Puttees. They ought, with practice, to have been possible. Buggers. Roll on, Duration, I can’t roll me puttees. A bulge top or bottom. A bulge just when they were almost done. Left leg perfect, right leg wrong, right leg perfect, left …
He had his pals, though.
Snowy said, “Best day’s work I ever—getting meself them teeth. Always had a ache, like, before, top or bottom, alius one or t’other.”
“My cousin,” Gus told them, “my cousin Arnold, he saw this notice, Xmas time, for the cycling corps it was. It said large letters at bottom ‘Bad teeth no bar.’”
“Well,” said Snowy, “so what then?”
“They took him right enough. Only heck, he couldn’t ride a bike. He’d never—they give you one, see, he thought it’d be easy, like—but no matter how he tried, he couldn’t, he’d no notion. They’ve put him some other place, me Dad says. He’s summat with guns now.”
Early days yet—so that it was still novel and weird and not too bad. He could be, if not comfortably, at least mindlessly, 6904 Greenwood. The pain of Stephen was lessening a little, because just by being here he was going to avenge him. One day.
After a few beers the usually peaceful natures of all four of them would devise what they’d do to the Hun when they got the chance. Bert knew some terrible stories, worse than any that had been in the papers. About women’s titties being cut off. Anyone who could do that … And if Von Kluck came over here, it would happen to their mothers and sisters and sweethearts. Winnie was in his mind, in all their minds. They would all be defending Winnie.
Homesickness caught up with him when he least expected it. Early in the third week he’d been bawled at by Sarge (hadn’t they all been saying the night before what they’d do to him if they got the chance) for not moving quick enough. He had reacted and for a second only given him the Look which he’d used so often in the last few months for Mr. Stainthorpe.
Next thing he knew he was up for something called Dumb Insolence: 6904 Private Greenwood got six days Confined to Barracks. Jankers, they called it. Gus had been there in their first week and was especially sympathetic: it had been the usual, he said, emptying urinal tubs, all that. Hal got mess waiter fatigues. That way he saw for the first time the officers all together. They were eating, drinking well. One with his smooth freckled face reminded Hal of Gib. The meal had the look of one at The Towers. The room smelled the same: food, drink, wine remaining in glasses, Stilton. A disorder, expensive, which was no concern of theirs, someone else’s work. A manner like Mr. Hawksworth’s. A pyramid of washing-up.
His last evening, a slight, moist-skinned officer was talking to another, heavier, pouch-faced, dark. Suddenly they took notice of Hal. Earlier in the week the one who reminded him of Gib had thrust on him the end of a box of peppermint fondants—marked “carminative.” Tonight the pouchy-faced one said:
“I say—you, Private, what’s your name?”
“Greenwood, 6904 Greenwood, sir.”
“Right, Greenwood.” He turned a second, then: “Have a cigar, old chap,” he said to Hal. “Ever tried one?”
Hal said, “I don’t smoke, sir.” He added, “Thank you.” Damn you, he thought. Suddenly angry.
“Hungry then? You look lean and damned hungry. I say, what about a biscuit and a bit of Stilton? Know Stilton?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Didn’t work in a grocer’s shop by any chance?”
“That’s Varley, sir—”
“Didn’t ask who—all right. No, don’t go, Greenwood. This, look at this, have a bit on toast. Pâté de foie gras de Périgord, with truffles. Food for civilized chappies. Treat for you, Greenwood, eh? Well, answer. Better than cowheel and tripe, eh? Never seen, tasted, it before, have you?”
“Yes, sir. No, sir.” He said it wearily. It must have been eight, nine weeks since he last ate it. New Year. He felt humiliated.
After Lights Out that night he found himself weeping, as from somewhere deep, deep down.
Gus was the one he told first. Gus told the others. He didn’t come from a farm at all. Hadn’t been staying with his Auntie Olive, didn’t even really talk like he’d been talking. He was someone quite else, from somewhere quite else, which was home. Which he suddenly, desperately desired and needed.
