The Phoenix Generation (9 page)

“The chemist told me they’re blowing up German pillboxes in the cornfields near Brandhoek,” said Piers, who was thinking that he would like to get hold of the girl who had shown them the way up. “How about some lunch, or do you want to go on?”

“What would you like to do?”

“Anything you like.”

“You’re not bored?”

“Not at all, my dear Phil. But I think a drink might do us both some good.”

“I’ll take you to La Poupée, where all the chaps used to go. It’s down one of these streets off the Square.”

Where was it? The sun was hot, the streets narrow. They went up and down several streets, then finding themselves back in the rue d’Hôpital, Phillip said that he remembered:
La
Poupée
was a name given by the soldiers—The Doll—its real name was something else.

“I think this is the place, Piers.”

They entered, and out of a dark kitchen came a plump and pleasant woman with a reserved smile on her face. They asked for an omelette. Chairs were piled on a long table covered by a soiled and worn American cloth.

“I lunched here with a chap called Teddy Pinnegar, when I
was a transport officer in the Machine Gun Corps. I think it might be the same girl.” But not the same spirit. The room was dreary and lifeless. Should they cancel the order and find
somewhere
else, he asked Piers, who said that the cooking was the thing. They finished their glasses of wine, and were about to ask for more when a smell of burning drifted into the room.

“It could be the eggshells, of course,” remarked Piers. “Did you read Birkin’s speech?”

“Yes, it got through to reality. Tell me about him.”

“I’ve met him at the Minotaur Club. He’s first-rate with the foils. Represented us at the Olympic games.”

“He was in the war, wasn’t he?”

“Yes. He went straight from school to Sandhurst in August on an abbreviated three-month course, and was in the first battle of Ypres, flying as an observer in the Royal Flying Corps. He crashed, and nearly lost a leg, but hearing that his Lancer regiment was in the trenches at the battle of Loos, nine months later he left hospital and joined them, in mud up to his thighs. His wound opened and became septic. But he wouldn’t have his leg off, and now rather resembles Byron, with a club boot to take up a couple of inches. He talks about ‘the hard-faced Parliament of profiteers and money’. You must meet him. He thought your novel
The
Phoenix
was an authentic voice of his generation.”

“Now he’s up against the hard-faced men of the money-power.”

The woman with the Mona Lisa smile moved towards them bearing a black and yellow omelette. She put it before them with slices of bread.

“I suppose it was like this in the war, Phil.”

“Oh, no, the cooking was first-rate.”

They scraped away the burnt parts, and washed down the rest of the omelette with two bottles of white wine.

*

They returned to Ypres, with feet blistered from walking on cobbles. It was late afternoon. They drank glass after glass of beer while sitting under an awning, and watched the passers-by.

Ypres to Phillip was unrecognisable. Wipers existed in the memory only. The new city was clean and hybrid-English. Its Grand’ Place held enough air and sunlight to give a feeling of freedom in space. The rectangular ruined fragment of the Cloth Hall was contained in a scaffold box. Grasses and wildflowers on the tops of the walls made the ruin beautiful. American tourists noticing the four-way trumpets of the local Fire Brigade’s siren
on the top of the ruin repeatedly asked their guides if it was “the old original gas-horns of the British.”

Phillip rested on his pavement seat in front of an hotel, and sipped pale yellow beer, and looked at some printed papers which had been thrust into his hand by touts.

They ordered more beer, and stretched their legs, for the pavé had been hard going. Then Piers drank brandy, and Phillip followed him. After four glasses Piers said to Phillip, “This place is haunted by the spirit of love.”

