Chapter III: Part ONE: The North (2)

The moonlight is a pool of silver on the linoleum floor. It glints on the enamel washbasin and slop pail. I can almost see the moon reflected in the slop pail. Everything in my cubicle is luminous. My clothes hanging on pegs, my white aprons and rubber boots, my typewriter and tin box of biscuits, the big sharp scissors on the table--all these familiar things are touched with magic and make me uneasy. Through the open door of the hut comes the sweet sickish scent of new-mown hay, mingling with the smell of disinfectants, of Eau de Javel and iodoform, and wet mud and blood. There is wet mud on my boots and blood on my apron. I don’t mind. It is the scent of new-mown hay that makes me uneasy. The little whimpering voice of a man who is going to die in an hour or two comes across the whispering grass from the hut next door. That little sound I understand. It is like the mew of a wounded cat. Soon it will stop. It will stop soon after midnight. I know. I can tell. I go on duty at midnight, and he will die and go to Heaven soon after, lulled to sleep by the lullaby of the guns.

Far beyond him, out in the deep amorous night, I can hear the war going on. I hear the motor convoys rumbling down the road and the tramp of feet marching. I can tell the ambulances from the lorries and distinguish the wagons that carry provisions. Reinforcements are coming up along the road through the moonlit fields. The three-inch guns are pounding. All along the horizon they are pounding, pounding. But there will be no attack. The section is quiet. I know. I can tell. The cannonade is my lullaby. It soothes me. I am used to it. Every night it lulls me to sleep. If it stopped I could not sleep. I would wake with a start. The thin wooden walls of my cubicle tremble and the windows rattle a little. That, too, is natural. It is the whispering of the grass and the scent of new-mown hay that makes me nervous.

The war is the world, and this cardboard house, eight by nine, behind the trenches, with a roof that leaks and windows that rattle, and an iron stove in the corner, is my home in it. I have lived here ever since I can remember. It had no beginning, it will have no end. War, the Alpha and the Omega, world without end--I don’t mind it. I am used to it. I fit into it. It provides me with everything that I need, an occupation, a shelter, companions, a jug and a basin. When winter comes my stove is red hot, and I sit with my feet on it. When it rains I sleep under a mackintosh sheet with an umbrella over my pillow and a basin on my feet. Sometimes in a storm the roof blows off. Then I wait under the blankets for the old men to come and put it back again. Sometimes the Germans shell the cross roads beyond us or the town behind us, and the big shells pass over the hospital screaming. Then the surgeons in the operating hut turn up the collars of their white jackets, and we lift our shoulders round our ears. I don’t mind--it is part of the routine. For companions there are, of course, the surgeons and the nurses and the old grizzled orderlies, but I have other companions more intimate than these. Three in particular, a lascivious monster, a sick bad-tempered animal, and an angel; Pain, Life and Death. The first two are quarrelsome. They fight over the wounded like dogs over a bone. They snarl and growl and worry the pieces of men that we have here; but Pain is the stronger. She is the greater. She is insatiable, greedy, vilely amorous, lustful, obscene--she lusts for the broken bodies we have here. Wherever I go I find her possessing the men in their beds, lying in bed with them; and Life, the sick animal, mews and whimpers, snarls and barks at her, till Death comes--the Angel, the peacemaker, the healer, whom we wait for, pray for--comes silently, drives Pain away, and horrid, snarling Life, and leaves the man in peace.

Lying in my bed, I listen to the great, familiar, muttering voice of the war and to the feeble, mewing, whimpering voice of Life, the sick bad-tempered animal, and to the loud triumphant gutteral shouts of Pain plying her traffic in the hut next to me, where the broken bodies of men are laid out in rows with patches of moonlight on their coverlets. At midnight I will get up and put on a clean apron and go across the grass to the sterilizing room and get a cup of cocoa. At midnight we always have cocoa in there next to the operating room, because there is a big table and boiling water. We push back the drums of clean dressings and the litter of soiled bandages, and drink our cocoa standing round the table. Sometimes there isn’t much room. Sometimes legs and arms wrapped in cloths have to be pushed out of the way. We throw them on the floor--they belong to no one and are of no interest to anyone--and drink our cocoa. The cocoa tastes very good. It is part of the routine.

But the moonlight is like a pool of silver water on the floor, and the air is soft and the moon is floating, floating through the sky. In a dream I see her, in a crazy hurting dream. Lovely night, lovely lunatic moon, lovely scented love-sick earth--you are not true; you are not a part of the routine. You are a dream, an intolerable nightmare, and you recall a world that I once knew in a dream.

The mewing voice of the wounded cat dying in the shed next door to me is true. He is my brother, that wounded cat. This also is true. His voice goes on and on. He tells the truth to me. He tells me what I know to be true. But soon--quite soon--I hope and think that his voice will stop. Now the monstrous mistress that he has taken to his bed has got him, but soon he will escape. He will go to sleep in her arms lulled by the lullaby of the pounding guns that he and I are used to, and then in his sleep the Angel will come and his soul will slip away. It will run lightly over the whispering grasses and murmuring trees. It will leap through the velvety dark that is tufted with the soft concussion of distant shells bursting from the mouths of cannon. It will fly up through the showery flares and shooting rockets past the moon into Heaven. I know this is true. I know it must be true.

