To End All Wars

by David Tallerman

  “None that I’m aware of,” he said.

  The doctor trained the light on first one ear and then the other and gave the faintest nod. He slipped the torch back into his jacket pocket. Moving to the cart, he returned with a bulky piece of equipment in a metal box. “Hold out your arm.” He fitted a canvas strap around Forrester’s forearm, pumped it with a rubber bulb, and consulted the thermometer-like scale it was attached to. “And yourself? Any childhood illnesses? Protracted spells in hospital?”

  “Nothing unusual. Colds, a couple of bad cases of flu. A nasty dose of the mumps when I was eight. I broke an arm falling out of a tree a couple of years later, but the bone healed well, and I was never in hospital.” He tried to remember where the nearest hospital had even been. Any treatment that proved beyond his mother and nurse had fallen to the village physician, a kindly, myopic man who’d long since passed away.

  “Yes. Good.” The doctor removed the strap and packed the equipment into its box, which he replaced on the cart. He took Forrester’s pulse at the wrist, and then held out two fingers and said, “Grip these, please, with your right hand. As hard as you can. And with the left. Yes, that’s it. All right, you can button your shirt.”

  The doctor turned away from Forrester as though he’d never existed. Nor did he say anything to Campion or the second soldier. He paced to his desk in the corner, opened a cardboard folder, and began to make notes.

  The second soldier pushed the wheelchair to the gurney and Forrester lowered himself into it. Then he was trundled out, with Campion in tow. Not once did the doctor look round.

  They took him farther along the passage, in the same direction as before. From his recollection of the outside, Forrester guessed they must have traversed almost the whole of the roof. Campion stopped at another undistinguished door and pulled it open. He stepped in and the second soldier followed, propelling Forrester ahead of him. When Campion clicked a switch just inside the door, an electric bulb flickered to life.

  The room it lit was smaller even than the other, with a single window tiny and high up in the rear wall. The floor and walls to waist height were covered by white tiles faintly yellowed with age. Forrester didn’t know what the room had been, but there were indications that it had recently been converted; lengths of board upon the floor perhaps concealed fresh damage. At any rate, he was certain its present furnishing was a late addition, for the one item in there was a hefty wooden chair, bolted down via crude brackets.

  The sight of that chair sent a shudder through him. There were leather straps about the arms and legs, and one near the summit of the high back. The rightmost foreleg rested in a square wooden basin, and a channel of metal half-piping led from that to a hole excavated in one wall. It all had the look of hasty workmanship; he could discern ragged saw marks in the wood and clumsy soldering where the pipes had been joined.

  “What is this?” Forrester murmured.

  Campion regarded him with obvious irritation. “A treatment. At the director’s orders.”

  “What sort of a treatment?” The words were difficult to produce. Forrester appreciated on some level that he should be afraid, far more afraid than he was.

  “Please don’t be troublesome, sir,” Campion said.

  “I’ve a right to know— “

  “You haven’t. No rights at all. That’s what the director says. Now, will you move yourself, or do we have to carry you?”

  The sneer on Campion’s face announced that he’d be happy to force Forrester, whether he needed to or not. Yet something held him back. Orders from Forbes, maybe? Only, his reticence seemed more elementary than that. And whatever intangible influence constrained Campion was exerting itself on Forrester also. Putting up a resistance was nigh inconceivable, and compliance was easy. Though Forbes’s warning regarding the director was at the front of his thoughts, even that wasn’t enough to furnish him with a proper defence. Forrester stood unsteadily and transferred himself to the wooden chair.

  Immediately, the second soldier knelt and fastened the straps around Forrester’s ankles. He didn’t draw them tightly; nevertheless, the bands were thick, and there’d be no dislodging them.

  “There’s no need for that,” Forrester said, knowing how hopeless the protest was.

  “Put your arms flat,” Campion insisted.

