Liam's Story

by Ann Victoria Roberts

  Liam looked at his brother’s hand, then up into his face. He could have struck him. ‘But I don’t understand,’ he declared in an undertone. ‘I never have and I doubt if I ever will. Now leave it alone, Robin, and get your hand off my bloody arm!’

  Moving back, Robin sank the rest of his beer in one swallow, found his own cigarettes and lit up. His hands were not quite steady. He ordered two more beers with a calm pleasantry for the patron, but there was tension in every muscle. With sweat standing out on him and heart racing, Liam felt as though he had just been under fire. He was distressed, too; arguing with the only person he could love unreservedly, the one he had longed so desperately to see. On the point of apology, he heard the words from his brother.

  ‘No.’ Liam shook his head. ‘I’m the one who’s sorry. I’m sorry for this – I didn’t want to talk about it because I knew what it would come to. And I’m more grieved than you can ever understand about the whole bloody sorry situation. Really I am. I do know what you’re trying to say to me. I’ve thought about it so many times, don’t think I haven’t. But I can’t resolve it.’ He sighed, shook his head. ‘It’s impossible.’

  ‘But why? What is it you don’t understand? I mean it happened – years ago – why can’t you just accept it? What difference does it make? Especially now, with all this…’ His gesture encompassed the shell-pocked square, the whole of the war. ‘How can it be important, in the face of all this?’

  Liam turned away, afraid to show his pain, afraid that somehow, with that uncanny intuition of his, Robin would see and understand what it was that still gripped him. That he could not think of the man who was his father without loathing, nor the woman who was his sister, without desire.

  Eventually, to deflect the subject, he said sardonically: ‘And our father – how is he? Where is he in all this? I don’t see him in a sweat-stained, lousy uniform, do you? Where was he when we were sitting in our holes in the ground, going daft with the noise? He didn’t sweat and tremble and cry, expecting death by the second! And when you stormed the trenches at Fricourt, and saw all your mates mown down like grass, where was he?

  ‘I tell you where he was,’ Liam added, stabbing the table with a finger that was scabbed and torn, ‘he was sitting in a comfortable office in Whitehall, or reading papers in his flat, or taking the boat-train to Dublin. That’s where he was. Not here. Oh, no – not here.’

  ‘You’re very bitter.’

  ‘He’s a professional soldier, for God’s sake! A fucking staff officer! He got medals for being so bloody clever in South Africa and the Sudan – he’s an old mate of Haig’s, did you know that? Oh, don’t look so surprised,’ he added quickly, covering up for the source of that information, ‘I looked him up a long time ago.’

  ‘I don’t think mate quite fits his relationship with Haig,’ Robin said stiffly. ‘He knew him, but they never got on. In fact I got the impression that he disliked him intensely.’

  ‘Oh, you did, did you? And when was that?’

  ‘Last Christmas, when I was coming back from leave. He met me at King’s Cross with Georgina.’

  Her name was like an arrow to the heart. Unable to trust his voice, Liam simply shook his head.

  ‘I wish you could understand how deeply he cares, how bitter he is at being kept in Ireland. It’s not his doing, you know.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘No, it damn well isn’t! I know you dislike him, but I wish you wouldn’t despise him so. He doesn’t deserve that. For all his faults he’s very straight, and says what he thinks. Which is why he’ll retire as a colonel, while Haig will probably end up with a bloody sainthood!’

  ‘He’s drawn you to his side, I see that.’

  ‘It’s not a question of sides. I like the man, I admit it. I always have.’ He softened suddenly. ‘It’s strange, but I remember him so well from when I was little. You don’t, I know, although I can’t imagine why. In fact one of my earliest memories is of sitting on his knee and eating humbugs. And then we had a game, and he let me slide down his legs — and I swallowed the humbug whole!’ Robin laughed at the memory. ‘I suppose I must have been about two or three.’

  ‘And you’ve been swallowing humbugs ever since,’ his brother remarked acidly.

  ‘Oh, thanks! And what have you been doing that’s so much better? Running away from things, burying your head in the sand, just like you always did! You can hurt other people, but nobody must hurt you. Is that it? Tisha always said you were spoiled — I’m beginning to think she was right.’

