The Project Gutenberg eBook of The forbidden zone
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: The forbidden zone
Author: Mary Borden
Release date: January 9, 2026 [eBook #77655]
Language: English
Original publication: London: William Heinemann, Ltd, 1929
Credits: Sean/IB@DP, Tom Trussel and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FORBIDDEN ZONE ***
THE FORBIDDEN ZONE
_Other works by Mary Borden_
THE ROMANTIC WOMAN
JANE--OUR STRANGER
THREE PILGRIMS AND A TINKER
FOUR O’CLOCK
JERICHO SANDS
FLAMINGO
JEHOVAH’S DAY
[Illustration: SOLITUDE]
SOLITUDE
_The zone at Thiepval, near the Somme, in 1916_
_From the Drypoint by_
PERCY SMITH
THE FORBIDDEN ZONE
BY
MARY BORDEN
[Illustration]
_To the Poilus
who came that way in
1914-1918_
[Illustration]
WILLIAM HEINEMANN, LTD.,
_London_
_Published 1929_
CONTENTS
_Part One_
THE NORTH
_Page_
1 BELGIUM 1
2 BOMBARDMENT 5
3 THE CAPTIVE BALLOON 11
4 THE SQUARE 13
5 SENTINELS 17
6 THE REGIMENT 21
7 THE BEACH 42
8 MOONLIGHT 51
9 ENFANT DE MALHEUR. A story 66
10 ROSA. A story 93
_Part Two_
THE SOMME
_Hospital Sketches_
1 THE CITY IN THE DESERT 109
2 CONSPIRACY 117
3 PARAPHERNALIA 123
4 IN THE OPERATING ROOM 127
5 BLIND. A story 136
6 THE PRIEST AND THE RABBI. A story 160
7 THE TWO GUNNERS. A story 167
POEMS
1 THE HILL 175
2 THE SONG OF THE MUD 179
3 WHERE IS JEHOVAH? 183
4 THE VIRGIN OF ALBERT 189
5 UNIDENTIFIED 193
THE PREFACE
_I have not invented anything in this book. The sketches and poems were
written between 1914 and 1918, during four years of hospital work with
the French Army. The five stories I have written recently from memory;
they recount true episodes that I cannot forget._
_I have called the collection of fragments “The Forbidden Zone” because
the strip of land immediately behind the zone of fire where I was
stationed went by that name in the French Army. We were moved up and
down inside it; our hospital unit was shifted from Flanders to the
Somme, then to Champagne, and then back again to Belgium, but we never
left “La Zone Interdite.”_
_To those who find these impressions confused, I would say that they
are fragments of a great confusion. Any attempt to reduce them to order
would require artifice on my part and would falsify them. To those on
the other hand who find them unbearably plain, I would say that I have
blurred the bare horror of facts and softened the reality in spite of
myself, not because I wished to do so, but because I was incapable of a
nearer approach to the truth._
_I have dared to dedicate these pages to the Poilus who passed through
our hands during the war, because I believe they would recognise the
dimmed reality reflected in these pictures. But the book is not meant
for them. They know, not only everything that is contained in it, but
all the rest that can never be written._
_The Author._
PART ONE
THE NORTH
BELGIUM
MUD: and a thin rain coming down to make more mud.
Mud: with scraps of iron lying in it and the straggling fragment of a
nation, lolling, hanging about in the mud on the edge of disaster.
It is quiet here. The rain and the mud muffle the voice of the war
that is growling beyond the horizon. But if you listen you can hear
cataracts of iron pouring down channels in the sodden land, and you
feel the earth trembling.
Back there is France, just behind the windmill. To the north, the
coast; a coast without a port, futile. On our right? That’s the road
to Ypres. The less said about that road the better: no one goes down
it for choice--it’s British now. Ahead of us, then? No, you can’t get
out that way. No, there’s no frontier, just a bleeding edge, trenches.
That’s where the enemy took his last bite, fastened his iron teeth,
and stuffed to bursting, stopped devouring Belgium, left this strip,
these useless fields, these crumpled dwellings.
Cities? None. Towns? No whole ones. Yes, there are half a dozen
villages. But there is plenty of mud, and a thin silent rain falling
to make more mud--mud with things lying in it, wheels, broken motors,
parts of houses, graves.
This is what is left of Belgium. Come, I’ll show you. Here are trees
drooping along a canal, ploughed fields, roads leading into sand
dunes, roofless houses. There’s a farm, an old woman with a crooked
back feeding chickens, a convoy of motor lorries round a barn; they
squat like elephants. And here is a village crouching in the mud: the
cobblestone street is slippery and smeared with refuse, and there is a
yellow cat sitting in a window. This is the headquarters of the Belgian
Army. You see those men, lolling in the doorways--uncouth, dishevelled,
dirty? They are soldiers. You can read on their heavy jowls, in their
stupified, patient, hopeless eyes, how boring it is to be a hero.
The king is here. His office is in the schoolroom down the street, a
little way past the church, just beyond the dung heap. If we wait we
may see him. Let’s stand with these people in the rain and wait.
A band is going to play to the army. Yes, I told you, this is the
army--these stolid men standing aimlessly in the drizzle, and these
who come stumbling along the slippery ditches, and those leaning in
degraded doorways. They fought their way out of Liege and Namur,
followed the king here; they are what is left of plucky little
Belgium’s heroic army.
And the song of the nation that comes from the horns in the front of
the wine shop, the song that sounds like the bleating of sheep, can it
help them? Can it deceive them? Can it whisk from their faces the stale
despair, the unutterable boredom, and brighten their disappointed eyes?
They are so few, and they have nothing to do but stand in the rain
waiting. When the band stops they will disappear into the estaminet to
warm their stomachs with wine and cuddle the round-cheeked girls. What
else can they do? The French are on one side of them, the British on
the other, and the enemy in front. They cannot go back; to go back is
to retreat, and they have been retreating ever since they can remember.
They can retreat no farther. This village is where they stop. At one
end of it is a pigsty, at the other end is a grave-yard, and all about
are flats of mud. Can the noise, the rhythmical beating of the drum,
the piping, the hoarse shrieking, help these men, make them believe,
make them glad to be heroes? They have nowhere to go now and nothing
to do. There is nothing but mud all about, and a soft fine rain coming
down to make more mud--mud with a broken fragment of a nation lolling
in it, hanging about waiting in it behind the shelter of a disaster
that has been accomplished.
Come away, for God’s sake--come away. Let’s go back to Dunkerque. The
king? Didn’t you see him? He came out of the schoolhouse some time ago
and drove away toward the sand-dunes--a big fair man in uniform. You
didn’t notice? Never mind. Come away.
BOMBARDMENT
The wide sweet heaven was filling with light: the perfect dome of night
was changing into day. A million silver worlds dissolved from above the
earth: the sun was about to rise in stillness: no wind stirred.
A speck appeared in the great immensity. It was an aeroplane travelling
high through the mysterious twilight. The sound of the whirring of its
engine was lost in the depthless air: like a ghost it flew through the
impalpable firmament: it was the only thing that moved in heaven and
earth.
The unconscious map lay spread out beneath it: the wide plain, the long
white beach and the sea, lay there exposed to its speeding eye.
On the face of the plain were villages and cities; the dwellings of
men who had put their trust in the heavens and had dared to people the
earth.
The aeroplane turned in the sky and began circling over the town.
The town far below was asleep. It lay pillowed on the secure shore;
violet shadows leaned against its pale buildings; there was no movement
in its streets; no smoke from its chimneys. The ships lay still in the
deep close harbour; their masts rose out of the green water like reeds
thickly growing with the great funnels and turrets of warships like
strange plants among them. The sea beyond the strong breakwater was
smooth as a silver plate; there was no sound anywhere.
The aeroplane descended in slow spirals upon the town, tracing an
invisible path through the pearly air. It was as if a messenger from
heaven were descending upon the people of the town who dreamed.
Suddenly a scream burst from the throat of the church tower. For an
instant the sky seemed to shiver with the stab of that wail of terror
rising from the great stone throat. Surely the town would waken in a
panic--and yet, no, nothing stirred. There was no sound or movement in
any street and the sky gave back no sign.
The aeroplane continued to descend until it looked from the church
tower like a mosquito; then there dropped something from it that
flashed through the air, a spark of fire.
Silence had followed the scream.
The aeroplane, superbly poised now in the spotless sky, watched the
buildings below it as if waiting for some strange thing to happen; and
presently, as if exorcised by the magic eye of that insect, a cluster
of houses collapsed, while a roar burst from the wounded earth.
The bombardment had commenced. The big gun hiding in the sand-dunes in
Belgium had obeyed the signal.
Still, the neat surface of the wide city showed no change, save in
that one spot where the houses had fallen. How slow to wake the town
was! The daylight brightened, painting the surfaces of the buildings
with pale rose and primrose. The clean empty streets cut the city into
firm blocks of buildings; the pattern of the town spread out on the
earth, with its neat edges marked by walls and canals, gleamed like a
varnished map.
Then the siren in the church tower screamed again; its wail was
followed by a second roar and a ragged hole yawned in the open square
in the middle of the town.
The aeroplane circled smoothly, watching.
And at last signs of terror and bewilderment appeared in the human
ant hill beneath it. Distracted midgets swarmed from the houses: this
way and that they scurried, diving into openings in the ground: swift
armoured beetles rushed through the streets; white jets of steam rose
from the locomotives in the station yard: the harbour throbbed.
Again there was a great noise, and a cloud of debris was flung into the
air as from a volcano, and flames leapt after it. A part of the wharf
with a shed on it reeled drunkenly into the sea with a splash.
The white beach was crawling now with vermin; the human hive swarmed
out on to the sands. Their eyes were fixed on the evil flying thing in
the sky and at each explosion they fell on their faces like frantic
worshippers.
The aeroplane cavorted, whirling after its tail in an ecstacy of
self-gratification. Down among the sand-dunes it could see the tiny
black figures of men at the anti-aircraft guns. These were the
defenders of the town; they had orders to shoot to death a mosquito
floating in boundless heaven. The little clouds that burst in the
sunlight were like materialised kisses.
The face of the city had begun to show a curious change. Scars appeared
on it like the marks of smallpox and as these thickened on its trim
surface, it seemed as if it were being attacked by an invisible
and gigantic beast, who was tearing and gnawing it with claws and
teeth. Gashes appeared in its streets, long wounds with ragged edges.
Helpless, spread out to the heavens, it grimaced with mutilated
features.
Nevertheless the sun rose, touching the aeroplane with gold, and the
aeroplane laughed. It laughed at the convulsed face of the town, at
the beach crawling with vermin, at the ant people swarming through the
gates of the city along the white roads; it laughed at the warships
moving out of the harbour one by one in stately procession, the mouths
of their guns gaping helplessly in their armoured sides. With a last
flick of its glittering wings, it darted downward defiant, dodging
the kisses of shrapnel, luring them, teasing them, playing with them:
then, its message delivered, its sport over, it flew up and away
in the sunshine and disappeared. A speck in the infinite sky, then
nothing--and the town was left in convulsions.
THE CAPTIVE BALLOON
There is a captive balloon in the sky, just over there. It looks like
an oyster floating in the sky.
They say that a man lives in the balloon. They say that from the
balloon you can see the enemy’s trenches and the country behind that
is held by the enemy, but from here we can see nothing, only trees and
farmhouses and carts going along the road, and the captive balloon.
Aeroplanes sail over our heads sometimes. They gleam in the sun, they
move past with a great whirring, they fly fearlessly toward the enemy’s
country. They whirl about and disappear and come again, swooping down
over us with arrogant wings. They are beautiful, proud and adventurous.
But the captive balloon is tied forever by a string to a cabbage field.
It has been just over there ever since we have been here and that is
a long time now. It never moves. It never comes down or goes up. It
floats there while the biplanes and the monoplanes circle round it.
What does it do? It is an oyster in the sky, keeping an eye on the
Germans.
THE SQUARE
Below my window in the big bright square a struggle is going on between
the machines of war and the people of the town. There are the motor
cars of the army, the limousines, and the touring cars and the motor
lorries and the ambulances; and there are the little bareheaded women
of the town with baskets on their arms who try to push the monsters out
of their way.
The motors come in and go out of the four corners of the square, and
they stand panting and snorting in the middle of it. The limousines
are full of smart men in uniforms with silver hair and gold braid on
their round red hats. The touring cars, too, are full of uniforms, but
on the faces of the young men who drive them is a look of exhaustion
and excitement. The motors make a great noise and a great smell and a
great dust. They come into the square, hooting and shrieking; they
draw up in the square with grinding brakes. The men in them get out
with a flourish of capes: they stamp on the pavement with heavy boots;
they salute one another stiffly like wooden toys, then disappear into
the buildings where they hold murderous conferences and make elaborate
plans of massacre.
The motor cars have all gone wrong. They are queer. They are not
doing what they were designed to do when they were turned out of
the factories. The limousines were made to carry ladies to places
of amusement: they are carrying generals to places of killing.
The limousines and the touring cars and the motor lorries are all
debauched; they have a depraved look; their springs sag, their wheels
waver; their bodies lean to one side. The elegant limousines that carry
the generals are crusted with old mud; the leather cushions of the
touring cars are in tatters; the great motor lorries crouch under vast
burdens. They crouch in the square ashamed, deformed, very weary; their
unspeakable burdens bulge under canvas coverings. Only the snobbish
ambulances with the red crosses on their sides have self-assurance.
They have the self-assurance of amateurs.
The business of killing and the business of living go on together in
the square beneath the many windows, jostling each other.
The little women of the town are busy; they are dressed in black;
they have children with them. Some lead children by the hand, others
are big with children yet unborn. But all the women are busy. They
ignore the motors; they do not see the fine scowling generals, nor the
strained excited faces in the fast touring cars, nor the provisions of
war under their lumpy coverings. They do not even wonder what is in
the ambulances. They are too busy. They scurry across to the shops,
instinctively dodging, and come out again with bundles; they talk to
each other a little without smiling; they stare in front of them; they
are staring at life; they are thinking about the business of living.
On Saturdays they put up their booths on the cobble stones and hold
their market. The motors have to go round another way on market days.
There is no room in the square for the generals, nor for the dying
men in the ambulances. The women are there. They buy and sell their
saucepans and their linen and their spools of thread and their fowls
and their flowers; they bargain and they chatter; they provide for
their houses and their children; they give oranges to their children,
and put away their coppers in their deep pockets.
As for the men on the stretchers inside the smart ambulances with the
bright red crosses, they do not know about the women in the square.
They cannot hear their chattering, nor see the children sucking
oranges; they can see nothing and hear nothing of the life that is
going on in the square; they are lying on their backs in the dark
canvas bellies of the ambulances, staring at death. They do not know
that on Saturday mornings their road does not lie through the big
bright square because the little women of the town are busy with their
market.
SENTINELS
All these little men coming out of their boxes along the road--.
The boxes are oblong. They stand on end by the ragged ditches. The men
pop out of the boxes into the middle of the road. They are blurred and
shapeless. They wave dirty flags in weary warning. A motor car slows up
and stops before the box. The languid menace of these figures stops it;
their joyless power holds it with its engines panting.
The coats of the little men who come out of the boxes are too big for
them; their rifles with the bayonets are too heavy. The light of the
sky in the daytime is too strong, and the darkness of the night is too
dark, and the many motors that pass the barriers are too many. The
vague vast meaning of their minute task is too much for them.
It is stupid to live in an oblong box in a ditch, and to pop out at
the sound of a motor and wave a flag and look at a piece of blue paper
or a piece of pink paper with writing on it that is hard to read. There
is a name written on the paper, but how is one to know whether the name
written on the paper is the name that was given to the man in the motor
by his parents when he was a baby in a cradle? How is one to know? It
is one’s business to look at the paper and at the man’s face. What good
does that do? What does it matter? It is one’s duty to look at the
paper. It is one’s duty to look at the man. It is one’s duty to find
out where he has come from and where he is going. La Panne, Dunkerque,
Bourburg, Calais, Boulogne; Boulogne, Calais, Bourburg, Dunkerque, La
Panne, it is always the same. It is always written there on the paper,
with the stamp and the signature of some well-educated officer who sits
in some warm room before piles of papers. These papers wander out from
his room along the road.
It is always the same on the road. It is always the same. All these
motor cars full of men keep coming along the road--the long road that
leads to the war. Sometimes it is hot and there is sunlight and dust
on the road, and the smell of petrol is strong; sometimes it is cold
and the rain beats down from the sky; sometimes it is night and there
is a lantern to wave instead of a flag, and there is the fear of
falling asleep. But the road is always the same and the box by the road
is always the same, and deep down there is the same truth always.
All these motors and all these scornful men that stop to show impatient
papers will disappear up the road for ever. Even those who come down
the road will go up again and will be destroyed and will never come
back. So it is good to be in the box. As long as one is in the box
one will not be destroyed. These fools who are angry because they are
stopped on the road that leads to the war, they will be destroyed. The
generals who do not look and the colonels who glance sideways, and the
lieutenants who make bad jokes--the English and the French and the
Belgians--they will all be destroyed.
They wear fine uniforms. Their faces are clean. They have been eating
good food. They receive back their papers disdainfully. They wear
gloves. They will be destroyed with their gold braid and their medals
and the good food inside them.
Their motors dash off flinging mud into the face from their hind
wheels. They disappear. The road is empty.
THE REGIMENT
There was no sign of horror in the heavens or upon the earth. The
summer world was deep, immense, beautiful. High white clouds were
moving slowly towards Belgium, moving without movement through a sky
ineffably blue, superb castles of white vapour, floating towards a land
called No Man’s Land, and their shadows were flung like banners far
below over the green meadows and fields of yellow corn.
An aeroplane was visiting the romantic city of the sky. A fearless,
capricious, gay glittering creature of pleasure, it flew through the
glistening portals and disappeared, bent on mysterious adventure.
The smiling country was enjoying itself. The caress of the wind sent
shudders of pleasure through the corn and a fluttering delight through
the trees. Along the road banks scarlet poppies were winking their
little black eyes. Like grizzled dwarfs squatting on pedestals in the
fields, the windmills waved their arms in grotesque gaiety.
War had that day the aspect of a country fair. The armies were gipsy
caravans vagabonding over the country. Swarms of little men were
housekeeping in the open. Their camp fires, their pots and pans, and
their garments hung out to dry on bushes, twinkled and fluttered
through the furbelowed country side. Here and there near a stream, a
cluster of tents, gaudily painted, suggested a circus.
The snug villages tucked between the fields of high golden corn and
scattered clumps of woodland hummed like beehives, sheltering an army
in their warm farmyards and barns and cottages, and the army in reserve
waited comfortably, sharing the lovely day with the cattle, the great
farm horses, the pigs and chickens.
Ten miles from the Belgian frontier a lowbrowed, moody town dozed on
the banks of a canal. Folded close between its great gates, it was deep
as a dark well in the midst of the bright flighty country. The dull
ochre walls of the houses soaked up the sunlight. Their shutters were
closed. The barges in the canal were motionless, their great bosoms
sunk deep in the cool water. From the quiet streets and close-lidded
houses the spirit of the place was being distilled in the sunlight.
It was as if the sun were drawing the melancholy soul out of the
weary, proud old body of the town. Reluctantly it gave up its secret.
The memories of its troubled history and of how it had defended a
passionate egoism on the threshold of an alien nation, spread upon the
sunny air like a dark and bitter perfume.
A regiment was marching along the high road towards the town. In the
distance, looking towards Belgium, you could see it coming down the
white road. It was a shadow moving across the bright surface of the
country against the wind and against the shadows of the clouds. It
looked like the shadow of a snake.
There was, however, no snake visible in the lovely sky, and on a nearer
view the shadow became a column of hunchbacks, a herd of deformed
creatures driven on together, each one like another one.
It was a French territorial regiment. It had come out of the trenches
that morning, and from the trenches it was marching toward the town.
It was a moving mass of men covered over with the cloth of fatigue.
Over them was their suffocating weariness, and under them was the dust
of the road. They moved along, bending forward as if the space between
the weight that lay on them and the dusty road under them was not wide
enough to hold them upright. They moved laboriously through the dust,
as if they were dragging chains. But there was no sound from them save
the dull sound of their feet tramping the road.
The regiment was a regiment of old men. Their faces were old and their
clothes were old and their bodies were old, and the spirit in them was
old. There was no youth in any one of them.
They marched steadily along the road. Their gait was the steady jolting
gait of weary animals. They did not look quite like men. One could
not be certain what kind of men they were. One could only be certain
that they were not young. They had not quite the colour nor the
shape of men. The war had spread over them its own colour. They were
dark against the bright mirage of summer. They were of a deep, dull
courageous hue. Their faces and their hands and their coats were all
stained with the same stain, no longer blue, no longer brown. Fatigue
and suffering and dirt had soaked through them and had made them this
colour.
