War Story

by Derek Robinson

  The really funny thing, the thing Paxton tried to tell everyone at the Casualty Clearing Station, was the way getting shot in the arm turned other people deaf. It was really very funny. He could clearly remember O’Neill and someone else lifting him out of the cockpit and O’Neill asking something, or at least his mouth kept opening and shutting but no sounds came out. Same with Dando, when Paxton was lying on a stretcher. Much mouth-action, no sound. Which meant they had all gone deaf, and that was very funny, you must agree. Paxton tried to tell everyone. Some smiled, some didn’t. They were all deaf, too. In the end he gave up. It was awfully tiring, talking to deaf people. He fell asleep.

  Paxton went to a hospital in Paris. He arrived there before noon; few casualties were coming back from the battlefront, so the army had ambulances to spare. This hospital had a very good arm man, and the doctors at the CCS wanted him to scout about inside Paxton’s forearm to see if they had missed any fragments of bullet. While he was at it he would check on the quality of their embroidery. Especially the hemstitching.

  In fact it wasn’t a bad wound. Paxton woke up next day with a thudding headache and a taste like glue. His arm felt as if it had been slammed in a barn door but he could move his fingers, and the phenomenon of universal deafness had disappeared. What pained him most of all was the discovery that he was in Paris, out of the battle, out of the fun. Why had he fainted, if he’d only been pipped in the arm? It was feeble. Pitiful. A thoroughly dud show. He complained bitterly to the first doctor he saw.

  Later in the day, after a couple of meals, one of the doctors drew him a little picture. The bullet had entered just above his wrist, made its way up his forearm, disintegrating as it went, and emerged near the elbow. It had scraped the bone but missed the artery and the major veins. He showed Paxton the fragments of metal they had collected. Paxton fingered them, and in his imagination he tried to assemble them into a 7.92 mm bullet fired from a Spandau through the prop of a Fokker. They failed to take shape. “Why did I pass out?” he asked. “Shock, and loss of blood,” the doctor said. “By all reports you were wading in the stuff when you landed.”

  The next day he got up. They tried to stop him but he wouldn’t be stopped, and when he didn’t fall on his face they let him stay up. He ate, and ate. When a man came to collect the plates, Paxton asked him if he knew how the battle was going. “I haven’t had much chance to look at the papers, sir,” he said,”but I saw a headline yesterday I think it was, said something about an advance on the whole front, twenty-five miles I think it said but I’m not much of a one for figures, sir.”

  “We advanced twenty-five miles? But that’s wonderful! Did you hear that?” Paxton called to a passing nurse. “Twenty-five miles! How’s that for progress?”

  “You won’t make any progress if you go on waving that arm like that,” she said.

  He lay on his bed, feeling pleased and a little drowsy. He woke up six hours later when a doctor checked his condition. “What’s the best thing to take for loss of blood?” he asked.

  “Salt water. Fruit juice. Guinness if you can get it.”

  “Fetch me a crate of Guinness,” Paxton told the nurse.

  He ate a meal and drank a pint of salt water.

  If that report of a British advance had been in yesterday’s paper, he thought, then the news was three days old, at least. Tremendous things could have happened since then. “I say!” he said to a nurse. “Where can I get some newspapers?”

  “I don’t know. Why don’t you go and talk to the captain in the next room? The poor man’s got double vision, so he has.”

  Captain Kerr suffered more than double vision. He had led his company of infantry over the top and halfway across No-Man’s-Land until a shell blew him up and broke various bones. He had crawled back to the trenches, often hiding behind the bodies of his men. Now he welcomed both images of Paxton.

  “Sit down, old chap,” he said,”make yourself comfortable. Got pipped in the arm, did you? Lucky blighter. I got crumped, you know, well and truly crumped, I remember one second I was thinking ‘Shall I ask my sergeant about that Jerry wire?’ and the next second I was twenty feet up in the air, never heard the bang, came down one hell of a wallop, long way to fall, twenty feet. Just as well I didn’t ask the sergeant, because he wasn’t there any more, was he?” Captain Kerr began to laugh and hurt his chest, so he stopped. “He got even more thoroughly crumped than I did,” Kerr said. “He got completely dismantled. His constituent parts were laid out for inspection. Or perhaps not. Hard to tell. There were large numbers of constituent parts all over the place, including a few of mine.” He held up his left hand. It had no fingers.

