“Before dawn there was another German bombardment. They attacked at first light, their generals having made exactly the same mistake as ours the day before. They suffered even heavier casualties. They got past my crater and to the trenches we had attacked from, but they were driven back again almost at once. All I knew of this was the noise. And the foot of a German soldier. He used my shoulder for a support while he was firing.
“Night fell again. There was war to the south, but our sector was quiet. The battle was over. Our casualties were some thirteen thousand killed—thirteen thousand minds, memories, loves, sensations, worlds, universes—because the human mind is more a universe than the universe itself—and all for a few hundred yards of useless mud.
“At midnight I crawled back to the village on my stomach. I was afraid I might be shot by a startled sentry. But the place was manned by corpses, and I was in the middle of a desert of the dead. I found my way down a communication trench. There, too, only silence and corpses. Then a little further on I heard English voices ahead, and called out. It was a party of stretcher-bearers, passing round for a final ascertaining that only the dead remained. I said I had been knocked out by a shell blast.
“They did not doubt my story. Stranger things had happened. From them I learnt where what was left of my battalion was. I had no plan, nothing but the instinct of a child to return to its home. But as the Spanish say, a drowning man soon learns to swim. I knew I must be officially dead. That if I ran away, at least no one would be running after me. By dawn I was ten miles behind the lines. I had a little money and French had always been the lingua franca of my home. I found peasants who sheltered and fed me that next day. The next night I marched again, over the fields, always westward, across the Artois towards Boulogne.
“A week later, traveling always like this, like the émigrés in the 1790s, I arrived there. It was full of soldiers, and of military police, and I was near despair. Of course it was impossible to board a returning troop-ship without papers. I thought of presenting myself at the docks and saying that my pocket had been picked… but I lacked the impudence to carry it off. Then one day fate was kind to me. She gave me an opportunity to pick pockets myself. I met a soldier from the Rifle Brigade who was very drunk, and I made him drunker. I caught the leave ship while he, poor man, was still snoring in a room above an estaminet near the station.
“And then my real troubles began. But I have talked enough.”
21
There was silence. The crickets chirped. Some night bird, high overhead, croaked primevally in the stars.
“What happened when you got home?”
“It is late.”
“But—”
“Tomorrow.”
He lit the lamp. As he straightened up from adjusting the wick, he stared at me.
“You are not ashamed to be the guest of a traitor to his country?”
“I don’t think you were a traitor to the human race.”
We moved towards his bedroom windows.
“The human race is unimportant. It is the self that must not be betrayed.”
“I suppose one could say that Hitler didn’t betray his self.”
He turned.
“You are right. He did not. But millions of Germans did betray their selves. That was the tragedy. Not that one man had the courage to be evil. But that millions had not the courage to be good.”
He led the way through to my room, and lit the lamp there for me.
“Good night, Nicholas.”
“Good night. And…”
But his hand was up, silencing me and what he must have guessed were to be my thanks. Then he was gone.
When I came back from the bathroom, I looked at my watch. It was a quarter to one. I undressed and turned out the lamp, then stood a moment by the open window. There was a vague smell of drains in the still air, of a cesspool somewhere. I got into bed, and lay thinking about Conchis.
He seemed a more human person, a much more human person, than he had before; yet there was a kind of professionalism, an air of having rehearsed the narrative, or at any rate, of having told it before—to Leverrier and Mitford?—that took away a little from the frankness and impact of the confession. I knew that I must be getting close to his real purpose in inviting me. For some reason he wanted me to hear these things, to be impressed by them. They were not casual reminiscings. That was why the good night had followed so abruptly on the end of the story-telling; he had wanted to create a feeling of to-be-continued; to leave me in doubt about him, speculating.
And then there were the footsteps, a whole tangle of unrelated ikons and incidents, the photo on the curiosa cabinet, oblique looks, Alison, the little girl called Lily with her head in sunlight.
I was about to go to sleep.
At first hallucinatorily faint, impossible to pinpoint, it began. I thought it must be coming through the walls from a gramophone in Conchis’s bedroom. I sat up, put my ear to the wall, listened. And then I leapt out of bed and went to the window. It was coming from outside, from somewhere far to the north, well up in the hills a mile or more away. There was no light, no sound except the crickets nearby. Only, beyond, this faintest sound of men, a lot of men, singing. I thought—fishermen. But why should they be in the hills? Then shepherds—but shepherds are solitaries.
It grew imperceptibly clearer, as if on a gust of wind—but there was no wind—swelling, then fading away. I thought for an incredible moment that I caught something familiar in the sound—but it couldn’t be. And it sank away, almost to complete silence.
And then—unimaginable the strangeness of it, the shock of it—the sound swelled again and I knew beyond doubt what was being sung up there. It was “Tipperary.” Whether it was the distance, whether the record, because it must have been a record, had been deliberately slowed—there seemed to be some tonal distortion as well—I couldn’t tell, but the song came with a dreamlike slowness, almost as if it was being sung out of the stars and had had to cross all that night and space to reach me.
I went to the door of my room and opened it. I had some idea that the record player must be in Conchis’s room. Somehow he had had the sound relayed to a speaker, or speakers, in the hills—perhaps that was what was in the little room, relaying equipment, a generator. But there was absolute silence in the house. I closed the door and leant back against it. The voices and the song washed dimly down out of the night, through the pine forest, over the house and out to sea. Suddenly the humor, the absurd, tender, touching incongruity of the whole thing, made me smile. I realized that it must be some elaborate joke of Conchis’s, mounted for my exclusive benefit. There was no need to rush about trying to discover how it was done. I should find that out in the morning. Meanwhile, I was to enjoy it. I went back to the window.
The voices had become very dim, barely audible; but something else had grown penetratingly strong. It was the cesspool smell I had noticed earlier. Now it was an atrocious stench that infested the windless air, a nauseating compound of decomposing flesh and excrement, so revolting that I had to hold my nose and breathe through my mouth.
Below my room there was a narrow passage between the cottage and the house. I craned down, trying to see what it was, because the source of the smell seemed so close. It was clear to me that the smell was connected with the singing. I remembered that corpse in the shell hole.
The sound faded, went completely. After a few minutes, the smell too was fainter. I stood another ten or fifteen minutes, straining eyes and ears for the faintest sound or movement. But there was none. And there was no sound inside the house. No creeping up the stairs, no doors gently closed, nothing. The crickets chirped, the stars pulsed, the experience was wiped clean. I sniffed at the window. The foul odor still lingered, but under the normal antiseptic smell of the pines and the sea, not over it.