CHAPTER NINE
Et puis mon souvenir s’éteindrait comme meurt
Un obus éclatant sur le front de l’armée
Un bel obus semblable aux mimosas en fleur
And then my memory would fade
As a shell blooms, bursting over the front line,
Magnificent, like mimosa in blossom
—Guillaume Apollinaire, “Si je mourrais là-bas,” written on 30 January 1915, Nîmes
WHEN I WAS A BOY, my father would take me on his knee and place one of my fingers on a very small dent in his forehead. Running from it was a thin, old scar. “That’s where the Chink got me with the knife,” he’d say. And there would follow an odd story about how Bill Fisk had to solve a problem with a Chinese man during the First World War and how after he was attacked he shot dead his assailant with a revolver. “My Dad shot a Chinese man,” I used to tell my friends at school. I could never explain why.
My father had a strange relationship with the 1914–18 war. He rarely wanted to talk about his own brief participation in the conflict, but all his life he read every book on the subject. He read the poems of Wilfred Owen—who, like my father, lived in Birkenhead—and he studied every official history of the Western Front. I can still remember his gasps of horror as he was reading the first critical biography of Earl Haig and realised that a man he once regarded with veneration was a proven liar. In a nursing home where he was recovering from cancer in the mid-Eighties, I asked him to recall his own memories of the trenches. “All it was, fellah, was a great, terrible waste.”
My father called me “fellah” from the first day he saw me in my cot. He had been reading P. C. Wren’s saga of the French Foreign Legion, Beau Geste. When one of the heroes bravely suffers a wound in silence, his comrade calls him “stout fellah.” Never realising that fellah was an Arabic word for peasant or farmer, Bill always addressed me as “fellah” or “the fellah”—which was irony enough, since I would be spending half my life in the Arab world. Indeed, I was in Beirut when Bill Fisk died in 1992 at the age of ninety-three, unafraid of death but an increasingly angry and bitter man. He had been faithful to my mother, Peggy—his second wife—and he never lied or cheated anyone. He paid his bills on time. For about thirty years, he was Borough Treasurer of Maidstone in Kent. Every Sunday morning, he would wait for my mother to accompany him to All Saints’ Church, striding up and down the hallway singing the 23rd Psalm. “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil.” He was a patriot. In 1940, he unhesitatingly agreed to a request from MI6 to form a resistance cell in Kent when it seemed likely that German troops would invade south-eastern England. At school, I used to show off his plans—to the envy of every boy in my class—for blowing up Maidstone East railway bridge while a German troop train was passing. Had the Nazis arrived, of course, Bill Fisk would have been shot as a “terrorists.” For years, Karsh of Ottawa’s great photograph of Churchill speaking over the wartime BBC from Downing Street loomed over our sitting-room in Maidstone— until, after my father’s death, Peggy mercifully replaced it with a gentle water-colour of the River Medway.
Unfortunately, there were two sides to Bill Fisk. While he was loyal to my mother, he was also a bully. He would check her weekly housekeeping expenses as she waited in fear at his side for a word of criticism. If I interrupted him, he would strike me hard on the head. And his patriotism could quickly turn racist. In later years, and to my increasing fury, he would call black people “niggers” and when I argued with him he would turn angrily upon me. “How dare you tell me what to say?” he’d shout, while Peggy stood wringing her hands in the doorway. “Nigger means black, doesn’t it? Yes, I’m a racist, and proud of it. I am proud to be English.”
My mother would try to soften his language and would sometimes end up crying. At the age of nine, I was sent away to boarding school. I hated it—its violence as well as its class distinctions—and pleaded with my father for weeks, for months, for years, to take me away. My mother appealed to him too. In vain. Boarding school would enable me to stand up for myself, he told me. I was to be a stout fellah. His pride when I passed exams was cancelled out by his ferocity when confronted by a son who would not obey him. My clothes, my ties, my shoes were all to be chosen by him. Years later, when I told him I was sick of hearing his racist abuse—he had taken to cursing the Irish—he threw a table knife at me. My mother once told me that Bill had punched a council official on the jaw when he thought the employee was making a pass at her. Only after Peggy’s death did my aunt tell me that it was the Mayor of Maidstone whom father laid out.
I was usually an obedient child. My father was for me—as fathers are for all young children—a protector, as well as a potential tyrant. I liked him when he was self-effacing. I tried to soften his temper by calling him “King Billy,” which somehow satirised his dominating personality. And when he called himself “King Billy”—acknowledging his flaws with self-deprecation—he became an ordinary human. He taught me to love books and history, and from an early age I learnt of Drake and Nelson, of Harold of England and of the Indian Mutiny. His choice of literature could range from Collins’s Children’s History of England to the awful G. A. Henty. By the time I was sent to boarding school, I knew about the assassination of an archduke at Sarajevo that had started the First World War and I knew that the Versailles Treaty of 1919 brought an end to the First World War but failed to prevent a second. So it was that at the age of ten, the “fellah” was taken on his first foreign holiday—to France, and to those battlefields that still haunted my father’s mind.
When my mother died in 1998, I discovered the little scrapbooks she had compiled of this 1956 holiday, a cheap album with a green fake leather cover in which she had stuck a series of small black-and-white snapshots: Bill and Robert standing by our car—an Austin of England, it was called, and I can imagine why my father chose it—outside Dover Marine station, waiting for the old British Railways boat, the Shepperton Ferry, to take us to Boulogne; Robert in his school pullover sitting beside Bill, the car boot open and a paraffin stove hissing beside us; Robert loco-spotting French steam trains; and Bill and Peggy together by the car, slightly out of focus, a picture that must have been taken by me.
But it was clear where my father’s mind was. “Through Montreuil, Hesdin, St. Pol, Arras,” Peggy wrote in the album as she mapped our journey, “to—Louvencourt.” And beside the word “Louvencourt” was a photograph of a road, framed by tall trees, with on the far side a barn with a sagging roof. I knew what this was. My father spoke of it many times later; he had found the very house on the Somme in which he slept on 11 November 1918, the last day of the First World War. On our 1956 holiday, my father had been too shy to knock on the door. Another snapshot shows him standing before a memorial of 1914–18 to the French dead from Louvencourt. He is wearing the tie he always wore, at work and on holiday, for seventy-two years: the navy-blue and maroon tie of the King’s Liverpool Regiment.
He was wearing that tie one night in our hotel in Beauvais, waiting for my mother to join him at the bar. I had been suffering from food poisoning and Peggy had stayed with me until my father suddenly opened my bedroom door and said to her: “I want to speak to you—now.” I listened at the thin wall that partitioned my room from theirs. “How dare you leave me waiting like that? How dare you?” he kept asking her. Then I heard Peggy weeping. And my father said: “Well, we’ll say no more about it.” He used that same phrase many times to me in later years. Then he would refuse to talk to me for weeks afterwards as punishment for some real or imagined offence. He didn’t talk to Peggy for several days after he was kept waiting at the hotel bar. In the holiday scrapbook, we are always smiling. There were other holidays and other snapshots later, always through the battlefields of what Bill called the Great War. We went to Ypres many times. And to Verdun. By then, my mother was taking early colour stock home movie film. And in those pictures, too, we were always smiling.
