Lewis didn’t do any digging himself. When he had started he had wanted to and on his first day, he did. He found the rhythmic movement dulled his brain and tired his body. But the two sergeants had come to him saying that it wasn’t really the thing, and the men disapproved, saw it as demeaning and that it diminished his authority. Reluctantly Lewis had stopped and then had contented himself with going from digging party to digging party. But he had stopped doing that too as he felt he was treading on the two sergeants’ toes. It was perhaps a better use of his time to look for more bodies. And so he would sweep the ground again, from a different direction. Or he would do more poke and sniffs. Or, towards the end of the day, he would stand with a low sun at his back and see if it showed up anything on the ground. He almost always found more bodies.
The men worked steadily through the morning. They were instructed not to dig too closely to the bodies. This made the work easier but also prevented disturbance of the bodies and, most important of all, revealed whether more than one man was buried in a particular spot. They were taught to disinfect their hands and gloves generously with Cresol, not that they needed much reminding. If nothing else, the smell of the Cresol masked the other smells.
Like most of them Lewis had been appalled at the nature of the work they had to do. Despite the fact that he had volunteered for it, it seemed scarcely endurable. But this had only lasted a week or two. After that men just seemed to get hardened to it. Strange as it seemed, Lewis felt also there was a large amount of tenderness in the work. Men felt that each new body could have been them and that each body, particularly those that were identified, represented not just a man but a family. Fathers, brothers, children.
By mid-afternoon there were ghastly parodies of bodies lying on sheets of canvas all across the field. There was also a small pile of rusted shells of different calibres. These had been carried up to the roadside and placed as far away as possible from the ruined house. French engineers would come along in due course and take them away to be destroyed. The sun had given up trying to break through and the off-white clouds blanketed the sky. What the bodies looked and smelt like depended on when they had been put in the ground. Some looked like piles of grass, earth, stones and bones. Some were grinning skulls attached to rotting, compressed clothing. Some – those that had been buried on the bottom of a pile of bodies – looked almost like boards made of a blackened, compressed material.
Each of the bodies was searched carefully for any effects which might lead to identification. Lewis remembered how these burial parties had been conducted at the time. He had never known whether it was better to take the identification or leave it on the body. His first reaction had been to take it, as well as noting carefully the location of the grave, so that the news could be passed on to the next of kin. But then what about the body? Shellfire was always disturbing bodies, throwing up previously buried ones and scattering gobbets of them all over the place. With some bodies it happened countless times. And taking the identification didn’t guarantee anything because the man who took it could be killed the next minute. In the end, though it wasn’t always possible, he had come to the conclusion that it was better – if possible – to do both, take something and leave something on the body.
But it had never been quite as neat as that in practice. He would ask his men to do this but there was no guarantee that they would. Most of them just wanted to get the burial fatigue over with. And as 1917 progressed, the number of bodies became so great that such niceties were simply forgotten. At Passchaendale burying bodies had been the furthest thing from anybody’s mind.
Today, all the bodies were British. They found a couple of pay books and some identity discs, so that it looked like they might be able to identify four or five of them. The rest of the bodies would be recorded as ‘Unknown British Soldier’ on the Burial Return.
When the General Service wagons, each drawn by a pair of mules, arrived from the cemetery, the men began to move the bodies from the field up to the road. The remains were wrapped in the sheets of canvas which were then tied up. A brown paper butcher’s label on a string was attached to each one. Any personal effects found were placed in a ration bag and this too was tied to the canvas. Where more than one body had been found in a particular location, the bodies would be sent to the cemetery together. This was because it was often possible to identify unknowns from the fact that they were known to have been buried with men who could be identified. But this would be a job for somebody else.
Lewis went round to each of the bodies in turn and wrote out the labels. For each group of bodies he marked them with a particular letter of the alphabet, followed by a number giving the order in which they were to be buried. Then he signed each label. In the end, there were seventeen bodies from today’s work but more remained. At the very least, they would have to return tomorrow which wasn’t going to make the French brothers very happy. Still, there was nothing else for it.
The canvas-covered bodies were placed on stretchers and loaded onto the wagons. The French brothers, their wives and a gaggle of children, stood in front of the ruined house and watched silently. Even the children were quiet. Each time a new body was placed on a wagon, they crossed themselves. Each wagon could take five loaded stretchers, four laid across the top from one side to the other and a fifth underneath on the wagon’s floor. There was a large Union Jack in each wagon and, once the stretchers were installed, the driver shook out the flag and draped it over the canvas covered bodies.
There were four wagons and now they lined up in a row, their mules waiting patiently with alert ears and sad eyes. Four men were detailed, one for each wagon. Their job was to walk behind the wagon as it made its way to the cemetery and ensure that nothing fell off the wagon or slipped out of the canvases. Lewis told the Frenchmen that they would be back tomorrow and was pleasantly surprised to not get any more disagreement from them. They were strangely subdued. Maybe they were glad to be getting all of this horror off their land.
