I awaken in hellish pain that shoots all the way up my back and neck, as two men carry me limping to the dressing station. I see the officer coming out of the tent.
Our work is done, mon commandant, I say, and then I sink into a feverish dream.
Two stretcher-bearers lay me on a stretcher, wash the wound, clean the mud and dirt out of it, and disinfect it with alcohol that makes me jump with pain. A male nurse brusquely pushes me back down onto the stretcher. Panting, I pound my head against the canvas in agony as they apply the first bandage. The stretcher is loaded onto a flat trailer. The automobile thuds and creaks its way over the bumps and potholes to the field hospital in Hoogstade. I am moved to a bed, the pain is driving me crazy. It is August 18, 1915.
—
You’re the darling of your regiment, you are, the nurse says as she washes me with lukewarm water. An officer came to say we have to give you very special treatment. The nurse has coppery curls peeping out from beneath her white and gray bonnet. She looks at me with large green eyes and smiles. I hear you’ll be receiving a Medal of Honor from the king himself.
I hiss in pain whenever she comes near the surgical scar on my thigh. I try to smile.
I’m just an ordinary sergeant-major, I stammer.
You get some more rest now, she says. You have to recover your strength first.
She tucks me in under the starched sheets, pulls them tight, and runs a flat hand over them. Then she rustles away in the sunlight through the large ward filled with wounded men, a number of them moaning and groaning. I sleep like a log from sometime in the late afternoon till mid-morning.
The next day, all fifty soldiers are lifted out of their beds in the large ward and laid on stretchers in a field of grass.
To our surprise, a brass band is playing. The instruments gleam in the afternoon light; a baritone sings “J’aime le son du cor”; this is followed by Luigini’s Egyptian Ballet. The sun breaks through the clouds; the fragrance of flowers comes drifting over the dewy grass. September is already in the air. The silky mildness of the afternoon, combined with the music, melts my heart. All this unimaginable luxury, harmony, and tranquility: no lice, no rats, no muck, no reeking uniforms, no thundering mortars, no dying men, no swollen feet in tight, soggy boots, no swarms of buzzing mosquitoes—it makes my head spin. Looking around, I see the nurses a little way off, in a row, listening. Some of them have their heads cocked; one has her arms crossed over her chest; another is laughing at something whispered in her ear. The andante grabs me by the throat. I remember the bandstand in my faraway hometown where I heard this music as a child, while strolling through Kouter with my father and my mother. My bedsheets smell like Marseilles soap. In the intervals between the acts of the ballet, we hear, far in the distance, the dull thundering of guns at the front. To think this light, bright heaven is built on the sounds of that hell in the distance….I think of my men who are still back there, and of cross-eyed Rudy from Lossystraat. You’ve got a cushy one now, buddy, he said, laughing. Out for another six months. Make the most of it. You’ll be back here with the rest of us soon enough.
A week later, the ward is in commotion. It starts early in the morning, when the nurses bathe us more hurriedly than usual, giggling and saying they mustn’t give away the secret. But all is revealed that afternoon, when who should come into our ward but—we can’t believe our eyes—the Queen herself, in a simple nurse’s uniform. She goes from bed to bed, asking each wounded soldier if he wants chocolate or cigarettes. But she gives me both, saying, “You’re a courageous man, I hear, a credit to our nation.” I stammer, “Your Majesty, I…” I want to tell her I sang for her in the main square as a boy; the green-eyed nurse is standing next to her; she brushes a few coppery curls from her forehead and offers an encouraging smile. The words catch in my throat; a sort of sob wells up inside me. Then the Queen has moved on; I urgently have to use the toilet; I cannot move; I am sweating in consternation and embarrassment.
—
After three weeks, I still cannot lift the wounded leg so much as a hair’s breadth.
