The Sixteen Trees of the Somme

by Lars Mytting

  Parents of soldiers. Widows of soldiers. The rightful claimants of an empty fund in Scottish Widows.

  I pulled out a record book from the thirties, then another from 1953, and noticed the developments in how British schools taught handwriting. I read how the pattern of grief changed as parents grew older or passed away; how the legacy of war which began as a bloody family tragedy, turned into a historic, national event.

  But I could not read for long. I skimmed the pages in search of a majestic signature I had seen before, on the contract giving Einar the right to reside on Haaf Gruney in perpetuity. Perhaps the signature he regretted most in his life.

  But the columns were endless, it would take hours to find him. I skipped ahead to September, the month in which the battle of the Daireaux woods was ultimately won.

  And there he was. Capt. Winterfinch. The Black Watch. A signature with rank and regiment still, despite the fact that he ran an international business with offices around the world.

  The visit was repeated year after year, and always in September, which must be the wettest season here; the autumn record books were spotted with mould, with curled pages and signatures marred by pens which would not write. From 1928, the timings of his visits became more regular. He was one of the earliest to arrive in the morning, perhaps to be alone with his grief. His signature filled two lines, and he was never accompanied by anyone.

  Each year Captain Duncan Winterfinch had visited his fellow soldiers’ graves, and from 1931 onwards he was invariably the very first visitor. First he had driven to Thiepval, then methodically to each and every cemetery, along the endless white gravestones. To be on the safe side, he always brought his own pen, a wide-nibbed fountain pen with green ink.

  I turned the pages more rapidly, past the five missing years of the Second World War, and found his name again in September 1945. The signature was a little more slanted that year. Had he passed the Daireaux woods, seen the hollows where the trees should have been? It must have felt like a combination of betrayal and blasphemy.

  1968, 1969. Still he was the first, still he signed as Capt. Winterfinch. 1970. I knew his system now, and opened the record book for the autumn of 1971, to October. Flipped backwards. I was approaching the beginning of my existence, my own year zero.

  There I discovered that the last time Duncan Winterfinch had visited his fallen comrades was early on the morning of September 23, 1971.

  This time, for the first time, he had brought someone with him to Thiepval. Beneath his signature was one that I had not expected to see, much less her comment. Because there it was, Mamma’s last testament, written just before she died.

  N. Daireaux. May you find peace.

  10

  I WOKE AT THREE IN THE MORNING AND FELT A PRESENCE in the night. Switched on the light and stared at the white boarded walls, then at the telephone, half expecting someone to call. Left myself open to the possibility that the ghosts of twenty years ago had visited me.

  But I was the only one here. Only I knew everything that had happened that morning, only I had heard every word spoken.

  I got dressed, put on the kettle and made a strong cup of instant coffee. I would never be able to re-create that day’s events exactly, but I knew enough. What I needed was a truth that I could be content with.

  They must have arranged to meet Duncan Winterfinch at the restaurant, but it was too busy, full of people talking at the tops of their voices. A man who built a palace of oak in the most desolate spot in Great Britain would not be prepared to negotiate in such a clamour. It was the most important transaction of his life, when the wood from the sixteen trees of the Somme would be brought to light again. He left the restaurant exasperated and indignant, and that night decades of pent-up anger must have gnawed at him. According to Gwen he had always woken at three.

  Duncan had called the hotel room that night. A loud ringing from an old telephone. He would have suggested that we meet at Thiepval, at the crack of dawn. There, free from the droning of cars, free from curious eyes, with no noise other than the twittering of birds, he would describe the advance of the Black Watch in 1916. A war veteran’s final story. The same temperature, the same air, the same light.

  The British believed that a soldier owned the ground on which he died. This was something Einar could never understand; he was blinded by his and Isabelle’s story from those same woods.

  He may have been amenable, Duncan Winterfinch. His sleep was out of sync and Mamma may have suggested it. Let’s meet now, she might have said. If a three-year-old boy is wide awake anyway, there’s no point in sitting in a hotel room waiting.

  *

  Outside it was a chilly morning. I started up the Bristol and drove through the dawn. The streets were empty, the gilded church spire barely visible against the sky, just as it had been twenty years ago. A wide-awake child, sleepy parents, on their way to a war memorial to meet a one-armed man. I tried to evoke the memories of the street lamps reflected in the bonnet, the humming of the engine, the yellowish gleam of the instruments. Mamma and Pappa on their way to die.

  Up on a hillside I could make out the silhouette of Thiepval. A colossus of a memorial, impossible to determine if it was ugly or attractive, built for eternity to broadcast the cries of the dead.

  The car park was empty, the only sound my footsteps on the gravel. The monument rose in the dark as I walked towards it. Think. You have been here before. Remember the shape of the arch against the sky, the birdsong in the distance?

  I stopped to breathe in the raw morning air, and it occurred to me that Gwen might be here too. I reached the wide steps of the brick colossus and climbed amidst the cold aroma of consecrated stone; I was there with the dead. The sound of my steps smacked hollowly beneath the arches. Everything was dark, chilly, old.