Although Bill was reluctant to speak of his war, I had several times pestered him to tell a few stories. He had, it turned out, been bitten by a rat in the trenches in 1918. For several nights he lay in a first aid station actually inside Amiens Cathedral, its roof blown off by German shellfire—he remembered looking up at the stars as medieval gargoyles stared back at him. He had once shown me a photograph he had taken of the Western Front, a tiny, inch-long picture of muck and dead trees. My father had—against every military rule—taken a camera to the war in 1918. It sounded quite unlike the Bill I knew, who was usually as subservient to authority as he was jealous of his power in his home. He didn’t say much about the war in the trenches—he had only arrived in August 1918—but when, in 1976, I was leaving to cover the Lebanese civil war for The Times , Bill turned to me and said: “Remember, fellah, it’s not the shells you have to worry about—it’s the snipers you have to watch out for.” Advice from the trenches of the First World War. And he was right.
Not long before he died, he told me of his first marriage—it had been a secret from me until I discovered in Maidstone cemetery one day, by chance, his first wife’s grave. She had been a childhood sweetheart, but when he had married her she had not returned his love, not even on the first night of their marriage. Matilda Fisk died in 1944, during the Second World War, which is how Bill came in 1946 to marry Peggy. She was twenty-five. He was forty-six.
But there is another story he told me, an astonishing one, quite out of character. At the very end of the war in 1918, he said, he had been ordered to command a firing party to execute a soldier. He had refused. Then, with the war over, the army punished him by forcing him to help transport the corpses left lying on the front lines for burial in the great British cemeteries. All the time I knew him, Bill hated things that rotted. A dead bird, a dead dog in a road would make him turn away. My father’s insubordination sounded unlike him. But I admired him enormously for it. Indeed, as the years went by, I came to the conclusion that my father’s refusal to kill another man was the only thing he did in his life which I would also have done.
For my twenty-eighth birthday, he bought me William Moore’s The Thin YellowLine, one of the first histories of capital punishment on the Western Front. My mother told me that Bill had read the book from beginning to end in total silence. He had wanted me to read of the fate of the 314 men executed by the British in the Great War. It seemed to prey on his mind. Not long before he died, I asked him if he knew the identity of the doomed soldier he refused to shoot. He was an Australian, my father replied, who had got drunk and then murdered a French gendarme. Someone else had commanded the firing squad.
That was all. I once asked Peggy to talk to my father about the war, to interview him as if she were a journalist, to find out about this missing segment of his life. She promised that she would. Yet on his death in 1992, all I found were nine short pages of notes in his own handwriting—in pencil—about the history of his family. “Born 1899 at ‘Stone House,’ Leasowe, Wirral, Cheshire,” it said. “Father, Master Mariner Born 1868. Mother, Market Gardner’s [sic] daughter, born 1869. Earliest record [of the Fisks] Danish professor, came to England 1737. [I] attended Council School. Won Scholarship to High School. Father unable to support me there, so no alternative but to leave school and compete for work in Borough Treasurer’s Department. Examination (25 entrants) for 6 shillings per week—was successful and commenced two weeks before my 14th birthday in 1913.” So no wonder my schooling was so important to Bill. The notes failed to mention that his father Edward had once been first mate on the Cutty Sark, the great tea-clipper now permanently in a Greenwich dry dock. There was another short entry, recording that only after the First World War was over did Bill discover that his own grandfather—his father Edward’s father—had also served in the same conflict, as a naval reservist at Zeebrugge in 1918, when the British blocked the Belgian harbour to prevent its use by German U-boats and destroyers.
It would be another six years before I learned more. For when my mother lay dying in the autumn of 1998, I found in the roof of her home in Maidstone a tin box of the kind that families sent to soldiers in the Great War with soap and shaving brushes. On the front, the words “Parfumery Chiyotsbaki” were stamped above a painting of a young, half-smiling woman with roses in her hair. Inside the box were dozens of photographs from the 1914–18 war. Some were postcard-sized pictures of Bill’s long-dead army friends in the uniform of the King’s Liverpool Regiment, all of them with the solemn faces of doomed youth. “Lads from Preston” it said on the back of a large card. Others had been taken by Bill with his illegal camera. One I had seen before—the picture of the shattered countryside of the Western Front. “North of Arras 1918,” Bill had written on the back. Another showed a young officer on horseback with the words “Self on Whitesocks near Hazebruck” on the reverse side. There was a French money coupon and a photograph of fifty young soldiers with my father, hatless, lying sprawled at the front, hobnailed boots towards the camera. A dramatic snapshot showed the 4th Battalion of the King’s Liverpool Regiment on parade in driving snow at Douai in northern France, bayonets fixed amid the blizzard, another—much faded and probably poorly developed—showed the Douai artillery school, a vast Napoleonic building confronting a parade ground filled with British troops and horses and gun carriages. “Major General Capper inspects ‘B’ Company,” he had written on the back.
And there was a larger photograph of Bill Fisk, leaning against the windowsill of a house in Arras, dated August 1918. He was a tall, handsome man, a shock of dark hair, deep-set eyes, protruding nose, a faint smile on his face, right hand self-consciously pushed into his trouser pocket, the horse rampant insignia of the regiment on his lapel. He looked like the young Burt Lancaster. Aside from the handsome appearance, I had to admit he looked a little like me.
Another picture showed him in an open-top car with a man and a woman. And a snapshot showed him in the French countryside in civilian clothes but still in his Great War puttees, the cloth wraps that British troops wore around their legs to prevent trench water from pouring into their boots. Behind him, hanging on a branch, was a woman’s hat. Had there been a wartime love affair? He never said and my mother never spoke anything of it. When Bill was in France, she was not even born. But on his death, I had found two tickets to the races at Longchamps in 1919. “Throw them away!” my mother had commanded me. She didn’t like the thought that Bill had kept those tickets all those years.
The tin of photographs had been stored in a shoebox in the roof. But in my mother’s desk downstairs I found pages of notes in her handwriting. It was the interview with my father she had promised to make at least a decade earlier. Bill had spoken more freely to her. He describes his excitement at being posted to France—an amazing reaction from a man whose friends from Liverpool had already died at Ypres—and the thrill of wearing his first officer’s uniform. He received a grant of £50 and “scrounged” a Smith & Wesson revolver. “I thought I was a Field Marshal,” he told my mother. He was sent to France in August of 1918. “When I first got to France there were thousands of Chinese there,” he said. “They were brought there to repair the roads from shell holes, and they had been robbing a French provision train, and we were the next battalion . . . I was a junior subaltern at the time.” Bill arrived at the Chinese encampment near Arras to find a group of huts surrounded by barbed wire.
