The first shot, misaimed, hit him in the left thigh, making him stagger from its impact, though he felt nothing. He saw the second, immediately after, blast through the back of his raised left hand and felt the blow, like a punch, as the bullet hit his left shoulder, canting him round sideways for the third shot to slam into his chest, high on the right-hand side.
He went down heavily on to the studded metal floor and heard the noise of her feet clatter up the stairway. He raised himself off the ground on his elbows and caught the shockingly distressing sight of his own vibrant, red blood beginning to spill and pool beneath him before he slumped back again and felt his body begin to go numb, hearing the jocular, breathy phoot-phoot! phoot-phoot! of the steamer’s whistle announcing its imminent arrival at the sunny bustling quayside of Evian-les-Bains.
PART FOUR
LONDON, 1915
1. Autobiographical Investigations
So, the one agreeable bonus of all this is that I finally found a way of gaining admittance to Oxford University. Here I am in Somerville College on the Woodstock Road experiencing a simulacrum of the varsity life. While I have a room off a staircase in a quadrangle in a women’s college there are no women (apart from nurses and domestic staff) – the undergraduettes having been decanted to Oriel College for the duration of the war. We are all men here, wounded officers from France and other battlefields with our various incapacities – some shocking (the multiple amputees, the burned) and some invisible: the catatonic victims of mental dementia caused by the concussion of huge guns and images of unconscionable brutality and awfulness. Somerville is now part of the 3rd Southern General Hospital, as the Radcliffe Infirmary, a few yards further up the Woodstock Road, has been renamed.
Florence Duchesne shot me three times and caused seven wounds. Let’s begin with the last. Her third and final squeeze of the trigger sent a bullet through my chest, high on the right-hand side, entering two inches below my collar-bone and exiting above my shoulder blade. Her second shot blasted through my left hand – that I’d raised in futile protection – and sped on, undeterred, through it and through the muscle of my left shoulder. I remember seeing – in a split second – the flower of blood bloom on the back of my hand as the bullet passed through. The scar has healed well but I have enduring stigmata – one in the middle of my palm, and one on the back of my hand – puckered brown and rose badges the size of a sixpence. Her first shot was a miss, of sorts – a misaim, certainly: she hadn’t raised the gun sufficiently when she fired and I was hit in the top of my left thigh where the bullet smashed into a small bundle of change in my pocket, driving some of the coins deep into the rectus femoris muscle. The surgeon later told me he’d extracted four francs and sixty-seven centimes – he gave them to me in a small envelope.
The shot in the chest caused my lung to collapse and I think produced the copious flow of blood that I saw before I passed out. My good fortune – if such a concept is valid in a case of multiple gunshot wounds – is that six of my seven wounds were entry and exit. Only the pocketful of coins denied egress and – now I’m feeling much better – only my thigh still causes me discomfort and makes me walk with a limp and, for the moment, compels the use of a cane.
I’m also lucky in that, after Florence Duchesne shot me and disappeared, some mechanic or stoker emerged from the engine room and found me lying there in the widening pool of my own blood. I was swiftly taken to a small nursing home in Evian and then Massinger, who eventually tracked me down, had me transferred immediately across country by private motor ambulance to the British base hospital at Rouen.
I convalesced there for four weeks as my injured lung kept filling with blood and had to be aspirated regularly. My left hand was in a cast as some small bones had been broken by the bullet on its way through but the persistent problem was my left thigh. The bullet and the small change were extracted in Rouen but the wound seemed continually to re-infect itself and had to be drained and cleaned and re-dressed. I was obliged to walk around on crutches for most of my stay there.
I was shipped back to England and Oxford towards the end of August. My mother came to visit me almost as soon as I was installed in Somerville. She rushed into my room wearing black and for a fraught, shocked moment I thought Florence Duchesne had returned to finish me off. Crickmay Faulkner had died a month before – while I was in Geneva, in fact – and my mother was still in mourning.
She told me that the worst night of her life had occurred when she received the telegram that I was ‘missing in action’. Crickmay was close to death and she thought her son had been snatched away, also. The next morning, however, she had a visit from a ‘naval officer’ – bearded, with a most curious, eerie smile, she said – who had come all the way to Claverleigh to tell her that I was believed to have been captured, unharmed. She found it very hard to understand how it came about that I was now in hospital in England, ‘riddled with bullets’. I told her that the naval officer (it could only have been Fyfe-Miller) had been well intentioned but not in possession of all the facts.
Despite her new status of widow she seemed in excellent spirits, I had to admit, and she’d made the most of her mourning subfusc with a lot of black lace and ostrich feathers on display. Crickmay’s passing was a blessing, she said, much as she loved him, sweet old man, and Hugh was preparing a perfectly adorable cottage on the estate to serve as a kind of dower house for her. The charity fund was growing incrementally and she was to be presented at court to Queen Mary. After we had walked through the quadrangle and I had seen her into her taxi, one of my fellow wounded – who knew about my former life – wondered if she were an actress. When I told him no, he asked, ‘Is she your girl?’ War affects people in all manner of different ways, I suppose – in my mother’s case she was flourishing, visibly rejuvenated.
I received a telegram from Munro today, commiserating and congratulating simultaneously, and saying that we needed to assess the intelligence from the Glockner letters. And when that moment came he had a proposition to put to me. I reasoned that with Glockner dead the pressure to find the War Office source might have reduced somewhat – whoever our traitor was would have to seek out someone new to communicate with and that would obviously take some time.
Hamo has just left. He was very affected to see me – I was in bed, having just had my lung aspirated again – a concern that took the form of very specific questions about my wounds: what exactly were the physical sensations I felt at the moment of impact? Was the pain instant or did it arrive later? Did I find that the shock anaesthetized me in any way? Did the numbness endure for the length of time I lay out on the battlefield – and so on. I answered him as honestly as I could but kept deliberately vague about the reality of who had shot me and where. ‘I had the strangest feelings when I was wounded, that’s why I ask,’ Hamo said. ‘I’ve seen men screaming in agony from a broken finger, yet there I was, blood everywhere, and all I felt was a kind of fizzing, like pins and needles.’ When he left he took my hand and squeezed it hard. ‘Glad to have you back, dear boy. Dear brave lad.’
I walked up St Giles this evening all the way to the Martyrs’ Memorial and back – as far as I’ve walked anywhere since Geneva. I stopped in a pub on the return journey and had half a pint of cider. People looked at me oddly – my pallor and my stick signalling the ‘price’ I’ve paid, I suppose. I keep forgetting I’m an officer in uniform (Munro has arranged for me to be resupplied). Lt. Lysander Rief, East Sussex Light Infantry, recovering from wounds. It was a warm late summer evening and St Giles with its ancient, soot-black college to one side and the Ashmolean Museum on the other looked timeless and alluring – motor cars and tradesmen’s lorries excepting, of course – and I rather envied people who had had the chance to study and live here. Too late for me now, alas.