‘Thus we nobly slithered into battle,’ said Pembridge under his breath.
The sky above was wide and grey. They had left behind the last signs of the village and out here there was nothing to navigate by; no hills or trees or roof timbers broke into the peripheries of their vision. Nothing but the high earth walls, a funnel of sky and Wilkinson’s pack in front with its swinging mess tin.
‘Mind now.’ Bartley’s voice came from up ahead.
Part of the trench wall had collapsed, a small landslide spilling across their path. They clambered over it, complaining as their feet sank into the waterlogged earth. Harry felt the cold seep into his boots.
‘They’re falling in with the thaw,’ said Jones.
Earth was sliding from either side. In front, the bottom of the trench was a line of winter sky and feet splashing through it.
‘The whole thing is crumbling,’ said Wilkinson. ‘It’s all going to fall apart.’
It came over their boots, to their ankles, creeping up their calves. The water was sharply cold. Harry watched the first raindrops spatter in Wilkinson’s mess tin. His own movements, reflected in the metal, were the colour of mud. They discussed the efficaciousness of various patent embrocations, to pass the time, and speculated as to whether they would all have pneumonia by the morning.
‘Goose grease is the only thing.’
‘I’d rather have the roast goose.’
‘Right now I’d gladly sell my wife if I could buy a hot bath with the proceeds.’
‘I’ve seen your wife. They might let you have the hot water free out of sympathy.’
The line was moving slowly. It was like walking up a stream at first, but now the stream had thickened and was rising. It had turned to a heavy sludge. They took difficult, careful, deliberate footsteps. It sucked and pulled, as if the landscape itself was now against them, wanting to drag them down. The enemy was forgotten. They stumbled and swore and the struggle now was to stay upright. Harry’s hands pushed into the earth walls either side. The walls oozed water and fell away. Each step was an effort.
‘What’s going on?’
Ahead, the men had stopped.
‘It’s a bog,’ said Pembridge. ‘It’s like a trap.’
‘Is there a way around?’ asked Bartley.
‘What do you suggest: climb over the top?’
‘Or build a boat?’
The wickerwork revetments were collapsing into it. Wires sagged and the walls slumped. Everything was falling down into the mud ahead.
Bartley nudged into Harry. The line behind pressed.
‘Go on,’ said Fearnley’s voice.
‘We can’t go back,’ said Jones.
It was up beyond Harry’s knees now and moving against the glutinous thickness of it was so tiring. His greatcoat was an enormous weight.
‘My legs are screaming,’ said Pembridge.
Harry took large, exaggerated, slow steps. Each movement required concentration. Getting across it was the only thing that he could think about, but there didn’t seem to be a far side. The mud-coloured figures ahead were staggering like old men. He wished that he could shrug off his kit and his greatcoat. He watched the rain pitting the surface of the mud.
‘I feel about a hundred years old,’ said Bartley. Harry could hear the effort of his breath.
‘I feel as though I could fall down and sleep for a hundred years.’ Pembridge leaned against a post with his eyes closed. ‘I am clinging to the mast,’ he said. His eyes opened and rolled skywards. In the gathering dusk and the all-around mud, the whites of his eyes glinted.
‘This ship is well sunk,’ he said.
From the thighs down Harry was all clay; he was a statue struggling into life. He felt the coldness of it circling around his thighs. It was soft yet sharp. It chilled and burned. Someone up ahead was yelling. The cries sounded hysterical.
‘I’m not sure that I can go on,’ said Bartley. ‘I’m not sure that I want to go on.’
The rain streamed down Harry’s face. He tasted the salt of his skin and it stung in his eyes. He thought about giving in to it, just spreading his arms and sinking in. He imagined the mud pushing into his mouth and his nose, claiming his throat and his lungs. He stumbled in his panic.
‘Go on,’ said Francis’ voice behind. Harry looked behind him. The line of men were only shadows now, the mist of breath and the shimmer of rain on tin hats and capes.
