by Dan Simmons
The room is illuminated just by the light of the medical monitors. Visitors do not think that Robert can hear what they are saying, but he can.
“He has been like this for some time,” says the nurse to the President’s visiting daughter and her son.
“My father wants nothing but the finest care for him,” says Lancer’s daughter. She has grown into a beautiful woman. Her son is three or four and has inherited his grandfather’s healthy thatch of chestnut hair. The little boy takes Robert’s fingers in his small hands. He is not frightened by the hospital room or the IV drips or the medical monitors. He has been here before.
Lancer’s daughter sits by his bedside as she has so many times before. Do not weep for me, thinks Robert. I am not unhappy.
Carol sits by her father’s bed until 3 A.M. when the technicians come to unhook the machines and to take his body away.
When they are gone, she continues to sit in the dark room. Her eyes are open but she does not see. After a while she smiles, takes out a thirty-minute tube, raises it almost reverently to her nose, and breaks the tab.
THE GREAT LOVER
Editor’s Prologue by Richard Edward Harrison III:
The following secret wartime journal of the poet James Edwin Rooke was “discovered” in the Imperial War Museum, in London in September of 1988. In fact, the journal had been correctly logged and catalogued as one of several thousand Great War diaries found or donated to the Museum almost seventy years earlier, but the small notebook had been misfiled with bureaucratic detritus of little interest to scholars through all or most of the intervening decades. Once “discovered,” however, the ensuing reaction it has created in scholars might be described as nothing less than sensational.
That it is the actual writing of James Edwin Rooke has now been verified beyond question. The handwriting has been confirmed. The poems, most of them in their earliest work state, have been identified as holistic versions of several of the more famous verses in Trench Poems by James Edwin Rooke, copyright 1921 by Faber and Faber Ltd., London. Indeed, although the diary was not signed and was one of hundreds of nearly identical cheap journals recovered at aid stations, burial centres, or on the battlefield itself, many of the passages in this journal were “signed” by Rooke’s hasty symbol Q, which was to become so famous on the cover of the 1936 Faber edition of Trench Poems.
But even when there was no further doubt as to the authenticity of this diary, there remained a shocked disbelief. The reasons are varied and profound.
First, James Edwin Rooke’s Somme diary from the Great War had already been found and published (One Infantry Officer’s Memoirs:
James Edwin Rooke’s Somme Diary, copyright 1924 by George Falkner & Sons) and while it contained some disturbing imagery of trench warfare, the tone was of the more temperate and often wryly humorous variety which so typified officers’ diaries of that time. In point of truth, most of Rooke’s published Somme Diary comments were terse operational notes with few personal asides of interest to any but the most dedicated literary scholar or military historian.
Certainly there was nothing of the sort of shocking material present in this more recently discovered journal.
Secondly, there were the legal rights of the Rooke estate to be considered and the surviving members of the Rooke family to be consulted. The editor wishes to thank Mrs. Eleanor Marsh of Tunbridge Wells for her kind permission to reprint the following pages.
Finally, there was the factor of the contents themselves. The reputation of James Edwin Rooke, as both poet and man, has seemed secure for most of this century. While the demands of honest scholarship require full disclosure, drastically altering the reputation of an historical figure so central to British pride and British literary tradition is no light undertaking. Thus it is that this, the first publication of James Edwin Rooke’s secret Somme diary, was delayed for several years due as much to this editor’s concern about the effect it would have on the image and literary legacy of the famous “trench poet” as to the serious and extended effort required to verify all aspects of the journal’s authenticity.
But having verified the diary’s authenticity and carefully weighed the effect such revelations will have on the memory of one of this century’s premiere poets, the burden of honest scholarship compels this editor to publish the journal without amendation or expurgation.
The journal itself has suffered waterstain, some damage from the terrible war environment it describes, and the inevitable decomposition from seven decades in storage under less than optimum conditions at the Imperial War Museum. More than that, several pages are missing and may have been torn out by the author. Many passages have been scrawled over or marked out. Some of these have been retrieved through various X-ray techniques; others appear to have been lost forever.
Because of the many years and cultural differences that now separate us from those terrible months along the Somme in 1916, I have inserted a few editorial comments for purposes of clarification. Where the text is illegible or ambivalent, I have noted my own best guess reconstruction of a word or phrase. I have footnoted the bits of verse in the journals.
Other than these few editorial intrusions, the words and impressions are totally those of the twenty-eight-year-old Lieutenant James Edwin Rooke, late of C Company, No. 4237, 13th (S) Battalion, The Rifle Brigade.
—REH
Cambridge
December, 1992
Saturday, 8 July, 8.15 A.M.—
Because I had been here as observer the week before during the Big Push and “knew the way” through the endless maze of trenches, I was appointed last night to lead the entire Rifle Brigade from the reserve trenches on the Tara-Usna Ridge into our section of the Front at la Boisselle. I accepted with good enough grace, despite the fact that the lines had changed dramatically along this section of the Front in the intervening week. Since la Boisselle itself had fallen, it now lies behind the front line, while the section of enemy trench we had undermined and blown heavenward with such a ferocious bang on the morning of 1 July now exists merely as a gigantic crater to the right of our new forward line. (As I write this, the crater is in the process of becoming a mass grave for our comrades in the 34th Division whom I watched go over the top so bravely and so futilely only seven days ago. Their bodies have been out in the No Man’s Land since the morning of the attack, and only the successful advance this morning during which la Boisselle finally fell has allowed our troops to reach the wire where most of the bodies have lain since the previous Saturday.)
