A Whispered Name

by William Brodrick

  ‘What’s my replacement like?’ asked Chamberlayne with something like envy.

  ‘Dead,’ replied Duggie. ‘In life he was a stickler. When an enquiry came from London, he told me you must have thrown half of Flanagan’s file in the bin. The paperwork was a complete mess, he said. I didn’t believe him for one moment.’

  Herbert lived through another mess in the spring of 1918. A massive German offensive was launched across a fifty-mile front. The expected but unthinkable decision was made: Passchendaele was to be abandoned. So was Messines. And the Salient itself. And so, in a daze of obedience, all the ground bought in blood between July and November was ditched in three days. They fell right back to the canal this side of Ypres. ‘“A coherent and defendable position,”’ cited Chamberlayne on another day out. He’d made notes while the strategists thrashed out a plan. ‘Why didn’t we think of that?’ moaned Duggie. Of course, he wasn’t surprised at the move. No one who knew Ypres was surprised. It was obvious: a Salient is always a death trap. As Chamberlayne mounted his horse, he confirmed a rumour flying through the officers’ mess: this withdrawal to the canal had been first suggested by a general way back in 1915, for all the same reasons, but no one had listened … he’d got the sack. The Salient. God, what a place. What did we defend it for? Almost everyone Herbert could remember lay buried out there.

  The 8th was topped up, as and when, with fresh faces. They held the new line with distinction as Jerry made his last, violent roar. Herbert was mentioned in Despatches. There was talk of an MC for some other act of soldiery, but he didn’t get it. He lived, right up to the armistice in November 1918 and the return of the regiment to England, though Herbert missed the boat. And throughout, around his neck, hung the identity tags of 6890 Owen Doyle.

  2

  Herbert’s failure to stay with his unit constituted an act of desertion, but he was quite sure that Duggie would not convene a Court of Inquiry, or refer the matter to Evans, the new Brigadier. (Pemberton had been killed by a burst of shrapnel at Polygon Wood.) They said goodbye in Étaples, of all places. Herbert then retraced his steps to Oostbeke where the Divisional Camp was being gradually dismantled. The outline of the mock-battlefield where the Menin Road attack had been rehearsed could still be made out. The coloured tape markers had been left flapping on the ground. Herbert walked among them thinking, strangely, of Elliot, the one soldier who’d never forgiven him. The fields were terribly bare and dry, and a cold wind whistled through the hop frames. Looking around him, Herbert began to weep with a quite awful sound like laughter. He could not contain himself. The loneliness of the land was in his soul. His shoulders heaved with an immeasurable sorrow and all the dead men he’d known seemed to turn round in his memory and ask, ‘What’s up, Sir?’

  Throughout the unspeakable horrors of the Flanders campaign, Herbert’s attention had frequently returned to a sound in his memory – the singing of the monks in a language he could not understand. In the early evening, drawn by that remembrance, Herbert knocked on the guesthouse door of Les Ramiers. He was still dressed in his uniform and Doyle’s identity tags were still around his neck. No one asked any questions, though he’d expected a fairly gentle interrogation on his background and why he was still in Flanders. The Guestmaster, it transpired, was a chatterbox on English Rugby League, with a particular interest in the fortunes of the Wigan team. He led Herbert to a room overlooking the road that ran towards the school. A note on the wall told visitors that the maximum stay was a week. Seeing Herbert’s consternation, the Guestmaster explained that everyone had a tendency to run away from things they ought to face. The monastery, he promised, was not that kind of refuge. The peace and quiet wore off after you’d lived with yourself for a while. And other people, he added, darkly. It was ultimately a school for prayer, he said. With that thought, he withdrew. Alone, Herbert sat at the window, his eyes on the low bank of trees and the pink light in the greater distance. With a stab of feeling like homesickness, he remembered gazing at the sea from his hotel room in Boulogne, when he couldn’t write to Quarters’ mother, when he’d written instead to Mrs Brewitt; that period of simple suffering – almost innocent it seemed, now – before he’d been called back to sit on a court martial. ‘Third officer required.’ As he’d stared at the sea then, Herbert now gazed upon the woods beyond Oostbeke. Between those two obscene executions the whole world had spun off its axis.

