The Children's Book (98 page)

“So does mine. So do they all.”

And indeed, their letters turned out to be identical, with the same phrases of admiration, affection, for their boy, of sorrow and regret for his death.

“Go and talk to him,” Olive said to Marian.

Marian stood outside the study door. From inside came sounds of sobbing. Marian tried the door, which was locked.

Harry Wellwood was twenty in 1915. His reaction to Robin’s death was to say that he must join up. Olive, who had not wept for Tom, who had not wept for Robin, suddenly began to weep with extraordinary violence. She repeated two words. “No” and “Why?” Over and over. Harry, a gentle creature, scholarly and, since Tom’s death, rather silent, said that everyone was joining up, he felt horrid sitting at home. Humphry, who had gathered himself together enough to go back to writing articles on the conduct and misconduct of the war, gave his son some figures. British casualties were so great that it seemed likely that conscription would be introduced, probably early in 1916. Harry would have to go then. He could wait. “Your mother needs you,” he said, looking at Olive’s wet, mottled red face. Harry did not reply “My country needs me,” though the Kitchener posters were everywhere. He said “People look at me. People who have lost their sons. It doesn’t feel
right
to stay here and be comfortable.” Humphry said almost viciously that winning the war would solve none of the political problems of Europe and thousands and tens of thousands had already given their lives for no advantage. Harry said “There are no men my age in the village or in the town. I need to join.” Humphry said “There are no individuals. There
are just herds and flocks. It takes courage not to run with the herd.” Harry smiled icily. “More courage than I’ve got.”

He joined up. In 1916 he was sent, with the fresh conscripts and the middle-aged reservists, with the British Third Army to the hills and woods and pretty villages of the Somme. It was calm there. They were known as the Deathless Army. Harry practised his French, and once, in Albert, collecting provisions, he ran into Julian Cain, who was in the trenches opposite Thiepval. He told Julian that the Robins were dead—“killed instantly, within two days of each other,” he said. Julian smiled benignly. “Keep an eye out, young Hal,” he said. He did not say, though they all knew it, that they were building up to an important attack. They were constructing railroads and communication trenches, with good revetments and duckboards to walk on. They were practising communication by field telephone and signals. They were exercising their bodies, to make them hard and healthy. They would flow out of the trenches, over No Man’s Land, and take the Germans by surprise, driving them back, and then there would be real warfare again, with marching and galloping armies, charges and feints and acts of courage, the generals believed.

Julian had taken to writing poetry. It was not poetry of despair, nor yet—not yet—savage poetry of anger. It was not poetry about the glorious hour, the glorious dead, and the high calling, either of perfect gallantry or of bugles and fifes. It was poetry about trench names, which in themselves were poetry.

Harry’s battalion was part of III Corps which, in the small hours of July 1st got ready to attack. The British bombardment of the German positions in the villages of Ovillers and La Boisselle had been loud and heavy. The plan was to make a breakthrough in the German defences through which the Cavalry would sweep forward. The gunners of III Corps were cautious about their wire-cutting. They could not cut distant wire, and had not enough ammunition to be sure of cutting what was nearer. Nevertheless, before the attack, the artillery gave up on the wire, and began shelling more distant Germans, which was part of their plan to make way for the Cavalry. Nevertheless the
brigades moved forwards. Between the two villages ran Mash Valley, which was No Man’s Land. It was wide. It was eighty yards wide. A mine which was intended to bury the Germans in their dugouts and confuse their response to the attack had been discovered by the Germans, and the miners captured.

Harry waited. He was standing next to an old corporal, Corporal Crowe. Harry thought in bursts, and between the bursts was numb and placid, as though nothing was real. He did not think about the King or the Flag though he did briefly think of the quiet North Downs. He thought: I am young and full of life. His teeth chattered. Corporal Crowe patted his shoulder, which he did not like, and said everyone was frit, no exception. Very brave men, he said, had filled their trousers, a miserable thought which had not occurred to Harry and added to his alarm. I am young and full of life. I have a gun and a knife and must fight. Corporal Crowe handed him a water bottle which turned out to be full of rum, and told him to take a swig. Harry didn’t like rum. It upset his stomach. But he drank quite a lot, and felt vaguer, and giddier, and sick.

