Wells rested his head against the rattling windowpane, watching as the fields and forests rolled by. French farm women, in loose black skirts, lifted a hand; their children sometimes ran alongside the train, waving wildly. At dusk, the train stopped at an overwhelmed country junction, and everyone was ordered off for a night in the rest area—where thousands of belled tents, like the Indian teepees he’d once seen in the American West, were set up in orderly and endless rows, and a YMCA hut did a brisk business in hot tea and tobacco—before another early departure, on yet another train, the next day. Wells guessed that the soldiers, too, were confused by that same combination of expectation, even exhilaration, and mounting dread that was afflicting him. One minute you could not wait to arrive, finally, at the Front, the next you were relieved to hear, via the grapevine that functioned as well as any telegraph through the train cars, that the battlefield was still hours away.
The first signs that they were approaching their terminus were the occasional abandoned farmhouse, with a neglected yard and caved-in roof, or splintered barn with animals wandering loose. A dead horse lay in a ditch, its body bloated. A row of poplars, every other one of them felled, ran along one side of the tracks. There were no children waving, or hay wagons lumbering down the country roads. And if you listened carefully, above the rumble of the train, the shriek of its whistle, there was a low and steady thunder in the distance. A thunder that grew louder as the train progressed into Belgium. Even the officers in the car quieted down, puffing on their pipes, or hurriedly scrawling some last few words in a letter to their wife or the girl back home.
Wells made a few notes of his own, and when the train began to slow, he looked ahead and saw what looked at first, in the fading afternoon light, like a quaint country village. It was only when they got closer to the covered station that he could see the town was a ruin—all the chimneys down, the windows broken, the rooflines sagging or missing altogether. Arc lamps, casting a paler and weaker glow than the ones at Southampton, were already on above the platform, and when the train ground to a stop, there was a momentary jolt when everything seemed to stop—all motion, all noise—before being suddenly engulfed, as if by a tidal wave, in a flurry of barking orders and escaping steam, doors being thrown open, kit bags hauled from overhead racks, horses’ hooves clattering down ramps, a blaring loudspeaker spouting unintelligible gibberish.
Wells felt his very head might explode, but as he stepped down from the train, the ever-reliable Sergeant Stubb was waiting, luggage all accounted for, and ready to escort him to a waiting car. He was deposited in the back seat between a fat major with a walrus mustache and his rail-thin adjutant; Stubb sat in front beside the driver, and as they pulled away from the station yard, past the troops being mustered into marching order, a British plane—one of the de Havilland biplanes used for scouting—swooped low overhead, tipping its wings in salute to the new arrivals.
“Won’t be long now,” the major said, clapping Wells on the knee, “before we’re back in the thick of it, eh.” He said it as if they were riding to hounds.
“It appears that way.”
The car jounced along what might once have been a main street, pausing only for a mangy dog to drag itself out of the way, before leaving the relative illumination of the town for a gloomy track leading into a dark and stunted wood.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
It had been a struggle to get him up to the attic, but with Dr. Gruber’s help, Jane had managed it.
How she had managed all the rest was a mystery even to her, a day later.
She had driven to the village herself to fetch the doctor, banging on his door to wake the dead. But his puzzlement continued all the way back to her house.
“But what is the problem?” he’d said, his medical bag in his lap, his gray hair a wild entanglement. “Whatever it is, it’s best dealt with here in my surgery.”
“This problem can’t be.”
“You look fine. And although you’re driving a bit recklessly, your motor skills seem unimpeded.”
“It’s not me.”
“But H. G. is away, isn’t he?”
“Yes. He’s over there,” she said, using the common shorthand. “Reporting.”
“That’s no place to be just now.”
“So I told him,” she said, trying to concentrate on the road. She seldom drove the car—her husband always said she was a menace to local wildlife when she did—and the night only made it worse. The headlights punched two neat holes in the dark, for ten or twelve feet, but that was all.
“Then who? Mrs. Willoughby is no doubt fast asleep in her own home right now. As I was.”
