Chapter 29 Thiepval Gate
Much like the battlefield itself, the memorial to the Somme was located in a seemingly random part of Northern France.
The rain had continued from the night before and was now pelting down, providing an authenticity of mud to the event.
It was the only element that felt genuine.
The rest of the celebration, from the festooned grandstand to the men and women milling in their Sunday best, were at odds with how Charlie remembered the Somme.
Huddling under an edge of the grandstand, Charlie fought the urge to light a cigarette. He hadn’t slept after the fiasco at Ned’s hotel, and the guilt and confusion hadn’t faded either. What was it about this place that brought out the worst of his nature?
Ned’s arrival was impossible to miss, even in this swarm of people, he stood head and shoulders above the rest. If Ned was disturbed from the night before at the hotel, there was no sign of it on his face, impassive and polite as he gestured towards the memorial.
Ned was in command, of himself, of this conversation, of this whole bloody event.
Distantly, Charlie heard a call for attendees to take their seats. With a muttered curse, he stepped out to take his seat.
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The Somme. Hell on earth for three years.
Where the hopes and futures of entire communities were erased in the span of an hour.
Where tens of thousands were lost without a grave, bodies so destroyed that they became indistinguishable from the mud that they had died in.
Where Charlie had begun to lose his mind.
Charlie probably should have paid more attention to the ceremony. The Prince of Wales was there. So was the president of France. While most attendees would be able to comment afterward about how moving the speeches were, the details of the various pomp and circumstance, Charlie barely heard a word.
From the moment the ceremony started, the memorial itself had transfixed him.
The unveiling was the whole purpose of the trip, but Charlie hadn’t put much thought into what he was expecting.
If he had, he probably would have thought the memorial would be like Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square—a statue of the general on a pillar, surrounded by lions representing everyone else.
This was nothing like the column.
The memorial was a gigantic gate, towering over the flat fields of the Somme like a mediaeval cathedral. The scale was staggering, as if size alone could pay tribute to the grinding human sacrifice it commemorated.
The gate might have the scale of a natural wonder, but Thiepval was unflinchingly a work of man. Its statement was simple. ‘This is what we are capable of.’ The horror and the glory.
The nuances of its architecture probably meant more to someone properly educated like Ned, but to Charlie the plain red brick evoked the streets and homes of the working-class boys who had fought and died there.
It stood in testimony and in witness to what Charlie—and men like him—had lived through.
He couldn’t deny that his war experience, from seeing a world outside of London to the knowledge he had killed men, cast the shape of him as much as it had broken him.
Without the war, would he still have been as contrary?
As curious about the world outside London?
Would he have seen a man’s rough stubble and wondered what it would feel like to kiss him?
Ned’s words in front of the cathedral haunted him, that their war had not been the war to end all wars.
Charlie waited for his sense of adventure or patriotism or whatever had made him enlist in ’14 to surge up in him. To be ready to fight again, to pull the trigger on command. Instead, all he felt was a wave of nausea.
In the background, the ceremony droned on, but Charlie couldn’t make himself care. The man he was today and Corporal Charles Villiers, London Scottish Regiment, 1st London Territorial, had parted ways.
In the shadow of a memorial dedicated to the worst acts of Charlie’s life, he vowed he would never kill again.
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After the formal speeches, Charlie ventured up to see the memorial in more detail.
Only once inside the gate did the names of the fallen become properly visible.
Endless lettering, stretching towards the sky and down again, covered every pillar.
Each was distinct, and yet so many that they blurred together.
Charlie craved a cigarette. He probably could sneak in one with some of the others from the division before heading back to Arras, though. Resolved, Charlie turned on his heel and walked smack dab into a familiar broad chest.
The programme clutched in Ned’s hand trembled.
A small motion that shoved the disaster of last night out of Charlie’s mind. Accompanying Ned for this particular moment was why Charlie had booked this trip in the first place. To do right by Ned, without Ned needing to ask. No moments of weakness while dancing was going to change that truth.
