Alec

by William di Canzio

  Jerry had hidden barbed wire along the ridges, woven it through the bushes. Alec got caught at the knees. He feared a bayonet blade in his back while he tried to get free. Instead he heard Carlisle shouting the prescribed curses as he stomped down and cut away the wire. Then a single file of a half dozen German prisoners marched toward them, their arms held Y-style over their heads. Alec noticed a very young one, his greatcoat as smartly belted as any toy soldier’s, his correct martial bearing at odds with his face’s exhaustion and despair. Alec thought he had never seen a salute so gallant as the one that this boy presented to his captors’ officer.

  By noon the dead were being laid out in rows, officers side by side with the other ranks. (“When the game’s done,” Llewellyn had said, “pawn and king both get tossed into the one box.”) Father Phelan was talking to the corpses and tracing crosses with his thumb on their foreheads. Among the living casualties, the bearers first carried off those whose viscera were ripped open. They would be overdosed with morphine.

  Smoke and sunlight streaming together through the leaves were confusing Alec’s eye now, no telling tree trunks from shadows. That was why he first doubted what he saw there in the glade: a man, no longer a man, a dead body, a thing, who’d been caught in the hidden barbed wire, like a ram he’d once seen tangled in thorny brambles in Dorset, so that the bleating animal would shred its own flesh when it struggled to get free. Half the soldier’s uniform was torn away by the barbs; his right leg was naked; his sex, small and boyish, bared. Unlike Alec, he’d not been freed from the snare of barbed wire: instead a bayonet had pierced him in the middle and then the blade had been ripped up through his gut as far as his heart, exposed now, framed by rags and bones. No angel had stopped the knife. Alec heard the clink of a tripod behind him. He found his last grenade, pulled the pin, and lobbed it with a cricketer’s skill just when the machine gun started to fire. The grenade exploded even as the bullet struck him.

  Then the noise of the guns became drumming, a music not fearsome but dancelike, and the wind in the leaves, women’s voices heralding. From where he lay, Alec saw her enter the clearing: Brigantia, queen of the woods, robed in streaming-down sunlight, veiled in diaphanous smoke. She cradled Llewellyn’s torn body, claiming him, dead, for her own. She graced his head with a circle of flowers and ivy, the way the child had crowned Alec once in Dorset on a midsummer night.

  VI

  A SENSE OF PRESENCE

  22

  “Put it down on paper,” Sister said to the group of them. “Don’t worry about grammar or commas or spelling—least of all, penmanship. It’s a chance to get it out; it’s hiding there, festering. Like all evil things, it fears the light of day. Write for your own sakes, not mine. You need never show anyone. But if you should ask me to read it, I shall, or to keep it for you unread, I shall, or, if you like, even burn it.”

  How old might she be? Thirty? Hardly older than her patients. Kind and wise. War accelerates aging. At twenty-two, he was already an old-timer in the ranks. Was he any wiser…? She was so very thin, careworn, and amazingly clean. How did she do it? Those white cuffs and that elaborate kerchief—what did you call the thing? Something medieval … Llewellyn would have known the word. Wimple! And always that fresh smell about her, of soap and starch. How did she stay so crisp in this knackery of wounds and seeping stumps, of coughing and spitting up? Brooms, mops, hot water, soapsuds, day and night wielded by angels of hygiene battling the demons of grime. “Your worst memory,” she said, “the worst sight you saw. It’s only a thought now, it can’t harm you anymore. Write it down and cast it off.”

  Mental hygiene! Ah-HA! Expose the sick memory and scrub it away. But now why (given all the human wretchedness he’d witnessed), why did he first think of animals? A horse made to drag the carcass of another horse into a ditch. (Had the two once pulled one wagon together?) Or then think not of battle, but here, just outside, yesterday, the legless master sergeant in his wheelchair. He was smiling for a camera. Why? What girl would ever have him to bed? How long would the man live, and always on charity? Or in Kensington Gardens, the model “trenches.” Or Trafalgar Square, the “ruined village,” bombed and burned. Stage sets so civilians might get a clean look at the war and toss money into the empty artillery barrels to keep it going …

  Alec wrote nothing. He closed his eyes. She approached. “Try not to dwell on it,” she said quietly to him. “It’s better to write it out quickly.”

