The Ghost Road (22 page)

5 October

I think the worst time was after the counter-attack,
when we lay in that trench all day surrounded by the dead. I still had
Longstaffe by my side, though his expression changed after death. The look of surprise
faded. And we listened to the wounded groaning outside. Two stretcher-bearers
volunteered to go out and were hit as soon as they stood up. Another tried
later. After that I said, No more, everybody keep down. By nightfall most of
the groaning had stopped. A few of the more lightly wounded crawled in under
cover of darkness and we patched them up as best we could. But one man kept on
and on, it didn't sound like a human being, or even like an animal, a sort of
guttural gurgling like a blocked drain.

I decided I ought to try myself, and took Lucas with
me. Not like going over the top used to be,
climbing
out of the bloody
trench.
Just a through the wire, barbs snagging the sleeves,
and into the mud.
I felt the coldness on my cheek, and the immense space
above, that sense you always get when lying on the ground in the open of the
earth as a ball turning in space. There was time to feel this, in spite of the
bullets—which anyway frightened me less than the thought of having to see what
was making that sound.

The gurgling led us to him. He was
lying
half way down the side of a flooded crater and the smell of gas was stronger
here, as it always is near water. As we started down, bullets peppered the
surface,
plop, plop,
plop
, an innocent sound like
when you skim a flat stone across a river, and bullets flicked the rim where
we'd been a second before and sent cascades of loose earth down after us. The
gurgling changed as we got closer so he knew something different was happening.
I don't think he could have known more than that. I got right up to his feet,
and started checking his legs for wounds, nothing, but then I didn't expect it.
That sound only comes from a head wound. What made it marginally worse was that
the side of the head nearest me was untouched. His whole frame was
shaking,
his skin blue in the starlight as our skins were
too, but his was the deep blue of shock. I said 'Hallet' and for a second the
gurgling stopped. I gestured to Lucas and he helped me turn him further over on
to his back, and we saw the wound. Brain
exposed,
a
lot of blood, a lot of stuff not blood down the side of the neck.
One eye gone.
A hole—I was going to say
in
his left cheek—where his left cheek had been. Something was burning, casting an
orange light into the sky which reflected down on us.
The
farm that had been one of our reference points.
The underside of the
clouds was stained orange by the flames.

We got a rope underneath him and started hauling him
round the crater, up the other side, towards our trench and all the time I was
thinking,
What's
the use? He's going to die anyway. I
think I thought about killing him. At one point he screamed and I saw the
fillings in his back teeth and his mouth filled with blood. After that he was
quiet, and it was easier but then a flare went up and everything paled in the
trembling light. Bastards, bastards, bastards, I thought. I heard a movement
and there on the rim of the crater was a white face looking down. Carter, who,
I later discovered, had come out entirely on his own initiative. That was just
right. More than three and we'd have been getting in each other's way. We
managed to drag him back through fire that was, if anything, lighter than
before, though not intentionally I think. Too little mercy had been shown by
either side that day for gestures of that sort to be possible.

We fell into the trench, Hallet on top of us. I got
something damp on my face that wasn't mud, and brushing it away found a gob of
Hallet's brain between my fingertips. Because he'd gone quiet on the last
stretch I expected to find him unconscious or dead, but he was neither. I gave
him a drink of water. I had to press my hand against his face to get it down,
because otherwise it slopped out of the hole. And all the time, I was doing it
I was thinking, Die can't you? For God's sake, man, just
die.
But he didn't.

When at last we were ordered to pull back I remember
peering up at the sky and seeing the stars sparse and pale through a gauze of
greenish light, and thinking, Thank God it's evening, because shells were still
coming over, and some of them were falling directly on the road. At least we'd
be marching towards the relative safety of night.

The sun hung on the lip of the horizon, filling the
sky. I don't know whether it was the angle or the drifting smoke that half
obscured it, but it was
enormous.
The whole scene looked like something that couldn't be happening on earth,
partly the sun, partly the utter lifelessness of the land around us, pitted,
scarred, pockmarked with stinking craters and scrawls of barbed-wire. Not even
birds, not even carrion feeders. Even the crows have given up. And I stumbled
along at the head of the company and I waited for the sun to go down. And the
sodding thing didn't. IT ROSE. It wasn't just me. I looked round at the others
and I saw the same stupefaction on every face. We hadn't slept for four days.
Tiredness like that is another world, just like noise, the noise of a
bombardment, isn't like other noise. You see people wade through it, lean into
it. I honestly think if the war went on for a hundred years another language
would evolve, one that was capable of describing the sound of a bombardment or
the buzzing of flies on a hot August day on the Somme. There are no words There
are no words for what I felt when I saw the setting sun rise.

6 October

We're far enough back now for officers from different
companies to mess together again. I sit at a rickety little table censoring
letters, for the post has arrived, including one for me from Sarah saying she
isn't pregnant. I don't know what I feel exactly. I ought to be delighted and
of course I am, but that was not the first reaction. There was a split second
of something else, before the relief set in.

Letters arrive for the dead. I check names against the
list and write
Deceased
in a firm bold hand in the top left-hand corner.
Casualties were heavy, not so much in the initial attack as in the
counter-attacks.

Gregg died of wounds. I remember him showing me a
letter from home that had big 'kisses' in red crayon from his little girl.

