In Memoriam

by Alice Winn

Despite Ellwood’s tactile relationship with his other friends, he rarely laid a finger on Gaunt unless they were play-fighting. Gaunt would have died rather than let Ellwood know how it bothered him.

Mostly, Gaunt found it charming, except when he remembered that Arthur Hallam had died at the age of twenty-two and Tennyson had spent the next seventeen years writing grief poetry.

“Do you believe in magic?” he asked. Ellwood paused for a while, so long that if he had been anyone else, Gaunt might have repeated the question. “I believe in beauty,” said Ellwood, finally.

“You’re not afraid of dying, Henry. You’re just opposed to killing. That isn’t cowardice.”

Gaunt did not hesitate before he signed, although he felt as if his name was being ripped from him. He was simmering with a restlessness like that he felt in the boxing ring; a determination to hurt and be hurt, an impulse towards disaster and destruction, and nothing else would have satisfied him. He would not be a pansy German pacifist. He could not help that he was German, and he could not seem to help whatever he felt when Ellwood pressed himself close. But he could jolly well kill people.

It was amazing how much less affectionate “With affection” sounded than “Affectionately.”

I’m sorry. This is not what I intended to say. What I meant to say is this: You’ll write more poems. They are not lost. You are the poetry.

Perhaps I would rather Ellwood had played at loving me, if only for a few weeks, than never to have had anything at all. (Ellwood would tell me there’s a Tennyson quotation for that.) There’s an empty space in my mind where those memories might have been. I hope you are keeping safe.

The men stayed still, paralysed by terror like nothing I’d ever seen. These were men who daily went on patrols right up to the enemy lines, but that smell was not something they could fight. It was like a phantom, it was like the spirit of God, come to kill every firstborn to show his anger.

I stood on the most God-forsaken patch of earth I hope ever exists and I thought: I wonder how Elly is.

Soon I will have to go back. I am terrified. I wish to God I could see you again before I die.

“Is Gaunt all right?” asked Pritchard, finally. “No. I mean, yes. But really, no, he’s not all right at all. And you know him, he’s hardly forthcoming. If he’s writing me a letter like this…” “How much has he changed?” “Yes.”

A rotting hand had popped out of the trench wall that morning, and Ellwood watched as a private stopped and shook it. “Good afternoon,” said the man in an exaggerated posh accent. He didn’t seem to know anyone was watching him. “Very fine weather we’ve been having!”

Gaunt watched him. Gaunt was always watching him, as if Ellwood was something important he wanted to remember, but this was different. He leant against the trunk of the oak tree, his teeth clenched, frowning. He seemed in pain.

Ellwood wanted to punch him. He wanted to make him bleed, and then tend to the wounds.

Gaunt was woven into everything he read, saw, wrote, did, dreamt. Every poem had been written about him, every song composed for him, and Ellwood could not scrape his mind clean of him no matter how he tried.

And it was a magical thing, to love someone so much; it was a feeling so strange and slippery, like a sheath of fabric cut from the sky.

In the hypermasculine atmosphere of war, they were not overly concerned with manliness.

That night, Gaunt sat in the window seat and smoked. He thought Ellwood was asleep until his voice pierced the dark. “Behold me, for I cannot sleep, And like a guilty thing I creep At earliest morning to the door.”

“Elly,” said Gaunt. “Elly, we have to focus. We—look at where we are.” But Ellwood only had eyes for him. “I wish I could tell you in my own words,” he said. “But I can’t. And you don’t want me to. ‘Love is my sin, and thy dear virtue hate, / Hate of my sin, grounded on sinful loving—’ ” “I don’t hate you, don’t be absurd,” said Gaunt, although he did hate Ellwood a little, just then, hated him for his useless, incomprehensible eloquence, which did not belong at Loos, which reminded Gaunt of Preshute and England and things he did not want to think of until he could be sure he would have them again.

“What was it like?” He did not know how to answer. It was the Hell you’d feared in childhood, come to devour the children. It was treading over the corpses of your friends so that you might be killed yourself. It was the congealed evil of a century. So he had simply stared at the farmer, speechless, until his mother took his arm and led him away, as if he was a drunken old fool. “He’s very tired,” she’d apologised to the farmer. Yes. He was very tired.

My dearest, darling Sidney, There was nothing else. Only dead white paper, blank and meaningless. A comma, followed by nothing. Death summed up by grammar.

“The rest of the War…! That might be years!” “It can’t be,” said Hohenheimer. “We can’t go on like this.”

He was beginning to think the War would continue until No Man’s Land enveloped the world, and the last two men alive shot at each other from their ditches in the mud.

“I think we’re all so busy offering that we forget how much we take.”

It was much easier to be brave for your friends than for yourself.

“It seems unfair, doesn’t it? Our parents got to live their whole lives without anything like this.” “Busily building up the world that led to this.” “I suppose they thought they had their own problems,” said Ellwood. “No one ever thinks their life is easy.”

My heart would hear her and beat, Were it earth in an earthy bed; My dust would hear her and beat, Had I lain for a century dead, Would start and tremble under her feet, And blossom in purple and red. With Gaunt dead, there was no one Ellwood spoke to about poetry.

It was as if the dirt had a heartbeat, and it pounded to be saved, urgently alive.

The land had lain for a century dead, but now it had awoken, demanding blood.

Ellwood remembered what Gaunt had said, about gunfire: how it made you feel as if you were at the centre of the universe. It was more than that, at the Somme. It was like watching the universe split in half.

Ellwood had the most curious feeling of spinelessness, as if his whole body were filled with turbulent water. Hayes grabbed Ellwood and enveloped him in a tight hug. Ellwood hugged him back, just as hard. It made him feel, for a minute, as if he had bones.

They watched the lamplight reflect on the quiet water of the canal. “This is enough, just now,” said Gaunt. “Amsterdam, at night, with a friend,” said Pritchard. They did not speak again. The peaceful loveliness of the night absorbed them completely.