The Penguin Book of First World War Stories

by None

  After she had finished with Thiepval, with Thistle Dump and Caterpillar Valley, she would drive up through Arras and take the D937 to wards Béthune. Ahead lay Vimy, Cabaret Rouge, ND de Lorette. But there was always one other visit to be paid first: to Maison Blanche.8 Such peaceful names they mostly had. But here at Maison Blanche were 40,000 German dead, 40,000 Huns laid out beneath their thin black crosses, a sight as orderly as you would expect from the Huns, though not as splendid as the British graves. She lingered there, reading a few names at random, idly wondering, when she found a date just a little later than 21st January 1917, if this could be the Hun that had killed her Sammy. Was this the man who squeezed the trigger, fed the machine-gun, blocked his ears as the howitzer9 roared? And see how short a time he had lasted afterwards: two days, a week, a month or so in the mud before being lined up in known and honoured burial, facing out once more towards her Sammy, though separated now not by barbed wire and 50 YDS but by a few kilometres of asphalt.

  She felt no rancour towards these Huns; time had washed from her any anger at the man, the regiment, the Hun army, the nation that had taken Sam’s life. Her resentment was against those who had come later, and whom she refused to dignify with the amicable name of Hun. She hated Hitler’s war for diminishing the memory of the Great War, for allotting it a number, the mere first among two. And she hated the way in which the Great War was held responsible for its successor, as if Sam, Denis and all the East Lancashires who fell were partly the cause of that business. Sam had done what he could – he had served and died – and was punished all too quickly with becoming subservient in memory. Time did not behave rationally. Fifty years back to the Somme; a hundred beyond that to Waterloo; four hundred more to Agincourt, or Azincourt as the French preferred. Yet these distances had now been squeezed closer to one another. She blamed it on 1939–1945.

  She knew to keep away from those parts of France where the second war happened, or at least where it was remembered. In the early years of the Morris, she had sometimes made the mistake of imagining herself on holiday, of being a tourist. She might thoughtlessly stop in a lay-by, or be taking a stroll down a back lane in some tranquil, heat-burdened part of the country, when a neat tablet inserted in a dry wall would assault her. It would commemorate Monsieur Un Tel,10 lâchement assassinê par les Allemands, or tuê, or fusillê, and then an insulting modern date: 1943, 1944, 1945. They blocked the view, these deaths and these dates; they demanded attention by their recency. She refused, she refused.

  When she stumbled like this upon the second war, she would hurry to the nearest village for consolation. She always knew where to look: next to the church, the mairie, the railway station; at a fork in the road; on a dusty square with cruelly pollarded limes and a few rusting cafê tables. There she would find her damp-stained memorial with its heroic poilu, grieving widow, triumphant Marianne,11 rowdy cockerel.12 Not that the story she read on the plinth needed any sculptural illustration. 67 against 9, 83 against 12, 40 against 5, 27 against 2: here was the eternal corroboration she sought, the historical corrigendum. She would touch the names cut into stone, their gilding washed away on the weather-side. Numbers whose familiar proportion declared the terrible primacy of the Great War. Her eye would check down the bigger list, snagging at a name repeated twice, thrice, four, five, six times: one male generation of an entire family taken away to known and honoured burial. In the bossy statistics of death she would find the comfort she needed.

  She would spend the last night at Aix-Noulette (101 to 7); at Souchez (48 to 6), where she remembered Plouvier, Maxime, Sergent, killed on 17th December 1916, the last of his village to die before her Sam; at Carency (19 to 1); at Ablain-Saint-Nazaire (66 to 9), eight of whose male Lherbiers had died, four on the champ d’honneur, three as victimes civiles, one a civil fusillê par l’ennemi. Then, the next morning, cocked with grief, she would set off for Cabaret Rouge while dew was still on the grass. There was consolation in solitude and damp knees. She no longer talked to Sam; everything had been said decades ago. The heart had been expressed, the apologies made, the secrets given. She no longer wept, either; that too had stopped. But the hours she spent with him at Cabaret Rouge were the most vital of her life. They always had been.

