“You play it,” he said, after a pause. “It needs playing.” His gaze moved to the old bellows. There was no electricity here yet. “Five minutes. I can still do the bellows.” But he didn’t move. He was biting his lip.
Benedict just watched on, his breath slowing. Looked at Theo, his half-suppressed excitement, his creased uniform, his posture, slightly bent over, the cross of his suspenders; the way they buttoned to the center-back rise of his breeches. The pale cream shirt tight over his shoulder blades, the dark, damp patches under his arms. Finally, his hands, which had been capable of creating such worlds, turning noise into beauty, writhing in his lap. His healthy fingers moved slightly over the strange curvature of the damaged hand.
Benedict ached. He felt as if his heart would burst or shrivel. If he could only touch. He could touch, of course. There were a dozen reasons why he might touch, and just one why he never could.
Theo stood and moved over to the bellows; and as Benedict took his place at the unfamiliar console, he could hear Theo waking the creature sleeping in the roof. The rumblings, the wheeze, the inhalations of air into the bellows and regulators; each big organ had its own unique sound. Its coming to life was always a moment Benedict loved. Even here, illicitly, in Amiens, in wartime. Even where Theo would soon exhaust himself doing the work of two or more men. Benedict wondered, briefly, if Dr. Brewer had ever felt any of these things. Then he thought of the possibility of this monster being slaughtered by men of either side armed with high explosives.
He peered at the stops, just visible in the unsteady light. They were different, of course. In Gloucester he would see
Choir, Great, Swell, Solo
. Here they read
Pédale, Grande Orgue, Positif, Récit.
The arrangement of the stops was different too, and he moved his hands over them, a few inches above the keyboard, as if trying to understand them. He reached down and unlaced his boots, freed his feet to play.
To one side of the organ was a small, newish plate with the name of the restorer:
Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, 1889.
How little the old man, perhaps the greatest organ-maker ever, could have suspected what was to come as month after month he worked on this wondrously ancient organ to create the best possible sound in the last years of his life, in the last century.
He nodded to Theo. Tried an arrangement of chords. Tried to get the feel of the organ, knowing that had Theo been in his seat, he would have experimented with confidence. Would once have done that, would never do it now.
Then, he played. Bach, because Bach was what he knew best. He could hear Theo moving heavily from bellow to bellow and yet, there, immediately, was blue, purest blue, then mauve, like a morning glory they had seen on a wall in the hot summer five years ago. Now he began “By the Waters of Babylon” and created green, falling over blue. He made a few mistakes. Started again. Stopped. He looked back at Theo, who was mopping his brow and counting the bellows.
“Am I stoking up rainbows?”
Benedict shook his head.
Theo was gasping, slightly, but Benedict’s hands were already moving again, and with the opening chords the blue filled him even as the familiar music filled the cathedral below him and his heart beat so fast that he could hardly breathe and for a brief time Theo and the pain of Theo was lost to him, as he focused with utter intensity on the notes. He had no sheet music in front of him, was out of practice and on an unfamiliar organ, yet on this second pass he was nearly note-perfect. His feet moved securely across the unfamiliar French pedal board as though he had known it all his life; keyboards and draw-stops obeyed his hands as if being offered to him. His head and shoulders moved minutely with the music. Theo would soon reach the end of his physical ability to step from bellows to bellows, but for Benedict the purity of the color, the astonishment that, so out of practice, he could still draw all this out of a strange organ, and the longing for his old life, almost consumed him; and the Bach, the music, was his, could only ever be his.
After a few minutes, Theo said “Enough. Enough, I think.” His voice was very quiet, though he was breathing fast from exertion. His expression was unreadable. He stood, leaning against the wall by the bellows. Benedict stayed sitting, absorbing every detail, trying to commit the organ to memory.
Theo walked up to him, put his hands on Benedict’s shoulders. Benedict stared ahead at the console.
“It was quite beautiful,” Theo said. “What a fool I’ve been. Always a fool. There’s something wrong in how I’m put together. Something mad or cruel in there. Perhaps that’s why I’m good at this war thing. This,” he lifted his claw and stroked Benedict’s cheek, “this is what I’m really like all through. And you know it.”
