Gadfly in Russia

by Alan Sillitoe

  The bill for work and parts was such a negligible amount that I gave him a Monte Cristo as well. The lights never failed again, and I was thanking him all the way to England whenever I had to overtake. Hurrah for Italian expertise!

  The long tongue of land beyond the village of Iesolo led to the lido of that name, a resort area close to Venice. A friend who worked at the Hotel Ionio had arranged for me to stay there two nights.

  After a shower and a nap I went with her to the end of the spit, from where the islands of Venice were visible, a couple of miles away. The sun on its decline spread a coppery glow over the towers and spires, my first view of the place. I recalled Shelley’s lines, though he had written them at dawn:

  As within a furnace bright,

  Column, tower, and dome, and spire,

  Shine like obelisks of fire …

  I was back in Western Europe, and nearer to home than God. My friend and I went to dinner at a good restaurant (I even put on a tie) to celebrate my safe arrival.

  Thursday, 6 July

  We caught the crowded morning boat, went weaving in a mist between islands to a mooring near the Piazza San Marco. It was only a reconnaissance, but a pleasure to walk. The square swarmed with pigeons and tourists, but a leisurely second breakfast inside a café cut off the sight of most. A twenty-minute glance in the cathedral told me I must look into my Ruskin later. A cardboard box could only hold so many maps and books.

  After a few hours walking through streets and alleys the only sighs at the Bridge of Sighs concerned my feet. We had a late lunch at as ordinary a trattoria as could be found in such a tourist-ridden place. On deck in the afternoon, looking over the wake of the launch, the spires of Venice faded away.

  Friday, 7 July

  The last great barrier – the Alps – between me and the Channel loomed as I motorwayed the flat expanse of the Po lowlands, Dolomitic peaks sensed but not seen in skirting Vicenza and Verona, Brescia and Bergamo.

  I felt no hurry on swinging north from Monza towards Como, merely going at the by now accustomed pace, recalling yesterday’s marvels in Venice, and almost missed the bifurcation for the Swiss border. Had I done so – that impulsive and treacherous left turn again – I would have been shunted to the Simplon Pass and out of Switzerland by Lausanne, not on my planned route. A one-second swerve at the vital split of the motorway spun me in the right direction, and it was lucky that no other traffic was close enough to be disturbed by the abrupt manoeuvre.

  The unmistakable mass drew close, under a moil of grey cloud about to send rain on to all cars as they went through the frontier post at Chiasso. I knew that even in July there could be snow on the St Gotthard where I was heading.

  After the formalities I changed the remaining lire into francs, and bought a couple of Swiss maps at the 1:200,000 scale which showed the route as far as Basel. Two youths signalled they were hitchhiking, so I stopped for them. Twenty years old and on their way home to Holland, they said they would be grateful for a lift as far as the Rhine, 300 kilometres in a northerly direction.

  They laid their rucksacks in the back and came on board. ‘It’s Friday,’ I said, ‘your lucky day,’ and off we went, up and over wooded foothills to the glistening Lake of Lugano. Negotiating a range by an 1,800-foot pass, imposing scenery was again in my theatre, until we were on a straight road to Bellinzona by the River Ticino, My passengers said they had been south to Sicily, and had done well in getting lifts from kindly Italians.

  The valley gave a gradual ascent as far as Airollo, when the hard work began, a thousand-metre climb in a few miles by thirty-eight well-laid hairpin bends, which one of the Dutchmen began carefully to count. I told him soon enough amid much laughter that if he clocked another bloody curve I’d stop the car and throw him into the foaming torrent.

  The pass was a dreary open space, with scattered small lakes between sombre mountain walls. At 7,000 feet we were in a different climatic zone, snow in patches looking like dull milk, the scene bleak in its dearth of any comforting vegetation. Walking towards the gaunt hotel for coffee, the air felt bitterly cold after so long a time driving in the heat, and I looked hopefully for a renowned woolly-bully of a St Gotthard Newfoundland dog with a barrel of brandy swinging from its neck.