  “I’m all right, Sister,” he said. When he shifted in his chair, a sudden sharp pain made him squeeze his eyes shut, pressing hot tears out from under the lids. It would pass, it would pass; don’t hold your breath, that prolonged it …

  The bullet had not been a dumdum, like those the Austrians were using against the Serbs. Those shattered on impact, blasted shrapnel inside you; that meant cutting off the stricken limb—or death if it hit the torso. Alec’s bullet had been conventional. It pierced his side under the arm. Two ribs had cracked with the force but stopped the bullet just short of his lung, which, though not penetrated, had collapsed from the pressure of the air entering his chest through the hole in the skin. Good bullet! Did its job, its only job—i.e., to kill or to maim and thereby remove a pawn from the board. He heard someone say that about a third of those with a collapsed lung die of it. Odds working in his favor, he survived. Still he wondered: If one simple slug cost him so many hours of agony, and the medics and nurses so much labor, what was the price of those millions of rounds fired at the Somme in one day? What price was the other fellow paying, the one he’d shot, who’d killed Lieutenant Hampton? He wrote nothing.

  The Scudders came to visit in the afternoon, as they’d been doing regularly. Their visits were easier now. Weeks ago, at first sight of their wounded son, Elwood held stoic, but Aderyn could not contain her anguish.

  “Please, Ma, you’re makin’ it worse,” Alec said, “like you need this bed more than I do.”

  She wept. “Don’t you know how gladly I’d lie there in your stead if the Lord God might take your pain and give it to me?”

  With time, she’d come around; she’d even found a way to make Alec chuckle, along with others within earshot, by threatening to go to the trenches herself and teach those brutes not to attack such fine boys. Today she was bubbling with good news: Jane had given birth to their first grandchild. “Six pounds twelve! A big healthy baby! They’re christening her Rita because it’s the same in Spanish and will go easy in school. Lovely, isn’t it, Rita? Jane’s mother says she’s going soon as she can and stay six months. ‘However will you get to the Argentine with this hateful war?’ I asked her. She says, ‘I’ll row my own boat if I have to.’”

  Alec smiled, though the news saddened him, he couldn’t say why. Maybe because he felt no part of a world where couples had children and grandparents doted?

  “Folks ask for you often,” Elwood said, as they were about to go.

  “Do they, Da?”

  “Yes, son, they care about you.”

  As they were departing, the Scudders passed an elegant woman by the doors who seemed out of place in this ward for other ranks. She waited till the villagers were gone. Then she went to their son’s bedside, attracting the attention, as she always did when she visited him, of patients and staff.

  “Sweet Alexander,” the baroness said, smoothing his hair, kissing both cheeks, then dabbing away the red smudges. “Sorry…”

  “Might as well leave it, the way you set tongues awaggin’. They’re all wantin’ to know, ‘Oo’s she?’ When I tell them the truth, my former employer, there’s such winkin’ and hootin’: ‘Send milady’s footman young Scudder to attend her bath.’”

  She laughed. “I’ve heard so much worse. Now tell me, are you feeling better at all?”

  “Yeah, I think so. The throbbin’s calmed down. That means I’m on the mend.”

  “Good.”

  “Don’t suppose there’s any news—?”

  She sighed. “I do wish there were…”
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  “Thought not. You’d have said right away…”