After examination by the attending physician, I and twenty other men are sent to northern France in two army vans. We ride along the coast, laid out on stretchers, each bump and thump causing fresh torment. We arrive at the casino in Dinard, which has been converted into a hospital. There is one large infirmary with a view of the sea. Silence, crashing waves, salt air, seagulls in the morning, the distant tooting of fishing boats. The absence of booming guns in the background echoes in our ears. It’s a strange sight: beds and more beds in a circular ballroom, with pathways cleared between them for the nurses, and here and there a chair topped with medicine bottles and all sorts of clutter.
For the first few days I am invisible, nobody talks to me, even the nurses who bring the meals don’t say a word. Only after three days does a soldier come to ask for our names. Flemish names drive him crazy, he tells us. We have to write them down on slips of paper for him. A few hours later, boards with our names on them are attached to the beds. Soon after that, two army doctors enter the room and spend a few minutes examining each soldier.
When they come to my bedside, one of them flings away the sheets.
Levez la jambe.
I can’t lift my leg.
Levez la jambe, Sergent. That’s an order!
I just can’t do it, je suis désolé.
Bon. We’ll see.
—
The next morning at eight, a bear of a man with rolled-up shirtsleeves strides up to my bed. My last sip of coffee goes down the wrong way.
He produces an iron pot of Vaseline and screws it open. After briefly consulting a notebook, he pulls the sheets off my bed.
Let’s have a look, by Jove! he says, in French laced with laughter. He holds his flat hand an inch or two above my big toe.
All right, old man, give us your best kick, right into my hand.
I cannot move my leg a fraction of an inch. The muscles are completely paralyzed.
Now the bruiser leaps into action. He rubs Vaseline into my thigh and starts pinching, pressing, chopping, and pounding with his brutish paws.
I am sweating, coughing, drooping, and panting, almost choking with pain.
Look, old man, you can go ahead and scream. Bawl it out! For the love of Jesus, breathe!
He grabs my wrists and makes me clasp the iron bars under the mattress. I pull with all my might. The torture continues for another five minutes or more.
When I am thoroughly spent, he gives me a whack on the rear and says, There, that’s enough for the first time. Chin up. See you tomorrow.
The next morning, when I see his villainous face approaching, I break into such a sweat that it runs down my forehead into my eyes.
He grins broadly.
Not scared, are you?
He pats me on the cheek and resumes the torture. Again, he pushes my hands to the bars of my bed frame.
Afterward, I notice I’ve bent the bars.
I won’t break your thigh, so don’t you break your bed, he says with a chuckle.
After ten days, life starts to trickle back into my leg. Even the orderly seems surprised. He admits that he thought the muscles were too severely torn ever to heal.
It takes another full week before I can cautiously stand up next to my bed and try to support myself on the wounded leg. I instantly fall to the floor. But from that moment on, I can do slow little exercises in bed; soon I can lift my leg more than an inch. The brute is delighted; the Vaseline is flying.
One day in October I stumble outside on my own for the first time, leaning on a crutch. The sea air overwhelms me; it’s thick with a strange light; seagulls sail over the park and the stately houses; the sea is calm and blue-green; I sit on a bench by the promenade. People walk by, chatting, a few boats are bobbing just outside the Baie du Prieuré. Out to the left, in the distance, I can just make out the medieval silhouette of Saint-Malo. The leaves crackle, yellow and dewy, on the trees; a breeze si
ghs through the grass; it’s as if there had never been a war.
—
Every day I sit there for a couple of hours, looking around and making quick sketches. A girl with a round hatbox walking against the wind; an old woman swathed in flapping black garments, scattering bread for the seagulls, which dive dangerously close to her hands; a soldier passing on two crutches, the stump of his lost limb wrapped neatly in a freshly ironed trouser leg.
Suddenly, an old man is standing behind me. My hand comes to a stop.
“La prestidigitation est un art très peu apprécié,” he says, and he walks on.
For a moment I sit staring, mystified. Why would this strange man call drawing an underappreciated conjuring trick?
The boats ply peacefully between Dinard and Saint-Malo. One day I make the crossing. The sea is flat; fish leap out of the water; seagulls dive and screech in the ship’s white wake. I sit on deck and am free of all my cares. But as soon as that thought comes to me, my heart pounds in my throat, and I remember my comrades, crawling through the mud, fed up and comfortless.