  Liam winced at that.

  ‘You’re my brother and I care about you. I’m taking nobody’s side against you. But just because you’re the eldest doesn’t mean to say you’re always right. In this case, I think I am. You can’t change what happened, Liam, but you can change the way things are now.’ He paused and leaned across the table. ‘It would do Mother and Dad so much good. Get some leave, if you can. Go home and see them. Please, Liam.’

  How the old name affected him! It touched so many chords, brought forth a softness in him that could well have dissolved in tears. Was he really so selfish? Was that how it seemed to others? Had his behaviour been interpreted as that of a spoiled, wilful child? Surely not. His name, the thought of home, the memory of his mother placidly gardening, lovingly ruffling his hair, all flooded his mind and weakened that stony resolve. He wished with all his heart that he could go back, that the past with all its tragic mistakes could be wiped out; that truth could have come gently. Perhaps, if he went home, he might see things differently; perhaps the pain would ease...

  Briefly, he gripped his brother’s hand. ‘All right, all right. If it will satisfy you, I’ll go home. If I get the leave I’ve applied for, I’ll go.’

  There was joy in Robin’s eyes and a sudden warm hand-clasp which said everything was all right again between them; what had been said was harsh, but they were brothers and it did not matter. It did, because Robin’s words, despite their sting, had given Liam something to ponder over. But that extracted promise left him feeling curiously relieved.

  The atmosphere lightened, became rather silly. They ordered more beers and something to eat. More than a little drunk, with the hour of noon well past, they decided to have their photographs taken.

  ‘Looking like this?’ Liam demanded. ‘I haven’t even got a bloody hat – only this tin thing.’

  ‘We’ll borrow one. Look – there’s some of your mob killing time — go and ask.’

  Concerned that he should be on his way back to camp, Liam was reluctant to draw undue attention; but he knew why Robin wanted photographs, knew why he wanted them himself. They were a kind of proof, something of this day to hold on to. Otherwise it would slip away, become dreamlike, unreal.

  He borrowed a hat and stood the soldier a beer at the estaminet. Half an hour later, with Robin promising to collect the photographs and send one on to him, they were walking back towards Liam’s camp, when, rounding a corner, they spotted the whole contingent coming towards them. With a sharp about-face, Liam dragged his brother back to the square, into the shelter of a recessed doorway. There was no time for more than a hurried farewell.

  As his company appeared, he slipped out to march alongside them; somebody moved over and he was roughly in place, two rows behind Keenan. Looking back to wave, he saw Robin sprint forward, grinning from ear to ear as he kept pace alongside. His eyes were sparkling — with laughter or tears, Liam could not be sure – but for a moment he looked so much the mischievous boy, that Liam was disoriented, wondering what on earth they were doing here.

  They passed the church, but Liam’s view was blurred; he put out a hand to wave his brother away and felt it grasped in an iron grip. Then Robin released him, said good luck, and fell back.

  At the corner, turning his head, Liam saw him shadowed against the sunlight, tall and dark and straight, raising his cap in a final wave.

  Twenty-two

  The photograph took just over a month to reach him. Holdin
g it, Liam had the sense of a moment captured, preserved forever in time; a moment which seemed to have been amusing, although he could not imagine now what they had found to laugh about. Still, he was glad to have it; glad, too, to have Robin’s letter, despite its age. Was he still alive? He supposed so, he still had news of him from York, but it was one of the frustrations of war that letters took so long to cross a battlefield.

  Aware that he should write to him, Liam shied from the task. Feeling as he did, he was in no fit state to communicate with anyone.

  Instead, he turned to his diary. ‘Poperinghe. Tomorrow, or the next day, Ypres. A sea of mud, probably, after a week or more of storms and torrential rain. Flooded out yesterday from the camp outside town, and today we are billeted in an old warehouse. Not much better, the roof leaks. Spent afternoon cleaning gun and filling belts. Had the usual silly orders read out, about smartness and saluting. As if it mattered.’

