in to us and hoisted him with difficulty on to the narrow white table,
in the white room full of glistening bottles and shining basins and
silvered instruments, among the white-coated surgeons and nurses. His
head hung over one end of the table, and his feet over the other, and
his great freckled arms hung helpless and heavy down at either side.
Thick curling bunches of red hair, wiry and vigorous, grew out of his
enormous chest. We stripped his body. It lay inert, a mountainous mass,
with the rough-hewn brick-red face tipped back. His sightless face
reminded one of the face of a rock in a sandstone quarry, chiselled
with a pickaxe, deeply gashed. His closed eyes were caves under bushy
cliffs, his battered mouth a dark shaft leading down into a cavern
where a hammer was beating.
Because he was so big, his helplessness was the more helpless. But
one could feel life pounding powerfully in his body--senseless life,
pounding on, pumping air into his lungs, keeping his heart going. Yes,
he would be hard to kill, I thought. Even a bullet in the head hadn’t
killed him.
I counted his pulse. It was strong and steady.
“Shot through the mouth. Revolver bullet lodged in the brain.” Monsieur
X was reading the ticket that had been pinned to the man’s blanket in
the dressing station behind the front line.
But how? I wondered. How queer, I thought. Shot in the mouth--through
the roof of the mouth. He must have been asleep in the trench with his
mouth open. And I imagined him there, sprawling in the muddy ditch,
an exhausted animal with his great stupid mouth open; and I saw a
figure crawl in beside him and put the barrel of a revolver between
his big yellow teeth. Fool, I thought. You fool--you big hulking brute
beast--going to sleep like that in utter careless weariness.
But no, it was impossible. In this war such things didn’t happen. Men
were killed haphazard--maimed, torn to pieces, scattered by shell fire,
plugged full of shrapnel, hit square sometimes by rifle bullets, but
not shot neatly through the roof of the mouth with a revolver.
They were whispering as they bent over him. Monsieur X frowned,
pinched his lips together, looked down at the great, gentle unconscious
carcase sideways.
“But how?” I asked. “Who?”
“Himself. He shot himself through the mouth. It’s a suicide.”
“Suicide!” I echoed the word vaguely, as if it contained a mystery.
There was something queer, out of the ordinary, about it, shocking
to the surgeons and orderlies. They were ashamed, worried, rather
flustered. “But why suicide?” I asked, suddenly aware of the
extraordinary fact that a personal tragedy had lifted its head above
the dead level of mass destruction. It was this that shocked them.
He’s not young, I thought, cutting the bandage round the rough
unconscious head with its shock of matted red hair. A peasant,
probably--very stupid--an ox of a man.
“Why suicide?” I asked aloud.
“Panic,” answered Monsieur briefly. “Fear--he tried to kill himself
from fear of being killed. They do sometimes.”
“This one didn’t.”
“No, he didn’t succeed, this big one. He ought to be dead. The bullet
is here just under the skull. It’s gone clean through his brain. Any
other man would be dead. He’s strong, this big one.”
“You’ll extract it?”
“But certainly.”
“And he will live?”
“Perhaps.”
“And what then?”
“He’ll be court-martialed and shot, Madame, for attempted suicide.”
They were strapping his iron arms and legs to the narrow table. Someone
lifted his heavy head. Someone pulled his great bulk into position and
bound him to the table with strong leather bands.
“Don’t do it!” I shouted suddenly. “Leave him alone.” I was appalled by
his immense helplessness.
They went on with their business of getting him ready. They didn’t hear
me. Perhaps I had not shouted aloud.
“You don’t understand,” I cried. “You’ve made a mistake. It wasn’t
fear. It was something else. He had a reason, a secret. It’s locked
there in his chest. Leave him alone with it. You can’t bring him back
now to be shot again.”
But they clapped the ether mask over his face, stifling his enormous
stentorious breathing, and with that he began to struggle--the dying
ox. Life, roused by the menace of the suffocating gas, sprang up in him
again--gigantic, furious, suffering, a baited bull. It began plunging
in him, straining, leaping to get out of his carcase and attack its
enemies. A leather thong snapped, a fist shot out, knocking over
bottles and basins. There was a crash, a tinkle of broken glass, a
scramble of feet, and suddenly through the confusion I heard a thin
soft anguished voice cry as if from a great distance, “Rosa, Rosa!” It
came from his chest; it sounded like the voice of a man lost in a cave.
