‘We stick together,’ said Francis.
They all laughed at their own intensity then. Their eyes met, the moment and the emotion broke and they mocked themselves with grinned curses. Harry knew, though, that he wouldn’t forget the image of their three linked initials.
*
They were told that they were to march east the next morning.
‘This is it,’ said Will. ‘This is our turn. What is the point in us being here otherwise?’
Behind the bravado, Harry saw fear flickering over his brother’s face. He contemplated what their turn would entail.
‘I’d put up with being pointless,’ he said.
They marched for two days towards the war. On the advice of the old-timers they had packed their pockets with chocolate, cigarettes and candle stubs. The wax was warm and pliant between Harry’s fingers; the cold air caught at the back of his throat. They’d been told that each one of them, fighting men and fighting fit, was equal to three Germans.
Harry’s head filled with songs, worked to the rhythm of their tramping feet, moving as one rhythmic being. As they marched, they left something of themselves behind, cast off a singularity and became soldiers. It was surprising how easy it was to fall into the tempo. It propelled them with some hypnotic compulsion, turning them into one soldierly unit.
‘ “We are Fred Karno’s army,” ’ they sang. ‘ “We are the ragtime infantry. We cannot fight. We cannot shoot. What bloody use are we?” ’
They were billeted on a farm on the outskirts of a blasted village, where all the angles seemed peculiarly askew. The farm buildings formed a square around a courtyard full of spilled tiles and rotting cartwheels. The abandoned plough and rake resembled instruments of medieval warfare. The barns, where they were quartered, smelled of the breath of patient cattle. They made makeshift mattresses, encasing the sharp straw in groundsheets, and watched the officers drinking café au lait, all domesticity around the farmhouse table.
‘We can roll together for the warmth,’ said Will.
‘Hark at the Boy Scout.’
There was talk of campaigns in the candlelight that night, of offensives and shifting fronts. Only Mac McCabe marred the collective bravado with the clink of rosary beads in the afterwards blackness.
‘I wish the old git would give it a rest,’ hissed Will in a whisper that seemed meant to be heard. ‘It puts the wind up.’
McCabe had been at Mafeking. He was their old-timer, their grousing warhorse, their yardstick of old soldiering. It didn’t seem right that he should be afraid. But it also didn’t seem quite right to hear Will dismissing that fear.
Harry looked up through the beams and cobwebs to a roof that was more sky than tile. Stars slid in the spaces.
‘As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be,’ intoned Francis’ voice. ‘World without bleeding end.’
7
Harry
Arras, August 1921
Location image order: Mrs Kathleen Gibson requests a photograph of the sugar factory at the junction of the Douai Road, Arras. Pte. Michael Gibson (23791, Durham Light Infantry), the client’s husband, died in England in October 1916, three weeks on from receiving an injury in this location.
‘I suppose that for them the war hasn’t ended, that it won’t ever finish until they’re found,’ Rachel had said, as they walked into the hospital grounds.
‘Found?’
‘Amnesiacs,’ she’d replied. ‘Men who don’t know who they are. They can’t remember their names, their wives or their children. They’ve forgotten where their homes are. I suppose it’s a sort of limbo, isn’t it? Some of them no longer even remember what nationality they are.’
‘So there could be Englishmen amongst them?’
‘Yes. That’s what I’ve been told. It’s a possibility.’
It wasn’t a possibility that he had previously considered. Harry had looked at the windows of the asylum ahead. Were they all looking out and waiting? Were eyes even now watching Rachel and wondering, considering, hoping for her recognition? Were eyes at this moment searching for familiarity in his own face?
‘Did David make your locket?’
‘Yes. He gave it to me on the day that we were married.’ She had put her hand to her throat and smiled. ‘Forget Me Not. You see? And I won’t.’
‘I don’t think he will have forgotten you, then.’
