He managed to find a room in a small hotel in Rue Amiral Courbet. The window had a view of the spire of the Cathedral. Having dumped his pack, he went back downstairs and asked at reception whether it would be possible to hire a bicycle tomorrow.
‘Mais bien sur’, came the smiling reply from the strikingly beautiful blonde girl behind the counter. It would be here for him in the morning. She had brown eyes. Her shining hair was tied up in a pony tail and was in stark contrast to her black dress with sleeves that came down below the elbows. Her arms were white and she had long fingers. She was thin with no breasts to speak of and her lips pouted in the way of almost all French women. He thanked her and going out, wondered what it would be like to lie in her arms, to be naked with her.
‘I miss you so much, Helen,’ he murmured, as he turned right, out of the hotel and up the street towards the Cathedral.
The signs of the War were everywhere. Roofless shells of houses; piles of rubble and timbers neatly swept to the side of the street; lone walls – all that remained of some houses – looking decidedly shaky; shell-battered buildings with weeds and bushes growing wildly from them, boarded-up buildings. And then almost as if by a miracle, a lone house or the odd tree that had escaped damage. There were also signs of rebuilding. Scaffolding around houses, masons or plasterers or carpenters whistling cheerily or calling to one another. There would be work here for the rest of their lives.
Lewis hadn’t been here during the battles on the Somme – he had spent that summer and autumn with Helen. Back then it had been like the capital of the British Army, a hectic, bustling place where civilians still lived and earned a living from the British and their allies. When Lewis had been posted to France, there were still one or two men in his platoon who remembered that time. Amiens had boasted restaurants, shops, brothels, they told him. Here men with a little bit of time off could lorry-jump and find a few hours of civilized living. There were hotels where they could get a bath if they were early enough and the hot water hadn’t run out. There were streets of shops with unbroken plate-glass windows. Civilians walked about. There were women and children – women who might smile and look away sadly if you caught their eye.
Always these men had money to spend – ‘bought it’ in the front line having an entirely different meaning. And so they bought little things that they could carry back to the line as presents for wives or girlfriends. Perfumed soap, stationary for writing letters, a print to stick on the wall of a dugout. Lewis got the impression that it was the normality of going into a shop and buying something, rather than the thing itself that was what made the expeditions so special. And, of course, there were always girls behind the counters. They would smile or your hand could touch theirs when the money was exchanged. Or if you were really daring you might ask their name and they would say ‘Helene’ or ‘Odile’ and it would be an excuse to say ‘Enchanté’ and reach out and take their hand.
And there were other pleasures to be had. ‘Bonsoir, mon capitaine’ a girl would say out of the shadows. ‘If fait froid, n’est-ce pas?’ It’s cold, isn’t it? Would you like a little love? Un peu d’amour’. Lewis was sure he would have gone himself if it hadn’t been for Helen. It was hard to imagine how men could resist even a few minutes of softness and femininity and sweet fragrance. Especially if, earlier that day, they had been under harassing fire or living through a gas wave or lying in mud and shit and piss and bits of bodies as shell splinters and machine gun bullets flailed the air above them.
Lewis first came to Amiens at the beginning of April 1918. By then the place had been evacuated of all its civilians by the French military authorities. He thought it possibly the saddest place he had ever seen. During the War, extensive measures were taken to protect the Cathedral. The stained glass windows were carefully removed and stored; the great west door was screened from bomb-splinters by sandbags piled high. Inside, sandbags were stacked high in the nave and around the sanctuary and some of the windows. The sandbags were gone now and the interior of the place echoed with the footsteps of visitors.
It was strange but also, in an odd sort of way, comforting to be back. Lewis sat in a seat towards the back and followed the tall columns up to the impossibly high roof. Light spilled in through the arched clerestory windows, candles flickered in the shadows. He thought of all the men who had come here during the years of the War – the figures who had walked around here and were ghosts now.
