To End All Wars

by David Tallerman

  “I was trying to get help,” Forrester responded, caught between indignation and the penitence Campion’s tone demanded.

  “There’s no call for that,” Campion announced harshly.

  “Perhaps not now, sergeant, but—“

  “This needn’t go any further. But let’s get you inside.”

  I’ve done nothing wrong , Forrester wanted to insist. However, with the immediate crisis apparently over, he had no energy for arguing, even in the face of such blatant insubordination. At any rate, the matter was sure to work itself out; the inexplicable unconsciousness of dozens of men and women could not be brushed under the carpet. In fact, Campion’s belligerence probably contained an element of shock. What must he have thought, to find himself lying on the floor, with more than an hour having passed and his charge vanished?

  Whatever the case, Forrester had expended every ounce of strength he had. His concern for the afflicted sleepers had been taking his mind from the excruciation of his leg, which now was returning unbearably. “I don’t know that I can walk,” he muttered, hating how feeble he sounded.

  Campion gave him a dark look, but said to the nurse, who had at last caught up, “Go back to the house and bring down a chair for the lieutenant here.”

  Once she’d gone, Campion ushered Forrester to the first flight of stairs and helped him lower himself onto the mossy stone. There Forrester waited, the chill creeping through the seat of his trousers, until the nurse returned, propelling a wheelchair before her. Campion lifted him into the seat, assistance Forrester would gladly have refused if he’d been capable.

  Campion pushed him up the slope and the nurse trotted beside them, carrying Forrester’s crutches and looking sheepish. She was younger even than the corporal who’d been guarding the gate and had none of that long-developed steeliness Forrester had noted in nurses at the front.

  As Campion wheeled him toward the leftmost corner of the house, Forrester had ample opportunity to behold the place in its entirety. There were short wings to either side, leaving a rectangle cut off along its rear edge. Over on the far flank, Forrester could see the walls of the kitchen garden he’d arrived through, the gate open as he’d left it. The main building and both wings rose to three storeys, concluding in sharp-angled roofs and crow-stepped gables. He guessed that his own room must be up there somewhere, amid the servant’s quarters.

  If the house was impressive in scale, it was oppressive in character, everything built from dreary grey stone and the lines too unremittingly harsh. There was no delicacy anywhere, no indication that decisions of design had been made with the comfort of the living in mind. Yet maybe, Forrester thought, he was imposing his own mood onto bricks and mortar. Now that the episode was past, he was frustrated at Campion’s behaviour, and only weariness kept him from genuine acrimony.

  They re-entered by a side door, via a recently constructed garage where two lorries in army green were parked together. Campion wheeled him down one nondescript corridor and another, until a second door let them back into the well-to-do portion of the house. From there, a further while passed before Forrester recognised anything. By then he’d recovered a little of his strength, so that, when Campion paused at the base of a stairwell and asked, “Do you think you’re up to walking?” Forrester agreed that he was.

  Still, the stairs were an ordeal, and it was maddening when he had to rely on Campion’s support. At least the sergeant made no pretence of sympathy: his face was like granite, his eyes sullen and inert. Forrester dreaded their arrival at his room, when Campion was bound to speak to him again. He wasn’t prepared to stand another dressing-down from a subordinate officer, yet nor was he certain he had the fortitude to argue as he should.

  However, when the moment came, Campion watched Forrester hobble to his bedside, and then closed and locked the door without a word. Forrester had noticed this time that there was no mechanism on the outside of the door, just a keyhole. Campion must therefore be carrying a copy of the key. Did he do that for every patient? No, Forrester was the only one who needed to be locked away, lest he attempt to flee on his crutches, or perhaps lead more men to their deaths upon a foreign battlefield. Truly, what did they imagine he’d do that was so awful?

  Something inexplicable had happened today. And his imprisonment was inexplicable too, rationally so, anyway. He had resisted admitting that fact. He’d wanted to believe Forbes was telling him the truth. The reason was the war, he realised, with sudden understanding: the war had taken all the fight from him, had taught him it was better to accept a plausible lie than to challenge and so stick one’s head above the parapet.