They had only just come down the stairwell when a priest appeared in front of them, rushing across the nave with another man, a civilian in his forties who wore a thick dark coat and was holding a Homburg in front of him like a shield. Both men were clearly in a fury.
Benedict caught only the word
orgue
in their fast and enraged French; but from the gesticulating upward at the organ pipes, then at the braced walls and sandbags, the shaking fingers, and the priest’s sour expression, he grasped quite well what he already knew. That they had trespassed in the organ loft and played the organ without permission.
Theo answered in French; he had traveled in France in past summers as a boy, and his French was far better than Benedict’s. Benedict recognized the name Bach when the priest said it with anger, but the conversation moved too fast for him to keep up. Theo was shaking his head and looking nonplussed.
“Ah,” he said, still facing his interlocutors as if conversing. “The priest believes, he’s not sure, mind you, that we might have been playing enemy music. I assured him that, there being no sheet music at hand up there, you were merely using your musical genius to improvise.”
Then he turned to Benedict, his face benign. “I can’t think of the right word for pompous ass. Help me out here, Benedict. What’s ‘pompous ass’ in French? And surely the priest’s chum is young enough to be in uniform?”
Theo could hardly get a word into the flow of complaint.
“He says that we have violated his great house of God and the noise we made may have alerted the enemy. I’ve just pointed out that the enemy can hardly have missed the fact that there’s a great hulk of a cathedral here. The enemy has very good maps, as we know, and has a reasonable claim to have produced the greatest musicians in history, so they’ll know more about this organ than the cathedral director of music does.”
Now the priest spoke, clearly trying to control his voice. Theo answered gravely and slowly; Benedict understood much more. He caught the name Cavaillé-Coll, and, later, London in England, and whatever Theo was saying seemed to bring down the fever of the argument. At one point he placed his palm on Benedict’s back, as if to introduce him. Both Frenchmen turned and scrutinized Benedict. Eventually the layman, now with an expression verging on respect, put out his hand and shook Benedict’s. Then he shook Theo’s.
“The priest said we might have ruined this venerable old instrument by our sudden violation. That it isn’t being maintained these days. So I explained that you were the chief organist of the famous St. Paul’s Cathedral and I your pupil until I was injured in battle. That you had played for the King before departing for France and that in a break in hostilities we had hurried here to see the wondrous instrument of which so many great men had spoken.”
Now the older man spoke directly to Benedict.
“He wants to know if you found it as you hoped,” Theo said. The priest added another apparently earnest statement.
“Say something, for God’s sake,” said Theo.
Benedict’s mind was blank. “Say the organ was beautiful, then,” he finally managed to say. “Apologize. Thank you. I mean, thank him.”
Theo spoke and then translated. “I’ve told him that you will return to the battlefield strengthened in fortitude and vigor to assist in the liberation of the great heritage of France. The priest is going to pray for us, although he very much regrets that we are not Roman Catholics.”
The four men stood awkwardly and then, with a slight bowing of heads, the two Frenchmen walked away.
They moved to follow them, with Benedict saying “Why on earth did you—?” when another figure rose from his seat in the side chapel. As he eased himself between the pews and moved in and out of a shaft of light, Benedict could see that it was a French officer who had obviously been listening to the exchanges.
The officer put out a hand.
“Vignon,” the Frenchman said. “Captain Vignon, military surgeon. How do you do?”
Now the officer held Benedict’s hand with both of his, almost as if pleading.
“Thank you,” the Frenchman said in English. He cleared his throat and then again, “Thank you,” still holding Benedict’s hand.
“An Wasserflüssen… .”
For a split second Benedict’s mind struggled to grasp why he was being spoken to in German, and then he realized that it was simply the name of the piece he had been playing: “By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept.”
The officer released Benedict’s hand to shake Theo’s, spoke briefly in French, then fell silent; but his gaze strayed back to Benedict.
