by John Freeman
That morning I had been to nearby Nimy and located the places where my great-uncle’s two machine guns were positioned beside the canal, and found a tan plaque to Lieutenant Dease and Private Godley under the extant railway bridge. Children with backpacks pushed their bikes cheerfully across its metal footbridge. High-grade multicoloured graffiti of cats, tags and clouds was painted along the canal bank wall, and someone had sprayed 2012 MONS! HATER FAKER neatly between two sections. I had visited the memorials around the city, almost all written in English: a tablet to the British Expeditionary Force’s first skirmish, a Canadian plaque, a Celtic cross, an ugly stone arch commemorating ‘the forces of the British Empire’ – which had been put up after World War II just as that empire was disintegrating. I felt a physical resistance to being in Mons, and kept running through excuses in my head to leave. But I knew I had to visit the graveyard at St Symphorien.
I had trouble picturing an army in battle, the complication of retreat, no one being sure if they were winning or losing, unless they were dying. For an instant outside Mons, driving through farmland by Bois-la-Haut, I felt the war: dry ploughed soil, a field of wheat, copses where the German cavalry had pursued the retiring British as they would not do again once the combat fell to stalemate; and I had the epiphany of a volley of shots, galloping horses, a gleam of bayonets through smoke.
As a child I had been taken to the military cemetery at St Symphorien – there was photographic evidence – but I had no recollection, and was surprised to find a beautiful place, raised up, sheltered by evergreens, laid out carefully beside stretches of pasture. The man I had come to meet lay beneath the grass between a private from the Royal Irish Regiment and another lieutenant from the Fusiliers who was killed on the same day. After the battle, Uncle Maurice’s harrowed body had been taken in by a Belgian family and kept in a vault. When the war was over it was buried in this cemetery, which was shared, unusually, by the German and British war dead.
In my mind’s eye, I had thought of St Symphorien as a huge industrial graveyard, symmetrical tablets of white stone emerging from the ground like endless teeth. It was not like that. Krankenträgers and Musketiers lay alongside lance corporals and captains. The graves came in little clusters and semicircles and parcels of their own, as you walked at different levels. Some gravestones were eroding with the wind, sun and rain, but this was not the end: the Commonwealth War Graves Commission was replacing them with new ones, making sure nobody could be forgotten. Britain has no Forgetfulness Sunday.
For a lifetime, I had reacted against the elevation of military service and the assumption that because I had been born to this, it was my destiny. I resented the appropriation of the First World War, the way men who had never been to war used its memory as cover, acting as if their own commemorative pride and respect for violence made them the living delegates of the war dead. I didn’t much like the reverse either, where statements about the futility of fighting were grafted, colonially, onto a generation that had lived by different laws. I realized these nostalgic myths had fused in British culture – sacrifice and futility, the official and the alternative – when I was invited to sit under canvas on a bench at Bulford Camp to watch the play Oh! What a Lovely War. Serving soldiers’ wives and children smiled as one staff officer jumped right over another acting staff officer’s back.
Coming back across the lawn at St Symphorien I was suborned by an Englishman, ex-army by the look of him, chattily mourning the dead. ‘That’s the resting place of the first holder of the Victoria Cross in the Great War, our most prestigious decoration for gallantry,’ he said to nobody, pointing at Uncle Maurice’s headstone. I skipped away, smiling with raised eyebrows as if I had a train to catch. The inevitable was happening. He had a story to tell, and he was going to tell it. ‘With Mr Dease on the bridge was Mr Godley, who got the VC at the same time. Mr Dease was told to hold up the Germans for three hours and keep them at bay. So he did, and gave his life for us. Mr Godley was taken prisoner and threw his machine gun into the canal. He came back to Mons and was told he could have a free glass of beer whenever he wanted in the town square. After the war, a boy and a girl came up to him and said, do you remember, we brought you coffee and croissants before the battle and he said yes and they said, we’re the same boy and girl, and he adopted them and came back every five years.’ Could this account be true? It didn’t sound likely.
