The Opened Cage

by S. C. Howe

  Barratt found Tom later, leaning against the trench wall, with his eyes shut. It looked as though he was asleep on his feet. There was lethargy about Fielder, Barratt noticed, which had come through his initial helpfulness on first arriving back, like a dark stain beneath white. He shook his head. Why was he even remotely surprised? This war ground on, motiveless and without apparent direction. It was only by sheer fluke they had survived this long and he knew the law of chance was running out. Leave Fielder to his sleep, however uncomfortably snatched, he thought, and went down into his dugout and sat, whisky at his elbow, in an old armchair, someone – no-one knew how – had dragged in there long ago. The other officers were asleep or on duty, but they were virtually boys, and Barratt knew he had to keep quiet.

  The next few days in the trench were sunny and unusually quiet. A few of the men hand-washed their shirts and hung them up on upturned rifles, covering their torsos with buttoned-up tunics. Some privates lay supine on more intact areas of fire steps while the sergeants tried to invent things to occupy them, and Barratt merely smiled disinterestedly and told them to leave the men be. He brought a hard wooden chair up from the dugout and sat in the sun smoking a cigarette, and beckoned for Tom to sit down. Taking the proffered cigarette, Tom sat on a bit of collapsed fire step by the side of the chair.

  ‘So tell me about Deerman,’ Barratt said.

  Tom’s expression fell a little. ‘He’s pretty beaten up, to be honest, Sir. When I left him, he still had to use two walking sticks.’

  Barratt pulled a face. ‘You were both pretty wrecked when we found you,’ he said.

  ‘You found us?’

  ‘Yes, with a few others,’ he said, and Tom sensed how he was guarding what he was saying. ‘Miller took the main force of the blast.’

  Tom tried to remember – all he could see was the horror of Miller’s demise.

  ‘I’m just glad Joss’s got the farm to be involved in,’ Tom said.

  Got the farm, thought Barratt, and his grammatically-correct tic, which had followed him since early teens, made him wince. Why on earth did it matter how Fielder spoke? It was crazy, sitting here surrounded by filth and near death, worrying about grammar! Fielder could come out with sentences that were ungainly, arse-end backwards, as his men would say, but so what? He dragged on his cigarette and then took in what Fielder had actually said, ‘Farm? What farm?’

  ‘He’s bought a farm and I’ve chipped in. We’re going to make a go of it when – if – this ever ends,’ Tom explained.

  Brave, Barratt thought. If he meant… But perhaps he just meant farming.

  ‘Yes, it’s only a small farm,’ Tom was saying. ‘But it will be rather nice to bring something back to life, rather than scraping what’s left off the surface.’

  Barratt widened his eyes. ‘Well, good luck to you,’ he said, and then realised he believed that neither of them would survive the war.

  Four o’clock and still the post had not arrived. Tom drummed his fingers on the pack he had in his lap, realised how much the letter from Joss, arriving with precision every second or third day, kept him going. He moved to the other side of this trench. The sun had dried the bottom of the trench out and so, mercifully, repressed some of the more immediate smells, but the stench of putrefaction was worse than ever out in no man’s land; it drifted over every so often, so strong he could taste it and his stomach clamped hard against vomiting.

  Six thirty. Tom stared at the trench wall only a few feet in front of him. The shadows from the pieces of wrecked artillery in the waste above grew long and the amber light was intense and shone into his face as he stood, propped against the revetted wall. Still no post. No nothing. Walking quietly to the meal queue, he avoided speaking to anyone because he knew his voice sounded hopelessly flat. Somehow he was going to have to get through another evening, another night, with time edging forward slowly, painfully slowly, before there was hope of another postal delivery. His life seemed to have shrunken to that routine. His hands shook when he held out his mess tin for the unappetizing evening gloop and he nearly dropped it. The private ladling the stuff out looked at him with narrowed eyes, but he wasn’t surprised, there was nothing new out here anymore.

