To Mum and Dad,
with love.
Timeline of the First World War
1914
4 August
Great Britain declares war on Germany.
31 August
Recruitment for Manchester’s first ‘Pals’ battalion opens, and long lines of men queue to sign up. The idea that friends (and brothers) can serve together, rather than being split up, has great appeal, but the geographical concentration of these new battalions will have tragic consequences.
22 November
With the First Battle of Ypres ending in stalemate, front lines are being dug in. The entrenched Western Front will stretch from the Belgian coast to the Swiss border. Ypres remains in Allied hands, but faces heavy artillery and aerial bombardment. On 22 November incendiary devices hit the iconic Cloth Hall.
1915
March
The Graves Registration Commission is established. As well as registering and marking graves, it begins to dispatch photographic prints in response to requests from bereaved families in Britain. 170,000 of these photographs will eventually be supplied.
1916
27 January
Conscription is introduced in Britain.
1 July
The Somme offensive starts, and will continue for the next four and a half months. The capture of the village of Montauban is one of the few successes of the first day of the campaign, and the men of the Manchester and Liverpool ‘Pals’ battalions are praised for the part they play. Despite repeated attempts, it will take another two months to capture the neighbouring village of Guillemont.
1917
January
As the French prepare for their spring offensive, British troops relieve French forces in the southern Somme trenches.
16 March
Over the winter of 1916 German troops had been preparing a new front line, the Hindenburg Line; deep dugouts and concrete defences had been built and a network of supply lines constructed behind. They now withdraw to this strongly fortified front, torching villages, destroying roads and felling trees in their wake. Advancing Allied forces enter Chaulnes on 17 March and Péronne on the 18th, and find both in ruins.
6 April
The United States declares war on Germany.
9 April – 17 May
Second Battle of Arras. The Canadian Corps capture the high ground of Vimy Ridge. Otherwise, despite initial success, the Allies aren’t able to consolidate gains.
May
As the scale of the work of the Graves Registration Commission expands, it is reconfigured as the Imperial War Graves Commission.
31 July
The Third Battle of Ypres (‘Passchendaele’) begins. It will continue for the next three months.
22 October
An attack is launched on enemy lines in Houthulst Forest, north of Ypres. This is a diversionary manoeuvre, designed to distract from preparations for the main attack at Passchendaele. But, facing artillery bombardment and concealed snipers and machine-gun positions, and moving over difficult ground, the British struggle to advance.
1918
21 March
The enemy spring offensive, Operation Michael, is launched.
8 August
The beginning of the Hundred Days – the final offensive on the Western Front.
11 November
Representatives of the warring nations sign the Armistice of Compiègne just after 5 a.m. Fighting ends at 11 a.m.
1919
1919
The Imperial War Graves Commission is now responsible for more than half a million graves and over 1,200 cemeteries in France and Belgium alone. The work of consolidating cemeteries begins and by 1923 the Commission will be shipping over 4,000 headstones per week to France.
1920
1920
The Imperial War Graves Commission ceases to offer a photographic service. But as demand remains, charities and commercial photographers take over this work.
1927
24 July
The Menin Gate is unveiled – a memorial to the soldiers who died on the Ypres salient, but who have no known grave. 54,896 names are cut into the stone, but there proves to be insufficient space within the structure to add those registered as missing beyond August 1917. A further 35,001 men are commemorated on the Tyne Cot Memorial to the Missing. Stonemasons will still be completing work on the Menin Gate when Germany invades Belgium in 1940.
PART I
Prologue
Edie
Lancashire, May 1921
Edie doesn’t hear the postman. She only notices the envelope, there on the linoleum, as she passes through from the kitchen to the sitting room. She bends to pick it up, sure it is a thing of no great consequence, just another bill that will have to wait, until she sees the postage stamp. It is the same stamp that used to be on their letters from France.
She turns the Manila envelope in her hands. The address is typed, so that it has a vague look of being official. She has written a lot of letters to France and Belgium over the past four years and, in return, receives envelopes full of apologies and repetitions. Her mind flicks through the names of agencies and bureaus, charities and associations, official offices and cemeteries.
At first it is merely a white sheet of paper inside the envelope, with nothing written or printed upon it, but when she turns it over, she sees it is a photograph. For a moment she doesn’t know the face. For that one moment it is the face of a stranger with no place or purpose being here, in her hallway, in her hand. It is an item of misdirected post, a mistake, a mystery – but only for a moment.
Edie leans against the wall and slides down the tiles. She hugs her arms around her knees. There’s a flutter in her chest like a caged bird beating its wings against the bars. The photograph has fallen from her hands and is there, at an angle to the chequerboard pattern of the floor, an arm’s stretch away. She rocks her head back against the wall and shuts her eyes.
Edie tells herself that she needs to look at it again. She must look. She ought to look, to bring it up close to her eyes, and to be certain, because while those are surely his eyes in the photograph, everything else makes no sense. How can it be? Certainly it is only a resemblance. It can’t possibly be him, after so long. Can it? But she doesn’t need to see the photograph a second time to know the truth. It is undoubtedly Francis.