  On the sixth day, when ambling around the enclosure, Herbert saw a monk by a compost heap. His head was almost perfectly round and with his thick round glasses he seemed to be a phenomenon of where humanity met mathematics. He raked leaves on to a pile and then prodded them with a long stick. There were no flames to be seen, though smoke rose in sudden gusts. Herbert joined him and for a long time they just watched the heat in the mulch. Though they did not speak, a kind of mutual confidence grew between them, and Herbert said, with feeling, ‘Father, what do you do here?’

  The monk gave the leaves a stir and they crackled quietly. ‘We tend a fire that won’t go out.’

  They fell silent again. The monk pushed his stick deep into the pile, letting the air in. ‘Captain, may I ask you a question?’

  The mention of his rank told Herbert that the community must have talked about him. For a moment, he was unnerved. ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Are you a tormented man?’ The gardener’s face was very still and all the rounder for that.

  ‘I am,’ replied Herbert, bowed and broken.

  ‘Have courage,’ he murmured. ‘Approach the darkness in your heart, a darkness that needs more than enlightenment.’

  Part of Herbert’s consciousness, a remnant of who he once was, almost fainted at the words. The impact of the whole war on him was summed up in that phrase. He’d seen the annihilation of a civilisation. He’d lost faith in its past and its future. He simply could not articulate the desolation he felt: there was no possible connection between the world he’d known as a boy and the one he must face as a man. He looked elsewhere now, hungry for something permanent; another land whose sound he once heard behind a white door.

  Before leaving the next morning, Herbert went to the chapel where he’d once prayed for Flanagan’s release; and where – to call a spade a spade – his prayer had not been answered. He sat between the two statues, those guardians of the sanctuary, and realised – well ahead of any informed intention or even the evocation of a desire – that one day he would join these silent men.

  3

  While mulling over the words of the gardener, Herbert taught English in a small school near Poperinghe. The thought of travelling any great distance from Les Ramiers destabilised him. He had become a loiterer, neither in the world nor of it. But, inevitably, letters from home urged Herbert’s return: his parents were troubled at his self-imposed exile. And so in June 1919 Herbert crunched up the gravel path to Whitelands. He paused to look over the treetops – for the house was high on a bank – and he could see lush green fields dotted with sheep, and the Coquet winding towards the purple moor-grass of the Cheviots. It was an enchanting vista; but it was no longer home, if it ever had been.

  Constance and Ernest threw a party. Friends came from near and far, including Keswick. When everyone had gathered in the dining room, Herbert’s mother handed him a gift: a typed, bound volume of all the letters he’d sent home since 1915. Everybody clapped while Herbert flicked through the pages: ‘The rations came up on limbers …’ ‘… the wooden huts were stamped F. J. Lewis of Alnwick’; ‘No-man’s-land is just covered with litter …’; ‘The Lambton Cup is ours!’ Herbert’s eyes blurred and he toasted dear, absent friends. He could find no other phrase.

  Throughout the meal, Herbert was like a man deep within a pool of water, listening to voices from high above the surface. There was such a gulf between what he’d seen and done, and what anyone who wasn’t there could reasonably imagine, that he could barely speak. His participation in the slaughter separated him not just from ordin ary people, but from history, his under
standing of the past, the very culture that had brought about the conflict. He felt adrift in a cold place, haunted by millions of faces. And he thought of the monk prodding a pile of burning leaves. While the cheese plate was being passed around the table, Herbert announced that he would shortly return to Belgium, resolved to become a monk.

  The considered view of many was that Constance and Ernest’s son had shellshock. And that, thought Herbert, was a fitting memorial.

  4

  Those at the monastery charged with discerning a vocation were more lukewarm than pleased. They hummed and hawed and suggested he work off the idea, as if he might be slightly drunk. But he kept coming back, drawn by the rhythm of life; its focus on something beyond the matter in hand. Finally, the novice master suggested he meet the Prior to discuss his intentions. There, by the compost heap, he was introduced to Père Lucien Koopmans. Herbert had met him once before. He was the gardener with the rake; the monk who’d no doubt ordered that the bells be rung after Joseph Flanagan had been shot.

