by Pat Barker
When we got here we found a new draft had arrived from Scarborough. They’re sitting around at the moment, expecting to be welcomed, though so far they haven’t been. Difficult to say why the other men avoid them, but they do. Heads too full of battle to be able to cope with all those clean, innocent, pink faces. A couple of them I remember. One particularly useless boy, the bane of Owen’s life at the Clarence Gardens Hotel, until he upset some hot soup in the CO’s lap, after which everybody, including Owen, found him a lot more tolerable. Waiters, drummer boys. They sit around, when they’re not being chivvied from one place to another, most of them dejected, miserable. Frightened. A few strut up and down – hard men – real killers – and succeed only in looking even more like baby thrushes than the rest.
12 October
Parcels arrived today. Shared out fags in parcels intended for the dead and wounded. Tempers immediately improved. A lot of niggling administrative jobs connected with feeding men from the new draft into the companies. Get flashes from the battle while I’m filling in forms. The man I bayoneted. What worries me is that he was middle aged. Odd really – it’s supposed to be golden youth you mourn for. But he was so obviously somebody who should have been at home, watching his kids grow up, wondering whether brushing his hair over the bald patch would make it more or less obvious, grumbling about the price of beer. And yes, you could see all this in his face – with some people you can. Some people do look exactly what they are. Fuck it.
Meanwhile more exercises. Route marches. We feed our faces on precisely adequate quantities of horrible food. Bread now has potatoes in it. (Makes an interesting combination with the wood chippings.)
15 October
Last night we were entertained by The Peddlers, the whole battalion, and a few officers invited over from our neighbours on the left. Among whom was Marshall-of-the-Ten-Wounds, now acting Lt Colonel, who applauded every turn with childlike glee. Exactly what you wouldn’t expect him to do. At the end of the evening, when things are allowed to get a bit slushy, somebody sang ‘Roses of Picardy’:
Roses are flowering in Picardy
But there’s never a rose like you.
Not a bad voice – it soared over the privies and the tents, the columns of smoke from the fires – and I looked along the row and there was Marshall with great big fat tears rolling down his cheeks. I envied him.
16 October
Bainbrigge’s dead. I remember him in the oyster bar in Scarborough a couple of nights before we left. We were all pissed, but Bainbrigge was pissed enough to quote his own poems (than which there is no pisseder). He was talking to Owen, saying real anti-war poems ought to celebrate what war deprives men of – wait for it – ‘Beethoven, Botticelli, beer and boys.’ Owen kicked him under the table, for my benefit, I think. A wasted kick.
More new arrivals from England yesterday. And I’ve been transferred to a tent, just as the weather’s laying on the first real taste of winter. The misery of sleety rain under canvas. Not that we spend much time under it. We’re out all day doing route marches, column into line, consolidation, etc., etc. And gas drills.
But now it’s evening. The men are leaning against their packs or each other’s knees, aching legs allowed to sprawl at last, writing to wives, mothers, girl-friends. Perhaps even one or two to Beethoven & Co. I said I wasn’t born to the delusion that I’m responsible for them. True. (True I wasn’t born to it, true it’s a delusion.) But I wouldn’t like it to be thought I didn’t care. So. Going round the group nearest to me. Wilson’s got a fucking great nail sticking up through the heel of his left boot. We’ve all had a go at it: hammers, pliers, tent pegs, God knows what. Still it sticks up, and since it breaks the skin he’s quite likely to get a septic sore, unless I can find him another pair of boots. Which ought to be easy, but isn’t. Unfortunately, the septic sore won’t be enough to get him out of the line if we have to go back there. It’ll just exhaust him, make every step a greater misery than it need be.
