It was a Sunday morning when I arrived at Maubeuge railway station, one of
those half-awake Sunday mornings that make provincial France so seductive. I
had brought some prejudices and preconceptions with me: this was the
industrial north; smoke, I expected, factories, grimy industrial streets. I
found nothing of the kind. The place was full of sunlight; flowers hung in
pots; there was a smell of honeysuckle on the air, and the River Sambre ran
through the centre of town, and pleasure boats were moored to its banks.
Two years before urging Modestine, the immortal donkey, across the Cevennes,
Robert Louis Stevenson paddled a canoe from Maubeuge to Pont-oise, along the
Sambre and the River Oise. I was all set to follow him along the towpaths on
a mountain bike; so at nine that Monday morning, I coasted down a gravel
slope and came to the canal.
The path was deserted; not a fisherman, not a barge. I passed under the walls
of a dead factory or two, one pink, one in black and brown; industrial
architecture whose sad, broken windows stared at me. But, in a while, the
track widened and became covered with soft, springy grass. A lazy heron took
off, grey against the green, haughty, an aristocrat of a bird.
At Hautmont, the towpath climbed to a bridge, and I was suddenly in the main
street of a small town. A man was walking his dog, and three women came out
of the baker's. "After Hautmont," wrote Stevenson, "we went through a
delectable land, the river wound among low hills ... On either side were
meadows and orchards, bordered with a margin of sedge and water flowers ..."
I bowled along, and all was a luminous green, and trees grew in beautiful
shapes, and the cows made congregations in their shade. There were water
meadows, more herons rising and the sun glittering through an early mist.
"Everything was drenched in the scents of summer, the hedgerows were full of
perfumes, the riverside meadows were full of the sweetness of new-mown hay."
At Sassegnies, the lock house was all flower-bedecked and, beside it, more
flowers and the week's laundry were vying to be the brightest colours in the
garden. In the surrounding fields, the poplars shimmered like distant
steeples in a mirage. And there sat two ancient fishermen, "stupefied with
pleasure", statues, saints in green niches, like figures on some magic clock
made to register not time but contentment.
I was in the saddle the next day before the sun had risen much above the
horizon. The waters of the Sambre were like smoke, the reflections of the
trees faint and ghostly. Moorhens rushed to the far bank as I passed and the
mist rolled in from the fields, dripping steadily from the trees, making a
noise like half-hearted rain, all the way to Landrecies.
When Stevenson passed this way, it was only six years after the defeat of the
French in the Franco-Prussian war, and Landrecies was a heavily defended
garrison town. Now, there is little left of its military past, and even the
extensive barracks are empty and silent. The barbed wire has rusted away and
weeds have burst through the ground where conscripts once stamped their feet
and shouldered arms.
I stopped there to visit the small supermarket, purchasing a picnic and half a
bottle of wine -something of quality for a very special purpose. A mile
farther on, I followed the towpath through a left-hand bend, and the tiled
rooftops of the village of Ors came into sight. The chimes of midday echoed
across the fields and I dismounted. I was standing on the long, straight
stretch of canal where Wilfred Owen was killed.
Sitting on the bank, in the green shade by the green water, were two
fishermen, quiet in an endless calm where shells and bullets and bodies and
blood had been, and where one of our most gifted poets had lost his life,
only a week before the armistice was signed. "It's a lot quieter here now,"
said one of the men, and gazed at his float where it stood steady in the
still water.
The main alley of the village cemetery is lined with family tombs. At the far
end from the gate stands a tall cross, and to the right of it are 62 plain
white tombstones with the names of those who died at Ors, most of them on
that same day -November 4, 1918. In the left-hand corner, three from the
end, three red roses in bloom, lies Wilfred Owen, MC, dead at 25. Beyond the
wall, an empty field stretched back to the village and its church. I was
alone, so I read the poem I'd brought with me, With an Identity Disc, then
poured the wine over the ground, into the grave.
But let my death be memoried on this disc.
