In fact it wasn’t a bad wound. Paxton woke up next day with a thudding headache and a taste like glue. His arm felt as if it had been slammed in a barn door but he could move his fingers, and the phenomenon of universal deafness had disappeared. What pained him most of all was the discovery that he was in Paris, out of the battle, out of the fun. Why had he fainted, if he’d only been pipped in the arm? It was feeble. Pitiful. A thoroughly dud show. He complained bitterly to the first doctor he saw.
Later in the day, after a couple of meals, one of the doctors drew him a little picture. The bullet had entered just above his wrist, made its way up his forearm, disintegrating as it went, and emerged near the elbow. It had scraped the bone but missed the artery and the major veins. He showed Paxton the fragments of metal they had collected. Paxton fingered them, and in his imagination he tried to assemble them into a 7.92 mm bullet fired from a Spandau through the prop of a Fokker. They failed to take shape. “Why did I pass out?” he asked. “Shock, and loss of blood,” the doctor said. “By all reports you were wading in the stuff when you landed.”
The next day he got up. They tried to stop him but he wouldn’t be stopped, and when he didn’t fall on his face they let him stay up. He ate, and ate. When a man came to collect the plates, Paxton asked him if he knew how the battle was going. “I haven’t had much chance to look at the papers, sir,” he said,”but I saw a headline yesterday I think it was, said something about an advance on the whole front, twenty-five miles I think it said but I’m not much of a one for figures, sir.”
“We advanced twenty-five miles? But that’s wonderful! Did you hear that?” Paxton called to a passing nurse. “Twenty-five miles! How’s that for progress?”
“You won’t make any progress if you go on waving that arm like that,” she said.
He lay on his bed, feeling pleased and a little drowsy. He woke up six hours later when a doctor checked his condition. “What’s the best thing to take for loss of blood?” he asked.
“Salt water. Fruit juice. Guinness if you can get it.”
“Fetch me a crate of Guinness,” Paxton told the nurse.
He ate a meal and drank a pint of salt water.
If that report of a British advance had been in yesterday’s paper, he thought, then the news was three days old, at least. Tremendous things could have happened since then. “I say!” he said to a nurse. “Where can I get some newspapers?”
“I don’t know. Why don’t you go and talk to the captain in the next room? The poor man’s got double vision, so he has.”
Captain Kerr suffered more than double vision. He had led his company of infantry over the top and halfway across No-Man’s-Land until a shell blew him up and broke various bones. He had crawled back to the trenches, often hiding behind the bodies of his men. Now he welcomed both images of Paxton.
“Sit down, old chap,” he said,”make yourself comfortable. Got pipped in the arm, did you? Lucky blighter. I got crumped, you know, well and truly crumped, I remember one second I was thinking ‘Shall I ask my sergeant about that Jerry wire?’ and the next second I was twenty feet up in the air, never heard the bang, came down one hell of a wallop, long way to fall, twenty feet. Just as well I didn’t ask the sergeant, because he wasn’t there any more, was he?” Captain Kerr began to laugh and hurt his chest, so he stopped. “He got even more thoroughly crumped than I did,” Kerr said. “He got completely dismantled. His constituent parts were laid out for inspection. Or perhaps not. Hard to tell. There were large numbers of constituent parts all over the place, including a few of mine.” He held up his left hand. It had no fingers.
Paxton looked away from the bandaged stump. “I hear we’ve advanced twenty-five miles,” he said.
“Load of balls. Who told you that?”
“Chap who works here. He said there’s been an advance along the whole Front. Twenty-five miles was his figure. Mind you, he wasn’t very bright.”
Using his right hand, Kerr picked at a small scab on his forehead. “That’s the length of the attack,” he said.
“Ah. Yes, of course it is.” Paxton slumped in his chair. “It’s still jolly good, though, isn’t it?”
“No, it’s still a load of balls. My mob didn’t get anywhere and we weren’t the only ones. Absolute shambles, it was.”
“Excuse me,” Paxton said. “I have to get my dressing changed.”
“Good idea,” Kerr said.“Get them both changed while you’re at it.”
Paxton ate and slept, ate and slept. He slept fitfully. Sometimes the pain in his arm made him clench his teeth until his face was wet with tears and sweat; when it stopped, sleep took over immediately and completely.
Next morning he wandered about the ward, growing more and more bored and restless, until he went to see if Captain Kerr was awake. He was. “I don’t want to be a nuisance,” Paxton said. “I just wanted to ask about the wire.”
“Too late, old chap. Far too late. Somebody should have asked about the wire before we went over the top… Do me a favour, will you? Get these bloody wasps out of the room. They’re driving me potty.” Kerr flailed at the empty air with his right hand.
“All right,” Paxton said. “I’ll open a window. They’ll soon buzz off.” He made a fuss of opening the window.
The effort had exhausted Kerr. He lay with his arm across his eyes, and so he did not see a middle-aged woman in a blue coat and hat walk into the room. She was bright-eyed and smiling. She had an up-tilted nose and rosy cheeks and a cheerful expression. Everything about her was bright, especially her voice, which was light and brisk, the voice of someone who has spent her life being a good mother. “Good morning!” she said. “I am Mrs. Cruikshank, and I’ve come to read the newspaper to Captain Kerr.”
Paxton liked her as soon as he saw her. “Allow me,” he said and brought her a chair. “You’re very kind,” she said. “I’m sure you’d like me to start with the big news.” Kerr let his arm slip from his eyes. “Oh Christ,” he mumbled.
“Are we all ready?” She gave the newspaper a shake. “Allies Still Advance. Desperate Battle Fought. German Losses Very Heavy. Then there’s a bit from a special correspondent. He says: ‘I was particularly struck by the general air of complete satisfaction with the way in which operations had gone in this length of the front. More than was really expected had in places actually been done.’ Isn’t that good?” She smiled brightly at them. “I think that’s very good, don’t you?”
“Anything about my lot?” Kerr asked. His head kept twitching. “Anything about the Manchesters?”
“Shall we see what we can find?” She turned the pages. “Ah-ha! Now here’s something. It’s all about the Somersets.” Kerr groaned and shut his eyes. “I think you’ll find this very interesting.” Her voice had developed a rhythmic, musical rise and fall. “Shall we read all about the Somersets?”
“Manchesters,” Kerr said.
“West Countrymen in Big Advance,” she read, “A Sprint With The Gordons. Wounded Sergeant’s Stirring Narrative. Doesn’t that sound exciting?”
Paxton nodded. He had identified her swooping, perky voice: it was that of a good mother telling a bedtime story to a dull child and squeezing the juice out of it. “Jolly thrilling,” he said.
“Suddenly,” she read aloud, “suddenly the order came to mount the parapet of our trenches, and you never saw anything equal to the sprint between the Gordons and the Somersets.”