  Paxton looked away from the bandaged stump. “I hear we’ve advanced twenty-five miles,” he said.

  “Load of balls. Who told you that?”

  “Chap who works here. He said there’s been an advance along the whole Front. Twenty-five miles was his figure. Mind you, he wasn’t very bright.”

  Using his right hand, Kerr picked at a small scab on his forehead. “That’s the length of the attack,” he said.

  “Ah. Yes, of course it is.” Paxton slumped in his chair. “It’s still jolly good, though, isn’t it?”

  “No, it’s still a load of balls. My mob didn’t get anywhere and we weren’t the only ones. Absolute shambles, it was.”

  “Excuse me,” Paxton said. “I have to get my dressing changed.”

  “Good idea,” Kerr said.“Get them both changed while you’re at it.”

  Paxton ate and slept, ate and slept. He slept fitfully. Sometimes the pain in his arm made him clench his teeth until his face was wet with tears and sweat; when it stopped, sleep took over immediately and completely.

  Next morning he wandered about the ward, growing more and more bored and restless, until he went to see if Captain Kerr was awake. He was. “I don’t want to be a nuisance,” Paxton said. “I just wanted to ask about the wire.”

  “Too late, old chap. Far too late. Somebody should have asked about the wire before we went over the top … Do me a favour, will you? Get these bloody wasps out of the room. They’re driving me potty.” Kerr flailed at the empty air with his right hand.

  “All right,” Paxton said. “I’ll open a window. They’ll soon buzz off.” He made a fuss of opening the window.

  The effort had exhausted Kerr. He lay with his arm across his eyes, and so he did not see a middle-aged woman in a blue coat and hat walk into the room. She was bright-eyed and smiling. She had an up-tilted nose and rosy cheeks and a cheerful expression. Everything about her was bright, especially her voice, which was light and brisk, the voice of someone who has spent her life being a good mother. “Good morning!” she said. “I am Mrs. Cruikshank, and I’ve come to read the newspaper to Captain Kerr.”

  Paxton liked her as soon as he saw her. “Allow me,” he said and brought her a chair. “You’re very kind,” she said. “I’m sure you’d like me to start with the big news.” Kerr let his arm slip from his eyes. “Oh Christ,” he mumbled.

  “Are we all ready?” She gave the newspaper a shake. “Allies Still Advance. Desperate Battle Fought. German Losses Very Heavy. Then there’s a bit from a special correspondent. He says: ‘I was particularly struck by the general air of complete satisfaction with the way in which operations had gone in this length of the front. More than was really expected had in places actually been done.’ Isn’t that good?” She smiled brightly at them. “I think that’s very good, don’t you?”

  “Anything about my lot?” Kerr asked. His head kept twitching. “Anything about the Manchesters?”

  “Shall we see what we can find?” She turned the pages. “Ah-ha! Now here’s something. It’s all about the Somersets.” Kerr groaned and shut his eyes. “I think you’ll find this very interesting.” Her voice had developed a rhythmic, musical rise and fall. “Shall we read all about the Somersets?”

  “Manchesters,” Kerr said.

  “West Countrymen in Big Advance,” she read, “A Spr
int With The Gordons. Wounded Sergeant’s Stirring Narrative. Doesn’t that sound exciting?”

  Paxton nodded. He had identified her swooping, perky voice: it was that of a good mother telling a bedtime story to a dull child and squeezing the juice out of it. “Jolly thrilling,” he said.

  “Suddenly,” she read aloud, “suddenly the order came to mount the parapet of our trenches, and you never saw anything equal to the sprint between the Gordons and the Somersets.”

  “Sprint …” Kerr was shaking his head, or maybe it was twitching more strongly. “What sprint? Nobody ran.”

  “Helter skelter we peltered across the ground which was intervening and as we drew up to the German defences—”

  “The wounded sergeant said all this?” Kerr asked. “Helter pelter?”

  “Not helter pelter,” she said, sweetly correcting him. “Helter skelter we peltered across—”

  “Rubbish. I never knew a sergeant who talked like that.”