“He’s a surgeon,” Theo said. “He works on one of the hospital barges out there. They are moving today, making space for more barges with expected casualties. He says he first heard the piece as a boy, when he sang in a cathedral choir, and finds it very moving.”
Benedict wished either his French or the doctor’s English were better.
The man spoke again.
“He has to return to his duties,” Theo said, and then, with very un-Theolike seriousness, he added, “He says, whatever lies ahead, he will treasure the single moment of comfort—I think that’s what he said—and perfection, of hearing that music. Of light in the darkness. Of
you
playing the organ, Benedict.”
The Frenchman gave a half-salute, put on his cap as he stood in the doorway, and walked away.
“Me too,” Theo said. “I felt it too. Here we all are in a strange land, all weeping by the bloody river.”
Harry, Amiens,
June 1916
I
T HAD BEEN THAT RARE
thing, a happy day, Harry thought at the end of it. He had gotten up early and packed his things, knowing that tomorrow a new man would have his job behind the lines. Tomorrow he would move forward to rejoin his regiment and take over a company that was already at the front. A driver had dropped him in Amiens before midday, and he had only to deliver some papers and pick up a book for his colonel before the Eton dinner at 7
p.m.
He had loitered, knowing what lay ahead in the next few days. The empty hours seemed a great luxury, for now he could walk and sketch and breathe fresh air.
The happiness was more precious because he knew it was finite. The evening before, he had gone to the last big meeting at H.Q. The attack was set. They had pored over the maps: confident lines curving, sweeping around rising ground or following rivers. If you looked at it one way, it seemed a triumph of surveying and of control; another way, and it looked like the scrawlings of a maniac. He had realized early on that he needed glasses: was he getting old? But he focused on the portion of map nearest to him, the northern sector—there was the French landscape and there were the ancient and evocative names: Foncquevillers, Le Breyelle, Beauregard, Sailly-au-Bois, Chateau de la Haie; and there the superimposed new British geography, so homely and so deadly: four small copses: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John; Watling Street, Rose Cottage, Waterloo Bridge, Blackfriars Bridge. Running north to south down all the maps, the serpentine broken blue line, which meandered like a river but which marked the British front-line trench. “The Styx,” he’d once said, early on, and was met with looks of determined incomprehension. Each inch of blue a temporary home, a last home perhaps, to hundreds of men. Behind them were other trenches, thousands more men; three waves; hundreds of thousands of soldiers waiting to turn the plan they were so busy refining on paper into flesh and bullets.
The Somme in Amiens ran in a businesslike way between wharves, warehouses, and quays, lined by a long row of barges. No doubt there had always been barges, Harry thought, but these all had red crosses on their roofs. A few French nurses and orderlies had been chatting by the moorings, and women came and went with armfuls of crumpled linen. Since last winter, the rumor was that the French losses at Verdun were running at seventy thousand casualties a month, and the fighting went on and on.
He had sat down on a bollard and started to draw: quick pencil lines. The barges, the swooping gulls, and the fluttering headscarves: he had wanted to catch a moment of movement, when things were alive. Two British officers rose from a café table and crossed the river, near his stakeout, nodded to him. Then a nurse had helped an injured French soldier down the short plank onto the shore. He was young, wan, and unsteady on his legs. But then he had looked up at the sky and across to the cathedral, and in a few minutes he let go of the nurse as if with every breath of river air he was drawing in strength. Harry had begun drawing the pair of them but then became conscious of the soldier’s gaze and, not wanting to be intrusive, he laid his pad down on his knee. The soldier started crossing the short distance between them, and just when Harry had thought there might be some sort of altercation coming, the young Frenchman had reached into a pocket. What he had brought out was a folded and slightly grubby piece of paper. Harry looked down, puzzled; the writing was quite neat:
Colonel Marzine, Hôpital Militaire d’Amiens.
The young man gabbled something, but too fast and in too strong an accent for Harry to pick up.
“
Lentement,
slowly,” he said.
The soldier had pointed at himself and then the barge.
