The Children's Book

“Stop arguing,” said Basil. He liked her for arguing.

Ann came in, thin, little, leggy, with a face like a will o’ the wisp. She looked as though you could blow her away, or snap her like a twig. She smiled uncertainly.

“These are his—Charles/Karl’s—mum and dad. They’ve invited us to their house.”

Ann nodded seriously.

Katharina said “We can try, Elsie. And if you are unhappy, we will think of something else.”

54

The Belgian landscape is flat and watery, polders planted with corn and cabbage, claimed from the North Sea by a series of dykes. Further inland there are fields and houses resting on a thick bed of clay. There is water there too, water in ponds and moats, water running into little bekes (rivulets), water in canals. The land floods easily because the water cannot penetrate the clay and drain away. In 1914 the Belgians, having offered unexpected fierce resistance to the advancing Germans, had retreated towards the coast. The Belgians opened locks and sluices and flooded the land, letting in the North Sea, and creating impassable water plains between the Germans and the coast. The villages around the sandy ridges that offered height to an army had been battered by the guns into dust, which was worked into the clay, by churning wheels and hooves, by marching men and limping, hopping, crawling wounded. In the summer of 1917 General Haig commanded his armies to advance. In the early autumn, when the generals agreed to make a push against the Passchendaele ridge, it rained. The sky was thick with cloud, and no air reconnaissance was possible. The rain blew chill and horizontal across the flat fields and liquefied the mud, and deepened it, so that movement was only possible along duckboard planks—the “corduroy” road, laid across it. The men at the front crouched in holes in the ground and the holes were partly filled with water, which was bitterly cold, and deepening. The dead, or parts of the dead, decayed in and around the holes, and their smell was everywhere, often mingled with the smell of mustard gas, a gas which lay heavily in the uniforms of the soldiers, and was breathed in by nurses and doctors whose eyes, lungs and stomachs were damaged in turn, whose hair was dyed mustard yellow. The peaceful polders had become a foul, thick, sucking, churning clay, mixed with bones, blood and burst flesh.

Geraint and his gun crew were manoeuvring their gun on the corduroy road, between snapped and blackened tree stumps, over mud and pools of filthy water. He had had letters from unimaginable England. Imogen wrote that Pomona had announced her engagement to one of her patients, Captain Percy Armitage, who had lost both his legs and most of his sight in one eye. “She seems truly happy,” wrote Imogen. She had attached a photograph of her palely pretty daughter, from which she had, with inconsiderate consideration, obviously cut away another child, with scissors.

Geraint didn’t much mind. He was thinking very slowly, in the racket of gunfire and shellfire, having had no sleep for twenty-four hours, and only two hours in the preceding night and day. Maybe because they were so tired the crew lost control of the mule that was hauling its end of the wheels on the boards. The gun keeled over in the mud. Geraint was under it, and was killed instantly, crushed into the slime. Nobody stopped to dig for him. There were orders not to stop for those who fell off the snaking boards.

As the landscape grew more and more to resemble the primal chaos, human ingenuity became more and more desperately orderly and inventive. Columns of bearers, at night, carried ammunition and water and hot food in insulated rucksacks to the men at the front. They resembled Christian, in Pilgrim’s Progress, making his way with his heavy pack through the Slough of Despond. One of the cyclist regiments balanced an odd load—full-size flat images of soldiers, painted in England by women who had once painted bone china, with realistic faces, with moustaches and glasses under their tin hats. These were puppets. They had flat strings snaking over the mud, operated by puppeteer soldiers hidden in foxholes and craters, who made them stretch and turn, stand up and fall. They made what were known as Chinese attacks, deployed in hundreds, under a smokescreen, inviting the Germans to fire on them and reveal their own positions. A man in a shell-hole could operate four or five of these “soldiers.”

The Women’s Hospital in the Claridge’s hotel in Paris had been closed in 1915: the women moved briefly to Wimereux and then back to London, where they opened a successful, much larger hospital in Endell Street. There were still ambulances and a field hospital, paid for by women’s colleges and run by crews of women. Dorothy and Griselda had elected to stay. Dorothy believed that if men’s wounds were dressed as well, and as promptly, as possible, there was a greater chance of their survival, and of the survival of damaged hands and feet, arms, legs and other parts. Griselda continued to talk to the wounded prisoners. One evening, when they were sitting in their shelter over a cup of cocoa—a thick taste and texture that recalled the quiet studies, the library and the rose garden of Newnham as surely as Proust’s madeleine recalled his childhood at Cambrai—she said, casually, that this tent of prisoners were Bavarians from Prince Rupprecht’s Army Group. One of them, she said lightly to Dorothy, claimed to have seen Wolfgang Stern, alive, and as well as he could be, a month ago. Dorothy said “Do you ask all of them that question?” Griselda said “No, not all, of course not. Only the ones who might know.”

“I never knew how much you cared for Wolfgang?”

“It is so far away. And there is all this killing. I think I—did care for him. I sometimes thought he … Oh, what does it matter, when we are trying to kill him in all this mud.” She laughed sharply. “It’s hard to be half-German. My mother is having a bad time. She sent an odd letter after Charles/Karl went missing, saying she was going to look for his wife in Dungeness.”

“His wife?”

“That’s what the letter said. Mama didn’t elaborate. I ask about him, too, but get no answers. The men don’t hate each other, mostly. The walking wounded help each other. Once it’s clear they don’t have to kill each other. It’s all mad. Mad and muddy and bad and bloody. I don’t know if it’s better to stop hoping about Karl. And Wolfgang.”

They were about to go to bed when a new contingent of wounded men and stretcher-bearers plodded slowly, and painfully, towards the ambulance. The nights were rarely quiet: the long snakes of men and animals moved into the dark and were hurt in the dark as the shells fell and found them. On the stretcher this time was a man almost invisible in a case or coffin of thick clay, which was drying onto him. The stretcher-bearers said he had gone right under. A shell burst, quite close, and sent up a lot of the stuff and damaged the duckboards. This man had been carrying a large pack on his back and had lost his footing when the shell came down, and he had gone sideways into the mud, and under. His pals pulled him out. There’s orders not to pull men out, if they get in, because they mostly can’t be saved. And they hold up the line of night-workers. Men were swearing behind, and shouting, leave the bugger, excuse my language, ma’am. We was passing by, on the track we come back on, and the man we was carrying died as we went. So we had just dumped him when this one got pulled out, lucky for him. He lost his trousers, they was sucked off of him. They wanted to save his pack, o’ course. It was hot rations. He’s breathing. Shell-shocked, seemingly. They did get the pack. With mud in it and over it, but the hot food was still in it and still hot, we hoped. I hope you ladies can take him, we need to get back out there.

So the clay-cased man was rolled off the stretcher, on to a temporary bed in the hospital. Dorothy looked round for nurses. They were all busy. She found a bucket and began to pick off the mud, which came off in bloody hunks, at first. Griselda helped. The face was the face of a golem: the ambulance men had made breathing holes and eye