by Thomas Wood
I had heard him take his last breath, felt his heart beat for the last time. It was as if nature was holding him to ransom, daring him not to let his heart beat again, but he kept going, defying the calls to let go. He continued to lay there, covered in the most shattering blisters, each one searingly hot to the touch and excruciatingly painful, and yet, he was calling for his wife.
It struck me how much it seemed to mean to her that he was calling for her. I had heard of men calling for their mothers and wives before, but it was chilling that the very words that were haunting me, brought a sense of comfort and peace to her.
She had stopped cleaning the kitchen and putting things away and stood, hands on either side of the basin, staring out at some children playing on the other side of the window pane.
From what I could see, they were playing a game somewhere between hopscotch and football, a series of bobbing heads at the window, interrupted only by the occasional flash of a ball as it was lobbed at one of the bouncing scalps.
I felt a sudden urge to get up and leave, to leave and never come back, but just as I made the first movements to vacate my chair, she spoke.
“You were his best friend, John. You were all he ever spoke about. He would never tell me about what you were training to do or what he thought the ultimate goal would be. It would always be about you.”
An odd sense of pride, mixed with a whole heap of awkwardness came over me and I shifted in my seat, hiding the fact that I had just tried to get up and leave.
“I know a lot about you John, I don’t know whether that fills you with happiness or anxiety,” she chuckled nervously.
“But you were almost like his hero.”
She began to cry, and she scuttled out of the room for a moment. I sat, completely dumbfounded. How could a man like Charlie, respect someone like me? I constantly stole from stores, frequently missed training and was up on subordinate charges more than he sat on the toilet.
I heard her footsteps creak on the floorboards above my head as I continued to drown in feelings of inadequacy and total confusion.
He was from a respectable, hardworking family, and now he was the head of his own family. He was earmarked for promotion, noted as one who would go much further than the likes of me. We were two, very different people. And yet he respected me.
I wondered if he would respect me now, sat in his kitchen with his wife, especially after I’d just brutally attacked her, all because of a kettle. Meanwhile he was condemned to an eternity of misery.
She shuffled back into the room, this time with an extra passenger on board.
“Here,” she motioned for me to take the bundle of cloth in my arms, leaving me with no other option but to do as she said.
I stared down at him in utter amazement and adoration. He was perfect.
His eyes were resting but he slowly moved his limbs around in a trance like state, as only a small child can. He let out a small “coo” as he shuffled around in my arms and his innocence, the naivety of the world was beautiful. He was unblemished. He knew nothing of the evil and the suffering in the world, and I prayed on the spot that it would be a long time before he discovered what it was really like.
I raised my hand as if to stroke his face, but he stopped me. Gently, he opened his fluttering, paper thin eyelids and stared. His piercing green eyes stared back at me and he gradually moved his hand up to greet mine.
His miniature hand clamped itself over my index finger, like a bat hanging to a tree for dear life. And then, for a moment, I thought I felt something. Then again.
Was he? No, surely not.
Yes! He was! He was squeezing my finger. I almost drowned him in great globules of tears as they splashed down around him. All the time he maintained a perfect eye contact with me, completely unblinking as the droplets crashed into his face and all around him. It was as if he knew, he knew that this is what I needed, the comfort and compassion of a small, unblemished child would help me to deal with myself, to deal with the horrors of what one man can do to another.
His innocence calmed me. It was the first time since Normandy that I had had a positive thought about another human, and for the first time, he had given me hope. Hope that a child can be brought into such a world as this and still maintain a perfect, untouched innocence.
“He’s beautiful.”
“You were his best friend John. I don’t know exactly what you saw out there or what you experienced, but I know that you were always with him, and that brings great comfort to a widow.” She spoke matter-of-factly, it was as if she had already got over Charlie, no emotion in her voice at all.
I shuffled once more in my seat, still clutching to the new life that was in my arms.
“You were always a part of him John, and now he’ll always be a part of you.
“He’s called Charlie, by the way.” I looked up with a half-smile on my face. I would have done the same.
“Charlie…John.”
I looked up at her, the great waterfalls that had filled up my eyes blurred my vision completely and they cascaded downwards as I looked back at the small child.
Charlie John Manning. I liked it.
Part III
1
September 1985
My Dad died nearly fifteen years ago now, and he took what he had experienced to the grave with him. Still, to this day I do not know how he made it out of that burning box alive, and now I never will. That afternoon before I went to war was the only time he had spoken to me about what had happened to him and, as far as I know, he never spoke to anyone about it ever again.
He continued to carry his scars, the visual, physical reminders of what had happened to him. But they didn’t matter, there were ointments and pills that he could take that would give him some respite from the pain. It was the ones in his mind that continued to torment him, continue to taunt me, and it is those scars, that will never leave.
