The Phoenix Generation

by Henry Williamson

  “You are good friends?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “What are the children like, Girlie?”

  “Oh, Rosamund is a darling. So are the two boys. Billy is rather a problem child, in a sort of way——”

  “Billy is the son of Phillip Maddison’s first wife, I take it?” remarked the guardian.

  “Yes, Fitz.”

  “Tell me more about Billy, Girlie. I very nearly popped down the other morning to see how you were getting on. The excursion trains are running again, and cost only eight-and-six return. That would have been a surprise for you, wouldn’t it?” She spoke pleasantly, while waiting nervously for her daughter’s reply.

  “Oh, Mother, never do that. People who live in the country always call by appointment.”

  “I suppose the Maddisons have many visitors?”

  “Only the local people call, about a dozen in all, to leave cards. It’s a good thing really, for Phillip is always very busy writing.”

  “Does he dictate to you, or write in longhand?” asked the man in the armchair.

  “He did try once, but I think my presence got in the way.”

  “Oh really?”

  “In what way, may I ask?” said Mrs Ancroft.

  She felt a nervous flutter about her heart, and prayed that she was not going to have one of her attacks. She saw with some relief that her box of tablets was in place on the marble shelf beside the clock.

  “He says that he can feel what other people are thinking.”

  “I see,” said Mrs. Ancroft, who wondered what exactly her daughter meant by that. Could it be—but no, the child had had a Christian upbringing. Such a thing was unthinkable. Her daughter knew the difference between right and wrong. Besides, she had had her own example of duty always before her.

  “You’re looking tired, Girlie. I’m going to give you a bath and then put you to bed with a cup of hot Maltine. Then tomorrow, after a good sleep, you can tell your mother all your troubles.”

  *

  When Felicity was in bed Mrs. Ancroft returned to the sitting-room where her old friend (with reservations) was doing the crossword puzzle of The Daily Telegram. Dare she tell Fitz her forebodings? Or was it better to wait until she had spoken to Girlie in the morning?

  “I’ll make some tea, Fitz. China tonight, or Indian, which is it to be?”

  “Oh, China, if you’ve got any lemon.”

  “Of course there is lemon. I should not have asked you otherwise.”

  “I fancy I’ve caught a bit of a cold.”

  “Girlie is putting on weight, Fitz.”

  “Too much clotted cream,” he replied, wondering what it was that began with LA, had eight letters ending with IS, and would be greeted by hysterical screams if seen crossing the carpet of a lady’s bedroom in Golders Green.

  “She told me she was trying to ‘bant’—what an expression—and thought of having a sauna bath tomorrow.”

  “Puppy fat. What would make you scream if you saw it crossing your bedroom floor with eight letters beginning LA and ending with IS, although you don’t live in Golders Green?”

  “I should not scream in any event, but can the answer to your problem be one of the Three Fates of Greek mythology, ‘Lachesis’?”

  Mr. Fitzwarren calculated. “Well, it fits in. I’ll look in the dictionary.”

  When she returned with the tray he said, “How clever of you to guess first go off. ‘Lachesis’ is also a species of venomous rattlesnake found in Suninam.”

  “I remember my brother George telling me about the Three Fates, Fitz. Poor George. He worked so hard that he damaged his eyes, working at night by a single candle. He got a first in Greats, only to die four days after joining his regiment at Zillebeke.”

  She poured the tea, and added two thin slices of lemon to the cup before putting it beside him.

  “Did she say what had upset her?”

  “I didn’t dare to ask.”

  Their eyes met.

  “Better take her to a doctor, Nora, and forget about the sauna bath.”

  Desperately she said, “Do you think he could have turned her away?”

  “I wouldn’t put it past him. He came here, you know, one night two years ago, and hung about to see me off. I thought then that there might be something in the wind, and so awaited an opportunity to take him with me. It was when you were away seeing your mother.”

  “You never told me that, Fitz.”

  “I didn’t want to alarm you unduly, old girl. If you remember, you asked me to keep an eye on her while you were away, and so I came round about ten o’clock, as usual, to see if she was all right.”

