Twice he almost made it to the top, only to slide back: the rain had loosened the surface of the clay to the consistency of soft butter. The third time he moved left and found a foothold on a tumble of bricks. He reached the broken earth of the lip and looked out. The cries and moans of the wounded went unheeded. The shape of a man trying to pull himself along, crab-like across the ground, collapsed and lay still. No man’s land was otherwise deserted. No firing came from the sap trench or from the burnt-out house. The occasional flare rose, like the last squib on Bonfire Night, revealing a scene of desolation. The dark windows of the house were like eyeless sockets. George stared, straining his eyes. Was that a movement? Had they taken the house? It seemed empty but he couldn’t be sure. He could get no further; he put one arm up over the edge and got his shoulder up but he hadn’t the strength to pull himself right over the lip. His legs and arms felt warm and floppy; he could barely stop himself from slipping back. The thought came to him that he was unlikely to get out of this, that he could die in this stinking pit, that his human frame would be covered, like Percy’s, by water and his body left in the mud like carrion. He felt sure that he would die here, alone.
As a flare went up, snaking into the sky, he took out Violet’s letter and opened it, laying his hand where hers had touched. The envelope dropped from his stiff fingers and the breeze caught it, fluttering it away from him, a pale shape tumbling over the dark, waterlogged ground. Then there was a crack, and brightness, whiteness, snow-blindness, and then nothing.
PART THREE
BLIGHTY
14
CHRISTMAS POST
George was hot, horribly hot. Sheets and blankets pinned him on his back in a bed and he was aware of cloth tightly swaddling his head and face, and of pain. The pain in his face was like an animal gnawing, as if a creature was trapped behind a mask and was trying to escape by the softer route through his flesh.
Sometimes hands would lift his head and a china spout would be placed between his lips. He would drink from what he imagined to be a teapot, cool water trickling down his parched throat. If he moaned with pain, a pad would be held over his nose and mouth and he would breathe in a chemical smell; then the animal would stop its frantic gnawing for a while and let him sink into a half-sleeping, half-dreaming state. Sometimes two people would come and take off the covers and a blessed draught of air would flow over him as they lifted his body and spread dry coolness under him, or moved him from his back to lie on his right side. He heard their voices around him but couldn’t make sense of them; he was aware only that they echoed as if there was a high space above them, as if they were in a concert hall.
In the time before here, there had been only pain with no respite, and movement that made the pain worse. First, the hard boards of a cart and jolting and jerking. He had tried to cry out but his mouth and throat had been full of liquid, salty as seawater, and he’d been unable to do more than make a strangled, gargling sound. That was a long time ago. There had been aeons of time since then, time when he had lain somewhere cold with men moaning around him and someone had bandaged his leg, and then his face and head, covering his eyes. Next there had been an agony of movement as wooden wheels passed over pavé roads and he had been jostled and shuffled into a close space in a train that sped, rattling and shaking and smelling of coal smoke. There had been voices, calling out for water, or for pinard, to drink. A woman’s voice in the background had said words he didn’t understand: ‘les blessés’, ‘les mutilés’. Later, he had been lifted again and carried up a long slope and into a place that smelt of disinfectant, where his bed rose and fell with the swell of the sea for a long weary time and where there had been the sound of someone weeping, on and on, refusing to be comforted. Then there were the sounds of a dock, more carrying, more rattling: this time over tramlines through noisy streets, until they reached a place where he was unloaded once more and wheeled through corridors and into a room with many voices and the smell of ether. Hands had unwrapped his face, picked the folds of cloth apart with thumb and forefinger, as gently as picking up a butterfly. A rubber mask was held over his nose and mouth until there was blackness. Then the consciousness of pain once more, gnawing away when he was left alone, excruciating when his wounds were dressed. Hands held his arms and pinned his head still while the gauze that had knit into blood and serum was peeled away. There were days and nights of burning heat when he was stripped and sponged with cloths until the rigors that shook his body ceased. At last he lay sweating under the weight of bedclothes that he had no strength to throw off, hearing busy footsteps that echoed in the high place.
