‘Where are we on this?’ asked Wilkinson, leaving greasy fingerprints on the newspaper’s plan of the new and old front lines.
Francis leaned in to see. ‘Funny that, eh? Cartographer’s oversight? Godforsaken Shit Hole seems to have been missed off this map.’
‘Godforsaken Shit Hole just north of Albert,’ said Harry, and pointed.
‘Miles behind the line, then?’
‘Not bastard far enough.’
Francis wiped his fingers on his tunic before he opened his letter. Harry watched. Francis seemed to be taking care not to fingerprint Edie’s yellow writing paper. ‘Lord Derby told the papers that the Manchester Battalions have covered themselves with glory.’
Will looked down at his mud-splattered uniform. ‘Glory, eh? Is that what this is?’ He sniffed his sleeve. ‘I’m not sure that I like the smell of it.’
The yellow notepaper radiated cleanness in the all-around grime and accentuated the trembling in Francis’ fingers. He looked up and met Harry’s eye. ‘I’m cold, that’s all,’ he said.
‘What I’d give for a hot bath.’
‘Or a vaguely tepid one.’
‘And a mademoiselle to scrub my back.’
‘She sent you pencils,’ said Will, retrieving them from the box.
‘God bless Mater and all who sail in her.’
Wilkinson yawned widely.
‘Heavens,’ said Francis. ‘Where have our manners gone? Your veneer of civilization is wearing frightfully thin, old thing.’
The expletive with which Wilkinson replied was censored by the boom of the guns behind.
‘I can’t hear myself think,’ mouthed Will.
‘Go in for much of that sort of thing, do you?’
Second-Lieutenant Rose came into the bay with his hands over his ears. ‘Is this a cosy family reunion?’ he shouted. There were shadows under his eyes, Harry saw. He didn’t look as though he’d had any sleep either.
‘We had a parcel,’ said Will in between the guns.
‘She sent me film. Two boxes.’ Francis smiled.
‘Splendid,’ said the lieutenant. ‘Not achingly picturesque here, though, is it? Not quite the scenic bosky glade?’
‘If we put in a complaint, do we get our money back?’
The wood, through which the trenches ran, was considerably smashed. With, seemingly, the majority of the Allied artillery positioned behind them, there was much coming in and falling short. Guns of every calibre bellowed over their heads. The wood was all mud and broken branches. There was a terrible eloquence to the crude blackened trunks that surrounded them, Harry thought. The trench was cut through tree roots, several inches deep in earthy-smelling water, and something about the torn roots struck Harry as a particularly horrible act of violence.
‘The sea view is criminally exaggerated,’ critiqued Will, ‘and the catering leaves much to be desired.’
‘I shan’t be leaving a tip,’ put in Wilkinson.
‘I think we already have,’ said Harry. He watched the surface of his tea pulse with the rumble of the artillery. It tasted more of petrol than of tea, but it at least thawed his fingers. If only he could soak his feet in a vat of it.
Francis took off his waterproof cape. Shaken-off water glittered. ‘I’m not sure whether this thing is keeping the damp off or in.’
‘Mind out,’ said Wilkinson, protesting with the newspaper.
‘On the catering front, I’d pace myself if I were you, chaps.’ Rose waved a stick at the remains of the cake. ‘Might find that the hospitality arrangements are a little disrupted for the foreseeable.’
‘Is the buffet off?’
‘Exceedingly. Here.’ Rose produced a tin can from his pocket, looked at the label and threw it towards them.
Francis caught the can. ‘Pilchards in tomato sauce? Much obliged, sir.’
‘More of a tinned-salmon man myself, but my sister seems to have invested in a whole shoal of ruddy sardines. Well meaning, you know, but still—’
‘What is the foreseeable?’ asked Will. ‘Do we know how long we’re going to be here?’