If he’d thought and feared that after all this time, his pals might (rightly) be angry with him, it wasn’t like that at all. Maybe it was too late and some link had been forged: those first weeks of change in all their lives, beginnings of shared experience, reaching out into the future. Perhaps that was the reason. But they didn’t mind. They were delighted. It was their “open” secret.
His Nibs.
Bert said only, “What’d you want to fib about Greenwood’s?”
“I don’t know anyone that’s of it,” Hal said. “There’s a cousin, I think, that I’ve never met—”
“That’ll be Mr. Walter. Mr. Walter, he was round at Xmas. Tall man, big man, heavy. Balding.”
Lord Marmaduke, his Nibs.
“Heck, they’ll make you a officer,” Gus said, “a officer. One of them.” Bert told him that he’d been bad not to think of his Mam. Snowy said the same.
“She knows I’m safe—”
“She’ll want to hear, though, will your mother.”
“I don’t want to be an officer,” he said. It was something he could not imagine, or rather could imagine too well. For every Gib there would be ten like the teasing two he had met on Jankers.
6904 Private H Greenwood alias his Nibs, alias Lord Marmaduke, to be known henceforth as Marmaduke.
He didn’t tell the others too much about his home. Especially not about matters such as the Stones Room and the Diamond Waterfall.
The days ran one into the other. So much to learn. Bull. Everything shone. He was good at that. He had a Lee Enfield and did rifle practice, and was good at that too. The high-ups spoke of making Snowy a lance corporal.
The weather became so bad there was little they could do outdoors. Indoors, bayonet practice made him sick. He was no longer so sure of what he would do to the Hun. Sarge bawled at them all, but especially Hal, for halfheartedness.
Snowy said about the bayoneting that if you could spear a sausage over the fire, you could manage that. But Gus said he hadn’t been counting on eating a Hun.
In the middle of March a married man in the squad, three beds down, went on leave. His home was in Nottingham. Hal gave him a letter to post from there. In it he said he was sorry, because he was, but that he was well and happy and had made friends. “I shan’t go abroad without telling you, or seeing you. I don’t expect anyway that it’ll be for quite a while.” He wondered still why he hugged his secret. It wasn’t likely they could get him out now, however they tried. An oath was an oath, in whichever of his accents he’d sworn it.
He didn’t say anything about coming home, although he’d decided he’d go there the first time he had proper leave. He had had a weekend pass already which he had spent at Gus’s home. He’d visited Bert’s home and met Winnie, and Snowy’s family, who lived next door.
Meanwhile at the barracks, he could amuse them. They found him amusing, their clown.
“Give us your Fräulein, Marmaduke. Listen to his Nibs now. Fuck Von Kluck.”
“Give us the Sarge talking to his missus. Now, Sarge’s missus talking to Sarge…. Better than pierrots last summer, Scarborough—”
“Good as a night at the Empire.”
“Don’t push your luck after Lights Out…. Mild and bitter twice, once down, once up. Watch out for Sarge.”
“04 Greenwood—I didn’t hear you. … 04 Greenwood. Do you hear me? You’d soon find it if there was hair round it.”
24
The letter, which had traveled through Holland and was over three months old, reached Alice in the May of 1916 when she was already in France. It had been stamped by the censor. She wondered what he had made of it, that, to her, so familiar round yet spiky hand, more used to German than to modern scri
pt. The letter was in English, but the recognizable confused English of Fräulein in one of her emotional states. Alice could see the great face distorted, collapsed with distress.
She began to read. And as she did so, shocked, part of her thought, But of course …
All the day now I am thinking of Family Firth, please I don’t understand how I lived among you with my wickedness which was not being punished. That sad day when the God of War struck our two countries, I was trying very hardly to make my confession. I was not able. Now, it is God who punishes.
It is I who take the rubies and emeralds and other matters from your home. (I did not wish this knowledge where and how the keys are being kept.) In my great despair concerning my beloved Augustin, I listened to the Evil One. Und he speaks, Alice, with such a voice that it made for me a command: Save Augustin!