  Paxton asked her: “What happened when they reached the German defences?”

  “Let me see … We met a hellish machine-gun fire.” She shivered deliciously. “Bullets whizzed in all directions. One after another I saw my pals fall… The Manchesters on our left suffered very badly.” She glanced at the rest of the story. “What a shame. That’s all there is about the Manchesters.”

  “That’s all there would be,” Kerr said. “There wasn’t any more.”

  She folded up the newspaper. “I don’t suppose you’re interested in the Eastern Front, are you?” she said. “No. Well, I’ll be back tomorrow.”

  “This is an awful chore for you,” Paxton said. “Why not just let me have the paper and I’ll—”

  “Heavens, no! It’s my little war-effort. I enjoy it.” She went out, brightly.

  “Awfully sorry about the Manchesters,” Paxton said. Kerr said nothing. He had his arm over his eyes again. Paxton left him.

  He asked the nurses about Mrs. Cruikshank and was told that she was the wife of a surgeon. They had five children. She regularly read the lesson at services in the hospital chapel. She put lots of expression into it.

  Paxton slept a bit better that night; he had learned how not to lie on his arm. But during the spells when pain came back and shook him awake, time dragged by and he felt like a prisoner in the gloom.

  Next morning he made sure he was in Kerr’s room when Mrs. Cruikshank arrived.

  “Have you both been jolly good lads and done what you were told?” Her eyes twinkled. “Because if you have, I’ve got such a reward for you here!” Already her voice was swooping and peaking like a roller-coaster.

  “It’s all bunkum,” Kerr whispered, but if she heard him she didn’t show it.

  “Here’s the best medicine for you,” she said; and for one terrible moment Paxton thought she was going to ruffle Kerr’s hair; but instead she sat on the side of his bed. “The big headline says Good Day For Allies!” she announced, “and the little one says Success on All Fronts, British Gaining Ground. That means,” she explained,”we’re doing jolly, jolly well.”

  “I don’t suppose there’s anything about the Flying Corps,” Paxton said.

  “I’ve found a topping story on one of the inside pages. It’s called Tales of Bravery. What our men faced. The deadly machine-gun.” She made her shoulders shiver. “They got it from a wounded major when he reached London.”

  “Not our major,” Kerr said. “Our major won’t see London again.”

  “Are you ready? He says the Hun kept up a slow machinegun fire during the last half-hour of our intense bombardment preceding the assault.”

  “What?” Paxton was appalled. “That can’t be right, can it?”

  “The Boche knew,” Kerr said. “Or guessed. Same difference.”

  Mrs. Cruikshank rattled the pages. “Then there’s a heading that says Cheering Into a Bath of Lead.”

  “I don’t remember any cheering,” Kerr said.

  Mrs. Cruikshank sighed, a dramatic in-and-out of breath. “Honestly, what a pair of fusspots! This major remembers it, and he ought to know. He says: Never in my life have I seen anything finer than the way our successive waves of men marched, singing and cheering, into that bath of lead. The more casualties they saw in front of them the louder they cheered and sang, the harder they pressed forward into it.” She paused because Kerr was blowing his nose, not an easy thing to do when his head twitched so violently.

  “Perhaps that’s enough for today,” Paxton suggested.

  “Oh, but you must hear this bit. It’s from a young lieutenant who went over the top. He told a reporter, Excepting a few, the fellows who’d been hit came on with the others, shouting just as loud and running nearly as hard, too!”

  “Poor bastards,” Kerr whispered.

  Paxton shook his head. “It’s not possible,” he said. “How can it be possible?”

  “It’s perfectly clear,” she said. “He saw it happen. Some bowled over like boys doing Catherine Wheels when they were hit, and rushed straight on with hardly a check … Let go. Let go!”

  Kerr had grabbed a corner of the newspaper and was trying to drag the rest of it out of her hands. It tore, slowly and raggedly. Kerr was swearing, an endless, hoarse, stammering stream of obscenities.

  Paxton went and found a nurse.

  Later, when his dressings were being changed, he asked the doctor how much longer he would have to stay. “I’d very much like to rejoin my squadron,” he said.

  “We’ll see about that in due course.”

