The Ghost Road (30 page)

* * *

The light was growing now, the subdued, brownish light
of a November dawn. At the far end of the ward, Simpson, too far gone himself
to have any understanding of what was happening, jargoned and gobbled away, but
all the other faces were turned towards the screens, each man lending the
little strength he had to support Hallet in his struggle.

So far, except for the twice repeated whisper and the
wordless cries, Hallet had been silent, but now the whisper began again, only
more loudly.
Shotvarfet.

Shotvarfet.
Again and again, increasing in
volume as he directed all his strength into the cry.
His mother tried to
soothe him, but he didn't hear her.
Shotvarfet.
Shotvarfet.
Again and again,
each time louder, ringing across the ward.
He opened his one eye and
gazed directly at Rivers, who had come from behind the screens and was standing
at the foot of his bed.

'What's he saying?' Major Hallet asked.

Rivers opened his mouth to say he didn't know and then
realized he did. 'He's saying, "It's not worth it'".

'Oh, it is worth it, it
is
,' Major Hallet said,
gripping his son's hand. The man was in agony. He hardly knew what he was
saying.

'Shotvarfet.'

The cry rose again as if he hadn't spoken, and now the
other patients were growing restless.
A buzz of protest not
against the cry, but in support of it, a wordless murmur from damaged brains
and drooping mouths.

'Shotvarfet.
Shotvarfet.'

'I can't stand much more of this,' Major Hallet said.
The mother's eyes never left her son's face. Her lips were moving though she
made no sound. Rivers was aware of a pressure building in his own throat as
that single cry from the patients went on and on. He could not afterwards be
sure that he had succeeded in keeping silent, or whether he too had joined in.
All he could remember later was gripping the metal rail at the end of the bed
till his hands hurt.

And then suddenly it was over. The mangled words faded
into silence, and a moment or two later, with an odd movement of the chest and
stomach muscles like somebody taking off a too tight jumper,

Hallet died.

Rivers reached the bedside before the family realized
he was gone, closed the one eye, and from sheer force of habit looked at his
watch.

'6.25,' he said, addressing Sister Roberts.

He raised the sheet as far as Hallet's chin, arranged
his arms by his sides and withdrew silently, leaving the family alone with
their grief, wishing, as he pulled the screens more closely together, that he
had not seen the young girl turn aside to hide her expression of relief.

*
* *

On the edge of the canal the Manchesters lie, eyes
still open, limbs not yet decently arranged, for the stretcher-bearers have
departed with the last of the wounded, and the dead are left alone. The battle
has withdrawn from them; the bridge they succeeded in building was destroyed by
a single shell. Further down the canal another and more successful crossing is
being attempted, but the cries and shouts come faintly here.

The sun has risen. The first shaft strikes the water
and creeps towards them along the bank, discovering here the back of a hand,
there the side of a neck, lending a rosy glow to skin from which the blood has
fled, and then, finding nothing here that can respond to it, the shaft of light
passes over them and begins to probe the distant fields.

*
* *

Grey light tinged with rosy pink seeps in through the
tall windows. Rivers, slumped at the night nurses' station, struggles to stay
awake. On the edge of sleep he hears Njiru's voice, repeating the words of the
exorcism of Ave.

O Sumbi! O Gesese!
O Palapoko! O Gorepoko! O you Ngengere at the root of the sky. Go down, depart
ye.

And there, suddenly, not separate from the ward, not
in any way ghostly, not in
fashion blong tomate,
but himself in every particular, advancing
down the ward of the Empire Hospital, attended by his shadowy retinue, as
Rivers had so often seen him on the coastal path on Eddystone, came Njiru.

There is an end
of men, an end of chiefs, an end of chieftains' wives,
an
end of chiefs' children—then go down and depart. Do not yearn for us, the
fingerless, the crippled,
the
broken. Go down and
depart, oh, oh, oh.

He bent over Rivers, staring into his face with those
piercing hooded eyes. A long moment, and then the brown face, with its streaks
of lime, faded into the light of the daytime ward.

AUTHOR'S
NOTE

The reader may wish to know more about some of the
historical characters encountered in this novel.

Colonel Marshall-of-the-Ten-Wounds was killed
attempting to cross the Sambre-Oise canal, having led his men 'without regard
for his personal safety'. He was awarded a posthumous VC.

James Kirk, who paddled himself out on to the canal to
give covering fire, was also awarded a posthumous VC.

Wilfred Owen's MC, for gallantry in capturing an enemy
machine-gun and inflicting 'considerable losses' on the enemy at the battle of
Joncourt, was awarded after his death.

Rivers drew on his Eddystone data in several published
papers, but the major joint work he and Hocart planned was never written. His
notebooks are in the Rare Manuscripts Department of Cambridge University
Library.

Njiru, Kundaite, Namboko Taru, Namboko Emele, Nareti,
Lembu and the captive child are also historical, but of them nothing more is
known.

The following works can be unreservedly recommended:

W. H. R.
Rivers
by Richard
Slobodin (Columbia University Press, 1978)

Memories of
Lewis Carroll
by
Katharine Rivers, with an Introduction by Richard Slobodin (Library Research
News, McMaster University, 1976)

Collected
Letters
of Wilfred Owen
(Oxford University Press, 1967)

Wilfred
Owen
by Jon
Stallworthy (Oxford
University
Press, 1974)

Owen the
Poet
by Dominic
Hibberd (Macmillan, 1986)

Wilfred
Owen,
The
Last Year
by Dominic Hibberd (Constable, 1992)

Wilfred
Owens
Voices: Language and Community
by Douglas Kerr (Clarendon Press, 1993)

Wilfred
Owen, Poet and Soldier
by Helen McPhail (Gliddon Books in association with the Wilfred Owen
Association, 1993)