She bites at her knee and makes herself look up. She can see her own footprints on the floor, the habitual patterns that she makes around this house. The linoleum needs mopping again. She should find time to paint the scuffed skirting boards and to beat the doormat. An oak leaf has blown under the hall table, and there next to it is that library card she’s been searching for. She notices all of these things, so that she doesn’t have to look at his face.
‘How?’ She asks the question out loud.
The envelope has crumpled in her hand, but she needs to check inside it. There must be more than that picture. There must be an explanation. A meaning. But there is nothing else there. No letter. Not a sentence. Not one word. She turns the envelope over and sees her address has been typed on a machine with worn keys. The curve of the u is broken, the dot on the i is missing, but the inky perforation of the full stop is emphatic. She can’t read the smudged postmark. There are hyphens in the chain of letters, she makes out, and it is perhaps a Saint-Something-or-Other, but the blur is a divine mystery. Her hands leave damp fingerprints on the brown paper. She has grown to accept that there must be a full stop after Francis’ name, but could she have got that wrong? Could there really be a chance? It is strange to see her own fingers tremble that way.
She rocks onto her side and feels the cold of the floor against her cheek. The p
hotograph is there, inches from her hand. She hears footsteps going along the pavement outside, the buddleia tapping against the sitting-room window in the breeze, the beat of a waltz on Mrs Wilson’s gramophone next door, but mostly there is the noise of her own breathing. She shouldn’t be here, lying on the hall floor on a Tuesday morning, with her face pressed down against lino that needs mopping, but how hard it is to make herself move. Why is it so difficult to stretch her hand out towards the photograph? To believe that it really is him?
The sun is slanting through the fanlight now, and the harlequin colours of the glass are elongating across the tiles, jewelling his face in red and green and gold. The face of her husband, who has been missing for the past four years.
1
Harry
The Folkestone–Boulogne ferry, August 1921
‘Edie?’
Harry sees her as he steps out onto the deck. She is wearing a grey silk dress and though her hair is hidden under a broad-brimmed straw hat, he knows her from the shape of her wrist on the railings and the way that she holds a cigarette.
‘It is you?’
But when she turns, it isn’t Edie at all.
‘Pardon?’ The woman takes her sunhat off as she looks up at Harry. Dark hair flickers around a pale face. ‘Forgive me, do I know you?’
‘I’m terribly sorry. I was mistaken. For an instant I was certain that you were somebody else.’ He nods an apology and steps back. How could he have thought it? He wants to walk away quickly now, to turn his face from the woman who is not her. He suddenly feels breathless and unsteady, but he hesitates when he sees the woman’s eyes. ‘Are you quite well, miss?’
‘It’s that blasted sun.’
‘Here. Please.’
‘You’re very kind.’
It is only as she takes his handkerchief that he remembers it is embroidered with his brother’s initials. It was a shame not to use them, Edie had said, not sounding entirely convinced. He looks away as the woman wipes the tears from her eyes. The blue water is glitteringly bright.
‘ “F.B.” is it? Frank? Fred? To whom do I address my thanks?’
‘Harry, actually.’ He offers her his hand. ‘Harry Blythe.’
‘Rachel West.’ Her face softens when she smiles. ‘Bother. It doesn’t seem nice to soil a stranger’s handkerchief and then to hand it back. Even if it perhaps wasn’t yours to begin with.’
‘Do keep it. Think nothing of it.’ He can feel his breath slowing, his centre stilling. To focus on the details of a new face, to see her tears drying and to exchange steady civilities, takes that momentary misplaced rush away.
‘I’m indebted to you, Mr Blythe. I assure you, I don’t make a habit of commandeering the linen of men I’ve never met before.’
‘No secret stockpile of pilfered napkins and inveigled cravats, then?’
‘This is the first in my collection.’
How could he have mistaken her? Her face isn’t like Edie’s at all, he sees now: the angles are sharper, her colours all darker. But something in her smile, in the animation of her eyes, reminds Harry of her.
‘Did I see you drawing pictures earlier?’ she asks.
‘Quite possibly. I’ve found myself press-ganged into being a floating portrait artist. A lady asked me to draw her likeness this morning and now they’re forming a queue. I’ve never had more custom or more gratitude. I’m starting to think that I could make a living on this crossing.’
‘What a thing!’
‘They mean to pin themselves up in enquiry offices and cafés and railway stations. They’re looking for missing men.’
Rachel West blows smoke at the sea and nods, as if she finds this behaviour perfectly normal and natural. Her hand goes to the locket around her neck, her fingers stroking the engraved words Forget Me Not. He considers, as he watches her, whether it is sometimes best to try to forget.
‘They stick up photographs of their husbands and their own faces. Like so many misplaced shoes that need pairing together again. I didn’t know that there would be so many.’
When she looks back at him, she seems surprised. ‘So many? But of course.’
