Barton did not comment.
‘You can get used to almost anything you know.’
‘But should you?’
‘Well, it helps to be able to sleep. You have to sleep when you can.’
‘I don’t mean things like that – sleeping, getting used to the food, the rats and fleas and noise. I mean … other things.’
‘I know.’
‘I thought about you just now. I’ve been sitting here for a long time thinking about you. You’ve had more time to get used to things, haven’t you?’
‘Some things. Yes.’
‘And yet when you went back to England you couldn’t sleep, you had nightmares, you couldn’t even bear the smell of the roses. It all came back then, the men you’d seen die, the noises and the smells. You hadn’t forgotten.’ He seemed to be asking for some kind of reassurance, that this was truly so, that Hilliard had remembered, and suffered for it.
‘You know I hadn’t. I told you – I’ve told you more than anyone.’
‘Yes.’
‘David, what have you been doing tonight?’
He moved across the tent and looked over the valise at the packing case-table. The green-bound copy of Sir Thomas Browne, and the notebook into which Barton had earlier copied the quotations, lay in a pile, torn into small pieces, the leaves ripped from the binding. There were only a few pages still left intact, he had almost finished when Hilliard woke.
‘You can’t make a pattern out of it, you cannot read a book and get comfort from fine words, and great thoughts, and you shouldn’t bloody well try.’
‘I don’t know …’
‘I do. I’ve got to face it, it is wicked and pitiless, it is all one Godawful mess, and how can I sit here and let that man, that great man, lull me into a kind of acquiescence? Be romantic about it? Is that right? Is that how he would want to be used?’
‘You were reading the Psalms, too.’
‘Yes. Or the Psalms or anything. You asked me if it all “helped”. Well, if it did it should not have done so.’
Hilliard sat down on the canvas stool beside him. He said, ‘Hasn’t your father used anaesthetic? And why do we give the men rum issue?’
‘For God’s sake …’
‘Isn’t it the same?’
‘No.’
‘I wonder.’
‘No, John. It’s one thing to numb yourself against some kind of pain, to get up courage for an ordeal. This is different, this is a question of basic attitude. I’ve been trying to set everything apart, make it grandiose, give it a point and a purpose when there are none.’
‘Perhaps the men wouldn’t agree with you – not all of them. Coulter thinks there’s still a reason for it all, for him it is a just war, he’ll go on till he drops.’
‘I’m not Coulter.’
‘You’re not being fair to yourself, all the same.’
But it is all right, Hilliard thought, now it is all right again, at least we are talking, he will let me get through to him. He felt enormous relief and a kind of gratitude.
‘I told you about what it was like in the summer and when I went home afterwards. I think that was a good thing, for me anyway, because you made me talk and it was what I needed. I couldn’t talk to anyone else.’
‘No.’
‘I haven’t forgotten any of what happened in July, I haven’t accepted any of it. But I still feel better for having told you.’
Barton smiled and his face lost its withdrawn, formal expression. ‘Oh, you should have been a family doctor, you should be a C.O. or a priest! Except that perhaps you would be too conscientious, and I can see through you like a mirror. You are thinking, “What a good thing it will be if only I could get David to spill it all out, how much better he would feel!” Oh, I’m sorry, John, you’ve been trying very hard with me.’
‘Yes.’
‘But I have never felt like this in my life before. You must see that. I haven’t known myself. I didn’t know what to do.’
‘I’ve felt it. I know.’
‘Yes. Perhaps we’re alike then?’
Hilliard hesitated. ‘No,’ he said eventually. ‘We’re not. And it’s a good thing. It’s just that we happen to have had the same responses to a situation.’
‘It was going up into the o.p. that day. I saw eleven men killed. I suppose that doesn’t seem many to you. It was to me, when there wasn’t even anything in particular going on, it was a “routine day”. Eleven men. There might have been more only that I didn’t see them. And there were all those bodies lying out in the shell craters and they’d been there for weeks, months – I don’t know. They were all swollen and black and the flies were all over them. And I had to sit there and draw a map. I saw …’ He stopped.
‘What? Tell me.’
‘No. No, you don’t need me to go on.’
‘But it would be best if you did.’
‘Haven’t you had enough of it all yourself?’
‘That isn’t the point,’ Hilliard said gently, and knew then that he had learned all this from David, learned how to listen and to prompt, and why, even learned a tone of voice. Not long ago he would not have been able to do it. He wondered if there was anything that he had not learned from David.