It was night next time he woke. It was cooler. He remembered the agony of having his dressings changed and hoped that they would last a while and not soak through. One eye was free of bandages and he forced it open a crack, blinked and then opened it wider. A light was moving steadily towards him, illuminating plain white walls and tall, shuttered windows, set so high that no one could look in or out, their tops disappearing into shadow. He moved his head slowly as if turning to the sun. Above the light was a woman’s face, surrounded by an angular white shape. The light advanced towards him, revealing, on either side of a wide aisle, rows of red-blanketed beds and sleeping men. The woman, who wore a long white apron, paused occasionally to look more closely at a sleeper before padding on.
George ran his tongue over his dry lips. The bandages passed across the left side of his face, covering his eye, and were wound tightly over his crown and under his jaw, as he remembered being tied up when he had mumps as a child. As the figure approached, he tried to say, ‘Nurse,’ but his voice emerged from his long unused throat as an incoherent groan. The woman, however, hurried over, holding up the spirit lamp to get a good look at him before setting it down on a small wooden table beside the bed.
‘Welcome back!’ she said in a low voice. ‘How are you feeling?’ She pulled up a stool and lifted his wrist.
‘Pretty ropey.’ George’s voice was gravelly. He studied her while she took his pulse: her dark hair was parted in the middle and pulled back under the white starched cotton. She was, at the most, mid twenties, and had a plain, kind face, broad and soft, yet at the outer ends of her thick, straight eyebrows, George noticed tiny lines like commas: the marks of anxiety and distress.
‘Good, good,’ she said, looking down at the fob watch pinned at her breast. ‘Not so thready – there’s a definite improvement.’ Further down the ward, a man cried out and a nurse came out of a side room carrying a basin and went to him.
‘What is this place?’
‘You’re back in England, at the Third London General,’ she said. ‘You’ve been out of it for quite a while, I’m afraid. My name’s Nurse Patterson.’ She leant forward and looked at the tag that was pinned to George’s pyjamas. ‘Can you tell me yours?’
‘George Farrell.’
She nodded as if he had passed some kind of test.
‘What happened to me? My leg … It smells bad.’ He tried to sit up but his head spun and he sank back against the pillows again.
She put her hand on his arm. ‘You’ve had a high fever; the wound was infected but we’re hopeful that the leg will be saved. It’s looking much cleaner. When you’re stronger we’ll move you out to the veranda for an hour or two where we can get some sunlight to it.’
She moved as if to rise. By way of a question, George lifted his hand as if to touch his face and she stilled. After a pause she said, ‘There is some tissue damage. The eye is intact but we’ll have to wait to know whether it still has sight.’
George’s hand moved again towards his face but she caught it in hers and held it. ‘It’s a miracle you’re here at all,’ she said.
George took his hand away and, again, brought it up to his face. He felt upwards with his fingertips, over the grainy texture of the bandages. Beneath the small ridges where they overlapped, there was a wide indentation where his cheekbone ought to be, a hollow, as if a punch had caved in his bones like paper. Sh
e watched him as his fingertips explored the mask of bandages, and he saw her struggling to hide her pity and assume the non-committal expression of professionalism. The flesh around his eye and brow was swollen hard and despite the thickness of the dressings, he could feel that there was a dip at the bridge of his nose, where no dip should be. He held the good side of his face with his other hand, its familiar planes and angles fitting his palm and fingers as it did each night when he settled down to sleep. He felt again, finding the edges of the map of pain that made up the left side of his face. Right side … left side, his fingers compared. Right side … wrong side, his fingertips told him. Wrong, all wrong. He took his hands away and placed them palm-down on the blankets, spreading his fingers over the fuzzy surface so that they wouldn’t tremble.
‘Dr Bailey has done all he can,’ she said gently. ‘He was able to close up the wound at least. That isn’t always possible.’
‘Yes. Thank you,’ George heard himself say in a dull voice.