How strange the moon is with its smooth cheeks. How I fear the whispering of the grasses and murmuring of the trees. What are they saying? I want to go to sleep to the old soothing lullaby of the cannon that rocks me--rocks me in my cradle--but they keep me awake with their awful whispering. I am drowsy and drugged with heavy narcotics, with ether and iodoform and other strong odours. I could sleep. I could sleep with the familiar damp smell of blood on my apron, but the terrible scent of the new-mown hay disturbs me. Crazy peasants came and cut it while the battle was going on just beyond the canal. Women and children came with pitch-forks and tossed it in the sun. Now it lies over the road in the moonlight, wafting its distressing perfume into my window, bringing me waking dreams--unbearable, sickening, intolerable dreams--that interrupt the routine.

Ah! The great gun down by the river is roaring, is shouting. What a relief! That I understand--that giant’s voice. He is a friend--another familiar, monstrous friend. I know him. I listen every night for his roar. I long to hear it. But it is dying away now. The echo goes growling down the valley, and again the trees and the grasses begin that murmuring and whispering. They are lying. It is a lie that they are saying. There are no lovely forgotten things. The other world was a dream. Beyond the gauze curtains of the tender night there is War, and nothing else but War. Hounds of war, growling, howling; bulls of war, bellowing, snorting; war eagles, shrieking and screaming; war fiends banging at the gates of Heaven, howling at the open gates of hell. There is War on the earth--nothing but War, War let loose in the world, War--nothing left in the whole world but War--War, world without end, amen.

I must change my apron now and go out into the moonlight. The sick man is still mewing. I must go to him. I am afraid to go to him. I cannot bear to go across the whispering grass and find him in the arms of his monstrous paramour. It is a night made for love, for love, for love. That is not true. That is a lie.

The peaked roofs of the huts stand out against the lovely sky. The moon is just above the abdominal ward. Next to it is the hut given up to gas gangrene, and next to that are the Heads. The Knees are on the other side, and the Elbows and the fractured Thighs. A nurse comes along carrying a lantern. Her white figure moves silently across the ground. Her lantern glows red in the moonlight. She goes into the gangrene hut that smells of swamp gas. She won’t mind. She is used to it, just as I am. Pain is lying in there waiting for her. It is holding the damp greenish bodies of the gangrene cases in her arms. The nurse will try to get her out of those beds, but the loathesome creature will be too much for her. What can the nurse do against this she-devil, this Elemental, this Diva? She can straighten a pillow, pour drops out of a bottle, pierce a shrunken side with a needle. She can hold to lips a cup of cold water. Will that land her, too, in Heaven one day? I wonder; I doubt it. She is no longer a woman. She is dead already, just as I am--really dead, past resurrection. Her heart is dead. She killed it. She couldn’t bear to feel it jumping in her side when Life, the sick animal, choked and rattled in her arms. Her ears are deaf; she deafened them. She could not bear to hear Life crying and mewing. She is blind so that she cannot see the torn parts of men she must handle. Blind, deaf, dead--she is strong, efficient, fit to consort with gods and demons--a machine inhabited by the ghost of a woman--soulless, past redeeming, just as I am--just as I will be.

There are no men here, so why should I be a woman? There are heads and knees and mangled testicles. There are chests with holes as big as your fist, and pulpy thighs, shapeless; and stumps where legs once were fastened. There are eyes--eyes of sick dogs, sick cats, blind eyes, eyes of delirium; and mouths that cannot articulate; and parts of faces--the nose gone, or the jaw. There are these things, but no men; so how could I be a woman here and not die of it? Sometimes, suddenly, all in an instant, a man looks up at me from the shambles, a man’s eyes signal or a voice calls “Sister! Sister!” Sometimes suddenly a smile flickers on a pillow, white, blinding, burning, and I die of it. I feel myself dying again. It is impossible to be a woman here. One must be dead.

Certainly they were men once. But now they are no longer men.

There has been a harvest. Crops of men were cut down in the fields of France where they were growing. They were mown down with a scythe, were gathered into bundles, tossed about with pitchforks, pitchforked into wagons and transported great distances and flung into ditches and scattered by storms and gathered up again and at last brought here--what was left of them.

Once they were real, splendid, ordinary, normal men. Now they mew like kittens. Once they were fathers and husbands and sons and the lovers of women. Now they scarcely remember. Sometimes they call to me “Sister, Sister!” in the faint voices of faraway men, but when I go near them and bend over them, I am a ghost woman leaning over a thing that is mewing; and it turns away its face and flings itself back into the arms of Pain, its monster bedfellow. Each one lies in the arms of this creature. Pain is the mistress of each one of them.

Not one can escape her. Neither the very old ones nor the young slender ones. Their weariness does not protect them, nor their loathing, nor their struggling, nor their cursing. Their hideous wounds are no protection, nor the blood that leaks from their wounds on to the bedclothes, nor the foul odour of their festering flesh. Pain is attracted by these things. She is a harlot in the pay of War, and she amuses herself with the wreckage of men. She consorts with decay, is addicted to blood, cohabits with mutilations, and her delight is the refuse of suffering bodies.