Harry’s foot sank as he turned and he felt it lurch. The cold rushed up. His hands grasped but there was nothing to grab on to, nothing to stop him falling. He tried to move his feet, to find purchase but the weight and thickness of mud was too great. It crept beyond his waist. His hands flailed but there was nothing to cling on to. He felt it rising up his chest. The figure of Pembridge was pulling away. He tried to turn, to reach to the man behind.
Francis was there, then. His face flared into light as he put a match to a cigarette. The match arced away and Francis’ hands were gripping Harry’s. He felt his brother’s pulse and pulled against his hands, kicking, fighting, heaving, frantic. Then the red glare of the cigarette was gone and Harry was falling again. He felt the cold pushing up and panic surging through his body.
‘Francis!’
Other hands were at his armpits, pulling his pack and his greatcoat away. He felt hot breath against his cheek and caught glints of half-familiar faces. He screamed as they pulled. He felt as if the sockets of his arms were going to spring loose and his bones were going to tear apart. The mud let him go. He clung to Bartley, found himself blinking into his up-close eyes. He wanted to say thank you but couldn’t seem to form the words. The line ahead went on and they were pulled with it. He looked back to see his greatcoat sinking into the mud.
‘Leave it,’ Bartley said.
Harry remembered how he had once spent an afternoon watching a butterfly slowly shrug off its cocoon, struggling free of its constriction to stretch its wings. Moving on through the darkness and the thigh-high mire he wished for a set of wings. He thought of Francis’ hands pulling away from his own. Had he imagined it? He could hear his own teeth chattering.
‘The guide is a spy,’ Fearnley’s voice was proposing behind. ‘He’s one of theirs. He’s led us into a bog to finish us off.’
‘Bastard is lost, that’s all,’ said Pembridge. ‘He’s got no more clue than we have.’
Harry looked back. All that he could make out now was occasional glimmers of reflection and a swaying line of cigarettes. Was one of those red lights Francis? Was he still behind?
‘We’re all lost,’ said Bartley.
They went on with only the noise of their legs in the mud and the patter of the rain. The moonlight seemed to heighten the texture of everything. The flooded ditch ahead shivered.
‘What’s that?’
There were voices ahead, notes of hilarity and fast foreign words. He looked up to see the silhouettes of men standing up on the top of the parapet. Pembridge stopped. He turned towards Harry. He could see Pembridge’s breath and the question in his eye.
‘Boche?’
‘French.’
The poilus were standing up on top of the trenches that they were meant to be holding. Harry could see the shapes of them. They were walking about apparently without any concern for the facing enemy and offering their hands to the men who had come to relieve them. He could see the men in front clambering up.
‘Are they mad?’
‘Perhaps we are.’
The figures on the tops of the parapets were patting each other on their backs. Someone was singing. Cigarettes were being passed and lit. It looked as if the war was forgotten. It looked like the war was over.
‘Allons! Venez! Ne restez pas dans la merde.’
Hands were beckoning, stretching down to them, pulling them up.
‘Is it safe?’
The men on the parapet were laughing. Harry took offered hands, kicked and clambered. He rolled onto the top.
‘Bien. C’est mieux, hein
?’
Hands were patting him, then. He lay on his back and looked up at the faces. They grinned and joshed in the gloom. Were they madmen or satyrs or ghosts? He took a proffered cigarette and a hand that helped him to his feet.
‘Allez, regardez là!’
An arm pointed away. Harry looked out across no man’s land, across the dark shadows of the churned and cratered land, flooded shell holes glowing like milky pools and the sharp twists of torn trees. On the far side was a bobbing line of yellow lights. Harry looked at the cigarette in his own hand and realized what it was.
‘They’re on the tops too?’
‘They climbed out this evening, and so we did the same. Their trenches are flooded too,’ said a voice without a face in heavily accented English. Harry could discern what might have been the shape of a church spire beyond the enemy lines. ‘It is as bad for them as it is for us. And why should we stay in the mud just because politicians say it ought to be so? The village behind is Chaulnes. We have been fighting for it for seven months.’
The noise of laughter carried across the darkness.
