Known Unto God
The land in the foreground is low lying and throws up rust-coloured weeds that say something sour lies underneath. Heaps of clay dominate the middle distance. They seem to be following the line of something. Beneath these heaps men with shovels prod and peer. Their movements are delicate: the men are too careful to be navvies. In the background is an industrial building that looks like a grey briefcase tipped on its side, the sort of prefabricated box you might see on the outskirts of any town anywhere in the world.
This town – or, more accurately, village – is Boesinghe, about three miles north of Ypres. Boesinghe was part of the old British frontline in the Great War. Edmund Blunden, the poet and critic, served here and told how the village looked then: jutting roof-timbers, roomless doorways, rubble everywhere. John McCrae, the Canadian doctor, came here to treat soldiers who had been gassed. One morning he walked out of his dressing station, looked at the rows of wooden crosses that each day became thicker, and wrote the deathless poem In Flanders Fields.
The men working in the shadows of those heaps of clay call themselves battlefield archaeologists. This is their dig. They are following the line of a trench from the Great War, rummaging for its secrets before another box of a factory is erected over the ground. They wear shorts and gumboots and work with narrow-bladed shovels. They cut a slice of clay from the face, deposit it gently, knead the shovel through it even more gently, then reach down to pick up a spent cartridge or a scrap of uniform.
Two weeks ago these men came upon a body. ‘He was there,’ one of the diggers says. ‘Blown to pieces.’ The skeleton was in two parts.
Earlier this Saturday morning, with police present and in the heavy air of a cloudy summer’s day, they lifted it out. All that the diggers know about this man is that he was probably from the Rifle Brigade. A shoulder badge, with the words still legible, lay among the bones.
Now the diggers are searching beyond the triangular patch where the body lay for whatever the soldier left in this world. One by one his possessions come out of the clay. A brass belt buckle. Rifle rounds stained with soft green mould. Scraps of a woollen uniform that have endured so well in this wet ground that they do not tear when pulled. Leather strapping, the rivets covered with a lurid green. Small shards of bones, like grey pumice. Buttons. And the driving band from the shell that probably killed the soldier.
All of this goes into plastic bags. But, as usually happens, there is nothing that can establish who this man was.
THEY BURIED HIM the following Friday afternoon in one of the 155 cemeteries that loop around Ypres like a necklace of well-kept sorrow. Buglers from the Menin Gate sounded the Last Post over his bones and the standard of the Royal British Legion was raised under an overcast sky. Some seventy-five people attended, including a representative of the British Government. The Reverend Ray Jones of St George’s Memorial Church in Ypres led the service, which was non-denominational. Brief reports of the burial appeared in local papers the next day.
One day soon they will put a headstone over his grave. Known Unto God, it will say.
YOU KEEP THINKING about this man, or rather that huddle of clay-smeared bones, during the next few weeks, which is absurd because you know nothing about him and never will. Maybe that’s why you keep thinking about him. What was he doing when the shell hit? Was he on sentry duty, scratching away at lice as he stared into a black night, or was he hopping the bags? Did he hear the shell coming? Was he young or old? Did he have a wife and children? What did he think about the war? Who wept when he was reported missing?
The Great War is long ago and far away. And in the clay that is soft and springy under your feet at Boesinghe it is still with us, loaded with mysteries and heavy with sadness and thoughts of things that are unspeakable. All the Australians who fought on the western front are gone now. There were so many of them, and we never really saw them.