  “I told you, there’s no—“

  But Campion’s glower silenced him. Forrester lay his forearms level and gripped the chair, and the soldier fastened the wrist straps. Then he turned to the final band, the one that would restrain Forrester’s neck. It was padded and the soldier secured it loosest of all, yet its presence about his throat set Forrester’s nerves on edge. He couldn’t shake the sense that he was unable to breathe freely.

  Retreating to inspect his handiwork, the soldier glanced to Campion for confirmation, and received a nod in return, which ended in a tilt of his head to indicate the wheelchair and door. The soldier grasped the handles of the chair and hauled it outside.

  Campion abided until his companion had left the room. Then he leaned in, close enough for Forrester to catch the sour odour of his breath. “You brought this on yourself, lieutenant,” he said.

  Campion paced out. The door slammed shut.

  Forrester sat perfectly still. If he struggled, he might panic, and panic would serve no purpose. However, when he looked for the dread he should be feeling, he couldn’t find it, and in its place was a kind of muffled, creeping anxiety. He fought the urge to test his strength against the straps. He knew they’d hold, in defiance of anything he could do. He sat still. He waited.

  To keep track of time, Forrester began counting, and recalled the way his nurse had taught him to measure the seconds when he was small. One hippopotamus, two hippopotamus —where had that homely woman, who’d never set foot beyond the next village, ever learned of such a beast? He felt a sharp pang of nostalgia: for his childhood, for his entire past. It wasn’t only gone but erased; the war had burned it and scattered its ashes, and even his memories seemed fragile as scorched paper. Yet he would have paid any price to slip into the safety of his boyhood for a moment, to be somewhere other than here.

  He had counted past fifty and nothing had happened. He had no notion of what to expect. Gas, perhaps? Campion’s closing comment had hinted at some awful outcome. But maybe that was simply another minor torment. The man was a sadist, a bully—and probably a coward, too, when push came to shove. Forrester had seen enough like him in France, petty men made big by a dash of authority. Yes, there’d been one in particular; Forrester strove to recollect his name and couldn’t. Try harder , he admonished himself. Think about anything, damn it. Anything but this damned chair.

  He heard the faintest sound. Before he’d quite registered it consciously, his mind had taken him back: he and Middleton with Liversby and Captain Fitzpatrick, returning from an afternoon in Amiens, and when their lorry had broken down, they’d stopped in a little village estaminet west of Albert. They had shared a bottle of wine, and then Liversby had produced a bottle of good Scotch from his knapsack and asked the owner for glasses. The man had vanished for a minute, and when he’d returned, he had done so with not just the glasses but, miraculously, a cube of ice in each. He had even sat down to join them, and taken his part when Middleton proposed a toast.

  “To victory,” Middleton had said, “and to a lasting peace.”

  Forrester could see his face clearly: the freckles on his tanned cheeks, the slight dimples his smile produced, and the strain in his eyes, a blemish of terrible knowledge that had not been there even two weeks before.

  At that point, Middleton had one more month to live.

  The reverie faded, its vestige the chink of that impossible ice against the frosted glass. And finally, he understood. That detail was no memory. He could hear the same crystalline tinkle, faint but irrefutable. Forrester endeavoured to follow the sound, twisting his neck until he was sure the leather about his throat would garrotte him.

  But by the time
he saw, he didn’t need to, since he could feel as well. Ice ... iced water. It was sluicing through the gap in the wall, down the metal channel, to collect in the wooden basin—to pool around his right foot. The discomfort was negligible but mounting. The urge to tear his foot free was irresistible, and he shook the leg futilely. All he accomplished was to bruise his calf and heel against the wood.

  Forrester exhorted himself to stop, to breathe. Was this really some unorthodox treatment, or was it a punishment, or both? The tiled room was so very cold, and Forrester was dressed in nothing except his night clothes. Already he was shivering fiercely. The cold, he knew, could kill a man as surely as a bullet, as certainly as any noose .

  Could it be that Campion had had enough of him? Was this an execution? Was this a murder?

