‘I remember,’ he used to tell them, ‘we came to this house once. It was among a lot of trees, you understand. I don’t know their names so don’t ask me. Well, the house was rotten with Boche and we’d fired at it all day. And the buggers fired back. Towards evening – it might have been 1800 hours – they stopped firing and it got so quiet you could hear yourself breathing. One of our blokes – a small madman from Wales, I think it was – dashed across and threw a grenade or two in the door and the window. And there wasn’t a sound from inside the house, ’part from the explosion of course, so he kept shouting, “The Boche are off, lads,” in that sing-song Welsh of his. So we all rushed the place and true enough they’d mostly gone. Run out of ammunition, I suppose. We went over it for mines but there wasn’t none. So we stood in the hall, I suppose you’d call it, all of us with our dirty great boots and our rifles and bayonets and there was these stairs going up, very wide. The windows were shot to hell and there was glass all over the place. And suddenly – this is God’s truth – an old woman come down the stairs. Dressed in white she was, a lovely dress like you’d see in a picture. And her lips all painted red. You’d think she was dressed for a ball. Her eyes were queer, they seemed to go right through you as if you wasn’t there. She came down the last steps and our officer stepped forward to help her. And do you know what she did? She put her arms around him and she started to waltz. He was so surprised he didn’t know what to do – the fat bugger. And all the time there was this music. Well, in the end he got away from her and some people took her away. Well, we could still hear this music, see? So we goes upstairs – there was a dead Boche on the landing, he’d been shot in the mouth – and we goes into this room. There was a bed there with a pink what-do-you-call-it over it. And beside the bed there was this big dead Boche. And do you know what – there was a dagger with jewels in it stuck in his breastbone. And beside him on the floor there was this phonograph playing a French tune, one of the officers said. He said it was a dance tune. Someone said it was bloody lucky the little fat fellow wasn’t wearing a grey uniform.’
‘All present and correct, sir,’ said Sergeant Smith.
‘All right, let’s go then,’ said Lieutenant Mackinnon.
Down the trench they went, teeth and eyes grinning, clattering over the duckboards with their Mills bombs and their bayonets and their guns. ‘What am I doing here?’ thought Robert, and ‘Who the hell is making that noise?’ and ‘Is the damned wire cut or not?’ and ‘We are like a bunch of actors,’ and ‘I’m leading these men, I’m an officer.’
And he thought again, ‘I hope the guns have cut that barbed wire.’
Then he and they inched across No Man’s Land following the line of lime which had been laid to guide them. Up above were the stars and the air was cool on their faces. But there were only a few stars, the night was mostly dark, and clouds covered the moon. Momentarily he had an idea of a huge mind breeding thought after thought, star after star, a mind which hid in daylight in modesty or hauteur but which at night worked out staggering problems, pouring its undifferentiated power over the earth.
On hands and knees he squirmed forward, the others behind him. This was his first raid and he thought, ‘I am frightened.’ But it was different from being out in the open on a battlefield. It was an older fear, the fear of being buried in the earth, the fear of wandering through eternal passageways and meeting grey figures like weasels and fighting with them in the darkness. He tested the wire. Thank God it had been cut. And then he thought, ‘Will we need the ladders?’ The sides of the trenches were so deep sometimes that ladders were necessary to get out again. And as he crawled towards the German trenches he had a vision of Germans crawling beneath British trenches undermining them. A transparent imagined web hung below him in the darkness quivering with grey spiders.
He looked at his illuminated watch. The time was right. Then they were in the German trenches. The rest was a series of thrustings and flashes. Once he thought he saw or imagined he saw from outside a dugout a man sitting inside reading a book. It was like looking through a train window into a house before the house disappears. There were Mills bombs, hackings of bayonets, scurryings and breathings as of rats. A white face towered above him, his pistol exploded and the face disappeared. There was a terrible stink all around him, and the flowing of blood. Then there was a long silence. Back. They must get back. He passed the order along. And then they wriggled back again avoiding the craters which lay around them, created by shells, and which were full of slimy water. If they fell into one of these they would be drowned. As he looked, shells began to fall into them sending up huge spouts of water. Over the parapet. They were over the parapet. Crouched they had run and scrambled and were over. Two of them were carrying a third. They stumbled down the trench. There were more wounded than he had thought. Wright . . . one arm seemed to have been shot off. Sergeant Smith was bending over him. ‘You’ll get sent home all right,’ he was saying. Some of the men were tugging at their equipment and talking feverishly. Young Ellis was lying down, blood pouring from his mouth. Harris said, ‘Morrison’s in the crater.’
He and Sergeant Smith looked at each other. They were both thinking the same: there is no point, he’s had it. They could see each other’s eyes glaring whitely through the black, but could not tell the expression on the faces. The shells were still falling, drumming and shaking the earth. All these craters out there, these dead moons.
‘Do you know which one?’ said Robert.
‘I think so, sir, I . . . Are you going to get him?’
‘Sergeant Smith, we’ll need our rifles. He can hang on to that if he’s there. Harris, come with us.’ They were all looking at him with sombre black faces, Wright divided between joy and pain.
