PART ONE THE NORTH (continued 2)

“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?”

“Himself. He shot himself through the mouth. It’s a suicide.”

“Suicide!” I echoed the word vaguely, as if it contained a mystery. There was something queer, out of the ordinary, about it, shocking to the surgeons and orderlies. They were ashamed, worried, rather flustered. “But why suicide?” I asked, suddenly aware of the extraordinary fact that a personal tragedy had lifted its head above the dead level of mass destruction. It was this that shocked them.

He’s not young, I thought, cutting the bandage round the rough unconscious head with its shock of matted red hair. A peasant, probably—very stupid—an ox of a man.

“Why suicide?” I asked aloud.

“Panic,” answered Monsieur briefly. “Fear—he tried to kill himself from fear of being killed. They do sometimes.”

“This one didn’t.”

“No, he didn’t succeed, this big one. He ought to be dead. The bullet is here just under the skull. It’s gone clean through his brain. Any other man would be dead. He’s strong, this big one.”

“You’ll extract it?”

“But certainly.”

“And he will live?”

“Perhaps.”

“And what then?”

“He’ll be court-martialed and shot, Madame, for attempted suicide.”

They were strapping his iron arms and legs to the narrow table. Someone lifted his heavy head. Someone pulled his great bulk into position and bound him to the table with strong leather bands.

“Don’t do it!” I shouted suddenly. “Leave him alone.” I was appalled by his immense helplessness.

They went on with their business of getting him ready. They didn’t hear me. Perhaps I had not shouted aloud.

“You don’t understand,” I cried. “You’ve made a mistake. It wasn’t fear. It was something else. He had a reason, a secret. It’s locked there in his chest. Leave him alone with it. You can’t bring him back now to be shot again.”

But they clapped the ether mask over his face, stifling his enormous stentorious breathing, and with that he began to struggle—the dying ox. Life, roused by the menace of the suffocating gas, sprang up in him again—gigantic, furious, suffering, a baited bull. It began plunging in him, straining, leaping to get out of his carcase and attack its enemies. A leather thong snapped, a fist shot out, knocking over bottles and basins. There was a crash, a tinkle of broken glass, a scramble of feet, and suddenly through the confusion I heard a thin soft anguished voice cry as if from a great distance, “Rosa, Rosa!” It came from his chest; it sounded like the voice of a man lost in a cave. It came from under his heaving side where the bushy hair grew thick and strong—a hollow heartbroken voice, issuing from his blind unconscious mouth, in a long cry—“Rosa, Rosa!”

Twice again he called Rosa before they could clap the ether mask down again on his face.

It was a neat operation and entirely successful. They took the bullet out of the top of his head, bandaged his head up again, and carried him away through the sunny afternoon to be put to bed.

“He will surely die in the night,” I said to myself, and I went again and again in the night to see if, happily, he were dead; but always, standing beside the shadow of his great bulk, I could hear him breathing, and once I thought I heard sighing on his shrouded lips the name of the woman—Rosa.

“He can’t live,” the night nurse said.

“He can’t die,” I whispered to myself. “Life is too strong in him, too hard to kill.”

He was much better next day. I found him sitting up in bed in a clean pink flannel night shirt, staring in front of him. He didn’t answer when I said “Good morning,” or take any notice of me. He hadn’t spoken to any one during the day, the nurse told me, but he was very obedient and ate his soup quietly, “as good as gold,” she said he was. “A remarkable case,” Monsieur X said. “He ought to be dead.” But there he was sitting up eating his meals with an excellent appetite.

“So he knows what will happen?” I asked, following the surgeon to the door.

“But certainly. They all know. Everyone in the army knows the penalty.”

The suicide did not turn his head or look in my direction. He was still staring straight ahead of him when I came back and stood at the foot of his bed.

Who are you? I wondered, and who is Rosa? And what can I do? How can I help you? And I stood there waiting, miserably spellbound by the patient brute who at last turned on me from his cavernous eyes a look of complete understanding, and then looked heavily away again.