  He sighed and tucked the diary back into his breast pocket, found his cigarettes and went to the huge warehouse doorway to smoke. The rain was passing, a pale evening sun making high drama of thunderclouds in the east. Across the canal everything was sparkling, so green after the dearth of Pozières, so untouched. And so quiet; although that was probably deafness. He felt as though his ears were permanently stuffed with wool, and it had been growing worse with every bombardment.

  Swallows were swooping low over the water, and on a sudden stirring of the air Liam caught the invigorating smell of rainwashed fields. He felt his nostrils flare as he followed it, dragging deep breaths into his lungs, filling his chest with clean, ionised air. He had forgotten its intoxication, had imagined he was filled forever with the sour-sweet smell of death and the acrid reek of chemical explosives. Even now, with the freshly-washed streets of the little town before him, soldiers and black-clad women passing back and forth, Liam still had a vision of hell imprinted at the forefront of his mind. It was a wasteland of shifting grit and ashes, a place so thoroughly obliterated that no sign of human habitation remained.

  Only the dead remained, only those rotting carcases of men. Their mangled bits of arms and legs, sometimes attached to a piece of khaki, sometimes tangled in strips of barbed wire, were thrown up with horrifying regularity, to remind those who were still alive of those who had gone before. There were moments when he thought that no one could convey the moonlit horror of those journeys across the ridge, when the sudden explosion of flare or shell would send men flat, to come face to face in the dirt with gnarled, disembodied hands, or the blackened eyes of a rotting skull. Who would willingly describe the days of sweltering sun, lying in shell-holes which were alive with fat, buzzing flies and the sickening miasma of corruption. Or the rain, which turned everything to greasy, slithering, stinking mud.

  In the four days that it took to take and hold Pozières, and in the ten days which had just passed, the 1st Division had lost almost 8,000 men. Between times, the 2nd and 4th Divisions had held the village and pressed northwards a further thousand yards to the stronghold of Mouquet Farm. Eastwards, they had taken the position at the windmill beyond the village, and pushed the Germans back a few hundred yards along the Bapaume Road. But each attack had been on such a narrow front, like driving a wedge into a hardwood log, each blow less effective as the wood became harder, more dense with resistance.

  Knowing what was coming, knowing too well the aim of those blows – which were to cut off the Thiepval ridge – the German commanders had thrust all their reserves into that same small area. As for the British Commander-in-Chief, Sir Douglas Haig, he let the Australians get on with it. There was some assistance at Pozières, most notably, in Liam’s experience, from the Black Watch, who had managed to earn his wholehearted admiration. The British artillery, alongside their Australian cousins, had kept those guns going night and day. But elsewhere on the front line the attacks were no more than skirmishes. Haig’s troops had taken a terrible battering in those first two weeks of July, and instead of flinging everything in, all along the line, he had held them back for rest and recuperation. Now, with each passing day, he was losing the chance to follow up that hard-won victory on the hill.

  In bitterness they had all discussed it, all the amateur strategists repeating what this or that officer had said or been overheard to say. Liam agreed they were right to feel badly let-down. The costs were incalculable. But after being with his brother he had a fair idea of how badly beaten the British troops had been. And yet, had those good, brave men not been so utterly wasted on 1st July – if that initial attack had been at dawn, instead of in broad daylight, surely surprise would have been on their side!

  But as Robin said, at half-past seven, attacking into dazzling sunlight, long after the barrage stopped, they had not stood a chance.

  And who was to blame for that?

  The waste of it ate into his soul. And still it went on. The Australian divisions were still hammering at Mouquet Farm, trying to push through, trying to cut off the Germans at Thiepval. It was a lost cause, they had all been through it twice, and nobody wanted to go back again. Not there.

  Heartsick, despairing, Liam could not summon so much as a sense of relief at being out of it. After five days travelling on foot and by train from Pozières, they were relegated to rest and recuperation at Ypres, to take over from the Canadians, who were slowly moving down to the Somme. Rest and recuperation at Ypres! The Canadians he’d met had laughed at that. To be sure there was no big push to contend with, but it was hardly a place in which to sit and lick wounds.

