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  From the earliest days of European settlement white Australians loved music, loved to sing and play it, thronged to touring opera and theatre companies. Launceston in Myrtle's time was more populous than Cahors, but still a small country town. By the turn of the century its vast Victorian Albert Hall held audiences of a thousand or more for its Patriotic Concerts and those of “the Tasmanian Nightingale” Amy Sherwin, and especially Nellie Melba. Melba, Australia's national heroine, toured the country twice during Myrtle's childhood, in 1902 and 1909, mobbed wherever she went.

  This was the age of operetta, especially of Gilbert and Sullivan's Savoy operas, which first came Myrtle's way with Launceston Operatic Society's enthusiastic performances of HMS Pinafore and The Pirates of Penzance. Myrtle was an exception in her family in many ways: she was theatrical and outgoing, quite untouched by Presbyterian habits of thrift, industry and temperance.

  By 1912 Lexie was spending her weeks in a Launceston house so that the younger children could attend their schools more easily. Perhaps Myrtle left home then. By 1916 her brothers, Hector and Vernon, were both working on the mainland; the boat trip from Launceston to Melbourne is short, and it seems that Myrtle took it before Harry Jones sold Armidale and moved what was left of his family into Launceston.

  How Myrtle became an actress and singer, and why and when she left home, remain mysteries, but by 1916 she was gone across the water. She was twenty-two. When she married in 1923 she signed herself as “Sandra Lindsay, Actress.” Anne Darquier told me her mother was a singer, and next to his bed Louis Darquier always kept a cheeky Edwardian photo of “Sandra” in a bathing suit, posing with her stockings rolled down her thighs in the postcard manner of the time. It seems a fair guess that when Myrtle left home she perhaps took some classes—in piano, acting or performing—and tried her luck on the stage.

  Myrtle was never abandoned by her parents: quite the opposite—they never ceased to fret about her. Louis would cause the death of many thousands, but these deeds seem never to have been acknowledged by the Jones siblings in Australia. For them, Myrtle achieved undreamed-of heights, and their horror of anyone investigating her life intimates that some of them, at least, knew what Louis Darquier did, and what Myrtle Jones accepted and approved.

  The youngest of Myrtle's sisters, Heather, wrote a record of Myrtle and Louis' lives. That Myrtle called herself an actress, that she drank— was in fact an alcoholic, most probably from her twenties—and that she almost certainly had a drug habit too, are glossed over in family accounts of her wonderful later life as a real European baroness, living in the fabled land of “abroad.” Their Myrtle was a creature whose vibrant personality was little suited to their small island, a sister who could only flourish on a larger stage, and who happily found this in a great, aristocratic European love affair. The convict Britton Jones offered his descendants much to be proud of; instead it was Myrtle's life that was the fairy tale for the Jones family.

  In fact Myrtle knew more of the constancy of love, physical comfort and financial security in her Tasmanian years than she was ever to know again. The Darquiers of Cahors were by no means as blind or as loving as the Jones family of Launceston. Otherwise the two families had much in common. Their unsteady hold on social respectability and professional achievement demanded silence, the forgetting of disturbing facts, and gave birth to children who escaped into fantasy worlds, and there wrought havoc.

  3

  Soldier's Heart

  THE GREAT WAR OF 1914–18 began with a roar of patriotism as France and Great Britain, with their empires and their allies Russia and Belgium, confronted Germany and its allies, the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman Empires. Many other nations were sucked into its maw, and by its end nearly nine million men were dead, millions more were missing, twenty million more wounded, disfigured, mutilated, gassed. Most were young men of Louis Darquier's generation. When war broke out in August 1914, all French men aged between twenty and forty-eight were called up and marched away to the glorious adventure, “the purifying war.”1 Even the extremist Catholic press, and Charles Maurras— rejoicing because the object of his unremitting vituperation, the French socialist leader Jean Jaurès, had been assassinated by a fanatic on the eve of war—united behind the republic in a Union Sacrée, a sacred union.