Later he found a restaurant and had something to eat. Then, when it was dark, he went back out and down towards the river, the Somme. He wanted to be with the ghosts. The moon wasn’t up but there was a certain luminescence off the water so that he could see as he walked along the quayside. The last time he had been here, the sky north and east had been quivering with flashes of white light like summer lightning and the guns had been thundering. It was all quiet now. The night was clear, the stars were out and since the street lighting in Amiens hadn’t been restored over most of the city, they were as bright as diamonds on black silk. The air was starting to cool after the heat of the day. The place had a certain stark beauty about it. He crossed the river and looked back at the Cathedral, high and beautiful above the silhouettes of the huddled ruins of Amiens. He could see its pinnacles and buttresses faintly against the inky night.
Lewis felt empty, numb, fearful. He was glad that tomorrow he was going to Henry’s son’s grave. The next day would be the trip to Etaples. He was longing for it and dreading it. If she wasn’t there or if she was there but didn’t want to see him or wouldn’t come with him or he couldn’t find any trace of her. He had been so confident after she failed to appear at Readymoney. Now here, in this place that looked like the end of the world, when the resolution of all of this was only a matter of hours away, he feared that his world was coming to an end too.
49
Lewis had had his forebodings about the bicycle but it turned out to be an almost brand-new, touring machine. The blonde receptionist explained that she was expecting to have many more tourists who would want to visit the battlefields, and so in future, she intended to buy a number of cycles for just such a service. Lewis had thought she worked there. From the way she spoke, it sounded like she owned the place. After breakfast he took the road up the Rue Amiral Courbet, past the railway station and over a little stone bridge along the road to Querrieux.
Lewis was struck by how far away from the front line the town was – this was where Rawlinson, the architect of the first day on the Somme, had made his headquarters. Like most front line soldiers Lewis had never been to any of the generals’ headquarters. But those few who had, had brought back stories of what it was like. Headquarters, any headquarters, was a world apart.
Usually, the generals picked chateaux or fine old houses in grand parks with fields. GHQ, the overall headquarters of the British Army, was in Montreuil, an old walled town on a steep hill with views out over richly cultivated lands. Here it was the world of light opera with clean, sharply pressed uniforms, medals, decorations and much saluting. Elderly generals with fine, carefully trimmed moustaches, middle-aged colonels and majors, young officers all wearing red hat-bands and red tabs on their uniforms.
But for the uniforms, it might have been an insurance company or some other paper-intensive enterprise. Men came and went looking important and carrying sheaves of paper or files. A man carrying a single piece of paper with a purposeful stride and glancing to neither right nor left, had to be even more important. Men scribbled notes in the margins of papers. ‘I agree’ or ‘Please copy Colonel So-and-so’.
These were the men who masterminded the campaigns. What a heavy responsibility they bore and it could be seen in the worried frowns and lines on their faces as they passed up and down corridors and from one office to another. Such warriors needed some diversion in the evenings and so they would change into a different and perhaps even more grandly decorated uniform, with polished buttons and crossed swords. Their boots would be gleaming as they came noisily down marble or wood
en staircases to a dinner of rich food and wine. They would chat over dinner of inconsequential things or of the latest intrigue or scandal. At night they slept in beds with deep pillows and clean sheets.
Despite the heavy food and the good claret that washed it down, they sometimes found themselves unable to sleep or would wake in the middle of the night. Perhaps it had been too much good coffee. ‘Bloody artillery,’ they would curse, while twenty miles away men were being clubbed to death or eviscerated with steel blades or drowned in mud or gas or atomised by the self-same artillery that disturbed the officers’ dreams.
Lewis continued along the Route Nationale to Albert. The sky was a pale blue that promised another warm day. A lark was singing somewhere. Lewis remembered that the road ran like a ribbon over a series of long, slow rises and falls. The climbs would be stiff on a bike but the downhills would be exhilarating. It had been different three years ago. Men weary – even after a rest period – and carrying sixty pounds or more of equipment, found the climbs brutal. The toil turned calf muscles to bars of rolled steel and there was no mercy in the downhill because the next ascent could be seen in front, waiting. The men sang to try to forget their fear.
