The Passing Bells (68 page)

He took the road to Albert and then on to Arras and over the Vimy Ridge to Bethune. There were still belts of rusted barbed wire to be seen, and here and there the burned-out hull of a tank entombed in a grassy mound that had once been putrid mud. Woods of shell-splintered stumps were growing again. A greenness had crept over the land, a blanket of grass and vine, sapling and leaf, to hide the places where a generation had been butchered.

He was known at the Hotel Gaillard in Hazebrouck as a man who came at least three times a year to stay for a few days. It was not the most popular of towns, Hazebrouck. A place to stop on the road to Dunkerque, or Calais. No more than that. The little town had escaped the shells, but a million soldiers had tramped through its streets on the way from Saint Omer to the front. “
Boots and cannon wheels ground us down
,” the mayor would say as he puttered helplessly in the ruined garden of his hotel, not to mention the vast dumps of shells and mountains of supplies, or the five thousand cavalry horses. The dumps and the horses were gone now, but their imprint remained on a bleak and trampled landscape.

From Hazebrouck the road went north over the slopes of Messines into Belgium and the Great Salient, past tortured earth still rank with rusted iron and death. Past the blasted sites of villages with names that rang like a dirge—Wytschaete and Hollebeke, Langemarck and Passchendaele. The lunar rubble of Ypres.

He had brought flowers, which he placed at the base of her cross, than ran a hand over her name, wiping dust from the black painted lettering. Ivy Thaxton Rilke—of the Imperial Military Nursing Service. Killed at the age of twenty by a shell.

“You knew her, then?”

Martin looked up. An elderly Englishman in well-tailored tweeds stood on the gravel path leaning on his walking stick.

“My wife.”

“Ah,” the man said with a sigh, as though a great mystery had been solved to his satisfaction. “I've passed often and wondered about her. There are so few women reposing here, you know. My sons are down the path a ways. John and Hubert.”

“I'm sorry.”

“It's very lovely here this time of year. The trees are growing wondrously well. Do you come often?”

“Several times a year.”

“Really? Odd that we haven't met before. I try to come over once a month. I live near Dover.”

Martin turned away from the grave and stepped off the wellclipped grass onto the path.

“This is my last visit,” he said. “I realize now that she's gone.”

The Englishman smiled slightly. “Totally, you mean? I've talked to others who feel the same way and no longer come. I can't share that belief. Death is a sleep, Swinburne said. My sons are in slumber.”

No, Martin thought as he walked back to the car, they are dead as Ivy is dead. Not sleep but death. Death, not sweet repose. He had faced the reality of the war and cut the knot that bound him to the past.

He left the wheezing Renault with a friend in Saint Pol-sur-Mer, telling him to keep it, or sell it, and then took the channel steamer from Dunkerque to Folkestone. Standing in the stern of the little ship, he watched the coast of France blend into the sea haze and slowly faded from view. A part of his life fading with it. A moment in time over. Sailing toward another.

He was thirty, a man of average height and sturdy build. His hair was flaxen and parted loosely in the middle. His oval, square-jawed face just missed being handsome—the mouth a trifle too wide; the thin, high-bridged nose a shade too long. His most arresting feature was his eyes, which were blue and merry, a paradox for someone who had seen so much of the world's horrors.

He had a whiskey and soda in the station saloon and then took the 3:15 to London. It was an uncrowded train and there were only two other passengers in the first-class carriage. One of them, an elderly curate, went immediately to sleep, and the other, a large woman wearing a fox fur, sat as far from Martin as possible, as though she smelled the whiskey on his breath. He had forgotten to buy a newspaper, so there was nothing to do other than look out the window or write in his journal. The view was certainly worthwhile. England in June. The North Downs and the Kentish Weald. Soft, patchy sun on fields and woodland. Rain clouds to the east drifting slowly inland from the sea. He had seen England for the first time on just such a day. Both he and the world had changed drastically since that summer in 1914, but the English countryside appeared to have drowsed on, untouched by the past seven years. Heath and common, copse and hedgerows. Sheep, placid in the fields. Children gathering blackberries, waving at the train. But the pastorals of England, like the pastorals of France and Germany, were deceptive. Trees and pastures, gabled towns and thatched villages, implied an innocence and serenity that no longer existed.

“Do you mind if I smoke?”

The woman looked at him and stroked the black-button-eyed head of a silver fox.

“Not an odious cigarette, surely.”

“Cigar,” Martin said. “Havana, and very mild.”

The woman nodded her approval. “I find nothing objectionable about a fine cigar.” She continued to look at him, fondling the tiny, grinning head. “I took you for a German. You have that coloring.”

He managed a polite smile. “I'm an American, of German ancestry.”

“Oh,” the woman said, and looked away.

He took a notebook and pen from his bag, lit a cigar, and settled back in the seat. He began to write in Pitman shorthand, the strokes and curls flowing across the page as fast as he could form his thoughts. . . .

Monday, June 20, 1921. Observations and reflections. By train from Folkestone to London.

How many times, I wonder, have I been on this train and taken a seat by the window and written in a journal? Times beyond count. A milk run in 1915 and '16. The carriage jammed then with men coming back to Blighty on leave. The mud of Flanders still on their boots, that glazed “trench look” in their eyes. Only half believing their luck. Only half believing they were not in fact dead and being transported to hell.

