by Tim Atkinson
‘Yeah! We can get Skerritt to recite “In Flanders Fields”, ’ Fuller laughs. ‘In Fwlanders, Fwields duh Ppppppeeessss gruh … just better make sure they’ve got their umbrellas up, eh, skip?’
‘That’s not funny, lad.’ Jack stares at the road. ‘Not funny at all.’
‘Suit yerself, skip.’ Fuller looks down at his feet before changing the subject. ‘Then where are we off to after that, Jack?’ he asks, rubbing his hands together.
‘Well then …’ Jack considers for a moment. ‘Then, happen we’ll take the road up to Gravenstafel. Plenty for them to see up there if the roads is clear.’
‘Right-o, skip! You drive. I’ll tell the ladies.’
As Jack looks over his shoulder he notices that Ocker – in the car behind – has already settled comfortably into his role as guide and chauffeur. Driving with one hand on the enormous steering wheel and the other, no doubt, between the thighs of the nurse who sits alongside him on the front seat, he is giving what looks like a continuous commentary as the party turns past Talbot House and then through the market square and out onto the Ieperseweg. A short time later they are passing the remains of Vlamertinghe, with what is left of Road Camp and Givenchy Camp on their right and the ragged shape of the Cloth Hall bell tower in the Grote Markt at Ypres just visible on the horizon ahead of them.
As they slow to pass the small cemetery, the nurses fall suddenly silent. The tattered remains of camouflage netting still line the sides of the road. The ruins of Vlamertinghe church abuts a flat expanse of wooden crosses – some tall, some small, some old, some new – each silently marking one of the many hundreds of graves in the military cemetery. A War Graves Commission works team is busy levelling the ground and digging shallow borders along each row of the established graves. To the side, bordering the wartime railway, a flat expanse of earth has been cleared and is now fenced off from the road, the ground divided into squares by neat lines of chalk.
‘Is that a playing field?’ someone asks.
‘Er … not exactly, Sheila,’ Ocker says. ‘Unless you like playing the harp.’ A nervous laugh. ‘No, that’s space for the rest of ’em.’
‘The rest? You mean there are more? But the war …’
‘I know, I know, the war is over. No one gets killed these days. Well, not unless you count daft coolies playing around with high explosives.’
‘Or tourists who take it on themselves to go for a wander …’
‘So … ?’
‘So, it’s for the men that were buried in the field, miss. Smaller cemeteries, and the like. Shallow graves dug in a hurry after a show.’
‘A show?’
‘A battle. An attack – offensive, miss. Those coves who stopped one were dug in close to where they fell.’
‘Stopped … what?’ asks one of the girls.
‘A bullet, miss. Or shrapnel. Or maybe a shell if they was really lucky.’
‘I see,’ she says. ‘I think.’
‘And now,’ Ocker continues, ‘we dig ’em up again and bring ’em here. Or somewhere else just like it.’
‘Oh.’
No one else speaks until they cross the Leie Kanaal and enter Ypres fifteen minutes later. ‘And this, ladies,’ Ocker is announcing to his party, ‘is the famous Wipers.’
A brief flutter of recognition at the familiar name is followed by another hushed silence as the cars drive past ruined buildings, open cellars and streets still lined with piles of rubble.
‘Why aren’t they … rebuilding?’ one of the nurses asks.
‘They is,’ Fuller says. ‘You should’ve seen the size of them piles o’ stone when we first got here.’
‘Really?’ One of the girls shakes her head.
‘I hear Ypres was a magnificent city,’ another adds, ‘before the beastly Germans came here.’
‘They didn’t have to come here to destroy the place, miss.’
‘But I thought … ?’
‘Oh aye,’ Mac tells them. ‘The Germans were here, briefly, in 1914.’
‘Oh, really?’
‘Aye,’ he goes on. ‘But for the next four years it was ours, stoutly defended by the British Army. Why, there can scarcely be a man who served who hasn’t passed through this place.’ Mac turns to the girl on the back seat and takes hold of her hand.