A Belgian bystander asked him why Germans were buried in the graveyard. ‘It started out as a German cemetery and at the beginning of the war they laid some of our boys beside their boys. In those days we had chivalry. Do you understand the word chivalry?’ The Belgian man said he understood the word chivalry. ‘They took them in. It was the same with us. If a German soldier was wounded, we would treat him alongside our own, and if he died we buried him right next to our boys.’ The Englishman was brimming with pride. ‘We took care of any German boy that needed it. That’s what we did. We took care of those boys.’
I said nothing and walked away and sat in the car. I wanted out. Minutes later his shape appeared at the car window: blue zip-up jacket, military lapel pin, white baseball cap. ‘Would you care to join us for a cup of coffee? I’ve brought a flask.’ I denied him, frozen by unwarranted antagonism. Why should I commemorate this war, I wanted to say, rather than any other time when human beings have died in large numbers? Does death have a different value depending on who is doing the dying? Are you concerned about the three million soldiers of the Ottoman Empire, or the half-million African soldiers like the tirailleurs sénégalais in their blue, white and red uniforms, or the 140,000 Chinese contract coolies who were transported to the Western Front to bury putrefying corpses? In Ieper, which you call Ypres, why did I only see an unending parade of British visitors? What of the dead from Fiji and Australia and the Maghreb and Jamaica and Indochina and the Maori from New Zealand and the Sikhs and the Vietnamese infantry and the fighters from the Blood Tribe of Alberta like Mike Mountain Horse who inked a pictograph on stretched cowhide of his attack on Vimy Ridge? It wasn’t a Western Front in West Flanders – everyone was there. Yes, I know you’ll tell me to go to the Menin Gate memorial and look at the list of sepoys from the 9th Bhopal Infantry, but what is being remembered beneath that inscribed PRO REGE marble slab except the monumental power of empire? What of the nameless Chinese labourer who engraved a metal shell case in northern France with lines from a Tang dynasty poem about plum blossoms and exile and home? Please don’t mention Rupert Brooke to me. And why, when Germany and France each lost twice as many men of military age as the British in this First World War, do they not have our ghoulish national religion? Why is it Britain’s prime minister, standing in the Imperial War Museum with his shiny face and jutting underbite looking for all the world like a cavalry officer heading for the Somme, who announces glorious repeats for children in 2014? Instead, I said nothing.
I am able to analyse succinctly the emotions of other people, using a biographical instinct that I think comes from my mother’s thin-skinned oversensitivity to the feelings of others, but with myself, I am nowhere. I am not shy; I can talk to pretty much anyone, but I could not have a conversation with Ian Crosswell, as he revealed himself to be, solemnly handing over a business card, which said his motto was HONOURING THE FALLEN. ‘My wife said to me when I retired, you can’t be around the house all day. So I organize battlefield tours.’
In England’s assiduous literature of the First World War, the returning soldier is greeted by his family with handshakes and incomprehension and asked if he had a nice day at the war; nobody speaks, nobody feels, except internally. You do not encounter anyone like Rostov in War and Peace, coming home on leave to Moscow in 1806 and meeting from parents and siblings ‘more hugging, more kissing, more outcries, and tears of joy. He could not distinguish which was papa, which Natásha, and which Pétya. Everyone shouted, talked, and kissed him at the same time … Natásha, after she had pulled him down towards her and covered his face with kisses, holding him tight by
the skirt of his coat, sprang away and pranced up and down in one place like a goat, and shrieked piercingly.’
