The Mermaid's Tavern

The Mermaid’s T avern opens in a cramped dugout on the Western Front, in the final hours before the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Captain Samuel Meredith of the Royal Welch Fusiliers lies awake, hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling as German shells pound the earth above. His childhood friend and brother-in-law, Captain Alexander Pritchard, wakes and immediately gives voice to the dread they both share: the attack at 7.30 a.m. is being planned with fatal optimism. The two men discuss the many flaws in the preparations—the need to walk steadily across open ground, the lack of reliable communication with headquarters, the fear that the artillery barrage has failed to destroy the German wire. Meredith reveals his own contingency plan: if machine-gun fire cuts them down, his men are to remain where they fall and try to crawl back to their own lines under cover of darkness.
As they wait, Meredith struggles with a private anguish. He is married to Pritchard’s sister, Sylvia, and they have an eight-month-old son, John. On his last leave, the baby cried whenever Meredith held him, and Meredith could not sleep in a bed, so conditioned was he by the trenches. He carries a studio photograph of Sylvia and John, and he has written a letter to Sylvia, to be sent if he does not survive. When Meredith mentions an encounter with an old French farmer who asked to photograph the troops passing through his land, the conversation takes a strange turn. The farmer, Meredith says, looked at him with weary, knowing eyes and told him that he and Pritchard would one day reminisce at The Mermaid’s T avern. Pritchard is unnerved, but Meredith cannot let the moment go. The farmer seemed to sense something Meredith himself could not name.
Meredith’s unease deepens into philosophy. He carries a copy of Hesiod’s Theogony, a gift from Sylvia, and he explains to Pritchard the old beliefs he has been studying. Drawing on Pythagoras and the idea of dualism, Meredith argues that the material world was created by an evil entity, that matter is evil, and that the soul must undergo an awakening after death, passing to a higher state of knowledge. He recalls the archaeological dig on the Pritchard estate when they were boys, where a skeleton was found facing east with a white and black pebble beside it—one stone to guide the dead on its journey, the other a symbol of the flawed world left behind. Pritchard, uncomfortable, tries to dismiss the subject, but Meredith presses on, insisting that the truth was suppressed by later religions and that heretics were killed for knowing it. The Kingdom of God, he says, is within us; the reality we see is only a purgatory, and once the veil is torn away, the soul perceives untold revelations. He even connects Pythagoras’s brotherhood at Croton with the word “Croatoan” carved by the lost settlers of Roanoke, a mystery that has never been solved.
Meredith’s voice-over deepens the personal stakes. As a boy he watched his father die, and he saw not fear but tranquillity on his father’s face after the struggle ended. That moment convinced him that there is more to existence than the visible world.
Now, on the eve of his own likely death, he believes he is living out a dream he had in childhood. When two exhausted soldiers enter the dugout, Meredith’s narration continues, speaking of the soul residing in both states, of slivers of light that offer passage to other realms. After the soldiers leave, Pritchard’s hands shake so badly that he drops bullets while loading his revolver. Meredith gently takes the revolver, loads it for him, and hands it back.
With a little over an hour to go, the two friends turn to poetry. Pritchard recalls “The Mermaid’s T avern” by John Keats, a poem about Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and other writers gathering in a tavern on Bread Street. He admits that the imagery always suggested to him an Elysian Field—an afterlife where the poets meet and drink together. Meredith is delighted, telling Pritchard that immortality comes from the words they wrote, and that Keats’s real question is where the soul resides. He promises Pritchard that after the battle is over, they will drink a tankard to each other’s health at the Mermaid’s T avern. Pritchard, sullen, wonders whether anyone will remember Thiepval Wood after today. Meredith brushes his uniform and tries to reassure his friend. Their conversation drifts to the Battle of Mons, where both men saw something—apparitions that aided the retreat anto the British trenches. Hundreds of soldiers mass in silence, waiting for the order. Shells explode on the German lines, but the ridge ahead offers no sight of the enemy. Meredith sees Pritchard fifty yards down the line, speaking individually to his men, appearing relaxed. At 7.30 a.m. whistles blow, and the soldiers go over the top, walking as if on a country stroll. The German machine guns open up. Men are hit and fall; others walk past them. Shells tear apart the first contingent. Meredith, waiting for the forty-five-second interval, climbs the ladder into No Man’s Land, calling to his men to keep going.
He sees bodies hanging on barbed wire that was supposed to have been destroyed. The smoke is thick, the enfilade merciless. A shell explodes beside him, and Meredith stumbles, losing consciousness.
In a strange, silent space beyond the battlefield, Meredith finds himself resting against a tree in a pristine Eden, illuminated by a presence he does not understand. The sounds of battle echo in his mind, then fade. A voice, like rustling leaves, asks what he seeks. He replies that he wishes to understand the things that are, their essence, and to know God. The light becomes pure and unadulterated, and then his vision fades. At that exact moment, in the Meredith residence in London, Sylvia walks downstairs, tired and overwrought, sensing something wrong. The drawing room door opens a fraction, and she hears footsteps. Frightened but drawn toward the room, she enters and sees her reflection in the mirror over the fireplace. Then, by the bay window, she sees Meredith in full dress uniform, almost ethereal, smiling at her. His image slowly fades, revealing the heavy curtains behind him. On the battlefield, the battle still rages. Meredith lies dying, his eyes glazed but fixed on the clear blue sky. A weak smile appears on his lips as blood trickles from his mouth, and his vacant eyes stare into eternity.