I never asked him if it had made him feel any better to explain, we never spoke of it ourselves after that, but it had seemed he had needed that one release, that one opportunity to pour his mind out to someone else, share the burden. This is what this is. I do not know yet if it has helped me, I do not know if it ever will, but, to an extent I feel like I have shared the burden with you. I pray every day that you will never experience what I did, I beg that you never even come close, but, if you do, you must always hold fast, and settle things as much as possible within your own mind.
Talk about it if that’s what it takes. Write about it. Share the burden.
The “battle fatigue” that Major Lewis diagnosed me with, still looms over me, clings to me, even forty years on. I sleep now, the dreams have subsided, but the memories that I possess still haunt me daily.
I still walk with a limp, a small piece of shrapnel embedded in my upper thigh. There’s no point in trying to remove it now, it will do more harm than good, so it will always be a part of me. It doesn’t hurt, apart from the occasional twang that is so often followed by a similar twang of uncontrollable guilt.
The dreams have eased, the names have faded but the memory is still so painfully vivid. I cannot escape what I have seen, what I have done, even forty years later. People call me a hero and I let them, not because I think they’re right, but because they do not understand what their heroes have actually done. Their heroes are murderers, interrogators, thieves, but most of all, they are simply damaged.
Their heroes have seen and done some of the most horrific things that one man can do to another, but yet, it was all done in the name of righteousness and freedom. A necessity of war. It’s hard to think like that when you’re on the battlefield. Out there, it’s man versus man, not democracy versus totalitarianism. Out there, you have to kill a man to survive. One minute you are fighting a living, breathing human, one with a family and friends, with aspirations and goals, maybe even sympathies with you. The next, he is just a slab of meat, lying on the floor, a pool of blood slowly filling up around him.
No one, unle
ss you have truly been there yourself, can ever fully understand what taking a life feels like. To be there when the eyes stop seeing and the breathing ceases forever. No one can ever understand what that felt like to me. I am selfish, I do only think of myself, but understand this, it’s because of what has happened to me, I’ve seen things, done things that no one should ever do and seen things that no one should see. I’ve become self-centred, not out of a lack of compassion or sympathy for other members of this world, but out of a genuine fear of what I could do to them, even now, a sixty-something, old man.
So, my child, your grandad will never speak of the things that he has seen or done, he will just quietly mull them over and lock them away in the darkest compartment of his mind, only to let it out when he’s out of sight of everyone he loves. I will never speak of it, but it is all here, my mind, laid out in ink, a physical manifestation of the memories that taunt me.
They are not here to scare you, they are not even here to warn you. They are here so that you know, so that you understand, why I am the man I am today, why I am the man who refused to wear his medals or take part in any kind of celebration of war. Maybe one day you will understand why I am the man who cries daily, watching the six o’clock news. One day.
These thoughts encompass me day after day, I never make any progress in them, they just linger, they linger there until I become too tired for the day and fall asleep. Then, I’ll repeat the whole process again tomorrow.
I am not the only man who now thinks like this. It is not just the men that deal with these thoughts either. There is an entire generation of us, all of your Grandad’s friends and contemporaries are scarred in one way or another. We cannot tell you what we have seen or done, we cannot identify ourselves as suffering individuals. But we are there. We are the man waiting at the bus stop, or the lady struggling with her change at the checkout. We are in the doctor’s waiting room or walking down the street. We are strangers to you. Or we might even be a part of your family.
I came back, and I thank God, every day for letting me, but others didn’t. I was able to return, make something of my life and build a family around me, a loving family. Soon, when you are born, I will become a grandparent, a new, tiny child will fill my attention. One that is completely oblivious to this life, to its corruptibility, the nature of humankind and its nonchalant view of life.
I don’t want to be a grandparent who hides things. In my older life, I have found myself yearning for the world, willing the world to put aside its differences and come together in peace. The conclusion that I have come to is, sadly, it will never happen. But I can make a difference.
I am a man who has been to war, one who has killed to make things right and although we won that war, another one will be along soon, and the killing will start again.
I want to end these stories, one man at a time, they need to see what war, what killing, does to a man’s soul. It breaks it beyond repair.
I fulfilled my promise to myself that I’d made all those years ago when I visited Christine. I live in a leafy suburban village in the south of England. There are no planes overhead here, no unnecessary vehicles trundling around, no sirens screaming or people shouting; I am left alone with my thoughts. And so, I came home, I made something of my life, I have a wife, a son and soon, a grandson. But I will never escape. I have never escaped. I survived, but often, I find myself asking how much of me died over there, how much of me died with Charlie and how much of Charlie survives within me?
When the dreams do come to me, they are different than before, but always the same. The maze that I’m in only ends when the morning alarm sounds and the day begins. It twists and turns and the gravel beneath my feet crunches and echoes, louder and louder with each step. Then I’ll see my first monument. Charlie will be there smiling to me, encouraging me on my way through, helping to find a way out. He never gets any older, he is always the same twenty-two-year-old that had, a few minutes before, been crashed face down in a bush after being ejected from the glider.
