It Was the Nightingale (10 page)

“Oh yes, I can face it, Irene. You are right, of course. But I did feel no real confidence in the doctor, who forgot to tell me, two
years ago, for weeks, that I was clear of tubercle. He also diagnosed a rupture as the pains of food poisoning, and gave a local farmer castor oil, which might have led to a broken intestine.”

“Did it?”

“Well, no; I was only told that.”

“Ah, village tales, P.M.! But to return to the idea of guilt. It is as bad, sometimes, to blame oneself as it is to blame others. Why, I could so easily blame myself because I wasn’t with Barley that night. I would have been, but for a wretched tummy upset. No; one must not assume
entire
responsibility when life and death are matters for God to decide! Why, you could blame yourself for living in the heart of the country, and not in London, where she might have had better treatment! On the other hand, it might have made no difference. No, P.M., don’t spoil your life by thinking about such things. If there was any blame, it might be attached to that midwife, for going straight to bed and not taking the baby and the cot into her room with her. But again, if she had done so, Barley would not have had the wonderful pleasure of holding her mite in her arms!” and Irene cried again, and it was his turn to comfort her.

He could not rest there, he must go, walk again upon the battlefields, see once more those places which one day must be recreated as a monument to his friends in the war. The train returned him to Bordeaux, where he dined alone in an empty restaurant, and it was while waiting for the Paris train that realisation of his loss struck him again with such anguish that he hardly knew how to contain his feelings as he walked up and down the station platform without rest until the train from Madrid rolled in under its steaming furnace glare. Having put his pack and staff in one corner of a carriage, he walked up and down again until the express was due to leave.

A small bearded peasant and his wife had taken his seat, after putting his things upon the floor; they sat there impassively; it did not matter; he could lie down upon the floor of the corridor and feel not so alone with the feet of French
matelots
on leave from Bordeaux stepping over his body most of the night.

From Paris he took a slow train to Arras, to seek upon the battlefields the friends of his youth.

In the village of Roclincourt in Artois there lived a widow woman who kept a new
estaminet
worth 85,000 francs. With pride she told her English guest the value of her new house as she showed him up the stairs of bare poplar boards to his bedroom. He stayed in her home during several nights, after wandering about by himself during most of the daytime.

It was gracious weather, with white cumulus clouds moving high under the blue sky. Cuckoos were calling, larks sang everywhere above the cornfields. He carried a map, the names of which were familiar; but when he came to any of the named places he found a strangeness which induced a sort of momentary helplessness: they were of a different world: for he had known them only in war.

The hamlet of Roclincourt was a few miles from Arras, on a slope leading north to the villages of Farbus and Vimy. He was glad to be quiet, to walk about slowly in the sunshine which sustained his thoughts as he tried to get himself together.

The wheat in the wide fields was beginning to tiller, and the silky reams of the wind moved across the plants from the south and west. One morning he strolled up the long and gradual slope to the northern sky, recalling the story told to him by Colonel Vallum of his Regiment, of Sir Douglas Haig coming from Advanced Third Army Headquarters to Arras on the tenth of April, 1917, and stepping out of his black Rolls-Royce motorcar with the small Union Jack fluttering on the radiator, to ask,
But
where
is
the
Vimy
Ridge?

Well, where
was
the Vimy Ridge? Looking east from the Maison Blanche no obvious slope was visible; but when he had walked up the long way to the crest, and was standing on one of the cracked roofs of the reinforced concrete German gun-shelters at the edge
of Farbus Wood, immediately there was a view over hundreds of square miles of flat country to the north, where the smoke of industrial towns dissolved the far horizon. Below in the foreground was the wide, sprawling, brick-redness of Lens rebuilt.

Through miles of green plain below, the trench pattern of the northern spur of the Siegfried Stellung was visible in blurred lines of chalky subsoil spread amidst the brown and reclaimed top-soil of the fields.

After wandering among the concrete shelters of the German gun-pits along the edge of the wood, trying to visualise scenes of those far-off days but seeing only a remote face or two, like transfers upon the air, he thought to descend the reverse slope of the Ridge down to Vimy village for some wine, bread, and cheese. With the sensation of remoteness from life still upon him, coupled with a vague resentment of the present, he entered an
estaminet
and had an omelette there with a bottle of red wine that was more an act of communion with his friends of the war than a refreshment. Afterwards he pottered about, looking at old concrete pill-boxes and touching rusty strands of barbed wire.

