Regeneration

1 Finished with the War A Soldier’s Declaration

I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it.

I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that this war, upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purposes for which I and my fellow soldiers entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them, and that, had this been done, the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation.

I have seen and endured the suffering of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust.

I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.

On behalf of those who are suffering now I make this protest against the deception which is being practised on them; also I believe that I may help to destroy the callous complacence with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realize.

S. Sassoon

July 1917

Bryce waited for Rivers to finish reading before he spoke again. ‘The “S” stands for “Siegfried”. Apparently, he thought that was better left out.’

‘And I’m sure he was right.’ Rivers folded the paper and ran his fingertips along the edge. ‘So they’re sending him here?’

Bryce smiled. ‘Oh, I think it’s rather more specific than that. They’re sending him to you.’

Rivers got up and walked across to the window. It was a fine day, and many of the patients were in the hospital grounds, watching a game of tennis. He heard the pok-pok of rackets, and a cry of frustration as a ball smashed into the net. ‘I suppose he is — “shell-shocked”?’

‘According to the Board, yes.’

‘It just occurs to me that a diagnosis of neurasthenia might not be inconvenient confronted with this.’ He held up the Declaration.

‘Colonel Langdon chaired the Board. He certainly seems to think he is.’

‘Langdon doesn’t believe in shell-shock.’

Bryce shrugged. ‘Perhaps Sassoon was gibbering all over the floor.’

‘ “Funk, old boy.” I know Langdon.’ Rivers came back to his chair and sat down. ‘He doesn’t sound as if he’s gibbering, does he?’

Bryce said carefully, ‘Does it matter what his mental state is? Surely it’s better for him to be here than in prison?’

‘Better for him, perhaps. What about the hospital? Can you imagine what our dear Director of Medical Services is going to say, when he finds out we’re sheltering “conchies” as well as cowards, shirkers, scrimshankers and degenerates? We’ll just have to hope there’s no publicity.’

‘There’s going to be, I’m afraid. The Declaration’s going to be read out in the House of Commons next week.’

‘By?’

‘Lees-Smith.’

Rivers made a dismissive gesture.

‘Yes, well, I know. But it still means the press.’

‘And the minister will say that no disciplinary action has been taken, because Mr Sassoon is suffering from a severe mental breakdown, and therefore not responsible for his actions. I’m not sure I’d prefer that to prison.’

‘I don’t suppose he was offered the choice. Will you take him?’

‘You mean I am being offered a choice?’

‘In view of your case load, yes.’

Rivers took off his glasses and swept his hand down across his eyes. ‘I suppose they have remembered to send the file?’

Sassoon leant out of the carriage window, still half-expecting to see Graves come pounding along the platform, looking even more dishevelled than usual. But further down the train, doors had already begun to slam, and the platform remained empty.

The whistle blew. Immediately, he saw lines of men with grey muttering faces clambering up the ladders to face the guns. He blinked them away.

The train began to move. Too late for Robert now. Prisoner arrives without escort, Sassoon thought, sliding open the carriage door.

By arriving an hour early he’d managed to get a window seat. He began picking his way across to it through the tangle of feet. An elderly vicar, two middle-aged men, both looking as if they’d done rather well out of the war, a young girl and an older woman, obviously travelling together. The train bumped over a point. Everybody rocked and swayed, and Sassoon, stumbling, almost fell into the vicar’s lap. He mumbled an apology and sat down. Admiring glances, and not only from the women. Sassoon turned to look out of the window, hunching his shoulder against them all.

After a while he stopped pretending to look at the smoking chimneys of Liverpool’s back streets and closed his eyes. He needed to sleep, but instead Robert’s face floated in front of him, white and twitching as it had been last Sunday, almost a week ago now, in the lounge of the Exchange Hotel.

For a moment, looking up to find that khaki-clad figure standing just inside the door, he thought he was hallucinating again.

‘Robert, what on earth are you doing here?’ He jumped up and ran across the lounge. ‘Thank God you’ve come.’

‘I got myself passed fit.’

‘Robert, no.’

‘What else could I do? After getting this.’ Graves dug into his tunic pocket and produced a crumpled piece of paper. ‘A covering letter would have been nice.’

‘I wrote.’

‘No, you didn’t, Sass. You just sent me this. Couldn’t you at least have talked about it first?’

‘I thought I’d written.’

They sat down, facing each other across a small table. Cold northern light streamed in through the high windows, draining Graves’s face of the little colour it had.

‘Sass, you’ve got to give this up.’

‘Give it up? You don’t think I’ve come this far, do you, just to give in now?’

‘Look, you’ve made your protest. For what it’s worth, I agree with every word of it. But you’ve had your say. There’s no point making a martyr of yourself.’

‘The only way I can get publicity is to make them court-martial me.’

‘They won’t do it.’

‘Oh, yes, they will. It’s just a matter of hanging on.’

‘You’re in no state to stand a court-martial.’ Graves clasped his clenched fist. ‘If I had Russell here now, I’d shoot him.’

‘It was my idea.’

‘Oh, pull the other one. And even if it was, do you think anybody’s going to understand it? They’ll just say you’ve got cold feet.’

‘Look, Robert, you think exactly as I do about the war, and you do… nothing. All right, that’s your choice. But don’t come here lecturing me about cold feet. This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.’

Now, on the train going to Craiglockhart, it still seemed the hardest thing. He shifted in his seat and sighed, looking out over fields of wheat bending to the wind. He remembered the silvery sound of shaken wheat, the shimmer of light on the stalks. He’d have given anything to be out there, away from the stuffiness of the carriage, the itch and constriction of his uniform.

On that Sunday they’d taken the train to Formby and spent the afternoon wandering aimlessly along the beach. A dull, wintry-looking sun cast their shadows far behind them, so that every gesture either of them made was mimicked and magnified.

‘They won’t let you make a martyr of yourself, Sass. You should have accepted the Board.’

The discussion had become repetitive. For perhaps the fourth time, Sassoon said, ‘If I hold out long enough, there’s nothing else they can do.’

‘There’s a lot they can do.’ Graves seemed to come to a decision. ‘As a matter of fact, I’ve been pulling a few strings on your behalf.’

Sassoon smiled to hide his anger. ‘Good. If you’ve been exercising your usual tact, that ought to get me at least two years.’

‘They won’t court-martial you.’

In spite of himself, Sassoon began to feel afraid. ‘What, then?’

‘Shut you up in a lunatic asylum for the rest of the war.’

‘And that’s the result of your string-pulling, is it? Thanks.’

‘No, the result of my string-pulling is to get you another Board. You must take it this time.’

‘You can’t put people in lunatic asylums just like that. You have to have reasons.’

‘They’ve got reasons.’

‘Yes, the Declaration. Well, that doesn’t prove me insane.’

‘And the hallucinations? The corpses in Piccadilly?’

A long silence. ‘I had rather hoped my letters to you were private.’

‘I had to persuade them to give you another Board.’

‘They won’t court-martial me?’

‘No. Not in any circumstances. And if you go on refusing to be boarded, they will put you away.’

‘You know, Robert, I wouldn’t believe this from anybody else. Will you swear it’s true?’

‘Yes.’

‘On the Bible?’

Graves held up an imaginary Bible and raised his right hand. ‘I swear.’

Their shadows stretched out behind them, black on the white sand. For a moment Sassoon still hesitated. Then, with an odd little gasp, he said, ‘All right then, I’ll give way.’

In the taxi, going to Craiglockhart, Sassoon began to feel frightened. He looked out of the window at the crowded pavements of Princes Street, thinking he was seeing them for the first and last time. He couldn’t imagine what awaited him at Craiglockhart, but he didn’t for a moment suppose the inmates were let out.

He glanced up and found the taxi-driver watching him in the mirror. All the local people must know the name of the hospital, and what it was for. Sassoon’s hand went up to his chest and began pulling at a loose thread where his MC ribbon had been.

For conspicuous gallantry during a raid on the enemy’s trenches. He remained for 1 1/2 hours under rifle and bomb fire collecting and bringing in our wounded. Owing to his courage and determination, all the killed and wounded were brought in.

Reading the citation, it seemed to Rivers more extraordinary than ever that Sassoon should have thrown the medal away. Even the most extreme pacifist could hardly be ashamed of a medal awarded for saving life. He took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. He’d been working on the file for over an hour, but, although he was now confident he knew all the facts, he was no closer to an understanding of Sassoon’s state of mind. If anything, Graves’s evidence to the Board — with its emphasis on hallucinations — seemed to suggest a full-blown psychosis rather than neurasthenia. And yet there was no other evidence for that. Misguided the Declaration might well be, but it was not deluded, illogical or incoherent. Only the throwing away of the medal still struck him as odd. That surely had been the action of a man at the end of his tether.

Well, we’ve all been there, he thought. The trouble was, he was finding it difficult to examine the evidence impartially. He wanted Sassoon to be ill. Admitting this made him pause. He got up and began pacing the floor of his room, from door to window and back again. He’d only ever encountered one similar case, a man who’d refused to go on fighting on religious grounds. Atrocities took place on both sides, he’d said. There was nothing to choose between the British and the Germans.

The case had given rise to heated discussions in the MO’s common room — about the freedom of the individual conscience in wartime, and the role of the army psychiatrist in ‘treating’ a man who refused to fight. Rivers, listening to those arguments, had been left in no doubt of the depth and seriousness of the divisions. The controversy had died down only when the patient proved to be psychotic. That was the crux of the matter. A man like Sassoon would always be trouble, but he’d be a lot less trouble if he were ill.

