The blast had shredded my trousers until I was essentially naked from the waist down and I could not feel my legs where they disappeared into the brackish water. My upper tunic was also in rags, although my blouse had survived in front. My helmet was gone. I felt little pain above the great numbness that spread from my back down to my legs, but I was sure that I had to have been hit by some mortal piece of metal that even at that second lay deep in my numbed flesh. My hands were smudged as black as the rest of me, but they seemed intact and—after some moments of drifting in and out of consciousness—I used them to try to drag myself up and out of the water.
This was not a good idea. The top of my head was only inches below the edge of the steep shell crater, and as soon as I rose above this ad-hoc parapet, bullets and shrapnel whizzed by. I gave up struggling against the mud and slipped back down so that my legs disappeared again up to the thighs beneath dark water.
There were one or two others sharing my hole. I say one or two because to this day I do not know if it was one body or two lying across the six-foot pool from me. The bottom half of a torso lay on the mud, toes almost touching the lip of the crater. The bit of spinal cord visible glowed white each time a flare drifted down or an explosion lit the scene. The puttees and boots were decidedly British and I would have thought it was the lower half of my own body lying there if I had not already glimpsed my naked legs.
The top half of some chap’s head protruded from the water, visage toward me. He had managed to keep his helmet on and the chinstrap seemed firmly attached. His eyes were open and staring at me very intensely indeed. I would have guessed that this was a clever fellow lying doggo, waiting for the bombardment to ease before lurching up for another try, except for the fact that both the man’s mouth and nostrils were under water. There were no bubbles. He did not blink as minutes faded into hours.
With my legs useless, my wounds unable to be assessed while the general numbness persisted, and the bombardment continuing, I lay back in the shell-hole mud and waited to die as the barrage continued. When it ended, if I survived it, the Germans would send out patrols to finish the last of us with bayonets.
I admit that I lay there and tried to think philosophical thoughts, but the best I could do was remember the faces and names of all the girls I had bedded. It was not an unpleasant way to pass the time.
And then the pain in my back and chest began in earnest. I had prepared for this eventuality by bringing the regulation four morphia tablets allowed to each officer. Now I reached for them in my trouser pocket.
I had no trousers. Only rags and lacerations there.
I patted my blouse pocket, hoping against hope that I had put the morphia there in a fit of absent-mindedness, but all I found were this journal, a stub of pencil, and my silver whistle.
The pain rolled in like poison gas. I would have welcomed poison gas at this point, if only to put an end to the pain. I am, as I have admitted in these pages, not brave.
It was sometime after midnight and before dawn, as I writhed in the mud on the pinpoint of my dead comrade’s unblinking stare, that she came.
The Lady. The one for whom I wait this night.
But perhaps the scratch of my pen or my upright posture keeps her from visiting. I will set the journal aside until another time and wait in the darkness between the flashes of the big guns.
Post Script: the gas victim across the aisle no longer breathes.
Sunday, 15 July, 9.00 A.M.—
The Lady did not come. Or at least I do not remember her being here. I cannot express the depth of my disappointment.
The nun—the brusque one, not Sister Paul Marie—explains the frenzied sound of our big guns by saying that there is a terrible battle being waged for High Wood. Most of the casualties streaming in, she says, are from the 33rd Division, especially the Church Lads Brigade. She says that the wounds are more terrible than anything she has seen to date.
