Coventry (3 page)

Harriet turns abruptly from the window. She doesn’t want to think of that woman, not now. She’s just one more person who hasn’t kept her promise; just one more person who hasn’t returned to Harriet.

The bus judders over the uneven ground. Harriet is thrown about in her seat, has to hold on to the seat in front of her in order to keep her balance, to keep herself upright. It is raining. The water falls in veils over the streaked glass, obscuring the fields of mud, the burned, skeletal trees that they pass on their way into Ypres.

The bus is full, and mostly women—wives, mothers, sisters of the soldiers who fought in the trenches here at the start of the war. No one speaks. Even last night, in the guest-house in Poperinghe where Harriet and some of the other women were staying, no one had much to say. Grief, unlike love, seems to be a solitary experience.

They pass the ruins of a spinning mill, then a wooded area where the tops of the trees are all blown off and what remains are charred and splintered stumps, bare of leaves or bark.

Harriet still has the telegram she received two months after Owen left for Europe. When she was handed it solemnly by the messenger, on a crisp November day, at the door of the flat on Berkeley Road, she knew that it said one of three things. Her husband was wounded, missing, or dead. When she opened it, with shaking hands, right there on the front door stoop, it said two of three things. Private Owen Marsh was missing, believed killed. Such a simple statement, with just one word between
missing
and
killed
to offer her the smallest flicker of hope.
Missing
in a place called Ypres.

How Harriet clung to that small pause between what she wanted, and what was probably true. For those first months after she received the telegram, she believed that Owen would walk into the flat at any moment. When that didn’t happen, she believed that he was probably wounded somewhere, perhaps badly, and that they hadn’t been able to identify him yet. She had heard stories of soldiers lying in military hospitals, suffering from wounds that left them unconscious and unable to identify themselves.

She waited for word, but none came. She went to the local war office every day to make inquiries. Then Harriet prayed to a God she had never really believed in, night after night down on her knees on the bare bedroom floor, her head resting on her clasped hands, the words rasping in her throat.

But nothing brought him back to her, and at the end of the war, when the death tally was done, Owen Marsh was simply one of nearly eight thousand soldiers who had perished on October 30, 1914, during the first battle of Ypres, simply one of ninety thousand British soldiers with, as the military reports put it,
no known grave.
A generation of young men gone.

The bus lurches to a stop and the doors swing open. There’s a hesitation before people move from their seats. The rain is still pelting down and it is very cold. No one is dressed adequately. There’s a hesitation, and then an old woman stands up slowly and they all rise.

Harriet steps off the bus and hunches her shoulders against the rain. She has forgotten her umbrella. It feels petty to mind getting wet, but she does mind. She walks purposefully down the road and into the ruined city.

The Belgian city on the border of France had once been prosperous and had boasted many fine houses, many grand buildings and churches. It had a magnificent cathedral. The Cloth Hall was an enormous market for the buying and selling of every kind of fabric—wool, lace, linen, cotton. It had been built around a rectangular courtyard, and it was so vast that on the ground floor alone there were forty-eight doors to the outside. The river once ran through the town and allowed the boats carrying merchandise to sail right up to the warehouses to unload.

Now the main street of the city is entirely flattened. There isn’t a building in Ypres that hasn’t been affected by the shelling, that isn’t either missing, or wounded, or destroyed.

Only because Harriet has seen pictures of Cloth Hall does she recognize what’s left of it. It has been shelled to almost nothing. Parts of two walls remain, ragged towers of brick. The once impressive bell tower is a crumbling wreck, and what once were the two interior floors are now a mound of rubble filling the cavity between the walls, rubble as high as a small hill.

The cathedral is an endless plain of broken stone and dust, with several small portions of wall jutting up from the debris like tombstones.

Harriet walks through the city streets. The rain plasters her hair to her scalp and starts to run down the back of her neck. The other people who have been on the bus are reading their guidebooks, for there is a sombre guidebook that has been published for the thousands of people who travel here to see the ruins.

Harriet pulls her coat tighter around her. The mud is making it hard to walk, and she has no clear idea of where to go. She had been anticipating this moment for so long, this moment when she would be able to go to the place where Owen had last been; but now that she is here, she doesn’t know what to do.

The dead men are nowhere to be found, and so it seems that they are, in fact, everywhere. There is no guidebook for that.

No one knows that Harriet has made this journey. She is estranged from her own family and has been for years, and Owen’s parents, despite making a strained effort to be polite to her when she was married to Owen, have retreated into their own grief. They would think it ghoulish that she had travelled here to find the ghost of her husband. They dislike a display of feeling, prefer emotion to be securely locked away, like the good bone china they keep in the mahogany bureau in the parlour.

Yesterday the bus tour travelled to nearby Hooge, a village that had been completely obliterated. All that was left was the wooden signpost with the word
Hooge.
There was a small British cemetery there, containing about two thousand graves, on the western ridge above the vanished town; no grass, no trees, just tight rows of simple wooden crosses planted in the dirt. The names of the dead soldiers and their rank were painted on the crosses in white.

How Harriet envied the women who knelt in prayer in that small cemetery, weeping at the graves of their husbands. How she envied their laying of flowers on the graves, the way they ran their hands over the contours of the crosses. One woman laid her forehead against the top of her husband’s marker, the way Harriet remembers Owen laying his forehead against hers. Harriet had to turn away at that.

Now, she huddles in a corner where two ruined stone walls meet. “Owen,” she says out loud, just to hear his name here. “Owen.”

