The Professor and Other Writings Read Online Free

busy taking photos of the photos and smiling delightedly.
    We passed next through a kind of garage with rusty stuff piled all around: shell casings, barbed wire, rotting Sam Browne belts, a pair of ludicrous French shop dummies gaily attired in mismatched officers’ uniforms. Then on out to the display trenches, snaking off into the woods behind the building. These had a neat, generic, recently packed-down aspect, the corrugated iron supports looking as if they’d just come from the Lille DIY store. Not much to see really,once you’d peered down into them or clambered in—as Bridget briefly did—so we went back in the house and down the other side of the exhibit room. Here was further war debris: ammunition boxes, ancient bully-beef tins and, jarringly, some bits of Nazi regalia and Hitler junk (a blotted letter to him at the front from his grandmother). I knew Hitler had fought—valiantly—in a Bavarian infantry regiment near the Messines Ridge, but this part of the show seemed nonetheless a mite too enthusiastic. A big dusty swastika banner, sorely in need of dry-cleaning, was draped in a corner, like a prop from the Hall of the Grail scene in Syberberg’s postmodern Parsifal.
    But they saved the best till last. Zhose ughly girls get snooquered Beeg Time! Along the far wall by the exit was a long wooden work desk with five or six seats attached, rather like a junior high school science class setup. Mounted at each seat was a beautiful old-fashioned viewing machine—a kind of antique stereopticon—made of brass and polished wood, with a double eyepiece and hand crank. It was all too exquisite and Proustian to resist. Like silent film cameramen, Bridget and I took our seats and eagerly began to crank.
    Yet hellish indeed what assailed us. Trench-pix again, in lots of twenty, but now eternally fixed in a lurid, refulgent, Miltonic 3-D. Sickening and brain-twisting. A clicking, clacking kaleidoscope of atrocities. Don’t forget the vertigo. Even as I sat and stared I felt myself lurching forward, into the bright intolerable sunshine of some ruinous as usual summer day in 1917. The light itself was a somatic wedge tilting one into the past. The cerebellum went walkabout.
    Granted, the light preserved in old photographs can be unnerving at the best of times. I have a picture in one of my books of Mahler and Richard Strauss stepping out into bright sunlight after a matinee of Salomé in Graz in 1906. The Old World sun glinting off the side of Mahler’s polished shoe, the sharp edge of Strauss’s boater, the geometric shadows thrown onto the wall behind them: these teleport one instantly into the scene. You start remembering what the day waslike. But here the illusion of reality was fearsomely, even fiendishly intensified. The febrile glare, conjoined with the stereoscopic depth of field, equaled My God They’re Right There. A corpse with flies. A headless body upside down in the sand. Two skulls on a battlefield midden. An obscure something or other in feldgrau . I got up in disgust after seeing yet another moribund horse, its intestines spilled out and glistening.
    In the weeks and months that followed, nothing made very much sense. (After a surreal shopping spree at the vast Eurostar mall outside Calais, Bridget and I got back to Herne Hill without incident.) I confess I was moody. I was on sabbatical; I should have been happy. But I maundered and malingered. On the flight home to San Francisco I stopped for the weekend in Chicago to see Blakey. She politely admired the absurd keychain I’d brought her from Flanders: a laminated reproduction of a 1914 recruiting poster. A cadre of shrewish females exhorting their unfortunate men, “Women of Britain Say—Go!” (I myself had a plastic, finger-pointing Kitchener, the brave homo-warlord bristling like a 1980s Castro Street clone.) We took my photos of Tyne Cot and Franvillers to be developed at the Walgreens on