Chapter Thirty-Two
Thirty-two
The Somme had had its fill. Like some grotesque creature from the imagination of HG Wells, it had supped on our bodies and minds and when it was over we thought we had nothing left.
But, of course, we did. We had not run out of men and in my dreams I see them marching from the Bull Ring, an endless column, into the maw of war.
I blame Iso, though it isn’t her fault. She was only painting what she saw.
In the early dusk of late November, I sat with her as she sketched.
She used charcoal, and her small hands in their fingerless gloves moved swiftly to make an impression.
Lines of soldiers, four abreast, man after man after man.
They were marching away from us and their figures became less distinct on paper as they were in real life.
But the column of men seemed infinite, and it did not end at the edge of the page.
It continued to march towards some dreadful place.
We spoke of it, of where they were heading. Up the line. Could there be a less descriptive phrase?
‘The production line,’ I said. Because she’d given me that idea: lines of soldiers, four abreast, man after man.
So many of her paintings had this pattern: row on row of tents, hospital huts, horses.
Even when the subject was something more relaxed she would show the order of the camp in the background, but never the chaos. And never the violence or the blood.
She still refused to paint the beauty of that place, though the sun set over the sea in a palette of orange and red, and the River Canche would be lit with a slick of silver whenever the moon rose full. Perhaps that is why I find the beauty so hard to recall.
I looked again at her drawing, each figure identical, with boots, trousers, jackets and packs.
With tin hats and rifles. They were marching away from us, so we couldn’t see their faces.
And because we couldn’t see their faces, they had no personalities, no emotions.
That morning they had entered the Bull Ring awkward and shy, or full of themselves: too young and, increasingly, too old; willing volunteers and reluctant conscripts alike.
They had been drilled – ordered, disciplined, prepared.
They had been made uniform, and then they’d marched out of the Bull Ring, unidentifiable.
Dispensable. As if they had been manufactured for consumption.
Did I think it so clearly then? It was over, they said, but here was proof that it wasn’t.
Despite the camp in the background, most of Iso’s drawings were unburdened by a before or an after.
They were moments of calm, when those she observed leaned against fences or warmed their hands above a drum fire.
When they sat in the shade and wrote letters, or loitered on the streets of étaples, deciding between a meal and a drink or a girl of joy.
They were moments of pause, when there was little to do and no battle to fight.
It was not how I experienced that place but she made the calm seem possible, and I found her drawings soothing. Even hopeful.
This drawing was not like that and I didn’t care for it, not at all. But it was good, very good. It was one of her best from that place, I think now.
It would have given her pleasure if I’d told her that. It’s very good, I could have said, and she would have shrugged, as if what I thought was neither here nor there. But then she’d blush and prove otherwise.
Instead, I said, ‘We’ll see them when they’re spat out the other end.’ Then I started pointing. ‘That one will live, that one will die, that one will come back to us with half his limbs.’
Did she frown?
‘Simple maths,’ I said.
Or did she just ignore me?
I was becoming unpleasant and even then I regretted it. But her drawing opened my mind to what might come again and I didn’t want to imagine it.
Where the column of men began to move off the page, Iso had painted two spindly trees. They weren’t actually there, but she said they were needed for balance. To me they looked dead, like they’d been burned.
I became angry at Iso for drawing that column of men, not in a moment of calm but on a march towards their fate.
Even as I sat there, wide awake, I could see their wounds as I might in a dream.
As I watched their legs move in unison, and heard the regular rhythm of their footfall, I could hear the chaos of gunfire and explosions and shouting.
I could imagine the landscape of burned and broken trees and men running like rabbits, darting this way then that until they fell.
She swapped the blue stick of pastel for yellow and, with little hesitation, she illuminated the windows of huts and scattered light across the darkening camp.
‘They don’t help, you know.’
She turned to me.
‘A few daubs of light in such a gloomy scene. It’s hardly enough.’
I got up and left, without saying another word. I expected her to call after me. But she didn’t.