We arrived after 10 P.M. last night, in the pouring rain, and, without sleep or a proper meal, were put to the task of burying the dead before the sun rose. The Colonel explained to the officers that burial teams had been sniped at during daylight hours so that we were to begin our business at night. The other officers and I called together the NCOs in our respective companies and passed on the explanation. The NCOs explained nothing to the men, but roused them out of their muddy nooks and crannies, out from under their dripping oilsheets, and away from their midnight brew-ups to get on with the grisly business.
The trenches here are a nightmare to navigate, even in the daytime, a confusing rat’s maze even before the hasty advance and the addition of new trenches in the past two days, and last night, in the rain, the maze was almost beyond human mastery. Nonetheless, I led burial parties to places along the row of old German trenches, hoping all the while not to leave our section altogether and blunder into active Boche lines. There was little to do except to direct the men in the pulling of corpses dressed in khaki off the rolls of still-standing wire. There were more bodies in the innumerable shell craters, of course, but I decided to leave those alone in the dark and rain. A living man can drown in one of those craters. The dead are in no hurry to leave them.
This entire front stinks of death and decay and the smell has already permeated my new uniform. It never leaves one and one does not seem to grow completely used to it according to my chums in the 34th who have be
en here since replacing the French. It was worse, of course, out among the corpse-filled craters and body-strewn wire of what only yesterday had been No Man’s Land.
Our burial parties moved forward warily under the sputtering light of Very flares and the incessant heat-lightning flash of artillery. Neither the German guns nor our own had let up their dueling from the day’s battle (we lost thirteen men merely moving the mile from the Tara-Usna Ridge to the forward communications trenches behind the Front) and whatever advantage we held over snipers in the dark certainly seemed negated by the effect of the heavier nighttime shelling.
There were hundreds of bodies on the wire just in our small section of line and I had the NCOs tell the men to concentrate on these, ignoring, as I said, those in the shellholes and former German trenches. Naturally there were hundreds of German bodies there as well as the British dead, and the other two lieutenants and I decided that it would be easier to sort these out in the daylight.
The procedure was rather straightforward. Each detail consisted of men to pull our comrades’ bodies from the wire, often leaving chunks of the corpse behind, other men to gather identity disks, stretcher bearers to carry each corpse to the crater, and a final group of men to gather up rifles and other recoverable equipment. At the crater, the bodies were merely tipped over without memorial service or farewell. In the red light of flares, I watched as several of these dead men—some of whom I may well have met or known during my week of liaison with the 34th Division—went rolling gently, almost comically, down the muddy slope in the rain and dark. No effort was made to identify individuals at this point. Their identity disks will be perused later and the appropriate letters written and posted.
The bodies roll very slowly, usually burying themselves in the chalk and sucking mud before reaching the noxious green lake of gas and decay at the bottom of the crater. Once, as I watched, a shell struck the lip of the crater where a work party of six men were lifting corpses off stretchers and bits of the recently quick and the recently dead all went spiraling out over the hungry maw of the pit. Two wounded men were helped back toward the aid station—I do not know if their helpers ever found the aid station—while the rest of the mutilated burial detail (or at least as much as could be found) were merely shoved down into the crater along with the bodies they had been handling only moments before.
We are ordered to occupy the forward trenches, but these are also mass graves.
And clink of shovels deepening the shallow trench.
The place was rotten with dead; green clumsy legs
High-booted, sprawled and grovelled along the saps
And trunks, face downward, in the sucking mud,
Wallowed like trodden sandbags loosely filled;
And naked sodden buttocks, mats of hair,
Bulged, clotted heads slept in the plastering slime1
But I must write of what has caused me to start this new and private diary.
I know that I will die here at the Somme. I am certain of it.
And I know now that I am a coward.
During the past few months of training at Auxi-le-Château, or the billet time before that at Hannescamps, I had suspected that my nervous tendencies and poetic inclinations indicated a lack of nerve. But I had told myself that I was merely green, that it was merely a case of the usual jitters, of the new subaltern getting the wind up during his first exposure to the Front.
But now I know better.
I am a coward. I want to live and nothing—not King, not Country, not even saving home and family and Western Civilization from the slavering Hun—seems worth dying for.