She is past tears. She is past believing in his safe return. She is past love. She says his name into the falling rain, rubs the back of her knuckles against the stones until they bleed, and then she feels stupid and stops.

They are to stay the night in Ypres, in one of the small hotels that have sprung up to support the tourists who pour into the city. This afternoon they are to visit some of the remaining trenches and the wooded area where the soldiers would wait to be reunited with their regiment if they had become separated from it.

Harriet could never have imagined this much destruction. It seems unreal. She thinks of all those days and nights when she foolishly believed that Owen was still alive. Being here now, she knows absolutely that he is dead.

He is everywhere. He is nowhere. The blood on her knuckles is the brightest thing in this landscape. His name tastes like smoke in her mouth.

Owen had time to write Harriet only one letter before he was
missing, believed killed.
Before that letter she had received a regulation postcard. The postcard had lines already written on it that the soldier was supposed to cross out if they didn’t apply to him. The lines that Owen had crossed out sent a chill through Harriet when she received the card.

I have been admitted into hospital.

I am sick and am going on well.

I am wounded and hope to be discharged soon.

I have received no letter from you for a long time.

 

What he left as his message was the simple and entirely banal
I am quite well. Letter follows at first opportunity.

The letter, when it came, a mere week before the telegram arrived, was surprisingly vivid. Harriet had never known Owen to be much of a talker, let alone much of a writer, and she felt both comforted and alarmed by his letter. She was grateful that he hadn’t tried to spare her his experience by engaging in reminiscences of their life together, or inquiries into how she was getting on at home. He still wanted to offer himself to her, even if just with words—and for this she was glad. But the man who wrote this letter to her was also not a man she felt she knew, and it alarmed her to think how much there still was to learn about her husband.

Harriet has brought Owen’s letter with her to Ypres. But she has read it so many times that, even standing in the mud-filled trench, she can bring it back word for word.

Dearest Harriet,

Well, I’m writing from the trenches within hearing distance of the Germans; they are in fact only 25 yards away. It is daylight and a beautiful day and I’ve just had a good sleep in a sort of covered hole. There is nothing but sandbags all around, and a crater nearby full of dead matter. Yes, the stink is awful and the Germans have a nasty habit of stirring the bowl and keeping it good and fresh. However, in spite of all this, I feel unaccountably happy.

The Germans tried to bomb us out last night, but of course failed. This is the second time in this trench that I have helped to repulse the raiding enemy.

I’m now writing under candlelight in a foul-smelling dug-out which is fairly safe from shellfire. It must be at least 11 p.m. and my turn for guard comes at 12, for we only sleep by day.

Whatever happens, you must not believe that the Germans are worse than us. The regiments who opposed us just recently in Ypres were as human as could be to our wounded, even more so than we were to them. One fellow, having been wounded in the head during the night fighting lost his way, and hardly having the strength to stand, made for the nearest trench, or what was left of it. Just before he was about to jump in, he saw Huns crouching beneath him, and believing himself undetected, was about to turn back, when one of the Germans, seeing his wound in the head, immediately spoke in English and comforted him. The wounded man, feeling so weak, accepted and allowed himself to be helped into the trench. Then the German undid his cup and gave him water, laid him down and sacrificed his coat. Soon afterwards the Germans evacuated this section, and when this man came to, he saw British soldiers carrying him out on a stretcher. As soon as he could he told his benefactors the story and showed them the cup that the German had allowed him to keep. I saw this mug. Many of our wounded have been found covered with coats.

On the other hand, it is a recognized fact by both sides that when charging, enemy wounded left in the rear are killed to prevent any chances of their sniping.

The morrow morning: I am writing in a ruined church, on an improvised table, and I am facing what was once a garden. The sun is shining, the sky is blue, and a cooling breeze is blowing into my face. What a difference, what a contrast to the stagnant fire-swept, shell-torn battlefield, where all a man can do is to hug the earth and rot in dirty holes, and to inhale the filthy thick air.

 

The letter ends there, in the middle of the page. Owen has hastily scrawled a line of
x
’s and
o
’s for hugs and kisses, signed
Love,
and then written his name. Because the letter was completed over the course of three days, Harriet knows it was a struggle to write.

Harriet had never known him to write so beautifully. Early on in their courtship he had written her a few letters, but they were all of the
I can’t wait to see you
variety—short, impatient declarations. This letter, even though it had taken three days to write, felt as though Owen had spent time with the words, had been careful in a way Harriet had not expected of him.

Harriet thinks how that letter has both stopped her from hating the Germans and has given her a small taste of the man she was just beginning to know, how because there is no body to grieve, it is the last thing she will ever have of her husband—those words on that page.

Sanctuary Wood is a torn piece of earth with a few upright dead trees, standing like burned matchsticks in the dirt. It is impossible to imagine that it was once a wood filled with flowers and birds and that particular kind of light that sifts down through the leaves overhead. In the early days of the war, it had offered a brief respite from the fighting to the men who had become lost in the maze of muddy trenches and had climbed out, retreated back to the wood, and waited there to reunite with their regiments.

“It wouldn’t have been a wood for very long,” says the woman beside Harriet as they walk between the blackened trees. “For most of the war, it would have looked like this.”

Harriet wonders if Owen was ever in the wood. She had thought, on the journey across the Channel, on the journey into Ypres, that she should try to find the church where he had penned the last fragment of his letter. She hadn’t anticipated the utter devastation of the city.