Common Ground (31 page)

But what could he possibly say? What could he possibly do? The hall so unchanged and him so terribly. So he'd run from its freshly cleaned gate and hand-made sign, from the Huttons and his mother, skirting the edge of Bilton Park and down through Spring Wood, slowing to a walk by the Nidd. It was the track he and Arthur always took when rough shooting in the Christmas holidays. Walking it again had created a flashbulb of memory – they'd talked of the woods shortly before going up the line. At brigade headquarters, while being briefed over maps, he'd stared at the four copses intercut by British trenches. The ‘Gospel Copses' as they were christened – Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
You see those, Thomas?
Arthur had said, clapping him on the back and pulling on his gloves.
It'll be like hunting pheasant in Spring Wood.
Arthur's smile, his fingers working their living way into chestnut leather, his eager, keen-to-get-in-the-fight face. Arthur's
smile
. The woods around him. The whistles of birds. And in so remembering he forgot the game for a minute, the device that had kept such thoughts at bay since the boat over from France laden with the deformed and dying. And then, by the time he remembered, it was too late. Arthur had appeared behind him, clogged in reeking mud. That sucking, sloshing sound wasn't the Nidd lapping the bank any more, it was Arthur trying to speak. The trees were thick suddenly with the stench of him – cordite, shell-soured soil and the iron tang of fresh blood, like an abattoir's yard. Something had brushed his elbow. Not a hazel sapling, but Arthur reaching for his arm. The dead. So many dead. Constituting the earth itself. That was when he'd screamed and scrambled up the bank by the weir, praying his friend couldn't follow, his mind grasping for something else to fix upon. Something to start the game with again. A brick to build the wall.

He looks at the nettle, noting its small, soft, needle-covered leaves, the two topmost ones egg-shaped, pointing up and down, the two beneath left and right.
How long does a nettle live?
‘Indefinitely,' he says aloud.
How long will any of us live?
He fumbles for and sparks a woodbine to try to unclench his jaw, covering the flame and shielding the glow instinctively (that's how they got Banks – first night on the line). A deep drag to fog the mind. The tapping foot.
How long does a nettle live?
Its rhizomes run through this earth, thin yellow roots that, even if dug out, will return. The gardener, Addyman, had told him that.
Pull them out and they'll only come back. Astounding things.
And he'd seen them come back stronger, rising anew from the ground.
Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection into eternal life.
They'd buried as many as they could in the stinking mud behind Touvent Farm. But a fortnight later he'd watched the Germans shell the same ground, blowing the rough crosses and rotting bodies into smithereens.
Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust
. And that unholy smell, like a larder full of hanging meat that somebody forgot to gut.
Think, man, think. Concentrate. How long does a nettle live? Where did it come from? It must have come from somewhere? Think.
Perhaps he should uproot it? Perhaps its roots will reveal its secrets? It was his nettle anyway – he could do with it what he pleased. All this land was his, from the hall to the viaduct, the fine gardens, the woods and fields. He knew every scrap and shred of it. Since his father's death, it had come down to him. The eldest son of Bilton Hall. The only son.
You will come home, Tom
, his mother said, proud, but insistent.
You must come home.
The world beyond the fog twinkling.
But what does any of that mean now?
An old life. This had become the demesne of that shrunken, shrivelled him, hidden away in a drawer. His lands were elsewhere. Now he stands at the edge of this place, far away from its inhabitants, as though dead himself. Demented, frightened and adrift. He looks at his hands and sees Arthur's hands feeling their way into chestnut gloves. ‘I'm sorry, Lizzie; how could I face you like this?' He is speaking aloud again. ‘How could I face any of you? Sorry. I'm sorry. It's best you never know.' And he starts rocking back and forth and humming. The pines and the crying crows gather –
aaah, aaaah, aaaaah
. The birds interrupt each other, yelling out primal, scolding rattles and screams –
ah … ah …
,
ah-ah-ah
and
aaaaaaah
. So many textures to their choirs, far and near, like a field filled with the wounded and the dying. The desperation. The shame of it all. The shame of his life ended at twenty-one. It was Arthur's birthday on 22 June. Nine days before the attack. They'd celebrated together with those two lieutenants from 94 Brigade.
Remember that
?
The whisky. All drunk at the
estaminet;
cigars from the colonel …