  Ten minutes passed as dawn crept forward, the morning light glimmering on the stone surfaces, summoning a sea of engraved characters, row upon row. Then the sun came up, and seventy-three thousand names emerged and surrounded me.

  I sought out the stone panel for the Black Watch. They had stood here, Winterfinch and Mamma. He had the company behind him, and she had a history that began in Ravensbrück. They had plenty of time for long explanations at this hour of the day – for a man who wanted to get his house in order before he died and a woman who bore responsibility for a mother she did not remember.

  I did as they had done. At the stone steps at the bottom I found the brass box built into the wall with a cross on the outside. I took out the visitors’ book and signed it, the first person that morning.

  Why had they not settled it there and then? Why did they have to go to the woods? Perhaps he made Mamma an offer, suggested a sum of money. Perhaps they had gone for a drive in the car, to be alone, to have time to think.

  I left Thiepval and drove to my family’s walnut grove. It was about the same size as the flame-birch woods, but surrounded by scrub and undergrowth which pressed against the fence. There were some beech trees growing a little further in, the crowns visible against the bluish sky. The birds were silent. There was the scent of damp earth in the air.

  By the rusted barbed wire I felt suddenly unwell and was almost forced to my knees. My clothes clung to the cold sweat on my back. I pictured Mamma and Pappa’s names on a distant, weathered grave, carved in blue Saksum granite, a grave I could not bring myself to leave flowers on.

  Then it was as though the woods answered me. The wind rushed down, carrying autumn with it. A whistling from the trees. The flutter of a precious memory.

  Pappa’s hand holding mine. Firm and strong. In the other, something new and amusing. The wooden dog. Now I carved out another memory, no detail, just a feeling of disquiet: my impatience. Because someone was talking and talking incessantly. Then the three-year-old boy thought: It’s about time I got some attention. The restless child who hides behind the apple trees every morning. And no matter how tired I am, I join in, because every time it is as if we rediscover each other, it is a reminder
that life has meaning now.

  We were never meant to enter the woods. The agreement had been made, they had come here to cross the final T. Pappa’s grip loosened for a brief moment, and then we lost each other for ever. Suddenly I was off and running. I ran like I had my entire life, in through the tree trunks.

  The truth was that I had killed my parents. If I had not bolted into the woods, they would still be alive today.

  *

  I forced myself to enter. My heart wanted to leap out of my chest, and my body was so reluctant that my testicles contracted. But I was only one of tens of thousands who had felt exactly the same way in the woods.

  I climbed the fence and lowered myself slowly down the other side. I kept so close to the fence that my clothes snagged on the wire. The branches reached out and brushed me with dew. The path was impossible to find. It was likely that no-one had been here since 1971. I continued along the fence until I reached a belt of old aspens.

  Aspen. The first tree to grow in a clearing. Or on a path which is no longer used. I left the fence, bending twigs back and allowing the line of aspens to lead me in past overgrown trenches, shell craters and snapped trunks, through a wilderness in which nature was trying to cover its war wounds.

  I came to a clearing. A bare, dead stretch where grass grew reluctantly. Sixteen large hollows, narrower and with straighter sides than the craters left by the shells. The roots of the walnut trees. Thousands of dead soldiers beneath me, kneaded into the earth.

  All was still. I realised that even if I had strayed here without knowing the history, I would have felt exactly the same: this was no longer a forest, it was a mass grave.

  Here and there around me were what appeared to be small piles of stones. They were overgrown with decayed foliage, but I glimpsed rusted metal in between. The heaps of shell casings the sappers had collected.

  Beyond them was a crooked tree, with large nuts on the ground beneath it. It must have germinated before 1944, a descendant of the Daireaux family’s walnut trees.

  The nuts appeared fresh, like those we ate at Christmas, the shape and veined ridges resembling a brain. I put some in my pocket. Further ahead through the bushes I could see the glint of water.

  Twenty years ago I must have run towards the water. In the night I had convinced myself that I needed to see where it happened, but now the tendrils of my common sense grabbed hold of my legs and I was reminded of the Alsatian with the severed hindquarters. The crackle of dead foliage. I heard a voice telling me to go back to my very first memory. To remember that more than anything.

  The journey led me to Hirifjell. It must have been the first winter without Mamma and Pappa. I sat on the snow crust looking at Alma and Bestefar who were standing by the front door, lightly dressed under the porch lamp. They said something, and I realised that it was about me. But what seemed important was that the crust was hard and could support my weight. And that spring lay beneath it.

  I gazed through the trunks at the glittering water at the bottom of the valley, beyond a no-man’s-land of gas shells and certain death. And then I understood what I had to do. It was as if I had walked with a loose wire in my hands all my life – now I realised that it was a bowstring, twisted from an umbilical cord.

  I fought my way out of the woods and ran through muddy thickets to the other side of the pond, until I came to the place where the fisherman must have stood. Trampled ground, discarded fish guts and cigarette butts revealed that it still was a good spot for fishing.

  I threw off the tweed jacket and removed my shoes and trousers, then stepped into the water. My bare feet sank straight away, the stink of decay bubbling up. A toad hopped off. I stretched out flat in the murky water, the algae on the surface covering me to the shoulders as I kicked my way through the mire.

