Justin Go - The Steady Running of the Hour

Long after Mireille has gone to bed, I sit sleepless before the living room fire, studying Ashley’s letters in my notebook. The wood burns down to a heap of dwindling embers, radiant slivers of red and orange. I push my armchair closer to keep warm. The sunset was hours ago, but dawn seems little closer. I read on.

There are footfalls behind me on the staircase. Mireille stands in the door frame with a blanket wrapped around her shoulders, blinking wide eyes at me as if unconvinced of my presence at this hour. We are meant to rise early to go to Étaples and I’m embarrassed to still be awake.

— I thought you went to bed.

Mireille drags the other armchair toward the fire and sits down.

— If you’re doing something secret, she says, you don’t have to tell me—

— It’s no secret.

I hand her my copy of Daily Life in the Trenches , the passage already marked with a scrap of paper.

— I found this after you went to bed.

Among the mundane duties of the infantry subaltern was the censoring of soldiers’ letters, the responsibility of the day’s orderly officer. In their letters home, front-line soldiers were forbidden from revealing their location, but some used codes to communicate their whereabouts to loved ones. In one common code, the soldier would agree upon a ‘trigger word’ with his wife. When the soldier’s wife read the trigger, she would note the second letter of each following line and thus learn the location of the soldier.

Mireille looks at me. — This code is in the letters?

— Not exactly.

I give Mireille my notebook and she turns the pages slowly, noticing the word I have circled several times.

— Mistletoe, she reads. What does it mean?

— It’s a plant you kiss under at Christmas. I don’t know what it’s called in French—

— Le gui , she says. Why did he use that word?

— I don’t know. But it’s a trigger word, you can see for yourself. He did it a little differently from how they describe it. He used the first letter of each sentence.

Mireille looks down at the notebook and after the word mistletoe appears, she writes out the first letter of each following sentence onto a sheet of paper. When she is finished we both look at the word on the sheet: SOMME .

— It’s incredible, she says. How did you find this?

— Mistletoe isn’t a common word, so I noticed the second or third time it showed up in the letters. Then I read about the code. I tried it the way they described it, and it didn’t work, but then I saw Somme . It’s pretty obvious, once you see it.

Mireille flips the pages of the notebook and begins to decode the next location.

— Don’t bother, I tell her. I already know them all—

— I want to do it myself.

Beneath SOMME she spells out COURCELETTE .

— That’s a village, she says. It’s near Albert.

— I know.

— Is there another one?

I nod. — It’s the last letter in the notebook. The one after she came to the Somme.

19 Dec 1916

My Darling Imogen,

Four days ago I left the convalescent depot & rejoined the battalion. I was pleased enough to go, for the idleness of that depot had begun to feel more sinful than the trenches. And I have rejoined the battalion at the perfect moment — they have just come into the rear for rest.

It is a luxurious respite. I am billeted with a family called Lefèvre, in the upstairs bedroom of a large house — my own four-poster bed and feather duvet, opulence beyond imagination. There is a girl of eleven here, unusually clever, who is keen to learn English. I give her lessons in what spare moments I have. I have tried to teach her the meaning of poetry — the Sphinx you encountered as a girl — but its charms are yet foreign to her, even in her native tongue. Still I persist, that one day she may know the sounds of Shelley half so intimately as the Vickers gun.

Like the neighboring country, the house itself is grim. It lies along the periphery where town gives way to farmland, but there is an old water tower in the Romanesque style, and in spring I suppose the fields might be picturesque. At least I shall be here to see the farm in its gayer moments, the rafters draping Mistletoe — for we stay here through Christmas, they say.

Can I hope for anything in the New Year, the ever-receding mirage of the war’s end? Any peace without you would be worse than futile. Let the others celebrate Yule and turn their faces from the carnage we have wrought together. Of all my sins this year, those against you seem the mildest, and still they cost me dearly. This life without you is beyond senseless — a mad lieutenant among a lunatic army, separated from the only thing I care for, the one thing that keeps me good & true & loving. The thing I lost to keep the thing I hated. Even a madman knew it was a poor trade, but what would you have me do? Reason could take me only so far. In the deep of night I dream you have come back for me, to meet again at that cottage, but this time we give each other everything. Even that which isn’t ours to give.

I reveal all secrets to you — but only so well as I may.

Imogen, I never meant to ask the impossible of you. When I left England I hadn’t any notion what it meant to care for someone, nor to have someone care for me; nor to wait for something that cannot wait, nor risk the thing we ought never to risk. For what does a man do when all the world pulls him east, with only his instinct tugging west? You know the answer to that & always have. But it’s never been so simple for me.

I don’t offer any excuses, not even the obvious excuse that I have seen & done things here that have left me a stranger even to myself. You needn’t forgive me or accept my choices. Only write to me anyway, that I shall have the slightest reason to greet the dawn tomorrow.

Yours as ever,

Ashley

Mireille has copied the third message onto the sheet: CALOTTERIE.

— La Calotterie, she says. It’s near the coast, beside the dunes. Not so far away.

— Can you take me there? I want to find the house where he stayed.

— It’s not such a small place, there will be more than one house—

— He said there’s a Romanesque water tower on the farm. There can’t be many of those. And we have the name of the family. Lefèvre.

Mireille shakes her head.

— That was eighty years ago. They will have moved. Or knocked the house down. And what would we do, even if we found this family?

— We’d talk to them. Ashley stayed there for a long time. He was friends with the family, they might know something—

Mireille sighs and hands me back the notebook. She goes to the fire and throws on a fresh log, prodding at it with the iron rod. For a moment there is only the hissing of the wet wood over the coals.

— You can’t change the past. Learning about it doesn’t mean you can change it.

— I know.

Mireille leans the rod against the fireplace, telling me that she’ll speak in French now to be sure of her words. Her voice sounds different in her own language, and though she speaks softly her words are confident and without hesitation.

Mireille says she believes that to be more interested in people because they lived long ago or because they suffered greatly is a mistake. She tells me that people still suffer greatly now, and that in any case one must not admire suffering or loss, because life is brief and time spent dwelling on things that have already passed is surely wasted. She says that even love can sometimes be a mistake, and that perhaps this vanished love of Ashley and Imogen’s had been a wasted one. She asks if a person could truly love someone they had not seen for so long, and for whom they had so little reason to harbor such wild affection.