by Thomas Wood
I felt bad that I had made her sweat in that way, but I had no other alternatives. There was no other way of going about it.
Marie was one of my best friends at the hospital. She was a better nurse than I was and had been honing her skills for several years before I had completed my training, but she was always there for me, a far more approachable figure than some of the newer nurses who felt like they were superior to me.
“It is a long story,” I tried to explain, but I could not bring myself to go through the whole story once again that night. Marie would simply have to make do with vague outlines and assumptions. I was surprised that she had not seen something like this coming along one day, and I supposed that I was far better at standing on top of that secret than I had previously thought.
“I just need you to take these two letters. Promise me that you will send them immediately. They are very important.”
“Why can’t you just send them?” she spat back, her cigarette almost falling from her mouth. She was a kind soul, but her abruptness had landed her in trouble on more than one occasion. It was part of the reason why I had taken to her.
“I need to go away. I am going now. I won’t have time to send them. Here, I will pay.”
I shoved the money into her palm, along with the two letters, before almost sprinting away to leave her with no choice but to take them.
I would just have to trust her that she wouldn’t open and read the letters.
“Goodbye, Marie. I am sorry to have made you jump.”
“But—”
It was already too late, by the time the first syllable had come from her mouth, I was gone. Back into the darkness.
As my feet slid over the highly varnished floors of the entrance hall of the chateau, I recalled the first time that I had met the woman, the one that had changed my life forever.
It was not long after I had joined the hospital, and I was rushing about trying to find some more bedsheets for the new intake of wounded men, that were due to come in once the latest offensive had faltered.
She stood some way off, but she locked eyes with me immediately, beckoning me over with them, the second that we connected.
As I approached her, I realised that she had a kindly face, but one with eyes so stern that one could only do exactly as she said. She seemed like a schoolteacher of some sort.
“Goeiedag.”
I assumed that the woman who now stood before me was Flemish, as we had a lot of people wandering through this part of France as they searched for a new home, but she did not seem to give off that sort of impression.
I replied in the best Flemish that I could muster, only being able to speak certain phrases, more to help me get by in my professional capacity than any other conversation.
We spoke for a while after that, which had led to me slowly becoming one of her feeders of information. Gradually, we became close, before I learned that she was, in fact, a Dutch woman who was merely here to make the best of the opportunity that was presented before her.
She could speak several languages, as could I, and we took great enjoyment of having conversations in three or more languages before we tired of one another, and retired for the evening. It was this fact that had made it difficult for me to select which language I should write to her in.
It is time for me to go, I am afraid. I would like you to know that it is not through want that I leave you, but through necessity. It was just one step too far for me. If you see the necessity also, then I will not hold you back in making the same decision that I did.
I hope with all my heart that once this is all over, we can meet up again and discuss things more fully.
I had no name for her, no idea of her background, other than the address that we shared our brief meetings in, as we relayed information to one another. It was all that I could scribble on the envelope in such a hurry.
I had been as vague as I possibly could have been, without it being void of any indication of where I had really gone. She must have known that the risks involved in me merely sending a letter at all would be enough to give her the general notion of its contents.
I really did want to meet up with her after the war was ended, however. Even if it was just to find out her name.
Deliberately, I tried to tell myself that I had written just the one letter, as I could not bring myself to recall the other one that I had handed to Marie. If I was to mull it over in my mind for too long, it would sadden me too much, possibly even bring tears to my eyes, at which point I would be putting my life in an unnecessary danger.
It was all too complicated to be thinking about right now anyway. I was a French nurse, that was feeding information to a Dutch woman, who in turn was taking the information to whoever she pleased. He was a German soldier. There was nothing more to him than that.
But it was all a little too complex to be giving it too much attention right now.
Instead, I had to focus on simply putting one foot in front of the other one and making sure that I carried myself as far away from that hospital as I possibly could.
Instead of engaging my thoughts with the letters that I had written, I pulled out his flachmann, the hip flask that he had entrusted me with when he had last been back behind the frontline.
I twisted it and rubbed it over in my palm with such a vigour that I thought I would need to get it repaired soon enough, I was that convinced that it was beginning to wear thin. I looked at the dulled steel as it slowly warmed in my hands, just catching the desperate glow of the moonlight as it peered through the clouds.
It was empty and I didn’t think that it had housed a single droplet of the stuff in quite a while, but it somehow made me feel warmer inside. It was as if the small flachmann that Franck had given to me was somehow keeping me safe, keeping me sane even.
There was no way that it had had any real influence over my life, and yet I found myself believing in its abilities to somehow keep a watch over me. I wondered if Franck had ever taken a similar comfort from it, when it had been in his hands.
It was his face that I tried to recall as I gripped hold of it tightly, his round, almost gaunt face glaring back at me from the wall of the flask.
