Dark Angel

by Sally Beauman

  After some three or four nights of this, Winnie observed the habits of the French villagers, who, within days, began to turn the caves into homes. First of all, they selected the best cave, the warmest and the driest and the one that provided the finest view of the activities below, since it overlooked the guns.

  Having established this cave as their territory, they marked it out with piles of belongings, which would be left there in readiness until the next raid. Mattresses appeared; one very old man even toiled up the hill hauling a sagging armchair. Children carried up baskets of food and bottles of wine; grandfathers brought accordions and harmonicas; one grandmother brought her goat, on a string. She sat in the mouth of the cave and milked it.

  “Typical—absolutely typical!” Winnie pronounced jealously, after visiting this cave. “Do you know what that woman was doing—the one with the goat? She was frying chicken on a paraffin stove. In the middle of a battle. The French really are the absolute end.” The night after this, Winnie produced a primus stove, which she set up with a flourish. The night after that, she used it. Being English, she did not fry chicken; she heated up tins of thick oxtail soup. The next night, she promised, there would be deviled sardines.

  “Sardines at midnight—amazing, Winnie,” Wexton murmured.

  In fact these sardines never made their appearance, for that night the German aircraft scored a direct hit. They missed munitions, they missed the parade ground and the Nissen huts, but one bomb fell, fair and square, right on the top of Winnie’s YWCA club. No one was injured, but the Winnie who made her appearance in the caves the following night was a changed woman.

  “Gone, all gone!” she announced with a stricken look. “All my lovely tins of condensed milk—and I’d waited weeks for those! The china, the tables and chairs—matchsticks! Even the piano, utterly smashed. They knew—I’m certain the Huns knew. Munitions? They weren’t attacking the munitions dump; they were attacking our morale.”

  Winnie was determined to be inconsolable. She even refused cocoa. She hunched herself under her blankets and began, after a while, to emit noises that might have been snores or groans. When they were sure they were snores, Jane and Wexton left her.

  Jane checked the cave where her own patients lay, then joined Wexton at the mouth of the caves, overlooking the camp. They stayed there some while, talking to the sentries, peering out into the darkness, listening for the drone of approaching planes. Wexton sat down. He lit a cigarette and took out his notebook. Jane left him, and turned back.

  The cave with the French—she could see the grandmother and her goat sitting side by side. The grandmother was knitting. She passed on to a deeper, larger cave, where the wounded lay sleeping in rows of camp beds. She went farther into the hill and looked into the cavern where the men who suffered from battle fatigue were stationed. This cave was the innermost of those in use; here, the sound of guns and explosions was muffled. The men seemed to sleep peacefully enough. One of the Red Cross nurses, a woman Jane had met at Winnie’s club, sat watching over them. There was a book on her knee and two candles at her side. The light of the candle flames leaped against the walls and danced devils upon the nurse’s face. Seeing Jane, she glanced up from her book and smiled. Jane walked on.

  Deeper and deeper into the hillside; the silence was absolute now. Some of the caves were small, little more than spaces below shelves of rock; others were caverns so high that the beam of her flashlight could not penetrate to their roofs. The light made the seepings from the rock gleam; it lit the phosphorescence of stalactites.

  Jane did not pause to look at these. She quickened her pace. There was one cave she wanted to reach, one she had explored before, a cave that was as high, as wide, as echoing as a cathedral. At the entrance to this cave there was a hollow of rock as smooth as a stoup. It contained water. When she reached this cave, she felt for the rock. She dipped her hand into the ice-cold water and splashed it against her face. Holding her flashlight tightly, she walked forward, first five paces and then ten.

  She stopped. She listened. Far above her, something stirred, a leathery rustling, almost certainly bats. Jane was afraid of bats. She imagined them tangled in her hair. She hesitated; then she knelt.

  Jane came to this cave to pray. She came to it because it gave her total privacy. But sometimes, even here, Jane felt her prayers were small things. They knotted and twisted and doubled back.