  Louise wanted both her elder sons to become doctors. Louis was a sturdy fellow by now, the tallest of the Darquier men. Jean graduated from the Lycée Gambetta in the summer of 1913, bedecked with honours in philosophy. In September 1914 Louis' equal success in Latin, sciences and maths took him to Toulouse to join his brother as a student in the Faculté des Sciences.

  In the years before the war, Action Française had spread throughout France with its rituals and meetings, its groups, sections and student branches. Its young royalists, the Camelots du Roi, went on the streets to sell the movement's newspaper and, as wandering bands armed with bludgeons and lead-tipped canes, did the movement's dirty work, creating incidents and administering beatings—actions described as just “fooling about” by La Défense. They were also much given to surprising their enemies by slapping their faces in public.

  Neither Jean nor Louis belonged to Action Française at this point, though they would certainly have heard of the noisy activities of its Camelots, many of them fellow students in the faculties of science and medicine. Both brothers studied for the Certificat de Licence ès Sciences, the PCN—Physics, Chemistry, Natural Sciences—the entrance examination required to study medicine in France. Jean passed. Louis failed his chemistry examination, giving Louise “sleepless nights of worrying about him.”

  Pierre Darquier, forty-five in 1914, was mobilised immediately as a major and chief medical officer. Posted to an ambulance service, he was attached to those first armies sent to war by cheering crowds, to the singing of the “Marseillaise” and cries of “Vive la France! ” Inspired by the fervent wish to avenge the defeat of 1870, they believed the war would be over in a few weeks. Within a month Pierre witnessed the near victory of the German army as it made for Paris and the French and British armies fought to push it back. From August to November 1914 he followed the battles of the Guise, the Marne, the Aisne and the Yser in Belgium, treating the wounded and the columns of exhausted men in fields and towns which were to be fought over again and again—Ypres, Passchendaele, Messines, the ridge of the Chemin des Dames.2

  As the hope of early victory disappeared, the scale of suffering became clear. Arms, legs, heads and bodies cut or blown to pieces were strewn over the fields and along the roads, often dwarfed by teams of bloated dead horses. Soldiers fought alongside, on top of and surrounded by corpses and fragments of corpses. Thunderous offensive confronted counteroffensive, and furious fighting alternated with stalemate. Trench warfare began, and with it the intensity of sound which marks all the descriptions of this war—the moans and cries of men wounded and dying, the stuttering and thunder of rifles and whizzbangs, machine guns and howitzers. Worse, past human imagining, was the destruction of human flesh which Pierre Darquier saw—the hideous wounds of the soldiers in this first mechanised war, and the carnage of battle on a scale hitherto unknown. In 1916 Henri Barbusse, the French writer called “the Zola of the trenches,” wrote in his best seller Le Feu (Under Fire): “This war means dreadful, superhuman exhaustion, water up to your belly, and mud, and grime and unspeakable filth. It means rotting faces and flesh in tatters, and corpses that no longer even look like bodies floating on the surface of the voracious earth.”3

  Pierre Darquier had not qualified as a surgeon, but in war he became one; his experience of the suffering of the troops at the front was to end with the first battle for Ypres. He had left Cahors in August 1914 a prosperous and jolly doctor-mayor; on 18 November he was evacuated to Dunkirk, prosaically with sciatica, but he had seen enough of this new kind of warfare to turn him into the “coward” his son Louis considered him to be. “The French Army, with a mobilised strength of two million, had suffered by far the worst. Its losses in Septe
mber, killed, wounded, missing and prisoners, exceeded 200,000, in October eighty thousand and in November seventy thousand; the August losses, never officially revealed, may have exceeded 160,000. Fatalities reached the extraordinary total of 306,000…”4

  As winter set in Pierre was posted to Tours, where, attached to a military nursing home, he was in charge of deciding whether wounded soldiers were fit enough to return to the front. Something vaguely shameful about his attitude to the war, murmured about in Cahors, muttered about more forcefully by Louis later, could well have been his over-generosity in diagnosis. In January 1915, Louise joined him. In Tours she socialised, visited the châteaux of the Loire, embroidered, and summoned pears, eggs, truffles and services from those who did her bidding in Cahors. Louis and Jean joined their parents in Tours, and in July 1915 both enlisted at the Hôtel de Ville. The seventeen-year-old Louis belonged to the class of 1917—that is, he would have been called up for military service in that year—but instead he volunteered two years early. The French army accepted underage volunteers, but they had to be eighteen before they could fight. Young men who knew their way about sometimes volunteered early in order to avoid being sent directly to the infantry, where casualties were atrocious in the trenches. Joining as an underage volunteer also meant training courses and better preparation to become an officer.