And they were all deformed, and certainly their deformity was the
deformity of the war. They were not misshapen in different ways. They
were all misshapen in the same way. Each one was deformed like the
next one. Each one had been twisted and bent in the same way. Each one
carried the same burden that bowed his back, the same knapsack, the
same roll of blanket, the same flask, the same dangling box, the same
gun. Each one dragged swollen feet in the same thick-crusted boots. The
same machine had twisted and bent them all. They did not look quite
like men, and yet they were men.
Nor did they behave like men. They did not look about them as they
marched along the road. They did not talk as they marched close
together. They did not stop marching, never for a moment did they stop
marching. They did not shift their burdens to ease them. They did not
notice the milestones as they passed. They paid no attention to the
signposts at the cross roads. They did not wipe the sweat off their
faces. They did not behave like men walking through pleasant country,
and yet they assuredly were men.
I saw in their eyes that they were men. They marched with their eyes
fixed on the rough bent backs of those in front, on the rough backs
of their companions who were too old to be comrades. And in their
deep fixed eyes, sunk under grizzled eyebrows, there was a strange
expression, the expression of profound knowledge. They were old men and
they knew. There were many things they did not know; they did not know
where they were going; they did not know why they were going there;
they did not know how far they had to go, or how long they would rest
there; but two things they did know; they knew that they were not going
home, and they knew that they were condemned to death. They knew this;
they had always known. They understood and they did not complain.
France was at war. They were old men. Their sons had been killed. They
were taking the place of their sons.
There was no elasticity in them, nor any enthusiasm, nor any passion;
but they were patient. Being old men, there was nothing they could
not accept; there was nothing they could not endure. They had endured
fatigue and cold and hunger and wet. They had endured so long that they
had ceased to think about these things. Their weariness was a thing of
such long standing that they thought of it no more. Their uncleanness
had become a habit to them. Suffering was a part of their rations. They
were acclimatised to misery. Death was a part of the equipment they
carried always with them. The war had no interest for them nor any
terror. They accepted the war. It was a thing to be endured. They were
enduring it.
There was only one thing they wanted, and this thing they wanted
without hope. They wanted to go home, and they knew they were not going
home.
Out of the deep comfort of the warm dear holes they had dug for
themselves in the land they loved, these old men had been called to
war, the bleak desert of death. Each one had been torn up out of the
deep place he had made. Like old trees, strong rooted, they had grown
into the soil of France, and they had been torn up and carted away to
die, and in the place each one had left there was a gaping hole.
They remembered their homes as they marched along the road. They did
not look about them as they walked through the bright country that was
enjoying itself, because this country was not their home and they were
too tired to look up.
They were coming away from the trenches and they were tired. They were
relieved of the strain of imminent death, but the relief made them only
more tired. And what was the good of coming away from the trenches if
they were not going home? Long ago they had gone into the trenches.
They had crawled laboriously into them, their old bodies creaking,
their gouty souls wincing, and they had learned how to live in those
ditches. Carefully with great caution they had learned how to endure
them. They had smoked innumerable pipes in them and had chewed loaves
of bread; they had slept and waked and received letters from home.
Then, with the same creaking of their joints they had come out of the
trenches. Some of them had not come out, but those that were left had
come out.
Now they were going along the road.
They did not know where they were going; they only knew that they were
not going home. It was all the same to them as long as they could not
go home.
The aeroplane, glittering in the sun, was still circling through the
citadel of the sky. High it flew. It flew high! It flew higher again,
and still higher.
The regiment was chained to the earth. The men were chained to the
ground. They were heavy; they were fastened down. The mass of them
jolted along, a dark weight scraping the road. Their flag alone was
lifted. It moved fluttering above their heads, tattered and soiled. It
was there for an emblem of hope. They ignored it. They did not see it.
Long ago they had ceased to regard it.
So they marched toward the town.
In the centre of the big sleepy square of the town was a group of
fine little men in costume. They were waiting for the regiment that
was marching along the road, and they were waiting for the General
who commanded the army, the General-in-Chief, their own General.
These fine little men were officers. One could not be certain that
they had anything to do with the war, but one could be certain that
they were officers. Their trim figures, polished and clean and neatly
put together and nicely covered in scarlet and blue cloth and brown
leather, stood upright in the centre of the square. The wide expanse
of cobblestones on which they stood glistened like a sheet of opaque
glass. From the four sides of the square the wise houses watched under
ruminating brows. It was difficult to tell what the houses thought of
the officers in the square. It was difficult to tell what the officers
were doing there in the middle of the square. Certainly they were
waiting, but they seemed to be busily, nervously waiting. They could
not keep still. They seemed conscious of the stare of the houses. They
drew themselves up very straight. Their arms made quick gestures; their
gloved hands twirled their moustaches; their neat heels tapped the
pavement smartly. They bowed to one another elaborately.
There was variety among these officers. No one was like another one.
Not one had gestures like another one. Not one had clothes like another
one. Certainly they were individuals. One was a slim, graceful one;
one was a flabby one; one was an elegant one; one a tall, very stiff
one; one was a pot-bellied one. Each remained the same one he had been
before the war. They were varnished over with a military varnish, but
beneath the varnish appeared distinctly the small individuality of each
one. It was curious to see such fine shiny men in the centre of the old
haggard town.
The hard knobbled palm of the square held them up to the view of the
sky.
Through the east gate of the town the regiment came into the town
dragging its weight and its darkness, and it poured its darkness
into the square. It poured through the gap of the street into the
square, and it came to a stand. It was a dark mass of tenacity, inert,
incurious, obstinate, one man beside another man, each one like the
next one, close packed together between the pale dreaming houses.
The regiment brought truth into the square. It was a fact, a darkness,
a weight filling one side of the square.
And with the regiment war appeared in the square.
The town shuddered under the tramping feet of the regiment.
The men of the regiment stood close packed together. The mass of their
round metal helmets gleamed like a beach of smooth pebbles before the
windows of the houses, and their bayonets shot up like a forest of
knives flashing in the sunlight.
The town shuddered. But there was sympathy between the regiment and the
town.
The town said to the regiment:
“You old ones, you are strangers; but we know you. You come from the
war. You are welcome.”
The regiment said to the town:
“You are kind, but you’d do well to keep your welcome for those who
can use it. We are old. We want nothing since we cannot go home.”
“Rest here awhile, old ones,” repeated the town.
“No, we cannot stay. We do not belong here. You are old, too, like us;
but we are too tired to make friends with you, though we thank you.”
The group of officers said to the regiment:
“Look spry now. You’re to be inspected by the General, and we are to
receive decorations.”
The regiment didn’t answer. It had nothing to say to the staff
officers. It did not recognise them. Its own officers--yes; but
these it did not know, and the staff officers were embarrassed by
the obstinacy and the stupidity and weariness of the regiment. They
fidgeted on the edge of its darkness.
While the regiment and the officers waited in the square for the
General, the aeroplane flew down from the cloud castles in the sky and
circled over the town crying gaily:
“Look at me. Look at me, you heavy old ones, I can fly.”
The officers looked up at the aeroplane. The regiment did not look up.
The officers said to themselves:
“That silly aeroplane is amusing itself, but we are going to receive
decorations.”
The regiment remained silent. It took no notice.
A bugle sounded, heralding the approach of the General, but instead
of the General a woman came into the square. She came in a motor with
glass windows. Her shining car stopped in front of the regiment. She
opened the door of the motor and put out her white foot and stepped
down, and her delicate body dressed in the white uniform of a hospital
was exposed to the view of the officers and the regiment. Her head was
bound close with a white kerchief. A red cross burned on her forehead.
She was a beautiful animal dressed as a nun and branded with a red
cross. Her shadowy eyes said to the regiment:
“I came to the war to nurse you and comfort you.”
The regiment said nothing. It did not know what to say. It was merely
puzzled.
Her red mouth said to the officers:
“I am here for you.”
And the officers said:
“We know why you are here.”
The eyes of the officers followed the white shining woman as she moved
through the sunlight, and they rested on her as she stood in a shadowed
doorway.
The presence of the woman was a teasing current of delight touching the
officers.
To the regiment the woman was a puzzle, but the old ones were too tired
to bother about puzzles.
To the town she was a strange fantastic thing, like a white peacock.
The town said to itself: “This curious creature has gone astray. It has
the appearance of being expensive. It must have escaped from its owner
who, no doubt, prizes it highly; but that is none of our business.”
The clock in the church tower marked three o’clock.
Suddenly a cry burst from the regiment, and a shout burst from the
trumpets and horns and drums of the regiment. It rang through the
square shivering against the houses. The little people of the town
came to their doorways. The rosy faces of the comfortable women and the
round children spread round the square like a smile, and the hoarse
passionate voice of the old rusty regiment rose bravely in welcome.
The General came.
He appeared at the far end of the square, a small solid figure standing
alone. He existed apart, isolated. He stood at a distance, a solitary
man, concentrating the attention of the town.
He came across the square alone, growing larger and larger as he came.
He covered the ground with long strides. His gloved hand was on the
hilt of his sword. When he reached the centre of the square, he wheeled
and faced the regiment, a stone giant, solid as granite, commanding the
attention of every man in the square. He ignored the officers and faced
the regiment. And the town watching saw a curious thing. The bodies of
the hunchbacks straightened under the eyes of the General. It was as
if the iron arm of the stone man raised to salute them had lifted the
weariness from the deformed shoulders of those old ones.
It was evident to the town that the General understood the regiment. It
was evident that he knew what they knew. And with this dark knowledge
he faced them. The trumpets and drums were hushed. A strange silence
filled the square, and in silence the General summoned the regiment to
meet his eyes. He took full in the face its dumb message. The weight
he had lifted from it fell on him. The darkness drowning it flowed
into him. He accepted it. He did not dodge it or bend under the weight
of it. He stood rigid before the eyes of the regiment challenging its
knowledge. The weary eyes of the old territorials were fixed on his
white head and deep stony face. They searched him, and they saw that
he knew what they knew, that there was nothing about the war that he
didn’t know, and they were satisfied.
The General said to the regiment:
“You are mine. Your sons have been killed. France had need of you and
you came. You must die for France as your sons died. You left your
homes to come to the war. You will never go home again. You will go
back to the trenches. It is I who will send you back there. Again and
again you will go back to those ditches, by my orders, until you are
killed as your sons were killed. You are mine for the war. I carry the
weight of your obedience and your patience. You will be patient until
death. I know you.”
The regiment answered the General:
“It is for our homes and for our sons. We are here because our sons
are gone to protect the homes we cannot go back to. You are the one we
obey.”
There was truth between the regiment and the General.
And the old town looking on, said:
“Clearly this is a great man. A hundred years ago there came here such
a one as this, and he was a great man. We, too, are acquainted with war
and with armies. We have seen thousands of little men, and we have seen
some big men. We know that this is a great man.”
From the regiment the General turned to the officers and the town
perceived that the relation of the General to his officers was a
complex thing. It was as complicated as a formal dance or pantomime on
a stage. The officers knew their steps. They had apparently rehearsed
the performance. The General treated the officers with elaborate
ceremony. He was there to decorate them. The decorating of the officers
was a ceremony, and he performed the ceremony with the skill of an
actor. It was a pretty play in which the General played the principal
rôle. He played it with solemnity. He saluted each one in turn, the
long one, and the pale one and the pot-bellied one. He drew his sword
from its scabbard; it flashed in the sun as he laid it upon their
shoulders. On the left shoulder and upon the right shoulder of the
Colonel he laid his sword. He pinned a medal on the Colonel’s elegant
chest and then he kissed him on the left cheek and on the right cheek.
He did the same with each officer in turn. He called each one by name
and addressed him in a loud voice of commendation. He laid on each one
his sword and he kissed each one on both cheeks, and on the chest of
each one he left a bit of ribbon and a bright medal.
The regiment in the background was the chorus for this pretty play.
After each kiss and each decoration the trumpets and drums of the
regiment cried aloud in congratulation.
Kisses and bits of ribbon and a graceful flashing sword, these little
things passed between the General and his officers. No truth passed
between them--nothing but a play.
And the play was ended.
And the General went away as he had come, taking with him the pride and
the courage that he had brought into the square.
The face of the town grew dull as it watched him go. The women and
the children disappeared into the dim houses. The white strange woman
looked after him with vague, troubled eyes, not noticing the officers
who advanced towards her, elaborately bowing.
The regiment lowered its bayonets at his going and bowed its shoulders.
Its darkness grew more dark, and its weariness more heavy. When the
General had gone it became again a shapeless mass of dark, weary
hunchbacks.
The clock in the church tower marked five o’clock when the regiment
left the square. It marched out of the town and along the road as it
had come.
A regiment of old men.
They did not know where they were going. It did not matter to them
where they were going. They did not look about them as they marched.
They did not look before them, nor behind them. They did not look up at
the cloudless sky, nor did they wonder where the clouds had gone. They
did not remember the beautiful clouds of the morning that had sailed
serenely over the enemy’s country. They did not remember the sympathy
of the town, nor the complacency of that fine little group of officers,
nor the glittering of the bright medals, nor the insolence of the white
woman who watched. They did not very much remember the grandeur of the
General, nor the pride they had known in the General. They remembered
their homes. The sweat ran down their faces under their helmets. Their
feet were heavy on the road. They marched steadily, jolting along,
patient, weary animals who remembered.
There was no sign of horror upon the earth. There was not a cloud in
the sky. The afternoon sunlight was golden over the land. The regiment
passed like a shadow through the bright country and was lost to view.
THE BEACH
The beach was long and smooth and the colour of cream. The woman
sitting in the sun stroked the beach with the pink palm of her hand
and said to herself, “The beach is perfect, the sun is perfect, the
sea is perfect. How pretty the little waves are, curling up the beach.
They are perfectly lovely. They are like a lace frill to the beach. And
the sea is a perfectly heavenly blue. It is odd to think of how old
the beach is and how old the sea is, and how much older that old, old
fellow, the fiery sun. The face of the beach is smooth as cream and the
sea to-day is a smiling infant, twinkling and dimpling, and the sun
is delicious; it is burning hot, like youth itself. It is good to be
alive. It is good to be young.” But she could not say this aloud so she
said to the man beside her in the wheel chair:
“How many millions of years has it taken to make the beach? How many
snails have left their shells behind them, do you think, to make all
this fine powdery sand? A million billion?” She let the sand run
through her strong white fingers and smiled, blinking in the sun and
looked away from the man in the invalid chair beside her toward the
horizon.
The man wriggled and hitched himself clumsily up in his chair; an ugly
grimace pulled his pale face to one side. He dared not look down over
the arm of his wheel chair at the bright head of the woman sitting
beside him. Her hair burned in the sunlight; her cheeks were pink. He
stole a timid, furtive look. Yes, she was as beautiful as a child. She
was perfectly lovely. A groan escaped him, or was it only a sigh?
She looked up quickly. “What is it, darling? Are you in pain? Are you
tired? Shall we go back?” Her voice sounded in the immense quiet of the
beach like a cricket chirping, but the word “darling” went on sounding
and sounding like a little hollow bell while she searched his features,
trying to find his old face, the one she knew, trying to work a magic
on him, remove and replace the sunken eyes, the pinched nose, the
bloodless wry mouth. “He’s not a stranger,” she said to herself. “He’s
not.” And she heard the faint mocking echo, “Darling, darling,” ringing
far away as if a bell-buoy out on the water were saying “Darling,
darling,” to make the little waves laugh.
“It’s only my foot, my left foot. Funny, isn’t it, that it goes on
throbbing. They cut it off two months ago.” He jerked a hand backward.
“It’s damn queer when you think of it. The old foot begins the old
game, then I look down and it’s not there any more, and I’m fooled
again.” He laughed. His laughter was such a tiny sound in the great
murmur of the morning that it might have been a sand-fly laughing. He
was thinking, “What will become of us? She is young and healthy. She
is as beautiful as a child. What shall we do about it?” And looking
into her eyes he saw the same question, “What shall we do?” and looked
quickly away again. So did she.
She looked past him at the row of ugly villas above the beach. Narrow
houses, each like a chimney, tightly wedged together, wedges of cheap
brick and plaster with battered wooden balconies. They were new
and shabby and derelict. All had their shutters up. All the doors
were bolted. How stuffy it must be in those deserted villas, in all
those abandoned bedrooms and kitchens and parlours. Probably there
were sand-shoes and bathing dresses and old towels and saucepans and
blankets rotting inside them with the sand drifting in. Probably the
window panes behind the shutters were broken and the mirrors cracked.
Perhaps when the aeroplanes dropped bombs on the town, pictures fell
down and mirrors and the china in the dark china closets cracked inside
these pleasure houses. Who had built them?
“Cowards built them,” he said in his new bitter, rasping voice, the
voice of a peevish, irritable sandfly. “Built them to make love in, to
cuddle in, to sleep in, hide in. Now they’re empty. The blighters have
left them to rot there. Rotten, I call it, leaving the swanky plage
to go to the bad like that, just because there’s a war on. A little
jazz now and a baccarat table would make all the difference, wouldn’t
it? It would cheer us up. You’d dance and I’d have a go at the tables.
That’s the casino over there, that big thing; that’s not empty, that’s
crowded, but I don’t advise you to go there. I don’t think you’d like
it. It’s not your kind of a crowd. It’s all right for me, but not for
you. No, it wouldn’t do for you--not even on a gala night.
“They’ve a gala night in our casino whenever there’s a battle. Funny
sort of place. You should watch the motors drive up then. The rush
begins about ten in the evening and goes on till morning. Quite like
Deauville the night of the Grand Prix. You never saw such a crowd.
They all rush there from the front, you know--the way they do from the
race-course--though, to be sure, it is not quite the real thing--not a
really smart crowd. No, not precisely, though the wasters in Deauville
weren’t much to look at, were they? Still, our crowd here aren’t
precisely wasters. Gamblers, of course, down and outs, wrecks--all gone
to pieces, parts of ’em missing, you know, tops of their heads gone,
or one of their legs. When they take their places at the tables, the
croupiers--that is to say, the doctors--look them over. Come closer,
I’ll whisper it. Some of them have no faces.”
“Darling, don’t.” She covered her own face, closed her ears to his tiny
voice and listened desperately with all her minute will to the large
tranquil murmur of the sea. “Darling, darling,” far out the bell-buoy
was sounding.
“Bless you,” said the thin, sharp, exasperated sandfly voice beside
her. “Little things like that don’t keep us away. If we can’t walk in
we get carried in. All that’s needed is a ticket. It’s tied to you like
a luggage label. It has your name on it in case you don’t remember your
name. You needn’t have a face, but a ticket you must have to get into
our casino.”
“Stop, darling--darling, stop!”
“It’s a funny place. There’s a skating rink. You ought to see it. You
go through the baccarat rooms and the dance hall to get to it. They’re
all full of beds. Rows of beds under the big crystal chandeliers, rows
of beds under the big gilt mirrors, and the skating rink is full of
beds, too. The sun blazes down through the glass roof. It’s like a
hot-house in Kew Gardens. There’s that dank smell of a rotting swamp,
the smell of gas gangrene. Men with gas gangrene turn green, you know,
like rotting plants.” He laughed. Then he was silent. He looked at her
cowering in the sand, her hands covering her face, and looked away
again.
He wondered why he had told her these things. He loved her. He hated
her. He was afraid of her. He did not want her to be kind to him. He
could never touch her again and he was tied to her. He was rotting
and he was tied to her perfection. He had no power over her any more
but the power of infecting her with his corruption. He could never
make her happy. He could only make her suffer. His one luxury now was
jealousy of her perfection, and his one delight would be to give in to
the temptation to make her suffer. He could only reach her that way. It
would be his revenge on the war.
He was not aware of these thoughts. He was too busy with other little
false thoughts. He was saying to himself, “I will let her go. I will
send her away. Once we are at home again, I will say good-bye to her.”
But he knew that he was incapable of letting her go.
He closed his eyes. He said to himself “The smell of the sea is good,
but the odour that oozes from the windows of the casino is bad. I can
smell it from here. I can’t get the smell of it out of my nose. It is
my own smell,” and his wasted greenish face twitched in disgust.
She looked at him. “I love him,” she said to herself. “I love him,” she
repeated. “But can I go on loving him?” She whispered, “Can I? I must.”
She said, “I must love him, now more than ever, but where is he?”
She looked round her as if to find the man he once had been. There were
other women on the beach, women in black and old men and children with
buckets and spades, people of the town. They seemed to be glad to be
alive. No one seemed to be thinking of the war.
The beach was long and smooth and the colour of cream. The beach was
perfect; the sun perfectly delicious; the sea was perfectly calm. The
man in the wheel chair and the woman beside him were no bigger than
flies on the sand. The women and children and old men were specks.
Far out on the sea there was an object; there were two objects. The
people on the beach could scarcely distinguish them. They peered
through the sunshine while the children rolled in the sand, and they
heard the sound of a distant hammer tapping.
“They are firing out at sea,” said someone to someone.
How perfect the beach is. The sea is a perfectly heavenly blue. Behind
the windows of the casino, under the great crystal chandeliers, men
lie in narrow beds. They lie in queer postures with their greenish
faces turned up. Their white bandages are reflected in the sombre gilt
mirrors. There is no sound anywhere but the murmur of the sea and the
whispering of the waves on the sand, and the tap tap of a hammer coming
from a great distance across the water, and the bell-buoy that seems to
say, “Darling, darling.”