‘The main thing we need to concentrate on now is getting that leg better.’ She stood, picked up the lamp and moved to the end of the bed. She tucked the ends of the covers more firmly under the mattress, straightened up and then paused. ‘You can see the gardens from the veranda; it’s beautiful in the frost. You’ll like it.’
‘Yes,’ George said, unable to take in her words.
She patted the bedclothes. ‘Try to get some sleep.’ She turned away and the soft velvet darkness fell around him as she moved on with the lamp held high to shed its pool of light over other beds.
This is retribution, George thought. The bleakness of no man’s land came over him: Edmund and Percy somewhere beneath the mud; the German soldier’s face slowly being covered by leaves. He stared into the dark imagining how it would feel if, when his eye was uncovered, he found that he could see nothing but blackness. Would his eye be cloudy, the blue iris milky and dim like the eyes of the blind man who sold matches in the street at home? He wondered what a face looked like after a bullet had passed through flesh and bone.
Nurse Patterson had joined her young colleague tending to the man at the far end of the ward. He was retching into the basin while the women supported him so that he could sit upright. Suddenly, both women exclaimed. The younger woman stepped back sharply, her apron splashed with red, and Nurse Patterson spoke to her in a quiet, urgent voice until she nodded and ran from the ward. George watched, horrified, as blood continued to bubble from the man’s mouth and the nurse held him and spoke to him, trying to give him comfort. The young nurse returned with two others carrying a stretcher. They lifted him on to it and bore him away, with Nurse Patterson following. The door swung shut behind them and the nurse immediately began to strip the bed, her movements quick and efficient, a practised routine. Her shadow moved behind her, tall against the high white wall. George shifted and turned his head away against the pillow. The smell from his leg was faint but sickly. It reminded him of the smell of water in which flowers have been left to rot.
He was woken by the creak of wheels on the tiled floor as a nurse arrived with a trolley piled high with folded sheets. She turned on the lights and a row of hanging glass globes sprang to life, their brightness making him blink. As he got used to the light he saw that the place was decked out for Christmas; from the centre of the ceiling, festoons of greenery extended to the corners: branches of yew, holly and mistletoe. At the end of the long room, above the main doorway, hung a huge Union Jack, which flapped each time the door was opened, as if insisting that it be paid attention.
An orderly arrived carrying a long pole and hooked it into a catch in the top pane of each window, and then deftly lifted and pulled so that it pivoted open a crack. He reached the window next to George and repeated the operation, letting in a shiver of air. The man in the bed on his right groaned loudly and pulled the blankets up around his ears, muttering, ‘Bloody fresh air. What are they trying to do? Kill us with pneumonia?’
George caught the smell of the outside world stealing through the fug of fumes made by the stoves: fog, wet trees, damp earth. Men began to wake; those who were able to sat upright; one or two got out of bed and started shuffling down the ward. Nurses arrived to deliver bedpans and left again with them covered by cloths; others moved among the beds checking the patients or changing the bed linen. George listened to their high-pitched voices as they spoke with the patients or conferred with each other; he watched the movement of their small, quick hands and the way they walked – he had almost forgotten the way a woman walked.
An orderly came round with cocoa and the man in the next bed, on his right, sat up, his mousey hair tousled. His skin had a waxy pallor like an old candle. He took the mug saying, ‘Is it hot this time? Yesterday’s was lukewarm, you know.’
The orderly ignored him, took another mug from the tray for George and carried on. George, who could hardly bear the pain in his face and didn’t want to move his jaw to drink, for fear of starting up an agony of throbbing, left the mug where it was.
‘Wellings,’ the man said, holding out his hand; then, as George turned towards him: ‘Christ, what happened to you? You look like a bloody mummy!’
George said nothing.
‘Got it in the face, did you?’ Wellings dropped his hand.
George stared.
Wellings was undeterred. He lifted the blankets, pointing to the paunch beneath his army-issue blue pyjamas. ‘Appendix,’ he said. ‘Bloody painful but worth it to get out of that hellhole. I should have another week or so before I get sent back, with a bit of luck: warm and dry, proper Christmas dinner, a few of the chaps are even putting on a concert.’ He tucked the covers back around him. ‘What have they done for you then, the stone-cutters?’
