The Accidental Soldier Read online

  As to your invitation to the reunion in November, I thank you and decline. I can’t sit up for long periods any more and the train journey to Melbourne would exhaust me. To be honest, I’m almost wholly reliant on my daughter to get about.

  Another thought, and probably you know this already, but old George Lambert – Pa George as he was to us – wrote a few pages for posterity soon after his brother’s death. I believe it was done at the prompting of his second son. I’d be very much surprised if this isn’t still tucked away in someone’s Bible. That at least would be something first-hand and reliable.

  Still, for what it’s worth, I’ll repeat what I was told as a child, and you can see how it tallies. As to the exact year they came out from England I can’t say. By guesswork and a little deduction one would have to say around 1864. Pa George I remember as a bad-tempered old fellow who went quite mad at the end. He had the joinery and employed several men. Sylvia has two of his chairs, collector’s items now. Uncle Sammy I don’t remember, except by hearsay. By all accounts a good sort. He died young, like my Wattie. Fifty something. He’s supposed to have dropped dead at the dinner table in the middle of a conversation about plums. I daresay you know he had the bakery. I believe the building’s still there in High Street, but vacant. I’m told Rushburn is much run down, shrunken away to nothing in fact. As to who begat whom, you’d know more about that than me. Suffice it to say, we’re all descended from old Pa George and Mary-Nan, as Uncle Sammy and Aunt Sarah had only the one child, and I’ll get to him in a minute.

  I was very much intrigued by the photograph you sent. To me it looks like Market Square, or at least some other sports ground in the district. As to the year I’d say 1915. The Allies Fair. There were any amount of patriotic carnivals in those days, but I’d say it was the Allies Fair. That was the big one. I have written on the back my opinion as to who each person might be. The fellows in dungarees are my two uncles and my father, all of whom went to Palestine and came back whole, quite an achievement considering the losses. The two old ladies sitting on chairs under the tree are the Suffolk wives, and a more fearsome pair of old Tartars you never met. Mary-Nan is the stout one, Pa George’s wife, and all that enormous spread was probably her doing. She would bake and bake for days and none of the married daughters was allowed to contribute. A matter of pride or self-importance or whatever you want to call it. The same every Christmas and new year, mountains of food. I can’t say I liked her. She was one of those silent women who breed up a big family to preside over with a glance and a nod and just you watch out if you transgress!

  The other one, Great Aunt Sarah, was a different story. In Rushburn she was somebody. Not because of wealth, though I can tell you the bakery was quite lucrative, but because she had a wit and a presence. Of course standing six foot helped. She towered over most people. For years she all but ran the shire, telling her Sammy or Mary’s George or old Lew Broughton what to do. (I’ve marked Lew – the little rooster in shirt-sleeves and braces.) When Aunt Sarah got sick they put me in the shop, so I got to know her a little. And to give her her due she was fair and quite kind in an offhand way, though if you crossed her she had a tongue like a knife. No one dared stand up to her. They came in so meekly to buy their bread it was like church. She had them all bluffed. But she got sicker and sicker and I’d go days without seeing her. Sometimes I’d hear her vomiting out back. Stomach cancer I suppose it was.

  That left just me and Uncle Harry, your particular interest. I said I would get to him. He was my actual boss, the one who paid me. If anything the photograph flatters him. He wasn’t handsome, too portly and stooped. But you can see his height. He was disconcertingly tall, and awkward to go with it. To this day I think of him as old, though he can’t have been more than forty. One of the aunts, I can’t remember who, said he was burnt in a wash-house fire as a baby. He was in a Bendigo hospital for weeks. You could see the shiny skin on the backs of his hands like modern-day plastic. The left side of his face was a little scarred too, around the temple and ear, but not obvious unless you looked hard at him.

  To work for he was very stiff and formal but otherwise agreeable, although always preoccupied with his mother. I was just fourteen and he was a middle-aged man, so it’s not surprising he didn’t tell me his thoughts. When the old girl died he enlisted and went to France, the only one of our lot not to come back. It was early 1917. I know this because the shop shut and I lost my job. I don’t know if there are any letters, or who in fact he’d have written to. I’m quite sure there wasn’t a sweetheart. Whoever told you that is quite wrong. A grieving girl would have been mentioned and I would have remembered.

