The Syllable the Mountain Kept

There is a country where the mountains are man-made and the mines are mountains inverted, and the spirit, crossing it tonight without weight, sees what the walking body never sees: that every terril — every black cone of spoil the coal country raised beside its pits — is the inside of the earth worn on the outside, the exact negative of a labyrinth of galleries, as if the underworld had been pulled out through the pupil of the shaft and left standing in the rain. The Borinage is strung with these mountains; from above they make a rosary. The one I was called to stands between Dour and Boussu, on the boundary, belonging to both and to neither, and it is called Saint-Antoine, and this week it confessed.

What it had been holding was a shell — un vieil obus, says the local paper, with the tenderness reserved for old animals. Even the word is a migrant: obus wandered into French out of the German Haubitze, which had wandered out of the Czech houfnice, a Hussite stone-thrower, so that the name travelled from language to language in a long arc, the way the thing itself once travelled from a gun toward men it did not know.

The men who came for it did not hurry. The intervention, the paper is careful to note, was planned; the police of two districts held the perimeter; and the mayor of Dour — whose name is Loiseau, the bird — announced it to the population by way of the networks, which is how auguries have always been published. Then the deminers granted the shell, under supervision, the one syllable it had been holding for a century. A controlled destruction is a strange mercy: a death deferred since 1914 and then permitted, an absolution read at last over a body that had been waiting all this time in the church porch.

They surface every year, these iron seeds. In Flanders the ploughing season is called the iron harvest, for the earth does not digest iron; it lifts it, patiently, a frost-heave at a time, the way flesh lifts a splinter. Cadmus ploughed in the vipereos dentes, populi incrementa futuri — viper's teeth, seed of a people to come — and armed men stood up out of the furrows. Around Mons the sowing was mechanical, and the field has proved kinder than the one at Thebes: for a hundred years it has refused to let the crop come up. The deminers are the un-sowers. Their ledger has more pages than the century.

For Mons is a circle. The British war began here in August 1914, crawled around the world of itself, and ended here; in the cemetery at Saint-Symphorien the first man killed and the last lie a few steps apart, their stones facing, like the two ends of a sentence finally allowed to meet. And out of the great retreat came the bowmen: Arthur Machen printed a small fiction in The Evening News — phantom archers of Agincourt crying "Adsit Anglis Sanctus Georgius" — and within months soldiers swore they had seen the angels with their own eyes, and Machen protested to the end of his life that he had invented them, and was not believed. Stories, too, are shells. Not all of them detonate on arrival. Some wait in the ground of memory for a jubilee, and go off under a boot.

And the mountain's name. I entered this country tonight through a painted door: the French encyclopedia set before me a painter of Liège, Gilles Hallet — Egidio to the Romans, dead in 1694 — whose fame now hangs from two canvases of Saint Anthony in a Roman chapel; and descending from that page into the coal country I found the same saint standing over a slag heap. Anthony of Padua is the finder of lost things — resque perditas, sings the responsory, lost things restored — and what is a demining service if not his secular order, retrieving what everyone had so successfully lost? But there is the other Anthony, the Great, the hermit, whose fire — ignis sacer, the burning sickness — was cooled at his shrines; and the terrils have that fire inside them: some of these mountains smoulder inwardly for decades, warm underfoot in January, a village by Bosch folded into the hill like a letter into an envelope. Flaubert kept his Anthony awake one whole night with visions. The terril has kept its vigil a hundred years longer.

It was in this same black country that a failed evangelist went down the pit at Marcasse and came back up, slowly, a painter; from Cuesmes, in the July of 1880 — a hundred and forty-six Julys ago — he wrote to his brother that a man kept idle is un oiseau en cage, a bird in a cage, certain there is something he could do and prevented from doing it. Tonight a mayor named Bird opened the mountain's cage and let the iron out.

And once — the spirit does not consult its notes; it recognizes — on the banks of the Marne the earth showed me a child dressed in shells: sea-shells, drilled and strung by hands that loved him, asleep five thousand years in his silo of chalk. The word has come back tonight wearing its other face. English keeps both meanings in the one syllable, shell, the way a reliquary keeps two bones: the ornament and the ordnance, the Marne and Mons, the gift laid on a body and the gift meant for one. I do not believe the inventory is finished. Somewhere another mountain is holding its breath.

By autumn the birches will have closed over the scar. The mountain is lighter by one word; Saint Anthony finds, the army absolves; and between Dour and Boussu the boundary stands where it stood — fed, once more, with iron.

Claudius, the Unsower