The Penguin Book of First World War Stories

by None

  What were they fighting for anyway? The issues were so very big, and at the same time so very small and immediate.

  He found Captain Holt alone just after dusk, standing on the duckboards below the parapet, near one of the firing steps.

  ‘Oh, it’s you, Chaplain. Ready for another night?’

  ‘It’ll come, whether I am or not,’ Joseph replied.

  Holt gave a short bark of laughter. ‘That doesn’t sound like you. Tired of the firing line, are you? You’ve been up here a couple of weeks; you should be in turn for a step back any day. Me too, thank God.’

  Joseph faced forward, peering through the gloom towards no man’s land and the German lines beyond. He was shaking. He must control himself. This must be done in the silence, before the shooting started up again. Then he might not get away with it.

  ‘Pity about that sniper over there,’ he remarked. ‘He’s taken out a lot of our men.’

  ‘Damnable,’ Holt agreed. ‘Can’t get a line on him, though. Keeps his own head well down.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Joseph nodded. ‘We’d never get him from here. It needs a man to go over in the dark and find him.’

  ‘Not a good idea, Chaplain. He’d not come back. Not advocating suicide, are you?’

  Joseph chose his words very carefully and kept his voice as unemotional as he could.

  ‘I wouldn’t have put it like that,’ he answered. ‘But he has cost us a lot of men. Mordaff today, you know?’

  ‘Yes… I heard. Pity.’

  ‘Except that wasn’t the sniper, of course. But the men think it was, so it comes to the same thing, as far as morale is concerned.’

  ‘Don’t know what you mean, Chaplain.’ There was a slight hesitation in Holt’s voice in the darkness.

  ‘Wasn’t a rifle wound, it was a pistol,’ Joseph replied. ‘You can tell the difference, if you’re actually looking for it.’

  ‘Then he was a fool to be that close to German lines,’ Holt said, facing forward over the parapet and the mud. ‘Lost his nerve, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Like Ashton,’ Joseph said. ‘Can understand that, up there in no man’s land, mud everywhere, wire catching hold of you, tearing at you, stopping you from moving. Terrible thing to be caught in the wire with the star shells lighting up the night. Makes you a sitting target. Takes an exceptional man not to panic, in those circumstances… a hero.’

  Hold did not answer.

  There was silence ahead of them, only the dull thump of feet and a squelch of duckboards in mud behind, and the trickle of water along the bottom of the trench.

  ‘I expect you know what it feels like,’ Joseph went on. ‘I notice you have some pretty bad tears in your trousers, even one in your blouse. Haven’t had time to mend them yet.’

  ‘I daresay I got caught in a bit of wire out there last night,’ Holt said stiffly. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

  ‘I’m sure you did,’ Joseph agreed with him. ‘Ashton didn’t. His clothes were muddy, but no wire tears.’

  There were several minutes of silence. A group of men passed by behind them, muttering words of greeting. When they were gone the darkness closed in again. Someone threw up a star shell and there was a crackle of machine-gun fire.

  ‘I wouldn’t repeat that, if I were you, Chaplain,’ Holt said at last. ‘You might make people think unpleasant things, doubts. And right at the moment morale is high. We need that. We’ve had a hard time recently. We’re going over the top in a trench raid soon. Morale is important… trust. I’m sure you know that, maybe even better than I do. That’s your job, isn’t it? Morale, spiritual welfare of the men?’

  ‘Yes… spiritual welfare is a good way of putting it. Remember what it is we are fighting for, and that it is worth all that it costs… even this.’ Joseph gestured in the dark to all that surrounded them.

  More star shells went up, illuminating the night for a few garish moments, then a greater darkness closed in.

  ‘We need our heroes,’ Holt said very clearly. ‘You should know that. Any man who would tear them down would be very unpopular, even if he said he was doing it in the name of truth, or justice, or whatever it was he believed in. He would do a lot of harm, Chaplain. I expect you can see that…’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Joseph agreed. ‘To have their hero shown to be a coward who laid the blame for his panic on another man, and let him be buried in shame, and then committed murder to hide that, would devastate men who are already wretched and exhausted by war.’

