I’m holding a letter, dated August 26th1918.
It is dashed off at haste, probably late at night, and would have been delivered to an address in London in a black lined envelope a couple of days later. The ink is faded and smudged.
Dear Mrs Gull
I very much regret to tell you that Frank was killed yesterday evening. He was hit by a machine gun bullet in the head, and the only words that he spoke were ‘give my love to my wife’. The attack was held up, and Frank rushed forward, and led them on, and I have no hesitation in saying that it was due to his initiative and quick appreciation of the situation that the village was taken. This is a small consolation to you, but I should like you to know how perfectly magnificent his example of fearless bravery was, and I cannot tell you with what great admiration he was looked on by every officer and man in the battalion. He was admired and loved as a soldier by everyone.
We brought back his body last night and he was buried in a little Rifle Brigade cemetery at Achiet le Grand, with a brother officer, and 18 brother riflemen.
Eastes tells me he has written you. He is quite broken hearted.
Frank will live for ever in the memory of the regiment
Yours sincerely
R. Mostyn Owen.
*
A year later, she stood by his French grave in the moonlight, and wrote:
‘Dusk has slipped into night and the moon is rising. The stillness is absolutely intense, as if the earth was spellbound. There is no movement in all the desolate land- but there is a most majestic grandeur and a deep repose- a sense of great content. Here and there where the moonlight touches them, the cross on a soldier’s grave stands out, the only feature in all the uniformity of waste. They seem to say ‘Behold this Peace, the heart of life beats here- even life’s intolerable griefs and anguishes show themselves small. Something infinitely greater, something altogether real is here.’
For all the calm words, she would still be beside herself with sadness for another five years, all her life, really.
*
Ninety years later, I stood by the same grave with her young great-grandchildren, my own sons.
I had found all the details of Frank’s fighting patrol from reports and from the regimental museum, and had re-enacted it in slow time with my family. We got to a particular tree in an old orchard at Favreuil and knew, from the line of fire from the village church tower where the machine gun nest had been, that this was precisely where he had fallen. After all, I had been a soldier, too, a lifetime later, and it was pretty clear to me where he would have taken cover before that one, final, fatal assault. Then we walked slowly, and wordlessly, back through the heat of the summer’s afternoon to the graveyard, at Achiet-le-Grand and said our little words to him, and thought our private thoughts.
Betty had remarried in 1925, and had raised a family of her own with one of Frank’s brother officers- my grandfather- who, sadly, she never really forgave for not being Frank. They ploughed on dutifully, but it was still Frank’s picture, not Bill’s, on her dressing room table when we were led up to say our farewells to her all those years later.
*
We can think about trenches, and guns, and gas, and tanks, and horses, and graves, and wilderness, and bodies and shattered trees, and so we should.
But each Remembrance, I find myself thinking of Betty, too, the cold and formal grandmother who, as a young boy, I would do anything to avoid visiting. And all the other Betty’s out there.
I didn’t get it then. But I do now.
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