You can watch her plying her trade here any day. She is shameless. She lies in their beds all day. She lies with the Heads and the Knees and the festering Abdomens. She never leaves them. Even when she has exhausted them, even when at last worn out with her frenzy they drop into a doze, she lies beside them, to tease them with her excruciating caresses, her pinches and twinges that make them moan and twist in sleep. At any hour of the day or night you can watch her deadly amours, and watch her victims struggling. The wards are full of these writhings and tossings, they are agitated as if by a storm with her obscene antics. But if you come at midnight--if you come with me now--you will see the wounded, helpless, go fast asleep in her arms. You will see them abandon themselves to deep sleep with her beside them in their beds. They hope to escape her in sleep and find their way back to the fields where they were growing, strong lusty men, before they were cut down.

She lies there to spoil their dreams. When they dream of their women and little children, of their mothers and sweethearts; when they dream that they are again clean, normal, real men, filled with a tender and lovely love for women, then she wakes them. In the dark she wakes them and tightens her arms round their shrivelled bodies. She strangles their cries. She pours her poisoned breath into their panting mouths. She squeezes their throbbing hearts in their sides. In the dark, in the dark she takes them; she takes them to herself and keeps them until Death comes, the gentle angel. This is true. I know. I have seen.

Listen. Do you hear him? He is still mewing like a cat, but very faintly, and the trees are still murmuring and the grasses whispering. I hear the sound of many large creatures moving behind the hedge. They are panting and snorting. A procession of motor lorries and ambulances is going heavily down the road. They pass slowly, lumbering along with their heavy loads, and through the huge laborious sound of their grinding wheels threads the whirr of a swift touring car. You can hear it coming in the distance. It rushes nearer. It dashes past with a scratching shriek of its Klaxon. It plunges down the road and is gone. Some officer hurrying on some terrible business, some officer with gold leaves on his hat and a sword on his hip, in a limousine, leaning back on his cushions, calculating the number of men needed to repair yesterday’s damage, and the number of sandbags required to repair their ditches. He does not see the lovely night and the lovely moon, and the unseemly love affair that is going on between the earth and the moon. He does not notice that he has passed the gate of a hospital, or know that behind the hedge men are lying in the dark with patches of blood and patches of moonlight on their coverlets. He is blind, deaf, dead, as I am--another machine just as I am.

It is twelve o’clock. The nurse has disappeared. She has left her lantern outside my door. There is no one to be seen. Nothing moves in the moonlight. But the earth is trembling, and the throbbing of the guns is the throbbing of the pulse of the War; world without end.

Listen! The whimpering mew of the wounded cat has stopped. There’s not a sound except the whisper of the wind in the grass. Quick! Be quick! In a moment a man’s spirit will escape, will be flying through the night past the pale, beautiful, sentimental face of the moon.

ENFANT DE MALHEUR

His name was tattooed on his arm, and the head of a woman life-size on his back. He himself might have been fashioned by Praxitiles, but some sailor in a North African port had dug needles of blue ink into the marble flesh of his arm, and written there the indelible words--Enfant de Malheur. He waved that slender member of his incredibly perfect Greek body in the nurse’s face when she asked him his name, and said Voila! with a biting sarcasm and a snarl of pointed white teeth. Then, glaring defiance, defying her to knife him in the back, he turned over and displayed his back to her. The face of a chocolate box beauty done in colours decorated its smooth surface. Her silly blue eyes stared up from between his fine flat shoulder blades and her full red lips smiled on his spinal cord. She was a trashy creature, a plump, coarse morsel, no fit companion for this young prince of darkness. He had race, distinction, an exquisite elegance, and, even in his battered state, the savage grace of a panther. Not even his wounds could disfigure him. The long deep gash in his side made his smooth torso seem the more incredibly fair and frail. The loss of one leg rendered the other more exquisite with its round polished knee and slim ankle.

He was one of a lot of some twenty Apaches that had been brought in that morning. As I remember them, they were all handsome young men--these assassins, thieves, pimps and traffickers in drugs--with sleek elastic limbs, smooth polished skins and beautiful bones. It was, if I remember rightly, only about their heads that I noticed imperfection. Their skulls were not quite right somehow, nor the shape of their ears. Their foreheads were low and receding, their jaws weak, and their mouths betrayed depravity. Still they were beautiful, beautiful as young leopards, and they brought with them into the hospital the strange morbid glamour of crime. But the Enfant de Malheur was the most beautiful of them all. He had the face of an angel.

They were exiles, and they belonged to the Battalions D’Afrique that had been put into the line two days before on the eve of an attack. Excellent troops of assault, these young Parisian criminals who had been sentenced to penal servitude for life and conscripted in the army of North Africa; but no good for holding the line or for anything else, so the General told me. No stamina, no powers of endurance; but they were born killers and they went over the top when the signal was given like wolf-hounds suddenly unleashed. Moreover, they knew that if they distinguished themselves in battle they would win back their freedom and become again at the end of the war, citizens of Paris.

