The Sons of Adam

by Harry Bingham

  The middle bottom belonged to a colonel in the RAMC. The two outer bottoms belonged to a pair of RAMC captains, ordinary family doctors who had joined up for the duration of the war. Between them, the three bottoms and their owners constituted a Medical Board, gathered to review Alan’s case, among many others.

  ‘Anderson?’ said the colonel.

  ‘No, sir. Montague.’

  ‘Not Mr Anderson?’ The colonel’s tone of voice implied Alan’s response was verging on insubordination.

  ‘I’m afraid not, sir, no. My name’s Montague. Captain Montague.’

  And it was true. In acknowledgement of his services during the battalion’s tragic assault on German lines, Alan had been promoted to captain and recommended for the Military Cross.

  ‘Hmm … Ah! Montague.’ The colonel found the right papers. ‘Knocked about a bit by a shell. Nothing broken. Nothing hurt. Takes more than a Jerry shell to stop you, eh?’

  Alan didn’t answer. It was now more than a month since Tom’s death and Alan was still in shock. It was as though the shell blast had never stopped ringing in his ears and heart. Worse than that, despite remaining under medical supervision away from the front line, his lungs seemed to grow worse by the day. But he hadn’t cared. In a self-destructive mood, he had asked the Medical Board to rate him A1, ‘fit for active service at the front’.

  The colonel said, ‘You feel ready to go into the line once again?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Alan, conscious that he was lying.

  ‘And, of course, you’re desperate to take another crack at Jerry?’

  Alan ignored the question, but the colonel didn’t need an answer. ‘Good man,’ he said, looking sideways at the two captains for their approval. But the captains were dubious.

  ‘Can you run without difficulty?’

  ‘Have you attempted to carry a heavy load?’

  ‘How well do you think you would tolerate the sound and concussion of shelling?’

  ‘Do you think you are capable of commanding men under severe conditions? Bear in mind that the safety of your men will depend upon you.’

  Alan didn’t like to lie outright and his answers were visibly hesitant. The short interrogation ended.

  ‘Excuse us a second, would you, Montague?’ said the colonel, and proceeded to talk with his two colleagues in a low tone. Alan could hear the colonel saying, ‘What the devil are we here for, if not to get men back into active service?’ The two captains on either side were obviously disagreeing strongly, pointing at Alan’s recent medical records for evidence. Alan sat in the cold room, waiting for their verdict. He chafed his hands together for warmth.

  Then the doctors stopped their muttering and the colonel spoke again.

  ‘Look here, Montague, we can’t quite agree. These chaps worry you may not be ready to face Fritz again just yet. Do you –’

  But he was interrupted. Unseen by both the colonel and Alan, one of the captains lifted a file of paper and brought it slamming down onto the desk. The noise was like a pistol shot.

  Although not consciously scared, Alan’s body was no longer under his control. He jumped about a yard into the air and when he came down he was white as chalk, shaking, wide-eyed. His breathing had the liquid gurgle of a gas victim.

  There was a moment’s silence.

  The only sound in the room was the crackle of the fire and the tortured sound of Alan’s lungs fighting for air.

  The colonel nodded sadly. Thank you, Montague. That will be all.’

  40

  It was a week later.

  Tom’s body grew thinner, his clothes grew baggier. His work at the soda factory grew ever more punishing as his body weakened. Every day, morning and evening, Mitch Norgaard told him to pick up a pen and write home asking for help. Every day, morning and evening, Tom said no. But on the seventh day, Tom caved in. Since there was nothing else to swallow, he swallowed his pride. He wrote home. He wrote to his father, Jack, and to Sir Adam and Lady Pamela.

  He got no answer.

  He wrote again.

  Still no answer.

  ‘So what?’ said Norgaard. ‘Write again. Write to everyone you know. Write to everyone you’ve ever heard of. Go on writing till you get an answer.’

  But Tom shook his head. War turns a man half crazy and prison camp is there to finish the process. Tom laid down his pen and never wrote again.

  It was an error, understandable perhaps, but still horribly mistaken.

