Today, of course, we know the truth. We have the memoirs and the letters, testimony to what a horror France was, the rats and the lice and the severed limbs flying. Things that those of us who were not there have no right, no license, to describe. And we also know what an outrageous waste it was (“wastage” was the bureaucratic term for death in the battlefield), and how stupid the war was in conception and practice, and how stupidly we played it.
At the time, though, even as the rationalist in me tried to keep in mind the delusive purpose of the propaganda, the sentimentalist took pleasure and sometimes comfort in the notion that the war was a sort of jolly game. “All great fun,” as Rupert Brooke once put it. Nor did it help when Brooke waxed poetic, in his letters, about bathing with the “naked, superb” men in his regiment. Of course, Brooke could feel himself naked and superb in his own right, which I never could. Still, the very idea of bathing naked with a corps of handsome youths—I cannot pretend that it did not excite me. As a boy I had devoured tales of battle and glory and victory. I was a little in love with young Prince Harold. When he took the arrow in the eye at Hastings, I longed to have been there with him, to have ministered to his wounds and cradled him in my arms. I used to have a very strong erotic fantasy—I think it was the fantasy in which I indulged the first time I touched myself with carnal intent—that I was lying injured on a battlefield, my clothes somehow half torn away, and two officers, one a doctor, lifting me onto a stretcher and carrying me into a tent, where they proceeded to strip away the clothes that remained, until I was naked … The fantasy never progressed beyond this moment. What would happen next I could not imagine. And now, in the first years of the war, this fantasy returned, more powerful than ever, perhaps because I had had, in the intervening years, experiences that allowed me to extend the vision beyond the moment when my clothes were stripped off, to the one where the doctor leaned over to kiss me, and beyond that as well …
Somehow I dreamed, even gloried in, the possibility of my own death. When I read the lists of the Cambridge dead that the Cambridge Magazine published, I tried to insert my name among those of the men from Trinity, all of whom, of course, I had known, at least by sight, and some of whom I had taught. Hardy between Grantham and Heyworth. How lovely that sounded! Grantham, Hardy, Heyworth.
And the names of the regiments! Only England could make poetry from the naming of its regiments: 7th Seaforth Highlanders, 1st Royal Welsh Fusiliers, 9th Sherwood Foresters, presumably with Robin Hood in command and Friar Tuck and all the other members of that merry band.
You see, the action, not to mention the grisliness, was in France. Back at Trinity, the nights were quiet enough for dreams. I tried to convince myself that I appreciated the silence, when in truth I missed the drunken singing that used to wake me, and the philosophical arguments under my windows, the morose declarations uttered—as only the young can utter them—with rhapsodic joy. For this had always been the flavor of the first weeks once the term started. One could revel with the young in their newfound freedom, the freedom to stay up late, and argue, and say, “When youth ends, life ends. I shall kill myself when I turn thirty.” (The voicer of this particular sentiment, I happen to know, didn't make it past nineteen.) I even missed those rituals I'd once claimed to despise: the bloods invading the rooms of the aesthetes, breaking their crockery and throwing the pieces down into New Court. For now there were no bloods—the hale and hearty were off fighting—and few aesthetes, for many of these were fighting, too, and of those who remained, none seemed to have the heart to sing or argue.
Early that winter I was sitting, one morning, reading in my rooms, with Hermione on my lap, awaiting Ramanujan. I looked up and saw that the first snow was falling. And somehow its innocence, its seeming obliviousness to the condition of the world, moved me and saddened me. For possibly the snow was falling also on the riven farmland of France and Belgium, falling into the trenches in which the soldiers waited for what might be their last sunset. And it was falling on Nevile's Court, to be gazed upon by the injured lying on their camp beds. And it was falling in Cranleigh, where my mother, half out of her mind, watched it through her bedroom window, and my sister through the window of a classroom in which uniformed girls were painting a vase of flowers. Lifting Hermione off my lap, I got up and walked to the window. It was still warm enough outside that the snow didn't stick; it melted instantly when it touched the ground. And there, standing in the court below me, was Ramanujan. The flakes melted on his face and ran down his cheeks. He stood there like that for a full five minutes. And then I realized that this must have been the first time in his life that he had seen snow.