  That night, her prayers began in this way. The cold rock cut her knees and distracted her. There was still that leathery shuffling high in the roof space. She tried to pray for Boy, who, she believed, had killed himself, although his parents claimed it was a shooting accident. Water dripped. She tried to pray for her aunt Clara, who was dead, and her father, who was dead, and her brother, Roland, who was dead in a different war. The darkness stifled the prayers. She sat back on her heels. She felt her stockings tear at the knee. It was perhaps wrong, she thought, that she always seemed to pray for the dead. She ought to pray for the living.

  She then did a very strange thing. Later, when she tried to describe it in her diary, she could not account for it at all. It resisted the net of her sentences. There was no conscious decision. One moment she knelt; the next, she lay full-length on the rock, flat against the limestone, arms extended.

  All the words were gone; the rock drew them out of her. Anger and pain, war and the pity of war, faith and its obstructions; no more contradictions—they clung and then were gone. Such lightness, being lifted above the words; how small their anguish seemed as she rose above them. A space traveler, gifted with pinions, she looked down on the words and they were as small as a star, inexorable as a planet, distant and lovely as a moon—the good and the bad, the hope and the despair, all the opposites, moving in a sure equilibrium.

  Faster than light. She looked down at the woman she had left behind in the cave; she looked down on serenity and on battles; she watched the rhythms of death and birth, of extinction and regeneration. The beauty of this patterning was blinding; its exactitude and justice dazzled her eyes—and the woman in the cave below her cried out.

  Over in an instant, lasting beyond a lifetime. Once the brightness of vision was gone, the darkness of the cave was absolute. She lay there, resting in the darkness; then she began to be afraid. She stumbled awkwardly to her feet; the flashlight dropped from her hand. A moment of pure fear then, a vision of being trapped in that labyrinth of passageways. Then, bending, she found the flashlight at once. Her hand closed over the metal casing; the battery rattled. She heard that leathery shuffling in the roof space again; then the beam of light came back on.

  Jane trained the light against the rock face. Had she entered this cave by the slit in the rock there, or the one a little farther to her right? Should she go through the near opening or the far one? Which way?

  She turned in one direction. She turned back. She stared down fearfully at the ground where she had lain a few moments before. She was no longer sure that she had lain there at all. She might have imagined it. This frightened her more. There was a power in these caves, a power she had sensed from the first; she now began to believe it was malevolent. These caves meant her harm. They meant to lose her.

  Something brushed against her face. Jane cried out. The rock caught her cry and threw it back at her. The beam of the flashlight wavered, then strengthened; at once she felt calmer. She looked first to her left and then to her right. She was sure—almost sure—that she had entered this cave by the small opening to the left of her; she considered this fissure, then turned away from it. A few paces; a narrow gap, a shelf of rock, and then a passageway, its floor rising sharply.

  Not the way she had entered this cave, but the right way to leave it. She edged through the gap, then began to walk more quickly, now certain of her route; an Ariadne, she thought, following an invisible string. This way. She stumbled, then broke into a run. She was almost there. She stopped at a point where the passageway widened and three paths joined. The bombing had begun again; muffled by st
one, she could hear the reverberation of guns. The cave where Winnie slept was to her left; the cave where Wexton sat with the sentries was straight ahead; the cave she must find was to her right.

  She ran forward a few paces. As she reached the right cave, a gun stuttered. When she entered, the Red Cross nurse set down her book. She yawned, stretched, smiled. Her two candles were almost burned down. She picked up two more, lit them, fixed them in a pool of soft wax. Their flames wavered, then strengthened. “How long the night is,” she said.

  Jane looked from the nurse to the beds. She counted them. There were twenty-five men here. She shone the beam of her flashlight along the rows. Most of the men slept, huddled figures beneath their blankets. One man, caught in the light, sat up in his bed. He counted and then recounted the fingers of his hand. Two beds along, a man moaned, a low, monotonous crooning. Next to him, a man touched himself; the blankets lifted, then fell, up and down, a remorseless jiggling. His eyes rolled back. He opened and closed his mouth. He sighed. Then he began on the jiggling and the jerking again.