  There came muffled exchanges in the pitch black, and then swearing. Then something thudded onto Tom who was sitting propped against the parapet wall, his greatcoat unrolled and over him like a makeshift tent. The nights had started to turn cold. There were whispers and demands of Shut It! from men disturbed from scraps of sleep in trench-side holes. Tom’s eyes snapped open.

  ‘Something for you, there,’ said a young private Tom didn’t recognise. He gazed down at the parcel in his lap and suddenly he was awake and unwrapping the box, almost laughing with relief. Inside, there was food, Player’s Navy Cut, a dark khaki jumper, woollen scarf, thick knitted socks, balaclava, chocolate, several oranges, and most of all, a long letter from Joss, signed also with an untidy paw print.

  ‘From your girl, is it?’ said the youth, clearly interested in the chocolate.

  ‘From my sweetheart.’

  ‘Oh, ah...,’ There was an inflection of boredom with the subject while the youth’s eyes locked onto the chocolate wrapper. Tom gave it to him and he loped away into the night.

  The sun continued to beat overhead, so they itched and sweated into their uniforms. They craved water but it was tainted with the chemical taste of sterilisers, and was always warm. And, like everything else except death, it was in short supply. The weight Tom had put on back in England had gone and now his body was sinewy but strong; at night he used to absent-mindedly run his fingers up and down his ribs, like a stick against railings. The narrowness of the trenches started to eat away at his mind, so at night he would push with his booted feet until he could push no more, just wanting this narrow trough he was in to disappear; it was like sitting in your own grave. He wondered how long before he went raving mad.

  The next night came news of a German offensive slashing in from the north, and all sectors were told to be alert. They waited. Barratt had orders to send over a raiding party to see if the enemy was building up its reinforcements along their line. Since holes had been blown in the wire, the Germans had put up a board with ‘Hello Tommy! Come for tea?’, written in big white letters. But even this didn’t change the plans of a general back at battalion HQ who was more insistent they should ‘Show the darned Hun!’, so the raiding party went forward into nests of machine guns. Everyone who survived afterwards said it was only a warning-off, rather than a counter-attack, for only a few rounds had been spent and no bombs were thrown, yet the young men had forced on, to the incredulity of the opposing gunners. A gun to your back and a gun to your front it seemed. Not that the gun was shown by Barratt or his officers. No, Barratt had sat alone in the mud after the raid and wept; and the general back at base thought, all told, it hadn’t been such a bad show.

  On clear-mooned nights, the sort with night-time sunshine, the bearers could see easily, which also meant that the Germans in the opposing trenches could have picked them off within seconds, but they didn’t. Another raid. Another slaughter. Tom had given up trying to find any meaning in the greater plan of what they were doing...We’re here, because we’re here... Each time he tried to save as many of the broken men as he could; he seemed the old man of the bearer team now, as new recruits came in to replace those whose bodies had given out or been killed. That night he was with the newest bearer, a boy of no more than 16 or 17 who was painfully on edge. If he really wasn’t of conscription age, Tom thought, Why the hell was he putting himself through all this? A flare went up from the German line. Tom nodded over as if to thank them for their help. This war was absurd. There was definite talk now in the ranks that an end was in sight, and probably as much on the ‘enemy’ line. So why the red-tabs had to keep ordering these suicidal raids was beyond him... A gun to your back, a gun to your front...

  Tom knelt down, felt the pulse in the neck of a young private they had just eased onto a s
tretcher. There was none. ‘Take him off,’ he said, raising the front end of the stretcher.

  ‘You can’t do that!’ the young bearer shouted. ‘We got to bring him back in.’

  ‘We’ll bring him back in at the end,’ Tom said patiently. ‘We might be able save another man in the time it takes to get him back to the line.’ He rolled the soldier onto his front.

  ‘We can’t!’ the young bearer, Mitchell, wailed.

  Tom caught his arm. ‘I said leave it. We’ll come back for him at the end, all right?’

  Mitchell backed away a little. ‘You bastard,’ he muttered. ‘Fucking bastard.’

