The Gunner

by Paul Almond

  Eventually, I was led with three or four other wounded to a motor ambulance and was born off towards the Main Dressing Station, or MDS. As we jolted our way along, every lurch loudly accentuated the groans and curses of the more seriously wounded. The accumulated pain in that one little vehicle could hardly be believed, some silent, some seemingly relieved by loud laments, others wracked by smothered crying. I’d never been in the midst of such suffering. Little was I to know that this was just the beginning.

  We arrived at the grounds of a building I found out later was the Amiens Lunatic Asylum. The Medics sorted the mutilated and maimed into groups: men who needed immediate attention, men who could wait, and those sad lost causes with devastating head wounds or abdominal contusions who would not be sent back but made more or less comfortable until they died. It seemed I had joined some horrible torture chamber: dishevelled stretchers on the floor, scattered boots and piles of muddy brown blankets turned back from smashed limbs bound by filthy bandages.

  Watching more stretchers stream in, I shuddered to imagine what ghastly agony or imminent death lay under each blanket. The more serious cases were seen immediately. In an hour and a half, when my left arm felt about to break from holding my jaw, I was seen by the MO.

  He examined my hand first. “It’s stopped bleeding for the moment, but bones are broken, so we’ll have to get you to hospital. Meanwhile, I think I can tape that face of yours better, to save you holding it.”

  He worked on the torn flesh, which hurt like hell. Then I waited with others some hours for transport. I found out later that the British 4th Army commanding the Canadian Corps had limited the medical arrangements and transport in the forward area in case they were seen by the enemy. Finally we were loaded into motor ambulances and headed off to the Casualty Clearing Station. One of the men on the stretchers was a badly wounded German. First we try to kill him, now we try to save his life! War is insane.

  The journey itself was taking several unbelievable hours, and my thoughts began to wander... How frightened I had been by the sound of our own guns. My muscles had refused to obey my brain. Never happened before. Pray God, I would not be prey to those bizarre symptoms that had first bothered me in England, shaking or ducking non-existent shells. Well, since I had no control over any of it, I had better just wait and see.

  This Casualty Clearing Station had been set up near a railhead. I was seen first by a VAD, a sort of voluntary nurse, who told me this Number Five CCS was near Cachy. The first thing she did was douse both wounds with iodine. My God! My brain almost exploded. The pain, which most soldiers seem to bear, set off something in my mind, and I started shaking again like one of those threshing machines back home. No good telling myself to stop, I just had no control. When the MO came over, he saw the symptoms. Nothing new, apparently.

  I don’t know how I fell on such a sympathetic doctor, but I heard his words, muffled as through gauze: “Son, don’t you mind. If I told you what I’ve seen from men coming here after a battle, your shaking is normal. You’ll get over it, don’t worry. Let me re-bandage this face, and you could do with a new dressing on that hand...” He worked quickly and efficiently, and soothing away my tremors: “After every big attack, soldiers come in here in all states and conditions: shell-shock, my heavens — they tremble violently, they’re terrified, their hearts develop wildly uneven rhythms, even the slightest noise will make ’em jump. I’ve seen them,” he paused as he pressed the bandage tighter, “I’ve seen them jump up and run away, just like that, searching for safety, I suppose. They’ll scream out, or burst into tears just like a child. Some can’t even walk without babbling insanely, their legs trembling and giving out. Many just stare silently into space.”

  Well, I absorbed all that and hoped my shaking wouldn’t get worse. But the cries of so many delirious patients and the ravings of the five or six who were coming round from anaesthetic kept this Clearing Station in pandemonium. Beneath each stinking wad of bloody gauze, I wondered what new and obscene horror awaited these overworked doctors and nursing sisters.

  He finished. “We’ll get you off to the Field Hospital in Rouen, where they’ll X-ray your hand and do a proper job of setting the bones, don’t you worry.” With that, I got up and the next wounded man sat down to receive attention. I was then bathed and given a hospital uniform to replace my bloody rags.

