by Pat Barker
In bad weather, as now, the rain pelts down on the corrugated-iron roof with the rattle of machine-gun fire. At the moment it’s a real downpour. Waking from their half-sleep, the bundles in the blankets began to stir and cry out in fear. One of the head wounds throws off his blanket, clambers to his feet and, naked, runs between the rows of beds. Two of the orderlies give chase and eventually grab hold of him, one by each arm, and hold him like that, his arms outstretched, a blood-soaked bandage slipping down across one eye. They soothe him, stroke his arms, tell him there’s nothing to be frightened of, it’s the rain, only the rain, no guns here, and perhaps he believes them, but more probably he doesn’t understand a word, only the tone of voice and the touch. But he lets himself be led along, the strength that terror gave him ebbing with every step, until, by the time they reach his bed, he’s walking with the slow, shuffling steps of a very old man.
At last Sister Byrd signals that it’s Paul’s turn for a break. They drink their cocoa in the sterilizing room, all of them, dressers, orderlies, nurses, surgeons, surrounded by hissing and bursts of steam. The cocoa’s hot. It delineates his gullet as it goes down. Only his hands around the mug and the hot fluid in his mouth and stomach are real. The light over the dressing table blurs; he makes an effort to straighten up and focus on his surroundings. Swaying on his feet, and still four more hours to do. Sister Roper’s saying something to him. He has to strain to hear her quiet voice above the roar and hiss of the boiler. Somebody new, a volunteer, arriving on the eight o’clock train. Will he go and meet him? ‘Take him to the huts first – he’ll have luggage with him, I expect.’
‘Which hut?’
‘Yours. It’s the only spare bed.’
Paul wants to point out that the bed in his hut isn’t exactly spare, that the ambulance drivers sometimes use it, but it’s already too late for that. They’re all moving off again, back to the scrubbing room and from there into theatre. He understands, or at least nobody contradicts the idea, that he’s to leave what he’s doing now and go to the station – a ten, fifteen minutes’ walk away – and meet the eight o’clock train. It’s a break, at least. He has no quarrel with that.
Outside, in the darkness of the yard, there’s an ambulance crew, also drinking cocoa, leaning against the canvas side of their vehicle. He passes close by, grunts in acknowledgement of a raised arm, and heads off to the station. It’s muddy underfoot, and cold, but fresh after the hot, steamy air of the sterilizing room. Rain falls on his face. He shivers, and a cold sweat starts up. Within minutes his armpits and groin are drenched, his feet swimming inside his boots. Nothing to do with illness or even change of temperature, this sweat; everything to do with being plunged into the normal world. He stumbles, nearly falls. Every step now brings him further out of the trance. He pauses. Lets his shoulders relax: He’s waking out of his trance into the real time of the outside world.
On his left, there’s a goods train – its doors gaping open – and that shields him from the worst of the wind and rain. He walks along beside it, until, straight ahead, he sees the station and hears a man’s voice making announcements. All the time he’s coming back to himself.
The blue-painted lights of the railway station loom out of the dusk. He remembers the streets of London, walking through them that night with Elinor. All Europe now, he supposes, exists in this indigo twilight. Going into the station, he finds the platform crowded. Men, women, children – all waiting for the train. Eight hours he’s been on duty. Long enough for the sound of a child’s voice to be shocking.
Five to eight. If the train is on time, he won’t have long to wait. He stands near the ticket barrier, stamping his feet to restore the circulation. A little girl stares at him and he smiles at her, but she clasps her mother’s hand tighter and walks on, looking back at him over her shoulder. Perhaps pain, even other people’s pain, becomes a smell you carry round with you?
A rumble in the distance, the light on the line shivers and a single blue eye appears, advancing towards them. Mothers pull their children back from the edge. A belch of smoke and steam and then the engine roars past, snorts, sighs several times, subsides into silence.
All along the train’s length doors open and people spill out. Passengers greet friends, kiss, shake hands, ask and answer questions, pick up bags, begin to drift towards the exist. Soon the platform is almost clear and still no sign of the man he’d come to meet. Then, out of the darkness and the drifting smoke, a figure emerges and strides towards him.