A door closes behind her and Harry sits in the corridor. He lifts his feet for the woman with the mop and watches her progress across the floor, the tiles glossed briefly to glistening black and white and then dulling and leaving only the smell of bleach behind. The metal mop bucket scrapes, someone coughs in a room off the corridor and somewhere in the hospital a piano is playing. Harry pictures an audience of mute men, dulled men, dead-eyed lost men, and imagines his brother’s eyes blinking with the sudden recognition of a string of musical notes. Could it yet be? Should he have followed Rachel into the office? He photographs the shadows on the corridor, the doors on the corridor, the handles on the doors.
At length an officer emerges, ushering Rachel. He shakes her gloved hand and nods his head at Harry as he stands. ‘Nobody in England has any idea of the logistics of this thing. It will be years before it’s cleared up.’ He has weak eyes, Harry notices. He rubs at the red marks either side of his nose where his reading glasses evidently pinch. The smile that appears, when his hand pulls away from his face, is weary but sympathetic. ‘It is a dreadful mess,’ he says.
‘Isn’t it?’ Harry replies.
They walk back towards the village down a straight road. To the left, a farmer is struggling with a plough. Harry has read about the iron harvest, the barbed wire and spent shells that block the ploughshare’s path – and worse too. He watches the pointed toes of Rachel’s boots strike out. Her heels click sharply on the newly metalled road. Her mouth is a tense line.
‘So, could they tell you anything useful?’
‘Not really. He took all the details. I had to look through cards and pick out the colour of David’s eyes and hair. I had to point to the nearest match for the shape of his nose and his mouth. It shouldn’t have been as difficult as it was.’ She laughs oddly. ‘He said there are thousands that they haven’t identified, hundreds of men who have completely forgotten who they are. They’re photographing them, cataloguing them. That was the word he used. Can you imagine it? It made me think about butterflies in a collector’s cabinet.’
Harry thinks of Francis’ face as he painted it once long ago. He sees the colour of his eyes and the line of his nose and lips. His brother’s eyes are the blue of a butterfly’s wing. ‘I can imagine,’ he says. Surely Francis couldn’t yet be somewhere, nameless and waiting? Surely there was no way back? ‘So what happens now?’
‘They know where I am and, in the meantime, I have an appointment in town this afternoon.’
‘Your lost property?’
‘He talked to me about it in the hospital. Preparing me, I suppose, only there were so many polite euphemisms crammed into his sentence that, for a moment, I thought I was being invited to view some storeroom in a railway station. As if my husband might be idling amongst the forgotten umbrellas and lost gloves, waiting for me to reclaim him.’ She stares at her own gloves and flexes her fingers. ‘He advised me to go home.’
*
They eat thin soup and slices of ham. Rachel sometimes talks with her mouth full, he notices. Harry watches the room, surveying this strange collection of company. There are women who appear to be widows, French officers in uniform and workmen in shirtsleeves. A couple in Parisian fashions are sharing a table with men who look as though they’ve just come in from the fields. A bottle of wine passes between the hands of those who are ploughing and those who are grieving and those who have come to see the sights. This war has been a curious leveller, Harry thinks. The woman on the next table is sitting alone and staring at her soup, her expression suggesting that she is not at all sure how she has found herself in front of
this particular bowl. Harry looks down at his own bowl and thinks of Edie. Is she somewhere close by, also wondering how she came to be here?
‘You’re not listening, are you?’ Rachel waves her fork.
‘I am. You were talking about the amnesiacs.’
She places her cutlery down neatly. ‘You don’t have to stay here, you know, Harry. It’s very kind of you to have accompanied me this far, but I really don’t need chaperoning. You don’t have to help me.’
‘I want to help you,’ he replies.
*
A bus takes them into town, bumping along the patched roads, looking out at the healing-over land. Amongst the chaos and the corrugated iron, new buildings are rising. It is being reclaimed in red-brick and wire-defined boundaries. Rachel points a finger and passes comment on the architecture. This utility is ugly, she says; there is no sympathy, no softness, no acknowledging nod to the past.
‘I might feel inclined to snub the past if I lived here,’ he replies. ‘That or make a rude gesture at it.’