“Péniche,”
he said, pointing. Harry did not know the word.
Then the soldier had mimed an injury to his side and said something about Germans; as the nurse hovered, he had slowed down and, curbing an evident urgency, asked Harry to pass on his message. He regretted that he was himself too weak to reach the colonel; but it was a most important letter.
Harry had considered whether the man was serious—he was still wondering much later in the day; so many soldiers were sent at least partly mad by fighting and injury—but the young man had steady gray eyes, and his agitation appeared to reflect intensity, not insanity.
Eventually Harry had put the message in his pocket just as the nurse reached forward trying to intercept it, and then, failing, turned to argue with her charge, hands on hips. The boy wasn’t listening to her but gazing, his face almost like stone, at a spot beyond her, and for a moment Harry had doubted his wisdom in becoming involved. How would he pass the message on?
Before letting himself be swept up by the evening and the bravado, or arrogance, of a school reunion at the heart of war, he had continued his walk, taking a steep cobbled street up toward the basilica, past a small hotel and some fine medieval and eighteenth-century clergy houses, coming out into the Place de Notre Dame. He was staring up at the fine spire of the cathedral, which seemed to tip toward him out of the fast-moving sky, when a British Army messenger swept around the building on a bicycle and looked as surprised as he was by the near-collision. The corporal gave him something between a salute and a wave of apology. Harry put out a hand to stop him.
“Sorry, sir.” The soldier had dismounted and was having trouble holding his bicycle and saluting at the same time. “I didn’t see you exactly, sir.”
“No matter. I need you to deliver a message for me. Is that possible?”
“Yes, sir. I’m all finished here, sir.”
“Please take this to the French military hospital. It’s on the east road, I believe. Hand this message to an officer.”
The man nodded, putting the message into his bag. He had an intelligent face.
“Only to a French officer. You understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And your name?” he said, as the cyclist mounted again.
“Stanton, sir. Corporal Stanton, Hunts Cyclists.”
Two nuns walked away from the cathedral, their high coifs bobbing. A French officer had come up the steps behind him and was lighting a cigarette. Harry held back for a few minutes. He had taken out his pad and sketched a quick impression of the scene, not of the cathedral, which he could no doubt find in photographs, but of the square and the people in it. Recalling the fate of Ypres, he had simply wanted to capture it, right now, on this midsummer day.
It was only once the Frenchman had gone ahead into the building that Harry walked up the steps to the great door and stood there, looking outward. It had rained on and off for days, delaying the long-laid plans for the attack right along the line. But now that they had a time and a date, he felt an odd, strange relief, and the sun was out and the smell of damp stone and grass was wonderful. Long ago, in that school by the Thames, there had been a smell like this in summer. He felt the sun on his face and then, as if he hadn’t been lucky enough to have one sense indulged, there was another tiny miracle.
He had suddenly heard the organ, faltering at first and then being played with more confidence. For the five minutes or so while it continued, he had just stayed put. He had no wish to move from the pale sunlight into the darkness or see religious paintings of death and suffering, but out here there was both joy and sadness in the music.
After a few minutes the organ fell quiet again, and he’d moved on toward the mess, the evening, and whatever appalling jollity lay ahead.
Now, nearly twenty hours after the Old Etonian dinner, Harry still had a lingering pain between his eyes and a stiffness in the back of his neck. The photograph in his hand reminded him of his wife. The woman had fair hair, white skin, and a look of mischief, as if her stillness concealed possibilities. Her thighs were plumper than Marina’s, her nipples darker, as was her pubic hair, and there were holes in her stockings, her only item of clothing apart from a ribbon around her neck.
The photograph was French, found among the effects of an officer who had died of appendicitis in the hospital a few days earlier. The task of writing letters to the families of dead or wounded soldiers was a thankless one, and this was a man he didn’t even know. His nib caught on the rough paper and spat ink on the page as the words came out, stilted and inadequate and kind. Every soldier’s end was courageous or at least dutiful, all their deaths were instant, all the men were much liked by their fellows. It was harder when a man had died while inhaling chloroform so that his appendix could be removed. The man who had secretly owned this photograph and possibly enjoyed the woman, “Marie,” whose signature was on the back with a loving dedication in French, had, according to his brother officers, been an insistently devout Christian who had held back his men’s ration of rum before attacks. He had turned out to have a wife and child in Hove. Harry allowed himself to consider, very briefly, whether one day Marina might get a letter like this and what it might say.
