Jane nodded politely, flushed and uncertain of what to say, but before Maude withdrew, she felt Kurt stir on the table. She had taken her eye off the ball. She reached for the ether bottle, but Kurt’s eyes had flickered open for an instant. Under his breath, he was still counting. “Nein,” he said, then more loudly, “nein.”
“What did he say?” Maude asked.
“Nine,” her husband replied. “He went under at eight. Now, please, Maude.”
Reluctantly, she closed the door, and the doctor mumbled to Jane, “Not another drop of that.”
She put the ether away.
“In about ten minutes, he’ll be fully conscious. We will hustle him out to your car, and if my wife interferes in any way, I am going to tell her he is a nephew of yours, who had a motoring accident.”
Jane nodded. Why, she thought, had she ever entered into this subterfuge? And now, inevitably, she had implicated the doctor.
She could hear the sound of footsteps upstairs—the master bedroom must be above the surgery—and when the coast seemed clear, and Kurt was ambulatory again, she and the doctor were able to deposit him in the back seat of her car.
“I’m so sorry to have dragged you into this,” Jane said.
“Just go,” Grover said, pressing a bottle of analgesics into her hand. “Keep his leg slightly elevated, and give him two of those every few hours.”
As Jane got behind the steering wheel, she happened to glance up at the window, where she saw Maude Grover standing in full view, between the parted curtains. No wonder she had been appointed the local watch commander. Jane drove back onto the road, wondering all the while if the groggy boy in the back seat might not prove to be her undoing.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“The barrage goes off at five fifteen sharp,” Captain Lillyfield said in a low voice, so as not to disturb the sleeping Corporal Norridge or Sergeant Stubb.
“So early?” Wells said.
“Got to catch Fritz unawares,” Lillyfield said, attempting to pour a bit more of the cognac into Wells’s glass.
Wells put a hand over its rim. “I’ve had plenty, thanks.”
“We pound their positions until seven, then go over the top to mop up whatever’s left standing.”
He made it sound as easy as a row on the Cam. But from what Wells knew of the stalemate on the Western Front, things never went as smoothly as planned.
Holding his pocket watch close to the flickering candle flame, Lillyfield said, “Almost midnight. Perhaps we should turn in.”
“Yes, but not before you tell me more about these so-called ghouls.”
Lillyfield had been scrupulously ducking the subject, over and over, and even now heaved a sigh of resignation.
“Who exactly are they?” Wells persisted.
“This goes no further?”
“I can’t promise that, until I know what you’re about to tell me.”
“Who are they? They’re deserters. Cowards. Of all stripes—French, Germans, Canadians, Belgians, even some of our own. They live with the rats and the other vermin in all the underground tunnels and abandoned trenches under no man’s land. Like the dead men they are, they only come out of their graves at night.”
“To what purpose?”
“To scavenge the bodies of the brave men who died that day. Ration tins, tobacco, canteens—whatever they can get their filthy claws on.” He threw down the last of the brandy in his own glass. “Some even say,” he added, “that they’re cannibals.”
“Cannibals?” Wells said, his own credulity being stretched to the limits.
Lillyfield shrugged. “I’d put nothing past them.”
“How long has this been going on?”
“Months now. But don’t even consider writing anything about this. The War Office wouldn’t want any word of it to become public knowledge. It’s all too ghastly, and the fact that any of our own boys might be among these scoundrels . . .”
For Wells, it was as if someone had confirmed the existence of the Morlocks, the savage creatures from his grim vision of the future of mankind in The Time Machine. A race of man-eating monsters, living in darkness, and skulking beneath the blood-soaked battlefields to prey upon the dying and the dead. It beggared even his imagination.
When he did say good night and slip into his cold, damp bunk, he felt as if he were entering their world, and his sleep was accordingly fitful. His dreams were so troubling—skeletal fingers reaching up from the earth, hollow-eyed soldiers mumbling incomprehensibly, hordes of white rats swarming up from a sewer grate—that he didn’t regret being shaken awake in what seemed like only a short time later. He’d thought it was a hand disturbing his sleep, but when he opened his bleary eyes, he discovered that it was something far greater. The earth itself was shaking, dirt drifting down from between the beams, everything from the plates in the galley to the pallet he was lying on palpitating.