I have come to realize that this practice of filling Kitchener’s quota by recruiting Pals Battalions will reap a terrible whirlwind of grief and that while it was almost certainly a grand idea from the recruitment point of view, it is leading to empty villages, churches, fire brigades, and entire professions where the cream of our generation there will have been wiped out in a single afternoon. {Ed. note—Even now, few can have missed or forgotten the image of Lord Kitchener pointing from his poster stating unequivocally “Your Country Needs You.” What modern readers may have forgotten, however, is that Kitchener did not bring in conscription to fill the ranks until January of 1916. Thus James Edwin Rooke and some two and a half million other men in khaki were volunteers. Rooke’s opinion of the “Pals Battalions,” where friends and acquaintances could join en masse, turned out to be entirely correct. Much of the impact of the carnage of WWI on Great Britain has been not just the numbers of dead, but the terrible focus of such loss on specific locales brought about by destruction of “Pals.” Pals battalions suffering more than 500 casualties (out of a battalion consisting of 1,000 men) at the Somme included the
Accrington Pals, Leeds Pals, The Cambridge Battalion, Public Schools Battalion, 1st Bradford Pals, Glasgow Boys’ Brigade Battalion, and the Co. Down Volunteers. And this was on the single day of 1 July.}
The doctors and nurses came through a while ago to push the needle through my back and into my lungs. The noise it makes extracting fluid is beyond description, but rather reminds me of a circus elephant I once watched sucking up the last of a bucket of water. The circus was passing through Weald of Kent that leafy summer, and I wish to God I were there now.
The doctor left some papers he had wearily set down and I pilfered one of the forms to read. It is an autopsy report. I have been awake since before seven—the bells in the damaged steeple under the leaning Golden Virgin work very well indeed and are somehow more intrusive than the constant rumble and roar of guns—and I have been struggling with the poem I began last night about the gas victim whose breathing I still seem to hear despite his most definite absence.
The autopsy report seems more effective as poetry than my poor scribblings. I will reproduce it verbatim:
Case four: Aged 39
Years.
Gassed 4 July 1916.
Admitted to casualty clearing station
The same day.
Died about ten days later.
Brownish pigmentation present over large surfaces
Of the body. A white ring
Of skin
Where the wrist watch was.
Marked superficial burning of the face and
Scrotum.
The larynx much congested. The whole of the trachea
Was covered by a yellow membrane. The bronchi
Contained abundant gas. The lungs fairly
Voluminous.
The right lung showed extensive collapse at the base.
Liver congested
And fatty.
Stomach showed numerous
Submucous haemorrhages. The brain substance was
Unduly wet
And very congested.6
Merde. Poetry does not serve as poetry in this new age. And nonpoetry cannot masquerade as serviceable verse. Perhaps poetry is dead. Perhaps it deserved to die. Perhaps the poets do also.
The bells have stopped. Perhaps the half dozen faithful civilians still living in Albert have been driven in to Mass. The guns do not hesitate for a second. I pity The Church Lads’ Brigade. For what they are about to receive, may those of us who are not there be truly thankful.
It is almost time to write about the Lady. I have hesitated to do so because anyone finding and reading my journal would think me mad.
I am not mad.
And this journal will be destroyed…must be destroyed. It is a poet’s place to lay bare thoughts that others must deny even having, but poetry is dead and I soon will be and I refuse to leave these thoughts where prying eyes will find them.
And yet I must write about it all or go mad.
We
had attacked on the 10th, watched our Rifle Brigade be destroyed by ten P.M., on the 10th, and all that night of the 10th I lay in the shell hole, half-delirious with the pain from legs that would not work for me, half out of my mind with thirst and fear. I admit that I drank from the green slime of that corpse-littered crater. I would have drunk my own urine by that second night. I almost certainly did.
I cannot forget the sound. It started that first night and had not died away completely by the time I crawled out of that hell on the evening of the 12th.
The sound was constant, yet it rose and fell almost like the precisely composed vagaries of a wind-tossed surf or the rustling of a million leaves on an autumn evening in Kent. Only there was nothing lulling or meditative about this sound: it was the noise of a thousand teeth scraping on a hundred slabs of slate; it was the noise of broken fingernails scrabbling; it was the hiss and gurgle and blood-rasp gaspings of gas victims fighting vainly for another mucous-filled breath.
It was the sound of the hundreds of our wounded lads in No Man’s Land.
