It Was the Nightingale

by Henry Williamson

  She was suspended in time, until the voices of the English gardeners calling “Ma” in the other room gave her new life, and she shuffled to them swiftly, with food or wine or coffee; her eyes shone, and she smiled as she watched them, and when she returned to the kitchen again, he could see that she had gained vitality once more to feel proud of her fine new house.

  After supper the gardeners came into the kitchen for their evening dance; together they revolved solemnly to the tune of If You were the Only Girl in the World; then for a change it was K-K-K-Katie, Beautiful Katie. There were other records of tunes and foxtrots popular in the war, but those were the favourites. The old woman and her small grand-daughter looked on happily, with a neighbour who had come in for a chat.

  The widow was a short, red-faced motherly little old person. She cleaned her poplar floors every day on her knees. Her rooms held little furniture. The bedroom he slept in had a chair, a bed of fumed oak, and a pail. She told him she was awaiting dommage de guerre for the rest of her furniture. That, she hoped, would be fumed oak, très belle! He thought that the new house replaced what before the war had probably been a small pisé-and-thatch buvette.

  The gardeners told him they were working just off the Arras-Béthune road, not far from La Maison Blanche. This, explained one, had been the site of the Canadian Headquarter dugouts during the battle of Arras in April, 1917. The information excited him: in a series of caverns deep in the chalk, the generals had waited while the barrage fire rolled up to the crest of Vimy and turned the sleet into steam on that morning of April the ninth, eight years before.

  “We’re working just now in the British cemetery near there,” said one.

  “That’s right,” said the other. “You’ll find us if you walk up the road past the Labyrinthe to La Targette.”

  “That’s right,” added his chum. “You can’t miss it, it lies below the German Concentration Graveyard above the Labyrinthe. It looks at its best just now.”

  The German Concentration Graveyard! So this was where Willie had worked, this the place he had written about in the article which Bloom, in the Weekly Courier days, had liked, but not published!

  “I’m glad they’re looking after them!” he exclaimed, feeling happiness coming over him. “I remember that the German cemeteries always looked very neat and well-tended during the war. So they’ve planted flowers! Good!”

  “I meant it’s our little lot, at La Targette, that looks lovely just now.”

  “Then the German Concentration Graveyard is still as it was?”

  “That’s right.”

  Consulting his map, he planned to walk farther that day than La Targette—to Neuville St. Vaast, and beyond. He was specially eager to see the Labyrinthe because it was the scene of some of the fighting described in Le Feu, a book which Uncle John had given him with others which had belonged to Willie. Henri Barbusse had put the truth into words, even as he was determined to do, one day.

  “Have either of you two chaps read Barbusse?”

  The gardeners, both old infantry soldiers, shook their heads. He began to tell them that the French, both white and Colonial troops, had attacked there in blue coats and red trousers, to perish in far greater numbers than the Germans. It was one of the field-fortifications which had to be taken before the assault on the Vimy Ridge was possible. His words aroused no response in the gardeners; the one continued to wind up the gramophone, while the other waited to put the needle in the outer groove of the record.

  Apparently he had interrupted a ritual: they seemed to share every action, on the principle of fair-do’s all round. Perhaps the one had been winding up the gramophone, the other putting in the needles, for years.

  The next morning after breakfast he walked down the road to the Labyrinthe. Arriving there with mounting excitement, longing, and apprehension, he stood in the road below the front position of the field-work, possessed by the feelings of those who once had waited there white-faced, cold, and trembling, to advance into certain death. For it had been a field-work of immense strength, he could see, commanding the Arras-Béthune road. The redoubt, still visible in outline as star-shaped, sloped almost imperceptibly to the eastern horizon. Here wave after wave, in attack after attack by troops from Morocco, wearing the fez—a fragment of red cloth was visible in the grass—had gone forward with French soldiers wearing the kepi—straight into the mort-blast of machine-guns hidden under steel and concrete cupolas, some to hang upon the barbed wire until all were shredded to rags fluttering above bone-heaps, wandered over by ants, all to be forgotten in wild grasses by 1916.

