Valiant Gentlemen

by Sabina Murray

  “Easy,” he says to the man, but it’s an abdominal wound and he doesn’t know what damage he might do by moving him. “Is there a nurse who might assist?” Ward asks, hoping that one of this number, dimmed to shadowy figures, might offer some direction.

  “Leave him,” says a voice. Or maybe he said it himself. They are near enough the heater, so perhaps he will thaw sufficiently to be removed with more ease. Maybe being frozen is holding everything in place. What can Ward do? He hears his driver, Kavanagh, shouting that he needs to find him, to find Ward, and the other stretchers must be empty and now loaded on the ambulance for another trip.

  There is no shortage of injured here in the Vosges.

  “I’m so sorry,” says Ward to the man on the stretcher, and he is, for everything, for the conditions of this hospital, for the freezing weather, for his ineptitude, for this war. He is trained to think of this eighteen-year-old as a man, because if these are all boys, it is impossible to proceed.

  There is Kavanagh at the doorway. Ward looks up, helpless, then stands, wiping his hands on his trousers. They are sticky and although the darkness makes it impossible to see, he knows it’s blood. “Lieutenant Ward, we have to go. Leave him. They’ll know what to do with him.”

  Ward gets up front with Kavanagh and they begin the drive to the Post. Ward has been feeling sharp pains in his chest and he thinks that, in any other situation, it might be a good idea to mention this to someone, to say that he should possibly sit this one out, but he can’t think of how to do it and isn’t even sure if he wants to. And sharp chest pains alongside boys with their insides unraveling and frozen to stretchers seems insignificant. But he is uncomfortable and, seeing his expression, Kavanagh, a Tipperary man who thinks that talk is the cure for nerves when singing is not an option, is studying his face.

  “Nice weather we’re having,” he says, almost a shout, over the struggling engine and the tires spinning in the dirt, hitting holes, rolling over rocks.

  “It reminds me of home,” says Ward. It’s not really a joke, but given circumstance, Kavanagh will have to forgive him.

  “Where did you say your boys were?”

  “My older son Charlie is with the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, tenth Battalion. He’s a lieutenant, stationed at Neuve Chapelle.”

  “An officer.” Kavanagh must also be struggling for conversation, dealing with nerves of his own, for this is a poor relative of his usual chatter. And Kavanagh knows all this.

  “And the other?”

  “Herbie. He’s a pilot.”

  “A pilot? He must be very clever.”

  “He must be,” says Ward, “but growing up he’s always been the family clown. And you, Kavanagh?”

  “No one in the war. I have a daughter,” says Kavanagh, “and the poor thing looks just like me.”

  Is there any way to make Kavanagh shut up? It is bad enough to be struggling like this without having to maintain a politeness. If he were anyone else, he would just stop the idle talk. Sarita would think of something to say, sharp and funny that would quiet him. There’s that sound, a screeching. Ward feels his shoulders pull up, as if that might protect him, and there’s an explosion. Rocks fly up and the windscreen cracks. Kavanagh slams on the brakes and the engine dies. He’s swearing up a storm now and Ward is not sure what has just happened.

  “The road’s been blown up. Fuck!” says Kavanagh. He strikes the steering wheel and leaps from the vehicle. Now what? Kavanagh runs to the front of the vehicle and there’s another shriek as some explosive tears through the air. There’s the boom. They are buried in dust and Ward struggles to see Kavanagh in the thick air at the hood of the vehicle. He reappears, apparently unharmed. “Let’s go on foot,” he says. “It’s not that far.”

  Kavanagh moves quickly to the back of the ambulance. Ward wonders how far is not that far. Ward gets out, giving the sky a cautious look. It’s purple, edged in smoke, portentous, as if hatching problems of its own. He and Kavanagh stack four stretchers, one atop the other. Together they move quickly over the busted road and torn trees. Men are running on the ridge above and Ward has the sickening feeling that the Front has moved, that if he wasn’t willing to find the Front—his promise to Sarita—the Front has found him. Ward is not sure how Kavanagh knows where he’s going. They could encounter Germans—lost Germans, brave Germans—as it happens all the time.