He came upstairs and we went to work. I cannot say exactly what we were working on. It's so hard to remember with Ramanujan, for he was always busy with two or three things at once, or he had had another dream, and had another oddity to share. Were we, for instance, already on to the theory of round numbers? This was the sort of thing in which he could lose himself for days at a time, counting through all the numbers from 1 to 1,000,000 and then ordering them by roundness. “1,000,000, Hardy, is very round,” he said to me one day. “It has 12 prime factors, whereas if you take all the numbers between 999,991 and 1,000,010, the average is only 4.” I liked to imagine him sitting in his rooms, making lists like this. Yet he was doing much more than that. He was laying the groundwork for the asymptotic formula for roundness that we would later perfect.
By the middle of October, the last of the wounded had been moved out of Nevile's Court. New hospital facilities were being built on the cricket grounds of Clare and King's colleges—one of the best pitches in town, I noted ruefully at the time.
Still, I visited the hospital. The first time, I took Ramanujan with me. The wards stretched for three-quarters of a mile, ten blocks of them, with sixty beds each. What was strangest about them was that they only had three walls each. In each one, where the fourth wall should have been, there was open sky, clouds, lawn.
I asked one of the sisters why the walls were missing. “It's for the fresh air,” she said, rubbing her arms for warmth. “Fresh air blows away germs. Also headache and lassitude.”
“And what happens when it rains?”
“There are blinds. Though if I'm to tell the truth, they don't work very well. Not that it matters. These men are used to sleeping outdoors, and under far worse conditions.”
Not far off, a soldier started wailing. His words were unrecognizable. Perhaps he was Belgian. The sister went off to tend to him, and I looked at the men, most of whom were wrapped in cocoons of blanket and bandage. How would they stay warm in the winter? I wondered. Or perhaps that was the point. Perhaps the thinking was that, should they be made too comfortable, they might be less willing to return to the front. I could imagine such an idea gaining credence in military circles.
Afterward Ramanujan expressed his bewilderment at the missing wall. “Tuberculosis patients are treated the same way,” I told him— having no idea, of course, what was to come. “Fresh air! Fresh air! The English are great believers in the healing powers of fresh air.”
“But what happens when it rains?”
“Then they will get wet.”
That afternoon, on target, it rained. Great sheets of rain came down. Somehow I could not sit in my room, watching the deluge, so I took my umbrella, the one I had stolen from Gertrude, and went back to the ward. The sister was now fighting the blinds, which rattled and flapped in the wind. At her feet, rainwater pooled. She had put on galoshes. When the wind gusted, shards of rain splattered the men lying nearest the blinds, some of whom cursed or laughed, while others lay still, seemingly oblivious to the lashings.
The quietest of them—I noticed him only then—was a lad with dark blond hair and green eyes. Hair only slightly darker than that on his head tufted out from his nightshirt. I stepped gingerly to his bedside. “May I?” I asked, opening the umbrella over his head.
“I don't think I should thank you,” he said.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because opening an umbrella indoors is bad luck,” he said.
“Not this umbrella,” I said. “This is a lucky umbrella. And besides, we aren't exactly indoors. We're sort of … on the threshold, aren't we? Between outdoors and indoors.”
“Are you a don?”
“Yes. How did you know?”
“You talk like a don.”
“Do I?”
“All sorts of daft things.”
I was pleased that he considered me young enough to tease. I asked if I could sit with him a bit.
“There's no law against it,” he said. And I sat down in the chair next to his bed, being careful, all the while, not to let the umbrella sway.
“What's your name?” I asked.
“Thayer,” he said. “Infantry. Birmingham. Took a hunk of shrapnel in the leg near Wipers.”
“Wipers?”
“You know, in Belgium.”
“Ah, Ypres.”
“Yes, Ee-pray”
“Are you in pain?”