Paris! Montmartre! The lighted cafés of the Place Blanche; the jingling, flashing, merry boulevards; these boys who lay like Greek gods in their beds recalled fantastically all the romantic tales that had ever been written by liars about the underworld of that most brilliant and seductive of capitals. The cunning camouflage of their beauty made it all seem true. The wild breath of false romance swept down the huts over their beds. And they lay in their beds, glaring, defiant, suspicious, expecting, so it seemed, to be attacked, assassinated or robbed in their beds at any moment by any one of us.

Their arrival had created something of a sensation in the hospital. The line had been held for the last few weeks by regiments of territorials, the “old ones,” as we called them; and we had received for many days nothing but greybeards. Fathers and grandfathers. “Vieux Pères,” good troops they made for holding the line in the wet winter weather. They simply sat there doggedly in the cold, the mud and the wet, enduring the war and getting rheumatism in their old joints week after week. So the arrival of this gang of reckless, noisy, sardonic and suspicious cutthroats was a pleasant diversion. But the Medicin Chef wasn’t pleased. He divided them up carefully, put only two, or at the most three, in each hut, and turned the nurses out of the operating room, for when these lovely beings were laid out in their immaculate beauty on the operating table and the ether mask was put over their proud, depraved, contemptuous faces, a stream of language of such foulness spurted from their chiselled lips that even the surgeons turned sick.

Pim ignored this. Pim was in charge of the Enfant de Malheur. She was the daughter of an Archdeacon, and had been brought up in a cathedral close in the North of England, then had trained in Edinburgh. She was an excellent nurse, very fastidious about the care of the patients. Her blue uniform was always stiffly starched, her cap and apron were immaculate; so was her smooth severe Madonna face, with its childlike candid eyes and thin quiet mouth. Pim didn’t understand the word Apache. She didn’t understand the Enfant de Malheur. She didn’t, I believe, notice that he was beautiful. She was interested in his wounds and in saving his life. She had come to the front to nurse the French because she had been told that they needed nurses more in the French army than in England; but she was not interested in Frenchmen, nor in any man. She knew no men. She knew only her patients. And she fought for their lives grimly, quietly, with her thin gentle lips pressed tight together when the crisis came. So she did not look at her young Apache with curiosity, and she did not know why he glared at her or why he gave a start and leapt sideways in his bed when she approached him. She made no attempt at understanding his queer argot, and was unaware when he insulted her. She quite simply continued to look after him with complete serenity. She simply went on handling his dangerous body with the perfectly assured impersonal gentleness of an excellent surgical nurse--washing him, dressing his wounds, giving him injections, enemas and bed pans, as if she were at home in Edinburgh at work under the eye of the most exacting of Scotch surgeons.

It was Guerin who understood that the pain-racked body of the Enfant de Malheur was as dangerous as an unexploded bomb. Guerin was an orderly with the rank of corporal, and he shared with Pim the responsibility of the ward. He was a priest, mobilized for the war; but we forgot this the greater part of the time, because he was so efficient as a nurse and looked so little like a priest in his neat blue corporal’s uniform with his bright alert eyes looking out through his pince nez. Indeed, it was only when one of Pim’s patients died that we remembered that Guerin was a priest. Then Pim summoned him shyly and withdrew, leaving Guerin alone with the man who was dying.

Sometimes coming in I would find the little man kneeling by a bedside with a crucifix in his hands, and the sight of his neat compact figure and intent scholarly face would recall to me his other holy calling, and make me wonder. He was so unlike the big priest in the black cassock with the white head bandage, who strode through the hospital grounds swinging a walking stick, and who had won the Croix de Guerre with three palms for bravery in the field. Guerin had looked to me, when he first came to us, a bit of a prig. He had a slightly quizzical expression; his manner was dry and impersonal; but he was on duty at six in the morning, and although he was supposed to go off twelve hours later, he was usually there busy with Pim until late in the evening, swabbing tables, boiling up instruments, or writing letters to someone’s dictation.

They were a very satisfactory couple. They scarcely spoke to each other, but they worked together as if they had been born for this, and this alone--this silent, quick, watchful, unceasing battle with death; this struggle to save men’s lives, by doing small things accurately at the right moment--without fuss, without noise, without sign of fatigue or hurry, or nervousness or despair. Their hands, their feet, their eyes never faltered and were never still. They made the same calm, quick, exact movements, took no unnecessary steps, left nothing undone. Yes, a curiously harmonious pair, this tall Englishwoman and small sturdy Frenchman. But Guerin did more than Pim did, because he understood more and had more to do. He believed in the Holy Catholic Church and the Remission of Sins and the Life Everlasting. He had set himself a task that he never mentioned. These wounded were not only his countrymen, they were his children, and he considered himself responsible for their immortal souls.