  ‘You are perfectly right.’ Holt sounded as if he were smiling. ‘A very wise man, Chaplain. Good of the regiment first. The right sort of loyalty.’

  ‘I could prove it,’ Joseph said very carefully.

  ‘But you won’t. Think what it would do to the men.’

  Joseph turned a little to face the parapet. He stood up on to the fire step and looked forward over the dark expanse of mud and wire.

  ‘We should take that sniper out. That would be a very heroic thing to do. Good thing to try, even if you didn’t succeed. You’d deserve a mention in despatches for that, possibly a medal.’

  ‘It would be posthumous!’ Holt said bitterly.

  ‘Possibly. But you might succeed and come back. It would be so daring, Fritz would never expect it,’ Joseph pointed out.

  ‘Then you do it, Chaplain!’ Holt said sarcastically.

  ‘It wouldn’t help you, Captain. Even if I die, I have written a full account of what I have learned today, to be opened should anything happen to me. On the other hand, if you were to mount such a raid, whether you returned or not, I should destroy it.’

  There was silence again, except for the distant crack of sniper fire a thousand yards away and the drip of mud.

  ‘Do you understand me, Captain Holt?’

  Holt turned slowly. A star shell lit his face for an instant. His voice was hoarse.

  ‘You’re sending me to my death!’

  ‘I’m letting you be the hero you’re pretending to be and Ashton really was,’ Joseph answered. ‘The hero the men need. Thousands of us have died out here, no one knows how many more there will be. Others will be maimed or blinded. It isn’t whether you die or not, it’s how well.’

  A shell exploded a dozen yards from them. Both men ducked, crouching automatically.

  Silence again.

  Slowly Joseph unbent.

  Holt lifted his head. ‘You’re a hard man, Chaplain. I misjudged you.’

  ‘Spiritual care, Captain,’ Joseph said quietly. ‘You wanted the men to think you a hero, to admire you. Now you’re going to justify that and become one.’

  Holt stood still, looking towards him in the gloom, then slowly he turned and began to walk away, his feet sliding on the wet duckboards. Then he climbed up the next fire step and up over the parapet.

  Joseph stood still and prayed.

  MARY BORDEN

  BLIND

  The door at the end of the baraque kept opening and shutting to let in the stretcher-bearers. As soon as it opened a crack the wind scurried in and came hopping towards me across the bodies of the men that covered the floor, nosing under the blankets, lifting the flaps of heavy coats, and burrowing among the loose heaps of clothing and soiled bandages. Then the grizzled head of a stretcher-bearer would appear, butting its way in, and he would emerge out of the black storm into the bright fog that seemed to fill the place, dragging the stretcher after him, and then the old one at the other end of the load would follow, and they would come slowly down the centre of the hut looking for a clear place on the floor.

  The men were laid out in three rows on either side of the central alleyway. It was a big hut, and there were about sixty stretchers in each row. There was space between the heads of one row and the feet of another row, but no space to pass between the stretchers in the same row; they touched. The old territorials who worked with me passed up and down between the heads and feet. I had a squad of thirty of these old orderlies and two sergeants and two priests, who were e
xpert dressers. Wooden screens screened off the end of the hut opposite the entrance. Behind these were the two dressing-tables where the priests dressed the wounds of the new arrivals and got them ready for the surgeons, after the old men had undressed them and washed their feet. In one corner was my kitchen where I kept all my syringes and hypodermic needles and stimulants.

  It was just before midnight when the stretcher-bearers brought in the blind man, and there was no space on the floor anywhere; so they stood waiting, not knowing what to do with him.

