The landlord, making the best of all possible worlds, claimed that he was a great friend of the big man of the village. The son, he said, was a very nice young chap, very free with his money. He bought the ancient cows for father, who had acquired some trout fishing in the Ancre, below Thiepval—did he know Thiepval? The trout fishing was very good below there.
He began to feel that the battle of the Somme might never have happened. He went upstairs to bed. The moon gleaming in the east through the open window revealed patches on the ceiling under the leaking roof. The dancers seemed to be walking about in the road all night; but at two a.m. the hurdy-gurdy ceased its blaring jazz; the last unsteady steps and confused voices went away down the road, and as the moon declined to the west he fell asleep.
In the morning the sun was shining, puddles in the brick-rubble roads were drying at the edges as he walked about while coffee was being prepared. After rolls and butter, with apricot jam, he adjusted his mood of the night before, and saw the suspicions of the landlord as normal, considering that the old battlefield area was over-run by strangers, many of them vagrants seeking work, about whom stories of robbery with violence were told.
He asked if the patron knew of any English cemeteries being made in the district; and was directed to an area he had known during the war. He set out gladly, as to an old friend, following the way he had come, in March 1917, with the transport of 286 Machine Gun Company, when the German Great General Staff had quit their ‘Blood Bath’ on the Somme. It had been a masterly retreat; first they had blown up every cottage and mined every cross-road, cut down every tree that occluded observation for their gunners, removed every railway line, put detonators in some of the porcelain insulators of the thrown telegraph posts, riddled lengths of corrugated iron with hand-grenades, and generally destroyed everything that might have been of the slightest use to the British Fifth Army; and having done this, they walked back one Saturday night to their Siegfried Stellung, which the British soldier called the Hindenburg Line.
At the time there had been much newspaper talk at home about the German Corpse Factory, wherein the ‘Huns’ were said to have melted down the bodies of their dead to obtain fats for high explosive. He and his friends in France had regarded it as just something else in the newspapers, filled with things which were quite apart from the war; they had known that the story was a fake, for everywhere in the abandoned country between the old Somme battlefields and the Siegfried Stellung were to be seen German cemeteries, set with wooden crosses and flower-beds. And riding around one day, he had seen where British shells, dropping among the tombs of a cemetery, had revealed long leather boots and curiously shrunken grey tunics.
There had been many German cemeteries behind their lines of the ‘Blood Bath’. One at Ablaizanville had wrought-iron gates, and cream-coloured stones and monuments carved with names and regimental crests. It had caused some wonder and regard for the enemy in all who passed by, to see the British dead treated with the same respect as the German dead.
Another spring morning of that early April of 1917, cantering over the downs, he had come upon a solitary grave in the middle of a grassy valley: a grave set with a broken-bladed propeller for headstone, with pansies and violas and mignonette for coverlet; the three square yards railed off from cattle. Here rests in God a brave unknown English flier, who fell in combat, July 1916.
*
Now, eight years older almost to the day, he stood and watched graves in a cemetery he had visited in 1917 being dug up. It was near a hamlet not far from St. Leger. Here Willie had worked. Was his spirit near in the sunshine? He stood apart, watching the English official waiting beside a French gendarme. So they were still transferring the German remains into coffins, each about ten inches wide, to be taken away by lorry. The British remains were being placed in similar coffins, loaded into a second lorry.
“M’sieur, s’il vous plaît, est que c’est vous avez connu un Anglais officiel qui s’appelle William Maddison? II a travaillé ici quelque années auparavant.”
They looked puzzled; they shook heads, and went on with their work.
*
He began to feel the futility of his task to weigh upon him, while longing grew towards England. He would walk to La Boisselle, see the old front line of the Somme again, then go on down to Albert and take a train to Boulogne.
Walking beside the marshes of the Ancre, set with their burnt and splintered poplar stumps amidst new green growth four and five feet high, he turned east up rising ground to find the wood where the battalions of his brigade had assembled on the night before the attack of July the First. Nightingales had sung there until the beginning of June of that year; perhaps descendants of the birds would be singing there now.