  Well, I’m afraid that’s about it for family tattle. You must understand I was very young. The truth is you’re years too late. It’s my father might have been able to help, or his mother, Mary-Nan. They had it all on the tips of their tongues and I must confess I didn’t pay much attention.

  yours faithfully,

  Ruby McWhirter

  PROJECT NOTES, August 5, 1968

  First refusal. Should I send a formal invitation to be safe?

  Refreshing to hear from someone who says she knows nothing but puts all the blather in perspective. Uncle Harry becomes just a country baker who didn’t come back. No mystery, no heroics, a fair slice of sadness. I love it when the hallowed oldies don’t toe the line.

  Mum confesses to having been afraid of her, though Aunt Ruby can’t be more than fifteen or twenty years her senior. Must check. Essentially a personality gulf, rather than generational. To Mum’s mind R is one of the Rushburn Lamberts, close in spirit to the Pioneers, or closer than we suburban softies. R knew old Harry personally. Fine credentials. She shares in the glow of the ‘good old days’ when the Lamberts were gregarious and unified and no one was left out in the cold. Poor Mum. She feels the cold. I can hear her saying, ‘Enough of your psychologising! Is it so abnormal to want to bring the family together?’

  R’s lack of enthusiasm would baffle her. Never heard anyone else describe Uncle Harry as ‘portly and stooped’. As a child I didn’t have a mental picture. Rather he was a name in a special book kept in the Shrine of Remembrance. Mum first took me there after Dad left, around the time she chucked in Keely and went back to her maiden name. I suppose she was reclaiming her first identity, her heritage.

  A soldier wore white gloves to open the glass case and turn the pages of the book. Here were all the men who had served, their identities recorded in a script that looked like handwritten copperplate but wasn’t. Now I see the deliberate parallel with the Book of Life. Not then. There was a double page of Lamberts, nearly all relations. Mum singled out Harold George. ‘Your Uncle Harry,’ she said. ‘The one we lost.’

  I’m told that for thirty years all the far-flung Lamberts, known and increasingly unknown to one another, did the same. I see them climbing the high granite steps to pay homage to a dead baker. Not Aunt Ruby, however. She gives him no special significance.

  And she’s adamant there was no sweetheart! Mum will be disappointed. I should have asked about the French Wife, another favourite motif. Cousin Terry says it’s a concoction. If his dad was still alive all this would be easier. Probably I am wrong – unscholarly – to wish for one authoritative individual. Too many scruples.

  Things to do:

  1. Obtain service records.

  2. Pro-forma letter. Include diagram showing bare, missing and disputed branches. All information welcome. General inquiry about the French Wife. Did she exist? Was there correspondence?

  3. Individual letter to old Dickie.

  4. Ring Terry.

  5. Collate and label photos, clippings, etc.

  6. State Library for Rushburn and Burrakee Express. Microfiche? Originals? Have they a means of reproduction or must I copy out everything longhand?

  7. Sting the uncles for financial assistance. It’s their party and they can pay for it.

&nbs
p; 8. Venue.

  9. Catering.

  10. Printed invitations.

  11. Commemorative booklet. ‘The One We Lost’. Do they want it? Yes or no?

  five

  For Harry there is an inevitable low time. He decides he’s been guilty of mad escapism. He thinks, Mademoiselle Elise is just a fat old woman. It is like dipping his head in ice-water, a rough corrective. The woman was coarse-looking. She had yellow teeth. She was abrupt and annoyed to have been disturbed. Why should she care that in far-away Australia Harry Lambert grew up in the shade of her father’s rose? She doesn’t know him from Adam. She has no wish to know him. He thinks: You’re unbalanced, Harry! Crazy! Why this stupid hankering? Can’t you see there’s nothing beautiful in this place?

