‘Sit down, Ma,’ Fraser insisted firmly.
‘Goodness,’ Harriet murmured, lingering momentarily behind the one vacant seat at the table between two German men, as a whole host of questions and competing thoughts spooled into her mind, and wrestling with an ingrained prejudice.
‘Did you find her?’ Fraser asked. Without giving her time to answer, he turned to the German men and, in a voice lightened by alcohol, added, ‘My mother went off on an errand to track down the elusive Lina Peeters, my dead brother’s lover by all accounts.’
‘No, unfortunately not,’ Harriet answered. ‘But I had a good scout around. I’m sure we can find her in the morning.’ She turned and caught the waiter’s attention. ‘Could I trouble you for a cocoa, please?’
‘What was I saying, Stefan?’ Fraser asked the man beside him.
‘Christmas truce…’ Stefan answered, taking a long swig of beer and nearly quaffing the lot in one go.
‘Ah, yes! The Christmas truce of 1914. That was it.’ Fraser hung his head, eyes closed recalling what it had been like. Then, he opened his hands in incredulity. ‘I was there—in No-Man’s-Land—playing football against them…against you,’ he said, his eyes indicating the three German men. ‘It was actually rather fun.’
‘And so friendly,’ Kurt added.
‘Yes, absolutely friendly,’ Fraser continued. ‘Why in God’s name didn’t we just refuse to fight? Can you imagine what might have happened if the two opposing trenches had just said ‘No! We’re not fighting anymore!’ I mean, they couldn’t have done anything about it, then.’
The three men seemed in agreement, each of them nodding with dreadful discernment, which came crashing in on the back of hindsight.
‘We should have been stronger, ja,’ Stefan agreed. ‘What, would they have shot every one of us? Of course not.’
‘Do you know, when we returned to our trenches on Christmas night,’ Fraser said, ‘I was actually happy. I actually felt like something considerable and powerful had shifted in the world; the men on both sides were just that: men, not soldiers. No-Man’s-Land was just a football pitch. I could feel it; not one person in either trench wanted to continue fighting on.’
Franz dabbed his eyes with his sleeve. ‘I felt this same thing, also, on our side…’ His voice became pinched, and whatever else he had wanted to say caught and stuck in his throat. He blew out his cheeks and picked up his glass of beer.
Harriet leant across the table, placed her hand on Franz’s and gently squeezed. For a few seconds he held his hand motionless, then rolled it over and squeezed hers in return. As their hands united, the vying thoughts about the morality of socialising with these men all but vanished. Only one unanswerable question remained, unshakable in her mind: What would Malcolm and Edward have thought? But she had to believe that they, too, would have longed for such a peace to reign.
‘It must be difficult, being here so soon after the war,’ Harriet commented to nobody and everybody.
‘Yes, it is,’ Kurt agreed. ‘We keep low and we keep quiet, and we do our work.’
‘What is it that you do, exactly?’ she asked.
‘Stonemasons,’ Stefan answered with a scoff. ‘You can imagine the—what is the word? Bad humour?—of the situation: the Germans destroy the city, then they have to come back to rebuild it because the Belgian masons are all dead. Many do not like this.’
‘Irony’s the word,’ Harriet said. ‘And yes, I do see that.’ She glanced at Fraser. ‘He’s a civil engineer—erm, building engineer—and I’m sure the authorities here must be crying out for such a talent.’
‘Yes, of course,’ Kurt said. ‘Here, especially. If you want me to, I can ask if there is work here for you?’
Fraser shook his head. ‘No, definitely don’t do that,’ he said, shooting a look of contempt at his mother.
‘Why not?’ Stefan asked searchingly.
Fraser sipped his drink, taking his time to answer. ‘Because… I just can’t; I don’t care enough. When I woke up on Boxing Day morning in 1914, I was still so full of hope. The world seemed full of potential and possibilities. But then we’d barely been awake for an hour and the orders came through to attack those men…those men, whose hands I’d shaken just hours before…those men, who I had shared songs with…exchanged jokes…had a football match. That hope, potential and possibility was suddenly gone, replaced with a deep anger at the bloody faceless men reigniting war from the safe confines of their warm offices in London. All, as I watched more and more friends, and then my own two brothers get slaughtered on the bloody battlefield. By the time the Armistice came, all I was left with was numb indifference. Complete…and utter…indifference.’ Fraser began to sob. ‘It’s consumed me. It is me and I’m scared that it’ll never leave me or change…’
Kurt put his arm over Fraser’s shoulder, and Fraser leant into his side and cried more than Harriet had ever seen him cry in his entire life.
