The Professor and Other Writings (2 page)

I remember a conversation with a famous feminist poet in the late 1980s in which I grandly pronounced it a “disgrace” that so few women knew anything about military history. In an apotheosis of pomposity (and also to see if it would get her goat) I boasted about my great-uncle and proudly asserted that I could never have been a pacifist in August 1914.

Over the past ten years the
folie
has only become more involved. A couple of years ago I started collecting first editions of World War I books (latest Internet bandersnatch: a battered copy of Reginald Berkeley's
Dawn
, a patriotic tear-jerker, complete with garish pictorial dust jacket, about the martyrdom of Nurse Cavell).

I've got several faded trench maps and a tiny, pocket-sized “Active Service Issue” book of psalms and proverbs, issued by the Scripture Gift Mission and Naval and Military Bible Society in 1918. Every year, when I go to London, I load up on greasy wartime postcards in one of the memorabilia shops in Cecil Court (“Helping an Ambulance through the Mud,” “
Armée Anglaise en Observation
,” “The Destruction at Louvain, Belgium,” “Tommy at Home in German Dugouts!”). I've got a whole shelf on war artists: C.R.W. Nevinson, Paul Nash, William Roberts, Wyndham Lewis, and the skullishly named Muirhead Bone. I've got books about Fabian Ware and the founding of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. I've a 1920
Blue Guide to Belgium and the Western Front
and a Michelin Somme guide from 1922, both published for the so-called pilgrims—the aged, widowed, and dead-brothered—who flooded France and Flanders after the war seeking the graves of the lost. I have scratchy recordings of “Pack up Your Troubles” and “The Roses of Picardy”
a tape of a (supposed) German bombardment; and yet another of a Cockney BEF veteran describing, rather self-consciously, the retreat from Mons. I have videos and documentaries: Renoir's
Grande Illusion
, Wellman's
Wings
, Bertrand Tavernier's
Life and Nothing But
, and a haunting excerpt from Abel Gance's famous antiwar film
J'Accuse
. And then, too, there are all my mood-setting “highbrow” CDs: the songs of Gerald Finzi, Vaughan Williams, George Butterworth, Gurney, Ernest Farrar. (The baritone Stephen Varcoe is unsurpassed in this repertoire.) I have but to hear the dark opening bars of Finzi's “Only a Man Harrowing Clods” to dissolve in sticky war nostalgia and an engorged, unseemly longing for things unseen.

Yet something about my fixation has always bewildered me, as it indubitably has those friends and bedmates forced to enthuse over grimy mementos and the latest facts. (Thanks to a trawl around at www.fallenheroes.co.uk I recently discovered, for example, that Shorncliffe Camp was a major Great War jumping-off point, notably for the Canadian units who went on to fight, with appalling losses, at Vimy Ridge in 1917. The soldiers in the cemetery were mostly men who had died of wounds or sickness in nearby military hospitals after returning from the front. But a few graves hold other kinds of casualties: a small group of Belgian refugees, a single Portuguese soldier, several members of the Chinese Labor Corps, some civilian victims of a daylight air raid on Folkestone on May 25, 1917, in which ninety-five people were killed and 195 injured.
*
) I guess an obsession
is defined, crudely enough, by the fact that one doesn't understand it. Even as it besets, its determinants remain opaque. (The word “obsession,” interestingly, is originally a military term: in Latin it signified a siege action, the tactical forerunner of trench warfare.) The obsessions of others embarrass and repel because they seem to dehumanize, to make the obsessed one robotic and alien and unavailable. It's like watching an autistic child humming or scratching or banging on a plate for hours on end.

