Raw Material (15 page)

I drove along the empty road to Bapaume, and then southeast up to Flers and Longueval, where the outlines of hedges and fields were sharply enough etched for me to switch off the car lights. It was four o'clock, and no one was yet awake, all shutters being closed. Heavy mist lay in the hollows, but the land was wide open and rolling, high against the sky, with intensely dark patches of wood here and there. Faint scars showed where fighting took place, particularly on the edges of Delville Wood, in which thousands perished on both sides.

The same could be said of High Wood, and I drove to it slowly from Longueval, the sky leaden and the birds still noisy, but the half-kilometre flank of packed trees facing south was formidable up the gentle slope, stolid and uninviting even now in the dawn. The British, led for once by the cavalry, captured it on July 14th, 1916, but, owing to the failure to take it several hours earlier than they did, when it was empty, and to get up reinforcements to hold it properly, they were thrown out. Waves of attacking infantry passed through it, or stayed in it, and it was not finally taken till after two months of the most dogged and costly fighting of the war.

I walked up the lane hoping to enter the wood, but it was fenced off and, as of old, one needed wire-cutters to get into it. Words on a board stated that trespassers would be prosecuted. Perhaps similar notices had been there in 1916 when the British unexpectedly broke through to it. Had the soldiers wondered, in any case, when they were launched in attack after attack, what had been the name of the man who owned the wood? Where was he at the time? Did he know that British soldiers were being mown down in hundreds because they were trying to get his wood back from the Germans?

Did he realize, wherever he was and whoever he was, that they were being bled and mangled for the sake of his half-kilometre square of tree-covered land? If he had seen them dying outside the wood, and burning to death inside, would he have wanted them to go on trying to get it back for him? What property was worth so much? Surely it would have been better to have gone up to the Germans under a flag of truce and made some attempt at paying them to get out.

And when those British battalions at last captured that bit of smoking, tree-ruined land, considering the price they had had to pay, who would it belong to then? It was the sort of awkward question my Uncle Frederick liked to put. Should it not have been theirs? It could surely be nobody else's after that big shindig. But they'd been brought up to respect other peoples' property, even to die for it in thousands, which was a somewhat unfathomable passion since none of them had any of their own. The most they'd say perhaps is that if anybody deserved High Wood it was the dead, but that was a trick, because since the dead were dead and had no say, and in any case couldn't read notices saying that trespassers would be prosecuted, then it must go back to its private owner, waiting to claim its few charred trunks. One might say that a notice such as faced me is better than a hail of bullets, but either way, one can't get in, which makes one wonder what it was all for.

Even a man who had allowed himself to become a soldier should never do anything unless he first asks himself: ‘Why?'—and tries to square the action he is about to take with his own conscience. To disobey orders is a virtue, and if one is then alone after taking the responsibility of it, one exists in a state of grace, and becomes a hero of humanity.

46

I thought of walking in the field where my Uncle Edgar had lain while waiting to be captured, but I didn't want to disturb his shadow which must still have been on it. So at a later hour on Sunday morning I went into Aveluy Wood, in the valley of the Ancre.

The trees were grown up again, but not to any great stature, though inside it was dark enough to keep out the light. The pitted ground had no recognizable paths among the livid summer greenery, whereas the pre-1914 maps showed many. Banks of earth were piled above shallow yet distinct trenches. Bits of rusty wire and iron spikes, pieces of shovel and decaying steel were scattered under the leaves. If I dug I would have found bones, but I walked over ground that four battalions of West Yorkshire men had taken cover in before making their futile attack against Thiepval on July 1st, 1916.

Like other belligerent nations of the Great War the British have no defence against the charge of internal slaughter, of self-indulgent flag-waving, of a national patriotic suicidal lemming-rush, of the right hand smashing the left with such unfeeling brutality that both arms are still crippled more than half a century later. These are the unstated views of people I grew up among, of Frederick and his brother Edgar, the composite reactions to catastrophe of those whose words are not supposed to matter as far as history is concerned. But these myths have soaked themselves into the backbone of the country, and such unwritten emotional history will take generations to defuse.

