Rivers didn’t reply. The silence deepened, like a fall of snow, accumulating second by second, flake by flake, each flake by itself inconsiderable, until everything is transformed.
‘No, it wasn’t that.’ Graves’s knobbly, broken-nosed boxer’s face twitched. ‘I lied to him.’
Rivers’s glasses flashed as he lifted his head. ‘Yes, I thought perhaps you had.’
‘I swore on the Bible they wouldn’t court-martial him, but I didn’t know that. I think if he’d held out, they might’ve done.’
‘They might. But you know the advantages of treating this as a nervous breakdown would have been quite apparent to the authorities, even without your pointing them out.’
‘The fact remains I lied, and he gave in because he believed the lie. He wouldn’t have believed it from anybody else.’ He paused. ‘Do you think I was wrong?’
Rivers said gently, ‘I think you did the best you could for your friend. Not the best thing for his cause, but then the cause is lost anyway. Did you find the Board difficult to convince?’
‘Quite. There was one youngish man who was sympathetic. The other two… Well. I got the impression they didn’t believe in shell-shock at all. As far as they were concerned, it was just cowardice. I made up my mind right from the start they weren’t going to think that. I told them about last year when he took a German trench single-handed and got recommended for the VC. I’d like to see them do it. And this April. You know, that bombing expedition of his was fantastic. Everybody I’ve spoken to who was there thinks he should’ve got the VC for that.’ He paused. ‘I just wanted them to know what kind of man they were dealing with.’ He smiled. ‘I kept bursting into tears. I think that helped in a way. I could see them thinking, My God, if this one’s fit for duty what can the other one be like?’
‘And you told them that he had hallucinations?’
‘Yes.’ Graves looked slightly uncomfortable. ‘I had to convince them. There were a lot of things I didn’t tell them. I didn’t tell them he’d threatened to kill Lloyd George.’
‘And you persuaded him to say nothing?’
‘Yes. The last thing we needed was Siegfried talking sense about the war.’
‘Sense? You mean you agree with him?’
‘Well, yes. In theory. In theory the war should stop tomorrow, but it won’t. It’ll go on till there isn’t a cat or a dog left to enlist.’
‘So you agree with his views, but not his actions? Isn’t that rather an artificial distinction?’
‘No, I don’t think it is. The way I see it, when you put the uniform on, in effect you sign a contract. And you don’t back out of a contract merely because you’ve changed your mind. You can still speak up for your principles, you can argue against the ones you’re being made to fight for, but in the end you do the job. And I think that way you gain more respect. Siegfried isn’t going to change people’s minds like this. It may be in him to change people’s minds about the war, but this isn’t the way to do it.’
Rivers took his clasped hands away from his mouth. ‘I couldn’t agree with you more.’
‘What’s infuriating is that basically he knows it better than anybody. He’s the one who can communicate with the ordinary soldier. It’s just that he got taken over by Bertrand Russell and Ottoline Morrell. You know, I used to admire them. I used to think, well, I don’t agree with you, but, on the other hand, I can see it takes courage…’ He shook his head. ‘Not any more. I know Russell’s over military age, Ottoline’s a woman, fair enough, neither of them can understand what he’s been through, but they could see the state he was in, and they still went ahead. They were quite prepared to destroy him for the sake of propagating their views. I don’t forgive them for it.’ He made a visible effort to calm down. ‘Anyway, it’s over now. But I must say it gave me great pleasure to write to Russell and tell him Sassoon was on his way here, and he could just bloody well leave him alone in future.’
‘And what about you?’ Rivers asked, after a pause. ‘Do you think they’ll send you back?’
‘No, I don’t think so. In fact, the battalion doctor told me if he ever found my lungs in France again, he’d shoot me himself. I’m hoping for Palestine.’ A pause. ‘I’m glad he’s here. At least I can go back to Litherland knowing he’s safe.’
‘I hope he is.’ Rivers stood up. ‘And now I think I should let you get back to him. He’ll need company on his first evening.’
After Graves had gone, Rivers sat for a while resting his eyes, then opened the envelope Graves had given him. Three sheets of paper. On the top sheet, dated the 22nd April, Sassoon had written in pencil, ‘I wrote these in hospital ten days after I was wounded.’
Groping along the tunnel in the gloom
He winked his tiny torch with whitening glare,
And bumped his helmet, sniffing the hateful air.
Tins, boxes, bottles, shapes too vague to know,
And once, the foul, hunched mattress from a bed;
And he exploring, fifty feet below
The rosy dusk of battle overhead.
He tripped and clutched the walls; saw someone lie
Humped and asleep, half-covered with a rug;
He stooped and gave the sleeper’s arm a tug.
‘I’m looking for headquarters.’ No reply.
‘Wake up, you sod!’ (For days
he’d
had no sleep.)
‘I want a guide along this cursed place.’
He aimed a kick at the unanswering heap;
And flashed his beam across that livid face
Horribly glaring up, whose eyes still wore
The agony that died ten days before
Whose bloody fingers clutched a hideous wound.
Gasping, he staggered onward till he found
Dawn’s ghost that filtered down a shafted stair,
To clammy creatures groping underground,
Hearing the boom of shells with muffled sound.
Then with the sweat of horror in his hair,
He climbed with darkness to the twilight air.
The General
‘Good morning, good morning!’ the General said
When we met him last week on our way to the line.
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of ’em dead,
And we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
‘He’s a cheery old card,’ muttered Harry to Jack
As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.
• • •
But he did for them both with his plan of attack.
To the Warmongers
I’m back again from hell
With loathsome thoughts to sell;
Secrets of death to tell;
And horrors from the abyss.
Young faces bleared with blood,
Sucked down into the mud,
You shall hear things like this,
Till the tormented slain
Crawl round and once again,
With limbs that twist awry
Moan out their brutish pain,
As the fighters pass them by.
For you our battles shine
With triumph half-divine;
And the glory of the dead
Kindles in each proud eye.
But a curse is on my head,
That shall not be unsaid,
And the wounds in my heart are red,
For I have watched them die.
Rivers knew so little about poetry that he was almost embarrassed at the thought of having to comment on these. But then he reminded himself they’d been given to him as a therapist, not as a literary critic, and from that point of view they were certainly interesting, particularly the last.