false thoughts. He was saying to himself, “I will let her go. I will
send her away. Once we are at home again, I will say good-bye to her.”
But he knew that he was incapable of letting her go.
He closed his eyes. He said to himself “The smell of the sea is good,
but the odour that oozes from the windows of the casino is bad. I can
smell it from here. I can’t get the smell of it out of my nose. It is
my own smell,” and his wasted greenish face twitched in disgust.
She looked at him. “I love him,” she said to herself. “I love him,” she
repeated. “But can I go on loving him?” She whispered, “Can I? I must.”
She said, “I must love him, now more than ever, but where is he?”
She looked round her as if to find the man he once had been. There were
other women on the beach, women in black and old men and children with
buckets and spades, people of the town. They seemed to be glad to be
alive. No one seemed to be thinking of the war.
The beach was long and smooth and the colour of cream. The beach was
perfect; the sun perfectly delicious; the sea was perfectly calm. The
man in the wheel chair and the woman beside him were no bigger than
flies on the sand. The women and children and old men were specks.
Far out on the sea there was an object; there were two objects. The
people on the beach could scarcely distinguish them. They peered
through the sunshine while the children rolled in the sand, and they
heard the sound of a distant hammer tapping.
“They are firing out at sea,” said someone to someone.
How perfect the beach is. The sea is a perfectly heavenly blue. Behind
the windows of the casino, under the great crystal chandeliers, men
lie in narrow beds. They lie in queer postures with their greenish
faces turned up. Their white bandages are reflected in the sombre gilt
mirrors. There is no sound anywhere but the murmur of the sea and the
whispering of the waves on the sand, and the tap tap of a hammer coming
from a great distance across the water, and the bell-buoy that seems to
say, “Darling, darling.”
MOONLIGHT
The moonlight is a pool of silver on the linoleum floor. It glints on
the enamel washbasin and slop pail. I can almost see the moon reflected
in the slop pail. Everything in my cubicle is luminous. My clothes
hanging on pegs, my white aprons and rubber boots, my typewriter and
tin box of biscuits, the big sharp scissors on the table--all these
familiar things are touched with magic and make me uneasy. Through the
open door of the hut comes the sweet sickish scent of new-mown hay,
mingling with the smell of disinfectants, of Eau de Javel and iodoform,
and wet mud and blood. There is wet mud on my boots and blood on my
apron. I don’t mind. It is the scent of new-mown hay that makes me
uneasy. The little whimpering voice of a man who is going to die in an
hour or two comes across the whispering grass from the hut next door.
That little sound I understand. It is like the mew of a wounded cat.
Soon it will stop. It will stop soon after midnight. I know. I can
tell. I go on duty at midnight, and he will die and go to Heaven soon
after, lulled to sleep by the lullaby of the guns.
Far beyond him, out in the deep amorous night, I can hear the war
going on. I hear the motor convoys rumbling down the road and the
tramp of feet marching. I can tell the ambulances from the lorries and
distinguish the wagons that carry provisions. Reinforcements are coming
up along the road through the moonlit fields. The three-inch guns
are pounding. All along the horizon they are pounding, pounding. But
there will be no attack. The section is quiet. I know. I can tell. The
cannonade is my lullaby. It soothes me. I am used to it. Every night it
lulls me to sleep. If it stopped I could not sleep. I would wake with
a start. The thin wooden walls of my cubicle tremble and the windows
rattle a little. That, too, is natural. It is the whispering of the
grass and the scent of new-mown hay that makes me nervous.
The war is the world, and this cardboard house, eight by nine, behind
the trenches, with a roof that leaks and windows that rattle, and an
iron stove in the corner, is my home in it. I have lived here ever
since I can remember. It had no beginning, it will have no end. War,
the Alpha and the Omega, world without end--I don’t mind it. I am used
to it. I fit into it. It provides me with everything that I need, an
occupation, a shelter, companions, a jug and a basin. When winter
comes my stove is red hot, and I sit with my feet on it. When it rains
I sleep under a mackintosh sheet with an umbrella over my pillow and
a basin on my feet. Sometimes in a storm the roof blows off. Then I
wait under the blankets for the old men to come and put it back again.