“Yes,” said Phillip. He wanted to think of ‘Spectre’ West, whose lecture he had attended before the opening of Third Ypres, in July 1917. He remembered ‘Spectre’, then a G.S.O.3 attached to G.H.Q. D(a) telling them that the massive walls in red brick had been built by Vaubain to withstand seige by the Spaniards. The sun was going down below the rooftops as he reached the broken curve of grass-grown rubble by the new Menin Gate. Below lay the moat; but no longer foetid and shallow cloacal scum. Water-lilies lay on the surface, a grey wagtail skipped from one palette leaf to another. The brickwork rising sheer from the moat had somehow withstood the German
bombardments
of the years, but he had to go carefully. Where were the dugouts within the ramparts, once lit by electric light from a power station by the Menin Gate? The building of the power station was said during the war to be the only one remaining of 1914 Ypres.

He remembered the dugouts behind the ramparts. The roofs had been shored by steel girders and sandbags. At night rats used
to squeal whenever a light was shone, because it was usually followed by a revolver shot. The rats used to eat everything, even to climbing down the string of a suspended sandbag to eat the candles inside.

He walked on the ramparts with the wraith of his old, or was it his very young, self? That wraith fluttered with fear and disquiet and homesickness; it thought of the sorrows of a mother’s face equally with the smiling obliteration that was Lily Cornford vanished in the great livid light of a Zeppelin torpedo fallen on Nightingale Grove above the railway cutting on that September night of 1916, after he had come back wounded from the battle of the Somme. How the love of the dead remained, to be passed on to another. Lily whom he had kissed only once, in a love that had sustained the spirit through all things.

Below lay the calm new waters of the moat. The lilies were withdrawing their flowers with the going down of the sun. Fish were rising, swallows taking last sips as they flew. Children were running out of the Shannon cinema built on the bank across the water.

Motorcars were now bumping down the Menin road, carrying people to a jolly Saturday night in the Ypres cafés with their friends and relations. The cars bumped and swung over the uneven pavé surface, their horns filling the lighted hollow under the new white pantheon of the Menin Gate.

He could not face the idea of the new Gate; the wraith with him was with the long night columns of men moving east out of the city, stumbling in sweat and fear amidst clatter of limber and waggon wheels—horses, mules, men not knowing why they were there in the roar and flash and appalling terror of bursting shells. Everything was silvered within the semi-circle, the salient, of the swamp east of Ypres. Here was the dreaded Menin road with its spiky tree-stumps; here the quaking track of swilling beechwood slabs; his horse, Black Prince, had been left behind near the prison with the groom, before entering with his men each leading a pack-mule into the nihilism of water-glitter, curses, whooping shells and cries for help from wounded lost under the lilies of the dead, in a land beyond all imagination, all longing, almost all hope.

Here rose the new houses, all without chip or loose tile; but they did not obscure the passing of the men. No, it was not men; it was a force that was passing, like an invisible wind that hurled down brick and stone soundlessly, that filled the Grand’ Place and the
streets with cries and shouts and the screams of the dying, yet all was without sound. He left the ramparts and sought the hotel where they were staying. Piers was not to be seen. He drank several brandies. There was too much noise, the lights were too bright. Men were playing billiards, others talked with animation at the tables. Waiters hurried with trays of filled glasses. It was Saturday night, this was the happy chatter of men who knew they need not work on the morrow. Smoke straying from pipe and cigar. Many neat blue British serge suits, British voices, faces of old soldiers who had learned, in Conrad’s phrase, to submit. Their wisdom was immemorially wiser than that of the old or the young—but not to be communicated. O Christ, when could he begin his war novels?

He sat there, the wraith of himself merging with remembered darkness rushing by, yet stagnant amid soundless cries, viewless flashes of field guns lighting broken wall and scattered rubble, the subdued fears of men moving in broken step, laden and
sweating
, through the gap called the Menin Gate. He drank more brandy. Now he was with the reliefs going up: slouching shapeless men coming out, holding to one idea—sleep, sleep, sleep:
trogloditic
shapes against the great shimmering horsehoe of the Salient, slouching on desperately, puttees over boots, some bare-footed, feet swollen and unfelt, stumbling on and thinking only of sleep, sleep, sleep as they passed files of men moving up, rifle slings cutting into shoulders, thighs and ribs and arms overhot with sweat as they approached Hellfire Corner. Christ, Jerry’s five-nines were crumping, and sending the timber track before them into the air.