Gently, Charlie reached for the programme. “Let’s find his name, then?”
Ned nodded.
The rest of the attendees had already gone back down to the reception, which was probably for the best. Charlie wanted to protect Ned from prying eyes, if not from the pain of this place.
Once they had reached the heart of the memorial, standing under the main arches, Charlie spoke. “The names are listed by regiment in alphabetical order, which means that his name should be right around…”
“Here.” Ned’s voice was tight as he looked up midway on one of the pillars.
“Second Lieutenant Francis Arthur Pinsent,” Charlie read out. The second son of Viscount Alexander and Lady Emily Pinsent of Heyworth, the only brother of Lieutenant Edmund Pinsent. The namesake for Charlie’s own beloved son.
How could such a short set of letters, carved with seventy thousand other names, ever reflect the brother and son that had been lost? Was this government acknowledgment better than the metal plaque of a charging knight in a fake Norman church?
“To whom the fortune of war denied the known and honoured burial given to their comrades in death,” Ned quoted the massive inscription on the front of the memorial, which had been recited over and over throughout the day. “Mother will be pleased. A proper marker after almost twenty years.”
They were completely alone now, but Charlie wasn’t going to rush Ned. They would stand there as long as Ned needed.
The rain had petered out and, for the second day in a row, the sun was starting to come out.
The bright sun hitting the damp stone made the world feel fresh and renewed.
Charlie reached out to run his fingers over a few of the inscribed names.
He didn’t bother looking for familiar names. They were all his comrades.
“I can’t put it out of my mind.” Oh God, Ned was going to ask about last night. “Did you take field punishment from Pemberton to protect me?” Ned’s voice was barely above a whisper.
Charlie’s heart stopped. How was this question even worse? He knew, the same way he knew when to dodge a punch, that this conversation wouldn’t lead anywhere good.
Ned—determined, focused, brilliant Ned—continued, “What Pemberton said at the pub, it didn’t make any sense. Until I was sitting alone in the hotel last night and I remembered just how far you would hurt yourself to protect those you care about.”
This was the conversation he and Ned had been avoiding since meeting in the hat shop in 1923. Perhaps this was the tribute that Thiepval Gate demanded, a baring of the souls for this condemned ground.
So Charlie spoke, “Pemberton suspected you of gross indecency. Tried to get me to turn snitch. Sent me to the front to let me dangle when I wouldn’t.”
Ned’s face turned to thunder. “That utter bastard. You shouldn’t have taken punishment. It should have been me.”
“Now here!” Charlie cut Ned off sharply, his words echoing off the giant pillars of stone that surrounded them.
Charlie had made his fair share of mistakes, but Ned could take this noble self-sacrifice attitude and shove it up his arse.
“I had my hand around your cock just as much as you’d your hand on mine.
That you treated me as an equal when we were together in those dugouts meant something to me.
The memory of it means something to me now.
I wasn’t going to cower behind you and let you take all the consequences. ”
“You weren’t the same after those three weeks in Leuze Wood. You drank, you couldn’t sleep, you tried to, you…” Ned couldn’t finish the sentence, shifting to look out towards the fields. “All because you protected me.”
Charlie didn’t know if he wanted to punch Ned or laugh at him.
After all these years, Ned still couldn’t bring himself to utter the words.
Couldn’t say that Charlie had tried to off himself.
“I didn’t slit my wrists because of my memories of being a stretcher bearer, you fool.
I slit them because I couldn’t face being a regular Tommy anymore.
The only meaningful thing I did the whole war were those three weeks of field punishment. ”
Ned’s voice cracked with emotion when he finally spoke. “How could you, Charlie? How could you have left me alone like that? For God’s sake, why couldn’t you have come to me? You abandoned me!”
Oh God. Charlie’s knees nearly buckled at the pain in Ned’s voice.
“I didn’t know how to love in the trenches. You were a golden-boy officer with a future, and I was a washed-up soldier whose only skill was killing people. I was coming apart with what I had done. I only knew I didn’t want to drag you down with me.”