It was around that time that he noticed a certain numbness in his right hand, between the index finger and the thumb, where the bite had been. He would massage it reflexively every now and then, but it did not go away. Instead it slowly spread to his fingers. He could still use it for the rough jobs around the camp, the feeding and washing, but he wondered what would happen if he tried to pick up a pencil or a carving knife. A hand had to be really rather strong to handle a carving knife, and rather calm to guide a pencil.
He asked the doctor about typhus symptoms. Numbness in the hand was not one of them.
He trained his left hand to hook up the bottles with the saline solution and to guide spoons towards the patients’ mouths.
*
It was only when recovery set in, when the inmates had enough life in them to express something other than a ceaseless demand for food and water, that pity recovered, too.
As the spoon-fed sugar water turned into tubs of steaming soup and finally, bowls of stew and potatoes, the products of the human laundry slowly became men again.
One afternoon the sister brought a vase of wildflowers and leaves into the hospital tent and placed it on a wooden crate in the centre for everyone to see.
The next morning Paul entered the tent and noticed that the cornflowers and yellow gorse were still there, but the green leaves had been stripped off their branches.
He cautiously asked what had happened. The men tended to hoard bread and potatoes under their pillows. His initial fear was that they had crawled out of their beds at night and eaten the leaves. Then he noticed that some of them had placed the leaves beside them on the pillows.
‘Why did you do that?’ he asked the man in the next bed.
‘It is so pretty,’ the man said. ‘I wanted to have it close to me.’
*
The pyjamas were delivered two days later, on 7 May. Until the delivery, the inmates had worn their camp clothes. Then, the pyjamas. Paul handed them out with practised efficiency, ticking off names, quantities, walking through the tent with his clipboard. He came to the end and handed the last pair to a man who sat on his bed. He ticked off his name and then stood going over the list, making sure no one had been left out. He had been living through lists for weeks. This many bodies washed, this many mouths filled with soup.
After a minute or so he noticed that the man still sat on his bed in the same position, holding the folded pyjamas in his lap. Paul nodded at him, as if to say, yes, they’re yours, put them on. But the man did not move.
It took Paul another moment to realize that the man was waiting for him to go away. He wanted to put on his new pyjamas, and he did not want to undress in front of another person. He was displaying a very natural, a very human sense of modesty, of modesty and shame.
Paul left the tent, walked past the ambulance where an old woman from the village was reading someone’s palm, crouched down behind a hut and rested his forehead on the clipboard. He sat like that for a while. When he looked up, he spotted one of the nurses across the path, a stocky local woman with a round freckled face and blond hair she wore in a coiled braid at the back of her head. She was unloading another delivery of pyjamas. He went to help her.
‘They make such a difference, don’t they, those pyjamas,’ he said. It was not at all what he had wanted to say. He wanted to tell her something about what he had seen. About how a pair of pyjamas could make someone human again, and how terrible that was. But he could not find the words, and he knew he would never find them; that there would always be this image of the man with his pyjamas, that there would never be the words to match it.
‘I noticed that, too,’ she said. Then she stood up, and as she stood up she bent over slightly and put her hands on her stomach.
It was a mere moment; she straightened up and walked away before he could even convey that he had noticed the gentle roundness.
The truth was that he had noticed it that time at the pub with Charlie and Miriam, too. When she had stood up and paused ever so briefly midway with that hand on her stomach, some hidden part of him had known the gesture. Some part of him had known that her recurring nausea had nothing to do with her exhaustion from the night shifts.
The nurse had reached the hospital tent. She parted the canvas and weak voices drifted out still praising the new pyjamas.
*
That evening, there was a tremendous noise outside the Lambs’ cottage in Highgate, as if the four winds had come together and blown upon the dead. Mr Lamb put his finger between the chapters of Ezekiel he had been reading and pushed back the curtain. Instead of an army of bones, he saw only a brass band trailed by cheering women and children.
His wife called from the hallway and he shuffled towards her, still holding his Bible with the index finger between the pages. In the bright rectangle of the doorway there stood a young man, an airman. His feet were respectfully planted outside the threshold, which no uniformed man had ever crossed.
The Bible slipped from Mr Lamb’s grasp. It landed on the carpet with a soft thud. Then he realised the man in the doorway was not Charlie. He was some young man in an RAF uniform, but he was not Charlie.
His visitor stepped inside, reached out, steadied him with a strong arm just as the brass band passed their front garden. Mr Lamb tried to say something, but the drums and tubas drowned him out with their triumphant song.
He shook off the airman’s arm and stared past him, at the open doorway where for a split second he had so clearly seen Charlie.
They were talking now, his wife and the young man: he was handing her a wooden box, murmuring condolences. Mr Lamb stood with his back to them, still staring out. The brass band was already disappearing round a corner. One of the children, a little boy, stopped to kneel down and tie his shoelaces. Mr Lamb waved at him. The boy smiled, waved back, then ran to catch up with his friends.
*
Mrs Morningstar watched the green fireworks from her office at Bentham College in Bloomsbury. She switched on the Anglepoise, tore the old blackout paper away, and leaned out of the single illuminated window in the vast black façade. Cheers and shouts drifted up from the streets.