  Here, out of the massed bloody sweat of a generation the truth had arisen: here, out of the shock of the colossal and prolonged cruelty played with shell, bullet, bayonet and bomb had arisen that flower of the human spirit, a poet upon the battlefield—Barbusse!

  Upheld by thoughts of the poet’s courage he returned to the road. As he ascended to the crest he perceived abruptly and with dismay a black horizon rising before him. Here the French had concentrated the German dead, upon the position of the invaders’ main fortress. Here Willie’s footsteps had passed, here his shadow had fallen upon the dusty road—so soon to be lost to the sun, beyond the darkness of death.

  Phillip stood still with eyes closed; then, with a sigh, looked about him.

  Elsewhere the white subsoil of chalk thrown up by shovel and bombardment had been scattered and plowed under, or in unreclaimed places allowed to cover itself with grass; but on the Labyrinthe the chalk sub-soil had been laid deeply upon the surface in order to create a white wilderness. Yet even the effects of a wide and startling expanse of chalk shone upon by the sun was darkened, as Willie had written in his article, by the massed effect of scores of thousands of tall black crosses, acre after acre of blackness standing under the summer sky; and not even one poppy or charlock growing there.

  What ferocious mind had ordered such a revenge on the living, he cried to himself. It could not have been the idea of any man whose body had been used against its will as part of the businessmen’s war. Here was hate; here was the crystallized mentality of a declining European civilization: here was the frustration of love that was the Great War. Even the light of the open day was made sinister there: old agonies dimmed the noonday sun.

  While he sat by the roadside watching a bumblebee bending a yellow flower of hawkbit, he had a chance to observe the effect upon a German parent, arriving for the first time to seek the place where her little child—for that was how a mother would remember him—was buried. A motor-car stopped on the road below and a woman got out and walked alone through the gates. So cousin Willie had watched a German mother ‘beginning a search in the immense silence of charred human hopes’.

  She stopped, helpless and appalled, before walking on with lowered head, and pausing to gather her thoughts together, before beginning her search. He got up and went to her. “May I help you, madam?”

  “Ach, thank you, thank you, monsieur! My son Carl Kemnitzer—where is he?”

  Obviously she had taken him for an official: she produced a card, with her son’s particulars. How not to disappoint her? He could not think what to say—waiting there unmoving—until, remembering the war-time inscriptions on German graves he said, “Your son Carl rests with God, m’am.”

  She looked into his face, hesitated, and wept. He took her hand, and pressed it. Soon they were smiling, almost cheerful. Nein bitte, no thank you, she must search for her son alone, she was happy now. He saluted her, and walked on up the road much relieved in spirit, thinking that there must be no more nations, only Europeans, for all mankind was one species upon the earth.

  He arrived at La Targette, where the British and French cemeteries lay side by side. There he found the two gardeners working, using little hoes among the plants, kneeling to their work. The spirit arising from the gardens further clarified his mind, for it was of calm loving-kindness. Truly that was God. Flowers which grew in English gardens were to be seen there, some in bloom—columbi
ne, pansy, sweet william, wallflower and campanula.

  He looked in the book placed in a green box on a post, for the signatures and remarks of visitors. Many Canadians, Scots and English folk had written their thoughts of the cemetery; the phrase nice and beautiful recurred often. The simple head-stones, each carved with a badge and a name, were clean, and the lawns around them weeded and mown. Here was no hate; only the clarity that was love.

  Beyond a plashed hawthorn hedge was the French cemetery. Here the white crosses were scrolled with the tricolour, spaced wider; blue, red and white. He felt that the spirits of the slain could breathe here; or rather, the spirit of the living found an easier place for its hopes than in that place up there, the Labyrinthe …

  He went on, turning through Neuville St. Vaast and beyond, where the terrain was left wild and desolate. Rank grasses covered the old trenches and the concrete shelters. Willows waved on the ancient parapets, thrice the height of the howitzers which their parent-withies might have helped to camouflage. Reeds had sprung out of old shell-holes stagnating with a brown scum, whence arose the percussive mutter of many frogs.

