Chapter 1
Paris was free, and I was one of the very few Englishmen to see it. I was twenty-five, a captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps, attached to 26 Field Hygiene Section, and were it not for the fact that our CO had a strange whim one afternoon, I would not have seen what I saw.
For anyone who lived through the war, or who fought in it, or, as I did, found themselves in the fighting but did not fight, a thousand new paths through life opened up every day. Of course, many of those paths led to death, whether on the front lines, behind a hedgerow in Normandy or at home under the fleeting shadow of a rocket bomb, and that instilled a certain feeling in many people, something new that few of us had felt before. I saw, time and again, what living with the quotidian possibility of death did to people; making them reckless, or adventurous, heedless that they had a future self, an older self, who was relying on them not to destroy their lives before they could become that person.
Because, I supposed, it was an old age that might never arrive, in which case what use was there in protecting it?
But there were other possibilities besides death, many of them. Other possibilities that led people to strange events or chance meetings that would determine their living destiny, or, as I was to discover, that led to an increase in fortune, or wealth.
It seemed to me, even young as I was then, that I had merely shut my eyes one day. At the time, I was a newly qualified house officer at Barts, six months under my belt, Cambridge life still in my heart; I still thought of my room at Caius as my home, not the digs I’d taken in Pimlico. Without time to take in what was happening, I was called up and sent to Oxford to join an RAMC military hospital that was forming in the Examination Building. A moment later and I was on the Isle of Wight, for two weeks’ training on the Ducks. Then another brief moment, one of waiting, in the countryside above Southampton.
When I opened my eyes again, I was on Sword beach, watching the troops run behind the tanks pawing their way up the sand, making for the tracks the sappers had laid, all the while trying to get my trucks off the landing ship, for we, of course, came last.
I remember calculating that I was eighty-four days into my active service when I saw Paris. Less than three months, but already a lifetime, in that I felt I had changed, started to grow up at last.
While I would like to pretend that I saved the lives of one hundred, two hundred, three hundred soldiers as the Second Army fought its way across Normandy, that I saw death daily and grew fearless of its presence, I cannot. That was perhaps the case for other men of the RAMC, but life in the Hygiene Section was a different matter. It was our job to find safe sources of drinking water, to purify it if necessary, to set up showers and dig latrines. In its own way, our work was vital, for without these things an army quickly becomes ill and unable to fight, but there’s no way of pretending it was a glamorous business.
In truth, I saw little of the wounded, and though from time to time we would run across a field hospital, I saw very little blood, which is in itself a strange thing for an officer in the RAMC to report.
Of course, I had seen enough blood during my studies; but of that, what can I say?
Maybe I should here admit to the first time I saw blood. By which I mean not a smear on a grazed knee in the playground, or a few drops from a bleeding nose on the rugby pitch, but lots of it. Blood in quantity. Which I first saw as I observed a simple operation on a man in his fifties in the theatre in Trumpington Street. I can remember that moment well. There were very few medical students in Cambridge in those days and that particular day there were just three of us who watched: an emotionless intellect named Squiers; Donald, who would become a friend of mine, and who fainted as the first drops welled under the surgeon’s knife; and me.
I watched . . . how can I describe it? It seemed to be a dream that I was in, and I watched from within it as if I was witnessing something secret. As if I was seeing something I shouldn’t; like seeing a couple making love. The colour, the sheer quantity . . . it seemed, quite literally, to be full of life, and I guess I began to understand something I have had much cause to consider since then: why it was that the ancients instinctively felt that life is in the blood. That blood is life.
None of that was clear in my mind, then. Then, I just marvelled at it, wondering if my reaction showed to those around me.
The surgeon and the nurses helping him barely stirred when Donald fainted – apparently that happened a lot – and neither did they seem to show much interest in the blood. I glanced at them briefly, reluctant to look away from the operation, and couldn’t understand why they didn’t seem to react to it, but were vaguely irritated by its presence, the awkwardness it gave to the procedure. Squiers was presumably making mental notes on the physiology, so I was left, taking in nothing medical at all, merely dreaming.
And yes, after that day, in my medical training and in France, I occasionally saw large amounts of blood. But none of the other times remains in my memory, until what I saw in a hole in the ground in Saint-Germain-en-Laye.
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Mister Memory Page 31