  The D 937 did its reminding elbow at Cabaret Rouge, making sure you slowed out of respect, drawing your attention to Brigadier Sir Frank Higginson’s handsome domed portico, which served as both entrance gate and memorial arch. From the portico, the burial ground dropped away at first, then sloped up again towards the standing cross on which hung not Christ but a metal sword. Symmetrical, amphitheatrical, Cabaret Rouge held 6,676 British soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen; 732 Canadians; 121 Australians; 42 South Africans; 7 New Zealanders; 2 members of the Royal Guernsey Light Infantry; 1 Indian; 1 member of an unknown unit; and 4 Germans.

  It also contained, or more exactly had once had scattered over it, the ashes of Brigadier Sir Frank Higginson, Secretary to the Imperial War Graves Commission,13 who had died in 1958 at the age of sixty-eight. That showed true loyalty and remembrance. His widow, Lady Violet Lindsley Higginson, had died four years later, and her ashes had been scattered here too. Fortunate Lady Higginson. Why should the wife of a brigadier who, whatever he had done in the Great War, had not died, be allowed such enviable and meritorious burial, and yet the sister of one of those soldiers whom the fortune of war had led to known and honoured burial be denied such comfort? The Commission had twice denied her request, saying that a military cemetery did not receive civilian ashes. The third time she had written they had been less polite, referring her brusquely to their earlier correspondence.

  There had been incidents down the years. They had stopped her coming for the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month by refusing her permission to sleep the night beside his grave. They said they did not have camping facilities; they affected to sympathize, but what if everybody else wanted to do the same? She replied that it was quite plain that no one else wanted to do the same but that if they did then such a desire should be respected. However, after some years she ceased to miss the official ceremony: it seemed to her full of people who remembered improperly, impurely.

  There had been problems with the planting. The grass at the cemetery was French grass, and it seemed to her of the coarser type, inappropriate for British soldiers to lie beneath. Her campaign over this with the Commission led nowhere. So one spring she took out a small spade and a square yard of English turf kept damp in a plastic bag. After dark she dug out the offending French grass and relaid the softer English turf, patting it into place, then stamping it in. She was pleased with her work, and the next year, as she approached the grave, saw no indication of her mending. But when she knelt, she realized that her work had been undone: the French grass was back again. The same had happened when she had surreptitiously planted her bulbs. Sam liked tulips, yellow ones especially, and one autumn she had pushed half a dozen bulbs into the earth. But the following spring, when she returned, there were only dusty geraniums in front of his stone.

  There had also been the desecration. Not so very long ago. Arriving shortly after dawn, she found something on the grass which at first she put down to a dog. But when she saw the same in front of 1685 Private W. A. Andrade 4th Bn. London Regt. R. Fus. 15th March 1915, and in front of 675 Private Leon Emanuel Levy The Cameronians (Sco. Rif.) 16th August 1916 aged 21 And the Soul Returneth to God Who Gave It – Mother, she judged it most unlikely that a dog, or three dogs, had managed to find the only three Jewish graves in the cemetery. She gave the caretaker the rough edge of her tongue. He admitted that such desecration had occurred before, also that paint had been sprayed, but he always tried to arrive before anyone else and remove the signs. She told him that he might be honest but he was clearly idle. She blamed the second war. She tried not to think about it again.

  For her, now, the view back to 1917 was uncluttered: the decades were mown grass, and at their end was a row of white headstones, domino-thin. 135
8 Private Samuel M. Moss East Lancashire Regt. 21st January 1917, and in the middle the Star of David. Some graves in Cabaret Rouge were anonymous, with no identifying words or symbols; some had inscriptions, regimental badges, Irish harps, springboks, maple leaves, New Zealand ferns. Most had Christian crosses; only three displayed the Star of David. Private Andrade, Private Levy and Private Moss. A British soldier buried beneath the Star of David: she kept her eyes on that. Sam had written from training camp that the fellows chaffed him, but he had always been Jewy Moss at school, and they were good fellows, most of them, as good inside the barracks as outside, anyway. They made the same remarks he’d heard before, but Jewy Moss was a British soldier, good enough to fight and die with his comrades, which is what he had done, and what he was remembered for. She pushed away the second war, which muddled things. He was a British soldier, East Lancashire Regiment, buried at Cabaret Rouge beneath the Star of David.

