragile as a row of matchsticks. The watchtowers, that yesterday seemed so high and strong, fall straight into the flood. In a second the water is loaded with planks of wood and the split trunks of the stockade that swing round in the current like battering rams and smash against the sides of the huts, where the prisoners will just be getting up.

  Now the shrieking begins, high above the roar of the water. Through the mist I see the prisoners clambering onto the roofs of their huts. I know there is nothing to be done. I have seen before, as a child, the force of water unconfined; no power on earth can stop it. It will burst open the doors of the warehouses, push aside the stacks of spades, undo the great coils of rope and smash the bags of wooden pegs against the walls. It will rush through the food stores, soaking the piled hessian sacks of potatoes and beans. Everywhere, people will try to climb up out of its way; into the wagons, onto the roofs, up on tables, uselessly. The water will be too strong for them; I have seen this also. Beyond the stockades into the soldiers’ quarters and the town it will take down fences and walls, sweep away hen coops and rabbit hutches, and carry its cargo across the fen. There it will spread out, filling the new drainage ditches, merging with the old meres. The water will follow its earlier ways, the channels and rills it knows. The great field of water confined in the washes will empty onto the land and return it to mere and island as it was before.

  The sun rises and pushes away the dark night clouds. I am standing on the edge of the embankment looking down into the breach, where the water is still running, knotting and turning over in its hurry to get out. Across the wash the other embankment that runs along the course of the new cut is holding firm. The sounds of the water, the rush of it, and the crack of branches and timber, fill the sky.

  For a moment I am in another place: on Tholen, a little boy, standing on the dyke above the Oosterschelde, hearing the roar of the river and hanging onto my father’s legs. The river has burst its banks and poured down into the fields beyond. It is winter, and a bitter wind is turning my fingers red and swollen. The whole village of Sint-Maartensdijk is out on the dyke, and as I look a body floats by, twisted and broken. I bury my face in my father’s cloak.

  Night after night the sight comes back to me. Even as I sleep the pictures gather. How forceful the water is; how helpless a man. And it is not just the dead man who is broken and frail; my father too shrinks and floats away in my mind. Though he is strong, and my father, he cannot stop the flood. He cannot make the world safe.

  It was after the flood on Tholen that I determined to become an engineer. I never wanted to see again a battered thing that had lived so soon before. I work to increase prosperity, as I am asked to do, but below that, buried in my mind, is the stronger force. I work never to feel again such fear as I felt that night, and never again to see such misery. Step by step I got there, measuring, planning, taking care. I have been a good engineer, and until now I have never met the flood again.

  I look up and see Van Hooghten. He stands on the other side of the breach and gazes down at the swirling water that runs between us. He is shouting but the noise of the flood snatches away his words so that we can only gesture to one another. I want to tell him what I have seen along the embankment; four breaches at regular intervals. Nature does not measure in this way; nature finds a weakness in a structure and concentrates there.

  ‘Jacob. Jacob.’

  Van Hooghten does not hear.

  ‘The camps. Get to the camps,’ I shout into the noise, gesturing towards them.

  Van Hooghten throws his arms into the air. I do not know what he is trying to tell me. Two soldiers are running towards me, covered in spray.

  ‘Go back. Go back,’ I say. ‘Find Captain Townley and tell him what has happened.’

  They are too afraid to listen.

  ‘The rest of the embankment is safe. Go. There will be no more breaches.’

  The water has done its worst. I cannot think of the collapse now. I have to concentrate on getting the prisoners and soldiers out of the flooded camps and onto dry land. More soldiers come up along the embankment. Major Wade arrives too, muddied to the waist. To my surprise, when he sees me he doubles over and begins to sob.

  ‘The camps – it is like a battlefield, Mr Brunt. My men caught asleep – hurled against the walls of their huts.’

  ‘Are they dead?’

  ‘Yes, yes, many. Others alive, but with limbs broken. The same for those prisoners who tried to run. The water got them, and the debris too. Tree trunks, bits of the stockade. No man can withstand that.’

  I have seen it, I want to say.

  Wade is chattering, words falling out of him. ‘It is terrible, terrible; I did not think to see such things in this place.’

  ‘Your stores?’

  ‘The powder is lost, many weapons too, or fallen into the wrong hands maybe.’