MOONLIGHT
The moonlight is a pool of silver on the linoleum floor. It glints on
the enamel washbasin and slop pail. I can almost see the moon reflected
in the slop pail. Everything in my cubicle is luminous. My clothes
hanging on pegs, my white aprons and rubber boots, my typewriter and
tin box of biscuits, the big sharp scissors on the table--all these
familiar things are touched with magic and make me uneasy. Through the
open door of the hut comes the sweet sickish scent of new-mown hay,
mingling with the smell of disinfectants, of Eau de Javel and iodoform,
and wet mud and blood. There is wet mud on my boots and blood on my
apron. I don’t mind. It is the scent of new-mown hay that makes me
uneasy. The little whimpering voice of a man who is going to die in an
hour or two comes across the whispering grass from the hut next door.
That little sound I understand. It is like the mew of a wounded cat.
Soon it will stop. It will stop soon after midnight. I know. I can
tell. I go on duty at midnight, and he will die and go to Heaven soon
after, lulled to sleep by the lullaby of the guns.
Far beyond him, out in the deep amorous night, I can hear the war
going on. I hear the motor convoys rumbling down the road and the
tramp of feet marching. I can tell the ambulances from the lorries and
distinguish the wagons that carry provisions. Reinforcements are coming
up along the road through the moonlit fields. The three-inch guns
are pounding. All along the horizon they are pounding, pounding. But
there will be no attack. The section is quiet. I know. I can tell. The
cannonade is my lullaby. It soothes me. I am used to it. Every night it
lulls me to sleep. If it stopped I could not sleep. I would wake with
a start. The thin wooden walls of my cubicle tremble and the windows
rattle a little. That, too, is natural. It is the whispering of the
grass and the scent of new-mown hay that makes me nervous.
The war is the world, and this cardboard house, eight by nine, behind
the trenches, with a roof that leaks and windows that rattle, and an
iron stove in the corner, is my home in it. I have lived here ever
since I can remember. It had no beginning, it will have no end. War,
the Alpha and the Omega, world without end--I don’t mind it. I am used
to it. I fit into it. It provides me with everything that I need, an
occupation, a shelter, companions, a jug and a basin. When winter
comes my stove is red hot, and I sit with my feet on it. When it rains
I sleep under a mackintosh sheet with an umbrella over my pillow and
a basin on my feet. Sometimes in a storm the roof blows off. Then I
wait under the blankets for the old men to come and put it back again.
Sometimes the Germans shell the cross roads beyond us or the town
behind us, and the big shells pass over the hospital screaming. Then
the surgeons in the operating hut turn up the collars of their white
jackets, and we lift our shoulders round our ears. I don’t mind--it is
part of the routine. For companions there are, of course, the surgeons
and the nurses and the old grizzled orderlies, but I have other
companions more intimate than these. Three in particular, a lascivious
monster, a sick bad-tempered animal, and an angel; Pain, Life and
Death. The first two are quarrelsome. They fight over the wounded like
dogs over a bone. They snarl and growl and worry the pieces of men that
we have here; but Pain is the stronger. She is the greater. She is
insatiable, greedy, vilely amorous, lustful, obscene--she lusts for the
broken bodies we have here. Wherever I go I find her possessing the men
in their beds, lying in bed with them; and Life, the sick animal, mews
and whimpers, snarls and barks at her, till Death comes--the Angel, the
peacemaker, the healer, whom we wait for, pray for--comes silently,
drives Pain away, and horrid, snarling Life, and leaves the man in
peace.
Lying in my bed, I listen to the great, familiar, muttering voice of
the war and to the feeble, mewing, whimpering voice of Life, the sick
bad-tempered animal, and to the loud triumphant gutteral shouts of Pain
plying her traffic in the hut next to me, where the broken bodies of
men are laid out in rows with patches of moonlight on their coverlets.
At midnight I will get up and put on a clean apron and go across the
grass to the sterilizing room and get a cup of cocoa. At midnight we
always have cocoa in there next to the operating room, because there
is a big table and boiling water. We push back the drums of clean
dressings and the litter of soiled bandages, and drink our cocoa
standing round the table. Sometimes there isn’t much room. Sometimes
legs and arms wrapped in cloths have to be pushed out of the way. We
throw them on the floor--they belong to no one and are of no interest
to anyone--and drink our cocoa. The cocoa tastes very good. It is part
of the routine.
But the moonlight is like a pool of silver water on the floor, and the
air is soft and the moon is floating, floating through the sky. In a
dream I see her, in a crazy hurting dream. Lovely night, lovely lunatic
moon, lovely scented love-sick earth--you are not true; you are not a
part of the routine. You are a dream, an intolerable nightmare, and you
recall a world that I once knew in a dream.
The mewing voice of the wounded cat dying in the shed next door to me
is true. He is my brother, that wounded cat. This also is true. His
voice goes on and on. He tells the truth to me. He tells me what I know
to be true. But soon--quite soon--I hope and think that his voice will
stop. Now the monstrous mistress that he has taken to his bed has got
him, but soon he will escape. He will go to sleep in her arms lulled by
the lullaby of the pounding guns that he and I are used to, and then
in his sleep the Angel will come and his soul will slip away. It will
run lightly over the whispering grasses and murmuring trees. It will
leap through the velvety dark that is tufted with the soft concussion
of distant shells bursting from the mouths of cannon. It will fly up
through the showery flares and shooting rockets past the moon into
Heaven. I know this is true. I know it must be true.
How strange the moon is with its smooth cheeks. How I fear the
whispering of the grasses and murmuring of the trees. What are they
saying? I want to go to sleep to the old soothing lullaby of the cannon
that rocks me--rocks me in my cradle--but they keep me awake with
their awful whispering. I am drowsy and drugged with heavy narcotics,
with ether and iodoform and other strong odours. I could sleep. I
could sleep with the familiar damp smell of blood on my apron, but the
terrible scent of the new-mown hay disturbs me. Crazy peasants came and
cut it while the battle was going on just beyond the canal. Women and
children came with pitch-forks and tossed it in the sun. Now it lies
over the road in the moonlight, wafting its distressing perfume into my
window, bringing me waking dreams--unbearable, sickening, intolerable
dreams--that interrupt the routine.
Ah! The great gun down by the river is roaring, is shouting. What a
relief! That I understand--that giant’s voice. He is a friend--another
familiar, monstrous friend. I know him. I listen every night for his
roar. I long to hear it. But it is dying away now. The echo goes
growling down the valley, and again the trees and the grasses begin
that murmuring and whispering. They are lying. It is a lie that they
are saying. There are no lovely forgotten things. The other world was a
dream. Beyond the gauze curtains of the tender night there is War, and
nothing else but War. Hounds of war, growling, howling; bulls of war,
bellowing, snorting; war eagles, shrieking and screaming; war fiends
banging at the gates of Heaven, howling at the open gates of hell.
There is War on the earth--nothing but War, War let loose in the world,
War--nothing left in the whole world but War--War, world without end,
amen.
I must change my apron now and go out into the moonlight. The sick man
is still mewing. I must go to him. I am afraid to go to him. I cannot
bear to go across the whispering grass and find him in the arms of his
monstrous paramour. It is a night made for love, for love, for love.
That is not true. That is a lie.
The peaked roofs of the huts stand out against the lovely sky. The moon
is just above the abdominal ward. Next to it is the hut given up to gas
gangrene, and next to that are the Heads. The Knees are on the other
side, and the Elbows and the fractured Thighs. A nurse comes along
carrying a lantern. Her white figure moves silently across the ground.
Her lantern glows red in the moonlight. She goes into the gangrene hut
that smells of swamp gas. She won’t mind. She is used to it, just as
I am. Pain is lying in there waiting for her. It is holding the damp
greenish bodies of the gangrene cases in her arms. The nurse will try
to get her out of those beds, but the loathesome creature will be
too much for her. What can the nurse do against this she-devil, this
Elemental, this Diva? She can straighten a pillow, pour drops out of
a bottle, pierce a shrunken side with a needle. She can hold to lips
a cup of cold water. Will that land her, too, in Heaven one day? I
wonder; I doubt it. She is no longer a woman. She is dead already, just
as I am--really dead, past resurrection. Her heart is dead. She killed
it. She couldn’t bear to feel it jumping in her side when Life, the
sick animal, choked and rattled in her arms. Her ears are deaf; she
deafened them. She could not bear to hear Life crying and mewing. She
is blind so that she cannot see the torn parts of men she must handle.
Blind, deaf, dead--she is strong, efficient, fit to consort with gods
and demons--a machine inhabited by the ghost of a woman--soulless,
past redeeming, just as I am--just as I will be.
There are no men here, so why should I be a woman? There are heads
and knees and mangled testicles. There are chests with holes as big
as your fist, and pulpy thighs, shapeless; and stumps where legs once
were fastened. There are eyes--eyes of sick dogs, sick cats, blind
eyes, eyes of delirium; and mouths that cannot articulate; and parts of
faces--the nose gone, or the jaw. There are these things, but no men;
so how could I be a woman here and not die of it? Sometimes, suddenly,
all in an instant, a man looks up at me from the shambles, a man’s eyes
signal or a voice calls “Sister! Sister!” Sometimes suddenly a smile
flickers on a pillow, white, blinding, burning, and I die of it. I feel
myself dying again. It is impossible to be a woman here. One must be
dead.
Certainly they were men once. But now they are no longer men.
There has been a harvest. Crops of men were cut down in the fields of
France where they were growing. They were mown down with a scythe,
were gathered into bundles, tossed about with pitchforks, pitchforked
into wagons and transported great distances and flung into ditches
and scattered by storms and gathered up again and at last brought
here--what was left of them.
Once they were real, splendid, ordinary, normal men. Now they mew like
kittens. Once they were fathers and husbands and sons and the lovers of
women. Now they scarcely remember. Sometimes they call to me “Sister,
Sister!” in the faint voices of faraway men, but when I go near them
and bend over them, I am a ghost woman leaning over a thing that is
mewing; and it turns away its face and flings itself back into the
arms of Pain, its monster bedfellow. Each one lies in the arms of this
creature. Pain is the mistress of each one of them.
Not one can escape her. Neither the very old ones nor the young slender
ones. Their weariness does not protect them, nor their loathing,
nor their struggling, nor their cursing. Their hideous wounds are
no protection, nor the blood that leaks from their wounds on to the
bedclothes, nor the foul odour of their festering flesh. Pain is
attracted by these things. She is a harlot in the pay of War, and she
amuses herself with the wreckage of men. She consorts with decay, is
addicted to blood, cohabits with mutilations, and her delight is the
refuse of suffering bodies.
You can watch her plying her trade here any day. She is shameless.
She lies in their beds all day. She lies with the Heads and the Knees
and the festering Abdomens. She never leaves them. Even when she has
exhausted them, even when at last worn out with her frenzy they drop
into a doze, she lies beside them, to tease them with her excruciating
caresses, her pinches and twinges that make them moan and twist in
sleep. At any hour of the day or night you can watch her deadly amours,
and watch her victims struggling. The wards are full of these writhings
and tossings, they are agitated as if by a storm with her obscene
antics. But if you come at midnight--if you come with me now--you will
see the wounded, helpless, go fast asleep in her arms. You will see
them abandon themselves to deep sleep with her beside them in their
beds. They hope to escape her in sleep and find their way back to the
fields where they were growing, strong lusty men, before they were cut
down.
She lies there to spoil their dreams. When they dream of their women
and little children, of their mothers and sweethearts; when they dream
that they are again clean, normal, real men, filled with a tender and
lovely love for women, then she wakes them. In the dark she wakes them
and tightens her arms round their shrivelled bodies. She strangles
their cries. She pours her poisoned breath into their panting mouths.
She squeezes their throbbing hearts in their sides. In the dark, in the
dark she takes them; she takes them to herself and keeps them until
Death comes, the gentle angel. This is true. I know. I have seen.
Listen. Do you hear him? He is still mewing like a cat, but very
faintly, and the trees are still murmuring and the grasses whispering.
I hear the sound of many large creatures moving behind the hedge. They
are panting and snorting. A procession of motor lorries and ambulances
is going heavily down the road. They pass slowly, lumbering along with
their heavy loads, and through the huge laborious sound of their
grinding wheels threads the whirr of a swift touring car. You can hear
it coming in the distance. It rushes nearer. It dashes past with a
scratching shriek of its Klaxon. It plunges down the road and is gone.
Some officer hurrying on some terrible business, some officer with
gold leaves on his hat and a sword on his hip, in a limousine, leaning
back on his cushions, calculating the number of men needed to repair
yesterday’s damage, and the number of sandbags required to repair their
ditches. He does not see the lovely night and the lovely moon, and the
unseemly love affair that is going on between the earth and the moon.
He does not notice that he has passed the gate of a hospital, or know
that behind the hedge men are lying in the dark with patches of blood
and patches of moonlight on their coverlets. He is blind, deaf, dead,
as I am--another machine just as I am.
It is twelve o’clock. The nurse has disappeared. She has left her
lantern outside my door. There is no one to be seen. Nothing moves in
the moonlight. But the earth is trembling, and the throbbing of the
guns is the throbbing of the pulse of the War; world without end.
Listen! The whimpering mew of the wounded cat has stopped. There’s not
a sound except the whisper of the wind in the grass. Quick! Be quick!
In a moment a man’s spirit will escape, will be flying through the
night past the pale, beautiful, sentimental face of the moon.
ENFANT DE MALHEUR
His name was tattooed on his arm, and the head of a woman life-size on
his back. He himself might have been fashioned by Praxitiles, but some
sailor in a North African port had dug needles of blue ink into the
marble flesh of his arm, and written there the indelible words--Enfant
de Malheur. He waved that slender member of his incredibly perfect
Greek body in the nurse’s face when she asked him his name, and said
Voila! with a biting sarcasm and a snarl of pointed white teeth. Then,
glaring defiance, defying her to knife him in the back, he turned over
and displayed his back to her. The face of a chocolate box beauty done
in colours decorated its smooth surface. Her silly blue eyes stared up
from between his fine flat shoulder blades and her full red lips smiled
on his spinal cord. She was a trashy creature, a plump, coarse morsel,
no fit companion for this young prince of darkness. He had race,
distinction, an exquisite elegance, and, even in his battered state,
the savage grace of a panther. Not even his wounds could disfigure him.
The long deep gash in his side made his smooth torso seem the more
incredibly fair and frail. The loss of one leg rendered the other more
exquisite with its round polished knee and slim ankle.
He was one of a lot of some twenty Apaches that had been brought
in that morning. As I remember them, they were all handsome young
men--these assassins, thieves, pimps and traffickers in drugs--with
sleek elastic limbs, smooth polished skins and beautiful bones. It
was, if I remember rightly, only about their heads that I noticed
imperfection. Their skulls were not quite right somehow, nor the shape
of their ears. Their foreheads were low and receding, their jaws
weak, and their mouths betrayed depravity. Still they were beautiful,
beautiful as young leopards, and they brought with them into the
hospital the strange morbid glamour of crime. But the Enfant de Malheur
was the most beautiful of them all. He had the face of an angel.
They were exiles, and they belonged to the Battalions D’Afrique that
had been put into the line two days before on the eve of an attack.
Excellent troops of assault, these young Parisian criminals who had
been sentenced to penal servitude for life and conscripted in the army
of North Africa; but no good for holding the line or for anything else,
so the General told me. No stamina, no powers of endurance; but they
were born killers and they went over the top when the signal was given
like wolf-hounds suddenly unleashed. Moreover, they knew that if they
distinguished themselves in battle they would win back their freedom
and become again at the end of the war, citizens of Paris.
Paris! Montmartre! The lighted cafés of the Place Blanche; the
jingling, flashing, merry boulevards; these boys who lay like Greek
gods in their beds recalled fantastically all the romantic tales
that had ever been written by liars about the underworld of that
most brilliant and seductive of capitals. The cunning camouflage of
their beauty made it all seem true. The wild breath of false romance
swept down the huts over their beds. And they lay in their beds,
glaring, defiant, suspicious, expecting, so it seemed, to be attacked,
assassinated or robbed in their beds at any moment by any one of us.
Their arrival had created something of a sensation in the hospital. The
line had been held for the last few weeks by regiments of territorials,
the “old ones,” as we called them; and we had received for many days
nothing but greybeards. Fathers and grandfathers. “Vieux Pères,” good
troops they made for holding the line in the wet winter weather. They
simply sat there doggedly in the cold, the mud and the wet, enduring
the war and getting rheumatism in their old joints week after week. So
the arrival of this gang of reckless, noisy, sardonic and suspicious
cutthroats was a pleasant diversion. But the Medicin Chef wasn’t
pleased. He divided them up carefully, put only two, or at the most
three, in each hut, and turned the nurses out of the operating room,
for when these lovely beings were laid out in their immaculate beauty
on the operating table and the ether mask was put over their proud,
depraved, contemptuous faces, a stream of language of such foulness
spurted from their chiselled lips that even the surgeons turned sick.
Pim ignored this. Pim was in charge of the Enfant de Malheur. She was
the daughter of an Archdeacon, and had been brought up in a cathedral
close in the North of England, then had trained in Edinburgh. She was
an excellent nurse, very fastidious about the care of the patients.
Her blue uniform was always stiffly starched, her cap and apron were
immaculate; so was her smooth severe Madonna face, with its childlike
candid eyes and thin quiet mouth. Pim didn’t understand the word
Apache. She didn’t understand the Enfant de Malheur. She didn’t, I
believe, notice that he was beautiful. She was interested in his wounds
and in saving his life. She had come to the front to nurse the French
because she had been told that they needed nurses more in the French
army than in England; but she was not interested in Frenchmen, nor in
any man. She knew no men. She knew only her patients. And she fought
for their lives grimly, quietly, with her thin gentle lips pressed
tight together when the crisis came. So she did not look at her young
Apache with curiosity, and she did not know why he glared at her or why
he gave a start and leapt sideways in his bed when she approached him.
She made no attempt at understanding his queer argot, and was unaware
when he insulted her. She quite simply continued to look after him with
complete serenity. She simply went on handling his dangerous body with
the perfectly assured impersonal gentleness of an excellent surgical
nurse--washing him, dressing his wounds, giving him injections, enemas
and bed pans, as if she were at home in Edinburgh at work under the eye
of the most exacting of Scotch surgeons.
It was Guerin who understood that the pain-racked body of the Enfant de
Malheur was as dangerous as an unexploded bomb. Guerin was an orderly
with the rank of corporal, and he shared with Pim the responsibility of
the ward. He was a priest, mobilized for the war; but we forgot this
the greater part of the time, because he was so efficient as a nurse
and looked so little like a priest in his neat blue corporal’s uniform
with his bright alert eyes looking out through his pince nez. Indeed,
it was only when one of Pim’s patients died that we remembered that
Guerin was a priest. Then Pim summoned him shyly and withdrew, leaving
Guerin alone with the man who was dying.
Sometimes coming in I would find the little man kneeling by a bedside
with a crucifix in his hands, and the sight of his neat compact figure
and intent scholarly face would recall to me his other holy calling,
and make me wonder. He was so unlike the big priest in the black
cassock with the white head bandage, who strode through the hospital
grounds swinging a walking stick, and who had won the Croix de Guerre
with three palms for bravery in the field. Guerin had looked to me,
when he first came to us, a bit of a prig. He had a slightly quizzical
expression; his manner was dry and impersonal; but he was on duty at
six in the morning, and although he was supposed to go off twelve
hours later, he was usually there busy with Pim until late in the
evening, swabbing tables, boiling up instruments, or writing letters to
someone’s dictation.
They were a very satisfactory couple. They scarcely spoke to each
other, but they worked together as if they had been born for this, and
this alone--this silent, quick, watchful, unceasing battle with death;
this struggle to save men’s lives, by doing small things accurately
at the right moment--without fuss, without noise, without sign of
fatigue or hurry, or nervousness or despair. Their hands, their feet,
their eyes never faltered and were never still. They made the same
calm, quick, exact movements, took no unnecessary steps, left nothing
undone. Yes, a curiously harmonious pair, this tall Englishwoman and
small sturdy Frenchman. But Guerin did more than Pim did, because he
understood more and had more to do. He believed in the Holy Catholic
Church and the Remission of Sins and the Life Everlasting. He had set
himself a task that he never mentioned. These wounded were not only
his countrymen, they were his children, and he considered himself
responsible for their immortal souls.
