The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [355]
54
The Belgian landscape is flat and watery, polders planted with corn and cabbage, claimed from the North Sea by a series of dykes. Further inland there are fields and houses resting on a thick bed of clay. There is water there too, water in ponds and moats, water running into little bekes (rivulets), water in canals. The land floods easily because the water cannot penetrate the clay and drain away. In 1914 the Belgians, having offered unexpected fierce resistance to the advancing Germans, had retreated towards the coast. The Belgians opened locks and sluices and flooded the land, letting in the North Sea, and creating impassable water plains between the Germans and the coast. The villages around the sandy ridges that offered height to an army had been battered by the guns into dust, which was worked into the clay, by churning wheels and hooves, by marching men and limping, hopping, crawling wounded. In the summer of 1917 General Haig commanded his armies to advance. In the early autumn, when the generals agreed to make a push against the Passchendaele ridge, it rained. The sky was thick with cloud, and no air reconnaissance was possible. The rain blew chill and horizontal across the flat fields and liquefied the mud, and deepened it, so that movement was only possible along duckboard planks—the “corduroy” road, laid across it. The men at the front crouched in holes in the ground and the holes were partly filled with water, which was bitterly cold, and deepening. The dead, or parts of the dead, decayed in and around the holes, and their smell was everywhere, often mingled with the smell of mustard gas, a gas which lay heavily in the uniforms of the soldiers, and was breathed in by nurses and doctors whose eyes, lungs and stomachs were damaged in turn, whose hair was dyed mustard yellow. The peaceful polders had become a foul, thick, sucking, churning clay, mixed with bones, blood and burst flesh.
Geraint and his gun crew were manoeuvring their gun on the corduroy road, between snapped and blackened tree stumps, over mud and pools of filthy water. He had had letters from unimaginable England. Imogen wrote that Pomona had announced her engagement to one of her patients, Captain Percy Armitage, who had lost both his legs and most of his sight in one eye. “She seems truly happy,” wrote Imogen. She had attached a photograph of her palely pretty daughter, from which she had, with inconsiderate consideration, obviously cut away another child, with scissors.
Geraint didn’t much mind. He was thinking very slowly, in the racket of gunfire and shellfire, having had no sleep for twenty-four hours, and only two hours in the preceding night and day. Maybe because they were so tired the crew lost control of the mule that was hauling its end of the wheels on the boards. The gun keeled over in the mud. Geraint was under it, and was killed instantly, crushed into the slime. Nobody stopped to dig for him. There were orders not to stop for those who fell off the snaking boards.
As the landscape grew more and more to resemble the primal chaos, human ingenuity became more and more desperately orderly and inventive. Columns of bearers, at night, carried ammunition and water and hot food in insulated rucksacks to the men at the front. They resembled Christian, in Pilgrim’s Progress, making his way with his heavy pack through the Slough of Despond. One of the cyclist regiments balanced an odd load—full-size flat images of soldiers, painted in England by women who had once painted bone china, with realistic faces, with moustaches and glasses under their tin hats. These were puppets. They had flat strings snaking over the mud, operated by puppeteer soldiers hidden in foxholes and craters, who made them stretch and turn, stand up and fall. They made what were known as Chinese attacks, deployed in hundreds, under a smokescreen, inviting the Germans to fire on them and reveal their own positions. A man in a shell-hole could operate four or five of these “soldiers.”
The Women’s Hospital in the Claridge’s hotel in Paris had been closed in