Helen Humphreys Three-Book Bundle (31 page)

How Harriet envied the women who knelt in prayer in that small cemetery, weeping at the graves of their husbands. How she envied their laying of flowers on the graves, the way they ran their hands over the contours of the crosses. One woman laid her forehead against the top of her husband’s marker, the way Harriet remembers Owen laying his forehead against hers. Harriet had to turn away at that.

Now, she huddles in a corner where two ruined stone walls meet. “Owen,” she says out loud, just to hear his name here. “Owen.”

She is past tears. She is past believing in his safe return. She is past love. She says his name into the falling rain, rubs the back of her knuckles against the stones until they bleed, and then she feels stupid and stops.

They are to stay the night in Ypres, in one of the small hotels that have sprung up to support the tourists who pour into the city. This afternoon they are to visit some of the remaining trenches and the wooded area where the soldiers would wait to be reunited with their regiment if they had become separated from it.

Harriet could never have imagined this much destruction. It seems unreal. She thinks of all those days and nights when she foolishly believed that Owen was still alive. Being here now, she knows absolutely that he is dead.

He is everywhere. He is nowhere. The blood on her knuckles is the brightest thing in this landscape. His name tastes like smoke in her mouth.

Owen had time to write Harriet only one letter before he was
missing, believed killed.
Before that letter she had received a regulation postcard. The postcard had lines already written on it that the soldier was supposed to cross out if they didn’t apply to him. The lines that Owen had crossed out sent a chill through Harriet when she received the card.

I have been admitted into hospital.

I am sick and am going on well.

I am wounded and hope to be discharged soon.

I have received no letter from you for a long time.

What he left as his message was the simple and entirely banal
I am quite well. Letter follows at first opportunity.

The letter, when it came, a mere week before the telegram arrived, was surprisingly vivid. Harriet had never known Owen to be much of a talker, let alone much of a writer, and she felt both comforted and alarmed by his letter. She was grateful that he hadn’t tried to spare her his experience by engaging in reminiscences of their life together, or inquiries into how she was getting on at home. He still wanted to offer himself to her, even if just with words—and for this she was glad. But the man who wrote this letter to her was also not a man she felt she knew, and it alarmed her to think how much there still was to learn about her husband.

Harriet has brought Owen’s letter with her to Ypres. But she has read it so many times that, even standing in the mud-filled trench, she can bring it back word for word.

Dearest Harriet,

Well, I’m writing from the trenches within hearing distance of the Germans; they are in fact only 25 yards away. It is daylight and a beautiful day and I’ve just had a good sleep in a sort of covered hole. There is nothing but sandbags all around, and a crater nearby full of dead matter. Yes, the stink is awful and the Germans have a nasty habit of stirring the bowl and keeping it good and fresh. However, in spite of all this, I feel unaccountably happy.

The Germans tried to bomb us out last night, but of course failed. This is the second time in this trench that I have helped to repulse the raiding enemy.

I’m now writing under candlelight in a foul-smelling dug-out which is fairly safe from shellfire. It must be at least 11 p.m. and my turn for guard comes at 12, for we only sleep by day.

Whatever happens, you must not believe that the Germans are worse than us. The regiments who opposed us just recently in Ypres were as human as could be to our wounded, even more so than we were to them. One fellow, having been wounded in the head during the night fighting lost his way, and hardly having the strength to stand, made for the nearest trench, or what was left of it. Just before he was about to jump in, he saw Huns crouching beneath him, and believing himself undetected, was about to turn back, when one of the Germans, seeing his wound in the head, immediately spoke in English and comforted him. The wounded man, feeling so weak, accepted and allowed himself to be helped into the trench. Then the German undid his cup and gave him water, laid him down and sacrificed his coat. Soon afterwards the Germans evacuated this section, and when this man came to, he saw British soldiers carrying him out on a stretcher. As soon as he could he told his benefactors the story and showed them the cup that the German had allowed him to keep. I saw this mug. Many of our wounded have been found covered with coats.

