Gather the Bones

by Alison Stuart

  With a monumental effort, she choked them back. “I gave this to him, when he left,” she said.

  She had bought the piece at an expensive jeweler in Collins Street in Melbourne and had her photograph taken especially for it. If she could open it, she knew the inscription would read, Always loved, H.

  “I know,” Paul said. “He never took it off. It left me in no doubt.”

  Helen clasped the locket so tightly she could feel it digging into the palm of her hand. She looked up at Paul.

  “What happens now?”

  “The funeral will be the day after tomorrow at the Tyne Cot Cemetery. Tony, can I leave you to hire a car?”

  “Whatever you want me to do,” Tony said. “Look, you two have things to talk over. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  They watched him go and Paul picked up the glass of brandy. “What do we have to talk about, Helen?”

  She looked at him. “I want you to tell me how you are.”

  His face gave nothing away as he said, “I never intended to ever come back, least of all to do what I have to do. What I should have done six years ago.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I never forgave myself for leaving him there. I should have brought him back.”

  “He was dead, Paul, and you were in no condition to bring him back to the lines. You know that.”

  Paul raked his fingers through his hair. “It’s not something I can intellectualize. I survived, he didn’t. That’s what I live with.”

  “Nothing I can say can change that, Paul.”

  “No.”

  “But for what it is worth, I’m certain had it been Charlie sitting there, not you, he would say exactly the same thing.”

  He rose to his feet. “For what it’s worth, Helen, thank you.” She heard the bitterness in his voice. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

  She watched him walk away, his shoulders square, his back straight, despite the awful burden that he seemed to carry.

  * * * *

  The next day Helen procured a shapeless black dress, coat and hat. Just wearing the awful clothes brought her soul down.

  She looked at herself in the mirror one last time and then straightened, lifting her chin. She was Helen Morrow and she owed it to Charlie to behave with the dignity he would have expected of her.

  Tony and Paul waited in the foyer of the hotel, so unfamiliar in their stiff, immaculate uniforms that it took her a moment to recognize them. Evelyn sat in one of the chairs, in full mourning, her face obscured by a heavy crepe veil that made her look like a bedraggled crow. Helen took her arm, and led the shattered woman out of the hotel to the waiting car.

  The weather continued bleak and damp and Helen stared out of the foggy car window as the countryside changed from pleasant fields and hamlets to an unrecognizable landscape of ruined villages, barely passable roads, devastated forests of tree stumps and a bleak landscape of churned fields. If she could have imagined the end of the world this is what it would have been like.

  Many of the villages through which they passed had been completely destroyed leaving nothing more than piles of rubble where there had once been a bustling little town with bakers, butchers, churches and homes. Some new buildings had begun to rise from the ruins, but the deeper they drove into the Ypres Salient, the more dismal the landscape became. What had once been fields were now nothing more than wild earthworks from a painting of hell, dotted with small cemeteries of rows of white crosses, like a grim harvest of death.

  She stole a glance at the two men, but their faces told her nothing. Evelyn’s face concealed behind the heavy veil was also unreadable. The woman sat straight as a ramrod, her black gloved hands folded over a small black handbag.

  The car halted at one of the larger cemeteries. In a far corner of the field, a knot of men in khaki waited for them beside a fresh mound of sodden dirt.

  “The regiment sent a contingent,” Paul said, as he helped Evelyn out of the car. “They’re all men who served with us.”

  He took Evelyn’s arm in his and led her across the field. Tony took Helen’s arm and they followed.

  The regiment had also sent a bugler and the chaplain. The soldiers snapped to attention as the mourners, led by Paul and Evelyn, crossed through the maze of white crosses to the freshly dug grave that awaited Charlie.

  For the first time Helen had a sense of Paul as the man he had been in the trenches. Charlie had described him as an officer the men would have followed to hell and back. Looking at the respectful faces of the men who waited for them, she could see for herself now that all these men had been to hell and back and owed their survival to their commanding officer.