When I got there they wouldn’t let us in . . . but they would let me in [alone]. I said to this Chinese man who could speak English: “I’ve been sent to make inquiries about a French supply train [with] my platoon of 30 men.” [He said] “You can come in, but not your men”—which I didn’t think much of. I didn’t like that “not your men” a little bit. But I went in and sat at a table and there were Chinks all round, and this fellow aimed a knife at my forehead between my eyes. I was trying to read something, leaning forward, when I felt this fellow opposite me moving . . . he would have got me in the back of the neck if I hadn’t moved. Well, I shot him dead and made for the door, and ran like hell—they were streaming after me and the Sarge that was in charge of these 30 men opened fire—I don’t know how many of the Chinks they killed. It’s a good job they did.
Many of the incidents Bill related to Peggy were told in an off-hand manner. The rat had bitten him on the chest just outside Arras—one of thousands that swarmed around the lines. “Their teeth must have been poisonous because they were eating casualties and dead men [who] had . . . been laying out for a week or more in the sun . . . The hospital at Amiens was staffed by German prisoners and that was where a German prisoner that was looking after me . . . gave me a shell case and he had inscribed on it a drawing of the regimental battalion horse, [my] name and rank and I took it home.” Then he added in reference to me that “the lad would have liked that, I’m sure he would.” For years, the shell case sat on his mother’s mantelpiece in Birkenhead but then disappeared long before I was born.
The armistice of November 1918 was only a ceasefire and tens of thousands of British troops stayed on in the filth of the front lines in case hostilities with the Germans resumed. At Dover and Folkestone, thousands of British troops refused to board the boats to France in 1919, but my father volunteered to serve an extra year. He told my mother of his long horse rides with his colonel through the broken cities of northern France as the victorious powers dismembered the old empires of Europe and the Middle East at Versailles. One of his horses was blind in one eye and rode in circles, dumping him in a French railway yard. He was sent to Cologne as part of the army of occupation, and to Le Havre to oversee the departure of the last British fighting troops from France.
But still there was so little on the war itself, the agony of the trenches in which I knew he had spent weeks. And nothing of the execution party he said he had refused to command. The last page of my mother’s notes broke off in mid-sentence. Had Bill destroyed the rest? My family was now gone, and I had inherited few of my father’s memories—save for those recollections to my mother and the cache of little snapshots. But there was one other way in which I could seek the missing months of my father’s life. In January 1999, I walked into the British Public Record Office in the London suburb of Kew and asked for Bill’s personal war service file—along with the war diaries of his two battalions—the 12th and 4th King’s Liverpool Regiment.
I have to admit to a slight tingle in the back of my hands when the tiny reader’s computer bleeped and I walked to the desk where a middle-aged civil servant handed me file no. WO374/24476. The cover read “2nd Lt. Wm Fisk.” But almost at once, my hopes fell. Printed on the same cover were the words “weeded in 1936” and “weeded in 1955.” A file that might have contained fifty or sixty pages was left with scarcely twenty. Bill’s commission as an officer was intact, his civilian status listed as “assistant book-keeper.” The War Office questionnaire even asked if Bill was “of pure European descent.” “Yes,” Bill had replied. I don’t suppose he had much trouble with that one. Under “power of command,” an officer had written: “V fair. He only needs experience.” Bill’s dates of posting to France, his transfer to his postwar battalion and his final embarkation by steamship from Boulogne back to Liverpool just before Christmas of 1919 were all there. But nothing more. What had been taken out of the files? Reference to a refusal to command an execution, perhaps? A small massacre of Chinese workers?
A separate PRO file on the Chinese showed there were 187,000 of them in France by 1918, paid by the War Department, many of them lured away from their homeland by false promises that they would not be in the firing line—a promise that was a lie. Documents in the files refer to them as “coolies,” stating that they should be kept away from Europeans. At least ten were executed for murder, several of them not even given the dignity of a name—only a number—when they were shot at dawn by British troops. The war diary of one British regiment did make a single intriguing reference to Chinese involvement in the looting of “French provision trains.”
Then my reader’s computer bleeped again. The war diaries of the King’s Liverpool Regiment had arrived from the archives. In the last months of the Great War, a massive German offensive that almost reached Paris was turned back by British, Canadian, French and newly arrived American troops. Bill’s last battles were thus part of a great Allied counter-attack that would still be in progress when the conflict ended. Handwritten on flimsy paper that was crumbling at the edges, the battalion war diaries came in big cardboard boxes. Yet the pages of the 12th Battalion’s history from August 1918 seemed eerily familiar. It would be many hours before I realised why this was so.
There were brief, hurried reports in the war diaries of “hostile shelling” and “enemy gas shells causing four OR [other ranks] casualties.” On 22 August there was a raid towards German trenches which ended in the capture of two German prisoners. “Most of the enemy’s concrete emplacements were destroyed by our artillery fire.” On 1 November the battalion was in billets at Rue St. Druon in Cambrai. I knew my father had been in Cambrai—he had told me it was burning when he entered it with a Canadian unit—but what caught my attention was the handwriting. It was identical to the handwriting on the back of the snapshots I had found in the loft of my mother’s home. Even the little squiggles that Bill used to put under his capital “D’s were there. I found them under the “D” of Douai.
Bill Fisk must have been the second lieutenant tasked to write up the battalion war diary each night; of course, he had been an “assistant book-keeper.” Sometimes the entries were only a few words in length, a remark about the “inclement weather”—all his life, my father called rainy days “inclement,” much to my amusement—but there were other, longer reports in the dry military language that Bill would have been taught to use. “Strong fighting patrols out by day and night,” Bill was reporting in early October. “. . . Patrols active and touch constantly maintained with the enemy. During the morning of the 5th contact patrols moved N. and S. from newly gained positions . . . Hostile opposition entirely in the form of M.G. [machine gun] Fire; machine guns appeared to be very numerous.” In the official diaries, Bill always referred to the Germans as “the enemy.” All his life, he called them “the Bosche.”
He had been billeted in Douai. Yes, I knew that. Because along with the tin of snapshots—which included a long-distance photograph of German prisoners being led away down a tree-lined road by Bill’s comrades in the King’s Liverpool Regiment—were hundreds of black-and-white postcards. Everywhere Bill was stationed, he bought these cheap photographs of the cities and towns and villages of northern France. Some showed the devastation caused by German shellfire. Most had been printed before the war—of medieval towns with tall church spires and cobbled streets and Flemish house façades, of delicate tramcars rattling past buildings with wooden verandas—and were even then, as Bill collected them, souvenirs of a France that no longer existed.