  “Stretchers!” comes that disembodied yell. At least they’ve been seen. And then it’s double time. Ward’s chest sends an occasional jolt of discomfort, but his lungs are giving him a few warnings of their own.

  It’s tough going. They must be up around Lac Blanc. Kavanagh stumbles ahead but recovers. There’s a ditch or something. Kavanagh is an absolute goat and Ward does his best to keep up. It occurs to him that he is now a porter, that he is often exceeding his regulation sixty-five pounds, but in his mind—is he ill?—he hears Casement’s voice telling him to bear up, to carry this weight, and he thinks of that chopped-up elephant carcass of so long ago and how it dripped blood down the porters’ heads and shoulders. He’s going to have to tell Kavanagh to slow down, but if he can just make it the next 200 meters to the station, that will at least give him time to breathe as they’re loading the stretchers. And then he sets his foot on a rock, and the rock slides, and he’s down. There’s a searing pain in his knee and he’s knocked his head. He’s probably bleeding. He struggles to get up, and there’s Kavanagh at his side, helping him, but he can’t hold his weight. He screams as he tests the leg.

  “Wait here,” says Kavanagh. And he’s gone. Ward hunkers down in the ditch, cowering behind the stretchers. Could he die here? He really doesn’t want to. The last kindness drains away from the landscape in a wash of blue watercolor.

  Herbert is back at Rolleboise with the war raging inside his head. He has been back for two months. The doctors are still in disagreement as to how to handle the torn ligament in his knee. Surgery? No surgery? But with the heart they are in agreement. General sentiment seems to be that Herbert has shortened his life span with his stint in the Vosges, but to look at him one would think that rather than taking that hit at the end of his life, he is meting out this death sentence over each of his hours, a sort of tax on his vitality. At least she knows where he is—sitting on the terrace watching the Seine that asserts its serenity as a sort of poor-taste joke on the present circumstance.

  Charlie is stationed at Neuve Chapelle. The last time he had leave, he said little about the trenches. He’s led patrols right up to the German wire but beyond that is tight-lipped about what goes on. Charlie struggles to sound cheerful, but as he’s not inherited her sharp wit, he doesn’t have the refuge of gallows humor and is most often grim. All he has is an encroaching silence and a parody of manhood. Sarita’s begged him not to be a hero, tried to introduce possibilities to get him off the Front, for example, they could set up a farm somewhere and he could do that work. Maybe he could wave his arm at the Germans and get that shot in order to bring the rest home. He tolerates all her madness with a look of such extreme sympathy that she composes herself. And Herbie? Taking pictures, flying a plane, while better-armed Germans try to kill him.

  She cannot stand the visitors at Rolleboise, all those lieutenants and majors with their collars strangling their dewlaps, men who have let their own sons fertilize the earth in Flanders and walk around draped in their pomposity as if this infanticide somehow enhances their own commitment to the cause. Oh, she is angry. She can barely rein it in to speak to her own husband. She should be grateful to have him home, but all her tolerance of him has turned to acid and when she looks him in the eye it is with such a ferocious coldness that he cannot hold her gaze. He understands. It’s his fault, all of it. His fault, men like him, fathers who resented the youth of their sons and—so accustomed to spending energy keeping them aware of their inferiority when balanced against the strength of their elders—are now smugly resigned to watch
them struck to corpses. She forces down the bread with some water. She has to eat. Charlie needs her, and Herbie. She has to keep asserting her forces, whatever they are, to bring them back, to give some strong pull to keep them alive.

  Herbert is writing another book, a ridiculous thing with little water­colors of noble soldiers and sketches of stoic farm folk. It is a celebration of the bravery of Mr. Poilu, the term given to the French soldier, who is always cheerful, always brave, and just the thing that the English can see fighting for, and maybe the Americans. At this point, it all hinges on America. The war needs to end now and so she tolerates this book that Harmsworth will publicize. It will be the occasion for Ward’s lecture tour in the United States.

