Shadowland (44 page)

 
'We landed in Brest on the
Seattle
and went immediately to the Pontanzen barracks for a few days of rest before being sent to the Gondrecourt area for some rudimentary training. We traveled as part of a section, with a motor truck, two ambulances, and a Packard car in which I and a few other young doctors rode. Our route was along the Beaumont-Mandres road. From Mandres we were meant to go to the Division HQ at Menil-la-Tour. It sounded easy, back in Boston, but back in Boston I had never seen a country torn to pieces by war. The only bodies I had seen were those on dissecting tables. And remember that my military training had been laughably brief. I don't even remember what I had expected to find: a tableau from a recruiting poster, I suppose, brave youthful soldiers brandishing German helmets like scalps.
And They Said We Couldn't Fight!

 
   'We had gone only a short way up the Beaumont-Mandres road when we passed an old battlefield. Great zigzagging rips torn through the ground, barbed wire looping over it all, and somehow a terrifying, claustrophobic feeling of death being all around — pressing its face toward us and blowing on us with its breath. The German trenches had been occupied since 1914 and ran parallel to the Flirey-Bouconville road. We could hear artillery going off in the distance. I had never seen anything remotely like it before — never seen anything like that destroyed snowy field, nor like the scale of death that it implied. To me, right then, what I saw looked like nothing so much as the shocking litter and mess you find at the bottom of a fireplace. Charred heaps of things, filthy little piles here and there, nothing orderly, nothing even recognizable except by an effort of the imagination. That was probably the last civilian image I would be privileged to have for two years. War refers only to itself — war is self-enclosed. It takes only the smallest exposure to make you know that.

 
   'My first real exposure came in that five-passengerPackard. Our convoy was shelled, and shelled very heavily. This of course was colossal bad luck, but the Beaumont-Mandres road was shelled day and night, and our superiors must have decided that it was a risk they had to take. If they had known that precisely one man of the entire convoy would survive, I suppose they might have decided otherwise.

 
   'I could hear soldiers in the supply truck singing 'Glor-ree-us, Glor-ree-us! One keg of beer for the four of us!' That was a favorite, along with 'Snowy Breasted Pearl' and 'Say Au Revoir, But Not Good-bye.' Then over the singing I heard a whistling in the air. I knew immediately what that meant.

 
   'Our driver muttered, 'She said there would be days like this,' and just then the truck in front of us blew up.
'Jee-sus!'
the driver yelled, and cramped the wheel. I saw a body sailing upward, as if a man had taken flight; the undercarriage of the truck rolled over, gouting fire, and metal pieces — scattered all over the road. We fell into an old shellhole — everybody in the Packard was yelling something. Explosions went off all around us, deafeningly loud. I was vaguely aware of an ambulance bouncing into the air like a child's toy. Men were screaming and sobbing. An arm clad in heavy wool thunked down onto the hood of the Packard. All of us fought our way out of the car, and another shell landed very near.

 
   'I came to in the field. My face and hands were burned, and I ached mightily all over and my head felt like it had been split apart, but otherwise I was all right. I had been fantastically lucky, and from that moment forth I knew that I had been saved for some great purpose. The shells were landing all over the road, and nothing rational, nothing sensible, was left of our convoy; in a few seconds, it had been altered into a scene from hell. The ambulances were destroyed. Dead men lay all over the road. A motorcycle wheel dragged a shredded litter into the wreckage of the truck. The rest .of the motorcycle, which had been riding outboard of the convoy, was not even visible. The rear end of the Packard, jutting out of the shellhole, looked like an enormous gray cheese. I reached out and picked up my little satchel of books from a heap of snow. At first I thought I was the only man left alive inthe convoy. Almost unbelievable devastation lay before me. Bodies and parts of bodies protruded from shellholes, from the burning vehicles — and shells continued to fall for some time, battering the broken ambulances and flinging the dead about. It must have been one of the most freakish accidents of the war, that routine shelling like that destroyed an entire medical section. Then I saw someone move, a man in the ditch between the road and the field. I knew him.

 
   'He had been in the Packard with me. His name was Lieutenant William Vendouris, and he was a new field doctor like myself. His guts had been opened up by shrapnel, by a jagged piece of the truck — I don't know. I saw hun lying in the ditch in a lake of his own blood. He was holding in his intestines with his hands. They flopped like thick purplish ropes.

 
   ' 'Give me something, for God's sake,' he hissed at me.

 
   'I had nothing. Nothing except Eliphas Levi and a pack of cards and Cornelius Agrippa. The supplies in the truck had been blown to bits.

 
   ''Jesus, help me,' Vendouris screamed. I knelt beside him and felt around his wound, although I knew he could not be helped. By all rights he should have been unconscious, but it had not taken hun that way. I could feel his blood beating against my hands. 'Settle down, old man,' I said. 'There are no supplies. It all went up with the truck.'

 
   ''Carry me to the HQ,' he pleaded. His eyes rolled, and the whites were so red that they looked about to explode. 'It's only another three miles.
God.
Carry me there.'

 
   ''I can't,' I said. 'You'd die if I moved you. You're three-fourths dead now.'

 
   
''I'm falling out!'
he screeched. His intestines were slipping out of his hands, bulging nearly to the frozen ground. He almost passed out, and I wished that he had. I recall that he had perfect, very white teeth which seemed already to belong to someone else — those teeth should have adorned another body.