Much of the square is shored up. Rachel’s directions bring them to a building with a columned portico and potted camellias on the steps. Pocks and splinters scar the symmetrical facade and there are piles of fallen stone all around. This architecture communicates its recent past all too amply, Harry thinks. How very strange it is to be back here.
They are directed to a large salon which has an ornate plasterwork ceiling. The floor has been boarded over, presumably to protect the parquet, and trestle tables are arranged in a U-shape and loaded with assorted personal effects. It looks like the most ghastly church jumble sale. Each item has an attached luggage label, the number upon which seemingly corresponds to a nameless burial, to a man who is now not even a number. Harry wonders how these things, these ubiquitous things – the standard army-issue pencils; the belts, buttons, and badges; the penknives and combs; the rings and razors; the cigarette cases, compasses, and picture postcards – could identify an individual. These objects could well have been his own. He mentally inventories the items in his old kitbag. Where now are his penknife and cigarette case, his letters and his diary? Could Francis’ belongings surface in a place such as this? Should he too be looking for clues? And how would Edie feel if Francis’ penknife did turn up on a trestle table with a ticket attached? Does she really believe that her husband – his brother – could yet be alive and the past four years have been nothing but errors and lies?
The women sniff as they sift. Rachel examines items diligently, picking them up and turning them over as if she expects them to exude some familiar energy, as if she is willing there to be a crackle of connection. She brings them close to her eyes and to her nose. Harry looks at her fingers working and wonders how many other women have already picked over the same debris. As her hands stroke a leather wallet he imagines Edie making the same gesture. Perhaps she has already been in this same room, has picked over these same tables. He wants to take Rachel away, to tell her not to put herself through this, but she stays until the end, until the officer in charge has studied his watch for long enough. Harry wonders at her tenacity, wonders if it is hope or fear that keeps her eyes searching, and considers which of those two sentiments brought Edie to this town.
They walk back through Arras empty-handed. There are still great chasms in the cobbles. He tries to steer Rachel on a safe path. From many buildings it is only the chimney stacks that have survived. They soar skywards. ‘Like exclamation marks,’ she observes.
The arcades are scaffolded and crumbling. On the broken walls above he can see the spaces that fireplaces and kitchen ranges formerly occupied. The remains of an electric chandelier are suspended from a ceiling and there are tatters of curtains at windows. These partially intact houses, with their hints to the lives that once went on inside them, are more moving than those that are completely levelled.
‘All wrecked,’ Rachel says. ‘All ruin.’
‘Yes.’ He turns in the centre of the square. ‘I saw an advert in The Times on the way out: six pounds to see the Somme. It’s almost laughable, don’t you think? People are choosing to holiday here now. I can’t fathom why you’d want to come here unless you had to.’
‘I have to.’
‘I understand that.’ Harry shakes his head. A stall is selling trinkets and nougat and shell cases. A woman holds a waffle pan over a burner. The smell of hot fat and sugar is making him feel slightly sick. ‘I must take a photograph. May I deposit you in a friendly café?’
‘I’d rather come with you, if I wouldn’t get in the way.’
*
The building is all boarded up. He peers through a shutter and sees a room that is full of mangled metalwork. There are giant boilers at crazy angles and a lot of tumbled-together pipework. He wouldn’t know it as a factory, but for the fact that he remembers the junction of the roads. Rachel watches him set the camera up. He focuses in on the nibbled brickwork and wonders which fragment of it finished off Private Michael Gibson.
‘Did he die here?’ she asks.
‘No. Back in England. But he never recovered from the wound that he got here.’
‘It was a sugar factory, wasn’t it? It would certainly put me off taking a lump in my tea. You didn’t know him?’
‘I never know them. My employer places advertisements in the newspapers and people reply to them. I exchange letters with the families in some cases, in certain instances I meet up with them to discuss what they know and what they want, and sometimes I just deliver the photograph. It rather depends on how good their information is and the particulars of what they want.’
‘What a thing to do for a living,’ she observes. ‘What a burden to be tasked with! You do make it all sound rather businesslike.’
‘It’s not businesslike at all, if I’m honest. But I’m very conscious of the responsibility – of the importance of trying to get it right and make the process as smooth and easy for the families as it can possibly be. Not that it’s ever really easy.’