‘Your guess is frankly as good as mine,’ said the lieutenant. ‘Moncrief rode forward this morning. He says that the whole place is an utter shambles. Villages that show on the map have been deleted. They’re just not there. Absolutely razed to the ground. Nothing but dust. There’s dead Boche everywhere and prisoners streaming from the ruins. It’s going to take forever to get them all buried. Moncrief says that the flies are infernal. He smoked two cigarettes at once to keep the filthy brutes off his face. He hasn’t stopped coughing since he returned.’
‘So what’s the half-time score, then? Are the odds on our side?’
‘I’m not a betting man,’ said Rose. ‘And I don’t know that we’re at half-time yet.’
‘But we’ll get our crack?’
Heavy artillery was heaving overhead. The lieutenant crouched and put his hands to his ears. ‘Good God, this is perfectly deafening.’
Will repeated the question. He shuffled a greasy set of playing cards as he spoke, the cards slipping smoothly through his fingers. Harry looked on and admired the agility of his brother’s unfaltering fingers, the steadiness of the rhythm, undisturbed by the churning sky and the shuddering ground. Was it really only twelve months ago that Will was a boy arranging seashells on the sand? Had they all changed so much?
‘Without doubt,’ Rose replied. ‘We’re awaiting orders as to when and where.’
‘Forgive my younger brother’s eagerness,’ said Francis. ‘He’s sparring for a scrap.’
‘Aren’t we all?’ said Rose.
Harry wasn’t entirely convinced by the lieutenant’s scrapping eagerness.
‘I think that we know less about what’s going on than they do in Manchester,’ said Wilkinson looking up from the newspaper.
‘I’m ready for my front-page photo,’ said Will, putting aside the playing cards and straightening his tunic.
‘ “Lancashire will indeed be proud of them,” ’ read Wilkinson.
‘Given half a chance,’ said Will.
14
Edie
North of Albert, August 1921
There are two young men sitting opposite her in the railway carriage, obviously two brothers, and Edie is glad of the laughter in their voices as she looks out at the sad country beyond the window. The whistle screams, the steam clears and she sees villages that are all wooden huts and levelled churches. Those strange undulations of the earth. The straggling belts of brown barbed wire. The endless thistles. She wants to shut her eyes to it, not to see how desolate and broken it is, but she tells herself that she must look.
The boys grapple, laughing, and smile when their eyes meet hers. She can make no sense of their foreign words, but the sounds are the same, and it pulls her back to Francis’ teenage bedroom and all those noises that were always coming through the walls.
When she was nineteen years old she had left the calm of her childhood home for a house full of male voices. It wasn’t that she’d grown up in a quiet house; there had always been the homemade wine and the gramophone and the nonsense poems that they’d recited in comic voices. But it was just her and her mother: two twinned female voices, ever harmonious, never raised. They had been contented in one another’s company, stirring the jamming pan together, and sharing their sewing patterns and their books. And then her mother’s voice had been so suddenly silenced. She was no longer there when Edie looked up from her book; there was no one with whom to share the twist in the plot or a new blouse pattern. All of a sudden, their busy kitchen was entirely still.
Francis had been so kind to her through those months of her mother’s illness; he had been so understanding, no longer the golden youth with the flashing grin and the ready rhymes, but instead a caring, gentle, steady man. He had let her talk when she needed to, and she had found comfort in the words that he returned. She could see how well he understood her, how he wanted to take away her sadness, and how s
he now hated the silence of her own newly empty home. And so she had left it for a house full of boys, with their jokes and their boisterous roughhousing, and the secrets that they always seemed to be sharing. Since she barely remembered her father’s presence, it had seemed odd to suddenly find herself surrounded by the noise and the movement and the scent of these men.
The train lingers in a station that is all corrugated iron and pine planks, and she watches a young couple swinging their legs on a bench. The boy is turning through a book of maps, seemingly following the line of a route with his finger, but the girl pulls his hand away and smiles as she links his fingers through her own.
She hadn’t wanted a great fuss of a wedding because she had no family to invite. Even so, the little church had looked so unbalanced, with all the friends and relations on Francis’ side, and so few seats taken on the left. But then, having seen her glance at the empty pews, his brothers had moved over; they had crossed the aisle. When she next looked, there they were, smiling on her side. ‘We’re your family now,’ Harry had said to her afterwards, ‘whether you want us or not, and we always will be.’ She can still picture Francis in his bridegroom smartness, the shine of his slicked-back hair and the glow of his face, his sudden nervousness and the twitching smile that he seemed to be having difficulty controlling.