  What Tom didn’t know was this. His first pair of letters was on a hospital ship bound for Dover when the ship was torpedoed and sunk. The second pair of letters was on a Red Cross lorry heading through the Black Forest to Switzerland. The lorry was set upon by hungry men hoping for food. The contents were ransacked. The letters were lost.

  Tom would be ‘missing, presumed dead’ until the war ended or he died.

  41

  ‘Darling, boy!’ It was Pamela who met Alan off the train at Winchester. She hugged him tight, burying her face in his neck. When she at last released him, her face was wet. ‘My poor loves, my poor loves.’ She was crying for Tom, whom she’d loved as a mother, and crying for Alan, who’d lost a brother. Alan was unable to speak in reply.

  At home, it was the same with his father, and with Tom’s father, Jack. They were pleased to see Alan, of course, but his presence only made Tom’s death more real.

  ‘He was the very best of officers and the very best of men,’ said Alan to Jack Creeley, when their voices had steadied.

  ‘Of course, he was – you and him both … And I say this war’s a dirty rotten stinking shame, lad, pardon me. You’ll have to pardon me for saying so, but anything that could take a man like him …’ Creeley’s voice crept out into silence.

  Alan spent three weeks at home. Glorious autumn weeks, with the great elms blazing yellow and gold along their boughs.

  It had turned out that the shell blast had done more damage than first realised. A needle-sharp splinter had burrowed through Alan’s chest, piercing both lungs. Almost invisible from the outside, the splinter had remained undetected by the original doctors. The longer the splinter had remained in place, the more damage it had done. An operation to remove it had been successful, but further surgery would be needed once he was strong enough. A couple of house guests, a pair of London debutantes, now working as nurses down in Southampton, silently left before his arrival, to give the patient all the rest and quiet he could get.

  Alan arrived home so weak he had to be carried to bed. But in the glow of love and warmth, he began to heal. His lungs remained poor, but his body began to grow stronger again. Apart from his lungs, he felt almost whole.

  But more painful than any physical damage was the mental scarring. Alan found it almost impossible to sleep in his first-floor bedroom. The wide windows and exposed position made him feel vulnerable to the shell and rifle fire that he continually expected. After three nights of struggling with his fears, he gave in, and took over a boxroom on the ground floor, built like a bunker and with a four-foot stone wall between him and the outside. He slept with a candle burning all night.

  Across the hall, in the nursery, there was a large-scale map of the Zagros mountains: a map that Tom had put there fourteen years before. A blue pencil line in Tom’s wobbly nine-year-old hand marked out the family oil concession. Some nights when sleep was hard to come by, and the air laboured in and out of his struggling lungs, Alan took his candle and went into the nursery, staring at the rough contours of the map, in the mountains north of Shiraz. He had promised Tom he’d go there and find whatever there was to be found. Would it be oil or just dry earth? There was no way to find out, except the good old-fashioned way: with a drill.

  Some mornings, when dawn had broken over the winter sky, he was still there in his nightshirt, with his candle, looking at the map and wondering, wondering …

  It sometimes felt as though finding oil was the most important thing in the entire world.

  42

  Nor
gaard rolled over on his bunk and handed Tom a handful of acorns.

  ‘Pissed up against an oak tree on my way back from the factory today. I found these.’

  Norgaard had a handful himself and he began cracking the shells and crunching up the nut inside. Tom did the same, chewing carefully. His stomach was beginning to balloon outwards, but all it held was painful wind. He tried vomiting sometimes, but all he had to vomit was stale air, and the retching brought no relief. Each time that happened, he thought of Alan Montague. Anger, bitterness and self-pity jammed together in a ball that hurt every bit as much as the wind in his belly.

  ‘What were you up to before the war?’ asked Norgaard, ‘and I’m not asking you to list your ten biggest ever meals.’

  Tom grinned. Most conversations in the camp these days were about food, or soap, or beer, or the countless other tiny things of life. ‘Oil,’ he said. ‘I was in the oil business.’

  ‘You don’t say?’ Norgaard sat up, dropping his acorns into the blanket. ‘On the drilling side or … ? Hey, d’you even have oil fields in England?’