  The sight of the coffin, not so much a coffin but a slender box covered in the Union Jack, brought the reality home to her. She gave a strangled gasp and at once felt a hand under her elbow. She knew without turning that it was Tony.

  The internment was short but poignant. The men formed a funeral party with their firearms reversed and carried the coffin at a slow march to the grave where they laid it with reverence in the dark, damp earth of Flanders, the earth that held Charlie these long six years. The men saluted their fallen comrade and the words of the internment were intoned, Helen removed her glove, stepped forward and picked up a handful of the clay. The dirt fell on the lid of the coffin with a hollow thunk.

  As the bugler played the Last Post, Helen stood looking down into the dark hole, not seeing the coffin, but Charlie, bare-headed, his fair hair bright in the autumn sun, whooping with delight as they brought the cattle down from the high country. That would be how she remembered him, not here, not in this bleak field.

  When it was over she stood with Evelyn and waited while Paul talked to the men. She watched the way they stood, the way they laughed, easy in his company and yet deferential. Tony leaned against the car smoking a cigarette, deep in his own thoughts.

  Paul strode through the cemetery, no trace of his limp. The uniform he wore had sent him back to the time before his injuries. He reached the car.

  “It’s going to rain again,” he said. “I suggest we stop in Ghent for lunch and then back to Brussels.”

  “Paul.” Evelyn spoke for the first time, throwing back her veil. Helen was shocked to see how old she looked, as if the events of the day had aged her twenty years. “I want to see where...where he died.”

  Paul’s face tightened. “No, Evelyn. Don’t ask that.”

  Her lip trembled. “Please, Paul. I want to understand...”

  “Seeing won’t help you understand,” Paul said.

  He broke her pleading gaze and looked away, into the watery sky with the heavy storm clouds closing in on them before giving a cursory nod of his head.

  Helen looked away. She didn’t share Evelyn’s desire to see, to understand. When Charlie had left her standing on Station Pier in 1915, he had walked out of her life into a world she could never share, even in his death. Her Charlie would always belong to the mountains in that far off country he had come to love so much.

  As if he could hear her thoughts, Paul turned to her and their eyes met in perfect understanding. Evelyn’s wish would take them both to a place neither wanted to go.

  Chapter 19

  “Is this it?” Evelyn asked, peering out of the window of the car.

  “The road’s impassable,” Paul said. “We’re going to have to walk.”

  He opened the car door, his polished boots sinking into the black mud. He looked down and shuddered. It felt as if the very ground once more tried to drag him back into the place from which he had escaped.

  Helen put a foot on the running board of the car and hesitated, looking down at the muddy track. “Is it far?”

  Paul glanced at her and shook his head. “Helen, you don’t have to...”

  Helen met his eyes and he saw no fear in her clear gaze. Where he went, she would follow. They would see this through together.

  Tony took Evelyn’s arm and half carried her as they picked the driest
way through the mud. Evelyn’s complaints about the state of the road fell on Paul’s shoulders. This was summer. Winter had been so much worse.

  What he remembered as a black, featureless landscape from the imagination of the darkest painter had softened in the intervening years. Brambles and hedgerows struggled back into life and he could hear birdsong. There had been no birds on the Western Front.

  What had been the British lines were still clearly visible, although there had been obvious attempts by the local farmers to attempt to restore some order to their land. Like the earthworks of giant moles, the abandoned trenches still snaked their way across a landscape pocked with crater shells filled with fetid water and tangles of rusty barbed wire.

  “I can’t believe it still looks like this,” Tony spoke first. “It’s been five years.”

  Paul hunched into his great coat as the rain began again and addressed Evelyn. “Are you sure you want to go on?”

  She held out a gloved hand to him and he took it, leading her over the line of trenches until they stood on the brink of no man’s land.

