Granta 125: After the War (23 page)

The explosion at Reactor 4 was indeed a millennial event, but only in that it meant the loss of a
nomos,
an ordering of experience. Some old people were unable to adapt away from their land, and found their way back; others moved to escape the law, or civilization. Around four hundred people are estimated to be leading isolated, semi-clandestine lives inside the Zone. Over the years, others have come in to loot. I ask the tour guide about it. ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘we have many stalkers.’

F
rom the earliest days after the attacks, the rubble of the World Trade Center was a tourist destination. A reading brought me to New York City in early November 2001; the night I arrived, I walked downtown from my hotel to stand on a corner and stare at a broken section of the latticed facade of the North Tower, visible over the fence that had been erected around the site. From the other side came the rumble of heavy machinery. Under floodlights, work was proceeding round the clock. I wasn’t the only one who’d come to see. I remember maybe half a dozen other people, each one alone, several smoking cigarettes, everyone making sure to give each other a lot of space. A block away, a Chinese vendor stood next to a tarp, selling plastic flags and a pile of FDNY T-shirts.

Ten years on, you can go online and buy a We Did Not Forget Thermos® Bottle to drink from while you wear your Let’s Roll Apron and hang your seasonal Tribute to 9/11 Ceramic Christmas Ornaments on your tree. Thousands of people come to the World Trade Center site every day to point their cellphones into the two large pits which now mark the footprints of the towers. Water gushes over sheer black walls, drawing the eye downwards. Though the souvenirs are tacky, the memorial is dignified, the negative space standing in for the absent dead. The people read the leaflets provided;
they pose for pictures. As I watch them, I try to remember what it was like that night in 2001, as I got colder and colder, but couldn’t tear myself away. The dust that floated in the air, the sharp burned chemical smell.

Huge landmark buildings are destroyed, creating a sudden unforeseen gap in the fabric of a city. What will take their place? Just for a moment, there is the possibility that
anything
could take their place. This is why all disaster areas are utopian. For the new, the absolutely radically new to happen, the old must be destroyed.

The Zone is different from the 9/11 site, from any memorial. It is not simply that the ruins are still there to be seen: the disaster is still taking place. By going there, the visitor is exposed to it, albeit in diluted form. It is a kind of crossing-over, an entry into a utopian space where the past is over and the future has yet to begin. In a certain sense the Zone is heaven, a purified abandoned earth that only the dead can inhabit.

Autumn leaves lie thick on the ground; wild flowers grow up through the rotting floorboards of an abandoned cottage. The nursery has a row of day rooms and dormitories filled with child-sized metal bedsteads. Everything is covered by a thick layer of dust. On the floor, in a litter of finger-paintings and alphabet cards, is a little slipper.

Outside, our dosimeters chirrup like a nest of tiny birds. Here in the nursery they are silent.

In the Pripyat school, I walk down dusty corridors, peer into classrooms. Slews of paper waste surround upturned desks. Images of Lenin in open textbooks, a cut paper dove. In the canteen, a cash register sits incongruously on a floor strewn with hundreds of respirators. According to the guide, they were standard school equipment, for use in case of nuclear attack. I remember my own
conviction at sixteen that I would die before I was able to fall in love or drive a car or play in a band. This is the archaeological record of that fear, the point of connection I have been looking for.

In a hotel room in Kiev, my wife is waiting for me. She is five months pregnant. Before I go in, I take off my shoes and leave them outside the door. Before we hug, I take a shower and change clothes. I have been through two sets of radiation detectors on my way out of the Zone, but whatever the machines may tell me, I’m still afraid of contaminating her.

F
rom a distance it looks more like a running stitch on a pillow or sampler than a collage of men. About one hundred soldiers are arranged by height on a tiered stand, each horizontal row of heads hyphenated by the shining belt of the man behind, each vertical line of brass buttons punctuated by a white face beneath a cap badge. This act of creative precision is matched by the backdrop: a high, symmetrical brick wall. The only deviations come at the periphery – you can make out a drum, a dog, a stick, a trumpet, a tuba. This is G Company of the 4th Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers. It is peacetime; the war is some way off.

Too young to have a moustache is Lieutenant Maurice Dease. He steps out of the regimental grid into more relaxed old photographs: with his sister Maud clad in matching dresses with sailor collars when they were little, mounted on a horse as a boy to hunt foxes in Westmeath, laughing with his parents at a military parade while trailing a sword from his hip, sitting cross-legged looking dreamy, missing home. He is a rarity, a Catholic officer from Ireland in the British Army. The Deases have lived in Turbotston near Mullingar for at least seven centuries, and martyrs and bishops within the family history have been elevated into moral exemplars in a type of Romanish ancestor worship. Maurice’s father has ten elder sisters, including several nuns. Like other offshoots of the Irish gentry, the Deases discovered England in Queen Victoria’s century: unlike the others, they are recusants, proud never to have converted to Protestantism, despite religious persecution. Their house is heavy with appeals to piety – crucifixes showing the tortured body of Christ, baby angels blowing trumpets, Our Lady with palms touching and her head bowed and covered.

