The Cunning Man

by Robertson Davies

  The Colonel’s trouble was booze, and as it was more freely available to the armed forces than to the civilian population (whom the Prime Minister, Mr. Mackenzie King, had urged to “put on the full armour of God,” meanwhile reducing the alcohol content of all liquor sold in the country), the Colonel was in close touch with his bosom enemy. Why did he drink so much? It appeared to be because the big bakery of which he managed a branch was flirting with the idea of sale to a large American complex, and if that happened, what changes might not come about? Would he be kept in his position, or would he be supplanted by a younger man? And if that happened, where would he turn? He was tired of his marriage; his wife, a simple girl, had not kept pace with his rise in the social scale, and could not mix in perfect amity with the wives of other branch managers. She was a dumbbell at bridge, and she had nothing to say at parties. Would the war settle any of his problems? He knew he would never be sent abroad; too old. Because he knew this, he convinced himself that he wanted nothing more than to plunge into the thick of battle, which he assumed would be the trench warfare of 1914–18. His life was a complexity of disappointments and worries and every Monday morning I had to do what I could to banish his hangover and still his fears.

  The Adjutant’s troubles were not dissimilar. His insurance business was his own, in so far as any man’s business is his own when he is obliged perpetually to show himself alert and a go-getter in the eyes of the giant companies which are his real masters. But he had built it up on his personality, which was, as he assured me I could see, that of a go-getter and a man fated for great achievement. He had left the business in the hands of his Number Two, who was a good fellow in his way, but lacked originality, was not innovative, was in fact just the sort of man a go-getter chooses for his Number Two because he presents no challenge. If the war were a long one, would the Number Two drive the business into the ground? Because in business there is no standing still; it’s advance or fall back, all the time. And at home—well, he didn’t know how it had come about, but it was just nag, nag, nag and gimme, gimme, gimme all the time and he had not himself had much money left over to buy the insurance he urged upon everybody else. If he had insufficient insurance, how was his retirement to be financed? Could I tell him that? Which of course I couldn’t. I had no medicine for him and he had to fall back on the bottle, which was the only medicine both of us knew for what ailed him.

  The Major was a relief, though not much of a relief, from these problems. His destiny lay, he was certain, in politics. He was a lawyer, and everybody knew that the law was the best preparation for a political life. He was well in with the Party, and it was only a matter of waiting for the next election for him to become a candidate for a pretty safe seat. Then along came this God-damned war, and if an election came soon, which was likely, where was he? He couldn’t stand for Parliament and wear a uniform at the same time, and he saw no way of getting rid of the uniform unless I could declare that he was unfit for service. Wasn’t there something he was likely to have which would manage that, without making him too unwell to face the duties of a Member of Parliament? Suppose—just suppose—he got shot in the leg during target practice, would that do it? Not easy to manage, of course; a man who gets himself between the target and the gun looks like a loser, and does anybody vote for a loser? Or was there some way he could be a militia officer at home and an efficient M.P.? Meanwhile he had headaches of an intensity that I would certainly never have encountered in my medical practice and they had him worried. Was there any way I could take a look at his brain, without a lot of X-ray and stuff that would attract undesirable attention? God, if it turned out to be a brain tumour! The only way he could get any relief from worry was by heavy drinking. I had nothing for him.

  There were other officers who were perfectly sane and reasonably happy in their work, but these three at the top of the heap kept me busy at the physician’s perpetual work of reassurance. Nothing is ever quite as bad as it looks, etc. I acquired a reprehensible conviction that heavy drinking was not under all circumstances a bad thing.

  After that, my war experience, though extensive, was uninteresting. Whether I was bounced around from one place in Europe to another more than most medical officers I cannot say because I have not wanted to find out. But wherever I went, my work was the same, sometimes very close to danger, sometimes actually under fire, sometimes behind the guns, working in hospitals that varied from pretty well-equipped establishments that were not totally in ruins, to field hospitals where a lot of improvisation was needed. I had to do some surgery, at times when everybody who could handle a knife was needed, and there were days when I stood for ten or twelve hours with a knife in my hand, driven to make decisions about what to do in situations that called for facilities that simply did not exist where I was. I was a mediocre surgeon and had little taste for the work.