I confess that I added to that chorus. My own moans and inarticulate cries seemed to come from somewhere outside of me and at times I listened to them joining the common call of pain with a feeling more of embarrassment than horror.
Occasionally, above the dull explosions and rumble of guns and hammer of machine guns, there would be audible the flintlike clarity of a single rifle shot. And then one voice in the chorus of pain would be silenced. But the rest of us sang on.
All that second day—Tuesday the 11th—I lay between the shards of wire and bone. At one point I managed to drag myself up and sideways so that my nerveless legs were out of the water; I told myself that I was afraid they would rot, but my real fear was that something would grab me from beneath the surface of green scum. The dead soldier continued to stare at me, with only the dark pits and egg-whites of his eyes visible above the waterline and beneath the helmet shadow. Those eyes receded visibly as I watched, sinking into the skull as if retreating from the sight of me. The night before, even in the unsteady light of flares and explosions, the dark of his irises and pupils had been visible, but this second day the eyes were white with the bubbled mass of fly eggs.
The bluebottle flies were so thick that sometimes I thought they were a cloud of Valkyries that had descended on us. But they were only flies. Their buzzing reminded me of the bullets; the buzzing of bullets above me reminded me of the flies. I gave up trying to brush the flies from my face and stirred only when they crawled from my lips into my open mouth.
The steady background of moaning had slackened toward dusk that second evening, but when it grew dark the volume rose again, as if the dead had joined the dying in our song. I tried pulling myself up when it was truly dark, my hands grabbing stones, my elbows digging into mud, but as soon as my head came above the lip of the shell hole, machine guns opened up. As many tracer rounds came from the British line as from the German. Our lads were obviously nervous and frightened of a counterattack.
One of these bullets took a warning nick out of my left ear. Another cut through the tattered cloth of my blouse between my left ribs and inner arm. I gave up the thought of crawling two hundred yards through this and slid back into my brackish tomb. The soldier seemed to welcome me back with a white wink. Rats were tugging at the bottom half of the torso in the dark so that the legs seemed to be attempting a feeble dance.
My hands had gained enough feeling so that I pitched stones at the vermin. They ignored me. I preferred that to being the focus of their attention.
I dozed in a half-conscious state where the growling of the big guns wove the texture of my dreams. Suddenly, sometime before dawn, I awoke. The Lady had come.
It seems insane now to admit that I felt little surprise. There had been talk of nurses coming as far as the Front lines, but this was only barracks’ fantasy. At any rate, I knew this was no nurse. She did not stumble and slide down the steep crater wall; one minute she was simply there. I awoke to the touch of her hand on my cheek.
To describe her, even now after several of her visits, seems somehow sacrilegious. But perhaps if I do so with even a small fraction of the reverence I feel toward her, it will not harm the chances of her future coming.
She is fair. Not merely English fair as in an absence of sun, but fair with the radiance of a fine piece of white Carrara marble. There is a light about her features, which are classical but not refined to the point of what we now think of as ideal feminine beauty. Her nose is long and straight, her chin strong, her eyes set wide apart and quite dark. Her hair is not done in the current style; when I was in Paris and London last, the ladies were wearing their hair cut shorter, dressed low on the forehead and pulled back, covering only part of their ears and often ending in a coil or bun in the back. The Lady’s hair is clasped somehow with combs on the side, but it still hangs loose, rather like that of a lady of my mother’s generation when preparing for bed.
When she touched my cheek, I tried to speak, to warn her of the terrible danger out here in No Man’s Land, but the Lady only touched my cracked lips with a finger and shook her head as if to silence me.
I noticed dully that she was wearing a gown quite unsuitable for a nurse or our environment; she wore a material which looked soft and silky such as crêpe de Chine set in a style somewhere between a chemise and nightdress. But this was no undergarment or night-dress. The Lady’s outfit was perfectly suited to her strong face and full figure. I felt as if Penelope had come for me to take me home from my wanderings.
