The Sixteen Trees of the Somme

by Lars Mytting

  Gwen looked at me, a look that said We’re getting close.

  “Strange,” said Mr Stewart. “In 1972 we gave Mr Westley an estimate for a significant repair. The weapon had obviously been damaged, perhaps fallen down a steep slope. The stock was cracked, the fore-end badly damaged. But it seems the repair was not carried out. The cost of doing such work is rather high, since wood of this kind is particularly complicated to fit. It requires a stockmaker with a master craftsman certificate and at least ten years’ experience. But now we come across something interesting. In 1898 the weapon was delivered with the stock graded as ‘deluxe nr 4’. That is, well above standard. But this wood is far, far more costly than that. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything like it.”

  He held the stock in both hands, turning it slowly so that the light from the windows brought out more and more nuances in the walnut, and then he slipped into a world of his own. “Hmm,” he said after a minute or two.

  “How many classifications of walnut are there,” I said.

  “Ten standard grades,” he said absently. “Then there are also the special classes, including specific categories for exhibition weapons. Exceptional colour and sheen, but too fragile to be used as a working weapon. Then there is ‘Circassian Grade’ – just as beautiful as the exhibition classes, but straighter and more sturdy. Named after the Circassian women, known to be the most beautiful women in the world.”

  Reluctantly, Mr Stewart put down the stock. “The wood alone makes this weapon very valuable. Very. At the right auction a stock blank like this would have obtained a price corresponding to a brand-new Jaguar. This is probably from the root of a walnut tree that was at least four hundred years old. Impossible to get hold of something like this these days.”

  He ran his sleeve over the stock and rubbed a new sheen in the wood. “Is it for sale?”

  “Possibly,” said Gwen.

  “Both the weapon and a stock blank like this would be, hmm, attractive to us, for a discreet transaction. Its only shortcoming,” he said, running his finger over the criss-crossed checkering, “is that the stock was not fashioned by a master stockmaker. Oh yes, he was exceedingly skilled. The workmanship exhibited here is rare. He was undoubtedly valued at the time, but he would have had to acquire experience over many years until he was in the foremost class. And that he would have been. There is the minutest level of uncertainty visible in the detail. See here – a tiny curve where the checkering should be straight, an infinitesimal splinter in the hollow of the tongue and the trigger guard. Clever nonetheless. Only five or six stockmakers in the country are worthy of such a blank, and even they would have lost sleep over flaws.”

  “But is it poorly made?” I said, and stopped myself from blurting out that it probably was the first time Einar had made a weapon stock.

  “Poorly made? Sir, it is near perfection. Let’s say that it delivers ninety-nine per cent instead of one hundred. He has even got the feeling.”

  My blank look made it clear that I did not understand.

  “With a thoroughbred shotgun,” he said, “the grip should be slender. The thickness of a lady’s wrist. But it’s one thing getting the dimensions. Two weapons can look identical and only one will come alive in your hands. The grip should also feel as though you’re holding the wrist of a lady. That’s what this one does.”

  He picked up the weapon and let the wood shine under the lamplight. “There is something . . . different about this wood – something I can’t quite place. It reminds me of a story Mr Battenhill told me, something about a consignment of French walnut—”

  “Battenhill?” Gwen said.

  “Our oldest stockmaker. Buyer of walnut for more than sixty years. Retired now.”

  “That’s a shame,” Gwen said.

  “He still comes here every day. I’m certain he would be happy to speak to you. But I must warn you, he can seem somewhat . . . brusque.”

  “Oh?” I said.

  “He’s ninety-three years old. And for eighty of those years he didn’t use ear protectors.”

  *

  The old stockmaker was due to visit on this day too. Gwen and I were able to wait for him in the office, and we barely exchanged a sensible word; it was as if we were awaiting a verdict.

  Before long we heard a booming voice outside and Battenhill appeared, an imposing old man, not least because he spoke loud enough to be able to hear himself. But when he caught sight of the weapon, he lowered his voice and whispered: “Good heavens, it’s one of them.”

