Coming Home

by Roy E. Stolworthy

  “You’re not going to make it up with Thomas then?” Leslie Hill asked suddenly.

  Banks glanced up quickly. “Strange question, what makes you ask?”

  Hill stared into Banks’s face and worked the muscles in his jaw, searching for a semblance of a smile. He knew Banks’s nerves were on the verge of breaking point. Most of the battalion knew and waited for the day when he would finally snap and be taken to the crazy house in Scotland. They were all afraid, afraid of their flesh being ripped from their bodies by showers of white-hot shrapnel, of being left forgotten and headless at the bottom of a gore-filled crater. Light faded, quickly replaced by darkness, and under the moon No Man’s Land glowed unnaturally, like a shadowy negative of a land inhabited by devils.

  “He misses you and you miss him. Trouble is, the pair of you are too bloody stupid to admit it. You were best friends once, perhaps it’s time to make up and allow bygones to be bygones. We’ve enough enemies on the other side of No Man’s Land without falling out with each other. How would you feel if he died tomorrow? Go on, tell me that. You’d cry your bloody eyes out like the rest of us, but be too late then, won’t it?” Hill said, struggling manfully to find the appropriate words.

  Banks looked down at his boots thoughtfully and raked his head with his fingernails.

  “Yeah, I reckon you’re right, lad, I might find it in my heart to give him the benefit of the doubt. No good harbouring grudges in the trenches, is there?” Stan said, his eyes flickering out of control. Leaning forward, he strained his ears. “The German buggers are repairing their barbed wire. Put a flare up, lad.”

  They caught the party of Germans working on the barbed wire filling in the gaps. There were eight of them, and six died from gunshot in the ghostly luminous shroud of the drifting flare. They left the other two to suffer, screaming in fear and agony, entangled in their own barbed wire.

  Thomas lay on his bed trying to ignore the ache from the bullet wound throbbing in his shoulder and to make sense of the past few days. Why had he cast a vote for life in the water-filled crater and then charged towards the German lines empty-handed seeking death? Why should he be allowed the privilege of picking and choosing the method of his demise? Archie wasn’t allowed a choice in the way he died. No one had the divine right to choose. To take one’s own life is as bad as murdering someone else, he’d heard somewhere, but he couldn’t remember where.

  He lied when he said he’d attend the medical centre. Instead, he returned to the farmhouse with the bullet still lodged in his shoulder. In his mind he argued with himself. If the bullet wouldn’t kill him, perhaps gangrene might. All he needed were a few days of peace and quiet somewhere he couldn’t be found. The next day he found Sergeant Bull and told him the doctor had recommended a few days’ rest to allow the wound to heal. Back in the farmhouse he waited until everybody was about their duties and using all his strength pulled up the heavy trapdoor leading down to the dusty cellar. In the corner a pile of hessian sacks reeked of dried blood from slaughtered animals – a legacy from better times when the building had been inhabited by farmers.

  Four days later, hungry and detached from reality, he lay in a peculiar stillness, and as time passed the infection set in. First he began to sweat and shake uncontrollably, his teeth chattering like a man freezing to death. Rapidly the infection penetrated deeper and deeper into his body and he dipped in and out of delirium, conscious one moment, semi-conscious the next. It couldn’t be long now, he told himself, it was time to persevere, time to give up his life that was once so precious and alluring.

  Archie came, like he always did, holding the rope with a noose dangling at one end. He saw Ruby, broken and dejected, herded away to the slaughterhouse. The butcher with the green van cut her up and made a display in his shop window, and people laughed when they fed their dogs on her flesh.

  Thomas’s initial reaction when he woke with a start to the acrid smell of disinfectant and carbolic soap was one of abject confusion, and twisting his head he wondered where he was. A nurse gently cut the blood-dried shirt away from the wound. She had once been voted the prettiest girl at the summer fete in the Sussex village, today her eyes were red raw, her eye sockets surrounded by dark lines and her flaxen hair pushed untidily under her stained starched hat. Her cup of coffee still waited untouched on the locker – they had made it for her at seven that morning. It was now nine-thirty in the evening. She worked quietly and diligently in a professional manner, her almost angelic smile ever present, as if someone had nailed it to her face. A man with grey hair and a clipped moustache peered down at him. His breath reeked of onions and Thomas knew he wasn’t dead. He turned his head and tried to speak, to tell them to leave him alone to die, but no words came and his heart began to race. He mistook the yellow glow of the acetylene lamp for the sun and scowled.