On the other hand, it is a recognized fact by both sides that when charging, enemy wounded left in the rear are killed to prevent any chances of their sniping.

The morrow morning: I am writing in a ruined church, on an improvised table, and I am facing what was once a garden. The sun is shining, the sky is blue, and a cooling breeze is blowing into my face. What a difference, what a contrast to the stagnant fire-swept, shell-torn battlefield, where all a man can do is to hug the earth and rot in dirty holes, and to inhale the filthy thick air.

The letter ends there, in the middle of the page. Owen has hastily scrawled a line of
x
’s and
o
’s for hugs and kisses, signed
Love,
and then written his name. Because the letter was completed over the course of three days, Harriet knows it was a struggle to write.

Harriet had never known him to write so beautifully. Early on in their courtship he had written her a few letters, but they were all of the
I can’t wait to see you
variety—short, impatient declarations. This letter, even though it had taken three days to write, felt as though Owen had spent time with the words, had been careful in a way Harriet had not expected of him.

Harriet thinks how that letter has both stopped her from hating the Germans and has given her a small taste of the man she was just beginning to know, how because there is no body to grieve, it is the last thing she will ever have of her husband—those words on that page.

Sanctuary Wood is a torn piece of earth with a few upright dead trees, standing like burned matchsticks in the dirt. It is impossible to imagine that it was once a wood filled with flowers and birds and that particular kind of light that sifts down through the leaves overhead. In the early days of the war, it had offered a brief respite from the fighting to the men who had become lost in the maze of muddy trenches and had climbed out, retreated back to the wood, and waited there to reunite with their regiments.

“It wouldn’t have been a wood for very long,” says the woman beside Harriet as they walk between the blackened trees. “For most of the war, it would have looked like this.”

Harriet wonders if Owen was ever in the wood. She had thought, on the journey across the Channel, on the journey into Ypres, that she should try to find the church where he had penned the last fragment of his letter. She hadn’t antici pated the utter devastation of the city.

“Do you know where your husband died?” she asks the woman.

“Brother,” says the woman. “My younger brother, Robert. And no, I don’t know where he died. He is missing.”

Believed killed,
thinks Harriet. They move out of the trees, look across to the rest of the group gathered near the trenches. The rain is still falling. Harriet can feel it creeping over her skin under her clothes. “What was he like?” she asks. “Your brother.”

The woman turns and looks at Harriet. She’s wearing a mackintosh pulled up almost to her ears. Her hair is limp and stuck to her skull. Harriet can see the muddy hem of her black dress at the bottom edge of the mackintosh. It looks like the same black dress she herself is wearing.

“He was a lot of fun,” the woman says. “Always up for a lark. He made me laugh. And your…?”

“Husband,” says Harriet.

What can she say about Owen now? It feels to Harriet as though she never knew him, he has slipped so far out of reach despite all her efforts to hang on to him. Even though she keeps a photograph of their wedding day beside her bed, she can’t remember his smile, or the look in his eyes when he laughed, or the sound of his voice. She knows he liked bicycles, but that seems a ridiculous thing to say. He’s been missing for so long now that all she can really be sure of is what he meant to her.

For all her efforts Harriet can’t really remember Owen very well. His memory has been worn thin from use, like a patch of cloth rubbed too vigorously and too often. She has her ideas of him and of their happiness, but at this point the reality of him has been subsumed into her own need to remember him in a certain way. In real life he would never have bent to her will, but now that he’s dead she can do whatever she chooses with him. This knowledge sickens her, but she is also powerless against it.

She turns away from the woman without answering her question and moves out of Sanctuary Wood to rejoin the rest of the tour group.

That night in the hotel, Harriet can’t sleep. She lies fully clothed on the narrow guest-house bed, listening to the women crying through the thin walls that separate the various rooms. The high-pitched murmuring sounds like birds in the trees.