This evening, there was just the one letter of condolence. Harry thought back over the strange, unrelated fragments of his twenty-four hours in Amiens and how much he had to tell Marina for once: of the brief exchange with the young French soldier, the organ playing in the cathedral, and then the ridiculous dinner. There was an almost impressive admirable folly in assembling Old Etonians for dinner just days before they all knew the big push was coming. You didn’t need to have the ear of High Command to know it; on the way to Amiens, the road had been clogged with wagons, guns, trucks, officers on horses, and company after company of soldiers. High above the road, aeroplanes kept watch for German spotters. The staff car that had picked him up in the morning—and he had an image of a Bairnsfather cartoon of this surprisingly shiny car scouring the lines to bring in recalcitrant Etonians—had to stop at times to let pass all the traffic coming the other way. There were a few sour looks and fewer grins from the marching men, as well as a few times when the driver, grumbling, had to pull off into the mud beside the road, to allow a heavy gun or a mobile canteen to pass.
Nearly a hundred and seventy of them had made it. “Floreat Etona,” one brigade major said under his breath as they climbed the stairs and were shown the seating plan. There were subalterns who had undoubtedly been on the famous playing fields last season and some gray-haired generals with straining mess dress, whose memories of their stripling selves must reach back far into the last century. There were a great many regular officers in addition to the men, like himself, who’d taken commissions in the New Army.
Among those present were a handful of chaps he’d known at school and was glad to see, although nobody he’d considered a really close friend. But there was a sense that they were all trying to avoid a roll call of the dead and if this drove them back to hazy school memories—cricket matches and pranks and the eccentric geeks who had taught them Greek or Latin, or rowing on the river or playing the wall game—well, it was just an evening on which the past seemed more compelling than the immediate future. The claret was good, and he wondered what Parisian hotel had been persuaded to surrender some of the treasures of its cellar. He sat next to a talkative RFC man to his left; across the table from a likeable regular, Reginald Bastard, who had fought in the Boer War and was now commanding the 2nd Lincolns.
General Rawlinson, “Old Rawly” the buffers called him, had given a rousing speech: without Eton the officer corps would be much depleted, not just in numbers but in spirit; it was the values of Eton that this war sought to uphold. At this point, Harry had looked around the sweating faces, the pink cheeks, the dazed young newcomers, and noticed, with no great surprise but a degree of amusement, that there were significantly more staff officers here than there were proportionately in the officer corps as a whole. Some excellent port and brandy fueled loud cheers. This encouraged Old Rawly to give an impromptu performance of a song from
Carmen
, but it all seemed to go down well. More cheers, applauding fists hammering on the table. From a small group of very drunken subalterns came the opening bars of “The Eton Boating Song,” but he was glad they were told to pipe down.
They had been returned to base late in the evening. It was still just light. The driver decided to take the side roads, but they were met by an extraordinary sight, something that in the violet semi-darkness might have been a scene from a medieval tapestry: there, avoiding the endless trail of troops and guns on the main road, were the cavalry, their tall lances upright, bobbing up and down as they rode between the fields, a slender new moon above them, and the only sound the horses’ hooves and the jangling of bridles.
Their car went slowly past them: the Dragoons, the Lancers, the Hussars, the Royal Horse, and the Life Guards, even the Indian Cavalry—for a while they were caught in the middle of dark-skinned turbaned troopers from the Deccan Horse, and he thought he identified a small group of mounted Canadians. The sight had moved and disturbed him where all the modern machinery of war he had seen earlier—the great guns, the wagons carrying rolls of barbed wire, the canteens and field ambulances; the parade of metal and men heading inexorably to the front—had failed.