The Cross of Carl

by Walter Owen

  Note on “The Cross of Carl”

  During the years 1916 and 1917 the writer was prevented from taking active part in the war by a physical affliction accompanied by severe pain which induced him to take quantities of opium as a sedative. In the first half of 1917 his mind became increasingly preoccupied with the moral and spiritual issues of the conflict. He suffered from attacks of melancholia which culminated in emotional crises. For some time these crises were confined to the chaotic nervous aberrations classified as hysteria by neurologists. But towards the end of the month of June, 1917, he observed that the termination of the nervous paroxysm marked the commencement of a third phase. The general characteristics of this third phase were in complete opposition to those of the preceding condition. There was a great sense of well-being, of peace, poise and power. The mind was exceptionally lucid and alert. Physical discomfort and disabilities were nonexistent. Spiritually there was a feeling of integration, dispassion and purposiveness.

  So marked and peculiar was this condition that he made notes, from which he compiled the following table of observations.

  PHYSICAL:

  Partial analgesia, not localised, i.e. sensibility diminished, in degree, to pain, cold, hunger, fatigue and bodily weakness.

  Hyperaesthesia specifically localised in the sensations of sound, light and touch. Motor automatism of varying intensity (automatic and semi-automatic script).

  Pulse 10 to 20 above normal (100 average).

  Breathing very slow (3 to 4 per minute.

  Temperature above normal (99°).

  MENTAL:

  Rapid and clear perception of phenomena. Supernormal lucidity, alertness and coordination.

  Effortless recollection of all past impressions. Expansion of sense of space and time. Imaginative luxuriance.

  Exceptional power of rhythmical and musical speech.

  Impairment of the power of verbal visualisation (bad spelling).

  PSYCHIC:

  Obliteration of the psychic diaphragm normally existing between the conscious and subconscious elements of personality.

  Extinction of the passional and egocentric emotions such as fear, anger, aversion, hatred, acquisitiveness.

  Voluntary heteraesthesia, ie, the power of projecting the sensibility into any selected object, whether organic or inorganic, conscious or unconscious.

  Occasional polylocationary consciousness (involuntary); by this is meant the sensation of being in two or more places at the same time.

  Visual and auditive automatisms manifesting as flashes of pale blue light of great intensity; and a sound of singing voices accompanied by music.

  A sense of spiritual completeness and exaltation.

  Whether the abnormal condition described was induced by the administration of opium or whether the opium was merely a contributory factor, the writer is unable to say. About the middle of the month of July, 1917, he suffered a particularly severe attack of depression which was relieved by the usual nervous paroxysm, but, this time, of exceptional violence, which gradually subsided into the third phase. At the commencement of the third phase on this occasion he experienced a vivid bilocation of consciousness. So clear and complete was his sensation of being in two places at once that his entire personality appeared to be double. One of these personalities was his customary one, with the modifications tabulated above. The other was that of a soldier in the trenches of one of the battlefields, who was about to take part in a dawn attack. A circumstance which he observed particularly was that, making allowance for the difference in locality, the hour in both places synchronised perfectly. The secondary personality was in no sense a mental marionette of his own, but an individual with whose name, history, relatives, social ties and mental and spiritual make-up he was as familiar as with his own. At the same moment that he experienced this bilocation of consciousness he was prompted to record in writing the experiences of this soldier. It is this record, without alteration except for the condensation of certain portions of the chapter entitled Golgotha (which seemed to him of too revolting detail), that forms the narrative of “The Cross of Carl.” During the writing of it he was a spectator of, and actor in, the events related; and he underwent the experiences of his “alter ego” even more vividly than if they had been actually objective, as a consequence of the heightened sensitiveness and lucidity which accompanied his condition of dual consciousness. The partial analgesia mitigated, but did not render him entirely immune from, the physical suffering inherent in Carl’s experiences. As it was, there was repercussion from the body - real or illusory - of Carl to his own body, to the extent that he felt the external physical impact of the wounds described, and that a superficial stigmatisation appeared at the seat of the injuries and endured for a few hours. He also while writing suffered occasionally from nervous collapse and underwent in a milder degree the other sensations described, with the exception of the attack of nausea which was violent and prolonged.