She is thinking of the mud dragging her feet to ground, of the black trees, sharp as spears, standing upright in the small patch of earth that had once been a wood.

She gets up, lights a candle, and carries it over to the chair by the fireplace. There are a few books on the mantel. She trails a finger over their spines.

She puts the candle holder on the floor, gets down on her hands and knees in front of the fireplace. She tries to pray, but the words have left her. The fire has only recently gone out. She puts her hand into the grate and pulls out a warm half-burned lump of coal. She makes a mark with it on her arm, then another on the tiles around the fireplace.

Harriet gets up and goes into the hallway. People have put pieces of cardboard by the doors to their rooms for the muddy boots. She carefully lifts her boots off the cardboard, and carries it back into the room. She gets down, once again, on the floor by the hearth and turns over the cardboard. She picks up the piece of coal and begins to draw.

Later, much later, when she is back home in England, she will write what will become the first of what she comes to call her
descriptions.

For hours, for no reason that I could imagine, I drew black swans. Hunched over a piece of cardboard on the floor of the hotel room, the coal softening to dust on this surface beneath me.

What I wanted was the simple pleasure of seeing you again. But you didn’t come, couldn’t come. I don’t know how to make you return to me.

But I did come to know the black swan. I knew the long snake flex of its neck, knew that the shape of the body was a leaf, a wing, an open hand, the human heart. I fastened these images to paper, called them swan. And then I rose, black dust dripping from my hands, my arms spread empty to the empty sky, as I walked out through broken streets feathered with shadow—darkness lifting me home.

H
arriet Marsh is certain of very few things. As she washes the front hall of her building, she takes an inventory. She used to believe in love, but she has worn that down to nothing. Every time she visits the memory of Owen it is foggier, farther away. She used to believe her writing was a way to stay connected to her dead husband, but years of typing up her descriptions after work in the cold offices of Bartlett’s Coal Merchants have left her emptied out of feeling. She is tired of trying to hammer a moment shut with words. All she has left is the outdoors, and most days this is a noon-hour head-down tromp through the muddy farmers’ fields that surround Coventry, where she tries desperately to be moved by a single dog rose or the flower of the black-thorn hedge.

Nothing holds its truth for long enough. Home leaves us, not the other way around, she thinks. And what are we meant to do when we come to know that?

Harriet is disappointed by the new war but not devastated by it. She won’t suffer as she suffered in the first war. This war does not have the power to do that to her. She sullenly capitulates to the rationing, doesn’t mind eating the horse meat—although the yellow fat that rivers through it is disgusting. She has even eaten the new meat product called snook, which is a rather horrifying cross between Spam, corned beef, and rubber. It has a grey appearance and smells like fish gone off.

Harriet endures the talk of raids and bombardments, listens to Wendell Mumby’s endless fantasies of saving the entire nation single-handedly from enemy capture. She has sewn blackout curtains for the flats in her building, painted her bicycle black, helped her neighbours dig a three-foot pit in their back garden for an Anderson bomb shelter. As if that would save them.

But this war, although not equipped to cause emotional pain to Harriet, is more dangerous to her physical well-being. The Germans are intent on flattening London and other major British cities. Having recently conquered Holland, they can use airbases there and in France to fly back and forth across the Channel, carrying their deadly cargo of bombs. Since September 7, there have been bombing raids against London for fifty-seven consecutive nights. Churchill, instead of being persuaded by these attacks to negotiate peace, has appealed to the British public to stand firm against the onslaught. Everyone is trying to be courageous. The most common thing Harriet sees in the boarded-up shop windows is the hastily scrawled sign
Business as usual.

The RAF is countering with raids against Berlin and other German cities, but it is no match yet for the steady wave of German bombers. The RAF targets are too far inland. The most it can hope for, at this point, is to engage with the enemy planes over the Channel, when the Luftwaffe is on its way to bomb England.