In Albion’s version, tears are forestalled. Some of this is retrospection, using later interpretations of how people would have behaved a century ago, but at its root is a truth about what is socially allowable. The British could do imperial, they could do ceremonial, but they could not do feeling – and I mistrusted that lack of passion, that lack of soul, that lack of articulated hysteria. The easiest demonstration of public sentiment in Britain remains the armed services. They are the only symbol of nationhood that a politician can invoke confidently in a speech, without fear of disdain. In England, being at war is normal: you do not even think you are at war. In accordance with the collective thinking, you take it for granted there is a mission here, a duty there, an expedition here, a responsibility there, and a ceaselessly applauded royal prince somewhere in the picture. Anyone who puts on a uniform today can be referred to as a hero. War is patterned into us, and we do it well: our armed services are often reported to be the best in the world. As Queen Victoria wrote back in 1879, ‘If we are to maintain our position as a first-rate power, we must, with our Indian Empire and large Colonies, be Prepared for attacks and wars, somewhere or other CONTINUALLY.’ The world has changed, but the philosophy has still to be updated.
I have agreed to join my father and his old comrades on a march on Parliament. He has sent me some quite complex instructions from his regiment involving serried dots, arrows and phrases like ‘the contingent will right wheel onto the grass and form a hollow square in front of the statue of George V’. Because a government defence review might disband their 2nd Battalion, retired Royal Fusiliers are making a stand to coincide with a parliamentary debate. Serving soldiers are not allowed to march, as that would be mutiny. A few months later, a young Fusilier from the 2nd Battalion named Lee Rigby will be hacked to death in Woolwich by self-made Salafists.
We take the Tube and I help my father walk up many steps since the escalator is under repair. At the Cenotaph, old soldiers are marching behind regimental standards headed by a Corps of Drums. He leans in to the black berets and red-and-white hackles grouped on the pavement. ‘Where have you come from today – Warwickshire?’ An exhalation of cigarette smoke. ‘Bermondsey.’ A drummer is wearing what seems to be a tiger skin. Some marchers have buzz cuts or earrings, some have missing teeth or fingers, some have metal structures to hold up all the medals mounted on the chest.
I get on fairly well with my father in part because I avoid occasions of this kind and the rehearsal of arguments to which there is no resolution. If he invites me to a commemoration of the Battle of Albuera, a reception at the Royal Fusiliers Museum in the Tower of London, of which he is a trustee, or something to do with the Korean War, in which he fought from 1952–1953, I invariably say no. This is more than an allergy to military life: if I am asked to join an organization or receive a signifier like an honour from the monarch, my instinct is to refuse. I resist being incorporated or co-opted. I distrust solidarity, and prefer all things counter, original, spare, strange. Lately, I have been wondering whether this tendency might be a trap of its own. Saying you are against war doesn’t mean very much. But without some version of pacifism, how can we undo the national narrative of the perpetual export of war?
At the stone version of King George V, the First World Warrior, the Fusiliers are being interviewed. ‘We’re the best regiment in the British Army,’ says one. ‘I know it’s unfashionable …’ begins another. ‘Our fighting record is second to none,’ says a third. The cameras play on a black man with dreadlocks and a Royal Fusiliers tie who is talking with other veterans, all of whom are white. A woman with a tartan sash draped around her stops the traffic, enabling us to cross the road towards the House of Commons. ‘I’m very proud to support you,’ she says with a wide, flirtatious smile. Big Ben strikes: it must be the correct time. When my father explains to a policeman that we are going to a backbench debate on the future of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, we are given a pass to jump the line. ‘As a former member of the Coldstream Guards, I can say that if I have any trouble from you,’ the policeman says, winking twice in the English way, ‘I’ll march you straight to the Tower!’ But my father does not hear this quip because his eardrums are shot to pieces from being near too many guns.
We go through the airport-style security of the Houses of Parliament, preceded by a regimental standard-bearer who has to fold the drapery around a pole and place the thing in a scanner. Inside the giant, medieval Westminster Hall, where Thomas More was tried and found guilty of treason, it is dark. St Thomas More is one of the Catholic martyrs from whom Maurice Dease was descended. My father processes slowly through the gloom, floating, propelled by the rubber tip of his stick, this man who has always insisted on walking briskly. We see a stained-glass window at the end of Westminster Hall and beneath it an edifice to those ‘who in the Great War consummated with their lives the tradition of public service’. The fourth name on the carved white tablet for the House of Peers reads ‘Arthur Reginald, Baron De Freyne’.