  There was also something about this place. The stuffiness, the air of authority embedded in the walls like the stain of ancient smoke; it was hard to get worked up here. Any spark of anger was extinguished as soon as it flared. He’d seen the same in Campion and Forbes. Campion, especially, seemed like a man with a nasty temper that under normal circumstances he’d have little inclination to control. If Forrester was really a prisoner and they really were lying to him, why make a show of treating him otherwise? What did they want ?

  Forrester longed to think the whole business through. If he puzzled enough, surely he could tease out some thread that would bring the false picture tumbling apart. Yet he was tired, so damnably tired. This was an old fatigue, he saw, and only partially to do with the exertions of the day, or his injured leg, or the strain of breathing with gas-infected lungs. It had been creeping up on him these last months, out there in France, devouring him by endless pieces. Then that climatic night, the horror and confusion, and finding Middleton as he had...

  Something was wrong in this place. He was being fed lies, or part truths at best. Perhaps he was even in real jeopardy. And when he needed it so badly, his strength was nowhere to be found.

  Chapter Nine

  H e was back in the trenches.

  It was late evening, the point before nightfall. The encroaching twilight had removed some of the harshness from the land, so that the earthen walls were not so frightful, so redolent of the death they narrowly restrained. It’s only a channel in the dirt , he thought. Mud and stone, the rot of pulverised trees and pulverised men. You return to the ground, for out of it you were taken.

  Forrester glanced to see if anyone was about, but the trench was empty in either direction. He had been searching for Middleton. Hadn’t they meant to meet? Then he registered with abrupt clarity that this was a dream, and so he could not meet Middleton here: Middleton was dead, and the dead did not dream. If Forrester was to find him, he would have to seek elsewhere.

  He was outside their dugout, though. Perhaps that was why he’d come. The entrance looked welcoming, more than he remembered it ever doing in reality. There was no gas blanket, merely the beckoning gloom.

  Forrester went down the stairs. Everything was the way he’d last seen it, as if the two of them had just left, as if the space retained the warmth of their habitation. Forrester would have liked to pause, to rest, to sit in the familiar chair at the familiar table. This loam-walled cavern had been his home, and there were so few places he could say that of.

  Yet he knew he wasn’t supposed to tarry. Opposite the entrance and about as wide was a tunnel, tilting into the earth. Crossing to that second opening, Forrester began to descend. He should have been in darkness. However, there was light to see by, a flickering blue-green. But of course, he must be underwater. He could feel its faint warmth, its shivering motion on his skin. Simultaneously, he noticed that the passage was widening. It was, in fact, hardly a passage at all, more of a long cave, and still expanding, so that the walls were nearly invisible, a speckled blackness on the edge of vision.

  Then he became aware of movement: some large being, far larger than himself, and yet he wasn’t alarmed. Instead, the presence filled him with a sense of comfort, and of affinity.

  Only then did he realise that the scudding forms were all around him, moving effortlessly, noiselessly, through the ebon water. F
ish , he thought, they’re like great fish. And here he was, among them, in this boundless cavity beneath the earth.

  Afterwards, the dream was foggy and half recalled. He had been looking for someone. Had he found them? He remembered that he’d found something , and that in the dream it had seemed important. The memory was fading already, dissolving within the weak sunlight that leaked from the window.

  Forrester turned his thoughts to the preceding night. To his dismay, that was barely easier to recollect. Exhaustion had left him feverish and helpless, and the events of yesterday were almost too strange to think about. By the cold light of morning, it was impossible to convince himself he could have imagined what he’d seen, as much so to credit that the phenomenon might have been real.

  It occurred to Forrester then that he’d only managed to get his boots off, and that he’d slept in his damp uniform. Perhaps the chill was what had transformed the ache in his leg into something intolerable. He bent to massage life into the muscles, gritting his teeth against the stab of pins and needles.