Sometimes the Germans shell the cross roads beyond us or the town
behind us, and the big shells pass over the hospital screaming. Then
the surgeons in the operating hut turn up the collars of their white
jackets, and we lift our shoulders round our ears. I don’t mind--it is
part of the routine. For companions there are, of course, the surgeons
and the nurses and the old grizzled orderlies, but I have other
companions more intimate than these. Three in particular, a lascivious
monster, a sick bad-tempered animal, and an angel; Pain, Life and
Death. The first two are quarrelsome. They fight over the wounded like
dogs over a bone. They snarl and growl and worry the pieces of men that
we have here; but Pain is the stronger. She is the greater. She is
insatiable, greedy, vilely amorous, lustful, obscene--she lusts for the
broken bodies we have here. Wherever I go I find her possessing the men
in their beds, lying in bed with them; and Life, the sick animal, mews
and whimpers, snarls and barks at her, till Death comes--the Angel, the
peacemaker, the healer, whom we wait for, pray for--comes silently,
drives Pain away, and horrid, snarling Life, and leaves the man in
peace.
Lying in my bed, I listen to the great, familiar, muttering voice of
the war and to the feeble, mewing, whimpering voice of Life, the sick
bad-tempered animal, and to the loud triumphant gutteral shouts of Pain
plying her traffic in the hut next to me, where the broken bodies of
men are laid out in rows with patches of moonlight on their coverlets.
At midnight I will get up and put on a clean apron and go across the
grass to the sterilizing room and get a cup of cocoa. At midnight we
always have cocoa in there next to the operating room, because there
is a big table and boiling water. We push back the drums of clean
dressings and the litter of soiled bandages, and drink our cocoa
standing round the table. Sometimes there isn’t much room. Sometimes
legs and arms wrapped in cloths have to be pushed out of the way. We
throw them on the floor--they belong to no one and are of no interest
to anyone--and drink our cocoa. The cocoa tastes very good. It is part
of the routine.
But the moonlight is like a pool of silver water on the floor, and the
air is soft and the moon is floating, floating through the sky. In a
dream I see her, in a crazy hurting dream. Lovely night, lovely lunatic
moon, lovely scented love-sick earth--you are not true; you are not a
part of the routine. You are a dream, an intolerable nightmare, and you
recall a world that I once knew in a dream.
The mewing voice of the wounded cat dying in the shed next door to me
is true. He is my brother, that wounded cat. This also is true. His
voice goes on and on. He tells the truth to me. He tells me what I know
to be true. But soon--quite soon--I hope and think that his voice will
stop. Now the monstrous mistress that he has taken to his bed has got
him, but soon he will escape. He will go to sleep in her arms lulled by
the lullaby of the pounding guns that he and I are used to, and then
in his sleep the Angel will come and his soul will slip away. It will
run lightly over the whispering grasses and murmuring trees. It will
leap through the velvety dark that is tufted with the soft concussion
of distant shells bursting from the mouths of cannon. It will fly up
through the showery flares and shooting rockets past the moon into
Heaven. I know this is true. I know it must be true.
How strange the moon is with its smooth cheeks. How I fear the
whispering of the grasses and murmuring of the trees. What are they
saying? I want to go to sleep to the old soothing lullaby of the cannon
that rocks me--rocks me in my cradle--but they keep me awake with
their awful whispering. I am drowsy and drugged with heavy narcotics,
with ether and iodoform and other strong odours. I could sleep. I
could sleep with the familiar damp smell of blood on my apron, but the
terrible scent of the new-mown hay disturbs me. Crazy peasants came and
cut it while the battle was going on just beyond the canal. Women and
children came with pitch-forks and tossed it in the sun. Now it lies
over the road in the moonlight, wafting its distressing perfume into my
window, bringing me waking dreams--unbearable, sickening, intolerable
dreams--that interrupt the routine.
Ah! The great gun down by the river is roaring, is shouting. What a
relief! That I understand--that giant’s voice. He is a friend--another
familiar, monstrous friend. I know him. I listen every night for his
roar. I long to hear it. But it is dying away now. The echo goes
growling down the valley, and again the trees and the grasses begin
that murmuring and whispering. They are lying. It is a lie that they
are saying. There are no lovely forgotten things. The other world was a
dream. Beyond the gauze curtains of the tender night there is War, and
nothing else but War. Hounds of war, growling, howling; bulls of war,
bellowing, snorting; war eagles, shrieking and screaming; war fiends
banging at the gates of Heaven, howling at the open gates of hell.