‘But the worst of it has been that I haven’t known how to face myself. That Private who was snipered – looking at him I could have wept and wept, he seemed to be all the men who had ever been killed, John. I remember everything about him, his face, his hair, his hands, I can remember how pale his eyelashes were and I thought of how alive he’d been, how much there had been going on inside him – blood pumping round, muscles working, brain saying do this, do that, his eyes looking at me. I thought of it all, how he’d been born and had a family, I thought of everything that had gone into making him – and it wasn’t that I was afraid and putting myself in his place down there on the ground. I just wanted him alive again. it seemed the only important thing. I just wanted to stay there and look at him, I couldn’t take it in, that he’d been so alive, and then he just lay, spouting out blood and that was that, he was dead, nothing. Or something. I don’t know. But dead as far as I could see, his flesh was dead, he’d had all that possibility of life and it was gone. Like Harris. A bloody silly accident. If I hadn’t been with Grosse I’d have stayed there, I think I would have lain down and never got up again. I wanted to bury myself. Do something. Only – God, I had to make a map, I had a job to do, so I went and did it and I suppose that took my mind off it. By the time I’d been there an hour and by the time I came back into our dugout, I’d begun to accept it all. I was used to it. A man was dead – eleven men were dead. So? It was happening every day, it was no different because I’d been there. It would go on happening and there was not a thing I could do to stop it. In fact, my being here was helping it continue. I felt nothing then, just nothing any longer. I didn’t think I could be unfeeling, but I was. Callous. Counting the bodies in No Man’s Land and trying to see if they were ours or theirs, guessing how long they’d been dead as a question of academic interest. I had watched stretcher parties scrape and shovel up what was left of half a dozen men, along with what was left of their meal and the side of the trench. I heard a Sergeant tell them to go for more help, to get more tools and put down some duckboards, they weren’t making a good enough job of it. They did. They simply did it. And ever since I’ve heard the shells going over, and thought, that’s so many dead, so many wounded, one or two dozen, that’s next door, that’s the right flank trench, where did that one go, and Oh, Pearce is dead then, I’m sorry to hear that, yes, I’ll write to his wife, give me his papers, I’ll do the form. Last week, the day I went to the village to see the Q.M.S. – that day it hit me, that I’d been feeling nothing, I’d become entirely callous, I was taking it in and not letting myself think or feel anything. I was reading Sir Thomas Browne in order to abstract it. I’d never been so ashamed. You said that you can get used to things.
‘I knew that. But although you were cool on the sur
face that is only because you are made like that – it is only the surface. You’d told me all about the summer, and how you felt when you went home, about what struck you most when other people there talked about the war and how it had to go on and I knew you hadn’t forgotten, you didn’t stop feeling any of it for a moment. But what was happening to me?What has happened to me?’
He had been tearing and tearing at the paper, the pieces were tiny like confetti in a pile before him. Now, he brushed his arm across them so that they scattered, dropping off the packing case and lying, white as flowers, in the mud.
Hilliard said, ‘But you haven’t forgotten either. You haven’t stopped feeling. You have just told me as much.’
‘That boy …’
‘You can’t feel every man’s death completely and all of the time, David, you simply cannot.’
‘Every man’s death diminishes me.’
‘Yes. So you have just told me the truth, haven’t you?’
‘Have I?’
‘That you are diminished and know as much. And you are changed. And ashamed. That you feel it. Some people would scarcely have noticed how many men were killed, they’ve gone past it, it’s all become part of the day’s work.’
‘That was how I felt.’
‘No, you didn’t, not really. Shock does strange things, you should know that. Some men do not even suffer shock.’
‘What kind of men are those?’
‘Precisely. But all the same, you know as well as I do that if you are here and doing this job, you have to shove things out of the way all the time. We’d never carry on at all otherwise.’
‘Then I wonder if we ought to “carry on at all”?’
‘If you truly believe that you can go and say so to Garrett tomorrow, register as a conscientious objector – lay down your arms. I imagine it would be hard – it was hard enough for your brother, and he hadn’t gone through the business of joining up and serving. But if that is what you feel, then you must do it.’
Barton looked up. ‘It would be funk, wouldn’t it? I went through all that before I came out here. It would be funk.’
‘You hadn’t seen anything then.’
‘All the more reason why it would be funk and seen to be so.’
‘Are you afraid of what else is to come?’
‘I’m afraid of myself. Of what I am becoming, of what it will do to me.’
‘Are you afraid of your own dying?’
Barton’s face lightened at once. ‘Oh, no. I’ve thought about that too. No. I have never really been afraid of that.’
‘It is a brave act of valour to condemn death, but where life is more terrible, it is the truest valour to live.’
Barton smiled. ‘I’ve just torn all that up.’
‘But I have just learned it by heart.’
‘And is it true?’
Hilliard considered. But he found himself thinking instead, whatever was wrong between us is wrong no longer, and will never be so again. He was certain of that.
He said, ‘It isn’t going to get any better. It is not going to stop being more terrible. None of that nonsense about its all being over and done with by Christmas, about our driving them out like foxes from cover. I scarcely believe that it will ever be over. At any rate there is no point in thinking so.’
‘But I asked you if it were true that where life is more terrible it is the truest valour to live.’
‘Isn’t it something you have to make up your own mind about?’
‘Is it true for you, then?’
‘Yes,’ Hilliard said, ‘it’s true. I think so. And you?’
‘I don’t know.’
Barton was looking down at the scattered shreds of paper. ‘What a philosophical night!’
‘No. We have been talking about what is happening, about yesterday and today and tomorrow.’
‘Yes. Do you suppose I ought to gather up the remains of Sir Thomas Browne?’
‘He’s stuck in the mud.’
‘A sort of burial. Fitting.’