  “But why ever didn’t you tell me about him being there when he offered her a post of secretary? My mother knew that I should never have let her go so far away from home, at her tender age. I distinctly recall her words—‘Mark what I say, you’ll regret letting her go.’”

  “Well, don’t meet trouble half way. Take her to the doctor tomorrow.”

  *

  Phillip and Piers had walked from Ypres to Poperinghe, and were making their way to the rue d’Hôpital to find Talbot House.

  “I came here with ‘Westy’ in nineteen seventeen, before Third Ypres, and again just before the last battle for Passchendaele.”

  Toc H was found to be next to the chemist’s shop, a three-storey building behind iron gates. Phillip called at the chemist’s to ask if it would be possible to see the chapel in the hop-loft, where many thousands of men had received the Sacrament before going up to the battles beginning at the end of July and ending with the occupation of the Passchendaele crest in early November, 1917.

  “The chemist won’t know me, of course, but I remember him. He has a face like that of Hindenburg, and I told him so once.”

  They went into the shop. The chemist said that the owner of the house would welcome them.

  “Thank you, m’sieu’. Do you remember my telling you, thirteen years ago, that you were like a famous German general?”

  “To whom do you refer, m’sieu’?”

  “To the President of the German Republic—Marshal von Hindenburg, m’sieu’.”

  The face went hard. Phillip left the shop hastily. Piers remained to talk.

  “I see that his ideas have not changed,” said Phillip, when his friend came out of the shop.

  “Nor would yours, perhaps, if your country had been invaded.”

  Phillip rang the bell of the tall grey house. Almost at once the inner door opened and a young girl appeared. She unlocked the gates, and drew back with a movement quiet and charming, bidding them enter. “To see the chapel, messieurs?”

  She led the way up bare white enamelled stairs to a room austerely furnished, up another flight, and so to a door, which she held open for them before leaving with a slight movement of her head, neither bow nor nod, but a gesture of sensibility and understanding.

  Phillip remembered the last flight up, very steep, poplar wood unpainted and thin—worn by thousands of nailed boots clumping up and clumping down. He sat on the bench at the far end, where the altar, a carpenter’s bench, used to stand.

  The sun came out of a cloud, and light shone whiter through the five semi-circular windows. Sparrows were chirping on the roof. Slow rattle of wheels on the pavé of the road below. Phillip was standing with eyes closed, trying to recall ‘Spectre’ West in the loft, when there came, as from far away, a dull report. Ah, the terror and dreadfulness of Third Ypres, during those four months, a horizon without hope, every tomorrow as today. How could it ever be written?

  “The chemist told me they’re blowing up German pillboxes in the cornfields near Brandhoek,” said Piers, who was thinking that he would like to get hold of the girl who had shown them the way up. “How about some lunch, or do you want to go on?”

  “What would you like to do?”

  “Anything you like.”

  “You’re not bored?”

  “Not at all, my dear Phil. But I think a drink might do
us both some good.”

  “I’ll take you to La Poupée, where all the chaps used to go. It’s down one of these streets off the Square.”

  Where was it? The sun was hot, the streets narrow. They went up and down several streets, then finding themselves back in the rue d’Hôpital, Phillip said that he remembered: La Poupée was a name given by the soldiers—The Doll—its real name was something else.

  “I think this is the place, Piers.”

  They entered, and out of a dark kitchen came a plump and pleasant woman with a reserved smile on her face. They asked for an omelette. Chairs were piled on a long table covered by a soiled and worn American cloth.

  “I lunched here with a chap called Teddy Pinnegar, when I was a transport officer in the Machine Gun Corps. I think it might be the same girl.” But not the same spirit. The room was dreary and lifeless. Should they cancel the order and find somewhere else, he asked Piers, who said that the cooking was the thing. They finished their glasses of wine, and were about to ask for more when a smell of burning drifted into the room.

  “It could be the eggshells, of course,” remarked Piers. “Did you read Birkin’s speech?”

  “Yes, it got through to reality. Tell me about him.”

  “I’ve met him at the Minotaur Club. He’s first-rate with the foils. Represented us at the Olympic games.”

