Regeneration (20 page)

Next, Lansdowne, an RAMC captain, whose long-standing claustrophobia had been uncovered by his inability to enter dugouts. A particularly testing session. Lansdowne was always demanding, though Rivers didn’t mind that, since he felt he was making progress. Then Fothersgill, Sassoon’s new room-mate, a fanatical Theosophist. He spoke throughout in mock medieval English – lots of ‘Yea verilys’ and ‘forsooths’ – as if his brief exposure to French horrors had frightened him into a sort of terminal facetiousness. He was forty-three, but with his iron-grey hair, monocle and stiff manners he seemed far older. He didn’t take long. Basically, he was suffering from being too old for the war, a complaint with which Rivers had a little more sympathy every day.

Then a meeting of the Hospital Management Committee. Fletcher, one of the two patient representatives, was a highly efficient, conscientious man whose stay in France had ended when he’d developed paranoid delusions that the quartermaster was deliberately and systematically depriving the men of food. This delusion he had now transferred to the hospital steward. The meeting went well enough until the standard of hospital catering came under discussion, and then Fletcher’s delusions came to the fore. Tempers became heated, and the meeting closed on an acrimonious note. It was an unfortunate incident, since it would certainly fuel the administration’s view that patients should take no part in the running of the hospital. Bryce, supported by Rivers, believed that patient participation was essential, even if this meant that Craiglockhart committee meetings sometimes developed a flavour all of their own.

After lunch, Rivers went along to Bryce’s room to discuss Broadbent. Broadbent had been to see his sick mother twice in recent months. Towards the end of the second visit a telegram arrived from Broadbent, saying that his mother had passed on, and asking permission to stay for the funeral. Naturally, permission had been granted. In due course Broadbent came back,
wearing a black armband, and – rather less explicably – the red tabs of a staff officer. The red tabs disappeared overnight, but the black armband remained. For some days after that Broadbent sat around the patients’ common room, pink-eyed and sorrowful, being consoled by the VADs. This happy state of affairs came to a close when Mrs Broadbent arrived, demanding to know why she never heard from her son. Broadbent was now upstairs, in a locked room. It was not easy to see how a court-martial could be avoided.

The rest of the afternoon was spent on a succession of young men. Rivers, by now feeling quite ill, was carried through it only by his perception that some at least were showing signs of improvement. One young man in particular, who’d broken down after finding the mutilated body of his friend, had become dramatically better in the last few weeks.

After dinner, Rivers decided to abandon the paperwork he ought to have been doing and have an early night. No bath tonight, he decided, he was too tired. He got between the sheets and stretched out his legs, thinking he’d never been so glad to be in a bed in his life. After a while he pushed the window further open and lay listening to the rain, a soft hushing sound that seemed to fill the room. Soon, still listening, he drifted off to sleep.

He was woken at two am by a pain in his chest. At first he tried to convince himself it was indigestion, but the leaping and pounding of his heart soon suggested other, more worrying possibilities. He pulled himself up, and concentrated on breathing slowly and quietly.

The wind had risen while he was asleep, and rain pelted the glass. All over the hospital, he knew, men would be lying awake, listening to the rain and the wind, thinking of their battalions sinking deeper into the mud. Bad weather was bad for the nerves. Tomorrow would not be an easy day.

An hour later he would have given anything for tomorrow to arrive. He was getting all the familiar symptoms. Sweating, a constant need to urinate, breathlessness, the sense of blood not flowing but squeezing through veins. The slightest movement caused his heart to pound. He was relieved when dawn came and it was possible to summon the orderly.

Bryce arrived shortly afterwards, brisk and sympathetic. He produced a stethoscope, and told Rivers to take his pyjama jacket off. The stethoscope moved across his chest. He sat up, leant forward and felt the same procession of cold rings across his back. ‘What do
you
think’s wrong?’ Bryce asked, putting the stethoscope away.

‘War neurosis,’ Rivers said promptly. ‘I already stammer and I’m starting to twitch.’

Bryce waited for Rivers to settle back against the pillows. ‘I suppose we’ve all got one of those. Your heartbeat’s irregular.’

‘Psychosomatic.’