Maurice Dease is sent across the sea at the age of eight to a London boarding school and later to the Jesuits in Lancashire. Being a marksman and keen on country pursuits, he is advised to follow his uncle to the military academy at Sandhurst, and into the Royal Fusiliers. In the summer of 1912, by now in command of a machine-gun section, he goes down to the Kent marshes to practise shooting. His men learn how to strip a gun, communicate by semaphore and march at night. Two summers later they are advancing in echelon under imaginary artillery fire on the Isle of Wight; they are clearing up after a steeplechase at Ashey Down; the twenty-four-year-old Maurice is posting a flirtatious letter to a Miss Mollie Hewitt.

In the same month, June 1914, a gun goes off in Sarajevo and Archduke Franz Ferdinand is assassinated; soon, training becomes actuality. German soldiers race across Belgium’s border, heading for France. At Leuven they burn the university, and when Antwerp falls the Belgian Army retreats to West Flanders. The country has slim martial traditions – bicycles and dog-drawn guns – and it is facing the largest invasion force in history. The German cruelty towards civilians will be used by England as moral justification for the war. The world has become too small: empires will now cannibalize themselves and commit sui-genocide.

‘I think we should go to Belgium,’ Maurice writes to his sister on the day after war is declared. ‘I have to collect all the horses for the regiment and as I have an awful old fool of a civilian – who buys them – to deal with I shall have rather a difficult job.’ He has been chosen to round up the horses – the Irish stereotype – and Maurice complains in his diary that the English soldiers do not know how to use tack and collars. Riding around the Isle of Wight’s farms he finds sixty horses that he considers ‘fit for the harness’ and has them shod, branded with a regimental number and attached to limbers and water carts for instruction before shipping the skittering beasts over to France. Drawing two days of rations from the stores for his section and 5,000 rounds of ammunition for the brace of machine guns, he boards a boat to Le Havre for his first trip to the Continent.

French troops singing the Marseillaise meet the Royal Fusiliers at the quayside; being Londoners for the most part, they respond with cheeky music-hall songs like Florrie Forde’s ‘Hold Your Hand Out, Naughty Boy’. The coming days are a miasma of preparation: marching over cobbles in the heat, being caught in the rain in an orchard one night, eating cold mutton and bread, sleeping in a garden of phlox where an elderly couple bring coffee with cognac, taking a troop train where the men are greeted at each station with flowers and cries of ‘
les braves anglais
’. Finally, when the battalion has assembled at La Longueville near the Belgian border, they are read an exhortation from the British Expeditionary Force’s commander-in-chief, Field Marshal French, telling them their cause is just and they are fighting for freedom and national honour and will ‘go forward together to do or die for God, King and Country’. They are told to show no lights and make no fires that night.

Maurice uses the evening to check if his dog Dandy has been sent safely home to Ireland, and writes to his Dear Daddy that he has made a will, since ‘they tell me it will save you trouble if I don’t return’. He asks his parents to mark their letters to him ‘On Active Service’ from now on. ‘If Maud has not got home you might let her know the address,’ he concludes. ‘It is not worth writing to her as there is no news.’

Early next morning, 22 August, they march through the city of Mons to the canal at Nimy. The landscape is marked by conical mounds of spoil from the mines: it is the same terrain Zola describes in
Germinal
, where families of coal miners lived by the pits, and foals were lowered in roped buckets to spend a lifetime underground, never again to see the light of day. A few images survive of the Fusiliers in the square at Mons that afternoon. Is the man with the cap pushed back high from his forehead frightened, or tired? It is easy to read too much into these blurry pictures. With the slow exposures of the time, it is hard to be certain of facial expressions. More than anything, these professional military men look ready to go, seated on the cobbles with their packs and puttees. They do not know it will be a world war.
Perhaps they really believe they will be home for Christmas. All the men are wearing caps: not until a year later would British troops be issued with metal helmets.

A high railway bridge and a lower swing bridge run across the canal at Nimy. Maurice has his two machine guns set up on the far side of the railway bridge and, after removing his jacket, he helps the others to fill sacks with stones to make a protective wall. Belgian villagers appear and present cakes. Evening falls. Not a shot has been fired; nobody knows when the enemy will arrive, or quite what that enemy will be. Only ten years earlier, a pair of rum-cooled Maxim guns had been enough to secure military victory during an invasion of Tibet. The Royal Fusiliers do not know they are vulnerable from three directions and will be met the next morning by the right flank of the Schlieffen Plan. The fighters bed down for the night beside the guns.

All that was before their war.

The British Expeditionary Force’s opening battle at Mons will gain a mythic importance in the cultural memory of the First World War. Dease and Godley, one of the men under his command, will both be awarded Britain’s highest award for gallantry, the Victoria Cross.