  Several hundred yards of mud, barbed wire and shell craters still clearly marked the battleground. Freshly dug earth indicated where the search parties had passed, scouring the field for the lost, like Charlie.

  “That line of stumps,” Paul said indicating the distant line of severed remains of what had once been trees, “is all that is left of Polygon Wood. The Germans had held it from the beginning and were well dug in.” He paused and took a deep, shuddering breath. “At the end of July 1917, we tried to take Polygon Wood. It was a disaster. We lost nearly half the battalion, certainly half the officers. The colonel took one in the arm and was shipped out. It left me in command of the battalion and all I had left in the way of officers were Charlie, a man called Collins and a few young lieutenants.”

  Evelyn leaned against him, her grip tightening on his arm as he continued. “What took us out was that bunker. From it they had intersecting arcs of fire with the other bunkers.” He pointed across the wasteland to a cement structure lying low in the ground like a malevolent toad. “The order came through that we would be going over again. We all knew we would be cut to pieces before we even got half way.” He stopped. “It looks such a little distance now...” He ran a hand over his eyes, struggling to maintain his composure.

  “Paul...” Helen’s voice sounded choked. “It’s all right, you don’t have to go on.”

  He couldn’t look at her. If he did, he would break.

  “You know what happened. You’ve heard it often enough,” Paul continued, fixing his gaze on the bunker. “Charlie led a party out before the attack and took that bunker with knapsacks of grenades. As a result we took the German lines with the loss of only a handful of men, but–” anger replaced despair in his voice, “–we were the only ones along the line who achieved our objective and within an hour we had to pull back or face being cut off. All that effort, for nothing...again.”

  “What about Charlie?” Evelyn’s voice, ragged with emotion, cut across the silence.

  Paul turned to face her. “Charlie was wounded in the sortie. When I realized he wasn’t with us, I went back for him. We were halfway across when a mortar shell caught us.” He swallowed. “The rest you know–Charlie died and I survived.”

  “I don’t know what happened,” Evelyn pleaded. “How did he die? Tell me, Paul?”

  He shook his head, barely able to speak. In his head, the guns pounded again, the smoke, the mud, the confusion...

  “I’m sorry Evelyn, I can’t.”

  “Was he still alive after the mortar?” Evelyn asked, her voice tight and breathless.

  “Evelyn, please.” Tony’s voice cut across her.

  “He died, Evelyn. That’s it, that’s all I can tell you. He died.” Paul thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his coat and lowered his head.

  He heard Tony say, “Let’s go back to the car, Evelyn. You’ll catch cold standing out here. Helen?”

  He heard Tony moving away but he could still sense Helen standing behind him.

  “Go back to the car, Helen.” He forced the words out through stiff lips.

  “You remember. I can see it in your face,” she said, her voice shaky with emotion.

  He looked away, narrowing his eyes at the distant German trenches.

  He shook his head. “No, just fragments,” he said softly. He turned to look at her and saw the pain in her face. “I held him in my arms and he died.” He took a shuddering breath. “I remember the crater was full of water, like these ones. I must have lost consciousness some time during the night. When I came to, he had gone. It was as if the earth had reached up and claimed him–” his voice broke and he closed his eyes, forcing back the emotion.

  “Paul, don’t go on.” Her voice sounded broken and he felt her arms around him and her head pressed against his chest. She had responded with the instinctive need of one suffering human being to comfort another and for a long moment he didn’t move, just stood within the circle of her embrace with his eyes still closed, letting her humanity and vitality seep through the cracks in his façade, breathing life back into him.

  “Helen,” he whispered, his own arms encircling her, drawing her in toward him. “I’m sorry.”

  She did not respond but her arms tightened around him.

  He had no sense of how long they stood there in the middle of the muddy, ugly landscape that still smelled of death and despair before he sighed and released her, drawing away from her.

  They walked back toward the car in silence, once more two strangers in this barren landscape, isolated by their individual grief.

