by Dennis Bock
It was a wonder a sniper had failed to get him in such an exposed position. Maybe the gentle rise in the land had obscured him, or from the opposite angle the enemy was unable to notice the twitching that became more evident as we approached, or they were just too tired to care. Maybe they thought to let him die out there, slowly. Then I heard the whistle of a shell. McGraw called us down right then and we jumped and the shell exploded. I realized that Robert was the lure, the bait. We’d been drawn out, I remember thinking. This was the end of us. As the dirt settled I waited. The debris cleared, and I waited still. I didn’t dare to call out to my friends. Crawling on my knees, chest to the ground, I found my party dead. I tested each man for signs of life but they were all gone, each one of them. I lay motionless and cried and asked God why I had survived. I spoke to God, for the last time in my life, and He did not speak back.
Then I heard a single moan. I lay flat on my stomach without moving. It seemed I waited a century. I shifted my head ever so slightly and saw Robert, removed from the fence post now—likely by the force of the mortar blast—and sprawling flat on the ground. I saw him, or what I thought was him. He was a lump of clothing staring up to the sky. I waited. I watched him. The sun behind him sank below the horizon. The sky turned a lovely pink and yellow and slowly the blues and purples dropped from the centre directly above, spreading downward slowly to the horizon like running paint washing out the colours from the sunset, and then I was alone in the night surrounded by the dead and a handful of stars.
I listened to Robert’s moans. In the new dark I saw him roll his head toward me, and his eyes opened. They were small white things. I crawled toward him carrying a canteen, an aid kit and my sidearm. “Robert,” I said, “it’s me, Beth. Stop your groaning, they’ll hear you.” I examined him and found a large piece of wood piercing his left thigh. His cheek was hanging open like a second set of lips. He was missing his left ear. He was a terrible sight. I told him to shut his mouth. “I’ll get you back,” I said, “you can survive this. But you have to shut up. They’re not far off, and they can shoot with their ears as well as their eyes.”
I remember thinking it best to leave the leg as it was. I wrapped his thigh tight with a tourniquet to staunch the flow, though it seemed already to have ebbed. In the dark I hefted him up onto my shoulders and began walking. I managed perhaps ten or fifteen feet before we fell into a crater. I lay silent, trying to catch my breath, and watched the darkness above us. Our round view of the universe looked peaceful and still. I was very tired now. It was like looking up from the bottom of a well, darkness on all sides giving way to a dark sky specked with lights. It looked like a hat full of stars above us, flowers in a lady’s bonnet. A sharp chill draped itself like a shawl over my shoulders. I heard pot-shots and cannon fire but it felt far removed from our situation, as harmless as distant thunder.
I whispered, “It’s like a spring evening back home, Robert.”
He moaned, a sound deep and throaty, almost echo-like. I didn’t understand what caused it but then I realized that the hole in his face functioned as a second mouth and he was trying to speak as if with two voices. There was nothing I could do but keep him company in his suffering. I had no medicines to induce unconsciousness. “When you get back,” I said softly, “you’ll tell that brother of yours that a German hits from behind, like a woman.”
He moaned again. After a minute he tried to speak but nothing comprehensible came out, only a strange murmuring through his teeth and that doubled sound as it passed through his destroyed cheek. He gave up and fell silent again. Soon I dozed. When I awoke it was full dark. The stars have closed their eyes, I thought, and now I am blind. I reached over and tapped Robert, who stirred and grunted. “It’s time to start again,” I whispered. His head fell forward, so I tapped him again harder.
I pulled up to the ridge of the crater and left him slightly below, protected, while I peeked out. I saw nothing, just blackness spotted by distant fires far behind the enemy’s lines, or maybe they were our lines, I couldn’t be sure. I slipped back into the crater, took hold of Robert and dragged him moaning up into the night. “Shut up,” I said, then gripped him by the crotch and arm and stood, turning slowly in a circle to get the lay of the land. I believed I noticed the gentle incline pointing toward home and so I started. “Robert, if you know something I don’t, feel free to tell me now,” I said. “Because we’re knee deep in s——t now, Robert.” I stopped to adjust my grip, then continued. “Robert,” I said, “I’ll be honest with you, Robert Pearce. I wish we were standing in that schoolyard. I’d take a bleeding lip over this any day.”
After a time I put him down again. I remember feeling that my legs could go no farther. I looked in all directions, again turning in a slow circle. I saw no distinguishing features, nothing on this landscape to direct me. There were no fires now, just complete blackness. I rested as long as I thought it was safe, then picked him up again. I continued in the direction I believed we’d been walking now half the night. My feet sank into the mud and each step felt like the Devil himself was grabbing hold of my foot down there. God had not answered and now Satan would, his fiery hands reaching up to grip my ankle as I struggled to raise it again.
And this with a man on my shoulders. I walked on with my burden, my friend. Suddenly the earth would open before us and down we would slide to the bottom of a bomb crater. I would catch my breath and then climb up again to the edge, hoping it was the proper side to come up on, and pull him up over the lip of mud so we could forge deeper into the night.