And the noise—the noise was overwhelming.
The scream of missiles—of all calibers, all sorts—blasting the air above. Heavy artillery, howitzers, mortars. All unleashed on the German lines.
He fished his own watch from the pocket of his greatcoat, in which he’d slept, and saw that the barrage had indeed begun right on time. The shocking roar of the guns had awakened everyone by now, and he could see Lillyfield lighting another lantern as he slumped into a chair at the table and turned a map to see it right-side up. Norridge emerged from the galley, with a pot of tea in one hand and a jiggling cup and saucer in the other, setting them down beside the open map. When he glanced Wells’s way and saw that he was awake behind the half-parted curtain—how could he not be?—he said, “Breakfast’s served early today.”
Wells grunted. “Just some hot scones, coddled eggs, and kippers for me,” he said, and Norridge chuckled. “Oh, and clotted cream for my coffee, of course.”
“Coming right up, guv’nor.”
Even Stubb, a veteran of many an artillery barrage, had swung his legs over the side of his bunk and was loudly stretching. The walls around them shook with the angry growl of cannons, the shriek of shells, and in the distance, the muffled roar of bombs hitting the German trenches. How could anyone, or anything, survive such an onslaught? he wondered. He had read about such warfare from the comfort of his own easy chair at the rectory, and even attended dinners where officers, returned from the Front, tried to describe it. But nothing could have prepared him for the sheer insanity of it, the absolute and ceaseless pulverization, the inescapable din, the seismic disruption of everything from the ground beneath his feet—quivering like jelly—to his own senses, unable to process the magnitude of the destruction being wrought all around.
And given what he’d been told over the cognac, the barrage had another hour or more to go. Over one dinner at the Reform, Churchill had shared with him stories of barrages that had lasted for days on end. “When they come back from the Front, there are men with bleeding ears and bulging eyes, their nerves utterly shattered. They jump at the closing of a door—when they can hear at all—and awake every night screaming and wet with sweat. It’s proving difficult to know how to treat them, or if they will ever actually recover at all.”
Wells could understand it now, in a visceral way that he had not been able to do before. But again, was this—a barrage and its brutal aftermath—anything the War Office would want him to be conveying? More and more, he saw his assignment in contradictory terms. As a patriotic correspondent, he could file stories about the courageous chaps manning the trenches, putting their lives on the line every minute of every day, and put his heart into it, but if he were to tell the whole truth—the albino rat Alphonse and his million fellows, the mud up to your ankles, the ticks and fleas and lice that infested every bed and article of clothing, not to mention the ghastly creatures that wormed their way above ground to batten on the bodies of the slain and the wounded—if he tried to tell all that, Colonel Bryce would recall him to the Ministry of Military Information posthaste. He’d be lucky not to be t
ried for treason.
Sitting on a crate at the table, he borrowed two of the field postcards from Lillyfield.
“You sure you don’t want the green envelopes? Much more room to write.”
“That’s precisely why I wanted these,” Wells said, the table shuddering under his pen. “I just want to dash off a couple of lines, and then go up to see what’s what.”
Lillyfield grunted, cradling his chin in his palm, as he studied a smudged map of the German lines one more time.
The first postcard he quickly addressed to Jane at home, assuring her that he was doing fine and having a grand adventure. The truth could wait until he got home.
The second card required more deliberation. Addressing it to Rebecca West, care of the Freewoman magazine, he took care to say nothing compromising, all the while trying to convey some sense of the longing he felt for her. It surprised even him. He had had a hundred passades, but this young woman, with whom he had shared nothing more so far than a passionate kiss and embrace, haunted his thoughts in a way that he found as exciting as he did alarming.
“Give ’em to Norridge when you’re done,” the captain muttered. “He’ll put ’em in the post.” One of the few things that worked with remarkable efficiency at the Front was the mail—a card could be posted and be back in England in no time, and a reply back in a couple of days. The soldiers relied upon it to keep up their morale.