  His insistence on beauty frightens him. Such excitability comes in spates and must be fought. He looks about at other men and understands that, of necessity, they are bereft of far-reaching thoughts, their subtle feelings denied. They have reduced themselves to a cooperative force of muscle, because the enemy must be broken. Along with his fellows he accepts that a nation must defend both its borders and its interests, but he remains terrified of what this entails on the battlefield. He is not a nation. What or who he might be is a debilitating mystery. He’s ashamed of his run-away mind, of how it bucks against the utilitarian bleakness of Base Depot. It flees the present, always bolting back to the comfort and love of his parents’ house. How easily he is knocked flat by trifles, a card, a dried rose in the mail evoking a surge of longing for the love that does not exist in this foreign place. Such eruptions are weakness. They’re unmanly. To survive he must shut himself down to a more primitive level. He has done it before.

  He falls back on bread: three hundred loaves a shift from his team of four. He works in a lather of desperation, a fanatic. Before dawn he heaves fifty-pound bags from the flour shed and stacks them seven and eight high on the rail carts. ‘Push, you buggers!’ Corporal Maitland cries, and they bend their backs. Their boots slip in the snow and mud but the iron wheels creak into motion. They unload at the mixing room, then the teams disperse to their respective bakehouses. Harry greets his oven with a slap on the firebox. He is possessive and professionally vain, thinking that only he can get the best from this antiquated contraption. He lugs timber and feeds the fire while the others stand idle, waiting for the dough to come from the kneading machine. It’s Harry who drives the rivalry between the teams. Daily production is recorded for all to see on a board outside the captain’s quarters. Bakehouse eleven is a consistent leader. In the diminished world of Field Bakeries South this is a cause for pride and a substitute for individual assertion. Most of all, Harry is grateful to be able to fall exhausted and thoughtless onto his bed at 9:00 p.m.

  Not everyone is grateful for bread. ‘Simple Simon was a pieman,’ says Herb Grinter, mocking their collective lot. He’s a querulous sort, a bad card-player, slow to pay his debts. He gripes because they don’t wear the khaki, but a simple baker’s workshirt, little different to those Harry wore at home. For Herb it’s an affront to his manhood. ‘I didn’t sign up to be a navvy,’ he says.

  False airs in Harry’s view. In the service corps they’re all navvies, men of lesser quality in the military estimation. Almost daily Herb declares his intention of swinging a transfer to a fighting unit. Nothing ever comes of it.

  To such hypocrisy, Harry prefers Bunter’s honest funk. When anyone complains about the weather Bunter says, ‘Don’t go wishing for blue skies. That’s when Fritz has a go.’

  He’s not the only one who believes in a coming German attack. The newspapers predict it too. Throughout January and February the rumours and pronouncements accumulate, all ending in ‘spring offensive’. There is a regular chorus of doomsayers. It will be hell on earth, they say, more bloody than anything that has gone before.

  On principle Harry keeps aloof from this talk. He pulls back into his utilitarian shell. He looks no further afield than bread – three hundred loaves a shift, six days a week. He eats, he works, he sleeps.

  It is impossible, however, to hold back spring. One morning he discovers that he’s vaguely elated, and for no better reason than it has stopped raining. The sky, made ominous by Bunter’s predictions, is blue, and not the steely blue you see after a frost – a soft spring blue! Beyond the bakehouse the sun transforms the drabness of the place, and as it slants in under the roof he feels almost a holiday laxness. Not that it’s possible to slacken pace. The dough comes inexorably from the kneading machines and if they dawdle it banks up. Even so, the sunshine effects a quickening in their veins. It chips away at their regime, melting the illusion of permanence. In winter you could be forgiven for thinking the whole sprawling concern had been there since the world began: the hospitals, the kitchens, the stables, the huts, the training grounds, the sodden fields of mouldy marquees. Admittedly, the bakehouses are rough structures, open on all sides. But everything within, from the scarred benches to the fire-blackened shovels, gives the misleading impression of having seen generations of use. Then along comes a sunny day and it’s all an aberration, their incessant industry, the distant killing, their quiet dread.