There is War on the earth--nothing but War, War let loose in the world,
War--nothing left in the whole world but War--War, world without end,
amen.
I must change my apron now and go out into the moonlight. The sick man
is still mewing. I must go to him. I am afraid to go to him. I cannot
bear to go across the whispering grass and find him in the arms of his
monstrous paramour. It is a night made for love, for love, for love.
That is not true. That is a lie.
The peaked roofs of the huts stand out against the lovely sky. The moon
is just above the abdominal ward. Next to it is the hut given up to gas
gangrene, and next to that are the Heads. The Knees are on the other
side, and the Elbows and the fractured Thighs. A nurse comes along
carrying a lantern. Her white figure moves silently across the ground.
Her lantern glows red in the moonlight. She goes into the gangrene hut
that smells of swamp gas. She won’t mind. She is used to it, just as
I am. Pain is lying in there waiting for her. It is holding the damp
greenish bodies of the gangrene cases in her arms. The nurse will try
to get her out of those beds, but the loathesome creature will be
too much for her. What can the nurse do against this she-devil, this
Elemental, this Diva? She can straighten a pillow, pour drops out of
a bottle, pierce a shrunken side with a needle. She can hold to lips
a cup of cold water. Will that land her, too, in Heaven one day? I
wonder; I doubt it. She is no longer a woman. She is dead already, just
as I am--really dead, past resurrection. Her heart is dead. She killed
it. She couldn’t bear to feel it jumping in her side when Life, the
sick animal, choked and rattled in her arms. Her ears are deaf; she
deafened them. She could not bear to hear Life crying and mewing. She
is blind so that she cannot see the torn parts of men she must handle.
Blind, deaf, dead--she is strong, efficient, fit to consort with gods
and demons--a machine inhabited by the ghost of a woman--soulless,
past redeeming, just as I am--just as I will be.
There are no men here, so why should I be a woman? There are heads
and knees and mangled testicles. There are chests with holes as big
as your fist, and pulpy thighs, shapeless; and stumps where legs once
were fastened. There are eyes--eyes of sick dogs, sick cats, blind
eyes, eyes of delirium; and mouths that cannot articulate; and parts of
faces--the nose gone, or the jaw. There are these things, but no men;
so how could I be a woman here and not die of it? Sometimes, suddenly,
all in an instant, a man looks up at me from the shambles, a man’s eyes
signal or a voice calls “Sister! Sister!” Sometimes suddenly a smile
flickers on a pillow, white, blinding, burning, and I die of it. I feel
myself dying again. It is impossible to be a woman here. One must be
dead.
Certainly they were men once. But now they are no longer men.
There has been a harvest. Crops of men were cut down in the fields of
France where they were growing. They were mown down with a scythe,
were gathered into bundles, tossed about with pitchforks, pitchforked
into wagons and transported great distances and flung into ditches
and scattered by storms and gathered up again and at last brought
here--what was left of them.
Once they were real, splendid, ordinary, normal men. Now they mew like
kittens. Once they were fathers and husbands and sons and the lovers of
women. Now they scarcely remember. Sometimes they call to me “Sister,
Sister!” in the faint voices of faraway men, but when I go near them
and bend over them, I am a ghost woman leaning over a thing that is
mewing; and it turns away its face and flings itself back into the
arms of Pain, its monster bedfellow. Each one lies in the arms of this
creature. Pain is the mistress of each one of them.
Not one can escape her. Neither the very old ones nor the young slender
ones. Their weariness does not protect them, nor their loathing,
nor their struggling, nor their cursing. Their hideous wounds are
no protection, nor the blood that leaks from their wounds on to the
bedclothes, nor the foul odour of their festering flesh. Pain is
attracted by these things. She is a harlot in the pay of War, and she
amuses herself with the wreckage of men. She consorts with decay, is
addicted to blood, cohabits with mutilations, and her delight is the
refuse of suffering bodies.
You can watch her plying her trade here any day. She is shameless.
