Ben set out on the journey he had been making daily for the last three weeks. To a silent city of the dead.
From a small, friendly hotel in Ypres, he set himself on the Menin Road and then a north-east course to Passchendaele, marching on strong, determined legs over ground that was flat in places and ridged in others. Over land that just a few short years ago had been battlefields. There was a church-silence now where once artillery and aircraft shells had screamed in destruction and thousands of young men had been killed instantly or died of wounds and diseases.
Nearly all the land and surrounding forests had been blasted into mires of mud, mud deep enough for men to drown in. How terrible to drown in mud. It was land left scarred and sacred for ever, once barely supporting miles and miles of trenches, some only yards from enemy lines, where men, living, breathing souls, husbands, fathers, brothers, sons, had huddled, cold, lonely and frightened, part of them still a child inside, wanting only to go home. Now the land was mercifully retrieved as roads or farmland, or honoured as military cemeteries. Several cemeteries. And there were the countless poor wretched souls who had been buried by shell blasts and would lie in their friendless secret places for ever.
He had lingered in the few remaining trenches and in the blasted-out woods, some well off the beaten track, and in German pillboxes, the most solid of the unchanged features, until he’d got a feel of the pride and anguish and suffering. He had also experienced some fearsome vibrations from the past and chillingly felt and smelled the lingering aura and stench of death. Desolate and disturbed, he had acknowledged he would never be able to comprehend how it must have actually felt to endure those dreadful deprivations and the formidable, terrifying battle conditions.
So much loss. So much suffering. And now with the Allies failing to agree on a moratorium on Germany’s war reparations, and France and Belgium occupying the Ruhr and its coalfields, leading to more hatred and violence, and the German mark in desperate decline, and a vociferous little individual named Adolf Hitler, the leader of the small but extreme anti-Semitic Nationalist Party, stirring up more unrest, Ben wondered about the possibility of the world being threatened from the same quarter again.
It was hot and sunny, the sort of weather when it was wonderful to roll up shirtsleeves and leave neck buttons open and to amble along, but it was inappropriate here. He was wearing a dark suit and black tie and stopped every half mile to shake the dust off his trouser hems. As on every other day he was keeping a distance from the road to avoid travellers on the same quest, in horse-drawn or motorized vehicles, some on organized tours run by war veterans. All were here to remember their beloved dead and see their last resting place.
The road was busy. With the number of dead it was inevitable there would be a large number of pilgrims. The Ypres Salient was the most visited place on the Western Front, circled as it was by vast cemeteries, and nearly every visitor ended up at Passchendaele, the most poignant and the most terrible and the most important battlefield of the Great War.
An hour and a half later Ben arrived at Tyne Cot Cemetery, the largest of the British cemeteries, site of a former battlefield. Overheated and perspiring, he used his handkerchief to mop his brow, then to wipe the dust off his shoes, bringing them up to a military polish. Then he was moving through the forest of gravestones, rows upon rows of them, neat rows of regulation oblong memorial stones, repeating a trail he had left his footprints on many times before.
He passed black-clad, sorrowing mothers and wives, some with children of an age too young to have been born before their fathers were killed. There were elderly stooped fathers; sisters; brothers; cousins; old comrades; and guides. When he reached his holy grail, his particular lozenge-shaped white marker, he took up guard there.
‘Here I am again, Billy.’
There he stayed. And stayed.
Occasionally other mourners skirted round him, sympathetically allowing him his veneration. A guide pointed him out to a small family group and whispered, ‘That’s him.’ Ben had no idea people were moving on with eyes filled with tears for him. That he had acquired the title in Ypres as the ‘saddest pilgrim’.
Sometimes he continued his one-sided conversation aloud. Other times he spoke in his thoughts. And he listened. The listening was important. And he was receiving the voice of the six-years-dead Corporal William Rowse, 14th Infantry Battalion, more clearly each day. Billy – Emilia’s brother, who had been just an ordinary bloke, cheerful, uncomplicated, honest, inoffensive and helpful. Billy – in death somehow putting him right.
Time passed. Those paying homage left and were replaced by others and others still. Ben stayed.
A woman crept close to him. He did not see her. Did not twitch a muscle or blink an eye. It was as if he had turned to stone. Every bit a statue like those being erected, in ever-increasing intervals in this sad and blessed region, in memory of the ‘glorious dead’.
She watched. She waited. She gained nothing from him, except the occasional sight of his lips moving in silent speech or prayer. It was true what she had heard about him. He was young and immensely good-looking, war-wounded in one eye, and so full of melancholy one instinctively wanted to reach out and comfort him. Mothers were said to long to take him home to replace beloved lost sons.
She must not disturb him. It was time to leave him to whatever it was that plagued him so much.
The sudden shift of her going caught his eye. Ben looked up. Stared at the neat, sparely shaped female in a plain black suit and a small hat; a little black tasselled bag was hanging from a drawstring over her gloved wrist. He grimaced to ease his stiff facial muscles.
‘Oh, dear, I’m so sorry. I never meant to intrude. Please forgive me.’
He was further surprised at the mild American accent. ‘No, I…’ He consulted the skies. The sun had gravitated a long way west. ‘I’ve been here nearly all day. I’m…’
To cover his confusion, she shot out her hand, making her unpretentious little bag sway, and for a moment he was mesmerized by it. ‘Brooke Wilder. From Wyoming, United States. Pleased to meet you. Although my pa died in the Argonne forest, in France, I’ve come here to look for the grave of a cousin of my mother’s. She originated from England, and he was a private in a West Yorkshire regiment. Sorry, I don’t know what else to say.’
‘Ben Harvey, from Cornwall, England.’ He returned her firm handshake.
‘I’ll leave you now.’
Discreetly, he shook out the rigidity in his limbs. ‘No, don’t. I mean, I can’t stay here for ever and you’re not disturbing me. Have you just arrived or are you leaving?’ According to the dried tears on her cheeks, she had already made her pilgrimage. She appeared cool and unruffled despite the atmosphere having turned humid and airless, but was prettily flushed. She was about twenty years old, with bobbed, light-brown hair shot through with gold flecks, and had a smile that was unobtrusive and warm and somehow uplifting.
She read the name on the grave he was attending, and the inscription. ‘“After Conflict Rest.” That’s well said. They all deserve their rest. Was he a relative, may I ask?’
‘A friend. I had three close friends as a boy and I’ve lost them all.’
‘I’m sorry. Are the other two buried here?’
This made him smile. ‘No. They’re alive and back in England. Actually, they’re both women, one is the sister of Billy lying here.’ His prolonged inactivity had made his head throb. He needed oxygen to course through his body and clear his befuddled mind. ‘I walked here, Miss Wilder. May I escort you to your motor car or whatever?’
‘I’ve hired a touring car. I take it you’re staying at Ypres? If you want to spare your feet I’d be glad of the company.’ She had an endearing way of leaning forward and giving self-deprecating little laughs. ‘Hope you don’t think I’m being forward.’
Ben’s heart leapt with triumph, for all at once he no longer felt the crushing need for solitude, and this unassuming young woman was just perfect to begin the process of rejoining life and order. ‘Not at all. I’d appreciate that, Miss Wilder.’