“You’ll see when we get there,” Jane said, afraid to reveal too much too soon. She was asking the doctor to do something that, for all she knew, was unethical, or even illegal. Helping an enemy combatant? She still wondered, for that matter, why she was fetching medical help instead of simply alerting the local constabulary.
When she led him out toward the barn, the doctor said, “Why didn’t you call on the veterinarian? I’m not equipped to—”
But Jane held a finger to her lips, opened the doors, and directing the beam from her electric torch, saw only a patch of disturbed earth where the boy had lain.
Dr. Gruber looked at her as if he were now wondering about her own sanity.
“He was right here.”
“Who?”
A track in the dirt led off toward the cow stall. Jane followed it, and at the back, huddled under her warm overcoat, was a shivering figure, eyes closed, and a gnawed bone (was it from last night’s pork chops?) lying by his side.
“Who is he?” Dr. Gruber said softly, before fully taking in the leather trousers, the unlaced boot, the scruffy blond beard. “Is he . . . from the zeppelin?”
Jane nodded.
The doctor knelt down by the boy and put a hand on his shoulder to rouse him. Even with only the smattering of German that Jane had—her children had had a German music teacher and tutor for years—she could tell that he had introduced himself as a physician, and told the boy he had nothing to fear. How strange that she had, until now, not even thought about the fact that the doctor’s surname was German and that he might speak the language . . . and this in a time when all things German were banned and even dachshunds were being stoned on the street. War threw all common sense out the window.
The boy, hearing his language, turned his head and muttered something. Perhaps he thought he was home again. He clutched the doctor’s hand, and when he was asked if he could stand up, tried to do so, pushing himself up against the back wall; the overcoat fell away, revealing the rest of his air uniform, and now, for the first time, he seemed to take in Jane, and in so doing remembered his precarious situation. But instead of threatening her again, he mumbled what sounded for all the world like an apology.
Jane said that it was all right, and with the boy suspended between them, she and the doctor helped him out of the stall. His left leg was dragging, and appeared to have been broken. Maybe it was his ankle, explaining the unlaced boot.
By the time they got to the back door of the house, he had fainted away altogether, and they had to carry him inside. Knowing that Mrs. Willoughby would be coming back again the next morning, Jane took the precaution of having the boy taken all the way up to the attic, where there was a small, unused servant’s room under the eaves. She pulled back the coverlet, letting loose a cloud of dust, and they laid him gently on the bed.
“I’ll need some water, hot as you can get it,” the doctor said, “some clean towels, and perhaps a spot of brandy would not be amiss.”
Waiting by the stove for the water to boil, she thought, What have I done? What am I doing? She knew only that she had responded in the way most natural to who she was. She saw suffering, and tried to ameliorate it. When she went back up the stairs with the provisions, the boy’s clothes were thrown on the floor, and he was undressed but for a pair of ragged undershorts. His chest and arms were scrawny, his ri
bs showing, and the doctor was tending to an ankle, raised on a pillow, that was as purple and swollen as an eggplant.
Together, Jane and the doctor sponged the dirt and grime off his body—he reeked of sweat, dried blood, and engine oil—and in the process he gradually came back to consciousness. When Dr. Gruber asked his name, he said, “Kurt . . . Kederer.”
“Where are you from?” the doctor asked in German, and Jane heard Stuttgart.
“Ah,” Gruber said, nodding as he continued to examine the boy’s wounds. “Where the zeppelins are made.”
At the sound of the word “zeppelins,” the boy’s eyes shifted nervously to Jane, holding a stack of towels at the foot of the bed. She knew what he was thinking, but her own thoughts were more of a muddle than anyone could ever imagine. This was an enemy soldier, one of the army that might even now be shooting at H. G. This was someone sworn to the defeat of England and working to achieve that aim by dropping bombs on innocent civilians. A baby-killer, as Slattery, the livery driver, had put it before plunging the pitchfork into the rear gunner. So how could she be attending to him now, how could she be seeing not a fierce and fire-breathing Hun, but a broken boy just a few years older than her own, a boy whose beard hadn’t even fully grown in yet? There was a dissonance in her head, as if she were hearing two voices yammering at her at the same time.