  “You’re a very lucky man, Corporal. If your friends hadn’t brought you when they did, you might well have died,” Dr Burch smiled. “Another day or so and we wouldn’t have been able to contain the infection penetrating your upper body, and that would have been that, I’m afraid. We have cut away the worst, now rest. Careful treatment should see you up and about in four to five weeks.”

  Before he could find the strength to answer, they left to attend to others more deserving of their attention than a man consumed by a selfish intent to bring about his own death. He felt the stabbing pain sear across his chest. Christ, four to five weeks!

  “Why, why for God’s sake won’t they allow me to die?” he murmured, wondering how they had discovered him lying in the cellar.

  In the evening the pain worsened and on several occasions he grimaced and twisted his head in a vain bid to escape the pain. Men lay wounded, waiting for attention, their features distorted in agony like a grotesque mask. Yet they made no complaint, asking only occasionally for a smoke. His discomfort seemed irrelevant, nondescript, and he lay with his eyes closed forcing himself to remain silent. The man in the next bed gave a long low moan. The spread of his chest displayed an anger of blood-mashed flesh and bare exposed ribs where shrapnel had ripped away half his torso.

  “Sorry,” he said, trying to raise his head, “It’s the pain. I’m not keeping anyone awake am I?”

  When the young ashen-faced nurse attempted to bathe the wound, he screamed and kicked in agony. Finally she broke down, her nerve ends severed from overwork and raw fatigue. The blood red swab fell from her hands and she ran sobbing from the tent. It seemed hopeless, worse than washing bare flesh in an abattoir. The man jerked once, called for his mother and then passed away. Minutes later he was replaced by a man with his right leg blown off. He clutched the severed limb tight in his arms, holding it close to his chest, and refused to give it up. Finally, when he came to his senses and realised what had happened to him, shock set in and he began to convulse. Kicking and thrashing, it took four male attendants to hold him down.

  After twenty-five minutes, the doctor, drenched in blood and trying to administer aid to twenty patients at once, ordered him to be tied down on a stretcher and taken outside. Silence descended like a sea fog when the sound of a pistol shot rang out and the screaming suddenly ceased, patients fidgeted and looked nervously at each other seeking confirmation that their fears were ungrounded. He pushed his raging thoughts to one side, refusing to believe that the British shot wounded soldiers, regardless of how bad their wounds were. The man with the severed leg was never seen again.

  That night he clasped his hands together and prayed. He prayed to the God that Moses had denounced to be taken from this man-made hell and left to die somewhere green and pleasant, where it didn’t rain, where birds sang in freedom and dogs scratched at flea-ridden hides.

  Two weeks later nature gave up its unnatural barrage of torment and the weather began to improve. It grew hotter, soon the slushy furrows were baked into solid ruts, and men stumbled and cursed with dust-blindness and sore eyes. Trenches were cleared and Dan, Dan, the sanitary man made a welcome appearance with his can o
f creosote. Hygiene and sanitation improved, and men stripped and de-loused their clothing. Nothing was ever perfect, yet morale rose and grim jaws relaxed. Thomas sat outside the casualty clearing station to allow adequate room for the ever increasing incoming wounded. Settled in a comfortable padded chair he watched the sparsely-leafed branches of an elm tree sway and rock in the breeze and the gentle rustle of newly-grown spring leaves sent him into a state of semi-hypnosis. When the nurses changed his dressings he refused to defer his concentration, preferring to fill his mind and soul with a tiny glimpse of the long-forgotten wonders of nature.

  When Moses made a surprise appearance it was even more surprising that he came accompanied by Stan Banks. Thomas glared at him, his features no longer as he remembered them – he was even more drawn and paler than ever, his lips bloodless and faintly blue. He barely recognised the gaunt and haunted man standing in front of him and pondered how long before Banks finally succumbed to life in the trenches. He tensed, and waited for the sneering innuendo and barbed insults to assault his senses.