So he frowned and his small sharply-cut features took on a look of added sharpness and his keen eyes grew suddenly alert when the stretcher-bearers brought the Enfant de Malheur into the ward. He didn’t interfere with Pim, but he watched. He didn’t warn her or try to stop her, or keep her away from the lovely Greek god whom he knew to be one of the damned and a fiend out of hell; but when she leaned over the beautiful fierce chiselled face he was always on the watch. And so he saw what Pim, who didn’t understand, couldn’t see. He saw that this damné, this vile savage rat from the sewers of Paris, was puzzled, bewildered, intimidated by Pim’s stolid impersonal gentleness. He saw him gradually stop jumping to one side of the bed and take to wriggling and squirming with acute discomfort under her candid gaze, and he heard him muttering and snarling under his breath with exasperation at the insufferable presence of this Madonna-like woman with the cold, white, calm face. Guerin understood how uncomfortable the Enfant de Malheur would be in the presence of the beautiful Mother of God, and he watched him wriggle to avoid Pim’s cool maiden eyes. And so on the third day, when the Apache beckoned Pim to come to him, Guerin was even more surprised than Pim was, because he knew that the wicked brute in the boy had been tamed by the power of Pim’s unconscious serenity. Pim approached calmly. She was rather a stupid woman in some ways. “What is it?” she asked in her virginal English voice. “Que voulez-vous?” And Guerin, listening, watchful still, but with his tense face relaxed a little, heard the Apache whisper as he pulled Pim down: “Come close. I want to tell you something. I want to tell you,” said the child of misfortune into Pim’s clean white ear, “that I have never deliberately killed a woman in my life.”

And then Guerin heard Pim murmur quietly in her stiff polite way, as if she were interviewing some well-meaning but unfortunate backsliding parishioner in the Deanery: “I’m so glad to hear it.” And then the fiend out of hell, incarnate in the sewer rat with the angel face, fell back on his pillows with a sudden look of sharp self-disgust, and Pim moved off down the ward about her business.

I don’t think it occurred to her to wonder what his phrase implied, or how many women he had killed, as he would have called it, by accident, or how many men with intent. I don’t believe she was aware of the immense compliment he had paid her, or of having gained any victory over him. She had no knowledge of vice or evil. She did not know that he was truly one of the damned, and that his heart was black and heavy with a sick black weight of fear that came sweeping over him in his new weakness, and so next day, when he began to be frightened, she was surprised by the wild gleams of fear that came and went in his eyes.

But Guerin knew. He was a student of men, and he knew that the Enfant de Malheur was his brother, and believed in what he himself believed, namely, in the Holy Catholic Church and the Life Everlasting, in God, and the Mother of God, and the Holy Son of God, against whom he had fought and blasphemed since the day he was born.

His condition, both physical and moral, grew rapidly worse after this. Symptoms of gangrene set in. A second amputation was necessary, high up the thigh, almost at the hip, and again Pim, who had followed her patient to the operating room, was told to go away. She refused. She stood there obstinately while streams of filth and obscenity spurted from his beautiful pale mouth--putrid psychic sewage of the underworld spouting from him like a fountain; but to the surgeon’s embarrassed, irritated excuses she answered: “I don’t understand his language, so what difference does it make?” and she took him back and put him gently to bed.

But when he came to after the operation, there was a new look in his eyes. Pim went white at the sight of it, and her hand, as she put the long saline needle into his side, trembled, and she went in search of Guerin.

“He is so frightened,” she said, “he is so afraid to die. I can’t bear it. We must save him, Guerin.”

So they conspired to save him. There were forty beds in the hut, and they were all full; but those two--Pim and Guerin--without fuss multiplied themselves. No royal patient was ever nursed with greater care than our Enfant de Malheur, but he grew worse, and his fear grew worse. His fear increased until its presence filled the ward, and the old greybeards in their beds turned away their faces and stopped their ears to hide from it.

He began to sweat terribly. He began to toss and writhe. He began to smell bad. Moods of blasphemous bravado alternated with fits of uncontrollable panic. In the middle of a curse his teeth would begin to chatter. Then suddenly his eyes would start from his head in terror, and he would shriek for help and thrash out wildly till Pim came to him or Guerin. Sometimes he sobbed like a child in Pim’s arms. More often he raged at her, cursed her and Guerin and God. His bed became a centre of obscenity. Foul odours, foul words, foul matter swirled round him, and always there was that terror in his eyes, and the sweat pouring down his body that was greenish now as if covered with slime. The tattooed lady smiled through the slime on his back, and he would wave his wasted arm and hit out with it, and the big letters seemed to shout to Pim down the ward: Enfant de Malheur!

Finally he could not bear her near him, could not bear the sight of her near his bed or the touch of her hands. One afternoon he yelled at her to go away, leave him alone. She had maintained so far her stolid serenity, but at that she broke down. I found her behind her screen at the end of the ward with her shoulders shaking, her face twisting. It was nine o’clock in the evening. I told her to go off duty at once.

“But he is going to die in the night,” she whispered.

“I know.”

“And he is terribly frightened.”

“I know.”

“His fear is so ugly. It frightens me and the others, all the old men. We must do something. Can’t we do something?”

“Perhaps Guerin can do something. You and I, what can we do?”

“If only he weren’t so sane. If only he didn’t realise. But his fever seems to have sharpened his wits. He knows he is going to die. He never forgets for a second. He hasn’t had a wink of sleep. Dying usually slows down, blurs everything, brings a merciful dullness; but for him there is no such mercy. His nerves are live wires. Morphine has no effect. I’ve given him extra doses. No good, not a bit of good. But he must have relief, I tell you. This is impossible.” Her face had a slightly crazed look. “I tell you I am ready to give him any amount of stuff. I’ll do anything to put an end to it.”