  All this worked for Louis. By February 1916 his brother Jean was serving as a gunner in the 18th Artillery Regiment under General Pétain, in the first months of the battle for Verdun, “on the front line in the battery, crouched at the bottom of a hole.” Louise was beside herself. Jean was “in a regiment where we know no one”; she did not want her sons to be common soldiers—poilus. She wrote: [Pierre] “has heard details from injured soldiers coming back from Verdun and they all agree that since the beginning they have never seen such scenes. The ground in the trenches trembles constantly and the soldiers say it is like a train rushing by right next to them with sudden jolts and tremors. You can imagine …”5

  A million men were killed or wounded at Verdun. Jean exacerbated the state of Louise's nerves with letters from mid-battle, as did Pierre, who horrified her by applying to serve again at the front. Anatole de Monzie visited the Darquiers in Tours and caused more pessimism and gloom, reducing Louise to “a state of madness.” She was almost as concerned that her boys should join the best regiments as that they should survive. She wanted Louis to go into the artillery, but found it impossible to arrange. The First World War was, in its first years, a war of men and horses. Though tanks and dismounted action took over as the war progressed, horses pulled the field guns and heavy cavalry was still used. France fielded over 100,000 cavalry, still accoutred in the magnificent costumes of Napoleon's time, still trained for mounted combat. “The idea of Louis in the cavalry fills me with dread,” Louise wrote, but Louis, always in love with uniforms, joined the 5th Cavalry Regiment as a Cuirassier Second Class.

  Louise delivered him personally, “very nervous,” to the instruction centre for officer cadets at St.-Cyr. By December 1915 he had completed his initial training and had advanced to Cuirassier First Class. He applied to train as an officer, but this was to be a second disappointment: he came eighty-eighth out of an intake of 128, not a position any Darquier boy was used to. His superiors admired his strength, energy, stamina and intelligence, judged him to be “more energetic than punctual, but should go far if he is well guided,” but found his character “slightly weak.”6 A year after enlisting, he had not yet engaged in battle. In July 1916 he was appointed first corporal, then sergeant in the 3rd Cavalry Regiment, as handsomely costumed as the 5th, and he finally became a cadet officer on 1 August. He was now ready for war. The first battle of the Somme had already begun.

  In September 1915, two months after Jean and Louis had enlisted in Tours, Will Jones went from Carrick to the town of Claremont, near Hobart—he was twenty, eighteen months younger than Myrtle—and, with the approval of Henry and Lexie, enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force, the AIF. Nearly half a million Australians volunteered to fight for Britain and the Empire, and most of them made the long journey over the seas to fight for “Home.” Australian soldiers of the Great War came to be known as Anzacs, the initials of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps who fought on the Gallipoli peninsula alongside men from India, France and Britain in early 1915.

  Gallipoli dominates popular Australian memory of the First World War, although almost three times as many British, and more French than Australian, soldiers were slaughtered there. But their real graveyard is in France and Flanders, where Australian soldiers—called “diggers” because so many former gold-diggers were in the early army units—dug, fought and died in the horrific trenches of the Western Front.

  Gunner Jones, soldier number 8911, Howitzer Brigade of the Ammunition Column, 2nd Division of the AIF, stood five feet seven inches tall, had green eyes, was a member of the Church of England and set sail from Melbourne two weeks before his sister Myrtle's twenty-second birthday. Before he left for the front, Will popped into Miss Windeatt's school in Launceston, to say goodbye to his younger sisters. The school rose to farewell him by singing the national anthem.