It was time, then. She pulled back into the room and walked to a shelf crammed with lab tools. From the back of the shelf, she carefully retrieved an opaque jar containing 23-carat gold dissolved in aqua regia. The trajectory of human life was irreversible: the blue-white days were gone for ever. Neither her daughter nor her brothers would come back to life.
However, there were other travel paths that could be retraced. A Nobel medal, for example, could be smuggled from Heidelberg to London, could be dissolved in a jar of aqua regia to hide it, could be precipitated from the solution and sent to Sweden to be reminted, could be handed back to Professor von der Weide when he was restored to his teaching post. Yes, she decided, that was how it would be. She carried the jar down to the chemistry lab, carefully poured sodium bisulphite into the solution and waited until the gold mud settled at the bottom of the jar.
*
In a hospital in northern Germany, a British Army medic drew aside a curtain and asked: ‘Mrs Hoffnung, are you quite sure this is your husband?’
She nodded.
‘Well, he’s lucky you recognized him. Under the circumstances.’
She cupped her hands around the brittle fingers. Out in the corridor, some of the soldiers broke into song.
‘I didn’t,’ she said. ‘He recognized me.’
He had lost consciousness and they both knew he would not make it through the night. Grace sat down on his left side, the heart side, and held his hand. When the medic was gone, she carefully laid down on the bed next to him, her hand on his skeletal shoulder, her head next to his on the pillow. She would stay with him. She would talk and sing to him as long as his heart was beating. And even then she would stay with him. She would not let them throw him in one of the group graves, six to a hole. No, she would rather bury him herself, if that’s what it took. With her sensible strong hands
, she would dig his grave herself.
‘Max,’ she whispered, ‘we’ve never talked about this, but the one thing that I would ask you, well, if there’s some way you could let me know where you are, once you’re there. Because I’m really rather ignorant about these things, and we never had much time to talk about them, so I’m not quite sure if the Jewish place and the place for Quakers is the same. But I thought, if you could let me know somehow . . . because you see, I don’t really mind which place I go to. I’d just like to make sure it’s the place where you are. I couldn’t bear to be in any other place.’
*
The boys in Paul Lamb’s unit were peeling potatoes and singing. There was going to be a feast. A bottle was going round and Paul already felt slightly drunk.
Men in a tent, celebrating their victory with wine and song: the ritual was ancient and eternal. They could have been camping by the town of Issus or indeed the river Euphrates, drinking wine out of animal skins and rams’ horns. King David would have celebrated like this after smiting the Philistines. Paul thought of Miriam again, of what she would say if she could see him now, celebrating like King David: would she still think him unfit to be a father? To think he was a father! To think he had a child! Well, he would show her that he was not unfit. Stranger lives than theirs had been broken up and put back together.
He took another sip. King David rose to be a mighty warrior because the Lord was on his side. But towards the end of his life, the king wanted to thank God by building a temple: and God said no. He did not want David’s temple, because David had shed too much blood.
Paul would tell Miriam that when he saw her again. He had not been completely wrong, or at least not more wrong than David. He and Miriam would sit on the Heath with their child and laugh and argue and laugh again, because that was how it was in peacetime, one could argue about these things and then laugh them off because they did not really matter very much.
He picked up another potato. The sergeant cook was chopping onions to the rhythm of the song. When they got to the end the cook punctuated it by driving his knife into a whole bulb.
Paul put down his peeling knife and mumbled that he was going out for air.
Outside the tent, with the hoarse singing voices behind him, he kneeled down and wiped his hands on the damp grass. He reached into his front pocket, scooped out the torn-up remains of his pledge card, pictured Miriam’s face for a moment while he held the bits of paper in his fist, then scattered them over the grass.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Jessica Leeke and Mark Stanton for their unwavering support, brilliant editing and sense of fun. A special thank-you goes to the Bensimon-Lerner family, without whose warm hospitality the early research for this book would not have been possible.
I am very grateful to Edwin Wrigley, Noel Makin and Clifford Barnard for telling me about their experiences as conscientious objectors, and to Rosemary Pearse for talking about her father, Dick Sheppard, a hugely influential pacifist. It was a privilege to hear their stories.
Staff and fellow researchers at Friends House Library, University College London, the British Library, the Imperial War Museum, Swarthmoor Hall and the Peace Pledge Union (especially Bill Hetherington) have been immensely helpful, knowledgeable and welcoming. It’s wonderful that so many archives and libraries are still open to the public, offering free access to our shared heritage. Sion Dayson and Stephanie Ramamurthy offered excellent comments on the final draft.
Finally, I am very lucky to have Dan Lerner as my first reader. Thank you for laughing at the funny bits, commiserating over the sad ones, and quoting my favourite lines back at me when I temporarily lost the plot.
About the Author
Sophie Hardach is the author of three novels, The Registrar’s Manual for Detecting Forced Marriages, Of Love and Other Wars and Confession with Blue Horses. Confession with Blue Horses was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Prize 2019. Also a journalist, she worked as a correspondent for Reuters news agency in Tokyo, Paris and Milan and has written for a number of publications including the Guardian, BBC Future and The Economist.
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