A Traveler at the Gates of Wisdom

by John Boyne

  I stepped forward to shake my friend’s hand and, although he took it, it seemed at that moment he almost didn’t recognize me. His eyes were focused instead on the rope swaying a little before him. He was a brave man, there was no doubt about that, but faced with imminent death, there’s not one of us who would not feel a moment of trepidation, question how we’ve lived our lives and whether we might face salvation, torture or an eternal silence once the last breath had left our bodies.

  “The hood?” asked the governor, holding out a black cowl that Kelly could choose to wear if he wanted, but he shook his head.

  “No point letting the world go dark until it has to,” he muttered.

  “Your choice,” said the governor, tossing it aside. He nodded to the hangman, who stepped forward without a word and placed the noose around Ned’s neck. “Any last words?” he asked, and Kelly glanced at him for a moment while his hands were manacled behind his back to stop him from struggling too much with the rope when he fell.

  “It’s come to this anyway,” he said with a shrug of his shoulders and, a moment later, before I even knew what was happening, he was gone over the edge. Fortunately for him, the manner of his tumbling must have cracked his spine, broken his neck and killed him instantly, for he didn’t struggle, not even for a moment, simply hung cleanly in the air as we all watched silently, uncertain who should speak or what should be done next.

  “Cut him down,” said Governor Castieau finally. “There’s a box waiting for him in the prison yard.”

  FRANCE

  A.D. 1916

  I WAS TWO YEARS AWAY from completing my sentence at HM Prison Shepton Mallet when Governor Caster brought me into his office to inform me that I was being offered a choice: I could remain where I was and see out the next couple of years of my sentence under lock and key, or I could sign up to the war effort, in which case I would be released immediately and shipped off to France.

  “The truth is,” he said, looking me directly in the eye, “you have more chance of survival if you stay here, so you should consider this very carefully before making a decision. A lot of the boys on the front line don’t even make it past a couple of days. At least here you stand a good chance of getting out alive.”

  I didn’t have to think it through, although I knew why he was encouraging me to stay, for Caster had been father to three sons, each of whom had already died in the trenches, so he was not well disposed toward the war effort. He was a considerate governor, though, one who didn’t treat the men under his care with any form of cruelty. Being locked up was bad enough, he always said, without having to be treated like an animal, too.

  We had our share of feather men in Shepton Mallet, lads who’d said no to the fighting on religious grounds, social grounds, or maybe just because they didn’t like the idea of pointing a gun at some chap they’d never met before and who’d never done them any harm in the first place. I respected their bravery at sticking with their convictions but hadn’t done much to stand up for any of them when they came to grief at the hands of the other inmates. The fact was, many of the prisoners were a lot older than me and had sons who were either still fighting in Europe or had already been lost in combat. To see some strapping twenty-year-old march through the gates telling all and sundry about peace, civility, man’s inhumanity to man and the philosophy of Bertrand Russell, well, it set their teeth on edge. Most of these boys had the wind kicked out of them quick enough. One, Joe Patience, a decent enough sort, was almost killed and the guards did nothing to find out who had inflicted his terrible injuries. Prison simply wasn’t a safe place to be if you were a conscientious objector. Me, I didn’t much like the idea of war, but if it meant that I could feel the sun on my face again, even if I was busy dodging bullets while I looked at the blue sky, then I was happy enough to sign up.

  On the evening that I boarded the boat for France, decked out in my uniform, I experienced some of the excitement that the other soldiers were feeling, although my thoughts were very much on my father, who would have been proud, if a little surprised, to see me now. Later that night, as we sailed toward Calais, I passed one of the soldiers who I’d met earlier and who had introduced himself to me as Will Bancroft. He wore an irritated expression on his face and, although I tried to speak to him, he brushed past me without a word. Looking ahead, I saw another of our group standing alone by the prow and made my way toward him, introducing myself as we stood together in the moonlight.

  “Tristan,” he replied, shaking my hand. “Or Sadler, I suppose. We’re meant to use surnames now, aren’t we? Will says it dehumanizes us. Makes us feel less concerned about killing.”

  “Bancroft, you mean,” I said with a smile, and he nodded. “I just passed him on my way down here. Looked as if he wanted to punch someone.”

  Sadler shrugged and looked out toward the dark horizon. He offered me a cigarette, which I declined, then lit one for himself.

  “I don’t know you, do I?” he asked, glancing at me for a moment as he exhaled his smoke. “You weren’t at Aldershot.”

  “No,” I replied.

  “So where did you train?”

  I thought about it. Would it matter if the men discovered the truth about my past? “Nowhere,” I told him. “The truth is, I’ve been in prison for some years now. At Shepton Mallet. They told me I could get out early if I was willing to do my bit for my country.”

  He breathed in through his nostrils, shaking his head. “That’s a difficult choice to make,” he said. “But I think you’ve done the right thing. What were you inside for, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “Breaking the law,” I replied, and he laughed, nodding his head.

  “Fair enough,” he said.

  “Sorry. But it’s probably best if—”

  “You don’t have to explain yourself. We all have secrets, I imagine. I know that I do.”