Stop it, for Christ's sake. The nettle.
Its square stem disappears into the earth.
Look at it. Clean earth.
He stares.
Yes. It is good earth
.
I might have made something of this once.
A dark brown soil, dotted with insects and pale seeds. Press your ear to it and you hear ocean. And he does. Getting on all fours he hears the soft roar of sea, not shells. He smells it. Cold and pure, like wet wool. And in Bilton's gentle fields, they are turning it up for potatoes.
Potatoes
. Under a September sky moving fast with cloud, three women are wielding forks, turning up sack-full after sack-full; six more are preparing the soil behind them for a winter crop. One thinks she spies something at the wood edge and straightens her back, sweeping her hair into her headscarf –
I swear I saw someone, looked like a soldier rising up and replacing his hat
– later she'll say it must have been a ghost of her Edward, killed at Mons.

They will all be there by now. In the hall, wondering.
Has the train been delayed? Evans, will you call? They say it ran on time, ma'am.
He sinks into the undergrowth, out of sight, and lights another woodbine. The last burned his palm, unsmoked. He doesn't want to, but he knows he must look up. Past the clump of nettles the field rises. It is there. Just at the top. Five hundred yards away.
Serre.
The objective. They are to take it in waves. He can see it plain as day.
It's a fucking fortress
, the soldiers whisper to each other on the firing step.
Stop that.
They are just south of Matthew Copse. An aberration of a wood; nothing left of nature. ‘Do yourselves proud,' the sergeant shouts, pacing behind them, slapping packs.
You are Fifteenth Battalion. You are sons of Leeds. Do your city proud. Do yourselves proud …
But there is nothing left of the men, either. Nothing you'd recognise. They are khaki shapes huddled in the khaki mud. Scared boys. Bags of bones and flesh and organs and emotions, loved to death by factory girls and mothers who, miles away, fill their morning kettles as their flesh and blood counts down the minutes. Waiting. Wide eyes. Far-off shouts. Close shouts. Ears ringing now they've blown the Hawthorn mine (heard on Hampstead Heath, he'd find out from Lizzie's letters). A rumour whistles down the line. Rumours.
Dugouts thirty foot underground
,
steel-fucking-lined.
And he knows they aren't wrong. He saw for himself the night before through the trench periscope beside a worried Captain Haley. The false ‘V' shapes in the untouched tangles of wires; barbs as big as nails.
Damn it, Watson
, Haley whispered. The shells had cut nothing.
Lucky if we even reach the wire. Pray God that we reach the wire.
He'd resisted the questions under his tongue:
Why are we doing this, sir? What for? Who for? 7:25 a.m.
Surely his watch had stopped.
How long?
he shouts to Arthur, who is waiting with his section.
Five minutes.
Then,
Good luck, Tom. Good luck.
But still they hold as the smokescreen starts, falters and fails. The crack and rumble echoes along the front. Trench mortars. Grey sky. The dead land. It feels unutterably wrong. Unutterably unnatural. They will never reach the wire. Arthur's thin smile. The whistle at his lips.

For God's sake. Look at the nettle.

The nettle. The nettle. How long does a nettle live? A hundred years? No, more than that.
How did he not see before? How could he never see before how perfect and quiet and sublime nature is? He will never uproot another thing – he promises it. Out loud.
The nettle
. He looks at this autumn resurrection of an ancient seed and feels sure it was first carried to this spot in the mudded hoof of a horse. Then the horse appears and he watches it plodding up an old Civil War track that once ran through the wood to the Skipton Road. On the mare's back –
who is that?
Charles I bound and pale, roughly handed over by the Scots and now being escorted from Ripon to Leeds, before his long march to Newmarket. The horse stumbles. Mud and seed are shocked from its shoe. The ground accepts them. The nettle grows and dies and grows and dies for 270 years. Centuries reel past before his eyes.
In sure and certain hope of the Resurrection into eternal life. Could this be real? Is anything real?
He can trust nothing that appears out of the white fog that has been his vision since that morning. The way the soldiers look at him – they must know it too.
You will show character, Lieutenant, or I'll see you on a charge.
The colonel was firm.
Your men need to see some damn fortitude.
What men?
Drink if you have to.
And he'd tried. But then Arthur started appearing from the fog. Arthur as he last saw him. An unbearable vision even drink won't drown.

‘You're quite mad,' he says to himself aloud.