  He picked up the shotgun as though it were a lost child and said that it had been twenty-six years since he last saw a weapon with wood like it, a double-barrelled African rifle that had once belonged to Ambassador Cleve. It went to auction, and one of the descendants of General Haig, the British Commander-in-Chief during the First World War, had offered an outrageous sum for it.

  “But what’s the connection?” Gwen said.

  “The wood carries the wounds of war,” Battenhill said and showed us a darker area on the shaft.

  He rummaged through a drawer and brought out a small glass bottle. The smell of linseed oil spread through the room as he rubbed it into the wood. The pattern grew more and more intricate, as though he were performing alchemy.

  “It’s a little dry,” Battenhill muttered. “Look there,” he said reverently. “One moment the pattern is symmetrical, like the out-spread wings of a pheasant. When I rub it, like this, the light hits it from a different angle and brings out the deeper layers of the wood. Every quarter of an inch has taken many years to grow. We’re looking back through the centuries. But the year that is clearest of all is 1916.”

  He continued to massage in the oil, and with every moment the pattern became clearer. He began to tell us about the Scottish regiment, the Black Watch, of their advance during the Battle of the Somme, and before long it became clear that the story was also about me: the year my history began was far, far earlier than the year I was born; my history began four hundred years ago, when sixteen walnut trees sprouted near the Somme.

  11

  AT FIVE O’CLOCK ONE MORNING IN SEPTEMBER 1916, the old stockmaker began, a company from the Black Watch was lying in the trenches, waiting for the signal to attack. When the bagpipes sounded, they advanced together with the Cameron Highlanders into the remnants of what had once been a lush forest. Artillery had levelled the area into a mash of mud, charred stumps and battered corpses. Like the soldiers who had been in the previous attack, they wore kilts. The corpses they advanced through were unrecognisable, but they could see where the individual units had fallen, their various tartan colours still fluttering amongst the carnage.

  The Battle of the Somme had been raging since July 1. On the first day alone there had been fifty-seven thousand British casualties, twenty thousand of whom had died instantly. Machine guns ran the entire length of the front, and masses died every minute in the most foolhardy advances. Hundreds of soldiers were left hanging in the barbed wire, and it was impossible to remove them. Their flesh rotted in the summer heat until it hung loosely. Even when the bodies could be buried, it was impossible to keep them in the earth because as soon as the counterattacks were launched, they were blown back to the surface.

  “It was as though the great powers had mustered a gigantic European collective effort,” Battenhill said. The very best machinery, the cleverest engineers, the most employable generation – millions stood along a front line that carved Europe in two; enough manpower and skill to build a pyramid every day.

  Fields, churchyards, forests and villages were transformed into infinite mires. Civilian miners dug kilometre-long tunnels and placed so many explosives that the detonations could be heard in England and left craters the size of meteor strikes. Soldiers who had only recently arrived wondered about the small clouds that appeared to be suspended over the fields, which were visible from fifty metres away. Only when they recognised the surreally loud buzzing did they understand these were in fact swarms of fli
es feeding on the corpses.

  The artillery thundered day and night on both sides. The front lines were bombarded with more than a billion tonnes of explosives, but the factories had to manufacture them so quickly that their quality was reduced. Around one in four shells struck the ground without exploding and were soon ground into the earth along with the dead.

  But of all the clashes during the Battle of the Somme, the soldiers considered the battles around the woods to be the most barbaric. Splinters flew about like spears when shells struck the tree trunks. The soldiers were forced to attack in tight formation, making them easy targets when the artillery and the machine guns zeroed in. The stumps and roots of the trees made it impossible to dig in and find cover, and the hand to hand combat was so intense that soldiers could be killed by bone splinters from fellow soldiers who had been hit.