I needed to cover a great distance tonight if I was to have any chance of survival, if I was to ever have a chance of seeing Franck’s face again, in the flesh.
What I wanted, what I really wanted, was to be able to get to England. The promised land. But even I, the young nurse who was seeing her loved one’s face in the side of a hip flask, knew full well that that was impossible.
There was nothing for it but to simply trek eastwards, towards the rising sun.
Part II
1
I was back in the trench and it felt good. It felt really good.
Over the past couple of weeks, I had found my life particularly difficult to deal with, with hundreds, if not thousands of questions racing through my mind every single minute. But the instant that I had my feet back in a German trench, every single one of those questions, every tiny little doubt that I had ever harboured, was completely dispelled, eradicated to a non-existence.
The raid itself had felt no different to any of the others that I had previously been on, everything seemed to be going as smoothly as it possibly could do. The wire had been cut almost perfectly, to the point where it looked like a seamstress had done it and we had managed to slide into the trench with an almost perfect silence. Even the new boys were performing well.
We dispatched of a few sentries who were more milling about in the frontline, trying to keep warm, than they were keeping watch, all the while still maintaining a decent level of noiselessness that I had previously thought completely impossible.
Everything was going so well, that I thought I even caught Captain Arnold smiling somewhere in the darkness, his eyes glistening as if he had just received the best news of his life. I took a greater appreciation of him for a moment, as I looked at the tall, enthusiastic and driven man that was leading me into
battle.
At first, he had seemed off with me, distant to a degree, but over the last couple of days I had realised what a terrific officer he truly was, the possessor of a fearlessness that seemed to only come with men of his calibre.
It was this sense of security, the notion of how easy everything seemed to be, that would get me into the most trouble, however. As I carelessly began flicking through documents and folders that the Captain had unearthed for me to sift through, I noticed that I was gradually losing interest in the actual content of the papers and more intrigued by the visions that were filling my mind.
The great landscapes and forests that I had grown up around, were slowly coming into focus in my mind, including the vibrant colours of springtime, mixed with the harshest of winters that I had ever experienced. The smell of the damp, cold December nights, infused with the summer rainfall, stirred up all kinds of emotions within the pits of my stomach.
It was only once the grand landscapes had been painted in my mind, that I began to populate them, to slot figures in who had been a part of my life and who I was missing terribly.
My mother and father, as poor as they were, were both immeasurably happy and, despite the fact that I had not seen them for many months, their smiles were just as prominent and recognisable as if I had seen them just yesterday.
I began to long to be back with them again, in the outstretched arms of my mother and within earshot of my father’s terribly coarse jokes that were not meant for my ears. It was a life before the war, one that was not tainted by thoughts of artillery shells or machinegun bullets, severed limbs or ugly deaths.
It was a life that I never thought that I would get to see again and now, here it was, appearing before my very eyes while I ransacked a German trench.
Within a flash, the whole beautiful and dreamlike landscape was washed away, to the point where it felt like it had never been there.
The warm, welcoming feeling, that had slowly taken a grip over my insides, was immediately banished, replaced by a chill that could only come with the sight that I was met with.
There was a dark shadow coming towards me, like the hooded outline of Death as he slowly made his way towards me. Foolishly, I looked for his scythe, as if somehow comforted by the fact that he had forgotten the most rudimental instrument in the whole of his arsenal.
The figure slowly came into focus, the German uniform now totally unmistakeable amid the darkened khaki of my own. He bore down on me, his face rolled up into a snarl, like I was vermin that had somehow snuck into his kitchen.
And, like vermin, he intended to exterminate me, in the swiftest way possible.
There was nothing that I could do now apart from wait. Expectantly, I stood there awaiting my fate, which I supposed would be a relatively quick and almost pain free death.
I tried to send some sort of a signal down to my toes, to begin waggling and get my feet into gear, but either my feet simply refused, or the message never got to its intended recipient, because I continued to stand and stare at the oncoming man.
I was fully aware that I was frozen, the phenomena of which had never happened to me before, but there seemed to be nothing that I could do to swing myself into action.
It would have been so easy for me to lift up my wooden cosh and bring it down on his head, or to bring my revolver to bear and fire a few rounds into his gut.
But none of that happened. I was completely rooted to the spot.
The man, for obvious reasons, saw no real threat in my existence and so chose not to execute me straight away. It was a fair analysis of the situation, I was far more likely to do away with the ones who were more likely to shoot me, than the coward who would not.
Instead of the flash of a revolver as it exploded in my face, my vision was filled with a fist the size of a football, and I felt my nose crumple as it gave way to the force with which the man had connected with me.
