If Then

by Matthew de Abaitua

  “You warned me not to give into them.”

  “So I did.”

  “What did Huxley tell you?” asks James.

  “He says that you glimpsed another life. That you are convinced that we are not really in the Dardanelles but are in fact in Sussex.”

  “It was a vivid impression. It does not interfere with my ability to carry out my duty.”

  “But you believe it to be more than an impression or a fancy?”

  “I’ve seen things.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Why are you and Father Huxley so interested in these visions?”

  Blore takes a swig from his water bottle.

  “You’re not the only one to have suffered them,” he says. “Huxley thinks it is in the nature of war to upset the normal order of our perceptions, and that we are reluctant to speak of the experience for fear of seeming mad.”

  “Father Huxley said he was thankful for the war.”

  “Yes, he told me that too. ‘Because it allows us to apprehend the true nature of our condition’. Now he may well be mad. That’s why the war suits him so well.”

  “What kind of visions have other soldiers had?”

  “I’ve seen some odd things on the operating table. It started with a lieutenant, who had almost the whole of his right frontal lobe blown out. A piece of shell about an inch square was lodged in his brain. I use a local anaesthesia on head cases rather than a general because if the patient can cough when ordered that helps extrude pulped brain. Now patients say odd things during brain surgery, and perhaps I should pay it no mind, but whenever I applied a magnetic charge, to collect shrapnel from the tissue, the lieutenant spoke in what sounded to me to be scientific formula. I asked Collinson to observe the phenomena and he made extensive notes. It was not gobbledygook, nor was it entirely explicable, not even to the professor, though he has discerned a consistency in the language which suggests a grammar.”

  Blore rubs at his face.

  “The lieutenant did not survive. And then the stretcher bearers brought in a more than average number of head cases from the Kiretch Tepe, wounds from a projectile that is quite different from a standard bullet. Always in the same part of the skull. The back of the head.”

  Instinctively, James reaches back to touch the ruckled scar of his own wound.

  “Yes, I have one of those too.” Blore puts his head forward so that James can see the scar on the back of his head. “The same part of the skull as yours, and a hole identical to the trepanning of the ancient skulls in the necropolis. That is just one of the facets of the anatomy of the skeletons we found that so intrigues me. Father Huxley is also keen to get back. Setting up an advanced dressing station on the ridge will allow us to continue with our duty and to retrieve material from the archaeological site.”

  “Won’t you be missed here?”

  “Some of the other MOs here are making a hobby of seeking out the wounded in the battlefield when we have a perfectly adequate supply of them at this station. They can come in and work these tents. They’ll live longer.”

  “Do you think all these head wounds are related?”

  Blore touches the scar on James’ head.

  “You are not the only one who remembers. I know you, James. Not from the army. And I’m scared of you. I don’t know why. But the thought of upsetting you makes something in my stomach cringe. That’s bloody peculiar, isn’t it? It’s not right that a doctor should be so afraid. At first I thought I might be dead, and that this is hell, but Huxley told me that I was being ridiculous.”

  “What do you remember?”

  “My operating theatre. It was underground, in a sort of stone icebox beneath the Institute. I hung a picture of the moon above the table so that the patients would have something to gaze at, and it was the moon as if seen close up, its valleys and mountains. Quite extraordinary. After work, I would return home to a village, to a small cottage with a green door. The village was owned by the lord of the manor. We came and went at his discretion. I remember a summer afternoon in the garden. I had dug out the weeds and trimmed a bay tree, and then burnt the cuttings in a pile. You arrived in the village inside a machine. A terrifying tall walking machine.”

  The doctor put his hand to his heart. “There. The fear again. I can feel it. You helped the lord clear the village of undesirables. We were all terrified of you because your face was so blank. My boy saw you on the village lawn, as tall as two houses. He called you the iron monster.”

  James nods.

  “You remember too?” asks Blore.

  “Firle,” says James. “That is the name of the village with the green doors.”

  * * *

  Under Blore’s direction, James prepares medical haversacks for the advanced dressing station.