*
She puts a hand to the railings and shuts her eyes to the wind. Harry thinks about ships’ figureheads as he watches Rachel West’s profile against the water. He pictures her as a wooden woman on a ship’s prow, crashing through waves, cutting across wide oceans, all baroque curls and barnacled breast, the darling of the crew. Rachel, very much flesh again, blows her nose on his brother’s handkerchief and observes that the sea is so bracing. ‘It’s buffing my edges off,’ she says as she turns towards him again.
Harry looks at the skyline. He can feel the vibration of the engine. The weight of the breaking waves. A glint of light reflects off a faraway fishing boat but there is, as yet, no sign of the French coast. He tastes salt on his lips and wonders if he will be sick again. Edie had once told him that the trick was to stay out on deck, to take deep breaths and to stare squarely at the water, as if it were a dog that might bite him if he took his eyes away. He thinks again about the postcard that he received from her last week. Has she stood where Rachel West is standing now within the past month? Could she have leaned on these same railings with her eyes fixed on the waves? Did she feel sick as she crossed to France? And why was she – is she – in Arras?
‘You look green,’ says Rachel. ‘I take it that you’re not an accustomed mariner, Mr Blythe?’
He shakes his head. ‘Not my calling.’
The boat pitches down and spumes of white water leap. He hears Rachel’s intake of breath. ‘Doesn’t it make you feel vigorous?’ she asks. ‘Keenly alive? Effervescent with it?’
‘Deeply so.’ He feels vigorously buffeted by the sharp, salty wind and nauseous with it. He tightens his grip on the railings. ‘As if I’ve got a stomach full of baking soda.’
‘ “I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,” ’ she quotes with a grin. ‘ “To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife.” ’ All the sadness in her face goes as she enunciates at the waves. Her eyes widen, as though she relishes the taste of the words. But then her gaze connects with Harry’s and the grin is gone. ‘I know you were there, weren’t you? I can see it on your face. I probably shouldn’t ask you – please forgive me for asking – but what was it like the first time? Would you tell me? The first time that you crossed over to France, I mean.’
She makes it sound like the River Styx, he thinks. Harry imagines himself and Francis on a small boat, the water all around writhing with the limbs of the wrathful. He imagines his fingers placing a penny in Francis’ mouth.
‘We had a false start,’ he says. It would be wrong to romanticize it for her. ‘They put us on an Isle of Man ferry – a proper old paddle steamer. It had been requisitioned by the Admiralty, but still had wood panelling and velvet upholstery and the Douglas to Fleetwood timetable up on the wall. We sang “Jerusalem” as we pulled out of Folkestone. I mean, can you imagine? “Bring me my spear! O clouds unfold!” ’ He looks at her. She nods in recognition. ‘Apologies for the singing voice. Bravado, you know? Only our sword did have to sleep in our hands that day. The destroyer that was accompanying us hit a submerged mine – and boom! It ripped a great gash in its side and all flames and smoke poured out. We’d strayed into an unmarked minefield, you see, and at any moment our poor old paddle steamer might have gone boom too. Anyway, we limped cautiously back to Folkestone and slept that night on the dock.’
‘With some relief?’
‘A concrete floor had never seemed so comfortable. But we had to do it all again the next day.’ The memory of torn steel and treacherous water looms at him like something spectral and leaves a metallic taste in his mouth. It had been there in the box of old photographs: that image of him and Will and Francis all curled together, three brothers asleep on the dockside. It was one of the pictures that made him pause when Edie had given him the box in May. H
e had never seen that one before and it had taken him a moment to recognize his own slumped shoulders. She had laughed at him briefly for that. He can’t remember who might have taken the photograph, or the feeling of sleeping entwined with his brothers’ limbs.
‘And so you did.’
‘Cross again? Yes.’ He blinks at Rachel. ‘That was February 1916. The experience rather put me off messing about in boats.’
‘ “All I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,” ’ she quotes, ‘ “And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.” ’
‘Quite,’ says Harry.
‘We learned that one at school.’
Seagulls arc and cry in the background of the canvas that he’s mentally composing of Rachel West. The wind in her hair makes her look like a mermaid. With his eyes on the water he can’t help but scan for mines. Regardless of what Edie might have advised, it calms him more to focus on this woman who offers poetry to the waves and how he might convey her in paint.
‘David went over in the January,’ she says.
‘David?’
‘My husband. Here. Perhaps you might understand this?’
She takes the paper from the envelope with some care and Harry feels a sense of responsibility as the wind tugs against the letter in his hands. He tries to read it through twice, wanting for her sake to understand, but only the date and Rachel’s own name are decipherable. There are the shapes of words, strokes and scrolls, which must have had meaning and importance to their maker, but Harry cannot untangle them. It might as well be in Greek.
‘Can you read it?’
‘I’m sorry. The writing is very difficult to make out, isn’t it?’
‘He used to write poems. Would you believe it? Verses full of the landscapes of his childhood and such clever rhymes.’
The Photographer of the Lost Page 1