  What was he to do? Yet it wasn’t as though he had any say. He remembered forcibly how Campion had locked the door, and that he wouldn’t be going anywhere unless they allowed him to. At any rate, he wasn’t certain he would be able to walk today, even with the crutches. For all his kneading, his leg was stiff as a crowbar. His lungs were worse, too; each breath grated. He was a prisoner and an invalid, exactly as Forbes had insisted.

  All the same, he needn’t lie here in soiled trousers. Forrester struggled to change back into his pyjamas before he settled again. Then he took up the volume of Vasari and did his utmost to find the garrulous Italian interesting.

  He’d been reading for about an hour when Abhaya came with his breakfast. She checked and replaced his bandage, settled the breakfast tray on his lap, and returned for it when he’d finished eating. The encounter had followed precisely the pattern of her other visits, as if their curious meeting the previous day had never occurred. All except one detail: as she’d opened the door, Abhaya had greeted him with a softly spoken, “Good morning.”

  Maybe it was just that Forrester was feeling the lack of company keenly, but the fact that she was ready to speak to him, if only to say two words, seemed momentous. If he had a friend in this place, his stay might become bearable. A single ally would make all the difference.

  He was still thinking upon those lines when there came another knock at the door. This time, to Forrester’s considerable surprise, it was Forbes, and he looked ill at ease to be there, like a messenger sent with bad news.

  “May I come in?” Forbes asked.

  “Please do,” Forrester said. He was in no position to refuse.

  Forbes crossed the threshold and sought distractedly for a chair. Finding none, he came to a halt in the middle of the room and stood ramrod straight, his eyes not quite on Forrester.

  “I suppose you can guess why I’m here,” he said.

  “I have an idea.”

  “I confess that I scarcely know where to begin.”

  “Perhaps,” Forrester said, “with Sergeant Campion’s attitude toward his—“

  “Oh Forrester,” Forbes exploded, “for goodness’ sake! Let us not play games.”

  “I only mean that—“

  “It’s bad enough,” Forbes cut him off, “that you’d set out wandering the grounds alone, but that you should accost the man on guard ... don’t you see how it looks? Can’t you appreciate that you’ve made it hugely difficult for me to protect you?”

  Forrester waited to reply until he was positive he could keep his voice steady. “My actions were in response to a manifest crisis, one I was uniquely positioned to deal with. Believe me, I’d rather that had not been the case.”

  “There was no crisis,” Forbes said.

  Stunned, Forrester repeated, “No crisis?” Was Forbes really to deny it?

  Forbes pinched the bridge of his nose between two fingers and exhaled forcefully. “What I mean is, none that required action on your part. Of course something irregular had happened, and of course we’re investigating what and why, but let me be clear: you are at Sherston primarily as a patient and secondly as an officer facing court-martial. Neither role affords you either the responsibility or the authority to go gallivanting around the grounds.”

  “I thought lives might be in danger,” Forrester protested, and was disheartened by how weak the defence sounded.

  “I do understand that.” For practically the first time since he’d entered the room, Forbes’s demeanour wasn’t antagonistic. “You believed there was an emergency. You imagined you might be the only one able to do something about it. Under other circumstances, your reaction would have been exactly what was expected.”

  Forrester wasn’t willing to be propitiated. “You told me my men died after I left them unconscious. Isn’t that the offence I’m here for? Well then, obviously I had to think that lives might be in danger if I didn’t intervene.”

  “Forrester,” Forbes said, his tone almost soothing, “I won’t argue the rightness of your actions with you because, and do try to absorb this, it simply doesn’t matter. You may have worried that lives were endangered, but they weren’t. And I promise you, while you’re here, there won’t come a time that they are. This is a place of safety, the safest place you could be at present. It is our responsibility to ensure that remains the case. And it’s your responsibility, your sole responsibility, to let us help you as we deem fit.”

  Defiance was hopeless. Arguing with Forbes was like striving to keep one’s feet on shifting sands. “In that case,” Forrester said, “I see that I’ll have to be more mindful of my position.”