They were told to advance. The German shelling was precise. Hundreds of men died behind their own front line, or struggled back to the medical post. Harry got out of the trench in one piece and so did Corporal Crowe. They started to walk forward towards the black stumps of a wood on the skyline. There was noise. Not only shells and bullets, whistling and exploding, but men screaming. They stumbled over the dead and wounded, over men, and pieces of men, and were reduced to crawling, so mashed and messed was the earth and the flesh mashed into it. After a brief time, Harry felt a thump, and found his tunic damp, and then soaked, with his blood. He tried to crawl on, and could not, and other men crawled past him and sprawled in the mud. He bled. He lay still. He knew in the abstract that stomach wounds were nasty. His head churned. He wished he had not had the rum. He wished he could die quickly. He did not. Men crawled round and over him and he came in and out of consciousness. He noticed when there were no more men, and he noticed nightfall, unless the dark was death. It was not. But he was dead by the time he was found by the stretcher-bearers, so they took his identity-tag, and looked in his bloody pockets for letters or photos—there was a publicity photograph of Olive, looking wise and gentle. Then they left him.

Corporal Crowe made it to the German wire, which was uncut. He was caught up in it, as they shot him, and he hung like a beast on a gamekeeper’s gibbet and died very slowly. In this attack three thousand men were casualties.

The 2 Middlesex Battalion had 92.5 per cent casualties. On that first day over forty thousand men were killed or wounded. General Haig remarked that this “cannot be considered severe in view of numbers engaged.”

The Todefright Wellwoods received another telegram. Humphry said “It is bad news” and Olive said “What do you think I thought it was?” She sat in an armchair and simply stared. Humphry said “My dear?” She simply stared. After a time, she heard Humphry, in his study, weeping. It was a strange, childlike, whimpering sobbing, as though he meant to conceal it. She stood up, heavily, and went, and stroked his hair as he sobbed, with his head on his desk.

“It’s like a knife. Cutting the world up, as though it was a cheese. Or butcher’s meat, that’s a better figure of speech. I do love you, Humph, whatever that means. If it helps. It may not. There isn’t much help.”

“I love you, too, if it helps.”

Tragedy had become so commonplace that it was impolite to mention it, or grieve in the open. Olive had the useless thought that she should have protected them, that she had thought of Tom, and taken her attention from these boys, and lost them.

Julian Cain was in the fighting round Thiepval and Thiepval Wood in July 1916. It was a pretty wood before the battle. It was a hopeless place to attack through and men went wild and mad and were lost there. There was a pretty château, which the shells pounded, and there were trenches whose parapets were reinforced with the deliberately built-in bodies of the dead. Julian was blown backwards by the explosion of a shell and lost consciousness, lost his mind, he thought, when he found himself lying on the earth near a field ambulance and could not remember who he was, or how he had come there. He had a shallow wound across his skull, and scattered shrapnel embedded in his flesh. He said, when they came to dress his wound, “Who am I?” and the orderly went through his pockets and told him he was Lieutenant Julian Cain.