T
here. I’ve done my duty and told the story of Maurice Dease at last. I have avoided World War I until now, just as I have consumed other points in history, always wanting to know more. Not that I could escape this Great War: the saturating cult of remembrance, the eroding stone memorials in every village decorated with fresh red wreaths, the hanging medals, the television solemnity, the slew of novels about contemplative officers on the Western Front, the pictures on the wall at home.

Every morning in my childhood when I came down to breakfast, the first thing I saw was Uncle Maurice. He was my great-uncle, my grandmother’s only sibling. My father was named Maurice after him and sent as a teenager into the Royal Fusiliers, where he spent his whole career. The Hero of Mons looked out from a large oil painting
beside which hung, in a frame of its own, his Victoria Cross, and after it had been sold, a replica of his Victoria Cross.

My antipathy to military culture started early, and it wasn’t helped by living in a garrison town. Everybody was in the army, and the people who weren’t in the army were connected to the army. If you went for a walk, you might see a man ripping the guts out of a dangling sandbag with a bayonet. A line of recruits – boys, really – would charge forward shouting ‘kill, kill, kill’ and poke and stab at the twisting, struggling sacks. It wasn’t easy to kill a sandbag: a raw arrival might just prod at it and not get anywhere, as if he were trying to puncture a balloon with a blunt instrument, and the sergeant would have to come up close, lean in and ask in a screaming shout if he was a fucking girl. That’s what life was like if you were born to be martial. In the winter, you shot birds; in the summer, you bicycled to ‘the camp’ and swam in the army pool or went on the assault course with other children, shinning up a cargo net and vaulting terrified over the top, swinging on a rope over a cavernous pit, cracking your elbows on the chalky earth as you wriggled like a snake under cat’s cradles of barbed wire and tried not to be afraid. For entertainment, you might go to a curry lunch at the mess, to eat rice and beef stew with chilli powder served up with plates of chopped banana, raisins and desiccated coconut. As a treat, you might be taken to a ‘firepower’ demonstration on Salisbury Plain where tanks and helicopters would attack a hill with live ammunition. Another day on the plain, daring each other, we would touch the tail fins of the unexploded shells buried in the wet ground.

Much of my life since has been taken up with trying to avoid exactly this kind of life. I have steered away from writing about myself or my country, and often feel more at ease in places or cultures that are not my own. But you can’t avoid yourself, since you are made up of the traditions and experiences that form you early on, however much you may dislike them.

During my childhood, all that was left of the Irish days were long trips in a packed, rattling car to the large, falling-down houses of
cousins or family friends (much the same thing in Ireland), where Major Maurice French, being a British Army officer and therefore a target, would check under our car for a bomb each time before we drove off. Sometimes he would stop to check after we’d already driven off, having forgotten the drill, making us laugh. My mother’s background was not so different from my father’s, but she had less reverence for its social mores. Her own mother had died young after being hit by a van full of hounds out hunting, and her father, after serving in the Grenadier Guards, bred horses in County Meath until one day in Ballymadun his horse fell, and landed on top of him.

With Ireland gone, what remained were watercolours, trinkets, prie-dieux, crucifixes, silver, records by the lovely songwriter and cousin Percy French – and Catholicism, which occurred morning and night and every Sunday with a visit to Mass at St George’s Church, where I stared at the hot, bare kneeling legs of the girl in the row ahead. I had no models, except in the negative. It was not easy handing out anti-war leaflets in the garrison town of Warminster during the first Iraq war. An old lady known to our family as Mrs Bunny, since my sister as a child was unable to pronounce her name, walked right past me and I followed after her enthusiastically, only realizing as she turned and spat ‘I wouldn’t read it’ that she had not failed to see me. My father was still in the army and my mother was suffering from bulimia, depression, dyspraxia and epilepsy – to stay near the front of the alphabet. Nobody we knew had been to university, or had any connection with the remote, magical world of literature to which I aspired, bar an uncle by marriage who had written the biography of a cavalry horse which had been blown up by the Irish Republican Army in Hyde Park. The English public loved that story: animals, soldiers, nail bombs, bad Irish, proximity to the royal family and even a happy ending since the horse recovered. Later, he wrote fiction about a terrier called Gannet: my elder brother looked at the book, took a large puff of dope and said with slow concern in his voice, ‘I’d have thought the market for this sort of stuff dried up in 1914.’ But I’m getting ahead of myself.

At primary school it was usual for small boys like me to read ‘trash mags’, comics in which storm troopers said ‘
Jawohl, mein Kommandant, Hände hoch
’ and ‘
Kill the Engländer Schwein
’ – the Germans usually being neutralized by the end of the story by British soldiers with neat scarves and clipped expostulations, and occasionally by square-jawed, late-arriving American helpers. Sometimes the trash mags would be set one war earlier, at sea off Heligoland or in Europe’s trenches. I refused to read these magazines or to join the daily fights against ‘Germans’, though occasionally I would play Messerschmitts, a game where you intercepted the stream of urine of another boy with your own as you pissed into the same toilet. I refused to join the proxy wars of football, and when asked which team I supported would reply: ‘It’s a team you won’t have heard of.’