In his collection from Douai, there were twenty-four postcards, some of which Bill had obviously sent home to Edward and Margaret Fisk in Birkenhead, because he had written a line or two on the reverse side. On the back of a prewar photograph which showed a streetcar negotiating the Rue de Bellain—devastated in the recent fighting—he had written with irony: “Haven’t seen any car here yet.” A picture of the Place d’Armes—the clock tower of the town hall in the distance, a set of elegant nineteenth-century town houses to the right—carried Bill’s caption: “The buildings to the right of the tower are ruined. Our mess is about 100 yards from the Tower (Hotel de Ville).” There was a picture of the medieval Porte d’Arras—“My billet is 50 yards from here—Will,” he had written, adding a kiss for his mother Margaret. He had included a printed drawing of a huge couple in Middle Ages regalia which captured Douai’s long and violent history.67 Much easier for Bill to understand was a dramatic photograph—obviously published after the town’s liberation by the British—showing German occupation troops in spiked helmets goose-stepping past their officers in the Place du Barlet. He sent it home to Birkenhead, writing angrily on the back: “The Bosche [sic] manner in entering a town.”
Much more precise, however, was a beautifully framed photograph, taken through an archway, of a set of turreted brick buildings close to the town hall. On the pavement to the right of the postcard, Bill had marked a cross. “I have put a cross under our mess,” he wrote on the back. “1606, Passage de l’Hotel de Ville.” The street had obviously survived the First World War. I wondered if it had survived the Second. On one of our interminable pilgrimages around the battlefields, Bill had driven my mother Peggy and me through Douai—it must have been in the late 1950s—but I had no memory of visiting these houses. All I can recall is that a gendarme had whistled Bill to a halt when he drove his beloved Austin of England car the wrong way up a one-way street. Bill had even bought a tiny wooden model of a fat gendarme to celebrate the occasion when a pompous French policeman dared to criticise the driving of one of Douai’s British liberators. The model stood for years on the windowsill of the sitting room in our Maidstone home.
Eighty-six years after Bill sent those postcards from Douai, I pushed them carefully into an envelope—“2nd Lt. William Fisk,” I wrote on the cover—and set off once more for the French city that Bill had entered under German shellfire in 1918. I’m not sure what I hoped to find in Douai. A ghost of the town he entered, a few of the buildings still standing, perhaps, an old pavement upon which a soldier had trodden a generation before me, cobblestones that he had marked with a cross twenty-eight years before I was born. The TGV express from the Gare du Nord flashed through the rainswept countryside of northern France, water lashing the carriage windows, sliding into Douai in just over an hour. I had the vague idea that it might be possible to use Bill’s pictures to discover the city, to graft his image of Douai—albeit badly damaged by the time he sent his postcards home—onto the present, to walk in Bill’s footsteps. One of his postcards showed the city’s railway station, a fine three-storey nineteenth-century construction in the Dutch style, the windows embroidered in dressed stone, with horses and carriages and an early motor vehicle in the forecourt. But the station into which my train glided was a box, a cheap block of late 1940s concrete whose ceiling was peeling away. On the back of the station picture in 1918, Bill had written something illegible: “This is . . . a little.” The missing word looked like “humped.” Perhaps he meant “bombed” or “damaged.”
I soon discovered why. “The British and Americans bombed the place to pieces in the Second World War,” an old man in the station buffet told me. “The Germans destroyed Douai in 1914 and then in 1918 and then the Germans destroyed it again in 1940 and then the British and Americans bombed it in 1944. They wanted to stop the Germans using the railway to send reinforcements to Normandy after the landings.” I stopped at a local bookshop. The sixtieth anniversary of D-Day—Jour-J in French—had provoked an army of new books on the German occupation, though strangely not a single volume about the city in the First World War. But a booklet on Douai’s military history recorded how German troops had occupied the city on 31 August 1914—twenty-seven days after the outbreak of war, just over four months after Bill’s fifteenth birthday—how they had been driven out and then returned on 2 October. As a railhead and a centre of the French coal-mining industry, Douai would become a strategic military objective. All Frenchmen between the ages of seventeen and fifty were ordered to leave and then, when resistance to the occupation began, the Germans took hostages. Twenty hostages, including seven women, were sent to Germany on 1 November 1916, another thirty-three—twelve of them women—to Germany and Lithuania in late December 1917. In all, 193 civilians died in German hands during the Great War.
The rain had lifted and I pulled Bill’s postcards from the envelope. The bookshop was in the Rue St. Jacques and one of Bill’s pictures showed the same street before the Great War. There was a tramline, a cart and more than thirty people— many of them women in long white aprons—standing on the pavement and in the street. In the postcard, the street bent to the left, just as it did in front of me. A three-storey building to the left of the street bore an extraordinary wooden balcony, a big carved trellis that hung over the tramline. And there it still was. The building was decayed, the windows dirty, but the balcony was still there. This was still, conceivably, Bill’s Douai. I walked along the canal. Again, Bill’s postcard of the same canal showed several Flemish-style buildings identical to those along the quai upon which I was walking. I turned left into a cobbled street, its low cottages clearly untouched for a century. Did Bill and his fellow soldiers march down this street in October 1918?
It began to rain again and the cobbles turned shiny. I buried the postcards back in their envelope. There are times when journalists want to be film directors, to re-create history from both archives and experience. I could see the King’s Liverpool Regiment moving down this street in the rain, their helmets shiny, the smoke of shelled buildings rising behind the houses, the few civilians allowed to remain in the city by the Germans waving to the British soldiers who had freed them. Would Bill, innocent nineteen-year-old Bill, have waved back? Of course he would. He was a liberator, a hero. He must have felt that. It must have been good to be a British soldier in Douai in 1918.
Did he know its history? Did Bill realise that eight hundred years before he arrived in this city, its liege-lords had set off on the Crusades to the Middle East, to liberate Jerusalem? Surely he could never have known that a family of Crusaders of this city would eventually settle north of Jerusalem, in the country we now call Lebanon, would intermarry with local Christians to form a Lebanese family which is today the “Douaihy” family? Why, just over a quarter of a century ago, I tried to question the leader of another Lebanese Crusader family, old Sulieman Franjieh— “Franj” comes from “French” and is the Arabic for “foreigner” or even “Westerner”—about his participation in the machine-gun massacre of members of the Douaihy family in the Lebanese town of Zghorta in 1957. They were shot down in a Lebanese church, but old Sulieman refused to discuss this with me. His militiamen fingered their Kalashnikov rifles when I pressed the subject, and so I never discovered what lay behind his cold, French Crusader savagery. In Lebanon, even when challenged by overwhelming Muslim power, the Christians have always fought each other.
And history’s fingers never relax their grip, never leave us unmolested, can touch us even when we would never imagine their presence. Europe and the Middle East, the “West” and the Arab world, are so inextricably entangled that even in modern-day Douai, I can be confronted by my own journalistic story. For in a narrow lane-way opposite the canal, I stop a young man and ask him for directions to the city archives. He promises to help me, tells me we will go to his university to find the address, apologises for his lack of local knowledge because he is—at this point I suddenly recognised his accent as we spoke French—Lebanese. Raymond Haddad was a Lebanese Christian from the Beirut suburb of Ashrafieh, his father a police officer who spent weeks trying to arrange a civil war ceasefire between the Christian Phalangist militia and General Michel Aoun, the messianic Christian Maronite army commander who claimed in 1988 that he was the Lebanese prime minister. I had spent more than two years reporting this absurd, pointless, bloody inter-Christian conflict and here I was, more than 3,000 kilometres away, seeking help from a Lebanese Christian as I tried to walk in my father’s footsteps through a far more terrible, more horrific war. Raymond Haddad listened to Bill’s story— those who have experienced war show understanding of such historical research, if not always a lot of sympathy—and eventually took me to the Hôtel de Ville whose great clock tower dominated many of Bill’s postcards.
