by Liz Trenow
‘I rather like it,’ Ruby said, after a tentative tasting. The butter was creamy and unsalted, complementing the saltiness of the cheese. ‘Makes a change from the fry-ups we have at home. Well, we had, before rationing,’ she added, a little wistfully. On the rare occasions they managed to get hold of a few rashers, the smell of frying bacon never failed to remind her of her father.
She’d slept well, surprisingly. The heavy curtains in her room blocked the light so efficiently that she’d only woken when Alice had knocked on her door: ‘C’mon, sleepyhead, it’s eight. You don’t want to miss breakfast.’
By the time they were outside the hotel waiting for the motorbus to arrive, she’d barely had time to think about what today would bring. A photographer arrived with a large black camera on a heavy tripod, and began to organise the group into some kind of order.
‘Gentlemen at the back, please. You, miss, come to the front. I can’t see you.’ It must be a lucrative little sideline if Thomas Cook had gone to the lengths of bringing an Englishman across the Channel especially for the task, she thought. ‘That’s right, a little further please, miss.’ Ruby stepped forward reluctantly while Alice, so much taller, was encouraged to move to the side. Smiles were forced and positions held as still as possible until the ordeal was finally over. The prints would be ready for purchase at the end of the week. It would be something to take home for Bertie’s parents at least.
Major Wilson shepherded his troops onto the coach via a set of steps at the rear. Ruby was relieved to see that the vehicle had glass windows, the lower half of which could be pulled up or down with a leather strap, for ventilation. She wasn’t afraid of motion sickness, but disliked being cooped up for too long without fresh air. Alice manoeuvred herself to the head of the queue and secured a pair of seats at the front.
‘Gotta get the best views, don’t you think?’ she whispered, as Ruby joined her. The wooden benches were designed for two people and supplied with flat cushions. Alice helped her arrange them: one for the base and one for the backrest.
Major Wilson took the seat opposite. ‘Slept well, I hope, ladies?’ he asked. After murmuring polite confirmation, Alice confided that she hadn’t slept a wink. ‘If you like a lumpy mattress and bedding smelling of mould, it would be just dandy,’ she grouched. ‘And it was supposed to be a superior suite. What a joke.’
Are all Americans so hard to please?
The major began to address them in a finest parade-ground voice that ensured even the deafest among them would not miss a word. ‘Good morning, friends. I hope you are all feeling well, and ready for day one of our tour, a day that I confidently predict you will remember for the rest of your lives. We shall visit Ypres in the morning and a war cemetery in the afternoon, passing by the battlefields. As I said last night, it may be difficult at times for some of you. But I hope that it will help you to understand what happened over here, and perhaps to come to terms with your losses. Some call it bearing witness, but of course everyone has their own way of describing these things. One thing is certain, you will come away with a greater appreciation of what war really means – and hopefully a determination never to allow it to happen again in our lifetimes.’
‘Hear, hear,’ called a gruff voice from behind.
*
To Ruby’s relief, the countryside seemed perfectly normal at first, green and very lush farmland, flatter even than East Anglia, small fields bordered by canals and peppered with black and white cows that reminded her of the painted metal toys in her play farm long ago. This tranquil, misty landscape was punctuated by farmhouses huddled together with red-roofed barns, all protected from the wind by plantations of willow trees. Tall poplars lined the long, straight road, their silvery leaves glimmering in a gentle breeze.
They passed through a small village where black-clad women queued to buy vegetables from a stall, old men sat on a bench smoking pipes and children played in a school yard. Ruby began to relax. So far, so normal.
A few miles beyond this, everything changed.
They pulled up beside a collection of derelict buildings and large piles of rubble, and the major held up a photograph of a village square with an ancient town hall and church with a tall spire.
‘Believe it or not, this was once the beautiful medieval village of Dixmude.’ Gasps of dismay fluttered through the group. ‘It was one of the first villages the French and Belgians defended against the German invasion in October 1914. The name Dixmude means “gate to the dyke” – that’s the canal – so they were able to open the gates and flood the whole area, which stopped the German advance. The river became the frontline throughout the rest of the war.’