  The foregoing will explain why the writer disclaims for “The Cross of Carl” any pretension to form a narrative of actual objective experience in the customary sense of the words. He believes, however, that he is warranted in putting it forward as an authentic personal record of an abnormal pathological process induced by the psychic perturbations which formed the background of the physical conflict. He is not prepared to assert that the impressions received by him through his bilocated consciousness have any other validity. They may have been objectively veridical; they may have been hallucinatory; or they, may have been impressions received from some extraneous source and which possess a purely symbolic significance. The immediate recipient of those impressions may have been a material frame inhabited by a separate consciousness between which and his own a rapport was established of such immediacy as to constitute a temporary fusion of personalities. It may have been a phantasmal vehicle disengaged from his own physical body and utilised in an actual psychical excursion. Or, again, it may have been a vision originating in his own mind. Upon such matters he has formed no judgment. But there is no doubt in his mind that there are subtler and more potent forces in operation in the world than those externalised to the senses, and that during the late war the spiritual and mental atmosphere of humanity underwent far-reaching modifications as the result of a period of agitation manifesting the essential symptoms of a neurotic paroxysm. His own particular temperament, conditioned by his hypersensitised condition, probably rendered him specially susceptible to those forces and induced in him a temporary functional activity of faculties latent in the normal consciousness. It is to his mind suggestive that in his case the neurotic explosion was superseded, albeit temporarily, by a third phase in which the higher faculties of the ego appeared to be liberated and expanded; and it may not be beyond the bounds of probability that that third phase may be in some degree the foreshadowing of a development in the collective consciousness of mankind of which the first indications are gradually becoming apparent at the present time.

  “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me, Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me.”

  Psalm xxiii. 5.

  I. Gethsemane

  Carl shifted his weight from one foot to the other on the fire-step and leaned his body as much as possible against the front wall of the trench. Usually such relief was not to be had, for Carl was sturdy and inclined to fat, but here the rain, which for the last three days had ceaselessly poured, had carved a little gully that ran from the parapet to the step, so that Carl lay half cradled in the embrace of the earth, and his legs, which since he left his home a week ago had gradually grown wearier, till they were a permanent ache to him, found thus, for a space, relief from a portion of his weight.

  His rifle lay acr
oss the parapet in front of him, bayonet fixed, but Carl’s eyes did not rove foeward, for that way here the unwary soul departs quickly, and the red spout of blood in a trench that waits the signal for a dawn attack is not beloved even by the best-tempered lieutenant.

  So at intervals picked snipers peered, here and there a periscope poked its inquiring nose, and the trench was like a queer beast that felt the air with horns. And Carl kept his nose low, like the rabbit that the good soldier knows so wholly how to be; while overhead death zipped and sang, and the rifle shots of the snipers pinpricked here and there the thunder of the guns, like an impish tickle on a mammoth’s flank or the puny staccato of crews of foundering barques over whom the ocean rolls.

  The guns were terrible that morning, dreadful, like the voice of some Behemoth of man’s making, whose works indeed when he strays from God are more terrible than God’s, not greater, but grotesque and unholily deformed, dreadful as the abortions of an angel. And truly the ground on which Carl lay was like some beast that heaved in birth-pang, in the throes of a pain too big, too big for earth, and the air shuddered with the breath of its woe. Now it grumbled like Vulcan, far off in bowels of adamant and granite, and then a gust took it and it shook afresh, gathering its blast; and the scale of its breath was the gamut of madness, and the anthem that it sang, the anthem of the agony of all the choir of hell that sang to the baton of Abaddon the Trisagion of Pandemonium - unholy! unholy! unholy! Sometimes a lull made an island in the roar, but when it burst again, only more terribly did its billows roar, and more brutal the bellow with which it shook the blue.

