by Pat Barker
A spasm of contempt. ‘It’s a scratch. I should never’ve let them send me back, do you know that’s the last thing I said to my servant, “I’m coming back.” “Back in three weeks,” I yelled at him as I was being driven away. And then I let myself be corrupted.’
‘Corrupted? That’s a harsh word, isn’t it?’
‘I should’ve refused to come back.’
‘Siegfried, nobody would have listened to you if you had. Head injuries have to be taken seriously.’
‘But don’t you see, the timing was perfect? Did you see my poem in the Nation? “I Stood with the Dead”. Well, there you are. Or there I was rather, perched on the top-most bough, carolling away. BANG! Oops! Sorry. Missed.’
‘I’m glad it did.’
A bleak sideways glance from Siegfried. ‘I’m not.’
Silence.
‘I feel amputated. I don’t belong here. I keep looking at all this…’ The waving hand took in fruit, flowers, chocolates. ‘I just wish I could parcel it up and send it out to them. I did manage to send them a gramophone. Then I got… ill.’
‘You know, what I don’t understand,’ Rivers said, ‘is how you could possibly have been wounded there.’
‘I was in No Man’s Land.’
‘No, I meant under the helmet.’
‘I’d taken it off.’ An awkward pause. ‘We’d been out to lob some hand-grenades at a machine-gun, two of us, they were getting cheeky, you see, they’d brought it too far forward, and so we…” He smiled faintly. ‘Reestablished dominance. Anyway, we threw the grenades, I don’t think we hit anybody – by which I mean there were no screams – and then we set off back and by this time it was getting light, and I was so happy.’ His face blazed with exultation. ‘Oh, God, Rivers, you wouldn’t believe how happy. And I stood up and took the helmet off, and I turned to look at the German lines. And that’s when the bullet got me.’
Rivers was so angry he knew he had to get away. He walked across to the window and stared, unseeing, at the road, the railings, the distant glitter of the Serpentine under the summer sun. He had been lying to himself, he thought, pretending this was merely one more crisis in a busy working day. This anger stripped all pretence away from him. ‘Why?’ he said, turning back to Siegfried.
‘I wanted to see them.’
‘You mean you wanted to get killed.’
‘No.’
‘You stand up in the middle of No Man’s Land, in the morning, the sun rising, you take off your helmet, you turn to face the German lines, and you tell me you weren’t trying to get killed.’
Siegfried shook his head. ‘I’ve told you, I was happy.’
Rivers took a deep breath. He walked back to the bed, schooling himself to a display of professional gentleness. ‘You were happy?’
‘Yes, I was happy most of the time, I suppose mainly because I’ve succeeded in cutting off the part of me that hates it.’ A faint smile. ‘Except when writing poems for the Nation. I was… There’s a book you ought to read. I’ll try to dig it out, it says something to the effect that a man who makes up his mind to die takes leave of a good many things, and is, in some sense, dead already. Well, I had made up my mind to die. What other solution was there for me? But making up your mind to die isn’t the same as trying to get killed. Not that it made much difference.’ He touched the bandage tentatively. ‘I must say, I thought the standard of British sniping was higher than this.’
‘British sniping?’
‘Yes, didn’t they tell you? My own NCO. Mistook me for the German army, rushed out into No Man’s Land shouting, “Come on, you fuckers,” and shot me.’ He laughed. ‘God, I’ve never seen a man look so horrified.’
Rivers sat down by the bed. ‘You’ll never be closer.’
‘I’ve been closer. Shell landed a foot away. Literally. Didn’t explode.’ Siegfried twitched suddenly, a movement Rivers had seen many thousands of times in other patients, too often surely for it to be shocking.
‘You can’t get shell-shock, can you?’ Siegfried asked. ‘From a shell that doesn’t explode?’
Rivers looked down at his hands. ‘I think that one probably did a fair amount of damage.’
Siegfried looked towards the window. ‘You know, they’re going on a raid soon, Jowett, five or six of the others, my men, Rivers, my men, men I trained and I’m not going to be there when they come back.’
‘They’re not your men now, Siegfried. They’re somebody else’s men. You’ve got to let go.
