Human Traces by Sebastian Faulks
In the same summer, speaking from his palace at St Petersburg, the Czar threatened that if the Slav cause was betrayed he would use Russia’s military power in the Balkans. In the following spring, the English newspapers noted that Britain had by far the smallest standing army of any European power, while Germany and Austria-Hungary were multiplying their arms to match the Russians.
Thomas told Kitty they should make plans to leave.
‘It seems so unreasonable,’ she said, ‘that the quarrels of Bosnia should bring the whole continent to war.’
‘I think there is a desire to fight,’ said Thomas. ‘The desire is looking for a pretext. We will not be well placed here, my love, on our mountain top. You could plead your German nationality—’
‘Or my British.’
‘Yes. But I have no choice. I never saw a need to change and I felt a loyalty in any case. It is the same for Sonia. And Daniel.’
‘Oh my God. Daniel.’
‘Yes, indeed. France and Britain are still at some remove from the argument, but there seems . . . Some sense of the inevitable.’
‘We cannot just leave our sanatorium and our patients.’
‘We could in fact, quite easily. Franz is a partner in the business. We could promote Peter Andritsch. I don’t think either of them would be required to fight if it came to it. And they could take on two more doctors for the duration.’
‘It is dreadfully sad,’ said Kitty. ‘To give up your life’s work.’
‘We can return. When the war is over. It may not take long. And the girls would have a good education in England. We could be happy in London. Or I could take up my brother’s offer of the farmhouse.’
‘What about Sonia and Jacques?’
‘Their need to leave would be just as pressing – more so. I suppose they would go to Paris.’
‘Could we not persuade them to come to England with us?’
‘I do not think Jacques would want to. Sonia might, but not Jacques. I think he would welcome the chance to start again elsewhere.’
Kitty went over and took Thomas’s hands in her own. ‘Perhaps it will be all right,’ she said. ‘No one can really want a war.’
‘I think they can.’
‘I am so sorry for you, Thomas. The schloss, the Wilhelmskogel. I know what they have meant to you. Your whole life.’
‘It is over, Kitty,’ said Thomas, standing up and walking towards the door. ‘In truth, it has been over for some time.’
While Thomas spoke, Jacques was lying beside Roya, stroking back a strand of hair from her face.
‘Why must you go to St Petersburg?’ he said.
‘My father is ill. He has no one else. And he says a war is coming. He is scared.’
‘Will you come back?’
‘Of course.’
‘Do you expect him to die?’
‘I think so. That is why I must be there.’
Jacques ran his hand over the skin of her back, over her haunches down to the thigh.
‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘I have the feeling that you are not real.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You are not real in the way that I am. Or my wife. Or my colleagues. You came from nowhere. Now you vanish.’
She laughed. ‘I promise you that I am real enough. Touch me.’
He smiled. ‘I am not convinced.’
‘All right,’ she said, leaning up on her elbow. ‘What is the most real thing you can think of?’
Jacques thought for a long time before answering; he tried to weigh up what was most vital and enduring in all that he had known. Eventually, no longer smiling, he said, ‘Memory.’
‘Very well, then,’ said Roya. ‘I am as real as memory.’
With Roya gone, Jacques became biddable in the question of moving. Like Thomas, he felt that their joint venture had ended some time ago, and while he had become fond enough of the Wilhelmskogel, he did not wish to spend the rest of his life there. The thought of going back to Paris was attractive to him and he reminded Sonia of how much she had liked the city.
‘May I spend the summers in England?’ she said.
‘Of course, my love. You can travel to England as often as you choose.’
So it was agreed that Franz Bernthaler and Peter Andritsch would take over the running of the clinic and would have financial control, with a right to hire and dismiss staff, for a period of twelve months, to be renewed at yearly intervals. If neither Thomas nor Jacques resumed his partnership within five years, they could be bought out and the entire business would be made over to Bernthaler and Andritsch.
In December, Sonia began to pack up their belongings. She told Daniel, who was just eighteen, that he would not be able to complete his last year at school but could finish his studies in Paris. ‘Then you should go to the university at Cambridge, like your uncle Thomas.’
‘Would they take me?’
‘Of course they would. If nothing else, you could study languages. You already speak three – four if you count Italian. And so long as your father can take enough money out to pay the fees I am sure there would be no difficulty.’
Jacques heard nothing from St Petersburg. Perhaps Roya could not write for fear of Sonia seeing the Russian postmark, though she could always have sent it to him at the hospital; maybe she thought that even there some suspicious nurse or porter would see the stamp and start to gossip. Drobesch held no more dinner parties; the Modern World Colloquium for 1914 was postponed sine die and it was said that he planned to travel to Russia, to be with his wife. Jacques called at the house to wish him bon voyage, but found him gone. The butler told him that the house was up for sale and that he had been instructed to show it to prospective purchasers.
‘Does he intend to stay in Russia? Why on earth would he want to be there?’
‘I imagine he wants to be wherever Frau Drobesch is, sir.’