Paul’s first thought was, he won’t last five minutes. He was looking at a gangly boy, all arms and legs. A sprinkle of freckles all over his face gave him a slightly surprised look, like somebody caught in a shower. Close to, there was something about his expression – not just youth and inexperience, something else – that made Paul uneasy. He felt irritated. He’d become rather good at coping with the work, but having a hut to himself had been an important part of that process. Now, he’d have to share it with this freckly-faced schoolboy – deal with his questions, his incomprehension, his shock. Everything that Paul had felt when he first started, and no longer permitted himself to feel.
He held out his hand. ‘Hello, I’m Paul Tarrant. Sister Roper asked me to meet you.’
‘Hello. I’m Richard Lewis.’
A deep baritone – surprising, it didn’t go with his appearance. Lewis was staring at him. Paul looked down at his tunic, which had bits of blood-stained gauze stuck to it. He picked off the bits and let them drop.
‘Good journey?’
‘Not bad.’
Lewis was pink and excited, not at all tired from the journey, swinging a big, heavy bag from hand to hand.
‘I expect you’ll want to get rid of that.’
‘How close are we to the hospital?’
If Paul had been capable of smiling he’d have smiled then.
‘Not far.’
They walked along beside the track, in silence. The path was thronged with weeds. Their boots swished through the long stalks, shaking off raindrops that flashed silver in the moonlight. Even with the moon it was hard to see the way ahead.
‘I hope you’ve brought a torch?’
‘Yes, in here.’ Lewis swung the bag to his other hand. ‘How long have you been here?’
‘A month.’
‘Oh. So you know the ropes, then?’
Paul didn’t bother to reply.
Five minutes later they were approaching a row of huts. He stopped at the third one along. ‘Here we are.’
The door opened straight into the only room. Inside there was a puddle of wet footprints where somebody, one of the ambulance drivers probably, had come in and gone out again. Because he’s showing the hut to Lewis he’s forced to see it again himself. Two iron beds covered in brown blankets, a table with an oil lamp, two chairs. Nothing else, except a candle on the floor between the beds.
The huts had been assembled quickly, not intended to last more than a couple of months. Like everything else around here, they reek of creosote.
Paul groped his way across to the table and lit the lamp. The flame fattened. Walls, chairs, table, beds seemed to take a leap upwards, as if the hut was startled by its own squalor.
Lewis, looking puzzled, stared around him.
‘You’d best take that bed.’
Paul pointed to the bed nearest the door. The draughtiest and least comfortable of the two. Nothing like round-the-clock attendance on wounded and dying men to expunge the last traces of altruism. The bed was tightly made up in the hospital style, the ends of the coarse, brown blanket neatly mitred and tucked in.
Lewis swung his case up on to the bed. ‘It must have been rather nice having it to yourself
‘I don’t mind. It’s not as if I spend a lot of time here anyway. Do you want to have a rest now, before you go over?’
‘No, I’d rather get stuck in.’
‘Right, then. Off we go. Your first sight of the Shambles.’
Lewis looked blank.
‘The hospital.’
‘Oh, I see. Sorry.’
He thought it was a joke. Despite his eagerness to get going, he lingered for a moment by the door, staring from table to chair to bed and back again, willing it all to go away, so he could start again and have the experience he’d been expecting. He looked lost, standing there in his smart uniform.
Again the wave of irritation.
‘You didn’t think of enlisting, then?’
‘I’m a Quaker.’
‘Sorry, I didn’t realize.’
‘Why should you? We don’t wear uniform. What about you?’
‘Tried, wouldn’t have me.’
‘Were you very disappointed?’
‘At the time, yes. Not now. I mean everybody I know who’s enlisted is still in England.’ He turned the lamp out. ‘Strange, isn’t it? The only reason we’ve got this close to the front is because I can’t fight and you won’t.’
That came out hostile, though he hadn’t meant it to.
‘How close are we?’
‘About two miles.’
‘I thought I heard the guns.’
‘Probably. It’s a bit like the trains, after a while you don’t notice them.’ For a moment he was back in bed with Teresa, listening to a goods train rumble past. ‘You can tell if it’s really bad, the lamp jumps up and down.’