  “This place is getting very full. You could give my bed to someone who really needs it.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  “Hornet Squadron’s got a damn good MO. He could do this.”

  “We’ll see.”

  In the afternoon he had a visitor: Kellaway. Paxton was delighted and wanted to hear all his news from Pepriac, but Kellaway had banged his head yet again in another forced landing, and his memory was patchy. He was in Paris to have his skull X-rayed. “Spud Ogilvy went west, I do know that,” he said. “Collided with a Hun. I know Spud went west because he owed me forty francs … It’s been very busy since you left, lots of changes. O’Neill asked me to give you this.”

  It was a tinted postcard showing a very jolly-looking naked lady. On the reverse side O’Neill had written: You owe me a fiver. “I don’t remember borrowing a fiver from Bunny,” Paxton said.

  “Beats me, old chap. I don’t remember eating breakfast.”

  “I’m fed up with this hospital,” Paxton said. “I’ve asked them to send me back to Pepriac. They keep saying they’ll see about it, but they never do. I’m fed up with doctors, and their bloody silly wives.”

  “Come with me. I’m going back tomorrow, in a car.”

  Paxton was startled by the simplicity of the idea. People were walking in and out of the hospital all the time. “All right,” he said. “All right. Yes. All right, I’ll do it.”

  Paxton slept, woke, ate, drank salt water, and was chatting to a gunner captain who had only one foot when a nurse stopped to say that Captain Kerr was asking for him. Paxton collected the newspapers and went to see him.

  “I’d like to apologise,” Kerr said. “Unforgivable way to behave.” He looked grey and tired. His twitch was worse.

  “Not a bit of it, old fellow. I quite understand.”

  “To tell the truth, I don’t remember very much. All a bit hazy.”

  There was a newspaper clipping on his bed. “Is that about the Manchesters?” Paxton asked.

  “One of the nurses gave it to me. I haven’t read it, of course.”

  Paxton read it, silently. There was nothing there that he could tell Kerr, so he gave him the clipping and said: “Everyone agrees the Manchesters were very brave.” It didn’t seem enough, so he added:”And all the papers say we’ve nearly won.”

  “Nearly won.” The clipping shook in Kerr’s hand like a paper flag being waved. “Nearly won.”

  The problem next morning
was finding something to wear, something better than hospital-blue pyjamas. He wandered about the corridors, pretending to read a newspaper, and came across a huge wicker laundry-basket, open. He pretended to be resting against it. Nobody even glanced at him. The hospital was very busy now; everyone had too much to do. He fished out a pair of white trousers and a white jacket, both spattered with blood, and a white coat. If he wore the coat loosely, over his shoulders, it would hide the fact that his arm was in a sling.

  Kellaway’s car was waiting outside the hospital at the agreed time. Two other RFC officers were in it, but they made room for him. Nobody wanted to talk about the war. Before they had left the suburbs he was asleep.

  When he awoke they were bouncing and jolting along a rutted lane and his arm didn’t like it. This went on for a very long time, as they delivered one pilot to his aerodrome, and then the other. There was no sun. The roads were clogged with troops and transport. Everyone was in khaki, everyone was moving eastward, nobody was smiling. “I bet the Hun’s feeling jolly sick,” Paxton said.

  “Oh?” Kellaway yawned. “Why’s that?”

  “Well, he must be retreating like mad.”

  “Don’t ask me, old chap. I can’t remember what I had for breakfast” They trundled through a crowded village where military police directed traffic. “Did I tell you Charlie Essex went west?” Kellaway asked.

  “No. You said Spud Ogilvy.”

  “Really? Are you sure?” Kellaway worried about it for a mile or so. “The thing is, Spud owes me forty francs.” He chewed a thumbnail and looked at it with distaste. “I could use forty francs,” he said. “What would you do, if you were me?”

  “I’d forget it.” Paxton was feeling very weary. “There are more important things going on, you know.”

  “Mmm.” Kellaway chewed the other thumbnail and didn’t like it either. “Eggs!” he said suddenly. “Just remembered what I had for breakfast. Eggs.” He smiled and looked out of the window. They passed yet another column of troops. “Or maybe that was yesterday,” he said.