Zonnebeke is a ramshackle village of semirepaired ruins and the site of a cemetery of the Eleventh Essex of the Fifty-third Brigade. The War Graves Commission told me this cemetery has the best chance of being where my brother was laid to rest. Adrian died in the charge of July 31 on Messines Ridge, right in the thick of it. Dhondt dropped me off at the gates and wished me luck. Tactfully, he told me he had business nearby—we must have been fifty miles from the nearest jeweler’s—and left me to my quixotic quest. A consumptive ex-soldier guarded the gates when not tending his sorry vegetable plot. He also worked as a groundsman—self-appointed, one suspects—and waved a donation box at me, for “upkeep.” Parted with a franc, and the fellow asked in tolerable English if I was looking for anyone in particular, as he had committed the entire cemetery to memory. Wrote down my brother’s name, but he did that Gallic mouth droop that indicates, “My problems are mine, and yours are yours, and this one is yours.”
Always felt I would divine which KNOWN UNTO GOD was Adrian’s. A glowing inscription, a nodding magpie, or just a musical certainty would lead me to the right plot. Utter tripe, of course. The headstones were uncountable, uniform, and arrayed as if on parade. Coils of brambles invaded the perimeter. The air was stuffy as if the sky were sealing us in. Along the aisles and rows I searched the F’s. Long odds, but one never knows. The War Office makes mistakes—if war’s first victim is truth, its second is clerical efficiency. In the event, no Frobisher was resting in that plot of Flanders. The closest was “Froames, B. W., Private 2389 18th (Eastern Division),” so I laid J.’s white roses on his stone. Who is to say? Maybe Froames asked Adrian for a light one tired evening, or cowered with him as bombs rained down, or shared a Bovril. Am a sentimental fool and I know it.
One encounters buffoons like Orford in your college, who wear an air of deprivation that the war ended before they had a chance to show their mettle. Others, Figgis springs to mind, confess their relief not to have been of service age before 1918 but a certain shame that they feel this relief. I’ve often banged on to you about growing up in my legendary brother’s shadow—every rebuke began with an “Adrian never used to . . .” or “If your brother were here now he’d . . .” Grew to hate the sound of his name. During the runup to my forcible ejection from the Frobishery, it was all “You’re a disgrace to Adrian’s memory!” Never, ever forgive the parents that. Remembered our last send-off one drizzly autumn afternoon at Audley End, Adrian was in uniform, Pater clasping him. Days of bunting and cheering were long over—later heard Military Police were escorting conscripts to Dunkirk to deter mass desertions. All those Adrians jammed like pilchards in cemeteries throughout eastern France, western Belgium, beyond. We cut a pack of cards called historical context—our generation, Sixsmith, cut tens, jacks, and queens. Adrian’s cut threes, fours, and fives. That’s all.
Of course, “That’s all” is never all. Adrian’s letters were hauntingly aural. One can shut one’s eyes but not one’s ears. Crackle of lice in seams; scutter of rats; snap of bones against bullet; stutter of machine guns; thunder of distant explosions, lightning of nearer ones; ping of stones off tin helmets; flies buzzing over no-man’s-land in summer. Later conversations add the scream of horses; cracking of frozen mud; buzz of aircraft; tanks, churning in mud holes; amputees, surfacing from the ether; belch of flamethrowers; squelch of bayonets in necks. European music is passionately savage, broken by long silences.
Do wonder if my brother liked boys as well as girls too, or if my vice is mine alone. Wonder if he died celibate. Think of these troopers, lying together, cowering, alive; cold, dead. Tidied B. W. Froames’s headstone and went back to the gates. Well, my mission was bound to be futile. Groundsman was twiddling with twine, said nothing. Morty Dhondt collected me bang on time, and off we hurtled back toward civilization, ha. Passed through a place called Poelkapelle or some such, down an avenue of elms lasting mile after mile. Dhondt chose this straight to push the Bugatti as fast as she would go. Individual elms blurred into a single tree repeated to infinity, like a spinning top. The needle was nudging top speed when a form like a running madwoman ran out smack in front of us—she hit the windscreen and spun over our heads. Heart popped like a gunshot, I can tell you! Dhondt braked, the road tilted us one way, shrugged us the other, the tires screamed and singed the air with hot rubber. We had run out of infinity. My teeth had bitten deep into my tongue. If the brakes hadn’t locked in such a way that the Bugatti continued its trajectory along the road, we would have finished our day—if not our lives—wrapped around an elm. The car scraped to a halt. Dhondt and I jumped out and ran back—to see a monster pheasant, flapping its broken wings. Dhondt blew out an elaborate oath in Sanskrit or something, and gave a ha! of relief that he hadn’t killed someone that also expressed dismay at having killed something. Had lost the power of speech, and dabbed my bleeding tongue on my handkerchief. Proposed putting the poor bird out of its misery. Dhondt’s answer was a proverb whose idiocy may have been deliberate: “To those upon the menu, the sauce is no concern.” He went back to try to coax the Bugatti back to life. Couldn’t fathom his meaning but walked up to the pheasant, causing it to flap ever more desperately. Its medallion breast feathers were matted with blood and fecal spewings. It cried, Sixsmith, just like a two-day-old baby. Wished I had a gun. On the roadside was a stone as big as my fist. I smashed it down on the pheasant’s head. Unpleasant—not the same as shooting a bird, not at all.
Wiped its blood off the best I could, using dock leaves plucked from the roadside. Dhondt had the car running, I hopped aboard, and we drove as far as the next village. A no-name place, as far as I could see, but it had a miserable café-cum-garage-cum-funeral parlor shared by a gang of silent locals and many flies who wheeled through the air like drugged angels of death. The hard braking had misaligned the Bugatti’s front axle, so M.D. stopped here to have it seen to. We sat alfresco on the edge of a “square,” in reality a pond of cobbly mud with a plinth plonked in its navel whose original inhabitant had long ago been melted down for bullets. Some dirty children chased the only fat hen in the country across the square—it flew up to the plinth. The children began throwing stones at it. Wondered where the bird’s owner might be. I asked the barman who had formerly occupied the plinth. He didn’t know, he was born in the south. My glass was dirty, so I made the barman change it. He took umbrage and was less talkative from then on.
M.D. asked about my hour in the Zonnebeke cemetery. Didn’t really answer. Mangled, bloodied pheasant kept flashing before my eyes. Asked M.D. where he’d spent his war. “Oh, you know, attending to business.” In Bruges? I asked, surprised, hard put to imagine a Belgian diamond merchant prospering under the Kaiser’s occupation. “Good God, no,” answered M.D., “Johannesburg. My wife and I got out for the duration.” I complimented his foresight. Modestly, he explained, “Wars do not combust without warning. They begin as little fires over the horizon. Wars approach. A wise man watches for the smoke, and prepares to vacate the neighborhood, just like Ayrs and Jocasta. My worry is that the next war will be so big, nowhere with a decent restaurant will be left untouched.”
Was he so sure another war was coming?
“Another war is always coming, Robert. They are never properly extinguished. What sparks wars? The will to power, the backbone of human nature. The threat of violence, the fear of violence, or actual violence is the instrument of this dreadful will. You can see the will to power in bedrooms, kitchens, factories, unions, and the borders of states. Listen to this and remember it. The nation-state is merely human nature inflated to monstrous proportions. QED, nations are entities whose laws are written by violence. Thus it ever was, so ever shall it be. War, Robert, is one of humanity’s two eternal companions.”