In one grassy field, revealing its war history by the gentlest undulations where shell-holes had been filled in, the land resown with rye-grass and clover, a bull was grazing beside a cow. They grazed quietly and happily nose by nose, less than a yard behind the wire fence at the edge of the sunken road. He stood and watched how their tongues caught and pulled the succulent young grasses. Their noses were apart only by the width of their horns. How content they were! The feeling from those tranquil beasts gave him for a few hours an acceptance of life that was serene behind his fatigue and sadness; but with the sun descending he hurried back to the widow’s house as to sanctuary.

His room was bare as before; but in the kitchen there was a warmth and a comforting friendliness. The old woman was wise, gentle and quiet. She was looking after two English gardeners of the local cemeteries, and had done so since the
estaminet
had been rebuilt. There was a gramophone; and newspapers from England arrived regularly. They had their meals in another room, while he ate in the kitchen, at the table that was scrubbed every day and allowed to dry before the new American cloth was relaid upon it.

There was only one picture in the kitchen: the portrait, enlarged
from a snapshot, of the widow woman’s only son, a soldier who had fallen at Verdun. Thin-faced, with fixed eyes and slight dark moustache, his image stared blankly from the wall. The mother was proud of her fine new house with its electric light and central heating (not used yet, for economy), and of her shining cooking range, porcelain and enamel with a pleasing design of pale blue birds and pink flowers; but sometimes when she was telling him how
jolie
was her house her eyes lost their shine and her sight became unfocused; her voice faltered to silence, and he knew that she too was lost in her world of wraiths and phantoms.

She was suspended in time, until the voices of the English gardeners calling “Ma” in the other room gave her new life, and she shuffled to them swiftly, with food or wine or coffee; her eyes shone, and she smiled as she watched them, and when she returned to the kitchen again, he could see that she had gained vitality once more to feel proud of her fine new house.

After supper the gardeners came into the kitchen for their evening dance; together they revolved solemnly to the tune of
If
You
were
the
Only
Girl
in
the
World;
then for a change it was
K-K-K-Katie,
Beautiful
Katie.
There were other records of tunes and foxtrots popular in the war, but those were the favourites. The old woman and her small grand-daughter looked on happily, with a neighbour who had come in for a chat.

The widow was a short, red-faced motherly little old person. She cleaned her poplar floors every day on her knees. Her rooms held little furniture. The bedroom he slept in had a chair, a bed of fumed oak, and a pail. She told him she was awaiting
dommage
de
guerre
for the rest of her furniture. That, she hoped, would be fumed oak,
très
belle
! He thought that the new house replaced what before the war had probably been a small pisé-and-thatch
buvette.

The gardeners told him they were working just off the Arras-Béthune road, not far from La Maison Blanche. This, explained one, had been the site of the Canadian Headquarter dugouts during the battle of Arras in April, 1917. The information excited him: in a series of caverns deep in the chalk, the generals had waited while the barrage fire rolled up to the crest of Vimy and turned the sleet into steam on that morning of April the ninth, eight years before.

“We’re working just now in the British cemetery near there,” said one.

“That’s right,” said the other. “You’ll find us if you walk up the road past the Labyrinthe to La Targette.”

“That’s right,” added his chum. “You can’t miss it, it lies below the German Concentration Graveyard above the Labyrinthe. It looks at its best just now.”

The German Concentration Graveyard! So this was where Willie had worked, this the place he had written about in the article which Bloom, in the
Weekly
Courier
days, had liked, but not published!

“I’m glad they’re looking after them!” he exclaimed, feeling happiness coming over him. “I remember that the German cemeteries always looked very neat and well-tended during the war. So they’ve planted flowers! Good!”

“I meant it’s our little lot, at La Targette, that looks lovely just now.”

“Then the German Concentration Graveyard is still as it was?”

“That’s right.”

Consulting his map, he planned to walk farther that day than La Targette—to Neuville St. Vaast, and beyond. He was specially eager to see the Labyrinthe because it was the scene of some of the fighting described in
Le
Feu,
a book which Uncle John had given him with others which had belonged to Willie. Henri Barbusse had put the truth into words, even as he was determined to do, one day.

“Have either of you two chaps read Barbusse?”

The gardeners, both old infantry soldiers, shook their heads. He began to tell them that the French, both white and Colonial troops, had attacked there in blue coats and red trousers, to perish in far greater numbers than the Germans. It was one of the field-fortifications which had to be taken before the assault on the Vimy Ridge was possible. His words aroused no response in the gardeners; the one continued to wind up the gramophone, while the other waited to put the needle in the outer groove of the record.

Apparently he had interrupted a ritual: they seemed to share every action, on the principle of fair-do’s all round. Perhaps the one had been winding up the gramophone, the other putting in the needles, for years.