So he frowned and his small sharply-cut features took on a look of
added sharpness and his keen eyes grew suddenly alert when the
stretcher-bearers brought the Enfant de Malheur into the ward. He
didn’t interfere with Pim, but he watched. He didn’t warn her or try to
stop her, or keep her away from the lovely Greek god whom he knew to
be one of the damned and a fiend out of hell; but when she leaned over
the beautiful fierce chiselled face he was always on the watch. And
so he saw what Pim, who didn’t understand, couldn’t see. He saw that
this damné, this vile savage rat from the sewers of Paris, was puzzled,
bewildered, intimidated by Pim’s stolid impersonal gentleness. He saw
him gradually stop jumping to one side of the bed and take to wriggling
and squirming with acute discomfort under her candid gaze, and he heard
him muttering and snarling under his breath with exasperation at the
insufferable presence of this Madonna-like woman with the cold, white,
calm face. Guerin understood how uncomfortable the Enfant de Malheur
would be in the presence of the beautiful Mother of God, and he watched
him wriggle to avoid Pim’s cool maiden eyes. And so on the third day,
when the Apache beckoned Pim to come to him, Guerin was even more
surprised than Pim was, because he knew that the wicked brute in the
boy had been tamed by the power of Pim’s unconscious serenity. Pim
approached calmly. She was rather a stupid woman in some ways. “What is
it?” she asked in her virginal English voice. “Que voulez-vous?” And
Guerin, listening, watchful still, but with his tense face relaxed a
little, heard the Apache whisper as he pulled Pim down: “Come close.
I want to tell you something. I want to tell you,” said the child of
misfortune into Pim’s clean white ear, “that I have never deliberately
killed a woman in my life.”
And then Guerin heard Pim murmur quietly in her stiff polite way, as
if she were interviewing some well-meaning but unfortunate backsliding
parishioner in the Deanery: “I’m so glad to hear it.” And then the
fiend out of hell, incarnate in the sewer rat with the angel face, fell
back on his pillows with a sudden look of sharp self-disgust, and Pim
moved off down the ward about her business.
I don’t think it occurred to her to wonder what his phrase implied, or
how many women he had killed, as he would have called it, by accident,
or how many men with intent. I don’t believe she was aware of the
immense compliment he had paid her, or of having gained any victory
over him. She had no knowledge of vice or evil. She did not know that
he was truly one of the damned, and that his heart was black and heavy
with a sick black weight of fear that came sweeping over him in his
new weakness, and so next day, when he began to be frightened, she was
surprised by the wild gleams of fear that came and went in his eyes.
But Guerin knew. He was a student of men, and he knew that the Enfant
de Malheur was his brother, and believed in what he himself believed,
namely, in the Holy Catholic Church and the Life Everlasting, in God,
and the Mother of God, and the Holy Son of God, against whom he had
fought and blasphemed since the day he was born.
His condition, both physical and moral, grew rapidly worse after this.
Symptoms of gangrene set in. A second amputation was necessary, high
up the thigh, almost at the hip, and again Pim, who had followed her
patient to the operating room, was told to go away. She refused. She
stood there obstinately while streams of filth and obscenity spurted
from his beautiful pale mouth--putrid psychic sewage of the underworld
spouting from him like a fountain; but to the surgeon’s embarrassed,
irritated excuses she answered: “I don’t understand his language, so
what difference does it make?” and she took him back and put him gently
to bed.
But when he came to after the operation, there was a new look in his
eyes. Pim went white at the sight of it, and her hand, as she put the
long saline needle into his side, trembled, and she went in search of
Guerin.
“He is so frightened,” she said, “he is so afraid to die. I can’t bear
it. We must save him, Guerin.”
So they conspired to save him. There were forty beds in the hut,
and they were all full; but those two--Pim and Guerin--without fuss
multiplied themselves. No royal patient was ever nursed with greater
care than our Enfant de Malheur, but he grew worse, and his fear grew
worse. His fear increased until its presence filled the ward, and the
old greybeards in their beds turned away their faces and stopped their
ears to hide from it.
He began to sweat terribly. He began to toss and writhe. He began
to smell bad. Moods of blasphemous bravado alternated with fits of
uncontrollable panic. In the middle of a curse his teeth would begin to
chatter. Then suddenly his eyes would start from his head in terror,
and he would shriek for help and thrash out wildly till Pim came to him
or Guerin. Sometimes he sobbed like a child in Pim’s arms. More often
he raged at her, cursed her and Guerin and God. His bed became a centre
of obscenity. Foul odours, foul words, foul matter swirled round him,
and always there was that terror in his eyes, and the sweat pouring
down his body that was greenish now as if covered with slime. The
tattooed lady smiled through the slime on his back, and he would wave
his wasted arm and hit out with it, and the big letters seemed to shout
to Pim down the ward: Enfant de Malheur!
Finally he could not bear her near him, could not bear the sight of her
near his bed or the touch of her hands. One afternoon he yelled at
her to go away, leave him alone. She had maintained so far her stolid
serenity, but at that she broke down. I found her behind her screen at
the end of the ward with her shoulders shaking, her face twisting. It
was nine o’clock in the evening. I told her to go off duty at once.
“But he is going to die in the night,” she whispered.
“I know.”
“And he is terribly frightened.”
“I know.”
“His fear is so ugly. It frightens me and the others, all the old men.
We must do something. Can’t we do something?”
“Perhaps Guerin can do something. You and I, what can we do?”
“If only he weren’t so sane. If only he didn’t realise. But his fever
seems to have sharpened his wits. He knows he is going to die. He never
forgets for a second. He hasn’t had a wink of sleep. Dying usually
slows down, blurs everything, brings a merciful dullness; but for him
there is no such mercy. His nerves are live wires. Morphine has no
effect. I’ve given him extra doses. No good, not a bit of good. But
he must have relief, I tell you. This is impossible.” Her face had a
slightly crazed look. “I tell you I am ready to give him any amount of
stuff. I’ll do anything to put an end to it.”
I said, “Come along, Pim. You can’t kill your patient. Come now at
once. You’re doing no good here.” What he wants, I said to myself,
is to be convinced that he has nothing to be afraid of. But suppose
I tried to convince him that there was nothing to fear, no God, no
crucified Christ waiting, no everlasting life stretching ahead of him,
nothing but nothingness, I could never convince him--never. I had no
power over his fear.
Guerin met me at the door of the hut as I was going out with Pim. He
was polishing his eyeglasses.
“I would like permission to spend the night in the ward,” he said in
his quick way, adjusting his pince nez on his pointed nose.
“Very well, Guerin. You’ve been on duty all day, and you’ll be on all
day to-morrow, remember.”
“Don’t worry about that,” he said briefly, dismissing us both with a
wave of his hand.
“Can I do nothing, Guerin?” Pim asked meekly.
“Nothing, Mademoiselle.”
They looked at each other. Then she looked down the ward to where the
boy was lying and her mouth contracted. We could distinguish from our
distance the terrified eyes.
“What is he afraid of?” she asked, shuddering.
“Of hell, Mademoiselle,” said Guerin. And suddenly, as if he had heard
us, some power jerked the boy off his pillow, and his arms shot out
in front of him. “Je ne meurs pas,” he cried; “Je ne meurs pas. Je ne
voudrais pas mourir.” I hurried Pim away.
When I went back, Guerin was on his knees by the boy’s bed reading
in low rapid tones from a little book. The Enfant de Malheur was not
listening. He was quite unaware of him. He was entirely and horribly
absorbed by another presence that seemed to be attacking him as an
octopus attacks with a dozen arms. He was writhing in the unseen
clutches. He was dodging and twisting and hissing at the thing through
clenched teeth, and his eyes darted this way and that like beings
separate from himself, possessed by a panic of their own.
I went from bed to bed attending to the old grumbling ones and trying
not to look, but I could hear his fear increasing. Its tempo grew
audibly more rapid, more frantic. His invisible enemy seemed to be
going for him now in rushes and leaps of increasing fury. I hurried
through my work, scolding in whispers the old men who were annoyed by
his noise and troubled by his fear. I rattled my basins and kettles,
making a noise of my own to distract them. But I could hear the boy’s
sobbing breath, hear him choking and shuddering, and every few seconds
his voice would burst from his suffocating chest in a wail of defiant
terror, and once he went off into a peal of hysterical laughter.
Guerin’s low voice went on through it all. His words followed each
other rapidly, in a monotone, in a level directed chant. He was aiming
them straight at the head of the sweating terror-struck creature beside
him. He paid no attention to me. Neither of them was aware of me. I
hurried past them and went out.
I had a great deal to do. I went from hut to hut. I gave piqures
and medicines and drinks, adjusted bandages and pillows, filled hot
water bottles. I busied myself busily, making an unnecessary fuss
over my duties, and tried to absorb myself in relieving the shadowy
suffering forms that lay so patiently, murmuring their gratitude. I
was greedy for their gratitude. I wanted badly to be comforted. But I
had a feeling of sickening suspense and miserable futility. I could
not forget those two. But I thought of them as three. I caught myself
saying to myself: “There is Guerin and the Enfant de Malheur and
another. It isn’t just a case of one man fighting the panic of another.
That’s what you call it. That’s what you want to believe it is. But
there is something there that inspires the panic. Something else,
something immense. The boy is a worm; the priest is an insignificant
little man. But there are huge invisible things assaulting that noisome
bed. What? The powers of darkness?”
“Nonsense,” I said to myself. I was adjusting the pulleys of a fracture
case. “There are no dark powers abroad in the world. There is only
death and pain and human evil and puny human remorse. The boy is a
murderer, a thief, a vile rat, and he knows it; that’s all, but soon it
will all be over. Soon he’ll be nothing, nothing. You know all the rest
is silly superstition. If Guerin didn’t happen to be a Catholic priest
he wouldn’t take it so hard.”
But even the quiet huts full of sleeping men seemed to be filled with
mystery, and I hurried to get back to that other one across the way,
where I knew an immense struggle was going on. I couldn’t bear not
to see what was happening. I was afraid to go back, but fascinated,
haunted, allured. “If Guerin didn’t happen to be a priest he would
be as useless as you are in the face of this,” I said to myself. But
could even Guerin do anything? Who was Guerin? A good orderly, a
conscientious little man who believed in old legends. Very well, very
well. Put it that the power of an aged belief was being put to the
test in that ugly hut. I must see; I must know. I was devoured with
curiosity.
My round took me two hours. It was midnight when I got back to them.
Guerin was in the same position, on his knees, but he was praying now
with a crucifix in his lifted hands and his eyes were closed. His face
showed signs of great fatigue; it was tight and strained, but it wore
a curious expression. And this expression was so concentrated that it
seemed to come from his face and shoot upward like a shaft of dark
light. I cannot describe it otherwise. His voice, too, had gained in
power; it was low, level, and penetrating, but there were undertones in
it that made one’s nerves tingle. “Dieu qui nous regarde, ayez pitié.
Dieu le Saveur, je vous supplie--”
The Enfant de Malheur, I saw with a sickening catch in my side, had
changed too, and the change was dreadful. I had hoped. What had I
hoped? In his growing exhaustion and terror he had a look of madness.
He was almost unrecognisable. There was a devilish hatred on his
clammy face, a vile frantic fury, as well as an agony of terror. His
fury seemed directed toward Guerin and the crucifix, while his terror
was concentrated on something straight in front of him. His lips were
twisted into a malevolent and hideous snarl; his eyes were the eyes
of a suffering lunatic; they shot sullen sidelong looks of wild
vindictiveness at the crucifix. As I passed he gave a vicious leap
toward the foot of the bed, flung his tortured body past the priest’s
head, hit out at the Christ with his fist, and, grinding his teeth,
yelled out a hideous curse into the shadows. Guerin’s voice became
audible again an instant later: “Dieu, notre seul espoir--Dieu, notre
Sauveur.” The old men groaned and muttered, half waking.
At two o’clock the struggle was still going on and the situation seemed
to me at first unchanged except that the apache and the priest were
both fainting with exhaustion; but I noticed presently that they had
come to closer grips with each other. Guerin, still on his knees, was
talking now with his mouth close to the boy’s head, talking with a
breathless intensity, saying apparently the same thing over and over,
as if he were trying to drive home into that maddened brain a single
important fact, and it seemed to me that through his terror the dying
boy was listening in spite of himself. His attention was now very
evidently divided between the death that menaced him at the foot of
his bed and the voice that spoke in his ear. He was still fighting,
but while he fought he listened reluctantly, fearful of allowing his
attention to be distracted from his awful antagonist for a second, but
nevertheless compelled to pay attention. And his antagonist seemed to
have withdrawn a little. The beast was crouching, was cowering now, so
it seemed to me. I stood at a distance under the lamp that hung from
the peaked roof and watched. Guerin was panting for breath as if he had
been running in a long race. But he seemed to be winning: he seemed
to have pushed back a little that dark power. The boy was undoubtedly
listening to his rapid, determined, insistent voice. The power in it
was reaching him. What power? Guerin’s, you fool, I said to myself,
but what powers did Guerin have to draw on. He had been at it now for
four hours. Could he last out, keep it up? Keep up what? What, after
all, was he doing? Was he telling the sewer rat lies to get him quiet?
But how could he go on lying and lying? What power lay in tricks and
falsehood to rout that awful terror? If Guerin failed he would, I
caught myself thinking, be proved a liar; but if he won, what then?
And just at that moment I saw the boy break away from Guerin’s voice
and plunge with a shriek back into his agony and begin to writhe again
as if grappling with a monster; and I almost ran to the door, sick with
horror and disappointment.
“He has failed,” I said to myself. “Guerin has failed.” And I hurried
away with my lantern through the bitter air, making excuses for him.
“It’s too long, it’s too much. He’s been at it all night. No man on
earth could keep it up at that pitch of intensity.” I stopped, stood
staring down at my lantern. “But he’d almost got him,” I whispered,
“and now he’s lost him again.” But had he? I turned round. Suppose
Guerin had given up? I went running back. “I couldn’t bear that,
Guerin,” I whispered. “I couldn’t bear to see you beaten;” I felt half
suffocated as I crept to the door and looked in again.
Guerin had not relaxed or changed his position; he was still praying,
praying. His words came to my ears like the soft raps of a small
muffled hammer, hammering away, hammering and hammering.
And as I went on my rounds again, from hut to hut and bed to bed, I
kept hearing Guerin’s voice, hammering away, hammering away at the
gates of Heaven for the sake of the poor Enfant de Malheur. I knew
now that nothing could stop him, that he would never give in, but I
knew, too, that his time was getting short. The boy couldn’t last
much longer. Soon he would die. Would he die in terror, aware of his
unutterable vileness? Would Guerin be forced to see that happen? Would
he be proved to himself to be a liar?
I felt cold and very tired. The sky was beginning to pale. It was
four o’clock, the hour when life beats most feebly in the bodies of
men. I went from hut to hut again, listening for the little sounds of
uncertain fluttering life. Was this one slipping away or that one? “No
one, no one else must die to-night,” I kept saying to myself. “There
is only one death here to-night.” Then I turned towards Guerin’s hut.
It stood ungainly and ugly in the half light, a wooden shelter through
which many men had passed, some to go home, some to be buried in our
cemetery where the wooden crosses stood so modestly above the ground.
None of them stayed with us. All were lost to us. They passed like
shadows. I could not remember them. They had no names, no faces in my
memory. Who were they? What were they? What had become of them? I did
not know. I knew nothing about them; I knew nothing of the dead or the
living. I felt cold. I felt dreadfully cold as I approached the door,
but as I entered I was aware that a strange hush had come into the
ward, and through it I heard the old men breathing, and a young voice
talking. It was the Enfant de Malheur who was speaking. He was talking
to Guerin in a small weak child’s voice, and Guerin was kneeling
beside him with the sweat pouring down his face. I saw Guerin take his
handkerchief from his pocket and wipe his forehead, but he did not take
his eyes from the boy’s eyes while he did this. They were both quiet;
Guerin was very, very quiet, but the boy was sobbing a little, He was
confessing his sins. He was pouring out all his dark, secret, haunting
memories into Guerin’s ears and sobbing with relief. I turned and
tip-toed out again, and stood for awhile against the wall of the hut,
trembling. I went back at five. I could not keep away. I went back
half through my round. I knew that I must not miss the last act of the
drama that was playing itself out so quietly on that ugly narrow bed. I
knew that I would never again in this world see anything so mysterious.
The dawn was filtering into the long wooden hut, filling it with the
twilight of morning. The old men in their beds lay asleep. I looked
down the long row apprehensively with a last catch at the heart. Was
it over? Had Guerin really won? No, it was not over yet. Yes, yes, he
had won. There they were, the two of them, and the boy’s white face was
smiling above smoothed sheets. His eyes were closed. He lay relaxed, at
peace, happy, and a small crumpled figure was still kneeling beside his
bed and a low voice was praying again: “Jesu--Dieu--Sauveur qui nous
regard.” And I knew that the Enfant de Malheur was listening. I knew
that he could hear, because he moved a little, and touched the priest’s
arm, half opened his eyes, and smiled as I watched him.
He died at six o’clock, holding Guerin by the hand. Then Guerin loosed
his hand, and crossed the boy’s two hands on his wasted chest over the
small crucifix, and rose from his knees and walked stiffly to the door.
The sun was rising. He staggered a little as he came out into the fresh
morning air. I stood beside him. He began polishing his pince-nez.
The sky was crimson behind the wooden sheds. Suddenly, softly, it
filled with golden light. Great luminous bands spread up and out like
a fan from the horizon. I looked at Guerin, so small, so crumpled, so
exhausted. He did not look at all like a man of God. He looked like a
book-worm, a bit of a prig, an insignificant little man.
“What does it mean, Guerin?” I asked. “It was like a miracle; but what
does it mean?”
“He is safe.” Guerin said briefly. Then he adjusted his pince-nez, gave
me a quick sharp look, and turned away to his own quarters.
ROSA
The stretcher bearers staggered under his weight when they brought him
along through the sunlight to the operating room. They put him down
for a moment on the ground outside the operating hut and wiped the
sweat off their old foreheads. It was a hot summer’s day. The sector
was quiet. The attack that had filled the hospital two days before had
fizzled out. Now only occasional ambulances lurched in at the gate,
bringing men who had been missed by the stretcher bearers, left out
for a couple of nights on No Man’s Land, or been wounded unnecessarily
by stray bullets after the big push was over. This man had come up
over the horizon alone, a red giant, brought unconscious through the
summer afternoon in a battered Ford, and deposited like a log on our
doorstep, solitary character of some obscure incident in the aftermath
of battle. He lay on the ground like a felled ox, a bull mortally
wounded, breathing noisily.
His head was bound with a soiled bandage; his eyes were closed; his
bruised mouth was open. Thick tufts of red hair pushed through the head
bandage. There was dried blood round his immense rough lips. His huge
red face was dark and blurred. He was covered with dust. He looked as
if he had been rolling in a dirty field like some farm animal. He was a
man of the soil, of the dark earth, with the heavy power of the earth
in him. The bright sun shining on his massive unconscious bulk made
the darkness of his lost consciousness visible. He seemed to lie deep,
distant, withdrawn in a shadowy abyss. His spirit--brother spirit of
ox and bullock and all beasts of the field--was deep asleep, in that
sleep which is the No Man’s Land of the soul, and from which men seldom
come back. But his immense body continued, in spite of his absence to
hum and drum like a dynamo, like a machine whose tremendous power takes
time to run down, and his breath came whistling and spurting through
his rough bruised lips like escaping steam.
The old stretcher-bearers lifted him again grunting, and brought him
in to us and hoisted him with difficulty on to the narrow white table,
in the white room full of glistening bottles and shining basins and
silvered instruments, among the white-coated surgeons and nurses. His
head hung over one end of the table, and his feet over the other, and
his great freckled arms hung helpless and heavy down at either side.
Thick curling bunches of red hair, wiry and vigorous, grew out of his
enormous chest. We stripped his body. It lay inert, a mountainous mass,
with the rough-hewn brick-red face tipped back. His sightless face
reminded one of the face of a rock in a sandstone quarry, chiselled
with a pickaxe, deeply gashed. His closed eyes were caves under bushy
cliffs, his battered mouth a dark shaft leading down into a cavern
where a hammer was beating.
Because he was so big, his helplessness was the more helpless. But
one could feel life pounding powerfully in his body--senseless life,
pounding on, pumping air into his lungs, keeping his heart going. Yes,
he would be hard to kill, I thought. Even a bullet in the head hadn’t
killed him.
I counted his pulse. It was strong and steady.
“Shot through the mouth. Revolver bullet lodged in the brain.” Monsieur
X was reading the ticket that had been pinned to the man’s blanket in
the dressing station behind the front line.
But how? I wondered. How queer, I thought. Shot in the mouth--through
the roof of the mouth. He must have been asleep in the trench with his
mouth open. And I imagined him there, sprawling in the muddy ditch,
an exhausted animal with his great stupid mouth open; and I saw a
figure crawl in beside him and put the barrel of a revolver between
his big yellow teeth. Fool, I thought. You fool--you big hulking brute
beast--going to sleep like that in utter careless weariness.
But no, it was impossible. In this war such things didn’t happen. Men
were killed haphazard--maimed, torn to pieces, scattered by shell fire,
plugged full of shrapnel, hit square sometimes by rifle bullets, but
not shot neatly through the roof of the mouth with a revolver.
They were whispering as they bent over him. Monsieur X frowned,
pinched his lips together, looked down at the great, gentle unconscious
carcase sideways.
“But how?” I asked. “Who?”