  This is Harmsworth’s war. He makes it whatever he wants it to be, sinks some people, raises others up, brings the trenches into the living rooms of London, although his trenches are characterized by cheery, brave men whose patriotic singing is only halted to let off a round of bullets. Or when shot dead. If Harmsworth could figure out a way to win the war and still have it, he would. No one can live without a newspaper now and the growing roster of the dead is just more saleable ink.

  Herbert sits in the sunshine, turning his head to one side and the other, spinning the anecdotes together into a pithy little tale. There are the nuns who pick flowers in the moonlight to present to the injured men. There is Herbert himself cooking a rustic sausage meal in a helmet. Who wouldn’t want to join this cloying war? And she would make him eat it, eat the book, and fantasizes about tearing each page and stuffing it into his mouth, choking him, but she too wants America in the war and she has no book. She is a woman and has nothing to give, except her boys. All she has left is her rage.

  The phone is ringing. Beatrice will answer, and although Sarita is sitting in the drawing room right by the hallway, Beatrice will walk the extra distance to fetch Herbert as Sarita is better to be avoided. She hears Beatrice’s polite Oui, oui, Monsieur and then her walking to the end of the hall, the opening of the door, her footsteps muted by distance as she reaches Herbert. There’s her high-pitched mumble, followed by his low growl. There’s the screech of chair legs as he pulls himself to standing and his new, signature limp as he goes to the telephone. And now her heart is pounding. Is it her heart? It rather feels that her entire torso is being inflated in rapid, short bursts like an expiring fish. She hopes that Herbert will take the call quickly, and then return to his chair and his view and his book. Or if he comes to find her, it will be a matter of setting the table for guests, or maybe even a room for an overnight visitor. She breathes consciously as Herbert’s limp comes closer. She looks up to see him at the door, his face pale. Was his face pale before? They look at each other, not saying a word. She feels her lower lip quiver, as if she’ll start crying, but she stills it and pulls her spine straight.

  “That is not an attractive expression,” she says.

  “Sarita.”

  Is this when she says, Yes, that’s my name? Is he waiting for her to make the news easier for him to deliver? He approaches in a tentative step, but she stops him with a raised hand. “Anything you need to say, you can say from there.”

  Herbert looks around, lost, again lost. He is desperate and she feels her resolve shattering.

  “Out with it.”

  “Herbie’s been shot down.”

  “That’s not possible.” She does not know where this statement comes from. It just leaps out as if it’s been waiting in the wings these long weeks.

  “He could still be alive. No one is sure. One person was seen crawling from the plane.”

  “Who was that person?”

  “It was impossible to tell.”

  “Was it a big person or a small person?”

  “There is no news.”

  Sarita doesn’t know how to process this information. She doesn’t. She can’t believe it and feels that Herbert has delivered a line handed to him as an actor in a play. “Thank you for letting me know.”

  “Sarita,” he says again.

  “What can you possibly have to say to me?” she manages. “Why are you standing there? I heard it.”

  He makes another step to her.

  “Leave me alone.” She raises her face to him, finally, and he has tears, but she has none. “I beg of you, Herbert, if you have any ounce of consideration for me, that you leave me alone, just for a while. Please.”

  She lives like this for weeks, in and out of reality, eating bread, sometimes a little fish or broth. Charlie writes almost daily from the Front, telling her not to lose hope. Pilots are pulled from the aircraft by the Germans and treated well, almost as heroes, as there is a great deal of respect among those who fly. If Herbie were dead, they would all know by now. She can hear that Charlie is appealing to his good public school training and that the regulation hope—a restrained thing that may or may not have a basis in reality, but is, beyond doubt, the correct response to this situation—has been set in motion. She and Charlie bat this thing back and forth in their letters as if they are playing badminton, because that’s all they can do. Herbert applies himself with telephone calls, pulling strings. The higher-ups find his bravery and courage appealing. How many of these men lifting phones have carried stretchers? Herbert is a person that powerful people like to help, but there is nothing they can do.