  Indeed, she would have. For nearly two years now, this lady’s friendship had been crucial to the love of Alec and Maurice. It was impossible for them to write each other: correspondence between officers and other ranks was suspect, forbidden by custom if not rule. Of course they couldn’t communicate through their families. Teddy and George had offered to receive letters from one and pass the news on to the other in some coded way, but that scheme got ruled out because the older men were being watched for their public opposition to the war. The baroness stepped in. Aware of the censors, Private Scudder wrote to “Mrs. Wentworth,” housekeeper, care of her employer’s house on Bedford Square, with updates on his health and army life and always a message of love to “Mary.” Second Lieutenant Hall wrote to the same house, but to its owner, Mme la Baronne du Thoronet, with assurances of his good health and tender words for “Alice.” The lady responded to each with news and affection from the other. At first it had almost been fun, when the lovers were writing frequently about training and longing for Mary or Alice. But after deployment, the notes got radically shortened. She could sense her young friends’ fear in the way they’d try to sound lighthearted. Sometimes, when there was hardly any news to send, she’d been tempted to make things up for the sake of their morale, but she did not. Instead she managed for these nearly two years to convey to each that the other was alive and devoted.

  Because of the censorship, information about whereabouts was always sketchy, hardly more than Alec’s being at the Western Front and Maurice in the Mediterranean. Then the handwritten notes stopped, and she’d receive only those preprinted field service postcards, maddeningly vague and evasive, headed with this message:

  NOTHING is to be written on this side except the date and signature of the sender. Sentences not required may be erased. If anything else is added the postcard will be destroyed.

  In July, “Mrs. Wentworth” had received one such card from Paris with checkmarks next to three phrases, I have been admitted into hospital, and Wounded, and Hope to be discharged soon. Others crossed out. So she’d learned of Alec’s injury. As for Maurice, there’d been no word for months.

  “I search the lists every day,” she said. “We must believe it’s a good sign, Alec, really. Let’s trust that he’s well and things just aren’t getting through.”

  “They’re still countin’ the dead from Gallipoli,” Alec said, then choked up. She held him while he sobbed.

  Someone approached and called out, “Licky!”

  Alec sniffled and said, “Ma—?”

  Aderyn rushed to the bed. “What’s wrong? Where’s the nurse?”

  “I believe he’s all right, Mrs. Scudder,” said the baroness. “Just having a sad recollection…”

  “Is that so?” said Aderyn, shocked and suspicious.

  “Ma, the lady’s—”

  “Cornelia Wentworth,” the lady interjected.

  The mother fixed her eyes on her, who felt obliged to speak: “Your son worked for us in Dorset a few years ago…” She garnished the facts to spare Alec the need to explain: “I came here today for a governors’ meeting. I recognized his name on the patients’ list and thought I should greet Private Scudder. How proud you must be—”

  “Of course we are. Didn’t we see you earlier, waiting?”

  “I didn’t like to intrude. You were enjoying a family visit.”

  “Most thoughtful of you.”

  “Ma, I’m fine. Just a bad recollection, like Mrs. Wentworth was sayin’.”

  “What could so trouble you?”

  “It’s nothin’.”

  “Tell me!”

  “Why drag it up?”

  “I knew it. I knew you were keeping things from us. Didn’t I say as much to your father?”

  “What brought you back? You’re gone but twenty minutes.”

  “My glove—there ’tis—from my good Sunday pair. And don’t the Lord work in mysterious ways? As if he were calling me here to find you in such a state.” She turned to the lady. “A mother always senses. Thank you for your solicitude. I’ll stay with him now.”

  “But where’s Da?”

  “Where I left him, I suppose, at the tram platform.”

  “He’ll be worried—”

  “Then let him come find me.”

  * * *

  “‘Don’t dwell on it,’ she says. What’s it matter if I dwell or not? They’re only fixin’ me up to send me back for more.”

  “Might you please tug the sheet on your side?”

  Alec did so, awkwardly, from his chair; on her side of the bed, the nurse snapped the hem taut, made a triangular fold, and tucked it under the mattress for a sharp corner. She was his favorite: from the Voluntary Aid Detachment, like many who worked here at Slough. He liked her round-rimmed glasses, the way they magnified her greenish eyes, the short cheeky cut of her very dark hair. Of her haircut she said, “Good riddance to Victorian froufrou! You men can’t conceive the upkeep. Hours of washing and drying and combing, and then twenty minutes at least, never less, to pin it in place—each time! My week’s gained an entire day since I snipped off the tresses, though my aunt still groans at the sight.” She laughed: “And of course that’s another advantage.”