A woman in the town hall immediately identified the street with the cross on the pavement that marked Bill’s mess in 1918. The arch in the photograph had been destroyed by Allied bombing in 1944 but it was easy to find the buildings on the right of the picture. They were identical: the balconies, the mock-château steeples on the top, the curve in the pavement, the elaborate stone frames around the windows. Long ago, the authorities had plastered over some gashes in the stonework of the walls—the shrapnel marks of the 1944 bombing that destroyed the arch—but the street was otherwise untouched. I rang the doorbell of number 1606 in the passage. Bill had walked over this doorstep, I told myself. Not the middle-aged Bill I remembered as a child, not the angry old man who would intimidate my mother, but a young Bill who believed in life and happiness and patriotism and, maybe, in love.
I don’t know what I expected to find. Did I think that 2nd Lieutenant Fisk would open the door to me, that a fifty-seven-year-old son would meet his nineteen-year-old father, still wearing the khaki uniform in which he had been photographed at Arras in August of 1918? The door opened—the same door which had led to Bill’s mess—and a small, friendly Frenchman greeted me with suburban politesse, a lawyer, I imagined—I was right—who expressed appropriate but not over-enthusiastic interest in my story. Yes, this was clearly the same house in which Bill’s mess had been located. M. Michel Leroy was an avocat and expressed himself with precision. His wrought-iron balcony, with its lower railing bulging towards the narrow street, was clearly the same as the one in Bill’s postcard. But everything inside had changed. He had remodelled the rooms—which had themselves been internally reconstructed long after the First World War—when he had bought the house eight years ago. His parents now lived in the long, low room where Bill and his fellow junior officers had drunk their pints and smoked their pipes in their mess. M. Leroy looked at my bearded Lebanese friend—who had survived his own war—and then at me—who had survived Raymond’s war and several others—and thanked me formally for my interest in his home.
But why should a citizen of Douai have shown any more sympathy towards me? In the Second World War, British and American air attacks had killed 342 civilians in the town on one night alone, 11 August 1944, and left many ancient buildings—including the school of artillery that Bill had photographed just over a quarter of a century earlier—in ruins. Some of the dead must have been liberated by Bill and his fellow soldiers in 1918, only to be killed by his countrymen twenty-six years later. Bill must have liberated some of the thirteen French Jews of Douai who were deported by the Nazis in 1942. Several of Douai’s citizens were to die under Gestapo torture; the local resistance had been strongly supported by local miners, many of whom were communists.
So what was Bill’s war worth? I asked myself as my TGV slid back towards Paris through the dripping countryside of the Somme. My train crossed the line of the old Western Front, from German-occupied France into British-held France. For four years, tens of thousands of men died to hold these trenches—mere faint waves in the fields today—and my carriage crossed them in just under ten seconds, a hecatomb gone by in a sixth of a minute. And as I sipped black coffee in first class, a tiny British military cemetery zipped past so quickly that I could not read “Their Names Liveth for Evermore” beneath the plain cement cross amid the graves.
My father had always told me that when he died, I would inherit his library, two walls of books in his Maidstone home to which he would constantly refer as the years condemned him. “I always have my books,” he would say. He held all of Churchill’s published work, including a two-volume biography of Marlborough which Churchill—through the intercession of a friend in the National Savings Movement—had signed for Bill. I still from time to time take this book from its shelf. “Winston S. Churchill” signed his name with a fountain pen that has slithered across the page with the same self-confidence as it did when its author wrote his reports of action on the Afghan border, when he initialled the decision to land at Gallipoli in 1915, when he wrote his encomium to the young pilots of the Battle of Britain in 1940. By the time of my father’s death, my own library was much larger than Bill’s—I never told him this, of course—but his vast horde of works on the 1914–18 war and its aftermath was irreplaceable. Some of them would be used as references for this book. The memoirs of Haig and Lloyd George and Allenby—who entered Jerusalem in 1917 only eight months after Maude marched into Baghdad—leaned against weekly picture magazines of the Great War and analyses of the redrawing of the postwar world’s frontiers.
In all, it was to take my father’s generation just twenty-three months to create these artificial borders and the equally artificial nations contained within them. The new state of Great Lebanon was torn from the body of Syria and inaugurated by General Henri Gouraud on 30 August 1920. The constitution of Yugoslavia, the so-called Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, was promulgated on 28 June 1921. And the Anglo-Irish Treaty that partitioned Ireland was signed less than six months later, on 6 December. The League of Nations approved Britain’s Palestine Mandate—incorporating the terms of the Balfour agreement—on 22 July 1922, eleven months after King Feisal, the son of Sherif Hussein, was set up by the British as king of Iraq. And it is, as I often reflect, a grim fact of my own life that my career as a journalist—first in Ireland, then in the Middle East and the Balkans—has been entirely spent in reporting the burning of these frontiers, the collapse of the statelets that my father’s war allowed us to create, and the killing of their peoples. It is still a quaint reflection on the spirit of that age that most of the redrawing of maps and setting up of nations was supposedly done on behalf of minorities, minorities who in almost every case but two—that of the Jews of Mandate Palestine and the Protestants of Northern Ireland—did not want their maps redrawn at all.
Croats and Serbs fell out at once. Fierce sectarian rioting broke out in Ireland while Irish nationalists embarked upon a brutal civil war among themselves. The French destroyed the Arab army of Syria, executed its defence minister and cruelly put down revolts across both Syria and Lebanon. Britain was faced by a nationalist insurrection in Iraq. And by the 1930s, the British in Palestine were fighting a revolt by Arabs incensed that their land was to be divided and given to Jews as a homeland. The promises of independence that T. E. Lawrence had made to the Arabs were of no worth. Lord Balfour’s 1917 declaration on Palestine specifically stated that “His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” with a throwaway addendum that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” In reality, Balfour had no interest in consulting the Arabs of Palestine as to their future. Indeed, the same Lord Balfour took an almost equally complacent—though somewhat more open—attitude towards Northern Ireland. Balfour gave vital cabinet support to Belfast prime minister James Craig’s proposal that, in view of the number of Catholics who might serve in the new Royal Ulster Constabulary, a paramilitary Protestant force should be formed from the old sectarian Ulster Volunteer Force. A sectarian Palestine and a sectarian Northern Ireland, a sectarian Lebanon—founded upon the power of a thin minority of Christian Maronites—and a Syria and an Iraq divided and ruled by sects and tribes, and a Yugoslavia based upon ethnic suspicion: these were among the gifts my father’s war bestowed upon the world.