The wood was defended by London battalions of the 47th Division when the British front swung away from the Germans at the beginning of April 1918, and there was savage hand-to-hand fighting with heavy loss of life on both sides. Undoubtedly there were many bones under the soil. Northern France is a vast bone-yard—British, German, and native French—and four million corpses rotted there. Why had they left their wives, children, and parents to fight and die in this patch of wood? Were they so bored that they became belligerent and patriotic to cure it? Or was it true, as many said, that war was invented to keep massacre away from the homely fireside?

England, for so long the balcony from which one observed European revolutions, was dragged into an unnecessary revolution in 1914 by the scruff of its own neck, off with a wave and a smiling cheerio to help gallant little Belgium and clamorous Gaul. The upper classes were bored after late-Victorian stagnation and Edwardian good living, and wanted at the same time to cup the stirring body of the oppressed country. It seemed to fit in so well, everything coming together with such force that it almost makes one believe in God, in order to think that the Devil got into them.

Yet I come across the stray but galling reflection that if I had been alive at the time and twenty years of age I too might have allowed myself to be drummed into the slaughter—unless, being like my Uncle Frederick, I opted out with the closely-guarded integrity of my native sense. I am enough like him to have done that, though no one can finally say.

I picked up a marlin spike and for a moment considered taking it as a souvenir, but the idea seemed ludicrous so I threw it down. My feet were occasionally trapped in the undergrowth, legs buckling when some hidden trench or shell-hole opened below. There were ghosts all around—though I laughed at the insane notion of it—and no noise except for the brush of my own passing, and the crack of dead, overfed twigs. I stood and listened, and couldn't get away from Edward Elgar's music which kept coming into my mind. I disliked it at such a time, but there was nothing to be done about it. Let the ghosts haunt the ghosts, and spiders weave their webs. It was bad to be alone in such a place.

But the time of the world was up, when the blood-letting came among these trees. Apart from the matter of revolution, the emotional sensuousness that was matched to a hundred years of romanticism and repression burst into a slaughterhouse. The music of Sibelius and Mahler led straight into the trenches. They didn't see it then, but we can see it now. Truth (for what it was worth) hauled the uniformed masses over the top by the scruff of the neck and the grip of the genitals. We haven't finished here yet, nor in any way understood it.

What happened indeed to the peace one was supposed to find in the middle of a wood? I walked in the direction I had come, hoping it would take me to the car, though by keeping a straight line I would obviously reach some lane or other, and escape from this verdant spirit-haunt.

But it is impossible to escape from Elgar—whether or not one is in Aveluy Wood. He is a real artist, a man of complete conscience, England's greatest composer certainly, for he not only sent the men into the trenches but greeted them when they came out. He beat in the other ranks with the Pomp and Circumstance Marches, and nodded the commissioned officers in to the Introduction and Aleggro for Strings. When they returned he met those broken men with the infinite sadness and pity of the Violincello Concerto in E minor. This work contains the broken bones of Edwardian glory and an attempt at semi-jovial rebirth, never taken seriously, as if he could not get over the fact that his most enduring work was to be built on a million corpses.

He wants to be gay in the second movement, but the Angel of Mons is too much in the ascendant. There is a crater under his heels which he edges warily away from. In the third section his tetric phrases meander through the ranks of his million ghosts. In his bucolic English way he expresses sorrow and regret that the world had gone the way it did—even though he may have been in some small way responsible.

But finally the energy overcomes him and he says: ‘I am an artist and so can't be to blame. If I set your subconscious to music, much as I might with any poet's words, then I am only being myself as an artist.'