  Where I shone (I suppose in the privacy of this Case Book I can tell myself that I shone) was in diagnosis and the care of men after hospital, when they had to be cajoled, or bullied, or hypnotized into a state of mind in which they could be sent back to the lines. I became the Talking Doctor, and anyone who thinks that talking under such circumstances is easy work should try it and find out the reality. Through Italy, in that dirty and difficult campaign beginning in Sicily and up The Boot all the way to the Lombard Plain I talked without cease, and inevitably developed some persuasive skill. How did I do that?

  Doctors are men of substantial education, though not always men of wide culture. They develop a manner, and a vocabulary suitable to their professional status, which is sufficient in civilian life, and which is often reassuring to the uneducated patient. But sick men, and wounded men who have been patched up, who are in a strange land and often in uncomfortable and disagreeable conditions, need another kind of talk. They need a talk which is not obviously professional, and which is not couched in language that is filled with scientific terms. Friendly talk. Not patronizing talk, and not foolishly simple talk, but talk that inspires trust in men whose trust in life has been worn very thin. Talk which can reach men who have been driven to that farthest edge of the spirit we call despair. Talk that persuades a man from the prairies that as he lies in an Italian villa which is a temporary hospital, and where at every turn he comes on evidences of a Catholicism he associates with everything deceitful and morally inferior, that he has not been utterly deserted by his God, or whatever he holds as the engine of his life.

  Of course the chaplains were supposed to do this, but to many of the men the chaplain was somebody with something to sell, a Holy Joe who wanted to win souls for Christ, or whatever. Some of the chaplains were first-rate. Others should have been sent home to do their mischief in civilian life. But none of them were doctors, and it was in Italy, as an Army doctor, that I first understood that the physician is the priest of our modern, secular world. The Medical Corps insignia on my sleeve promised a magic that the chaplain’s Cross had lost.

  It was early in 1945 that the Italian campaign ended, in so far as the Canadian Army was concerned, and we were returned to England, to await events. It was whispered—where do these whispers originate?—that we would soon get into the show in Europe. Meanwhile, reforming and reorganization and retraining under circumstances which seemed easy after the Italian battles. And first of all, some leave.

  I spent my leave in London, going to the theatre and eating as well as I could in restaurants that had some—never very much—black-market food of a kind I had not eaten in over a year. I stayed at a small hotel in Russell Square, where on the night of May 2, 1945, a German bomb that had buried itself nearby without exploding, exploded at last, and my hotel suffered heavy damage. I was taking a bath at the time.

  It was one of those hotels where the baths were not attached to each room, but in the old-fashioned way, were at the ends of corridors. To get the use of a bathroom required some campaigning, and the hot water ran out quickly. I had been lucky and was lying in a suitably hot bath when the explosion occurred. I can
not say precisely what happened, but it appeared from what I later learned that the floor of my bathroom sank a few feet, and the ceiling above collapsed inward. A mass of plaster and structural wood fell on the bath, and I was lucky not to have been killed by it. As it was, I found myself imprisoned in the tub, with enough of the rubbish above me open to the sky to assure me of air, though I was unable to move except gingerly in my bath-water, which quickly began to cool.

  There I remained for rather more than four days.

  I could hear the workers who were trying to bring some order into the chaos of the hotel, and to remove people who had been injured, or killed. But the hotel was not the most important building to suffer damage, and the work was slow. I could hear voices, and when I did so I shouted, but was not heard.

  As a medical man I knew that starvation was not imminent, but that unless I could have water, I would not last for as long as it might take for me to be discovered, or for the wreckage under me to collapse and dash me down into—what? I had water, but it was soapy water, and dirty water, and it soon became very cold water.

