Langemarck

A plump Englishman took Tiney’s battered cardboard suitcase, and flung it into the back of his car. ‘You think the job at the school might suit, Miss Flynn?’ he asked.

‘I don’t think I’m the person you’re looking for,’ said Tiney. ‘I came to Europe to visit my brother’s grave in the Somme. I have a cousin who died here in Belgium too. I’m not a qualified teacher.’

‘You look like an educated young lady to me.’

‘I’m sorry if there’s been a misunderstanding,’ said Tiney. ‘I wrote to see about being billeted with the schoolteacher, but I’m very happy that there’s a room at the Hôtel de la Gare.’

‘I don’t suppose you’d think of staying on after you’ve found your cousin’s resting place?’ he persisted. ‘My little ones, their mum has this idea that if I talk English to them and she speaks Flemish, they’ll work out both languages. But the little buggers don’t seem to be able to learn to read either language. Charlotte’s coming up six now, our first little war baby, and I’m right worried about her.’

‘Are there a lot of Englishmen working in Ypres?’

‘My word! Less than half the locals have come back. There’s talk of turning the whole town into a war memorial; others want to rebuild, make the old town what it was. The Imperial War Graves Commission is based here too and we don’t have enough men to tackle the job of building the cemeteries. The Chinese Labour Corps are working on the battlefield clearance but there’s no end of work needs doing. Visitors are banned from the Salient but we can’t stop those with money and connections. And to be honest, I think it’s good to see a loyal young lady like yourself make a pilgrimage for our brave boys.’

The jolly Englishman chatted all the way from the station to the hotel, as they drove through ruined streets full of rubble and destruction. The hotel looked as though it had been hastily repaired. The building was not much more than a shell, missing sections of walls and roof, its empty windows framing patches of blue sky. Most of the street was in ruins and only a few buildings were still standing. In the distance, small huts used as temporary housing sat clumped on the bleak plain like ugly mushrooms.

Before opening the door, Tiney turned to the driver and took a deep breath. ‘As I said, I’ve come to find my cousin’s grave. I was wondering if I could employ you to drive me out there tomorrow? The Red Cross sent me his details. He’s in Langemarck Cemetery.’ She took the letter from her bag and unfolded it. ‘I have a map of how to reach it.’

‘That can’t be right. Langemarck is a German cemetery. The Huns are renting the land they’re buried in but they shouldn’t be allowed to stay.’

‘My cousin fought with the Germans,’ said Tiney. She tried to keep her voice steady but she sensed the driver freeze.

‘You shouldn’t have come to Ypres,’ he said, finally, his tone heavy and flat. ‘The German cemeteries are dangerous. They’re in a terrible state. You’ll never find your cousin’s grave. There’s more than a million dead Boche in the Salient plain.’

Tiney folded the map and letter and put them back in her bag. A heaviness settled on her limbs and she could hardly bring herself to open the car door.

Martin had warned her against coming to Ypres. He’d even written her a letter from Geneva trying to dissuade her. Ida had told her the idea was ludicrous, that it was more than enough to have simply found the information about where Will was buried. No one expected her to go and visit his grave. Onkel Ludwig and Tante Bea had expressly said it wasn’t necessary. But Tiney was determined. While Ida was away on a painting expedition with friends, Tiney spoke with some of the painters who had been to Ypres and made her plans. By the time Ida returned to Paris, Tiney was on her way to Belgium.

The driver unloaded Tiney’s suitcase from the car and placed it on the ground outside the Hôtel de la Gare. Then he turned to face Tiney. ‘The war will never be over for the people of this town,’ said the Englishman, ‘nor for any of us who survived it. The war exists in people’s imaginations and memories and it will live on forever and ever. You should go home to your own country and get on with things.’

‘Peace lives in the imagination too,’ said Tiney, and suddenly she found herself quoting Martin. ‘We need to make a place for peace.’

The driver didn’t respond. He slammed the door of his car and sped off down the dusty roadway.

That evening, Tiney walked down to Skindles, a small restaurant that served simple Flemish food. It was housed in a temporary building at the end of the road. Tiney sat by the restaurant’s coal-burning stove and ordered a bowl of what she thought was rabbit stew. There were two other tables of battlefield visitors in the small room as well as several local workers, many of them speaking in English, but after the reaction of the driver, Tiney wasn’t keen to strike up a conversation. The room smelt close, of beer and tobacco, of fried onions and coal smoke. She slunk back to the hotel.

That night, Tiney hardly slept. In the early-morning light, before anyone else in the hotel awoke, she packed her bag and slipped out into the ruins of Ypres. Most of the residents were living in small and flimsy temporary houses made of wood and corrugated iron on the edge of the town. It was eerie walking past the shadows of the crushed and broken Cloth Hall. The medieval town was like a ghost town. No one was up and few birds sang as she made her way along the road to Langemarck Cemetery.