  “He was in the war, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes. He went straight from school to Sandhurst in August on an abbreviated three-month course, and was in the first battle of Ypres, flying as an observer in the Royal Flying Corps. He crashed, and nearly lost a leg, but hearing that his Lancer regiment was in the trenches at the battle of Loos, nine months later he left hospital and joined them, in mud up to his thighs. His wound opened and became septic. But he wouldn’t have his leg off, and now rather resembles Byron, with a club boot to take up a couple of inches. He talks about ‘the hard-faced Parliament of profiteers and money’. You must meet him. He thought your novel The Phoenix was an authentic voice of his generation.”

  “Now he’s up against the hard-faced men of the money-power.”

  The woman with the Mona Lisa smile moved towards them bearing a black and yellow omelette. She put it before them with slices of bread.

  “I suppose it was like this in the war, Phil.”

  “Oh, no, the cooking was first-rate.”

  They scraped away the burnt parts, and washed down the rest of the omelette with two bottles of white wine.

  *

  They returned to Ypres, with feet blistered from walking on cobbles. It was late afternoon. They drank glass after glass of beer while sitting under an awning, and watched the passers-by.

  Ypres to Phillip was unrecognisable. Wipers existed in the memory only. The new city was clean and hybrid-English. Its Grand’ Place held enough air and sunlight to give a feeling of freedom in space. The rectangular ruined fragment of the Cloth Hall was contained in a scaffold box. Grasses and wildflowers on the tops of the walls made the ruin beautiful. American tourists noticing the four-way trumpets of the local Fire Brigade’s siren on the top of the ruin repeatedly asked their guides if it was “the old original gas-horns of the British.”

  Phillip rested on his pavement seat in front of an hotel, and sipped pale yellow beer, and looked at some printed papers which had been thrust into his hand by touts.

  Carefull drivers. Highly recommended and very populair with visitors’ tours to Belgium, the prices quoted as for first-class car including experienced guide explaining all places of interest and are inclusive absolutely nothing extra.

  You may go to Schrapneel Corner or Tyne Cote cemetery, absolutely largest in district, about 12,000 graves. Highly recommended and most interesting point of view Trip No. 7 which includes St. Julien, Poelcapelle, and the famous Houthhulst forrest, Deat trench kept the same state up as it was in the war and can be visited for small fee of one franc.

  Trip No. 9 … after lunch a most extensive visit to Bruges (often referred to as the Venice of the North) including amongst others the Blood-chappel with the casket containing a drop of the blood of Christ brought back from Palestine by one of the Crusaders, with its famous painting, recommended highly to all desiring a real pleasant and interesting day … £2 10s.

  They ordered more beer, and stretched their legs, for the pavé had been hard going. Then Piers drank brandy, and Phillip followed him. After four glasses Piers said to Phillip, “This place is haunted by the spirit of love.”

  “Yes,” said Phillip. He wanted to think of ‘Spectre’ West, whose lecture he had attended before the opening of Third Ypres, in July 1917. He remembered ‘Spectre’, then a G.S.O.3 attached to G.H.Q. D(a) telling them that the massive walls in red brick had been built by Vaubain to withstand seige by the Spaniards. The sun was going down below the rooftops as he reached the broken curve of grass-grown rubble by the new Menin Gate. Below lay the moat; but no longer foetid and shallow cloacal scum. Water-lilies lay on the surface, a grey wagtail skipped from one palette leaf to another. The brickwork rising sheer from the moat had somehow withstood the German bombardments of the years, but he had to go carefully. Where were the dugouts within the ramparts, once lit by electric light from a power station by the Menin Gate? The building of the power station was said during the war to be the only one remaining of 1914 Ypres.

  He remembered the dugouts behind the ramparts. The roofs had been shored by steel girders and sandbags. At night rats used to squeal whenever a light was shone, because it was usually followed by a revolver shot. The rats used to eat everything, even to climbing down the string of a suspended sandbag to eat the candles inside.