I hoped for a single star to break through the cloud cover, but none did. “Don’t worry,” I said quietly, trudging along, “and do you know why, Farmer?” I heard that raspy, echoing breathing through mouth and cheek. “There’s no need to worry because we’re brothers and this night will end once and for all, and we’ll come out on the right side. We’re brothers, after all. Not because we think alike, you and I—we couldn’t be more different—and it’s not because we have a common enemy who wants to see us dead, but because together we’re being tested and we have no one to look to or depend on, just ourselves. We’re brothers because my life is in your hands and yours is in mine, because on this night we’ll find out what we have in store for us. I can say I’ve never been in a situation like this, Farmer, this is rock bottom as far as I’m concerned. We only have each other, and what we find out here in this wasteland will make us as close to holy as we’re ever likely to get, and holy I wish to be, although you don’t look to the Bible in times like these. But that doesn’t change the fact that out here in this muddy, starless night, not knowing which way to go, we’ll be made either holy or dead, and I much prefer the former, Robert, so just hang on. It’s just as well you can’t hear me because I don’t know what I’m saying, but I’ll keep talking anyway.” His breathing rose and fell gently against the back of my neck. “Farmer, this will be a story one day. A story to tell your little brother.”
The tourniquet on the upper portion of his left thigh was still tight. “You were right, that weather did mean something. I think it means you’ll be out of this war in no time. This is the story of how you got out of the war. Beth carries you to safety. Won’t that make a grand story? You might even beat that letter in your pocket home. You’ll be having breakfast one morning with your little brother when that letter comes knocking and you’ll take it from the postman’s hand and think of poor me still stuck here thinking of you.” I rolled him off my shoulders and sat.
I waited. I dreamed the world was full of light. Bright blue stars streaked across the sky. When I opened my eyes I saw this was not a dream. A flare had been sent up. For a few seconds I sat in full daylight in a vast ocean of mud and mounds of churned earth and the tangled bodies of men. I did not move. I watched the flare sink in the sky, and the sky slowly returned to its sombre grey, then the indifferent dark returned. We were alone in our private sea of darkness.
Just
as the green glow of dying ember-tip was extinguished and I was attempting to lift Robert, I heard the crack of a German Mauser—distinct and not difficult to distinguish from a Lee-Enfield. I knew this before I felt the bullet penetrate my leg. I collapsed and thought, Thank you. Thank you for pointing me home. I gripped the leg while keeping my sights aimed in the direction opposite the one I knew the bullet had come from, for behind me was the Mauser and ahead of me was home and what I now had to do was tie off my leg below the knee without losing sight of that hole in the darkness. It pointed a straight line away from the Mauser. Assume the life of the bullet, I told myself, and continue in the direction it was travelling. I sat down, rolled Robert off, removed the tourniquet soaked with his blood and wrapped my leg. Go, I told myself, follow the bullet. The world glowed again. It was not the light of flares or bombs or fire. The night glowed ecstatically.
*
Maybe I’ve told you too much. I am sorry. It was not my aim to burden you with difficult tales of my life. But I’m beginning to think that’s exactly where the truth lies. You take strength where you can find it, whether from the dark or the light. Those were terrible times. But they did not belong only to me. If you are to know anything about me, you will understand that. I have acted with fine intentions and failed miserably. I have given the best of myself and found that it wasn’t enough. I have wished for my father’s strength. I have envied his ability to pray for those things he himself could not provide or achieve, and have envied his God-like patience when it came to waiting for an answer. I have envied his faith, in the face of the horrors I’ve seen. Tomorrow, another day. Higher into the hills.
*
I was shipped to Southampton, England, like so many wounded out of the war, and then on to the Cambridge Military Hospital. It was there I learned to walk again. There I mastered, for the second time in my life, the baby step. And there, three days into my convalescence, it was confirmed for me that both Robert and God had been left for dead in that wasteland. It is not pleasant to dwell on this dark time, and if I’m correct in saying that the difficult tales of my life will bring forth some hard truth, you can be sure there will be a fair measure of it here.
In total I spent eleven weeks at the hospital. With great pain I waited from one day to the next for some sign. For the darkness to lift. I was wheeled about in a chair, but the windows were set high in the walls and poorly designed for viewing from that position, so I sat in the grey shadows waiting like a crippled child for his father to come and take him in his arms. Near the end of my third week I rose with a great teeth-grinding effort. Aided by a cane I managed briefly to teeter on my legs and peer down into the garden, and slowly, in ever-widening arcs as the weeks passed, I began to explore the wide polished hallways and stairwells, the lounges and Cafeterias. Into my sixth week I investigated the carved granite front steps leading back into the world, and when I was ready I journeyed down to the bright lawns and their gentle slopes to the riverbed.