She lies in their beds all day. She lies with the Heads and the Knees
and the festering Abdomens. She never leaves them. Even when she has
exhausted them, even when at last worn out with her frenzy they drop
into a doze, she lies beside them, to tease them with her excruciating
caresses, her pinches and twinges that make them moan and twist in
sleep. At any hour of the day or night you can watch her deadly amours,
and watch her victims struggling. The wards are full of these writhings
and tossings, they are agitated as if by a storm with her obscene
antics. But if you come at midnight--if you come with me now--you will
see the wounded, helpless, go fast asleep in her arms. You will see
them abandon themselves to deep sleep with her beside them in their
beds. They hope to escape her in sleep and find their way back to the
fields where they were growing, strong lusty men, before they were cut
down.
She lies there to spoil their dreams. When they dream of their women
and little children, of their mothers and sweethearts; when they dream
that they are again clean, normal, real men, filled with a tender and
lovely love for women, then she wakes them. In the dark she wakes them
and tightens her arms round their shrivelled bodies. She strangles
their cries. She pours her poisoned breath into their panting mouths.
She squeezes their throbbing hearts in their sides. In the dark, in the
dark she takes them; she takes them to herself and keeps them until
Death comes, the gentle angel. This is true. I know. I have seen.
Listen. Do you hear him? He is still mewing like a cat, but very
faintly, and the trees are still murmuring and the grasses whispering.
I hear the sound of many large creatures moving behind the hedge. They
are panting and snorting. A procession of motor lorries and ambulances
is going heavily down the road. They pass slowly, lumbering along with
their heavy loads, and through the huge laborious sound of their
grinding wheels threads the whirr of a swift touring car. You can hear
it coming in the distance. It rushes nearer. It dashes past with a
scratching shriek of its Klaxon. It plunges down the road and is gone.
Some officer hurrying on some terrible business, some officer with
gold leaves on his hat and a sword on his hip, in a limousine, leaning
back on his cushions, calculating the number of men needed to repair
yesterday’s damage, and the number of sandbags required to repair their
ditches. He does not see the lovely night and the lovely moon, and the
unseemly love affair that is going on between the earth and the moon.
He does not notice that he has passed the gate of a hospital, or know
that behind the hedge men are lying in the dark with patches of blood
and patches of moonlight on their coverlets. He is blind, deaf, dead,
as I am--another machine just as I am.
It is twelve o’clock. The nurse has disappeared. She has left her
lantern outside my door. There is no one to be seen. Nothing moves in
the moonlight. But the earth is trembling, and the throbbing of the
guns is the throbbing of the pulse of the War; world without end.
Listen! The whimpering mew of the wounded cat has stopped. There’s not
a sound except the whisper of the wind in the grass. Quick! Be quick!
In a moment a man’s spirit will escape, will be flying through the
night past the pale, beautiful, sentimental face of the moon.
ENFANT DE MALHEUR
His name was tattooed on his arm, and the head of a woman life-size on
his back. He himself might have been fashioned by Praxitiles, but some
sailor in a North African port had dug needles of blue ink into the
marble flesh of his arm, and written there the indelible words--Enfant
de Malheur. He waved that slender member of his incredibly perfect
Greek body in the nurse’s face when she asked him his name, and said
Voila! with a biting sarcasm and a snarl of pointed white teeth. Then,
glaring defiance, defying her to knife him in the back, he turned over
and displayed his back to her. The face of a chocolate box beauty done
in colours decorated its smooth surface. Her silly blue eyes stared up
from between his fine flat shoulder blades and her full red lips smiled
on his spinal cord. She was a trashy creature, a plump, coarse morsel,
no fit companion for this young prince of darkness. He had race,
distinction, an exquisite elegance, and, even in his battered state,
the savage grace of a panther. Not even his wounds could disfigure him.
The long deep gash in his side made his smooth torso seem the more
incredibly fair and frail. The loss of one leg rendered the other more
exquisite with its round polished knee and slim ankle.
He was one of a lot of some twenty Apaches that had been brought
in that morning. As I remember them, they were all handsome young
men--these assassins, thieves, pimps and traffickers in drugs--with
sleek elastic limbs, smooth polished skins and beautiful bones. It
was, if I remember rightly, only about their heads that I noticed
imperfection. Their skulls were not quite right somehow, nor the shape
of their ears. Their foreheads were low and receding, their jaws
weak, and their mouths betrayed depravity. Still they were beautiful,
beautiful as young leopards, and they brought with them into the
hospital the strange morbid glamour of crime. But the Enfant de Malheur
was the most beautiful of them all. He had the face of an angel.