I said, “Come along, Pim. You can’t kill your patient. Come now at once. You’re doing no good here.” What he wants, I said to myself, is to be convinced that he has nothing to be afraid of. But suppose I tried to convince him that there was nothing to fear, no God, no crucified Christ waiting, no everlasting life stretching ahead of him, nothing but nothingness, I could never convince him--never. I had no power over his fear.

Guerin met me at the door of the hut as I was going out with Pim. He was polishing his eyeglasses.

“I would like permission to spend the night in the ward,” he said in his quick way, adjusting his pince nez on his pointed nose.

“Very well, Guerin. You’ve been on duty all day, and you’ll be on all day to-morrow, remember.”

“Don’t worry about that,” he said briefly, dismissing us both with a wave of his hand.

“Can I do nothing, Guerin?” Pim asked meekly.

“Nothing, Mademoiselle.”

They looked at each other. Then she looked down the ward to where the boy was lying and her mouth contracted. We could distinguish from our distance the terrified eyes.

“What is he afraid of?” she asked, shuddering.

“Of hell, Mademoiselle,” said Guerin. And suddenly, as if he had heard us, some power jerked the boy off his pillow, and his arms shot out in front of him. “Je ne meurs pas,” he cried; “Je ne meurs pas. Je ne voudrais pas mourir.” I hurried Pim away.

When I went back, Guerin was on his knees by the boy’s bed reading in low rapid tones from a little book. The Enfant de Malheur was not listening. He was quite unaware of him. He was entirely and horribly absorbed by another presence that seemed to be attacking him as an octopus attacks with a dozen arms. He was writhing in the unseen clutches. He was dodging and twisting and hissing at the thing through clenched teeth, and his eyes darted this way and that like beings separate from himself, possessed by a panic of their own.

I went from bed to bed attending to the old grumbling ones and trying not to look, but I could hear his fear increasing. Its tempo grew audibly more rapid, more frantic. His invisible enemy seemed to be going for him now in rushes and leaps of increasing fury. I hurried through my work, scolding in whispers the old men who were annoyed by his noise and troubled by his fear. I rattled my basins and kettles, making a noise of my own to distract them. But I could hear the boy’s sobbing breath, hear him choking and shuddering, and every few seconds his voice would burst from his suffocating chest in a wail of defiant terror, and once he went off into a peal of hysterical laughter.

Guerin’s low voice went on through it all. His words followed each other rapidly, in a monotone, in a level directed chant. He was aiming them straight at the head of the sweating terror-struck creature beside him. He paid no attention to me. Neither of them was aware of me. I hurried past them and went out.

I had a great deal to do. I went from hut to hut. I gave piqures and medicines and drinks, adjusted bandages and pillows, filled hot water bottles. I busied myself busily, making an unnecessary fuss over my duties, and tried to absorb myself in relieving the shadowy suffering forms that lay so patiently, murmuring their gratitude. I was greedy for their gratitude. I wanted badly to be comforted. But I had a feeling of sickening suspense and miserable futility. I could not forget those two. But I thought of them as three. I caught myself saying to myself: “There is Guerin and the Enfant de Malheur and another. It isn’t just a case of one man fighting the panic of another. That’s what you call it. That’s what you want to believe it is. But there is something there that inspires the panic. Something else, something immense. The boy is a worm; the priest is an insignificant little man. But there are huge invisible things assaulting that noisome bed. What? The powers of darkness?”

“Nonsense,” I said to myself. I was adjusting the pulleys of a fracture case. “There are no dark powers abroad in the world. There is only death and pain and human evil and puny human remorse. The boy is a murderer, a thief, a vile rat, and he knows it; that’s all, but soon it will all be over. Soon he’ll be nothing, nothing. You know all the rest is silly superstition. If Guerin didn’t happen to be a Catholic priest he wouldn’t take it so hard.”

But even the quiet huts full of sleeping men seemed to be filled with mystery, and I hurried to get back to that other one across the way, where I knew an immense struggle was going on. I couldn’t bear not to see what was happening. I was afraid to go back, but fascinated, haunted, allured. “If Guerin didn’t happen to be a priest he would be as useless as you are in the face of this,” I said to myself. But could even Guerin do anything? Who was Guerin? A good orderly, a conscientious little man who believed in old legends. Very well, very well. Put it that the power of an aged belief was being put to the test in that ugly hut. I must see; I must know. I was devoured with curiosity.

My round took me two hours. It was midnight when I got back to them. Guerin was in the same position, on his knees, but he was praying now with a crucifix in his lifted hands and his eyes were closed. His face showed signs of great fatigue; it was tight and strained, but it wore a curious expression. And this expression was so concentrated that it seemed to come from his face and shoot upward like a shaft of dark light. I cannot describe it otherwise. His voice, too, had gained in power; it was low, level, and penetrating, but there were undertones in it that made one’s nerves tingle. “Dieu qui nous regarde, ayez pitié. Dieu le Saveur, je vous supplie--”

The Enfant de Malheur, I saw with a sickening catch in my side, had changed too, and the change was dreadful. I had hoped. What had I hoped? In his growing exhaustion and terror he had a look of madness. He was almost unrecognisable. There was a devilish hatred on his clammy face, a vile frantic fury, as well as an agony of terror. His fury seemed directed toward Guerin and the crucifix, while his terror was concentrated on something straight in front of him. His lips were twisted into a malevolent and hideous snarl; his eyes were the eyes of a suffering lunatic; they shot sullen sidelong looks of wild vindictiveness at the crucifix. As I passed he gave a vicious leap toward the foot of the bed, flung his tortured body past the priest’s head, hit out at the Christ with his fist, and, grinding his teeth, yelled out a hideous curse into the shadows. Guerin’s voice became audible again an instant later: “Dieu, notre seul espoir--Dieu, notre Sauveur.” The old men groaned and muttered, half waking.