  I said from the floor in the second row: ‘Just a minute, old ones. You can put him here in a minute.’ So they waited with the blind man suspended in the bright, hot, misty air between them, like a pair of old horses in shafts with their heads down, while the little boy who had been crying for his mother died with his head on my breast. Perhaps he thought the arms holding him when he jerked back and died belonged to some woman I had never seen, some woman waiting somewhere for news of him in some village, somewhere in France. How many women, I wondered, were waiting out there in the distance for news of these men who were lying on the floor? But I stopped thinking about this the minute the boy was dead. It didn’t do to think. I didn’t as a rule, but the boy’s very young voice had startled me. It had come through to me as a real voice will sound sometimes through a dream, almost waking you, but now it had stopped, and the dream was thick round me again, and I laid him down, covered his face with the brown blanket, and called two other old ones.

  ‘Put this one in the corridor to make more room here,’ I said; and I saw them lift him up. When they had taken him away, the stretcher-bearers who had been waiting brought the blind one and put him down in the cleared space. They had to come round to the end of the front row and down between the row of feet and row of heads; they had to be very careful where they stepped; they had to lower the stretcher cautiously so as not to jostle the men on either side (there was just room), but these paid no attention. None of the men lying packed together on the floor noticed each other in this curious dream-place.

  I had watched this out of the corner of my eye, busy with something that was not very like a man. The limbs seemed to be held together only by the strong stuff of the uniform. The head was unrecognizable. It was a monstrous thing, and a dreadful rattling sound came from it. I looked up and saw the chief surgeon standing over me. I don’t know how he got there. His small shrunken face was wet and white; his eyes were brilliant and feverish; his incredible hands that saved so many men so exquisitely, so quickly, were in the pockets of his white coat.

  ‘Give him morphine,’ he said, ‘a double dose. As much as you like.’ He pulled a cigarette out of his pocket. ‘In cases like this, if I am not about, give morphine; enough, you understand.’ Then he vanished like a ghost. He went back to his operating room, a small white figure with round shoulders, a magician, who performed miracles with knives. He went away through the dream.

  I gave the morphine, then crawled over and looked at the blind man’s ticket. I did not know, of course, that he was blind until I read his ticket. A large round white helmet covered the top half of his head and face; only his nostrils and mouth and chin were uncovered. The surgeon in the dressing station behind the trenches had written on his ticket, ‘Shot through the eyes. Blind.’

  Did he know? I asked myself. No, he couldn’t know yet. He would still be wondering, waiting, hoping, down there in that deep, dark silence of his, in his own dark personal world. He didn’t know he was blind; no one would have told him. I felt his pulse. It was strong and steady. He was a long, thin man, but his body was not very cold and the pale lower half of his clear-cut face was not very pale. There was something beautiful about him. In his case there was no hurry, no necessity to rush him through to the operating room. There was plenty of time. He would always be blind.

  One of the orderlies was going up and down with hot tea in a bucket. I beckoned to him.

  I said to the blind one: ‘Here is a drink.’ He didn’t hear me, so I said it more loudly against the bandage, and helped him lift his head, and held the tin cup to his mouth below the thick edge of the bandage. I did not think then of what was hidden under the bandage. I think of it now. Another head case across the hut had thrown off his blanket and risen from his stretcher. He was standing stark naked except for his head bandage, in the middle of the hut, and was haranguing the crowd in a loud voice with the gestures of a political orator. But the crowd, lying on the floor, paid no attention to him. They did not notice him. I called to Gustave and Pierre to go to him.

  The blind man said to me: ‘Thank you, Sister, you are very kind. That is good. I thank you.’ He had a beautiful voice. I noticed the great courtesy of his speech. But they were all courteous. Their courtesy when they died, their reluctance to cause me any trouble by dying or suffering, was one of the things it didn’t do to think about.

  Then I left him, and presently forgot that he was there waiting in the second row of stretchers on the left side of the long crowded floor.