  Two months later his ship reached Suez; then, after three months' training in Egypt, the Australian soldiers joined the British Expeditionary Force at Alexandria. In March 1916 they were shipped to Marseille and sent on by train to the battlefields. Will joined the 4th Field Artillery Brigade just in time for the first battle of the Somme, which had begun on 1 July, the day on which the British army walked steadily into barrages of German machine-gun fire, with the loss of some sixty thousand men.

  When Pierre Darquier served as a doctor at the front, the only horror he did not witness was poison gas, first used by the Germans in April 1915. Otherwise he knew perfectly well what his sons might endure, Jean at Verdun, Louis in the trenches. As it turned out, it was Will Jones who got the worst of it. The first battle of the Somme lasted for a little over four months, and over a million men were killed, went missing or were wounded. Into this inferno Will Jones's division and the 2nd AIF descended in the last week of July 1916. Louis Darquier was a fine horseman, Will Jones a better one, but this was a skill Will could use only in pulling the howitzers and mobile guns of field artillery. He was a gunner, subject to the barrage of fire that often drove men mad. He had two weeks of normal life left to him.

  Will fought at the battle of Pozières in the department of the Somme. The little village of Pozières was razed to the ground in July and August 1916. Twenty-three thousand Australian officers and men were killed or wounded there within five weeks. As one Australian soldier wrote: “One feels on a battlefield like this that one can never survive, or that if the body holds, the brain must go forever.”7 Will was gassed on his twenty-first birthday—13 August 1916—but was back at the front four days later. He was gassed again on 29 October in the assault on the Transloy Line and admitted to hospital. The number of times he had been gassed now qualified him as wounded and won him a trip in a hospital ship to Blighty.

  At this time, Louis' cavalry regiment was near the front, but in reserve, helping with the harvest near Beauvais. Cavalry divisions were of little use in the exploding world of flying bombs and earth, smoke and shrapnel of the Somme, and Louis' youth still protected him. As Will left for England, Louis' regiment moved from behind the lines to take its turn in the trenches at Vailly, along the Chemin des Dames, the ridge above the Aisne originally built by Louis XV as a pleasure path, now the sector of the front which stretched from Rheims to Soissons. As a cadet officer, only eighteen years old, Louis was back at base camp doing stable guard service. Misbehaviour began immediately—“eight days of ‘open arrest’ ” for “kicking a horse.”

  The United States declared war on Germany as the French 3rd Cavalry moved towards the front as part of General Nivelle's new offensive of April 1917, along the Chemin des Dames. In May, Louis' regiment was in the trenches near Rheims, and saw violent action. Nineteen of
the 3rd Cavalry's “officers and men who displayed brilliant conduct during the Hun's offensive of 30 July against the Prunay trenches” received the Croix de Guerre in July. Louis was not among them, but he shattered his mother by reporting that his best friend in the regiment had been killed. Although there were fewer horses at the front now, and cavalrymen were being sent to fight in the trenches or moved to tank or artillery brigades, his cavalry regiment was still a place of relative safety.

  In 1917 the French army was losing thirteen thousand men a month. In eight months of fierce warfare, Louis' regiment suffered ten deaths and forty wounded. Well before then, Louis had had enough of horses and uniforms and stables behind the lines. During the worst days of the battle for Verdun in 1916, General Pétain had provided the French people with their great symbolic victory of the Great War, and its patriotic cry: “They shall not pass!” Following the disastrous failure of General Nivelle's April offensive, Pétain replaced him as commander-in-chief of the French army. But that month French soldiers, enraged by decreasing success, poor food, no rest, and the endless mud, rain and cold, rats and lice, coupled with the overpowering tedium of waiting for almost certain death and their distrust of the generals who sent them to it, began to mutiny.

  Few soldiers were unaffected by the violence and disobedience, although it was mostly the infantry, entrenched in appalling conditions along the front, who raised their voices against their leaders. In August 1917 Louis refused to carry out an order and gave a ridiculous excuse, resulting in four more days of single arrest. While he was having a wretched war inactive behind the lines, his father was promoted and moved to Paris, to the army discharge centre at Clignancourt, still certifying the wounded as unfit for service.