  “Best to leave them.” The Red Cross nurse looked across at this man. “They don’t mean any harm. Just like children, most of them—and besides, if it keeps them quiet, why not?”

  Jane looked back at the beds. The man who had been moaning was growing restless. He began to thresh back and forth in the bed. He leaned back and banged his head against the rock.

  “Oh, that one—he’s one of the difficult ones, he is.” The nurse stood. She gave Jane an assessing look. “Some of them are quiet as mice. Never say a word. But that one …” She clicked her tongue. “Once he starts, there’s only one way to stop him. You want to see? You won’t say a word? We all do it, and it settles him just nice—but the sister wouldn’t like it, not if she knew—”

  “Please. They are your patients.”

  Jane turned away. She looked at the candles. She watched shadows move against the rock. When she turned back, the nurse sat on the edge of the moaning man’s bed. She bent over him. She smoothed his forehead. She gave a quick, precautionary glance toward the entrance to the cave. She loosened the front of her uniform and drew out one plump breast.

  “Here you are, love. Here. There now. There now.”

  The man’s eyes were still tight-shut; at the sound of her voice, his wails diminished. The nurse took his hand and guided it. It closed on the pale globe of her breast and clutched at it. He began to make smacking noises with his lips. The nurse leaned forward, cradling him. She slipped her nipple between his lips. The man sucked.

  She sat there, nursing him, for perhaps two or three minutes. Then she laid him back, stroked his brow, refastened her dress.

  “Quiet as a lamb now, poor thing. He’ll sleep now, you’ll see. It’s a comfort to him, and what is it, after all? No more than you’d do for a baby if it cried. Better than morphine, not as addictive, and quicker too.”

  “Does he talk?” Jane still stared at the line of beds. “Does he think you’re his mother?”

  “I couldn’t say, dear. He moans a lot—like you heard. Never says much. Not actual words. I think …” She hesitated. “I think he won’t make it back, not that one.”

  “Do any of them talk?” Jane turned back. “I mean, do they ever talk—about what made them like this? What it was they saw?”

  “Some of them.” The nurse gave a sigh. “Usually it’s just one little thing, something they fix on, and they will go over it again and again. And then, others—like him—they never speak at all. They just look right through you. There’s some don’t even have a name. We don’t know who they are, and when they bring them in, we give them a number. I don’t like that, so I give them a name anyway. I say to them: Right, you’re Bill, or Johnny. They seem to like that. They can’t remember a thing, of course. It’s all blanked out.”

  “Names?” Jane turned back to the beds. “Why wouldn’t they have names?”

  “A hundred reasons. Blown up. On the wire. Half-buried alive. In a dugout with dead men for five days before they get to them. It happens all the time. Some of them still know who they are, some of them can be identified, and some of them can’t. They sort it out, I expect, when they get them back to England. Oh, Lord! Look at that one. I’ll have to stop him. I won’t be a sec.”

  She pushed her chair back. She crossed to the man whose blankets had jiggled and jerked. His blankets had now fallen from the bed. His trousers gaped. Between his pumping hands was a strip of anxious hooded flesh, scarcely erect. Jane averted her eyes. There was a sound of a slap. The man groaned. When Jane next looked back, his blankets were in place. The man’s eyes were closed. His thumb was in his mouth.

  “No peace for the wicked.” The nurse paused by his bed. She switched on a flashlight and shone it along the line of beds, first to the right and then to the left. Her patients were quiet. She looked up.

  “Do you fancy something warm to drink? I’ve a flask here with some warm milk and a spot of something stronger. Would you like some, dear? I’d be glad of the company. We’ll be here hours yet.”

  “In a minute. I should just like to …” Jane walked forward. She edged between the beds. “One of the men you checked just now—when you shone your flashlight. Something just caught my eye—”

  “Which one?” The nurse flicked her flashlight again, up and down the row. “This one? He’s quiet tonight. He’s another won’t make it back, I think.”