Arrived at the copse, he sat down to rest, and soon afterwards a bird began to sing in the new undergrowth a few yards from him.
It seemed to be hesitating; the same note was repeated among the hazel wands and ashpoles, a note low and plaintive. Next, three high and frail strokes of song and then another pause. Suddenly the green shade around him seemed to shake with the liquid notes of the bird’s passion. It was a moving occasion—the woods of his boyhood—Keats’ poem—Stravinsky’s opera heard from the Dove’s Nest at Covent Garden—Barley beside him in the Camargue——
It was right that the villages should be rebuilt; right that the shell-holes be filled, the ground levelled to grow corn once more. The living and the dead were one, united by faith. The nightingale’s song was immortal: a symbol of human longing as old as that longing in man for love and immortality. It was poetry, it was truth; and nothing else mattered. The bird’s song was perfection: were it a little less so, it would touch all human hearts at once.
He walked on down Railway Road, and at Mill Causeway crossed the marshes and stream of the Ancre, meaning to climb up the slope to the Schwaben Redoubt, and on to Thiepval, and down along the old front line to the Bapaume road, where his platoon had fallen to a man, killed or wounded, on July the First. The battlefield had been left at that place, and he could still see where some of the trenches had been dug in the hillside slopes leading up the high ground and the Schwaben Redoubt.
Here, above Thiepval Wood, like a giant hand of stone severed at the wrist and upheld as a warning, stood the Ulster Division Memorial Tower. The trenches—over which the Orangemen had attacked on that hot summer morning until the enfilade fire from both the south and the north had cut them down—were half-hidden by the long wild grasses of the years, acres of undulating wilderness and silence.
There was nothing to be found on the high ground except an overwhelming feeling of loneliness, whichever way he looked: north to Hebuterne, Beaumont Hamel, and Gommecourt; east to the ridge, failed objective of July the First, with its black stipples of dead tree trunks; south to La Boisselle and Fricourt.
He could go no farther; he hurried away and down to the causeway across the marshy valley, with its charred poplar stumps wherein rusty splinters of shells and rifle bullets were still embedded. A barbed-wire fence enclosed the reeds and rushes on both sides of the causeway; he was about to climb a fence, to seek the position of the German 5.9 howitzer battery which, bestrewn with empty wickerwork shell-cases, had lain there broken and derelict in the winter of 1916, when a voice cried out threateningly, “Que voulez-vous là?”
He turned, and saw an elderly man with a grey moustache and ruddy face carrying a fly-rod.
“Je suis soldat anglais revenu, m’sieur.”
“Eh bien, allez-vous-en!”
Seeing the stranger hesitate, he growled in English with a Cockney accent, “This ain’t England!” and turning about, walked towards a punt moored to a post by the bank.
*
That night Phillip lay in bed in another new estaminet, thinking that he must learn a fresh way of life before he lost himself in memory, like Uncle John at Rookhurst. The trouble was that he had grafted on himself, during the war, a new personality; he had returned half a stranger to himself, and
very nearly an alien to his family. Where was the lost part? Was the war responsible? That shell on Messines Ridge of Hallowe’en, 1914, which had buried him? But did realisation of what had happened help to settle the effect? A madman knowing he was mad: would self-knowledge help to cure him?
Outside in the marshes of the Ancre many frogs were croaking. As the night wore on and he could not sleep he began to believe that the entire valley was permeated with the spirits of the dead, and the ghostly past of himself was being called to join them.
Did one lose a part of oneself, in spirit, as one shed part of the body in normal growth? If not, where was his lost part? Was it still lurking in the marsh, an essence of old emotion? Surely that would only be natural? Memory rules life, or most of it. For years the lost part of himself had lurked in the marsh, seeing wraiths of men in grey with helmets and big boots, wraiths of men in khaki, laden and toiling, wraiths of depressed mules sick with fatigue and mud-rash, walking in long files up to the field-gun batteries, past wraiths of howitzers flashing away with stupendous corkscrewing hisses upwards, wraiths of pallid flares making the night haggard, while bullets whined and fell with short hard splashes in the gleaming swamps of the Ancre.