“Himself. He shot himself through the mouth. It’s a suicide.”
“Suicide!” I echoed the word vaguely, as if it contained a mystery.
There was something queer, out of the ordinary, about it, shocking
to the surgeons and orderlies. They were ashamed, worried, rather
flustered. “But why suicide?” I asked, suddenly aware of the
extraordinary fact that a personal tragedy had lifted its head above
the dead level of mass destruction. It was this that shocked them.
He’s not young, I thought, cutting the bandage round the rough
unconscious head with its shock of matted red hair. A peasant,
probably--very stupid--an ox of a man.
“Why suicide?” I asked aloud.
“Panic,” answered Monsieur briefly. “Fear--he tried to kill himself
from fear of being killed. They do sometimes.”
“This one didn’t.”
“No, he didn’t succeed, this big one. He ought to be dead. The bullet
is here just under the skull. It’s gone clean through his brain. Any
other man would be dead. He’s strong, this big one.”
“You’ll extract it?”
“But certainly.”
“And he will live?”
“Perhaps.”
“And what then?”
“He’ll be court-martialed and shot, Madame, for attempted suicide.”
They were strapping his iron arms and legs to the narrow table. Someone
lifted his heavy head. Someone pulled his great bulk into position and
bound him to the table with strong leather bands.
“Don’t do it!” I shouted suddenly. “Leave him alone.” I was appalled by
his immense helplessness.
They went on with their business of getting him ready. They didn’t hear
me. Perhaps I had not shouted aloud.
“You don’t understand,” I cried. “You’ve made a mistake. It wasn’t
fear. It was something else. He had a reason, a secret. It’s locked
there in his chest. Leave him alone with it. You can’t bring him back
now to be shot again.”
But they clapped the ether mask over his face, stifling his enormous
stentorious breathing, and with that he began to struggle--the dying
ox. Life, roused by the menace of the suffocating gas, sprang up in him
again--gigantic, furious, suffering, a baited bull. It began plunging
in him, straining, leaping to get out of his carcase and attack its
enemies. A leather thong snapped, a fist shot out, knocking over
bottles and basins. There was a crash, a tinkle of broken glass, a
scramble of feet, and suddenly through the confusion I heard a thin
soft anguished voice cry as if from a great distance, “Rosa, Rosa!” It
came from his chest; it sounded like the voice of a man lost in a cave.
It came from under his heaving side where the bushy hair grew thick and
strong--a hollow heartbroken voice, issuing from his blind unconscious
mouth, in a long cry--“Rosa, Rosa!”
Twice again he called Rosa before they could clap the ether mask down
again on his face.
It was a neat operation and entirely successful. They took the bullet
out of the top of his head, bandaged his head up again, and carried him
away through the sunny afternoon to be put to bed.
“He will surely die in the night,” I said to myself, and I went
again and again in the night to see if, happily, he were dead; but
always, standing beside the shadow of his great bulk, I could hear him
breathing, and once I thought I heard sighing on his shrouded lips the
name of the woman--Rosa.
“He can’t live,” the night nurse said.
“He can’t die,” I whispered to myself. “Life is too strong in him, too
hard to kill.”
He was much better next day. I found him sitting up in bed in a clean
pink flannel night shirt, staring in front of him. He didn’t answer
when I said “Good morning,” or take any notice of me. He hadn’t spoken
to any one during the day, the nurse told me, but he was very obedient
and ate his soup quietly, “as good as gold,” she said he was. “A
remarkable case,” Monsieur X said. “He ought to be dead.” But there he
was sitting up eating his meals with an excellent appetite.
“So he knows what will happen?” I asked, following the surgeon to the
door.
“But certainly. They all know. Everyone in the army knows the penalty.”
The suicide did not turn his head or look in my direction. He was still
staring straight ahead of him when I came back and stood at the foot of
his bed.
Who are you? I wondered, and who is Rosa? And what can I do? How can
I help you? And I stood there waiting, miserably spellbound by the
patient brute who at last turned on me from his cavernous eyes a look
of complete understanding, and then looked heavily away again.
That night when the orderly was dozing and the night nurse was going on
her round from hut to hut, he tore the bandage from his head. She found
him with his head oozing on the pillow, and scolded him roundly. He
didn’t answer. He said nothing. He seemed not to notice. Meekly, docile
as a friendly trusting dog, he let her bandage him up again, and the
next morning I found him again sitting up in his bed in his clean head
bandage staring in front of him with that dark look of dumb subhuman
suffering. And the next night the same thing happened, and the next,
and the next. Every night he tore off his bandage, and then let himself
be tied up again.
“If his wound becomes infected he’ll die,” said Monsieur X, angrily.
“That’s what he’s trying to do,” I answered. “Kill himself again before
they can shoot him,” I added, “to save them the trouble.”
I dared not speak to the man whom I thought of day and night as Rosa,
having never learned his name, and he never spoke to me or any one. His
eyes, which he now always turned on me when I came in, forbade me to
speak to him. They stared into mine with the understanding of a brute
mortally wounded, who is not allowed to die, so I went to the General,
and, actuated by some hysterical impulse, pleaded for the man’s life.
“But, Madame, we have epidemics of suicide in the trenches. Panic
seizes the men. They blow their brains out in a panic. Unless the
penalty is what it is--to be court-martialed and shot--the thing would
spread. We’d find ourselves going over the top with battalions of dead
men. The same penalty applies to men who wound themselves. That’s the
favourite device of a coward. He puts the muzzle of his rifle on his
foot and fires.”
I argued. I explained that this man was not afraid of being killed, but
of not being killed, that his luck was out when the enemy missed him;
that he had been kept waiting too long, had shot himself in despair
because the Germans wouldn’t shoot him; and a woman called Rosa let him
down, or perhaps she died. Perhaps he simply wanted to go to her.
“He must have had a letter in the trenches--a letter from Rosa or
about her. He’s not a young man. He is forty or more--an enormous
brute with red hair and hands like hams. A farmer probably. One of
those slow plodding gentle brute men, faithful as dogs. His voice was
broken-hearted, high and hollow like a child’s voice, when he called to
her. Like a child that is lost. ‘Rosa! Rosa!’ If you’d heard him.
“And here you are with your military regulations asking me to save him
for you so that you can shoot him. You expect us to tie up his head
every night and prevent his dying so that you can march him off to
trial and stand him up against a wall.”
But what was the good of arguing against army regulations? We were at
war. The General could do nothing. The man must be made an example, so
that these epidemics of suicide could be kept in check.
I didn’t dare go back to Rosa. I went to the door of the hut and called
the nurse. Down in the centre of the long row of beds I could see his
great shoulders and his huge bandaged head. He looked like a monstrous
baby in his white bonnet and pink flannel shirt. But I knew that his
big haggard eyes were staring, and I remembered that his face had been
a little paler each day, that it was not brick colour any more, but the
colour of wax, that his cheek bones stood out like shelves.
He’s killing himself in spite of us all, I thought. He’s succeeding.
It’s hard work, it takes patience, but he’s doing it. Given a chance,
he’ll pull it off. Well, he’ll have his chance. I almost laughed. I had
been a fool to go to the General and plead for his life. That was the
last thing he wanted me to do for him. That was just the wrong thing.
I spoke to the nurse who was going on duty for the night.
“When Rosa pulls off his bandage to-night, leave it off,” I said
abruptly.
She looked at me a minute hesitating. She was highly trained. Her
traditions, her professional conscience, the honour of her calling
loomed for a moment before her, then her eyes lighted. “All right,” she
said.
I thought when I stood at the foot of Rosa’s bed next morning and found
him staring at me that I detected a look of recognition in his eyes,
perhaps even a faint look of gratitude, but I could not be sure. His
gaze was so sombre, so deep, that I could not read it, but I could
see that he was weaker. Perhaps it was his increased pallor that made
his eyes so enormously dark and mysterious. Towards evening he grew
delirious, but he tore off his bandage all the same, in the middle of
the night. He managed to do that. It was his last effort, his last
fumbling desperate and determined act. His fixed idea prevailed through
his delirium, his will triumphed. It was enough. He was unconscious
next morning and he died two days later, calling in his weary abysmal
heart for Rosa, though we could not hear him.
PART TWO
THE SOMME
THE CITY IN THE DESERT
What is this city that sprawls in the shallow valley between the chalk
hills? Why are its buildings all alike, gaunt wooden sheds with iron
roofs? Why are there no trees, no gardens, no pleasant places? The
sheds are placed on top of the muddy ground like boxes, row after row
of them, with iron rails down the centre where the main street of the
town should be. But there are no streets. There are only tracks in the
mud and wooden walks laid across the mud from one shed to the other,
and a railway line.
I see no children playing anywhere. The wind brings no sound of
laughter from the place, or splendid shouting, no sound of any kind.
Silent men in couples are carrying heavy bundles between them from one
shed to the other, heads down to the wind. The small white figure of a
solitary woman is crossing a wide open space. She is slipping in the
mud. Her white dress is fluttering. The place is immense and empty, new
and still and desolate. But the naked wet hills are throbbing. There’s
a noise of distant booming as if the sea were breaking against their
sides.
You tell me there is no sea over there. But the roar? Surely there are
waves breaking, and this desert is wet as if a great wave had just
receded, leaving the muddy bottom of the earth uncovered. A bare sea
bottom, strewn with bits of iron, coils of wire, stones. No sign of
life, no fish fossils, or rotting sea-weed, no plant of any kind, not a
blade of green; a dead sea must have lain here.
Whoever built this city on this slippery waste, built it quick, at ebb
tide, between tides, to serve some queer purpose between low and high
tide. They put up these sheds in a hurry, covered them with sheets of
corrugated iron, pinned them to the mud somehow, anyhow, knowing that
a roaring surge would rise again, come rolling back over the hills to
carry them away again. Then all these new buildings, all this timber
and these sheets of iron will be broken up, and will rush down in a
torrent.
Down where? How do I know. I’m lost. I’ve lost my way. The road was
slippery. There were no landmarks. The village I used to know at the
cross-roads was gone. Everything was sliding in the mud and all the
villages that I knew here once on a time had slipped clean out of
sight, and now all the men and horses in the world with wagons and
motor lorries seem to be pouring after them into a gulf. The earth is a
greased slide, tilted up and shaking. And the men who built this place
knew evidently that there was danger of the face of the earth itself
slipping--for look over there on that hill-side and that one--they’ve
tied the earth down with wire. You see those intersecting bands of
wire, looking like a field of tangled iron weeds and iron thistles?
That is evidently to keep the mud from slipping away.
Queer, isn’t it? This new city where there once was a snug town huddled
round a church with cafés, little tables under the trees, schoolboys in
black pinafores playing on the church steps. The inn, I remember, was
famous for its cuisine. What has become of the fat landlord who watched
the plump succulent fowls turning on a spit and dripping? Now, there’s
this place that looks like a mining town or a lumber camp, only it
can’t be. There’s not a tree to be seen, north, south, east, or west,
nothing but mud glistening. It’s very queer, I say. That flimsy gate
there with a banner across it as if for a celebration, with H.O.E. 32
on it in big black letters, and a flag flying, and those red crosses
painted on the iron roofs of the buildings. H.O.E. 32 must be the name
of the place; but why such a name? What does it mean?
Perhaps there has been a new flood, since Noah, and you and I slept
through it. Perhaps a new race of men has been hatched out of the mud,
hatched like newts, slugs, larvæ of water beetles. But slugs who know
horribly, acutely, that they have only a moment to live in between
flood tides and so built this place quickly, a silly shelter against
the wrath of God, and gave it a magic hieroglyphic name, and put the
name on a banner and hoisted a flag, and then put those red crosses up
there, tipped skywards. Everything showy in the place points skywards,
is designed to catch an eye in the sky, a great angry eye.
Otherwise it seems a secret place, vast, spread out, bare but secret;
and some strange industry, some dreadful trade is evidently being
carried on here in the wet desert, where a flood has passed and another
flood will come.
The workers have a curious apprehensive look with their big secretive
bundles. They may be smugglers. Certainly some shameful merchandise is
being smuggled in here from the shore that you say is not the shore of
the sea. If the booming noise beyond the hills were the roar of waves
breaking, one would say that these old men were gangs of beachcombers,
bringing up bundles of wreckage; that they go out across the mud under
cover of the night to hunt in the backwash. You can see from the way
they move that the stuff is valuable and breakable. They come out of
the sheds cautiously and go carefully along the narrow board walks, two
by two, with the heavy brown bundles swinging between them. They are as
careful as they can be. They seem to be old men. They stagger under the
weight that swings from their arms and their old shoulders cower as if
under the lash of an invisible whip; but they go up and down the long
rows of sheds, patiently, carefully, gently, taking small careful steps.
You say that these bundles are the citizens of the town? What do you
mean? Those heavy brown packages that are carried back and forth, up
and down, from shed to shed, those inert lumps cannot be men. They are
delivered to this place in closed vans and are unloaded like sacks and
are laid out in rows on the ground and are sorted out by the labels
pinned to their covers. They lie perfectly still while they are carried
back and forth, up and down, shoved into sheds and pulled out again.
What do you mean by telling me that they are men?
Why, if they are men, don’t they walk? Why don’t they talk? Why don’t
they protest? They lie perfectly still. They make no sound. They are
covered up. You do not expect me to believe that inside that roll there
is a man, and in that one, and in that one?
Ah, dear God, it’s true! Look! Look through the window. The old men are
undoing the bundles inside this shed. Look, there’s a face and there’s
an arm hanging down crooked, and there I see a pair of boots sticking
out at one end of a bundle.
But how queer they are! How strangely they lie there. They are not
the usual shape. They only remind one of men. Some, to be sure, are
wearing coats, and some have on iron hats, but all of them seem to be
broken and tied together with white rags. And how dirty they are! The
mud is crusted on them. Their boots are lumps of mud. Their faces are
grey and wet as if modelled of pale mud. But what are those red, rusty
stains on their dirty white rags? They have gone rusty lying out there
in the mud, in the backwash. Ah, what a pity. Here is one without an
arm, and another and another, and there, dear God, is one without a
face! Oh! Oh! What are the old men doing to them? They are pulling off
their clothes, uncovering the dreadful holes in their sides. Come away,
come away from the window. I know now. There is no need to sneak up and
stare at them.
They are lost men, wrecked men, survivors from that other world that
was here before the flood passed this way, washed up against the shore
of this world again by the great backwash. They thought that they had
done with it, thought it was over and done with, thought they had
left it for ever. But they’ve been brought here, brought back again to
this city of refuge called H.O.E. 32, that sprawls under the angry Eye
of God. Bundled into vans they were, all mangled and broken, carried
back over the sliding mud through that flimsy gate where the flag is
flapping, to be saved. To be hauled about and man-handled, to have
their broken, bleeding nakedness uncovered, to have their bodies cut
again with knives and their deep wounds probed with pincers, and to
have the breath choked back in their sobbing lungs again, so that they
may be saved for this world.
How strange it must look to them when they open their eyes! There are
no trees anywhere. There is no shelter, except under the iron roofs.
The place is new and still and desolate. But the wind is howling over
the wet desert, and the old men who go carefully up and down with their
heavy oblong bundles, stop and listen to the booming sound beyond the
hills as if they heard the flood rising.
CONSPIRACY
It is all carefully arranged. Everything is arranged. It is arranged
that men should be broken and that they should be mended. Just as you
send your clothes to the laundry and mend them when they come back,
so we send our men to the trenches and mend them when they come back
again. You send your socks and your shirts again and again to the
laundry, and you sew up the tears and clip the ravelled edges again and
again just as many times as they will stand it. And then you throw them
away. And we send our men to the war again and again, just as long as
they will stand it; just until they are dead, and then we throw them
into the ground.
It is all arranged. Ten kilometres from here along the road is the
place where men are wounded. This is the place where they are mended.
We have all the things here for mending, the tables and the needles,
and the thread and the knives and the scissors, and many curious things
that you never use for your clothes.
We bring our men up along the dusty road where the bushes grow on
either side and the green trees. They come by in the mornings in
companies, marching with strong legs, with firm steps. They carry their
knapsacks easily. Their knapsacks and their guns and their greatcoats
are not heavy for them. They wear their caps jauntily, tilted to one
side. Their faces are ruddy and their eyes bright. They smile and call
out with strong voices. They throw kisses to the girls in the fields.
We send our men up the broken road between bushes of barbed wire and
they come back to us, one by one, two by two in ambulances, lying on
stretchers. They lie on their backs on the stretchers and are pulled
out of the ambulances as loaves of bread are pulled out of the oven.
The stretchers slide out of the mouths of the ambulances with the men
on them. The men cannot move. They are carried into a shed, unclean
bundles, very heavy, covered with brown blankets.
We receive these bundles. We pull off a blanket. We observe that this
is a man. He makes feeble whining sounds like an animal. He lies still;
he smells bad; he smells like a corpse; he can only move his tongue; he
tries to moisten his lips with his tongue.
This is the place where he is to be mended. We lift him on to a table.
We peel off his clothes, his coat and his shirt and his trousers and
his boots. We handle his clothes that are stiff with blood. We cut off
his shirt with large scissors. We stare at the obscene sight of his
innocent wounds. He allows us to do this. He is helpless to stop us. We
wash off the dry blood round the edges of his wounds. He suffers us to
do as we like with him. He says no word except that he is thirsty and
we do not give him to drink.
We confer together over his body and he hears us. We discuss his
different parts in terms that he does not understand, but he listens
while we make calculations with his heart beats and the pumping breath
of his lungs.
We conspire against his right to die. We experiment with his bones,
his muscles, his sinews, his blood. We dig into the yawning mouths
of his wounds. Helpless openings, they let us into the secret places
of his body. We plunge deep into his body. We make discoveries within
his body. To the shame of the havoc of his limbs we add the insult of
our curiosity and the curse of our purpose, the purpose to remake him.
We lay odds on his chances of escape, and we combat with death, his
Saviour.
It is our business to do this. He knows and he allows us to do it. He
finds himself in the operating room. He lays himself out. He bares
himself to our knives. His mind is annihilated. He pours out his blood
unconscious. His red blood is spilled and pours over the table on to
the floor while he sleeps.
After this, while he is still asleep, we carry him into another place
and put him to bed. He awakes bewildered as children do, expecting,
perhaps, to find himself at home with his mother leaning over him, and
he moans a little and then lies still again. He is helpless, so we do
for him what he cannot do for himself, and he is grateful. He accepts
his helplessness. He is obedient. We feed him, and he eats. We fatten
him up, and he allows himself to be fattened. Day after day he lies
there and we watch him. All day and all night he is watched. Every day
his wounds are uncovered and cleaned, scraped and washed and bound
up again. His body does not belong to him. It belongs to us for the
moment, not for long. He knows why we tend it so carefully. He knows
what we are fattening and cleaning it up for; and while we handle it,
he smiles.
He is only one among thousands. They are all the same. They all let us
do with them what we like. They all smile as if they were grateful.
When we hurt them they try not to cry out, not wishing to hurt our
feelings. And often they apologise for dying. They would not die and
disappoint us if they could help it. Indeed, in their helplessness they
do the best they can to help us get them ready to go back again.
It is only ten kilometres up the road, the place where they go to be
torn again and mangled. Listen; you can hear how well it works. There
is the sound of cannon and the sound of the ambulances bringing the
wounded, and the sound of the tramp of strong men going along the road
to fill the empty places.
Do you hear? Do you understand? It is all arranged just as it should be.
PARAPHERNALIA
What have all these queer things to do with the dying of this man?
Here are cotton things and rubber things and steel things and things
made of glass, all manner of things. What have so many things to do
with the final adventure of this spirit?
Here are blankets and pillows and tin boxes and needles and bottles and
pots and basins and long rubber tubes and many little white squares
of gauze. Here are bottles of all sizes filled with coloured liquids
and basins of curious shapes and round shining boxes and square boxes
marked with blue labels, and here you are busy among your things. You
pile the blankets on his exhausted body. You fetch jugs of hot water
and boil the long curling rubber tubes in saucepans. You keep corking
and uncorking bottles.
Yes, I know that you understand all these things. You finger the glass
syringes exquisitely and pick up the fine needles easily with slender
pincers and with the glass beads poised neatly on your rosy finger tips
you saw them with tiny saws. You flaunt your perfect movements in the
face of his mysterious exhaustion. You show off the skilled movements
of your hands beside the erratic jerkings of his terrible limbs.
Why do you rub his grey flesh with the stained scrap of cotton and
stick the needle deep into his side? Why do you do it?
Death is inexorable and the place of death is void. You have crowded
the room with all manner of things. Why do you crowd all these things
up to the edge of the great emptiness?
You seem to have so much to do. Wait. Wait. A miracle is going to
happen. Death is coming into the room. There is no time for all this
business. There is only one moment between this man and eternity.
You still fuss about busily. You move your feet and rustle your
petticoats. You are continually doing things with your hands. You keep
on doing things. Why do you keep on doing things? Death is annoyed at
you fussing.
The man’s spirit is invisible. Why do you light the lamp? You cannot
see the God of Death with your splendid eyes. Does it please you to see
the sweat on that forehead and the glaze on the eyeballs?
