The battle of Third Ypres lasted for months and much of it was fought in torrential rain. The monotonously flat ground was completely water-logged, repeatedly churned up by shells. Nothing of the original countryside remained. Nothing at all remained except mud, often thigh deep and in some places capable of sucking men and mules down to their death. It was laced throughout with broken timbers and old barbed wire, with rotting bodies of men, mules, and horses. There was no cover, for every hollow was filled with slime and water, commonly scummed with blood and fragments of flesh. Old corpses thrown up by the explosions lay amid the dying.
Over all this watery desolation hung the reek of death and decay, the garlic odor of mustard gas, the stench of the mud itself. Even a minor wound could cause a man to drown, and in those days there were no antibiotics to combat the frightful infections. The soil was poisoned by gas and virulent microbes. The roar of artillery never ceased. The ground shook as if Earth itself were suffering. Mule trains struggled forward with ammunition; the walking wounded staggered toward the rear. The British Army was attempting to advance across the desolation, while the Germans tried to mow it down with howitzers, machine guns, shrapnel, and poison gas. The field was swept by unrelenting fire and unrelenting rain.
Through this maelstrom of death went stretcher parties looking for wounded. Four men to a stretcher was a bare minimum. Often eight or ten were required, and even then it was not uncommon for the whole party to stumble and tip the wounded man to the ground. After a journey back to the field dressing station—which might take hours—the stretcher-bearers would go back for another. The work had to be done in daylight, for at night there were no landmarks.
Peculiar as the incident itself was, the subsequent behavior of the Army command structure was even stranger.
Suspicion must be directed at the brigade commander, Brig.-Gen. J. G. Stringer, although in all other respects his reputation is unclouded. The son of an Army of India officer, Brig.-Gen. (later Major-Gen.) Stringer had a distinguished career as a professional soldier. Born in India in 1882, he was educated in England at Fallow and Sandhurst. He was a noted athlete, playing cricket for Hampshire and serving as master of the Dilby Hunt. When war broke out in August 1914, he held the rank of major in the Royal Fusiliers, which formed part of the British Expeditionary Force dispatched to France. His subsequent rise was dramatic. He was well-thought-of by both his superiors and his subordinates. He was to die tragically in a motor accident in 1918, shortly before the end of the war.
One man did not testify at the inquiry—the mysterious stranger himself.
Even when the stretcher party had set off with their mysterious patient, their troubles were not over. The British began bringing up reinforcements. The Germans laid down a barrage to stop them. The stretcher-bearers had to run the gauntlet of high-explosives, shrapnel and, at one point, poison gas shells. They took a gas helmet from a corpse for their patient, but some of his exposed skin was blistered.
Their estimates of the time this journey took varied from two and a half to three and a half hours. By the time they arrived at the dressing station, the unknown man was unconscious and incapable of explaining anything.
2
TWO MEN SAT IN A GARDEN AND TALKED ABOUT HELL. ONE OF THEM had been there.
The time was a Saturday afternoon in early September 1917. The site was a sunny corner in the grounds of Staffles, which had been an English country house since the seventeenth century and was now a hospital for wounded returning from the Great War.
The two sat side by side at the top of a short flight of steps leading up to a set of glass doors. Inside those doors, a row of beds prevented anyone from coming out or going in, so the speakers would not be disturbed. It was a sheltered spot. The younger man had found it, and it was probably the best place in the entire hospital for a private chat. He had always had a knack for coming out on top like that. He was not greedy or selfish, yet even as a child he had always been the one to land the best bed in the dorm. Draw a name from a hat, and it would almost always be his.
The steps led down to crazy paving and a lichen-stained stone balustrade. Beyond that, a park sloped to a copse of beeches. The grass badly needed cutting, the rosebushes were straggly, and the flower beds nurtured more weeds than blossoms. Hills in the distance were upholstered with hop fields, their regular texture like the weave of a giant green carpet. Autumn lurked in the air, although the leaves had not yet begun to turn.
Once in a while a train would rush along behind the wood, puffing trails of smoke. When it had gone, the silence that returned was marred by a persistent faint rumbling, the sound of the guns across the Channel. There was another big push on in Flanders. Every man in Staffles knew it. Everyone in southern England knew it.
Men in hospital blues crowded the grounds, sitting on benches or strolling aimlessly. Some were in wheelchairs, some on crutches. Many had weekend visitors to entertain them. Somewhere someone was playing croquet.
In front of the two men stood a small mahogany parlor table, bearing a tea tray. One plate still bore a few crumbs of the scones which had come with the tea. The sparrows hopping hopefully on the flagstones were well aware of those crumbs.
The younger man was doing most of the talking. He spoke of mud and cold, of shrapnel and gas attacks, of days without rest or relief from terror, of weeks in the same clothing, of lice and rheumatism, of trench foot and gas gangrene. He told of young subalterns like himself marching at the head of their men across the wastes of no-man's-land until they reached Fritz's barbed wire and machine guns scythed them down in their ranks. He told of mutilation and death in numbers never imagined possible in the golden days before the war.
Several times during the tea drinking and scone eating, he had reached out absentmindedly with his right sleeve, which was pinned shut just where his wrist should have been. He had muttered curses and tucked that arm out of sight again. He chain-smoked, frequently reaching to his mouth with his empty cuff. At times he would try to stop talking, but his left eye would immediately start to twitch. When that happened, the spasms would quickly spread to involve his entire face, until it grimaced and writhed as if it had taken on an idiot life of its own. And then he would weep.
At such times the older man would tactfully pretend to be engrossed in watching other men in the distance or studying the swallows gathering on the telephone wires. He would speak of the old days—of the cricket and rugby, and of boys his companion had known who were now men. He did not mention the awful shadow that lay on them as they waited for the call that would take them away and run them through the mincer as it ran their older brethren. A war that had seemed glorious in 1914 was a monster now. He did not mention the ever-growing list of the dead.
He was middle-aged, approaching elderly. His portly frame and full beard gave him a marked resemblance to the late King Edward VII, but he wore a pair of pince-nez. His beard was heavily streaked with gray, and his hat concealed a spreading baldness. His name was David Jones and he was a schoolmaster. For more than thirty years he had been known behind his back as Ginger, not for his temperament or his coloring, but because in his youth Ginger had gone with Jones as Dusty went with Miller.