Oakshott, who’s sort of on the fringes of the group – he’s taken to not talking to people – is well on the way to cracking up. (I should know.) The thing is he’s not windy, he’s a perfectly good soldier, no more than reasonably afraid of rifle and machine-gun bullets, shells, grenades. (Let’s not ask ourselves how afraid that is.) He isn’t even windy about gas, though inevitably it comes across like that. He’s just terrified of the mask. I don’t know what to do with him. Once or twice recently I’ve noticed him lagging behind in gas drills, and I’ve noticed myself letting him get away with it. Which I mustn’t do. If he gets away with it, they’ll all start.
Next to him, in front of him rather, is Moore. Moore’s wife spent the evening of the Friday before last in the lounge bar of the Rose and Crown (I know it well) in the company of one Jack Puddephat, who has a good job at the munitions factory (same one Dad works at) and brings home five quid a week. Moore’s sister-in-law, a public-spirited soul, was kind enough to write and tell him about it.
Heywood’s kid has tonsillitis and the doctor’s all for whipping them out. Heywood’s all for leaving well alone, but the letter he’s writing now won’t get there in time.
Buxton’s missus is expecting their first. The birth doesn’t seem to worry her, but it terrifies him. His own mother died in childbirth, and he’s convinced himself the same thing’s going to happen to her.
Jenkins writes the most incredibly passionate love letters to his wife. They’ve been married since before the Flood, but obviously nothing’s faded. I get erections reading them. Nothing else I’ve done sexually has filled me with such shame. In fact it’s the only thing that’s ever filled me with any shame. He must know they’re censored, and yet still he writes, page after page. Perhaps he needs to say it so much he somehow manages to forget that I read them first? It’s the mental equivalent of the baths. Here I sit, fully clothed as it were, knowing my letters to Sarah won’t be censored. I suppose random checks are carried out on officers’ letters, but at least it’s done somewhere else, and not by people you have to see every day.
Peace talk goes on whether orders forbidding it are promulgated or no. On the night we heard the Germans had agreed to peace talks there was a great impromptu party, officers and men together. Everybody sang. And then next day in John Bull there’s Bottomley saying, No, no, no and once again no. We must fight to the bitter end. (Whose end?) I don’t want any more talk about not being out to destroy the German nation – that is just what I am out for …
But it doesn’t wash with the men. Not this time. In fact some of them have taken to going to the latrines waving copies of John Bull.
Nobody here sees the point of going on now.
18 October
But others do. We leave here today, going back into the line.
Sixteen
October rain spattered the glass. Outside in Vincent Square golden leaves were trodden in the mud. Rivers stopped coughing, put his handkerchief away, and apologized.
‘’S all right,’ Wansbeck said. ‘I should be apologizing to you. I gave it you.’
‘At least I can’t give it back,’ Rivers said, wiping his eyes. ‘In fact you and I are about the only two round here who can’t get it.’
‘Things are getting pretty bad, aren’t they? I mean, on the wards. I don’t suppose I could do anything to help?’
Rivers looked blank.
‘Lifting patients. It just seems bloody ridiculous a great big chap like me sitting around doing nothing while some poor little nurse struggles to lift a twelve-stone man on her own.’
‘It’s very kind of you,’ Rivers said carefully. ‘But I really don’t think the authorities would allow it. In any case you’re not doing “nothing”.’
Silence. The hint was not taken up. Rivers forced himself to open his shoulders, knowing his tension was communicating itself to Wansbeck, though it was only the tension of driving himself through a long day while still feeling very far from well. ‘How have you been?’
‘Smell’s g
one.’ A flicker of amusement. ‘I know it wasn’t there, but it’s still nice to be rid of it.’
‘Hmm, good.’ What pleased Rivers even more than the vanished smell was the hint of self-mockery. The one expression you never see on the faces of the mentally ill. ‘When did that happen?’
‘Just faded gradually. I suppose about the middle of last week I suddenly realized I wasn’t worried about it any more.’
‘And the dream?’
‘It isn’t a dream.’
‘The apparition, then.’
‘Oh, we still see quite a bit of each other.’
‘Do you ever miss a night?’