“I can’t.’
EIGHTEEN
Rivers had been invited to dinner with the Heads, and arrived to find the Haddons and Grafton Elliot Smith already there. No opportunity for private conversation with Henry or Ruth presented itself until the end of the evening, when Rivers contrived that he should be the last to leave. It was not unusual after a dinner with the Heads for him to stay behind enjoying their particular brand of unmalicious gossip, well aware that his own foibles and frailties would be dissected as soon as he left, and sure enough of their love for him not to mind.
Not that he was inclined to gossip tonight. As soon as they were alone, he told them about Siegfried, clarifying his own perception of the situation as he spoke.
‘Excited, you say?’ Henry asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Manic?’
‘Oh, no, nowhere near. Though there was a hint of… elation, I suppose, once or twice, particularly when he was talking about his feelings immediately before he was wounded. And the afternoons are his best time. Apparently the nights are bad. I’ve promised I’ll go back. In fact, I ought to be going.’ He stood up. ‘I’m not worried. He’ll be all right.’
‘Does he regret going back?’ Ruth asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Rivers said. ‘I haven’t asked.’
After seeing Rivers off, Head came back into the living-room to find Ruth gazing reflectively into the fire.
‘No, well, he wouldn’t, would he?’ she said, looking up.
‘He might think there wasn’t much point,’ Henry said, sitting down on the other side of the fire.
A long, companionable silence. They were too replete with company and conversation to want to talk much, too comfortable to make the move for bed.
‘He came to see me last year, you know,’ Henry said. ‘Almost a sort of consultation. He got himself into quite a state over Sassoon.’
‘Yes, I know. I didn’t realize he’d talked to you about it.’
Head hesitated. ‘I think he suddenly realized he was using… his professional skills, if you like, to defuse a situation that wasn’t… medical. There’s really nothing else you can do if you’re a doctor in the army in wartime. There’s always the possibility of conflict between what the army needs and what the patient needs, but with Sassoon it was… very sharp. I told him basically not to be silly.’
Ruth gave a surprised laugh. ‘Poor Will.’
‘No, I meant it.’
‘I’m sure you did, but you wouldn’t have said it to a patient.’
‘I told him Sassoon was capable of making up his own mind, and that his influence probably wasn’t as great as he thought it was. I thought he was being… I don’t know. Not vain –’
‘Over-scrupulous?’
‘Frankly, I thought he was being neurotic. But I’ve seen him with a lot of patients since then, and I’m not so sure. You know how you get out of date with people if you haven’t seen them for a while? I think I was out of date. Something happened to him in Scotland. Somehow or other he acquired this enormous power over young men, people generally perhaps, but particularly young men. It really is amazing, they’ll do anything for him. Even get better.’
‘Even go back to France?’
‘Yes, I think so.’
Ruth shrugged slightly. ‘I don’t see the change. But then I suspect he’s always shown a slightly different side to me anyway.’ She smiled. ‘I’m very fond of him, but –’
‘He is of you.’
‘I sometim
es wonder why we even like each other, you know. When you think how it started. You going to Cambridge every weekend so he could stick pins in your arm. I never had a weekend with you the whole of the first year we were married.’
‘It wasn’t as bad as that. Anyway, you got on all right.’
‘Do you think he still thinks Sassoon went back because of him?’
Head hesitated. ‘I think he knows the extent of his influence.’
‘Hmm,’ Ruth said. ‘Do you think he’s in love with him?’
‘He’s a patient.’
Ruth smiled and shook her head. ‘That’s not an answer.’
Head looked at her. ‘Yes, it is. It has to be.’
Siegfried was sitting up in bed, pyjama jacket off, face and chest gleaming with sweat. ‘Is it hot, Rivers?’ he asked, as if their conversation had never been interrupted. ‘Or is it just me?’
‘Warm.’
‘I’m boiling. I’ve been sitting here simmering like a kettle.’
Rivers sat down beside the bed.
‘I’ve been writing to Graves. In verse. Do you want to read it?’
Rivers took the notepad and found himself reading an account of his visit that afternoon. The pain was so intense that for a moment he had to keep quite still. ‘Is that how you see me?’ he said at last. ‘Somebody who’s going to make you go back to France till you break down altogether?’