The nettle. Think of the nettle. Concentrate. Uro –
he dredges Latin learned at Ampleforth
– to burn.
A million little nails on its leaves. The woodbine, again unsmoked, burns his palm and he drops it, and then stares at the circle of shiny, scorched skin it has left.
The nails on the wire. They put nails through his hands and feet. First comes crucifixion then resurrection.
‘Christ, they crucified us, Arthur,' he says suddenly. All the sons of Leeds that went into that earth. Not a street unscarred from Hunslet to Headingley; not a road of back-to-backs spared. They say the whole city wailed the night the telegrams came. In Bradford too and all across Lancashire. Hooded houses crying through drowsy, blind-drawn eyes. And no son has risen since. Just more and more thickened, sickened, injured skins in every town. New states of existence. New shades of dark. Neither death nor life. The nail through the hand that can't be removed.

He frowns. Somewhere back in the memory – something joyous – there was a nail. Here.
A tree. And Lizzie.
He looks along the edge of the wood.
There!
The ash is only fifty yards away. They'd hammered it there together, a nail low into its trunk, the night before leaving for training huts in Colsterdale, before Alexandria. A kiss, too, down the gully. A fumble above her stockings. Her hair, blond and curled, and her neck that smelled always of lavender. His lip behind her ear. She was everything good in that old world. Such a short time together; little did he know how quickly time would pass. He remembers it all – a day of leave on 24 September 1914. The party at the hall.
The nail.
He wants to see it again but
when did the light change?
He is scared to move.
Their snipers watch for movement.
Dusk has begun to pink Bilton's fields. They must be worried now. Fires lit in the grates. All gathered. Elizabeth's silent tears. Mother's stoicism; the vicar holding her hand.
He will be doing his duty, Evelyn. His duty. He won't want to leave his men.
What men?
Of course, you're right. Evans, will you take the sign down? And tell the maids we'll have the beef cold.
The blackness is on the horizon. He wants to touch the nail, to touch Elizabeth again, but he's afraid.
You don't need to be afraid, Thomas
.
We'll sign up together. Father says we should. It'll make men of us. There's a jolly tram decked in flags in the centre of Leeds. It's our duty, Thomas.
Arthur's thin smile.

You've forgotten the game again.

Arthur has the whistle in his lips.
Time to go. Good luck, Tom. Good luck. 7:29 a.m
. The grey sky and the dead land. The crack and far-off crack of stray fire. Then deafening, shattering concussions everywhere. Impacts that shock and throw. Captain Haley with his chest blown wide open, blinking and bemused as if merely caught in an unfortunate mix-up with a reservation at his club. The earth bucking in waves, folding in on them the same way brown storm waves smash over the sea wall at Scarborough. The German artillery untouched. Their wire untouched.
Pray God we reach the wire. We will never reach the wire.
Boys swallowed whole by the earth; shelled before they can even leave the trench. How many? Two hundred, three hundred? Count each of them on your fingers. Each one loved.
Out, out. Get up and out, for fuck's—
The sergeant sliced in half. The whistle of the shells. Cordite filling the throat and lungs. The rain of blood and damaged, rancid soil.
Out, out.
The scared khaki shapes scurrying into death, wide-eyed and teeth gritted. Flesh and blood crumpling, as if winded, or bursting apart. And the scream of the shells. The screams of the wounded men. The screams of mothers' kettles boiling on stoves from Hunslet to Headingley.
Out, out. Up and over.
The scream of the whistle still shrilling between his teeth as he runs through the
zip-zip
and hailstorm of burning mud. And ahead, Arthur, on his knees.
Arthur! Arthur! Get up!
But his whole jaw is shot off. He is fumbling, feeling the mess of fractured bone and flesh where his face used to be. Unutterably wrong. Unutterably unnatural.
How silly! How silly you look now in that smart uniform and tie. How silly
.
How silly all of this is.
Then he is gone completely. Shell and soil dissolve him into a black cloud; they reduce his kneeling form to nothing.
Dust. Ash. Earth. Mist.
And Thomas, hurled back through the air, watches the lines of
zip-zip
over his face like bees in the meadow in summer. The white fog forming over his eyes. ‘And do you know what I thought when I was lying there?' he asks, out loud, for he is aware Arthur has appeared again behind him in the treeline, clogged and reeking, rasping and sucking. ‘I thought,
Thank God the shell got you
.'