‘I’m going to France then.’
Meriel tossed the statement across the bubble and squeak on the Bury dinner table the Sunday following the signing of the Armistice. ‘The Red Cross people are hopeless, and now the damn war’s over there’s nothing to prevent me finding Ned myself.’
‘Nothin’ but Lloyd George, the Military, the French Consulate and the Transport Officer at Folkestone,’ Margaret Ashby told her. ‘Don’t be such a fool girl, you know as well as I do that there’s nothin’ useful you could do out there. If the authorities haven’t time for folk like the Waedemons with homes of their own to go to, you may be sure they won’t have time for you.’
‘I don’t see why not.’ Meriel’s chin was up. ‘And it’s no use objecting G.M., because I’m going!’
‘Might as well look for a thatchin’ needle in a haystack,’ Margaret considered. ‘In any case we’re goin’ to need you here, my girl, until I can get Goodworth demobbed. Frank Longhurst’s finally agreed to send a man to plough the Brooks for us next week. But if it’s that squab Swales, he’ll need watchin’ every second turn.’
‘She’ll have to watch him herself then, won’t she?’ Meriel remarked to Simmie when they boarded the early train for London the following morning. ‘She might have given up on Ned, but I most certainly have not.’
It was just about the last thing Simmie would have chosen, to help Meriel mount her assault on the War Office. She’d always hated scenes, especially with officials, and been scared to death of men in any kind of official capacity. But Meriel had decided she would come, and knowing it was useless to argue, she’d sat beside her in the railway carriage like a woman on a tumbrel, humming a thin little tune to steady her frayed nerves.
‘Firmness, that’s the great thing,’ Meriel was saying. ‘No good asking, for God’s sake, or writing letters for some idiot clerk to lose in the files. I’ve tried that and it doesn’t work. The only way’s to face them man to man, and stick it on a bit, and be ready to break furniture if all else fails!’
At the central War Office block in Whitehall they were required to complete a pink admission form, then sent on to an even more forbidding looking building in Northumberland Avenue where Meriel harangued everyone indiscriminately until a junior officer finally escorted them up four flights of stairs to a green-painted office on the second floor. The man behind the desk was a major, moustached, bespectacled and punctiliously courteous..
‘Mrs Ashby, isn’t it and Miss Sims? Won’t you please sit down? I must apologise for keeping you waiting, but the truth is we’re very short-staffed – this wretched Spanish ’```flu, you know. Mind if I smoke? You won’t, I take it? Well now, let’s see, your husband was Lieutenant Edwin Charles Ashby of the 7th Royal Sussex?’
‘IS,’ Meriel corrected. ‘IS Edwin Charles Ashby, because he’s still alive.’
‘Ah – quite so.’ The Major considered her for a moment before returning to the file in front of him. ‘Reported missing, I see, on or about the sixth of April of this year…’
‘Almost eight months ago,’ Meriel interrupted, scraping her chair on the oilcloth as she jerked it closer to his desk, ‘and no news since.’
‘Nothing?’
‘Not a word.’ She stared at him accusingly with her obstinate chin in the air and the brim of her hat visibly trembling.
The Major cleared his throat. ‘Well, Mrs Ashby, you’re entirely right, of course, to keep on hoping. At this moment there are some thirty thousand British soldiers still officially designated as missing, and I have no doubt at all that many of them are still alive, in camps or hospitals, or even in transit…’
‘Look, let’s skip all this, shall we?’ Meriel jumped up again impatiently to lean over him, palms flat on the leather surface of his desk. ‘I know that my husband’s still alive, all right? And since no one else seems remotely capable of doing it, I intend to go out to France to find him. So I suggest you save us both a great deal of time and tell me how best to go about it.’
The Major took off his glasses and began to massage the bridge of his nose slowly between forefinger and thumb. He was doing awfully well, thought Simmie – poor man.