“Not the leg. I don't feel anything in the leg. They say it's fifty-fifty if I lose it.” Suddenly he looked up at me. “Is not feeling pain a bad sign? Does it mean I should consider the leg gone? Because Lord knows you can't get a straight answer out of anyone around here.”
“I wish I could tell you,” I said. “But I'm only a mathematician.”
“I was never any good at long division.”
“Neither was I.” I said this without even thinking what effect the words might have on him. He laughed.
“So are you in pain anywhere else? Besides your leg, I mean.”
“It's just that my head aches. A sort of pounding. Ever since the explosion.” He pointed to a bowl next to the bed, in which a wet cloth lay. “The sister drenches this with hot water and puts it on my forehead and that seems to help. Could you ask her if she'll do it now? It's got cold.”
“Of course I will,” I said. And I got up to look for the sister. But she was still doing battle, valiantly and hopelessly, with the blinds, a struggle from which she would be called away intermittently by a patient's yelp.
I glanced around the ward. There were one or two other sisters about, tending to patients. Then I noticed a stove in the corner. On one of the hobs was a pot of water from which steam rose.
“Just a minute,” I said. And I leaned the umbrella, as best I could, on the chair, so that it might continue to keep him even a little dry. “I'll be right back,” I said. And then I took the cloth from the bowl and carried it over to the stove, where I dipped it in the hot water and wrung it out.
“Here we are,” I said, returning. “May I?”
He lifted his chin with a kind of knightly forbearance. Very cautiously I brushed back his hair. Then I took the cloth and draped it over his brow. He shuddered and gave out an audible sigh of relief.
All that afternoon I sat with him. He talked to me, not, I sensed, because he took any great interest in me, but because he had things to say and I was someone to listen. I must be honest about this. He talked about the front line, and the rats that were as big as dogs, and the curious fact that one almost never saw the enemy—“never saw Jerry” was how he put it—but always felt his sinister proximity. Somehow you knew he was there, in his own trench, not two hundred yards away, and when, on occasion, some sign of life would emerge from the other side of No Man's Land—when one heard a bit of singing, or smelled food frying—it came as a shock.
“What kind of singing?”
“Jerry songs. Only once—it was the oddest thing—I heard a radio playing, and it was a British program. A comedy. And they were laughing at it.”
All the while the rain came down. Men moaned and wailed and asked—begged—for cigarettes. Every twenty minutes or so I would take his cloth and warm it in the hot water. The bother was, during those intervals when I was away at the stove, the umbrella, propped up against my chair, kept falling over. Rain would mat his hair and soak his blankets. I'd do my best to dry him. Then I'd sit again and try to keep the umbrella steady, even though doing so made my arm ache. You see, I was determined that no drop of water should land on him, other than the water from the cloth on his head.
Finally the storm let up. The exhausted sister was now able to remove her galoshes and retire for a cup of tea. Thayer stretched; his eyes fluttered. At that moment I would have done anything to protect him. I would have stayed, holding up the umbrella, all night. But I feared that my prolonged presence might be thought unseemly, either by the sister or by Thayer himself. So I picked up the umbrella and said, “Well, I'd best be going.” And much to my surprise, he asked me if I would return again tomorrow. And if I might, before I left, wet the cloth, one more time, and lay it on his brow.
I said that of course I would—both wet the cloth and come back tomorrow. And I did come back. Every day for two weeks I came back. We talked and talked. He asked me to tell him what kind of mathematics I did, and I tried to explain Riemann to him, and, much to my amazement, he grasped the essentials. Or we talked cricket. (He shared my admiration for Shrimp Levison-Gower.) Or he told me about his mother and his sisters, and his friend Dick Tarlow, to whom one of his sisters had been engaged, and how, at Wipers, Dick Tarlow had been blown to bits, and how much he missed him, and how much his sister missed him.
Thayer did not, in the end, lose his leg. Instead I arrived, one afternoon, at the hospital, bearing a gift for him—the first gift I had dared bring, a copy of Wells's The Time Machine—only to be told by the sister that he had been discharged that very afternoon, and sent to his people in Birmingham, for a few weeks' rest before going back to the front. A month or so later he sent me one of those horrible form letters that the government issued to the soldiers in those days, with the line checked off that read “I am being sent down to the base. Letters follow at first opportunity.” Only his signature at the bottom—J. R. Thayer—indicated any connection between the form and the lad who had filled it out.