  Whatever it was, the pain in his foot was worsening. Forrest found it incomprehensible that such a sensation could be the chill alone; he felt as if the skin had been flayed. Then came a fresh agony, one so immense and potent that he couldn’t imagine that a second ago he’d been concerned with the petty irritation of his foot. This was like a catastrophic blow to his head, but within and without at once—and familiarity made the ordeal no more bearable.

  The light had flickered out, leaving him in near-absolute darkness. He hardly noticed. The pain was everything. He had faith that it would pass, in a moment it would pass, but it was so total that he could barely form the thought. While he was enduring, endurance seemed to go on forever.

  Yet it did pass, and in its wake, the throb of his foot seemed almost manageable. No, it wasn’t that. The flesh was beginning to go numb. Where before there had been razor edges working raw muscles, now there was only the persistent pricking of a thousand pins. He was losing all feeling below the ankle.

  That should have been a relief, and it was, but he knew what such insensibility meant. He’d seen frostbite in the trenches, through two brutal winters. He’d seen skin ravaged, flesh permanently deformed—limbs amputated.

  The light blinked crazily and then came back on. A small relief. At least he wouldn’t be crippled in the dark.

  Was that what they wanted? The possibility made a dreadful sort of sense. What better punishment for a man who’d strayed outside the bounds set for him than to ensure he could never do so again? A bullet wound was one thing, but an amputated foot ... for an instant, the awfulness of that prospect engulfed his mind, wrenching him from the infernal calm that held him.

  The flow of the iced water had ceased, he realised. He could no longer hear its glassy clink. It didn’t matter. The room was still freezing. The feeling in his right foot was altogether gone, and the numbness was creeping into his calf.

  He knew what the pain in his head had denoted. No one would be coming to free him. No one would help. They were all of them fast asleep.

  Chapter Eleven

  B y the time they released Forrester, he was somewhere on the border of delirium: not unaware, not understanding either. He had no idea how long had passed. From his perspective, it might have been hours, a day—a lifetime. He’d stopped noticing the cold, which had transformed into nightmarish shapes that flitted round the edges of his consciousness. He had ceased wondering whether they’d free him, or daring to hope that they would.

  Forrester watched as the soldier who’d accompanied Campion released his straps, half expecting the man to dissolve into the air. Their words washed over him, sounds devoid of meaning. His body was a useless weight.

  Only as Campion and the soldier lifted Forrester between them did reality begin to reassert itself. He blinked against the brightness of the light and identified a third man in the doorway: the doctor from earlier. As they lowered Forrester into a wheelchair, the doctor knelt to scrutinise his foot. Forrester could see how his fingers moved across the pallid flesh, yet he felt nothing .

  The doctor stood. “As I predicted,” he said, and he stepped aside.

  Forrester was wheeled the reverse of the way they’d travelled earlier in the night, and eventually to the familiar stretch of passage, where they paused while Campion opened the door to Forrester’s room. Then the soldier pushed him across the threshold.

  Abhaya was waiting inside. Her eyes widened as she saw Forrester.

  “Get those bedclothes drawn back,” Campion demanded.

  Abhaya did so, and Campion and the soldier hoisted Forrester up once more and deposited him on the bed. When Campion noted that he was unable even to lie flat, he helped ease down Forrester’s legs, adjusting them rough-handedly as if he were some dummy in a tailor’s window. The doctor came over and slipped a couple of tablets between Forrester’s lips, following them with water so that he had no choice except to swallow.

  By then, Forrester was shivering badly. The pins and needles were returning to his foot, which might be a good sign. However, close in their wake came a renewal of the pain. Though only his right leg had been in the water, his wounded left had grown nearly as dead from disuse; as life began to return, so both throbbed agonisingly. He wanted to scream at the knowledge that mere hours ago he’d been capable of standing, that perhaps in a few days he might have been walking properly.

  The doctor examined Forrester’s foot, not touching the flesh this time. “Dry it,” he said to Abhaya, “and wrap it in fresh towels. But don’t massage the skin. Be gentle.”

  Abhaya did as instructed. She worked methodically and didn’t once look up at Forrester.