  The road to Andermatt and Altdorf, through icy drizzle for a while, gave way to tantalising views of tortuous cliffs around the Vierwald Statter See, specks which must have been boats on flashes of sheet metal. I wondered whether to pull in and spend the night at one of the comfortable hostelries passed now and again, lights glowing in their windows. Instead we took a long time circuiting the in and out configuration of the three lakes, and it was nearly dusk when driving through Lucerne.

  As usual darkness caught up with me, and I found it difficult to stop. Should I maintain a compass course pointing to Basel and follow it through the night? My passengers were relaxed enough not to care, though I assumed that the sooner we reached the Rhine before calling it a day the better.

  Exhaustion, however, was gritting up my eyes and, not wanting to endanger any of us, I thought Olten would be a convenient place to bed down, yet the inside demon hastened me through. Again on the open road I had to admit that, after 400 miles, enough was enough, and I disliked driving in darkness, so a lodging of some sort had to be found.

  The road took a hairpin turn to the west for about a mile, then by a similar sharp bend went back east, straightening out at the village of Hauenstein. Under a street light I saw a large unlit building with a sign in the window: Zimmer, meaning of course that there were rooms to let.

  It was ten o’clock, and the street was empty. The house was without lights and shuttered up, but I thumped the door till a man who looked like a farmer came from around the back, asked what so much noise was about, and what I wanted. It seemed obvious to me, but I told him in pidgin German that the three of us needed a room for the night. When he smiled and said he had one for us I called to the lads who were dozing in the car. He showed us into a large room with four single beds. I paid the tariff for all three in advance so that we could set off early in the morning. On asking about a place for supper he thought I was daft, because all possibilities were closed at such an hour.

  Leftover sandwiches – the cornucopia package made up at the hotel in Iesolo – provided us with sufficient fodder to sleep afterwards. We sat on the beds too tired to do more than munch in the dim light.

  Saturday, 8 July

  The room was hardly quiet, from so much passing traffic, but it was agreed on waking at half past seven that we had slept like moss-covered stones. Yawns were contagious while packing our few things, but lessened after a plentiful Swiss breakfast.

  An early drizzle on going through the Jura hills soon fulfilled its prophecy of good weather. Steering between trams and lorries in Basel, I let the youths off at a safe place so that they could try their luck on the German motorways to Holland. Wishing them Godspeed, they asked for my address and, being well brought up, promised to send a thank-you letter on getting home – which they did.

  In France I set the nose of the veteran Peugeot on to the open roads of its homeland, but it went leisurely at first, as if to sniff the full sweetness of the soil. I bought fresh supplies of food in Altkirch, then sent a telegram from the post office thanking the manager of the Hotel Ionio for his generosity in having let me stay two nights free. I later posted a parcel of signed books.

  The car pulled me through le trou de Belfort, that topographical feature so tempting to an invading army. After Vesoul and Langres I gave an almost mute soldier a lift from Chaumont to Troyes, then pushed on to Château Thierry, Soissons and Ham.

  I called at Coucy-le-Château Auffrique hoping to find a bed, but it was Saturday and the hotel was full. I strolled around the village wanting a look at the castle, or what was left of it. It had once been a remarkable example of medieval military architecture, but in 1918 the Germans blew it up in their retreat, even though it had no tactical significance. Heaps of debris re
mained after such ‘wanton and destructive vandalism’, as the 1920 Blue Guide to Belgium and the Western Front informed me.

  Trundling into Bapaume, six hundred kilometres from Hauenstein, I was back in the north, and could have been over the Channel well before midnight, and home by early morning, but I had no will to charge on. Like an aircraft in an emergency landing searching for a place to set down without alarming its passengers, I didn’t want to frighten the devils still in me by a too abrupt end to the journey.

  At dusk a ribbed cloud filled the sky like the skeleton of a giant predatory bird, and I recalled reading From Bapaume to Paschendaele by the journalist Philip Gibbs when I was twenty, a narrative of battles in the Great War, which began my obsession with the history of that dire four years.