The train of wagons, each with their follower set off down the road towards the cemetery. Cemetery duty was regarded as the cushier of the two types of work and most officers rotated from exhumation to cemetery. Like all the others Lewis had been offered this rotation but he had declined. He preferred to do the exhumation work. It seemed to have become his mission to recover every lost body in France. It was as though each time his men identified a body, he reduced the ocean of sadness that the War had caused by maybe a teaspoonful.
As the wagons disappeared from view, the men finished their cigarettes and went back to do another hour’s digging. It was just after three when Wilkes suggested it was time to pack up. Lewis agreed and the men stopped, brought their tools and equipment up to the road and put them into the backs of the two remaining lorries. Lewis took a walk around the field to make sure that nothing had been left behind. Then they got into the lorries and drove to the cemetery.
The stretchers had been lined up beside a newly dug trench about six feet deep. The men who had dug it stood around, leaning on their shovels and smoking. A French priest was there in a white surplice with a heavy black coat over it against the cold. It was a dreary scene. The cemetery officer, a lieutenant called Timpson that Lewis had met before, had worked his way along the line of stretchers. He was on the last one. He squatted down, examining the personal effects in the ration bag and comparing them to the label attached to the body. He made some notes in a notebook.
‘Any problems?’ asked Lewis.
‘Don’t think so,’ he said, without looking up and continuing to write. ‘There are a couple that I’ve noted that we might be able to identify from battalion records. Apart from that, nothing else.’
He finished writing and looked up.
‘Just get on with it, I suppose,’ he said.
He had a lantern jaw, a firm mouth and deep set eyes. Lewis asked Wilkes to form the men into a hollow square with the men on three sides and the grave on the fourth. While this was going on, two of Timpson�
�s men jumped down into the grave. Then two others went to the first stretcher in the line. Slowly, they lifted up the end of the stretcher furthest away from the trench, causing the canvas shrouded body to slide forward slightly. Then, as the stretcher was raised more, the body slid down into the trench to be caught and guided by the men there. They lowered it to the earthen floor. Lewis was always taken by the great gentleness, the almost reverential way in which they did this. As the stretchers were emptied they were taken away where they would be washed in Cresol and returned to the wagons.
When the last body was lowered into the grave, the priest who had been standing on the thrown up earth, delivered a short and fast, committal service in Latin. He seemed anxious to get away and get in out of the cold. When he was finished he shook hands with Timpson and hurried off, obviously with thoughts of a warm fire and a hot drink. Meanwhile the men were hammering wooden crosses in at the head of each grave. Each one had a little strip of tin plate attached to it into which had been pressed details of the soldier in the grave. Sometimes the tin strip gave the name, initials, number, rank and regiment of the soldier. More often though it just said ‘An Unknown British Soldier’.
55
Timpson asked Lewis if he’d like to go into Amiens that night, but he declined. Lewis found such evenings tedious beyond belief. Instead, he ate his dinner in his tent, and afterwards lay on his cot and read. The evenings and nights were the worst. Then there was nothing to occupy him, to keep him busy and the thoughts and feelings came flowing in until they swamped him.
He had no real memory of what had happened after Helen had said goodbye or how he had come back from Shropshire. It was self-evident that he had but he could not recall the smallest detail of those few days. He assumed he must have gone back to his hotel and spent the night. He must have checked out in the morning and gone to the station and caught the train to London. But he remembered none of it. All he knew was that by the time he was walking up Horn Lane towards home, he had decided he would volunteer for the Graves Exhumation Units. Now that everything that was best in his life was dead, being with the dead seemed like the only logical place to be.
In fact, the truth was he wanted to die. Why hadn’t she done this while the War was raging? Then dying would have been so easy. But he thought he still might be able to do it with the Graves Exhumation Units. There would be unexploded shells all over the battlefield. Hadn’t the sergeant who had given him the lift to Albert told him that somebody had been killed only the previous day? So maybe this was a way that he could go.
He vaguely remembered a talk with Dad where he explained what he planned to do – not that he told him anything about Helen. Dad was less than pleased, saying that if he planned to make a career in the Army, then the Graves Exhumation Unit was hardly the place to do it. They had had an argument, as far as Lewis could recall, but it didn’t matter. The next day he returned to barracks and within a couple of weeks had been transferred as he had requested.
He started at the worst possible time – high summer. The stench and flies were unbelievable and the armies of rats, who had come to regard the deserted battlefields as their domain, took time to be persuaded otherwise. Rat bites were common. One man in another unit died from one. But by starting early and finishing early, so as to avoid the worst of the day’s heat, they managed to make it a bit more bearable. By the end of the summer when the weather was starting to cool, they had settled into a well practised routine.
What he remembered most from those first couple of months was the feeling that Helen had been cut from the world. It was like a great hand had come down and taken her away. He would never speak to her again, never hear her voice, hold her, touch her, hear her laugh. He thought about her as if she was dead, but of course she wasn’t. He felt that in some ways, had she died it might have been easier. There would have been a finality about it. But to know that she was still in the world, that he could have written to her, gone to her, talked to her, this was perhaps the most unbearable of all.