It came from under his heaving side where the bushy hair grew thick and
strong--a hollow heartbroken voice, issuing from his blind unconscious
mouth, in a long cry--“Rosa, Rosa!”
Twice again he called Rosa before they could clap the ether mask down
again on his face.
It was a neat operation and entirely successful. They took the bullet
out of the top of his head, bandaged his head up again, and carried him
away through the sunny afternoon to be put to bed.
“He will surely die in the night,” I said to myself, and I went
again and again in the night to see if, happily, he were dead; but
always, standing beside the shadow of his great bulk, I could hear him
breathing, and once I thought I heard sighing on his shrouded lips the
name of the woman--Rosa.
“He can’t live,” the night nurse said.
“He can’t die,” I whispered to myself. “Life is too strong in him, too
hard to kill.”
He was much better next day. I found him sitting up in bed in a clean
pink flannel night shirt, staring in front of him. He didn’t answer
when I said “Good morning,” or take any notice of me. He hadn’t spoken
to any one during the day, the nurse told me, but he was very obedient
and ate his soup quietly, “as good as gold,” she said he was. “A
remarkable case,” Monsieur X said. “He ought to be dead.” But there he
was sitting up eating his meals with an excellent appetite.
“So he knows what will happen?” I asked, following the surgeon to the
door.
“But certainly. They all know. Everyone in the army knows the penalty.”
The suicide did not turn his head or look in my direction. He was still
staring straight ahead of him when I came back and stood at the foot of
his bed.
Who are you? I wondered, and who is Rosa? And what can I do? How can
I help you? And I stood there waiting, miserably spellbound by the
patient brute who at last turned on me from his cavernous eyes a look
of complete understanding, and then looked heavily away again.
That night when the orderly was dozing and the night nurse was going on
her round from hut to hut, he tore the bandage from his head. She found
him with his head oozing on the pillow, and scolded him roundly. He
didn’t answer. He said nothing. He seemed not to notice. Meekly, docile
as a friendly trusting dog, he let her bandage him up again, and the
next morning I found him again sitting up in his bed in his clean head
bandage staring in front of him with that dark look of dumb subhuman
suffering. And the next night the same thing happened, and the next,
and the next. Every night he tore off his bandage, and then let himself
be tied up again.
“If his wound becomes infected he’ll die,” said Monsieur X, angrily.
“That’s what he’s trying to do,” I answered. “Kill himself again before
they can shoot him,” I added, “to save them the trouble.”
I dared not speak to the man whom I thought of day and night as Rosa,
having never learned his name, and he never spoke to me or any one. His
eyes, which he now always turned on me when I came in, forbade me to
speak to him. They stared into mine with the understanding of a brute
mortally wounded, who is not allowed to die, so I went to the General,
and, actuated by some hysterical impulse, pleaded for the man’s life.
“But, Madame, we have epidemics of suicide in the trenches. Panic
seizes the men. They blow their brains out in a panic. Unless the
penalty is what it is--to be court-martialed and shot--the thing would
spread. We’d find ourselves going over the top with battalions of dead
men. The same penalty applies to men who wound themselves. That’s the
favourite device of a coward. He puts the muzzle of his rifle on his
foot and fires.”
I argued. I explained that this man was not afraid of being killed, but
of not being killed, that his luck was out when the enemy missed him;
that he had been kept waiting too long, had shot himself in despair
because the Germans wouldn’t shoot him; and a woman called Rosa let him
down, or perhaps she died. Perhaps he simply wanted to go to her.
“He must have had a letter in the trenches--a letter from Rosa or
about her. He’s not a young man. He is forty or more--an enormous
brute with red hair and hands like hams. A farmer probably. One of
those slow plodding gentle brute men, faithful as dogs. His voice was
broken-hearted, high and hollow like a child’s voice, when he called to
her. Like a child that is lost. ‘Rosa! Rosa!’ If you’d heard him.
“And here you are with your military regulations asking me to save him
for you so that you can shoot him. You expect us to tie up his head
every night and prevent his dying so that you can march him off to
trial and stand him up against a wall.”
But what was the good of arguing against army regulations? We were at
war. The General could do nothing. The man must be made an example, so
that these epidemics of suicide could be kept in check.