‘My uncle Reggie, Grandfather’s eldest son,’ says my father. ‘What a thing, I didn’t know this memorial was here.’ Reggie disappeared in America in 1905, the New York Times reporting that ‘the police think there are grounds for the suspicion that he was foully dealt with’ in the Bowery. When he reappeared in Ireland eight years later, it turned out he had been in New Mexico on the ranch of an uncle (who had employed Butch Cassidy while he was on the run) and enlisted in the US Army. Uncle Reggie died in 1915 on the same day as his little brother George, both fighting in the disastrous Battle of Aubers Ridge. The younger boy wrote a letter home to County Roscommon a few weeks before their death: ‘We put a pole with a turnip stuck on it. The Bosche did not discover the jest and three times knocked the cap off the poor old turnip.’ Four of my father’s paternal uncles were killed in the First World War. Reggie’s stepson, who was rumoured to be the child of King George V, became a celebrated society murderer in the 1920s. But that’s another story.
After retirement my father produced a booklet called Some Memories. The cover showed a photo of himself in a matching pose to Uncle Maurice in the painting, looking away into the distance, dressed in a high-collared red coat, his left hand grazing the hilt of a sword and his right arm cradling an enormous black mass – a tall, ceremonial fur hat worn by the Royal Fusiliers. I have never asked him whether this recreation was deliberate, but I suspect he would answer it was not.
He was formed by two world wars: his own father died during the Blitz at the age of forty-one. If this were fiction, where loose ends are tied up, I would tell you now that my father is like an army dad in a movie, sternly organized and soldierly, distraught that none of his three sons have gone near the Fusiliers and none of his six children have married inside their community. But here’s the odd thing: he is not a typical military type, although the army has been his life. You would not want to entrust him with a practical task like, say, booking a ticket, servicing a boiler or replacing an ink cartridge in a printer. These days he sits down for Christmas lunch with a Muslim, a Jew and a Hindu – which sounds like the start of an old-fashioned joke, but they are his children-in-law. By temperament, he is a talker, a joker, a romancer who will never let a fact come in the way of a good story, and I take this, perhaps mistakenly, to be a second-generation Irish trait.
He is having a late flowering in the lead-up to the hundreth anniversary of the Battle of Mons, as books and television programmes are put together. The BBC has three programmes in which his uncle features, and the producers enjoy having a live military link to the past. Raidió Teilifís Éireann is making a documentary about Maurice Dease too. The long nationalist lull when Ireland steered clear of soldiers who had fought in the two world wars is over, and oblivious history is being recovered. The family of Sidney Godley recently auctioned their Victoria Cross, and the newspapers are full of stories about the inevitable feud,
his eighty-nine-year-old daughter reportedly being ‘totally devastated’ and her son saying the sale of the medal has split the family. Years ago, my father sold his uncle’s Victoria Cross privately to his regimental museum to get money for school fees, and recently when he moved to a smaller house the oil painting followed it there.
We walk from Westminster Hall to the central lobby of Parliament.
‘Private Godley’s VC went for £280,000,’ he says. ‘I met the old boy when I joined the regiment.’
‘What was he like?’
‘He had a big moustache, and didn’t talk about the battle. His daughter is absolutely hopping. Uncle Maurice’s would have gone for £400,000 if I’d waited.’
The price of a house for a ribbon and some molten gunmetal.
‘Do you think Mozza knew Godley?’ I ask. I’ve caught this nickname from my younger son, who refers to his heroic antecedent as Moz Dog. ‘It’s weird the way they are always yoked together just because they got a medal on the same day.’