I closed my eyes then, and in my half-dream I was still with her. We were no longer on the battlefield, but on the terrace of a fine home in the moonlight. The trees and summer night scent were familiar; I thought it might be Kent. The Lady was waiting for me at a wrought-iron table under an arbor. I approached and took my seat across from her, noticing that she was no longer wearing the soft gown but a more normal outfit, two pieces of peach-colored cotton, a basqued jacket shirred at the waist, broad sleeves ending in flounced cuffs, and an ankle-length skirt. Her auburn hair—I could see the color clearly now in the moonlight—was tied up in a more conventional manner and partially covered by a straw hat with a furred plume and a softly curving brim.
There was a tea set on a silver tray between us. When she tried to pour my tea, I reached to touch her. She pulled away, but was smiling.
“This is an hallucination,” I said.
“Do you really think so?” she said softly. Her voice excited me as much as did her eyes.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m dying in some…” I paused before saying “bloody shell hole.” I may have been hallucinating upon the point of death, but that was no reason to lose my manners in front of a lady. “…in some banal shell hole in France,” I continued. “And all this…” I waved toward the arbor, the gardens from which the July scent of hibiscus wafted, and the estate dimly visible in the moonlight. “All this is the delusion of my dying brain.”
“Do you really think so?” she said again. And took my hand in hers. Her fingers were ungloved.
The word “galvanized” is too inactive to describe my reaction at her touch. It is as if I had never contacted a woman’s skin until that instant. It is as if I was a stammering boy again rather than the seasoned ladies’ man I had allowed myself to become since my days at Clare College, Cambridge.
I tried to speak then, to say that I was certain that none of this was real, but clouds moved from in front of the moon and touched the soft curve of flesh visible above her décolletage, and the words stayed stuck in my throat.
“I think this is quite real,” she whispered. Her fingertip traced an oval on my upturned palm, “but you will have to return to your friends before we can meet again.”
“Friends?” I whispered, embarrassed that my lips were so dried and cracked. At that moment I could remember neither the names nor faces of any friends. All my comrades in the war were dust. Less than dust. Only the Lady held the firmness of my attention.
She smiled at me. It was not the simpering smile of so many of the London ladies I had known, nor the coquettish smile of so many of the French lasses, and certainly not the cruel smile of certain widows and well-off wives I had included in my acquaintance. It was a pleasant enough smile, but weighted with irony and some challenge.
“Do you wish to see me again?” she asked. The moonlight made her lashes gleam.
“Oh, yes,” I said, not thinking how naïve it sounded. And not caring.
She patted my hand a final time. “We will talk again when you have returned to where you must go.”
“Where must I go?” I asked. My legs were in the brackish sludge again. My hands were twitching in nervous spasms. My father’s watch, its chain wrapped around my blackened wrist, gleamed in the moonlight.
“Back,” she whispered. She was wearing the chemise-robe now. I worried about it. There were so many pleats. Lice bred on us everywhere here at the Front, especially along the seams of our uniforms and in the pleats of the Scots’ kilts. My uniform was new—had been new—purchased at a special officers’ store in Amiens only weeks before, but already I was lousy.
No, the thought of the Lady with lice was absurd. I realized that she was touching me. Her fingers were on my bare leg, rising up my bare thigh. The soldier in the water watched with his white eyes stirring in the moonlight.
“Go back,” she whispered, leaning closer. Her scent was violets and a hint of jasmine. Her fingernails raked the inside of my thigh gently, more as if in testing than in teasing. “Then we will meet again.”
I started to speak then, but the Lady glanced to her left as if she had been called and then rose above the edge of the crater somehow more gently than if merely walking. Then I was alone again with the staring face, the lower torso, the tugging rats, and the cloud of flies.
I crawled out of the shell hole just before dawn, was fired at as soon as the sun came up, lay doggo another long July day, and began pulling myself toward British lines as it grew dusky on Wednesday the 12th. It was almost dawn again before someone challenged me. I heard the bolt of the rifle slamming home.