A faint smile. ‘You mean, does he ever miss a night? No.’
A long silence. Rivers said, ‘It’s difficult, isn’t it, to talk about … beliefs?’
‘Is it?’
‘I find it so.’
Wansbeck smiled. ‘What a very honest man you are.’
‘I wanted to ask if you believe in life after death?’
A groan, followed by silence.
It is difficult, Rivers thought. He could list all the taboo topics on Eddystone, but in his own society it seemed to him the taboos had shifted quite consider-ably in recent years. It was almost easier now to ask a man about his private life than to ask what beliefs he lived by. Before the war … but one must beware of attributing everything to the war. The change had started years before the war.
‘No,’ Wansbeck said at last.
‘You had to think.’
‘Yes, well, I used to believe in it. I was brought up to. I suppose one doesn’t like to have to admit it’s gone. Faith.’
‘What changed your mind?’
A flare of the eyebrows. Rivers waited.
‘Corpses. Especially in cold weather when they couldn’t be buried. And in summer in No Man’s Land. The flies buzzing.’
They rose from Ngea’s body in a black cloud.
‘It needn’t have that effect, though, need it? What about priests keeping a model of a skull on their desks? Because it reminds them of their faith.’
Or Njiru. Man he stink, he rotten, bymby he go Sonto. A simple, casual statement of fact.
‘Well, that’s the effect it had on me. I’d like to believe. I’d like to believe in the possibility of – you’re right, it is embarrassing – redemption.’
Silence.
‘Anyway,’ Rivers said, when it became clear there would be no more, ‘you don’t believe that the apparition is the man you killed? You don’t believe it’s his ghost?’
‘No, though I’m not sure I’d believe that even if I were still a Christian.’
‘So what is it?’
‘A projection of my own mind.’
‘Of your guilt?’
‘No. Guilt’s what I feel sitting here, I don’t need an apparition. No, it’s …’ A deep sigh. ‘Guilt as objective fact – not guilt as feeling. It’s not … well, I was going to say it’s not subjective, but of course it has to be, doesn’t it?’
‘It’s the representation to yourself of external standards that you believe to be valid?’
‘Yes.’
‘What language does it speak?’
A blank look. ‘Doesn’t. Doesn’t speak.’
‘What language would it speak if it spoke? Yes, I know it’s an irrational question but then the apparition isn’t rational either. What language would –’
‘English. Has to be.’
‘So why don’t you speak to it?’
‘It’s only there for a second.’
‘That’s not the way you described it. You said it was endless.’
‘All right, it’s an endless second.’
‘You should be able to say a lot, then.’
‘Tell it my life story?’
Rivers said gently, ‘It knows your life story.’
Wansbeck was thinking deeply. ‘All right. It’s bloody mad, but I’ll have a go.’
‘What will you say?’
‘I have absolutely no idea.’
After Wansbeck had gone, Rivers sat quietly for a few minutes before adding a note to the file. Sassoon had been much in his mind while he was speaking to Wansbeck, Sassoon and the apparitions that gathered round his bed and demanded to know why he was not in France. Also, another of his patients at Craiglockhart, Harrington, who’d had dreadful nightmares, even by Craiglockhart standards, and the nightmares had continued into the semi-waking state, so that they acquired the character of hypnagogic hallucinations. He saw the severed head, torso and limbs of a dismembered body hurtling towards him out of the darkness. A variant of this was a face bending over him, the lips, nose and eyelids eaten away as if by leprosy. The face, in so far as it was identifiable at all, was the face of a close friend whom Harrington had seen blown to pieces. From these dreams he woke either vomiting or with a wet bed, or both.
At the time he witnessed his friend’s death Harrington had already been suffering from headaches, split vision, nausea, vomiting, disorder of micturition, spells of forgetfulness and a persistent gross tremor of the hands, dating from an explosion two months before in which he’d been buried alive. Despite these symptoms he had remained on duty (shoot the MO, thought Rivers) until his friend’s death precipitated a total collapse.