  Tom shook his head. ‘Marketing. And no, the country’s as dry as a bone.’

  ‘Bet the King’s mad as all hell about that … Which company?’

  ‘Standard, actually. Standard of New Jersey.’

  Tom expected the patriotic Norgaard to be pleased with his reply, but instead Norgaard pursed his lips and spat. ‘Goddamn Rockefeller. Ruined the industry for all of us. And dissolution was a bust. Standard of New Jersey, my ass.’

  They continued to talk. Before the war, Norgaard had been an independent oilman, a driller with his own crew.

  ‘And every time we sent the drill bit down, we more than half expected to hit the smell of oil. Boy, I never sharpened the drill so carefully as when I was on my own thirty acres. Every single time you do it, you could find oil sands glistening on the end of the bit.’

  ‘Did you ever make a strike? For yourself, I mean.’

  ‘Twice, just twice.’

  ‘Yes?’

  Tom’s hunger vanished, his thoughts of home, his anger with Alan. He was transfixed, the old addiction biting harder than hunger.

  ‘First time was a little well up near Bradford, Pennsylvania. First day, I pumped thirty barrels. Two weeks later, eighty-five. Four weeks later, no matter what I did, the well gave me ten barrels of oil, if I was lucky. I ended up selling that well for the price of a new pair of pants. Two miles down the road, on land I’d offered on but never clinched, a friend of mine made a strike. Three thousand barrels a week that son-of-a-bitch got out of there.’

  Tom breathed out in awe. This was the sharp end of the oil industry, where luck, adventure and geology all met in one glorious mix. ‘And the second strike?’

  ‘Second strike was sweet as a dream. I called the well Old Glory right from the start. Drilling was as easy as slicing butter. Hit gas after two thousand feet. Three hundred feet later and we were bathing our feet with oil. Six hundred barrels a day, Old Glory produced at her best, God bless her.’

  ‘And?’ Tom knew that Norgaard was playing with him, but he couldn’t help but fall for the man’s game. ‘And?’

  ‘And John D. Rockefeller stole every last drop … He owned all the refineries in the area. The price he paid for oil wasn’t hardly worth the cost of hauling it. He sweated me out of what was mine, then bought the well off me when I came begging at his door. It ain’t enough to find the oil, Tom, it’s turning it into dollars that counts.’

  Over the weeks and months that followed, Norgaard continued to tell Tom of his days as an oilman in Pennsylvania and Oklahoma, and ‘never did get out west to California, but if all your kings and kaisers ever get tired of fighting each other, then that’s where you’ll find me, drilling for oil in my own back yard.’

  Tom’s old addiction grew again. If he ever got out of prison camp, then he knew what he would do. He’d get into the oil business: not with Alan, but by himself. Not in Persia, but in America. And not relying on anybody else’s money or goodwill, but relying only on his brains, his guts, his determination to succeed.

  Stuck away in prison though he was, it sometimes felt as though finding oil was the most important thing in the entire world.

  43

  Alan grew stronger: strong enough for his second and final operation.

  In February 1917, he was sent to a specialist hospital in Southampton. He was readied for surgery and given an anaesthetic. A nurse said, ‘Count to ten for me, please. One, two, three …’

  He woke up dazzled by light.

  There was a screen around his bed, a couple of doctors, a stout ward sister, and a pretty nurse in the background. The doctors were arguing over treatment and criticising the way the sutures had been applied. When they noticed that Alan was awake, they began asking him questions to test out the extent of his recovery.

  What year was it?

  ‘Nineteen thirteen.’

  What month?

  ‘No idea.’ Alan laughed at the idiocy of the question, hoping that the doctors would be able to see the funny side. They couldn’t.

  What was his name?

  ‘Alan.’

  Alan who?

  ‘Creeley. Alan Creeley.’

  The doctors tutted to themselves, then vanished. The ward sister looked at Alan’s bedclothes with disapproval and tucked them in so tightly that she might have been packaging her patient for shipment overseas. Then she left too.

  The pretty nurse, auburn-haired, freckled, and with lovely dancing blue eyes, drew closer to the bed. She loosened the bedclothes.

