• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2142 0

wounded, over men, and pieces of men, and were reduced to crawling, so mashed and messed was the earth and the flesh mashed into it. After a brief time, Harry felt a thump, and found his tunic damp, and then soaked, with his blood. He tried to crawl on, and could not, and other men crawled past him and sprawled in the mud. He bled. He lay still. He knew in the abstract that stomach wounds were nasty. His head churned. He wished he had not had the rum. He wished he could die quickly. He did not. Men crawled round and over him and he came in and out of consciousness. He noticed when there were no more men, and he noticed nightfall, unless the dark was death. It was not. But he was dead by the time he was found by the stretcher-bearers, so they took his identity-tag, and looked in his bloody pockets for letters or photos—there was a publicity photograph of Olive, looking wise and gentle. Then they left him.

Corporal Crowe made it to the German wire, which was uncut. He was caught up in it, as they shot him, and he hung like a beast on a gamekeeper’s gibbet and died very slowly. In this attack three thousand men were casualties.

The 2 Middlesex Battalion had 92.5 per cent casualties. On that first day over forty thousand men were killed or wounded. General Haig remarked that this “cannot be considered severe in view of numbers engaged.”

The Todefright Wellwoods received another telegram. Humphry said “It is bad news” and Olive said “What do you think I thought it was?” She sat in an armchair and simply stared. Humphry said “My dear?” She simply stared. After a time, she heard Humphry, in his study, weeping. It was a strange, childlike, whimpering sobbing, as though he meant to conceal it. She stood up, heavily, and went, and stroked his hair as he sobbed, with his head on his desk.

“It’s like a knife. Cutting the world up, as though it was a cheese. Or butcher’s meat, that’s a better figure of speech. I do love you, Humph, whatever that means. If it helps. It may not. There isn’t much help.”

“I love you, too, if it helps.”

Tragedy had become so commonplace that it was impolite to mention it, or grieve in the open. Olive had the useless thought that she should have protected them, that she had thought of Tom, and taken her attention from these boys, and lost them.

Julian Cain was in the fighting round Thiepval and Thiepval Wood in July 1916. It was a pretty wood before the battle. It was a hopeless place to attack through and men went wild and mad and were lost there. There was a pretty château, which the shells pounded, and there were trenches whose parapets were reinforced with the deliberately built-in bodies of the dead. Julian was blown backwards by the explosion of a shell and lost consciousness, lost his mind, he thought, when he found himself lying on the earth near a field ambulance and could not remember who he was, or how he had come there. He had a shallow wound across his skull, and scattered shrapnel embedded in his flesh. He said, when they came to dress his wound, “Who am I?” and the orderly went through his pockets and told him he was Lieutenant Julian Cain.

He remembered, for some reason, very clearly, the Wood in Through the Looking-Glass, where things have no names, neither trees, nor creatures, nor Alice herself. He lay there, swimming in morphine, and thought about names. The dead who were buried had their names on temporary grave-markers, which were often blown to bits in the endless gunfire. Their name liveth after them for evermore. He had a drugged vision of names, like scurrying rats searching the battlefield for the flesh they had been attached to, like the prophet Ezekiel’s valley of bones. You thought a name had a life but men you met in the trenches were not solid enough to have a named life that went before and after in what they had always thought was a normal manner. Men and their names were provisional: he realised he learned their names with a kind of dull grief, because there were already so many he did not need, any longer, to recall, because they could not be recalled, they were