‘My fiancé!’ She passes him the small portrait she is holding. ‘He was here,’ she says.
‘A fine-looking young man,’ Mac says, handing back the photograph.
‘He was first here in 1915,’ she tells him. ‘And then again in 1917.’
They drive on, down the main street, past the skeletal remains of the cathedral and the Cloth Hall. Weeds grow out of the stones. Birds – pigeons – are nesting in the ruins, laying eggs and raising chicks well into September as if determined to repopulate the city on their own.
‘Oh, look!’ one of the girls says quietly. ‘It’s just like Fountains Abbey.’
‘It’s beautiful,’ another girl adds. ‘I think they should leave them here as they are,’ she says, ‘as a memorial to the men who died.’
‘Don’t be silly, Daisy,’ her friend says. ‘Life does go on, you know.’
‘Aye, lassie, for you maybe,’ Mac says, softly.
But the girl isn’t listening. ‘So, who did you book with?’ she is asking another member of the party.
‘The British Legion,’ the girl answers. ‘Three pounds eleven shillings and sixpence.’
‘Oh,’ she says. ‘I came here with Thomas Cook.’
‘Nice-looking, is he?’ They both laugh.
Jack crosses the ramparts at the end of Menin Straat before turning the car left alongside the moat, then turning left again towards the Minneplein.
‘There you are,’ he shouts, pointing to the neat lines of small huts spreading across the flat area of grass. ‘Rebuilding!’
‘Oh, Lucy, look at those lovely little houses!’
‘Very cosy,’ another girl laughs. ‘Is that where you live?’ she says to Fuller.
‘No, miss,’ he says. ‘We still live in camp.’
‘In tents?’
‘Oh no, miss. We’ve got huts now, ain’t we, Jack? And a brazier. Them houses – them’s for the locals.’
Children play in the space between the small, prefabricated dwellings; a pig squeals from a backyard sty and scraggy chickens scratch and peck the ground.
‘They’ve been given ’em,’ Fuller tells the girl. ‘By the King.’
‘By the King!’ the girls shrieks. ‘My God!’
‘I know,’ Fuller laughs. ‘They’re hardly palaces, are they?’
‘They are to the folks that live in ’em,’ Jack interrupts. ‘They are for them who’ve had their houses flattened by a thousand German shells. They are for them as have had their lives destroyed by four years of war and who are trying to get things back to normal.’
‘I suppose so,’ says the girl. ‘Why are they building them here, though?’
‘Because there’s a such lovely view of your pretty ruins, Daisy,’ the other girl grins. ‘Look at them!’ The broken walls of the campanile loom over the neat rows of wooden dwellings like the bleached bones of a long-dead dinosaur.
‘Nay, lass. They build ’em here because it’s safe,’ Jack tells the girls. ‘No danger of summat falling down on top o’ your head.’
‘Or what you’ve just built disappearing down some great big hole in the ground,’ adds Fuller. ‘Like an old cellar or somefink.’
‘So what was here before the war?’ another girl asks.
‘Nothing,’ Jack says. ‘It were just a field.’
‘A field?’
‘Aye. Where kids played. People wandered. Bit like a park, I suppose.’
‘Oh! And does it have a name?’
‘T’locals call it Minneplein,’ Jack tells the girl.
‘And what does that mean?’
‘That’s the local lingo for La Plaine d’Amour,’ grins Fuller, winking.
The girl blu
shes.
10
A little farther out to the north of the town on the road to Boezinge is Essex Farm and one of the smaller dressing station cemeteries. Hidden in their concrete bunkers in the flood banks of the Yser, the Canadians clearly patched up most of the men who made it back here, injured, from the front lines. A mere seventy burials mark the medics’ failures – or the enemy’s success. Some of the graves are tightly packed where hurried interments under fire were necessary; others are neatly spaced where more leisurely funerals or reburials have occurred.
‘Hallo.’ Jack nods a greeting to a local woman. She hands the baby on her arms to him and smiles.
‘Another of yours, eh, Jacko?’
