Gifts of War (4 page)

A week later our unit was ordered to make a push for the small village of Plumont. We advanced under cover of dark and, at about eleven forty-five P.M. on Sunday, 3 January 1915, I took a bullet in my groin and the shooting war ended for me. The bullet that found me fractured my pelvis, I went down in a mudflat, and later I was told that I might have drowned but for a lance corporal who found me, saw that I was still breathing, and pulled my unconscious head out of the freezing water. I had passed out from loss of blood and pain and only came to hours later in a hospital tent outside Douai.

“It wasn’t easy for that lance corporal,” said the medical orderly who told me all this when I recovered consciousness. “But he said he owed you one. Man called Beddoes, or Meadows.”

The blood loss was stanched, the pain was stultified with drugs, and I was invalided home, via Calais, Folkestone, and Farnham, to a hospital in the Vale of Evesham called Sedgeberrow. There, my pelvis was reconstructed—to the best of the surgeon’s ability—and when the pain was under control my parents were allowed to see me. They
had been to the hospital just after I had arrived, as had Isobel on a separate occasion, but I had been too sedated to realize I had visitors.

I didn’t know what to expect of my mother and father on their second trip. After all, my injuries were hardly life-threatening. Was my mother, who had been against the war from the start, going to give me the “I-told-you-so” treatment? Would my father be disappointed that I was not more of a hero, and hadn’t had any impact on events—that all my “preparation” in Germany had been wasted? They had never shown much emotion when Izzy and I were growing up, so I didn’t expect them to gush. We would all have been embarrassed.

In the event, they were surprisingly gentle and took me for a walk around the grounds in a wheelchair. Being in the Vale of Evesham, the grounds of Sedgeberrow were full of fruit trees—apples, pears, and plums mainly, though it was too early in the year for there to be much sign of life. But there was also some market gardening going on— vegetables mainly—so there was plenty to look at and talk about if you liked that sort of thing.

I asked about life back home in Edgewater, inquired after the vicar (whose family was always the subject of much gossip in the village) and my sister. I was told she was in London finishing her training to be a nurse and would come and see me again in due course. At some point, I remember, my mother made an excuse and left my father and me alone. I was in the wheelchair and he was sitting on a bench, and we were watching some ducks meandering about—they seemed to have lost the patch of water they lived on—when my father suddenly burst out, “Hal, I have something to tell you.”

This was very unlike him, to be conspiratorial. Though distant, he was usually the most straightforward of men. He was taller than me, and always stooped when he addressed me, so that his hair flopped down over his forehead.

I was aware that I had picked up a few mannerisms from my father
and one of the things that he did, which had rubbed off on me, was to set his lower jaw to one side when he was preparing to say something awkward or difficult. He did that now.

What was coming? Was he or my mother ill? Were they getting divorced? Had some disaster befallen my headstrong sister?

“The doctors told us … and, well, we elected to tell you, rather than have them do it.” He leaned forward and put his hand on my leg. “When that German bullet entered you and smashed your pelvis, it also destroyed your prostate gland. You’ve been very unlucky, Hal, cruelly damaged, but… well, my sad task is to tell you that you’ll never be able to have children.” He looked straight at me. “This is all painfully personal, but it’s better coming from me than from a stranger. You will still be able to have erections and there will be some ejaculate, so I’ve been told. But no semen and therefore no children.” He withdrew his hand and looked away. “I am terribly, terribly sorry.”

I didn’t say anything.

I didn’t say anything then, and I didn’t say anything for the rest of the day, for that week. I can’t fully explain it even now, but that was the last news I was expecting and, perhaps because of it, perhaps because I was so used to death itself, a profound depression settled over me that I was quite unprepared for and was unable to do anything about. All the descriptions you read about depression are completely inadequate to the task. A black cloud? That doesn’t come close. A huge weight pressing down on you? Not at all. If you can imagine such a thing, if such a thing could exist, depression is like being alive in a coffin, down a mine, six miles deep under the ocean, with no light, no air, and, above all, no possibility of escape, no possibility of any other living thing being anywhere near you, where no sound can reach you, no smell, where nothing has any meaning. Think of what you can see behind you—it’s not black, is it, but nothing? No color, no texture, no form. That’s what depression is—nothing, six miles down.