  I pulled up at the Hôtel de la Paix on the main street, a convenient place to stay, but was satisfied with a meal and glass of wine, intending to sleep in the car. With the help of a Michelin map bought at the last filling station I went south of Bapaume and parked at a British military cemetery, half a kilometre from the nearest village.

  Darkness and isolation was soothing after the drive, and though it was early I lowered the front seat to make a more or less level bed, and stretched out under a blanket. I slept awhile, but woke because an unexplained regular sharp click sounded every minute or so of the chilly night from behind the dashboard. I thought the disturbance came from the clock, then couldn’t be sure. Proper rest was impossible, and the loud singing of birds soon signified that daybreak was close.

  I came out of a coma rather than proper slumber, also because the spot I had parked at wasn’t as isolated as I had hoped it would be, since huge lorries going to Lille or Paris on the motorway were audible for much of the time. Silence makes even the slightest noise loud.

  Sunday, 9 July

  Stirring, I took a gulp of brandy and ate bread and cheese. A faint light glowed in the east and, unable to be still, I drove at half past three along the empty road to Bapaume. Turning southwest to Flers and Longueval, fields and hedges were sharp enough etched for the car lights to be switched off. No good farmer was awake, shutters still closed at the houses. Mist lay in the hollows but land above rolled openly against the sky, a dark patch of wood looming here and there. Humps and hollows of greensward on the edge of Delville Wood (Devils Wood to the soldiers) told even now where fighting had taken place half a century before.

  The sky was leaden and birds noisy as I drove slowly out of Longueval to High Wood, a flank of packed trees formidable even now in the dawn.

  The British took it on 14 July 1916, when it was almost empty of Germans, but several hours elapsed before reinforcements could be brought up, and so it was recaptured. British battalions spent weeks in attack and counterattack, and it was only occupied after two months of fighting. In one assault Robert Graves’s lungs were riddled with shrapnel, and he was reported killed in action on his twenty-first birthday – though he lived to be ninety.

  I wanted to explore the wood, but a piece of board informed the public that trespassers would be prosecuted. I went along the field to look for a gap but it was so firmly fenced that, as in the Great War, the heaviest wirecutters would have been necessary to make a breach.

  In London I had recently come across a cloth-mounted War Office Trench Map in a secondhand bookshop, for a shilling. The scale was about six inches to the mile, and it covered the Gommecourt sector of the front where, on 1 July 1916, two battalions of Sherwood Foresters had been annihilated by German artillery and machine-gun fire while trying to cross no-man’s-land on the first day of the Somme Offensive. An uncle of mine had been taken prisoner, and I wanted to see the scene of the disaster.

  On the way to Gommecourt I glanced now and again at the outspread map on the passenger seat, showing the German defences, one line behind the other running from southwest to northeast in red. The British front was indicated by a dotted line in blue, a mere five hundred yards separating the different colouring.

  I reconnoitred the ground, as if to find the spot where my uncle had laid before he was captured. The silent fields were now planted with corn, potatoes and barley, but when the Foresters went ‘over the top’ – suicidally laden with seventy pounds of equipment, after a week of bombardment, heavy work shoring up their trenches, lack of sleep, little food, and soaked from mud and rain – they had no chance.

  Examining the area between the trenches through binoculars, it was no longer pitted with craters, but a wide gently sloping meadow of rich grass. With bread and ham bought in a shop in Fonquevillers I sat on the cemetery wall of Gommecourt Wood by the laneside trying to imagine the emotions of the men as they climbed out of their trenches at seven o’clock and advanced into a storm of shells and machine-gun fire.

  Rows of well-tended graves behind me were each marked with a cross, many nameless headstones having: ‘Known only unto God’ chiselled into the concrete. I took notes for a possible novel, or family memoir, about my young soldier uncle and his mates caught in the kind of warfare they’d had no conception of when so blithely enlisting. Perhaps the theme would tell how the conflict, triggered by those fatal shots in Sarajevo, affected not only them but their families as well. I would call the book Raw Material.

  I drove to the valley of the Ancre, and made my way, by a little bending of the fence, into Aveluy Wood. The trees had grown again, though not to any great height, yet made enough shelter to hide a trespasser by also keeping out much of the light.

