The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [107]
‘Do either of you know about what happened there?’
‘I’d say Paul here is more of an Easter Rising man, Father,’ Mason said. ‘For him, 1916 is all about Patrick Pearse and Michael Collins and the occupation of the Post Office in O’Connell Street.’
‘It was still called Sackville Street then,’ Seaton said. ‘But you’re right enough. I don’t know anything about Verdun.’
‘It was the collective name for a system of supposedly impenetrable fortresses,’ Mason said. ‘They were built by the French to discourage German thoughts of invasion. The flaw lay in the massiveness of the fortifications and the number of men they committed to a static defensive role. By 1914, all the more astute German commanders knew that Verdun could simply be bypassed by a modern mobile army. But the German Chief of Staff, von Falkenhayn, knew the French would feel obliged to defend it. It had come to represent national pride. A full assault would commit the bulk of the French army and make them an easy target.
‘Since the progress of the war had made Verdun a salient in the French line, it could be attacked by heavy artillery bombardment from three sides. The French still refer to Verdun as the last great battle. But, in reality, it was a slaughter, only really distinguished by the number of dead it claimed.’
‘The siege began in February,’ Lascalles said. ‘It finally petered out in October. By then a million men had been killed or wounded in the battle.’ He paused for a moment, remembering. And remembering vividly, Seaton thought, from the shadow inflicted by the recollection on his face. ‘By the autumn I was counselling the still-living, comforting the wounded and burying our legions of dead entirely by rote. I believed in nothing. Cruelty and chance and sometimes absurdity dictated human life. Instinct and cunning permitted survival. There was no afterlife. There was no hope. And certainly, there was no God.’
There was silence. Mason broke it. ‘Why did they send you to Passchendaele?’
‘You might think because Falkenhayn had familiarised me with slaughter. And because your General Haig planned another. But the truth is, the British had sufficient chaplains of their own, in all denominations. They had no practical requirement for a French priest who no longer believed.’
Seaton said, ‘So why did you go? Why were you sent?’
‘Wheatley,’ Lascalles told them.
Twenty-Four
He had heard the story before being seconded, because rumour spread fast along the front and different languages proved little obstacle to the proliferation in wartime of legend and myth. So he had heard, in the mess, the story of the English artillery officer whose men had become too unnerved to serve any longer under his command. It was an odd situation, because the mutinous artillerymen were campaign veterans, battle-hardened gunners who prided themselves on their professionalism in the field. It was not the usual matter of cowardice or shell shock or exhaustion. Instead, the story was that they had seen something that had subsequently made several of them risk execution for mutiny rather than continue to fight in their particular unit. And they were adamant, these men. They were adamant even in the peculiar light of what they claimed to have seen.
The officer concerned had been hit by an enemy shell. The violence of the blast should have blown him into vapour. But in the aftermath of the explosion, as soil and debris rained back on the smoking earth, he was seen to clamber from the shell hole, ragged and smouldering, but intact. Incredibly, he seemed entirely unscathed.
‘I walked over to him,’ a bombardier facing an insubordination charge was quoted as saying. ‘It was dusk, but you could see pretty well. Better than I would have liked to, it turned out. What I noticed straightaway was that he didn’t move right. He wasn’t staggering, like you see the wounded and the dazed stagger on a battlefield, looking like men seeking somewhere comfortable to fall. Instead he had this stiffness about him, like you see with a strung puppet in a pier-end show. And when I got closer