  “All right,” the doctor told her. “You can go.”

  His voice had become a drawl. It irritated Forrester that the doctor should speak to Abhaya so, and he’d have liked to say something in her defence, but his tongue was thick and heavy. He could feel the shivers abating, the prickling too. The discomfort had retreated to a dull twinge. Someone pulled the bedsheets over him, and he realised there were blankets piled on top.

  He was warm. He’d never imagined he would be warm again.

  The doctor leaned in and shone his torch into Forrester’s eyes. When he clicked the light off, his face was a blur without features.

  “He’ll sleep now,” he slurred, and Forrester knew it was true.

  Then finally they left him alone.

  When Forrester woke, the sky was darkening outside his window. It must be late evening; he’d slept through an entire day. He had nebulous memories of the doctor coming in and of his foot being bandaged, but only when he dragged back the bedclothes did he verify their authenticity. His right foot was so padded with gauze that it resembled the cocoon of some giant insect.

  Beneath the bandages, the skin felt raw and blistered. But at least he could feel, that was something. He spent five minutes testing the sensitivity with gentle pressure upon the bandage and moving each toe in turn. There were patches less responsive than others and some that were particularly raw, but to his vast relief, nowhere was absolutely devoid of sensation.

  Just as Forrester finished his inspection, the door opened without warning and Campion came in.

  “The doctor would like to know how it feels,” he said, indicating Forrester’s exposed foot .

  He was tempted to say, As though it had been left for hours in a bowl of freezing water . But to provoke Campion would be to extend his presence. “Sore,” he replied. To his frustration, his voice sounded weak and scratchy.

  “That’s it? Sore?”

  “Yes.”

  “Fine. I’ll pass that on.” Campion reached into a pocket, took out a glass bottle, and, unscrewing the lid, tipped two white pills onto his palm. “He wants you to take these. For the pain.”

  Forrester would have preferred the pain to another bout of involuntary oblivion, but he took the pills from Campion and the water from his bedside and drank them down. “There,” he said.

  “Well done, sir. Need to keep your strength up.” And Campion left, slamming the door behind him.

  Forrester could already feel the pills working. The tenderness in his foot and leg was fading, and so too was his brief consciousness.

&n
bsp; Again, he slept.

  He was back in the trenches.

  He was outside the entrance to his and Middleton’s dugout. On the horizon, ruddy sunlight merged with the shattered earth. Home , he thought, I’ve come home . How had he ever been afraid of these gouged channels? This was scarcely a real place; he could see that now. Beneath the fury of the war, even topography had broken.

  He brushed aside the gas blanket, descended the stairs beyond. There seemed to be more of them than he recalled. Within, the dugout was lit in pallid blues and greens. Middleton sat at the small table. He had a spread of cards before him, and Forrester gathered that he was in the midst of a round of patience.

  When he looked up at Forrester, he smiled. “Hello Raff,” he said.

  “It’s good to see you,” Forrester told him.

  “What, even in this state?” And Middleton ran a finger across the uppermost of the neat scarlet holes strung diagonally across his chest like a dignitary’s sash.

  “Even this way,” Forrester said.

  Middleton nodded, and Forrester sensed that he was pleased with the answer. He watched as Middleton shuffled the cards together, placing them in a neat pile at the centre of the table. “Did you manage to send my letters?” he asked casually.

  “I’ve tried. It’s been difficult.”

  “And that other thing?”

  For a moment, Forrester was puzzled as to what he meant. Then he remembered. “Oh yes,” he said, “I’ll look for it.”

  “You won’t find it here,” Middleton observed. “You’ll need to go deeper.”

  Though Middleton gave no overt signal, Forrester felt his attention being drawn to the rear of the dugout, which stretched on into interminable gloom. Yes, he would need to go deeper.

  When he glanced back, Middleton was gone, and Forrester experienced a pang of sadness. He wondered if they would meet again. And could Middleton really have imagined that Forrester would think less of him for being dead?