So the clay-cased man was rolled off the stretcher, on to a temporary bed in the hospital. Dorothy looked round for nurses. They were all busy. She found a bucket and began to pick off the mud, which came off in bloody hunks, at first. Griselda helped. The face was the face of a golem: the ambulance men had made breathing holes and eye holes but the hair was caked solid and the eyebrows were worms of mud, and the lips were thick and brown. Dorothy picked and wiped. Griselda said “He’s got shrapnel down here, where his trousers were, I’ve got his pants off, it doesn’t look nice.”
The man trembled. Dorothy said “There’s a lot in his back, as well.” She washed him, quickly but gently, and then again, as though the mud layer was inexhaustible, always renewing itself.
The man said “I always said you had good hands.” His voice was clogged, as though he had swallowed mud. Dorothy said
“Philip?”
Philip said, with great difficulty, “When I went under, I thought, it’s a good end for a potter, to sink in a sea of clay. Clay and blood.”
“Don’t talk.”
“I didn’t think they’d pull me out. They’re not meant to.”
Dorothy said “Can you move your fingers? Good. Toes? Not so good. Turn your head? Not too far. Good. There’s shrapnel in your back, and in your legs, and in your bottom. It needs to come out, or it festers. You’re lucky, this is an ambulance attached to the Women’s Hospital, we have Bipp.”
“Bipp?”
“It’s a patent antiseptic paste. You put it on and leave it for ten or even twenty-one days. It seals the healing. And it is good for the healing not to be disturbed. You’ll need a lot of Bipp. Some of the army doctors think they can sterilise needles and blades with olive oil. We are cleverer than that.”
There was no other surgical emergency, so Dorothy sat by Philip’s muddy body in the lamplight, picking out the pieces of shrapnel, delicately, precisely. He said
“The feeling’s coming back. I was all numb.”
“That’s good, though you may not think so. I can give you morphine.”
“Dorothy—”
She searched with tweezers for a deep scrap of metal, in his flesh. “Dorothy, you’re crying.”
“I do, sometimes. All this is hard. You don’t expect to find a friend in a cake of mud.”
“I can’t laugh, it hurts. What are you doing?”
“You’ve got a deep bit, here between the legs. I shall need to get it out under anaesthetic. That can wait till tomorrow. I’ll get out all I can, and apply the Bipp. And give you morphine, and make you comfortable. I think your leg’s broken, too. You’ll have to go back to England.”
Philip gave a great sigh. Dorothy injected morphine. She slapped on Bipp, where the shrapnel had been extracted. Philip said “I don’t really believe you’re here. I often wished you were. I mean, not in the mud, in the abstract.”
Dorothy said “Not abstract. Concrete.”
55
Aprés la Guerre Finie
May 1919. A cab drew up outside the house in Portman Square. A man got out, a skeletal man, whose cheap clothes hung on him like a coat hanger. He hesitated a moment or two, then rang the doorbell. A young maid answered and looked at him doubtfully. He went past her, like a shadow, and into the drawing-room, where he heard voices.
He stood in the doorway. The maid stood doubtfully behind him. He was puzzled by the group of people there. There was a man with a strapped leg and thigh lying on the chaise longue. There was a thin young girl in a smart short skirt. There was a nursemaid. There was an elegantly dressed young woman, with fashionable short hair, on a low chair, with her back to him.
Basil and Katharina Wellwood were sitting side by side on a sofa, admiring the baby the young woman was holding. It was not as he had imagined it. He cleared his throat. He said, as people all over the world were saying, “Did you not get my letter?” Katharina sprang to her feet like a wire uncoiled, all of a tremble.
“Karl. Charles. It is not.”
“It is,” he said. His father stood up. The red hair was almost grey. Basil said
“You need to sit down.”
Katharina came unsteadily towards him. The fashionable young woman rose to her feet, still holding the baby, who had white-blond hair and well-defined features, not pudgy. He said
“Elsie.”
Katharina pulled at his hand. “Sit down, sit down.”
She could not say how deathly she thought he looked. Elsie said, matter-of-fact, “You’ve had a bad time.” And began to cry. She said
“This is Charles. We all wanted to call him Charles, because we thought—”
He sat down on the sofa, surrounded by his family, and tried to work out the wounded soldier on the chaise longue. He was, of course, Philip Warren. The room had changed, not only because of the baby and the nursemaid, but because two great golden jars of Philip’s were there, either side of the hearth, covered with twined, climbing, tiny demons.
“I can’t really get up,” said Philip. “I am glad to see you.”
“Where did you get hit?”
“Passchendaele. I was saved—I think—by prompt medical attention from Dorothy. Griselda was there. They’re in the Women’s Hospital in Endell Street now. So is Hedda. She’s an orderly. She saved my leg, Dorothy did.”
Katharina said he must be hungry. She went away to order beef tea, and soft bread, and a milk pudding. Charles/Karl sat on the sofa and looked at his wife and son. Basil said
“Elsie and Ann—and little Charles—have been such a comfort to us. As you can see. We have looked after them, as you asked.”
Charles/Karl could not say that by “looking after” he had supposed he meant setting Elsie up in a comfortable cottage, with an income. Basil said
“Elsie has been such a support to your mother. She has had a difficult time. Not to be compared, of course,” he added, still appalled by his son’s boniness and bald skin. He said “We must telephone the Women’s Hospital. Griselda is an orderly. She works very long hours, but she may be able to come home. She must, at least, know—”
Charles/Karl stroked his son’s hair with shaking fingers. His son smiled, pleasantly. Charles/Karl did not feel steady enough to take the baby. Elsie leaned over him and kissed his hair and kissed his hand in small Charles’s hair. She said “Your people have been unimaginably good to me. And Ann. Ann, come over and say—welcome back—to—to—”
Ann came over and looked at him, and said
“Have you been in prison?”
“I was. There was no food. The guards had next to no food. Everyone is starving.”
He could not describe the unspeakable. He said he had been burned in an explosion, whilst carrying a German soldier on a stretcher in No Man’s Land. The soldier and Charles/Karl’s companions had been killed. He had been picked up by some German soldiers—Bavarians, who had looked after him because he spoke German. He hesitated. He could not begin to describe the foul journey, the deaths and the dead. He said
“I ended up in Munich. There was no food and men were deserting, a few at a time and then all together. I walked to the Pension Susskind. Joachim and his sister were there. They fed me. They found a doctor. They …”
He was about to weep.
Ann said “It will be better now.”
Charles/Karl looked across at Philip, who looked darkly back. Basil said “We must telephone the Women’s Hospital. We must tell Griselda.”