The Stone Carvers (28 page)
Who knows who or what shattered his indifference, or why, but the last years of the war came to him as a great awakening that let all the horror in, and he dreamed the Great Memorial well before the government competition was announced. He saw the huge twin pillars commemorating those who spoke French and those who spoke English, the allegorical figures with downcast or uplifted faces, and in the valley beneath the work of art, the flesh and bones and blood of the dead stirring in the mud. And then the dead themselves emerged like terrible naked flowers, pleading for a memorial to the disappeared, the vanished ones … those who were unrecognizable and unsung. The ones earth had eaten, as if her appetite were insatiable, as if benign nature had developed a carnal hunger, a yawning mouth, a sinkhole capable of swallowing, forever, one-third of those who had fallen. A messy burial without a funeral, without even a pause in the frantic slaughter.
Who were these boys with their clear eyes and their long bones, their unscarred skin and their educated muscle? How was it possible that they were destined to be soldiers? In what rooms had they stood? In what shafts of sunlight? Prairie grasses quivering beyond the old watery glass of farm windows. Snow falling softly on small uncertain cities, or into the dark lakes of the north. And all the footsteps they left in the white winter of 1914 would be gone by spring. The boys themselves gone the following autumn.
Nothing about the memorial was probable, even possible. Allward wanted white, wanted to recall the snow that fell each year on coast and plains and mountains, the disappeared boys’ names preserved forever, unmelting on a vast territory of stone that was as white as the frozen winter lakes of the country they had left behind. Or he wanted granite, like the granite in the shield of rock that bled down from the north toward the Great Lakes. So sad and unyielding, so terrible and fierce in the face of the farmer.
The memorial was to be built in France, at the site of the great 1917 battle of Vimy Ridge, won with huge losses by the Canadians who had lived for weeks in tunnels they had carved themselves out of the chalky soil before bursting out of these tunnels on April 9 into a hell of mud and shrapnel. It was to stand near Arras, on the crest of Hill 145, looking across the Douai Plain toward the coveted coal fields in the east and what were once lush fields belonging to peasant farmers to the west. After the war the French, in an act of reckless gratitude, had given one hundred hectares of the battleground to Canada in perpetuity, one hundred hectares of landscape that looked like it had been victimized by a terrible disease boiling through the earth’s system to its surface. Almost a century later there would still be territorial restrictions on this land as active mines and grenades would occasionally ignite. And in the tunnels below, helmets and entrenching tools would continue to smoulder in the slow, relentless fire of rust.
Allward had watched the citizens of the provincial capital of Toronto stroll or hurry past his Queen’s Park sculptures of colonial founding fathers without a glance; in fact, he had not once seen a passerby pause to examine the bronze faces of these men who had so successfully imposed Europe’s questionable order on what had been their personal definition of chaos. After the brief ceremonies of installation, these statues in frock coats had become as easy to ignore as trees, fire hydrants, or lampposts. This would not—could not—happen with the memorial. It would be so monumental that, forty miles away, far across the Douai Plain, people would be moved by it, large enough that strong winds would be put off course by it, and perfect enough that it would seem to have been built by a vanished race of brilliant giants.
After he received the commission, Allward moved his family to a studio at Maida Vale in London, England, assuming that from there he would be able to travel easily back and forth to France in order to oversee the engineering of the project. He auditioned models for the figures of defenders, mourners, torchbearers, for the figures of peace and justice, truth and knowledge, often abandoning or substituting these individuals before the plaster models were cast or sometimes later, when he would change his mind throughout the night. He made hundreds of drawings of swords and wreaths, of pylons and of walls, always with the lead of his pencil sharpened like a weapon. In the end it was the imposing front wall of the memorial that obsessed him, the wall that would carry on its surface the names of the eleven thousand no one ever saw again.
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.
W
hen 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.”
“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.