Wells finished up, gulped down a cup of hot tea, then went into the galley to give the cards to Norridge. The man was hunched over a camp stove, his pasty face gleaming with sweat, his hands flying about as he reached for ingredients and pots and pans. How old could he be? Wells wondered. No more than thirty, surely, but in the ruddy glow of the cramped kitchen, he looked like a wizened devil.
“Your breakfast’s coming right up,” he said, without glancing at Wells.
“Take your time. I’m going up top to have a look around first.”
“Won’t be much to see.”
“But what do I do with these?” Wells said, holding out the cards.
“Stick ’em in the post pouch hanging above my bunk.”
On his way to the dugout stairs, Wells buttoned his coat all the way up, and fixed the strap of his helmet under his chin. It didn’t do to think too much about the last man who had worn this helmet.
It was still dark enough out that the sky shimmered from the glare of the explosions. The clouds, hovering over no man’s land, were briefly illuminated in a fuzzy blaze of white or green or crimson. From a perch on the firing step—surely no sniper could be out plying his trade in the midst of this bombardment—he looked across the tortured landscape, more shell holes than level ground, and saw what might have passed for a breathtaking spectacle under other circumstances. The German line was a strange fountain of erupting lights, bursts of color from the different shells exploding atop it, geysers of black dirt shooting up into the air, commingled with wood and metal and, no doubt, the atomized bodies of the defenders. It reminded him of a fireworks display over the Crystal Palace, from when he was a boy.
The sight was so transfixing, the night air so refreshing compared to the stultifying atmosphere in the dugout, that he remained there, lost in thought, until the dawn broke, and he became aware of the soldiers, roused by their officers to take up their positions, beginning to fix their bayonets and ready themselves for battle. A pair of them, one holding a bucket and the other a ladle, went up and down the line, dispensing a spoonful of rum to each soldier in place. Wells passed on his own—better it should go to one of the lads about to go over the top—and was soon joined by Corporal Norridge. For a moment, he didn’t recognize him in the daylight, without his apron on or in the glow from the galley stove.
“There’s toast and jam waiting for you down below, Mr. Wells,” he said, “and a bit of bacon, whenever you want it,” and Wells suddenly felt himself ashamed. Here he was—a middle-aged spectator, a famous author sent to record the derring-do of anonymous men who at any moment might sacrifice themselves for their country—being informed that his breakfast was waiting. How disgraceful. He lost any appetite he might have had.
“Thank you,” he said. “And good luck to you, Mr. Norridge.”
“The name’s Eddie. You can call me that.”
“Eddie. And I’m H. G.”
“If anything happens to me, do be sure to spell my name right.”
Wells did not know what to say. Captain Lillyfield approached, his wire-rim spectacles firmly affixed, his own helmet at a jaunty angle, slapping an encouraging hand on the shoulders of the anxious Tommies, dispensing a bit of advice over the din of the bombardment—“Much as you might want to stop to help a mate, keep on going forward at all costs”—before stopping to talk to Wells.
“Once the barrage ends, in exactly two minutes, the charge will begin. Stay put, and Sergeant Stubb will escort you about a mile down the line.”
“Down the line?”
“Yes. We’ve a surprise for you.”
Wells did not like the sound of that.
“It’s something that you can write about, but only after it’s gone off.”
“Gone off?”
“You’ll see soon enough. Stubb will explain. No time now.”
Scaling ladders were being propped against the trench walls. Wells could feel, and see on their faces, the nervousness of the waiting soldiers. Some prayed, eyes closed, some chewed on tobacco, some even tried to make a joke to amuse anyone close enough to hear them over the roar of the cannons. The tension was electric.