  She wondered when they would plough them up, Herbêcourt, Devonshire, Quarry, Blighty Valley, Ulster Tower, Thistle Dump and Caterpillar Valley; Maison Blanche and Cabaret Rouge. They said they never would. This land, she read everywhere, was ‘the free gift of the French people for the perpetual resting place of those of the allied armies who fell…’ and so on. EVERMORE, they said, and she wanted to hear: for all future time. The War Graves Commission, her successive members of parliament, the Foreign Office, the commanding officer of Sammy’s regiment, all told her the same. She didn’t believe them. Soon – in fifty years or so – everyone who had served in the War would be dead; and at some point after that, everyone who had known anyone who had served would also be dead. What if memory-grafting did not work, or the memories themselves were deemed shameful? First, she guessed, those little stone tablets in the back lanes would be chiselled out, since the French and the Germans had officially stopped hating one another years ago, and it would not do for German tourists to be accused of the cowardly assassinations perpetrated by their ancestors. Then the war memorials would come down, with their important statistics. A few might be held to have architectural interest; but some new, cheerful generation would find them morbid, and dream up better things to enliven the villages. And after that it would be time to plough up the cemeteries, to put them back to good agricultural use: they had lain fallow for too long. Priests and politicians would make it all right, and the farmers would get their land back, fertilized with blood and bone. Thiepval might become a listed building, but would they keep Brigadier Sir Frank Higginson’s domed portico? That elbow in the D937 would be declared a traffic hazard; all it needed was a drunken casualty for the road to be made straight again after all these years. Then the great forgetting could begin, the fading into the landscape. The war would be levelled to a couple of museums, a set of demonstration trenches, and a few names, shorthand for pointless sacrifice.

  Might there be one last fiery glow of remembering? In her own case, it would not be long before her annual renewals ceased, before the clerical error of her life was corrected; yet even as she pronounced herself an antique, her memories seemed to sharpen. If this happened to the individual, could it not also happen on a national scale? Might there not be, at some point in the first decades of the twenty-first century, one final moment, lit by evening sun, before the whole thing was handed over to the archivists? Might there not be a great looking-back down the mown grass of the decades, might not a gap in the trees discover the curving ranks of slender headstones, white tablets holding up to the eye their bright names and terrifying dates, their harps and springboks, maple leaves and ferns, their Christian crosses and their Stars of David? Then, in the space of a wet blink, the gap in the trees would close and the mown grass disappear, a violent indigo cloud would cover the sun, and history, gross history, daily history, would forget. Is this how it would be?

  Places of the Western Front

  Of the many theatres of the First World War, the Western Front – that is, areas in Belgium and northern France – is the main scenario of the stories in this volume.

  Mons, the capital of the Belgian province Hainaut, was the site of the first battle of the war. It resulted in a British retreat, but stalled the German advance to the Belgian coast.

  The Somme area stretches along the river Somme through northern France and Belgium. Arras, situated close to the front line, was largely destroyed during the war. In May 1915, Allied troops failed to break through the well-fortified German lines. Allied casualties were heavy and amounted to over 130,000 men. The offensive was renewed in June 1915, but to no avail. Béthune saw repeated action and was largely destroyed, as were Albert and Pêronne. The battle of the Somme was one of the major offensives of the war, a co-operation of French and British forces on a thirty-kilometre front. On the first day, 1 July 1916, almost 60,000 casualties occurred on the British side alone. The offensive was continued until 18 November 1916.