The German graveyard lay seven miles from town, through flat fields of devastation. As the sun rose, the poppies in the fields glowed like scarlet flame against the spring grass. Tiney felt as though she was walking through a dream. Along the verge, more red poppies were in bloom, as well as yellow buttercups and white Queen Anne’s lace. She passed along an avenue of ruined trees, tiny green leaves struggling to bud through the blackened, broken trunks. She crossed small bridges over creeks, hastily reconstructed, walked past craters and piles of rubble, shattered farmhouses with nothing but a single section of wall remaining, deep trenches where water pooled and lay stagnant, and thousands and thousands of graves. Some bore white crosses, others had scattered headstones. Everywhere she looked, there were graves.

The sun had well and truly risen by the time she reached Langemarck, where thousands of simple, unpainted crosses stretched across the field. A low hedge and a tangle of barbed-wire fences surrounded the cemetery. The slope from the road to the edge of the cemetery was slippery with mud and though she walked up and down the road, she couldn’t see a point of entry. Tiney knew that crossing any land without a marked path could be dangerous. She remembered the small boy at Villers-Bretonneux with one leg. Then she noticed an older woman dressed in black moving among the graves. She moved with purpose, cutting small briar roses from a hedge and placing them before the yellowing crosses. Tiney waved to her.

‘How did you get in?’ she called, first in English, then in German. The woman’s face relaxed when she heard Tiney speak German.

‘Up ahead, follow me, I’ll show you where I found a way through the wire,’ she said.

As they walked in tandem either side of the barbed wire, Tiney said, ‘I’m searching for my cousin’s grave. He’s buried here.’

‘My cousin is here too.’

The woman stopped at a small break in the hedge and then, wrapping her shawl around her hand, she pushed aside a large coil of barbed wire and gestured for Tiney to climb through.

‘My cousin, my brothers and my son are all in Belgian soil,’ said the woman, offering her hand to Tiney as she clambered up the verge. ‘There are more than a million German men and boys in Flanders fields.’

They walked together through the graves, both glancing from side to side to scan the tin nameplates tacked to the base of the crosses.

‘My cousin died in the first battle of Ypres in 1915,’ said Tiney. ‘My brother died in the Somme. I’ve already been there to find his grave.’

‘My husband died in the Somme. I’ve come to Belgium to find my cousin and my brothers, but especially to find my boy, my only son. He went missing in action in 1915. He was only eighteen. But you know, all these years, since he died, I can never feel he’s truly dead. Perhaps missing in action might mean he lost his memory and came to live among the people here. Sometimes, I dream that he is living in Belgium. Perhaps he has a Belgian wife and a little child.’

Tiney had seen enough of the battlefields now to know how easy it would be for a man to be listed as ‘missing in action’ but truly dead. She looked at the woman with such pity that the woman began to weep.

‘I must believe in this dream.’

‘Dreams are important,’ said Tiney, touching the woman gently on her shoulder.

Tiney remembered too well that feeling, that numbing disbelief that someone you loved so much could simply have been snuffed out. She remembered those moments of wanting to believe Louis’ death had been some sort of terrible joke, that at any moment a letter would arrive to say it was all a mistake, that he was alive and on his way home to Adelaide. And she thought again of the photo of the woman and child, the desperate longing to believe that they might have been connected to Louis.

The woman suddenly, unexpectedly, embraced Tiney. Tiney felt how frail she was beneath her widow’s weeds. Then the woman kissed her swiftly on one cheek and turned and hurried away. Tiney was left alone, surrounded by the yellowing wooden crosses.

When she finally reached the section of the cemetery that the Red Cross had designated as being where Will was buried, she discovered it was actually a mass grave. The tin plate simply said that the grave contained twenty-five soldiers. Her heart sank. She couldn’t take a picture of this for her uncle and aunt. Instead, she gathered up handfuls of wildflowers and covered the length of the grave. She worked with speed and purpose until the grave looked as decorated as Louis’ had been. Then she took a photograph of the blanket of flowers with her Brownie camera. Lastly, she knelt down and removed a small pinch from an envelope of poppy seeds that she’d gathered in the cemetery in Buire-Courcelles and buried them near the grave marker.

‘These are from Louis to you, Will,’ she whispered. She thought of the woman in black, running away from her through the cemetery of graves. ‘For you and the cousins and brothers and husbands and sons that are with you.’

The sun rose high overhead as Tiney pulled aside the barbed-wire coils and climbed onto the road again. As she walked through the sunshine, her shadow stretched out before her. In her mind’s eye she made a picture of Louis and Will walking alongside her, their shadows overlapping. And for the first time since that morning at Larksrest, the morning when Papa had come into the room a changed man and Mama had spilt her basket of plums across the floor, Tiney felt at peace.