That winter was famously cold—so cold that I could not bear to visit the hospital anymore, for fear of witnessing too much suffering and feeling hopeless at my own inability to ease it. This included my own suffering. Thayer, at least, I had helped make comfortable, though I never touched any part of him besides his forehead, on which I laid, time and again, that warm, wet cloth. It was for his sake, those days, that I prayed for rain. Every morning I would rise and beg God to bring rain. Sometimes He would oblige, which annoyed me. I worried that He was onto the game. Most days, though, the clouds never broke, and once or twice the sun even shone through the vast space where the south wall of the ward should have been, raising the spirits of the soldiers and giving some cause to smile. On such days I was grateful for the umbrella, which I was able to rest, closed, against the wall next to Thayer's bed. Closed, it had brought luck. Open— who knows what it had brought?
I must confess that I fear myself, now, ever finding out.
5
IN MARCH 1915, Russell sends him a note saying that he has invited D. H. Lawrence to visit Trinity. Would Hardy join them, after dinner, for sherry in Russell's rooms?
Most of the officers have left by now, so he goes that evening to Hall. A man he supposes to be Lawrence sits across from Russell and next to Moore. Hardy is too far down the high table to overhear their conversation. Still, he can tell it's strained. There are long silences, during which the eupeptic Moore eats with relish, while Lawrence merely stares at his plate, a morose expression on his oblong face. Although Hardy hasn't read any of his books, he's heard much about the writer: about his childhood in a coal-mining town near Nottingham, and the years he spent as an elementary schoolteacher, and his recent marriage to a zaftig German divorcée, the daughter of a Baron, six years his senior. And what must he make of these Trinity men, sawing at their meat while Byron and Newton and Thackeray look on? Do they seem ridiculous in their gowns? Is he overawed? Is he repulsed?
As requested, Hardy arrives at Russell's rooms around nine. A few others
are there: Milne—former editor of the Granta, now at Punch— as well as Winstanley, who makes it his business to know more about the history of Trinity than anyone else, and is currently pontificating to Lawrence about the building of the Wren Library in 1695. Moore is there too, and Sheppard (without Madam Cecil, thank goodness), waiting his turn to address the author.
What impresses Hardy most about Lawrence is his gauntness. Gauntness like that you have to work at. With his big head and hunched shoulders, he might be an underfed gargoyle. His hair is thick and brown, and looks as if it has been cut the old-fashioned way, by placing a bowl over the head, which is strangely shaped, thick and protuberant at the brow, then tapering into a chin the sharpness of which his beard, cut to a point, only accentuates. He doesn't speak much. He seems to be listening very intently—at the moment to Russell, who has just received, by post, an article that Edmund Gosse wrote for the Edinburgh Review at the beginning of the war. “Listen to this,” Russell says. “‘War is the great scavenger of thought. It is the sovereign disinfectant, and its red stream of blood is the Condy's Fluid that cleans out the stagnant pools and clotted channels of the intellect.’” He throws the review down. “Have any of you ever actually seen a bottle of Condy's Fluid? I had to ask my bedmaker. She showed me one. Purplish stuff. She says she uses it to ‘get out the odors.’ And this from a man who hasn't left London in ten years! What does he know? What do any of us know?”
“War is not fine,” Lawrence says. “This abstract hate of a fairy-tale German ogre—there are finer things to live and die for.”
Then he is quiet again. Does the mention of the ogre owe to the influence of the German wife? From what Hardy has heard, she left her first husband, also an Englishman, to marry Lawrence.
“Gosse is a shit,” says Russell. “And Eddie Marsh—even worse. Selling this bill of goods just so he can dress up and go with Churchill to parties. These men are insects, obscene, venturing out from their crevices into the darkness, crawling over corpses, polluting them with their slime.”
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