  He looks round and begins to weep again. I keep asking questions to bring him back from the sights in his mind.

  ‘The prisoners?’

  ‘I have given orders for them to be rounded up. Many are on the roofs of the huts. Others trying to get away across the fen.’

  ‘We can do nothing, Major Wade, until the water stops running like this.’

  Wade concentrates himself with a great effort. ‘How long before the water stops?’

  ‘I cannot say.’

  ‘What happened here? What happened?’

  All day the Major’s question squats there, and I will not allow it into the light. I am an engineer and a man who measures and orders what I see. What can I say of the day? That no man can outrun water, though some try. Most who tried, or thought to escape with the flood, are swept away. We find their bodies, dozens of them, smashed and broken against tree trunks or walls. Others have been taken out onto the meres where we will find them tomorrow. It is certain that a few have escaped and are hiding on the fen, but they cannot get far, and will be recaptured in time.

  Some prisoners who have had the strength have scrambled onto woodpiles sheltered by warehouse walls from the force of the water. Others are lucky and find old banks and islands that still stand above the flood when the water settles. Wade and his men find them there, and the soldiers, without compunction, tie them with ropes and confine them to the higher areas of ground. Until they have cleaned their huts and rebuilt the stockades the prisoners must somehow be contained.

  As Wade tells me, the soldiers’ encampment, built on the low ground beyond the camps, has been half destroyed and is now encircled by water. The doctor is tending to all the injured, prisoners and soldiers alike, who have gathered by his house. Some sit and clutch at their broken arms, others lie on bunks brought from their huts. Knots of soldiers have managed to clamber to safety on the high
est ground, covered in mud. There they clean their weapons with rags, or stand bewildered and silent, more reduced in speech than any battle could make them. All around, amongst the reed stems and the flotsam, and up in the trees, are the chattels of everyday life. High in a leafless willow a white shirt flaps in the wind. In a jumble at my feet I see pipes and tinderboxes, bibles and cooking pots, candles and spoons. Everything is filthy, smashed and torn. A scummy brown film covers what men once treasured or hoarded. A few of the soldiers bend down to pick things up; others simply stand stunned.

  Striding from hut to hut is Adriaan Renswyck, his cur at his heels. He is a man possessed by fury, and his russet cloak and the notebooks that he clutches are caked with mud. I watch him lift and drop a pair of soaking breeches, pluck out a wooden cup floating on the water, and set upright a broken looking glass on a smashed and tottering table. When he sees me, he turns abruptly and stops.

  ‘Adriaan.’

  He fixes me with his burning eyes and begins immediately to shout, walking towards me until we are close, cocking his face upwards so that his beard juts out.

  ‘You have done this, you fool. You have destroyed the camps, the stockade.’

  Coming right up he pulls his fists out from underneath his cloak and I wonder if he is going to hit me. Instead he turns away, delicately draws a cambric shirt out of the sludge and then throws it back with a look of disgust. Finding a chair legs-up in the muddy floor he turns it upright in a single flourish and wipes the seat with his handkerchief, then sits down and pulls a bottle out from underneath his cloak. Oblivious to the other men and to himself, he drinks. Then he begins to shout.

  ‘Everything I built is gone. Everything destroyed.’

  ‘All we can do is clear the camps and start again. It is the force of nature, Adriaan. Sometimes nature is too strong for us.’

  ‘In my experience it is man who is too weak.’

  ‘Adriaan, I cannot talk like this.’

  The only thing to do is walk away. I feel Renswyck’s anger towards me and towards the whole world; but it is a small thing to set beside a flood. After a few minutes I forget about him completely. With the afternoon, cold sets in. Major Wade orders a detachment of soldiers to round up the scattered animals. Men cannot swim without learning and justly fear the water. Yet animals that we credit with few capacities are endowed with that knowledge, and they swim with ease. So it is that this afternoon I see several cows standing on an elevation in the mere quite serene, having swum from their places of sleep or milking. The smaller animals, taken by the current as it rushed through the camps, are returning. Wading through the soldiers’ encampment I see several dogs that have made it back to their haunts. The cats sit on the roofs of huts or in trees. They will find their own ways to the ground. Only the horses, tied up in the stables, have drowned. Their noble bodies, gashed and mangled, now float on the flood.