After only a few minutes, a British Army truck pulled in ahead of him and stopped with its engine running. Lewis cycled up to the cab. The sergeant in the driver’s seat had a Bairnsfeather’s Ole Bill moustache and told him he was going up to Albert if he wanted a lift. Lewis was happy to accept and went round to the back to stow his bike. As he lifted it over the tail board, he saw that it contained a great heap of wooden crosses, newly made and smelling of wood preserver. Lewis went up to the passenger side and climbed in.
The sergeant had a cigarette permanently in his mouth and rested his elbows on the steering wheel. On the dashboard was a large scale map of the area. Between them, on the truck’s single seat, lay an open folder holding a sheaf of forms. The top form had been completed in type but then there were pencilled corrections to it. The form was headed ‘Burial Return’. Then it had a series of columns headed ‘Row’, ‘Grave’, ‘Map reference where body found’, ‘Was cross on grave?’ The next column was called ‘Regimental particulars’. There was one entry in this column that said ‘2/ Scottish Rifles’ but all the rest of them had ‘Unknown British Soldier’. The final two columns said ‘Means of identification’ and ‘Were any effects forwarded to Base?’
‘Working for the War Graves people,’ the sergeant explained without being asked.
‘That must be a tough job,’ said Lewis.
‘Pays well,’ said the sergeant. ‘But it’s unpleasant, that’s for sure. And dangerous. A lot of unexploded stuff still out there. We lost a fellow only yesterday.’
For a moment, it seemed to Lewis that he was back in the War again and that when people said things like this, you just shrugged, if that. But it was peacetime now. He remembered that there were certain niceties that had to be observed.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
The sergeant’s cigarette had burnt right down. He put his thumb and forefinger around it, took one last pull and threw the butt out the open side of the cab.
‘We’re under a lot of pressure apart from that,’ he went on. ‘The Froggies want to get back onto their land, rebuild their houses, plant crops, start getting on with their lives. Can’t blame ‘em really, I suppose.’
The road had been repaired in the sense that all of the shell holes and craters had been filled in. The trees on either side were still stumps though, like bits of giant pencils driven into the ground. The land on either side was pretty much as the War had left it. Greenery grew in profusion in shell pits, long rolls of brown marked rusting barbed wire. The land was a study in a deep red brown, and an intense shadowy green. From the cab of the lorry it was possible to get a sense of the zig-zags of trenches hurrying in this direction and that. And everywhere there were shell holes, with who knew what ghastliness in the bottoms of them.
‘Ain’t a pretty sight,’ said the sergeant. ‘Even on a day like today.’
‘Think it’ll ever recover?’ asked Lewis.
‘It’ll recover,’ said the sergeant with complete certainty. ‘Nature’s a wonderful thing.’
Lewis wasn’t so sure.
‘Where there’s plenty of greenery growing,’ said the sergeant. ‘That means there are bodies there. We also use this.’
The sergeant reached behind him and from the back pulled forward a long piece of metal, thin like a rapier, with a handle on it. Lewis recognised it as a cleaning rod for a machine gun. He looked quizzically at the sergeant.
‘Push it down into the ground,’ he said. ‘Then pull it out and smell it or touch it and see if it’s sticky.’
The sergeant turned to look at him.
‘You soon know.’
In Albert children played over the heaps of rubble which lined the streets. It was hard to imagine that houses could be destroyed in such a multiplicity of ways. Houses with the tiles swept off the roof; houses that were little more than a skeleton of rafters and beams and laths; houses where the front had collapsed as though it had fallen on its face; houses where the back or the side had fallen off; houses with large, roughly circular holes in the sides where shells had crashed through, houses that were just empty shells so that it was hard to imagine how life had ever gone on in any of these places.