  Tom pulled him forwards roughly with the stretcher. It was starting to get cold at nights. Whereas sweat made the solid ends of the stretcher poles slippery in the hot weather, cold made the skin over his knuckles split and sting, so he had tried wearing gloves, but they wouldn’t grip properly. Some of the bearers wound wire on to the pole handles to give purchase, but this bit into flesh, sometimes even drew blood. So they had settled on tying unused sandbags to the ends of poles, which helped a bit. When the clean bags were all used up, they used dirty ones, which were often wet, and then fingers almost froze onto the cloth. Mitchell had tried to use the stretcher halter at his end, but after this had twisted several times and nearly throttled him, had abandoned the idea. Several times, Mitchell’s knees had given way under their load and the soldier being stretchered had slithered into a shell hole or thudded backwards onto the ground. All the time Tom had kept his temper, remembering how clumsy and gauche he had once been and what unflappable patience Joss had displayed. But it was after they had heaved one casualty up and Mitchell had slipped in a slick of bloodied mud, and the stretcher had snatched against Tom’s weight and dragged viciously at the old shoulder wound, that he turned on Mitchell.

  ‘You’re going have to watch me more carefully!’ he snapped. ‘Work with me, not just on your own. Remember the training. Watch me as we walk on, watch the footing.’

  They clambered on, Mitchell desperately feeling for pot holes under the puddles, his legs so weak they seemed to drag against him. They came across another private who was sitting half upright, in full view of the enemy line. His breathing laboured, he reached up at Tom as he stooped down.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Tom murmured. ‘We’ve got you now. You’ll soon be on your way home. Can you open your mouth so I can give you something to take the pain away?’ He reached in his Red Cross shoulder bag for the morphine tablets, held him up straighter as the man drank fiendishly from the flask of water. ‘Careful now, try not to bolt it, otherwise you’ll choke and that’ll be painful.’ Tom looked up at Mitchell who put the morphine tablet in the soldier’s mouth. ‘Undo one of the field dressings and put it firmly on here,’ Tom directed, pointing to a gaping wound in the patient’s shoulder. ‘Now tape it on.’ He looked back at the man who was crying like a child and kept thanking them. ‘Shush...shush, now, it’s all right,’ Tom soothed. ‘You just try to relax and we’ll get you on the stretcher. And then I want you to go as limp as you can. You leave it to us to get you back safely, all right?’ Tom’s voice was low, velvety, and the injured soldier grabbed hold of his arm as they shuffled him onto the stretcher. With one heave, which fairly took Tom’s breath away and made Mitchell nearly buckle, they made their way over the mud, skirting large puddles and several corpses. All the time Tom spoke in his low, reassuring voice: ‘Just think, in a day or so you’ll be in a nice, clean bed, with a hot cup of tea... And where’s home?’ and so on. Mitchell lugged the back end of the stretcher in silence.

  When the young soldier had been safely delivered to the aid post, they were back out again in the moonlit mud. They worked in silence, Tom checking on the casualties. The next one was a man in his early thirties who was sitting quietly in the water of a shell hole. One of his arms hung, uselessly. He was smoking a cigarette in a cupped hand.

  ‘Do you want morphine tablet?’ Tom asked.

  ‘I suppose I’d better,’ said the man matter-of-factly.

  Mitchell opened another field dressing; put it over the seeping long gash, and the soldier held it in place. The man’s nonchalance clearly perturbed the young bearer who was trying not to look at the useless arm. Tom opened dressing after dressing and, at last, staunched the blood. It was only when they tried to get the man on the now blood- and gore-soaked stretcher did he sway and catch hold of Tom.

  ‘Sorry mate,’ he said, ‘gone all dizzy, like.’

  ‘It’s the blood-loss,’ Tom said. ‘You’ll feel better when you lie down.’

  The soldier lay calmly, gave a deep sigh of relief. ‘I thought I was a goner there.’

  Mitchell gave him a puzzled look, as he straightened his soaking legs.

  ‘Just thought me time up like, and there was no use struggling. Thought as might as well go out with a coffin nail.’ He searched around for the packet of cigarettes but they were bobbing uselessly in the water.