Chapter Twelve
13th September 1919, Ypres, Belgium
With a restored Fraser at her heels, Harriet strode into the saloon, certain that she, too, had not had such a good night’s sleep in donkeys’ years. She felt refreshed, invigorated and, after some breakfast, ready to track down Lina Peeters.
‘Oh,’ Harriet said, pausing at the doorway to the saloon; each of the ten tables was already occupied.
‘We are rather late, Ma,’ Fraser whispered behind her.
Harriet blushed at the glances noting her tardiness, which came from the eyes fixed on her around the room. She smiled pleasantly and noticed two vacant spaces at a middle-aged couple’s table, whom she had overheard speaking English the night before. ‘Good morning, may we join you, please?’
‘Oh, please, do,’ the man said. He was smartly dressed in a black suit, white shirt and black tie. He was balding, but an unsuccessful attempt had been made to drag hair from close above his right ear in order to cover the fact.
‘Thank you. I’m Mrs McDougall and this is Fraser, my son,’ Harriet said, sitting beside the lady and nodding courteously. Harriet stared across the table at the man’s hair, fascinated. She wondered how it must look when wet. Presumably it tumbled down over his shoulders, almost to his chest. A most odd and slightly unpleasant image, she thought.
‘I’m Jack and this is my wife, Daisy.’ The man thrust a forkful of bacon into his mouth, as it brushed through his substantial grey moustache.
‘Harriet,’ she felt the need to say. Quite what the rules were regarding this growing informality, she had no idea.
Jack was quick to prevent a silence from forming: ‘May I ask the purpose of your visit to Ypres?’
‘My brother was killed in action not far from here,’ Fraser explained. ‘We came to visit his grave, and…well…just to see the area, I suppose.’
‘And, importantly,’ Harriet added quickly, ‘to find a certain young lady involved with my son. Lina Peeters.’ She looked hopefully at the couple, as if they might have encountered her on their travels, but they made no reaction upon hearing the name.
‘What about yourselves?’ Fraser asked them in return.
‘We’re trying to find out what happened to our poor Sidney,’ the lady said quietly. ‘Killed in the Second Battle of Ypres but his body was never found…’
‘Oh, I am sorry,’ Harriet said. The absence of a body, she felt, must add a further layer of anguish and uncertainty to the grief shared by every parent faced with the worst news imaginable. Cruelly, it also maintained the unlikely perennial possibility that a mistake had been made and that he was alive somewhere, perhaps confused in a foreign country, or lying seriously injured in a hospital. She herself had imagined every possible scenario, and every door-knock or postal delivery offered a glimmer of optimism for an alternative outcome.
‘We’re still no closer to the truth, though,’ the man said. ‘One minute he was there, running across No-Man’s-Land under a hail of bullets, and the next he was gone. None of his comrades saw him enter the G
erman trenches, or return to the British line, or get hit. And…to the best of our knowledge, there were no mortar explosions.’
‘He just vanished,’ the lady said.
‘Well,’ Harriet began, ‘if there’s one thing I will say, it’s that you must persevere; the answers are out there, somewhere, you just need to persist to find them.’
The couple nodded and murmured their mutual agreement.
‘Good morning!’ a young male waiter said breezily, appearing beside Fraser at the table. ‘Can I get you a tea or coffee?’
‘Coffee, for both of us, please,’ Harriet ordered.
‘Lovely,’ he said, scribbling on a notepad. ‘And to eat we have porridge, or we have toast with bacon and egg.’
Harriet and Fraser ordered bacon and egg, then, as the waiter disappeared to the kitchen, Daisy whispered, ‘You just cannot get a decent cup of tea anywhere outside of England, can you, Jack?’ she said, turning to her husband.