  * * * *

  Paul stood by the window of his hotel room looking with unseeing eyes down into the quiet, rain sodden Brussels street. Knowing he would not sleep, he had tried to read but he couldn’t focus on the words. He had risen from the chair to fetch a glass of water. He looked down at the glass in his hand and wished it was whiskey.

  * * * *

  Passchandaele September 18, 1917.

  Paul dreamed a cold, wet pillow was being held over his mouth and nose and the more he struggled, the tighter the grip became. With one last supreme effort, he fought the smothering pillow away and lay still, taking in deep breaths of air that smelled of cordite and death. His ears still rang with the percussion of the shell and the silence added to the eerie sense that he inhabited the world of the half dead, neither alive nor dead but not permitted to cross the River Styx.

  The lowering, rain-soaked sky told him that it was late afternoon and that he had been unconscious for several hours. He tried to move and the limbo world he had returned to gave way to indescribable agony. Through the ringing in his ears, he heard himself cry out in pain. A bullet zinged into the ground just beside his right hand and the damp mud spattered across his flesh, bringing him fully to his senses.

  Wounds or not, he had to move and move now. He took a deep breath and tried to assess how badly he had been hurt. His right hand and arm seemed to be uninjured but it hurt when he moved his head, and a tentative exploration with his right hand confirmed his helmet had gone and he had a gash over his left ear that bled profusely. His left shoulder had a piece of shrapnel protruding from the wound, rendering his left arm useless and his right leg–he had never experienced anything like the pain of what must be a broken femur.

  With a supreme effort, he rolled on to his right shoulder. Charlie lay beside him on his back and he knew what had been smothering him. It had been Charlie’s weight on top of him. Charlie had taken the brunt of the shell burst. Charlie had saved him.

  Paul seized a handful of his cousin’s tunic in his hand and used it as leverage to haul himself toward him. Hardly daring to breathe, he reached out and touched Charlie’s shoulder.

  “Charlie!”

  If Charlie responded, Paul could not hear him above the roaring in his ears. His head spinning, he raised himself up on his right elbow and saw with a sinking heart what he had not seen bef
ore. The torn tunic, Charlie’s abdomen, sodden with dark blood and worse. Even as he lowered his head, grief threatening to overwhelm him, Charlie groaned and his eyes flickered open. He turned his head slightly and seeing Paul, something like a smile touched the corners of his mouth as the blood bubbled from his lips.

  Paul felt utter despair wash over him. The fact Charlie still lived made it worse. He couldn’t stay here and he couldn’t leave Charlie out here to die.

  Paul raised his head looking for shelter in the desolate landscape. Another bullet whistled past his ear as he saw just a few yards away, a shell hole, a massive crater in the lunar landscape, an old hole already half filled with water.

  Paul swallowed. Knotting his hand around Charlie’s collar and with the pain of his own wounds suddenly nothing against the basic instinct to live, he started to pull the dead weight of his cousin toward the shell hole. Charlie screamed but Paul had been a soldier long enough to know that whatever he did, however gentle he could be, it would make little difference to Charlie in the end.

  The Germans now had a good sight of the two men and began the sport of trying to pick them off. Paul felt a bullet graze his already injured right leg but there was no time for pain.

  He had reached the edge of the shell hole and with one last supreme effort, Paul sent them both tumbling into the water-filled crater.

  * * * *

  A soft knock on the door caused his hand to jerk, sloshing water from the glass on to the thick carpet at his feet. For a moment, he thought he had been mistaken but the sound came again, a soft rap on the door.

  He glanced at his watch. It was long past midnight. He crossed to the door and opened it. Helen stood in the dimly lit corridor, still fully dressed, her arms wrapped around her slender frame. When she turned her face up to him, he could see she had been crying.

  They stood for a moment without speaking, both understanding in each other the need for company but not for talk.

  “Get your coat,” he whispered. “Let’s go for a walk.”