Jacques thought he detected something facetious or suggestive in the man’s tone, but he did not care. He walked away up the cobbled street and he knew that he would never see her again.
The Christmas festivities were a burden to him, with their social visiting and arduous bonhomie. He once more lost the ability to sleep and spent the days in a nervous coma of wakefulness. She had gone, she had never been his; she was vanished like a torn-off page in a book of hours. He felt the whole shape of himself collapse and fold inward, shrunken and desiccated; he could barely push his footsteps through the air. He longed to move, to be anywhere else.
Then in February, at the lowest time of the year, there came a cable to the hospital, addressed to him. The words were typed and pasted in strips on the flimsy paper from the regional post office: ‘CANNOT RETURN. P’BURG HOME INDEFINITE. D HERE. I LOVE YOU ALWAYS, BEYOND TIME AND PLACE. R.’
XXII
DANIEL WAS NINETEEN years old when he started as an undergraduate at the college next door to his uncle’s at Cambridge in the Michaelmas term of 1915, but the place was already starting to seem empty. By the spring of the following year the undergraduate population had fallen from more than four thousand to less than six hundred, most of whom were either medical students or were unfit for service. The west court of Daniel’s college had been taken over by the military, and on the lawns that adjoined the Fellows’ rose garden, sheep had been put out to graze. Daniel wrote to his parents in Paris to tell them what was going on, but Sonia, who had heard the German guns on the Marne and seen the Gare de l’Est teeming with the maimed and wounded, replied that he should devote himself to his studies. It was a French war, she said, and Daniel was English. ‘Papa may disagree,’ she wrote, ‘but in my view, nationality, like religion, comes through the mother. Anyway, Herr Frage, you are as much Carinthian as French, so which side would you choose to fight for? Put your nose back in your books and do not listen to bloodthirsty boys who tell you otherwise.’
In the summer, Daniel read of the British attack on the Somme and he saw the strained faces of his fellow-students and their teachers, who
He did not at first write to tell his parents, fearing they might somehow contrive to have him discharged, but once he had passed the medical and been sent for training, he wrote, from deep within the protective walls of discipline and censorship, to break the news.
‘I had thought I was bilingual, but I could not at first understand anything the men were saying. The Londoners speak, so far as is possible, without consonants; and there are also men from Glasgow and Durham and Belfast, as I suppose you would expect in a capital city. My section is Alton, Jeavons, Kemp, Reader, Scott and Turney. My mess mates or muckers (there are many odd words in the army) are Billy Reader (who cannot read; I have to do it for him), Jack Turney and Harry Scott.
‘Harry is known as “Mac” because he comes from Scotland. He is about thirty-five, I think, and has worked in shipyards for most of his life. He is married to a woman called Ellen, of whom he speaks very fondly, and they have two children, Dougal and Ailsa, whose photographs I have been shown many times. He is extremely strong and rather bad-tempered. His idea of the war is to save up his pay in a cushy billet and make sure that on no account does he get promoted. He assured me that whatever the casualty figures suggest, we are unlikely ever to have to go “over the top” and that half the army is “transport”, a general term just meaning support and back-up. He eats prodigious amounts of food in preparation for leaner times ahead. His favourite expression is, “Sailor Vee, pal.” You can probably work out what this means, though it took me several days.
‘Billy Reader and Jack Turney are about twenty-eight, but they seem much older. Both were unemployed, though Billy had worked as a signwriter and Jack in the docks. Billy looks like a ferret, with a sharp face and greasy brown hair. He has a surprisingly good singing voice and is a good artist, as you might expect – he does nice little sketches of the sergeant (of whom more below). He is only interested in one thing, and that is girls. He and Jack talk about almost nothing else and between them seem to have seduced (not their word) every female between the ages of fourteen and forty “from Hainault to Epping” as Billy puts it. All of these ladies seem to have been extremely grateful for his services and he clearly feels that he has done them a tremendous favour.
‘Jack Turney, who is short and bald, has a son from a liaison with a woman in Millwall, though he appears not to be married to her. Of the three, Jack is the most openly patriotic and believes it is our duty to “shut the Hun back in his **** sty and bolt the door”. He believes the Germans have raped a lot of women in Belgium and northern France, though seems slightly resentful that they got there before he did. (I apologise, Ma, if some of this seems awfully coarse to you; believe me, I am keeping out the worst!) Jack is also aggrieved that we are having to help out “the ***** French” and is anxious about how he will manage to “parley” with the local women.
‘We are all drilled into the ground by Sergeant Duncan, a small man with no chin but an unpleasant and aggressive attitude. He claims to have fought in Sudan with the regular army, but there is some scepticism about this. He seems a most bitter and vindictive person. “What that man needs,” says Billy about five times a day, “is a good . . .” But I am sure you can imagine what Billy’s prescription is.
‘There is one other thing that Jack and Billy will talk about and that is football. This does not always go well because they support different teams, and it is almost a relief to hear them get back to whether short girls are “more willing” than tall ones.
