Gabriella

When I think of those woods, and that hill in the moonlight, I see the mess and chaos left behind in the evening after the battle that took place there, many years before the little girl was born. Nanny Anna’s stories often included references to this battle, and to soldiers, and to the wars that seem to have been the constant backdrop to the lives of the people in the village and in the towns and cities in the widening circle beyond the confines of the village stories.

Dead soldiers. Dead horses. Wounded men, smashed carts and cannon, and abandoned equipment litter the dark fields and the grassy slopes and the fringes of the woods.

I imagine the moonlight picking out the pale wood of severed branches, and glinting on pools of [thick/coagulated] blood that hasn’t yet drained into the soil. There are white breeches and dark uniform coats, shattered wheels, muskets and pikes half-hidden in the rough grass and the crop [?] fields, and – always – the young soldier, his head untidily bandaged, pouring water onto the lips and moustache of a dying comrade who’s leaning back against some empty cannon shot boxes. The young soldier’s face is grave but resolute as he looks down at his [comrade’s] face, as if he were trying to keep the older man alive through sheer seriousness and force of will alone.

I always thought that if the young soldier softened the intensity of his gaze the older soldier would slip away to the land of death, which I imagined to be a smoke-wreathed replica of this nighttime battlefield, haunted by abandoned, voiceless soldiers, by wolves and battlefield scavengers in human form, and by horrible things that crawled and chewed and burrowed into [exposed/bare] flesh [especially at the throat, at the collar??].

The soldier’s efforts are fruitless in the end. The veteran soldier dies, eyes wide open in the moonlight and chin still wet from the last choke-spilled mouthful of water, far from home and unknown to his family.

The young soldier straightens up, feeling the tension in his head and the back of his legs for the first time. The moon is high and nearly full, and he can look out over the gently sloping land and its clutter of battle detritus, seeing the clumped shapes and their skirts of shadow. Away to the east, glittering in the moonlight, a twist of metalled road makes a silvery S against the [matt] fields. As the wounded and the dying groan under the moon and animals snuffle around the bodies of the dead, he feels a cool breeze against his cheek, and he thinks of home.

[Gabriella now? Or back then? Or is this Anna’s memory/story? Who knows…?]
He remembers a blue jug on a thick wooden table in front of a window, backlit with buttery yellow light. There’s a blackbird whistling its characteristic fluting tune in the vegetable garden beyond the window. This summer afternoon moment is the soldier’s recurrent memory of his childhood. He can step back into the cool, shadowed [pantry??] of the cottage kitchen, his shoulder blades [angular and protuberant – tender??] against his coarse [linen? Poor cloth…] shirt, leaning back against the rough plaster, his fingertips brushing over the familiar pocks and lumps on the wall.

He can step forwards into the kitchen proper, look left, and see his mother, grey-skirted and white-bodiced [?], her hair secured under a white cap, kneading dough, with a dusting of flour up to her elbows and little globules of dough on her cheeks and forehead where she’s wiped away the sweat with her forearms.