At two o’clock the struggle was still going on and the situation seemed to me at first unchanged except that the apache and the priest were both fainting with exhaustion; but I noticed presently that they had come to closer grips with each other. Guerin, still on his knees, was talking now with his mouth close to the boy’s head, talking with a breathless intensity, saying apparently the same thing over and over, as if he were trying to drive home into that maddened brain a single important fact, and it seemed to me that through his terror the dying boy was listening in spite of himself. His attention was now very evidently divided between the death that menaced him at the foot of his bed and the voice that spoke in his ear. He was still fighting, but while he fought he listened reluctantly, fearful of allowing his attention to be distracted from his awful antagonist for a second, but nevertheless compelled to pay attention. And his antagonist seemed to have withdrawn a little. The beast was crouching, was cowering now, so it seemed to me. I stood at a distance under the lamp that hung from the peaked roof and watched. Guerin was panting for breath as if he had been running in a long race. But he seemed to be winning: he seemed to have pushed back a little that dark power. The boy was undoubtedly listening to his rapid, determined, insistent voice. The power in it was reaching him. What power? Guerin’s, you fool, I said to myself, but what powers did Guerin have to draw on. He had been at it now for four hours. Could he last out, keep it up? Keep up what? What, after all, was he doing? Was he telling the sewer rat lies to get him quiet? But how could he go on lying and lying? What power lay in tricks and falsehood to rout that awful terror? If Guerin failed he would, I caught myself thinking, be proved a liar; but if he won, what then? And just at that moment I saw the boy break away from Guerin’s voice and plunge with a shriek back into his agony and begin to writhe again as if grappling with a monster; and I almost ran to the door, sick with horror and disappointment.

“He has failed,” I said to myself. “Guerin has failed.” And I hurried away with my lantern through the bitter air, making excuses for him. “It’s too long, it’s too much. He’s been at it all night. No man on earth could keep it up at that pitch of intensity.” I stopped, stood staring down at my lantern. “But he’d almost got him,” I whispered, “and now he’s lost him again.” But had he? I turned round. Suppose Guerin had given up? I went running back. “I couldn’t bear that, Guerin,” I whispered. “I couldn’t bear to see you beaten;” I felt half suffocated as I crept to the door and looked in again.

Guerin had not relaxed or changed his position; he was still praying, praying. His words came to my ears like the soft raps of a small muffled hammer, hammering away, hammering and hammering.

And as I went on my rounds again, from hut to hut and bed to bed, I kept hearing Guerin’s voice, hammering away, hammering away at the gates of Heaven for the sake of the poor Enfant de Malheur. I knew now that nothing could stop him, that he would never give in, but I knew, too, that his time was getting short. The boy couldn’t last much longer. Soon he would die. Would he die in terror, aware of his unutterable vileness? Would Guerin be forced to see that happen? Would he be proved to himself to be a liar?

I felt cold and very tired. The sky was beginning to pale. It was four o’clock, the hour when life beats most feebly in the bodies of men. I went from hut to hut again, listening for the little sounds of uncertain fluttering life. Was this one slipping away or that one? “No one, no one else must die to-night,” I kept saying to myself. “There is only one death here to-night.” Then I turned towards Guerin’s hut. It stood ungainly and ugly in the half light, a wooden shelter through which many men had passed, some to go home, some to be buried in our cemetery where the wooden crosses stood so modestly above the ground. None of them stayed with us. All were lost to us. They passed like shadows. I could not remember them. They had no names, no faces in my memory. Who were they? What were they? What had become of them? I did not know. I knew nothing about them; I knew nothing of the dead or the living. I felt cold. I felt dreadfully cold as I approached the door, but as I entered I was aware that a strange hush had come into the ward, and through it I heard the old men breathing, and a young voice talking. It was the Enfant de Malheur who was speaking. He was talking to Guerin in a small weak child’s voice, and Guerin was kneeling beside him with the sweat pouring down his face. I saw Guerin take his handkerchief from his pocket and wipe his forehead, but he did not take his eyes from the boy’s eyes while he did this. They were both quiet; Guerin was very, very quiet, but the boy was sobbing a little, He was confessing his sins. He was pouring out all his dark, secret, haunting memories into Guerin’s ears and sobbing with relief. I turned and tip-toed out again, and stood for awhile against the wall of the hut, trembling. I went back at five. I could not keep away. I went back half through my round. I knew that I must not miss the last act of the drama that was playing itself out so quietly on that ugly narrow bed. I knew that I would never again in this world see anything so mysterious.