Rivers was roused from these thoughts by the crunch of tyres on gravel. He reached the window in time to see a taxi draw up, and a man, who from his uniform could only be Sassoon, get out. After paying the driver, Sassoon stood for a moment, looking up at the building. Nobody arriving at Craiglockhart for the first time could fail to be daunted by the sheer gloomy, cavernous bulk of the place. Sassoon lingered on the drive for a full minute after the taxi had driven away, then took a deep breath, squared his shoulders, and ran up the steps.

Rivers turned away from the window, feeling almost ashamed of having witnessed that small, private victory over fear.

2

Light from the window behind Rivers’s desk fell directly on to Sassoon’s face. Pale skin, purple shadows under the eyes. Apart from that, no obvious signs of nervous disorder. No twitches, jerks, blinks, no repeated ducking to avoid a long-exploded shell. His hands, doing complicated things with cup, saucer, plate, sandwiches, cake, sugar tongs and spoon, were perfectly steady. Rivers raised his own cup to his lips and smiled. One of the nice things about serving afternoon tea to newly arrived patients was that it made so many neurological tests redundant.

So far he hadn’t looked at Rivers. He sat with his head slightly averted, a posture that could easily have been taken for arrogance, though Rivers was more inclined to suspect shyness. The voice was slightly slurred, the flow of words sometimes hesitant, sometimes rushed. A disguised stammer, perhaps, but a life-long stammer, Rivers thought, not the recent, self-conscious stammer of the neurasthenic.

‘While I remember, Captain Graves rang to say he’ll be along some time after dinner. He sent his apologies for missing the train.’

‘He is still coming?’

‘Yes.’

Sassoon looked relieved. ‘Do you know, I don’t think Graves’s caught a train in his life? Unless somebody was there to put him on it.’

‘We were rather concerned about you.’

‘In case the lunatic went missing?’

‘I wouldn’t put it quite like that.’

‘I was all right. I wasn’t even surprised, I thought he’d slept in. He’s been doing a… a lot of rushing round on my behalf recently. You’ve no idea how much work goes into rigging a Medical Board.’

Rivers pushed his spectacles up on to his forehead and massaged the inner corners of his eyes. ‘No, I don’t suppose I have. You know this may sound naïve but… to me… the accusation that a Medical Board has been rigged is quite a serious one.’

‘I’ve no complaints. I was dealt with in a perfectly fair and reasonable way. Probably better than I deserved.’

‘What kind of questions did they ask?’

Sassoon smiled. ‘Don’t you know?’

‘I’ve read the report, if that’s what you mean. I’d still like to hear your version.’

‘Oh: “Did I object to fighting on religious grounds?” I said I didn’t. It was rather amusing, actually. For a moment I thought they were asking me whether I objected to going on a crusade. “Did I think I was qualified to decide when the war should end?” I said I hadn’t thought about my qualifications.’ He glanced at Rivers. ‘Not true. And then… then Colonel Langdon asked said “Your friend tells us you’re very good at bombing. Don’t you still dislike the Germans?”’

A long silence. The net curtain behind Rivers’s head billowed out in a glimmering arc, and a gust of cool air passed over their faces.

‘And what did you say to that?’

‘I don’t remember.’ He sounded impatient now. ‘It didn’t matter what I said.’

‘It matters now.’

‘All right.’ A faint smile. ‘Yes, I am quite good at bombing. No, I do not still dislike the Germans.’

‘Does that mean you once did?’

Sassoon looked surprised. For the first time something had been said that contradicted his assumptions. ‘Briefly. April and May of last year, to be precise.’

A pause. Rivers waited. After a while Sassoon went on, almost reluctantly. ‘A friend of mine had been killed. For a while I used to go out on patrol every night, looking for Germans to kill. Or rather I told myself that’s what I was doing. In the end I didn’t know whether I was trying to kill them, or just giving them plenty of opportunities to kill me.’

‘ “Mad Jack.” ’

Sassoon looked taken aback. ‘Graves really has talked, hasn’t he?’

‘It’s the kind of thing the Medical Board would need to know.’ Rivers hesitated. ‘Taking unnecessary risks is one of the first signs of a war neurosis.’

‘Is it?’ Sassoon looked down at his hands. ‘I didn’t know that.’

‘Nightmares and hallucinations come later.’

‘What’s an “unnecessary risk” anyway? The maddest thing I ever did was done under orders.’ He looked up, to see if he should continue. ‘We were told to go and get the regimental badges off a German corpse. They reckoned he’d been dead two days, so obviously if we got the badges they’d know which battalion was opposite. Full moon, not a cloud in sight, absolutely mad, but off we went. Well, we got there — eventually — and what do we find? He’s been dead a helluva lot longer than two days, and he’s French anyway.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘Pulled one of his boots off and sent it back to battalion HQ. With quite a bit of his leg left inside.’

Rivers allowed another silence to open up. ‘I gather we’re not going to talk about nightmares?’

‘You’re in charge.’

‘Ye-es. But then one of the paradoxes of being an army psychiatrist is that you don’t actually get very far by ordering your patients to be frank.’

‘I’ll be as frank as you like. I did have nightmares when I first got back from France. I don’t have them now.’

‘And the hallucinations?’

He found this more difficult. ‘It was just that when I woke up, the nightmares didn’t always stop. So I used to see…’ A deep breath. ‘Corpses. Men with half their faces shot off, crawling across the floor.’

‘And you were awake when this happened?’

‘I don’t know. I must’ve been, because I could see the sister.’

‘And was this always at night?’

‘No. It happened once during the day. I’d been to my club for lunch, and when I came out I sat on a bench, and… I suppose I must’ve nodded off.’ He was forcing himself to go on. ‘When I woke up, the pavement was covered in corpses. Old ones, new ones, black, green.’ His mouth twisted. ‘People were treading on their faces.’

Rivers took a deep breath. ‘You say you’d just woken up?’

‘Yes. I used to sleep quite a bit during the day, because I was afraid to go to sleep at night.’

‘When did all this stop?’

‘As soon as I left the hospital. The atmosphere in that place was really terrible. There was one man who used to boast about killing German prisoners. You can imagine what living with him was like.’

‘And the nightmares haven’t recurred?’

‘No. I do dream, of course, but not about the war. Sometimes a dream seems to go on after I’ve woken up, so there’s a a kind of in-between stage.’ He hesitated. ‘I don’t know whether that’s abnormal.’

‘I hope not. It happens to me all the time.’ Rivers sat back in his chair. ‘When you look back now on your time in the hospital, do you think you were “shell-shocked”?’

‘I don’t know. Somebody who came to see me told my uncle he thought I was. As against that, I wrote one or two good poems while I was in there. We-ell…’ He smiled. ‘I was pleased with them.’

‘You don’t think it’s possible to write a good poem in a state of shock?’

‘No, I don’t.’

Rivers nodded. ‘You may be right. Would it be possible for me to see them?’

‘Yes, of course. I’ll copy them out.’

Rivers said, ‘I’d like to move on now to the… thinking behind the Declaration. You say your motives aren’t religious?’

‘No, not at all.’

‘Would you describe yourself as a pacifist?’

‘I don’t think so. I can’t possibly say “No war is ever justified”, because I haven’t thought about it enough. Perhaps some wars are. Perhaps this one was when it started. I just don’t think our war aims — whatever they may be — and we don’t know — justify this level of slaughter.’

‘And you say you have thought about your qualifications for saying that?’

‘Yes. I’m only too well aware of how it sounds. A second-lieutenant, no less, saying “The war must stop”. On the other hand, I have been there. I’m at least as well qualified as some of the old men you see sitting around in clubs, cackling on about “attrition” and “wastage of manpower” and…’ His voice became a vicious parody of an old man’s voice. ‘“Lost heavily in that last scrap. You don’t talk like that if you’ve watched them die.’

‘No intelligent or sensitive person would talk like that anyway.’

A slightly awkward pause. ‘I’m not saying there are no exceptions.’

Rivers laughed. ‘The point is you hate civilians, don’t you? The “callous”, the “complacent”, the “unimaginative”. Or is “hate” too strong a word?’

‘No.’

‘So. What you felt for the Germans, rather briefly, in the spring of last year, you now feel for the overwhelming majority of your fellow-countrymen?’

‘Yes.’

‘You know, I think you were quite right not to say too much to the Board.’

‘That wasn’t my idea, it was Graves’s. He was afraid I’d sound too sane.’

‘When you said the Board was “rigged”, what did you mean?’

‘I meant the decision to send me here, or or somewhere similar, had been taken before I went in.’

‘And this had all been fixed by Captain Graves?’

‘Yes.’ Sassoon leant forward. ‘The point is they weren’t going to court-martial me. They were just going to lock me up somewhere…’ He looked round the room. ‘Worse than this.’

Rivers smiled. ‘There are worse places, believe me.’

‘I’m sure there are,’ Sassoon said politely.

‘They were going to certify you, in fact?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Did anybody on the Board say anything to you about this?’

‘No, because it was —’

‘All fixed beforehand. Yes, I see.’

Sassoon said, ‘May I ask you a question?’

‘Go ahead’

‘Do you think I’m mad?’

‘No, of course you’re not mad. Did you think you were going mad?’

‘It crossed my mind. You know when you’re brought face to face with the fact that, yes, you did see corpses on the pavement…’

‘Hallucinations in the half-waking state are surprisingly common, you know. They’re not the same thing as psychotic hallucinations. Children have them quite frequently.’

Sassoon had started pulling at a loose thread on the breast of his tunic. Rivers watched him for a while. ‘You must’ve been in agony when you did that.’