  We stood in silence, elbows resting on the railings, lost in thought.

  “Did he say anything to you?” asked Sadler after a while. “Will,” he added. “I saw you talking to him before you joined me.”

  “We weren’t talking,” I said. “He just marched past me, scowling. Why do you ask?”

  “No reason.”

  “Is he all right?”

  “In what sense?”

  “Is he a fellow to be trusted? I imagine we’ll all have to watch each other’s backs where we’re going.”

  He considered this for a long time. “I think so,” he said. “I hope so. We don’t know each other very well, to be honest. Will and I had cots next to each other in Aldershot, but other than that—”

  “You don’t have to lie to me,” I said. “I don’t care.”

  “What makes you think I’m lying?”

  “Something happened between you, didn’t it?” I asked, and he spun around and looked at me in shock. Had it not been so dark, I imagine that I would have seen his face grow pale. “It’s not unusual,” I added. “We must each find comfort where we can. A man, a woman, there’s not much difference when it all comes down to it.”

  “Why would you even suggest such a thing?” he asked in bewilderment.

  “It’s just an impression I got, that’s all,” I said with a shrug. “Don’t misunderstand me, it doesn’t matter to me in the slightest. I don’t much care what other people get up to when they’re on their own.”

  He said nothing but I could feel the tension emanating from his body.

  “It’s a damnable thing to say,” he responded finally, although without a lot of conviction in his tone.

  “If I’ve offended you, then I apologize.”

  “A damnable thing,” he repeated.

  We remained where we were for some time. I got the sense that he wanted to speak further of it.

  “I should go back up,” he said eventually.

  “Look, I’m sorry if I upset yo
u,” I replied, placing a hand on his arm, and he looked at it for a moment before shaking it off.

  “You didn’t,” he said. “You haven’t. Only…don’t say things like that to anyone else, will you? Especially not to Will. He might take it the wrong way, that’s all. He’s rather tricky, you see. Prefers his privacy.”

  “I won’t say a word,” I promised, and he nodded and scurried back toward the staircase that led belowdecks. I turned around and looked back out to sea. I imagined that every man on board had a secret to tell and a story to share. And most of them, most of us, would surely never get to tell them.

  * * *

  • • •

  Three days in and I was sitting in a muddy trench somewhere near Lille. It wasn’t a bit like I’d read about in the papers. It was worse. Far worse. The soil beneath me was nothing but pure sludge and, no matter how often we tried to put new stakes in the ground to act as a dam to stop our roughly made edifices from collapsing around our ears, there was always a part of the trench that was falling apart and needed stitching back together. Was this the army, I wondered? If so, warfare was a filthy business. Things had been a lot cleaner back in Shepton Mallet, that was for sure, and that place had been no great bastion of hygiene. You could catch a disease there just by opening your eyes in the morning.

  Still, after so long living on my own in a small cell, it was a pleasure to be among men again and I did my best to make friends. Sadler and I remained sociable, although he held on to a certain reserve after our conversation on deck, while Taylor, Attling and Bancroft proved amicable enough types. We palled around together, playing cards in the dirt when we were bored, and some nights, when we found ourselves on duty together, our cigarettes held low around our knees in case the enemy caught sight of a red tip and sent a bullet flying in our direction, we ended up in the kinds of conversation that you have with other men when there’s a good chance that you’re all going to be dead before you get to worry about what you might have said twenty-four hours earlier.

  Attling had a wife at home, he told me, even though he was no more than twenty-one years old.

  “Got her in the family way, didn’t I?” he explained. “So what could I do but the decent thing? I’m nowhere near as frightened of the Hun as I was of her old dad anyway. The banns were read out a few days later in the parish church and then we were married within a month. The baby didn’t even live, that’s the sadness of it. He died while he was still inside her. Or she. I never knew, never wanted to know. But still, I was upset about it. I’d got used to the idea of being a dad, you know?”

  “I know very well,” I said.

  “You’ve got kids, then?”

  “A son,” I said.

  “And where’s he? Fighting, too?”

  “I haven’t seen him in a while,” I told him. “But I understand he’s working at the War Office. He’s a smart one. Much smarter than me. All mathematics and the sciences with my boy. They took him in on account of his brains.”

  Attling nodded. “Just the one lad, then?”

  “I had another once,” I said carefully. “But he died. It was a long time ago now. He was just a child at the time. And, like you, a couple more that never made it to their first breath. Still,” I added, “you don’t forget them. You never forget them.”

  Bancroft didn’t have a wife but he had a sweetheart, he claimed, a girl back home by the name of Eleanor who he planned to marry. He told me that she wasn’t conventional and I wondered about his choice of word, what he meant by it, and in the end, I took it to mean that she let him take liberties with her. Bancroft seemed surprised by my being there, on account of me being much older than the rest of the troop, old enough to be a father to some of them, almost as old as Sergeant Clayton himself, who gave us all a rum time of it, but I told him the truth about my life, too, about how I’d been released from prison to be a part of this caper.