‘No, Daisy. It’s a disgrace,’ he concurred. ‘As soon as you cross that channel of ours, you’ve had it. I don’t know what’s wrong with people but they cannot make a good cup of tea for toffee.’
A sudden burst of laughter from the corner of the room drew attention from tables around the dining area. It was the three German stonemasons sharing a joke.
Jack shook his head. ‘They’ve got a bloody nerve,’ he said loudly.
‘Jack…’ his wife said, the leaning of whose tone Harriet could not quite discern.
‘Don’t Jack me. Well, who do they think they are? Hmm? They really have some ruddy gall, I tell you,’ he fumed. ‘They should never be allowed to step foot in this city…or this bloody country, for that matter.’
‘Jack, that’s enough,’ his wife said weakly.
Fraser, saying nothing, stood up and left the table.
Harriet watched, as he walked across the room to join the three Germans.
‘God!’ Jack blustered, his crimson head flicking incredulously between Fraser and the Germans, his wife and Harriet, disturbing his hair in the process. ‘Whatever’s he doing of?’
‘They’re all just men, who did whatever their country commanded,’ Harriet appealed.
‘Really? And how would you feel, knowing that one of those…those Hun over there, had killed your son? Hmm? I tell you, if I knew it…!’ he continued to rant. ‘If I knew it, I’d string them up by their ankles and leave them to rot. I would, you know.’
Harriet wanted to say something pious, something which elevated her onto a higher moral plain, something about forgiveness. Or perhaps say something pithy, flipping the situation, and asking him to imagine the countless poor German women currently mourning their sons’ lives, which would have, doubtless, been taken by their son, Sidney. But the truth was infinitely more complex: she didn’t know how she would feel if she really came face-to-face with the man who had taken Malcolm’s life.
‘There! See! See!’ Jack raged. ‘It’s in your eyes, but you don’t have the nerve to say that you despise them, too. Now, control your son, won’t you?’
Every table around the room had fallen silent.
Everybody was listening and looking.
Harriet knitted her fingers together in front of her and cleared her throat. ‘No, I shan’t control him. And—while we are on the subject, if you must know—I don’t despise them. Really, I don’t. I feel nothing but compassion. My heart overflows with compassion towards them, and all the other men like them around the world, who, despite their having been asked to do the most arduous, horrendous and unspeakable of things to each other in the name of their country, have survived against all odds. And…at the same time…I feel nothing but compassion for you, too, for your indescribable loss.’ Harriet paused and drew in a breath. ‘No, the people I despise are the craven instigators of war, men who think nothing of sending thousands upon thousands to their deaths in order to maintain ill-gotten, archaic, colonial allegiances, nationalistic superiority and a dying empire’s power. These are the men, who killed our children—all our children.’
The room seemed to hold its collective breath, as Harriet finished speaking.
Nobody spoke.
Nobody moved.
Time stood quite still for a while.
‘Two mugs of our delicious Turkish coffee!’ the waiter sang, prancing merrily back into the room. He placed the cups on the table, and then stopped, his index fingers still coiled around the handles, as he gradually angled his gaze up and around the saloon. ‘What is it?’ he breathed, slowly looking over his shoulder, as if an unseen attacker were lying in wait behind him.
‘It’s nothing,’ Jack said calmly, his eyes moist. He dabbed his mouth with a napkin and rose from the table. ‘Good day.’
‘Good day to you, Jack.’ Harriet replied with sincerity.
His wife looked at nobody and swiftly followed him out of the room, her face sallow and her cheeks flushed.
Harriet picked up the two coffee cups and carried them over to where Fraser was now sitting. ‘Please, may I join you?’
There was a light coolness to the air in what was an otherwise sunny September morning; one of those lingering summer days, which, back home in England, was a foreshadowing of a pending change of season, when leaves’ colours changed, as they prepared to fall. ‘Phenology’, Malcolm had told her, once: nature’s response to the changing seasons. But here in the Plaine d’Amour, there were no trees or vegetation, or signs from the natural world of the approaching autumn.
‘What a place,’ Fraser commented.
‘Quite,’ Harriet agreed.