Sassoon lowered his hand. ‘No-o. Agony’s lying in a shell-hole with your legs shot off. I was upset.’ For a moment he looked almost hostile, then he relaxed. ‘It was a futile gesture. I’m not particularly proud of it.’

‘You threw it in the Mersey, didn’t you?’

‘Yes. It wasn’t heavy enough to sink, so it just’ — a glint of amusement — ‘bobbed around. There was a ship sailing past, quite a long way out, in the estuary, and I looked at this little scrap of ribbon floating and I looked at the ship, and I thought that me trying to stop the war was a bit like trying to stop the ship would have been. You know, all they’d’ve seen from the deck was this little figure jumping up and down, waving its arms, and they wouldn’t’ve known what on earth it was getting so excited about.’

‘So you realized then that it was futile?’

Sassoon lifted his head. ‘It still had to be done. You can’t just acquiesce.’

Rivers hesitated. ‘Look, I think we’ve… we’ve got about as far as we can get today. You must be very tired.’ He stood up. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow morning at ten. Oh, and could you ask Captain Graves to see me as soon as he arrives?’

Sassoon stood up. ‘You said a bit back you didn’t think I was mad.’

‘I’m quite sure you’re not. As a matter of fact I don’t even think you’ve got a war neurosis.’

Sassoon digested this. ‘What have I got, then?’

‘You seem to have a very powerful anti-war neurosis.’

They looked at each other and laughed. Rivers said, ‘You realize, don’t you, that it’s my duty to… to try to change that? I can’t pretend to be neutral.’

Sassoon’s glance took in both their uniforms. ‘No, of course not.’

∗

Rivers made a point of sitting next to Bryce at dinner.

‘Well,’ Bryce said, ‘what did you make of him?’

‘I can’t find anything wrong. He doesn’t show any sign of depression, he’s not excited—’

‘Physically?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Perhaps he just doesn’t want to be killed.’

‘Oh, I think he’d be most insulted if you suggested that. To be fair, he did have a job lined up in Cambridge, training cadets — so it isn’t a question of avoiding being sent back. He could’ve taken that if he’d wanted to save his skin.’

‘Any trace of… er… religious enthusiasm?’

‘No, I’m afraid not. I was hoping for that too.’

They looked at each other, amused. ‘You know, the curious thing is I don’t think he’s even a pacifist? It seems to be entirely a matter of of horror at the extent of the slaughter, combined with a feeling of anger that the government won’t state its war aims and impose some kind of limitation on the whole thing. That, and an absolutely corrosive hatred of civilians. And non-combatants in uniform.’

‘What an uncomfortable time you must’ve had.’

‘No-o, I rather gather I was seen as an exception.’

Bryce looked amused. ‘Did you like him?’

‘Yes, very much. And I found him… much more impressive than I expected.’

Sassoon, at his table under the window, sat in silence. The men on either side of him stammered so badly that conversation would have been impossible, even if he had wished for it, but he was content to withdraw into his own thoughts.

He remembered the day before Arras, staggering from the outpost trench to the main trench and back again, carrying boxes of trench mortar bombs, passing the same corpses time after time, until their twisted and blackened shapes began to seem like old friends. At one point he’d had to pass two hands sticking up out of a heap of pocked and pitted chalk, like the roots of an overturned tree. No way of telling if they were British or German hands. No way of persuading himself it mattered.

‘Do you play golf?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘I asked if you played golf.’

Small blue eyes, nibbled gingery moustache, an RAMC badge. He held out his hand. ‘Ralph Anderson.’

Sassoon shook hands and introduced himself. ‘Yes, I do.’

‘What’s your handicap?’

Sassoon told him. After all, why not? It seemed an entirely suitable topic for Bedlam.

‘Ah, then we might have a game.’

‘I’m afraid I haven’t brought my clubs.’

‘Send for them. Some of the best courses in the country round here.’

Sassoon had opened his mouth to reply when a commotion started near the door. As far as he could tell, somebody seemed to have been sick. At any rate, a thin, yellow-skinned man was on his feet, choking and gagging. A couple of VADs ran across to him, clucking, fussing, flapping ineffectually at his tunic with a napkin, until eventually they had the sense to get him out of the room. The swing doors closed behind them. A moment’s silence, and then, as if nothing had happened, the buzz of conversation rose again.

Rivers stood up and pushed his plate away. ‘I think I’d better go.’

‘Why not wait till you’ve finished?’ Bryce said. ‘You eat little enough as it is.’

Rivers patted his midriff. ‘Oh, I shan’t fade away just yet.’

Whenever Rivers wanted to get to the top floor without being stopped half a dozen times on the way, he used the back staircase. Pipes lined the walls, twisting with the turning of the stair, gurgling from time to time like lengths of human intestine. It was dark, the air stuffy, and sweat began to prickle in the roots of his hair. It was a relief to push the swing door open and come out on to the top corridor, where the air was cool at least, though he never failed to be depressed by the long narrow passage with its double row of brown doors and the absence of natural light. ‘Like a trench without the sky’ had been one patient’s description, and he was afraid it was only too accurate.

Burns was sitting on his bed, while two VADs helped him off with his tunic and shirt. His collar bones and ribs were clearly visible beneath the yellowish skin. The waistband of his breeches gaped.

One of the VADs tugged at it. ‘There’s room for two in there,’ she said, smiling, coaxing. ‘Have I to get in with you?’ The other VAD’s frozen expression warned her of Rivers’s presence. ‘I’ll get this sponged down for you, Captain.’

They hurried past Rivers, bursting into nervous giggles as they reached the end of the corridor.

Burns’s arms were goose-pimpled, though the room was not cold. The smell of vomit lingered on his breath. Rivers sat down beside him. He didn’t know what to say, and thought it better to say nothing. After a while he felt the bed begin to shake and put his arm round Burns’s shoulders. ‘It doesn’t get any better, does it?’ he said.

Burns shook his head. After a while Rivers got up, fetched Burns’s coat from the peg behind the door and wrapped it round his shoulders. ‘Would it be easier to eat in your own room?’

‘A bit. I wouldn’t have to worry about upsetting other people.’

Yes, Burns would worry about upsetting other people. Perhaps the most distressing feature of his case was the occasional glimpse of the cheerful and likeable young man he must once have been.

Rivers looked down at Burns’s forearms, noting that the groove between radius and ulna was even deeper than it had been a week ago. ‘Would it help to have a bowl of fruit in your room?’ he asked. ‘So you could just pick something up when you felt like it?’

‘Yes, that might help.’

Rivers got up and walked across to the window. He’s agreeing to make me feel useful, he thought. ‘All right, I’ll get them to send something up.’ The shadows of the beech trees had begun to creep across the tennis courts, which were empty now. Rivers turned from the window. ‘What kind of night did you have?’

‘Not too good.’

‘Have you made any progress with what we talked about?’

‘Not really.’ He looked up at Rivers. ‘I can’t make myself think about it.’

‘No, well, it’s early days.’

‘You know, the worst thing is…’ — Burns was scanning Rivers’s face — ‘that it’s a… a joke.’

‘Yes.’

After leaving Burns, Rivers went up a further short flight of stairs and unlocked the door to the tower. Apart from his own bedroom, this was the only place in Craiglockhart he could hope to be alone for more than a few minutes. The patients weren’t allowed out here, in case the hundred-foot drop to the path below should prove too tempting an exit from the war. He rested his arms on the iron balustrade and looked out towards the hills.

Burns. Rivers had become adept at finding bearable aspects to unbearable experiences, but Burns defeated him. What had happened to him was so vile, so disgusting, that Rivers could find no redeeming feature. He’d been thrown into the air by the explosion of a shell and had landed, head-first, on a German corpse, whose gas-filled belly had ruptured on impact. Before Burns lost consciousness, he’d had time to realize that what filled his nose and mouth was decomposing human flesh. Now, whenever he tried to eat, that taste and smell recurred. Nightly, he relived the experience, and from every nightmare he awoke vomiting. Burns on his knees, as Rivers had often seen him, retching up the last ounce of bile, hardly looked like a human being at all. His body seemed to have become merely the skin-and-bone casing for a tormented alimentary canal. His suffering was without purpose or dignity, and yes, Rivers knew exactly what Burns meant when he said it was a joke.

Rivers became aware that he was gripping the edge of the parapet and consciously relaxed his hands. Whenever he spent any time with Burns, he found himself plagued by questions that in Cambridge, in peacetime, he might have wanted to pursue, but which in wartime, in an overcrowded hospital, were no use to him at all. Worse than useless, since they drained him of energy that rightly belonged to his patients. In a way, all this had nothing to do with Burns. The sheer extremity of his suffering set him apart from the rest, but the questions were evoked by almost every case.

He looked down and saw a taxi turn into the drive. Perhaps this was the errant Captain Graves arriving at last? Yes, there was Sassoon, too impatient to wait indoors, running down the steps to meet him.

3

Graves, his mouth slightly open, stared up at the massive yellow-grey façade of Craiglockhart. ‘My God.’

Sassoon followed the direction of his gaze. ‘That’s what I thought.’

Graves picked up his bag and together they went up the steps, through the black and white tiled entrance hall on to the main corridor. Sassoon began to smile. ‘Fine prisoner’s escort you turned out to be.’

‘I know, I’m sorry. God, what a day. Do you know, the train stopped at every station?’

‘Well, you’re here now. Thank God.’

Graves looked sideways at him. ‘As bad as that?’

‘Hm. So-so.’

‘I don’t suppose you’ve seen anybody yet?’

‘I’ve seen Rivers. Which reminds me, he wants to see you, but I imagine it’ll be all right if you dump your bag first.’