‘In this case it’s the man’s wife who wants the photograph, isn’t it?’
He nods.
‘Have you met her?’
‘We’ve exchanged correspondence.’
He doesn’t tell Rachel how Mrs Gibson had described her husband’s long death. How she had shared the ways in which he had suffered through those weeks, and told Harry how she now struggles to live with her untargeted anger. He would never tell anyone else about all the secret anger and agonies and sorrow that people send him in letters. This isn’t his to share, he feels. He only hopes that the evidence that he can provide, and the actions that he can take on their behalf, can go some small way to quietening all those raw and open-ended emotions; that the placing of flowers and the knowledge of the details can bring the families some peace. But all the words and images in those letters stay in Harry’s head, compounding his own private agonies and angers, and he knows no peace.
‘Do you think that she feels some malice towards these walls?’ Rachel asks. ‘Do you think that she wants it to be all broken down and blasted?’
‘Perhaps she wants a photograph of it just so she can tear it up.’
‘And would you mind if she did?’
‘No. Of course not. Not if it makes her feel better.’ He hopes that it is so.
‘I suppose it’s a full stop, isn’t it?’ says Rachel, who has found no full stop again today. ‘That it’s some proof. That it makes it real and final.’
‘I think that in most cases all they want is to be able to picture it and to understand.’ Is this what Edie wants? Could that be the limit of it? ‘And I hope it helps them move forward.’
‘I’m not sure how I’d feel if I were sent a photograph of this place and told that a fragment of brick had finished David off. I think I might feel cheated. I think I’d feel angry. I mean, it doesn’t scream Right and Might, does it? I’m not seeing Just and Worthy Cause. It doesn’t look like something worth dying for.’
He shrugs. ‘No. Perhaps not. Bu
t it’s different now than it was in 1916. This town was a battlefield. The trenches were cut all through the suburbs, right through the factories and the cellars and the shops.’
‘You were here yourself?’
‘At about the same time,’ he tells her. So many memories of that autumn in Arras are dark and difficult – the gas scares, Francis’ drinking, and the grief hanging over all of it – but he doesn’t mean to tell Rachel any of that. ‘Our sector was a few streets further east. It was all shaken apart, but not so much that this wasn’t obviously a place where people had recently lived. It made it feel as though the rules had been shaken up, and so we had no qualms about picking over it all and scavenging what comforts we could. In some billets we had pianos and armchairs. The luxury of that! Can you imagine?’ He looks at Rachel and wonders if she can. ‘Houses were blown apart and yet, when you looked, there were slippers on rugs and books waiting for their readers under bedside lamps.’
‘What a sad image.’
‘It was lonely, more than anything. If that makes sense? Arras was full of troops, but strangely deserted. I remember hearing a gramophone playing one day on an empty street and thinking that it was the loneliest sound that I’d ever heard.’
He also remembers helping to develop photographs in the dark of a cellar on the Douai Road, trays of chemicals and curling reels of film. The recalled smell of the fixer is sharp and immediate. He sees Francis’ face in the red light.
Harry’s lens clicks on Mrs Gibson’s photograph. The loneliness of Arras strikes him again.
*
He buys a postcard for Edie before they go. On the newsagent’s rack, Arras is photographed in every angle of ruination. He recognizes the blasted basilica, the Citadel and the cemetery gates. Les fantômes d’Arras reads the annotation on an image of the ruined Grand Place. The rickety frontages bring to mind something out of a Gothic horror story. Harry selects an image of the Rue de Douai, a fire-blackened facade, leaning girders and a spill of tiles. ‘This was once our happy home,’ he writes on the reverse of the card. ‘We lived like troglodytes in caves, pillaged and looted and danced drunken waltzes to gramophone records. We picked blackberries in a forgotten walled garden, I read Wuthering Heights, and Francis set up a darkroom in a cellar on this street. But perhaps you have already been here and recognized it from his photographs? Perhaps you have already stood here?’
The Photographer of the Lost Page 5