  I rested a bit, and found my dreams replaced by a reality even more gruesome: convoys of haemorrhages, of delirium; I saw one man with a gangrenous leg wound, slimy and green and scarlet, with the bone laid bare. Horrifying.

  That evening, Thursday the 8th, as dusk began to fall, I was loaded onto a train with a number of others, but it was all becoming a bit of a blur. I was so fatigued that during the first part of the trip, I dozed. Then I saw bright moonlight and heard aeroplanes over the low thunder of guns. I drifted into more nightmare visions of ambulance trains jolting noisily, gassed men on stretchers clawing the air, dying men reeking of foul bandages, shrieking and writhing or as still as the death written in their fixed, empty eye sockets.

  I tried to stay awake, and when a bright-faced young nurse came lurching past, I smiled at her. The train gave a jolt, and she grabbed onto a seat-back for support, and shook her head. Exhausted, of course. I motioned for her to sit, my companion officer having gone to the bathroom; it was one of the few seats vacant. She hesitated, then gave a weak smile and flopped down.

  “Must be a tough job,” I said. “No man knows how tough. Am I right?”

  She nodded. Too worn out to talk.

  “Did you just get on with us?”

  “Oh no. I live on this train. A week or more at a time.”

  I frowned. How could that be?

  “Most of our hospital trains have a live-in nurse. But just one for this whole long train.” I frowned. “They gave me a place up in the first-class compartment. That’s where I do my washing — we have to be bright and clean, no matter whether we’ve walked through the mud to help soldiers onto the train, or tended others who vomited, and...” She shook her head. “Up there, when I get a moment, I sit and check my clothes and comb out my hair to find any lice you fellows bring in. So many train trips... Load after load of desperate, dying men... I don’t know how much longer I can take it.”

  She made to get up.

  “Sit a while, Sister,” I said. “You need a break.”

  “They need me more,” she sighed. “Sorry to have spilled it out, but you know, sometimes I...” She turned and went on with her struggle to dispense mercy to the trainload, heading some forty or fifty miles to Rouen.

  Chapter Thirty

  Rouen, August 1918

  The Red Cross train arrived at the platform in Rouen in the middle of the night. One by one, the carriages disgorged their loads of broken humanity. Stretcher cases were taken off by bearers who had quickly assembled. Those of us who could walk made our way painfully along the platform, limping, hobbling or lurching forward in great streams of agony. I was one of the luckier ones, no doubt, but was my mind all right? My muscles weren’t. As we jostled one another, some alert, some biting their lips to avoid crying out or making a scene, others stoic with large staring eyes, what a stream it was — flowing like the damned into some dark region of Hell.

  That mass exodus remained so vivid, blotting out exactly how we reached this Number Two British Red Cross Hospital. We were the first train from the Amiens slaughter, so we were processed rapidly, some into immediate operation rooms, others into wards with beds, still others onto chairs to await attention.

  I found myself beside a soldier who had lost his arm at the elbow, and another whose head had been swathed in bandages through which one bleak eye peered. And all the time, crowding out these horrors, inner visions kept torturing my brain.

  Don’t worry, I kept telling myself, it’s normal, remember what the doctor said, it’s not our fault, no, we can’t stop them, it will pass — oh yes, pray God, it will pass. But not right away, because whatever my brain coul
d not supply, there in front of me passed and repassed images of such mortal stress, such indignities, such shattered hulks of men, hobbling or being wheeled by bleary-eyed Sisters and orderlies.

  Finally, I was assigned a cot in a ward with severely wounded men until I could have my hand X-rayed, only a first assortment. In the next bed, the soldier had half his buttocks shot away, the fleshy part. In her haste to attend to him, the nurse hadn’t pulled his screen fully around so I watched her cleaning the raw flesh, not red as I expected, no, yellow with pus, absolutely suppurating with pus. She couldn’t do much, just apply those gauze things wetted with iodine to disinfect it.