  At such times Carl clutched the ground with trilling tympanums and bastinadoed brain, conscious dully of the grey clay an inch beyond the goggles of his gas mask. Silly things kept coming into his head. He wondered what they would be having at home for breakfast. He tried to think of his wife, but found that he could think of nothing except the breakfast. This was perhaps because he was hungry. Then a terrific burst of sound swept over him, and suddenly he recalled what he had heard a girl say to her lover at the station the day he entrained. She had said, “Remember to be careful!” It seemed so unutterably silly! Careful! That was woman all over. She should be here, the silly!

  Then he remembered his wife and how he had told her that he would bring her back the cross. His mind went back to the time when he was not fat, when he had wooed her in the long twilights after work; of their walks along roads deepening in the dusk, and the marriage in the village church - just a little hurried, perhaps, for they were human, these two - and of their first child. He put up his hand to wipe some mist from his goggles, but the mist was not on the outer glass…. Over Carl too those wings had hovered.

  He turned at a slap on the leg and saw the sergeant passing along the trench. The man on his right put his nozzle, grotesquely like the muzzle of a dog, close to his ear and yelled through to him: “We go over at eight, Fatty. It’s five to, now. When you see the signal, over you go. We've got to get Hill 50.”

  “Where's Hill 50?” Carl called back at him.

  The man waved his arm. “Straight ahead,” he said. “But it’s all the same; you'll never get there. It might as well be Hell 50.”

  Inside his stuffy mask Carl darkled. The man’s words waked in him a strange rage. What was he here for? What were they all fighting about, these fools, with their Hill 50, which might be Hell 50, and which was to be got to, but could not be got to by the fruit of woman? If they would only stop that infernal racket! The cross? What had the cross to do with this place of fifty hells, of tabulated infernos? Wrath swept through him - and his poor flesh, empty now for many an hour, trembled in its hollow. He raised his hands and beat the clay before his face. “Curse the cross!” he shrieked into the unheeding womb of din. “Curse the cross! - curse the cross!”

  So said Carl in his ditch that dim morning, while the Beast that man had made raged round him and wound him ever further and firmer in its coils. And you were right, Carl, as man is in the main right and men in the mass are in the main wrong; but you should have stopped at that last, Carl, for that was a hard thing to say, now; and out there Death reaps with a free sweep and singing scythe; and not with curses in his heart is it fit that a man should meet his Maker.

  ****

  The signal had been given, and Carl, scrambling upward on hands and knees, had sprawled across the wet clay of the parapet, risen grasping his rifle, and now was off at a shambling run over ground sodden with rain and dotted with shellpools. He ran awkwardly, as the middle-aged man runs on whose thews the fat has set old encroachment; and the mud squelched and slithered under the blunder of his big boots. Enveloping him, a shroud of mist and smoke drove and whirled and drifted; and in front a curtain hung, behind which the concussions of the barrage gambolled redly, throating always its oratorio.

  Little as had been his idea of the plan of attack and the part set apart for his battalion, it was now no better; only he knew that he was one of a crowd that straggled out across the open, death-dedicated, their faces set towards a bourne unknown. Dreadful to him seemed their ineffectual pace and grotesque the spludge with which they trudged the mud. Could sacrifice be so shorn of outward grandeur, could things ultimate enough to fling millions at each other’s throats be served by figures so ineffectual and ridiculous? Not so, surely, did Gaul and Ossian lean forward into battle, nor Hector leap the Grecian ditch. True, Carl, true - but in the end the last chapter of the body’s story is the same; one sure touch deep-biting on head or breast or belly, and the red honey that the soul stored pours, and she, the bee, is gone. Look, now.

  On the edge of a crater he saw a man in front kneel down as though to pray, there, at which Carl, this being his first charge, and indeed his first taste of war at all, hurried to him, and was just about to touch him when the man went forward on his face limply in the clay, and at the same instant another figure some three yards on his right said “Ah!” and, gasping, sprawled.