‘My dear Madam,’ he said wearily, ‘I fear you have quite failed to grasp the situation we’re having to cope with out there at present. It’s an armistice that Germany’s signed, not a peace treaty, and so far as our forces are concerned we are still technically at war. Special cases aside, there’s no intention as yet to demobilise our troops, and in the meantime private travel is entirely out of the question. In fact the Secretary of the War Office has made a categorical announcement to the effect that civilian visits to war graves will be impossible for some months to come.’
‘God in heaven!’ Meriel thumped the man’s desk with such force that Simmie distinctly saw his silver inkstand jump several inches to the right. ‘If it was only a grave I was after, I wouldn’t be here, would I? Can’t you get it through your thick, military skull that my husband’s out there somewhere, sick or incapacitated, waiting for us to do something, while you sit there on your fat khaki backside and spout categorical bloody announcements at me!’
The only means of escape open to Simmie was to close her eyes for a little moment, and by the time she opened them the Major had replaced his glasses and braced himself up in his chair to face the barrage. A trained soldier. ‘You’re naturally upset, Madam,’ he said stiffly. ‘But please try to understand my position. Believe me I’d like to help you, but I really have no authority to issue you with a Special Passport for France. Any serious application would have to be made in writing, and in fact the final responsibility still lies with the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs at the Foreign Office. However, I would advocate most earnestly…’
But Meriel was already on her feet. ‘The Foreign Office,’ she exploded, ‘now we’re getting somewhere! Ye gods, why didn’t you say so in the first place? I know someone there who’ll sort this ridiculous business out for us in two shakes!
‘Come on Simmie.’
She wrenched the door open, was already halfway to the stairs before the Major could reply; and the next thing Simmie knew, she was hurrying back down Whitehall trying to keep up.
‘I’ll give them ‘categorical announcements’, Meriel threw over her shoulder as she strode on ahead. Just wait until I get my hands on that cousin of Reggie’s in the Treaty Department, Simmie, then we’ll hear some announcements all right!’
She wheeled in through the main entrance of the Foreign Office swinging her arms like bludgeons.
Harpur Street had been too depressing under dust sheets, so the two women put up that night at Meriel’s Aunt Alice’s in Pimlico, returning to the Foreign Office Treaty Department at three o’clock the following afternoon, to collect and sign for one special viséd passport for France. ‘There you are, what did I tell you?’ Meriel said triumphantly as she forced the bulky document into her reticule. ‘Got to be firm with them you see, Simmie. It’s the only way.’
From terrorising her brother-in-law’s luckless cousin at the Foreign Office, she’d gone on to bully the Red Cross people at Carlton House Terrace into providing her with a letter of introduction to their French headquarters, at the Hôtel Christol in Boulogne. ‘Because that’s where I’m starting,’ Meriel announced. ‘There’s bound to be a matron or someone over there with lists of unidentified patients. So all I’ll have to do is to work my way through them – and if Ned’s there I’ll find him, Simmie, never fear.’
The loud, positive sound of her own voice had always been vastly reassuring to Meriel. ‘Action is what’s needed.’ She repeated it aloud to herself from the deck of the Folkestone Packet. G.M. could call it a wild goose chase if she liked. Action, that was the important thing.
But then, from behind her mental image of Margaret Ashby’s impassive old face appeared that of her own ten-year-old son, staring up at her anxiously from his pillow – and Patrick’s voice: ‘You are going to find him. You are going to find him, aren’t you Mummy?’
Hastily Meriel swept the memory from her mind and stepped forward to grip the rail, peering through the rain for her first sight of France. ‘I will find him,’ she muttered, doing what she always did, believing what she wanted. ‘I will find him. I WILL!’
‘My dear, I really must make you understand that you have absolutely no hope of gaining access to all our ‘unknowns’.’ The caped and striped Sister who received Meriel at the Christol and gave her tea in its small common room, broke the truth to the young woman as gently as she could.