“Let’s try that brandy now,” Gruber said, and it was Jane who held the glass to Kurt’s parched and blackened lips. He sipped it gingerly, eyes downcast as if in shame, and muttered, “Vielen Dank” in a hoarse voice.
“Willkommen,” she replied, and at this, his eyes—blue as a summer sky—lifted.
Dr. Gruber pressed the bone just above the ankle, and the boy yelped, a drop of brandy dribbling down his chin.
“If we don’t set this, and soon,” he said, “the bone will knit improperly and he’ll never be able to walk without a terrible limp.”
“What do we need?”
“My surgery. To do it right, we’ll need to do it there.”
Jane’s mind reeled at the thought. Finding an opportunity the next day to get the boy down from the attic, and unbeknownst to Mrs. Willoughby, who knew the workings of the house even better than Jane did, would be hard enough; but transporting him into town, unobserved, would be a challenge of an altogether higher order.
Dr. Gruber stroked his gray beard, and gave her a long and level glance. “Right now we could turn him over to the authorities and wash our hands of the whole matter.”
“Probably get a commendation for it,” Jane said, wryly. “But what would happen to him?”
“He’d be just another prisoner of war—eventually, they might even get ’round to operating on that leg—unless . . .”
“Unless what?”
“Unless, because of the unusual circumstances, he was charged with espionage.”
“Espionage?”
“He didn’t surrender himself. He’s been hiding in the English countryside since the crash, and he could be accused of everything from acting as a clandestine radio operator to an industrial saboteur.”
“Saboteur? He’s been starving in the barn.”
“I know,” Gruber said, nodding, “but military tribunals are not overly concerned with the finer points. Especially when the man in the dock is a zeppelin bomber.”
Oh, how she wished, at times like these, for H. G.’s wisdom and sage advice. What would he do? Would his natural sympathies and keen curiosity be aroused, or would he cut to the quick and be done with it? Something told her that in this case, it would be the latter—his native patriotism would trump all other concerns.
Kurt, who had to know that the debate was about him, looked beseechingly at the doctor—the German doctor—and speaking in a rush that Jane’s acquaintance with the language was too rudimentary to follow, tried to make his case. But for what? Further concealment? Escape? Medical help? In his eyes, she could see naked fear, his hand clutching the doctor’s like a lifeline.
Gruber tried to calm him, even digging into his black bag to give him two sedative tablets, which were washed down with a swish of the brandy.
Turning to Jane, the doctor said, “Are you all right with his sleeping up here tonight? He should be unconscious shortly.”
Was she?
“Can you lock this room?”
“Yes,” she said, “and the door to the attic stairs.”
“And your own room, I presume?”
“Of course.”
“Then maybe we should let it lie until tomorrow. We both have a great deal of thinking to do.”
“Yes, I should say we do. I’m sorry to have brought you into any of this, Dr. Gruber.”
He shrugged. “The war spares no one,” he said, snapping his medical bag closed. “Two weeks ago, my nephew was killed in action.”
“Oh, I am so sorry. I heard nothing of that.”
“You wouldn’t have. He was fighting for the other side.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“Best get used to keeping your head down, sir,” Sergeant Stubb reminded him, going so far as to press a hand down atop Wells’s newly acquired and uncomfortable helmet as they entered the trenches. “The snipers never let up.”