‘So it’s quiet now?’
‘So-so.’
‘I volunteered for ambulance driving.’
‘Me too. I think they must be short of ambulances. I don’t really know, nobody tells you anything.’ He moved towards the door. ‘Let’s talk later, shall we? I ought to be getting back.’
‘Wait, I’ll get my torch.’ Lewis was almost stammering in his eagerness. ‘Oh, where’s the … ?’
‘Behind the hut.’
Paul waited again, none too patiently, while Lewis disappeared round the side of the hut, no doubt expecting to find another similar hut containing the bathroom facilities.
A minute or so later he was back, head down, fumbling with buttons.
‘If you get desperate for a bit of civilization, there’s a hotel in town where you can get a bath.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘What don’t you understand?’
‘This.’ He looked around at the gulf of darkness, the dull blue lights of the station quavering as they always did on windy nights. ‘Where’s the hospital?’
‘There isn’t a hospital.’ Paul felt weighed down, resenting the need to explain. ‘Look, there’s a lot of huts built round a covered goods yard. I suppose the wounded were dumped there initially because it was the end of the line. I can’t think of any other reason. When the Red Cross took over there were over a thousand men lying on straw in their own shit. Half a dozen orderlies, no medicine, no bedpans, no anaesthetics. You name it, they hadn’t got it. They weren’t even being fed. They hadn’t had their wounds dressed, some of them, for a fortnight. So however primitive you think this is, remember it’s been a hell of a lot worse.’
Lewis nodded, soaking it in.
‘And you did volunteer.’
His head went up immediately. ‘I’m not complaining.’
They walked on in silence. When they reached the ambulances’ turning circle, Lewis stopped and stared longingly at the three parked vehicles. In the moonlight, the red crosses stood out black against their pale canvas sides. No sign of the drivers, who’d be over in the canteen having coffee, waiting for the next call.
‘Come on,’ Paul said. ‘You can look at them later.’
He pushed hard against the hut door. Warm air tainted with gangrene gushed out to meet them. Behind him, he felt Lewis take an involuntary step back.
‘We’re in a quiet patch,’ Paul said, glancing over his shoulder. ‘You’re lucky.’
Eighteen
Sister Byrd greeted Lewis briskly, then turned to Paul. ‘You’d better take him round with you. Show him the ropes.’ She pointed to a man a little way along the row. ‘Start with him.’
After fetching scissors from the sterilizing room, Paul led Lewis across to the patient. Pulling back the blanket, he saw that the man was naked from the waist down, his groin padded with a heavily stained dressing that was stuck to the skin. He set to work with the scissors, aware of Lewis watching him. Lewis was breathing with his mouth open, his rather full lips cracked and dry. Easing the lower blade under the bandage, Paul snipped close to the skin, trying to disturb the area as little as possible. Inevitably the scissors tugged and every time the man twisted and writhed. Paul stopped for a moment. He noticed Lewis had put one hand on the man’s wrist, a firm, steady pressure.
After a moment he began cutting again. A few minutes later he’d reached the point of pulling the dressing away. This had to be done slowly and carefully. Speed would have been more merciful, but risked doing further damage. He clenched his teeth as if he were in pain, though the pain was not his and never could be. He eased the dressing off. Shrapnel had come through from the back and severed the penis at the base. As they watched, urine welled up from the hole in his groin, hot acid spreading over raw flesh. The man arched his back and groaned again. Morphine. ‘Stay with him,’ he said, standing up and looking around for Sister Byrd. She was quick. She was always quick. Lewis watched her filling the syringe, flicking it, preparing to inject, with as much eagerness as if the pain had been his.
When the patient had settled a little, she said, ‘It’s gone through the intestines. He won’t last.’
‘Will they operate tonight?’ Lewis asked.
Sister Byrd looked at him consideringly. How much use are you going to be? was the question written on her face. ‘There’s not much they can do.’ Beat. ‘Once the morphine takes effect we’ll clean him up and see what Mr Burton says.’ She waited, watching Lewis closely. ‘Would you want to live?’
‘If it was me?’ For a second he stared into the abyss, then shook his head. ‘I don’t know.’