As I walk back to the casino that evening, carefully balancing on my crutches, step by tiny step, a nurse comes running up and scolds me: Why must I take such risks? Besides, there’s a message waiting by my bed. I tear open the envelope marked with a crown: my name is listed in the Military Order of the Day. I am to be made a Knight in the Order of the Crown. The next day, a letter arrives from Britain; my stepbrother Raymond invites me to spend a few days with him in Swansea, where he is staying as a refugee.
—
It is already mid-November when some twenty of us soldiers board the ferry to Saint-Malo in the early morning, have our travel passes stamped by the British consul, and, in the early afternoon, are escorted to a ship whose skipper greets us with a salute.
I spend an hour strolling around Saint-Malo; the narrow streets, the cliffs along the coast. A dead seahorse tumbles back and forth in the breakers, bright and opalescent. I am alone in life, I think, when I see a young woman approaching from the other end of the beach, and I do not know if I shall ever see my mother again. The woman is elegant, although dressed entirely in black; she has a small umbrella with her, which she thrusts into the hard sand at every step like a cane. I do not dare look her in the eyes. After she has passed, I turn around, and see her doing the same. For an instant, our eyes linger on each other.
My leg still cramps with pain sometimes; I have overexerted myself. Exhausted, I board the ship, which is scheduled to depart around four o’clock. A few soldiers are already blotto; they wolf down their allotted rations immediately. The ship’s bell tinkles, the steam whistle blows, the sound echoes from the house fronts, I wonder where the young woman lives, and loneliness crashes down on me like a boulder.
We sail to Southampton, the city that lost nine hundred young men just three years ago in the Titanic disaster. Most of them were crewmen: sailors, laborers, dishwashers, pursers. A lot of lonely ladies who need our services, one soldier says, before spitting on the deck. The skipper comes and reprimands the drunken, rowdy soldiers. He orders them to spend the entire voyage on deck, with cork belts around their limbs, and strictly forbids them to go from the forward deck to the port side. He knows what he’s talking about—the heavy trunks with metal parts that the ship is carrying to England could come loose and crush a careless passenger against the gunwale.
I take a seat on a canvas-covered bench on the port side.
At first, everything is fine. We bob peacefully past the small island of Cézembre, less than five hundred yards away, with its infamous prison where more than a few Flemish soldiers have been sent by military tribunals.
After an hour, dark mountains of cloud appear over the purple sea ahead. A strong wind starts to blow; the men curse; the skipper comes on deck and gives us all strict orders not to walk around. Just a few minutes later, the ship begins to buck like a wild horse; eddies form in the water like pits, some more than fifteen feet deep, and the bow topples into them as if dropping onto metal plates. We grimace at each other, clinging tightly to the bench as we are shaken back and forth. A few minutes later the storm breaks loose above our heads; the ship seems lost in the churning water. We see the skipper heading for the pilot house—he smacks into the railing, slips to the deck, scrambles back onto his feet, and hurries into the compartment. The wind shrieks and moans; all the devils in hell are on the loose. Gigantic waves crash onto the deck, sending great fans of water in all directions and leaving us thoroughly disoriented. I lie down flat under the bench; a soldier immediately vomits all over my feet. From that moment on, there is nothing to be done: everyone is seasick, deathly seasick, we puke the very souls out of our bodies, some soldiers still recovering from their wounds cry out in pain, the storm grows even fiercer. The prow of the ship sometimes rises high above the waves, only to fall into a huge eddy with an enormous crash, making us think our final hour has come. It is night; there is no direction, no land, no world, no up or down, no left or right; there is vomit and salt water; there is noise, a cracking sound as if the ship is splitting open, which goes on for hours and hours and never stops.