They were exiles, and they belonged to the Battalions D’Afrique that
had been put into the line two days before on the eve of an attack.
Excellent troops of assault, these young Parisian criminals who had
been sentenced to penal servitude for life and conscripted in the army
of North Africa; but no good for holding the line or for anything else,
so the General told me. No stamina, no powers of endurance; but they
were born killers and they went over the top when the signal was given
like wolf-hounds suddenly unleashed. Moreover, they knew that if they
distinguished themselves in battle they would win back their freedom
and become again at the end of the war, citizens of Paris.
Paris! Montmartre! The lighted cafés of the Place Blanche; the
jingling, flashing, merry boulevards; these boys who lay like Greek
gods in their beds recalled fantastically all the romantic tales
that had ever been written by liars about the underworld of that
most brilliant and seductive of capitals. The cunning camouflage of
their beauty made it all seem true. The wild breath of false romance
swept down the huts over their beds. And they lay in their beds,
glaring, defiant, suspicious, expecting, so it seemed, to be attacked,
assassinated or robbed in their beds at any moment by any one of us.
Their arrival had created something of a sensation in the hospital. The
line had been held for the last few weeks by regiments of territorials,
the “old ones,” as we called them; and we had received for many days
nothing but greybeards. Fathers and grandfathers. “Vieux Pères,” good
troops they made for holding the line in the wet winter weather. They
simply sat there doggedly in the cold, the mud and the wet, enduring
the war and getting rheumatism in their old joints week after week. So
the arrival of this gang of reckless, noisy, sardonic and suspicious
cutthroats was a pleasant diversion. But the Medicin Chef wasn’t
pleased. He divided them up carefully, put only two, or at the most
three, in each hut, and turned the nurses out of the operating room,
for when these lovely beings were laid out in their immaculate beauty
on the operating table and the ether mask was put over their proud,
depraved, contemptuous faces, a stream of language of such foulness
spurted from their chiselled lips that even the surgeons turned sick.
Pim ignored this. Pim was in charge of the Enfant de Malheur. She was
the daughter of an Archdeacon, and had been brought up in a cathedral
close in the North of England, then had trained in Edinburgh. She was
an excellent nurse, very fastidious about the care of the patients.
Her blue uniform was always stiffly starched, her cap and apron were
immaculate; so was her smooth severe Madonna face, with its childlike
candid eyes and thin quiet mouth. Pim didn’t understand the word
Apache. She didn’t understand the Enfant de Malheur. She didn’t, I
believe, notice that he was beautiful. She was interested in his wounds
and in saving his life. She had come to the front to nurse the French
because she had been told that they needed nurses more in the French
army than in England; but she was not interested in Frenchmen, nor in
any man. She knew no men. She knew only her patients. And she fought
for their lives grimly, quietly, with her thin gentle lips pressed
tight together when the crisis came. So she did not look at her young
Apache with curiosity, and she did not know why he glared at her or why
he gave a start and leapt sideways in his bed when she approached him.
She made no attempt at understanding his queer argot, and was unaware
when he insulted her. She quite simply continued to look after him with
complete serenity. She simply went on handling his dangerous body with
the perfectly assured impersonal gentleness of an excellent surgical
nurse--washing him, dressing his wounds, giving him injections, enemas
and bed pans, as if she were at home in Edinburgh at work under the eye
of the most exacting of Scotch surgeons.
It was Guerin who understood that the pain-racked body of the Enfant de
Malheur was as dangerous as an unexploded bomb. Guerin was an orderly
with the rank of corporal, and he shared with Pim the responsibility of
the ward. He was a priest, mobilized for the war; but we forgot this
the greater part of the time, because he was so efficient as a nurse
and looked so little like a priest in his neat blue corporal’s uniform
with his bright alert eyes looking out through his pince nez. Indeed,
it was only when one of Pim’s patients died that we remembered that
Guerin was a priest. Then Pim summoned him shyly and withdrew, leaving
Guerin alone with the man who was dying.