  “It is good to see you looking well,” Moses spoke first.

  “You’re looking well, lad. A bit peaky, but you’re looking well,” Stan said nervously, reddening in a fret of embarrassment and wondering how Thomas might react after months of having derogatory remarks hurled at him.

  “Thank you, I’m fine Stan. How are the snipers doing?” he smiled, quietly overjoyed at the opportunity to heal past differences with his old friend.

  “Not many of us left now. After you were shot it kind of all fell to pieces, nobody really knew what to do. You’re missed, lad,” Stan said, his heart singing out with happiness at Thomas’s response.

  “Keep them up to full strength. It’s important for the morale of the others. Tell the section leaders to recruit men from the ranks – it doesn’t matter how good they are, just make it look good.”

  “Aye, I’ll do that. Masher and Neil are no longer with us, can’t find hide nor hair of either of them,” Stan said, wringing and twisting his hands.

  For a moment Thomas reflected on the loss of his friends and two more faces joined the never-ending hallway of his memory. His sadness quickly evaporated, replaced by a boiling rage. His breathing came with short, fast gasps rattling from his open mouth. Every night he’d prayed for death and upon waking he prayed again. He fumed silently to himself – how can they die so easily, why do they make it sound so damn simple?

  “Perhaps Moses can help – he gets on well enough with the lads and they respect him,” Stan said, glancing at Moses.

  “How do you feel about that, Moses?” Thomas said, keeping his eyes firmly fixed on the swaying elm. “Could you take Neil’s place?”

  “If I can be of any assistance I shall be only too happy to oblige,” Moses said.

  “Good, that’s settled then.”

  Thomas wanted to cry out with sheer joy when the doctor told him he was to be transported with three other men by horse and cart to a first aid station to recuperate. Anything was better than living among the horror and stench of the dying. Nothing too strenuous, they told him. Take it easy and allow time to work its magic. The words gave him reason to smile. Here he was, in the middle of a mindless bloodbath where it seemed a thousand times easier to die than live, and yet he couldn’t manage it. After another week they arranged transport back to the farmhouse and warned him to avoid the cellar. The next time he fell down the steps he might not be so lucky and might break his neck. He struggled to stifle a smile. Moses, not so dull-witted as some, watched him from the corner of his eye and kept his thoughts to himself.

  Every three days he was attended to by a cross-eyed stretcher-bearer with a limited knowledge of first aid, and fresh dressings were applied to his wound. It seemed a waste of time – the present bandages dried onto the wound, and each time they were removed the wounds opened and bled.

  “Maybe if you left me enough fresh bandages, I could change them myself every day,” Thomas suggested.

  “No problem, we have plenty of spare bandages. I’ll leave you enough for ten days. After that I’ll drop by and take look at you,” he said, throwing the used bandages onto the small open fire.

  “Do you enjoy what you do?” Thomas asked for the sake of conversation.

  “My father forbids me to kill – I’m Jewish,” he shrugged with bony shoulders. “Anyhow, believe it or not I like the Germans – I have relatives in Dusseldorf – so why would I want to kill them? In Germany there are many Jews in high places responsible for running the country. Germans would never harm a Jew.”

  The face of good fortune never smiled for long and against all expectations the rain started again with a vengeance, swallowing the day and filling the trenches ankle high. Extra duckboards were collected by a line of dejected men and piled one on top of the other. This resulted in men moving around hazardously with their heads and shoulders on display above the trenches – an easy target for German snipers. Sandbags were quickly filled and heaped on the parapet to eliminate the danger. Again, cases of self-inflicted injury rose. Some men, desperate to escape the horror and carnage, shot themselves in the foot, others put a bullet through the leg tendons in a bid to receive an early passage back home. Worst of all was the man found minus his boots and socks and his big toe resting on the trigger of his rifle, the muzzle in his mouth as he prepared to blow off his head. He told the Military Police that during the previous evening he’d had a premonition he was going to die, and nothing anyone said could alter his belief. He was taken away and never seen again.