What was interesting about Harrington was that instead of treatment bringing about an elaboration of the nightmares, so that the horrors began to assume a more symbolic, less directly representational form – the normal path to recovery – something rather more remarkable had happened. His friend’s body had begun to reassemble itself. Night after night the eaten away features had fleshed out again. And Harrington talked to him. Long conversations, apparently, or they seemed long to him on waking, telling his friend about Rivers, about life at Craiglockhart, about the treatment he was receiving …
After several weeks of this, he awoke one day with his memory of the first hour after the explosion restored. He had, even in his traumatized state and under heavy fire, crawled round the pieces of his friend’s body collecting items of equipment – belt, revolver, cap and lapel badges – to send to the mother. The knowledge that, far from having fled from the scene, he had behaved with exemplary courage and loyalty, did a great deal to restore Harrington’s self-esteem, for, like most of the patients at Craiglockhart, he suffered from a deep sense of shame and failure. From then on the improvement was dramatic, though still the conversations with the dead friend continued, until one morning he awoke crying, and realized he was crying, not only for his own loss but also for his friend’s, for the unlived years.
Wansbeck’s predicament was worse than either of these cases. Siegfried’s apparitions vanished as soon as he agreed to give up his protest and go back to France. The external demands the nocturnal visitors represented, and which Siegfried himself believed to be valid, had been met. Harrington had been enormously helped by the discovery that he’d behaved better than he thought he had. From that moment on, his recovery had been one of the most dramatic Rivers could recall. Neither of these outcomes was available to Wansbeck, who’d fought a perfectly honourable war until one action had made him in his own eyes – and in the eyes of the law – a criminal. Almost everything one could say to console him either obscenely glossed over the offence or was in some other way insulting, and would have been instantly recognized as such by Wansbeck. A lesser man would have borne this better.
Rivers wondered whether Sassoon and Harrington had been too much in the forefront of his mind while he was listening to Wansbeck. At best, on such occasions, one became a conduit whereby one man’s hard-won experience of self-healing was made available to another. At worst, one no longer listened attentively enough to the individual voice. There was a real danger, he thought, that in the end the stories would become one story, the voices blend into a single cry of pain.
And he was tired. Because of the flu epidemic he’d been on duty for thirty of the last forty-eight hours and he was on duty again tonight too. Sighing, he reached fo
r an envelope, took out an X-ray and clipped it to the screen.
A skull stared out at him. He stood back and looked at it for a moment, one lens of his glasses illumined by the lighted screen, the other reflecting the rainy light of a November afternoon. Then he reached for the notes.
Second Lieutenant Matthew Hallet, aged twenty, admitted 18 October with bullet wounds to the head and to the lower jaw. On admission he was incapable of giving an account of his injuries, and the only information brought with him was a small card saying he had been wounded on 30 September.
So he was now twenty days post-injury.
A rifle bullet had entered just to the left of the inner canthus of the right eye and had made its exit directly above the insertion of the left ear. The wound of entry was marked by a small perfectly healed scar. The wound of exit consisted of a large irregular opening in the bone and tissues of the scalp, and through this protruded a suppurating hernia cerebri which pulsated.
Oh God.
He had so far said nothing spontaneously. When directly addressed he responded, but his speech was incomprehensibile. The wound to his lower jaw made it difficult to determine whether this represented a deficit in the power of using language, or whether the failure to communicate was entirely or primarily mechanical. He showed some understanding of speech, however, since he had responded to simple questions, when asked to do so, by movements of his unparalysed hand.
Somewhere at the fringe of Rivers’s perception was the soft sound of rain continually falling, seeming to seal the hospital away from the darkening afternoon. It had rained incessantly since early morning, the darkness of the day somehow making it even harder to stay awake. He took his glasses off, rubbed his eyes, and turned to the window, where each raindrop caught and held a crescent moon of silver light.