Graves followed Sassoon up the marble staircase to the first floor.

‘Here we are.’ Sassoon opened a door and stood aside to let Graves enter. ‘The guest room. You’ve even got a lock on your door.’

‘You haven’t?’

‘No. Nor in the bathroom either.’

‘Poor old Sass, you’ll just have to fight the VADs off.’ Graves swung his bag on to the nearest chair. ‘No, seriously, what’s it like?’

‘Seriously, it’s awful. Come on, the sooner you’ve seen Rivers the sooner we can talk.’

‘Sassoon asked me to give you this.’

Rivers took the envelope without comment and placed it unopened on his desk. ‘How did you find him?’

The net curtains breathed in the draught from the open window, and a scent of lime trees invaded the room. A sweet smell. Graves, to whom all sweet smells were terrible, wiped the sweat from his upper lip. ‘Calmer. I think it’s a relief to have things sorted out.’

‘I don’t know how sorted out they are. You do realize, don’t you, that he can walk out of here at any time?’

‘He won’t do that,’ Graves said definitely. ‘He’ll be all right now. As long as the pacifists leave him alone.’

‘I had quite a long talk with him this afternoon, but I don’t think I’m quite clear what happened. I suspect there was a lot going on behind the scenes?’

Graves smiled. ‘You could say that.’

‘What exactly?’

‘Sassoon sent me a copy of his Declaration. I was in a convalescent home on the Isle of Wight at the time —’

‘He hadn’t talked to you about it?’

‘No, I haven’t seen him since January. I was absolutely horrified. I could see at once it wouldn’t do any good, nobody would follow his example. He’d just destroy himself, for no reason.’ He stopped. When he spoke again, his voice was very clear and precise. ‘Sassoon’s the best platoon commander I’ve ever known. The men worship him — if he wanted German heads on a platter they’d get them. And he loves them. Being separated from them would kill him. And that’s exactly what a court-martial would’ve done.’

‘He’s separated from them here.’

‘Yes, but there’s a way back. People can accept a breakdown. There’s no way back from being a conchie.’

‘So you decided he—’

‘Had to be stopped? Yes. I wrote to the CO, asking him to get Siegfried another Board. He’d already skipped one. Then I contacted various people I know and managed to persuade them to treat it as a nervous breakdown. That left Siegfried. I knew it was no use writing. I had to see him, so I got myself passed fit and went back to Litherland. He was in a shocking state. He’d just thrown his MC into the Mersey. Did he tell you that?’

Rivers hesitated. ‘I believe it was in the Board’s report.’

‘Anyway, it took a long time, but he saw sense in the end.’

‘What made him give in, do you think?’

‘He just couldn’t go on denying he was ill.’

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.

Everything about the poem suggested that Sassoon’s attitude to his war experience had been the opposite of what one normally encountered. The typical patient, arriving at Craiglockhart, had usually been devoting considerable energy to the task of forgetting whatever traumatic events had precipitated his neurosis. Even if the patient recognized that the attempt was hopeless, he had usually been encouraged to persist in it by friends, relatives, even by his previous medical advisers. The horrors he’d experienced, only partially repressed even by day, returned with redoubled force to haunt the nights, giving rise to that most characteristic symptom of war neurosis: the battle nightmare.

Rivers’s treatment sometimes consisted simply of encouraging the patient to abandon his hopeless attempt to forget, and advising him instead to spend some part of every day remembering. Neither brooding on the experience, nor trying to pretend it had never happened. Usually, within a week or two of the patient’s starting this treatment, the nightmares began to be less frequent and less terrifying.

Sassoon’s determination to remember might well account for his early and rapid recovery, though in his case it was motivated less by a desire to save his own sanity than by a determination to convince civilians that the war was mad. Writing the poems had obviously been therapeutic, but then Rivers suspected that writing the Declaration might have been therapeutic too. He thought that Sassoon’s poetry and his protest sprang from a single source, and each could be linked to his recovery from that terrible period of nightmares and hallucinations. If that was true, then persuading Sassoon to give in and go back would be a much more complicated and risky business than he had thought, and might well precipitate a relapse.

He sighed and put the poems back in the envelope. Looking at his watch, he saw that it was time to start his rounds. He’d just reached the foot of the main staircase when he saw Captain Campbell, bent double and walking backwards, emerge from the darkened dining room.

‘Campbell?’

Campbell spun round. ‘Ah, Captain Rivers, just the man.’ He came up to Rivers and, speaking in a discreet whisper that was audible the length and breadth of the corridor, as Campbell’s discreet whispers tended to be, said, ‘That fella they’ve put in my room.’

‘Sassoon. Yes?’

‘Don’t think he’s a German spy, do you?’

Rivers gave the matter careful consideration. ‘No, I don’t think so. They never call themselves “Siegfried”.’

Campbell looked astonished. ‘No more they do.’ He nodded, patted Rivers briskly on the shoulder, and moved off. ‘Just thought I’d mention it,’ he called back.

‘Thank you, Campbell. Much appreciated.’

Rivers stood for a moment at the foot of the stairs, unconsciously shaking his head.

4

‘I was walking up the drive at home. My wife was on the lawn having tea with some other ladies, they were all wearing white. As I got closer, my wife stood up and smiled and waved and then her expression changed and all the other ladies began to look at each other. I couldn’t understand why, and then I looked down and saw that I was naked.’

‘What had you been wearing?’

‘Uniform. When I saw how frightened they were, it made me frightened. I started to run and I was running through bushes. I was being chased by my father-in-law and two orderlies. Eventually they got me cornered and my father-in-law came towards me, waving a big stick. It had a snake wound round it. He was using it as a kind of flail, and the snake was hissing. I backed away, but they got hold of me and tied me up.’

Rivers detected a slight hesitation. ‘What with?’

A pause. In determinedly casual tones Anderson said, ‘A pair of lady’s corsets. They fastened them round my arms and tied the laces.’

‘Like a strait-waistcoat?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then?’

‘Then I was carted off to some kind of carriage. I was thrown inside and the doors banged shut and it was very dark. Like a grave. The first time I looked it was empty, but then the next time you were there. You were wearing a post-mortem apron and gloves.’

It was obvious from his tone that he’d finished. Rivers smiled and said, ‘It’s a long time since I’ve worn those.’

‘I haven’t recently worn corsets.’

‘Whose corsets were they?’

‘Just corsets. You want me to say my wife’s, don’t you?’

Rivers was taken back. ‘I want you to say—’

‘Well, I really don’t think they were. I suppose it is possible someone might find being locked up in a loony bin a fairly emasculating experience?’

‘I think most people do.’ Though not many said so. ‘I want you to say what you think.’

No response.

‘You say you woke up vomiting?’

‘Yes.’

‘I wonder why? I mean I can quite see the sight of me in a post-mortem apron might not be to everybody’s taste—’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What was the most frightening thing about the dream?’

‘The snake.’

A long silence.

‘Do you often dream about snakes?’

‘Yes.’

Another long silence. ‘Well, go on, then,’ Anderson exploded at last. ‘That’s what you Freudian Johnnies are on about all the time, isn’t it? Nudity, snakes, corsets. You might at least try to look grateful, Rivers. It’s a gift.’

‘I think if I’d made any association at all with the snake — and after all what possible relevance can my associations have? — it was probably with the one that’s crawling up your lapel.’

Anderson looked down at the caduceus badge of the RAMC which he wore on his tunic, and then across at the same badge on Rivers’s tunic.

‘What the er snake might suggest is that medicine is an issue between yourself and your father-in-law?’

‘No.’

‘Not at all?’

‘No.’

Another long silence. Anderson said, ‘It depends what you mean by an issue.’

‘A subject on which there is habitual disagreement.’

‘No. Naturally my time in France has left me with a certain level of distaste for the practice of medicine, but that’ll go in time. There’s no issue. I have a wife and child to support.’

‘You’re how old?’

‘Thirty-six.’

‘And your little boy?’

Anderson’s expression softened. ‘Five.’

‘School fees coming up?’

‘Yes. I’ll be all right once I’ve had a rest. Basically, I’m paying for last summer. Do you know, at one point we averaged ten amputations a day? Every time I was due for leave it was cancelled.’ He looked straight at Rivers. ‘There’s no doubt what the problem is. Tiredness.’

‘I still find the vomiting puzzling. Especially since you say you feel no more than a mild disinclination for medicine.’

‘I didn’t say mild, I said temporary.’

‘Ah. What in particular do you find difficult?’

‘I don’t know that there is anything particular.’

A long silence.

Anderson said, ‘I’m going to start timing these silences, Rivers.’

‘It’s already been done. Some of the younger ones had a sweepstake on it. I’m not supposed to know.’

‘Blood.’

‘And you attribute this to the ten amputations a day?’

‘No, I was all right then. The… er… problem started later. I wasn’t at Étaples when it happened, I’d been moved forward — the 13th CCS. They brought in this lad. He was a Frenchman, he’d escaped from the German lines. Covered in mud. There wasn’t an inch of skin showing anywhere. And you know it’s not like ordinary mud, it’s five, six inches thick. Bleeding. Frantic with pain. No English.’ A pause. ‘I missed it. I treated the minor wounds and missed the major one.’ He gave a short, hissing laugh. ‘Not that the minor ones were all that minor. He started to haemorrhage, and… there was nothing I could do. I just stood there and watched him bleed to death.’ His face twisted. ‘It pumped out of him.’

It was a while before either of them stirred. Then Anderson said, ‘If you’re wondering why that one, I don’t know. I’ve seen many worse deaths.’

‘Have you told your family?’