‘What happened to all the villagers?’ someone asked.
‘They fled, like so many thousands did,’ he replied. ‘I’m sorry to say they weren’t alone. As you will soon discover, this was the fate of dozens of villages along the front line, even major towns like Ypres. But the Belgians are resilient people; they’re determined to return and rebuild their lives again.’
Among the rubble, groups of men were pulling out wooden beams and planks, piling them carefully according to shape and length. Others collected and stacked undamaged bricks and tiles, and a further team seemed to be salvaging metal gates and railings. They faced a Herculean task, battling to recover normality amid mountains of destruction.
‘Where are their families?’
‘They went wherever they could, to villages behind the lines, lodging with other families or renting barns, whatever they could find. Now, so they can get to work, they are building temporary homes.’ He pointed to a distant corner, where yet more men were hammering wood and corrugated iron into makeshift shacks.
‘Poor devils. Imagine having to live like that,’ Alice said. ‘I had no idea.’
They left the village and the road surface worsened, the coach slowing more frequently to avoid the potholes. Trees disappeared from the landscape and, in their place, reaching far into the distance, stood lifeless, blackened stumps like exclamation marks. The formal demarcation of drainage dykes had been obliterated. No more black and white cows stood peacefully grazing. Ruby shivered, struggling to accept the desolation her eyes were seeing. They had entered a place in which battles had been fought, and lives had been lost.
The landscape was barren, bleak, monochrome brown and grey, the only relief of colour provided by occasional clumps of wild flowers valiantly pushing their way through the ravaged earth: yellow dandelions and buttercups, pink ragged robin and bright red poppies.
Alice nudged her. ‘Did you read that little poem about the poppies?’ She pronounced it ‘pome’.
Although Ruby couldn’t remember exactly how it went, she’d heard people at work talking about how the poem, by a Canadian soldier, had inspired someone to propose the poppy as a symbol of remembrance.
Alice began to quote: ‘In Flanders fields the poppies blow between the crosses, row on row . . .’
Ruby felt her throat contract, aching with sadness.
‘. . . that mark our place, and in sky the larks, bravely singing . . .’
She sniffed, fumbling for her handkerchief.
‘I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you,’ Alice whispered. ‘I’m such a fool.’
‘No need,’ Ruby said. ‘It’s just those larks, singing so bravely . . .’
‘I guess you’ve lost someone very close to your heart?’ Alice said.
‘Please. I can’t, not here.’ Ruby swallowed. She hadn’t reckoned on everyone wanting to know her ‘story’ and the prospect of telling it terrified her: it would mean having to lift her mask, cracking the cocoon that she’d wound to protect herself against the pain.
As they jolted along rutted roads the major did his best to describe the complex pattern of battles that had taken over this narrow belt of land, no more than twenty miles wide. They passed by lines of trenches, long, deep ditches zigzagging into the distance, sometimes separated from the enemy lines by just a few hundred yards of ‘
no-man’s land’, an area of mud so pocked with water-filled shell holes that it was almost impossible to imagine that this had once been green and fertile farmland.
He told them of triumphs and catastrophes, of territory lost and regained, only to be lost again. He gave them the numbers, always in thousands, of lives lost in each battle. He passed around maps with wiggly lines reaching from north to south, their colour denoting the relative front lines of the enemy and the Allied forces. Some places had changed hands almost every few months.
However carefully she listened, Ruby found it virtually impossible to take it all in: the unfamiliar names, the unfeasible tolls of casualties, the tonnages of shells, the magnitudes of explosives, the miles of trenches and tunnels made deep below the surface, the indescribable terror of poison gas.
She’d imagined that, in war, one side moved forwards, taking towns and villages, while the other retreated. But here in Flanders, it seemed the two sides spent months, even years, hunkered down in their trenches, firing bullets and shells at each other, releasing terrifying poison gas and tunnelling beneath each other’s lines to set off enormous explosions. And all, until the very end, for little tangible outcome, except that thousands upon thousands of men suffered and died for the few yards of land gained or lost again.