The next morning after breakfast he walked down the road to the Labyrinthe. Arriving there with mounting excitement, longing, and apprehension, he stood in the road below the front
position of the field-work, possessed by the feelings of those who once had waited there white-faced, cold, and trembling, to advance into certain death. For it had been a field-work of immense strength, he could see, commanding the Arras-Béthune road. The redoubt, still visible in outline as star-shaped, sloped almost imperceptibly to the eastern horizon. Here wave after wave, in attack after attack by troops from Morocco, wearing the fez—a fragment of red cloth was visible in the grass—had gone forward with French soldiers wearing the
kepi
—straight into the mort-blast of machine-guns hidden under steel and concrete cupolas, some to hang upon the barbed wire until all were shredded to rags fluttering above bone-heaps, wandered over by ants, all to be forgotten in wild grasses by 1916.

Here, out of the massed bloody sweat of a generation the truth had arisen: here, out of the shock of the colossal and prolonged cruelty played with shell, bullet, bayonet and bomb had arisen that flower of the human spirit, a poet upon the battlefield—Barbusse!

Upheld by thoughts of the poet’s courage he returned to the road. As he ascended to the crest he perceived abruptly and with dismay a black horizon rising before him. Here the French had concentrated the German dead, upon the position of the invaders’ main fortress. Here Willie’s footsteps had passed, here his shadow had fallen upon the dusty road—so soon to be lost to the sun, beyond the darkness of death.

Phillip stood still with eyes closed; then, with a sigh, looked about him.

Elsewhere the white subsoil of chalk thrown up by shovel and bombardment had been scattered and plowed under, or in unreclaimed places allowed to cover itself with grass; but on the Labyrinthe the chalk sub-soil had been laid deeply upon the surface in order to create a white wilderness. Yet even the effects of a wide and startling expanse of chalk shone upon by the sun was darkened, as Willie had written in his article, by the massed effect of scores of thousands of tall black crosses, acre after acre of blackness standing under the summer sky; and not even one poppy or charlock growing there.

What ferocious mind had ordered such a revenge on the living, he cried to himself. It could not have been the idea of any man whose body had been used against its will as part of the businessmen’s
war. Here was hate; here was the crystallized mentality of a declining European civilization: here was the frustration of love that was the Great War. Even the light of the open day was made sinister there: old agonies dimmed the noonday sun.

While he sat by the roadside watching a bumblebee bending a yellow flower of hawkbit, he had a chance to observe the effect upon a German parent, arriving for the first time to seek the place where her little child—for that was how a mother would remember him—was buried. A motor-car stopped on the road below and a woman got out and walked alone through the gates. So cousin Willie had watched a German mother ‘beginning a search in the immense silence of charred human hopes’.

She stopped, helpless and appalled, before walking on with lowered head, and pausing to gather her thoughts together, before beginning her search. He got up and went to her. “May I help you, madam?”

“Ach, thank you, thank you, monsieur! My son Carl Kemnitzer—where is he?”

Obviously she had taken him for an official: she produced a card, with her son’s particulars. How not to disappoint her? He could not think what to say—waiting there unmoving—until, remembering the war-time inscriptions on German graves he said, “Your son Carl rests with God, m’am.”

She looked into his face, hesitated, and wept. He took her hand, and pressed it. Soon they were smiling, almost cheerful.
Nein
bitte,
no thank you, she must search for her son alone, she was happy now. He saluted her, and walked on up the road much relieved in spirit, thinking that there must be no more nations, only Europeans, for all mankind was one species upon the earth.

He arrived at La Targette, where the British and French cemeteries lay side by side. There he found the two gardeners working, using little hoes among the plants, kneeling to their work. The spirit arising from the gardens further clarified his mind, for it was of calm loving-kindness. Truly that was God. Flowers which grew in English gardens were to be seen there, some in bloom—columbine, pansy, sweet william, wallflower and campanula.

He looked in the book placed in a green box on a post, for the signatures and remarks of visitors. Many Canadians, Scots and English folk had written their thoughts of the cemetery; the phrase
nice
and
beautiful
recurred often. The simple head-stones, each
carved with a badge and a name, were clean, and the lawns around them weeded and mown. Here was no hate; only the clarity that was love.

Beyond a plashed hawthorn hedge was the French cemetery. Here the white crosses were scrolled with the tricolour, spaced wider; blue, red and white. He felt that the spirits of the slain could breathe here; or rather, the spirit of the living found an easier place for its hopes than in that place up there, the Labyrinthe …

He went on, turning through Neuville St. Vaast and beyond, where the terrain was left wild and desolate. Rank grasses covered the old trenches and the concrete shelters. Willows waved on the ancient parapets, thrice the height of the howitzers which their parent-withies might have helped to camouflage. Reeds had sprung out of old shell-holes stagnating with a brown scum, whence arose the percussive mutter of many frogs.