Alas, prayers do not deflect the hissing flights of bullets that rip, or dissolve the shell that scatters trunk and limbs into charred fragments among the upheaved tree-stumps of Polygon Wood.

Feeling unable to face the
café,
he went back to the Ramparts. The last of sunset, the purple-red bars and flecks of the damp Flanders sun, lay over the oakwoods to the north-west; but there was hope, the evening star was a rayless serene globe in the west. The edges of the moat below were dimly whitened by cement rocks tipped from the bank. Perhaps these were from the
blown-up
German pillboxes, made of Rhine gravel and cement. The lime in the cement would gradually dissolve in the water, and be used by shrimps and snails to make their shells, and so become food for fish. There were still some concrete machine-gun shelters on the farther bank—now the homes of nettles. How feeble they looked in comparison with the massive German shelters in the
Salient, the
mebus
called pill-boxes by the tommies. But the British had never, until 1918 anyway, thought of the B.E.F. as a defensive force, but as one eventually to cross the Rhine. And they had done it.

He saw a flat-bottomed boat pushed into the reeds below. An old man was fishing. Was everything normal for him? The war but an interruption in a life of trade, a profession? Did he think only of money as the true basis of life?

He sat still, longing for love. The fisherman was using
bread-pills
for the roach which roamed in shoals from the Menin to the Lille gates. The border of ground, under the ramparts where the boat was moored, was tilled with dwarf beans and potatoes. It looked to be his allotment; he had finished hoeing weeds, and was now enjoying a pipe and the watching of his quill float. Did he see only reed, water, lilies, his quill and the peaceful evening sky above the cultivated fiélds of dark brown soil east of the city; hear only the impatient horns of motorcars passing under the Menin Gate … the confident song-chatter of the warblers in the reeds?

The old man looked up.

“Soldat, M’sieu’? Anglais? Revenu?”

“Oui, Monsieur.”

“Sale boche fini, hey?”

“Bon soir, Monsieur.”

That night he could not sleep.

*

Through the open door of her room Mrs. Ancroft heard her daughter turning and turning in bed, and sometimes it sounded as though she was crying. Once she went in, and stood by the bed, summoning up resolution to whisper, “Are you all right, Girlie?” When there was no answer she went back to her room and, lying in bed, prayed that no harm had befallen her innocent child.

Her daughter had been born during the year of King George the Fifth’s succession. When the child was barely out of her third year the marriage had come to an end. Shouting with anger at his wife, calling her every hateful name that came from the years of his frustration, and, towards the end, hatred, her young husband had picked up the terrified child and shaken her, threatening to hurl her out of the window unless her mother altered immediately what he had often called her obstructive mentality.
I
never
want
to
see
you
again!
and putting down the child, who was too shocked to speak, or utter any sound, he had left the matrimonial home for ever.

The war came the following year. Mrs. Ancroft’s three elder brothers at once were commissioned in the militia, or reserve battalion of the county regiment. The eldest was killed at Zillebeke in 1914; the second at Festubert early in the following year; the third was reported missing after the flame-attack at Hooge Château in the Salient in 1916. Meanwhile she had learned that her husband had joined up, and after service at home, had
transferred
to the Royal Flying Corps. He had survived the war. Mrs. Ancroft meanwhile had thought it best to tell her little girl nothing about her father. He was, in his deserted wife’s eyes, ‘a mixture of half-saint, half-devil.’ How else could he—who had obviously loved his little girl from the time that she had first smiled at him, to be taken upon his lap and fondled—how otherwise
could
he have behaved with such fiendish cruelty as to pick her up and shake her violently in order to spite her, the mother? He had been indulged as a small boy, certainly, by two of his aunts, who had made themselves responsible for his upbringing after his parents had died of typhus in India, while he was at a private school in England.