In those early months he was often tempted to contact her. Untold times, he had taken out paper, written all or part of a letter, telling her how he felt, pleading with her to change her mind. But all the letters had ended up in the fire. What was the point? He should be trying to put it behind him. But he found it impossible.
He remembered the first night he dreamt about her. In the dream they were sitting up in her bed in the cottage talking and she was laughing. Lewis was so surprised to be with her that he woke with a start. But then came the shock of finding that she wasn’t actually there.
He would go into Amiens with some of the others. He would try to put a brave face on it and he must have been fairly successful because only once did anyone say that he seemed to be ‘feeling a bit down tonight’. He got drunk. He went back to a prostitute’s attic room one night, climbing endless flights of creaking steps. But once he got there and she took off her blouse and her brassiere and he saw her bare breasts, he just threw the money on the table and fled back down the stairs.
56
January 1920. Lewis was given a weekend’s leave. He normally just ignored these things but he had grown weary of their encampment and the smell of decomposition which he never seemed to be able to get out of his nostrils. He thought he would go to Amiens. He’d only been in the city a couple of times since he’d joined the Graves Exhumation Unit but suddenly, the thought of a couple of days in a hotel, hot baths every day – or even twice a day – some decent food , was too overwhelming to resist. But what to do in Amiens all day long after a bath and before it was time for the next meal? He feared time on his hands – empty spaces in which to think, to brood.
Then he had an idea. He had decided he would stay at the hotel he had stayed in last summer when he had gone to Henry the waiter’s, son’s grave. But now he had an even better idea. He would take a bicycle and revisit the grave, take some more photographs, write a letter to Henry and tell him he’d been there again. He realised there was no particular point to this. It would just give him a little project to do, something to keep his mind off other things.
It was Friday evening when he rode into Amiens on the lorry that was taking a group of leave men into the city for the weekend. He found the hotel in Rue Amiral Courbet and the blonde girl in the black dress was still there behind the counter. He was pleased when she said that she remembered him.
‘C’est gentil,’ he said. ‘ Merci Mademoiselle.’
It was her hotel, he asked. It was. And she ran the hotel by herself? Yes, she did. She had bought it with her husband before the War. But then he had been called up and gone off to be a soldier and never come back. She had hoped he might be a prisoner in Germany but all hope of that was gone now. It was hard being a widow and having to cope with the entire place by herself.
‘C’est dur,’ she said.
Lewis was astonished to hear that she was a widow. He had her as a mademoiselle of nineteen or twenty. Her story put her more in her mid to late twenties.
He set out for Albert the next day, wearing a brown Army waterproof cape over his uniform. It was a wet, grey day after a night of heavy rain that had stopped around dawn. Low ballooning clouds were like the roof of a tent as the tyres of the bike swished over the wet road. The air was cold but clean and newly-washed.
By mid-morning he had arrived at the cemetery. The remnants of the flowers were still there, little more than a brown soggy mess now. The letter was long gone, dissolved by rain or taken by the wind. He had brought some fresh flowers, placed them on the grave and took a couple of photographs. It was while he was wondering how he was going to spend the rest of the day that the idea occurred to him that he would ask the girl at the hotel if she’d like to have dinner with him. The notion that there had been a time in his life – indeed, not so long ago – when he would have been terrified to do this, made him smile. But it made sense – neither of them had much in their lives apart from the work they did. It would be good for both of them. And if she
declined? He shrugged. He didn’t care one way or the other. How did you say it in French? Je m’en fiche.
Around noon he ate the lunch that she had provided for him and then he cycled back to Amiens. It was a downhill run and easier – almost exhilarating at times as he freewheeled along. She was at the desk when he came in. He told her that he had left the bike in the courtyard and then he asked her. The surprise on her thin face became a smile and she said that yes, she would like that very much. Her friend Cecile, also a widow, could bring over her children and mind the place for a couple of hours. What was her name, by the way – he was sorry, he didn’t know. It was Sandrine.
They went out just as it got dark. She had changed into a different dress – still black – and shoes with heels. She had put on lipstick and her hair was up. They turned out of the hotel and went in the direction of the Cathedral. He asked her if she knew some place and she said that she had heard there was a very good place that had just reopened. They found it – essentially the living room of a house that still had new timbers showing and smelt of fresh paint. The husband did the cooking in the kitchen while the wife waited the tables. There was no menu, just three courses that her husband was cooking tonight. The wife knew Sandrine and they spoke in machine gun fire French for a few minutes before she left to pass on their order to her husband.
It turned out to be a really enjoyable evening. Sandrine had picked up a little English from the British soldiers who had stayed in the hotel during the War. Lewis’ French was modest but he made up for it by not caring if he made a fool of himself. They smiled and laughed and urged each other on and there were also a few puzzled silences and lots of frowns and requests for ‘Encore?’
Starlight (The Four Lights Quartet Book 1) Page 28