So that he would not get caught by the military police his father advised him to cycle along the tow-paths of the canals. Edgar and his brothers sat in the parlour with the map open and the curtains drawn plotting an escape route by the Trent and Mersey that would take him a good distance west before dipping to Burton-on-Trent. He had then to risk a seven-mile gap overland before getting back on to a canal which would twist its way through beautiful Leicestershire countryside to within a mile of his sister’s place.
He left Nottingham at five in the morning and rode fast, making it by late suppertime, cock-a-hoop at his success. Stretching his legs across the hearth after a well-earned meal, he heard Dolly promise he could stay as long as he liked, for he was safe with her, though he must be careful not to visit pubs or show himself in the street. Glad to have her brother in the house, at the same time she was uneasy about shielding a deserter, though when it was a question of choosing between family and country there was no doubt what she would do.
Dolly and her husband bred dogs, and Eddie went to sleep cradled in the noise of their barking, which must have been a fair relief from the yapping he had recently escaped. A few days later he was recaptured in a pub and sent back to his battalion, where he was met with an increased renewal of it.
He deserted again, and once more came home for succour. The trail was hotter for him because the British Army was obscenely desperate for flesh, never having enough men to throw into the carnage of Belgium and north-eastern France.
Edgar hid in Robins Wood beyond the Cherry Orchard, and my fourteen-year-old father biked there every day to take his food. Edgar had pitched a tent and camouflaged it with leaves and branches. Sitting outside on a log he received dishes of hot pudding and meat, and cans of tea lovingly prepared by his mother.
But a cyclist policeman followed my father, and Edgar was caught once more. He was bundled straight off to France, and sent ‘over the top’ with the 7th Battalion of the Sherwood Foresters on the first day of the Battle of the Somme.
35
Out of love for the earth’s surface, as fits somebody living in mists and deserts locked in a quest for the truth, I’ve always been fascinated by maps.
From as far back as I can remember I have felt inexorably drawn to printed representations of the earth’s shape, to those delineations of the land’s crust which have the achievements of civilization stamped on them in the same sense that beautiful women of certain primitive tribes show off the elaborate designs etched on to their bodies. The first time I saw a map I wanted to leave home.
In planning a way by car from London to Leningrad, from Calais to Cordoba, or from Kiev to Venice, I enter the realm of mathematical vectors, though on the actual journeys I hardly consult the maps so that, drawn into the fluctuations of traffic and the unexpected exigencies of topography, it becomes anything but a constricting vacation.
Nothing interests me more—now as when I was a child—than to hear of a highway built where one had not existed before, or a new railway, or a shipping route opened through the ice, or a new town settled on the edge of sandy or forest wastes.
While anthropologists moan the ruination of primitive tribes when a motor road is laid along the mountain backbone of New Guinea, or the conservationists bewail another sky of fresh air polluted beyond redemption, I cannot deny my excitement at the empty quarters being amplified and recreated by man’s endeavours, no matter how misguided this might seem in a more rational moment, just as at the same time I feel a sense of loss on hearing that deserts inexorably push their sand and barrenness into fertile oases.
In peering at maps of remote parts which lack the more intensive communications of Europe and the United States, I wonder where new roads could be built for the exploitation of mineral resources. By prolonged attention I plan my own routes, but will not actually mark the map to make the new roads or railways appear more possible. Being spitted upon the truth I keep myself feeding on many worlds.
I also like obsolescent maps so as to see what the relief colours looked like without the roads which now go in bold red lines over mountain ranges and through forests. I compare sheet with sheet, and see that where the dotted lines of primitive trails were, is now a motor-road or a single-track railway line. I imagine myself an engineer in charge of a new road, initiating surveys, sweating in a tent at dusk while glancing through the plans and elevations of another stage. I would draw them perhaps with the same attention to detail as my lace-designer Uncle Frederick put into his intricate patterns before they were set up on the Nottingham machines.
It is as if maps existed before roads and railways, Were showered from space so that men would be able to set out for contiguous lands and get in touch with neighbouring tribes. The technological perfection of human maps has something magical about it. Whether the land is wild or tamed does not matter, but the links for cultural mixing and the construction of new towns make me feel safer on the earth, for it is a defence against nature and a means of sustaining civilization.
But I also know that maps can be used as despicable instruments of oppression, for hunting and rounding up, for war and plunder. The civilization they helped to create often counts its success by the number of its prisons, and it is difficult to imagine a new road being made without such buildings close behind.
This conditional love of the earth’s topography and its meticulous representation on paper leads me to wonder about the inner configuration of myself, a curiosity which falters because I know there is no fixed shape and texture of the inner man, no settled tectonic picture of the soul, no solid-and-drift in the layers of my skin.
Yet this acute comparison with the landscape of the world is because the earth alone created the people who live on it, made man and all things out of soil and sea water, moulded him by air and fire and liquid matter, moved him by fear and hunger and violence. He is and will always be at the mercy of what formed him, a multiplicity of components which, as far as searching among them for the truth is concerned, are beyond analysis.
