The Stone Carvers

by Jane Urquhart

  In 1923, he began his investigation into dimension stone, his tour of the great quarries of Europe, his search for flawlessness. It was as if in his mind he had decided that the stone he chose must carry within it no previous history of organic life, that no fossil could have been trapped in it, no record of the earth’s hot centre or the long periods of cold retreat that had crept across its surfaces in the form of ice ages or floods. An undisturbed constituent, innocent since its own birth, of any transient event, so that the touch of the chisel cutting out the names would be its first caress.

  Nothing pleased him, not the warm stone used by medieval architects for the great cathedrals, not the cold stone used centuries later for great public buildings. He visited quarries in France, Spain, Italy, England; he investigated the possibilities of Canadian quarries, American quarries; he sent his emissaries off to distant corners of the world, rejecting their suggestions over and over until they quit his employment in despair. Two years passed, a sizeable portion of the money had been spent on the quest. I have been eating and sleeping stone for so long it has become an obsession with me, he wrote in response to queries on the part of the concerned War Graves Commission in Canada, and incidentally, a nightmare.

  Eventually, news came to him of a vast quarry near Split in Yugoslavia whence the Emperor Diocletian had procured the stone for his baths and palaces. It was opened for the first time in centuries so that Allward could inspect it in the company of his engineers. Like the negative imprint of a great architectural complex, the deep outdoor rooms of the quarry shone with a blinding whiteness in the sun. Exhausted after months of travel, and after a full day of scrutinizing the face of the stone, a day in which he spoke not one word to those who accompanied him, Allward placed his hand and then his forehead against the quarry wall and wept. “At last,” he is said to have whispered, “at last.”

  Before the stone could be shipped to France, a road leading from the Route Nationale on the Douai Plain to the site of the memorial had to be built. During the two years that passed in this employment Chinese workers young enough to have but scant knowledge of the European war were killed by mines hidden in mud, the noise of the fatal explosion like an insistent letter of reminder from the past. A rabbit warren of tunnels had to be closed and filled beneath the spot, a sunken rectangle had to be dug, and concrete had to be poured where the enormous foundation was to be installed. Body parts and clothing, bibles, family snapshots, letters, buttons, bones, and belt buckles were unearthed daily, and under the plot of earth from which the central staircase would someday rise, the fully uniformed skeletal remains of a German general were disinterred. In the seven years since the battle, several poplars had made a valiant attempt to take root on the battlefield, and some were now taller than a man. In almost every case when they were removed to make way for the road, bits of stained cloth and human hair and bones were found entangled in the roots. Once, a mine a half a mile away exploded, unearthing a young oak tree and the carcass of a horse, intact, activated, it would seem, by the fractional movement of the underground growth of roots.

  While this was going on, Allward worked on plaster figures in his London studio or travelled to the continent to audition Italian carvers for the making of the great on-site sculptures—the male and female nudes that were to be executed on the base or high on each of the pylons. He made several voyages back to Yugoslavia to supervise the extraction of the stone at Split. Crossing the water to the white marble island of Brac, he entered a white stone world where men worked all day in white quarries, departing at night for villages composed so entirely of white marble it was as if they lived in their own mausolea. Back on the mainland, he spent days watching stonecutters ease the limestone from the earth with such gentleness they might have been handling bone china. When it came time to move the massive pieces for the pylons to waiting ships, the wagons used in the process were so heavy they broke the ancient bridge at Trau over which stone for palaces and parliaments had passed without incident for almost two millennia. Work had to be halted until another bridge was built. Time passed.

  And then more time passed. The stone was coaxed from the earth, permitted to slide in a controlled manner down the mountainside. It then was taken—with great difficulty—over the Adriatic Sea, across Italy, and up from the south to the north of France. Eighteen thousand tons. Load after load. The final several tons were interred in the wrecked earth of Vimy for safekeeping against repairs, for Allward always anticipated breakage and ruin. And each minute of every day Allward’s ambition rolled heavily, turgidly through his mind, as something he would have to work with since it could neither be buried nor moved.

  Angry letters arrived from Ottawa demanding dates of completion, and then more letters arrived filled with threats of cutting back the funds. Allward replied with rage, claiming that no one but he was intimate with the memorial, knew what it meant, what it would be. I will be emptied, he thought, when this is over. I will have put every drop of my life’s blood into this already blood-soaked place. The anatomy of everything—natural or built—obsessed him. Stems became pedestals for that which must be supported to survive. Rivers became carving tools scouring curved banks, acting on the earth through which they passed in the same way as a sculptor’s gouge moved through stone. Human beings too were either an extension, a manifestation of his own skills, his own vision, or they were not. If they were not, he wasn’t interested. If he thought they were, and they proved otherwise, he felt first betrayed, then furious. The personal couldn’t hold his attention, he was driven by the idea of the monument. A sentence that did not make reference to its construction was a sentence he could neither hear nor respond to.