Jack tickles the thin child before handing it back to its mother.
‘Aw,’ one of the nurses smiles. ‘Look at that!’
‘Handsome, isn’t he?’ the girl’s friend teases.
‘Who, the baby?’
‘Good with children, too, by the look of him.’
‘Yes, but look at the other one,’ the first nurse frowns, ‘over there.’
‘Private Skerritt, you mean?’ Mac interrupts. The nurses blush. ‘Lost his lower mandible at Third Ypres.’
‘Careless of him, I know …’ says Ocker.
‘Aye, and we’re still looking for it.’
The woman with the baby turns and goes inside. ‘Are they …’ one of the girls asks, pointing to where the woman was standing, ‘living there in those concrete shelters?’
‘Happen they are, aye!’
‘Next to all these graves?’
‘Excuse me!’ One of the other girls is waving her hand and pointing to the far corner of the cemetery. A group of about half-a-dozen men with picks and shovels appear to have been digging. Fresh earth stands dark against the pale yellow, late-summer grass.
‘What are those men doing?’
‘Don’t rightly know, miss. Stay here a minute,’ Jack says to the nurses. ‘Ocker? Mac?’
‘Coming, mate!’
‘Hey, what about me?’ cries Fuller. Skerritt mumbles something unintelligible. ‘Stay here with the ladies,’ Jack tells them both.
‘Hey!’ Jack calls over as they dodge between the rows of crosses over to the corner where the graves are being opened. ‘Hey! Wat doe je? ’ The labourers stop what they’re doing and look up, briefly, but don’t answer. ‘Wat doe jij hier? ’ Jack says, a little louder. One of the men shrugs. ‘Bloody ’ell, not fucking Walloons are they?’
‘What’s happening?’ One of the girls turns to Skerritt as they see Jack and the others talking to the men. Skerritt makes a sound and points at Fuller. Fuller shakes his head and they stand and watch. Amid much waving of arms and a little conversation, one of the labourers produces a folded piece of paper, handing it to Jack.
‘It’s all right,’ he says as he strides back across the cemetery. ‘They’re French. They’re digging up the French graves, that’s all.’
‘Digging up the graves?’ one of the girls says. ‘But … why?’
‘To take ’em back home I suppose, miss. It’s all above board,’ Jack says. ‘I’ve seen the paperwork – they’ve got permission.’
‘But what are they … I mean, the bodies.’ She lowers her voice, almost mouthing the word. ‘What are they doing in a British cemetery in the first place?’
‘This was a French cemetery before we took it over. French are allowed to repatriate their dead if the families want ’em back.’
‘Unlike us,’ says Fuller.
‘Yes,’ one of the girls says. ‘Why is that?’
‘Why don’t you explain, laddie?’ Mac turns to Fuller.
‘I, er …’
‘Because you don’t know, do you, eh?’
Fuller looks confused.
‘Which is no doubt why Ingham …’
‘That’ll do,’ Jack puts a finger to his lips. ‘No need to hang our dirty washing out here.’
‘I suppose not.’ Mac stokes his pipe and the party breaks up, dispersing into small groups, each wandering informally round the tidy rows of graves. Late swallows gather along telegraph wires recently restored. A blackbird darts about among the earth disturbed by the exhumation.
‘Looking for someone special?’ Jack approaches a tall girl standing alone by a small cross at the end of the row. She looks round and smiles, momentarily, before suddenly bringing a hand up to her mouth and shaking her head.
‘Hey now – don’t take on.’ Jack looks round for one of the other girls, but they all appear to be following Ocker like the Pied Piper out of the cemetery and towards the canal. Jack raises an arm awkwardly before bringing it down gently on the girl’s shoulder. Suddenly she has turned and put both her arms around his waist. He gently folds his other arm around her shoulders and he holds her and they stand, her head buried in this chest, her sobbing gradually subsiding.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says at last, dabbing her eyes with a lace handkerchief.
‘Don’t be.’
‘No really, I am. I’m not looking for anyone.’
Jack looks surprised.