  He wished he might know her name, but it was forbidden. But he noticed that the professional medics treated her more respectfully than they did the other VADs, who, being women of middle or upper class, were unused to menial work and seemed offended when given orders. She came from privilege, that was clear, but she betrayed neither disgust nor resentment at what she was told to do. “There,” she said, satisfied with the clean bed. She stuffed the used sheets into the pillowcase and tossed the bundle into the laundry cart. “Ready to climb back in?”

  “Might I walk a bit instead? A turn round the ward? Have you time?”

  She consulted the watch fastened to her apron bodice, the one with the upside-down face. “Five minutes and a half. Shall we ambulate?”

  “If that’s what you’ve got to call it.”

  She offered to help him up from the chair. He declined, gripped its arm with his one hand, and pushed himself up to standing.

  “Excellent!” she said. “You’ll see, in a week you’ll be steady again.” She extended her arm to him, making a fist to keep it level and strong.

  Alec accepted her support. He said, “Steady and ready and right back to hell.” She made no response. “Sorry … I know you’re not allowed to say things against the war.”

  “Well, you can’t know for certain they’ll send you back.”

  “I know they’re desperate. This latest conscription’s only the start. Already kids and granddads servin’ side by side, people they’d never have took two years ago, each bunch shorter by four inches and thinner by two stone than the last. There’s no end in sight. You’ll see, next they’ll be draftin’ alley cats. Meow, meow, sir.”

  She chuckled.

  “Glad you find me funny.”

  “Well, you are. I’ve got a year almost till I’m twenty-three, and so of course I hope it will all be over by then, but if it’s still on, with my training, they’ll take me to serve abroad, closer to battle—back in hell, as you say.”

  Alec stopped their progress. “Why would you go? You’ve no idea, this hospital’s a garden in springtime to what’s waitin’ for you over there.”

  “That’s why. I can’t abide it that you, all of these fellows, suffer horribly while most of us go on about our lives. On the street I see girls old enough to know better trying to pin chicken feathers on any man not in uniform. The nasty twits, I hate them! Why don’t they go to battle themselves? I’m sure I sound naïve to you, ridiculous.”

  “No. You sound like a very good-hearted person.”

  She tried to lighten his mood: “And you sound like a kindly gray-bearded gent, when you’re a boy no older than I. You ask why I’d want to serve. Why did you enlist? A gallant gesture to dazzle someone special
?” They’d reached the foot of his bed. Alec did not answer. When she saw how sad he’d grown, she said, “Oh … I’m so very sorry. Pay me no mind. Really, I could just kick myself!”

  23

  Today the river looked like sludge, brown, dismal, scabbed with oil and tar, like bilge in the trenches, rat-slime. But in Flanders or France, you could raise your eyes from the ditch and in those few feet of open space see such a brilliant blue sky—The splendorous firmament! Llewellyn might say … No splendor in London today, only flat gray cloud cover. City, city. London Bridge definitely not falling down.

  Private D. Alexander Scudder had been released from the hospital in the third week of August 1916 and ordered back to combat. In light of his extraordinary service (i.e., getting shot, not killed), he’d been granted a week’s extended leave. He’d spent most of those days with his parents in Osmington, where all his old friends were long gone, boys to battle, girls to jobs making weapons. Just Alec and the elders in the village, along with the kids too young to fight or work in munitions factories. At first it felt good to be like a kid again himself, Ma and Da keeping him snug and fed. But he soon got fidgety. His mood made no sense: he both dreaded returning to the front and longed to be nowhere else. He’d pass the time walking aimlessly, once even as far as Lulworth Cove, to the sight of the Durdle Door, that stone archway over the water. Weird work of nature, awesome, even sublime. The sight caused him to realize that he was truly alone for the first time since enlisting, therefore truly himself, not playing a role for family or comrades or visitors in the hospital. (Only with Maurice could he be with another and still truly himself.) The sunlight struck the sea at such an angle that it seemed to pour through the Door, as if laying a path on the water to wherever Maurice might be.