Even while the conflict was still entombing its generations, the empires— victors and losers-to-be—used their colonial subjects as cannon fodder. Alongside my father on the Somme fought the Indians. Alongside the French at Verdun fought the Algerians and the Moroccans. In the Ottoman armies fought the Syrians and Palestinians and the soon-to-be Lebanese. My Lebanese driver, Abed Moghrabi, would often recall how his father was taken from his marriage only hours after his wedding night to serve in Turkish uniform against Allenby in Palestine. The Somme, where my father spent the last months of the war, had already soaked up the blood of tens of thousands of Catholic Irishmen who had fought and been cut down in British uniforms while their brothers died under British gunfire—or before a British firing squad—in Dublin.68 Padraig Pearse and James Connolly and John McBride—and, yes, Eamon de Valera—all indirectly helped to save Bill Fisk’s life. In the aftermath of their Easter Rising of 1916, my father was sent to Ireland rather than to France, where he might well have died on the first days of the Somme. He was to fight Sinn Fein—the “Shinners”—rather than the “Bosche.” At least for now.
A quarter of a century ago, I travelled with a young Irishwoman to the Belgian city of Ypres, where in stone upon the Menin Gate are inscribed the names of those 54,896 men who fought in the same British army uniform as my father— but whose bodies were never found. They were fighting, they believed, for little Belgium—little Catholic Belgium—which had been invaded by the German armies in 1914. Looking at all those names on the Gate, the young woman was moved by how many of them were Irish. “Why in God’s name,” she asked, “was a boy from the Station House, Tralee, dying here in the mud of Flanders?”
After a few minutes, an elderly man approached, holding a visitor’s book. He asked if she would like to sign it. This was long before an economically powerful and self-confident Irish Republic would face up to the sacrifice its pre-independence soldiers made in British uniform. So my friend looked at the British army’s insignia on the memorial book with considerable distaste. The Crown glimmered on the cover in the evening light. Belgian firemen—as they do every night—were about to play the Last Post within the gaunt interior of the Menin Gate. There was not much time to decide. But my friend could not forget the young man from Tralee. She was facing history, which was not as easy and comforting and comprehensible for her as it can be for those of us who always consider ourselves the winners of wars. In the end, she wrote in the book, in Irish, do thiortha beaga—“for little countries.” How carefully she eased the dead Irish soldier’s desire to help Little Belgium—one of my father’s reasons for going to war— into the memory of a tragedy of another little country, how she was able to conflate Ireland into Flanders without losing the integrity of her own feelings.
I admired her for this. It is easy to sign up for war, to support “the boys,” to editorialise the need to stand up to aggression, invasion, “terrorism,” “evil”—and the First World War was replete with definitions of “evil”—but quite another thing to sign o f on war, to shake free of history’s grasp, of the dead hand which catches us by the arm and reminds us that there is work still to be done, anger to be used up, ferocity to be assuaged, ambitions to be fulfilled, frontiers to be redrawn, states to be created, peoples to be ruled—or destroyed. Thus the First World War and the Gallipoli landings, which helped to provide an excuse for Turkey’s unparalleled genocide against the Armenian people—the first holocaust of the twentieth century—left those same Armenian people abandoned when peace was agreed at Versailles. It did the same to the people of Kurdistan. In Bill’s Great War, we Europeans used chemical weapons for the first time, another development we would bequeath to the Middle East. And how easily do we forget that the West’s first defeat by Islamic arms in the modern age came not at the hands of Arabs but of the Turks, at Gallipoli and at Kut al-Amara in Iraq.
The European superpowers were blind to so many of the realities that they were creating. One is reminded of Lloyd George’s description of Lord Kitchener. “He was like one of those revolving lighthouses,” he wrote, “which radiate momentary gleams of revealing light far out into the surrounding gloom and then suddenly relapse into complete darkness.” For many Britons, the Great War is an addiction, a moment to reflect upon the passing of generations, of pointless sacrifice, the collapse of empire, the war our fathers—or our grandfathers—fought. In my case, it was the war of my father and my great-grandfather. But it was the results of Bill Fisk’s war that sent me to Ireland and Yugoslavia and the Middle East. The victorious mapmakers were not all of one mind. The border of Northern Ireland was a sign of imperial decline, the frontiers of the Middle East a last attempt by Britain and France to hold imperial power. No, Bill could not be blamed for the lies and broken promises and venality of the men of Versailles. But it was his world that shaped mine, the empires of his day that created our catastrophe in the Middle East. His postcards were not the only inheritance passed on to me by my father.
So how much further could I go in my search for Bill’s life amid those gas attacks and shelling and raids mentioned in the war diaries—across the very same no-man’s-land that was portrayed so vividly in the tiny snapshot I had received from my father?
In his battalion war diaries, under the date 10–11 November 1918, my father had written the following: “At 07.30 11th instant message from XVII Corps received via Bde [Brigade] that Hostilities will cease at 11.0 today—line reached at that hour by Advanced troops to remain stationary.” Then, later: “Billets in Louvencourt reached at 18.00 hours.” My father had arrived at the barnlike cabin that was to be his home until the end of the following January. I turned again to the notes my mother had taken from him before he died. “There was a château [at Louvencourt],” he said. “And most of the officers were billeted in the château because the occupants had gone and the junior officers were put in these scruffy little farm houses. I found myself in a derelict cottage and to get into my room, I had to go through a room where an old ‘biddy’ was in bed. Every morning I had to go through her room . . . she was always sitting in bed smoking a pipe.”
I discovered that Bill’s memory could be defective. In the 4th Battalion records is the following: “DUISONS 11 June 1919. 2 companies quelled trouble at Chinese Compound Arras . . . 1 officer and platoon remained as guard.” I suspect that this is the official, censored version of the shooting at the Chinese compound, that the “officer” is my father. Only the date is 1919, not 1918. Bill had got the year wrong.
But he had remembered Louvencourt with great vividness. And one freezing winter’s day, the countryside etched by snow banks and the fields of white military cemeteries, I travelled the little road I had taken with my parents more than forty years earlier, back to Louvencourt on the Somme. I had my mother’s snapshot from the family scrapbook with me, which showed the house where Bill was billeted. Again, I’m not sure what I expected to find there. Someone who remembered him? Unlikely. He had left Louvencourt sixty years earlier. Some clue as to how the young, free-spirited man in the 1918 photograph could have turned into the man I remember in old age, threatening to strike Peggy even when she began to suffer the first effects of Parkinson’s disease, who had grieved her so much that she contentedly watched him go into a nursing home, never visited him there and refused to attend his funeral?
I found the house in Louvencourt, the roof still bent but the wall prettified with new windows and shutters. Unlike Bill in 1956, I knocked on the door. An old French lady answered. She was born in 1920—the same year as Peggy—and could not have known Bill. But she could just remember her very elderly grandmother— my father’s “old biddy”—who lived in the house. There was an old, patterned tile floor in the living-room and it must have been there for a hundred years. Bill Fisk in his hobnailed boots and puttees would have walked through here. At the end of the cold street, past the church, I found the château, half in ruins behind a yellow and red brick wall, and I met the oldest man in the village—he had three front teeth left—who did remember the English soldiers here. Yes, the officers had lived in the château.69 His home had been the infirmary for the battalion. He was six at the time. The English soldiers used to give him chocolates. Maybe, I thought, that’s why he lost his teeth.