And if emotional uncertainties are the only truths that the soul can possibly consist of, it will be a feverish and disordered map I shall finish with, that of a swamp as dangerous and untenable as where I began, perhaps even worse, for one is more likely to sink into spiritual extinction at the end of a search than at the time of setting out.
It often happens that, just before going away, I start to write a story, or even a novel. The stimulus of planning and the upset of preparation turns the senses in a creative direction, and I am prompted to tell something, though I rarely know what the end of it will be because I have to leave off and begin travelling.
The trip itself may be for no good reason except the muscle-flexing pleasure of moving on, but it cannot be denied when the veins are all set for it. It is no use protesting that whatever I wanted to say can wait till I come back, because it will never be the same again. The blood will be in a different spiritual zone, the maps around the feet redrawn, the heart and the eyes in another country.
The journey I am now a little beyond the middle point of is not the sort that takes me overland, but into the guts and around the darkness of the tripes. Myself, the earth, and time are indivisible during this peregrination, but the older I get the more it is necessary to scrape into the soil of time, even if it means digging the ground from under my feet so that I drop into the hole I have made.
The hole is in France. It is ten feet across and five feet deep. Edgar lies in it, rotting with terror though still sound in every limb, encompassed by the squalid rammel of the battlefield. Three corpses are on the anal lip of the crater, their khaki uniforms stained red and purple. Before falling into it Edgar saw them lying asleep in clumps and rows. Others were still screaming in horrible dreams: the sky was reality but they could not reach it.
Another man is wounded by a shrapnel bullet entering his stomach. He tries to spit out his shoulder-blades but they won’t come loose, so he falls. Edgar has ammunition, but no rifle. The overcast sky
is a vast and awful noise of bursting shells. The soil-and-chemical smell of explosions is as piercing as the sounds they make. It attacks another part of the senses. A massacre is taking place. Sixty thousand soldiers are being shot or blown to pieces for no reason at all, and Edgar wonders how as a human being he ever got into it.
36
The British Army has done for him—by hoping to move the battalion to which he belonged across a few inches of the 1:10,000 trench map—FONQUEVILLERS, SECOND EDITION, 57D N.E. SHEETS 1 & 2 (parts of) 1916.
His own officers, I heard him tell my father with a sort of crazed respect at their utter callousness, had lifted their revolvers to make sure the men went over the top. He remembered the voice petulantly barking as if they were cattle: ‘Get on! Get on, then! Get on! Come on, you, get on. Get on, then. Get on!’
During their move to the battlefront, Edgar had been singled out by his battalion commander for a special talk because he had been a deserter. He was told that if there was any shirking of duty now that he was on active service he would be court-martialled for it and shot. To ram home the threat he was a read a list of half a dozen names belonging to men who had so perished on that sector in the last month.
Two hundred and fifty of these heroes of common sense were murdered by their own firing-squads during the war, and many more were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment. The English war machine had spent nearly the whole of the nineteenth century limbering up for the super-butchery of the Great War. They tasted blood when Napoleon began his rampages, and had a go later in the Crimea, where thousands died. But the scores of minor colonial campaigns since then did not satisfy them, and they envied the Americans the slaughterous encounters of their Civil War. The great Henderson, who wrote so lovingly on Stonewall Jackson, theorized no end about it and regretted that the noble slave-owning south had lost. Observers were sent to the Russo-Japanese War, which was studied in every detail, so that the Army Office in London could produce the most intricate maps and monographs. But not until 1914 did the military caste hone up their ineptness, and sniff the possibility of real homebrewed slaughter—or as near to home as they thought it reasonable to get.
37
In the diversionary attack at Gommecourt the 5th and 7th battalions of the Sherwood Foresters came out of their trenches, which were a foot deep in mud, and went towards the German lines.
During the week prior to the attack both battalions, like the rest of the 46th Division, had been continuously soaked to the skin, set in pouring rain at the hardest physical labour on trenches and earthworks. None of them had a night’s sleep during this time, so that when they walked to their deaths on the morning in question they were like men only half alive. ‘I just went with the others,’ Edgar said to my father, ‘when the officer pointed his gun and shouted. None of us knew what we were doing. Or what to expect. We were all done in.’
If August 8th, 1918, was, as Ludendorff said, the blackest day in the annals of the German Army (and there is no reason to disbelieve him, though it was even blacker in 1945), it is equally true that July 1st, 1916, when Haig commenced his attack on the Somme, was a similarly dark day in the history of the British nation. Within ten minutes of the attack starting 60,000 men had fallen to the fire of a hundred German machine-gunners, and to their artillery. This is nearly as many casualties suffered by all sides during the whole day of the Battle of Waterloo.
‘Still,’ Edgar went on, ‘we hadn’t far to go. Not much more than a quarter of a mile between us and the Jerries. About from the White Horse to the Boulevard pub. We might as well have been trying to get at the moon.’
