‘I haven’t forgotten any of what happened in July, I haven’t accepted any of it. But I still feel better for having told you.’
Barton smiled and his face lost its withdrawn, formal expression. ‘Oh, you should have been a family doctor, you should be a C.O. or a priest! Except that perhaps you would be too conscientious, and I can see through you like a mirror. You are thinking, “What a good thing it will be if only I could get David to spill it all out, how much better he would feel!” Oh, I’m sorry, John, you’ve been trying very hard with me.’
‘Yes.’
‘But I have never felt like this in my life before. You must see that. I haven’t known myself. I didn’t know what to do.’
‘I’ve felt it. I know.’
‘Yes. Perhaps we’re alike then?’
Hilliard hesitated. ‘No,’ he said eventually. ‘We’re not. And it’s a good thing. It’s just that we happen to have had the same responses to a situation.’
‘It was going up into the o.p. that day. I saw eleven men killed. I suppose that doesn’t seem many to you. It was to me, when there wasn’t even anything in particular going on, it was a “routine day”. Eleven men. There might have been more only that I didn’t see them. And there were all those bodies lying out in the shell craters and they’d been there for weeks, months – I don’t know. They were all swollen and black and the flies were all over them. And I had to sit there and draw a map. I saw…’ He stopped.
‘What? Tell me.’
‘No. No, you don’t need me to go on.’
‘But it would be best if you did.’
‘Haven’t you had enough of it all yourself?’
‘That isn’t the point,’ Hilliard said gently, and knew then that he had learned all this from David, learned how to listen and to prompt, and why, even learned a tone of voice. Not long ago he would not have been able to do it. He wondered if there was anything that he had not learned from David.
‘But the worst of it has been that I haven’t known how to face myself. That Private who was snipered – looking at him I could have wept and wept, he seemed to be all the men who had ever been killed, John. I remember everything about him, his face, his hair, his hands, I can remember how pale his eyelashes were and I thought of how alive he’d been, how much there had been going on inside him – blood pumping round, muscles working, brain saying do this, do that, his eyes looking at me. I thought of it all, how he’d been born and had a family, I thought of everything that had gone into making him – and it wasn’t that I was afraid and putting myself in his place down there on the ground. I just wanted him alive again. it seemed the only important thing. I just wanted to stay there and look at him, I couldn’t take it in, that he’d been so alive, and then he just lay, spouting out blood and that was that, he was dead, nothing. Or something. I don’t know. But dead as far as I could see, his flesh was dead, he’d had all that possibility of life and it was gone. Like Harris. A bloody silly accident. If I hadn’t been with Grosse I’d have stayed there, I think I would have lain down and never got up again. I wanted to bury myself. Do something. Only – God, I had to make a map, I had a job to do, so I went and did it and I suppose that took my mind off it. By the time I’d been there an hour and by the time I came back into our dugout, I’d begun to accept it all. I was used to it. A man was dead – eleven men were dead. So? It was happening every day, it was no different because I’d been there. It would go on happening and there was not a thing I could do to stop it. In fact, my being here was helping it continue. I felt nothing then, just nothing any longer. I didn’t think I could be unfeeling, but I was. Callous. Counting the bodies in No Man’s Land and trying to see if they were ours or theirs, guessing how long they’d been dead as a question of academic interest. I had watched stretcher parties scrape and shovel up what was left of half a dozen men, along with what was left of their meal and the side of the trench. I heard a Sergeant tell them to go for more help, to get more tools and put down some duckboards, they weren’t making a good enough job of it. They did. They simply did it. And ever since I’ve heard the shells going over, and thought, that’s so many dead, so many wounded, one or two dozen, that’s next door, that’s the right flank trench, where did that one go, and Oh, Pearce is dead then, I’m sorry to hear that, yes, I’ll write to his wife, give me his papers, I’ll do the form. Last week, the day I went to the village to see the Q.M.S. – that day it hit me, that I’d been feeling nothing, I’d become entirely callous, I was taking it in and not letting myself think or feel anything. I was reading Sir Thomas Browne in order to abstract it. I’d never been so ashamed. You said that you can get used to things.
‘I knew that. But although you were cool on the surface that is only because you are made like that – it is only the surface. You’d told me all about the summer, and how you felt when you went home, about what struck you most when other people there talked about the war and how it had to go on and I knew you hadn’t forgotten, you didn’t stop feeling any of it for a moment. But what was happening to me?What has happened to me?’
He had been tearing and tearing at the paper, the pieces were tiny like confetti in a pile before him. Now, he brushed his arm across them so that they scattered, dropping off the packing case and lying, white as flowers, in the mud.
Hilliard said, ‘But you haven’t forgotten either. You haven’t stopped feeling. You have just told me as much.’
‘That boy…’
‘You can’t feel every man’s death completely and all of the time, David, you simply cannot.’
‘Every man’s death diminishes me.’
‘Yes. So you have just told me the truth, haven’t you?’
‘Have I?’
‘That you are diminished and know as much. And you are changed. And ashamed. That you feel it. Some people would scarcely have noticed how many men were killed, they’ve gone past it, it’s all become part of the day’s work.’
‘That was how I felt.’
‘No, you didn’t, not really. Shock does strange things, you should know that. Some men do not even suffer shock.’
‘What kind of men are those?’
‘Precisely. But all the same, you know as well as I do that if you are here and doing this job, you have to shove things out of the way all the time. We’d never carry on at all otherwise.’
‘Then I wonder if we ought to “carry on at all”?’
‘If you truly believe that you can go and say so to Garrett tomorrow, register as a conscientious objector – lay down your arms. I imagine it would be hard – it was hard enough for your brother, and he hadn’t gone through the business of joining up and serving. But if that is what you feel, then you must do it.’
Barton looked up. ‘It would be funk, wouldn’t it? I went through all that before I came out here. It would be funk.’
‘You hadn’t seen anything then.’
‘All the more reason why it would be funk and seen to be so.’
‘Are you afraid of what else is to come?’
‘I’m afraid of myself. Of what I am becoming, of what it will do to me.’
‘Are you afraid of your own dying?’
Barton’s face lightened at once. ‘Oh, no. I’ve thought about that too. No. I have never really been afraid of that.’
‘It is a brave act of valour to condemn death, but where life is more terrible, it is the truest valour to live.’
Barton smiled. ‘I’ve just torn all that up.’
‘But I have just learned it by heart.’
‘And is it true?’
Hilliard considered. But he found himself thinking instead, whatever was wrong between us is wrong no longer, and will never be so again. He was certain of that.