  Over the following months, the Gilbertines slowly but judiciously opened their doors to him. However, the more they did so, the more Herbert realised that he could not go on, that he’d been deceiving himself and the community. He packed his bags and told the novice master that he belonged in England. That evening Père Lucien asked to see him where they’d first spoken together, by the compost heap. After a long, awful silence, Herbert began to shake.

  ‘I condemned Joseph Flanagan to death,’ he finally whispered.

  ‘I know,’ he replied.

  Father Maguire had told Père Lucien long ago. Nothing more needed to be said.

  Abruptly Herbert blurted out another name. ‘Quarters … Jimmy Tetlow … he was a fisherman from North Shields … I said I’d meet him on the Green Line.’

  Digging his nails into the scar on his arm, he spoke of the mud and the drowning of a beast and the hesitation – the long, unending hesitation – before he pulled the trigger. And he spoke of the other dead he’d seen: the blank faces from all corners of the world.

  Père Lucien didn’t reply until Herbert had stopped shuddering, until his breathing was completely normal. Quietly, but with the force of a prophet, he said, ‘Herbert, you are forgiven. But you have wounds that will never heal. They are part of your loving. Use the suffering, your immense suffering, to heal others.’

  Within the hour, Herbert had unpacked his bags.

  Herbert frequently pondered upon these words. With a new kind of freedom, greater than anything he’d known in his life, he ran to his chosen future, tripped occasionally by those who knew the territory and what it meant to live there. But his progress was relentless: he moved into the guesthouse until, on a sharp November morning in 1920, Herbert was captured by the stillness of a cloister garth.

  Herbert’s entrance into monastic life, at one level, owed something to Flanagan’s talk about ‘the land’. It was as though the enclosure wall marked out a plot of ground, part of humanity’s shattered expectations, and gave it back to God. This land could never be the same again, never simply ordinary. It was a sign for everyone, of another possibility beyond all walls: a new, restored creation. And as if in tribute to the dead soldier, Herbert’s first significant act as a novice was to make a contribution to Gilbertine cartography. He suggested an English name for the bank of trees a mile beyond the school: Flanagan’s Wood. It was adopted by everyone at Les Ramiers. And everyone understood its meaning. While Herbert immortalised the location, he didn’t dare venture along the road out of the village, let alone enter the clearing.

  That changed in 1922.

  Herbert was on his hands and knees, one of six monks digging potatoes in a field. Looking up he saw Madame Lisette Papinau on the road that led out of Oostbeke. She walked past him without a glance but he recognised her profile instantly. Her black hair was tightly braided. In her arms was a sack that she held across her chest. A long blue dress reached to her ankles.

  Herbert scrambled from the field and shadowed her progress, keeping well back. When she reached the wood Herbert panicked. He did not want to go down the track; nor did he want to meet her, especially in there … but now she was out of sight, so Herbert cut through the trees, intending to hide but watch. He moved slowly, not wanting a branch to snap and give him away. It was so very like the morning of the execution, when he’d crept upon the firing party. The ferns were thick and the branches low and charged with leaves. He saw her blue dress through the foliage. She was in the centre of the clearing. Slowing, he tiptoed behind a tree, as he’d done when a soldier. Again he was present to that moment, but also to the one unfolding before him: the two events occurred at the same time: the drop of the handkerchief, and the fall of Lisette Papinau to her knees.

  She opened her sack and took out a trowel. Slowly, she untied the braid so that her hair fell loose and thick around her shoulders. Then she began to dig, leaning forward. Her hair tumbled over and touched the ground. It was like a pall and Herbert could not see her face. A strong desire moved his hands: he wanted to touch her and a terrible awkwardness made him blench, for this impulse was new to him, and came out of his growing identity: he wanted to bless her. Boldly, with humility, he raised both his hands.

  When the hole was finished, Madame Papinau reached once more into the sack. She took out a small bush and planted it. Rising, she brushed her knees clean with her hands and compacted the soil with her feet. Stepping back, she looked not at the place where the chair had survived in the flames, but all around, high into the branches. After a short while she braided her hair, picked up the sack and left the clearing.