  When more than ten years had passed, an increasingly hysterical government in Canada sent out emissaries to lure him home. The depression in the country had deepened, the tax base was shrinking. Allward kept none of the appointments these bureaucrats made with him. If they were in France, he was in England and vice versa. They eventually went back to Canada to report that the memorial was too advanced to stop now, that to suspend operations would be a diplomatic error impossible to overcome.

  Visible from a distance of forty miles, the two massive, irregular pylons stretching toward the sky like white bone needles or remarkable stalagmites, even the skeleton of the memorial had become a feature of the French landscape. The Italian carvers were beginning to work on the figures Allward had cast in plaster in his London studio. The names of the eleven thousand missing men were being collected and the complicated mathematics necessary to fit these names into the space available on the base was being undertaken. The most recent set of figures had suggested that it would likely take four stone carvers two years to chisel the hundreds of thousands of characters into the stone. Lines, circles, and curves corresponding to a cherished, remembered sound called over fields at summer dusk from a back porch door, shouted perhaps in anger or whispered in passion, or in prayer, in the winter dark. All that remained of torn faces, crushed bone, scattered limbs.

  When Giorgio Vigamonti was twenty-five and back from the war, he had almost immediately gone to see his friend and employer, the tombstone-maker Juliani. Things were still prosperous in a city such as Hamilton, a place dedicated to the fabrication of various kinds of metal, a city that had almost more than anywhere else in the country benefitted from the increased manufacturing brought about by the boom in the armaments industry.

  Juliani had embraced the returning soldier and then, without pausing for conversation, had handed him a carving tool. He needed help, he said. Many of the wealthy and some of the not so wealthy wanted memorials for their dead sons, marble plaques for various churches, portrait busts for the cemetery or, if the home was ostentatious enough, for the hall. There was lots of work, he told Giorgio, and lots of money.

  “How’s your pal, Tilman?” he had asked. “Dead or alive?”

  “I haven’t seen him, but I’ve heard he’s alive. He was wounded out at Vimy. Lost a leg, so they say.”
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br />   “Poor bugger.”

  “Yes.”

  “He was pretty good with marble but liked wood better, I seem to remember. Not a bad carver. Glad it’s only a leg he lost. It could have been his right arm.”

  Giorgio was wandering through a room filled with half-finished projects, the pale faces of young men stared at him from every corner, and the chisel was hanging useless at the end of his own right arm. “What shall I do?” he asked.

  “Words,” said Juliani. “You’re going to have to do a lot of words. Seems like everybody nowadays wants to express themselves. Used to be a name and the dates would do, but no more. You kill off a generation of boys and suddenly the whole world becomes interested in poetry. Sometimes, God forbid, they even write the poetry themselves.” He told Giorgio that he had seen hardened capitalists approach his shop, a piece of white paper shaking in their hands, tears in their eyes when they read the trite verses aloud. It was almost always the men who came to him, he said, and oddly they had all wanted him to approve of their choice of elegiac lines. Women visited the shop only if there was no man to do the job, and they were surprisingly less overtly emotional, often satisfied with the customary “king and country” epitaph.

  “I don’t know how to carve words,” said Giorgio.

  “You’ll learn. I’ll show you a couple of scripts, and you’ll learn.”

  In the past Juliani himself had always carved the names and dates, and Giorgio had paid very little attention to him while he worked at this task, which seemed to one who was constantly busy with angels to be boring in the extreme. He hadn’t been interested then, and he wasn’t interested now. But he was eager to enter civilian working life and felt, therefore, that it was prudent to agree—at least for the time being.

  “With any luck,” Juliani was saying, “we’ll get a commission or two for a war memorial from some village or another. Good money in that.”

  “And lots of words.”

  “Well, lots of names, yes.”

  And so Giorgio, quite reluctantly, began what would become a love affair with the alphabet. At first he struck a bargain with his employer that if he worked three weeks on words he would be able to spend two weeks on some image or another: an angel, a lamb, the face of a dead or missing soldier. To his great surprise, however, he developed—quite suddenly—a passion for the way words occupied the surface of stone, the placement, the depth, how the light affected them, and most of all their permanence. Even the mathematical calculations required for centring the words seemed to him somehow magical because they were so necessary. Without order, he came to know, the words would appear to be haphazard, unintentional, would lose the dignity that permanence demanded. He became fanatical about bevels and lines of incision, often in a temper for days about faults that even Juliani could not see. When the contracts for village war memorials began to arrive, it was he who negotiated with the mayors and councils, and he who carefully counted the number of characters necessary to honour the community’s lost sons. These symbols in stone would be all that remained of this farmboy, that office clerk, this boy who had played in the town band. Inevitably a quiet relative or friend or sweetheart would stand at a respectable distance behind Giorgio while he carved a particular name. And when he had finished they would shyly approach the stone and run their fingers over the marks that he had placed there. Sometimes they wept as they did this.