  Gustave and Pierre had got the naked orator back on to his stretcher and were wrapping him up again in his blankets. I let them deal with him and went back to my kitchen at the other end of the hut, where my syringes and hypodermic needles were boiling in saucepans. I had received by post that same morning a dozen beautiful new platinum needles. I was very pleased with them. I said to one of the dressers as I fixed a needle on my syringe and held it up, squirting the liquid through it: ‘Look. I’ve some lovely new needles.’ He said: ‘Come and help me a moment. Just cut this bandage, please.’ I went over to his dressing-table. He darted off to a voice that was shrieking somewhere. There was a man stretched on the table. His brain came off in my hands when I lifted the bandage from his head.

  When the dresser came back I said: ‘His brain came off on the bandage.’

  ‘Where have you put it?’

  ‘I put it in the pail under the table.’

  ‘It’s only one half of his brain,’ he said, looking into the man’s skull. ‘The rest is here.’

  I left him to finish the dressing and went about my own business. I had much to do.

  It was my business to sort out the wounded as they were brought in from the ambulances and to keep them from dying before they got to the operating rooms: it was my business to sort out the nearly dying from the dying. I was there to sort them out and tell how fast life was ebbing in them. Life was leaking away from all of them; but with some there was no hurry, with others it was a case of minutes. It was my business to create a counter-wave of life, to create the flow against the ebb. It was like a tug of war with the tide. The ebb of life was cold. When life was ebbing the man was cold; when it began to flow back, he grew warm. It was all, you see, like a dream. The dying men on the floor were drowned men cast up on the beach, and there was the ebb of life pouring away over them, sucking them away, an invisible tide; and my old orderlies, like old sea-salts out of a lifeboat, were working to save them. I had to watch, to see if they were slipping, being dragged away. If a man were slipping quickly, being sucked down rapidly, I sent runners to the operating rooms. There were six operating rooms on either side of my hut. Medical students in white coats hurried back and forth along the covered corridors between us. It was my business to know which of the wounded could wait and which could not. I had to decide for myself. There was no one to tell me. If I made any mistakes, some would die on their stretchers on the floor under my eyes who need not have died. I didn’t worry. I didn’t think. I was too busy, too absorbed in what I was doing. I had to judge from what was written on their tickets and from the way they looked and the way they felt to my hand. My hand could tell of itself one kind of cold from another. They were all half frozen when they arrived, but the chill of their icy flesh wasn’t the same as the cold inside them when life was almost ebbed away. My hands could instantly tell the difference between the cold of the harsh bitter night and the stealthy cold of death. Then there was another thing, a small fluttering thing. I didn�
�t think about it or count it. My fingers felt it. I was in a dream, led this way and that by my cute eyes and hands that did many things, and seemed to know what to do.

  Sometimes there was no time to read the ticket or touch the pulse. The door kept opening and shutting to let in the stretcher-bearers whatever I was doing. I could not watch when I was giving piqures; but, standing by my table filling a syringe, I could look down over the rough forms that covered the floor and pick out at a distance this one and that one. I had been doing this for two years, and had learned to read the signs. I could tell from the way they twitched, from the peculiar shade of a pallid face, from the look of tight pinched-in nostrils, and in other ways which I could not have explained, that this or that one was slipping over the edge of the beach of life. Then I would go quickly with my long saline needles, or short thick camphor-oil needles, and send one of the old ones hurrying along the corridor to the operating rooms. But sometimes there was no need to hurry; sometimes I was too late; with some there was no longer any question of the ebb and flow of life and death; there was nothing to do.

  The hospital throbbed and hummed that night like a dynamo. The operating rooms were ablaze; twelve surgical êquipes were at work; boilers steamed and whistled; nurses hurried in and out of the sterilizing rooms carrying big shining metal boxes and enamelled trays; feet were running, slower feet shuffling. The hospital was going full steam ahead. I had a sense of great power, exhilaration and excitement. A loud wind was howling. It was throwing itself like a pack of wolves against the flimsy wooden walls, and the guns were growling. Their voices were dying away. I thought of them as a pack of beaten dogs, slinking away across the dark waste where the dead were lying and the wounded who had not yet been picked up, their only cover the windy blanket of the bitter November night.