  He came upon an area of the battlefield which was being cleared up. There were many heaps of rusty iron shards piled by a cart-track with barbed-wire pressed into bales as of satanic hay; and farther on there was an immense and rugged pit, several acres in extent, in which bearded men stripped to the waist were working slowly. They had long hair and slanting eyes, were clad in ragged clothes and had the listless, uncaring attitudes of prisoners. A man, apparently their foreman, was standing moodily on a hummock above them.

  He greeted him in his feeble French. The man spread his hands as though dumb. He walked around the pit, or quarry, for it was ten to twelve feet below the grass and willows above its perimeter, and was examining a ten-foot pile of shells, the duds of a 1915 offensive, he thought, as he picked one up, when the foreman gave a hoarse cry and violently waved an arm at which Phillip put it down carefully among the other shells.

  Later, talking to the gardeners, he was told that the salvage work was being done by Russian labourers, paid a few francs a day. When one pile of duds was large enough a detonator was thrust into the yellow-crusted cylinders, balls, and canisters, and touched off with a time-fuse: away the men would run, to crouch out of sight: and WOMP … RUM … M … M … ble! A great slow-billowing mushroom of yellow and black smoke turning the sun brown. Then they would work for another week to prepare the next excitement.

  “The weight of iron there, of both exploded and unexploded shells, was greater than the weight of the first eight feet of topsoil,” he said—a remark which drew no reply from either of the gardeners. Only later did he realize that they were cut off from England, and existing each in his own thoughts, so they seldom spoke, but lived in dreams of England.

  “Can you direct me to La Folie Farm?”

  The one addressed did not look up, but pointed with his trowel while pressing into the bed a root-clump of Michaelmas daisies.

  *

  Cousin Willie in his article had written of ‘a ploughman’s mite’—a stick of aspen poplar stuck in the headland of a wheat-field, with a rough cross of the same wood: and the stick had blossomed. Where to look for it? Would it be there, after five years? He walked on, and suddenly it was before him—he might have been led by a spirit guide directly to it. Now a tree two inches thick at the base, and without its cross-piece, there it was and below it lay two bleached leg-bones, a skull, the white cage of the ribs, the arm bones at the ends of which were small white points, the knuckle and finger-bones of human hands. A plowman has done this act for some unknown German soldier left, perhaps, in the final retreat—the actual words of Willie, in the news-room of The Weekly Courier, five summers before, came to his mind. The skeleton, curved where it had fallen, had lain there during the intervening years, although the field elsewhere had been levelled for cultivation.

  “Willie,” he said, standing still with eyes closed, “are you near me? Willie, come to me if you can.” It was as though a cold wind had moved up his spine; at that moment the leaves of the tree began to tremble, making a bright rustling: yet there was no breeze. Perhaps the warmth of his body had caused a slight movement of air—the aspen was known as the ‘trembling poplar’. But was that all? Willie, he thought. Have you now met Barley? Are you both here, behind the sunshine?

  *

  With a wave of the hand towards the aspen, he continued on down the headland of the field. Whole families of women were out in the fine weather, kneeling in line and plucking weeds—grandmothers, aunts, parents, children, all in dark clothes, kneeling across the rows of wheat-plants, advancing slowly on all fours to pull every weed with their ringers, absorbed in their work. Were these the families Willie had observed, five years before, weeding the field? Such contentment in the sun; such simplicity! They were happy; they were making the earth a better place for men to see and feel.

  He walked on, coming to other fields, recently levelled, ploughed and cultivated but not yet sown, where peasants were gathering armfuls of docks, pulling up charlock and thistles and laying them in heaps on the headlands. It was pleasant to see them; they were too intent to talk. How easy for a lazy, conceited writer to make them creatures of low mentality, intent only on more money for better crops! They were the strength and sanity of France; they provided the bodies while the towns made the oversharp neuroticism which had resulted in first The Labyrinthe and then the Concentration Graveyard.

