by Thomas Wood
My mind raced for my every waking moment. What had happened. What could have happened. What might still happen. I thought of it all.
There were thirty-seven bolts from what I could see of this particular segment of the ship. Thirty-seven. An odd number. I tapped my fingers on the arms of the wheelchair in frustration, why only thirty-seven? It took me all my might to tear myself away from staring at the wall, growing increasingly angry at whoever hadn’t put one final bolt in to make an even number.
Soon after docking, I was wheeled in front of a Major Lewis, a man who seemed to sit hunched over his desk so much that he was permanently locked in a position staring down at his notepad. His white coat over the top of his khaki uniform reassured me somewhat, maybe he could confirm what was going on inside my head.
The room that Major Lewis occupied was like a school sports hall, the bland, unremarkable walls feeling like they were closing in on me from all sides. Other medical staff seemed undistractedly busy as they sprinted about, rushing to the aid of a fallen man, or to mop up a pool of blood that had found its way to the floor.
Tables with army personnel occupying them, lined one of the long walls, each with a worn away piece of flooring where the wheelchairs or walking sticks had slowly battered them.
The room was busy, maybe fifty people hustling and bustling their way around the hall. As I approached my table however, everyone else seemed to vanish.
“Any other symptoms other than the arm and the leg?” He barely looked up from his notepad, scribbling furiously. The constant scratching of the nib on the paper began to wear me down, as I watched it bob up and down in his hand. He continued to scratch away, nothing comprehensible from what I could see, just vague shapes in a fading ink, on a yellowing piece of paper. The frustration at his lack of communication with me was reaching boiling point. My fingers began incessantly tapping on the arm, and my good leg began jerking up and down as if I had a tremor.
With each scratch of his nib, with each tap on the floor as the orderlies walked around, it felt as if a wasp was stinging me. The wasp would hover for a moment, before striking, retreating slightly, before slamming itself into me once again. But this wasp wasn't going for my skin, it was going for my mind, my sanity.
My frustration with Major Lewis' scratching nib and the other, inconsiderate, incessant noises around me, slowly began to turn to anger, pure aggression began surging around my body with every heartbeat, like some sort of toxin.
“Why does he have to be making that noise?” I began asking myself, “Why is he being so selfish? Why won't he stop?”
I knew I was losing my mind, I knew I was being completely irrational, but all I wanted to do was escape, all I wanted to do was run.
But I couldn't, and that was making the rage bubble and boil even more.
My chest began to get tighter and tighter as the scratching continued, and I began to clamp down hard on my back teeth as the tapping seemed to intensify. The murderous aggression and the thoughts that went with it began to cloud my mind completely. All I could do was think about how to end it.
Tap. Tap. Tap. Scratch. Scratch. Scratch. Gut wound. Skull. Burning flesh.
My good fist smashed into the table so hard it nearly went through the desk and out the other side.
“WILL YOU STOP SCRATCHING,” I shook violently as I tried to calm myself, placing my bad hand over the good to prevent the shaking. Everyone in the room had come to a complete stop.
My breathing shook in unison with my body as I spluttered an apology to everyone who could hear my crackling speech.
The Major took his spectacles off and waited for me to calm myself down. The tears began splashing onto the Major’s desk as I tried in earnest to force them back into my eyes.
“Just breathe son, breathe,” his tone more one of impatience than reassurance.
He waited a moment, looking me up and down all the while, waiting for his time.
“So,” he uttered a little more calmly this time, and without the scratching nib, “any other issues apart from the arm and the…” he didn’t finish his sentence but instead used his pen to point in the direction of my splinted limb. He raised a doctor-like, sympathetic eyebrow, the kind that tells you off for being so foolish in the first place.
Keeping one hand firmly on top of the other, I leant out of my wheelchair slightly, so that I could bend in to him and tell him quietly.
I tried to blink and shut away the tears, but they refused to reopen as I spoke.
“I have…I have…erm…trouble, t-t-trouble sleeping Sir, and erm…” I hesitated, my whole body tensing up and my breathing threatening to give in. A lump of mucus convened at the back of my throat, making my voice stick. As I struggled to swallow it down, I cleared my throat perhaps a bit too violently for Major Lewis. He sat back from me.
My speech staggered before picking up an unbelievable pace, making me wonder whether he would even be able to take in what I was saying to him.
“I have these dreams, Sir. People dying, people alive who I know to be dead.” My eyes darted every which way as I spoke, only bringing them up to his when I’d finished my sentence.
He looked me in the eye and I thought for a moment I sensed a brief notion of compassion from him in his eyes, before he dropped his head back down to his notepad and scratched away once more.
“It’s battle fatigue son. Plenty of you boys have it, you’ll be right as rain in a couple of months.”
I felt like pulling my hair out and simultaneously forming a circle with my hands, my thumbs pressing down sharply on his windpipe until he agreed that what I had was different, different to what plenty of other boys have. I wanted to drain out his arrogance, I wanted to watch his eyes bulge as he realised that he would die. I felt like staying clamped down on his airways until his lips turned a blue-purple colour as the life was slowly sapped out from him.
