by A. S. Byatt
“I never knew how much you cared for Wolfgang?”
“It is so far away. And there is all this killing. I think I—did care for him. I sometimes thought he … Oh, what does it matter, when we are trying to kill him in all this mud.” She laughed sharply. “It’s hard to be half-German. My mother is having a bad time. She sent an odd letter after Charles/Karl went missing, saying she was going to look for his wife in Dungeness.”
“His wife?”
“That’s what the letter said. Mama didn’t elaborate. I ask about him, too, but get no answers. The men don’t hate each other, mostly. The walking wounded help each other. Once it’s clear they don’t have to kill each other. It’s all mad. Mad and muddy and bad and bloody. I don’t know if it’s better to stop hoping about Karl. And Wolfgang.”
They were about to go to bed when a new contingent of wounded men and stretcher-bearers plodded slowly, and painfully, towards the ambulance. The nights were rarely quiet: the long snakes of men and animals moved into the dark and were hurt in the dark as the shells fell and found them. On the stretcher this time was a man almost invisible in a case or coffin of thick clay, which was drying onto him. The stretcher-bearers said he had gone right under. A shell burst, quite close, and sent up a lot of the stuff and damaged the duckboards. This man had been carrying a large pack on his back and had lost his footing when the shell came down, and he had gone sideways into the mud, and under. His pals pulled him out. There’s orders not to pull men out, if they get in, because they mostly can’t be saved. And they hold up the line of night-workers. Men were swearing behind, and shouting, leave the bugger, excuse my language, ma’am. We was passing by, on the track we come back on, and the man we was carrying died as we went. So we had just dumped him when this one got pulled out, lucky for him. He lost his trousers, they was sucked off of him. They wanted to save his pack, o’ course. It was hot rations. He’s breathing. Shell-shocked, seemingly. They did get the pack. With mud in it and over it, but the hot food was still in it and still hot, we hoped. I hope you ladies can take him, we need to get back out there.
So the clay-cased man was rolled off the stretcher, on to a temporary bed in the hospital. Dorothy looked round for nurses. They were all busy. She found a bucket and began to pick off the mud, which came off in bloody hunks, at first. Griselda helped. The face was the face of a golem: the ambulance men had made breathing holes and eye holes but the hair was caked solid and the eyebrows were worms of mud, and the lips were thick and brown. Dorothy picked and wiped. Griselda said “He’s got shrapnel down here, where his trousers were, I’ve got his pants off, it doesn’t look nice.”
The man trembled. Dorothy said “There’s a lot in his back, as well.” She washed him, quickly but gently, and then again, as though the mud layer was inexhaustible, always renewing itself.
The man said “I always said you had good hands.” His voice was clogged, as though he had swallowed mud. Dorothy said
“Philip?”
Philip said, with great difficulty, “When I went under, I thought, it’s a good end for a potter, to sink in a sea of clay. Clay and blood.”
“Don’t talk.”
“I didn’t think they’d pull me out. They’re not meant to.”
Dorothy said “Can you move your fingers? Good. Toes? Not so good. Turn your head? Not too far. Good. There’s shrapnel in your back, and in your legs, and in your bottom. It needs to come out, or it festers. You’re lucky, this is an ambulance attached to the Women’s Hospital, we have Bipp.”
“Bipp?”
“It’s a patent antiseptic paste. You put it on and leave it for ten or even twenty-one days. It seals the healing. And it is good for the healing not to be disturbed. You’ll need a lot of Bipp. Some of the army doctors think they can sterilise needles and blades with olive oil. We are cleverer than that.”
There was no other surgical emergency, so Dorothy sat by Philip’s muddy body in the lamplight, picking out the pieces of shrapnel, delicately, precisely. He said
“The feeling’s coming back. I was all numb.”
“That’s good, though you may not think so. I can give you morphine.”
“Dorothy—”
She searched with tweezers for a deep scrap of metal, in his flesh. “Dorothy, you’re crying.”