That night when the orderly was dozing and the night nurse was going on her round from hut to hut, he tore the bandage from his head. She found him with his head oozing on the pillow, and scolded him roundly. He didn’t answer. He said nothing. He seemed not to notice. Meekly, docile as a friendly trusting dog, he let her bandage him up again, and the next morning I found him again sitting up in his bed in his clean head bandage staring in front of him with that dark look of dumb subhuman suffering. And the next night the same thing happened, and the next, and the next. Every night he tore off his bandage, and then let himself be tied up again.

“If his wound becomes infected he’ll die,” said Monsieur X, angrily.

“That’s what he’s trying to do,” I answered. “Kill himself again before they can shoot him,” I added, “to save them the trouble.”

I dared not speak to the man whom I thought of day and night as Rosa, having never learned his name, and he never spoke to me or any one. His eyes, which he now always turned on me when I came in, forbade me to speak to him. They stared into mine with the understanding of a brute mortally wounded, who is not allowed to die, so I went to the General, and, actuated by some hysterical impulse, pleaded for the man’s life.

“But, Madame, we have epidemics of suicide in the trenches. Panic seizes the men. They blow their brains out in a panic. Unless the penalty is what it is—to be court-martialed and shot—the thing would spread. We’d find ourselves going over the top with battalions of dead men. The same penalty applies to men who wound themselves. That’s the favourite device of a coward. He puts the muzzle of his rifle on his foot and fires.”

I argued. I explained that this man was not afraid of being killed, but of not being killed, that his luck was out when the enemy missed him; that he had been kept waiting too long, had shot himself in despair because the Germans wouldn’t shoot him; and a woman called Rosa let him down, or perhaps she died. Perhaps he simply wanted to go to her.

“He must have had a letter in the trenches—a letter from Rosa or about her. He’s not a young man. He is forty or more—an enormous brute with red hair and hands like hams. A farmer probably. One of those slow plodding gentle brute men, faithful as dogs. His voice was broken-hearted, high and hollow like a child’s voice, when he called to her. Like a child that is lost. ‘Rosa! Rosa!’ If you’d heard him.

“And here you are with your military regulations asking me to save him for you so that you can shoot him. You expect us to tie up his head every night and prevent his dying so that you can march him off to trial and stand him up against a wall.”

But what was the good of arguing against army regulations? We were at war. The General could do nothing. The man must be made an example, so that these epidemics of suicide could be kept in check.

I didn’t dare go back to Rosa. I went to the door of the hut and called the nurse. Down in the centre of the long row of beds I could see his great shoulders and his huge bandaged head. He looked like a monstrous baby in his white bonnet and pink flannel shirt. But I knew that his big haggard eyes were staring, and I remembered that his face had been a little paler each day, that it was not brick colour any more, but the colour of wax, that his cheek bones stood out like shelves.

He’s killing himself in spite of us all, I thought. He’s succeeding. It’s hard work, it takes patience, but he’s doing it. Given a chance, he’ll pull it off. Well, he’ll have his chance. I almost laughed. I had been a fool to go to the General and plead for his life. That was the last thing he wanted me to do for him. That was just the wrong thing.

I spoke to the nurse who was going on duty for the night.

“When Rosa pulls off his bandage to-night, leave it off,” I said abruptly.

She looked at me a minute hesitating. She was highly trained. Her traditions, her professional conscience, the honour of her calling loomed for a moment before her, then her eyes lighted. “All right,” she said.

I thought when I stood at the foot of Rosa’s bed next morning and found him staring at me that I detected a look of recognition in his eyes, perhaps even a faint look of gratitude, but I could not be sure. His gaze was so sombre, so deep, that I could not read it, but I could see that he was weaker. Perhaps it was his increased pallor that made his eyes so enormously dark and mysterious. Towards evening he grew delirious, but he tore off his bandage all the same, in the middle of the night. He managed to do that. It was his last effort, his last fumbling desperate and determined act. His fixed idea prevailed through his delirium, his will triumphed. It was enough. He was unconscious next morning and he died two days later, calling in his weary abysmal heart for Rosa, though we could not hear him.