I cannot speak even yet of the journey I have taken home after and of how every man was for me a police, so afraid I was. I never speak to Augustin of this—a life full of worries such as he has, it was not for me to make it more full.
These jewels, I sold them, and it made no difficulty. And I was happy, yes, even though so wicked—because there was so much gold for him, and he isn’t going to prison.
Then I did not sleep any nights until I have a letter and learn that you find the stones are gone, but no man has arrestation for it. This suspicion of the boy from the farm … Such persons are used to these things. I hear when I return in the month of January that all is for now forgotten. I believe then in God’s hand, because Augustin works now a serious man—it means from bad I have been bringing good.
But I cannot forget So when suddenly I have learned that because of our Kaiser I must leave you—it is not for me bearable. I know then I must tell you all I was thinking they shall put me in English prison to be punished. Und after, again we are friends once more.
Excuse me that I write in this confusion, I am not in good health and have some “woman trouble” so that I am going to the hospital here. But now because I make confession and ask that you please forgive the wicked thing I do in your house, I ask also God that He forgives me—and that He takes away the worst punishment.
Augustin is in Russia. Yes! Such a man, thirty-five years of age— he was already Oktober ’14 in the army—Why dear Gott does he do this when they have not asked for the ones of this age? But He will protect him now I have confessed and pay this debt.
Some of the writing was illegible, the paper tear-stained. Tears from that great, inexhaustible source. “Fräulein’s fountains,” as Hal had called them— or was it Gib? It did not matter, except that it belonged to the far-off days. We made jokes then, she thought.
As of course they did now. But differently—in defiance of this war which already had altered their lives beyond any return. Crowded events of the last twenty months—with their twin peaks of distress: disappearance of Hal, Gib’s departure for the Dardanelles …
She had found those early months of the war frustrating. Gib, although still in England, was away training. Belle Maman was preoccupied turning The Towers into a hospital, and Papa was suddenly so busy he had time for no one. Not only would he be taking care of the hospital administration, but he was also chairman of the War Aid Committee, on the board of the Local Aid Committee and the Recruiting Committee, as well as helping administer the Belgian Relief Fund. There’d been, too, the arrival in the village of Belgian refugees: Teddy settling down to learning French, both formally and informally, but seeming to be everywhere, wanting always to be “helpful.”
For Alice, who would like really to have been on one of Papa’s committees, there was to be work in the hospital. Belle Maman had assured her of this, even consulting her in matters of organization.
So far, though, her life had been ridiculous bandaging parties: rolling bandages, or unrolling them in order to encase healthy people like mummies. Too much time was spent traveling to and from these parties, which ended up often as social occasions. In the autumn as the news worsened, when it became apparent that not only would life not be normal by Christmas but that it would never be the same again, she took a First Aid Certificate. After that it seemed the best thing since she had decided (No, they had both decided) not to marry yet—that she should become a nurse.
A VAD. “Victim Always Dies,” Hal told her, having read it somewhere. There was a little teasing generally. Gib was neither approving nor disapproving. A little admiring, perhaps.
So by November it was Gib in the south of England, she at a hospital in York. From her window she could see soldiers drilling out on the near frozen grass. In early December they left for France, and as it was a free period, she went with other nurses to see them off at the station. She’d grown over the weeks to think of them as “her” soldiers. That night as she undressed for bed she found herself sobbing.
She knew that she worried about Gib. That every soldier she saw, most especially those she nursed, was a reminder. Khaki, hospital pajamas, hospital blue—it made no matter. Once Gib left the safety of England how would she dare to breathe by day, sleep by night?
Fortunately he seemed in no hurry to go. He’d said to her once or twice,
“I don’t know why some chaps make such a fuss—when we’re needed, they’ll use us soon enough. Until then, best to learn all one can.” He wrote to her that Vesey had a commission with the Sherwood Foresters, while Saint had surprised them all by choosing the sea, and was now in the RNVR.
She wrote daily to Gib, managing to see him once during her three months in York. In early February she got a place in a London hospital, together with her friend Marjorie Penruddock. (She found the plump, always smiling, red-headed girl, eight years her junior, a mixed blessing. From the first day she had thought Alice quite wonderful. “You never get things wrong, Miss Firth.”)