There was only a brief moment where the pain that ballooned across my face was registered, before I felt myself take a couple of steps backwards and hit the wall of the trench.
After that, there was nothing. There was no noise, no pain, no sights or smells of home. Just a perfect silence. It was almost heavenly to me.
I do not know for how long it was that I lay there unconscious, but once I had regained my senses, I simply lay there for a second or two, trying to work out what had happened.
I had a perfect recall of the events leading up to my knockout, but I listened carefully for any signs of a German victory, in which case I would have to be excruciatingly careful in the way that I went about things.
My unconscious state must have lasted for less than three or four seconds, for I soon found myself staring at the back of the German’s head, as he beat my sergeant within an inch of his life at the bottom of the trench.
With a renewed sense of courage and bravery, I pulled my revolver up and lined it up perfectly with the back of the German’s skull, all I had to do now was pull the trigger.
But there was something stopping me. A respect for the German for sneaking up on us? A sudden unwillingness to take another human life? I do not know. The only thing that I am sure of however, was that it manifested itself as a quiver in my hand, one so fierce and unceasing, that even when I gripped my wrist with my free hand, it continued to wobble the revolver around, to the point where I was useless.
Eventually, I felt my arms slump forward as the weight of the revolver dragged them back towards the ground. I was defeated. Completely and utterly.
I wanted no more part in this war. I wanted no more of the killing and destruction that I had been called to inflict on my fellow man in recent months. I was done.
I did not even care for the life of the sergeant who lay struggling beneath the weight of the German, who was slowly pressing down on his throat with such a ferocity that he would have been seeing stars almost straight away.
I cared not for his wife or children, nor for the rest of the men in the trench that I was putting at risk. As long as I was not the one pulling the trigger, then I did not care what happened to the rest of them.
My perception of time was completely thrown out of the window, as it felt like hours before anyone did anything to remedy my mistakes, when in reality it can’t have been much more than two or three seconds.
It was so difficult for me to feel anything at all other than a complete desperation, that I completely ignored the imposing stature of Captain Arnold as he made his way over to me. I had no real interest in the fact that he was raising his wooden cosh up high as he raced towards me. I took no notes over the way in which he brought the baton down hard on the German’s head, bringing him to a crumpling mess of flesh at my feet.
And I certainly took no pride whatsoever when I pushed the steel of a bayonet straight through the wincing German’s chest. I had started to feel nothing towards anyone but myself.
If it wasn’t for me, if only I had managed to keep my head and stayed focused on the task at hand, then two of our boys would have made it through that night. The chances are that in all likelihood, they would have been killed on the very next outing, as they were both rookies, but I should have been the one that had given them that chance.
Peterson was the first one to buy it that night, taking an incredibly lucky round in his body somewhere as the German tumbled to the ground. I was so focused on the body lying at my feet that I didn’t even realise that the gun had erupted, until it was far too late for young Peterson.
It is a shame. He seemed like such a nice young lad. But it was me who killed him.
The other was Dornan. Reg, I think his first name was. He was struck by a machinegun round that pierced through the top of his thigh. Or maybe it was a bit of shrapnel. I’m not sure. Whatever it was, it killed him, nonetheless. I killed him.
If only I had the courage to carry on with my job, to push the things of old to the back of my mind, just for a few hours, then there was a chance that those boys would still be here today. But I
didn’t, and that was what made me begin to think in the way that I did.
I saw no point in carrying on with this awful war any longer, where the life expectancy was more down to luck than skill or ability.
If I had done my job, then my conscience would be clear. But it isn’t.
It is why I am fully understanding of where I am right now, Andrew, and why I wholeheartedly deserve to be in this situation. I appreciate yours, and the Captain’s, efforts in trying to buoy me and keep me positive.
But, at the same time, I keep asking myself the same question, over and over again.
How can I possibly expect to be free from it all, if I don’t accept the punishment? And, if that punishment is to be death, then so be it. It is my fault and mine alone. You should feel no guilt in the matter whatsoever.
I hope to see you soon Andrew and that you are recovering in Old Blighty as well as you can.
McKay.
2
I began to fold up the letter that I had received from McKay and proceeded to slot it into my top pocket, for safe keeping.
I had read and re-read it numerous times now, at least once a day if I could help it, as each time that I read it through, a great weight felt like it had been lifted from my shoulders.
There was something within that letter, some sort of sentiment, that made me feel like I had not been responsible for all the death and destruction that I had caused in this war. Somehow, it helped me to externalise some of the blame, in the same way that McKay had started to take some of it upon himself.
I tried not to dwell on the actual events of the letter too much, nor did I linger on what came after the events detailed in McKay’s scribblings. We all knew what happened; McKay stole some maps and put them in the German frontline trench. It was not a big deal, not to us anyway.
