23
You see, but you do not observe.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Scandal in Arms, Sherlock Holmes speaking
I chose a café for my next meeting with Peter van Diemen. It spooked me to think of sharing a glass of wine in our home with someone who, however much provoked, had beaten a woman to death.
The prejudice was irrational, I knew. Of the many people we’d entertained over the years, a few no doubt had blood on their hands. But they’d killed in war, not, as Peter had, in the heat of domestic argument. A uniform made all the difference—that thought was running through my head as I stepped out of the August heat and into the cool.
From a table next to a window opening onto rue de Seine, Peter raised his head. I sat down opposite. We solemnly shook hands. With that very hand. . .
“Had any luck?” I asked hurriedly.
“Well . . . I did discover a few things.”
This was no surprise. The more obscure the subject, the more there rises from its experts the unvoiced cry, “Use me!”
Reaching under the table, he took something from an open briefcase and placed it between us: a dark blue concertina file, half filled with papers, and neatly labeled on the front “Baxter, William Archie.”
“All that?”
It surprised him that I was surprised. “Oh, there’s more. I just couldn’t carry it all.”
“I’m astonished.”
“Why? The Australian archives are very thorough.”
“Even so, I never expected . . . from just those few documents . . .” Who would have thought the old man had so much blood in him?
“A document can be very revealing, and a photograph even more.” He slid out the portrait of Archie and Stella.
“For instance?”
“The uniform, for a start. His tunic, the boots, the cap, the puttees. . . .” He pointed to the thick woolen bandages wound around his calves. “These tell us he was infantry, not cavalry, artillery, or signals. The records confirm this. His battalion, the Thirtieth, was entirely foot soldiers. Mainly in supply or reserve.”
“What about the slouch hat we found?”
Descriptions of the Australian Light Horse charge at Beersheba in 1917, the last cavalry charge in military history, made me wonder if Archie might have been one of General Harry Chauvel’s “forty thousand horsemen.”
“Ah, yes. The hat. ” Peter leafed through the papers in the concertina file and extracted a sheet. “The assistant curator of heraldry and technology acquisitions at the War Memorial. Very sound chap. He sent me details of the items you deposited with them: a hat, a pistol, some ammunition . . .” He read for a moment. “Hat size, 61/8 inches. So it couldn’t have belonged to your grandfather.”
“Why not?”
“Too small. You can see from the photograph. He was a big man. That’s probably why he’s wearing a cap. They issued those when they had no hats in the correct size. Big sizes ran out first. No, the hat wasn’t his.”
“What about the pistol then?”
“I’m afraid not.” He consulted the memo from the War Memorial. “ ‘The Dreyse semi-automatic pistol captured by Private William Archie Baxter. . . .’ I know the Dreyse. I have one, in fact. It’s a German gun, 9.65 mm, issued to officers. It made a good souvenir because it was small. You could hide it in the bottom of a kit bag, under the dirty clothes. Nobody dug down that far.”
So Archie was a scavenger, a ratter. It seemed that every serviceman was a pilferer. All the same . . .
“Did you find out anything about his actual service?”
“A great deal, as it happens. The Medical Corps also kept good records.”
The Medical Corps! “So he was wounded? In the family there’s a tradition that he might have been gassed.”
Of all weapons, gas was the most insidious. According to one account, “the skin of victims of mustard gas blistered, their eyes became very sore and they began to vomit. Mustard gas caused internal and external bleeding and attacked the bronchial tubes, stripping off the mucous membrane. Fatally injured victims sometimes took four or five weeks to die.” Novelist Vera Brittain, who worked as a nurse, wrote, “I wish those people who talk about going on with this war whatever it costs could see the soldiers suffering from mustard gas poisoning. Great mustard-coloured blisters, blind eyes, all sticky and stuck together, always fighting for breath, with voices a mere whisper, saying that their throats are closing and they know they will choke.”
But Peter shook his head impatiently. “Gassing? No, nothing like that at all.”
Archie’s stature was diminishing before my eyes, like a sand castle eroded by the tide.
“His legs, then?” I said. “Everyone agreed he never walked easily again after the war. He must have suffered some kind of injury.”
“Now that is possible.”
Peter extracted a pink sheet from his file, headed “Casualty Form Active Service.” I remembered it. The mixture of typed entries and variously readable handwriting, in colored inks that had differentially faded, had baffled me. Obviously he had more luck. Or maybe he just tried harder.
“This is your grandfather’s entire medical history.” He ran down the list with a pencil.
“ ‘Debarked from S.S. Ceramic Plymouth 21 November 1916.’ Well, you knew that. Then the following day, ‘Marched into Codford.’ Codford was a transit camp on Salisbury Plain. Most new arrivals didn’t have much military experience, so they’d have drilled there for a few weeks and got used to army discipline. ‘30 December Proceeded O/seas France SSO Princess Clementine.’ The Princess Clementine always sailed from Folkestone in Kent; hundreds of thousands of troops crossed the Channel on her. ‘6 January 1917. T.O.S’—that’s ‘taken on strength’—at Etaples. It means your grandfather was accepted for service in the front line.”
“So where did they post him?”
“Well . . . as a matter of fact, nowhere.”
“Nowhere?”
“Not literally. But nowhere in military terms. On January 27 he was admitted to hospital in Etaples and on February 10 evacuated back to England.”
“He was wounded in camp?”
“No, not wounded. You said he had problems with his legs. That’s correct. But it wasn’t related to combat. He was suffering from varicose veins.”