The girls she nursed with knew Alice was promised in marriage. They assumed that she was waiting for the first convenient opportunity to have the ceremony. But she knew that she, that both of them, were right not to marry yet, with the world as it was, the war going so badly, so much uncertainty. (Had not Gib himself remarked, “I can’t think it’s right to bring children into the world, just now.” But such matters, having babies, she did not want even to think about.) Marriage was difficult enough in a peaceful, predictable world. She had only to remember what her own mother had suffered. How badly Belle Maman had behaved…. Even for those who truly loved each other, were there not pitfalls?
Within a few weeks of her arrival in London, she heard the news of Hal. Everyone was sympathetic, knew someone who had a son, a brother, a cousin who had done just that. But in most of the stories the boy had come home to confess what he had done, to be forgiven, to be supported. Hal had not merely joined up, he had run away—without trace.
Belle Maman’s distress, the frantic letter to Alice, the War Office called upon to help. Papa’s friends. The searches promised for a “Firth, HRF.” She could not understand how those same strings, so easily pulled for her, now seemed useless. Worry, desperation, and finally anger. A letter from him. At last, his return. His first leave at home.
She herself had been terrified—as those years ago when he had come back screaming from the scene of Jack’s death. What would become of him? Wouldn’t he be, if nothing else, desperately homesick? He who had never been away to school. And those other worse fears of the family—that he might simply have disappeared? Fallen among thieves. An innocent abroad. Robbed, murdered, who knew what?
In York, she had had time to think. Now, in London, working in the military extension of one of the big teaching hospitals, she did not so much postpone thought as find it crowded out by activity.
She was completely unimportant. Nurse Firth and Miss Firth of The Towers were two different persons. Nurse Firth was one cog in a giant wheel. She discovered that in many ways she preferred that. All those years of being an alone child…. She slept now in a dormitory with the thinnest of partitions separating her from her fellow nurses. Alm
ost every minute of her day ordered, prearranged—and shared.
She was good at the work, certainly good enough to pass muster. I must be more practical than I realized, she told herself. And sharp: perhaps it was an advantage to be sharp—here it meant alert, quick-thinking, anticipating wants, needs.
Before all this she would never have believed she would like being teased. But when a boy, no older she would have sworn than Hal, said to her, “My sister’s a VAD too, Victim Always Dies—only I prefer Very Artful Darlings. Are you artful or just a darling?” “I’m a darling,” she told him in her crispest voice.
She nursed officers, probably, she thought, because she wasn’t obviously pretty or even very young. In fact, not likely to flirt. During her second week, a convoy of wounded had arrived. In the nonstop nursing that followed, she discovered about herself many new things, hidden strengths. Where she’d expected to be squeamish or shocked—she was neither. She could do anything, however intimate, for any of them. She saw a naked man for the first time, and realized she’d been afraid of that, for years. Now when it happened, in a setting of bedpans, dressings, pain, dependency—it did not matter.
It was the wounds that frightened her the most, although she would never have allowed her fear to show. Bad enough in themselves—flesh and bone were no match for all that flying metal, sheer weight of weaponry—they were made even worse by the fearful infections that were so common a sequel. These were not the clean wounds of the Boer War, from fighting on sandy soil (oh, those easy heroic days of With the Flag to Pretoria when in their imaginings Gib’s Galloper cousin thundered across the veldt), but rather wounds quickly infected by bacteria from rich plowland. The sight, the smell (above all the smell), the suffering became commonplace. She had seen nothing of this in York—she who had never so much as dealt with a sink of dirty dishes now handled flesh that suppurated, green, black, blue. Often her own arms and hands would be covered in the pus that poured out and poured out. This wasn’t the lifeblood, warm and red, the “wine of youth” of which people spoke and wrote so romantically, so carelessly. In her mind, this disgusting, stinking pus stood for all the war had now become.
The Diamond Waterfall Page 26