  Barker Bill returns at noon. For Sergeant Hector’s disciplinary hearing, he demands an orderly room be set up on the beach. His adjutants choose a suitably imposing bush for this purpose. They set up a green canvas camp chair before a neat pile of bully crates that act as a table, and upon this table, they place a pencil, some papers and a copy of the King’s Regulations. James walks through the dune grass to observe the disciplinary hearing. The sole of his right boot has come away and the sand gets between his toes. His beard itches.

  The sergeant major calls the disciplinary hearing. Hector walks into the open part of the beach marked up as the orderly room, then stands to attention opposite Barker Bill. Barker Bill knocks Hector’s cap from his head and makes him re-enter carrying it. Hector walks back holding the cap. No, that is wrong also. The language of Barker Bill is tight and mechanical, as if a telegraph wire has been slid up his arse. The black orbs of his eyes strain and writhe under the pressure of barking his peculiar language, as if the human face cannot keep up with such fast-moving syllables, cannot contain such swift shifts between high and guttural notes. The sergeant major grasps Barker Bill’s meaning: a man does not simply stroll into the orderly room, he has to be marched. Even if the orderly room is nothing more than a chair, a crate and a suitably imposing bush, the accused must march into it. The sergeant major flinches at Barker Bill’s tirade and then he marches Hector into position: Right-turn. Quick-march. Ab-ou-t-turn. Hector almost walks into the bush. Halt!

  The sergeant-clerk reads the charges. By concentrating, James can tune into the telegraph language.

  “Coming on parade improperly dressed,” says the sergeant-clerk.

  “Bad example,” thunders Barker Bill. “No puttees! Anything to say?”

  Hector offers no defence. A severe reprimand is entered onto his crime sheet.

  Barker Bill orders their camp be moved a mile and a half along the shore to be nearer to the trenches. The stretcher bearers spend the next day under fire lugging supplies to new dugouts. But the lieutenant colonel is furious that the new location is so damn shabby and so the entire ambulance has to shift everything into an adjoining field. With the general back on the HMS Jonquil with his bad knee, the landing loses its way. Under physical and mental hardship, minds narrow and it becomes hard to concentrate. Every damn thing seems to be afflicted with the drift.

  The war will not end until all the earth’s bounty has been sacrificed to its bureaucracy: every lump of coal, every animal, every machine, every woman, every tree, every child will be collected, catalogued and reprocessed into prolonging the war until the armies are firing wooden shells filled with blood at one another, and when they run out, the combatants will take up the severed limbs of their fellow soldiers and use them as cudgels to beat one another’s brains out, and when that fails, they will take a handful of earth and push it into the mouth of the enemy, and when that fails, the last two combatants of the Great War will try to choke each other with their bodies, pushing their hands down the oesophagus of the enemy so that the enemy swallows the arm up to the elbow, then pushing the head in through the jaw until the last two soldiers form the Ouroboros, the cartwheel snake, rolling over the blasted earth as it consumes its own tail.
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  Private Brilliant finds the Wolseley Valise of the lieutenant colonel among the remains of the mule train. James and Hector are dispatched to fetch it. Bent double, they scurry along the shallow communication trench with the valise between them on a stretcher.

  Fatigue parties forage through the stores dumped on the beach. They climb the ziggurat of crates and abandoned wagons and bring back rations and ammunition. James goes down there to gather medical stores. Blore wants bandages and silk treated with bismuth iodoform paraffin paste for his needles. Dichloramine for antiseptic, procaine hydrochloride as local anaesthetic. Methodically, Hector stocks up the medical haversacks ready to be shifted up onto the ridge to establish the advanced dressing station. The last supply to be loaded is Blore’s galvanic generator, which he uses to induce magnetism in his surgical instruments. The doctor folds a velveteen cloth neatly around the battery, and hands it over to James to put into the haversack. And so they are ready.

  22

  Shades pass James in his dugout and disappear into the communication trench. Three-thirty in the morning. His hair is slick with dew and his gut crawls for rum. He follows the men down to the overgrown gully, coughing and unsteady, and joins their congregation of ragged silhouettes.