If Wells had imagined a system of deep, straight furrows in the ground, well enforced and plainly laid out, he was immediately disabused of that notion. Though Stubb seemed to know his way about, to Wells it was a veritable maze, with what amounted to three tiers of trenches, eight or ten feet deep, with duckboards underfoot and parapets piled high with sagging sandbags. All the way at the rear, backed by the artillery, were the reserve trenches, then came the support trenches, and finally, there was the front-line barricade; all three were interconnected by communications avenues cut at roughly right angles. The trenches themselves zigzagged every fifty yards or so, designed that way, Wells surmised, so that if an enemy shell landed in one, the explosion and its accompanying shrapnel would be relatively contained; only the dozens of soldiers unlucky enough to be in that particular quarter would be exposed to the full force of the blast. Here and there, short side extensions were cut into the perpetually soggy earth for the English army’s own snipers or, more prosaically, for latrines; whenever Wells passed one of the latter, the stench of human ordure and buckets of lime, thrown in to aid in decomposition and hygiene, was so overpowering that he was tempted to pull on his hooded gas mask.
For the moment, all was quiet, and as he passed the mud-covered soldiers sitting on crates, cleaning their Lee Enfield rifles or trying to catch a few minutes of much-needed rest, he knew that he—an older gent, in a spotless uniform, being individually escorted through the labyrinth—was a subject of much speculation. Wells offered encouraging nods and smiles in return for their frank curiosity, while in his heart grew a mounting sympathy for these men who had to survive under such appalling conditions. They huddled in funk holes—tiny caves cut into the trench walls—or under wet macks, or around camp stoves where they might fill a dented cup with tepid tea. Beneath the uneven duckboards, the soil was slick and vile, except where it was altogether invisible under sloshing, stagnant water. And even now, in the full if pallid light of day, an army of black and brown rats went about their business with impunity, scuttling underfoot, burrowing into the sandbags, squeaking with indignation at the occasional well-aimed kick.
“Now we’re getting into the posh part of town,” Stubb said, gesturing at a metal sign hanging from an upright shovel that said, “Kensington High St.” It wasn’t the first such sign Wells had seen along the way—there had been others, for “Hyde Park Gate” and “Portobello Road” and “Charing Cross,” similarly and haphazardly mounted at various junctures, in part for wry amusement and in part as helpful reminders as to where you might be. Midway down the trench, he saw an incongruous wooden door, with a carved lion-head knocker and a polished brass handle, imperfectly set into a wall of corrugated panels and old oaken boards. “The officers’ dugout,” Stubb explained. The placard on this door rea
d, “The Reform,” the venerable London club where Wells, coincidentally enough, had dined often with Winston Churchill. A good omen. “This is where you’ll be billeted.”
Banging the knocker, Stubb pushed the door open with his shoulder, then stood to one side to let Wells enter first. After several seconds to let his eyes adjust to the scene, he saw a cramped warren of dimly lit rooms—if they could be so dignified—with low ceilings reinforced by rusted girders, and a few sticks of furniture cluttered with candles and lanterns, plates and bottles, books and maps.
A tall, rangy man peering into a microscope, of all things, looked up, hooked his spectacles over his ears, and said, “Hullo, you must be our honored guest.” Rising and coming forward with his hand extended, he said, “Captain Lillyfield—Gerald—Sixth Battalion, Northumberland Fusiliers. At your service.”
“Wells. H. G. War Office propagandist.”
“It’s only because we were alerted to your arrival a day or two ago that we were able to make the place look so inviting,” he said, waving his arm to take in the dim and forbidding cavern. “You can’t imagine what it looked like before.”
Wells laughed, as another man emerged from what must have been the galley, wiping his hands on a filthy apron, and introduced himself as Corporal Norridge, or “Forage, as they like to tell me after each meal.”
“Lord knows where he finds all the provisions,” Lillyfield said. “He can do wonders with field rations and the occasional fowl freed from a local farmhouse.”
“Where do you want me to drop this?” Stubb interjected, indicating Wells’s suitcase and gear.
“Oh, right back there.” Lillyfield pointed to a canvas cloth hanging open in front of a dark alcove carved from the earth itself. Though he’d expected no more, Wells’s heart sank nonetheless at the sight of the gloomy cubbyhole where he would be residing.
“In fact,” the captain said to Stubb, “you are welcome to the other bunk, too.”
“Not be putting anyone out, would I?”
The Haunting of H. G. Wells Page 8