‘Sir.’
Then they were at the parapet again, shells exploding all around them.
‘Which one is it?’ And the stars were now clearer. Slowly they edged towards the rim. How had he managed to break away from the white lime?
They listened like doctors to a heartbeat.
‘Are you there, Fred?’ Harris whispered fiercely, as if he were in church. ‘Are you there?’ Lights illuminated their faces. There was no sound.
‘Are you sure this is the right one?’ Robert asked fiercely.
‘I thought it was. I don’t know.’
‘Oh, Christ,’ said Sergeant Smith.
‘We’d better get back then,’ said Robert.
‘Are you going to leave him, sir?’ said Harris.
‘We can’t do anything till morning. He may be in one of the shallower ones.’ His cry of ‘Morrison, are you there?’ was drowned by the shriek of a shell.
‘Back to the trench again,’ he said, and again they squirmed along. But at that moment as they approached the parapet he seemed to hear it, a cry coming from deep in the earth around him, or within him, a cry of such despair as he had never heard in his life before. And it seemed to come from everywhere at once, from all the craters, their slimy green rings, from one direction, then from another. The other two had stopped as well to listen.
Once more he heard it. It sounded like someone crying ‘Help’.
He stopped. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘We’re going for him. Come on.’
And he stood up. There was no reason for crawling any more. The night was clear. And they would have to hurry. And the other two stood up as well when they saw him doing so. He couldn’t leave a man to die in the pit of green slime. ‘We’ll run,’ he said. And they ran to the first one and listened. They cried fiercely, ‘Are you there?’ But there was no answer. Then they seemed to hear it from the next one and they were at that one soon too, peering down into the green slime, illuminated by moonlight. But there was no answer. There was one left and they made for that one. They screamed again, in the sound of the shells, and they seemed to hear an answer. They heard what seemed to be a bubbling. ‘Are you there?’ said Robert, bending down and listening. ‘Can you get over here?’ They could hear splashing an
d deep below them breathing, frantic breathing as if someone was frightened to death. ‘It’s all right,’ he said, ‘if you come over here, I’ll send my rifle down. You two hang on to me,’ he said to the others. He was terrified. That depth, that green depth. Was it Morrison down there, after all? He hadn’t spoken. The splashings came closer. The voice was like an animal’s repeating endlessly a mixture of curses and prayers. Robert hung over the edge of the crater. ‘For Christ’s sake don’t let me go,’ he said to the other two. It wasn’t right that a man should die in green slime. He hung over the rim holding his rifle down. He felt it being caught, as if there was a great fish at the end of a line. He felt it moving. And the others hung at his heels, like a chain. The moon shone suddenly out between two clouds and in that moment he saw it, a body covered with greenish slime, an obscene mermaid, hanging on to his rifle while the two eyes, white in the green face, shone upward and the mouth, gritted, tried not to let the blood through. It was a monster of the deep, it was a sight so terrible that he nearly fell. He was about to say, ‘It’s no good, he’s dying,’ but something prevented him from saying it, if he said it then he would never forget it. He knew that. The hands clung to the rifle below in the slime. The others pulled behind him. ‘For Christ’s sake hang on to the rifle,’ he said to the monster below. ‘Don’t let go.’ And it seemed to be emerging from the deep, setting its feet against the side of the crater, all green, all mottled, like a disease. It climbed as if up a mountainside in the stench. It hung there against the wall. ‘Hold on,’ he said. ‘Hold on.’ His whole body was concentrated. This man must not fall down again into that lake. The death would be too terrible. The face was coming over the side of the crater, the teeth gritted, blood at the mouth. It hung there for a long moment and then the three of them had got him over the side. He felt like cheering, standing up in the light of No Man’s Land and cheering. Sergeant Smith was kneeling down beside the body, his ear to the heart. It was like a body which might have come from space, green and illuminated and slimy. And over it poured the merciless moonlight.
‘Come on,’ he said to the other two. And at that moment Sergeant Smith said, ‘He’s dead.’
‘Dead?’ There was a long pause. ‘Well, take him in anyway. We’re not leaving him here. We’ll take him in. At least he didn’t die in that bloody lake.’ They lifted him up between them and they walked to the trench. ‘I’m bloody well not crawling,’ said Robert. ‘We’ll walk. And to hell with the lot of them.’ He couldn’t prevent himself swearing and at the same time despising himself for swearing. What would Sergeant Smith think of him? It was like bringing a huge green fish back to the lines. ‘To hell with them,’ he shouted. ‘This time we’ll bloody well walk. I don’t care how light it is.’ And they did so and managed to get him back into the dugout. They laid him down on the floor and glared around them at the silent men.
‘Just like Piccadilly it was,’ said Harris, who couldn’t stop talking. ‘As bright as day.’
‘Shut up, you lot,’ said Sergeant Smith, ‘and get some sleep.’