  Moses dropped by the farmhouse with a half bar of chocolate he’d traded for a German bayonet. He sat peculiarly quiet watching Thomas seated by the window engrossed in the activity of a bird singing in a tree shading the farmhouse.

  “This war is important to you, isn’t it, Thomas?” he said quietly. “It has some relevance to your life. You use it as a form of retribution.”

  “How do you mean?” Thomas answered, feeling heat creeping into his ears.

  “You treat the war as if it is a form of jury, to judge you. I believe in your own perverse way you see yourself as the judge, jury and executioner, with yourself as the accused. Why is that?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Thomas said, shrinking from the question. Inside of him lurked a degree of vulnerability that he seldom gave any thought to, but he knew it was there, waiting to come to life. Moses teetered on the verge of reviving it.

  “You disobeyed orders when you left the trenches,” Moses continued. “You weren’t even firing at anyone, you just kept walking, waiting to be shot or blown to pieces. You want to die, and I would like to know the reason for your moral bankruptcy.”

  Thomas spun round on the chair feeling the hairs on his neck bristling with anger. He wasn’t bright by any definition, nor was he that stupid that he didn’t know when he was being compromised. Moses had been the first to put two and two together and come up with four.

  “It’s none of your bloody business, is it? Anyway, you don’t know what the bloody hell you’re talking about.”

  Moses leapt from his chair taking Thomas by surprise. His hands encircled his throat, cutting off his air supply.

  “Listen to me, boy,” he hissed between his teeth. “Sergeant Bull saved your life out there when he pulled you down. He saved your life again when you were about to be sucked into the crater, and all that time you thought only of yourself.”

  “He didn’t have to,” Thomas gasped.

  “No, he didn’t, and I didn’t have to risk my life running over No Man’s Land to stop that German officer from un-jamming his pistol and finishing you off. You don’t care about anyone but yourself, and that makes you a liability and a danger to the safety of others!” Moses roared. “If you want to die, be a man and shoot yourself. Go away and blow your head off and leave others to survive.”

  Thomas felt his defences crumble and struggled to free himself from Moses’s grip. “You don’t understand, I have
to die, I have to, for my parents,” he cried out.

  Limp in Moses’s strong hands his resolve drained away like water flowing into a gutter. It was over and he was no longer Corporal Archie Elkin, winner of the Military Medal for outstanding bravery. Now he was just a vulnerable sixteen-year-old boy living a terrible lie in a man’s world, a world so full of strange tangled contradictions that his young mind couldn’t understand. His options were simple. Die by a bullet or die on the end of a rope. Both frightened him witless and he remembered his father telling him that if a person doesn’t know where he’s going, any road will take him there. This day, for the first time, he knew the meaning of those words.

  “What the hell are you talking about? What have your parents got to do with the war, for God’s sake?” Moses roared, releasing his grip.

  Sergeant Bull’s hand hovered over the doors handle. He hesitated, his eyes slitted and instead of moving away he remained still and listened to the raised voices. Thomas exhaled, struggling to hold back the well in his eyes. With the back of his grimy hand he wiped away the snot running from his nose and sniffed. He wanted to fight Moses, to try and silence him before he learned his secret. Instead, he blurted out everything from the beginning. Moses listened in silence. Outside, Sergeant Bull turned his head in the hope he might hear more clearly. He was by no means a man who eavesdropped on other people’s conversation, yet he’d always held the view Archie Elkin wasn’t the person he made himself out to be. Thomas reached for his rifle, slid the bolt open and rammed a shell into the breech. With the muzzle tight to his forehead he reached for the trigger. Moses snatched the weapon away.

  “It was an accident for God’s sake, and they don’t hang fifteen-year-old boys in England. However, I must admit the episode concerning feeding your brother’s body to the pigs is a little extreme. So, you want to die a hero in Archie’s name and make your parents proud of him. Both will be lies. Have you thought about that, my friend? Learn to live like a man and you will die like a human being. Because that is what you are, not some hunted rabbit continually haunted by the past. You have done enough in Archie’s name. What would Ruby say if she knew of this, or maybe she already knows?”