‘Yes. Though as a matter of fact I’m rather sorry. I wanted to borrow the book and read it for myself.’
Barton stood up and put his arm across Hilliard’s shoulders, his face suffused with amusement. ‘Don’t worry. I’ve got another copy at home. I’ll get my mother to send it out to us!’
‘Do that.’
A gust of wind blew the tent flap open, blew rain inside.
‘It’s going to be bloody wet and bloody cold,’ Hilliard said looking down at his groundsheet. They ought to finish their sleep, though he had no idea of the time.
Barton let his arm drop, and moved a pace away. He said, ‘I love you, John.’
Hilliard looked at him. ‘Yes.’ He was amazed at himself. That it was so easy.
‘Yes.’
Part Three
Yes, I know you will have been thinking that something has happened. I’m sorry. But there were various troubles which I won’t go into now, because they’re resolved or under control anyway and more practically, I simply haven’t had a chance to write until now, we have been shifted about so much, nobody has had the faintest idea what’s been going on. We had a shocking march up here, we have scarcely unpacked for a week and your letters are only just being sent on to me, after long delays – which shows that nobody else knows where we are, either! I suppose there may be others of yours still to come. The upshot of it all is that we have come further north and that it has rained solidly for a fortnight. We are now in the front line trenches and under heavy fire the whole time. No farther than 150 yards away from the enemy. Why we moved from the last place is a mystery – we had thought they were fattening us up for the kill there, but apparently not and in any case all of our movements seem to be a mystery, we go when and where we are told. Perhaps someone knows why.
The rain. Yes, they all told me what it would be like, but I wasn’t really prepared for it and nor was John, because of course he didn’t come out till last spring, by which time the worst of it had cleared. The trenches here are very bad, under about 2–3 feet of water all the time. Of course we have trench pumps and of course they don’t work so the men spend much of their time baling us out with great ladles. Pretty useless and the rain just fills us up again. We live all the time in waders and mackintoshes. But I doubt if I shall ever feel truly dry again. I cannot believe that only a couple of weeks ago the ground was cracked and parched with the sun, and we were still passing through the last of the fruit orchards.
We have a tiny dugout which has been shelled a few times in the immediate past and patched up badly. It smells, it’s under a bank and the roof is only broken timber reinforced with some sandbags. There are two bunks of wire netting, which is useless. The old dugout in the supports was like a Grand Hotel suite in comparison and we have lost the gramophone – I mean, we were forced to leave it behind. I feel it may be a good thing. We have been in very low spirits and physically exhausted, very depressed altogether – our heads feel black and blue (if you see what I mean) from constant noise and alarums. It would have been hard to listen to Schubert and Elgar and be soothed, only to be dragged back so roughly into this present every other minute.
Besides, we have simply had no time.
John has had an appalling cold and sore throat, I suppose because of the wet feet and wet beds – wet generally. We have lice for the first time – a pleasant addition. And rats, which are what I really cannot cope with. You will remember how I used to secrete white and other mice in the house – well, don’t worry. I shall never be able to look any sort of verminous creature in the face again. And what faces these rats have! Really evil, and they are so bloated and fat and fit looking, they are scurrying about the whole time, you never know when one will come up. They feed on the corpses, of course, of which there are plenty and our own new ones are added every day. There was a battle here about a month ago, leaving the place in a terrible state.
Everybody is on digging parties during the day, rebuilding and sandbagg
ing, down at support line and then back here at night. There is no rest at the moment, and we snatch what sleep we can – we don’t seem likely to be relieved.
At night the parties have somewhat got to carry on as usual through the mud and rain, struggling to bring up the supplies, food and mail and all the stuff we need for our digging and repair work and so on. It’s much worse in this weather, it takes so much more time – with water up to your thighs and shells bursting all over the place, you often feel like simply giving up and lying face down in the water. The duckboards are quite useless. But somehow it is still tedious and fairly pointless work: imagine trying to patch up derelict houses in the middle of nowhere all through a pouring wet autumn night! We are drones not fighting men. Not that I want to be a fighting man. But John says that at least there’s a feeling of doing something positive, having one clear objective, in a battle. I suppose that means the men are ‘dying for the cause’ whereas here they are simply shelled or snipered at random in the middle of dinner or foot inspection or sleep, it is like a road accident on an ordinary day, you feel resentful because of the sheer waste of it all.
But I am feeling very resentful altogether now – I have seen enough. The men sing ‘I want to go home’ and they mean that they want to see their families and that they are sick of all this tiredness and wet and cold and din. That’s what I mean, too, but more, I want to be out of it all because I feel guilty that I’m here, and doing nothing to stop it – even if that were to mean bringing it to an end in some great, violent push. And I also just want to be comfortable again and sleep in a bed and have dry socks, to wander about where and when I choose, and to see you all – oh, but you cannot imagine how we long for the small everyday things, scarcely worth mentioning, scarcely noticed at home.
I think we have been brought up here because of some attack planned on the enemy trenches but really we do not know, it might simply be because we’re good at repairing. We thought we were going into battle at the last place, before we went down to reserve camp, but nothing came of that. It’s all hearsay.