  At dinner Herbert eats his pigeon with carefully restrained enthusiasm. He can feel her eyes watching him. Herbert would ask what she thinks he’s done, but he would hate to learn, so he is a coward in this respect. He prefers the cold silence. He rests his fork on the side of the plate and, looking across the table, says, “Herbie is my son too. I took him to see that flight at Bagatelle Field. I held his hand. He had a runny nose.”

  “No anecdotes, Herbert,” she says, the gall rising. “I cannot bear it.”

  Another phone call. She thinks of Charlie, but that would be a telegram, and she calms herself. Herbert tends to the call and she realizes that she has her hands covering her ears, something she has taken to doing each time the phone rings. Each time she thinks of Herbie, she sees him standing in the pear orchard with his butterfly net, his nose peeling from exposure to the sun, his eyes both alert and dreamy, trying to tease some joke out of the current circumstance. He is such an angel that she has taken to worrying that his image is actually a visitation. And there is Herbert at the door.

  “Sarita,” says Herbert, “Herbie is alive. There is a note. A German pilot dropped it just yesterday. They are sending it to us.”

  Sarita rises from her chair. She stands beside Herbert, tentatively tapping his shoulder, but warding him away at the same time, and tears come, choking sobs. Herbie is alive.

  Paris is gloomy, which suits Ward’s mood. A sleeting rain, hunched pedestrians slinking along the sidewalk, a dog raising its leg cheerlessly to the ornamental myrtle. But Cricket is here, will be for the next few days, and that does help to make things tolerable. She’s got her coffee and some fashion magazine that must be two years old. The house in Paris accumulates things like that—old magazines, ill-fitting jackets, fancy razors that the children give you for your birthday when you don’t really need them. Roddie has spent the holiday with his grandfather in America. They have all been waiting for him to mature out of his nerves, but if anything he seems to be worse. The strain of the war and his mother’s anxiety are no doubt compounding this. He wishes Sarita could rally for her youngest son. Although Roddie was actually quite pleased with the trip to America as he has become enamored of American musical theatre. Fine. But Ward doesn’t even know what American musical theatre is, nor do any of the family. It could be very good.

  Sarita has taken to waking at four in the morning and applying herself to the accounting, although what exactly she’s accomplishing, who can know? She has had all the shelves taken out of the downstairs linen closet and moved in a desk. In this tiny, windowless room she retreats for hours at a time
. Her explanation? I need this. He suspects she’s avoiding him. Ward has again appealed to his doctors to see if they won’t try surgery on his knee, and they say an operation would be to no purpose. What he needs is a new heart. He receives occasional missives from the center of operations in Lac Blanc asking if he’s well, if he’s able to return to the Vosges, and that even if he can no longer bear stretchers, there is a lot for a man like him to do. The doctors say no. A man like him—old, weak-hearted—can accomplish nothing but provision yet another of the injured, or worse, a corpse, and does that help anyone?

  “Father,” says Cricket, “so where is it?”

  “Where’s what?”

  “The Croix du Guerre.”

  “That? It’s in my desk drawer.”

  “What’s it doing in there? Shouldn’t it be displayed or something like that?”

  “I could do, but it might set your mother off.”

  “Set her off?” Cricket takes that new expression: determination. It’s a recent adult thing for her and he suspects Cricket’s determination is very effective. “I’ll give her another half hour, and then she’s got to get out of the closet.” Cricket spins her coffee cup, which clatters in the saucer. “You know, I came here to check up on you, because of your injury, but Sarita’s the one who’s falling to pieces.” That’s another development of his daughter’s: referring to her mother by her first name.

  “I don’t know if that’s accurate. I think she’s holding herself together and it’s taking all her strength to do it.”

  “When does Charlie have leave?”

  “Not for another week.”

  Cricket heaves a sigh. “And Herbie is in a prison camp. I hope he doesn’t do anything stupid.”

  “Like what? Isn’t that the situation in prison camps? You can’t do anything?”

  “Herbie will find something. He doesn’t calculate risk the way the rest of us do. He just doesn’t care. That’s why he can fly a plane, and why he was always in trouble at school.”