‘There is no one,’ she says coldly. ‘There never was’ – she shakes her head quickly – ‘never has been.’
‘What?’ Jack smiles, looking down at her. ‘A pretty lass like you?’
She laughs and looks at her shoes. They are caked in mud and wet with dew.
‘Oh my God,’ she cries. ‘What a mess.’
‘No matter, miss.’
‘Please, call me Rose.’
‘Look, there’s a bothy over there …’
‘A what?’
‘The gardeners’ bothy. It’s a hut they use, y’know – to store their tools, shelter from the rain, that sort of thing.’
‘I see.’
‘You’ll be able to clean yourself up there. There’ll be nobody about. And there’ll be a kettle. Don’t know about you but I could use a cup o’ tea.’
The door of the gardeners’ bothy at Essex Farm cemetery is locked, but Jack knows where the gardeners hide the key. Having opened the door he steps back, allowing the girl to climb the three steps up into the small hut. Before her eyes have a chance to adjust her nose tells her what kind of place it is – damp earth, tools and empty plant pots; a sharp, pungent tang from a sack of bonemeal.
‘So, you chaps have to … ?’ Rose is tense, sitting on the end of the rough wooden bench that runs along one side of the hut, like a bird perching on a cliff edge. Jack lights the stove and places the kettle onto the flame to boil.
‘Aye, lass. We dig the graves.’
‘And the bodies?’
‘Aye. We dig up the bodies.’
‘That must be … I don’t know. It must be awful for you.’
‘Someone’s got to do it, lass.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘And there’s still thousands of ’em still to find. They’re all over t’place. They’re everywhere.’
‘Really?’
‘Aye, lass. And somebody has to find them.’ Silence. The kettle boils quietly. The flame on the small stove burns blue.
‘And then?’ She looks up at him at last. He can see the whites of her eyes in the darkness.
‘And then, we have to bury them.’ He spoons tea into an old pot and stirs as he pours on the water. ‘Has to be done.’
‘And that is what you men do,’ she says, ‘all day long?’
‘Aye.’
The girl lights a cigarette as Jack pours two mugs of tea. The silver strainer that he holds beneath the spout of the teapot swells with black leaves. There is no milk or sugar.
‘Sorry, lass.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
His hands, large and rough, fold round the tin mug – his palms immune to the heat – and he offers the girl the handle. She smiles. He stands awkwardly, towering over her in the tiny space. ‘No room to swing a cat.’
‘Come on.’ She pats the bench next to where she is sitting. ‘Space for one more here.’
‘I suppose I’d never thought about it before,’ she says at last. ‘I’d assumed that the men who died were buried and, well, that was that. I know it was decided that no bodies were to go back home during the war. But I suppose I thought that now that it was finished …’
‘Where a tree falls …’
‘Where a tree falls?’
‘Where a tree falls, there let it lie. It’s in t’Bible, so the chaplain tells us. I wouldn’t know about that sort of thing myself.’
She looks up at him again, noticing his blue eyes as he stares out of the single, grubby window. Faint lines at the corners of his eyes trace – what? The pattern of a thousand smiles? Or an endless need to squint into the sun to see the enemy? She shudders, momentarily, at the cold, at the thought of what his eyes have seen, at her own secret shame sitting here beside him.
‘I’d never really thought of it before today. I suppose I’d just imagined …’ Her voice trails off and she curls her fingers tighter round the tin mug.
‘Nobody does,’ Jack shrugs. ‘Nobody really knows. And no one wants to, neither.’
‘It’s … surprising really. Rather shameful too, I suppose.’
‘Nay, lass,’ he smiles and shakes his head. ‘War’s over for most folk. No one wants to have to think about it any more. Or about us. Or about them.’
Silence. Whatever Ocker’s doing, Jack thinks, it’s taking him a long time.
‘They should dig them all up,’ the girl says bitterly. ‘Dig them up and take them all back home.’
He is surprised by the hostility in her voice. ‘They don’t want to be reminded of the past at home,’ he says. ‘They want to concentrate on t’future.’