  Father Huxley sets out an altar on a tea tray for the service of Lady-Day-in-Harvest. Not all of the congregation is Catholic. The freethinkers, the nonconformists, and the agnostics are here, too. Trevenen Huxley has a following. At home, his unconventional ideas would be unacceptable. But in the hollows beside a battlefield, the men do not have the constitution for cant.

  Huxley wears a chasuble over his uniform, its gold and green thread smeared with battlefield grime. The vestment is as awkward upon him as a stiff bib. His accent is of the same species as the officer class but his manner of speaking is more questioning and tentative; he is not issuing orders but venturing out in search of a new understanding.

  “Lady-Day-in-Harvest marks the end of the summer,” Huxley says. “As those of you who are Irish will know, if you were back home, you’d be singing, dancing and, yes, even drinking. Together we would hike up a hill and have our ceremony looking down upon the world.”

  He gestures toward the dark high ridges encircling the battlefield. The priest’s gestures are young and virile.

  James turns to Collinson. “How did Huxley end up in the priesthood? He doesn’t seem the type.”

  “A girl,” whispers Collinson. The professor has cleaned the unbroken lens of his round glasses.

  “It was a scandal,” he adds.

  “Was it an unsuitable match?” asks James.

  “She was a housemaid. But instead of brushing off the indiscretion, his idealism sent him into the order. It was either that or into the woods to hang himself from the tallest tree. But that was not the scandal. The outrage was a Huxley joining the priesthood. Neither of his grandfathers would have approved; indeed, Thomas Huxley would have seen it an evolutionary step backward.”

  “But Huxley is a freethinker,” says James.

  “He believes religion is true and science is also,” replies Collinson.

  It does not take long for Huxley to move the service onto his thoughts on comparative religion.

  “This feast day is about Mary, the mother of Christ. The Christian calendar uses pre-existing folk festivals and rituals: Lugh is the god of the harvest, hence this festival is also known as Lughnasa. Mary is Mother Nature. She is the lifegiver and nurturer. Love and kindness. My own mother died young. I was seventeen years old at the time. I come from a family where great achievements are expected and I wonder if she too was troubled by a lack of achievement. I wish I had said to her that, every time I show kindness, I regard that as my mother’s achievement. It is not easy to give comfort to the suffering or to take the time to listen to the last wishes of the dying. The patience and kindness of the mother, in the face of such suffering, especially their own…”

  Huxley is briefly moved by the memory of his mother; it is, James realizes, the source of the priest’s aura of religiosity, the wound that weakened him and made him unable to withstand his passions.

  “The end of summer is the time for harvest,” he continues. “To reap what we have sown. During the attack upon Chocolate Hill, I ran through corn fields. In front of the trenches there were two corn stacks, and to the rear the crop had just been cut and was lying in sheaves. In other places it was still growing. Those simple country fields were so redolent of life, and yet the whole scene wore a mask of horror and smoke. In fences of small stunted oaks, snipers lurked. We walk though these fields and in our hands we carry bayonets instead of scythes. We feel that we are living in another world, one superimposed upon the surface of the other, shaping it, and yet so different! At home, on this day, we would be dancing and singing, and full of life. Instead, we must dwell in this place where what lies before death is in the very act of passing into what lies beyond death.”

  Huxley is far too much of a freethinker to be a peacetime priest, but fit and kind and therefore suited to ministering to soldiers.

  “How can God allow this to happen? Why did he create a world with such evil in it? The answer is this: creation is not over. Creation is an ongoing event and we are part of it. This terrible violence is necessary to remove the constraints, the old ways of thinking, which hold us back, so that mankind can evolve. We must not withdraw from one another. Our interrelations matter. Everything we do matters. Every act of kindness binds us together and brings the day closer when we are as one mind with God.

  “Go forth today and know that this is where we are fated to be. To live passively and thereby squander oneself is an error. This point, this moment, is where the cosmic development is gathered and so it is here that we must place our weight and act!”