‘No. They know I don’t like the idea of going back to medicine, but they don’t know why.’

‘Have you talked to your wife?’

‘Now and then. You have to think about the practicalities, Rivers. I’ve devoted all my adult life to medicine. I’ve no private income to tide me over. And I do have a wife and a child.’

‘Public health might be a possibility.’

‘It doesn’t have much… dash about it, does it?’

‘Is that a consideration?’

Anderson hesitated. ‘Not with me.’

‘Well, we can talk about the practicalities later. You still haven’t told me when you said enough.’

Anderson smiled. ‘You make it sound like a decision. I don’t know that lying on the floor in a pool of piss counts as a decision.’ He paused. ‘The following morning. On the ward. I remember them all looking down at me. Awkward situation, really. What do you do when the doctor breaks down?’

At intervals, as Rivers was doing his rounds as orderly officer for the day, he thought about this dream. It was disturbing in many ways. At first he’d been inclined to see the post-mortem apron as expressing no more than a lack of faith in him, or, more accurately, in his methods, since obviously any doctor who spends much time so attired is not meeting with uniform success on the wards. This lack of faith he knew to be present. Anderson, in his first interview, had virtually refused treatment, claiming that rest, the endless pursuit of golf balls, was all that he required. He had some knowledge of Freud, though derived mainly from secondary or prejudiced sources, and disliked, or perhaps feared, what he thought he knew. There was no particular reason why Anderson, who was, after all, a surgeon, should be well informed about Freudian therapy, but his misconceptions had resulted in a marked reluctance to reveal his dreams. Yet his dreams could hardly be ignored, if only because they were currently keeping the whole of one floor of the hospital awake. His room-mate, Featherstone, had deteriorated markedly as the result of Anderson’s nightly outbursts. Still, that was another problem. As soon as Anderson had revealed that extreme horror of blood, Rivers had begun tentatively to attach another meaning to the post-mortem apron. If Anderson could see no way out of returning to the practice of a profession which must inevitably, even in civilian life, recall the horrors he’d witnessed in France, then perhaps he was desperate enough to have considered suicide? That might account both for the post-mortem apron and for the extreme terror he’d felt on waking. At the moment he didn’t know Anderson well enough to be able to say whether suicide was a possibility or not, but it would certainly need to be borne in mind.

The smell of chlorine became stronger as they reached the bottom of the stairs. Sassoon felt Graves hesitate. ‘Are you all right?’

‘I could do without the smell.’

‘Well, let’s not bother—’

‘No, go on.’

Sassoon pushed the door open. The pool was empty, a green slab between white walls. They began to undress, putting their clothes on one of the benches that lined the end wall.

‘What’s your room-mate like?’ Graves asked.

‘All right.’

‘Dotty?’

‘Not visibly. I gather the subject of German spies is best avoided. Oh, and I’ve found out why there aren’t any locks on the doors. One of them killed himself three weeks ago.’

Graves caught sight of the scar on Sassoon’s shoulder and stopped to look at it. It was curiously restful to submit to this scrutiny, which was prolonged, detailed and impersonal, like one small boy examining the scabs on another’s knee. ‘Oh, very neat.’

‘Yes, isn’t it? The doctors kept telling me how beautiful it was.’

‘You were lucky, you know. An inch further down—’

‘Not as lucky as you.’ Sassoon glanced at the shrapnel wound on Graves’s thigh. ‘An inch further up—’

‘If this is leading up to a joke about ladies’ choirs, forget it. I’ve heard them all.’

Sassoon dived in. A green, silent world, no sound except the bubble of his escaping breath, no feeling, once the shock of cold was over, except the tightening of his chest that at last forced him to the surface, air, noise, light, slopping waves crashing in on him again. He swam to the side and held on. Graves’s dark head bobbed purposefully along at the other side of the pool. Sassoon thought, we joke about it, but it happens. There’d been a boy in the hospital, while he was lying there with that neat little hole in his shoulder. The boy — he couldn’t have been more than nineteen — had a neat little hole too. Only his was between the legs. The dressings had been terrible to witness, and you had to witness them. No treatment in that overcrowded ward had been private. Twice a day the nurses came in with the creaking trolley, and the boy’s eyes followed them up the ward.

Sassoon shut the lid on the memory and dived for Graves’s legs. Graves twisted and fought, his head a black rock splintering white foam. ‘Lay off,’ he gasped at last, pushing Sassoon away. ‘Some of us don’t have the full complement of lungs.’

The pool was beginning to fill up. After a few more minutes, they climbed out and started to dress. Head muffled in the folds of his shirt, Graves said, ‘By the way, I think there’s something I ought to tell you. I’m afraid I told Rivers about your plan to assassinate Lloyd George.’

Rivers’s round as duty officer ended in the kitchens. Mrs Cooper, her broad arms splashed with fat from giant fryingpans, greeted him with an embattled smile. ‘What d’ y’ think of the beef stew last night, then, sir?’

‘I don’t believe I’ve ever tasted anything quite like it.’

Mrs Cooper’s smile broadened. ‘We do the best we can with the materials available, sir.’ Her expression became grim and confiding. ‘That beef was walking.’

Rivers got to his room a few minutes after ten and found Sassoon waiting, his hair damp, smelling of chlorine. ‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ Rivers said, unlocking the door. ‘I’ve just been pretending to know something about catering. Come in.’ He waved Sassoon to the chair in front of the desk, tossed his cap and cane to one side, and was about to unbuckle his belt when he remembered that the Director of Medical Services was due to visit the hospital some time that day. He sat down behind the desk and drew Sassoon’s file towards him. ‘Did you sleep well?’

‘Very well, thank you.’

‘You look rested. I enjoyed meeting Captain Graves.’

‘Yes, I gather you found it quite informative.’

‘Ab.’ Rivers paused in the act of opening the file. ‘You mean he told me something you’d rather I didn’t know?’

‘No, not necessarily. Just something I might have preferred to tell you myself.’ A moment’s silence, then Sassoon burst out, ‘What I can’t understand is how somebody of Graves’s intelligence can can can have such a shaky grasp of of rhetoric.’

Rivers smiled. ‘You were going to kill Lloyd George rhetorically, were you?’

‘I wasn’t going to kill him at all. I said I felt like killing him, but it was no use, because they’d only shut me up in a lunatic asylum, “like Richard Dadd of glorious memory”. There you are, exact words.’ He looked round the room. ‘Though as things have turned out —’

‘This is not a lunatic asylum. You are not locked up.’

‘Sorry.’

‘What you’re really saying is that Graves took you too seriously.’

‘It’s not just that. It suits him to attribute everything I’ve done to to to to… a state of mental breakdown, because then he doesn’t have to ask himself any awkward questions. Like why he agrees with me about the war and does nothing about it.’

Rivers waited a few moments. ‘I know Richard Dadd was a painter. What else did he do?’

A short silence. ‘He murdered his father.’

Rivers was puzzled by the slight awkwardness. He was used to being adopted as a father figure — he was, after all, thirty years older than the youngest of his patients — but it was rare for it to happen as quickly as this in a man of Sassoon’s age. ‘“Of glorious memory”?’

‘He… er… made a list of old men in power who deserved to die, and fortunately — or or otherwise — his father’s name headed the list. He carried him for half a mile through Hyde Park and then drowned him in the Serpentine in full view of everybody on the banks. The only reason Graves and I know about him is that we were in trenches with two of his great nephews, Edmund and Julian.’ The slight smile faded. ‘Now Edmund’s dead, and Julian’s got a bullet in the throat and can’t speak. The other brother was killed too. Gallipoli.’

‘Like your brother.’

‘Yes.’

‘Your father’s dead too, isn’t he? How old were you when he died?’

‘Eight. But I hadn’t seen much of him for some time before that. He left home when I was five.’

‘Do you remember him?’

‘A bit. I remember I used to like being kissed by him because his moustache tickled. My brothers went to the funeral. I didn’t — apparently I was too upset. Probably just as well, because they came back terrified. It was a Jewish funeral, you see, and they couldn’t understand what was going on. My elder brother said it was two old men in funny hats walking up and down saying jabber-jabber-jabber.’

‘You must’ve felt you’d lost him twice.’

‘Yes. We did lose him twice.’

Rivers gazed out of the window. ‘What difference would it have made, do you think, if your father had lived?’

A long silence. ‘Better education.’

‘But you went to Marlborough?’

‘Yes, but I was years behind everybody else. Mother had this theory we were delicate and our brains shouldn’t be taxed. I don’t think I ever really caught up. I left Cambridge without taking my degree.’

‘And then?’

Sassoon shook his head. ‘Nothing much. Hunting, cricket. Writing poems. Not very good poems.’

‘Didn’t you find it all… rather unsatisfying?’

‘Yes, but I couldn’t seem to see a way out. It was like being three different people, and they all wanted to go different ways.’ A slight smile. ‘The result was I went nowhere.’

Rivers waited.

‘I mean, there was the riding, hunting, cricketing me, and then there was the… the other side… that was interested in poetry and music, and things like that. And I didn’t seem able to…’ He laced his fingers. ‘Knot them together.’

‘And the third?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘You said three.’

‘Did I? I meant two.’

Ah. ‘And then the war. You joined up on the first day?’

‘Yes, in the ranks. I couldn’t wait to get in.’

‘Your superior officers wrote glowing reports for the Board. Did you know that?’

A flush of pleasure. ‘I think the army’s probably the only place I’ve ever really belonged.’

‘And you’ve cut yourself off from it.’

‘Yes, because —’

‘I’m not interested in the reasons at the moment. I’m more interested in the result. The effect on you.’