Hush, you are making a noise. Why do you make a noise? No, as you say,
he cannot hear you, but cannot you hear? Eternity is soundless, but
hush! Let us listen. Let us listen. Maybe we shall hear the stirring of
wings or the sighing tremor of his soul passing.
Ah! What are you doing? Why do you move? You are filling the room with
sound as you have filled it with objects. You are annoying death with
your ridiculous things and the noise of your foolish business.
What do you say? He is dead? You say he is dead?
And here are all your things, your blankets and your bottles and your
basins. The blankets weigh down upon his body. They hang down over the
bed. Your syringes and your needles and your uncorked bottles are all
about in confusion. You have stained your fingers. There is a spot
on your white apron; but you are superb, and here are all your things
about you, all your queer things, all the confusion of your precious
things.
What have you and all your things to do with the dying of this man?
Nothing. Take them away.
IN THE OPERATING ROOM
The operating room is the section of a wooden shed. Thin partitions
separate it from the X-ray room on one side, and the sterilizing room
on the other. Another door communicates with a corridor. There are
three wounded men on three operating tables. Surgeons, nurses and
orderlies are working over them. The doors keep opening and shutting.
The boiler is pounding and bubbling in the sterilizing room. There
is a noise of steam escaping, of feet hurrying down the corridor, of
ambulances rolling past the windows, and behind all this, the rhythmic
pounding of the guns bombarding at a distance of ten miles or so.
1st Patient: Mother of God! Mother of God!
2nd Patient: Softly. Softly. You hurt me. Ah! You are hurting me.
3rd Patient: I am thirsty.
1st Surgeon: Cut the dressing, Mademoiselle.
2nd Surgeon: What’s his ticket say? Show it to me. What’s the X-ray
show?
3rd Surgeon: Abdomen. Bad pulse. I wonder now?
1st Patient: In the name of God be careful. I suffer. I suffer.
1st Surgeon: At what time were you wounded?
1st Patient: At five this morning.
1st Surgeon: Where?
1st Patient: In the arm.
1st Surgeon: Yes, yes, but in what sector?
1st Patient: In the trenches near Besanghe.
1st Surgeon: Shell or bullet?
1st Patient: Shell. Merciful God, what are you doing?
A nurse comes in from the corridor. Her apron is splashed with blood.
Nurse: There’s a lung just come in. Hæmorrhage. Can one of you take him?
1st Surgeon: In a few minutes. In five minutes. Now then, Mademoiselle,
strap down that other arm tighter.
Nurse (in doorway) to 2nd Surgeon: There’s a knee for you, doctor, and
three elbows. In five minutes I’ll send in the lung. (Exit.)
3rd Patient: I’m thirsty. A drink. Give me a drink.
3rd Surgeon: In a little while. You must wait a little.
2nd Patient: Mother of Jesus, not like that. Don’t turn my foot like
that. Not that way. Take care. Great God, take care! I can’t bear it. I
tell you, I can’t bear it!
2nd Surgeon: There, there, don’t excite yourself. You’ve got a nasty
leg, very nasty. Smells bad. Mademoiselle, hold his leg up. It’s not
pretty at all, this leg.
2nd Patient: Ah, doctor, doctor. What are you doing? Aiee----.
2nd Surgeon: Be quiet. Don’t move. Don’t touch the wound I tell you.
Idiot! Hold his leg. Keep your hands off, you animal. Hold his leg
higher. Strap his hands down.
3rd Patient (feebly): I am thirsty. I die of thirst. A drink! A drink!
2nd Patient (screaming): You’re killing me. Killing me! I’ll die of it!
Aieeeee----.
3rd Patient (softly): I am thirsty. For pity a drink.
3rd Surgeon: Have you vomited blood, old man?
3rd Patient: I don’t know. A drink please, doctor.
3rd Surgeon: Does it hurt here?
3rd Patient: No, I don’t think so. A drink, sister, in pity’s name, a
drink.
Nurse: I can’t give you a drink. It would hurt you. You are wounded in
the stomach.
3rd Patient: So thirsty. Just a little drink. Just a drop. Sister for
pity, just a drop.
3rd Surgeon: Moisten his lips. How long ago were you wounded?
3rd Patient: I don’t know. In the night. Some night.
3rd Surgeon: Last night?
3rd Patient: Perhaps last night. I don’t know. I lay in the mud a long
time. Please sister a drink. Just a little drink.
1st Patient: What’s in that bottle? What are you doing to me?
1st Surgeon: Keep still I tell you.
1st Patient: It burns! It’s burning me! No more. No more! I beg of
you, doctor; I can’t bear any more!
1st Surgeon: Nonsense. This won’t last a minute. There’s nothing the
matter with you. Your wounds are nothing.
1st Patient: You say it’s nothing. My God, what are you doing now?
Ai--ee!
1st Surgeon: It’s got to be cleaned out. There’s a piece of shell, bits
of coat, all manner of dirt in it.
2nd Patient: Jeanne, petite Marie, Jean, where are you? Little Jean,
where are you?
2nd Surgeon: Your leg is not at all pretty, my friend. We shall have to
take it off.
2nd Patient: Oh, my poor wife! I have three children, doctor. If you
take my leg off what will become of them and of the farm? Great God, to
suffer like this!
2nd Surgeon to 1st Surgeon: Look here a moment. It smells bad.
Gangrenous. What do you think?
1st Surgeon: No good waiting.
2nd Surgeon: Well, my friend, will you have it off?
2nd Patient: If you say so, doctor. Oh, my poor wife, my poor Jeanne.
What will become of you? The children are too little to work in the
fields.
2nd Surgeon (to nurse): Begin with the chloroform. We’re going to put
you to sleep, old man. Breathe deep. Breathe through the mouth. Is my
saw there? Where is my amputating saw? Who’s got my saw?
3rd Patient (softly): A drink, a drink. Give me a drink.
3rd Surgeon: I can do nothing with a pulse like that. Give him serum,
five hundred c.c.s and camphorated oil and strychnine. Warm him up a
bit.
Door opens, nurse enters, followed by two stretcher bearers.
Nurse: Here’s the lung. Are you ready for it?
1st Surgeon: In a minute. One minute. Leave him there.
The stretcher bearers put their stretcher on the floor and go out.
2nd Patient: (half under chloroform): Aha! Aha! Ahead there, you son of
a ----. Forward! Forward! What a stink! I’ve got him! Now I’ve got you.
Quick, quick! Let me go! Let me go! Jeannette, quick, quick, Jeannette!
I’m coming. Marie? Little Jean, where are you?
2nd Surgeon: Tighten those straps. He’s strong, poor devil.
1st Patient: Is it finished?
1st Surgeon: Very nearly. Keep quite still. Now then, the dressings
mademoiselle. There you are old man. Don’t bandage the arm too tight,
mademoiselle. Get him out now. Hi, stretcher bearers, lift up that one
from the floor, will you?
3rd Surgeon: It’s no use operating. Almost no pulse.
3rd Patient: For pity a drink!
3rd Surgeon: Give him a drink. It won’t matter. I can do nothing.
2nd Surgeon: I shall have to amputate above the knee. Is he under?
Nurse: Almost.
3rd Patient: For pity a drink.
Nurse: There, don’t lift your head; here is a drink. Drink this.
3rd Patient: It is good. Thank you, sister.
1st Surgeon: Take this man to Ward 3. Now then, mademoiselle, cut the
dressings.
3rd Surgeon: I can do nothing here. Send me the next one.
3rd Patient: I cannot see. I cannot see any more. Sister, where are you?
1st Surgeon: How’s your spine case of yesterday?
3rd Surgeon: Just what you would expect--paralysed from the waist down.
1st Surgeon: They say the attack is for five in the morning.
3rd Surgeon: Orders are to evacuate every possible bed to-day.
3rd Patient: It is dark. Are you there, sister?
Nurse: Yes, old man, I’m here. Shall I send for a priest, doctor?
3rd Surgeon: Too late. Poor devil. It’s hopeless when they come in like
that, after lying for hours in the mud. There, it’s finished. Call the
stretcher bearers.
1st Surgeon: Quick, a basin! God! How the blood spouts. Quick, quick,
quick! Three holes in this lung.
2nd Surgeon: Take that leg away, will you? There’s no room to move here.
3rd Surgeon: Take this dead man away, and bring the next abdomen. Wipe
that table, mademoiselle, while I wash my hands. And you, there, mop
up the floor a bit.
The doors open and shut. Stretcher bearers go out and come in. A
nurse comes from the sterilizing room with a pile of nickel drums
in her arms. Another nurse goes out with trays of knives and other
instruments. The nurse from the corridor comes back. An officer appears
at the window.
Nurse: Three knees have come in, two more abdomens, five heads.
Officer (through the window): The Médecin Inspecteur will be here in
half an hour. The General is coming at two to decorate all amputés.
1st Surgeon: We’ll get no lunch to-day, and I’m hungry. There, I call
that a very neat amputation.
2nd Surgeon: Three holes stopped in this lung in three minutes by the
clock. Pretty quick, eh?
3rd Surgeon: Give me a light, some one. My experience is that if
abdomens have to wait more than six hours it’s no good. You can’t do
anything. I hope that chap got the oysters in Amiens! Oysters sound
good to me.
BLIND
The door at the end of the baraque kept opening and shutting to let in
the stretcher bearers. As soon as it opened a crack the wind scurried
in and came hopping toward me across the bodies of the men that covered
the floor, nosing under the blankets, lifting the flaps of heavy coats,
and burrowing among the loose heaps of clothing and soiled bandages.
Then the grizzled head of a stretcher bearer would appear, butting its
way in, and he would emerge out of the black storm into the bright fog
that seemed to fill the place, dragging the stretcher after him, and
then the old one at the other end of the load would follow, and they
would come slowly down the centre of the hut looking for a clear place
on the floor.
The men were laid out in three rows on either side of the central
alley way. It was a big hut, and there were about sixty stretchers in
each row. There was space between the heads of one row and the feet
of another row, but no space to pass between the stretchers in the
same row; they touched. The old territorials who worked with me passed
up and down between the heads and feet. I had a squad of thirty of
these old orderlies and two sergeants and two priests, who were expert
dressers. Wooden screens screened off the end of the hut opposite
the entrance. Behind these were the two dressing tables where the
priests dressed the wounds of the new arrivals and got them ready for
the surgeons, after the old men had undressed them and washed their
feet. In one corner was my kitchen where I kept all my syringes and
hypodermic needles and stimulants.
It was just before midnight when the stretcher bearers brought in the
blind man, and there was no space on the floor anywhere; so they stood
waiting, not knowing what to do with him.
I said from the floor in the second row: “Just a minute, old ones.
You can put him here in a minute.” So they waited with the blind man
suspended in the bright, hot, misty air between them, like a pair
of old horses in shafts with their heads down, while the little boy
who had been crying for his mother died with his head on my breast.
Perhaps he thought the arms holding him when he jerked back and died
belonged to some woman I had never seen, some woman waiting somewhere
for news of him in some village, somewhere in France. How many women,
I wondered, were waiting out there in the distance for news of these
men who were lying on the floor? But I stopped thinking about this the
minute the boy was dead. It didn’t do to think. I didn’t as a rule,
but the boy’s very young voice had startled me. It had come through to
me as a real voice will sound sometimes through a dream, almost waking
you, but now it had stopped, and the dream was thick round me again,
and I laid him down, covered his face with the brown blanket, and
called two other old ones.
“Put this one in the corridor to make more room here,” I said; and
I saw them lift him up. When they had taken him away, the stretcher
bearers who had been waiting brought the blind one and put him down in
the cleared space. They had to come round to the end of the front row
and down between the row of feet and row of heads; they had to be very
careful where they stepped; they had to lower the stretcher cautiously
so as not to jostle the men on either side (there was just room), but
these paid no attention. None of the men lying packed together on the
floor noticed each other in this curious dreamplace.
I had watched this out of the corner of my eye, busy with something
that was not very like a man. The limbs seemed to be held together only
by the strong stuff of the uniform. The head was unrecognisable. It
was a monstrous thing, and a dreadful rattling sound came from it. I
looked up and saw the chief surgeon standing over me. I don’t know how
he got there. His small shrunken face was wet and white; his eyes were
brilliant and feverish; his incredible hands that saved so many men so
exquisitely, so quickly, were in the pockets of his white coat.
“Give him morphine,” he said, “a double dose. As much as you like.” He
pulled a cigarette out of his pocket. “In cases like this, if I am not
about, give morphine; enough, you understand.” Then he vanished like a
ghost. He went back to his operating room, a small white figure with
round shoulders, a magician, who performed miracles with knives. He
went away through the dream.
I gave the morphine, then crawled over and looked at the blind man’s
ticket. I did not know, of course, that he was blind until I read his
ticket. A large round white helmet covered the top half of his head and
face; only his nostrils and mouth and chin were uncovered. The surgeon
in the dressing station behind the trenches had written on his ticket,
“Shot through the eyes. Blind.”
Did he know? I asked myself. No, he couldn’t know yet. He would still
be wondering, waiting, hoping, down there in that deep, dark silence of
his, in his own dark personal world. He didn’t know he was blind; no
one would have told him. I felt his pulse. It was strong and steady.
He was a long, thin man, but his body was not very cold and the pale
lower half of his clear-cut face was not very pale. There was something
beautiful about him. In his case there was no hurry, no necessity to
rush him through to the operating room. There was plenty of time. He
would always be blind.
One of the orderlies was going up and down with hot tea in a bucket. I
beckoned to him.
I said to the blind one: “Here is a drink.” He didn’t hear me, so I
said it more loudly against the bandage, and helped him lift his head,
and held the tin cup to his mouth below the thick edge of the bandage.
I did not think then of what was hidden under the bandage. I think of
it now. Another head case across the hut had thrown off his blanket and
risen from his stretcher. He was standing stark naked except for his
head bandage, in the middle of the hut, and was haranguing the crowd in
a loud voice with the gestures of a political orator. But the crowd,
lying on the floor, paid no attention to him. They did not notice him.
I called to Gustave and Pierre to go to him.
The blind man said to me: “Thank you, sister, you are very kind. That
is good. I thank you.” He had a beautiful voice. I noticed the great
courtesy of his speech. But they were all courteous. Their courtesy
when they died, their reluctance to cause me any trouble by dying or
suffering, was one of the things it didn’t do to think about.
Then I left him, and presently forgot that he was there waiting in the
second row of stretchers on the left side of the long crowded floor.
Gustave and Pierre had got the naked orator back on to his stretcher
and were wrapping him up again in his blankets. I let them deal with
him and went back to my kitchen at the other end of the hut, where
my syringes and hypodermic needles were boiling in saucepans. I had
received by post that same morning a dozen beautiful new platinum
needles. I was very pleased with them. I said to one of the dressers
as I fixed a needle on my syringe and held it up, squirting the liquid
through it; “Look. I’ve some lovely new needles.” He said: “Come and
help me a moment. Just cut this bandage, please.” I went over to his
dressing-table. He darted off to a voice that was shrieking somewhere.
There was a man stretched on the table. His brain came off in my hands
when I lifted the bandage from his head.
When the dresser came back I said: “His brain came off on the bandage.”
“Where have you put it?”
“I put it in the pail under the table.”
“It’s only one half of his brain,” he said, looking into the man’s
skull. “The rest is here.”
I left him to finish the dressing and went about my own business. I had
much to do.
It was my business to sort out the wounded as they were brought in
from the ambulances and to keep them from dying before they got to the
operating rooms: it was my business to sort out the nearly dying from
the dying. I was there to sort them out and tell how fast life was
ebbing in them. Life was leaking away from all of them; but with some
there was no hurry, with others it was a case of minutes. It was my
business to create a counter-wave of life, to create the flow against
the ebb. It was like a tug of war with the tide. The ebb of life was
cold. When life was ebbing the man was cold; when it began to flow
back, he grew warm. It was all, you see, like a dream. The dying men
on the floor were drowned men cast up on the beach, and there was the
ebb of life pouring away over them, sucking them away, an invisible
tide; and my old orderlies, like old sea-salts out of a lifeboat, were
working to save them. I had to watch, to see if they were slipping,
being dragged away. If a man were slipping quickly, being sucked
down rapidly, I sent runners to the operating rooms. There were six
operating rooms on either side of my hut. Medical students in white
coats hurried back and forth along the covered corridors between us. It
was my business to know which of the wounded could wait and which could
not. I had to decide for myself. There was no one to tell me. If I made
any mistakes, some would die on their stretchers on the floor under my
eyes who need not have died. I didn’t worry. I didn’t think. I was too
busy, too absorbed in what I was doing. I had to judge from what was
written on their tickets and from the way they looked and the way they
felt to my hand. My hand could tell of itself one kind of cold from
another. They were all half-frozen when they arrived, but the chill
of their icy flesh wasn’t the same as the cold inside them when life
was almost ebbed away. My hands could instantly tell the difference
between the cold of the harsh bitter night and the stealthy cold of
death. Then there was another thing, a small fluttering thing. I didn’t
think about it or count it. My fingers felt it. I was in a dream, led
this way and that by my cute eyes and hands that did many things, and
seemed to know what to do.
Sometimes there was no time to read the ticket or touch the pulse. The
door kept opening and shutting to let in the stretcher-bearers whatever
I was doing. I could not watch when I was giving piqures; but, standing
by my table filling a syringe, I could look down over the rough forms
that covered the floor and pick out at a distance this one and that
one. I had been doing this for two years, and had learned to read the
signs. I could tell from the way they twitched, from the peculiar shade
of a pallid face, from the look of tight pinched-in nostrils, and in
other ways which I could not have explained, that this or that one was
slipping over the edge of the beach of life. Then I would go quickly
with my long saline needles, or short thick camphor oil needles, and
send one of the old ones hurrying along the corridor to the operating
rooms. But sometimes there was no need to hurry; sometimes I was too
late; with some there was no longer any question of the ebb and flow of
life and death; there was nothing to do.
The hospital throbbed and hummed that night like a dynamo. The
operating rooms were ablaze; twelve surgical équipes were at work;
boilers steamed and whistled; nurses hurried in and out of the
sterilizing rooms carrying big shining metal boxes and enamelled trays;
feet were running, slower feet shuffling. The hospital was going full
steam ahead. I had a sense of great power, exhilaration and excitement.
A loud wind was howling. It was throwing itself like a pack of wolves
against the flimsy wooden walls, and the guns were growling. Their
voices were dying away. I thought of them as a pack of beaten dogs,
slinking away across the dark waste where the dead were lying and the
wounded who had not yet been picked up, their only cover the windy
blanket of the bitter November night.
And I was happy. It seemed to me that the crazy crowded bright
hot shelter was a beautiful place. I thought, “This is the second
battlefield. The battle now is going on over the helpless bodies of
these men. It is we who are doing the fighting now, with their real
enemies.” And I thought of the chief surgeon, the wizard working like
lightning through the night, and all the others wielding their flashing
knives against the invisible enemy. The wounded had begun to arrive at
noon. It was now past midnight, and the door kept opening and shutting
to let in the stretcher-bearers, and the ambulances kept lurching in
at the gate. Lanterns were moving through the windy dark from shed to
shed. The nurses were out there in the scattered huts, putting the men
to bed when they came over the dark ground, asleep, from the operating
rooms. They would wake up in clean warm beds--those who did wake up.
“We will send you the dying, the desperate, the moribund,” the
Inspector-General had said. “You must expect a thirty per cent.
mortality.” So we had got ready for it; we had organised to dispute
that figure.
We had built brick ovens, four of them, down the centre of the hut,
and on top of these, galvanised iron cauldrons of boiling water were
steaming. We had driven nails all the way down the wooden posts that
held up the roof and festooned the posts with red rubber hot-water
bottles. In the corner near to my kitchen we had partitioned off a
cubicle, where we built a light bed, a rough wooden frame lined with
electric light bulbs, where a man could be cooked back to life again.
My own kitchen was an arrangement of shelves for saucepans and syringes
and needles of different sizes, and cardboard boxes full of ampoules
of camphor oil and strychnine and caffeine and morphine, and large
ampoules of sterilized salt and water, and dozens of beautiful sharp
shining needles were always on the boil.
It wasn’t much to look at, this reception hut. It was about as
attractive as a goods yard in a railway station, but we were very proud
of it, my old ones and I. We had got it ready, and it was good enough
for us. We could revive the cold dead there; snatch back the men who
were slipping over the edge; hoist them out of the dark abyss into
life again. And because our mortality at the end of three months was
only nineteen per cent, not thirty, well it was the most beautiful
place in the world to me and my old grizzled Pépères, Gaston and Pierre
and Leroux and the others were to me like shining archangels. But I
didn’t think about this. I think of it now. I only knew it then, and
was happy. Yes, I was happy there.