‘And, as we keep telling the patients, psychosomatic symptoms are REAL. I think you should take some leave.’

Rivers shook his head. ‘No, I —’

‘That wasn’t a suggestion.’

‘Oh. I’ve got the September reports to do. If I do nothing else, I’ve got to do those.’

Bryce had started to smile. ‘There’s never going to be a convenient time, is there? Three weeks starting this weekend.’

A mutinous silence.

‘That gives you time to do the reports, provided you don’t see patients. All right?’ Bryce patted the coverlet and stood up. ‘I’ll tell Miss Crowe to put a notice up.’

Rivers was going on leave. He hadn’t been down to dinner for the past few days, but he was there tonight, Sassoon saw, looking rather better than he’d done recently, though still very tired. The MO’s table was the noisiest in the room. Even at this distance you could distinguish Brock’s high, reedy voice, MacIntyre’s broad Glaswegian, Bryce’s Edinburgh, Ruggles’s American, and Rivers, who, when he got excited in a discussion, as he often did, sounded rather like a sodawater syphon going off. Nobody, listening to him now, would have thought him capable of those endless silences.

Fothersgill, his long nose twitching fastidiously, had started to complain about the soup. ‘Nay, verily,’ he said. ‘A man knoweth not what manner of thing he eateth.’ He laughed as he said it, the laugh of a man who takes small discomforts very seriously indeed. Sassoon, marooned between two particularly
bad stammerers, felt no need to take part in the conversation. Instead, he twisted round in his seat and looked for Owen, remembering the last poem he’d been shown. ‘
Out there, we’ve walked quite friendly up to Death;/Sat down and eaten with him, cool and bland —/Pardoned his spilling mess-tins in our band
…’ Precisely, Sassoon thought. And now we complain about the soup. Or rather,
they
do.

After dinner he went straight to Owen’s room. ‘Do you mind?’ he said. ‘I’m on the run from Theosophy.’

Owen was already clearing papers from the chair. ‘No, come in.’

‘I can’t stay in the same room with him.’

‘You should ask Rivers for a change.’

‘Too late. He goes tomorrow. Anyway, I wouldn’t want to bother him. Have you got anything for me?’

‘This.’

Sassoon took the sheet and read the whole poem through twice, then returned to the first two lines.

What minute-bells for these who die so fast?

– Only the monstrous/solemn anger of our guns.

‘I thought “passing” bells,’ Owen said.

‘Hm. Though if you lose “minute” you realize how weak “fast” is. “Only the monstrous anger…”’

‘“Solemn’?”

‘“Only the solemn anger of our guns.” Owen, for God’s sake, this is War Office propaganda.’

‘No, it’s not.’

‘Read that line.’

Owen read. ‘Well, it certainly isn’t meant to be.’

‘I suppose what you’ve got to decide is who are “these”? The British dead? Because if they’re
British
, then
our
guns is…’

Owen shook his head. ‘All the dead.’

‘Let’s start there.’ Sassoon crossed out “our” and pencilled in “the”. ‘You’re sure that’s what you want? It isn’t a minor change.’

‘No, I know. ‘If it’s “the”, it’s got to be “monstrous”.’

‘Agreed.’ Sassoon crossed out ‘solemn’. ‘So:

What passing-bells for these who die… so
fast
?

– Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

‘Well, there’s nothing wrong with the second line.’

‘“In herds”?’

‘Better.’

They worked on the poem for half an hour. The wind had been rising all evening, and the thin curtain billowed in the draught. At one point Sassoon looked up and said, ‘What’s that noise?’

‘The wind.’ Owen was trying to find the precise word for the sound of shells, and the wind was a distraction he’d been trying to ignore.

‘No,
that.
’

Owen listened. ‘I can’t hear anything.’

‘That tapping.’

Owen listened again. ‘No.’

‘Must be imagining things.’ Sassoon listened again, then said, ‘They don’t
wail.
They hiss.’

‘No, these are going right over.’

‘That’s right. They hiss.’ He looked at Owen. ‘I hear hissing.’

‘
You
hear tapping.’

