At
the start of the centenary of the 1914-18 war I had a notion that we would by
now, as a nation, have found some sort of collective closure on the individual suffering
of the dead of the Great War, and be ready to move on, to toss their bones in
the air as it were, and free the spirits of the fallen to join with our distant
ancestors.
As
a writer, I agreed with Pat Barker’s comment that World War I had “come to
stand in for other wars … it’s come to stand for the pain of all wars.” Our
stories might be about that particular conflict, but the larger subject was war
itself.
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"Voie Sacrée"
supply line to the
militarized French region of Verdun
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Researching
and writing my own First World War novel, The
Goose Road, dented that conviction. Wherever I looked, the power of
individual suffering endured and the personal stories were endlessly shocking,
intimate and enthralling.
I
fell under their spell time and again while listening to the first-hand accounts
of veterans of the Western Front, their scratchy voices forever locked in a sound
archive, or when reading a collection of letters home, or interviews granted to
earlier researchers. I’d suddenly be caught unawares by a moment of humanity or
courage, or dark gallows’ humour.
Occasionally
an old soldier would admit to cruelty. More often they shared memories of the drudgery
of the trenches, punctuated by terror. To walk those trenches – or at least one
of the few fragments that remain, in Beaumont Hamel, say, zig-zagging through a
meadow – is to walk in a haunted place.
Near
Verdun, there’s a hill called Mort Homme. The name isn’t connected to the
1914-18 war, although the WW1 artillery battles fought there between the French
and the Germans were so fierce that engineers found afterward that meters of the
entire hilltop had been blown off. Local farmers still aren’t allowed to plough
its soil because of the human remains.
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| The French memorial to the fallen of Mort Homme: “They did not pass” |
When
researching closer to home I found that WW1 objects as well as places had the
power to take my breath away. Once I was in the Royal Artillery Museum in
Woolwich Arsenal, investigating a particular week in October 1916 and a
specific section of the Western Front near the occupied French town of Peronne.
The archivist bought me out a trolley laden with original material from that
time and that place, on top of which was a small moleskin notebook, written in
pencil by an English major, the pages still stained with the mud of the Somme.
I sat and stared at it for ages, feeling as if the battle itself was within
touching distance.
Poppies and cornflowers planted by
the local council on the road to Pozières in remembrance of Australian, Allied and German troops who
died during fighting in the immediate area
Just
before I returned for the second of four research visits to France, my mother
died unexpectedly. It was a release: she’d been ill for a long time. Among the
heirlooms she left to me was a forget-me-not locket with a photograph of her
father, Frederick Clarke, in his WW1 uniform. A stern old lady stares out of
the locket’s other frame – my great-grandmother, Selena, I believe.
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| My great-grandmother (I think) and her younger son, Frederick |
Mum
also left me a heart-shaped locket, which I think must have belonged to Selena
as it contained the pictures of two uniformed soldiers, her sons. One is Frederick,
who served in the 10th (Irish) Division as a medical clerk and stretcher
bearer in the Dardanelles in 1916 and later in Salonika. The other is
Frederick’s older brother, Thomas Clarke, a private in the 19th
King’s Liverpool Regiment, killed in action on the Somme, on July 30th,
1916.
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I’d
never seen Thomas Clarke’s picture before I inherited this locket. Mum thought
he’d died near Ypres, and as far as I know, until my husband tracked down his
regiment’s military records, no one in the family knew the details of his last
day. The official War Diary and Intelligence Summary of that engagement is
chilling:
“29/7/16
battle position in the MALTZ HORN TRENCH.
30/7/16
BATTLE began. Zero hour 4.45 am. The Battalion reached its objective, but
suffered heavy losses, and had to evacuate its position owing to no
reinforcements. At 12 noon the roll call was 7 officers and 43 men.
Total
casualties were: Lieutenant-Colonel G. Rollo wounded.
KILLED.
[Six officers named]
WOUNDED.
[One officer named.]
WOUNDED
AND MISSING. [Three officers named.]
Total
casualties in Other Ranks: 425, of which 76 were killed, 172 wounded, 177
missing.”
Barry
Cuttell’s account of that morning in 148
Days on the Somme is more detailed: “Morning mist prevented communication
by visual signals, and almost all underground cables had been damaged. The only
way of relaying messages to divisional headquarters was by runner, which would
be a dangerous task once the fog had lifted as the runners had to cross the
open ground between Guillemont and Trone’s Wood, over which German machine guns
… enjoyed an excellent field of fire.
“While
waiting for zero hour, 19/King’s Liverpool were subject to High Explosives and
gas (shelling) … The 19/King’s in the centre was also badly hit by enemy fire,
only a few men reaching the road. A little further north, a company of the
19/King’s succeeded in getting forward towards the south-eastern entry to
Guillemont.” But later that morning, “Under the impression they were cut off,
the 19/King’s withdrew from the edge of Guillemont.”
Thus
out of 486 soldiers of the 19th King’s Liverpool Regiment who
advanced at dawn on that summer’s morning, north and east from the Maltz Horn
Trench towards the German artillery and machine guns, only fifty remained standing
seven hours later. The rest were wounded, dead or “missing”, that is, their
bodies were either too badly mutilated for individual identification or otherwise
unrecoverable from the battlefield.
The
rolling fields where Thomas Clarke fell were bronzed with ripening wheat when I
saw them, flanked by the once devastated trees of Trone’s Wood. My husband, a
former Royal Marine, returned there on July 30th, 2016, to pay our
respects, both on the battlefield and at his graveside in the Bernafay Wood cemetery.
Perhaps his locket – the brother to the forget-me-not one I inherited – is
buried there with him.
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| Bernafay Wood cemetery |
Rowena House’s debut novel, The Goose Road, a coming-of-age quest
set in France in 1916, will be published by Walker Books on April 5th.
Website: rowenahouse.com
2 comments:
I'm looking forward to reading your book, Rowena!
Thank you, Candy. I'm looking forward to it being out!
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