‘Isolation, I suppose. I can’t talk to anybody.’

‘You talk to me. Or at least, I think you do.’

‘You don’t say stupid things.’

Rivers turned his head away. ‘I’m pleased about that.’

‘Go on, laugh. I don’t mind.’

‘You’d been offered a job in Cambridge, hadn’t you? Teaching cadets.’

Sassoon frowned. ‘Yes.’

‘But you didn’t take it?’

‘No. It was either prison or France.’ He laughed. ‘I didn’t foresee this.’

Rivers watched him staring round the room. ‘You can’t bear to be safe, can you?’ He waited for a reply. ‘Well, you’ve got twelve weeks of it. At least. If you go on refusing to serve, you’ll be safe for the rest of the war.’

Two red spots appeared on Sassoon’s cheekbones. ‘Not my choice.’

‘I didn’t say it was.’ Rivers paused. ‘You know you reacted then as if I were attacking you, and yet all I did was to point out the facts.’ He leant forward. ‘If you maintain your protest, you can expect to spend the remainder of the war in a state of Complete. Personal. Safety.’

Sassoon shifted in his seat. ‘I’m not responsible for other people’s decisions.’

‘You don’t think you might find being safe while other people die rather difficult?’

A flash of anger. ‘Nobody else in this stinking country seems to find it difficult. I expect I’ll just learn to live with it. Like everybody else.’

∗

Bums stood at the window of his room. Rain had blurred the landscape, dissolving sky and hills together in a wash of grey. He loathed wet weather because then everybody stayed indoors, sitting, around the patients’ common room, talking, in strained or facetious tones, about the war the war the war.

A sharper gust of wind blew rain against the glass. Somehow or other he was going to have to get out. It wasn’t forbidden, it was even encouraged, though he himself didn’t go out much. He got his coat and went downstairs. On the corridor he met one of the nurses from his ward, who looked surprised to see him wearing his coat, but didn’t ask where he was going.

At the main gates he stopped. Because he’d been inside so long, the possibilities seemed endless, though they resolved themselves quickly into two. Into Edinburgh, or away. And that was no choice at all: he knew he wasn’t up to facing traffic.

For the first few stops the bus was crowded. He sat on the bench seat close to the door of the bus. People smelling of wet wool jerked and swayed against him, bumping his knees, and he tensed, not liking the contact or the smell. But then at every stop more and more people got off until he was almost alone, except for an old man and the clippie. The lanes were narrower now; the trees rushed in on either side. A branch rattled along the windows with a sound like machine-gun fire, and he had to bite his lips to stop himself crying out.

He got off at the next stop, and stood, looking up and down a country lane. He didn’t know what to do at first, it was so long since he’d been anywhere alone. Raindrops dripped from the trees, big, splashy, persistent drops, finding the warm place between his collar and his neck. He looked up and down the lane again. Somewhere further along, a wood pigeon cooed monotonously. He crossed over and began climbing the hill between the trees.

Up, up, until his way was barred by a fence whose wire twitched in the wind. A tuft of grey wool had caught on one of the barbs. Burns blinked the rain out of his eyes. He pressed two strands of wire apart and eased himself through, catching his sleeve, and breaking into a sweat as he struggled to free it.

Trembling now, he began to scramble along the edge of the ploughed field, slipping and stumbling, his mud-encumbered boots like lead weights pulling on the muscles of his thighs. His body was cold inside the stiff khaki, except for a burning round the knees where the tight cloth chafed the skin.

He was walking up the slope of a hill, tensing himself against the wind that seemed to be trying to scrape him off its side. As he reached the crest, a fiercer gust snatched his breath. After that he kept his head bent, sometimes stopping to draw a deeper breath through the steeple of his cupped hands. Rain beat on to his head, dripping from the peak of his cap, the small bones of nose and jaw had started to sing. He stopped and looked across the field. The distance had vanished in a veil of rain. He didn’t know where he was going, or why, but he thought he ought to take shelter, and began to run clumsily along the brow of a hill towards a distant clump of trees. The mud dragged at him, he had to slow to a walk. Every step was a separate effort, hauling his mud-clogged boots out of the sucking earth. His mind was incapable of making comparisons, but his aching thighs remembered, and he listened for the whine of shells.

When at last he reached the trees, he sat down with his back to the nearest, and for a while did nothing at all, not even wipe away the drops of rain that gathered on the tip of his nose and dripped into his open mouth. Then, blinking, he dragged his wet sleeve across his face.

After a while he got to his feet and began stumbling, almost blindly, between the trees, catching his feet in clumps of bracken. Something brushed against his cheek, and he raised his hand to push it away. His fingers touched slime, and he snatched them back. He turned and saw a dead mole, suspended, apparently, in air, its black fur spiked with blood, its small pink hands folded on its chest.

Looking up, he saw that the tree he stood under was laden with dead animals. Bore them like fruit. A whole branch of moles in various stages of decay, a ferret, a weasel, three magpies, a fox, the fox hanging quite close, its lips curled back from bloodied teeth.

He started to run, but the trees were against him. Branches clipped his face, twigs tore at him, roots tripped him. Once he was sent sprawling, though immediately he was up again, and running, his coat a mess of mud and dead leaves.

Out in the field, splashing along the flooded furrows, he heard Rivers’s voice, as distinctly as he sometimes heard it in dreams: If you run now, you’ll never stop.

He turned and went back, though he knew the voice was only a voice in his head, and that the real Rivers might equally well have said: Get away from here. He stood again in front of the tree. Now that he was calmer, he remembered that he’d seen trees like this before. The animals were not nailed to it, as they sometimes were, but tied, by wings or paws or tails. He started to release a magpie, his teeth chattering as a wing came away in his hand. Then the other magpies, the fox, the weasel, the ferret and the moles.

When all the corpses were on the ground, he arranged them in a circle round the tree and sat down within it, his back against the trunk. He felt the roughness of the bark against his knobbly spine. He pressed his hands between his knees and looked around the circle of his companions. Now they could dissolve into the earth as they were meant to do. He felt a great urge to lie down beside them, but his clothes separated him. He got up and started to get undressed. When he’d finished, he looked down at himself. His naked body was white as a root. He cupped his genitals in his hands, not because he was ashamed, but because they looked incongruous, they didn’t seem to belong with the rest of him. Then he folded his clothes carefully and put them outside the circle. He sat down again with his back to the tree and looked up through the tracery of branches at grey and scudding clouds.

The sky darkened, the air grew colder, but he didn’t mind. It didn’t occur to him to move. This was the right place. This was where he had wanted to be.

By late afternoon Burns’s absence was giving cause for concern. The nurse who’d seen him walk out, wearing his coat, blamed herself for not stopping him, but nobody else was inclined to blame her. The patients, except for one or two who were known to be high suicide risks, were free to come and go as they pleased. Bryce and Rivers consulted together at intervals during the day, trying to decide at what point they should give in and call the police.

Burns came back at six o’clock, walking up the stairs unobserved, trailing mud, twigs and dead leaves. He was too tired to think. His legs ached; he was faint with hunger yet afraid to think of food.

Sister Duffy caught him just as he was opening the door of his room and bore down upon him, scolding and twittering like the small, dusty brown bird she so much resembled. She made him get undressed then and there and seemed to be proposing to towel him down herself, but he vetoed that. She left him alone but came back a few minutes later, laden with hot-water bottles and extra blankets, still inclined to scold, though when she saw how tired he looked, lying back against the pillows, she checked herself and only said ominously that Dr Rivers had been informed and would be up as soon as he was free.

I suppose I’m for it, Burns thought, but couldn’t make the thought real. He folded his arms across his face and almost at once began drifting off to sleep. He was back in the wood, outside the circle now, but able to see himself inside it. His skin was tallow-white against the scurfy bark. A shaft of sunlight filtered through leaves, found one of the magpies, and its feathers shone sapphire, emerald, amethyst. There was no reason to go back, he thought. He could stay here for ever.

When he opened his eyes, Rivers was sitting beside the bed. He’d obviously been there some time, his glasses were in his lap, and one hand covered his eyes. The room was quite dark.

Rivers seemed to feel Burns watching him, because after a few moments he looked up and smiled.

‘How long have I been asleep?’

‘About an hour.’

‘I’ve worried everybody, haven’t I?’

‘Never mind that. You’re back, that’s all that matters.’

All the way back to the hospital Burns had kept asking himself why he was going back. Now, waking up to find Rivers sitting by his bed, unaware of being observed, tired and patient, he realized he’d come back for this.

5

Rivers started his night round early. Sister Rogers was in her room, drinking the first of the many cups of coffee that would see her through the night. ‘Second-Lieutenant Prior,’ she said, as soon as she saw him.

‘Yes, I know, and there’s nothing I can do about it.’ Prior was a new patient, whose nightmares were so bad that his room-mate was getting no sleep. ‘Has he spoken to anybody yet?’

‘No, and if you speak to him he just stares straight through you.’

It was unlike Sister Rogers to take a dislike to a patient, but there was no mistaking the animosity in her voice. ‘All right,’ Rivers said, ‘let’s have a look at him.’

Prior was lying on his bed, reading. He was a thin, fair-haired young man of twenty-two with high cheekbones, a short, blunt nose and a supercilious expression. He looked up as Rivers came in, but didn’t close the book.

‘Sister tells me you had a bad night?’

Prior produced an elaborate shrug. Out of the corner of his eye Rivers saw Sister Rogers’s lips tighten. ‘What did you dream about?’

Prior reached for the notepad and pencil he kept beside his bed and scrawled in block capitals, ‘I DON’T REMEMBER.’

‘Nothing at all?’