As newly married husband and wife, she and Francis had moved into his teenage bedroom, with his cricket bats and fossil collections and his maps of ancient military campaigns on the walls. They had lived there for two months – his brothers’ voices coming through the walls, and laughing into the pillows to dampen the noise – before the house next door had come up for rent and they had moved one door down. It had seemed the most natural thing that they stay on the same street. She would never have taken him from his brothers, and why would they want to go any further?
She had always liked to watch the three of them together – Francis, Harry and Will – their secret sibling jokes and looks, and how their faces mirrored one another. When she sat across the table from them, it was like looking at a progression, or a picture of the passage of time. While Francis’ features were the most strongly defined – he was the most conventionally handsome of the three of them – Will’s face, beneath a mop of blond fringe, was still forming. When she looked from Will to Francis, she could see the man that he would be in ten years’ time. And she had assumed that they would always be there across the table from her, turning from boys into men, becoming the men they were meant to be.
The younger boy on the opposite seat catches her eye and she smiles as he looks away. That shy glance reminds her of Harry. She can see his eighteen-year-old features, facing her across his mother’s dinner service, and how his eyes had sometimes caught hers, exactly like that. All of the elements that she had loved in Francis’ face – the curl of his eyelashes, the angularity of his profile, the bow of his top lip – were there in Harry’s face too. When she had seen Harry again this May, that resemblance had been all the more obvious.
Steam billows as the train passes under a bridge; they have entered a cutting, and in the darkness of the earth bank she catches a glimmer of her own reflected face. Just as Francis had started with cameras in the summer before the war, forever insisting on taking her photograph, so it had been for Harry with his paints, and she always had to sit for her portrait. She puts herself back in the sitting room, listening to the whisper of his pencil on paper, the chink of his brush against the glass, and her brother-in-law’s steady breathing.
Harry used to look at her when he painted her portrait. She can remember the sensation of his gaze on her face and the weight of that look. Sometimes it felt as though he was looking right through her bones, and she wondered if he could read her thoughts, but he had to look properly, he said, in order to capture her likeness. He also looked at her when he wasn’t painting her, though, and she knew how Francis teased him about that. There were occasions when she felt like she was the prize that Francis had won, and it didn’t seem nice that Francis taunted Harry for his blushes and those glimpses under his eyelashes.
Harry didn’t help himself, though, she supposed. Sometimes she hardly recognized herself in Harry’s paintings and she wondered how he could consider that to be her likeness. He made her noble when he put her down on paper, so that she was no longer a girl who worked in a shop but a woman who might look out proudly from the walls of an art gallery, surrounded by a heavy gilt frame. There was such generosity in the way that Harry painted her, but he also gave so much of himself away.
The railway line is following the meander of a river – it is there on the left-hand side of the tracks now, and then on the right in the next moment – and the land all around is marshy. The ground is pitted and churned and the waterlogged places bounce back the white sky. A lot of branches have come down, as if there has been an almighty wind, but she can see from the crudely broken shapes of the tree trunks that this has been caused by more than a mere summer storm.
She remembers how, in the August of 1914, the newspapers had been full of the Ardennes and Lorraine, photographs of smashed forests, lines of refugees on the roads, and a burned-down library in a Belgian town. Francis had sat across the dinner table from her and told her that 300,000 books had turned to ashes in one night, and she had seen how that angered him. It had frightened her to see that look on Francis’ face, because she knew what that look might mean. And she knew that, if he went, he would take his brothers with him, that it would be their next shared passion, and how could she stop that? But of course, in the end, they did go. In the middle of July 1916, they’d travelled south towards the Somme river, when the newspapers were already full of assaults and attacks and such long casualties lists.
The young men leave the train at Aveluy, and the boy’s brown eyes connect with hers once more as he closes the door of the railway carriage.