  ‘It’s not so tidy,’ she said, ‘but at least you can breathe.’

  He smiled at her. ‘I don’t think the doctors liked me much.’

  ‘They don’t like anyone, not unless your injury is particularly interesting.’

  ‘I didn’t come up to snuff, then? I feel rather as though I’ve been run over by an omnibus.’

  ‘Well, the operation proved rather lengthy, I’m afraid. More than expected, but nothing that won’t heal. I’ve seen worse cases do well.’

  Alan realised that it must have been her who had changed his dressings and bathed him. He reddened with an old-fashioned embarrassment.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ve been here two years now and I’ve seen everything.’

  ‘Still …’

  ‘Still, nothing.’ She slipped a thermometer into his mouth, forcing him to cut his protest short. ‘Mutton stew or Scotch broth for lunch?’ she said. ‘Nod if you want mutton, shake if you want the soup. The mutton’s an absolute fright, by the way.’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Good choice. I’ve telephoned your mother and father. They’ll be here this evening. I’ve told them you’ll be a bit muzzy, but you’d love to see them. I’ll find you some vases and sneak them away for you. Pamela’s bound to bring flowers, even if she has to strip the hothouse bare.’

  ‘Thank –’

  ‘Ah! Thermometer! Don’t talk!’

  ‘Oree. Unk-oo.’

  She took his pulse. Her fingers felt delicious on his wrist, making the rest of his battered body feel like a truck was rolling over it. The white of her uniform seemed dazzling. He watched it rise and fall as she breathed. It was the most beautiful thing … he drifted off.

  When his parents did arrive that evening, they were laden with armfuls of flowers, jars of honey, bottles of barley water, and from his father, when his mother was busy with the flowers) a flask of whisky and a handful of cigars.

  ‘Who was that nurse?’ he asked. ‘She spoke about you as though she knew you both.’

  ‘The nurse? Lottie, you mean? Reddish hair, blue eyes? But Alan, darling, I’ve told you ten times already. That’s Lottie Dunlop, one of the girls who’s been staying with us this year. A lovely girl. I’ve been longing for you to meet …’

  44

  ‘Hier! Komm! Bitte schnell!’

  The guard was elderly, silver-haired, Jewish. He was standing thirty yards
away across the prison yard, beckoning at Tom.

  Tom pointed to himself. ‘Ich? Me?’

  The guard nodded.

  Tom dragged himself over. A bitterly cold winter had passed into spring. Tom was still losing weight, certain now that he was dying of hunger. He was listless and apathetic. His belly stuck out, jammed tight with wind and emptiness. He caught up with the guard.

  ‘Ja?’

  ‘Hier. Ein Geschenk. Für dich.’ A present. For you.

  Tom woodenly put out his hands. The guard gave him a bag of sugar, a couple of tins of goose fat, a jar of raspberry jam. Tom stared down at his treasures, hardly able to understand. The guard tried to explain further. Tom couldn’t properly follow the Jew’s accented German, but it was something to do with a Red Cross parcel that had arrived for a man recently dead. The guard had seen Tom’s state and wanted to help. Tom was so grateful – so shocked – he began to sob out thanks, like a child at Christmas. The guard waved away the thanks, told Tom to eat slowly, and left.

  The gift was like a second chance at life.

  Tom was tempted to wolf the lot, but knew his stomach would quickly revenge itself on him if he did. He ate the goose fat and the jam over five days and took a spoonful of sugar with a mug of cold water morning and evening. His stomach complained, but his painful wind reduced. For the first time in months, Tom felt nearly human. And, as a human, he felt ready for action.

  Speaking to Norgaard in the quiet of the camp that evening, he made a proposal.

  ‘Let’s escape,’ he said.

  45

  Alan recovered and Lottie Dunlop nursed him. One morning, as his brain fought its way out of its post-operation fog, he sat up in bed and tried to thank her.

  ‘Thank you so much for everything,’ he said. ‘I do apologise for not saying so earlier. I must have seemed very brutish. It was the anaesthetic, I suppose.’