Prior hesitated, then wrote, ‘NO.’

‘Does he talk in his sleep, sister?’

Rivers was looking at Prior as he asked the question, and thought he detected a flicker of uneasiness.

‘Nothing you can get hold of.’

Prior’s lips curled, but he couldn’t hide the relief.

‘Could you get me a teaspoon, sister?’ Rivers asked.

While she was out of the room, Prior went on staring at Rivers. Rivers, trying to keep the meeting from becoming a confrontation, looked around the room. Sister Rogers came back. ‘Thank you. Now I just want to have a look at the back of your throat.’

Again the pad came out. ‘THERE’S NOTHING PHYSICALY WRONG.’

‘Two l’s in “physically”, Mr Prior. Open wide.’

Rivers drew the end of the teaspoon, not roughly, but firmly, across the back of Prior’s throat. Prior choked, his eyes watered, and he tried to push Rivers’s hand away.

‘There’s no area of analgesia,’ Rivers said to Sister Rogers.

Prior snatched up the pad. ‘IF THAT MEANS IT HURT YES IT DID.’

‘I don’t think it hurt, did it?’ Rivers said. ‘It may have been uncomfortable.’

‘HOW WOULD YOU KNOW?’

Sister Rogers made a clicking noise with her tongue.

‘Do you think you could give us ten minutes alone, sister?’

‘Yes, of course, doctor.’ She glared at Prior. ‘I’ll be in my room if you need me.’

After she’d gone, Rivers said, ‘Why do you always write in block capitals? Because it’s less revealing?’

Prior shook his head. He wrote, ‘CLEARER.’

‘Depends on your handwriting, doesn’t it? I know, if I ever lost my voice, I’d have to write in capitals. Nobody can read mine.’

Prior offered the pad. Rivers, feeling like a schoolboy playing noughts and crosses, wrote: ‘Your file still hasn’t arrived.’

‘I SEE WHAT YOU MEAN.’

Rivers said, ‘Your file still hasn’t arrived.’

Another elaborate shrug.

‘Well, I’m afraid it’s rather more serious than that. If it doesn’t show up soon, we’re going to have to try to get a history together — like this. And that’s not going to be easy.’

‘WHY?’

‘Why do we have to do it? Because I need to know what’s happened to you.’

‘I DON’T REMEMBER.’

‘No, not at the moment, perhaps, but the memory will start to come back.’

A long silence. At last Prior scribbled something, then turned over on his side to face the wall. Rivers leant across and picked the pad up. Prior had written: ‘NO MORE WORDS.’

‘I must say it makes Dottyville almost bearable,’ Sassoon said, looking up and down the station platform. ‘Knowing you don’t have to be vomited over at every meal. I’d eat out every night if I could afford it.’

‘You’ll have to spend some time in the place, Sass.’ No reply. ‘At least you’ve got Rivers.’

‘And at least Rivers doesn’t pretend there’s anything wrong with my nerves.’

Graves started to speak and checked himself. ‘I wish I could say the same about mine.’

‘What can I say, Robert? Have my bed. You live with a herd of lunatics. I’ll go back to Liverpool.’

‘I hate it when you talk like that. As if everybody who breaks down is inferior. We’ve all been’ — Graves held up his thumb and forefinger — ‘that close.’

‘I know how close I’ve been.’ A short silence, then he burst out, ‘Don’t you see, Robert, that’s why I hate the place? I’m frightened.’

‘Frightened? You? You’re not frightened.’ He craned round to see Sassoon’s expression. ‘Are you?’

‘Evidently not.’

They stood in silence for a minute.

‘You ought to be getting back,’ Graves said.

‘Yes, I think you’re right. I don’t want to attract attention to myself.’ He held out his hand. ‘Well. Give everybody my regards. If they still want them.’

Graves took the hand and pulled him into a bear hug. ‘Don’t be so bloody stupid, Siegfried. You know they do.’

Alone and shivering on the pavement, Sassoon thought about taking a taxi and decided against it. The walk would do him good, and if he hurried he could probably make it back in time. He threaded his way through the crowds on Princes Street. Now that Robert was gone, he hated everybody, giggling girls, portly middle-aged men, women whose eyes settled on his wound stripe like flies. Only the young soldier home on leave, staggering out of a pub, dazed and vacant-eyed, escaped his disgust.

Once he’d left the city behind, he began to relax and swing along as he might have done in France. He remembered the march to Arras behind a limber whose swaying lantern cast huge shadows of striding legs across a white-washed wall. Then… No more walls. Ruined buildings. Shelled roads. ‘From sunlight to the sunless land.’ And for a second he was back there, Armageddon, Golgotha, there were no words, a place of desolation so complete no imagination could have invented it. He thought of Rivers, and what he’d said that morning about finding safety unbearable. Well, Rivers was wrong, people were more corruptible than that. He was more corruptible than that. A few days of safety, and all the clear spirit of the trenches was gone. It was still, after all these weeks, pure joy to go to bed in white sheets and know that he would wake. The road smelled of hot tar, moths flickered between the trees, and when at last, turning up the drive into Craiglockhart, he stopped and threw back his head, the stars burst on his upturned face like spray.

A nightly bath had become essential to Rivers, a ritual that divided his meagre spare time from the demands of the hospital. He was already pulling his tunic off as he crossed the bedroom. Naked, he sat on the edge of the bath, waiting for it to fill. The hot tap was shiny; the cold, misted over, dewed with drops of condensed steam. Absent-mindedly, he played with the drops, making them run together to form larger pools. He was thinking about Prior, and the effect he was having on his room-mate, Robinson, and wondering whether it was worse than the effect Anderson was having on Featherstone. In any event, no single room was available. One solution to the Prior problem was to move Robinson into a room at present shared by two patients, although if the overcrowding were not to prove intolerable, the patients would have to be very carefully selected. He was still running through possible combinations as he bathed.

By his bed was the current issue of Man, still in its envelope. He hadn’t managed even to glance through it yet. And suddenly he was furious with the hospital, and Prior, and overcrowding and the endless permutations of people sharing that were made necessary by nightmares, sleep-walking, the need of some patients for night-lights and others for absolute darkness.

His irritation, groping for an object, fastened on Sassoon. Sassoon made no secret of his belief that anybody who supported the continuation of the war must be actuated by selfish motives, and yet if Rivers had allowed such motives to dominate, he’d have wanted the war to end tonight. Let the next generation cope with the unresolved problem of German militarism, just get me back to Cambridge and research. He flicked through the journal, but he was too tired to concentrate, and, after a few minutes, he switched off the light.

Shortly before dawn he woke. Still dazed from sleep, he put his hand to his left arm, expecting to feel blood. The dry cloth of his pyjama sleeve told him he’d been dreaming. He switched on the lamp and lay for a while, recollecting the details of the dream, then picked up a notepad and pencil from his bedside table and began to write.

I was in my room at St John’s, sitting at the table in front of the book case. Head was beside me, his left sleeve rolled up, and his eyes closed. The sleeve was rolled up well above his elbow, so that the full length of the incision was revealed. The scar was purple. The tablecloth was spread with various items of equipment: jugs of water, wisps of cotton wool, bristle brushes, compasses, ice cubes, pins.

My task was to map the area of hypersensitivity to pain on Head’s forearm. He sat with his eyes closed and his face turned slightly away. Every time I pricked him he cried out and tried to pull his arm away. I was distressed by this and didn’t want to go on, but I knew I had to. Head kept on crying out.

The dream changed and I was drawing a map of the protopathic area directly on to his skin. The pen was as painful as the needle had been. Head opened his eyes and said something I didn’t catch. It sounded like, ‘Why don’t

you

try it?’ He was holding an object out towards me. I looked down to see what it was, and saw that my own left arm was bare, though I couldn’t recall rolling up my sleeve.

The object in Head’s hand was a scalpel. I began to ask him to repeat what he’d said, but before I could get the words out, he’d leant forward and brought the scalpel down my arm, in the region of the elbow. The incision, although about six inches long, was so fine that at first there was no blood. After a second, small beads of blood began to appear, and at that point I woke up.

Rivers started to analyse the dream. The manifest content didn’t take long. Except for the cutting of his arm, the dream was an unusually accurate reproduction of events that had actually occurred.

Henry Head had been working for some time on the regeneration of nerves after accidental injury, using as his subjects patients in the public wards of London hospitals, before concluding that, if any further progress was to be made, more rigorously controlled tests would have to be done. Rivers had pointed out that these would have to be carried out on a subject who was himself a trained observer, since an extremely high degree of critical awareness would be needed to exclude preconceptions. Head had volunteered himself as the subject of the proposed experiment, and Rivers had assisted at the operation in which Head’s radial nerve had been severed and sutured. Then, together, over a period of five years, they had charted the progress of regeneration.

During the early stage of recovery, when the primitive, protopathic sensibility had been restored, but not yet the finely discriminating epicritic sensibility, many of the experiments had been extremely painful. Protopathic sensibility seemed to have an ‘all or nothing’ quality. The threshold of sensation was high, but, once crossed, the sensations were both abnormally widely diffused and — to use Head’s own word — ‘extreme’. At times a pinprick would cause severe and prolonged pain. Rivers had often felt distress at the amount of pain he was causing, but it would not, in life, have occurred to him to stop the experiment for that reason, any more than it would have occurred to Head. In the dream, however, the wish to stop the experiment had been prominent.

