IN FLANDERS FIELDS
A single eye glares up at me out of the skull that has been yanked from the uncaring clutches of the airless mud. I step back; the eye follows me, Mona Lisa-like. It will not release me. The photo folder wavers in my guide Martial’s hand, but I focus, stare fixedly at the flap of calcified eyeball – miraculously intact after a couple of generations entombed – as if I can somehow conjure a portal into early last century, to witness this human being’s unspeakable coda.
Martial raises the image above a headstone which, epitaph excluded, is a facsimile of the rows and rows that periscope up from the militarily manicured lawn. Slack-jawed, like a sideshow-alley clown, my head arcs back and forth between him, it, and the headstone. The five Ws woodpecker deep into my brain: what, where, when, but mostly who and why.
Martial flips over to the next photo, the skull now exchanged for an assured, upright, clean-shaven bloke in a crisp uniform and unblemished slouch hat. Thanks to a series of improbable events, and undoubtedly determined work, we can now put a name to the handsome figure, owner of the posthumous eye: Private John Hunter.
At 28, the Queenslander was middle-aged compared to the many of those who bled into the soil around him. I imagine he never baulked at the big adventure, judging by the seed of a confident grin in the ‘before’ photo, and he probably didn’t like to