I don’t remember my parents leaving that day and I don’t remember them coming to visit me again for weeks on end, though I am sure that they did. I lost interest in everything, even the war. Especially the war, which was responsible for the way things had turned out. I suppose that my depression interfered with my recovery but I don’t know that for certain. I do remember that, after a while, a pretty nurse came to see me every day and took me out in the wheelchair and tried to get me walking and talking again. But, though I did start walking, I remained universally, unalterably, dismally morose and mute. Pretty girls were the last thing I wanted to see: what earthly
use
could I be to a woman, pretty or otherwise?

The only woman I wanted to see, the only woman I could be any use to, was Isobel, my sister. She still adored me, the more so now that I had a war wound, which to her made me a genuine war hero. She wrote me a couple of letters from London before she could get away for a visit. “Poor you,” she said in one of them, resolutely refusing to hide from my problem, as others were apt to do. “But I’ve been reading this new book by a doctor, a head doctor—Sigmund someone, a German of all people, or an Austrian, one of the enemy anyway—and he says that people who can’t have full sex often channel it into other areas, intellectual, or sporting, or social. That’s what you can do— become some big shot at the War Office. You speak fluent German and you have a war wound. Soon as you are up and walking—well, up and limping—they’ll have to do something for you.”

Sisters can get away with that sort of crack and I looked forward to her letters. They, more than anything, helped me over my depression. And when, eventually, she came to see me, toward the end of May, she worked her magic even more. She was dressed in her nurse’s uniform—pale blue—and looked very fetching, my little sister now all grown up and Miss Efficiency herself. First, she refused to take
me out in the wheelchair, saying, “No, you can walk the whole way, come on.”

“Do they teach you cruelty in that hospital?”

“Come
on
!” And she marched off down the corridor.

I followed.

That afternoon we toured the whole grounds, the first time I had done so on foot. I told her as much. “Good,” she said. “Great. But you’ve got to get better quickly anyway—they need your bed for people who are worse off.”

Worse off. She was right. Feeling sorry for myself, turning my back on the war, wallowing six miles down, I had never stopped to think of the people who had had rather more than their prostate destroyed. I had almost forgotten the people I had buried. Izzy’s sibling “cruelty” shook me back to the real world.

But what finally caused me to shake myself free of Sedgeberrow was when Isobel screwed up her courage that day and said, “Hal, can I ask you something really, really personal?”

Oh dear. She sounded like our father on the day when he told me about my paternal prospects. Now what? Was Izzy pregnant? Was she secretly married to someone our parents thought undesirable? Did she want me to intervene, to soften the blow?

“You can ask, Izzy,” I replied. “I’m not promising to answer, if it’s too personal, but fire away. I’ve never been a spy, if that’s what you’re going to ask.”

“No, no, nothing like that,” she said. “If you
were
a spy, I shouldn’t expect you to tell me, unless it was in a note, to be opened only after your death.”

I couldn’t help but grin. My sister always had a gruesome and romantic imagination, which for her were pretty much the same thing.

“Go on, then, what’s your question?”

I remember that we were sitting on a bench, near the ducks, which—I had decided—commuted between some distant patch of water and the garden vegetables that grew on the hospital grounds.

“Now, you’re not to get angry—promise?”

“How can I—?”
Promise!

“All right, all right. I promise.”

“Okay,” she said. “Okay. Here goes.” She took my hand in hers. “I couldn’t say this sort of thing to Ma and Pa—they would
die—
but… well, you’ve been in Munich and Berlin, and war… Are you, are you… you’ve had this depression, I know, so it’s unlikely, but—”

“Say it, Izzy, say it. Am I what?”

“I mean…” It came out in a rush: “You’re not homosexual, are you?”