What had been the point of it? When she’d begged Bertie not to sign up, he’d told her it was his duty. But what did that mean? His duty to whom? Why did the Germans want to invade Belgium and, in any case, why was Britain so keen to defend this little country? Why did so many lives have to be lost for these few miles of otherwise unremarkable countryside? If she could summon the courage, she’d ask Major Wilson what he thought. He’d told them, more than once, that coming here would help to make sense of it all, but right now she felt even more confused.
It was a further half hour before they finally reached the outskirts of a much larger town – or what was left of it – with a deep canal and some ancient fortifications, which the major called ‘Wipers’. It took Ruby a moment to grasp that this was the place written in the Thomas Cook brochure as Ypres.
Beside her, Alice breathed, ‘A whole city just blown apart.’
The coach picked its way slowly along streets of broken houses and pulled up in a wide central square bounded by the ruins of civic buildings that had been toppled, as though by some clumsy giant, into vast piles of rubble. Ruby found herself squinting through half-closed eyes, scarcely able to believe what she was seeing. Even the ruined villages they’d passed through could not have prepared her – any of them – for this. Was this what people meant by ‘bearing witness’: seeing for their own eyes, written in the physical wreckage of a whole town, the terrible destructive power of war?
‘This was once the Grande Place – the central square – of Wipers,’ the major was saying. ‘It stood for six hundred years, since the Middle Ages, but it took the ruddy Hun only a couple of months to destroy it. They never actually occupied the place, just blew it to high heaven.’
‘That was the ancient Cloth Hall, the main market place for the ancient city’s weaving industry,’ he went on. ‘The town’s cathedral was over there.’ He pointed to another ruin of which only a high Norman arch was still recognisable. Tall columns of broken brick and stone reached precariously and defiantly towards the sky, the remains of a tower Ruby reckoned must once have been the height of Norwich Cathedral. Stretching into the distance the other side, along what must once have been the town’s central square, was a long row of derelict arches.
Here, just as in the villages and fields, men and women clambered over the rubble, salvaging, sifting and sorting household items: saucepans, books, boxes, and even carpets and curtains, which they piled onto horse-drawn carts. Steamrollers strained to clear a road, official-looking men in smart suits scribbled on notepads and one man had a camera tripod which he set up from time to time, disappearing under the black cloth to take a photograph. People walked purposefully around the square, some in army uniforms. Others just stood and stared.
Two or three motorbuses offered ‘excursions to the battlefields’ and, now she looked more carefully, Ruby noticed groups like their own, dutifully following guides around the square. ‘I expect you’ll all want to stretch your legs,’ the major said. ‘We’ll have elevenses and then take a walk around together so I can tell you more about what Wipers went through.’
‘Elevenses? What the heck’s that?’ Alice whispered as they climbed down from the coach.
‘It’s what we call a mid-morning break – tea or coffee and a biscuit usually,’ Ruby said. ‘But where on earth we’d get anything in this place . . .’
‘Over there.’ Alice pointed towards a makeshift stall advertising coffee and something called waffles. Tea was not on offer, it seemed, so Ruby asked for a weak coffee with milk.
‘I’m having a waffle. Want to indulge?’ Alice said. ‘My treat.’
Ruby was about to refuse but the mouth-watering aroma of warm sugar was impossible to resist. The stallholder poured batter onto a hotplate powered by a small paraffin stove beneath the counter, and hinged down another metal plate on top. Within seconds the waffles emerged, fat pancakes with a chequerboard design wrapped in a white paper cone, dusted with icing sugar and presented to them steaming hot.
She took a bite, careful not to burn her tongue. It was utterly delicious. Sipping her coffee, she looked around and wondered, all over again, what she was doing here, feeling guilty for being alive in a place where people had suffered such misery.
5
ALICE
As soon as he said the word Hoppestadt, she knew.