‘C’est complétement fou. Tout est foutu. It is all madness,’ said the voice in the black.
28
Harry
Chaulnes, Somme, August 1921
‘Give me your hand,’ says Gabriel. ‘Allez!’
They clamber through the grassed ditches that once were trenches and climb to stand on the parapet. The ground ahead, though now scrambled over with green, still looks churned and dangerous. As they pick through the old wire Harry remembers walking along the top of the parapet searching for Francis. He had finally found him smoking with Harrison. He’d offered Harry the packet of cigarettes and said, ‘It makes you wonder what the point is, doesn’t it?’ He hadn’t been able to steady his hand as Francis held the struck match out towards him. With that memory seeming so close by at this moment, Harry has to cross his arms over his chest again.
‘We came here in September 1916,’ says Gabriel, shading his eyes to the sun. ‘By then the line had circled half around the town. We were fighting in the woods to the north, trying to complete the circle, but it was like a fortress.’
Beyond, to the north, the skyline bristles with tree stumps. It looks horribly sharp and unfriendly, like a wicked wood in a children’s fable.
‘Marcellin died here in the woods?’
‘Yes.’
He had taken a photograph of Marcellin Bousquet’s grave that morning, and a second of his brother standing at its side, Gabriel’s hand stretching out to touch the cross. There was a simple tenderness to the gesture. Behind the lens, Harry had pictured Gabriel’s hand on his brother’s shoulder. He can’t imagine himself posing for his portrait at the side of Francis’ grave.
‘I am sorry.’ Brambles and barbed wire pluck at Harry’s trouser legs. He kicks them away. ‘We walked into the town, or what was left of it, in March 1917. It was completely deserted.’
He remembers following Francis into a burnt-out house, its smell of blistered woodwork. Harry’s fingers had brushed against a cast-iron stove and he had been shocked by the heat that still issued from it.
‘I read that they are going to plant pine woods from here south, great stretches of them. They think that pine trees may grow in this earth if nothing else will.’
Harry looks up at Gabriel. ‘Shall we walk to the town together?’
‘Yes. I would like that.’
They take cautious steps between the tangles of old wire, over the dips and rises of the ground. He sees a hand grenade, flaking into rust, and a bolt of machine-gun cartridges. They look like something left by an ancient civilization. An ironwork gate is bent into a frightful shape, there is the mangled frame of a daybed, and Harry realizes how hard he has tried to put all of this out of his mind. He treads carefully, not wanting to see it all, yet needing to see. There are mouldered sandbags, scraps of rag and brown lengths that might be branches or bones. His boot touches the spine of a book. He nudges it and it falls stiffly open. The white pages inside are pristine, the print crisp and uncompromised.
‘A Bible?’
‘I think so.’
For an instant it might have been his own lost notebook, the book of sketches and thoughts that had been so important to him, into which he could put all his sorrows and fears, confine the images that he meant to forget, and preserve the memories that he chose to keep. Putting it down on the page had seemed to keep it all in balance, it had worked for him for a long time, but then his book had no longer been there. Harry wonders if anyone has ever curiously kicked at that cover as they’ve walked through the ruins and, if so, which page the book split open on.
‘We were at school together, Marcellin, Madeleine and I,’ Gabriel goes on. Harry watches as he pokes a stick at a helmet and turns it. Mercifully it is empty. Gabriel throws the stick away and shrugs. ‘She had a brown face and yellow plaits. She took the sheep out and knew bird calls. She had quick hands. She could catch lizards and could dance. She danced with us both.’
Harry sees gavottes spin around Gabriel and his brother’s grave and a girl’s white-toothed smile. He sees the spin of a long-ago garden, a woman’s lips forming the words to a song being played on a gramophone. But the woman is his brother’s wife and he should not recall those words on her lips. He blinks the rest away.
‘They were married before the war?’