The vibrant yet wistful strength of the body slowly rises. As a composer his best works show him to be a man of the people, but of the whole people. As an artist he tried to unify—that was his purpose—as any artist's must be. That was his wish, and I suppose at various times of his life, particularly before 1914, he thought that he might even be succeeding. But like any artist, part of him was blind, and it wasn't till 1918 that he saw how wrong he had been, and that some disaster had occurred which had smashed his beloved England for a long time to come. So his concerto is a work of sadness, regret, and hope. The broken body of England was dragging itself back through the mud of Passchendaele. It still haunts the resurrected woods of the Somme.

History, meantime, goes on. We love Mahler, we crave to hear Sibelius. They are artists, after all. And bourgeois capitalism is cured of its worst rampages of war because the Bomb, an effective weapon of peace, threatens not only people with total destruction, but
all property
, and no nation can bring itself to risk such a price. Property is God, and this age-old enemy of the people turns out at last to be its final safeguard, behind which we can go on enjoying the works of our favourite artists and try to live.

Walking through the cemetery of Gommecourt and the vast collection of graveyards around Ypres, where tens of thousands rest under crosses or the occasional Star of David, the feeling is one of bewilderment and pity that brings tears like a wall of salt up to the eyes. When there are too many people in the world the dead take up less space than the living. Even those who hate war have their idea of a just war, a war that people in the future will no doubt pronounce to have been as stupid as the rest.

I was lost, and began to wonder if I would ever get out. No longer amused at my lack of orientation, I stopped and lit a cigarette. There had been too many murders here in Aveluy Wood, too many state-sanctioned, church-blessed killings, too much confused death, too many mistakes—society's mincing-machine for its unwanted energy and talent.

Yet I knew there could be many surprises in the journey after death, especially for a soldier. The killing in the Great War was on so massive a scale that a decent number of corpses could be collected into cemeteries and put under the soil, a final resting place as far as we know. Many dead of the Napoleonic Wars, however, went through a different fate, as I was reminded on reading the following paragraph from
The Observer
of November 18th, 1822:

‘It is estimated that more than a million bushels of human and inhuman bones were imported last year from the continent of Europe into the port of Hull. The neighbourhood of Leipsig, Austerlitz, Waterloo and of all the places where, during the late bloody war, the principal battles were fought, have been swept alike of the bones of the hero and the horse which he rode. Thus collected from every quarter, they have been shipped from the port of Hull and thence forwarded to the Yorkshire bone grinders who have erected steam-engines and powerful machinery for the purpose of reducing them to a granulary state. In this condition they are sold to the farmers to manure their lands.'

I was alive, so through the treetops of Aveluy Wood took a healthy line on the sun—still easterly in the sky—and walked till I came to a lane. Using a map, I soon reached the open, glad to be away from trees that had smelled so many corpses they seemed almost human.

47

A photograph of my Uncle Frederick, which he had taken before 1914 and which blended neatly with the older man I came to know, shows an acute and ironic expression, a face both forceful and sensitive, with thin down-curving lips which could not have boded too well for anyone who became emotionally involved with him, nor indeed for the man who actually wore such a face.

He was about thirty when the Great War began, a small man like his father, but handsome and well educated, with dark hair and brown eyes, the eldest and most cultured son of the family. He was gifted in his trade of lace-designer, and travelled in it a good deal before 1914. Finding it difficult to sell his patterns in Nottingham, or being dissatisfied with the prices offered, he went to London, and bought a second-class return ticket for £5 11s 8d to the German textile town of Chemnitz, hoping for better luck. The 700-mile journey took thirty-five hours, and on arrival he set to work making appointments.

One firm was impressed by his designs, and the manager took him to a meal at the opulent Stadt Gotha Hotel while they were being examined by the directors. But when they returned to the office the manager gave the designs back, regretting that his factory would be unable to use them, though hoping he would bring more in the future. This was a big dip from their first enthusiasm. He politely accepted his portfolio, but then said to the directors who had come to wish him goodbye: ‘Would you now give me back the copies you made of my drawings while I was out at the hotel?'