By morning some soldiers, whose friends lashed them to pipes or masts, are rolling numbly back and forth like limp sacks, broken and half-dead. The ship is no longer sailing, but surging on the waves, sustaining blow after blow, adrift on the swirling sea. The skipper is sitting it out. As lash after lash beats down on us, we pray, convulsed with cramp, for the end to come. We should have reached the other side last night at ten. In the sparse light, we can tell there is no land anywhere in sight. Some boys, certain we shall perish, whimper like dogs as they expel the last bit of gall from their bodies, drooling and gnashing their teeth in pain and misery.
By nine in the morning, the storm has mostly passed, but the sea is still so rough that when the motors start pounding again, it’s enough to make us all dizzy with agony. We proceed at a snail’s pace, angling into the wind, until we’re near the coast. Swaying ships in the harbor sound their horns to warn us not to dock; our ship would be smashed to pieces in seconds. So we go on swaying and surging until late afternoon; the endless torment froths blue and white over our wrung-out bodies, like the foam that bubbles on our lips, and we crawl in circles to escape ourselves, with twisted visages like devils and demons, as we hold tight with our final scraps of willpower.
This is worse than anything we went through in the trenches, a soldier hiccups in my ear. It is six in the evening before the skipper carefully maneuvers his way toward the harbor, moving astern, yard by yard. A tall wave lifts us up and hurls us down, narrowly missing the quay wall. Again, we sail a hundred yards away from the quay; all the swaying ships are honking like mad to warn us.
Around seven o’clock, the ship is tied up at dock, still swaying, and we, the sick animals, the lice, and the rats crawl and roll ashore like dying creatures and lie in the wind and rain for another hour, our trousers stained with shit and the stench of gall around our heads.
By the time we stagger to our feet, the sun has set.
The skipper calls us together for a head count. One soldier is missing; no one has any idea where he could be.
“It’s the same damn thing every time,” the captain growls. “Now they’ll hold me accountable for the drunken swine who got knocked overboard.”
He takes us to a small café to get over the worst of the shock.
Only now do we look at each other, because the waitresses clap their hands to their mouths. We are as yellow as Chinamen, thin and haggard from spewing gall, hollow-eyed ghouls with trails of dried saliva on our cheeks.
Nobody feels like eating; a little later, when we are shown to small attic rooms with bare wooden bunks to sleep on, we immediately fall into a dreamless sleep, while outside in the darkness the November storm rages on, pounding dully against the roof.
—
The next day I sit and doze on the train to London, where I wait for my connection for two hours, numb and d
rained, like a man who has lost all purpose and direction in life. I feel homesick for my friends in the trenches. From London, I travel on to Swansea by way of Bristol. I sit alone with my misery, downhearted and chilled to the bone, as the train rattles slowly onward through the deserted hills. The trees and hedges drip with melting snow. No one says a thing. At each station that slips past, we see huddled soldiers, some smoking, obviously fully recovered and on their way back to the front. Others look like me, pale and wasted, on their way to a few weeks of convalescence. Long past midnight, we pull into a dilapidated old village station. I ask the way to the refugee home where Raymond is staying, spend the next hour trudging through the snow along a coastal path, and arrive at a tiny seaside resort that has one long street with some shops and low houses and three hotels overlooking the promenade. There is no sign of life anywhere, except for the sentry posted by the wooden barracks along the seafront, who mistakes me for an officer in the darkness and springs to attention.
Good evening, sir.
Good morning, you mean.
He laughs and asks, “How’s the war going in Belgium?’
I mumble a few words and ask him the way to Home Rest Cottage.
I continue down the seafront; waves froth on the snow-dusted beach.
Seven o’clock and still no light in the sky. Feverish and fed-up, I notice a deck chair under a lean-to by one of the large houses and decide to lie down on it. My leg tingles and throbs and burns; I am utterly spent. I curl up like a child and tumble into a hell of remorse: I should have gone back to Liverpool to search for my father’s fresco, why did I come all this way just to visit Raymond? My friends have gone to the south of France to recover, I’m a first-class idiot, my feet are frozen so solid they could snap off, I never should have crossed the bloody Channel, I am sick with fatigue and trembling so violently I can feel my bones creak.
War and Turpentine Page 22