  He chooses to ignore Bunter’s predicted spring offensive. He contemplates a second excursion to the Cordier property, to see the roses in leaf. What harm is there in that? He applies for leave.

  But in late March, a day after he receives his pass, a bakery team returns from the Australian field hospital with grim rumours. They report that the doctors have been told to throw out the mild cases to make room for new casualties. Why? Because the Germans have broken through! Where? Near Amiens, not one hundred miles away. The British are running like rabbits!

  There are plenty of sceptics. British soldiers don’t run. The idea is invidious, a slur. Harry is in the opposite camp. For him catastrophe is entirely possible, since armies are composed, in part, of men as unreliable as himself. Not that he reveals his misgivings. He keeps his cards close, unlike Bunter who goes about with a look of proud vindication and terror. By late afternoon there’s no controversy at all, just overwhelming evidence of trouble, if not of a full-blown emergency. Their sergeant informs them that all leave has been cancelled. They see a company of provosts depart for Amiens, apparently to restore order to the roads between the outlying villages, where, it’s said, troops brought up to plug the breach are impeded by an opposing stream of refugees. A great body of black labourers sets off at a march for Rouen, while in the transport compound there’s a frenzy of salvage work – men stalking over the acres of wrecked vehicles, searching for redeemable parts, others knocking and tugging at battered lorries.

  ‘Didn’t I tell you?’ Bunter moans.

  Yet after the initial shock there is a week or more of excruciatingly normal routine. There is still flour and wood to be shifted, dough to be kneaded, bread to be baked. During smoko they watch the Rouen road. The wounded come in lorries and horse-transport, in any sort of vehicle that will do the job. In all the Allied hospitals the wards are choked with mutilated troops.

  Everyone insulates himself from this in his own way. Harry notices a strange inwardness in the faces of his fellow bakers. Even Bunter grows quiet. For Harry there is the usual expedient of blind toil and exhaustion, but also, at the end of the week, the promise of a hot bath. This is not a simple wash, the sort of quick splash of cold water he engages in every evening. It is a cherished indulgence, a once-weekly opportunity to soak away the ash and smoke and flour dust from the sweaty creases of his skin. He anticipates the pleasure of it all the preceding afternoon. That there is a crush of broken and dying men just a few hundred yards away is sometimes disturbing, but mostly he is able to shut them out. His body pleads for comfort. He makes a nest of his private needs. He burrows deeply. He doesn’t know whether this is obscene or crazy or a special gift.

  The ablution shed is a cavernous building, with rows of oak tubs that give it the look of a brewery. It rever
berates with the shouting and horseplay of bathers. Steam curls up to the high ceiling and condenses, falling back down in big cold drips. Harry strips and some clown flicks at his buttocks. To his surprise he has lost all shyness in standing naked with other men. Nor does he object to immersing himself in their spent bathwater. He sweeps his hands through the warmth of a vacated tub. He climbs up and in. The former occupant grins and assures him he’s pissed in it. ‘Better than bath salts, mate! Good for the complexion.’ Harry doesn’t believe him.

  An orderly warns him to push to the far side and adds another scalding bucketful. The sudden heat swirls against Harry’s knees and thighs and stings his tender parts. He doesn’t flinch but welcomes the sensation. He’s determined to keep this moment, however corrupted and public, above the tedium and anxiety of the week – a sort of Sabbath of the body. It’s here that he rediscovers his abundant flesh, pink and soft and steaming with heat. He raises a sparse lather and scrubs himself with a bristle brush. He washes and rinses his hair then sloshes about beneath a dirty scum, wallowing and savouring the weight of water. Too soon, far too soon, an orderly blows a whistle. ‘Out,’ he says, jerking his thumb for emphasis. The men delay, beginning to move only when he threatens to turn the hosepipes on them. Reluctantly, Harry throws a leg over the rim of the tub. He sees Sergeant Ticker picking his way fully dressed through the puddles. He patters his feet in the suds that gather on the concrete. He rasps his body with a towel that has been so many times boiled and bleached it has the feel of rawhide. Then suddenly Ticker is under his nose.