Louis de Bernières - The Dust That Falls From Dreams

‘No, no,’ interjected Rosie. ‘Can you translate it? My French isn’t terribly good.’

‘Oh, I see. Sorry. It says “Leaving his sweet Canadian girl, the fellow makes himself a soldier in the English army in France where the fighting is. When leaving he said softly to himself, ‘Canada, I will love you always, the woods, the rivers and the fields. But I also love the Canadian girl, faithful in the country where she waits for me.”’

‘Oh dear,’ said Rosie, her eyes welling with tears. ‘Poor man. That was Corporal Larvière. He got septicaemia.’ She reached out her hand and took the book, flicking through it to find another passage. She handed it back and he saw ‘ Chantons soldat chantons même si les blessures saignent …’ He translated: ‘“Let’s sing soldier let’s sing even if our wounds bleed and if our voices have to rise higher than the highest torment louder than the cannons even if the wounds bleed and the heart breaks sing of hope and implacable hate by this beautiful autumn sun and the pride of remaining kind when vengeance would seem to us so good.”

‘That’s extraordinary,’ said Daniel. ‘No punctuation but it makes a beautiful kind of sense.’

‘He was called Georges,’ said Rosie.

‘Gone west?’

‘No, but there are things he’ll never be able to do. He would have been a wonderful father, I expect.’

‘This is a tremendous book,’ said Daniel. ‘I’d like to read all of it one of these days. Such lovely cartoons. All the cap badges and photographs, the silly rhymes, the fond messages. It’s a treasure.’

‘I’ve got three,’ said Rosie. ‘I look at them and it makes me think that those years of hard work really were worth it. Quite a lot of them say that they love me and will never forget. I mean love in the proper sense. I loved them too. They were my boys.’

‘Did you know that both my older brothers died in South Africa? Only just after my father?’

‘I see their memorial every time I go to St John’s,’ said Rosie. ‘What happened?’

‘Enteric fever got one and an ambush got the other. You can imagine how dreadful it all was for my poor mother after what happened to my father.’

‘I can imagine,’ said Rosie. ‘What regiment are you in? I’m not sure I recognise your uniform.’

‘This is the important bit,’ said Daniel, pointing to the wings above his left chest pocket. ‘Royal Air Force. Personally I preferred it when we were the Royal Flying Corps, but reorganising everything is a military passion, I’m afraid, and they decided to bung us together with the Royal Naval Air Service. We have completely incompatible habits and traditions, even in the manner of toasting the King. They sit and we stand. The rest of the uniform is Service Corps. Not very glamorous, but it’s what I could scrounge when I came over, and all my proper Royal Flying Corps stuff is being laundered, and we haven’t got our RAF ones yet. It’s a bit complicated. By the end of the war none of us was wearing anything that was related to the unit he was with. I had a wonderful Sikh uniform, but I left it behind. The soldiers at the trenches all looked like tramps, tied up with bailing twine and wearing captured hats. And boots without socks or puttees.’

‘I remember,’ said Rosie. ‘What did you mean by “came over”? From where?’

‘I was in India. North-West Frontier, busy with all those tribesmen who want to kill each other and us too. I was in Rattray’s Sikhs, but then I volunteered for the Frontier Scouts. My brother Archie was out there with me. I expect you remember him. He got in the papers once.’ She nodded, and he continued. ‘Anyway, I did a very disgraceful thing.’

‘Did you?’

‘Yes. I deserted.’

She put her hand to her mouth in horror.

‘I didn’t want to spend the war involved in some sideshow, so I deserted. We had three months’ leave per annum anyway, so I took ship home and immediately volunteered for the Flying Corps. By the time they caught up with me I was back in uniform and serving in France.’

‘What happened?’

‘They didn’t know whether to shoot me or pat me on the back. In the end they lost the file, quite accidentally on purpose. I did turn out to be reasonably useful, I like to think. I don’t suppose that Archie will ever forgive me. I left him in the lurch in the middle of one of our amateur dramatic society productions. We were doing Iolanthe .’

‘You’ve got some medals,’ she said, looking at the row of ribbons on his chest.

‘One or two. Nothing very special. I’m thinking of leaving the air force now. Everyone says there are going to be huge opportunities in civil aviation. I’m looking into it, just sniffing around. Now that the show’s over we’re all going to have to look for something else.’

‘What does the “O” with a wing on it mean?’

‘That means I qualified as an observer. The one with the Lewis gun and the camera who has to try and land the plane if the pilot gets hit. You don’t get the O until you’ve survived an engagement.’

‘An engagement? I don’t follow. What’s being engaged got to do with it.’

‘An engagement with the enemy, not a marital contract.’

Rosie leaned forward, patted his arm and laughed. ‘I know. I was just being silly.’ She paused and said, ‘I was with the Voluntary Aid Detachment. That’s how I spent the war. And now it’s horrible having nothing to do after all those years of frantic hard work. I just find all the things I saw … and the sounds … going round and round in my mind, and I can’t get rid of them. I’m sure you know what I mean. I’m probably as mad as poor Mother is. Or soon will be. You must find the same, sometimes.’

‘I do. I have a bad dream that keeps coming back. Wakes me up in a sweat every time. It’s an endless parade of the dead.’

‘I keep hearing “Gilbert the Filbert”, and it won’t go away.’

‘So, you were a VAD?’

‘Yes, at Spikey.’

‘Spikey?’

‘That’s what we all called it. Spike Island. I don’t know why. Everyone else knows it as Netley.’

‘I know people who came through Netley. You must have known them too.’

‘Netley’s absolutely vast, so I probably didn’t. We had tens of thousands of patients.’

What about Edward George, from the Buffs? Got sent to 46 Squadron?’

‘No, I’m afraid not.’

‘He lost his legs. And he has to wear a mask when he’s out. Poor man. He’s back in Lincolnshire with his family now. He made a perfectly good landing, and then the undercarriage collapsed.’

Rosie hung her head and fell silent for a very long time. Suddenly she burst out, ‘It was so awful, I just had to do something. That’s why I went to Netley. Mother wouldn’t have let me go to France, and actually I didn’t want to go there either. I love it here. Going away is such a wrench. But I couldn’t do nothing, could I?’

She looked up, and he saw that she was trying to be cheerful. ‘Do you remember that day when you and Archie did that wonderful thing, at the coronation party?’

‘When I vaulted the wall and Archie did a somersault? Gracious me, we must have been utterly mad. I can’t imagine why my parents let us do it. The pole wasn’t even the real thing.’

‘You were brought up to be Spartan warriors,’ said Rosie, ‘and that’s what you became, really. It was at that party that Ash …’

‘Yes?’

‘That Ash …’

Daniel looked at her with concern. Her shoulders had started to heave, and she had put her face into her hands as she sobbed. He hesitated, and then knelt before her. She dropped her hands to her lap, and he took them in his, pressing them to his cheek and kissing them. As the tears flowed more freely in response to his sympathy, he felt that he ought to put his arms around her, but realised that it would not be appropriate. Then at last he decided to follow his instincts, and hugged her to his chest, murmuring, ‘My dear girl, my dear girl.’