  Belgian Ypres and the surrounding salient saw some of the most devastating battles of the war. The first battle of Ypres took place in October and November 1914, stalling the German advance to the coast at high Allied cost and resulting in the stagnation of trench warfare as both sides fortified their positions. During the second battle of Ypres (April–May 1915), German troops first employed chlorine gas on a large scale, and the city of Ypres was evacuated, then almost completely destroyed. The third battle of Ypres (July–November 1917) caused the deaths of almost half a million men, many of whom drowned in the boggy marshlands surrounding the village of Passcbendaele. Menin Gate Memorial, opened in Ypres in July 1927, commemorates all missing British and Commonwealth soldiers of the salient. The Belgian village of Zillebecke, or Zillebeke, near Ypres, is the site of seventeen war cemeteries.

  Verdun was a French fortress of high symbolic value since it had long withstood the Prussians in the war of 1870– 71 and was therefore well-known to most French citizens. The German army attacked Verdun in February 1916 and succeeded in engaging the French troops in a long drawn-out siege designed to weaken the French army in other parts of the frontline.

  Glossary

  Blighty: Britain; coined originally by British expatriates in India, but taken up by homesick soldiers during the First World War. A ‘Blighty wound’ required a trip home for treatment and convalescence.

  Boche: French derogatory term for Germans, used by the British during the war.

  Bully: ‘bully-beef’, or corned beef, formed an important part of the British soldiers’ rations.

  Estaminet: French tavern or public-house, frequented by locals as well as British soldiers during the war.

  Fritz: German male Christian name; used as nickname for all Germans.

  Hun: derogatory term for Germans during the war.

  Jerry: a German or German soldier.

  Poilu: nickname for French soldiers of the First World War. It derives from the adjective poilu, translating literally as ‘hairy’ and referring to the unshaven faces of the soldiers, who had to spend long periods in the trenches.

  Subaltern: in the British army, a junior commissioned officer below the rank of captain.

  Very lights: flare fired by a pistol at night, either for temporary illumination, or for signalling.

  Wipers: soldiers’ slang for Ypres.

  Military Abbreviations

  Admiralty Court KC: King’s Counsel in Britain’s Admiralty Court, responsible for all cases pertaining to maritime law.

  ASC: Army Signal Command.

  BEF: British Expeditionary Force – the professional army sent to France and Belgium in 1914. The term applied primarily to British soldiers stationed on the Western Front until November 1914; they were later supplemented by the volunteers of ‘Kitchener’s Army’, who had been recruited and trained from August 1914 onwards. The BEF landed at Boulogne on 14 August 1914, and engaged in action at Mons and Ypres during the first months of the war.

  Batt. HQ: Battalion Headquarters.

  CB: confinement to barracks, a military punishment.

  C-in-C: Commander-in
-Chief.

  CO: Commanding Officer.

  CSM: Company Sergeant Major.

  Corps HQ: Corps Headquarters.

  DCM: Distinguished Conduct Medal; a military decoration for noncommissioned officers established in 1854.

  DSO: Distinguished Service Order; a military decoration for officers created in 1886. The DSO was awarded nearly nine thousand times during the First World War.

  GHQ: General Headquarters.

  NCO: Non-commissioned Officer. In the British army of the First World War, NCOs were members of the so-called enlisted personnel. They took over administrative or supervisory tasks delegated to them by a commissioned officer.

  OC:Officer Commanding – that is, the Company Commander.

  OTC:Officer Training Corps.

  QM: Quartermaster.

  RSM: Regimental Sergeant Major; a warrant officer obliged to maintain discipline and ensure high standards of performance in his regiment or battalion.

  VC: Victoria Cross; a military decoration awarded to members of the Commonwealth armed services. It was created in 1856 by Queen Victoria to acknowledge conspicuous acts of bravery.

  Notes

  Arthur Machen: The Bowmen

  First appeared in the Evening News on 29 September 1914. It sparked the legend about the ‘Angels of Mons’, who were subsequently claimed in other sources to have appeared during the British retreat from the town. Machen was at first willing to exploit the story’s popularity commercially and republished ‘The Bowmen’ in a short collection of war tales under the title The Angels of Mons: The Bowmen and Other Legends of the War (1915), but he was bewildered when the ‘incident’ in his story was taken as fact by many, particularly the Church. He tried to expose it as fiction in his introduction to the volume.