The wind went on rising all evening. By the time Sassoon left Owen’s room, it was wailing round the building, moaning down chimneys, snapping branches off trees with a crack like rifle fire. All over the decayed hydro, badly fitting windows rattled and thumped, and Sassoon, passing several of his ‘fellow breakdowns’ in the corridor, thought they looked even more ‘mental’ than usual.

His own room was empty. He got into bed and lay reading while he waited for Fothersgill to return from his bridge session. As soon as he entered the room, Sassoon rolled over and pretended to be asleep. A tuneless whistling ensued, punctuated by grunts as Fothersgill bent over his shaving mirror and tweezed hairs out of his nostrils.

At last the light was out. Sassoon lay on his back, listening to the roar of wind and rain. Again he heard tapping, a distinct,
purposeful sound, quite unlike the random buffeting of the wind. On such a night it was impossible not to think of the battalion. He listened to the surge and rumble of the storm, and his mind filled with memories of his last few weeks in France. He saw his platoon again, and ran through their names – not a particularly difficult feat, since no fewer than eight of them had been called Jones. He recalled his horror at their physique. Many of them were almost incapable of lifting their equipment, let alone of carrying it mile after mile along shelled roads. He’d ended one march pushing two of them in front of him, while a third stumbled along behind, clinging to his belt. None of the three had been more than five feet tall. You put them alongside an officer – almost any officer – and they seemed to be almost a different order of being. And as for their training. One man had arrived in France not knowing how to load a rifle. He saw them now, his little band, sitting on bales of straw in a sun-chinked barn, while he knelt to inspect their raw and blistered feet, and wondered how many of them were still alive.

The windows banged and rattled, and again, in a brief lull, he thought he heard tapping. There were no trees close enough to touch the glass. He supposed there might be rats, but then whoever heard of rats tapping? He tossed and turned, thinking how stupid it was not to be able to sleep here, in safety and comfort, when in France he’d been able to sleep anywhere. If he could sleep on a firestep in drenching rain, surely he could sleep now…

He woke to find Orme standing immediately inside the door. He wasn’t surprised, he assumed Orme had come to rouse him for his watch. What did surprise him, a little, was that he seemed to be
in bed.
Orme was wearing that very pale coat of his. Once, in ‘C’ company mess, the CO had said, ‘Correct me if I’m wrong, Orme, but I have always assumed that the colour of the British Army uniform is khaki. Not…
beige.
’ ‘Beige’ was said in such Lady Bracknellish tones that Sassoon had wanted to laugh. He wanted to laugh now, but his chest muscles didn’t seem to work. After a while he remembered that Orme was dead.

This clearly didn’t worry Orme, who continued to stand quietly by the door, but Sassoon began to think it ought to worry him. Perhaps if he turned his head it would be all right.
He stared at the window’s pale square of light, and when he looked back Orme had gone.

Fothersgill was awake. ‘Did you see anybody come in?’ Sassoon asked.

‘No, nobody’s been in.’ He turned over and within a few minutes was snoring again.

Sassoon waited for the rhythm to be firmly established, then got out of bed and walked across to the window. The storm had blown itself out, though twigs, leaves and even one or two larger branches, scattered across the tennis courts, bore witness to its power. The palms of his hands were sweating and his mouth was dry.

He needed to talk to Rivers, though he’d have to be careful what he said, since Rivers was a thorough-going rationalist who wouldn’t take kindly to tales of the supernatural, and might even decide the symptoms of a war neurosis were manifesting themselves at last. Perhaps they were. Perhaps this was the kind of hallucination he’d had in the 4th London, but no, he didn’t believe that. His nocturnal visitors
there
had come trailing gore, pointing to amputations and head wounds, rather like the statues of medieval saints pointing to the instruments of their martyrdom. This had been so restrained. Dignified. And it hadn’t followed on from a nightmare either. He thought back, wanting to be sure, because he knew this was the first question Rivers would ask. No, no nightmare. Only that tapping at the window before he went to sleep.

He got dressed and sat on the bed. At last eight o’clock came, and the hospital became noisy as the shifts changed. Sassoon ran downstairs. He felt certain Rivers would go to his office to check the post before he left, and there might just be time for a few words. But when he tapped on the door, a passing orderly said, ‘Captain Rivers’s gone, sir. He left on the six o’clock train.’