‘We have thirty-five base hospitals over here now, and goodness only knows how many provisional evacuation units and field hospitals besides. If your husband was seriously wounded, I’ll admit that he could still be in one of them. We’ve two or three neurological cases in this unit who’ve been with us easily that long. But however could you hope to find him? I mean, just think. You’d have to visit each hospital individually and almost every patient – thousands, tens of thousands of them, because no one keeps central records of who’s been identified and who hasn’t. Why, it would take you months, dear; and by the time you’d got around them all, half the patients would have moved on anyway.’
‘Well, do you have any here that I could look at; any ‘unknown’ patients I mean?’
She wouldn’t be put off by the logistics of the thing. She’d look wherever she could, that’s all – and could be lucky, damn well would be lucky!
‘Yes indeed we have, Mrs Ashby.’
The Sister clearly was relieved to be moving from the general to the specific. ‘Uniforms and identity discs are all too easily mislaid in transit. We even get cases without medical labels. But of course you’ll have to wear a mask. We’re over-run with grippe – influenza you know – far worse killer than the Boche this season.’
It was the same down the coast at Camiers and Étaples – beds in the corridors, stretchers end-to-end in the aisles of the Nissens and tents and rows of wooden hutments that served as wards. Surgical units had been converted to medical wards, and men wounded in action displaced from their cots to make way for more recent cases of influenza and bronchial pneumonia – and create a human obstacle course for Meriel, threading her way between them. In all the years of the war, she’d invariably thought of ‘the wounded’ as the press depicted them. Or as she herself had seen them sallying out from their convalescent homes; cheerful, cheeky, making light of their crutches and empty, pinned-up sleeves – too happy to be alive and out of it to reckon the cost. But for the patients in these French hospital wards life could be nothing more than a goal in view; something to be fought for through irrigation tubes and wads of bloodstained gauze, and an atmosphere already tainted with sepsis.
Meriel moved rapidly from man to man, scanning the personal details at the foot of each cot or stretcher, looking for blond hair, for blue eyes – and after a while just looking.
‘That one actually had a fragment of someone else’s skull driven right through his spinal cord. Hard to believe isn’t it? This man was alive with maggots when they found him.’
The professional detachment of the Charge-Sisters was almost harder to bear than the injuries themselves. ‘Don’t worry, dear, they can’t possibly hear us, deaf as posts both of them. That’s shell-shock. Mustn’t drop anything, or make any kind of row around these chaps though – go through the roof at the slightest sound, poor things.’
She saw a number of men like that, jerking and convulsing as if an electric current was passing through them. She saw men with hacked-off stumps for limbs; men with blistered, suppurating skin and repulsively disfigured faces; men stripped of all human dignity. By the time that Meriel emerged from the last foetid hutment of the 24th General at Étaples, she had convinced herself that Ned wasn’t – could never have been amongst the pathetic remnants of men that lay in these wards. ‘It’s not me. I can take it all right, I’m not afraid!’ she told herself stoutly. ‘Good heavens, if those little mice of nurses can cope, then so can I.’
But still she’d found the need to lean against the outside wall of the last hut to breathe in the cold clean air, unconsciously brushing at her coat as if the smell of pus and Jeyes Fluid was something physical that clung to the fabric. A handsome, white-barred magpie rose from the area between the buildings where the nurses kept their disposal bins, and then another. Meriel watched them whirring to their perches in the poplars – and watched the leaves they dislodged, gold as guineas, spinning to the ground.
‘Oh yes, I can take it; why I could go through every stinking hospital ward in France if I had to! But what would be the point,’ she asked herself, ‘when I know Ned isn’t there?’
Meriel wouldn’t ask herself how she knew, or what she could expect to find in Ned’s old trenches at Bouzincourt, or at his billet at Warloy after all these months. It was simply that she had to see them for herself – had to do something positive outside in the fresh air. And when she’d done it, when she’d stood where Ned had stood and looked out from that farmhouse window in Warloy – well then, then perhaps she’d know.