‘Yes,’ Sassoon said cheerfully. ‘But that’s all right, I want you to. You’re my external conscience, Rivers, my father confessor. You can’t let me down now, you’ve got to make me go back.’
Rivers read the poem again. ‘You shouldn’t send this.’
‘Why not? It took me ages. Oh, I know what it is, you don’t think I should say all that about the lovely soldier lads. Well, they are lovely. You think Graves is going to be shocked. Frankly, Rivers, I don’t care; shocking Graves is one of my few remaining pleasures. I wrote to him – not to shock him – just an ordinary letter, only I made the mistake of talking with enthusiasm about training in one paragraph, and in the next paragraph I said what a bloody awful business the war was, and what do I get back? A lecture on consistency, oh, and some very pathetic reproaches about not terrifying your friends by pretending to be mad, I thought that was particularly rich. I’ve done one totally consistent, totally sane thing in my life, and that was to protest against the war. And who stopped me?’
Graves, Rivers thought. But not only Graves. It was true, he saw it now, perhaps more clearly than he had at the time, that whatever the public meaning of Siegfried’s protest, its private meaning was derived from a striving for consistency, for singleness of being in a man whose internal divisions had been dangerously deepened by the war.
‘You mustn’t blame Graves. He did what –’
‘I don’t blame him, I’m just not prepared to be lectured by him. I survive out there by being two people, sometimes I even manage to be both of them in one evening. You know, I’ll be sitting with Stiffy and Jowett – Jowett is beautiful – and I’ll start talking about wanting to go and fight, and I’ll get them all fired up and banging the table and saying, yes, enough of training, time to get stuck in to the real thing. And then I leave them and go to my room and think how young they are. Nineteen, Rivers. Nineteen. And they’ve no bloody idea. Oh, God, I hope they live.’
Suddenly, he started to cry. Wiping the back of his hand across his mouth, he sniffed and said, ‘Sorry.’
‘That’s all right.’
‘You know what finally put the kibosh on my Jekyll and Hyde performance, no, listen, this is funny. I got a new second in command. Pinto. Absolute jewel. But the first time I met him he was reading Counter-Attack, and he looked up and said, “Are you the same Sassoon?” My God, Rivers, what a bloody question. But of course I said, “Yes.” What else could I say? And yet do you know I think that’s when things started to unravel.’ A marked change in tone. ‘It was when I faced up to how bloody stupid it was.’
Rivers looked puzzled. ‘What was?’
‘My pathetic little formula for getting myself back to France.’ He adopted a mincing, effeminate tone. ‘“I’m not going back to kill people. I’m only going back to look after some men.”’ His own voice. ‘Why didn’t you kick me in the head, Rivers? Why didn’t you put me out of my misery?’
Rivers made himself answer. ‘Because I was afraid if you started thinking about that, you wouldn’t go back at all.’
He might as well not have spoken. ‘You’ve only got to read the training manual. “A commander must demand the impossible and not think of sparing his men. Those who fall out must be left behind and must no more stop the pursuit than casualties stopped the assault.” That’s it. Expendable, interchangeable units. That’s what I went back to “look after”.’ A pause. ‘All I wanted was to see them through their first tour of duty and I couldn’t even do that.’
‘Pinto’s there,’ Rivers said tentatively.
‘Oh, yes, and he’s good. He’s really good.’
Siegfried’s face and neck were running with sweat. ‘Shall I open the window?’ Rivers asked.
‘Please. They keep shutting it, I don’t know why.’
Rivers went to open the window. Behind him, Siegfried said, ‘I’m sorry you don’t like my lovely soldier lads.’
‘I didn’t say I didn’t like them. I said you shouldn’t send them.’
‘There was one in particular.’
‘Jowett,’ said Rivers.
‘I wrote a poem about Jowett. Not that he’ll ever know. He was asleep. He looked as if he were dead.’ A silence. ‘It’s odd, isn’t it, how one can feel fatherly towards somebody, I mean, genuinely fatherly, not exploiting the situation or even being tempted to, and yet there’s this other current. And I don’t think one invalidates the other. I think it’s perfectly possible for them both to be genuine.’