  “Yes, perhaps you do,” agreed Forbes. Then his brows furrowed. “Nevertheless, you made a similar pledge less than a day ago, and look what happened after that. The truth is, I’m not certain the issue is in my hands anymore. I spoke to the director this morning and—“

  “The director?” put in Forrester .

  “Of this establishment.”

  “But I thought you were director?”

  “I am chief medical officer,” Forbes said. “I’m purely accountable for medical concerns. Though sometimes I find myself drawn into business that exceeds that purview, as now.”

  “Then the director isn’t a doctor?” Forrester asked, his curiosity stirred.

  Forbes looked exasperated. “Really, must I explain the entire inner workings of Sherston to you? No, the director is not a medical man. Nor is he a tolerant one. Like many, he does not accept the evidence in favour of shell shock. He believes in the use of more—vigorous —treatments than I personally favour. And he has had his eye on you ever since you arrived. I’d convinced him you weren’t well enough to endure a court-martial, but your exploits yesterday may have put paid to that. Even if he’ll listen to me, he may decide to take a more active hand in your recovery.”

  Beneath his aggravation, Forbes was genuinely concerned, Forrester realised. He had been friendly for a while with an MO who’d come over from a spell at Barts during the second year of the war and had heard stories of the more outlandish treatments floating around for shell shock. Some the MO had described with his head bowed, as though ashamed at the depths his profession could sink to, at procedures that blurred the line between cure and punishment beyond easy distinction.

  Yet what was Forrester to do? He’d given his assurance, and many times now, it seemed. Then an idea came to him, and before he could contradict it, he said, “In that case, I absolve you, Major Forbes. I acquit you of any moral culpability in the matter of my treatment.”

  Forbes jerked, as if jolted awake. His eyes widened. “Lieutenant Forrester, you know not what you say.” He mastered himself, with an effort. “Regardless, I shall continue to do my best on your behalf. Only, if it should come to the worst ... please understand that you brought it on yourself.”

  With that portent, Forbes turned away, and he was out of the room, had drawn the door shut and locked it behind
him, all before the significance of his statement had altogether sunk in.

  Despite Forbes’s intimation and the vague anxiety left in its wake, the rest of Forrester’s day passed uneventfully. For once, confinement didn’t bother him. He was glad to have leisure in which to recuperate from yesterday’s exertions, content with his books to make the passage of time tolerable, and grateful when Abhaya brought his meals. At lunch, she offered him a hushed good afternoon and left with a goodbye; after his dinner, she said goodnight. To both, he replied in kind, and it felt to Forrester that they had managed a perfectly decent substitute for conversation.

  Once Abhaya had left with the dinner tray, Forrester limped next-door, filled the bath with hot water until the room was warm with steam, and then stripped and washed, carefully avoiding his bandage. It was the first proper clean he’d had in days, if not weeks, and he could feel the ingrained dirt being scoured from his skin. At the same time, it seemed to him that some of the mental strain he’d been carrying about was starting to dissolve, as though his thoughts had become stiff and unyielding and the water was softening them.

  Even a day of inactivity had done little to penetrate his tiredness. However, as Forrester settled into bed, it occurred to him that perhaps the nature of his fatigue had evolved. What he was experiencing was closer to comfortable languor. He dared imagine that this might be the sensation of injured muscles and scathed organs beginning really to heal, and if that were the case, maybe there was hope for a wounded mind as well.

  The next morning, Forrester felt better. It struck him as the first time since the raid that he could make such a claim with any confidence. There had been dreams in the night, but their only real residue was a mood of complacency. He’d woken with no lingering disquiet, and as a bonus, the pain in his leg was just about tolerable.

  As the light outside rose from a dull post-dawn glimmer to the full flush of morning, Forrester pondered what he should do with his surge of energy; for he must make use of it, otherwise he felt instinctively that he’d lose it. He needed a better notion of what was going on at Sherston, and aggravating Campion with enquiries would do no good, let alone trying to arrange another interview with Forbes. Those doors were closed to him, if they had ever been otherwise.