It was getting on towards dawn and I had sent back the last burial party—Sgt. Jowett, Corporal Newey, Bobby Wood, Frank Bell, and several of the other boys who had worked at W.H. Smith’s in Nottingham and who had joined together—when I tried to find my way back to Battalion H.Q. via a series of low communication trenches. Any trip through these interlocking lines of zigzagging wounds in the wet earth can take an absurd amount of time—last week I became lost trying to find 34th Divisional Headquarters and spent almost an hour traversing a few hundred yards—but this morning I was completely, totally, irrevocably, irretrievably lost. And alone. Finally, when I realized that the trench system which I was traversing was deeper than any British trench I had ever seen, that the junction signs—too dim to decipher in Very light without igniting a flame on my trench lighter, which I was not about to do—were nonetheless visibly written in Fraktur, and that the corpses against which I had been brushing were wearing higher boots and sharper tin hats than the honest British dead, I decided that I had blundered into a section of German trench which was—I sincerely hoped—only recently captured and not yet manned against counterattacks.
I sat down to wait for daylight.
It was several minutes before I realized that someone was sitting directly opposite me in the rain, his pale face appearing to study me quite intensely.
I admit that I started rather violently and reached for my pistol before I realized that it was only another corpse. It was helmetless, and I could not make out the color of the uniform fabric—all uniforms seem composed of mud at any rate—but the protruding legs seemed booted more in the Boche manner than in Blighty leather. {Ed. note—British Tommies along the Somme at this time often referred to England and things English as Blighty.}
As I sat there waiting for dawn to reach forth her rosy fingertips, or at least for the black rain to turn to grey drizzle, I studied the man—what had been a man only days or hours before—in the red light of flares and the orange and magnesium-white pulse of exploding shells. I think the rain had let up a bit, or I had become used to it. I had left my valise {Ed. note—some officers carried their sleeping gear in a sort of portmanteau} and oilsheet where the Brigade had come onto the line, so I merely huddled miserably against the front of the trench since my friend seemed comfortable leaning against the parados {Ed. note—the backside of the trench, the front being the parapet} and satisfied myself in letting the rain drip from my tin hat onto my drenched lap.
Rats had been busy with my friend. This was no surprise, since most of the corpses we had witnessed this long day and longer night had a dead rat or two as quiet company. Sergeant Jowett, who has spent more time in the forward trenches than any of the rest of us, explained that a certain number of the giant vermin literally gorge themselves to death on the flesh of our comrades. During the first days on the line, he explained, the men tend to take it personally and to use bayonets to stab the slower-moving overstuffed creatures and toss them out into No Man’s Land. But soon enough, he says, one learns to ignore the living rats, much less the dead.
There were no dead rats here tonight. At least none that I could see in the rain and mud. I began to make deductions about my friend’s fate. He appeared to be almost one with the trench wall, as if he had been slammed back into it by a great force of exploding shell or a tossed Mills bomb. But his clothing and limbs were visibly intact, so that presumption seemed less than probable. It was more likely that he had been shot, had slumped against this trench wall, and one or more days of rain had brought the mud packing down around him in a sort of vertical burial. His hands were visible and very white. His clothes seemed to fit him wonderfully well, better than any quartermaster had ever clothed any living German infantry soldier—or British one either for that matter—but this sartorial precision was the result of gasses bloating the body so that expanding wet wool and leather almost creaked in protest.
I had seen this before, this deceptive rotundity of the dead.
My friend’s fatal wound seemed quite visible and—to me—most terrible.
The rats and carrion birds had taken his eyes, of course, but the eyelids seemed intact right down to the lashes and he seemed to gaze at me with these black oval pits. And there was a third eye precisely in the center of his pale forehead. Sometimes, when the Very flares sputtered near the end of their descending lifetime, one or more of these three eyes seemed
to wink and blink at me in some sort of necromantical conspiracy, as if saying—You too will soon know this stillness.
A Lee Enfield such as those the men in my rifle brigade carry and which almost certainly inflicted the visible wound in my friend, does not leave a dramatic entrance hole. Usually the German shooting victims we had passed on the roads coming up had little more than a neat, bluish, bloodless, eye-sized or smaller aperture in the side that had been facing our marksmen. Of course, they—like my friend here—might have an exit hole large enough to put one’s fist in, large enough to spill the entire contents of his cranium out in a widening fan of brain and blood, but these details were mercifully hidden by the trench wall of which he seemed intent on becoming a part.
I confess here that this single, simple wound caused terror in me because I have always had an abnormal fear of being struck in the face. When other boys had faced off with fists at school, I had backed away from confrontation. Not, I told myself, because I feared pain—I feel that I deal with pain as well as the next boy or man—but precisely because the thought of a closed fist coming toward my eyes and face made me sick with revulsion and terror.
And now this. A bullet from one of our rifles, or—more relevantly, from its counterpart German Mauser—travels at almost half a mile per second, arriving twice as quickly as the sound of the shot itself.
Directly towards one’s face. At one’s eyes. Sharp metal flying directly at the eyes—the “darling of one’s senses.” The thought is insupportable.
I watched my friend and eventually I tore my gaze away from his unblinking tripartite stare.
I believe he had been young. Younger than my twenty-eight years certainly. Through the mud, there was the hint of short blond hair. The rats had left the flesh of his face surprisingly alone, suiting themselves to only a few long strips torn away around the cheekbones and jaw. These looked like mere finger scratches in the flarelight as water dripped from his nose and brow and strong chin.