Looking back, I do not understand that woman--myself--standing in that
confused goods yard filled with bundles of broken human flesh. The
place by one o’clock in the morning was a shambles. The air was thick
with steaming sweat, with the effluvia of mud, dirt, blood. The men lay
in their stiff uniforms that were caked with mud and dried blood, their
great boots on their feet; stained bandages showing where a trouser
leg or a sleeve had been cut away. Their faces gleamed faintly, with
a faint phosphorescence. Some who could not breathe lying down were
propped up on their stretchers against the wall, but most were prone on
their backs, staring at the steep iron roof.
The old orderlies moved from one stretcher to another, carefully,
among the piles of clothing, boots and blood-soaked bandages--careful
not to step on a hand or a sprawling twisted foot. They carried zinc
pails of hot water and slabs of yellow soap and scrubbing brushes.
They gathered up the heaps of clothing, and made little bundles of the
small things out of pockets, or knelt humbly, washing the big yellow
stinking feet that protruded from under the brown blankets. It was the
business of these old ones to undress the wounded, wash them, wrap them
in blankets, and put hot-water bottles at their feet and sides. It was
a difficult business peeling the stiff uniform from a man whose hip
or shoulder was fractured, but the old ones were careful. Their big
peasant hands were gentle--very, very gentle and careful. They handled
the wounded men as if they were children. Now, looking back, I see
their rough powerful visages, their shaggy eye-brows, their big clumsy,
gentle hands. I see them go down on their stiff knees; I hear their
shuffling feet and their soft gruff voices answering the voices of the
wounded, who are calling to them for drinks, or to God for mercy.
The old ones had orders from the commandant not to cut the good cloth
of the uniforms if they could help it, but they had orders from me not
to hurt the men, and they obeyed me. They slit up the heavy trousers
and slashed across the stiff tunics with long scissors, and pulled very
slowly, very carefully at the heavy boots, and the wounded men did not
groan or cry out very much. They were mostly very quiet. When they did
cry out they usually apologised for the annoyance of their agony. Only
now and then a wind of pain would sweep over the floor, tossing the
legs and arms, then subside again.
I think that woman, myself, must have been in a trance, or under some
horrid spell. Her feet are lumps of fire, her face is clammy, her
apron is splashed with blood; but she moves ceaselessly about with
bright burning eyes and handles the dreadful wreckage of men as if in
a dream. She does not seem to notice the wounds or the blood. Her eyes
seem to be watching something that comes and goes and darts in and
out among the prone bodies. Her eyes and her hands and her ears are
alert, intent on the unseen thing that scurries and hides and jumps
out of the corner on to the face of a man when she’s not looking. But
quick, something makes her turn. Quick, she is over there, on her knees
fighting the thing off, driving it away, and now it’s got another
victim. It’s like a dreadful game of hide and seek among the wounded.
All her faculties are intent on it. The other things that are going on,
she deals with automatically.
There is a constant coming and going. Medical students run in and out.
“What have you got ready?”
“I’ve got three knees, two spines, five abdomens, twelve heads. Here’s
a lung case--hæmorrhage. He can’t wait.” She is binding the man’s
chest; she doesn’t look up.
“Send him along.”
“Pierre! Gaston! Call the stretcher-bearers to take the lung to
Monsieur D----.” She fastens the tight bandage, tucks the blanket
quickly round the thin shoulders. The old men lift him. She hurries
back to her saucepans to get a new needle.
A surgeon appears.
“Where’s that knee of mine? I left it in the saucepan on the window
ledge. I had boiled it up for an experiment.”
“One of the orderlies must have taken it,” she says, putting her old
needle on to boil.
“Good God! Did he mistake it?”
“Jean, did you take a saucepan you found on the windowsill?”
“Yes, sister, I took it. I thought it was for the casse crôute; it
looked like a ragout of mouton. I have it here.”
“Well, it was lucky he didn’t eat it. It was a knee I had cut out, you
know.”
It is time for the old ones “casse crôute.” It is after one o’clock.
At one o’clock the orderlies have cups of coffee and chunks of bread
and meat. They eat their supper gathered round the stoves where the
iron cauldrons are boiling. The surgeons and the sisters attached to
the operating rooms are drinking coffee too in the sterilizing rooms.
I do not want any supper. I am not hungry. I am not tired. I am busy.
My eyes are busy and my fingers. I am conscious of nothing about myself
but my eyes, hands and feet. My feet are a nuisance, they are swollen,
hurting lumps, but my fingers are perfectly satisfactory. They are
expert in the handling of frail glass ampoules and syringes and
needles. I go from one man to another jabbing the sharp needles into
their sides, rubbing their skins with iodine, and each time I pick my
way back across their bodies to fetch a fresh needle I scan the surface
of the floor where the men are spread like a carpet, for signs, for my
special secret signals of death.
“Aha! I’ll catch you out again.” Quick, to that one. That jerking!
That sudden livid hue spreading over his form. “Quick, Emile! Pierre!”
I have lifted the blanket. The blood is pouring out on the floor
under the stretcher. “Get the tourniquet. Hold his leg up. Now then,
tight--tighter. Now call the stretcher bearers.”
Someone near is having a fit. Is it epilepsy? I don’t know. His mouth
is frothy. His eyes are rolling. He tries to fling himself on the
floor. He falls with a thud across his neighbour, who does not notice.
The man just beyond propped up against the wall, watches as if from a
great distance. He has a gentle patient face; this spectacle does not
concern him.
The door keeps opening and shutting to let in the stretcher-bearers.
The wounded are carried in at the end door and are carried out to the
operating rooms at either side. The sergeant is counting the treasures
out of a dead man’s pockets. He is tying his little things, his
letters and briquet, etc., up in a handkerchief. Some of the old ones
are munching their bread and meat in the centre of the hut under the
electric light. The others are busy with their pails and scissors. They
shuffle about, kneeling, scrubbing, filling hotwater bottles. I see it
all through a mist. It is misty but eternal. It is a scene in eternity,
in some strange dream-hell where I am glad to be employed, where I
belong, where I am happy. How crowded together we are here. How close
we are in this nightmare. The wounded are packed into this place like
sardines, and we are so close to them, my old ones and I. I’ve never
been so close before to human beings. We are locked together, the old
ones and I, and the wounded men; we are bound together. We all feel it.
We all know it. The same thing is throbbing in us, the single thing,
the one life. We are one body, suffering and bleeding. It is a kind of
bliss to me to feel this. I am a little delirious, but my head is cool
enough, it seems to me.
“No, not that one. He can wait. Take the next one to Monsieur D----,
and this one to Monsieur Guy, and this one to Monsieur Robert. We will
put this one on the electric light bed; he has no pulse. More hot-water
bottles here, Gaston.
“Do you feel cold, mon vieux?”
“Yes, I think so, but pray do not trouble.”
I go with him into the little cubicle, turn on the light bulbs, leave
him to cook there; and as I come out again to face the strange heaving
dream, I suddenly hear a voice calling me, a new far-away hollow voice.
“Sister! My sister! Where are you?”
I am startled. It sounds so far away, so hollow and so sweet. It sounds
like a bell high up in the mountains. I do not know where it comes
from. I look down over the rows of men lying on their backs, one close
to the other, packed together on the floor, and I cannot tell where the
voice comes from. Then I hear it again.
“Sister! Oh, my sister, where are you?”
A lost voice. The voice of a lost man, wandering in the mountains, in
the night. It is the blind man calling. I had forgotten him. I had
forgotten that he was there. He could wait. The others could not wait.
So I had left him and forgotten him.
Something in his voice made me run, made my heart miss a beat. I ran
down the centre alley way, round and up again, between the two rows,
quickly, carefully stepping across to him over the stretchers that
separated us. He was in the second row. I could just squeeze through to
him.
“I am coming,” I called to him. “I am coming.”
I knelt beside him. “I am here,” I said; but he lay quite still on his
back; he didn’t move at all; he hadn’t heard me. So I took his hand
and put my mouth close to his bandaged head and called to him with
desperate entreaty.
“I am here. What is it? What is the matter?”
He didn’t move even then, but he gave a long shuddering sigh of relief.
“I thought I had been abandoned here, all alone,” he said softly in his
far-away voice.
I seemed to awake then. I looked round me and began to tremble, as
one would tremble if one awoke with one’s head over the edge of a
precipice. I saw the wounded packed round us, hemming us in. I saw his
comrades, thick round him, and the old ones shuffling about, working
and munching their hunks of bread, and the door opening to let in the
stretcher bearers. The light poured down on the rows of faces. They
gleamed faintly. Four hundred faces were staring up at the roof, side
by side. The blind man didn’t know. He thought he was alone, out in the
dark. That was the precipice, that reality.
“You are not alone,” I lied. “There are many of your comrades here, and
I am here, and there are doctors and nurses. You are with friends here,
not alone.”
“I thought,” he murmured in that far-away voice, “that you had gone
away and forgotten me, and that I was abandoned here alone.”
My body rattled and jerked like a machine out of order. I was awake
now, and I seemed to be breaking to pieces.
“No,” I managed to lie again. “I had not forgotten you, nor left you
alone.” And I looked down again at the visible half of his face and saw
that his lips were smiling.
At that I fled from him. I ran down the long, dreadful hut and hid
behind my screen and cowered, sobbing, in a corner, hiding my face.
The old ones were very troubled. They didn’t know what to do. Presently
I heard them whispering:
“She is tired,” one said.
“Yes, she is tired.”
“She should go off to bed,” another said.
“We will manage somehow without her,” they said.
Then one of them timidly stuck a grizzled head round the corner of the
screen. He held his tin cup in his hands. It was full of hot coffee. He
held it out, offering it to me. He didn’t know of anything else that he
could do for me.
THE PRIEST AND THE RABBI
The General came one morning after the big attack, to visit the
hospital. He went through all the huts, stopping beside each bed to
speak to the wounded, and he decorated every man who had lost a leg
or an arm with the Medaille Militaire. It was a short ceremony. The
General stood at the foot of the bed and recited quickly the military
formula citing the man for bravery in the field, and he raised his
sword and saluted the wounded man; then he pinned the medal on his
nightshirt, and, leaning over him, kissed him on both cheeks. When he
rose and moved on down the ward, “the amputé” found an envelope on his
coverlet with a hundred francs in it. The General, so they said, gave
all his pay to the men in this way.
He admired the white coverlets with their gay patterns of pink or red
flowers. He had a stony face and his eyes were like bits of blue
steel; but he congratulated us on the gay appearance of our huts. He
said, looking out of the door at the bare ground, the ugly sheds,
and the artillery rattling down the road past the flimsy gate of the
hospital, that to awake after a battle in a clean bed, dressed in a
pink nightshirt and with a white coverlet with pink roses on it spread
over your feet, must be like waking in Paradise.
I said, following him from bed to bed, that the coverlets came from
Selfridges and cost two shillings apiece, and I thought they were worth
it. They even, I said, made the difference sometimes between a man’s
slipping away or back into the world when he awoke.
The General did not have very much time. All the beds were full. He
couldn’t stop to talk to each man for more than half a minute, but
when he came to No. 11 in Mademoiselle de M----’s ward and saw the
ugly, scarred, black, burnt-up face grinning on the pillow and the eyes
twinkling so astonishingly under the singed eyebrows, he seemed very
taken aback.
“What’s the matter with his face?” he asked me in a low tone. “It’s a
cinder! Why is he so jolly?”
“The shell burst so near that he was burnt. All his skin is burnt
black, you see. Both arms are broken, and both legs. He is wounded all
over his body. God knows why he is so jolly.”
There was very little to be seen of the man but his merry, burnt,
scarred face. The cradle over his broken legs hid him from view till
you got round it close to his pillow. His arms were in splints, and
were supported by pulleys attached to a scaffolding over his bed.
He couldn’t move any part of himself but his head. He grinned up at
us and began to talk in his rough patois that was very difficult to
understand. He was a great talker, was No. 11. He must have been the
wag of his village. He came from somewhere near Nantes. He had a very
strong accent and a rough rollicking comical voice that bubbled out of
him in a stream in answer to the General’s enquiry as to how he felt.
The General listened, fascinated and puzzled. “What does he say?” he
asked me.
“He says he feels fine, except for his legs and arms. He says he’s in
fine shape. He says if he hadn’t had to wait on the battlefield for
four days and nights his wounds would be nothing. He was lost, he said,
in No Man’s Land, and had to crawl along on his stomach, and it was a
slow business because his legs and arms were broken. He hitched himself
along somehow on his stomach, but it was a slow way of travelling. He
says he had to lie quiet in the daytime, and could only crawl along at
night, and he didn’t know which way to make for. He said the men were
lying out there as thick as flies, but the stretcher-bearers didn’t
come his way, so he is lucky to be here. He says he’s always lucky,
always has been.”
The bright laughing eyes in the burnt-up face watched me while I
explained. When I paused he began to talk again.
“What’s he saying now?” asked the General. “He seems to think it is all
a good joke.”
“He says when he woke up here and saw the pink roses on his bedspread
he thought he was in Heaven, and then he felt a great hunger, and knew
he was alive, and that his luck was good; a miracle had happened. He
says the priest at home told him about miracles, and he always poked
fun at him.”
The General was evidently intrigued, but he hadn’t much time. “Four
days and four nights out there! I congratulate you, mon vieux.” He
turned reluctantly to go.
“One minute, mon General, one minute. I saw something, a little thing.
I would like to tell you what I saw out there on the battlefield.”
The General turned, came back again past the mountain of bedclothes
and looked down with his steel-blue eyes into the ugly blackened face.
“Tell me,” he said, “what did you see?” The General might possibly have
looked in that way at a beautiful woman whom he loved very tenderly in
the secret depths of his stone heart. His eyes were fixed intently,
questioningly, wistfully, on the ugly visage with its incredible
jollity. “What was it you saw, mon vieux, quick--tell me.”
“It was like this. There were men dying out there and there were
priests on their knees going from one to the other. It was early
morning, just after sunrise, and the Boche were shelling again.
Every now and then a shell would fall and a shower of shrapnel, and
pht--some poor devil would stop groaning. I wasn’t dying, you see,
so I didn’t call to the priests. I’d been crawling along in the dark
during the night, but now in the light I lay still, pretending I was
dead, because of the sniping. There was a man dying a little way off,
and a priest was kneeling, holding up a crucifix in front of him, and
a little further off there was another man dying, who was a Jew, and
the Rabbi of his regiment was kneeling beside him; and just then, when
I watched, I saw the priest fall forward on the ground, on his face,
with the crucifix in his hands. The Rabbi saw it, too. His man was just
dead, and he saw that the priest had been hit in the back. He looked
over his shoulder, you see, when the shell exploded. Then he crawled
over on his hands and knees to where the priest was lying and took the
crucifix out of his hands and knelt just where the priest had been
kneeling, and held up the crucifix in front of the eyes of the man, the
good Catholic who was dying; and he didn’t know the difference, you
see; and so he died, not noticing the priest was dead and the Rabbi
was in his place--only seeing the crucifix.”
There was a silence. The General drew himself up and turned away,
staring out of the window. Two stretcher-bearers were passing, carrying
a tightly rolled bundle to the morgue. I did not try to see the
General’s face. The man in the bed was smiling.
“Lucky for him, wasn’t it?” he said to me. “I’ll tell the priest in my
village when I get home, and I’ll tell him about the coverlet with the
pink roses. Maybe the wife could get one like it.”
“They come from Selfridges,” I said. “They cost five francs. I’ll send
you one when the war is over.”
THE TWO GUNNERS
They were very big men. They must have stood six feet three or four in
their socks, but, of course, I never saw them standing up. I only saw
them horizontal, carried in on stretchers, flat on their backs. One of
them I saw next morning in his bed, the other one I only saw on his
stretcher in the receiving hut. He was carried away, was never put into
a bed. I knew I would never see him again. His pal knew it, too.
It was a mistake their coming to us. The English were co-operating
with the French in the attack, and these two had been picked up in the
confusion by a French ambulance. I remember how surprised I was when I
saw the khaki uniforms. It was the same night that the blind man came
in, or, to be exact, it was toward morning of the same day.
The hut was still crowded with wounded. The door still kept opening
and shutting to let in the stretcher-bearers. We seemed to be making
no headway. The men came in as fast as we could despatch them to the
operating rooms. Would there never be an end to it? Would the sound
of the ambulances lurching in at the gate never stop? What, I asked
myself, was the toll of this last failure to break the German line?
How many men had passed through my hands during the last thirty-six
hours? I did not know. I had not tried to count them. They were carried
in and carried out, and they were always there--the same ones, it
seemed to me--suffering the same pain, with the same wounds gaping,
the same blood pouring out of them. Cold--they were all so cold--half
frozen--and we warmed them, thawed them back to life; and yet there
they were, still so cold, still wrapped in cold death; and the dying
were still dying, and they were all so courteous about it. They all
spoke with such courteous voices, using such beautiful phrases, as
if they were in my drawing-room. They apologised gravely in their
exhaustion for the dirt, the blood, the ugly wounds.
“Do not trouble, sister. Do not give yourself so much trouble, I beg of
you.”
“I am sorry, Madame, my bandage is leaking. I would not trouble you,
but I think I am bleeding.”
“I beg your pardon. No, it is not too bad; no, not unbearable. I
didn’t mean to do that. A thousand pardons. It is nothing. Yes, I am
comfortable now--quite comfortable. Do not trouble yourself in the
least, Madame.”
Most of them were peasants. The French, I realised, were a nation of
peasants. But how was it that, even in their agony, they spoke so
beautifully, had such perfect manners, chose such pleasant words;
and even when they lay there waiting hour after hour, getting weaker
and weaker, that their small thin dying voices, scarcely more than
whispers, still kept that note of elegance?
“Yes, I am a little tired, Madame, but it is of no consequence, I
assure you.”
“That I should die while I wait here is a mere trifle that you must not
allow to disturb you,” was what they seemed to be saying to me.
I was so accustomed to this elegance of mind among my poilus that I
no longer noticed it. I took it for granted. I did not think about it
until the two British Gunners came in. Then suddenly I realised that
there are two types of courage, the British and the French, as there
are two types of men.
The Gunners were pals. They lay side by side staring at the roof. If
they were pleasantly surprised to find an English nurse in this barn of
a place, they gave no sign of it. Even the red-faced one, who sat up
leaning on his elbow when I approached, took me for granted. The other
one lay motionless; his face was grey and damp. Neither of them spoke
while I looked at their tickets. The red-faced giant was wounded in the
leg, otherwise there was nothing wrong with him; the other was wounded
in the abdomen; it was clear that there was no hope for him. I would
send him through at once to Rouviere. He would save him if he could be
saved, but I knew it was useless. I knelt beside him, looking at his
ticket. His name was written on it, and the name of his regiment. I do
not remember his name, but he came from somewhere in Lancashire. I was
wondering whether I should ask him his address and offer to write to
his family. Something in my attitude as I knelt there seemed to strike
him. He turned his head ever so slightly toward me, and asked, “Is it
serious, sister?”
“Yes,” I answered, “it is serious. You are wounded in the stomach. That
is always very serious.”
For a moment he stared into my eyes, then he turned his head away
again, shutting me out. I was dismissed, he had nothing to say to me.
I rose to my feet and looked from one to the other. But just as I was
moving away, the dying one turned his head again and looked across at
his pal. There was a dumb interchange of some sort between them, then
the red giant spoke.
“Stick it,” he said. That was all he said. They didn’t talk any more;
they had nothing more to say to each other. A few minutes later the
stretcher-bearers carried the Gunner, who was wounded in the abdomen,
away to the operating room. He died under the anæsthetic. His pal
didn’t see him again. I don’t know where they took him or where he was
buried or where his home was. The other Gunner didn’t tell me. He
didn’t ask me anything about his friend.
I found him the next day in one of the wards sitting up in bed eating
his dinner. He didn’t say anything when he saw me. He looked very fit
and very big, and he seemed to have a good appetite. There was no
expression of any kind on his face.
I said, “Good morning. How are you?”
He answered something. I couldn’t understand what he said, so I asked
him again, saying, “I didn’t quite catch what you said.”
“A1 at Lloyd’s, Madam,” he repeated. That was what he had said.
They were the only two wounded Tommies that passed through my hands
during the four years of the war, and that was all that they said to
me. I don’t know any more about them. The big red one was taken to the
British evacuating station that afternoon in an ambulance. There was
nothing much the matter with him. He didn’t say good-bye. I didn’t see
him when he left. I remember the only two phrases I heard him utter,
one to his pal and one to me:
“Stick it.”
“A1 at Lloyd’s, Madam.”
POEMS
THE HILL
From the top of the hill I looked down on the beautiful, the
gorgeous, the superhuman and monstrous landscape of the superb
exulting war.
There were no trees anywhere, nor any grasses or green thickets, nor
any birds singing, nor any whisper or flutter of any little busy
creatures.
There was no shelter for field mice or rabbits, squirrels or men.
The earth was naked and on its naked body crawled things of iron.
It was evening. The long valley was bathed in blue shadow and through
the shadow, as if swimming, I saw the iron armies moving.
And iron rivers poured through the wilderness that was peopled with a
phantom iron host.
Lights gleamed down there, a thousand machine eyes winked.
The sun was setting, gilding the smooth crests of the surging hills.