It was what passed for a quiet evening. Three men died but they’d been expected to, and did so quietly and without fuss. Mess tins full of grey stew were carried up and down the rows of stretchers. Lewis fed several patients who couldn’t feed themselves. He kept yawning, more from shock than tiredness, but Sister Byrd chose to regard it as the effect of his long journey.
‘Look, why don’t you go across to the huts and get settled in? We can manage.’
Lewis blinked, from surprise, probably, that this experience had an end. Paul knew the feeling. When you first started a twelve-hour shift could last for ever.
An hour later Paul followed him across to the hut, the weak, sickly circle of torchlight playing across thronging weeds and stacks of abandoned sleepers. There was no light under the door. Cupping his hand round the beam of the torch he opened the door on a smell of damp socks and unwashed blankets. Lewis was awake. He could see the whites of his eyes among the flickering shadows but then with a squeal of springs he turned away.
Paul undressed quickly and got under the blanket before the slight warmth of his clothes could evaporate. He lay with his arms clasped across his chest, fingertips tucked into his armpits, doing everything possible to conserve heat. Sleep would come anyway – he was worn out – but it would last longer and stand a better chance of being dreamless if he could keep warm. He was aware of Lewis, breathing quietly, awake in the darkness. The pressure of that other consciousness was intolerable. Resigned, he turned heavily on to his side and set the candle on the floor between them.
‘How many of them die?’ Lewis asked.
‘Thirty per cent.’
‘Per cent?’
Paul was puzzled, then realized Lewis was questioning his coldblooded way of talking about it. ‘That’s good. When the Red Cross first arrived it was much worse than that. Now seventy per cent survive.’
‘You know the very young one who died?’
Paul frowned into the darkness. No, he couldn’t remember any of the three who’d died. Not their faces.
He could remember their positions in the hut, because he’d taken note of where the spaces were so that he could direct stretcher-bearers to them as quickly as possible, when the next batch came in.
‘Sister Byrd said he had gas gangrene, but I thought the Germans haven’t used gas?’
‘They haven’t. It’s when tiny organisms in the soil get into a wound, they produce gas.’
‘And that’s the smell?’
‘You get used to it.’ Paul was struggling to keep his eyes open. This was no time for a tutorial. ‘Look, there are three ways you can tell if it’s gas gangrene. One, the smell. And then there’s a kind of crackling under the skin. It’s … It’s quite hard to describe, but you’ll know it once you’ve felt it. I’ll show you tomorrow if I get a chance.’
He was turning away as he spoke.
And the third?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘You said three things.’
‘Did I? The third thing is they die.’
Despite his exhaustion, Paul couldn’t sleep. He was too aware of Lewis, now lying on his back in the darkness with his arms folded behind his head, not even trying to sleep. Eventually Paul nodded off, then woke, and spent the next hour wandering along the edge of sleep, afraid of plunging in, in case the freshening-up process that Lewis had started should extend to the deeper layers of his mind and reawaken the nightmares. During his first fortnight on the wards every horror had followed him into sleep. During the day he managed to lower a safety curtain that protected him from the worst of it, but at night it failed him. Then gradually – he didn’t know how because no conscious effort would have done it – he’d somehow extended that protection into his sleep. Now he was afraid that wounds and mutilations would start pursuing him again.
After a while he started to drift off again, but time and time, found himself pulled back from the brink. Lewis was asleep now, but the quiet breathing from the next bed drove Paul into a kind of rage. Only now, when he’d lost it, did he begin to realize how much he’d valued the peace and solitude of this hut where, in his off-duty hours, he could read or write letters or draw. Whether he could do any of these things with Lewis around, he rather doubted. He’d never willingly shared a bedroom with anybody, except a lover. There was something about physical intimacy without passion that he found distasteful. Of course, this was a trivial matter in comparison with the great events of the war, but he’d already learned that the war was a compendium of trivial matters, and anyway, this wasn’t trivial to him. He needed space and solitude to go on working. Perhaps it would be possible to rent a room in town? He was always on call, but it might still be worthwhile to get a room and go there on his days off. Just to have somewhere he could draw and think. A cupboard would do.