  On my other side, a young lad had had his genitals blown off. When the nurse came in to dress him, I wondered how he stood it. I saw him watching her, dreading the moment she’d arrive. The hole — it was just a hole — was packed with gauze and a tube — the catheter that led into his bladder. She started and I jammed my eyes shut, but they opened again. All the packing she had to pull out, bit by bit, clean the hole then pack it back in. Such agony. He started to cry; he couldn’t help it, so she covered his face with a handkerchief to save him embarrassment. After it was over, and I felt almost as badly as she did, she returned with a drop of brandy that I could’ve used myself.

  Across the ward, another officer had half his face blown away. How hard it was for the young VAD to look him straight in the eye. He watched intensely to see how she was going to react, dressing his wound. Pretty hideous, he looked! His face was raw, though no worse than such horrors on arms or legs, but much more unpleasant because his breath, mingling with stale blood in the mouth and passages, smelled just so foul. The poor girl worked hard to sustain a smile during her adjusting of his drainage and feeding tubes.

  And with it all, sharp pains from my own tiny wounds stabbed me, filling me with despair that I might be confined here forever, that I might never escape. My whole world was filled with misery. But was I not as guilty as the Hun, for had our guns not filled the German hospitals with just as much suffering? Had I not, by commanding a howitzer, laboured to produce the same, if not more, suffering? What was all this about anyway? Why were we really fighting? For what were we dying? Worse than that, had we been handed so much torment because we ourselves had inflicted even more across a few yards of No Man’s Land? Was this not therefore a just retribution?

  I found myself crying out in rage and frustration, but so many other wounded also allowed cries to escape their lips. So many groans, and even, yes, I hate to report, volumes of blasphemy coming from the wounded that no one paid attention to my sudden bellow of despair.

  Finally, I did drift off. But had I not just come from the train? So what were these hordes of broken beings striding along in a black mass, like a vast army of damned, dark-suited souls all marching down, down, down.

  We reached the gates of the Underworld, black and threatening. We crowded against them, trampling each other underfoot. Then with a thunderous boom, they opened. Gates of Hell? Or some vast subterranean cavern of descending circles at the bottom of the universe?

  With the surging multitude, I faced new, great black gun barrels spouting flame and death right at us. But somehow we remained untouched by the avalanche of shrapnel and searing bullets, and pushed on. Was I now trapped in a nightmare from which I’d never, ever escape? I must have been screaming for I felt myself roughly shaken, and some orderly jabbed me with a needle, causing the images to subside.

  But their place was taken by a kind of icy emptiness... a dead mass of black blood that had congealed like treacle, like the mud of Passchendaele, yellowish, greenish, black, from which nothing could emerge. The deadness of a void. Would I float or would I drown?

  No, because it turned out this was a field of actual ice, like Chaleur Bay when it freezes: flat, torpid, lifeless. This horror became intensified by the frigidity, so deathly quiet, so different from the steaming battlefield. It struck me: did I feel like giving up? Oh yes, my footsteps that had been pounding along, thump thump thump, as I staggered always forward, had become less certain. Below me, macabre shapes formed in the ice to freeze the blood in my veins. I knew I must not look down, these clutching fingers of corpses craved my body and my soul, tempting me to join them.

  But I continued, shakily, step after step, until there, at the very end of the ice field, stood a huge, horrific figure, waiting. As bad as what I had been through? No, worse than anything I’d ever seen.

  But something told me I had to deal with him if I were ever going to escape this icy prison of pain. I paused in a kind of bewilderment, and again felt the putrid, white, crystalline substance beneath tugging at me, trying to absorb me, pulling me in! If I stayed, I knew I’d become like the others, stuck forever, so I made myself stagger on, yes, towards that indescribably menacing figure, the personification of War, like Satan himself.

  But I could not face him yet. I could not. I woke up. I was being wheeled into an examination room.

  ***

  By noon my chin wound had been repaired by a worn-out doctor in his mid-forties staring through large bifocals. He had deftly stitched my flesh in place and bandaged me. Then my hand. My shuddering was so bad that when they placed it in an X-ray machine, two men had to hold my wrist to keep it still.

