Louis de Bernières - The Dust That Falls From Dreams

At Westminster we had to learn reams of heroic poetry. It was beaten into us, did you but know it, but there’s a verse I remember, by Lord Macauley, I believe, which goes:

‘To every man upon this earth

Death cometh soon or late:

And how can man die better

Than facing fearful odds,

For the ashes of his fathers,

And the temples of his gods?’

Well, that’s how I feel. Airmen don’t live long, as you probably know. I may be lucky, or I may have the worst of luck and be maimed rather than killed. But if I am killed, I would like you to be fearsomely proud as you show my photograph to your visitors, and say, ‘That was my son, mort pour la France. ’

Ton fils dévoué,

Daniel P.

BOXING DAY OF 1914 began very wet, and Rosie was awakened by the sound of rain on the windowpanes. Her face was cold, but her body was warm from being tucked under the covers. The coal fire, which had been banked up the night before, had burned itself out, and was giving very little heat. It was still dark outside, and she lay in bed thinking about Ashbridge in France. He would almost certainly be outside in the trenches, and she wondered how one could possibly cope with being there in weather like this. Rosie remembered that it was St Stephen’s Day, and that he had been the first Christian martyr. She got dressed in bed.

The house was quiet now that all the male servants had gone. When she went downstairs the Christmas tree seemed lifeless with its candles unlit, and the presents gone from beneath it. She was the first of the family to be up, although she could hear Cookie and Millicent clattering in the kitchen. She sat in the drawing room watching the world become light outside, and felt helpless.

That morning she conscientiously wrote her thank-you letters, and then put on her coat and a sou’wester and went next door to see Mr and Mrs Pendennis. She found the latter very pale and agitated, but doing her best to be collected.

‘My dear,’ said Mrs Pendennis, ‘I shall just have to resign myself, won’t I? I’ve got three boys out there, and it’s not very likely that they’ll all come back, is it? Have you noticed that the parents of the dead boys have become a kind of club?’

‘They do errands for each other,’ said Rosie. ‘It’s nice in a forlorn kind of way, isn’t it?’

‘I’m worried about my husband,’ said Mrs Pendennis. ‘He’s smoking an awful lot, and it’s giving him a cough. He says it helps to clear his lungs, but I really don’t think it helps at all.’

‘We spend our time clutching at straws, don’t we?’ said Rosie.

On the next day, which was the day of St John the Evangelist, there was a terrible gale, and once again Rosie woke up feeling a kind of horror for Ashbridge, in case the weather should be like this wherever he was. Mrs McCosh, sensitive to Rosie’s worries, tried to keep her busy, and despatched her to the post office, so that she came back drenched and windswept. Because Millicent was so busy, Rosie made up the fire in the drawing room herself and knelt in front of it to dry out. It was unbearable to think of Ash being shelled and soaked, with no real shelter and no fire to dry out next to. Rosie stared into the flames as if there were something to be divined there.

She tried to read, but could not concentrate. She wrote a letter to the Poetry Bookshop to ask when the next collection of Georgian poetry was due out, and then settled down with their anthology for 1911–12. She bypassed the rather overblown contributions of Lascelles Abercrombie and Gordon Bottomley, and turned straight to the five contributed by Rupert Brooke. How very strange to read a long poem written in Germany about nostalgia for one place in England. ‘Grantchester’ was a poem that could no longer be written. You could write something very like it in France, though. Rosie wondered how many of the soldiers were writing poems. It wasn’t something that Ash was likely to do.

She read ‘Dust’ four times to herself, and then stood up and read it aloud as she paced about the drawing room. That poem was certainly about her and Ash, should one of them die. She liked the phrase ‘The shattering fury of our fire’. That’s what it was, this desperate passion. She read ‘The Fish’, and noticed how clever was that cascade of couplets, connected by so much deft enjambement. Rosie would have loved to write a poem as accomplished as that. ‘Town and Country’ was irrelevant because it was about the seeping away of love, and that was something in which Rosie did not believe. ‘Dining Room Tea’ seemed a little obscure and strange to her, so she went back and read ‘Dust’ again. Then she turned to page 71 and read Walter de la Mare’s ‘The Listeners’. Really, it was by far the best poem in the book, even better than ‘Dust’. Rosie wished again that she could write poetry of such quality. She knew that somewhere inside her there was poetry waiting to come out. She had an obscure instinct that all she needed to do was read enough poetry with her eyes, and one day it would start coming out of her fingers. She went and fetched a paper knife from her father’s desk, and eagerly began to cut the remaining pages.

In the evening Mrs McCosh, Rosie and Christabel went out to play bridge, and when they were coming back, Mrs McCosh’s umbrella was blown inside out and wrecked.

On the 28th Rosie could not stand the agony of sitting around worrying, so she went to the YMCA hut to see if there was any way in which she could be useful, but there wasn’t. What was she supposed to do with herself? She went round to see Mr and Mrs Pendennis again. Mrs Pendennis asked Rosie about the Pitt brothers who used to live on the other side of the McCoshes, wanting to know if she knew where they were these days. She said, ‘No, but I expect Mama does,’ and on the way home she remembered what a little scallywag Daniel Pitt had been, expert in all those horrible tricks and tortures that little boys love. He’d fired a rotten plum at her with his catapult, and it had splattered all over her dress. Still, she had been very fond of him. She remembered his brother Archie, who was older, and thought how nice it would be to see them again, after all these years. No doubt they were both caught up in the war too.

Rosie drifted through the 29th and 30th in a fog of numbness, but on the 31st it was raining violently again, and once more she was desperate with worry on Ash’s behalf. That evening Mr and Mrs Pendennis came round for dinner, and afterwards they all played bridge until 11.30. As everyone does in wartime, they kept themselves distracted with conviviality. It was raw and painful having to sing the new year in with ‘Auld Lang Syne’. Mr McCosh became emotional and stood up to recite Robert Burns. Then he sang ‘The Flowers of the Forest’ and the Pendennises went home feeling bleak.

The days of the new year dragged by. Rosie kept going down to the YMCA hut, but they never found any use for her. Her mother did the household accounts as usual at this time of year, and became irritable. Rosie went out to tea and people came to tea, she went shopping, she went to see Mrs Pendennis. On 5 January it occurred to her that the one thing she could do was to go and visit the Cottage Hospital, but she found it almost impossible not to get in the way, and felt very awkward with people who did not really want to speak. The sights and particularly the sounds were more dreadful than she could possibly have imagined. She knew that her horror was selfish, because she was never thinking of the victims before her, but only of the possibility that something like this could happen to Ash. Of course, she told herself, she would marry and love him anyway, even if he were blind and missing his legs, and even if he were covered in burns, but what worried her was how Ash himself might take it. Rosie was convinced that he would prefer to die rather than become some of the things that she had seen, whether she were to marry him or not.