He could not sleep. Was there a demoniacal influence in the marsh, materialising out of the ceaseless croaking among the stumps of the dead poplars? The perpetual and restless spirits of old wrong and imposed cruelty and hate and despair wandering among the reedy shell-holes, among the broken wheels of guns, and the rusty wire in the long grasses? The young green had grown again, hiding the old bitternesses, but the desolation was still there. The young danced at their Jazz-Balle; the cunning made profit; the money-markets ruled the world as before; the war was still continuing within the crystallised mentalities of human beings; the war had brought no purification to the world, only to those who did not matter any more, the sensitive survivors of a decimated generation.
Trains from Lille and Amiens rolled noisily past the window, a star moved across the window space, seeming to look into the room curiously, glimpses of the past came with unavailing sadness.
The dug-outs of Y ravine had subsided, the dry-rotted timbers broke with a touch; the pistons and cylinders and mainshaft of a Morane Parasol rusted in the grasses—the charred fuselage once visible on the ridge above Station Road in December 1916—with rifle barrels and holed helmets and burst minenwerfer cases.
Was it all over and done with; or was it, as Willie had declared, all to do again?
The Ancre flowed in its chalky bed, swift and cold as before, gathering its green duckweed into a heaving coat as of mail and drowning the white flowers of the water-crowsfoot. Only one thing of all the Fifth Army’s work remained—the wooden military bridge over Mill Causeway. The Fifth Army? a voice seemed to be saying, the voice of the wan star, What you seek is lost forever in ancient sunlight, which arises again as Truth.
The voice wandered thinner than memory, and was gone with the star under the horizon.
And then, another voice, another face—hovering in the air, looking at him calmly—Barley before the baby had come—looking at him curiously, and with remote tranquility. Was it a projection of his thoughts—or was she really with him in spirit? Would she not be with her baby, if she could materialise? He must return to his son, be mother and father to the little fellow.
Chapter 6
THE SAD GESTURES OF LOVE
Hetty heard the exhaust notes of the motor-bicycle while watering the aspidistra in the front room, and looking out of the window saw him pull up outside. She waved, and hurried to the door.
“Welcome home, my son! When did you cross over?”
“This morning, Mother,” as he kissed her. “I’ve come straight here, I must go to Cross Aulton tonight. I’ll return soon.”
“At least you’ll stay until Father comes home, Phillip? He did so appreciate your postcards from France, and we both followed you on the old trench maps in the drawer of your bedroom. He still speaks of it as ‘Phillip’s’ bedroom, you know. Now come down to the garden room, and I will get you some tea. Sit down in Father’s chair, and rest yourself. Was it a good crossing?”
“Not very, Mother.”
She hastened to put on the kettle, but stopped on the way to say, “I suppose you haven’t heard about the baby while you’ve been away? I did think of going down to find out, but thought you might think it interfering of me.”
“Oh no, of course not, Mother.”
He looked tired and very thin. Uppermost in her mind was the thought of her grandson. She nursed a hope that Phillip would come to live at home, now that he got on well with Dickie. Then she would be able to look after the baby. Poor little Billy, he should not be in the hands of strangers.
The french windows were open. She put a plate of bread and butter beside him, knowing that after a sea-voyage he needed plain food.
“Why has Father lopped the elm so much? It looks quite bare.”
“He thought the roots might spread too far, and undermine the foundations of the house, Phillip.”
Sipping his china tea with a slice of lemon, he said, “I did think of living more or less permanently at Gross Aulton, as a lodger.”