Consulting a stopwatch, Captain Lillyfield shouted, “One minute!” and then, in the batting of an eye, “Thirty seconds!” and then “Zero!” As if at his command, the bombardment eerily stopped, only the echo of the artillery still reverberating in the still morning air. “Over we go!” He sounded a shrill blast on a metal whistle, and there was a mad scramble up the ladders. Wells was nearly bowled over by the boys struggling to get up and over the sandbags, and seconds later by the boys falling back into the trench. He assumed that they had simply lost their footing or been jostled off their feet in the melee.
But then he heard a methodical rat-a-tat, an unceasing enfilade of the English line.
How could this be?
There were screams and cries, and pops in the sandbags as machine gun bullets tore into them like hornets.
How could the German machine gun nests have survived the night? How could anything?
His back against the rear wall of the trench, he saw one man fall with his arms spread wide as wings, and another slide back down into the trench with his rifle still clutched in his hand. Another flew backward, landing flat on top of Wells. The two of them lay in a heap on the duckboards, their limbs entangled, and as Wells struggled to get out from under—could the man be saved?—he turned him over.
The face was at once perfectly recognizable—he’d been talking to him only minutes ago—but in an odd way unfamiliar. Where the right eye had been, there was now only a scorched black hole, as if someone had bored an awl into it. Everything else was unscathed.
Wells shook him, as if that might do any good, saying, “Norridge, Norridge,” before remembering that they were now on a first-name basis. “Eddie,” he said, over and again, to the one vacant and unblinking eye. “Eddie.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
There was a neat splotch of blood on the lapel of his greatcoat, precisely where you might wear a medal. But Wells realized that it must have come from the back of Corporal Norridge’s skull—from the hole where the bullet had exited.
He had held the man’s head there, unwilling to let it simply fall back against the muddy duckboards, or be trampled underfoot by the wave of soldiers who had been moved up from the support trenches to continue the assault on the German lines. Sergeant Stubb had eventually found him there, and bending low to be heard over the cacophony of shelling and gunfire, said, “Got to let go now, sir. Got to let go.” He had pried Wells’s hands away, allowing the corporal’
s head to fall back, its one remaining eye staring up at the smoke-filled sky. “We’ve got to be on our way.”
Wells staggered to his feet again, and Stubb, taking him firmly by the elbow, began to move him down the line, dodging the hundreds of soldiers clambering over the reredos, or back rampart, of the trench, before scaling the ladders to an almost certain doom in no man’s land. They passed signposts for “Oxford Circus” and “Piccadilly” and “the Strand,” while zigging and zagging through the maze, stepping over the bodies that had already fallen back, over the army of rats already swarming on top of them, through ankle-deep puddles stained red with blood and piles of split and sundered sandbags. Eventually, Wells stopped looking at the dead faces—it was too exhausting to register the various expressions of everything from surprise to exhilaration, pain to dismay. Some had been slain in their first burst of exuberance, others in agony and dread. All, no matter how disfigured or seemingly unscathed, lay preternaturally still as everything around them, from the squeaking vermin to their living comrades, swirled and eddied in a maelstrom of confusion and fear.
“Almost there,” Stubb shouted, as they rounded a corner marked “Euston Square Station,” and waved him on.
Where? Wells wondered—even when Stubb stopped at the end of a communications trench, bolstered better than most with brick and metal sheathing. What looked like the entryway to an officers’ dugout was wide open, and to his surprise, he saw a pair of parallel metal tracks, close together, running out from under it, and a battered wheelbarrow propped against the wall. A soldier was, incongruously enough, fiddling with a fire hose and a bellows.
“Welcome to the London Underground,” Stubb said, leaning close to his ear. “In you go!”
Ducking his head, and holding his helmet firmly in place, Wells went inside, and was no more than a few yards into a cavern lit only by hanging lanterns dangling from sagging beams, when the din of battle began to die down. It all became a muffled roar, like the sound of the ocean in a conch shell. The floor of this anteroom was littered with empty sandbags, spades, candle stubs, and socks crusted with mud. “Captain Lillyfield thought the best time for you to see this was while the action was going on up top,” Stubb said, his husky voice taking on a sepulchral tone. “Fritz will have his hands full right now.”
The Haunting of H. G. Wells Page 10