  At this Carl stood a space dazed, not knowing what to do, his throat choking and his heart aflutter; then going to the first man, he put down his hand and touched him, saying in a sort of whisper, “What is it?” and, without waiting to know, was off a few steps to the other, and over him, too, he leaned, and peered, and said again, “What is it?” in a sort of whisper. But scarcely had he spoken when he was answered; for the man rolled over in his death agony, and as he gasped, the death rattle blew from his torn throat in a splutter of red over Carl’s bent be-goggled muzzle.

  At that Carl started back, and had just time to see a leg severed at the hip lying bloody-stumped apart from that other huddle on the crater’s edge, when he heard dimly a shout behind, and looking, saw the sergeant with revolver pointed at him coming up through the haze. He could hear nothing of the words flung at him but understood the menacing murder of that glance and that glinting barrel, and terror urged him forward.

  He turned and plunged into the mist ahead, plugging the mud heavily, his rifle trailing and a weakness in his knees, for death is not pretty, and he had not seen it near before. In front he saw the backs of his fellows jogging slowly forward, all moving one way, in twos and threes; here and there a single figure, and at intervals larger patches, where many shadows blurred to one mass.

  Suddenly he found himself in a crowd. He saw two officers close to him. One seemed to be urging the men forward, the other hung upon the rear, moving this way and that, as a collie cuddles the rear of his flock. In his hand was an automatic. At that Carl spurted anew and drew up into the middle of the crowd.

  As yet he had seen no man, other than those first two, fall. He wondered if, after all, it might be that by taking care one might win a trick from death. Assuredly that was it. Those two back there had not been careful. Perhaps even Hill 50 might be hell only for its defenders. He brought his rifle from the ground - and a tall man beside him turned, threw up his arms and clutched him with a squeal, his mask a red mash.

  They went down together, the tall man atop, drumming fr
antically with his toes, his head pressed tight against the breast of Carl’s tunic. Carl struggled free and rose. The officer in front was gesticulating. With one hand he pointed at the mist ahead, and with the other he seemed to gather the air behind him and fling it forward. There was a rush around him, a chug-chug of many feet. He ran with the others.

  The smoke opened and ahead he saw a mound against a further murk, the remains of what once had been a hill, now a monstrous tumble of rubbish, like the midden of a Cyclops or a birth begotten of earthquake. From a dozen points smoke poured from it and he caught a glint just under the ragged rim of its ridge. Then Hill 50 spoke and justified the jest upon its name.

  Three horizontal bands, one above the other, crashed into flame upon the crouched hunch of the mound, and as the air knew that jar it shuddered and its riven chambers crashed heart-shatteringly. Cataract after cataract of sound poured; Niagaras of thunder gambolled amid a din of tumbling Gibraltars; and over their jostling battlements the trumps of judgment braved their blast of desolation. The sun was a brass that banged and the earth answered with her voice in travail.

  The air, too, was become the playground where in a carnival of passion immense presences danced with feet nimbler than the doe, and wings swifter than swallow wing. Their leap was whirlwind and the brush of their passing pinions vertigo unnamable. Here and there they whooped and stooped and flew, bruising the poor earth, burrowing to burst there deep their fiery hearts and throw fields skyward in steel-shot fountains. Overhead, while the eye pondered its flutter, their sirocco grew to full, and ere the lid drooped they whooped their whaup and went.

  Before that onslaught Carl’s band went down like penned cattle above which the red sledge is busy. Three level sheets of flame fraying out from the hill’s three bands of fire, converging, took them on a single edge of steel, solid almost as an axe blade. The first ranks, cut in two by that dreadful stream of death, wilted and were no more, and the blade, passing on, bit ever deeper into the huddle of the ranks behind. A blanket of burning air swept down on Carl, filling his lungs through the mask he wore. A jumble of screams beat in to him from in front and above the heads before him he saw a toss of arms and a shattered rifle spin.