Today, the sight was very different to the one which she had visited yesterday; there was an air of busyness, of its being a normal working day: women were hanging laundry on string lines, which ran between the houses; bare-footed children were running and playing; men were employed in various labouring roles, fixing roofs, erecting even more pre-fabs, calling to one another in a blend of languages. That general busyness of the area seemed to magnify the scale of the task ahead of them.
‘Do you think that we ought to separate and tackle half a side each?’ Harriet suggested.
‘Are you sure you’ll be alright by yourself?’ Fraser asked.
Harriet frowned. ‘Yes, thank you. Will you?’
‘I’ll yell if I need you,’ he replied.
‘Have you remembered the phrase?’ Harriet asked, not giving him a chance to reply, before saying, ‘Ik zoek iemand, die Lina Peeters heet.’
‘Ja,’ Fraser answered. ‘Dank uwel.’
‘Good. Right, then, I’ll take this side,’ Harriet said, pointing to the vaguely defined area on her left, in which was contained the stables that she had visited yesterday. She felt that she would be in a better position than Fraser to tackle the inevitability of being directed back towards the incorrect Lina Peeters.
Harriet walked briskly, not entirely sure how she was going to approach today’s mission. Would she knock on every door and ask if they knew her, or just talk to the numerous people going about their business in the streets? She settled on the latter idea, certain that the community was close-knit enough so as to be reasonably acquainted with those living around them.
Just two houses into the make-shift street, Harriet spotted a man who was chopping wood. She approached him and asked if he knew of Lina. He looked up to the sky briefly in consideration, then shook his head. Harriet thanked him and continued towards three women dressed in filthy clothes, washing linen in a large copper bucket. She asked the same question, and the three women looked each from one to the next, doubtful, and all replying in the negative. ‘Dank uwel,’ Harriet said, moving on down the street.
A short distance away, Harriet spotted a young girl, sitting in the open doorway to her home. Her head was resting sulkily in her hands, her elbows propped on her knees. Harriet approached her with a wide grin. ‘Hallo!’ she said with an accent, followed by her standard request phrase.
The girl gawked at her, but said nothing, so Harrie
t repeated the question and then, for good measure, said it in French and then English. The girl shrugged.
‘Rightio. Marvellous,’ Harriet said, thrusting her head upwards, as she changed direction, ready to intercept a young lady who was walking towards her. She took in a breath, her face a fixed rictus, as she asked the woman politely if she knew of Lina.
The woman looked to be in her mid-twenties, tall with long blonde hair. ‘Erm…are you English?’ she asked in a heavily accented voice.
‘Yes, is it that obvious?’ Harriet replied bashfully.
The woman grinned. ‘A little. Lina Peeters—yes, I know her. Well, actually I know two.’
Harriet emitted a small gasp at the news: ‘Does one of them live by the stables?’
The woman’s eyes lit up. ‘Yes, that is right; she is my good friend.’
‘Not that one,’ Harriet quickly corrected. ‘The other one. Where might I find her?’
‘I can take you to her house, if you would like this?’
She clapped her hands together for joy and exhaled: ‘That would be just wonderful! Thank you.’
‘Follow me this way,’ she instructed, taking a cut-through between two pre-fabs.
‘Do you know if this Lina Peeters lived in England during the war?’ Harriet asked, as they walked on.
‘Yes, that is right. Yes.’
‘She knew my son!’ Harriet declared, before adding, ‘He was killed in the—’ she stopped herself and listened. She thought that she had heard ‘Ma’ being called. There it was again! Clear as day. Fraser was calling her from somewhere in the direction in which they were headed. ‘Is it nearby?’
The woman pointed vaguely to the stretch of pre-fabs in front of them. ‘Just there.’
The houses to which she pointed were notably grubbier than the rest, perhaps the first ones to have been built. They stood on the extremity of the Plaine d’Amour boundary, in stark contrast to the ruins of the old city visible behind them. The crumbling towers of the historic Cloth Hall and the cathedral seemed all the more doleful and tragic when viewed against the vulgar, gaudy pre-fabs.
Ghost Swifts, Blue Poppies and the Red Star Page 17