“Good grief, Izzy!” I jerked my hand away from hers and groaned. “Of course I’m not queer. You’ve seen how depressed I’ve been, and you know why. What
on earth
makes you think I’m queer?” I groaned again. “J
ee-sus!”

“Well, I know it’s silly,” she said, giggling out of
relief
, I think, that it was now all out in the open. “You could have been depressed because you couldn’t have children … that would matter as much to a homosexual as a normal person.”

“Izzy,” I hissed in what I tried to make a menacing tone. “I repeat that I am not,
not
, queer—but what made you think I
was
homosexual in the first place?”

She took back my hand. “Well, when you were really, really ill, at the very beginning, remember that I came to see you and you were heavily sedated—completely torpedoed. Remember?”

I nodded. “I remember not remembering you were here. Uh-huh.”

“Well, I was a bit bored, hanging around for you to wake up—
which you didn’t. And I couldn’t leave, because I had to wait for the taxi to come back for me.”

“Y-e-e-s … Get to the point.”

“So, well, for something to do I started going through your things—”

“Izzy—!”

“I know, I know, I shouldn’t have. Don’t get mad—you promised. But I
am
your sister and I did it. I’m too old for you to twist my ear off, like you used to, so
there.”
She grinned.

I didn’t grin back.

“And … well, in your wallet I found a photo—”

“Jesus Christ!”

“Don’t blaspheme. Or think of a new swear word. I imagined it might be a photograph of your girlfriend and I wanted to see what I thought of her, see how pretty she was, that sort of thing, but… well, it was a man, a very good-looking man, I have to say, in some sort of uniform.” She made a face. “I thought you’d fallen in love in the army— with a man. The photo had a name and address on the back, Sam someone if I remember right. I even thought of writing to him, but I didn’t
—I didn’t!”
she cried out as my eyes grew rounder and she could see that my temper was beginning to cook.

I took my hand from out of hers, and instead cupped her hands in mine. “That serves you right, Izzy, for sticking your nose—your stumpy button of a nose—where it doesn’t belong. And no, you’re not too old for me to twist your ears.” But I didn’t try.

What I did do was tell her the story of the Christmas truce, and my exchange of gifts with the German officer, Oberleutnant Wetzlar.

“Crikey, Hal,” she said when I had finished. “I mean, can you do that, act as a sort of messenger? I mean, it’s very romantic—I wonder
if anyone would take such a risk for me—but isn’t it… well,
treason?
Will they shoot you if you get found out?”

“Well, I haven’t delivered my message yet, have I? And the authorities will only find out if a certain nurse tells them.”

But by now Izzy’s romantic side was moving into a higher gear, and she was ahead of me.

“Stratford’s not far from here, is it?”

It simply hadn’t occurred to me, but Izzy was right. I’d been so self-obsessed that I’d forgotten my geography. But she was on the ball; Stratford was not far away at all.

LEFT TO HERSELF
, Izzy would have driven to Stratford the very next day, in our father’s car, but I didn’t want that. I wasn’t sure what I did want but I knew I wanted to move more slowly, and all by myself. What Izzy
had
done, however, was convince me that I preferred to hand over Wilhelm’s photograph in person, not entrust it to the post. In that way there would be no chance of me being found out, for passing on something from the enemy, but—more important, I think—Izzy’s romanticism had persuaded me that the physical hand over of the photograph, the actual event, would be an emotional moment that I wanted to experience for myself. That encounter would be wasted if I just slipped the photograph in an envelope and slid it into a postbox. Also, in delivering the letter in person I could describe the Christmas encounter between Wilhelm and me, without setting down anything incriminating on paper. Finally, I have to admit, there was also the fact that Sam Ross was an attractive woman—or she photographed well. I wanted to see her for myself, to talk to her but also to see whether, in the flesh, she lived up to her image in the photo. She had become engaged to a German—how did she feel about him now? Was she still in love with him? The more I thought about it, the more interesting the handover of that small photograph became.