I didn’t dare go back to Rosa. I went to the door of the hut and called
the nurse. Down in the centre of the long row of beds I could see his
great shoulders and his huge bandaged head. He looked like a monstrous
baby in his white bonnet and pink flannel shirt. But I knew that his
big haggard eyes were staring, and I remembered that his face had been
a little paler each day, that it was not brick colour any more, but the
colour of wax, that his cheek bones stood out like shelves.
He’s killing himself in spite of us all, I thought. He’s succeeding.
It’s hard work, it takes patience, but he’s doing it. Given a chance,
he’ll pull it off. Well, he’ll have his chance. I almost laughed. I had
been a fool to go to the General and plead for his life. That was the
last thing he wanted me to do for him. That was just the wrong thing.
I spoke to the nurse who was going on duty for the night.
“When Rosa pulls off his bandage to-night, leave it off,” I said
abruptly.
She looked at me a minute hesitating. She was highly trained. Her
traditions, her professional conscience, the honour of her calling
loomed for a moment before her, then her eyes lighted. “All right,” she
said.
I thought when I stood at the foot of Rosa’s bed next morning and found
him staring at me that I detected a look of recognition in his eyes,
perhaps even a faint look of gratitude, but I could not be sure. His
gaze was so sombre, so deep, that I could not read it, but I could
see that he was weaker. Perhaps it was his increased pallor that made
his eyes so enormously dark and mysterious. Towards evening he grew
delirious, but he tore off his bandage all the same, in the middle of
the night. He managed to do that. It was his last effort, his last
fumbling desperate and determined act. His fixed idea prevailed through
his delirium, his will triumphed. It was enough. He was unconscious
next morning and he died two days later, calling in his weary abysmal
heart for Rosa, though we could not hear him.
PART TWO
THE SOMME
THE CITY IN THE DESERT
What is this city that sprawls in the shallow valley between the chalk
hills? Why are its buildings all alike, gaunt wooden sheds with iron
roofs? Why are there no trees, no gardens, no pleasant places? The
sheds are placed on top of the muddy ground like boxes, row after row
of them, with iron rails down the centre where the main street of the
town should be. But there are no streets. There are only tracks in the
mud and wooden walks laid across the mud from one shed to the other,
and a railway line.
I see no children playing anywhere. The wind brings no sound of
laughter from the place, or splendid shouting, no sound of any kind.
Silent men in couples are carrying heavy bundles between them from one
shed to the other, heads down to the wind. The small white figure of a
solitary woman is crossing a wide open space. She is slipping in the
mud. Her white dress is fluttering. The place is immense and empty, new
and still and desolate. But the naked wet hills are throbbing. There’s
a noise of distant booming as if the sea were breaking against their
sides.
You tell me there is no sea over there. But the roar? Surely there are
waves breaking, and this desert is wet as if a great wave had just
receded, leaving the muddy bottom of the earth uncovered. A bare sea
bottom, strewn with bits of iron, coils of wire, stones. No sign of
life, no fish fossils, or rotting sea-weed, no plant of any kind, not a
blade of green; a dead sea must have lain here.
Whoever built this city on this slippery waste, built it quick, at ebb
tide, between tides, to serve some queer purpose between low and high
tide. They put up these sheds in a hurry, covered them with sheets of
corrugated iron, pinned them to the mud somehow, anyhow, knowing that
a roaring surge would rise again, come rolling back over the hills to
carry them away again. Then all these new buildings, all this timber
and these sheets of iron will be broken up, and will rush down in a
torrent.
Down where? How do I know. I’m lost. I’ve lost my way. The road was
slippery. There were no landmarks. The village I used to know at the
cross-roads was gone. Everything was sliding in the mud and all the
villages that I knew here once on a time had slipped clean out of
sight, and now all the men and horses in the world with wagons and
motor lorries seem to be pouring after them into a gulf. The earth is a
greased slide, tilted up and shaking. And the men who built this place
knew evidently that there was danger of the face of the earth itself
slipping--for look over there on that hill-side and that one--they’ve
tied the earth down with wire. You see those intersecting bands of
wire, looking like a field of tangled iron weeds and iron thistles?
That is evidently to keep the mud from slipping away.