I walked back up the road. Opposite the house where my father had spent those cold nights I found another very small British war cemetery. And two of the graves in it were those of men who were shot at dawn by firing squad. Private Harry MacDonald of the 12th West Yorks—the father of three children—was executed here for desertion on 4 November 1916. Rifleman F. M. Barratt of the 7th King’s Royal Rifle Corps was shot for desertion on 10 July 1917. Their graves are scarcely 20 metres from the window of the room in which 2nd Lieutenant Bill Fisk lived. Did he know who they were? Had their graves, so near to him, spoken to his conscience when he was asked to command a firing party and kill an Australian soldier?
From Paris, I called up the Australian archivist in charge of war records in Canberra. No soldiers from Australian regiments were executed in the First World War, he said. The Australians, it seemed, didn’t want Haig’s men shooting their boys at dawn. But when the war ended, two Australians were under sentence of death, one for apparently killing a French civilian. The archivist doubted if this was the man Bill spoke of, but could not be sure. And—it would have pleased my father, I thought—the condemned man was spared. Alas, the truth was far more cruel.
Yet another Independent reader wrote to me, referring to the case of an Australian soldier, an artilleryman serving in the British army, who had indeed been sentenced to death for murder—for killing a British military policeman in Paris, not a French gendarme. His name was Frank Wills and his file was now open at the National Archives in London. Back I went to what was once called the Public Record Office, where the computer bleeper had been replaced by a screen; but when I read that file number WO71/682 was waiting for me, I knew that these papers would contain a part of Bill’s life. If he did not read them, he must have been familiar with their contents. He must have known the story of Gunner Wills.
The story was simple enough, and the trial of No. 253617 Gunner Frank Wills of “X” Trench Mortar Battalion of 50 Division, Royal Field Artillery, was summed up in two typed pages. He had deserted from the British army on 28 November 1918—more than two weeks after the Armistice—and was captured in Paris on 12 March 1919. He and a colleague had been stopped in the Rue Faubourg du Temple in the 11th arrondissement by two British military policemen, Lance Corporals Webster and Coxon. It was the old familiar tale of every deserter. Papers, please. Wills told the British military policemen that his papers were at his hotel at 66 Rue de Malte. All four went to the Hôtel de la Poste so that Wills could retrieve his documents.
According to the prosecution:
the accused and L/Cpl Webster went upstairs. Shortly afterwards two shots were fired upstairs . . . the accused came down and ran out with a revolver in his hand, he was followed by L/Cpl Coxon and fired three shots at him. One of the shots wounded L/Cpl Coxon in the arm slightly. The accused made off . . . but was chased by gendarmes and civilians and arrested. The revolver was taken from him and found to contain five expended cartridges. L/Cpl Webster was found at the top of the stairs, wounded in the chest, abdomen and finger; he was removed to hospital and died three days later . . .
The Australian soldier, the dead policeman, the involvement of French gendarmes, Paris. This must have been the same man whom Bill was ordered to execute. Gunner Wills had joined the Australian army in 1915 at the age of sixteen—he was Bill’s age—and was sent to Egypt, to the Sinai desert and to the Dardanelles. Like Private Dickens, Gunner Wills took part in Churchill’s doomed expedition to Gallipoli. He too fought the Ottoman Turks. But in 1916 he had been sent to hospital suffering from “Egyptian fever”—which left him with mental problems and lapses of memory. The prosecution at his court martial did not dispute this. Frank Wills was discharged from the Australian army in 1917, then travelled to England and—a grim reflection, this, on the desperation of the British army at this stage of the war—was allowed to enlist in the Royal Artillery in April 1918. He arrived in France before Bill Fisk. Unlike Bill, however, nineteen-year-old Frank Wills was already a veteran.
Wills, according to his own defence, had been drinking. “He came to Paris for a spree . . . Had no breakfast on 12th March, 1919 . . . He was not drunk, but getting on that way. Does not remember whether he fired at L/Cpl. Coxon or not. He knew the revolver was loaded, and had been loaded since November 1918.” A sad, eight-page handwritten testimony signed with an almost decorative “F Wills” explained how the two British military policemen asked him if he was carrying a pass to be in Paris and how, when he arrived with them at his hotel,
I rushed up the stairs to my room. I found the door of the room locked. Within a few seconds I heard someone coming upstairs. I had my great coat over my arm at the time. In a pocket of the great coat I had a revolver with six rounds. The revolver was issued to me by my unit . . . I took the revolver out of my pocket in order to hide it under the carpet on the landing. I did not want to be arrested with a revolver in my possession as I had a large amount of money on me and I had been playing crown and anchor. I thought a more serious charge would be brought against me in consequence. Scarcely had I taken my revolver out of my pocket when someone came up the stairs . . . This person rushed at me and I then saw it was Cpl Webster. No conversation passed. Cpl Webster had me by the right wrist. I was frightened and excited and in wrenching my wrist the revolver went off twice. Cpl Webster then let go my wrist and gave me a blow on the head and knocked me down the stairs. I was stunned by the blow on the head . . . I found the revolver lying on the stairs in front of me. I picked up the revolver. I was under the impression that Cpl Webster was following me down the stairs. I was bewildered and greatly excited. When I reached the street I heard one shot go off as I reached the pavement. I do not remember what happened after that until I was arrested.
Wills’s testimony was that of a very young and immature man. “When I left my unit,” he wrote, “I had no intention of remaining away. I met some of my friends and they persuaded me to come away for a spree. I eventually got to Paris. I intended to go back to my unit after seeing Paris: there was very little work being done at the time and things were rather slow. I got mixed up with bad company and had been gambling and drinking heavily . . .” Wills was to repeat this admission of his drinking problems in his last testimony. He claimed he still suffered from memory lapses. He had no pass to be in Paris and had returned to his hotel room to get his belongings. The two shots had been fired because Corporal Webster had “wrenched” his wrist. After his arrest, he wrote, French police had driven him away in a taxi and only after one of the policemen had hit him with a bayonet had his memory returned. “I was not drunk but was getting on that way. The deficiency in memory is brought on by drink . . .” It was not difficult to picture the young man, drunk, desperate, slowly realising the terrible fate that might await him. And again, I wanted to see this place, if it still existed, the hotel, the stairs, the second floor where Wills had fatally wounded the British military policeman, the street where Wills was arrested by the gendarme.
I fly back to France yet again. The Rue de Malte remains, a narrow one-way street cut in two by a boulevard, still home to a clutch of small, cheap hotels. And incredibly, No. 66 is still a hotel, no longer the Hôtel de la Poste, now the Hôtel Hibiscus. What on earth can I find here? The receptionist is Algerian and I ask for a second-floor room, nearest the stairs, the room in which Wills stayed. The hotel has been many times modernised, its walls flock-papered; there is a television in the lobby that is tuned to a football match with a commentary in Arabic. But the staircase is original, along with its ornate banisters and big iron knuckles, the kind installed in so many French houses in the late nineteenth century.