  Herbert stayed alone in the woods until the bells rang for Vespers. When the pealing found a regular strike, singing over the fields, he stepped into the open and approached the memorial to Joseph Flanagan. It was a mulberry, that most English of trees, and a symbol of lost love.

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  1

  Anselm thanked the Prior of Les Ramiers warmly for his help and put the phone down. He then walked rapidly to Father Andrew’s study, beginning his account even before the door had clipped shut behind him.

  John Lindsay was known to Les Ramiers and he did run a café in Étaples – or he used to, for the management had passed to his family upon his retirement. He’d been a regular visitor to Les Ramiers for about twenty years. Of late he’d always been accompanied by one of his children or grandchildren. They were a very private family and volunteered nothing of their purpose in coming, though their routine suggested a ritual of some importance. Each year they arrived on the evening of 14th September in time for Compline. Mr Lindsay rose very early – something like five in the morning – and went out somewhere, regardless of the weather. He was back for Lauds at seven. After lunch the family left, and Les Ramiers didn’t see them again until Compline a year later. An interesting family, Père Sébastien had said. Spoke together in English and French with relatives in both countries and further afield.

  It was obvious to both Anselm and the Prior that John Lindsay’s habit was to make a pilgrimage to the woods where Flanagan was shot on the date of the execution.

  ‘Go to Les Ramiers on the fourteenth,’ decided the Prior. ‘That is the place for you to approach him with Herbert’s message and these.’

  He held up the tags and for a moment they both watched them swing. Time was about to lose its momentum and its control over the ordering of events. They knew that when Mr Lindsay reached out to take them back his youth would reappear, as frightened and desperate as ever.

  The period of waiting was peculiarly charged for Anselm. He fulfilled his monastic duties mindful that, long ago, these mild September days had been an interregnum between two very different kingdoms, one of life and one of death. The thousands of names for the many, many monuments had not yet been determined. And he was about to meet someone who’d been smuggled out of the reckoning.

  ‘So where is it now?’ asked Bede, in the cloister, ‘Barbados?’

  Ans
elm stared back from that forgotten September and simply waved goodbye. He took the train to Folkestone, the ferry to Boulogne and a coach to Poperinghe, where a taciturn monk drove him the remaining twelve kilometres to Les Ramiers. Throughout the journey Anselm felt a subdued presence at his side: this was the route Herbert had taken long ago when he’d first left England in a uniform. At the end of Compline Anselm sang the Salve Regina with his brothers in the nave, wondering where Herbert had once stood, acutely aware that among the handful of guests were an old man and a woman. They sat at the very back, close together, apart from the others, hidden by shadows.

  2

  Anselm’s alarm went off at 4.30 a.m. He washed and dressed and then waited among a scattering of fruit trees planted not far from the guesthouse. At 5.30 a.m. two dark shapes appeared on the top step. Both were well wrapped to meet the cold of the morning. Mist came from their mouths as they whispered to each other. Arm-inarm they descended the short stairs, left the enclosure and began walking along the main road out of the village. After a few minutes Anselm followed them.

  The man and woman were about a hundred yards ahead, etched black against the first indications of the dawn. Anselm slowed, his senses sharply tuned … larks were singing in the fields on either side; and ahead, from a low line of trees, came yet more birdsong. It was like a secret festival, gathering voice with the coming of the light.

  They came to a school with quaint shutters, slowing for a moment before moving on. At a copse – the copse described by Mr Shaw – the man and woman turned on to a path and vanished from Anselm’s sight. When he reached the same spot, he paused, struck by the speckling of flowers. Looking up, he made a soft gasp.

  The track was flanked by aspens, oaks and chestnuts. But straight ahead grew a glorious, tangled Mulberry tree … all on its own, its roots sunk deep into the middle of a clearing. And like pilgrims before a shrine Mr Lindsay stood motionless before its branches, the woman at his side. The birds’ song had become a riot. Anselm couldn’t move a hair. He watched and prayed knowing that, in 1917, at roughly this moment, Harold Shaw had fished out an envelope from his mother, and that shortly afterwards Joseph Flanagan had been shot among the secrecy of the trees.