‘Yes. Him in uniform. But when we were sixteen I thought that it was me who Madeleine would choose. It was my eyes that she smiled into. But Marcellin had the confidence. He was the one who had all the talk, who knew the right words to say to girls, and he would have the farm one day. Marcellin had a future. Now he has no future.’ Gabriel picks up a piece of brown metal and turns it over in his hands. ‘Shrapnel?’ he says. ‘I do miss my brother, you understand.’
‘I understand,’ says Harry.
They rejoin the road, which looks as if it has recently been relaid. The new surface makes the roadside trees, splintered and severed, look all the more tragic. Today the sun is high and these trees can offer no shade. Harry takes off his jacket and passes a water bottle to Gabriel. This must once have been a handsome avenue, he considers. The well-spaced slumps of brick to either side must have been smart houses. Now there are only fragments of dressed stone and roses scramble over fallen walls to which they were perhaps once trellised. The grandeur of the gateposts looks almost mocking.
‘ “Following the Enemy withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line, British troops entered Chaulnes, almost without striking a blow, on March the eighteenth, 1917. But the town would be recaptured by the Germans in March 1918,” ’ he reads aloud from his guidebook. ‘ “It was only finally taken by the Allies on August twenty-eighth, after being surrounded. It was razed to the ground. The low brick-and-rubble houses which lined the wide straight streets sheltered a population of about twelve hundred and fifty inhabitants. Very few of them escaped total destruction.” ’
Gabriel passes the water bottle back and they walk on. A couple in black are staring at a pile of stones. The woman turns rheumy eyes to Harry. He takes off his hat.
‘I saw a proposal written in a newspaper that the trenches should be left, should be kept an open wound for all to see. I thought that it was right; but now I see that it’s wrong. This is someone’s home. I feel as if I ought to apologize,’ he says to Gabriel. When he looks back the woman is staring after them.
‘But still people do want to see. There is talk of building an Office National du Tourisme, with barracks to house the sightseers and fleets of motor buses to take them over the battlefields. They say that it will be a new invasion.’ A girl with blond hair passes them, cradling a loaf of bread to her chest. Gabriel says, ‘Bonjour,’ but the girl doesn’t take her eyes from the road ahead. ‘I don’t know that it will be welcomed,’ he says.
Curtains twitch at the windows of wooden huts. The houses here resemble gardeners’ sheds, Harry thinks. Another town is being remade in pine and
corrugated iron. An old man carries pails of water from a pump. At the junction, children stand and stare.
‘These places make me think about photographs that I’ve seen of prospector towns. Is this what it is like in the Klondike and California?’
‘I don’t know that the prize is quite so high.’
Their feet stop by a Nissen hut. There is the noise of a piano playing and voices joining within, shaping into the tune of a hymn that Harry recognizes. Pieces of coloured paper have been glued onto the windows to give the impression of stained glass. There is a large wooden cross nailed to the apex of the corrugated iron roof. It appears to have been salvaged from an older place. It looks somehow declamatory. Harry wonders how these people can cling on to faith and hope.
‘Communion,’ says Gabriel.
‘Perhaps that is what matters: the coming together?’
Chickens scatter ahead of them. A dog stretches lazily and watches them pass. There is a burnt-out house at the end of the road, the pink brick scorched and blackened roof beams slumped. Harry imagines how it must have roared when the roof gave way. They sit on the remains of a garden wall and pass a packet of cigarettes between them. A child hits at the dirt with a twig.
‘I get letters,’ Gabriel says. ‘They all know what they want the memorial to be and what they don’t want it to be. The trouble is that they don’t agree. One person writes that the figure has to be realistic, un fils de la terre, while a second wants a heroic homme de guerre. Another says that it should not be a soldier at all, but a mother, a Vierge Marie, a mother of Christ stripped of her son. Others tell me that it must not be triumphal; it must be a proletarian, socialist expression of loss – an old man struggling with the plough. Others want a symbol of Peace, a figure of Justice, a winged Victory – and I have no idea what is right!’ He throws his hands in the air and looks at Harry. ‘Is this peace? Is this victory? Is this justice? How am I supposed to make that decision? How can I sum all of this up?’
The Photographer of the Lost Page 15