  *

  The next morning he said goodbye to the widow of Roclincourt, heaved on his pack, took his staff of mountain ash with its iron spike, and set forth again. Where should he go? North to Ypres and the Salient? The thought brought reluctance, as of weight: too much had fallen upon that low-lying area of total destruction, every worm blasted in the bombardments upon village, road, and broken dykes or polders; the thought of the place was too heavy. To the south, and the Somme? That way was easier; he recalled green downland slopes after the 1917 retreat into the Hindenburg Line. He would walk south; he would be on his way home. Home? The thought pierced him: what was home without Barley?

  Onwards, through the night if need be; anything but remaining still. If only it would rain, that would be known, that would be a friend. The sky was growing dull, clouds were coming up; let it rain, for God’s sake, let the going be hard.

  *

  By the evening he had reached Achiet-le-Grand. He was by then wet through and weary. Should he walk through the night, down to Albert and beyond? To Etaples? Achiet when last he had been there was a waste of rubble and cellars; with relief he saw lights in a window, heard music and laughter within. After hesitation, because of his bedraggled appearance, without mackintosh or hat—he was unshaven, too, his hair long and wet—he pushed open the door and entered the estaminet. It was part of the new France: a floor of composition made to look like marble; the mirrors behind the bar had the tawdriness of new, factory-made things; the imitation oak panels of the chair-backs were of pressed paper. He asked for a cognac, while assembling himself to enquire about a room for the night.

  The bar was lit by a hissing petrol lamp, which hurt the eyes, and by its white light the faces of the young men and women dancing to the blare of an automatic hurdy-gurdy were made the more pale. On the wall a notice was hung:

  Grand Anglais Jazz-Balle every

  Sunday Night—Wellcome

  Although the hot, smoky atmosphere nearly choked him, his melancholy was slightly dispelled by that Wellcome, and he decided to have another cognac. During a break in the demand for drinks some minutes later he managed to edge himself through the crowd to the landlord. His appearance had obviously caused mild amusement among the gang of youths; the long, plus-four knickerbockers were obviously an unfamiliar sight causing unconcealed stares and giggles.

  The landlord was suspicious. He asked why he walked in the rain without a coat? Had he been looking for work in Bapaume? It was a shock to hear that name mentioned as a workaday
town. Was he like others, seeking more money than could be earned in the brick factories there? What had he got in his pack?

  Obviously he was wondering if the stranger had escaped from prison. He asked if he had money for a bed; whereupon Phillip showed him his note-case, taking out the dirty tattered paper-money of the district. It satisfied the patron.

  “Je suis soldat Anglais, m’sieur—revenu.”

  “Ah, c’est bon, m’sieu!”

  He was invited to drink and dance. In fact, Wellcome to the Grand Anglais Jazz-Balle!

  There were Italian plasterers in the throng, who were earning, he learned, from forty to eighty francs a day. While he was speaking to one, a pale thin French youth lurched up, flung down a hundred-franc note, and yelled for drinks all round. Most of the men had rum, which cost half a franc a glass—about a penny in English money. Meanwhile Madame was whispering in his ear that the benefactor, the son of a millionaire, spent hundreds of francs in the place most evenings.

  The millionaire father was apparently regarded with a mixture of envy and admiration; when the villagers had returned after the armistice, she explained, he had bought for ready cash the sites of many shattered houses as a speculation, hoping that the reparation grants would repay him generously later on. They did, declared the landlord; for the law fixed the reparation payments at four times the attested value of each pre-war house. No other evidence of value was required: you claimed for what you had had, the total was multiplied by four, and no questions asked. Now, added the landlord, the speculator was a millionaire, owning over fifty houses as well as the only butchers’ shops in the place—a flourishing monopoly, buying old cows at four francs a kilo, and selling bifteck at twelve to sixteen francs a kilo!