Queer, isn’t it? This new city where there once was a snug town huddled
round a church with cafés, little tables under the trees, schoolboys in
black pinafores playing on the church steps. The inn, I remember, was
famous for its cuisine. What has become of the fat landlord who watched
the plump succulent fowls turning on a spit and dripping? Now, there’s
this place that looks like a mining town or a lumber camp, only it
can’t be. There’s not a tree to be seen, north, south, east, or west,
nothing but mud glistening. It’s very queer, I say. That flimsy gate
there with a banner across it as if for a celebration, with H.O.E. 32
on it in big black letters, and a flag flying, and those red crosses
painted on the iron roofs of the buildings. H.O.E. 32 must be the name
of the place; but why such a name? What does it mean?
Perhaps there has been a new flood, since Noah, and you and I slept
through it. Perhaps a new race of men has been hatched out of the mud,
hatched like newts, slugs, larvæ of water beetles. But slugs who know
horribly, acutely, that they have only a moment to live in between
flood tides and so built this place quickly, a silly shelter against
the wrath of God, and gave it a magic hieroglyphic name, and put the
name on a banner and hoisted a flag, and then put those red crosses up
there, tipped skywards. Everything showy in the place points skywards,
is designed to catch an eye in the sky, a great angry eye.
Otherwise it seems a secret place, vast, spread out, bare but secret;
and some strange industry, some dreadful trade is evidently being
carried on here in the wet desert, where a flood has passed and another
flood will come.
The workers have a curious apprehensive look with their big secretive
bundles. They may be smugglers. Certainly some shameful merchandise is
being smuggled in here from the shore that you say is not the shore of
the sea. If the booming noise beyond the hills were the roar of waves
breaking, one would say that these old men were gangs of beachcombers,
bringing up bundles of wreckage; that they go out across the mud under
cover of the night to hunt in the backwash. You can see from the way
they move that the stuff is valuable and breakable. They come out of
the sheds cautiously and go carefully along the narrow board walks, two
by two, with the heavy brown bundles swinging between them. They are as
careful as they can be. They seem to be old men. They stagger under the
weight that swings from their arms and their old shoulders cower as if
under the lash of an invisible whip; but they go up and down the long
rows of sheds, patiently, carefully, gently, taking small careful steps.
You say that these bundles are the citizens of the town? What do you
mean? Those heavy brown packages that are carried back and forth, up
and down, from shed to shed, those inert lumps cannot be men. They are
delivered to this place in closed vans and are unloaded like sacks and
are laid out in rows on the ground and are sorted out by the labels
pinned to their covers. They lie perfectly still while they are carried
back and forth, up and down, shoved into sheds and pulled out again.
What do you mean by telling me that they are men?
Why, if they are men, don’t they walk? Why don’t they talk? Why don’t
they protest? They lie perfectly still. They make no sound. They are
covered up. You do not expect me to believe that inside that roll there
is a man, and in that one, and in that one?
Ah, dear God, it’s true! Look! Look through the window. The old men are
undoing the bundles inside this shed. Look, there’s a face and there’s
an arm hanging down crooked, and there I see a pair of boots sticking
out at one end of a bundle.
But how queer they are! How strangely they lie there. They are not
the usual shape. They only remind one of men. Some, to be sure, are
wearing coats, and some have on iron hats, but all of them seem to be
broken and tied together with white rags. And how dirty they are! The
mud is crusted on them. Their boots are lumps of mud. Their faces are
grey and wet as if modelled of pale mud. But what are those red, rusty
stains on their dirty white rags? They have gone rusty lying out there
in the mud, in the backwash. Ah, what a pity. Here is one without an
arm, and another and another, and there, dear God, is one without a
face! Oh! Oh! What are the old men doing to them? They are pulling off
their clothes, uncovering the dreadful holes in their sides. Come away,
come away from the window. I know now. There is no need to sneak up and
stare at them.
They are lost men, wrecked men, survivors from that other world that
was here before the flood passed this way, washed up against the shore
of this world again by the great backwash. They thought that they had
done with it, thought it was over and done with, thought they had
left it for ever. But they’ve been brought here, brought back again to
this city of refuge called H.O.E. 32, that sprawls under the angry Eye
of God. Bundled into vans they were, all mangled and broken, carried
back over the sliding mud through that flimsy gate where the flag is
flapping, to be saved. To be hauled about and man-handled, to have
their broken, bleeding nakedness uncovered, to have their bodies cut
again with knives and their deep wounds probed with pincers, and to
have the breath choked back in their sobbing lungs again, so that they
may be saved for this world.