No, more than that, I wanted him to follow me, to follow me in my dreams as I climbed up that staircase and crouched next to a dying Pole. I wanted him to be with me as I stared in disbelief at a crater in the back of someone’s skull. I wanted him to watch a burning man die. I wanted him to be that Pole, to be that cratered skull, to be that burning man.
But most of all, I wanted to stop the unrelenting, enraging, scratching.
I felt nauseous as I fought with my breathing once again to remain conscious. I swayed in my chair as I battled to regain control.
Scratch. Scratch. Scratch.
What I had was deep. Deeper than fatigue, I could feel it in my soul. Fatigue doesn’t last, but I could tell this would, till the very day I die. The sounds, the smells, the bodies. My anger towards him subsided as a shaking hand made its way through my greasy, matted hair, I had given up.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Great barrels of tears cascaded down my cheeks as the Major ushered a nurse in to wheel me away to my next hospital bed. As I reversed, he whipped off his specs once more and looked at me.
“Every man who goes to war dies, son. Anyone who makes it back, comes back cheated.”
He meant that. I wondered if he had felt cheated and asked myself what he may have been through. He looked old enough to have fought in the last war, maybe he had. Or maybe he had seen so many of the wounded, broken men from this one, that he had slowly lost his belief in humanity. As I was wheeled helplessly out of the hall, I felt a twang of sorrow for Major Lewis.
The scratching nib picked up pace again.
15
July 1944
The field had a covering of dew over it, which just glistened in the light of the moon. Turning my head, I caught a glimpse of a sodden cobweb, stretching from one tree trunk to another, sparkling sweetly in the night. It seemed almost to glow in the moonlight and was only visible because of the moisture that clung to it. It would be practically invisible by midday.
I pushed my finger into it softly and let it encompass my finger as the spider woke, scurried across its web to investigate, before retreating back in
to the crevice of the nearby tree.
It was cold, the kind of cold that you can’t shake off, no matter how many layers you pull on. The coolness of the night was biting, biting at my skin causing my hairs to stand to attention. But it went deeper than that, the cold tonight was biting my insides, making my blood run as cold as an autumnal river.
A few of the others stirred and grumbled in their sleep as they fought with Mother Nature to get some shut eye. I couldn’t sleep, I never could, not even in my own dreams. After a couple of hours, the Captain passed round to inspect us all, making sure we were still alert.
His hunched-up figure was comical against the backdrop of the moon, his silhouette making him appear more like a Greek mythical creature, rather than an officer in His Majesty’s Armed Forces.
“Evening chaps, how we all doing?”
A few murmurs of jovial discontent sparked up, which the Captain knew to take with a light heart.
“Well, with any luck boys, Jerry will be getting up soon, they’ll keep you awake.”
He trudged off again into the dark as the rest of us resettled in for the night.
Before long, the darkness of the night began to surrender to the orangey hues of the morning, tainted by the great pillars of grey that encompassed the sky. I begged the clouds to apart, but even for a moment, just to allow the sun to gently kiss my skin and warm me to the core.
I watched as Company Sergeant-Major Baker appeared, clutching a bottle of whiskey, which was gratefully passed round to all those still awake.
Can’t be long left on my stag now. Sun’s rising.
I fought against my senses to shut my eyes for longer than they should. My mind became foggier than the early morning mist and I consciously felt the weight of each individual eyelash. They began drooping, and a sudden shockwave went through my body, forcing my eyes open as I panicked that that last blink had lasted a millisecond or two longer than it should have done.
“Oi, you see that?”
“What?”
“Movement, up there, on the ridge line,” his speech was robotic, totally emotionless.
I pulled a pair of clumpy, battered binoculars up to my eyes, but they seemed so knackered that nothing ever appeared closer with them. I tossed them to one side and followed his finger with my naked eye.
The morning mist was just consolidating itself, kissing the top of the slow, steady incline to the top of the hill. The vibrant colours of the morning had been smothered by the icy blanket of the mist, everything turning into a stony grey haze.
“Yeah, I see him.”
A lone figure had appeared in the clearing of the woods, small at first, but soon he was charging towards us.
“Do we take him; do we take him?” came the excited chipper beside me. He’d never been under fire before, the whole stag he’d had his finger hovering over the trigger, tapping it gently in a cocktail of nerves and excitement. The barrel of his weapon had been hopping around all night, the end of his gun pointing wherever his manic eyes commanded it next.
I hesitated, waiting to see what happened first.
Bang!
“I got him, I hit ‘im!”
I flicked my head furiously to one side, but simultaneously the world exploded around me, flashes of muzzles and tracer fire everywhere. It was spectacular.
I pulled the trigger sharply and a round kicked out of my rifle, sending it flying backwards into my shoulder and sending a quiver down my spine. I loved that feeling, such a feeling of power and excitement. I could stop anything, anyone.
Machine guns opened up all around me, spitting furious hornets towards the enemy that was engulfing the clearing ahead of us.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Great numbers of rounds were poured on them, but they kept coming. Hordes upon hordes of men surged towards us, a never-ending supply of cannon fodder. It was futile. There seemed to be thousands upon thousands of them. We would never be able to hold them all back. But there were plenty of us, pouring explosives and rifle rounds on them. They would lose so many men.