‘I’m sorry; I don’t know what you mean …’
‘That’s what they call them, the surgeons who patch up the faces as best they can. You’re not the first, you know. There’s been others through here but they don’t tend to hang around; they don’t like everyone staring, see, so they stick together, in a group, like.’ He swung his legs out of bed, feeling around with his feet for a pair of shiny-looking carpet slippers. ‘Where are you from, anyway?’
‘Oh. Cumberland.’
Wellings nodded but looked as though George might as well have said Borneo. He drained his mug. ‘Well, I hope you’ll enjoy being at home in the bosom of your family while the rest of us are toiling away in the mud.’
George said, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t get your point.’
Wellings said with false bonhomie, ‘Of course, you’re the lucky one really, that’s the point. You won’t be going back, will you?’
George’s heart began to thump. ‘Why do you say that?’ he said angrily. ‘The nurse said they can save my leg! What do you know about it?’
‘I’m not talking about your leg, sport,’ Wellings said, looking straight at him. ‘With your face smashed, you’re not exactly a good advertisement for the war, now are you? Not exactly a morale booster. Even the ones who get masks made for them don’t go back, you know.’
He put one hand to his abdomen as he stood up; then he bent to take soap and a towel from the shelf under the table and shuffled off towards the bathroom.
George tried to take in what he’d said. Surely it was ridiculous. If he were lucky enough to recover and be passed as fit, surely he would carry on as before: he’d return to the battalion, be with the others again, be of some use, have a chance to make amends? Gradually, the realisation came that what had been so crassly verbalised was true: what officers would want their soldiers to have to work alongside the scarred men, a living reminder of the power of lead and steel and of the horrors that could befall them? It would be the same at home for everyone with husbands or sons at the Front, trying to keep hopeful. Who would want to see the men with war engraved upon their faces?
George lay down on his good side and brought his forearm up in front of his face so that he wouldn’t have to talk to Wellings when he came back. The noises of t
he ward went on around him: the low babble of voices, the squeaking of shoes on the shiny floor, the clinking of cutlery and tin plates as breakfast was served. George didn’t want a part of any of it. He lay with the pain like a clawing hand on his face, longing for sleep, a respite from thought and feeling. He wished he could sleep and never wake up.
Over the next week, George hardly spoke. He ignored Wellings, who eventually gave up and started to talk to the man on the other side of him, Cook, who had shrapnel wounds but was also expecting to return to the Front. George said as little as he could to the nurses too, answering their questions in monosyllables, or muttering his thanks. Most of them soon learnt to leave well alone and carried out their duties, cutting up his food into tiny manageable pieces, changing his dressings, or his bed, without the cheery conversation they tried to keep up with the other patients. Only Nurse Patterson, by dint of sheer perseverance, managed to get anything out of him. She asked him questions about what it was like living in what she jokingly called ‘the frozen North’ and what he had done before the war. When she asked about his family and if he would like to write to them and tell them where he was, he shook his head and clammed up for the rest of the day.
The next time she saw him, she started on a different tack. She told him that every time he put up with the pain of having his leg wound washed in saline and painted with iodine was a stride towards being able to take real steps, and that the day when he could walk again would surely come. The garden was lovely, she said, the trees and bushes sparkling with frost, the carp in the fish pond moving slowly beneath the sheets of ice, salmon-pink and grey, flame-orange, burnished gold. He would see it soon, very soon, but he must drink and he must eat and he must not turn his head away.
One day she arrived early, still in her nurse’s cape, and said that she had been checking the postroom and that some post had finally found its way to him. She brought out two letters from her apron pocket and put them into his hand. One bore his mother’s handwriting and the other Kitty’s. He looked at them but made no move to open them. An hour later, when she returned, they were still unopened on the table next to him. ‘Would you like me to read them to you?’ she asked, mindful of the difficulty he might have in managing with one eye still bandaged. He shook his head.
The Moon Field Page 21