  After the service, a squad of twenty-five men gather for the order to set out. The men of the ambulance – Professor Collinson, Private Brilliant, Sergeant Hector, James, and Doctor Blore are joined by Captain Tuke and his infantry. Huxley folds away his chasuble. Captain Tuke gives the word. Loaded with haversacks and stretchers, the squad walks in a silent single file over a rotten hill then through an abandoned Turkish trench.

  The gloom intensifies every cough and clatter of their gear. The winding trench becomes the goat track up the forbidding Kiretch Tepe. It is the third time James has taken this track into the mad country of the ridge. Huxley’s belief that creation is unfinished and ongoing is borne out by the tortured land. They climb up the infolded cerebellum of the gullies, hand-over-hand, their ragged silhouettes dark and exposed against grey scree. The ascent is nearly five hundred feet from beach to the Kiretch Tepe, a distance of just over a mile. The squad is under orders to be silent, just as they were when they first landed. The quiet sounds of war can be as terrifying as the loud: the snick of a sniper’s foot upon a dry branch, the sea wind rustling through the undergrowth like an invisible hound.

  Captain Tuke signals for the line to stop.

  “What is it?” whispers James.

  “Sniper,” says Tuke.

  “The sniper,” says Hector. He bites his bottom lip and considers the uncertain path ahead.

  “Do you see him?” asks James.

  “I saw a bush and when I looked back, I swear the bush had moved.”

  Hector climbs a tree and sits watchful in the branches like a cat. The rain sets in. Captain Tuke orders the men to lie down on their overcoats and make basic shelters from the stretchers. The ridge is a riddle of humps and hollows which seems to shift constantly. There could be anything hiding out there. After a time, Hector slips down from the tree and they resume their silent march. A hundred yards later, Tuke stops the line again.

  They wait for a while. James feels the approach of dawn. The faces of his fellow men are becoming clearer to him.

  “We’ve got to move on,” says James.

  “He’s still watching us,” says Hector.

  Doctor Blore and Father Huxley join the front of the advance.


  “Snipers,” explains Tuke.

  “No, the sniper,” says Hector.

  “I don’t understand. What do you mean, the sniper?”

  Hector raises his hand. Wait, he signals. Wait in silence.

  From the Saros Bay, northward, the searchlight of a destroyer flicks silently over the dark waters then up across the ridge. The trees sway with self-abandonment in the sea wind; James marks their position, and tries to track their movements. But it is they who are spotted. A rifle bullet moans on its approach, ricochets off a rock, then departs hissing through the long grass. The gunshot is from a standard rifle. Perhaps not the sniper after all.

  “Where is he?” Captain Tuke crawls up the goat track, trying to get a fix on the sniper’s position.

  “We must get on the seaward side of the ridge before dawn,” says James. “Otherwise we’ll be exposed to artillery.”

  The captain and his platoon spread out and advance up the ridge. The squad heaves up its gear and follows on toward the shoulder of the hill. Their destination lies somewhere between the peaks of Karakol Dagh and the Kiretch Tepe, just back from the front line on the high ground. The Dublins and Munsters of the 30th Brigade are dug in on the left flank with the 7th Royal Munster Fusiliers on the extreme left, on that sheer bluff drop down to the ravishing waters of Saros. The sniper takes one more shot, and then slips away.

  With dawn, the sky turns a rising peach colour and the sea is playful with iridescent blues, greens and turquoise. The destroyer, dodging the morning shells from the Turkish positions, zig-zags across the glittering water, raking the high hogsback of the ridge with its guns, methodically blasting points along the kilometre of the arid spine. The squad makes it onto the tilted, northward side of the ridge and then makes steady progress inland toward the proposed site of the advanced dressing station.

  Blore and Huxley have prepared well. The squad comes to a halt fifty yards back from the covered entrance of the necropolis. Hector, James and Private Brilliant set up two bell tents in which to stow the medical supplies, and Collinson, accompanied by a pair of dixie-bearing Tommies, is given the fatigue of locating water. After conferring with Huxley, Blore asks the stretcher bearers to set up the trestle table for treatment underground.