“I took you for a German.” That look of hate before she heard me speak in unbroken English. There had been that look during the war. The cold stare at my civilian clothes. The acid remark: “Been to France on holiday?” The atmosphere always warmed when I told them I was a newspaperman. They were well-informed men. They despised most war correspondents for good reason, but most had read my pieces and appreciated the honesty—even after the censors had chopped out the more unpleasant bits. They had raised reading between the lines to a fine art and knew what I was saying about the war.

“I took you for a German.” The hate runs deep—here and everywhere. “I took you for a Frenchman . . . [the man on the train from Saarbrucken to Berlin, ignoring me coldly because he had heard me speaking French at the station; warming up after our passports were checked before leaving the occupied zone] . . . a damned frog bastard.” We spoke German and I told him I was from Chicago. Second-generation German- American. “I have an uncle in Milwaukee,” the man said. “You Yankee fellows backed the wrong side. You'll find out.”

Who knows? As Jacob Golden used to say, there are no heroes anymore. We are all villains obsessed with the idea of kicking civilization to bits. The only animal on earth who fouls its own nest and makes a virtue out of slaughter.

The man at the cemetery pitied me. The faint smile, the glow in his eyes. The righteous look seen on the faces of the devout when told that one no longer believes in God. But I admit it took all the courage I had to walk away from her grave. It's easier to hang on. To return once a month, or three times a year, and “visit.” I'm sure the man from Dover does just that. He visits, passing the time of day with his dead sons. The woman I saw once by the grave of her husband, seated in a little folding chair. “Talks a blue streak,” the caretaker told me. “Comes across from London twice a year and tells him all the news of the family. They get a bit daft, poor souls.” Hanging on. Blocking the reality of oblivion from the mind. A mere prolonging of pain. Like sawing off a leg with a penknife where one quick swing with a sharp blade would be more humane.

The war itself too painful to comprehend for most people. The statistics just starting to be printed. A million English dead. Twenty-seven percent of all young Frenchmen. God alone knows how many Germans, Russians, Austrians, Italians, Turks, and Serbs. And who can tally the continuing cost of the peace? How many dead from famine? Typhus? Influenza? The figures are meaningless anyway. No one can grasp them. Each digit a person. Ivy—slender, dark-haired, violet-eyed. Naked and loving in our bed. Reduced in importance to a single number on a list. The old man's sons. John and Hubert. Who were they? What did they do? Will we feel their loss? Two more numbers added to the tally sheet. Nine hundred thousand, nine hundred and ninety-seven left to record, to personalize, to focus on a once-living face.

He put notebook and pen on the seat beside him, removed his reading glasses, and wiped them with a handkerchief. Through the window he could see a changing landscape, the greens and golds of the countryside blending into the smoky gray of towns, the blistered fringes of London. He reached for the notebook, and as he picked it up, the letter from Arnold Calthorpe slipped out from between the pages. No answer required, but he had to give it some thought.

CALTHORPE & CROFTS

Publishers

Bloomsbury Square

London

Dear Martin:

I trust this reaches you before you depart from Paris. Both Jeremy and I congratulate you on your new job. Very impressive. I wish your appointment had taken place before we printed the jacket for the book, but that can't be helped.

Martin, as we discussed last year, A Killing Ground is quite likely the best possible book at the worst possible time. First reviews—or rather, lack of them—appear to justify that prediction. Only the most liberal, socialist, or pacifist press has bothered to review it so far—and there aren't many of those left in Britain these days! We are anything but disappointed, as—also agreed between us—making money is not the object. We feel pride in printing it, just as you feel pride in having written it. However, we must face up to the fact that the book may come in for criticism designed to discredit it and you. A “muckraking” charge as example. Give some thought to rebuttal—a thousand words or so on just why you wrote such a savage exposé. Something we could send out as a “letter of publication” to any Tory paper that takes a swipe at you. This need not be done at this moment, while you are so busy and temporarily “uprooted.” After you get settled, drop by the office and we will discuss it.

Sincerely yours,

A. T. Calthorpe

He put the letter back in the notebook, then picked up his pen and began to write.

Regarding Calthorpe. How he thinks I can avoid charges of muckraking is beyond me. It is muckraking in the purest meaning of the term. But then I'm a Chicago boy, a town where muckraking is something of a fine art.

I wrote the book as my own personal catharsis, a way to cleanse my soul of gall. All those months covering the peace conferences at Versailles. Day after day observing the haggling over spoils. The fixing of blame and the establishment of costs—the peacemakers like so many lawyers wrangling over an accident case. And out there, along the old trench line of the western front, lay the dead. No one spoke for them. They were only mentioned as adjuncts to noble phrases—the “glorious dead” . . . “not in vain” . . . “fallen heroes” in “the war to save democracy” or “the war to end all wars.” And there they were in the boneyards, the millions who could just as well have been strangled at birth for all the good they had done to save or end anything.

An observation through the window. Rows of dark brick houses. A factory flanking the railroad line. Men standing in front of locked gates carrying signs: “Not a Penny off the Wage.” No pastorals here. A tiny glimpse of postwar England. Strikes and more strikes with over a million out of work. The pickets look shabby and ill fed. How many of them, I wonder, came back from the war believing Lloyd George's promise that they were returning to “a land fit for heroes?”

And so much for that.

Also By Phillip Rock

The Extraordinary Seaman

The Dead in Guanajuato

Flickers

Circles of Time

A Future Arrived

Credits

Cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa.

Cover image © by Richard Jenkins.

Copyright

Cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa. Cover image © by Richard Jenkins.

This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real.