“I do, sometimes. All this is hard. You don’t expect to find a friend in a cake of mud.”
“I can’t laugh, it hurts. What are you doing?”
“You’ve got a deep bit, here between the legs. I shall need to get it out under anaesthetic. That can wait till tomorrow. I’ll get out all I can, and apply the Bipp. And give you morphine, and make you comfortable. I think your leg’s broken, too. You’ll have to go back to England.”
Philip gave a great sigh. Dorothy injected morphine. She slapped on Bipp, where the shrapnel had been extracted. Philip said “I don’t really believe you’re here. I often wished you were. I mean, not in the mud, in the abstract.”
Dorothy said “Not abstract. Concrete.”
55
Aprés la Guerre Finie
May 1919. A cab drew up outside the house in Portman Square. A man got out, a skeletal man, whose cheap clothes hung on him like a coat hanger. He hesitated a moment or two, then rang the doorbell. A young maid answered and looked at him doubtfully. He went past her, like a shadow, and into the drawing-room, where he heard voices.
He stood in the doorway. The maid stood doubtfully behind him. He was puzzled by the group of people there. There was a man with a strapped leg and thigh lying on the chaise longue. There was a thin young girl in a smart short skirt. There was a nursemaid. There was an elegantly dressed young woman, with fashionable short hair, on a low chair, with her back to him.
Basil and Katharina Wellwood were sitting side by side on a sofa, admiring the baby the young woman was holding. It was not as he had imagined it. He cleared his throat. He said, as people all over the world were saying, “Did you not get my letter?” Katharina sprang to her feet like a wire uncoiled, all of a tremble.
“Karl. Charles. It is not.”
“It is,” he said. His father stood up. The red hair was almost grey. Basil said
“You need to sit down.”
Katharina came unsteadily towards him. The fashionable young woman rose to her feet, still holding the baby, who had white-blond hair and well-defined features, not pudgy. He said
“Elsie.”
Katharina pulled at his hand. “Sit down, sit down.”
She could not say how deathly she thought he looked. Elsie said, matter-of-fact, “You’ve had a bad time.” And began to cry. She said
“This is Charles. We all wanted to call him Charles, because we thought—”
He sat down on the sofa, surrounded by his family, and tried to work out the wounded soldier on the chaise longue. He was, of course, Philip Warren. The room had changed, not only because of the baby and the nursemaid, but because two great golden jars of Philip’s were there, either side of the hearth, covered with twined, climbing, tiny demons.
“I can’t really get up,” said Philip. “I am glad to see you.”
“Where did you get hit?”
“Passchendaele. I was saved—I think—by prompt medical attention from Dorothy. Griselda was there. They’re in the Women’s Hospital in Endell Street now. So is Hedda. She’s an orderly. She saved my leg, Dorothy did.”
Katharina said he must be hungry. She went away to order beef tea, and soft bread, and a milk pudding. Charles/Karl sat on the sofa and looked at his wife and son. Basil said
“Elsie and Ann—and little Charles—have been such a comfort to us. As you can see. We have looked after them, as you asked.”
Charles/Karl could not say that by “looking after” he had supposed he meant setting Elsie up in a comfortable cottage, with an income. Basil said
“Elsie has been such a support to your mother. She has had a difficult time. Not to be compared, of course,” he added, still appalled by his son’s
boniness and bald skin. He said “We must telephone the Women’s Hospital. Griselda is an orderly. She works very long hours, but she may be able to come home. She must, at least, know—”
Charles/Karl stroked his son’s hair with shaking fingers. His son smiled, pleasantly. Charles/Karl did not feel steady enough to take the baby. Elsie leaned over him and kissed his hair and kissed his hand in small Charles’s hair. She said “Your people have been unimaginably good to me. And Ann. Ann, come over and say—welcome back—to—to—”
Ann came over and looked at him, and said
“Have you been in prison?”