The red tents clustering on their naked yellow sides were like
scarlet flowers burning in a shining desert of hills.
Against the sunset, along the sharp edge of a hill, a strange
regiment was moving in single file, a regiment of monsters.
They moved slowly along on their stomachs,
Dragging themselves forward by their ears.
Their great encircling ears moved round and round like wheels.
They were big and very heavy and heavily armoured.
Obscene crabs, armoured toads, big as houses,
They moved slowly forward, crushing under their bellies whatever
stood in their way.
A flock of aeroplanes was flying home, a flight of wild ducks with
iron wings.
They passed over the monstrous regiment with a roar and disappeared.
I looked down, searching for a familiar thing, a leaf, a tuft of
grass, a caterpillar; but the ground dropped away in darkness before
my feet, that were planted on a heap of stones.
A path, the old deserted way of cattle, showed below beyond the
gaping caverns of abandoned dug-outs, where men had once lived
underground. And along the path a German prisoner was stumbling,
driven by a black man on a horse.
The black man wore a turban, and he drove the prisoner before him as
one drives an animal to market.
These three--the prisoner, the black man and the horse--seemed to
have wandered into the landscape by mistake. They were the only
creatures of their kind anywhere.
Where had they come from and where were they going in that wilderness
of iron with night falling?
The German stumbled on heavily beneath the nose of his captor’s
horse. I could see the pallid disc of his face thrust forward, and
the exhausted lurching of his clumsy body.
He did not look to the right or left, but watching him I saw him trip
over a battered iron helmet and an old boot that lay in his way.
Two wooden crosses showed just ahead of him, sticking out of the
rough ground.
The three passed in silence.
They passed like ghosts into the deepening shadow of the valley,
where the panorama of invisible phantom armies moved, as if swimming.
And as I watched I heard the faint music of bagpipes, and thought
that I heard the sound of invisible men marching.
The crests of the naked hills were still touched with gold.
Above the winking eyes of the prodigious war the fragile crescent of
the moon floated serene in the perfect sky.
THE SONG OF THE MUD
This is the song of the mud,
The pale yellow glistening mud that covers the hills like satin;
The grey gleaming silvery mud that is spread like enamel over the
valleys;
The frothing, squirting, spurting, liquid mud that gurgles along the
road beds;
The thick elastic mud that is kneaded and pounded and squeezed under
the hoofs of the horses;
The invincible, inexhaustible mud of the war zone.
* * * * *
This is the song of the mud, the uniform of the poilu.
His coat is of mud, his great dragging flapping coat, that is too big
for him and too heavy;
His coat that once was blue and now is grey and stiff with the mud
that cakes to it.
This is the mud that clothes him.
His trousers and boots are of mud,
And his skin is of mud;
And there is mud in his beard.
His head is crowned with a helmet of mud.
He wears it well.
He wears it as a king wears the ermine that bores him.
He has set a new style in clothing;
He has introduced the chic of mud.
* * * * *
This is the song of the mud that wriggles its way into battle.
The impertinent, the intrusive, the ubiquitous, the unwelcome,
The slimy inveterate nuisance,
That fills the trenches,
That mixes in with the food of the soldiers,
That spoils the working of motors and crawls into their secret parts,
That spreads itself over the guns,
That sucks the guns down and holds them fast in its slimy voluminous
lips,
That has no respect for destruction and muzzles the bursting shells;
And slowly, softly, easily,
Soaks up the fire, the noise; soaks up the energy and the courage;
Soaks up the power of armies;
Soaks up the battle.
Just soaks it up and thus stops it.
* * * * *
This is the hymn of mud--the obscene, the filthy, the putrid,
The vast liquid grave of our armies.
It has drowned our men.
Its monstrous distended belly reeks with the undigested dead.
Our men have gone into it, sinking slowly, and struggling and slowly
disappearing.
Our fine men, our brave, strong, young men;
Our glowing red, shouting, brawny men.
Slowly, inch by inch, they have gone down into it,
Into its darkness, its thickness, its silence.
Slowly, irresistibly, it drew them down, sucked them down,
And they were drowned in thick, bitter, heaving mud.
Now it hides them, Oh, so many of them!
Under its smooth glistening surface it is hiding them blandly.
There is not a trace of them.
There is no mark where they went down.
The mute enormous mouth of the mud has closed over them.
* * * * *
This is the song of the mud,
The beautiful glistening golden mud that covers the hills like satin;
The mysterious gleaming silvery mud that is spread like enamel over
the valleys.
Mud, the disguise of the war zone;
Mud, the mantle of battles;
Mud, the smooth fluid grave of our soldiers:
This is the song of the mud.
WHERE IS JEHOVAH?
Where is Jehovah the God of Israel with his ark and his tabernacle
and his pillar of fire?
Here is a people pouring through a wilderness;
Here are armies camping in a desert;
Their little tents are like sheep flocking over the prairie,
Through a storm of iron, rain and thunder and wind of iron.
And pillars of cloud and pillars of fire stand all about the quaking
earth;
And a sacrifice is prepared.
Send for Moses, send messengers to Daniel, Elijah, Joshua, Gideon--to
someone who knows where Jehovah is hiding.
Tell them He’s wanted--the Great God, the Jealous God, the God of
Wrath who drowned the sinful world of men and sent the seven plagues
on Egypt, and led His people out of bondage to scatter them again
like dead leaves in a storm.
Let them look for Him on Sinai, or down by the bitter mouth of
Jordan, or in an empty sepulchre in Bethlehem. Tell the ten tribes
of Israel in their ten thousand scattered cities to go into the
synagogues and call Him.
He should know. He should be told. Let them hunt Him out and tell Him.
Picardy is shaking with a fever.
Picardy’s hills are wounded and broken.
Picardy’s fields are scarred as with smallpox.
What a chance for His prophets!
What a playground for miracles!
* * * * *
A land that was silent, suddenly roaring; wide plains screaming; the
slippery grey valleys sweating, heaving in agony.
And men on them; flocks and herds of men driven over them through
the iron storm--slipping, falling, clutching, fighting as they slip,
fall, clutch, are suffocated, sucked down, buried, tossed again,
thrown to the iron winds.
Herds of men, hosts of men, driven to the sacrifice, like sheep,
like dogs, like goats and bullocks;
Driven to slay other herds of sheep-men on the burning altars.
Whose altars?
Since no Lord of Hosts shows himself.
Since there’s no sign of God, no voice of God. No captain to command
the ghost battalions of the flying, panic-stricken souls.
* * * * *
What a chance for Jehovah.
He need scarce lift a finger.
Here are all his pet properties ready to hand:
The thunder, the lightning, the clouds and the fire.
This is His hour, but Jehovah has missed it.
This is not His thunder nor His lightning.
These are not His people.
These are the armies of France and of England.
The thunder is the thunder of their guns, and the lightning that runs
along the horizon is the flash of their guns.
Moses is dead, and Joshua who led his people into the promised
land is dead, and there are no more prophets to cry through the
wilderness to warn or to comfort these people.
They must look after themselves.
All the host of them, each one of them, quite alone each one of them,
every one of the hundred thousand of them, alone, must stand up to
meet the war.
With the sky cracking,
With creatures of wide metal wings tearing the sky over his head,
With the earth shaking,
With the solid earth under his feet giving way,
With the hills on fire and the valleys smoking, and the few bare
trees spitting bullets; and the long roads like liquid iron torrents,
rolling down on him with guns and iron food for guns--always guns
and more guns--with these long roads rolling down like cataracts, to
crush him and no way of escape,
With the few houses broken open--no sides, no covers to them, no
protection anywhere,
With all of the universe coming down on him, the cold dark storm of
death coming full on him,
With the men near him going mad, jibbering, sobbing, twisting,
With his comrade lying dead under his feet,
With the enemy beyond there--unseen, mysterious,
With eternity waiting, the great silence and emptiness waiting beyond
the noise of the cannon,
With the memory of his home haunting him and the face of a woman
expectant,
With the soft echoes of his children’s laughter sounding, and shells
bursting with roars to left and right of him, in front and behind
him, but not drowning those small voices:
He stands there, he keeps on standing; he stands solid, this sheep
man.
* * * * *
He is so small, so quiet in the iron storm.
Why does he stand there? What keeps him standing there?
Is he not a lost sheep? Why does he not turn, run, rush, scramble
back through the rain, wind and thunder of iron, bleating with terror?
Why does he wait to die, and die so quietly, so humbly, with hope
still looking back from his eyes?
Where is the Good Shepherd? And where is Jehovah?
Why does He hide, wait, avoid this thing?
If this is His world, if it is He that made it,
Let Him come and put an end to it.
Let Him not escape it.
Find Him. Bring Him down here. Hunt Him out in Heaven you flying
ghosts of the dead and bring Him.
Bring someone, some mighty God, Baal, Beelzebub, the Powers of
Darkness--anything, anyone--anyone who will put an end to this.
Or a Piteous God, Christ the Son, He who was crucified.
Oh, God, Piteous Son of God, where is God the Father?
You, the great God, the King of Kings and Lord of Hosts;
The One who drowned mercifully the children of men;
Let the waters cover the earth again. Let there be an end to it--an
end.
THE VIRGIN OF ALBERT
Oh, the poor Virgin!
She is throwing herself from Heaven;
She is plunging down from the high tower with the child in her hands.
Look, hold your breath, watch the awful gesture of her divine despair!
Her golden figure shoots head downwards through the air;
The red carcase of the Church gapes beneath her;
The ragged skeleton of the tower holds her up
High above the ruined town.
But she is plunging.
With her arms outstretched beyond her head, downward,
With the child in her terrible pointing hands,
She is diving down;
She will dash the child down, on to the stones of the desolate
abandoned street.
She has been betrayed.
God has betrayed her.
Oh, the pity!
Oh, the terrible, desperate creature!
She believed in God,
And her people worshipped her,
And because she was the Mother of Compassion,
She stood between them and the anger of God.
For she believed in the love of God.
Lifted up above the city,
Above the little dark homes of her helpless people,
She stood, holding up her child to God.
So for centuries she stood lifted up in her humility and love;
And because God had chosen her and given her a child,
Because she had borne a son to Him,
She believed he would be kind to her people.
* * * * *
One day destruction came like roaring dragons out of Heaven, and fell
upon the town.
Out of the soft mysterious distance invisible monsters came shrieking
past her head.
Flocks of them, unseen, with whistling wings, thick as vultures to a
carcase in a desert,
They swooped down and sprang upon the city.
And the city writhed in their clutches.
Houses staggered, the streets cracked open.
Meek, motionless, holding her child up to Heaven, the Virgin watched
from her tower.
She watched the houses vomit,
Watched them reel like drunkards--fall;
Watched the people running, pouring through the quaking streets with
their treasures piled on wagons;
Watched the wagons smothered, buried, with the horses, the beds and
bedding, the fowls and pretty birds in cages.
She could hear the women and the children screaming;
And the squealing of horses and groaning of cattle and squeaking of
pigs caught in burning stables, sheds, yards.
Helpless, high above them, prisoner in the thundering sky,
Bound to her shaking pedestal, with the church walls giving way
beneath her,
She stood holding her child up to God, while her people screamed to
her to save them.
Now the city is deserted.
The people are gone.
The roofless houses and the broken buildings grimace at the Virgin.
The houses of the people who once worshipped her are open filthy
places.
The church yawns horrid.
Where the altar was is a heap of dust.
The uncovered apse is choked with debris, and the wind and the rain
play new havoc there every day.
* * * * *
Oh, the poor desolate Virgin!
She has been abandoned;
She has been betrayed.
God has betrayed her.
She is throwing herself down from Heaven with the child in her
terrible pointing hands.
She is diving down;
But she is held.
In the very act of determined despair she is held.
Something holds her suspended in anguish.
Shooting head downwards, she hangs there.
The supreme moment of her unbearable agony is fixed there, forever,
against the sky.
Oh, the poor Virgin!
UNIDENTIFIED
Look well at this man. Look!
Come up out of your graves, philosophers,
And you who founded churches, and all you
Who for ten thousand years have talked of God.
Come out of your uncomfortable tombs, astronomers,
Who raked the heavens with your mighty eyes,
And died, unanswered questions on your lips,
For you have something interesting to learn
By looking at this man.
* * * * *
Stand all about, you many-legioned ghosts;
Fill up the desert with your shadowy forms,
And in the vast resounding waste of death,
Watch him while he dies;
He will not notice you.
* * * * *
Observe his ugliness.
See how he stands there planted in the mud like some old battered
image of a faith forgotten by its God.
Note his naked neck and jutting jaw under the iron hat that’s jammed
upon his head;
See how he rounds his shoulders, bends his back inside his clumsy
coat;
And how he leans ahead, gripping with grimy fists
The muzzle of his gun that digs it butt-end down into the mud between
the solid columns of his legs.
* * * * *
Look close, come close, pale ghosts!
Come back out of the dim unfinished past;
Crowd up across the edges of the earth,
Where the horizon, like a red hot wire, twists underneath tremendous
smoking blows.
Come up, come up across the quaking ground that gapes in sudden holes
beneath your feet;
Come fearlessly across the twisting field where bones of men stick
through the tortured mud.
Ghosts have no need to fear.
Look close at this man. Look!
He waits for death;
He watches it approach;
His little bloodshot eyes can see it bearing down on every side;
He feels it coming underneath his feet, running, burrowing underneath
the ground;
He hears it screaming in the frantic air.
Death that tears the shrieking sky in two,
That suddenly explodes out of the festering bowels of the earth--
Dreadful and horrid death.
He takes the impact of it on his back, his chest, his belly and his
arms;
Spreads his legs upon its lurching form;
Plants his feet upon its face and breathes deep into his pumping
lungs the gassy breath of death.
He does not move.
In all the running landscape there’s a solitary thing that’s
motionless:
The figure of this man.
* * * * *
The sky long since has fallen from its dome.
Terror let loose like a gigantic wind has torn it from the ceiling of
the world,
And it is flapping down in frantic shreds.
The earth ages ago leaped screaming up out of the fastness of its
ancient laws.
There is no centre now to hold it down.
It rolls and writhes, a shifting tortured thing, a floating mass of
matter set adrift.
And in between the fluttering tatters of the ruined sky,
And the convulsions of the maddened earth,
The man stands solid.
Something holds him there.
* * * * *
What holds him, timid ghosts?
What do you say, you shocked and shuddering ghosts,
Dragged from your sheltered vaults;
You who once died in quiet lamp-lit rooms;
Who were companioned to the end by friends;
And closed your eyes in languor on a world
That you had fashioned for your pleasant selves?
You scorned this man.
He was for you an ordinary man.
Some of you pitied him, prayed over his soul, worried him with
stories of Heaven and Hell.
Promised him Heaven if he would be ashamed of being what he was,
And everlasting sorrow if he died as he had lived, an ordinary man.
You gave him Gods he could not know, and images of God; laws he could
not keep, and punishment.
You were afraid of him.
Everything about him that was his very own
Made you afraid of him.
His love of women, food and drink, and fun,
His clumsy reach for life, his open grabbing fist,
His stupid open gaping heart and mouth.
He was a hungry man,
And you were afraid of him.
None of you trusted him;
No one of you was his friend.
* * * * *
Look at him now. Look well, look long
Your hungry brute, your ordinary man;
Your fornicator, drunkard, anarchist;
Your ruthless rough seed-sowing male;
Your angry greedy egotist;
Your lost, bewildered, childish dunce;
Come close and look into his haggard face.
It is too late to do him justice now, or even speak to him.
But look.
Look at the stillness of his face.
It’s made of little fragile bones and flesh, tissued of quivering
muscles fine as silk;
Exquisite nerves, soft membrane warm with blood,
That travels smoothly through the tender veins.
One blow, one minute more, and that man’s face will be a mass of
matter, horrid slime and little brittle splinters.
He knows.
He waits.
His face remains quite still.
And underneath the bullet-spattered helmet on his head
His steady eyes look out.
What is it that looks out?
What is deep mirrored in those bloodshot eyes?
Terror? No.
Despair? Perhaps.
What else?
Ah, poor ghosts--poor blind unseeing ghosts!
It is his self you see;
His self that does remember what he loved and what he wanted, and
what he never had;
His self that can regret, that can reproach its own self now; his
self that gave itself, let loose its hold of all but just itself.
Is that, then, nothing? Just his naked self, pinning down a shaking
world,
A single rivet driven down to hold a universe together.
* * * * *
Go back, poor ghosts. Go back into your graves.
He has no use for you, this nameless man.
Scholars, philosophers, men of God, leave this man alone.
No lamp you lit will show his soul the way;
No name restore his lost identity.
The guns will chant his death march down the world;
The flare of cannon light his dying;
The mute and nameless men beneath his feet will welcome him beside
them in the mud.
Take one last look and leave him standing there,
Unfriended, unrewarded, and unknown.
_Printed in England_
Transcriber’s Note:
Obvious errors in spelling, hyphenation and punctuation have been
silently corrected in this version, but minor inconsistencies and
archaic forms have been retained as printed.
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FORBIDDEN ZONE ***
Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will
be renamed.
Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright
law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,
so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United
States without permission and without paying copyright
royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part
of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG™
concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark,
and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following
the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use
of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for
copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very
easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation
of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project
Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away—you may
do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected
by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark
license, especially commercial redistribution.
START: FULL LICENSE
THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the free
distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
Project Gutenberg™ License available with this file or online at
www.gutenberg.org/license.
Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg™
electronic works
1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg™
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in your
possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
Project Gutenberg™ electronic work and you do not agree to be bound
by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person
or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only be
used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works if you follow the terms of this
agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg™
electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the
Foundation” or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection
of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works. Nearly all the individual
works in the collection are in the public domain in the United
States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the
United States and you are located in the United States, we do not
claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,
displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as
all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope
that you will support the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting
free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg™
works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the
Project Gutenberg™ name associated with the work. You can easily
comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the
same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg™ License when
you share it without charge with others.
1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are
in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States,
check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this
agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,
distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any
other Project Gutenberg™ work. The Foundation makes no
representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any
country other than the United States.
1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other
immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg™ License must appear
prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg™ work (any work
on which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or with which the
phrase “Project Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed,
performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you
are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws
of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is
derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the
copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in
the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply
either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or
obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg™
trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is posted
with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
will be linked to the Project Gutenberg™ License for all works
posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the
beginning of this work.
1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg™
License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg™.
1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
Gutenberg™ License.
1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including
any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access
to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg™ work in a format
other than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in the official
version posted on the official Project Gutenberg™ website
(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original “Plain
Vanilla ASCII” or other form. Any alternate format must include the
full Project Gutenberg™ License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg™ works
unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
access to or distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
provided that:
• You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
the use of Project Gutenberg™ works calculated using the method
you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed
to the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark, but he has
agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid
within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are
legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty
payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in
Section 4, “Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation.”
• You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg™
License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue
all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg™
works.
• You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of
any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
receipt of the work.
• You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
distribution of Project Gutenberg™ works.
1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project
Gutenberg™ electronic work or group of works on different terms than
are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing
from the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the manager of
the Project Gutenberg™ trademark. Contact the Foundation as set
forth in Section 3 below.
1.F.
1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project
Gutenberg™ collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg™
electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may
contain “Defects,” such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate
or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or
other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
cannot be read by your equipment.
1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the “Right
of Replacement or Refund” described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
Gutenberg™ trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
Gutenberg™ electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
DAMAGE.
1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium
with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you
with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in
lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person
or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If
the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing
without further opportunities to fix the problem.
1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you ‘AS-IS’, WITH NO
OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT
LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement
violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the
agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or
limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or
unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the
remaining provisions.
1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
providing copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in
accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the
production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg™
electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses,
including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of
the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this
or any Project Gutenberg™ work, (b) alteration, modification, or
additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg™ work, and (c) any
Defect you cause.
Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg™
Project Gutenberg™ is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It
exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations
from people in all walks of life.
Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg™’s
goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg™ collection will
remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
and permanent future for Project Gutenberg™ and future
generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see
Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at www.gutenberg.org.
Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-profit
501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
Revenue Service. The Foundation’s EIN or federal tax identification
number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by
U.S. federal laws and your state’s laws.
The Foundation’s business office is located at 809 North 1500 West,
Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up
to date contact information can be found at the Foundation’s website
and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation
Project Gutenberg™ depends upon and cannot survive without widespread
public support and donations to carry out its mission of
increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
freely distributed in machine-readable form accessible by the widest
array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
status with the IRS.
The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND
DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular state
visit www.gutenberg.org/donate.
While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
approach us with offers to donate.
International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current donation
methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To
donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate.
Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg™ electronic works
Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
Gutenberg™ concept of a library of electronic works that could be
freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
distributed Project Gutenberg™ eBooks with only a loose network of
volunteer support.
Project Gutenberg™ eBooks are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
edition.
Most people start at our website which has the main PG search
facility: www.gutenberg.org.
This website includes information about Project Gutenberg™,
including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