‘Yes,’ said Rivers, with the merest hint of dryness, ‘I imagine so.’ He came back to the bed. ‘You say things “started to unravel”?’
‘Yes, because I’d always coped with the situation by blocking out the killing side, cutting it off, and then suddenly one’s brought face to face with the fact that, no, actually there’s only one person there and that person is a potential killer of Huns. That’s what our CO used to call us. It had a very strange effect. I mean, I went out on patrol, that sort of thing, but I’ve always done that, I’ve never been able to sit in a trench, it’s not courage, I just can’t do it, but this time it was different because I wasn’t going out to kill or even to test my nerve, though that did come into it. I just wanted to see. I wanted to see the other side. I used to spend a lot of time looking through the periscope. It was a cornfield. Farmland. Sometimes you’d see a column of smoke coming up from the German lines, but quite often you’d see nothing.’ A pause, then he said casually, ‘I went across once. Dropped down into the trench and walked along, and there were four Germans standing by a machinegun. One of them turned round and saw me.’
‘What happened?’
‘Nothing. We just looked at each other. Then he decided he ought to tell his friends. And I decided it was time to leave.’
A tense silence.
‘I suppose I should have killed him,’ Siegfried said.
‘He should certainly have killed you.’
‘He had the excuse of surprise. You know, Rivers, it’s no good encouraging people to know themselves and… face up to their emotions, because out there they’re better off not having any. If people are going to have to kill, they need to be brought up to expect to have to do it. They need to be trained not to care because if you don’t…” Siegfried gripped Rivers’s hand so tightly that his face clenched with the effort of concealing his pain. ‘It’s too cruel.’
Rivers had been with Siegfried for over an hour and so far nothing had been said that might not equally well have been dealt with at some more convenient time of day. But now, his excitement began to increase, words tripped him up, his mind stumbled alon
g in the wake of his ideas, trying desperately to catch up. He spoke of the vastness of the war, of the impossibility of one mind encompassing it all. Again and again he spoke of the need to train boys to kill; from earliest childhood, he said, they must be taught to expect nothing else and they must never never be allowed to question what lies ahead. All this was mixed in with his anxieties about the raid Jowett and the others were going on. He spoke so vividly and with so much detail that at times he clearly believed himself to be in France.
There was no point arguing with any of this. It took Rivers three hours to calm him down and get him to sleep. Even after his breathing had become steady, Rivers went on sitting by the bed, afraid to move in case the withdrawal of his hand should cause him to wake. Long hairs on the back of Siegfried’s forearm caught the light. Rivers looked at them, too exhausted to think clearly, remembering the experiments he and Head had done on the pilomotor reflex. Head’s hairs had become erect every time he read a particular poem. The holy shiver, as the Germans call it. For Head it was awakened by poetry; for Rivers, more than once, it had been the beauty of a scientific hypothesis, one that brought into unexpected harmony a whole range of disparate facts. What had intrigued Rivers most was that human beings should respond to the highest mental and spiritual achievements of their culture with the same reflex that raises the hairs on a dog’s back. The epicritic grounded in the protopathic, the ultimate expression of the unity we persist in regarding as the condition of perfect health. Though why we think of it like that, God knows, since most of us survive by cultivating internal divisions.
Siegfried was now deeply asleep. Cautiously, Rivers withdrew his hand, flexing the fingers. It had grown colder and Siegfried had fallen asleep outside the covers. Rivers went to shut the window, and stood for a moment attempting to arrange the story he’d been told into a coherent pattern, but that wasn’t possible, though the outline was clear enough. Siegfried had always coped with the war by being two people: the anti-war poet and pacifist; the bloodthirsty, efficient company commander. The dissociation couldn’t be called pathological, since experience gained in one state was available to the other. Not just available: it was the serving officer’s experience that furnished the raw material, the ammunition, if you liked, for the poems. More importantly, and perhaps more ambiguously, that experience of bloodshed supplied the moral authority for the pacifist’s protest: a soldier’s declaration. No wonder Pinto’s innocent question had precipitated something of a crisis.