  He walked on the ramparts with the wraith of his old, or was it his very young, self? That wraith fluttered with fear and disquiet and homesickness; it thought of the sorrows of a mother’s face equally with the smiling obliteration that was Lily Cornford vanished in the great livid light of a Zeppelin torpedo fallen on Nightingale Grove above the railway cutting on that September night of 1916, after he had come back wounded from the battle of the Somme. How the love of the dead remained, to be passed on to another. Lily whom he had kissed only once, in a love that had sustained the spirit through all things.

  Below lay the calm new waters of the moat. The lilies were withdrawing their flowers with the going down of the sun. Fish were rising, swallows taking last sips as they flew. Children were running out of the Shannon cinema built on the bank across the water.

  Motorcars were now bumping down the Menin road, carrying people to a jolly Saturday night in the Ypres cafés with their friends and relations. The cars bumped and swung over the uneven pavé surface, their horns filling the lighted hollow under the new white pantheon of the Menin Gate.

  He could not face the idea of the new Gate; the wraith with him was with the long night columns of men moving east out of the city, stumbling in sweat and fear amidst clatter of limber and waggon wheels—horses, mules, men not knowing why they were there in the roar and flash and appalling terror of bursting shells. Everything was silvered within the semi-circle, the salient, of the swamp east of Ypres. Here was the dreaded Menin road with its spiky tree-stumps; here the quaking track of swilling beechwood slabs; his horse, Black Prince, had been left behind near the prison with the groom, before entering with his men each leading a pack-mule into the nihilism of water-glitter, curses, whooping shells and cries for help from wounded lost under the lilies of the dead, in a land beyond all imagination, all longing, almost all hope.

  Here rose the new houses, all without chip or loose tile; but they did not obscure the passing of the men. No, it was not men; it was a force that was passing, like an invisible wind that hurled down brick and stone soundlessly, that filled the Grand’ Place and the streets with cries and shouts and the screams of the dying, yet all was without sound. He left the ramparts and sought the hotel where they were staying. Piers was not to be seen. He drank several brandies. There was too much noise, the lights were too bright. Men were playi
ng billiards, others talked with animation at the tables. Waiters hurried with trays of filled glasses. It was Saturday night, this was the happy chatter of men who knew they need not work on the morrow. Smoke straying from pipe and cigar. Many neat blue British serge suits, British voices, faces of old soldiers who had learned, in Conrad’s phrase, to submit. Their wisdom was immemorially wiser than that of the old or the young—but not to be communicated. O Christ, when could he begin his war novels?

  He sat there, the wraith of himself merging with remembered darkness rushing by, yet stagnant amid soundless cries, viewless flashes of field guns lighting broken wall and scattered rubble, the subdued fears of men moving in broken step, laden and sweating, through the gap called the Menin Gate. He drank more brandy. Now he was with the reliefs going up: slouching shapeless men coming out, holding to one idea—sleep, sleep, sleep: trogloditic shapes against the great shimmering horsehoe of the Salient, slouching on desperately, puttees over boots, some bare-footed, feet swollen and unfelt, stumbling on and thinking only of sleep, sleep, sleep as they passed files of men moving up, rifle slings cutting into shoulders, thighs and ribs and arms overhot with sweat as they approached Hellfire Corner. Christ, Jerry’s five-nines were crumping, and sending the timber track before them into the air.

  Alas, prayers do not deflect the hissing flights of bullets that rip, or dissolve the shell that scatters trunk and limbs into charred fragments among the upheaved tree-stumps of Polygon Wood.

  Feeling unable to face the café, he went back to the Ramparts. The last of sunset, the purple-red bars and flecks of the damp Flanders sun, lay over the oakwoods to the north-west; but there was hope, the evening star was a rayless serene globe in the west. The edges of the moat below were dimly whitened by cement rocks tipped from the bank. Perhaps these were from the blown-up German pillboxes, made of Rhine gravel and cement. The lime in the cement would gradually dissolve in the water, and be used by shrimps and snails to make their shells, and so become food for fish. There were still some concrete machine-gun shelters on the farther bank—now the homes of nettles. How feeble they looked in comparison with the massive German shelters in the Salient, the mebus called pill-boxes by the tommies. But the British had never, until 1918 anyway, thought of the B.E.F. as a defensive force, but as one eventually to cross the Rhine. And they had done it.