  The mulch-covered ground was indented where craters had been, and there were no recognisable paths through the greenery, though many were marked on the map. Banks of earth along shallow yet distinct trenches revealed bits of rusty wire and iron spikes, pieces of shovel and decaying metal of all sorts scattered under the leaves. Perhaps deeper down there were bones, because 4,000 Yorkshiremen had formed up there, many killed and wounded before emerging to attack Thiepval. I could only suppose that if I had been eighteen at the time I would have enlisted with everyone else.

  I considered taking a marlin spike as a souvenir, but threw it down. Quantities of live shells, grenades and small arms ammunition were still collected every year, unearthed by farmers while ploughing. Woods were also dangerous, and people hunting for mementoes were sometimes killed or maimed.

  My feet were trapped in the undergrowth, legs buckling at a hidden trench or the ridge of a shell hole. Ghosts lurked everywhere, though I laughed at the notion on pulling myself free. Tramping feet and the crack of dead twigs broke the silence again, and spiders wove their dewy gossamers, but it was eerie being alone in such a place.

  Losing all sense of direction, I wondered how I would find a way to the car. A lack of orientation was no longer amusing. I stopped to light a cigar found in my pocket. In a clearing a line on the sun showed the direction for getting back to the solid ground of a paved lane, and I was glad to be away from trees that had fed on so much blood they seemed almost animal.

  Back at the Hôtel de la Paix in Bapaume I booked a room for the night – the last one. On going in to supper I heard a tall blowsy red-haired Englishwoman (undeniably attractive) being told there wasn’t a bed left. She seemed about to stamp her foot at the disappointment, but the proprietor helpfully telephoned a hotel in Albert, where she would be able to stay.

  I had wondered whether to give up my room, as a gentleman ought, and sleep in the car again. Or I could offer to stretch out on the floor while she had the bed, and who knew what would come of that? But it was light enough for her to reach Albert less than twenty kilometres down the straight road, so I merely recorded the incident in the same notebook for a story sometime.

  Monday, 10 July

  Military cemeteries, and battlefields from which they were made, lay thickly about northwest France and a slice of Belgium. Still feeling no urgent reason to hurry across the Channel I headed north for Ypres via Arras, Lens and Armentières, through landscapes of peace, husbandry and life, over one stretch of open land after another.


  A brasserie off the main square at Ypres was thick with the odours of roast meat, rather better chips than could usually be found in England, salad dressing, coffee and tobacco, all of which successfully tempted me into ordering a bigger lunch than could be taken in.

  I walked to the Menin Gate, the entrance into the ‘Immortal Salient’, where tens of thousands had gone and not come back. The memorial complex, opened in 1927, and designed by Sir Reginald Blomfield, looked like a great Pharoanic temple from the outside.

  Above the main archway was a couchant lion, sombre though handsome, carved by Reid Dick. On the walls inside, and the steps and galleries leading to the Vauban ramparts, were chiselled the names of 55,000 who had been killed in the Salient but had no known graves.

  I recalled the walls of the Old Synagogue in Prague on which, similarly inscribed, were the names of 77,000 Czech Jews taken away by the Germans and murdered, women and children among them. A greater chill came from comparing the difference in numbers.

  A drive northeast on a slightly ascending road took me by the Tyne Cot Cemetery (12,000 graves) to the village of Paschendaele 130 feet above sea level. Its heap of ruins was taken with heavy loss by the Canadians, and ended the Third Battle of Ypres on 6 November 1917. The offensive had opened three months before, but persistent rain created a beleaguered region of mud in which overladen soldiers and wounded often drowned. Fighting in it was as the Official History said ‘the last word in human misery … in conditions hitherto unknown in war’. The soldiers endured and fought on. Out of five million who took part in the battles a million came back wounded, and three hundred thousand were killed.

  Dry and cultivated land sloped down to Ypres in the distance, farms and houses resurrected after the wilderness of fifty years ago. To the east Paschendaele overlooked the glistening plain of Flanders, which the soldiers had been striving to reach but didn’t until the final breakthrough in 1918.