  In one explosion out of the millions that had churned the earth at Pozières, Liam had lost Jack, his Number Three. That big, cheerful, reliable man had fallen beneath a direct hit which Liam could still see in horrifying detail. There had been nothing left to bury, or rather, too many bloody pieces, and no chance, under that bombardment, to do the decent thing. That side of war, the impossibility of burial, of necessary prayers and time for grieving, could still hurt him; all the friends lost, and on no more than an indrawn breath, the business of war went on.

  Young Vic, the railway clerk from Melbourne, had finally succumbed to horror and had to be sent out of the line, his reason gone completely. Liam prayed it was only temporary, but did not expect to see him back. One burly sergeant had gone quite mad with the noise, attacking everyone in sight; it took four men to restrain and disarm him. Keenan, however, had survived, like the bad penny he was; twitching visibly by the end of it, but then they all were.

  One night, after a relief of twenty-four hours, the team had carried up, between them, 32,000 rounds of ammunition. It was all used up by morning. A bad night that, Liam remembered, in which the 2nd Brigade had attacked after a heavy bombardment, but by some mistake got into their own artillery barrage, losing many men. It was a bitter tragedy, but understandable in that shifting sea of dirt, where there were no landmarks to establish, even from the air, the correct position of the line.

  On a very trivial scale, that same night he had been struck on the heel by a flying shell-splinter, which had sliced the heavy leather of his boot but missed his foot. Looking back, he was unsure whether to be happy or sad about that; like his old mate Smithy at Messines, he felt it might have sent him home.

  Home. Strange word. Did he know where it was, could he identify it? When his mates said home, they meant Australia, but Australia had become, for him, no more than a distant dream. When he thought of it, which was less and less often since he had come to France, he could hardly believe that he had spent eight months there. It seemed so brief, a moment from another lifetime; while York, which he had left so bitterly, loomed large on the edge of his awareness. Recalling his conversation with Robin, the extracted promise seemed no more than academic. Convinced he must die at Pozières, Liam found it hard to come to terms with his survival. He had no faith in the future, no belief in anything but death.

  The guns were booming at Ypres. Was one destined to bring death to him? If so, he hoped it would be soon, direct and instantaneous obl
ivion, not the drawn-out agony of disembowelment, or wounds that turned gangrenous, or the burning, blinding, retching end of poison gas.

  With no particular aim he ambled wearily towards the centre of Poperinghe, surprised to see people strolling along pavements, taking the evening air. Leaning against a wall, lighting a cigarette, Liam heard muffled thuds and wondered if he was imagining them. Everyone else seemed quite oblivious, heads nodding in conversation, lips smiling. A sudden burst of laughter penetrated his deafness, and he could have turned and yelled at them to be quiet.

  He moved on, vaguely aware that he had missed a meal; he would have liked a drink, but had no money. No pay since before Pozières. Had he been able to think where he might go to escape all this, Liam was aware that he would have gone. Just walked away. But he was beyond making decisions. He felt as empty and useless as a spent shell. There was not even enough in him to be afraid, although he had an uneasy feeling that he was unfit to carry out a corporal’s duties. How he would deal with any new men coming into the team, he had no idea.

  Having made a circuit of the town, Liam found himself once more in the square. He supposed he should return to the billet and try to sleep. He was certainly tired. So tired he was no longer sure of the way back. Dragging his feet across uneven cobbles, he headed for the far corner, hoping it was the right direction.

  A small man in the rather shabby uniform of a British officer stopped him. Liam tensed, expecting a dressing down for his lack of a salute; but the man was smiling. He was also wearing a clerical collar.

  ‘Excuse me, Corporal – you don’t have a light, do you? I seem to have lost my matches.’

  As Liam fished in his pocket, the man produced a pack of cigarettes and held it out. ‘Bet you could use a smoke, couldn’t you?’

  Liam hesitated, not wanting to be engaged in conversation, especially by a Padre. But the man pressed him, seeming determined to have his chat, even though Liam explained that he could not hear very well. Undeterred, he accompanied Liam across the square, asking where he was billeted, and had he just come up from the Somme?