The sergeant stopped in the square in front of the Basilica. The Basilica tower was still there, more or less intact and rising out of a mound of rubble. Behind it, only the walls stood. The Golden Virgin which had stood on top of the tower was nowhere to be seen. Lewis had never seen the famous statue. Before the War, it had stood on top of the Basilica and had been visible for miles around. The image was of the Virgin holding the infant Christ aloft as though offering him to God. Whether it was covered in gold or made of gold, Lewis never knew. Repeated shelling during the early part of the War had caused the statue to tip over so that eventually it lay slightly below the horizontal but still attached at the base. The result was that the Virgin looked like she was diving – offering her child as a sacrifice to stop the War, some of the more fanciful said. Eventually, during the German Spring Offensive in 1918, the British, knowing that the tower would make a good observation post, had deliberately targeted the tower and blown the statue down. Lewis thanked the sergeant and retrieved his bike.
The road south east out of Albert wound through more devastated countryside. The patching of this road had been more rough and ready, so that Lewis had to steer carefully to avoid damaging his tyres on flints or bits of metal. Soon on his right, amidst a clump of blasted trees so that it could easily be missed, he found the cemetery. The wooden crosses with the little metal tags on them were in straight lines. Lewis guessed that the dead had been buried in an old section of trench.
He wandered up the first line and then back down the second one and soon found the grave he was looking for. He stopped and unslung his pack. Out of it he took the bouquet of flowers which he had carefully placed in a small square cardboard box to avoid damaging it. These he carefully placed in front of the cross. Then he took out the envelope from his jacket pocket and tore it open. The ripping sounded loud in a countryside disturbed only by birdsong. He unfolded the paper and read.
‘Our dearest, darling, son James.
This kind gentleman, Mr Friday, has said that he will bring this letter to you & read it. It is a chance for us to say goodbye.
We miss you, darling boy. It is impossible to believe that you will never be coming back to us again. Remember those times when you used to come in from work in the shop? Such stories you had about the customers. You used to have us in stitches. Your father always said you should have been on the stage. Your commanding officer wrote to us after you died & said you were exactly the same in the Army, keeping them all laughing with the jokes you used to tell.
So farewell our darling until we meet again.
With all our love.
Mum and Dad.
&
nbsp; Lewis was in tears when he had finished. He placed the letter back in the envelope and slipped it down between the blooms of the bouquet. Then he took some photographs of the grave and of the views in each direction. When he had finished he sat on the ground and looked off to the south across the rolling, destroyed ground.
So now there was nothing else for it. Tonight he would stay in Amiens and tomorrow he would go to Etaples. And there he would see what he would see. He had done a good thing in coming here and, in general, he thought, in his life he had tried to live a good life and not hurt people. Yes, it was true he had killed men in the War, but he had also saved some lives. The gods were balancing the scales now. He hoped he wouldn’t be found wanting.
50
The following morning Lewis, dressed in his best uniform, took the train to Etaples. He sat by the window, staring out but not seeing anything. A taxi took him to No. 24 General Hospital. The sentry at the gate directed him to a building that was sign posted ‘Administration’. Here, a mousy French girl behind a hatch with a sliding glass pane directed him to a room down a feebly lit corridor. The corridor felt cold after the warmth of the sun outside. The sign on the door said ‘Administrator’. Lewis knocked and a voice commanded, ‘Come in’.
A well-built woman sat behind a desk. She wore no makeup and her hair was perfectly done. Her face didn’t look like a happy face or a face that smiled or laughed that often. On the desk in front of her were a glasses case, a leather blotter with an unused sheet of white paper in it, a pen holder, a black telephone and a wooden nameplate that said, ‘R.A. Armitage’. Whether this lady actually was R.A. Armitage, or whether she was just using the office to intimidate, Lewis never found out because she never introduced herself. Instead she addressed him as lieutenant, politely asked him to sit and inquired what she could do for him.
Starlight (The Four Lights Quartet Book 1) Page 25