I tell the Algerian why I have come here and he suddenly bombards me with questions. Why did Wills come to Paris? Why did he shoot the military policeman? His name is Safian and he tells me that for his university degree in Algiers he studied the effect on children of a massacre at a village called Bentalha. Bentalha. I know that name. I have been there. I have seen the blood of a baby splashed over a balcony in Bentalha, a baby whose throat had been slit by young men who killed hundreds of civilians in the village in 1997. The Algerian government blamed Islamists for the slaughter. But I had always suspected that the Algerian army was involved. I repeat this to Safian. “I have heard this,” he replies. “There is much to clear up about this massacre. I had a friend, he said the military were there and they advanced and they stayed just short of where the massacre was taking place. They did nothing. Why? I cannot say too much. Remember, I am an Algerian.” I remember. I remember the villagers who survived. They said the same thing to me, that the Algerian army refused to come to their rescue.
Like the sudden meeting with the young Lebanese man in Douai, the Middle East reaches out again. The fear of an Algerian—of his country, of his government—is present in this cheap hotel lobby in Paris. The killing of a soldier here more than eighty years ago is a safer subject. I translate Wills’s testimony for Safian. He cannot understand why Wills shot Corporal Webster when he would have received a lesser charge for desertion. I climb the stairs twice. It only takes fifteen seconds to reach the second floor. When I run up the staircase, I reach it in five seconds—the length of time it must have taken Corporal Webster. Wills would have had no time to conceal his gun—if he intended to. The second floor is only 5 metres square. Here Frank Wills struggled with Webster and left him lying in his blood on the floor. I walk into Room 22, nearest the stairs, Wills’s room, the last place he slept in freedom before his death. Here he kept his great coat and his service revolver. He had been drinking on the morning of 12 March 1919, probably in this room. Punch, cognac and “American grog,” he had told the court. There had been an American soldier staying in the hotel who fled after the shooting. No one ever found out his identity. Was there an army mafia at work here? Who was running the gambling dens, providing the drinks? Who gave Wills the money he was found to be carrying—6,640 French francs in notes and ten gold Louis coins?
I sit on my bed in Wills’s room and read again through his testimony, this young man whom my father was ordered to kill, his last words written to spare his life.
I am 20 years of age. I joined the Australian Army in 1915 when I was 16 years of age. I went to Egypt and the Dardanelles. I have been in a considerable number of engagements there, & in France. I joined the British Army in April 1918 and came to France in June 1918. I was discharged from the Australian Army on account of fever which affected my head contracted in Egypt. I was persuaded to leave my unit by my friends and got into bad company. I began to drink and gamble heavily. I had no intention whatever of committing the offences for which I am now before the Court . . . I ask the Court to take into consideration my youth and to give me a chance of leading an upright and straightforward life in the future.
I could see how this must have affected Bill Fisk. Wills was not only the same age—he had been sent to France only two months before Bill arrived on the Somme. Wills had not deserted in time of war. But he had killed a British military policeman. I remember how Bill believed in the law, justice, courts, magistrates, policemen.
I walk out of the Paris hotel into the soft summer night. To the left is the street in which the two military policemen asked Wills and his colleague for their papers. A little further is the street called “Rue Albert” in the British documents—it is the Rue Albert Thomas—in which Wills was grabbed by the French gendarme and pushed into a taxi and—according to Wills—struck by a bayonet. By then, he had forfeited his life.
The Court Martial summary states that Wills was “sentenced to suffer death”; he was taken to the British base at Le Havre on the French coast on 24 May. Bill was based there in May 1919—he took two snapshots of the camp, one of them with a church-tower in the background—and was present when Wills arrived. In the British archives, I had turned to the final record of his execution with something approaching fear. Bill had spoken of his refusal to command the firing party. I believed him then. But the journalist in me, the dark archivist that dwells in the soul of every investigative reporter, needed to check. I think that Bill’s son needed to know that his father did not kill Frank Wills, to be sure, to be absolutely certain that this one great act was real.
And there was the single scrap of paper recording Wills’s death. Shot by firing squad. “Sentence carried out 0414 hours 27th May,” it read. The signature of the officer commanding was not in my father’s handwriting. The initials were “CRW.” A note added that “the execution was carried out in a proper and humane manner. Death was instantaneous.” Was it so? Is death really instantaneous? And what of Wills in those last minutes, in the seconds that ticked by between four o’clock and 4:14 a.m., how did a man of only twenty feel in those last moments, in the dark in northern France, perhaps with a breeze off the sea? Did Bill hear the shots that killed him? At least his conscience was clear.
Bill Fisk was born 106 years ago but still remains an enigma for me. Was the French woman with whom he picnicked a girl who might have made his life happy, who might have prevented him returning on the Boulogne boat to Liverpool eighty-six years ago, to his life of drudgery in the treasurer’s office and his first, loveless marriage? Was she perhaps the real reason why he volunteered to stay on in France after the war?
The Great War destroyed the lives of the survivors as well as the dead. By chance, in the same Louvencourt cemetery close to Bill’s old billet lies the grave of Roland Leighton, the young soldier whose grief-stricken fiancée, Vera Brittain, was to write Testament of Youth, that literary monument to human loss. Perhaps the war gave my father the opportunity to exercise his freedom in a way he never experienced again, an independence that society cruelly betrayed. His medals, when I inherited them, included a Defence medal for 1940, an MBE and an OBE for postwar National Savings work, and two medals from the Great War. On one of them are the dates 1914–1919, marking not the Armistice of November 1918, but the 1919 Versailles Treaty which formally ended the conflict and then spread its bloody effect across the Middle East. This is the medal that bears the legend “The Great War for Civilisation.”
In Peggy’s last hours in 1998, one of her nurses told me that squirrels had got into the loft of her home and destroyed some family photographs. I climbed into the roof to find that, although a few old pictures were missing, the tin box containing my father’s Great War snapshots was safe. But as I turned to leave, I caught my head a tremendous blow on a roof-beam. Blood poured down my face and I remember thinking that it was Bill’s fault. I remember cursing his name. I had scarcely cleaned the wound when, two hours later, my mother died. And in the weeks that followed, a strange thing happened; a scar and a small dent formed on my forehead—identical to the scar my father bore from the Chinese man’s knife.
From the afterlife, Bill had tried to make amends. Amid the coldness I still feel towards him, I cannot bring myself to ignore the letter he left for me, to be read after his death. “My dear Fellah,” he wrote:
I just want to say two things to you old boy. First—thank you for bringing such love, joy and pride to Mum and me. We are, indeed, most fortunate parents. Second—I know you will take the greatest possible care of Mum, who is the kindest and best woman in the world, as you know, and who has given me the happiest period of my life with her continuous and never failing love. With a father’s affection—King Billy.