“I was. There was no food. The guards had next to no food. Everyone is starving.”
He could not describe the unspeakable. He said he had been burned in an explosion, whilst carrying a German soldier on a stretcher in No Man’s Land. The soldier and Charles/Karl’s companions had been killed. He had been picked up by some German soldiers—Bavarians, who had looked after him because he spoke German. He hesitated. He could not begin to describe the foul journey, the deaths and the dead. He said
“I ended up in Munich. There was no food and men were deserting, a few at a time and then all together. I walked to the Pension Susskind. Joachim and his sister were there. They fed me. They found a doctor. They …”
He was about to weep.
Ann said “It will be better now.”
Charles/Karl looked across at Philip, who looked darkly back. Basil said “We must telephone the Women’s Hospital. We must tell Griselda.”
Griselda was registering the visitors for the medical wards.
“Next please,” she said, to the line of tense, anxious and fearful visitors, mainly women, carrying bunches of flowers and boxes of cakes. Next, this time, was a man, a tall, dark, thin man, in a caped overcoat too heavy for the summer weather, wearing a wide-brimmed hat, pulled down so that his face was in shadow.
“Your name, please. Who have you come to see?”
“You, I think,” said the visitor. He said, in a low voice, “I am a runaway, an escaped patient. I want to see you and Dorothy before they lock me up again.”
Griselda looked into the shadow under the hat. The queue of women was stolid and anxious.
“I am a prisoner in Alexandra Palace. There I had influenza and pleurisy so they sent me to the hospital at Millbank. The war is over, but we may not go home until they finish signing the peace. I have stolen these clothes. Friends—prisoners—had a story of a Valkyrie on the battlefield, asking after Wolfgang Stern …”
Griselda was speechless. Wolfgang said “I can sit and wait for you?”
“You’d better sit. You look unsteady.”
“Oh, I am, I am. I may faint at any moment. Then you would have to admit me, which I should… ” Dorothy came hurrying. “Griselda—a shock—”
“I know. He’s here.”
Dorothy looked rapidly round.
“He isn’t here. He’s in Portman Square.” Griselda nodded in the direction of Wolfgang, hiding in his hat. “There—”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Your brother is in Portman Square. He’s alive. He was in Munich. He made his way home.” Griselda trembled.
“And your brother is here under that hat. He escaped. He was in the hospital at Millbank—”
Wolfgang stood up, began to shake and sat down again, grinning weakly.
“Find a cab,” said Dorothy. “Find Hedda. Get him into the cab.”
There were flocks of willing girls from schools for ladies, doing voluntary work. Two serious-looking ones from Cheltenham Ladies’ College were despatched on these errands, and Dorothy went over to look at her German brother in the shadow of his brim. She took his hand and measured his pulse. “Far too fast,” she said. “You should be in bed.”
In Portman Square there was happiness, a little giddy, mixed with apprehension, as the two old-young men told the little they could bear to tell of the chaos that had engulfed them. The English papers, at first cautiously welcoming, and then alarmed, had reported the succession of governments in Bavaria between early November 1918 and May Day 1919. The monarchy had been dislodged by huge crowds of the starving and desperate—mutinous soldiers and sailors, radical Saxons from the Krupp armaments factory, Schwabing Bohemians and anarchists, thousands of angry women, and an army of enraged farmers led by the blind demagogue, Ludwig Gandorfer. These had all been enchanted by the oratory of the wild-eyed and shaggy bearded socialist Kurt Eisner, who trimmed his beard and formed a government which could neither govern nor feed the people. Charles/Karl had never really supposed he would see anarchists in power. In December Erich Mühsam, to whom he had listened in the Café Stefanie as he advocated free love and all goods in common, led four hundred anarchists to occupy a newspaper office. In January there was an election in which Eisner won less than 3 per cent of the vote. In February, on his way to the Landtag to resign, he was shot down by Count Anton Arco auf Valley, a part-Jewish anti-Semite, who was himself shot down by the guards.