The dawn was filtering into the long wooden hut, filling it with the twilight of morning. The old men in their beds lay asleep. I looked down the long row apprehensively with a last catch at the heart. Was it over? Had Guerin really won? No, it was not over yet. Yes, yes, he had won. There they were, the two of them, and the boy’s white face was smiling above smoothed sheets. His eyes were closed. He lay relaxed, at peace, happy, and a small crumpled figure was still kneeling beside his bed and a low voice was praying again: “Jesu--Dieu--Sauveur qui nous regard.” And I knew that the Enfant de Malheur was listening. I knew that he could hear, because he moved a little, and touched the priest’s arm, half opened his eyes, and smiled as I watched him.

He died at six o’clock, holding Guerin by the hand. Then Guerin loosed his hand, and crossed the boy’s two hands on his wasted chest over the small crucifix, and rose from his knees and walked stiffly to the door.

The sun was rising. He staggered a little as he came out into the fresh morning air. I stood beside him. He began polishing his pince-nez. The sky was crimson behind the wooden sheds. Suddenly, softly, it filled with golden light. Great luminous bands spread up and out like a fan from the horizon. I looked at Guerin, so small, so crumpled, so exhausted. He did not look at all like a man of God. He looked like a book-worm, a bit of a prig, an insignificant little man.

“What does it mean, Guerin?” I asked. “It was like a miracle; but what does it mean?”

“He is safe.” Guerin said briefly. Then he adjusted his pince-nez, gave me a quick sharp look, and turned away to his own quarters.

ROSA

The stretcher bearers staggered under his weight when they brought him along through the sunlight to the operating room. They put him down for a moment on the ground outside the operating hut and wiped the sweat off their old foreheads. It was a hot summer’s day. The sector was quiet. The attack that had filled the hospital two days before had fizzled out. Now only occasional ambulances lurched in at the gate, bringing men who had been missed by the stretcher bearers, left out for a couple of nights on No Man’s Land, or been wounded unnecessarily by stray bullets after the big push was over. This man had come up over the horizon alone, a red giant, brought unconscious through the summer afternoon in a battered Ford, and deposited like a log on our doorstep, solitary character of some obscure incident in the aftermath of battle. He lay on the ground like a felled ox, a bull mortally wounded, breathing noisily.

His head was bound with a soiled bandage; his eyes were closed; his bruised mouth was open. Thick tufts of red hair pushed through the head bandage. There was dried blood round his immense rough lips. His huge red face was dark and blurred. He was covered with dust. He looked as if he had been rolling in a dirty field like some farm animal. He was a man of the soil, of the dark earth, with the heavy power of the earth in him. The bright sun shining on his massive unconscious bulk made the darkness of his lost consciousness visible. He seemed to lie deep, distant, withdrawn in a shadowy abyss. His spirit--brother spirit of ox and bullock and all beasts of the field--was deep asleep, in that sleep which is the No Man’s Land of the soul, and from which men seldom come back. But his immense body continued, in spite of his absence to hum and drum like a dynamo, like a machine whose tremendous power takes time to run down, and his breath came whistling and spurting through his rough bruised lips like escaping steam.

The old stretcher-bearers lifted him again grunting, and brought him in to us and hoisted him with difficulty on to the narrow white table, in the white room full of glistening bottles and shining basins and silvered instruments, among the white-coated surgeons and nurses. His head hung over one end of the table, and his feet over the other, and his great freckled arms hung helpless and heavy down at either side. Thick curling bunches of red hair, wiry and vigorous, grew out of his enormous chest. We stripped his body. It lay inert, a mountainous mass, with the rough-hewn brick-red face tipped back. His sightless face reminded one of the face of a rock in a sandstone quarry, chiselled with a pickaxe, deeply gashed. His closed eyes were caves under bushy cliffs, his battered mouth a dark shaft leading down into a cavern where a hammer was beating.

Because he was so big, his helplessness was the more helpless. But one could feel life pounding powerfully in his body--senseless life, pounding on, pumping air into his lungs, keeping his heart going. Yes, he would be hard to kill, I thought. Even a bullet in the head hadn’t killed him.

I counted his pulse. It was strong and steady.

“Shot through the mouth. Revolver bullet lodged in the brain.” Monsieur X was reading the ticket that had been pinned to the man’s blanket in the dressing station behind the front line.

But how? I wondered. How queer, I thought. Shot in the mouth--through the roof of the mouth. He must have been asleep in the trench with his mouth open. And I imagined him there, sprawling in the muddy ditch, an exhausted animal with his great stupid mouth open; and I saw a figure crawl in beside him and put the barrel of a revolver between his big yellow teeth. Fool, I thought. You fool--you big hulking brute beast--going to sleep like that in utter careless weariness.

But no, it was impossible. In this war such things didn’t happen. Men were killed haphazard--maimed, torn to pieces, scattered by shell fire, plugged full of shrapnel, hit square sometimes by rifle bullets, but not shot neatly through the roof of the mouth with a revolver.

They were whispering as they bent over him. Monsieur X frowned, pinched his lips together, looked down at the great, gentle unconscious carcase sideways.

“But how?” I asked. “Who?”