  The objective of the soldiers from the Black Watch on that morning was to recapture a small wood north of Authuille, on the hillsides facing the Ancre River. This was the seventeenth wave of attacks without a clear victor, and they knew that their opponents were under orders to fight to the death.

  The woods were no larger than thirty hectares, but they had been bombarded more intensely than any other place in the Somme. At the most frenetic point in the fighting, seven artillery shells were fired there every second. In the rare intermissions between the cannon salvos, the cries of hundreds of wounded soldiers could be heard from the forest. An entire day might pass before anyone could be pulled out, and by then most were dead.

  Forest warfare was nothing new to the Scots. The supreme commanders seemed especially eager to deploy them in these battles, and the Scots suffered huge losses in Devil’s Wood and High Wood.

  Within an hour of their initial advance, eighty per cent of the soldiers had fallen. Those still alive lost almost all sense of reality, and simply fought their way forward, yard by yard, with bayonets and shovels past the scorched tree trunks and piles of bodies, enveloped by the noise of war. Their supply lines had long since been cut, and the wounded had no hope of being saved.

  But with the help of mortars and other high-trajectory weapons, a few soldiers managed to blow up an enemy machine-gun nest and break the German line of defence, after which they stormed a small grove where a few huge trees still stood. They were ancient, thick walnut trees, and even though the branches had been blown off, they were so sturdy that they formed a shield against the artillery. At length the soldiers managed to set up a grouping of machine guns behind the large trees, established good sight lines and eliminated several hundred enemy soldiers.

  When night fell, the full fury of the enemy bombardment was unleashed. The tops of the trees burned, but did not collapse. Reinforcements arrived with food and ammunition, and they dug in to brace themselves for the dawn counterattack. They packed earth around dead horses and soldiers, with both hooves and arms sticking out of the barricades.

  Through their binoculars the Germans could see that the Scots had dug in, and now that they were sure none of their own men were in the vicinity, they decided to use all means necessary.

  At dawn they launched a large-scale bombardment of poisonous gas. The soldiers were familiar with the effects of chlorine and cyanide, not to mention mustard gas, which first blinded and then induced four weeks of hideous suffering as the body slowly surrendered, the intestines rotting while the soldier was still alive. But this gas was something new. Either it was a devilish, experimental gas so complex that the chemists could never make it to the same recipe, or there was a manufacturing flaw that no-one then, nor at any time thereafter, knew how to replicate.

  The shells exploded against the walnut trees, and a heavy, bright-green cloud poured out and settled on the ground. Those soldiers with working gas masks put them on at once, the others had to resort to the old field trick of urinating on cloth rags and breathing through them. But before long they all realised that nothing would offer them protection.

  The soldiers grew unruly. Some began to fight one another, others stood up and were immediately shot down by snipers. Those closest to the gas roamed aimlessly between the tree trunks before they passed out and fell into muddy shell holes. The company was bombarded for half an hour while the green gas rained down from the walnut trees. A young captain ordered his soldiers to advance and position their machine guns in front of the trees. It was an absurd order, but they set to it and were all shot instantly. The captain himself was struck by a shell and was later found far from his original position.

  But the trees remained. The wind began to pick up and carried the gas away. The Scots just managed to get reinforcements in before a counterattack was initiated. They took up positions behind their dead comrades’ guns, and laid down a dense, flat line of fire that mowed down hundreds of the enemy in a matter of minutes, and soon the rest could advance and secure their positions. The victory was decisive. In six weeks, fifty-five thousand German and British soldiers had sacrificed their lives in the battles for this small wood.

  *

  As Battenhill spoke, Gwen and I had imperceptibly moved closer to each other, until our arms were touching and I could feel her shoulder twitching slightly. But now she pulled away a little and I could not tell if her twitching had intensified or stopped altogether.