Robert was thinking of the man he had seen reading a book in a flash of light before they had gone in with their bayonets. He couldn’t see properly whether it had been a novel or a comic. Perhaps it was a German comic. Did Germans have comics? Like that green body emerging out of the slime, that fish. He began to shiver and said, ‘Give the men whisky if there is any.’ But he fell asleep before he could get any himself, seeing page after page of comics set before him, like red windows, and in one there was a greenish monster and in another a woman dancing with a fat officer. Overhead the shells still exploded, and the water bounced now and again from the craters.
‘The bloody idiot,’ said Sergeant Smith looking down at him. ‘He could have got us all killed.’ Still, it had been like Piccadilly right enough. Full of light. It hadn’t been so bad. Nothing was as bad as you feared.
The Fight
He didn’t dare to confront it, wriggling with piercing embarrassment into the tent poled by his thin legs and bony knees. The blankets hung warm and woollen from his arched bones to whom today had happened a disgrace so tremendous that his thought could not even edge sideways up to it without the terror of annihilation. Yet how could he prevent images from sidling into his shut eyes enveloped even in their second darkness. First there came the gloves against his petrified scream. But it didn’t matter, the gloves still came – the brown glossy white furred gloves: he would never wear them again, that was certain. And yet they had been so neat and fine, fitting with a loud click on his pale hands. It had all started with the gloves which he had worn to school that day for the first time having tested their leather in the early morning when in his shivering joy he had crossed unshod and conspiratorially the cold green linoleum to build the fire and surprise them all. They had matched his brown shoes too: that was an unexpected gift. Though you couldn’t throw stones with them you could walk gloved and delicate along the grassy verge of the road like an officer, a lieutenant certainly, a colonel possibly, except that you didn’t have the thin whistling cane which swished and cut aristocratically through the icy air. Then inside them your hands felt so disciplined as if the fingers had gathered together out of some chaos, some sadness of shapelessness, into a fixed flesh that you could control and command.
And he had walked up the sideroad to the school where at the gate were assembled some of his classmates. And the whole thing had started because he was so happy and possessed, being by the time he reached school Joe Louis the murderous hooker with the brown polished fists and the crowd rising in a frenzy roaring and punching ‘Come on, finish him off ’ so that in the brisk blue air he had begun to shadow box, his small tight nutty fists left-leading and right-crossing ceaselessly while his head swerved sideways from a slow but murderous opponent.
Then of course in his careless delight he had found himself face to face with the Section scowling in front of him with his screwed red face above his ragged blue jersey and his harsh rocky knees. He had led with a crisp checked left to the jutting chin and brought up his right till it halted exactly in the dirty circle in the centre of the blue jersey. And all the time the Section had stared at him without moving watching the new brown flickering gloves darting about his upright body like moths. The stocky body was rooted: the eyes were rooted: the heavy chin was rooted.
Then Merry had shouted: ‘Look at the Fairy making rings round the Section,’ and Plummy had said: ‘Come on, Fairy, let’s see you,’ and his light beautiful footwork dazzled even himself as he merged into the music of his body, his gloves darting in and out, artistically, not ferociously, showing off, imperiously calling attention to Joe Louis created by ten thousand eyes, blown into being on ten thousand voices. ‘Come on, Fairy, give it to him.’ But the Section remained there unmoved as if watching a child dancing, his black hair waving faintly in the morning breeze, his eyes steady.
And then at the climax of the dance when all his feathers were turning red, fanning out all about him in music of colour he had actually hit the Section on the nose and the Section had looked at him at last. Some being had come shambling out of the cave in his eyes and was staring at him as if awakened across a bleak landscape. Even then it might have been all right if he had apologised but how could he when everybody was shouting: ‘You should see the Fairy,’ ‘Why he’s a boxer. He’s a real boxer’ – even though his knees were really melting to water as he looked into the unfolding eyes of the Section.
Then someone shouted: ‘There’s going to be a fight,’ and because it was spoken it was certain.
‘At four o’clock.’
‘Out on the moor.’
‘Behind the school.’
He could have apologised but he turned away saying nothing. And the Section stood there while the strange being stood taller and taller in front of the cave in his red eyes.
‘At four o’clock.’
‘You should have seen the Fairy.’
‘He’s a beautiful boxer.’
When he looked at them he could have sworn they were mocking him. He had never been so scared in his life.
All morning he became more and more scared. At the eleven o’clock interval he was speechlessly followed by four or five small boys who stared at him as if they expected him to begin boxing as they watched. Trailed by his fans, he walked round by the grey stone privy at the back of the school. He saw two girls clucking ahead of him, arm in arm, giggling, telling each other secrets. Perhaps they were joking about him. Everyone must know: he was opened out like a walking wound. If only they had fought right away instead of waiting like this. He imagined the Section lounging against a wall or bending his black composed head under the pouring water of the copper tap, an inverted animal. If only he could speak to him. He went into the privy. He read the names scratched on the walls, the initials, the rhymes. He read them over and over again. He passed the Section in the quadrangle as the huge iron bell tolled and tolled. They looked at each other but did not speak. How large he had become, with his raw red fists, his blue jersey like the sea covering a rock, his deadly savage eyes, the rending rage in his heart. But nothing could be done now, he thought, almost vomiting, ceremony had taken over. He was trapped.
The Red Door Page 37