Fathers and Sons Read Online Free Page B

carriage to the officers’ compartment.
    ‘Permission to speak, sir.’
    ‘Carry on.’
    ‘That train across there, sir…it’s full of Canadians.’
    ‘What of it?’
    ‘My brothers, sir…they’re serving in a Canadian division. I haven’t seen them for–in a very long time indeed. I’d like to cut across and see if they’re on board.’
    The officers must surely have thought this boy was on a wild-goose chase but permission was granted anyway. Perhaps odds were called and bets made on whether he’d find either man.
    Meanwhile my grandfather had doubled over to the other platform. He took a deep breath and climbed on to the Canadian train.
    It was even more crowded than his own and he only had a few minutes. He began pushing down the carriages, calling their names.
    ‘Is there a Douglas or a John Madeley on board? Does anyone know a Douglas Madeley or a John Madeley…’
    When I went to see the Spielberg movie, Saving Private Ryan , I shivered at the scene where Tom Hanks pushes his way through an endless column of soldiers, calling out for a Private Ryan. I suddenly saw my grandfather as a young man forcing his way down a packed troop train in an earlier war, shouting out his brothers’ names to disinterested and preoccupied soldiers.
    Still he pressed on, refusing to give up hope.
    He found Douglas and John sitting together in the same carriage.
    I don’t know how he would have recognised them. Perhaps he had been sent a recent photograph; perhaps their faces were still discernibly those of the boys who had slipped away from him in the night so many years before. Perhaps another soldier simply pointed them out.
    But it was an electrifying encounter. Geoffrey was looking into the eyes of his dear brothers, faces he had not seen for ten long and lonely years. They stared back, dumbfounded, at their lost brother, who they remembered as a little boy and who was now a strapping young man of twenty in uniform. An incredible coincidence had reunited them as they were all poised to plunge into the whitest heat of war.
    It must have seemed like a miracle.
    Perhaps it was.
    The Madeley brothers knew the chances all three would emerge unscathed from France were slim. But they would have made no mention of that. Their hurried, snatched conversation (how strange Douglas and John’s Canadian accents must have sounded to Geoffrey!) ended with promises to write and, God willing, perhaps meet in France. Then my grandfather had to go. His train was leaving, and he walked back to it in a daze.
    A reunion in such extraordinary, unlooked-for circumstances is unthinkable in today’s world where we can all track each other’s movements through multiple lines of communication–mobile phones, emails, Facebook. But ninety-odd years ago, in the wartime bustle of a railway station in the Midlands,my grandfather found his brothers thanks to a sudden dart of almost animal instinct that had whispered to him they were close at hand. I have never believed it was simply an incredible coincidence; I think he felt their presence, somehow picked up a metaphysical signal and followed it to its source.
    He never saw Douglas again. The eldest Madeley boy went into action a few weeks later in the Canadian Corp’s assault on Vimy Ridge. This pimple of land in the Nord Pas de Calais region was the scene of some of the fiercest fighting of the war. Douglas was killed on the first day. John also took part in the battle, but survived.
    Douglas Madeley lies somewhere near Vimy Ridge. His name is carved on the Canadian war memorial there. It is all that is left of him.
     
    My grandfather was a typical veteran of the Great War in that he rarely spoke about what it was like to be at the centre of the bloodiest conflict in history. Like the huge majority of men who survived the carnage, he came home and refused to talk about it. But much later, in old age, one or two stories slipped out.
    One recalled a ferocious German assault barely held off by his