How strange it must look to them when they open their eyes! There are
no trees anywhere. There is no shelter, except under the iron roofs.
The place is new and still and desolate. But the wind is howling over
the wet desert, and the old men who go carefully up and down with their
heavy oblong bundles, stop and listen to the booming sound beyond the
hills as if they heard the flood rising.
CONSPIRACY
It is all carefully arranged. Everything is arranged. It is arranged
that men should be broken and that they should be mended. Just as you
send your clothes to the laundry and mend them when they come back,
so we send our men to the trenches and mend them when they come back
again. You send your socks and your shirts again and again to the
laundry, and you sew up the tears and clip the ravelled edges again and
again just as many times as they will stand it. And then you throw them
away. And we send our men to the war again and again, just as long as
they will stand it; just until they are dead, and then we throw them
into the ground.
It is all arranged. Ten kilometres from here along the road is the
place where men are wounded. This is the place where they are mended.
We have all the things here for mending, the tables and the needles,
and the thread and the knives and the scissors, and many curious things
that you never use for your clothes.
We bring our men up along the dusty road where the bushes grow on
either side and the green trees. They come by in the mornings in
companies, marching with strong legs, with firm steps. They carry their
knapsacks easily. Their knapsacks and their guns and their greatcoats
are not heavy for them. They wear their caps jauntily, tilted to one
side. Their faces are ruddy and their eyes bright. They smile and call
out with strong voices. They throw kisses to the girls in the fields.
We send our men up the broken road between bushes of barbed wire and
they come back to us, one by one, two by two in ambulances, lying on
stretchers. They lie on their backs on the stretchers and are pulled
out of the ambulances as loaves of bread are pulled out of the oven.
The stretchers slide out of the mouths of the ambulances with the men
on them. The men cannot move. They are carried into a shed, unclean
bundles, very heavy, covered with brown blankets.
We receive these bundles. We pull off a blanket. We observe that this
is a man. He makes feeble whining sounds like an animal. He lies still;
he smells bad; he smells like a corpse; he can only move his tongue; he
tries to moisten his lips with his tongue.
This is the place where he is to be mended. We lift him on to a table.
We peel off his clothes, his coat and his shirt and his trousers and
his boots. We handle his clothes that are stiff with blood. We cut off
his shirt with large scissors. We stare at the obscene sight of his
innocent wounds. He allows us to do this. He is helpless to stop us. We
wash off the dry blood round the edges of his wounds. He suffers us to
do as we like with him. He says no word except that he is thirsty and
we do not give him to drink.
We confer together over his body and he hears us. We discuss his
different parts in terms that he does not understand, but he listens
while we make calculations with his heart beats and the pumping breath
of his lungs.
We conspire against his right to die. We experiment with his bones,
his muscles, his sinews, his blood. We dig into the yawning mouths
of his wounds. Helpless openings, they let us into the secret places
of his body. We plunge deep into his body. We make discoveries within
his body. To the shame of the havoc of his limbs we add the insult of
our curiosity and the curse of our purpose, the purpose to remake him.
We lay odds on his chances of escape, and we combat with death, his
Saviour.
It is our business to do this. He knows and he allows us to do it. He
finds himself in the operating room. He lays himself out. He bares
himself to our knives. His mind is annihilated. He pours out his blood
unconscious. His red blood is spilled and pours over the table on to
the floor while he sleeps.
After this, while he is still asleep, we carry him into another place
and put him to bed. He awakes bewildered as children do, expecting,
perhaps, to find himself at home with his mother leaning over him, and
he moans a little and then lies still again. He is helpless, so we do
for him what he cannot do for himself, and he is grateful. He accepts
his helplessness. He is obedient. We feed him, and he eats. We fatten
him up, and he allows himself to be fattened. Day after day he lies
there and we watch him. All day and all night he is watched. Every day
his wounds are uncovered and cleaned, scraped and washed and bound
up again. His body does not belong to him. It belongs to us for the
moment, not for long. He knows why we tend it so carefully. He knows
what we are fattening and cleaning it up for; and while we handle it,
he smiles.
He is only one among thousands. They are all the same. They all let us
do with them what we like. They all smile as if they were grateful.
When we hurt them they try not to cry out, not wishing to hurt our
feelings. And often they apologise for dying. They would not die and
disappoint us if they could help it. Indeed, in their helplessness they
do the best they can to help us get them ready to go back again.