  ‘I’ll get you one lit when we’re back at the aid post,’ Tom said. ‘It’ll be back for Blighty for you,’ he said, and Mitchell sensed the effort he was making to appear hopeful. ‘Have you got a family?’

  ‘Oh ay, the missus and two girls.’ The man smiled up. ‘Five and seven, and right little madams they are!’

  Tom laughed. ‘Well, they’ll certainly be glad to have their dad back.’

  ‘And the missus.’

  ‘Goes without saying.’

  It was as they were unloading him at the aid post, that the man gripped Tom’s arm hard. ‘Thank you, mate. I’d all as given up.’

  Tom patted him on the shoulder. ‘You make sure you get those girls of yours a nice present back in Blighty.’

  The man gave a short, friendly smile. ‘I will, mate. They keep going on about a dog. So I’m going to get them one each. And I’ll remember you two. What’s your first names?’

  ‘Tom.’

  ‘William.’

  ‘Better make sure they’re males then.’

  ‘Have a word at Base,’ Tom said, ‘there’s lots of dogs needing homes.’

  ‘I will mate, I will! We can all get better together!’ The soldier’s voice trailed away into the night as they went back out.

  Mitchell caught Tom’s eye. ‘Sorry about what I said earlier,’ he said sullenly.

  ‘It’s all right, but we have to make those decisions. No-one wants to, but we have to.’

  Later, as he sat in the dark, Tom thought back to this conversation and winced. It was as though Mitchell’s first wail had threatened to strip away the veneer of efficiency that helped him cope. Would these decisions – of who was left and who was saved – stain him for life? How could he ever know if he had made the right choices – ‘right’? What was ‘right’ about leaving a badly injured man, telling him you’d be back later and knowing he probably wouldn’t last until then? Wasn’t that betrayal, and of the worst kind? Who was he to make such a choice anyway? A bob-and-half-a-day-private, having to make the decision of who should live or die. He blew out his cheeks, began hacking at a piece of thread on his arm as the poisonous relief of numbers started edging out into his mind. Barratt sat down beside him on the fire step, offered him a cigarette; a perfectly dry Players – a treat! Tom sensed he had forgotten the restraint of rank in his obvious fatigue. ‘I sometimes wonder, Fielder...’

  ‘Sir?’ Tom shuffled awkwardly, gave a cursory look around to make sure no-one else was listening.

  ‘If I survive this,’ Barratt continued, ‘I may, if I’m lucky, go back to a dreary little accountancy job in Worcester. That is, of course, if I haven’t been ousted by the firm or it hasn’t gone into liquidation.’ He paused and gave a mirthless laugh. ‘“Liquidation” – it has a completely different meaning out here, doesn’t it? In some ways, it’s almost easier being out here. At least we’re identified...To hell with accountancy, Fielder! If I get back, I’m going to leave. Pack up my bags and clear off somewhere.’

  Fielder caught the hint o
f alcohol on his breath: whisky, or some sort of spirit. So that was how he coped.

  ‘What will you do, Sir?’ It was imperative Tom led him back to his rank before he said too much.

  At this, Barratt seemed to lose energy. ‘That’s something I still haven’t worked out.’ He paused. ‘I suppose you have to have some inkling of whom or what you are before you know that. And in 29 years I still haven’t a clue.’ Barratt turned to him. ‘Do you know what you want to do?’

  Tom felt an odd depression settling on him. Only yesterday they had been discussing the farm. ‘The farm. You know what I told you about.’

  ‘Oh yes...’ Barratt nodded and lost interest. This chap’s grammar was definitely getting worse. ‘Why that?’

  ‘Because of this...’ Tom waved his hand over the parapet. ‘It’s given me the certainty I want to restore things. Put things back.’

  Barratt eased himself up. ‘The only certainty that that has given me,’ he said, walking away, ‘is my own mortality, which I can do without.’

  The end of the war, when it came, was oddly surprising. It was a Monday morning and raining lightly when a runner pounded down the trench, shouting for Barratt, who had taken the note, then stepped back, as though not believing what he was reading. For another moment he stared blankly then sat down on the fire step.