Standing at this window I watched the elms and the ginkgoes display their new blossoms on the grounds below, and the river grew fat and brown with the spring rains and carried away the buds of willows. I attempted to compose a letter to Robert’s family but was not successful. Every afternoon I took my spot at the window and put pen to paper, yet nothing came. Both God and Robert were dead, and words, too, were dead for me. Birds came down from their branches to pick in the grass and fluttered up and off at the approach of a cheerily dressed nurse strolling with a patient on her arm. I observed the world while trying to write the correct letter, though all I could think about was that night I’d left Robert out there to die. In the dark I closed my ears to the panicked calls that issued from the nightmares of sleeping soldiers. What did they see? How I tried to dodge that question as I lay waiting for light to break through the darkness.
I watched the hushed frenzy that marked the arrival of a new man, or the ordered regimen of nurses going about their business. I visited other floors, and sometimes a nurse sent me away; others merely regarded me with a look of irritation, and some did not regard me at all. There were many young nurses whose responsibilities had been accelerated prematurely as a result of pressing need, whereas the doctors seemed too old, many having come out of retirement; but the hospital was always calm and efficient, and I was cared for with a high degree of professionalism and attention.
It is difficult to live for months in the dark without once seeing the face of an angel. Wait long enough, dream long enough, and she will come. What finally appeared to me was not an Angel of God but an angel for a young boy turned man, still young enough to hold such silly dreams but old enough to feel the crushing solitude of the place that housed him.
Such an angel came to me in the form of Agnes McGinnis, a quiet, intelligent girl from the hand-loom weaving village of Little Goven, near Glasgow. This was many years ago—you must permit me a wide berth here—but these memories of her, the lilt in the voice I can still hear in my head, suggest a lighter heart than I have attested to. Perhaps I was even younger than I knew. She was only one of many who tended to us in that ward, but she was the one I most remember, the one who raised my spirits. In practical terms, she was very good at blanket-bathing and wound-dressing. Her patients hardly noticed her going about her work. In not so practical terms, she was too fast for my liking. From the moment she snipped off the old dressing, cleaned my leg and applied the new bandage, the process rarely lasted more than two minutes. Often I simply closed my eyes. Other times we exchanged snippets of conversation. We struck up a friendship. I told her what I could of myself and my family. After I mentioned the Scots blood in my veins, she came to me every afternoon with a new story of her village—Crazy Pete, the story of the talking ducks, the day Jimmy Quinn fell down the well. She painted such a fine picture of the place that I decided to go there with her and stay a lifetime. I listened eagerly. Her eyes hinted at a future I could only long for.
As she snipped my bandages, she told me she spent her one day off a week in London, an hour and a half distant, where she liked to sit for hours in the great cavernous silence of the British Museum. She preferred Ancient Egypt above all else. She admired its gods and goddesses, each with an assigned place in the world. She went with a girlfriend, a nurse in the opposite wing to mine. They saved for the train and ate sandwiches as they watched the countryside roll by. They complained to each other about the matron, Simpson, who managed to torment all the nurses equally. I squirmed and moaned as she talked, hoping to slow her down. Her fingers raced across my leg. To keep her by my bedside longer I asked if she had a favourite part of London. Had she ever seen the Tate Gallery? Did she know Soho Square? One day, not expecting any sort of considered answer, I asked if she had any favourite god or goddess. This question seemed to catch her. It was as if she’d been thinking this over for some time. Her fingers stopped their work. She said she didn’t have one, not really, but I could see her thinking. “Well,” she said, “if you’d have me choose, it’d likely be Nephthys, not that I’d like to be her.”
“Well, why’s that?”
“I’m just being truthful, I suppose. That’s what all the nurses would say, and the doctors too, if you asked them, if they had any idea of that sort of thing. Nephthys, you see, is the friend of the dead.”
“But I’m not dead yet,” I said, smiling. She finished quickly, without saying more, and went on to her next patient. She did not come back to me for some days, and when she did I asked if I’d upset her. She laughed off the suggestion and asked what I thought about the food, wasn’t it approaching criminal?
Although I still could not be sure what had thrown her so badly that day, our private communications resumed, and no one knew that we grew closer, though I suspected some of the other men in the ward might have guessed what was going on between us despite Matron Simpson’s admonitions to avoid fraternizing with the patients. For a few days after this disclosure, there was a lull in our conversations
as she wrapped my leg. I knew she’d been shaken by her own words. Despite her change in mood, I looked forward to her visits and prepared questions in advance. But I did not question her on the gods any further.
On a Tuesday she wheeled my chair down to the river, which by early June had been reduced to a shallow brook strung with waving ribbons of algae. The willows were in full bloom now. It was a beautiful English day. She sat on the grass beside the chair. We watched the clouds don their costumes and strip them clear again. First we saw a dragon, then a tiger, then a cat, then a sheep. The inventions were swift and effortless as the mile-high currents turned the shapes inside out.
“What will you do after the war?” she asked.
“I will do my best to forget about it, I think.”
She said, “I will get very drunk and stay drunk for a week.”
“That isn’t very ladylike.”
“But isn’t it a wonderful idea?”
“I have a week’s furlough coming up,” I said. “I’m staying at the Union Jack in London.”
“I could show you my museum.”
