The rest of the afternoon was spent on a succession of young men. Rivers, by now feeling quite ill, was carried through it only by his perception that some at least were showing signs of improvement. One young man in particular, who’d broken down after finding the mutilated body of his friend, had become dramatically better in the last few weeks.
After dinner, Rivers decided to abandon the paperwork he ought to have been doing and have an early night. No bath tonight, he decided, he was too tired. He got between the sheets and stretched out his legs, thinking he’d never been so glad to be in a bed in his life. After a while he pushed the window further open and lay listening to the rain, a soft hushing sound that seemed to fill the room. Soon, still listening, he drifted off to sleep.
He was woken at two am by a pain in his chest. At first he tried to convince himself it was indigestion, but the leaping and pounding of his heart soon suggested other, more worrying possibilities. He pulled himself up, and concentrated on breathing slowly and quietly.
The wind had risen while he was asleep, and rain pelted the glass. All over the hospital, he knew, men would be lying awake, listening to the rain and the wind, thinking of their battalions sinking deeper into the mud. Bad weather was bad for the nerves. Tomorrow would not be an easy day.
An hour later he would have given anything for tomorrow to arrive. He was getting all the familiar symptoms. Sweating, a constant need to urinate, breathlessness, the sense of blood not flowing but squeezing through veins. The slightest movement caused his heart to pound. He was relieved when dawn came and it was possible to summon the orderly.
Bryce arrived shortly afterwards, brisk and sympathetic. He produced a stethoscope, and told Rivers to take his pyjama jacket off. The stethoscope moved across his chest. He sat up, leant forward and felt the same procession of cold rings across his back. ‘What do you think’s wrong?’ Bryce asked, putting the stethoscope away.
‘War neurosis,’ Rivers said promptly. ‘I already stammer and I’m starting to twitch.’
Bryce waited for Rivers to settle back against the pillows. ‘I suppose we’ve all got one of those. Your heartbeat’s irregular.’
‘Psychosomatic.’
‘And, as we keep telling the patients, psychosomatic symptoms are REAL. I think you should take some leave.’
Rivers shook his head. ‘No, I —’
‘That wasn’t a suggestion.’
‘Oh. I’ve got the September reports to do. If I do nothing else, I’ve got to do those.’
Bryce had started to smile. ‘There’s never going to be a convenient time, is there? Three weeks starting this weekend.’
A mutinous silence.
‘That gives you time to do the reports, provided you don’t see patients. All right?’ Bryce patted the coverlet and stood up. ‘I’ll tell Miss Crowe to put a notice up.’
Rivers was going on leave. He hadn’t been down to dinner for the past few days, but he was there tonight, Sassoon saw, looking rather better than he’d done recently, though still very tired. The MO’s table was the noisiest in the room. Even at this distance you could distinguish Brock’s high, reedy voice, MacIntyre’s broad Glaswegian, Bryce’s Edinburgh, Ruggles’s American, and Rivers, who, when he got excited in a discussion, as he often did, sounded rather like a sodawater syphon going off. Nobody, listening to him now, would have thought him capable of those endless silences.
Fothersgill, his long nose twitching fastidiously, had started to complain about the soup. ‘Nay, verily,’ he said. ‘A man knoweth not what manner of thing he eateth.’ He laughed as he said it, the laugh of a man who takes small discomforts very seriously indeed. Sassoon, marooned between two particularly bad stammerers, felt no need to take part in the conversation. Instead, he twisted round in his seat and looked for Owen, remembering the last poem he’d been shown. ‘Out there, we’ve walked quite friendly up to Death;/Sat down and eaten with him, cool and bland —/Pardoned his spilling mess-tins in our band…’ Precisely, Sassoon thought. And now we complain about the soup. Or rather, they do.
After dinner he went straight to Owen’s room. ‘Do you mind?’ he said. ‘I’m on the run from Theosophy.’
Owen was already clearing papers from the chair. ‘No, come in.’
‘I can’t stay in the same room with him.’
‘You should ask Rivers for a change.’
‘Too late. He goes tomorrow. Anyway, I wouldn’t want to bother him. Have you got anything for me?’
‘This.’
Sassoon took the sheet and read the whole poem through twice, then returned to the first two lines.
What minute-bells for these who die so fast?
— Only the monstrous/solemn anger of our guns.
‘I thought “passing” bells,’ Owen said.
‘Hm. Though if you lose “minute” you realize how weak “fast” is. “Only the monstrous anger…”’
‘“Solemn’?”
‘“Only the solemn anger of our guns.” Owen, for God’s sake, this is War Office propaganda.’
‘No, it’s not.’
‘Read that line.’
Owen read. ‘Well, it certainly isn’t meant to be.’
‘I suppose what you’ve got to decide is who are “these”? The British dead? Because if they’re British, then our guns is…’
Owen shook his head. ‘All the dead.’
‘Let’s start there.’ Sassoon crossed out “our” and pencilled in “the”. ‘You’re sure that’s what you want? It isn’t a minor change.’
‘No, I know. ‘If it’s “the”, it’s got to be “monstrous”.’
‘Agreed.’ Sassoon crossed out ‘solemn’. ‘So:
What passing-bells for these who die… so
fast
?
— Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
‘Well, there’s nothing wrong with the second line.’
‘“In herds”?’
‘Better.’
They worked on the poem for half an hour. The wind had been rising all evening, and the thin curtain billowed in the draught. At one point Sassoon looked up and said, ‘What’s that noise?’
‘The wind.’ Owen was trying to find the precise word for the sound of shells, and the wind was a distraction he’d been trying to ignore.
‘No, that.’
Owen listened. ‘I can’t hear anything.’
‘That tapping.’
Owen listened again. ‘No.’
‘Must be imagining things.’ Sassoon listened again, then said, ‘They don’t wail. They hiss.’
‘No, these are going right over.’
‘That’s right. They hiss.’ He looked at Owen. ‘I hear hissing.’
‘You hear tapping.’
The wind went on rising all evening. By the time Sassoon left Owen’s room, it was wailing round the building, moaning down chimneys, snapping branches off trees with a crack like rifle fire. All over the decayed hydro, badly fitting windows rattled and thumped, and Sassoon, passing several of his ‘fellow breakdowns’ in the corridor, thought they looked even more ‘mental’ than usual.
His own room was empty. He got into bed and lay reading while he waited for Fothersgill to return from his bridge session. As soon as he entered the room, Sassoon rolled over and pretended to be asleep. A tuneless whistling ensued, punctuated by grunts as Fothersgill bent over his shaving mirror and tweezed hairs out of his nostrils.