  Once they got the X-ray back, more pain stabbed but I kept calming myself — it will all soon be over, my hand will be set and flesh stitched and bones in plaster, so healing would surely begin.

  But what terrified me most was that another night was fast approaching. Would I not be assaulted by images even more horrible? Would I have to again face that dreaded monster at the end of the ice field? But luckily, no, out the hospital windows in the setting sun, I saw Sisters coming to move us off, making room for more trainloads arriving from the Front. “Our troops have been so successful,” one was saying. “We advanced eight miles yesterday. The furthest advance since the war began. The Canadians did it!” Well for a time, that held at bay any blackness crowding round.

  Then I thought of “the terrible Boche” being subject to the same merciless pain in hospitals probably staffed, as the word was going around, by nurses even more worn out. I had heard discussed in the corridors that the Germans were down on their luck, little food, poor uniforms, not enough ammunition — they had thrown everything into their spring offensive and it had been halted. So at last, the tide had turned.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  England, August 1918

  The Fifth Southern General Hospital at Portsmouth was a fine sunny place. Having been among the first surge of wounded, those of us who had shared the trek to Rouen were now safely across the Channel. We had been moved quickly back to Blighty to make room for the waves of casualties flooding into the Advanced Dressing Stations, the Casualty Clearing Stations, and the hospitals in France.

  I was still a prey to tortured visions — made worse, no doubt, by being in the company of so many suffering from gas gangrene. This, by the way, was not caused by chemical warfare but by bullets or shrapnel driving bacillus microbes from the soil deep into a wound. In the absence of oxygen, the microbes quickly multiplied in that hothouse of crushed bone, tangled blood vessels, and shredded flesh. The infection created a septic swill that soon bubbled up like gas, sometimes within as little as twenty-four hours. The smell would make anyone vomit, even experienced medical men. I shall never forget that smell: a sort of chlorate of lime odour, as if the stench of the wounds themselves was not terrible enough.

  Gas gangrene made your death so agonizing because you were eaten away from within. Since the infection could only be eradicated by oxygen, the doctors had to expose it to the air. So they cut away living flesh from around the wounds, both where the bullet or shrapnel went in and came out. Then they punched a hole through to allow oxygen to enter and kill the infection. You just would not believe the smell of the drainage holes I glimpsed during dressings, some the size of clenched fists. It might have controlled gas gangrene, but surely made for other challenges,
nearly killing soldiers with pain. Every day a nurse had to pull a piece of sterile cord through the wound from front to back, leaving it overnight, then pull it out again and stick in another one. Imagine! And with this going on around me, I was trying to forget the war and blank out its horrific visions.

  The worst of it was watching poor young fellows awaiting phlegmatically the approach of their own death. A doomed lad lay in the next bed, his pale, once-handsome face now yellow, his cheeks sunken, his lips bitten out of restlessness and agony. He asked me in a courteous whisper if I knew how long he had to wait before he died. Not long; the next morning they brought in the screens round his bed. So many gas cases doomed from the start — I’d see them watch the nurses with fear-darkened eyes, afraid to ask the question to which they already knew the awful truth.

  Three days after I arrived, I was out on a balcony when who should arrive but my worthy brother, Jack.

  “Eric! My! You don’t look so bad after all! The telegram said, wounded face and hand — severe. I expected to find you much worse. You only have a bandage across your jaw.” But I could see in his face he’d been really concerned.

  I got to my feet, and we embraced. “You shouldn’t have bothered to come all this way, Jack,” I said, sitting down beside him. “I know you have your hands full in London.” Just words — I was really glad he’d come.

  “Don’t be silly, Eric, Momma would skin me alive if I hadn’t. And I made sure that I found business to do while here, checking our Canadian chaplains at these hospitals — I hope one of them visited you?”

  “Not so far, Jack. A lot of fellas are soon heading for the Almighty, and they need the chaplain far more than those of us left in the land of the Ungodly.” I cracked a smile, and yelped because my jaw still hurt.