The lateness of the hour by which they left Arras had done little to improve Tacit’s mood. With his battered brown suitcase in one hand, the pockets of his black coat laden down and bulging, they filed along the road out of the city, quickly realising that it would be impossible to hail a taxi for passage to the front. There was no choice other than to walk the four miles to Fampoux. Any motorised vehicles they had seen had been commandeered for army use, carrying fat Generals up and down the Rue D’Arras and to ‘important briefings’.
Hot, thirsty and hungry when they finally arrived at the outskirts of the village, they were little enthused to see an endless stream of soldiers and vehicles going into and out of the front, the line of military being the only feature visible. The entire landscape, for as far as Tacit and Isabella could see to the north and the south, had been battered into blackened charred featurelessness.
“You think Sandrine Prideux came back this way?” Isabella asked, doubtfully.
Tacit scratched his chin and sneered. “If she did, you have to ask what on earth for?”
As they’d left the city, a mournful bell had tolled somewhere in its depths, a haunting farewell for their departure. It sounded tuneless and despairing, as if the bell itself had been broken. It fell silent prematurely, midway through its peal. Every church they subsequently passed on the eastern road to Fampoux never once announced the hour. A strong, cold north-easterly swept over the sunken road, making the leaves on the few remaining trees rustle and fall like a shower upon the two lonely figures.
At many times they passed great formations of soldiers, singing and sharply dressed, going east, bloodied, blackened and shambling units coming west. An occasional lorry load of men, jolting and tilting over ruts and holes in the road, would shudder noisily past. A company of men was stretched out on a patch of grass, all of them motionless and silent. Isabella thought the area a makeshift morgue until one of the men tossed noisily in his sleep and turned over.
Always they were accompanied by traffic of one sort or another going towards or away from the front line. The road resembled a huge long traffic jam of soldiers, vehicles, refugees, supply lorries, cattle, cavalry and horse-drawn ambulances filled with the wounded. Incongruous in the churn and the industrialised hell of the scene, suddenly a well dressed woman in a fur coat appeared in the distance and passed them, her head held at a lofty angle, no shoes on her feet. And all the time, the noise of artillery hung in the background.
It took longer than four hours, once the traffic and the crowds and the sentry points had been traversed, to reach the outskirts of Fampoux. And they were still not at the village. Beyond where Tacit and Sandrine now stood, the road had been ground up by the great network of trenches, consumed back into the vast, churned earth from which it had been dug many centuries before. Back then it had been a track along which horses and carts had ridden from Arras to the east and back again. Now it was a metalled road broken up and lost in the myriad of support trenches, dugouts, officer posts, ammunition stores, latrines, feeding stations, hospitals and the harsh front line.
Great groups of soldiers were gathered in ragtag tired bands near mud stained field tents, chatting and smoking, congregating around tea urns or spread out on the earth under the very last of the heat from the sun that year. Officers marched in tight, conspicuous groups, their sparkling belts and boots as sharp as their clipped English accents. A proud troop of horses trotted by, their coats shimmering in the late French sun, riders saddled on them like proud birds atop pristine nests.
The great trenches had been hand carved into the earth, a rambling, chaotic interconnecting mesh of corridors and pathways winding their way spasmodically, but always gradually away towards the east. Teams of diggers were at work all across the vista, thrusting their spades into the sides of the trenches to widen and enhance, others forcing the first blades into new trenches. Wherever one looked, toil and sweat was the scene. With the drudgery came a muttering too, a jumble of accents talking of home, of Wigan and Hull, a debate about the industrial might of Liverpool or Newcastle, a sparring of words regarding the beauty of the Lancashire dales versus that of Cornish moors.
In the distance, over the rise in the land, they could see the broken tops of houses and leaning chimney stacks of Fampoux.
They passed lines of soldiers, heavily dressed, too heavily dressed for the weather, marching under sharp barked orders from Sergeants, perched high up on man-made mounds along the route, so they could look down as they shouted at the passing units. Artillery sets were being heaved by teams of sweat drenched horses and men, horses pulling at tethers, men groaning and cursing beneath the weight and the cloying soil. They passed a group of men, stripped to the waist, washing themselves with water taken from open drums. They cheered and called when they caught sight of Isabella.
“Alright, Sister?” one of them called, “any chance of a blessing?” to much laughter and cheer. Tacit’s cold stare quickly silenced any further hilarity.
They passed a field hospital. An officer and a number of juniors hung around outside it, puffing leisurely on cigarettes, whilst blood splattered doctors filed in and out of the tent openings, pursued by nurses carrying metal containers and trays of bloodied and defaced utensils. A constant stream of soldiers on stretchers carried by weary looking stretcher bearers came out of the trenches. Tacit looked at the wounded as they passed, their bodies pulverised by the shrapnel, flayed and torn.
Tacit looked towards the eastern horizon and watched it with heavy eyes.
The pair of them were regarded sceptically by the gathered ranks as they assembled to enter the labyrinth of the soldiers’ endeavours. But no one stopped to question them as they turned into the high walled trenches, most thinking them to be a Priest and a nurse heading to the front line to bless and tend to the wounded. The smell, the musty bite of charcoal mixed with the sweet aroma of hot metal, hung like a shroud across the devastated landscape, thick and clinging, so much so that the sun could barely penetrate and light the ground before them.
All around them, field hospitals consisting of flimsy makeshift and hastily constructed tents spewed an endless stream of nurses and bloodied stretcher borne soldiers and sucked nurses and bloodied and burnt soldiers in. It was like an endless conveyor belt of grief and mutilation.
Like entering a plane of hell.
Tacit and Isabella drew their clothes tight around them and stepped inside.