  Late in the second day I could no longer repress a bowel movement, and my water became a cold faecal soup, of which I could not force myself to drink.

  This was very bad, for if starvation was not an immediate concern, lack of water was. A physician in such a situation knows too much for his own good, and I suffered horribly from things foreseen which did not come to pass. Would I become so cold that I could not survive? If the temperature in the English spring dropped much below 50 degrees Fahrenheit I would be in serious danger. I could breathe freely, and move my legs and arms to some extent so that clotting of blood could be avoided, but it was hard to call up the will to move as much as I knew to be necessary, because as time wore on I suffered from lassitude and progressive weakness. I shivered a great deal, but this helped to maintain my bodily heat. Hunger was a torment, and I could not long keep my mind off food. After the second day my hands, my lower legs and feet began to swell. I knew perfectly well that I was not developing the waxy skin coating that I had so often seen in my days as a police physician on the bodies of drowned men and women, but nevertheless I feared it, and felt my body for it, and wondered if I were not indeed experiencing a novel form of drowning, while fully conscious.

  But I was not fully conscious. I began to drop off to sleep at intervals, and then to recover myself with a start, recognizing the dangers of such lassitude. I thought of all I had read about courageous people who, when trapped in some situation like mine, passed the time working out problems, or composing poems, or reciting verse they had by heart. Ah—heroes every one of them, but my best efforts could not lift me to their level.

  I knew the danger of despair, and fought it as hard as I could, but not with complete success. Once or twice I heard scramblings that I supposed must be rats, and all that I had ever read about prisoners plagued by filthy rodents recurred to torment me, for I knew I was weakening hourly, and had to give up shouting, for the feebleness of my own cries mocked me, and made me feel more helpless.

  I thought of my totem, as Mrs. Smoke had shown it to me. But my intertwining snakes had not then assumed the strength in my psychological makeup that they were to attain later, and they did nothing for me. I thought of Faust, which was still fresh in my memory, but it had nothing to suggest except the inevitability of Fate, and when one’s thread of life seems about to be clipped by the shears of unblinking Atropos, it demands a sturdier mind than mine to face it with courage. I remembered Mrs. Smoke and the Shaking Tent, and I longed to go into the Great Time and find help there. But how? It was in these dark hours that I knew that I needed a faith greater than the half-baked philosophy of my student days, if I were not to succumb under misfortune like this into a whimpering, ignoble creature, contemptible to myself.

  Even modern warfare had not killed in me the idea that man is a noble creature, and should behave nobly under necessity. Of course in ordinary life one does not use highly charged, emotive words like “noble.” Superior people laugh at such talk. But when one seems to be dying in an icy bath of one’s own shit, one sees things differently, and resolves that if one escapes alive, one will never be a superior person again.

  Superior? How could I be superior when my mind was invaded by rubbish from the past, and obscenities from student days? I tried to pass the time by recalling mnemonics which had helped to get me through my medical examinations, but for so many the “clean” form gave way to the form preferred by young men in excellent health whose instruction in science and medicine had done nothing to quench their natural lusts—did indeed, encourage them.

  Consider, for instance, the Twelve Cranial Nerves of the brainstem:

  I Olfactory On Oh!

  II Optic Old Oh!

  III Oculomotor Olympus’ Oh!

  IV Trochlear Towering To

  V Trigeminal Tops Touch

  VI Abducens A And

  VII Facial Finn Feel

  VIII Acoustic And A

  IX Glossopharyngeal German Girl’s

  X Vagus Viewed Vagina

  XI Accessory Some And

  XII Hypoglossal Hops Hymen!

  No, I could not be resolutely high-minded, and I now think that to do so would be inhuman.

  Four nights and four days passed before I heard workmen near enough to hear my voice, which had become surprisingly feeble. At last I was fished out of my tank, and carried off to a hospital.

