No longer blinded by deliberate forgetfulness, his memories roamed freely over the hours that led up to that summer dawn when the world had changed for him. He remembered the pale gleam of moonpennies by the roadside and the shuffle of boots on duckboards as the men moved up the trench line. The sound of the Allied bombardment echoed again in his ears, a night-long inferno of noise and uproar when the earth had shaken and the air had quivered with terrible hammer blows. Most of all, he recalled the gladness he had felt to be there with the other men, the sense of comradeship they had shared in the face of death. It was never to come again.
They had paused at the village of Hamel the previous afternoon so that he could look across at the sinister hill of Thiepval where his own battalion had come to grief. Standing arm in arm with Helen he pointed out where the forward trench had been and told her how he and the other members of his platoon had waited in the pale dawn light for the signal to attack.
He spoke the names of some of them: Bob Wilson, Ben Tryon, Charlie Feather, the Crown and Anchor man; the Greig twins, colliers from Kent, their white cheeks seamed with blue coal dust; Billy Baxter and his cousin Fred, both barrow-boys from Whitechapel.
Jamie Wallace with his sweet tenor voice.
He never saw them again. They had vanished, all of them, that morning, advancing into a cloud of smoke and dust as though entering the mouth of hell. But he kept the memory of them warmly in his heart, and they came to him no more in dreams.
It was Helen Madden, rather than her husband, who had wanted to make the trip, and who had felt that now was the time to do so before domestic priorities rendered any thought of foreign travel out of the question, at least for a while.
The previous year she had visited the graves of her elder brother and her first husband, who were both buried in Belgium. Now she wished to do the same for David, her younger brother, whose body lay near Fricourt in one of the chain of Allied cemeteries that peppered the killing ground of the Somme river basin.
Some six months earlier the War Office had handed over care of all military graveyards to the Imperial War Graves Commission. Work had begun at once on turning the cemeteries into places of beauty and pilgrimage and the Maddens found a team of gardeners labouring in newly dug flower-beds bordering the wide unfenced field where the neat lines of wooden crosses were half hidden by early-morning mist. The crosses would soon disappear, to be replaced by white headstones.
Leaving her husband seated on a bench by the warden's hut, where a map of the cemetery was available for consultation, Helen went alone to her brother's grave. She had brought a bunch of white roses flecked with blood- red poppies and she knelt down to lay it on the grassed mound.
Try as she might she could only remember David as a schoolboy, pink-cheeked, full of boyish slang, a noisy presence in the house at holiday time. He had gone straight from school to officers' training camp, but even the sight of him in his awkwardly fitting uniform had not persuaded her of his adult status. She mourned now for his lost manhood, all the sweetness of life denied him at its outset.
When plans for maintaining the cemeteries had first been mooted, voices had been raised in favour of reorganizing them by rank, of separating officers from men. They had been silenced by the near-unanimous wish, expressed at every level of society, that the fallen should be left to lie where fate and circumstance had placed them. In death's great democracy Second Lieu- tenant David Collingwood had for companions a gunner of the Royal Artillery and a lance-corporal of the Middlesex Regiment. His sister laid a flower on each.
Getting carefully to her feet, Helen Madden looked back to where her husband was waiting. The last of the ground mist had dissolved and the bench where he sat was bathed in silvery sunshine. Although his wound had healed completely and his vigour was almost fully restored, she continued to keep a watchful eye on him. She liked to know he was near at hand.
For his part Madden malingered happily. He'd felt well for some time now, but he enjoyed the many attentions his wife showered on him and thought he might let her cosset him for a little while longer.
Returning to France for the first time since the end of the war, he'd expected to be overwhelmed by memories — the memories she had taught him not to turn from. But although all that past was still fresh in his mind, he could feel it receding, ebbing like a wave that might return from time to time to wash on his shores, but would bring no terrors in its wake.
As to the future, he saw it approaching, noting with pleasure the continued alteration in her tall slender figure as it filled out week by week with the child she was carrying. Her eyes captured his while she was still some distance off, and he rose and waited for her, recalling as he did that it was her glance that had first struck him when they met. How it seemed to express the depths of her character.
Blue, unswerving, magnetic. True north.
The sunlight was bright on her hair as she drew near. She was smiling as she reached to take his arm.
'Come, my love' — pausing to straighten the collar of his coat and touch his cheek with her hand — 'it's time we went home.'