  “By November 1916 the Battle of the Somme was over,” the old stockmaker said, and he then described laconically how the number of losses on both sides stood at 1.2 million dead or wounded. The Allies had gained nine kilometres of terrain, land that was now a sludge of body parts and twisted metal. Few of the soldiers of the Black Watch were given a burial after the battles in the grove, but they had their names engraved on the piers of Thiepval, the memorial to those who were never found or were too mutilated to be identified. After the German capitulation the bodies of eight thousand soldiers remained in the small woods, tangled in mud and roots and unexploded shells.

  But in front of the old machine-gun positions, sixteen walnut trees still stood. The canopies were destroyed, the bark shredded and the branches burned off, but they stood. Since everything around them had been swept away, the cluster of trees was visible from a great distance. In the spring, small twigs sprouted and produced green leaves. Along with some orange poppies, they were the only sign of life along the old front, and amongst the British soldiers the trees became known as “the Sixteen Trees of the Somme”.

  When the authorities established their comprehensive regeneration plan, the so-called reconstitution des régions dévastées, the owner of the woods wanted to have the area cleared so he could replant trees there. But this was a task they had soon to abandon; the concentration of shells was so great that the sappers were instructed to make one safe path through the woods. The owner of the woods received no compensation other than free barbed wire with which to fence the area.

  Bushes and small trees began to grow, but the field was impossible to cultivate. The owner occasionally walked along his woodland path. From a distance he observed the sixteen charred trees, which until before the war had produced an abundant supply of nuts. Now he could see that the fruit was no longer fresh; the nuts were black and shrivelled, and the foliage soon took on a greyish tinge.

  In the meantime a Scottish timber merchant had heard about the trees from a returned soldier, and made the journey to Authuille in the twenties along with a small team of sappers. He made safe a passage to one of the walnut trees and managed to fell it at the root.

  When the trunk was transported to a sawmill, they discovered that the wood had an unusually intense golden-red pattern. The merchant put this down to a reaction with the unknown poisonous gas. He got his best people to saw the root, and straight away they recognised that the wood equalled or surpassed the highest-quality grade for old walnut, making it worth a fortune. A fortune that was automatically multiplied by the history attached to the tree.

  Walnut itself was a cherished commodity for the British upper classes, which had admired beautiful woodwork for generations. The timber
merchant decided that in this instance the walnut should only be offered as stock blanks for high-quality sporting guns, at once an ornament and a war memorial, and one that contained both the country’s sufferings and its victories.

  The owner of the woods agreed to allow the merchant to fell the trees and excavate the roots, but what he received in return is not known. The merchant then realised that the twisting pattern was still developing; the trees were slowly dying, and he wanted to wait before felling them, anticipating that the formations would not reach the height of their beauty until the trees were close to giving up the fight.

  From the first tree he managed to carve out twenty-four stock blanks, twelve of which were sold to the country’s foremost gunmakers: three to Purdey, three to Dickson, two to Holland & Holland, and four to Boss & Co. The wealthy classes of the war-torn country embraced the story of the wood, and despite the overall economy being weak, the weapons were sold at astronomical prices.

  During the thirties, the merchant gradually released the remaining blanks onto the market in order to keep the story alive, and he was careful to draw attention to the part they had played in the war. In 1937, gunmakers received a tip-off that the trees would be ready for harvesting around 1943, and would be available at auction the following year. Expectations were huge; the wood was mentioned several times in The Field and described with a single adjective in The British Shotgun – “unparalleled”.

  But then came another war, and when it was over, rumours began to circulate that the walnut had disappeared. Some said that the woods had been burned down in the Allied advance, others that the trees had been cut down and destroyed. But the timber merchant insisted that the shipment was merely in transit, and that all orders would soon be fulfilled.

  In 1949, two stock blanks were offered at a firearms auction at Bonhams in London. There was no doubt that they belonged to the missing shipment of walnut – the pattern was unmistakeable and far surpassed the few samples sold before the war. The seller was anonymous, and the merchant sued the auction house. But since the wood had neither stamps nor serial numbers, he was unable to prove that the wood had been stolen.