It Was the Nightingale (11 page)

He came upon an area of the battlefield which was being cleared up. There were many heaps of rusty iron shards piled by a cart-track with barbed-wire pressed into bales as of satanic hay; and farther on there was an immense and rugged pit, several acres in extent, in which bearded men stripped to the waist were working slowly. They had long hair and slanting eyes, were clad in ragged clothes and had the listless, uncaring attitudes of prisoners. A man, apparently their foreman, was standing moodily on a hummock above them.

He greeted him in his feeble French. The man spread his hands as though dumb. He walked around the pit, or quarry, for it was ten to twelve feet below the grass and willows above its perimeter, and was examining a ten-foot pile of shells, the duds of a 1915 offensive, he thought, as he picked one up, when the foreman gave a hoarse cry and violently waved an arm at which Phillip put it down carefully among the other shells.

Later, talking to the gardeners, he was told that the salvage work was being done by Russian labourers, paid a few francs a day. When one pile of duds was large enough a detonator was thrust into the yellow-crusted cylinders, balls, and canisters, and touched off with a time-fuse: away the men would run, to crouch out of sight: and WOMP … RUM … M … M … ble! A great slow-billowing mushroom of yellow and black smoke turning
the sun brown. Then they would work for another week to prepare the next excitement.

“The weight of iron there, of both exploded and unexploded shells, was greater than the weight of the first eight feet of topsoil,” he said—a remark which drew no reply from either of the gardeners. Only later did he realize that they were cut off from England, and existing each in his own thoughts, so they seldom spoke, but lived in dreams of England.

“Can you direct me to La Folie Farm?”

The one addressed did not look up, but pointed with his trowel while pressing into the bed a root-clump of Michaelmas daisies.

*

Cousin Willie in his article had written of ‘a ploughman’s mite’—a stick of aspen poplar stuck in the headland of a wheat-field, with a rough cross of the same wood: and the stick had blossomed. Where to look for it? Would it be there, after five years? He walked on, and suddenly it was before him—he might have been led by a spirit guide directly to it. Now a tree two inches thick at the base, and without its cross-piece, there it was and below it lay two bleached leg-bones, a skull, the white cage of the ribs, the arm bones at the ends of which were small white points, the knuckle and finger-bones of human hands.
A
plowman
has
done
this
act
for
some
unknown
German
soldier
left,
perhaps,
in
the
final
retreat
—the actual words of Willie, in the news-room of
The
Weekly
Courier,
five summers before, came to his mind. The skeleton, curved where it had fallen, had lain there during the intervening years, although the field elsewhere had been levelled for cultivation.

“Willie,” he said, standing still with eyes closed, “are you near me? Willie, come to me if you can.” It was as though a cold wind had moved up his spine; at that moment the leaves of the tree began to tremble, making a bright rustling: yet there was no breeze. Perhaps the warmth of his body had caused a slight movement of air—the aspen was known as the ‘trembling poplar’. But was that all?
Willie,
he thought.
Have
you
now
met
Barley?
Are
you
both
here,
behind
the
sunshine?

*

With a wave of the hand towards the aspen, he continued on down the headland of the field. Whole families of women were out in the fine weather, kneeling in line and plucking weeds—grandmothers,
aunts, parents, children, all in dark clothes, kneeling across the rows of wheat-plants, advancing slowly on all fours to pull every weed with their ringers, absorbed in their work. Were these the families Willie had observed, five years before, weeding the field? Such contentment in the sun; such simplicity! They were happy; they were making the earth a better place for men to see and
feel.

He walked on, coming to other fields, recently levelled, ploughed and cultivated but not yet sown, where peasants were gathering armfuls of docks, pulling up charlock and thistles and laying them in heaps on the headlands. It was pleasant to see them; they were too intent to talk. How easy for a lazy, conceited writer to make them creatures of low mentality, intent only on more money for better crops! They were the strength and sanity of France; they provided the bodies while the towns made the oversharp neuroticism which had resulted in first The Labyrinthe and then the Concentration Graveyard.

*

The next morning he said goodbye to the widow of Roclincourt, heaved on his pack, took his staff of mountain ash with its iron spike, and set forth again. Where should he go? North to Ypres and the Salient? The thought brought reluctance, as of weight: too much had fallen upon that low-lying area of total destruction, every worm blasted in the bombardments upon village, road, and broken dykes or polders; the thought of the place was too heavy. To the south, and the Somme? That way was easier; he recalled green downland slopes after the 1917 retreat into the Hindenburg Line. He would walk south; he would be on his way home. Home? The thought pierced him: what was home without Barley?

Onwards, through the night if need be; anything but remaining still. If only it would rain, that would be known, that would be a friend. The sky was growing dull, clouds were coming up; let it rain, for God’s sake, let the going be hard.

*

By the evening he had reached Achiet-le-Grand. He was by then wet through and weary. Should he walk through the night, down to Albert and beyond? To Etaples? Achiet when last he had been there was a waste of rubble and cellars; with relief he saw lights in a window, heard music and laughter within. After
hesitation, because of his bedraggled appearance, without mackintosh or hat—he was unshaven, too, his hair long and wet—he pushed open the door and entered the
estaminet.
It was part of the new France: a floor of composition made to look like marble; the mirrors behind the bar had the tawdriness of new, factory-made things; the imitation oak panels of the chair-backs were of pressed paper. He asked for a cognac, while assembling himself to enquire about a room for the night.

The bar was lit by a hissing petrol lamp, which hurt the eyes, and by its white light the faces of the young men and women dancing to the blare of an automatic hurdy-gurdy were made the more pale. On the wall a notice was hung:

Although the hot, smoky atmosphere nearly choked him, his melancholy was slightly dispelled by that Wellcome, and he decided to have another cognac. During a break in the demand for drinks some minutes later he managed to edge himself through the crowd to the landlord. His appearance had obviously caused mild amusement among the gang of youths; the long, plus-four knickerbockers were obviously an unfamiliar sight causing unconcealed stares and giggles.

The landlord was suspicious. He asked why he walked in the rain without a coat? Had he been looking for work in Bapaume? It was a shock to hear that name mentioned as a workaday town. Was he like others, seeking more money than could be earned in the brick factories there? What had he got in his pack?

Obviously he was wondering if the stranger had escaped from prison. He asked if he had money for a bed; whereupon Phillip showed him his note-case, taking out the dirty tattered paper-money of the district. It satisfied the
patron.

“Je suis soldat Anglais, m’sieur—revenu.”

“Ah, c’est bon, m’sieu!”

He was invited to drink and dance. In fact, Wellcome to the Grand Anglais Jazz-Balle!

There were Italian plasterers in the throng, who were earning, he learned, from forty to eighty francs a day. While he was speaking to one, a pale thin French youth lurched up, flung down
a hundred-franc note, and yelled for drinks all round. Most of the men had rum, which cost half a franc a glass—about a penny in English money. Meanwhile Madame was whispering in his ear that the benefactor, the son of a millionaire, spent hundreds of francs in the place most evenings.

The millionaire father was apparently regarded with a mixture of envy and admiration; when the villagers had returned after the armistice, she explained, he had bought for ready cash the sites of many shattered houses as a speculation, hoping that the reparation grants would repay him generously later on. They did, declared the landlord; for the law fixed the reparation payments at four times the attested value of each pre-war house. No other evidence of value was required: you claimed for what you had had, the total was multiplied by four, and no questions asked. Now, added the landlord, the speculator was a millionaire, owning over fifty houses as well as the only butchers’ shops in the place—a flourishing monopoly, buying old cows at four francs a kilo, and selling bifteck at twelve to sixteen francs a kilo!

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.