I suppose it was some desire to get free of a certain robot feeling in myself that prompted my trip to France and Belgium. Not that I was planning on renouncing my books or my collections. (Nor have I.) It was more a matter of, Okay, you've been talking about it forever; go find him. Blakey was teaching and couldn't go, but Bridget could, and wanted to, even though she is not from the Braddock side of the family. She turned out to be the ideal companion. She's my first cousin, a South Londoner by way of Ipswich. Our estranged fathers are brothers. We knew each other as children—for a brief time, before my mother took us back to San Diego—but then I didn't see her for two decades until I looked her up one day in the London telephone book. (After my parents' divorce I'd let all the Castle relatives go to hell.) Bridget, it turned out, had been in the Army for eleven years, in Germany and Belfast, and was now running the transport department for a London borough. She is slangy and brusque and ultracompetent—knows all about plumbing and engines and dogs—and regards me, the Prodigal Bluestocking, as a bit feckless. A couple of years ago we went down to Dungeness to see Derek Jarman's garden and ran into a man with his wife and mother-in-law whose car had got stuck in the wet gravel. Bridget had it hitched up in a trice and dragged it free, while the man stood by looking utterly flummoxed and outdone. (“Ex-military,” she said, by way of explanation.) Anyway, Bridget set it all up: our Chunnel car-ticket, the package-deal hotel in Ghent, our route map. Needless to say, she
drove all the way from Herne Hill to the outskirts of Ypres, with me a slightly cranked-up presence in the passenger seat.

I'd been hoping, obviously, that the trip might bring some new understanding, might clarify both my relationship with my dead great-uncle and my war fixation. But no such
éclaircissement
took place, at least not immediately. On the contrary. Though a “success” from a practical standpoint—we found Newton's neat little grave and red geraniums on the second day—the journey seemed only to provoke more disorientation. As Bridget gamely motored us from one memorial to the next, the freezing rain walloping down on the windscreen (“Hooge Crater is just up here”), I found myself less and less able to grasp what I was doing there. I felt misty, numb, a bit ghoulish. I was the Big Girl-Expert: an Unusual and Fascinating Person Now at Last Visiting the Western Front. (She's slept with more women than her father has!) But I felt increasingly disgusted with myself. I started thinking that probably a lot of people I knew didn't really like me, were only pretending to.

The nadir came on the second day. We'd spent the first day in and around Ypres, visiting Tyne Cot and neighboring cemeteries, moping around the In Flanders Fields museum. Ypres itself is a huge bummer, fake and nasty and foul, with machine-cut cobblestones and dead-eyed people everywhere. Numerous renovations were going on, presumably to make the spot more of a “target” destination for European Community tourists (though it's already been flattened and rebuilt more times than anyone can count). We found a Great War souvenir shop, run by a surly Falklands War vet, but I couldn't bring myself to buy anything, not even one of the dull gold cap badges or orphaned tunic buttons. That night we retreated in a downpour to our Ibis in Ghent Zentrum, the only good news being the charred steak and frites we gobbled down in a place near the cathedral. The hotel was filled with paunchy Benelux businessmen who took one look and didn't bother giving us the eye; the bedroom was
cramped and small, with two narrow beds about a foot apart. I got horribly self-conscious at having to undress in front of Bridget, and started blushing. The Incest Taboo, in one of its weirder manifestations, seemed to descend thickly, like a cloud of odorless gas.

The next day we zipped south on a motorway, Moby on the CD player, huge container trucks from Holland and Germany careening by in the rain. Coffee in Albert, a quick gander in the drizzle at the French war memorial in the town square, then on to the giant Lutyens monument to the Missing of the Somme at Thiepval. It was midmorning, and we were the only people there apart from a sullen group of French lycée students playing around on the steps of the thing. (They all had the same annoyed-teenager look:
We're too old to be standing around here!
) The memorial itself is a massively ugly parody-arch in the middle of nowhere. You see it coming up on the horizon from miles away. (“The majestic Memorial to the Missing,” says Miss Coombs, “stands amid fields still scarred with the trench lines of the Leipzig Redoubt.”) Blakey would call it fugly. Loads of Castles among the 73,000 or so incised names, though nobody known to us. One of them had been in the Bicycle Corps, which made us laugh because it was all so Edwardian and English and pathetic. “He died heroically, his bicycle shot out from under him.” Housman could have written a poem about it.

Uncle Newton, it turned out, was not far off, halfway between Amiens and Albert, in a pretty little walled “extension” cemetery at Franvillers filled mainly with Australians. The cemetery was on a small rise, presumably close to the place where he had died, and impeccably maintained. It had three or four farmhouses around it, probably built in the 1960s. I figured I was the fifth person to visit him in the eighty years since his death, the other four being my grandmother, her sister Dolly, her sister's daughter Sue, and my uncle Neil (on his way back from the Italian Front in 1945). As Bridget and I unlatched the gate and went in, the sun came out, just like in
a Jane Austen novel when the heroine is about to get proposed to. We walked around; we scrutinized the inscription on the Blomfield Cross of Sacrifice. We read the homely greeting-card messages in the memorial book. (“Sleep well, lads!” “We'll never forget you!” “Thinking of you always with love and gratitude.” “Always with us.”) Bridget took a photograph of me by the grave—glum and fat and respectful—and that was that.