‘Bonne journée,’ they say to her, and touch their hats, as they step out into a landscape that’s all at the wrong angles. The taller brother puts his arm around the younger and they walk down the platform. As the train slides past, it could well be Will and Francis for a moment. Perhaps she, as an only child, had not fully appreciated how much Francis needed his brothers to be there with him? She thinks about the photograph of Francis alone in the square, and is struck by the terrible loneliness of that image.
15
Harry
Montauban, Somme, August 1921
Location image order: Mrs Eunice Maxwell requests a photograph of the church in Montauban. Her son, Pte. Alan Maxwell (26519, 17th Manchesters), KIA 01/07/1916, has no known grave.
It is perfectly quiet. The only sound is the wind through the grass. This spot ought to be full of ghosts, ought to writhe with angry energy. Instead it is the absolute emptiness that strikes Harry.
‘The struggle for the village was short, but fierce and sanguinary,’ he reads. ‘Today it is utterly impossible to locate the site of a street or house. The only remaining landmarks are the pond and the cemetery – the latter considerably enlarged by the addition of numerous German graves. Everywhere else nothing is to be seen, except heaps of stones and rubbish, beams, scrap-iron and debris of all kinds.’
He looks up from the guidebook and finds that he can’t disagree with its assessment. There are not even ruins remaining. Nothing but thistles, nettles, broken glass and piled stone. A sign indicates that a hump in the earth is where the village church once stood. Iron crosses lean crazily around it.
Harry bends down to get an upwards angle on the remains of the church. He wants to somehow make it seem as if there is more to this place than a bulge of earth. He wants to make it seem more significant. He focuses in on the fancy ironwork of the crosses. As there is no grave for Private Maxwell, so too there is no church to photograph for his mother. Harry feels as if he can’t help but fail Mrs Maxwell.
He walks on. It is five years since Private Maxwell died taking this village and yet there doesn’t seem to be a single soul trying to rec
laim this place. He has read in the newspapers about English villages adopting devastated communes on the Somme, organizing raffles and jumble sales and tombolas to raise money to gift fruit trees, food parcels and ploughs. There doesn’t seem to be anyone here to whom fruit trees might be gifted. He wonders if people will ever live here again. Would anyone want to plant an orchard here? What strange fruit would grow from this earth?
The roads have been remade to some degree, but the land on either side has yet to be smoothed and tidied and made right. The ground is hummocky, scrambled over with tangling vegetation, and strange stumps of trees stand like sentinels. For an irrational instant, Harry feels as though the trees are watching him. There is something accusing about this ill-used landscape.
They had read newspaper reports about the attacks of the first of July as they waited north of Albert. On the eighteenth of that month they had finally received their own orders to move forward. The weather had been wet and they had slipped and skidded on roads that were turning to mud. It was the early hours of the morning before they had arrived, swearing then as they were instructed to make bivouac camp in a boggy field. The men who were coming out told them stories about fighting in the wood, about the splintered branches and the tugging brambles, about all the corpses and the confusion. It was an evil place, they said, a regular charnel house. Harry remembers the faces of the men who told them these stories, the whites of their eyes in the dawn light, the rush of their words, how they had almost seemed to want to outdo one another in shocking those who hadn’t been in the wood. Some of them seemed to have left their wits in the wood.
In the distance, to his right, there are what must once have been woods. Black sticks bristle on the skyline. To the left the land slopes away and he can see miles and miles of empty ugly nothingness. Harry feels the great oppressive weight of the nothingness. He feels like the last man left.
By the side of the road is a white stone obelisk. To the Glory of God, reads the inscription on the bronze plaque, and in imperishable memory. He realizes that the trunks and sticks and scrub behind are that wood. He passed through there himself in the last days of July, with the mist and the gas shells and the splintering awfulness all around. He photographs the memorial, focusing in on the bronze words. The broken trunks of trees stand phantom-like in the background of his image. Blackened and leafless, they give the impression that it is January, but the horizon shimmers with August’s heat.
The Photographer of the Lost Page 9