‘The barracks (I am in Surrey, but cannot say where) are not too bad. We have beds and blankets, which is good because it is already quite cold. The food is not as good as the food in college, but no worse than that in the average eating house. Stews, beans, jam, bacon, doughy bread, sweet tea; but there is enough and I don’t mind. We are issued with as many cigarettes as you can smoke. In addition to drill, kit inspection, marching up and down and scrubbing the floor, there is a fair amount of bayonet practice. We have been taught how to clean the rifle, but very little about how to fire it; and of course there is far too little ammunition for live practice. I have a very nice soft khaki cap, tin helmet (recent addition, I gather) and a uniform which fits well with a very smart regimental badge (a species of Goat Rampant – very suitable, as Mac drily pointed out to Billy). Shirt and undergarments are just picked out of a pile and a lot of swapping has to go on later. Mess tin, ground sheet, field dressings etc. etc. and something called a “hussif”, an all-in-one tool to open tins and “make yourself useful” as Sgt Duncan puts it. When I am posted, you can send me other things, such as scarves. I am hoping to be issued with a leather waistcoat before winter.
‘And what do they make of me? I am sorry to say that they think I am a bit of a joke. Most of them have a nickname – “Barmy” Jeavons, “Gunner” Kemp and so on – and I am “Frenchie” because of my surname. They can’t understand why I am not in the French army. I have explained everything but they can’t seem to follow, while my being a student makes them very suspicious. At first they thought I might be some sort of spy or “MP” (military policeman), but now they accept that I am just an ordinary volunteer like them. English graduates become officers almost at once, and even at the age of eighteen well-educated boys can find themselves commanding a platoon of men twice their age. But I am only an undergraduate, they have no record of my schooling and I seem to have slipped through that net. I am very happy with this, as I would be hopeless at telling people what to do since I have no idea what to do myself. Also, I have become fond of Jack and Billy and Mac. Well, not “fond” perhaps; but I can get on with them all right. I just wish they would not tease me quite so much about being “sixteen” and inexperienced with women etc., etc. I think that Jack thinks it is worth keeping in with me, so that when the time comes I can translate for him to the local French girls; though whether they will be much interested in his assessment of his local team’s centre forward, I am not so sure.
‘My dear Ma and Pa, I know all this is a shock to you. But almost every family in Europe is going through this. I could not stand aside and watch every other French and English man go off to fight. And believe me, the best are already dead. We are already down to the second- and third-rate, men like Jack and Billy and your son; the next stop will be conscription – predicted for Christmas. I would be ashamed to wait till I was forced. And although I volunteered on impulse, I have read the newspapers carefully and have lived, as you know, on a mountain from which I had the best view in Europe of the quarrelling nations. I have no doubt whatever that Germany must be stopped. Thank God your respective native countries are allies! What must it be like for Aunt Kitty – though I know she is only half-German? I hope Charlotte and Martha are not being teased or persecuted. I saw them only for a moment when I was passing through. Here is a photograph done in a little studio in Epsom High Street. Don’t I look smart?’
The first thing they had to do, once they had cleared out the bodies from the concrete pillbox they had captured, was put sandbags up the opening, because what had been a back door to the Germans was at the front for them, and invited a rude entry of explosive from the unmoved enemy guns. The brief telephone message from the support line told them that if they wanted sandbags they would have to come and get them
‘Me and Frenchie’ll go, sir,’ said Billy Reader. ‘If you wants to keep Private Turney for company, sir.’
‘All right, Reader,’ said Captain Denniston. ‘Good luck, and see if you can get any cigarettes from the chaps back there. And Reader?’
‘Yes, sir?’
‘How long have you been in Belgium?’
‘Come here first in November last year, after training at Etaples, then we was moved to the Salient before the attack on Passchendaele Ridge, sir, a few weeks ago, which—’
‘I don’t want the story of your life, man. I just wondered if you were going to take your helmet.’
‘Oh, yes. Thank you, sir.’
‘Honestly, I don’t know how you have survived.’
‘Rabbit’s foot, sir. Old lady givemeit at Folkestone. Though more likely need a fucking rubber ring out there—’
‘Get out.’
Daniel followed Billy out of the pillbox into the twilight. It was raining, though they did not notice the rain any more. Daniel shone his torch on to the duckboards which made a path across the liquid mud. They would have to make about three hundred yards back to the forward supply dump where they could load mules with the sandbags and bring them up to the pillbox. Daniel looked about to see if there were any aids to navigation, but the sky was clouded and the landscape had no features. The trees in the plain had been brought down or splintered; the knolls and hillocks had been flattened by weeks of artillery fire; the grass and earth had long been turned over, so that the greyish-brown mud stretched unrelieved by any change of shade or contour until it met the greyish-brown horizon. Even the shellholes, some of them twenty yards in diameter, quite soon lost definition in the rain, as their rims subsided and they joined hands with one another, first as craters in a planetary landscape, then mere dips in a quagmire whose marsh-gas came from yellow lurking phosgene and in whose liquid slime the only solid mass was the disconnected limbs of horses and men.