But even as we began winding back north towards Calais and home in the late afternoon, I suppose we were getting close to having had enough. I started to feel broody and compulsive and “Urne Buriall”–ish; the sky got dark and pent again. I asked Bridget, as we drove, if she thought soldiers buried in tidy little battlefield cemeteries like my great-uncle's occupied separate plots. True, they had their individual headstones; but might they not, in the hurry and chaos of war, have simply been piled willy-nilly into a single burial pit somewhere in the vicinity of the present markers? A mass grave, if you like. Bridget said, “Yes, I'm afraid so,” and kept her handsome gray-blue eyes on the road. We both hunkered down. Then back toward Ypres we decided on one last stop: a little old-fashioned war museum that, according to the guidebook, incorporated some vestiges of front-line trench—something, for all of our perambulations, we hadn't yet seen. We followed an ancient Roman track a mile or two across sodden beet fields; made several bumpy turns up a hill and into a copse; then rolled up, even as the rain started again, in the little dirt parking lot.

Dank thoughts in a dank shade. In the front of the “museum”—a little cluster of dilapidated houses and sheds—was a café, deserted inside except for a couple of bloated Flemish men with wet black mustaches. Empty beer glasses. The drill here was: buy your ticket in the café walk through the two side rooms where the “exhibits” were; then out into the back garden where the bit of old trench was; then back again. The bleary-eyed proprietor, likewise with mustache,
looked like that Belgian serial killer who got caught by Interpol a while ago. He contemplated us briefly with deep alcoholic hatred.
How yoo zhay in Inghlissh? Who arrhh zeeez two fhucking dykes?
The place was damp and cold and dirty—old spiked Uhlan helmets and things lined up on a shelf behind him—and smelled like hell.

The place, I learned afterward, is famously horrible. Stephen O'Shea, the wonderful Canadian writer, has a stark riff on it in
Back to the Front
, his extraordinary 1996 account of hitchhiking the entire length of the Western Front. (O'Shea is another catastrophe junkie: one of his later books is on the Cathars.) But Bridget and I needed no guidebook to alert us to the vibe. Down one side of the display room we proceeded, dutifully examining the fly-blown war photos on the wall. They got worse as you went along. Battlefield shots first—mudslides, craters, collapsing limbers and dead horses—then a switch to British and German wounded laid out in hospital beds. The photographer, “Ferdinand of Ypres,” had signed each picture in a flowery chemical script. (An early example of diversification no doubt: the Ypres
carte de visite
business must have fallen off dramatically when the place got pulverized in November 1914.) The last two were clearly Ferdinand's masterpieces: tight, nauseating close-ups of men with ghastly facial injuries, jaws and mouths gone, rubbery slots for noses, an eye or an ear the only human thing left. The one other person in the room with us was a pale young man in a windbreaker, one of the Four Horsemen on his day off. He was busy taking photos of the photos and smiling delightedly.

We passed next through a kind of garage with rusty stuff piled all around: shell casings, barbed wire, rotting Sam Browne belts, a pair of ludicrous French shop dummies gaily attired in mismatched officers' uniforms. Then on out to the display trenches, snaking off into the woods behind the building. These had a neat, generic, recently packed-down aspect, the corrugated iron supports looking as if they'd just come from the Lille DIY store. Not much to see really,
once you'd peered down into them or clambered in—as Bridget briefly did—so we went back in the house and down the other side of the exhibit room. Here was further war debris: ammunition boxes, ancient bully-beef tins and, jarringly, some bits of Nazi regalia and Hitler junk (a blotted letter to him at the front from his grandmother). I knew Hitler had fought—valiantly—in a Bavarian infantry regiment near the Messines Ridge, but this part of the show seemed nonetheless a mite too enthusiastic. A big dusty swastika banner, sorely in need of dry-cleaning, was draped in a corner, like a prop from the Hall of the Grail scene in Syberberg's postmodern
Parsifal.