Of the people who shared the house in Amiens only a
month ago, Potts is wounded, but likely to live. Jones (Owen's servant)
wounded, likely to live. Hallet's wounds are so bad I don't think he can
possibly survive. I see him sometimes lying in the lily pond in the garden with
the golden fish darting all around him, and silver lines of bubbles on his
thighs. More like a pattern than a picture, no depth to it, no perspective, but
brilliantly clear. And Longstaffe's dead.

The Thane of
Fife had a wife: where is she now?

I look across at Owen, who's doing casualty reports
with a Woodbine—now blessedly plentiful again—stuck to his bottom lip, and his
hair, rather lank at the moment, flopping over his forehead. For days after the
battle he went round with his tunic stiff with blood, but then I had blood and
brains on me. We must have stunk like the drains in a slaughterhouse, but
we've long since stopped smelling each other. He looks like one of the boys you
see on street corners in the East End. Open to offers. I must say I wouldn't
mind. He looks up, feeling
himself
the subject of
scrutiny, smiles and pushes the fags across. I saw him in the attack, caped and
masked in blood, seize a machine-gun and turn it on its previous owners at
point-blank range.
Like killing fish in a bucket.
And
I wonder if he sees those faces, grey, open-mouthed faces, life draining out of
them before the bullets hit, as I see the faces of the men I killed in the
counter-attack. I won't ask. He wouldn't answer if I did. I wouldn't
dare
ask. For the first time it occurs to me that River's job also requires courage.

We don't even mention our own dead. The days pass
crowded with meaningless incident, and it's easier to forget. I run the ball of
my thumb against the two first fingers of my right hand where a gob of Hallet's
brain was, and I don't feel anything very much.

We are Craiglockhart's success stories.
Look at us.
We
don't remember, we don't feel, we don't think—at least not beyond the confines
of what's needed to do the job. By any proper civilized standard (but what does
that
mean
now?)
we are objects of horror. But our nerves are completely
steady. And we are still alive.

PART THREE

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

SHEER FIGHTING

BOTH SIDES PAY
THE PRICE

HUNS WAIT FOR
THE BAYONET

Prior would have
been in that, Rivers thought. He picked the paper up from his breakfast tray
and made a real effort to concentrate. It was clear, even from this gung-ho
report, that casualties had been heavy. No point checking the casualty lists
yet: individual names took at least a week to come through. But he could
probably expect a field postcard in the next few days, if Prior was all right.
He'd sounded fine in his last letter, but that was ten days ago.

Reading it,
Rivers had felt the stab of envy he always experienced on receiving letters
from men serving in France. If the wretched war had to happen he'd rather have
spent it with Marshall-of-the-Ten-Wounds than with
Telford-of-the-Pickled-Penis. He tried to focus on the details of the
engagement, but the print blurred before his eyes. And his boiled egg—though
God knows what it had cost Mrs Irving to buy—was going down like lead. He
really thought he'd be sick if he forced any more of it down. He took his
glasses off, put them on the bedside table and pushed the tray away. He meant
only to rest a while before starting again, but his fingers slackened and
twitched on the counterpane and, after a few minutes, the newspaper with its
headlines shrieking about distant battles slipped sighing to the floor.

* * *

Ngea's skull, jammed into the v of a cleft stick,
bleached in the sun. A solitary bluebottle buzzed in and out of the eye sockets
and, finding nothing there of interest, sailed away into the blue sky.

On his way down to the beach to bathe, Rivers paused
to look at the skull.
Only a month ago he'd spoken to this
man, had even held his hand briefly on parting.
No wonder the islanders
wore necklaces of pepeuleaves to guard themselves against
tomate gani
yambo:
the Corpse-eating Spirit.

Later the same day he saw the little boy whom Lembu
had brought back from Ysabel squatting listlessly outside Njiru's hut, poking
about in the dust with a small stick. He was not crying, but he looked dazed.
The story was he'd been bought, but Rivers was not inclined to believe it. In
these islands—still, in spite of the abolition of head-hunting, warrior
communities—not even the poorest family would willingly part with a son.
Abduction was more likely. He watched the child for several minutes, wanting to
go to him, and yet knowing the appearance of a strange white man would only
terrify him more.

'Are they going to kill him?' Hocart said, lying
sleepless in bed that night.

'No, they won't do that—they'd have to kill us too.'

'Perhaps that wouldn't worry them.'

'The Commissioner's response to it would.'

But after Hocart was uneasily asleep, twitching and
muttering, Rivers lay awake, thinking that if the islanders wanted to get rid
of them it wouldn't be too difficult. White men died of blackwater fever all
the time, and no doubt there were poisons that mimicked the symptoms. You only
had to look at Ngea's skull to know that by the time the next steamer put in
there wouldn't be enough of them left to make investigation possible. Moreover,
the next steamer would be Brennan's, since he was the local trader, and,
confronted by any sign of trouble, he'd simply skedaddle as fast as possible.
No, they'd just have to wait and see, and be cautious.

Next morning, when he arrived in the village, the
little boy had gone.

* * *

They were invited to witness the placing of Ngea's
skull in the skull house. Njiru officiated.

At dawn they were woken by the screams of pigs being
slaughtered, and all morning columns of smoke had risen from the cooking fires.
It was noon before the ceremony started, the sun crashing down on shoulders and
heads, the heat intensified by two fires, the sacrificial fire on the hearth in
front of the skull house, and the common fire where Rivers and Hocart sat along
with people from the village and the surrounding hamlets. Rivers looked out for
the small captive boy, but could not see him. Beside him Lembu was plaiting a
creeper which he used to tie Ngea's jaw-bone to his skull, before placing a
diadem of shells round the cranium and other shells in the sockets of the eyes.