I expected to see them, as they normally did, catapulted backwards in a demented cartwheel before lying motionless on the ground, but none of them seemed to drop. I aimed at another unsuspecting victim and pulled the trigger. I watched intently as he too, failed to fall to the ground and I hastily re-cocked my rifle and took aim for a second time.
My aim was off, the mist clouding my vision and my effectiveness.
Again, he continued to charge towards me and I went through the motions once more. My rifle jammed, the bolt wouldn’t slide back into place like it was meant to. I pulled it all the way out and back in again, but for a second time it stubbornly refused to move. My fingers began shaking uncontrollably, as if they were possessed. I let my rifle fall limply to the ground and I watched as my hands convulsed fiercely in front of me.
Every fibre of my being was telling me to run, screaming at me to get away, but my legs refused, they simply did not work, the stitches were still there, preventing all movement.
My neighbour fired round after round into him, firing and re-cocking his rifle like a madman, only focused on one thing. But the figure kept coming.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
I scrabbled around, bundling the rifle back into my arms.
I adjusted my vision, keeping my eyes firmly fixed on my opponent, just me and him, as he continued to bound towards me. The guns stopped, it was just me and him. I was all alone, I could make out his face. He was smiling, laughing. A great haunting cackle resounded out across the barren field that would continue in my mind for an eternity.
And then, a voice, softly at first as it seemed to be dulled by the mist.
“…please…please help me…Johnny? You there?”
I felt the mist lift completely as my eyes bulged at the realisation.
It was Charlie.
The lights flicked on. Dad shuffled in, wearing his dressing gown. I was crouched under the kitchen table, and as I dropped my weapon to the floor, it rolled away from me as a rolling pin. My breathing was erratic, and I gave in to the tidal waves of emotion that drowned me.
I sobbed uncontrollably while Dad set about making me a cup of coffee. I watched him through my tears, his silhouette on the wall dancing unpredictably, as he began his day. He sighed as he basked in the warm rays of the early morning, letting them hit him full on in the face through the kitchen window. He spoke, not to me, not even to himself it seemed, he just spoke.
“The world will always be drowning in sorrow and grief. But the sunrise will always be beautiful.”
I was back home. Mum went into overdrive as she busied herself making sure that my every need was tended to immediately. Truthfully, it was utter torture.
Dad sat, as he always did, in his chair, smoking and reading the paper from cover to cover and back again. That’s exactly what I needed. Normality. I couldn’t stand the overbearing nature of my mother, I knew she meant well and only wanted me to recover, but she would have been better off knowing that nothing that she did would help me.
I could only sit and smoke, only able to let the warm blanket of the tobacco encompass my lungs, hour after hour, day after day.
The battle was in my mind, not in my physical wellbeing. I struggled to keep my emotions in check during those first few days at home, Mum pushing my patience a lot further than Major Lewis had ever done when I first got off the ship. But she was my Mum, and, despite everything, she was only doing her job, and that thought, it seemed, helped me to calm down somewhat.
What I needed though, was to find someone who felt the same, someone who had experienced what I had and someone that I could talk to. Dad would have been the obvious candidate, but it was clear that we weren’t meant to talk about these things for fear of making it worse, and so I pushed it to the back of the queue.
There was a doubt in my mind whether he would have understood anyway, we’d been in two, very different wars. Dad had been the technological spearhead, but I had been at the t
ip of a very different spearhead altogether.
I had my parents around me and that’s all I wanted when I was in hospital but, now I was with them, I felt alone. Terribly alone.
On the outside I was tired, exhausted; Major Lewis had got that right. But on the inside, I was consumed by a darkness. A darkness I could see no way out of. All I had was myself. And if I could not communicate with myself, how could I expect to communicate with those around me? How could I expect to be my old self, return to normal? Until I learned how to do that, I would be completely on my own.
I had been fighting a righteous war, some of those boys still were. When we came home we were treated as heroes, taking the fight to the enemy and tearing down Hitler’s Nazi Germany, foot by foot and yard by yard. Union flags were flown as the men in stretchers and wheelchairs were ushered into the hospital, great whoops and cheers resounded around the room as pictures were shown of our heroes after battle.
People were proud of this war. We were fighting a righteous war, a just one, so why did any man have any right to complain about what had happened? How could I tell people that I had seen an enemy soldier die, but I carried guilt around with me for his death? How could I admit that I no longer felt like I wanted to kill the enemy?
I couldn’t. We were fighting a righteous war.
16
July 1944
I couldn’t sleep. Every time I did, the same dream would haunt me. The enemy would charge at me, the steely grey uniforms slowly advancing through the early morning mist until everything fell silent. And it was just me and him. Just me and Charlie. Or me and Len. Or the Pole.
They were haunting my dreams, they were haunting my every waking hour.
I couldn’t eat. My Mum was a fantastic cook when I was younger, and she continued to be, whipping up great feasts with rationed foods, enough to feed a royal, but I couldn’t eat any of it. Every mouthful felt like another spoonful of judgement, or another burden on my back.