The anarchists took power. They were led by the gentle Jewish poet Gustav Landauer, whose beard and rhetoric were flowing. The “Schwabing Soviet” nationalised everything, closed all the cafés except Café Stefanie and put the students in charge of the universities. They searched houses for hoarded food and found none. There was no food and the Allies were blockading the borders. The Foreign Secretary, a mild man, wrote urgent letters to Lenin and the Pope, complaining that someone had stolen his lavatory key.
In April there was an attempted putsch by the government in exile, and briefly, a Bavarian soviet, led by another Jew, the Spartakist Eugen Leviné. The exiles, reluctantly, having hoped to regain Bavaria with Bavarian troops, asked for help from the federal German army. They took Starnberg and Dachau. The White Terror came next. Landauer was brutally slaughtered. Leviné was formally executed. The Ehrhardt Brigade, a Freikorps unit, wore on their gold helmets the primitive sexual symbol that had formed part of the blazon of the Thule Society, with its theories of pure and impure blood, the “ancient coil,” the hooked cross, the swastika. They sang full-throated songs in its praise. Order was restored in the Bavarian capital.
The Reds fought bravely, especially in the railway station, where they held out a day and a night.
Charles/Karl, stiffly, asked Wolfgang and Dorothy if they had news of the Stern family. They said no news had come out of Munich, no trains ran, letters went unanswered.
Charles/Karl said that Leon Stern had been killed in the railway station, fighting for his ideas. Wolfgang bent his head. There was a silence.
Charles/Karl said he had been to the Spiegelgarten of Frau Holle. Anselm Stern and Angela were as well as they could be, though thin and hungry. They thought they would move to Berlin, as Munich was now not a good place for Jews.
It had not occurred to Dorothy to ask whether her father was Jewish and he had not felt a need to tell her. She said, slowly,
“Perhaps, when all this is over, they could come here.”
They could make magical plays for a new generation of children. Angela could work, in London, in Kent, somewhere in peace. The idea seemed both possible and unreal.
• • •
They sat, the survivors, quietly round the dinner table, and drank to the memory of Leon. Ghosts occupied their minds, and crowded in the shadows behind them. They all had things they could not speak of and could not free themselves from, stories they survived only by never telling them, although they woke at night, surprised by foul dreams, which returned regularly and always as a new shock.
Katharina lit the candles which had been brought out for the occasion, and stood in silver candlesticks.
Philip sat at the end of a table in a wheelchair that supported his leg. He was next to Dorothy, who was opposite Wolfgang. Charles/Karl was sitting next to Elsie, and their hands touched. Katharina watched her daughter watch Wolfgang Stern. Griselda had become fixed, efficient and almost spinsterly as the war went on. Katharina was almost re
signed to seeing her close herself into a college. Now her composed face was discomposed and hungry in a way Katharina had never seen. Katharina asked Wolfgang if he would like more soup, and used the familiar “Du.” He smiled, and his grim face was livelier. She gave more soup to her frail and bony son, and to his wife, who watched him fiercely and fearfully. She gave more soup to Hedda, who was tired but almost contented, having worked hard and usefully all day, and to Ann, who had become attached to Hedda. She gave more soup to Dorothy, who gave more to Philip, who said it was delicious. Delicate dumplings lurked beneath the golden surface on which a veil of finely chopped parsley eddied and swayed. Steam rose to meet the fine smoke from the candles, and all their faces seemed softer in their quavering light.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This novel owes a great deal to many people, who have told me about things, shown me things, and shared their knowledge. People always thank their patient partners at the end of their acknowledgements, but I want to thank my husband, Peter Duffy, at the beginning. He has shown me southern England, driven me to odd places, and shared with me his considerable knowledge of the First World War, including his books. He has found things out about distances, modes of transport and buildings, and checked (some of) my mistakes. He has also been patient.