  “No, not that one. Over there.”

  The nurse directed the beam of her flashlight the other way. It shone on gray blankets and averted faces, closed eyes, grown men curled as tight as a fetus.

  “What, that one?” The beam hovered, then was still. “Oh, he’s one of the numbers. I don’t know much about him. They only brought him in—what?—two days ago. Three. There was an exchange of prisoners—at Arras, I think. Then they shipped him up here. Isn’t he thin? Half-starved. And he’s had a horrible wound—it’s healed now, but it’s still horrible. Look.”

  She leaned across and drew back the blanket.

  “Oh, don’t wake him. He’s asleep.”

  “He won’t wake.” The nurse gave her a sidelong glance. “And if he does wake, he won’t speak. He’s catatonic. I only give him a week. Look—just look. You tell me. How does a man get a wound like that and still live?”

  The man’s jacket was unfastened; his shirt was loose. The nurse pushed them to one side. She directed the flashlight.

  The man had taken a bayonet wound in the chest. The bayonet must have glanced across his ribs before penetrating just below the heart. The wound had been poorly sutured. It had left a livid scar, a cicatrice the shape of a crescent moon. The marks of stitches were clearly visible. Around the man’s throat was a thong and a small leather medallion.

  “One-nine-three?”

  “That’s his number. His hospital number.” The nurse began to sound impatient. She pulled the blanket back into place.

  “Did you not give him a name?”

  “This one? No, I didn’t. I don’t know why. He hasn’t been here long, and I haven’t nursed him that much. Also, he scares me. Some of them do, you know. The look they get in their eyes. As if they wanted to kill you. He has that. Cold eyes. They look right through you. And they’re a funny color.”

  It was as if the man heard her. He stirred, turned, opened his eyes. He lay on his back, staring straight up at them without blinking. He must have seen them, but he gave no sign. He might have stared at a wall.

  “Why don’t we have that milk?”

  The nurse turned away. Jane did not move.

  “Come on. I’ve some cigarettes, too, if you’d like one. Shouldn’t, not when I’m on duty—but the night’s so slow, don’t you find?” She shivered. “I hate these bloody caves.”

  “Yes. Very slow.”

  Jane knelt beside the bed. She took her own flashlight from her pocket and switched it on. She shone it carefully to the side of the man’s face, so it would not blind him. A thin face. The reddish s
tubble of a beard, perhaps four or five days of growth.

  Why had no one shaved him? she thought. She felt a sudden spurt of anger. Why had no one done this for him, if he could not do it for himself? And his hair was unwashed, as well as uncombed. She lifted her hand to smooth it; the man’s hair was alive; his scalp crawled. Jane jerked her hand away. She almost dropped her flashlight.

  “This man has lice.” She swung around accusingly.

  The nurse shrugged. “I’ll make a note of it. They can deal with it tomorrow.”

  “It should have been dealt with at once. At once.”

  Jane stopped. The man had turned his head. He regarded her face with a still cold gaze. His eyes turned to her hair, to her cap. He looked downward toward her mouth and chin, then back up to her eyes. His eyes had the vacancy of the blind.

  “Look, do you want some of this milk or don’t you?” The nurse sounded impatient. “Leave him alone. Let him get some sleep. I don’t want trouble.”

  “I know him,” Jane said. “I know him.”

  She leaned forward so that her own eyes looked down into his. The man continued to stare straight ahead, as if he looked through her into the dark. His eyes were green, the left a perceptibly different color from the right. Jane took his left hand and held it between her own. Once he had worn a signet ring on the little finger of this hand, though he wore none now.

  “Acland.”

  She spoke his name very quietly, so only she and he could hear. There was no flicker of response.

  “Acland. Can you understand me? It’s Jane. Look, touch me. I’m a nurse here. I’ve cut my hair since you last saw me, but I’m sure if you look you can recognize me—”