I journey on, a little further, before I see the Pole, standing there in his best dress uniform, a grin proudly on his face. It’s a smile of pride, of strength and he knows exactly what he wants from me. But it is also a smile of sorrow, a small glint in his eye as the tears reflect in the dusky twilight.
“Come on,” he says in a heavily accented English, “You’ve got this, this is yours.”
He replaces the pipe that he twiddles in his hand and inserts it slowly into the side of his mouth. Uplifted, I journey on further and see Len, who’s already talking before I even reach him.
“I’m from Lancashire,” he says each time, and I wonder if it’s my subconscious, that he did tell me where he was from and it has resurfaced at the back of my mind. Or if it was my mind, constructing a life for Len, a background of where he was from and how he grew up, in order to give him some sort of future, other than having his brains spilled out on the fifty yards or so of steel, stretching itself over a small river.
I would see them all, encouraging me on my way, spurring me on until I got to the middle. I would begin jogging as I got closer, before sprinting my way into the clearing that would open up before me.
Each time I would skid to a halt and try to turn back, only to find that the maze had closed around me. I would be alone. Every time. There was no happy ending to this maze, no sweet chirping of birds and shrieks of delight as children ran around outside, just total, deathly silence. Just me, swamped by the perimeter of the maze all around me.
The hangman’s noose would hang limply from a wooden frame, swaying gently in the breeze that rustled through the maze. I would never use it, never approach it, but would just stand and stare at it until I woke. It would taunt me, beckon me in, and on more than one occasion I have been tempted. But I always keep my feet firmly planted where they are, not moving an inch.
“Bad dream?” she would always say to me, I knew I kept her up, but I didn’t want to admit to her that I needed help.
How could it be a bad dream, if it would never leave me when I woke?
Charlie had died and, at times, I felt like he was the lucky one. He had seen some of the stuff that I had seen, but he would never have to live with it, he would always be the twenty-two-year-old, clutching my bar of chocolate and smiling broadly. He probably didn’t even work out what had hit him.
I had cheated death, but I couldn’t help but feel that life, had cheated me.
Every morning when I wake, I go about my daily routine, wandering downstairs to flick the kettle on, always stopping it manually before it clicks itself off. I check the clock, force of habit, but I’d taken the batteries out some time ago, the constant ticking would cause me great discomfort. My daily life is littered with oddities and habits, all of which I have picked up to prevent the “battle fatigue” that, forty years later, I still suffer from.
So, as you grow up my child, look at me, not as an enigma, a mysterious figure who once fought in a war, but as a man who deserved to die, a man who will never be proud of what he has done. A man who lives in pure terror at what the next dream might bring him.
As I go about my life, the same words always saunter through my mind, from the detestable Major Lewis who I had seen so many years ago;
“All men who go to war die, son. Anyone who comes back, comes back cheated.”
The End.
‘As If They Were My Own’ - Book 3 in the ‘Gliders over Normandy’ series is out now on
Amazon US and Amazon UK
1
As if they were my own
The screams of the Stukas had died away now, and my mind drifted as I wondered about their fate. I felt incredibly guilty at the thought that they had all been shot down, now lying in a burning wreckage, smouldering in the French countryside. Part of me had hoped that they hadn’t been able to bail out.
I was angry with them, they had bombed us day after day, raining terror and fear down on my boys as they desperately fought for survival. I couldn’t
help but think that there was an incredible cowardice in those dive bombers, a faceless murderer who scurried away back into the clouds, just as quickly as they had dived out of them. It was why I had taken pot shots at them at every opportunity I had, spreading myself out on the ground, flat on my back, rifle raised to the sky, firing off round after round at the gutless crew.
It was all pointless, but then again, everything had seemed to be pointless over the last few days. We were losing. We had fought and fought hard at that, we had lost men, lost boys, who were good at what they did and now they were left to soak into the ground, to become a part of France forever. We had pushed them back at times, a far superior army being pushed back by a small force of men who didn’t have enough ammunition, or heavy weapons. But it was futile. We’d push them back, but then we’d be ordered to retreat ourselves. All that fighting, all that ammunition, all those men, all so that the enemy could just march in and take what they wanted anyway.
I hated them.
The three figures in front of me charged across the forest floor, each of their footsteps cracking and crunching on leaves and twigs. Their rifles swung from side to side as I felt every stride they took, every breath they sucked in, as they desperately made their way to some cover.
I felt sick at the thought that my own progress was being hindered. I so desperately wanted to be able to sprint as hard as them, duck behind some cover and return fire. But I couldn’t, the weight was far too heavy.
He grunted with every staggered footstep that we took together. He had taken a fragment of a grenade through his boot, the force of which had melted part of it away and exposed the almost near-perfect hole that now occupied the bulk of his foot. He clung to me, and I to him, in the most deranged attempt at a three-legged race ever known to man. I laughed as I thought of what we must have looked like, and I couldn’t imagine that it would be taking off in any sports days anytime soon.