  I was uninjured. Indeed, I had been all through the Italian campaign without injury, though many Medical Corps people were hurt or killed. Of course I was almost ten pounds lighter, I was dehydrated, I had some pitting oedema, the localized dropsy to be expected, and a few pressure sores. All things considered I had not come off too badly, for I was young and strong. But though physically I recovered in about ten days, I was in a bad mental state, and that recovery was slow. I had passed my time in the tank in fear, in something not like sleep but a kind of lowered consciousness, and in futile attempts to lift my spirits and shout for help. But I had what I must call a revelation in that tub and very slowly I came to some conclusions that have been important in shaping my life ever since.

  As I look back at what I have written, I ask myself if I am being quite honest. Did I receive no help from anything greater than the hope that the workers outside would find me? Did I not, when the patch of sky that I could see above me turned black, think of Mrs. Smoke and her helpers? Did I not remember that in Faust Mephistopheles says:

  Dies sind die Kleinen

  Von den Meinen

  Hore, wie zu Lust und taten

  Altklug sie raten.

  Are not these the Devil’s helpers? And once Christian judgements are set aside, how does one know Mrs. Smoke’s from the Devil’s? Any helper, when one is in extremity, is a helper. If, as Faust says, the Devil is an egoist, who isn’t an egoist when it comes to the crunch? Did I not plead, as I lay in that icy, filthy water, for Helpers, no matter whence they took their power? Were they wholly deaf? Was I not discovered in time? But my recollection is not clear.

  When at last I was pronounced fit to leave hospital, where was I to go? The great ones of the Canadian Army Medical Corps were very decent in their behaviour towards me. They sent me to a hospital near Oxford, for some sensitive work that they thought I might be able to handle, or if I couldn’t I could do my best.

  It was sensitive work indeed. I found myself in charge of a ward of twenty-six men who had all been wounded in what has since been sardonically named “friendly fire.” That is to say, they were Canadians who had been wounded by other Canadians who had misjudged their range, or their terrain, and had launched bombs, or shells or grenades, or had placed mines in circumstances where the casualties were—again the lingo is sardonic—“fratricidal.” It has always been so in war, since firepower replaced the bow and arrow. Though perhaps the bow and arrow was not wholly blameless, for there were several reports of officers or sergeants who had been
shot by their own men when the press of battle made it hard to know precisely what was happening, and I am sure that officers who were brutal or just intolerable fell at Crècy with “friendly” arrows between their shoulders.

  Several of these men were legless, or had lost an arm, or now had a plate in the skull. The remainder were in various stages of what used to be called “shell-shock.” All were in bad psychological condition and many were of the group dismissed by the unthinking as “bed-wetters.” What was I to do?

  I talked, of course. I saw every man for an hour or a part of an hour three times a week. When I say I talked it would be more accurate to say that they talked, for their cauldrons of resentment and fury against fate, against the Army, against anything and everything were seemingly inexhaustible, and they raged and stormed and often they wept, because they had been injured by their own people. Stupid bastards, why couldn’t they watch what they were doing? (Because they were far out of sight, far behind the area which their comrades had reached, but of which they had not been informed.) Is this what it meant, when you sacrificed everything to come over and fight to defend a bunch of God-damned foreigners against a fate that was probably too good for them? (Yes, this is part of what it meant, and the outbursts of self-righteousness sat ill on some of these men who had enlisted for very different reasons than those of patriotism or humanitarianism.) Was this what it came to when you weren’t twenty-five yet, and you had another fifty years to go with no legs? What kind of job was there for you? What was the girlfriend going to think when you came back in a wheelchair? She was going to think Goodbye, nice to have known you. Was this all there was in life for you now? (Yes, in all likelihood this is all, unless you are the one in a thousand who can find a way of turning misfortune into benefit.) With this plate in my head I get hellish headaches, and the docs don’t seem to be able to do anything about it. When I get home, what am I going to do? (If I knew, I would certainly tell you.)