  For ten years Giorgio Vigamonti would concern himself with rendering the letters of the alphabet, and with the powerful emotions this alphabet had on men and women when it was arranged in certain ways. He had, during this period, almost married a woman from an Italian family, someone he had known for years. The great friendship between her family and his, and the fact that he was now making a reasonable amount of steady money, made marriage and a family seem like a logical next step. Then the bottom fell out of the market. The last of the war memorials had been completed, the rich had lost their fortunes in the stock market crash, and there was very little interest in memorializing anything at all. The need for angels and lambs seemed to have departed from the earth, granite was replacing marble, and few had the money even for granite. Juliani, who was by then an old man, was forced to let Giorgio go and not much later to close his shop for good.

  Giorgio, out of work, out of money, and out of luck, said goodbye to his family and his intended, left the city of Hamilton. For a year or two he became a vagrant and sometime migrant worker, drifting around the world of the hobos, eventually ending up in the large shanty town developing in the Don Valley in the heart of Toronto. It was here that he was reunited with Tilman, and here that he learned about the huge Canadian monument being built in France. A former soldier told him about it, a mad, dishevelled pencil seller who really had lost his right arm. The memorial was to honour the thousands of men who had gone missing in France—the names of those who had disappeared in Belgium had already been inscribed on the Menin Gate at Ypres. Giorgio would never forget the way the pencils in the man’s cup rattled as he gave him this news, as if they were an extension of the fellow’s constantly shaking body. He could barely believe what he was hearing. “The government is really going to pay for all this?” Giorgio asked.

  “So I’ve heard,” said the pencil seller and then added under his breath, “the bastards.”

  A week later, after hitchhiking to Montreal, Giorgio was stowed away in the baggage hold of a steamer headed for Le Havre, having unsuccessfully tried to persuade Tilman to join him.

  “What could ever make you want to go back there?” Tilman had asked his friend. “Back to the scene of the carnage?”

  “Work,” Giorgio had answered, “and anyway my particular scene of carnage was closer to Belgium, not in this part of France.”

  “I wouldn’t even think of going,” Tilman said. He had remained unsmiling when Giorgio suggested he might find his leg there, at Vimy, where he lost it. But as Giorgio walked away, Tilman had called to him, “Look for me when you get back and we’ll go see your father.”

  Giorgio had turned around then and shouted back, “Yes, we’ll do that. But what you should do in the meantime is find your own family.”

  Tilman would always remember this, knowing, as he did, that in the final analysis both he and Giorgio had found the Becker family, or at least what was left of it.

  Giorgio could barely imagine what eleven thousand names would look like carved on a huge stone wall surmounted by a magnificent monument. The texture they would make would be like no other surface, for words were like that. Even on impermanent, short-lived paper, even in foreign languages you would never understand, words had a presence unlike any other presence. They carried authority in a way no other collection of lines, circles, curves, and squares could. “Alpha and Omega,” he would sometimes whisper to himself when he was working. “Moses and the tablets.”

  He was disappointed to discover upon arriving at the site in the spring of 1934 that another man would not be needed for the carving of the names for several months. At present, the list of men provided by the Ministry of Defence was being added to and subtracted from each day, as men believed to be missing turned up in the north woods of Canada, or in the tropics, or hidden in their attics. And every week or so a few other men would be reported as never returning to homes that had waited for them for years. Occasionally a body with identity tags would be found during the course of the work itself, when a landmine went off, or when a road had to be built, or a pit had to be dug. The boy in question would then be scratched from the list of the missing and his remains would be buried in a nearby military cemetery with the customary simple white stone engraved with a maple leaf and his name. Giorgio was told by Captain Simson, the overseer, that he might get a position as a carver, might be able to join the team of Italians who were currently hanging, supported by ropes and scaffolds, all over the vast pylons.

  He would have to wait, however, until the man Allward returned to Vimy in a week or so, as each carver—even the stonecutters—had to be
auditioned by him, and if Giorgio was to believe what Simson told him, the master sculptor was not easy to please. Still there was always work to be had, apparently, as each week a few Italian carvers would succumb to a combination of homesickness and the miserable weather, throw down their tools, and begin the journey home to Naples or Perugia.

  Giorgio spent his first few days in the Picardie region, wandering in the countryside around the site, amazed by the colour green and the white, pink, and yellow blossoms in the orchards that had been planted since the war. So this was the celebrated French spring he had never witnessed during his years as a soldier. He could remember only the colours of flesh and of mud from that time; now there were tulips and daffodils in gardens, lace on the boughs of trees. After a day or two he began to feel uneasy, as if the display were somehow in bad taste in the face of what had gone before. There were those who were moved by nature’s blanketing of catastrophe. He was not to be one of them. To participate in work on the memorial seemed to him to be the only acceptable response to what had taken place.

  His own battles had been fought farther north—notably at Passchendaele and Ypres—but it did not take much of an act of the imagination for him to re-create how things must have been at the ridge, in the trenches that surrounded it and on the slope that led to it. What he had never before seen was such an extensive series of tunnels snaking like an underground river system beneath the fields of conflict. As soon as he could borrow a lantern, he walked the half-mile from the busy site of the monument to the entrance of Grange Tunnel and began to explore this subterranean hallway and the passageways that veered off from it. The rusting military detritus underfoot and the names and images scratched into the chalky walls recalled so vividly the human activity that had taken place there they caused his eyes to fill with tears.