 
   'A piece of the snowy field shifted, and I jumped about a foot — I was in shock, and I thought a dead man was standing up out there in that terrible mess. Then it shifted again, and I saw that it was a great white bird. A hugewhite owl. I was to see it once more, in France during the war, but then I thought I was hallucinating. The owl beat its wings — four feet from tip to tip, it looked — and came toward us over the landscape of broken men.

 
   'Vendouris saw it too, and began to rave.
'It's my soul, it's my soul,'
he screamed. Blood boiled out of him. The huge bird sat on a coil of wire and looked crazily at both of us. What with my shock and Vendouris' ravings, I almost thought I could hear it speak.

 
   
'Shoot him,
it was saying.
It is the only way.

 
   'I touched the revolver in its holster on my hip.

 
   'Vendouris understood the gesture. 'Oh, God, God, God, please, no,' he pleaded. So I put my hands under his shoulders and tried to lift him.

 
   'He screeched more horribly than any sound I had ever heard in my life, and in the field I thought I heard the owl screech too, just as if it really were his soul. 'If I lift you up,' I said, 'half of you is going to stay here. It's not possible.'

 
   ''Then get someone.' His head fell back, but he was still alive. Those perfect teeth which should have graced a tooth-powder advertisement shone in his gray face. 'You can't shoot me. I haven't even been here a month.'

 
   'That weird rationality, an excuse like that of a third-grader. I could feel the presence of that perhaps hallucinatory bird behind me, and it was all of a piece with the stink of burned flesh I could suddenly catch from my own face, the smell of shit and intestinal gas coming from Vendouris — all of this was thrown into an odd relief by Vendouris' strange childish plea. Something in my mind moved: I was in the war, and the war referred only to itself.

 
   ''It's not possible,' Vendouris said, and I knew he meant that it was not possible that this had happened to him. He was still a civilian mentally.

 
   'Now, think of my choices. I could pick him up, as he wished, and kill him — give him an agonizing death. I could stay by him and let him die. He may have had another half-hour, or however long it took him to really understand his condition. In that half-hour he would have suffered every agony possible for man to know. Killing him by lifting him would have been more merciful. Hispain was already burrowing through his shock. I could have left him, gone the three miles to the hospital, and left him to die alone.

 
   'He began to breathe in sharp little pants, like an overheated dog.

 
   'There was really only one solution. I took my revolver out of the holster. He saw me do it and his eyes widened, and for a second he was sane again. He tried to crawl back, and most of his insides cascaded out of him.

 
   'Maybe he died then. But I do not think so. I think what killed him was the bullet I put into his forehead.

 
   'A sink of odors surrounded me: my own burned flesh and sweat; Vendouris' horrible stinks of dying, blood; cordite. I picked up my things and walked along the edge of the road in the direction of the artillery fire. I should have been afraid. I should have felt like running back to the port and stowing away in the next ship for America. But instead I felt as though I were walking toward my destiny, for which poor William Vendouris and four other men had already given their lives.

 
   'Now we move ahead a couple of months. The Field Hospital was desperately understaffed, the more so that Vendouris was dead, and two other doctors and I slept three hours out of every twelve, taking shifts on a camp bed in a little tent a few yards from the larger tent which was our operating theater. Which is to say that we breathed war, drank war and slept war every day. Our work was packing wounds, closing aspirating chest wounds, and controlling hemorrhages on soldiers brought in from the battlefields and trenches by the Norton-Harjes and Red Cross ambulances. When we had taken off a leg or put a Thomas splint on a fracture, the wounded were sent off to hospitals for more extensive treatment. The loss of the truck I had been on meant not only the absence of another doctor but also of three months' worth of morphia and other supplies due for the hospital — so most of our operations were done with little or no anesthetic. Often we worked under torches just like those you see in the woods out there, moving with the comings and going of the war in Les Islettes, Cheppy and Verennes. The troops we worked with were mainly men from New York, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut, boys of nineteen andtwenty who'd wake up on the table and reach for their groins with the first movement of consciousness, just to make sure everything was there. It had not been a week before all of the medical staff and many of the troops knew about what happened to Vendouris. The other doctors, a tall red-headed Georgian named Withers and a smart, haggard, bald New Yorker named Leach, seemed to approve of what I had done, and so did most of the troops.

 
   'But they gave me a nickname. Can you guess? They called me the Collector. That act of mercy toward a fatally injured man set me apart, even in conditions as cramped and abnormal as prevailed in Field Hospital 84. Sometimes when I walked into the mess, I could hear men whispering the name. And once when I was operating on a poor little rifleman from the Pennsylvania detachment, trying to put his stomach back in place, he opened his eyes — two orderlies were holding him down — and looked at me and gasped,
'The Col. . . '
and died.

 
   'Leach told me, 'Don't worry about it. If I'm ever in that spot, I hope you'll do me the same favor Most of the boys are so addled by war they no longer think right.'

 
   'There was another reason for the name. For a time I made quite a bit of money playing cards with the line officers and other doctors. I assure you, I did not cheat. I just knew much more about the behavior of cards than they. But after a time I was no longer welcome in the games — I suppose I had won about a quarter of the regiment's money, most of it from Withers, who was a rich man. Withers had come to dislike and distrust me: after initially taking my side in the Vendouris business, he had begun to think that there was something fishy in it. By the time they had got around to bringing in the bodies, there was no money in Vendouris' pockets. And of course, being what he was, Withers distrusted all Northerners on principle. He hated Negroes the same way. And it is true that the work and the hours and the almost constant shelling had affected me too. I had lost forty pounds. When I was not on duty, I drank to put myself to sleep. And while I was still welcomed in card games, I played feverishly, recklessly — often I took large sums from Withers on the strength of a bluff.