He remembered, for some reason, very clearly, the Wood in
Through the Looking-Glass
, where things have no names, neither trees, nor creatures, nor Alice herself. He lay there, swimming in morphine, and thought about names. The dead who were buried had their names on temporary grave-markers, which were often blown to bits in the endless gunfire. Their name liveth after them for evermore. He had a drugged vision of names, like scurrying rats searching the battlefield for the flesh they had been attached to, like the prophet Ezekiel’s valley of bones. You thought a name had a life but men you met in the trenches were not solid enough to have a named life that went before and after in what they had always thought was a normal manner. Men and their names were provisional: he realised he learned their names with a kind of dull grief, because there were already so many he did not need, any longer, to recall, because they could not be recalled, they were spattered and scattered in the churned-up mire that had been green fields and woodland. You could write poems about vanishing names. He did not want to write poems about beauty, or sorrow, or high resolve. He would—if his wits held and he did not stop one—try to write a grim little poem or two about naming parts, and naming the battlefield. Thinking of Alice, some book lover had named trenches for the stories: there were
Walrus Trench, Gimble Trench, Mimsy Trench, Borogrove, Dum and Dee
. There was
Image
wood somewhere. Where had that come from? He had seen
Peter Pan Trench, Hook Copse
and
Wendy Cottage
. They were some other joker’s poetry but he could weave them into cat’s-cradles of his own, these ephemeral words in a world where nothing held its shape in the blast. You built your hiding-hole out of blocked dead men, and you called it
End Trench
, or
Dead Man’s Bottom, Incomplete Trench, Inconsistent Trench, Not Trench, Omit Trench
, or
Hemlock Trench
. The medical orderly came past and said they were taking him to a field hospital. Was he trying to say something, perhaps. Names, said Julian. Names. Names are getting away from things. They don’t hold together.

They gave him morphine. He wondered, as he drowned, if there was a morphine trench.

There was so much, so much of what was his life, that he wanted neither to name, nor to remember. Waking, he forced it down. In sleep, it rose, like a floodwave of dead and dying flesh, to suffocate him.

•  •  •

In the field hospital Julian thought from time to time about the English language. He thought about the songs the men sang, grim and gleeful. We’re ’ere because we’re ’ere because we’re ’ere because we’re ’ere.

Poetry, Julian thought, was something forced out of men by death, or the presence of death, or the fear of death, or the deaths of others.

He started making a list of words that could no longer be used. Honour. Glory. Heritage. Joy.

He asked other men for names of trenches. They came up with
Rats Alley, Income Tax, Dead Cow, Dead Dog, Dead Hun, Carrion Trench, Skull Farm, Paradise Copse, Judas Trench, Iscariot Trench
and many religious trenches:
Paul, Tarsus, Luke, Miracle
. Many trenches were named for London’s streets and theatres, and many more for women—
Flirt Trench, Fluffy Trench, Corset Trench
. Julian collected them in a notebook, and started stringing them together, but his head ached. They naturally formed into parodies of jingles

That was no good. But in that direction was something that could still be done. Rupert Brooke was gone, dead of an infected spot on his lip, in Greece, a year ago. He had written about Dining-Room Tea and about honey or some such thing in Grantchester, unimaginable now, and about war as a release from the life of half-men and dirty songs and
dreary, and fighting as “swimmers into cleanness leaping.” These children, Julian thought, had been charmed and bamboozled as though some Pied Piper played his tune and they all followed him, docile, under the earth. The Germans had sunk the liner
Lusitania
, and Charles Froh-man, the impresario who had staged
Peter Pan
, had drowned with gallant dignity, apparently reciting the immortal line which had been judiciously cut from wartime performances: “To die will be an awfully big adventure.”

Writing about mud and cold and sleet and lice and rats appealed to the real genius of the English language. It would be good to include shit and fuck and words current at schools and repressed in the unimaginable social life of respectable England. Maggot was a good English word. Someone contributed “
Bully craters.”

He recovered, and went back to his regiment. They went to take over the captured Schwaben Redout. Here were the deep German dugouts and the powerful fortifications, Schwaben Redout, Leipzig, Stuff and Goat (Feste Staufen and Feste Zollern) and the Wonder Work, or Wunderwerk, about which poems should be written. Julian went underground, and found, on a lower level, a little door in a wall, which led to dark galleries, packed with boxes of shells and equipment, and beyond that a way to two well-shafts, with windlasses and buckets, whose depths could not be gauged by the eye, and seemed to go down and down interminably. Julian walked through storerooms full of piled bombs and tins of meat, of black and gold helmets and leather mask respirators: he was briefly reminded of the storerooms under the South Kensington Museum, with their order and disorder.