Laden with 70 pounds of equipment they clambered over the parapets and walked across no-man’s-land in parade-ground formation, a fact which all official and many unofficial histories mention with pride. The Germans who watched them advance under a cloudless sky and shot whole lines of them down spoke highly of their courage. A seven-day bombardment before the attack had merely driven the Germans into their underground dugouts, some or which were forty feet deep and supplied with electric light, so that when on July 1st the bombardment stopped as a clear signal that the attack was about to begin, their machine-gunners rushed up to what remained of the parapets to meet the ‘flower of British manhood’.
At half past seven in the morning it came across no-man’s-land at a slow walk, having been led to believe that the guns had by this time smashed every living and resisting thing in their path, and that they more or less had only to stroll forward and ‘take over’ the German defences. In fact the walls of barbed wire had hardly been breached by millions of shells, which they discovered to their short-lived horror when they bunched up in hundreds at the few gaps open, and fell in heaps under the fire of the German gunners.
Those few who came back crawled across no-man’s-land at dusk, after waiting in shell-holes all day. Edgar wasn’t killed or wounded, and neither did he return to his own side. They would only have sent him on some other stunt, he said, which might really have killed him off, or he would have deserted on active service and got shot for it. With a dogged sort of insanity and courage he stayed in a shell-hole between the opposing trenches, hoping to surrender to the Germans as soon as it was possible.
Tortured by hunger and thirst, but above all fear, he many times wanted to go back to the comfort of his own unit but was afraid that, being unwounded and without his rifle, he would be caught on a charge of desertion. Cries of dying and wounded surrounded him. On the attack across no-man’s-land he had gone through rolls of wire as high as walls, and back through them again without knowing it. Just before dropping into the shell-hole he was aware of a young officer, his arm hanging bloodily loose, running by him and shrieking: ‘Hopeless! Hopeless!’
Edgar had collapsed through total exhaustion, and nobody bothered him because they were too intent on trying to save themselves, though few of them did. He did not know how long he lay in the crater, nor could he remember being picked up by the Germans, but after what seemed years he found himself sitting in one of their trenches, and recalled that they had treated him with every kindness.
When a German aeroplane on a mission of mercy and courtesy flew over the British front on July 4th and dropped a list of wounded and unwounded prisoners that their side had taken, Edgar’s name was on it.
Both battalions of Sherwood Foresters were wiped out in this diversionary attack. No gains were expected, and none were made. Blinds were drawn in every Nottingham street, for the battalions had suffered over 1,200 casualties on this small sector, and another Forester battalion lost 500 men further south. The only small advance was on the extreme right of the twenty-mile front where British troops, attacking in co-operation with the French left, had the assistance of their more efficient artillery.
The British staff considered the day’s battle a success because the New Armies, over which so much care was said to have been taken, had stood up well under fire. In other words, they had died rather than run away, though some officers were to complain afterwards how difficult and at times impossible it had been to get men who had been designated to carry wire into no-man’s-land to form up and become part of an attacking wave.
The assault might have proved more successful if they had been taught to stay alive—as all good soldiers should be—if they had dashed across at night, for example, with no equipment except a shovel and a few grenades, which would have achieved just as much, if not a great deal more. At such a time the British Army should have called on a nation of poachers instead of a nation of cricketers. It was war, not sport, but the casuality lists on this day or perhaps at some other time might have included the following group of names—though it was never sure whether they were killed, wounded, or simply missing:
L/Cpl John Cade
7th Buffs
Pte Robert Hood
11th Sherwood Foresters
Pte Edward Ludd
5th Sherwood Foresters
Sgt William Posters
7th Sherwood For
esters
Cpt George Swing
7th Royal West Kent
Pte Richard Turpin
1st Essex
Cpl Walter Tyler
2nd Essex
Their demise was not reported in The Times, though in their disappearance they were not divided.
38
After the opening of the Somme battle it was plain that the British people were willing to accept the appalling casualties of their soldiers, and that the soldiers themselves would take whatever massacres were foisted on them by the incompetents in control. Such passive attitudes allowed the offensive to continue, and led to the Passchendaele carnage of the following year. No great voice was lifted against this internal ripping to pieces of a country.
The British were all right as long as they did the attacking and were being shot down or blown to pieces. It was as if casualties actually kept up their morale—at least one is led to believe so by those who did not do the fighting. It was the staff officers’ war. They stayed alive, and as such the war belonged to them. Those officers who did die perished willingly in the public school spirit. For the old men in command it was a game of tactics in which live pieces were used, though it soon degenerated into a penny dreadful for those other ranks who in their gloom and despair did not know how to end it except by getting killed themselves.
On the Somme the strongest part of the German line was selected for attack. For this reason the Germans doubted that it would after all be made there, in spite of the preparations. The clues that it might be the spot chosen could be seen as a feint, so the British prided themselves on having achieved strategical surprise, a useless advantage when the defences are impregnable. But the Germans held themselves ready, in case it should after all turn out to be the real thing.