That’s how it was with Meriel. She’d travel almost any distance to avoid a short excursion through her own uncharted mind.
The next afternoon, through an hour and a half of deadly boredom at Abbéville station, she shared a bench and a conversation with two young Graves Registration Officers returning to their unit at Corbie. By the time their train reached Amiens, she’d extracted promises of help from both of them – and true to their word, they drew up outside her hotel the following morning in a Ford ambulance with a red cross and ‘4 assis, 3 couchés’ painted on its side.
They could take her to Warloy, the young men said, en route to their survey work at the village cemeteries there. If she didn’t object to a bit of practical fieldwork along the way, they might even manage the trench system at Bouzincourt as well.
The pair had been employed on graves registration work since the reorganisation of the Imperial War Graves Commission back in ’17; and inured as they were to the business, neither could imagine the effect that the Somme battlefield might have on someone like Meriel Ashby, whose solution to anything unacceptable was usually to look the other way. They’d planned a circular route round Albert, through Fricourt and Contalmaison, and up into the battered chalk hills between the Somme and Ancre rivers, where two of the most violent convulsions of the war had produced a new kind of landscape.
Sitting between them in the ambulance’s open cab with the rain wetting her face and the speed-lever constantly bumping her knees, Meriel looked out on a land unlike any that she’d ever seen. She thought of her first thrilling glimpse of the snowcapped Cordilleras of Chile from the poop of the Catriona; of Cartagena from a one-horse coché, bursting with new sights and sounds and smells; of the salty brilliance of the Sussex downs from the seat of a free-wheel bike – even of the rainswept quay at Boulogne from the deck of the Folkestone Packet, swarming with soldiers and smothered in red, white and blue. They all brought novelty, colour, stimulation – the challenge of new lands to conquer. But here there was no colour; nothing but desolation. No challenge; nothing but a brooding sense of doom. No trace of natural order or human achievement – no unbroken line, no whole tree, no hips or haws or seeding wildflowers, no drifts of fallen leaves. Nothing but a vast upheaval of mud and chalk, with black spikes for trees, snagged wire and picket stakes between canals of slime where men had once existed. Here, there and everywhere wooden crosses sprouted, scattered by the roadways and along the trenches, sticking up at angles from mounds and ridges and pools of stagnant water.
While Meriel sat and stared at lines of crosses, the young graves officers talked across her eagerly of regiments and actions, examining their grid-maps and jumping down every few hundred yards to chart the details of an unrecorded grave. From the window of the Abbéville train the previous afternoon, she’d watched farmers with oxen teams ploughing for spring corn. Where roads and waterways had crossed underneath the railway, she’d seen men pollarding the poplars, women with bundles of faggots on their backs and children fishing. But in this godforsaken landscape the only moving figures were members of the Labour Corps, most of them Chinese; working drearily to restore roads and ditches; searching the craters for unexploded missiles – and for fragments of human beings. Their eternally exhausted faces peered out from cowl-like hoods at the passing ambulance; inscrutable, colourless in keeping with the desolation round them. Like beings from another planet.
The Picardy villages that she’d seen from the train were prosperous; gold and russet with encircling apple orchards and tall brick churches. But here a pulpy reddish stain in the mud showed where a house had stood; a scorched fang of masonry at Fricourt; an island of compacted brick at Contalmaison. At Aveluy on the far side of the valley that divided the battlefield, they came upon a group of villagers picking through the rubble of their homes; the faces that they turned towards the ambulance expressionless, devoid of hope.
The appearance of an unattached woman on the Somme battlefield had acted as a stimulant on her young escorts. Without any conscious wish to exploit her situation, they competed with each other for Meriel’s attention with offers of advice and information, and with the provision, first of an umbrella then a supporting arm for the slippery climb up through the mud to the trenches at Bouzincourt. The chivalrous arm belonged to Lieutenant Ripley, the elder of the two by eighteen months. The military umbrella and the admiration for the British troops who’d held the ridge was Second-Lieutenant Scott’s – and in the heat of competition the young officers luckily failed to notice her indifference to them both.