‘We’ll be taking lunch in a little town just a few miles from here,’ the major told them. ‘It was a main rail and transport hub and also headquarters of the Allied command for the area and where the troops came back from the front line for rest and recuperation. The Belgian name is Hoppestadt, but us Tommies only ever called it Hops.’
She could hardly believe her ears at first. ‘That’s it! Oh my goodness. Where Sam wrote his letter, remember?’
Ruby nodded.
‘We’re actually going there. Imagine, someone might remember him?’
She endured the rest of the short journey in an agony of impatience, scarcely able to contain her excitement. After the devastation of Ypres and the other villages, the place appeared almost normal. Most buildings were intact and the small central square, bordered by shops and cafes, was buzzing with activity. Bicycles, farm carts, cars and motor coaches clattered by on the cobbles and crowds of black-clad women gathered around market stalls.
The major shepherded them towards a cafe on the corner, busy with customers seated at tables beneath faded awnings. ‘If you’re in the mood, you can partake of their famous beer, and I can recommend the beef stew they make with it.’ So that explained the bitter-sweet odour of roasting malt that pervaded the air.
A young waitress, no more than a teenager, slim and willowy with a head of russet curls, emerged to welcome them.
The major greeted her like an old friend. ‘Ginger! Ça va?’
‘Business good. Many tourists now.’
‘Not tourists, Ginger. We call them pilgrims. It is more respectful of the dead.’
‘Any name, so long as they spend money,’ she responded genially. ‘Heavens know, we need it.’
‘Have you seen anything of Tubby lately?’
‘I regret, no. We miss his big cheerful face, but the owner takes the house back.’
‘Give him my best, if you see him.’
The waitress glanced at the group. ‘You are ten?’
‘Please. On the terrace, I think, now the sun’s breaking through.’
‘What you drink, Major?’
‘The usual, of course.’
Alice listened, intrigued by this little exchange. The girl was surely local, and had probably been here right through the war. Had she served Sam, perhaps, or at least people who might have known him? And what about this Tubby character, fo
r whom both she and the major appeared to have such great respect? Might he also provide a lead to her brother?
Faced with a menu entirely in Flemish, the group quickly turned for advice. ‘I could order some of my favourite dishes for everyone to share, so you can taste different types of Belgian cuisine,’ the major said. ‘Would that suit?’
Delicious aromas began to float from the direction of the kitchen, and before long Ginger was ferrying plates to their table: white asparagus with chopped egg, a cheese tart she referred to as flamiche, stuffed tomatoes, a curious-looking vegetable called endive like a lettuce heart wrapped in ham with a cheese sauce, a sort of fish stew and several baskets of white bread. Finally, she brought a plate of cold meats and a kind of smoked fish that John Wilson happily informed them was eel.
‘Eel?’ Ruby whispered, frowning. ‘Not for me, thanks.’
‘Go on, try it. You might surprise yourself,’ Alice urged, recalling how she had discovered, rather late in the day, the delights of continental cuisine. But Ruby was not to be persuaded; she picked at her food like a sparrow, contenting herself with bread and butter, a couple of tomatoes and a single spear of asparagus.
Alice lingered over her coffee and when John Wilson rallied the group for a tour of the town, said she would join them later. Ginger and a couple of other staff were already seated with their own meals at a table at the rear of the restaurant. As they finished eating, Alice approached. ‘Mam’selle? Excuse me, may I speak with you?’
Despite her youth, the weariness of war was clearly written on the girl’s face. ‘Of course, madame.’
‘My name is Alice Palmer. From America. Can you spare me a few moments?’
‘My name is Eliane, but everyone calls me Ginger. Your French is very good. Please, take a seat.’
Alice took out the photograph. ‘This is my brother. I know he was here in Hoppestadt because he wrote about it, but he hasn’t returned home. I just wondered . . .’ She faltered, suddenly fearful. Ginger studied the photograph carefully before passing it to the barman and her father, the chef, who had emerged from the kitchen in his tall starched white hat. They all shook their heads.
