Page 72

Chapter 72

September 2011

The ma?tre d’ of the small hotel where she is staying has provided Georgia with a map, and circled her destinations in incongruous purple pencil.

She walks along the pavement, following the route he has suggested.

At the edge of the village, past the last of the houses, she sees the tree-green sign.

Commonwealth War Graves Commission.

She opens the low gate and steps into the cemetery.

It’s a warm day. Above her are swifts, swooping across the blue sky.

They do not scream. The grass is closely mown.

This is a place that’s looked after with pride, she thinks.

She sits on a bench near the side wall for almost half an hour, feeling no pressing need to wander among the graves, no urge to read the names so carefully carved on the headstones.

It’s enough to simply be present.

Eventually, she gets to her feet and begins to walk along the rows.

A lesson in regimental history, and in lives cut short, unfolds with each step.

Every so often she comes upon a stone without a name.

And another, and another, and another.

She makes her way along every row, finding more and more nameless white slabs.

‘Is this you, Finlay?’ she says to each one.

‘Is this you?’

She tries to imagine Ursula and John being here in 1921, with Annie by their side.

She would have been twenty-three years old.

Would she have been remembering the boys she teased in the school playground, as she stood among the graves?

Or the lads who surrounded her at the roller-skating rink on Saturday afternoons?

Perhaps she had a boyfriend or a lover who was called up but never returned.

Other than Finlay, Annie had never spoken to her about the missing.

Not a word.

In her online research, Georgia has seen a photograph of the cemetery from 1921, and knows that it would then have been filled with temporary wooden crosses with scratched-on details, not the carefully placed slabs of Portland stone professionally engraved with a cross or the occasional six-pointed star which are there now.

She is quite sure that Ursula and John would have looked at every grave hunting for Finlay’s name; but they hadn’t found him.

All they had was the letter from his commanding officer, saying that he had led his men courageously.

They would never have been asked about the personal words the stonemason might have carved at the foot of his headstone at a cost of threepence ha’penny per letter, because in the chaos, the Army didn’t know where Finlay was.

Did they guess? Did John choose a grave at random and decide that it was the one where his son lay?

She goes back to sit on the bench again and thinks about the scullery door, always left unlocked, just in case.

It’s almost noon when she stands to leave.

The sun is overhead and there are few shadows.

She has done her research and knows that when farmers or builders uncover the remains of a soldier, the Commission tries to find relatives.

They look at dog tags and cap badges and regimental buttons and engraved hip flasks, and anything else that might help, but there is no guarantee of a correct identity because in the theatre of war, when men were killed by the thousand all around the battlefield, their uniforms were sometimes reused; taken off the corpses and put on by others who needed warmth or just something less worn out than what they were standing up in.

She knows that occasionally there is a definite identification and sometimes it is discovered that the person already has a named grave, with a headstone placed there in error, bearing the name of another man.

When this happens the Commission does not exhume the incorrectly identified soldier and try to establish who he might be.

The original grave remains respectfully undisturbed, and a new headstone is carved and placed there instead.

Known Unto God.

She cannot take a photograph because her camera is on her phone, and it lies smashed to bits in Edinburgh, but she doesn’t feel the need anyway.

She opens her daysack and removes an envelope from the inside pocket.

Her grandmother’s neat handwriting is easy to read in the bright sunlight.

Georgia holds the still-sealed letter close to her heart.

‘This is your secret, Beatrice, not mine, so I’m not going to read what you have written.

I’ll put it back in the box with the other things when I get home, just as it is.

’ She puts it back into her bag and looks again at the long rows of white headstones.

‘I don’t think you are here, Grandpa,’ she whispers.

‘I think you would have spoken to me, if you were.’

*

On the way back into the village the cars swoop past, taking their owners home for lunch.

They kick up little stones that sting her legs; her sandals are covered in road dust. She walks right through the centre of the village, ignoring the bistro offering two courses and a glass of wine for a dozen euros, and past the sweet, sticky temptations of the boulangerie.

She looks at the map and heads for her second destination.

At the gate there is a different sign.

Cimitière Militaire Allemand

Instead of the rows of pure white stones, there are lines of simple black crosses stretching out in front of her.

There is no central monument pointing up into the sky.

It feels different, she thinks.

There is so much space here.

She walks among the crosses, and is aware of a quite different arrangement from the straight paths she had seen an hour earlier.

Each cross has two names, and two sets of dates on its horizontal limbs.

And on the reverse, there are two more names.

‘Four graves for one cross,’ she says softly.

‘And no unknown soldiers. Or not here, anyway.’

Georgia walks slowly, reading the names, and recognising their youth as she goes.

Near the boundary wall ahead of her is a slab of carved stone, set into the ground.

IN EINEM GEMEINSAMEN GRABE RUHEN HIER

Below is the word SOLDATEN, and some numbers.

She dredges up the German she learned at university in her twenties and nods to herself.

IN A SHARED GRAVE HERE LIE .

.?.

This is the explanation.

The unidentified soldiers are buried together beside a low wall at the edge of the cemetery.

She looks back towards the gate, and at the trees which make dappled shade in places.

‘So different, and yet the same,’ she whispers.

‘I know you are not here either, Grandpa. But I don’t think you would mind if you were in this place, beside these men. ’