“Yes, Uncle Joey told me you seemed to like being there. It’s a great deal changed since I knew it.” She sighed. “All those new red houses on the Downs——! Ah well, we can’t put back the clock, can we? Still, Arthur tells me that the new tennis club is a place of much social activity—and who knows, you might even find someone you might like there.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “I’d never find anyone like Barley again. You loved her, didn’t you?”
“We all did, Phillip.”
He hid his face with a hand. She wanted to comfort him, to put her arms round him; but knowing his reserve, forebore. To ease her pain she moved to the garden steps, pretending to be looking at her wallflowers.
“Mother, sometimes I feel she is with me, helping me!”
At those words she dared to open her heart. “If it would be any help dear, I think Father would not object if you left the baby with us for a time.”
He knew her intentions when she went on to speak of his sister. “I am afraid she is not very happy, Phillip. I did hope that the coming of her baby would help matters, too.”
“Mother, sentiment seems to rule us both. But what mind I have tells me that Doris will never be happy with any man. She is too adamant. I could never have stuck what Bob has had to put up with from her. I know you see it only from Doris’s side, you see the effects, not the causes.”
“I am only trying to make things better, Phillip.”
“I understand you, Mother. I have the same weakness.”
“I am thinking of Doris’s little one, when it comes, Phillip.”
“I know, I know! History must not repeat itself! But who am I to judge Father, or anyone else? I have the same faults, I know. Circumstances bring them out. We are both rather weak sorts, you know. Well, I must be going back to Cross Aulton now.” He kissed his mother. “Don’t worry, old dear. Try to keep an equal mind in all things.”
The sun was over the south-western slope of the Hill, reflecting its rays from the glass turrets of the Crystal Palace when he got astride the Norton.
“Father will be sorry to have missed you. You’ll be over again before you go back to Devon, won’t yous?”
“Yes, Mother, of course I will.”
He realised how dear to him his old home was now.
*
It was good to see the Downs again. They passed an area where hundreds of new houses were being built on what used to be farm and park lands. At first Phillip reacted away from this spreading suburbanisation; but seeing that many an oak and ash and beech—the hedgerow timber of former farms—had been left by the builders of the new Housing Estates, as they were called, he changed his mind about it.
Arthur said, “We’re going to make things better than they were in Grandfather’s time. Of course Father doesn�
��t like to see things changing, but then I tell him he’s old fashioned. I’ve tried to get him to see that it’s a good thing, since it will mean less human unhappiness.”
“I expect he, like my mother, remembers the herb fields. Where are they now? Living in the memories of old people!”
“I don’t think people should live in the past, Phillip.”
“It’s not what men should be, Arthur, but what they are.”
“I don’t agree. However, we’ll agree to differ, shall we? By the way, I want to see a man at the tennis club, we can get there this way.”
They came to an older road of detached Victorian houses, each standing in about an acre of ground. In some a coach-house had been converted to take a motor car.
The new tennis club, presided over by Sir Benjamin Sword, Bart., was the centre of the new social life. They had several distinguished members, declared Arthur, among them the Conservative member of Parliament and his wife and daughters.
There were a score of en-tout-cas courts of fine red rubble which made the balls faster than on a lawn, Arthur said, and also play was possible immediately after a shower. There were over a thousand members, and a long waiting list. Phillip thought it was a splendid place, so different from the small one-court club where he had played during half of one season in South Devon. Indeed, as he tried to think of his circumstances now, the old life in Malandine village seemed purposeless; perhaps he should ‘learn to submit’, in Joseph Conrad’s phrase, and return to suburban life. Mother had said that Uncle Joe was quite willing that he should stay with them for as long as he liked.
“We have dancing, or amateur theatricals, or both, every Saturday night, Phillip. By the way, we’re having a little dance tonight at home, to celebrate May’s engagement to Herbert. Only a gramophone, and ourselves, it will be very quiet.”
While he was wiping his boots on the mat Phillip heard his cousin May say to Arthur, “Herbert says he won’t be coming tonight.”
It Was the Nightingale Page 10