  It was a couple of hundred metres across. All I could hear was the splash of my strokes and I turned to see my zigzagging path through the algae. I had the feeling I was being watched.

  I approached the far shore where the water was shallower and flowed in a swifter stream. The trees hung over the water, their branches breaking its surface.

  This was the place in which they had died.

  And the water carried me. I floated above the shells as I combed through the past, each stroke drawing open infinite veils in my mind, until finally I came to the last.

  I remembered.

  I remembered.

  Not one coherent event, but a series of deep impressions.

  Mamma and Pappa there in the thicket. Two figures shouting my name, struggling to get through, and at the same time, inside me, then as now, a feeling which went from excitement to horror and darkness.

  They bounded towards the shore, and then a poisonous green substance rose up. Mamma doubled over and tumbled down, tried to grab hold of Pappa, they got up together but fell again, onto the muddy shore and into the water. Desperately they tried to scramble back onto the shore, but their bodies would not obey.

  It took them a long time to die. Pappa was the last to give up the struggle. The surface of the water grew calm. Pappa lay with his arms spread, the water rippling above his forehead, a faint vibration tracing the thoughts inside. Mamma was on her side, with her hair outstretched, pointing in the direction of the current. Her face was peaceful, her eyes were fixed on the shore, and they said:

  You are safe, I can die now.

  *

  After that, nothing. Just a great empty void.

  In a trance I swam back, grabbed an overhanging branch and pulled myself up amongst the fish guts and flattened cigarette packs.

  My heart was pounding. I tried to dry myself with my shirt, but realised that I was sweating out of fear, I could not get dry. Then, putting on the old tweed jacket, it was like a flash shed light on a brief but vital memory. A particular smell, a combination of nervous sweat, damp tweed and Balkan Sobranie.

  I remembered no more. But it was obvious what had happened.

  Mamma and Pappa’s shouting. A muffled explosion in the woods. A strange figure who approached and took me away.

  After that a barrier rolled away in my memory.

  Duncan Winterfinch had saved me. He must have followed Mamma and Pappa when I took off, perhaps helped them search for me. Then heard the whistling of poisonous gas in the distance and had seen the green fog that surrounded Mamma and Pappa, recognised their confusion. It had happened again. As meaningless as what he had experienced day after day in 1916. People dying. Rescue impossible.

  Then I must have popped up from my hiding place. Save those who can be saved. He lifted me up with his one arm and pressed me to his chest so hard that I was bruised. I had replaced his severed arm. My nose against his smoky jacket.

  Then we ran across Speyside Avenue. There was no sheltering from the poisonous gas, we had to get away. He threw me inside the car and drove off. A frightened old man, the head of a timber empire, with a crying child – where could he go at six o’clock in the morning, and he blaming himself for the deaths of two people? To his summer house, most likely.

  Later, Einar must have come to Authuille. He would have heard the sirens, discovered that there were two dead and a child missing. He had let himself into the hotel. Stood in the empty room and allowed the certainty to filter in. Did as he had done in 1944. Took the only precious keepsake with him, with the scent of someone dear to his heart: Isabelle’s summer dress.

  Then he had gone to the one person who might know something: Duncan Winterfinch. Maybe I ran to him, happy to see a familiar face. A rare occurrence for Einar, someone eagerly running towards him.

  It was then that I remembered something from Einar’s letter. In 1944 he had gone into hiding with a friend by the name of Charles Bonsergent. He came from a fishing village a day’s journey away.

  A family of fishermen. And where did they live, people who subsist on fish generation after generation? Not near fields, but in a place like Le Crotoy.

  11

  A DAY’S TRAVEL IN 1944, BUT ONLY A
COUPLE OF HOURS in a car.

  Le Crotoy reminded me of Lerwick. The smell of the sea, the boats setting out. I had not expected to discover much, just a hint of evidence that this was indeed where Einar had taken me. I had driven along the bay of the Somme, a gigantic wetland with sand dunes, bogs and stagnant water. Duck-hunting terrain where you could wander for weeks.

  A narrow main street, some houses near the sandy coast, small shops and a closed school. Trudging around looking for a doctor’s surgery, I passed two fishermen on a bench. I was about to ask directions but their expressions were closed. I walked on to the kiosk at the viewing point by the sea; it looked like it had been there for at least twenty years, as did the plump lady who ran it.

  “Gauloises,” I said. “And a lighter, please.”

  Without turning she reached behind her, picked up the correct pack of nineteen, and placed it on the counter.

  “How many doctor’s surgeries are there here?” I said.

  “Two,” she said. “Are you trying to give up smoking?”

  “Not for the time being, no. Actually there is one old doctor in particular I’m looking for. Someone who was here in 1971.”

  “In 1971? We only had one then. Docteur Boussat. He worked here until the day he died.”

  “When was that?”

  “In 1980, I think, or 1979. I don’t remember. Maybe even ’78.”

  “Tell me, where was his surgery?”

  “It’s closed down now.”

  “But where was it?”

  “Next to the Citroën garage,” she said and pointed through the hatch of the kiosk. “I went there a lot when my children were little, they both came down with false croup. Just follow the street until the end.”