As for Meriel, at Bouzincourt she stood not merely on the lip of a squalid trench which might briefly have been Ned’s, but on the edge of the abyss that threatened to swallow every hope she’d clung to. On the slopes below the shattered village, the surface of the hill was wormed and pitted, strewn with human debris. Chaotically, breached sandbags disgorged their contents into a tumbled mélange of splintered trench-boarding and iron weaponry, from which sodden scraps of khaki serge pathetically protruded.
Close to where she stood, a single boot lay in the ruins of a sandbag in the abandoned way that empty boots lie anywhere, in ponds and ditches and on beaches the world over. Except that this boot wasn’t empty – as Meriel discovered when she turned it over and the stink of putrefaction assailed her nostrils. Dear God, there was a man’s foot still inside it! As she stared in horror at the discoloured shinbone that projected from it, she thought sickeningly of the bonfires and the dancing and the mad spate of bell-ringing which had followed news of the Armistice back home in England. Meriel thought of the ease with which sophisticated people had talked of armaments before the war, and later of the glib records in the daily papers of casualties, advances and retreats – while this was the reality and had been from the start; a way to death and to destruction as brutal as anything in man’s uncivilised past, and much more inclusive.
There was only one farm with a dovecot and a walnut tree near Warloy; and for two sous a morose old Frenchman had agreed to show them where it was. Perched on a running board and clinging to the ambulance’s roof, he directed them down a rough track across the fields. It had stopped raining. The clouds were thinning to the west, with a pale sun behind them like a candle in an old horn lantern. Someone had been busy ploughing. The air was filled with the strong, earthy scent of fresh-turned clods, and the land closest to the track was the colour of weathered stone, streaked with the characteristic light and dark gradations of a chalky topsoil. As the ambulance lurched and skidded through the mud, a pheasant shot up from beneath its wheels in a commotion of tartan feathers, to tear away across the furrows and flap noisily into the air.
‘Faisan!’ the Frenchman cried joyously. ‘Bang-bang!’ And seeing how easily the sad creases of his face lifted at the sight, Meriel felt a little more of her own confidence returning. In a moment they would see the farm nestling in a fold of the downs, just as Ned had left it, with its soft-throated pigeons and protecting walnut tree; a place of peace in contrast to the horrors of the Somme. She could see it in the smooth, familiar contours of the ploughlands – and soon she would be standing in the window where Ned had stood, talking to the kindly women who had fed and sheltered him – discovering some trace or relic of him; something new and hopeful to hang onto through the weeks and months to come.
At last they saw the conical slate roof of the dovecot just as she’d imagined it – but for the fact that it stood alone; the only intact building in the ruins of the farm. The long-range shells, the ‘Weary Willies’, had made a thorough job of it.
They had to leave the ambulance at the obstruction of brick and timber which had once been the farm gate. While the Registration Officers explored the ruins, Meriel made straight for the dovecot, deciding at first glance to see its survival as a miracle. ‘It’s still here! His dovecot is still here,’ she told herself, forcing her way through the rubble to the door and ignoring the litter of broken walnut twigs that crackled underneath her boots. Inside, it smelt like a cave; dank and dimly lit from the two little flight hatches high in its roof.
I can hear them now, just like English pigeons, such a peaceful sound…
But the nesting ledges and the crossbeams, the ladder of wooden perches that descended from them, were as deserted as the ruined farm. There were no obvious signs of destruction – no corpses here; nothing but feathers and dry droppings. And total silence.
‘Oh Noggin… oh darling, where are you?’
Meriel leant on the door frame and remained there, staring dry-eyed at the feathers.