  “I bet you wish you were back there now,” he said, and I shook my head. I wished for nothing of the sort. “Or is the camaraderie much the same?”

  “No, it’s different,” I told him. “In prison, it’s every man for himself. You never know when someone’s going to come at you with a knife for no other reason than you looked at him funny over breakfast, or maybe he just woke up with a pain in his head and thinks it will only go away if he draws someone’s blood. It’s a cold place, is prison. A nasty place.”

  “You can’t find this comfortable, though?”

  “No,” I admitted. “But at least I feel like we’re all in it together. None of us are fighting our own private wars.”

  “I don’t know about that,” he said under his breath.

  “Well, we march as a group, I mean. We fall into these trenches as one unit. We stand guard in indivisible pairs. If we’re going to win, then that’s how we’ll do it.”

  “You don’t think the enemy feel the same way? Act the same way?” he asked. “And I’m not even sure that I know what winning even means anymore, are you?”

  I thought about it. He was a young man, but he had something about him, that was for sure. Always thinking. Always philosophizing about right and wrong. “No,” I said. “No, I probably don’t.”

  I liked most of the boys, but there was one, Milton, who rubbed me up the wrong way. He had a rough side to him, a sadistic side. Almost everyone felt a certain sympathy for the young lads on the other side of no-man’s-land because we were smart enough to know that they’d been dragged from their homes just like we had, only in their case it was by a kaiser, not a king, a pair of cousins who would be dining in their private dining rooms and listening to concerts every evening while the only music any of us heard was the sound the bullets made as they flew past our ears.

  Milton liked to describe the terrible things he wanted to do to the Germans, the tortures he wanted to put them through, and it occurred to me that he’d probably been one of those boys who had pulled the wings from butterflies before pinning them on a card.

  Attling, Milton, Sadler and Bancroft were ultimately involved in an incident that led to any number of difficulties for us all. We’d made it forward a few miles and achieved something of a triumph over the enemy when they were sent out to make sure that the trenches were clear on the other side. They were, for the most part, but it turned out that there was one soldier left, a German boy who’d had the unfortunate luck of staying alive while his fellows were all killed, and they’d dragged him out and Milton shot him in the head when he should have been brought back as a prisoner of war. It had been a cowardly act on his part and one that contravened all the rules of war, such as they were.

  Bancroft, who I took for something of a thinker by this point, was up in arms about the whole thing and spoke to Sergeant Clayton, who shrugged it off as just another casualty of the front, but the boy wasn’t having any of that nonsense and I was there one evening when he nearly attacked Sadler, accusing him of cowardice, saying that he’d been present at the incident, that he’d seen what Milton had done and needed to back him up. If the sergeant heard two accounts of the same story and they lay true with each other, then he’d have to do something about it. He’d have no choice.

  “It was cold-blooded murder,” Bancroft insisted, and Sadler said that he supposed it was but that he’d seen worse, a lot worse, and what did it matter anyway? Then Bancroft accused him of being all bent out of shape, saying that he was lying not to protect Milton but because he wanted to get back at him for something, and I took that to mean that whatever understanding they’d shared had come to an end.

  “Can’t we just be friends when we’re lonely and soldiers the rest of the time?” asked Bancroft, but Sadler was having none of that and caused a great bloody storm. Anyway, Bancroft ended up putting his guns down and saying that he wouldn’t take part in any more advances until something was done about what happened to the German boy and because of this he was put under court-ma
rtial before being sentenced to death as a coward and a traitor.

  It was a miserable morning and I was glad I wasn’t called upon to be in the firing squad that took him down. But Sadler was. They offered Bancroft a black cowl, but he preferred to look directly at his killers. And afterward, Sadler was a totally different person. All the life went out of him. All the energy. All the self-belief. He started to shake and tremble. When I tried to talk to him, he would barely say a word. Once, I found him sitting with his back to a tree, his pistol in his mouth, and it took me the best part of an hour to convince him that he shouldn’t pull the trigger, that his life was still worthwhile. Finally, when he put the gun down and I grabbed it away from him he looked at me with an expression of utter self-loathing on his face.

  “I don’t think I could have done it anyway,” he said quietly. “I’m a terrible coward, you see.”

  Anyway, the war went on. Some days we gained a little ground. Some weeks we stayed put for what seemed like a hundred years. Dispatches came and went. Men died, new men arrived who looked just like the ones we’d lost, and somehow, I stayed alive till the final day. The war to end all wars, they were calling it and, true enough, it didn’t seem like things could ever get much worse. But still, I never regretted my decision to go to France instead of remaining locked up in Shepton Mallet. It’s not a lot of fun being shot at all day. Your body isn’t your own. You’re covered in maggots and lice and you’ll never be clean again. But then again, once in a while, something good might happen. A bird might appear out of nowhere and land on one of the ladders that took us all up to no-man’s-land. Snow might begin to fall and we might throw our heads back and open our mouths to allow the snowflakes to land on our tongues. At moments like that, at least you could sit there and think, I’m free. At least I’m free. And soon, one day soon, this might all be over and I’ll sail back across the water, make my way to a train station and find my way home at last.