The latent content was more difficult. Superficially, the dream seemed to support Freud’s contention that all dreams were wish fulfilment. Rivers had wished himself back in Cambridge, doing research, and the dream had fulfilled the wish. But that was to ignore the fact that the dream had not been pleasant. The emphasis in the dream had been on the distress he felt at causing pain, and, on waking, the affect had been one of fear and dread. He didn’t believe such a dream could be convincingly explained as wish fulfilment, unless, of course, he wished to torture one of his closest friends. No doubt some of Freud’s more doctrinaire supporters would have little difficulty with that idea, particularly since the torture took the form of pricking him, but Rivers couldn’t accept it. He was more inclined to seek the meaning of the dream in the conflict his dream self had experienced between the duty to continue the experiment and the reluctance to cause further pain.

Rivers was aware, as a constant background to his work, of a conflict between his belief that the war must be fought to a finish, for the sake of the succeeding generations, and his horror that such events as those which had led to Burns’s breakdown should be allowed to continue. This conflict, though a constant feature of his life, would certainly have been strengthened by his conversations with Sassoon. He’d been thinking about Sassoon immediately before he went to sleep. But, on thinking it over, Rivers couldn’t see that the dream was a likely dramatization of that conflict. The war was hardly an experiment, and it certainly didn’t rest with him to decide whether it continued or not.

Recently almost all his dreams had centred on conflicts arising from his treatment of particular patients. In advising them to remember the traumatic events that had led to their being sent here, he was, in effect, inflicting pain, and doing so in pursuit of a treatment that he knew to be still largely experimental. Only in Burns’s case had he found it impossible to go on giving this advice, because the suffering involved in Burns’s attempts to remember was so extreme. ‘Extreme’. The word Head had used to describe the pain he’d experienced during the protopathic stage of regeneration. Certainly in Burns’s case, there was a clear conflict between Rivers’s desire to continue using a method of treatment he believed in, but knew to be experimental, and his sense that in this particular instance the pain involved in insisting on the method would be too great.

The dream had not merely posed a problem, it had suggested a solution. ‘Why don’t you try it?’ Henry had said. Rivers felt he’d got there first, that the dream lagged behind his waking practice: he was already experimenting on himself. In leading his patients to understand that breakdown was nothing to be ashamed of, that horror and fear were inevitable responses to the trauma of war and were better acknowledged than suppressed, that feelings of tenderness for other men were natural and right, that tears were an acceptable and helpful part of grieving, he was setting himself against the whole tenor of their upbringing. They’d been trained to identify emotional repression. as the essence of manliness. Men who broke down, or cried, or admitted to feeling fear, were sissies, weaklings, failures. Not men. And yet he himself was a product of the same system, even perhaps a rather extreme product. Certainly the rigorous repression of emotion and desire had been the constant theme of his adult life. In advising his young patients to abandon the attempt at repression and to let themselves feel the pity and terror their war experience inevitably evoked, he was excavating the ground he stood on.

The change he demanded of them — and by implication of himself — was not trivial. Fear, tenderness — these emotions were so despised that they could be admitted into consciousness only at the cost of redefining what it meant to be a man. Not that Rivers’s treatment involved any encouragement of weakness or effeminacy. His patients might be encouraged to acknowledge their fears, their horror of the war — but they were still expected to do their duty and return to France. It was Rivers’s conviction that those who had learned to know themselves, and to accept their emotions, were less likely to break down again.

In a moment or two an orderly would tap on the door and bring in his tea. He put the notebook and pencil back on the bedside table. Henry would be amused by that dream, he thought. If wish fulfilment had been involved at all, it was surely one of Henry’s wishes that had been fulfilled. At the time of the nerve regeneration experiments, they’d done a series of control experiments on the glans penis, and Henry had frequently expressed the desire for a reciprocal application of ice cubes, bristles, near-boiling water and pins.

6

Prior sat with his arms folded over his chest and his head turned slightly away. His eyelids looked raw from lack of sleep.

‘When did your voice come back?’ Rivers asked.

‘In the middle of the night. I woke up shouting and suddenly I realized I could talk. It’s happened before.’

A Northern accent, not ungrammatical, but with the vowel sounds distinctly flattened, and the faintest trace of sibilance. Hearing Prior’s voice for the first time had the curious effect of making him look different. Thinner, more defensive. And, at the same time, a lot tougher. A little, spitting, sharp-boned alley cat.

‘It comes and goes?’

‘Yes.’

‘What makes it go?’

Another shrug from the repertoire. ‘When I get upset.’

‘And coming here upset you?’

‘I’d have preferred somewhere further south.’

So would I. ‘What did you do before the war?’

‘I was a clerk in a shipping office.’

‘Did you like it?’

‘No. It was boring.’ He looked down at his hands and immediately up again. ‘What did you do?’

Rivers hesitated. ‘Research. Teaching.’

‘Did you like it?’

‘Yes, very much. Research more than teaching probably, but…’ He shrugged. ‘I enjoy teaching.’

‘I noticed. “Two l’s in physically, Mr Prior.”’

‘What an insufferable thing to say.’

‘I thought so.’

‘I’m sorry.’

Prior didn’t know what to say to that. He looked down at his hands and mumbled, ‘Yes, well.’

‘By the way, your file arrived this morning.’

Prior smiled. ‘So you know all about me, then?’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that. What did become clear is that you had a spell in the 13th Casualty Clearing Station in…’ He looked at the file again. ‘January. Diagnosed neurasthenic.’

Prior hesitated. ‘Ye-es.’

‘Deep reflexes abnormal.’

‘Yes.’

‘But on that occasion no trouble with the voice? Fourteen days later you were back in the line. Fully recovered?’

‘I’d stopped doing the can-can, if that’s what you mean.’

‘Were there any remaining symptoms?’

‘Headaches.’ He watched Rivers make a note. ‘It’s hardly a reason to stay out of the trenches, is it? “Not tonight, Wilhelm. I’ve got a headache”?’

‘It might be. It rather depends how bad they were.’ He waited for a reply, but Prior remained obstinately silent. ‘You were back in the 13th CCS in April. This time unable to speak.’

‘I’ve told you, I don’t remember.’

‘So the loss of memory applies to the later part of your service in France, but the early part — the first six months or so — is comparatively clear?’

‘Ye-es.’

Rivers sat back in his chair. ‘Would you like to tell me something about that early part?’

‘No.’

‘But you do remember it?’

‘Doesn’t mean I want to talk about it.’ He looked round the room. ‘I don’t see why it has to be like this anyway.’

‘Like what?’

‘All the questions from you, all the answers from me. Why can’t it be both ways?’

‘Look, Mr Prior, if you went to the doctor with bronchitis and he spent half the consultation time telling you about his lumbago, you would not be pleased. Would you?’

‘No, but if I went to my doctor in despair it might help to know he at least understood the meaning of the word.’

‘Are you in despair?’

Prior sighed, ostentatiously impatient.

‘You know, I talk to a lot of people who are in despair or very close to it, and my experience is that they don’t care what the doctor feels. That’s the whole point about despair, isn’t it? That you turn in on yourself.’

‘Well, all I can say is I’d rather talk to a real person than a a strip of empathic wallpaper.’

Rivers smiled. ‘I like that.’

Prior glared at him.

‘If you feel you can’t talk about France, would it help to talk about the nightmares?’

‘No. I don’t think talking helps. It just churns things up and makes them seem more real.’

‘But they are real.’

A short silence. Rivers closed Prior’s file. ‘All right. Good morning.’

Prior looked at the clock. ‘It’s only twenty past ten.’

Rivers spread his hands.

‘You can’t refuse to talk to me.’

‘Prior, there are a hundred and sixty-eight patients in this hospital, all of them wanting to get better, none of them getting the attention he deserves. Good morning.’

Prior started to get up, then sat down again. ‘You’ve no right to say I don’t want to get better.’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘You implied it.’

‘All right. Do you want to get better?’

‘Of course.’

‘But you’re not prepared to co-operate with the treatment.’

‘I don’t agree with the treatment.’

Deep breath. ‘What methods of treatment do you favour?’

‘Dr Sanderson was going to try hypnosis.’

‘He doesn’t mention it in his report.’

‘He was. He told me.’

‘How did you feel about that?’

‘I thought it was a good idea. I mean you’re more or less saying: things are real, you’ve got to face them, but how can I face them when I don’t know what they are?’

‘That’s rather an unusual reaction, you know. Generally, when a doctor suggests hypnosis the patient’s quite nervous, because he feels he’ll be… putting himself in somebody else’s power. Actually that’s not quite true, but it does tend to be the fear.’

‘If it’s not true, why don’t you use it?’

‘I do sometimes. In selected cases. As a last resort. In your case, I’d want to know quite a lot about the part of your war service that you do remember.’

‘All right. What do you want to know?’

Rivers blinked, surprised by the sudden capitulation. ‘Well, anything you want to tell me.’

Silence.

‘Perhaps you could start with the day before you went into the CCS for the first time. Do you remember what you were doing that day?’

Prior smiled. ‘Standing up to my waist in water in a dugout in the middle of No Man’s Land being bombed to buggery.’

‘Why?’

‘Good question. You should pack this in and join the general staff.’

‘If there wasn’t a reason, there must at least have been a rationale.’

‘There was that, all right.’ Prior adopted a strangled version of the public school accent. ‘The pride of the British Army requires that absolute dominance must be maintained in No Man’s Land at all times.’ He dropped the accent. ‘Which in practice means… Dugout in the middle of No Man’s Land. Right? Every forty-eight hours two platoons crawl out — nighttime, of course — relieve the poor bastards inside, and provide the Germans with another forty-eight hours’ target practice. Why it’s thought they need all this target practice is beyond me. They seem quite accurate enough as it is.’ His expression changed. ‘It was flooded. You stand the whole time. Most of the time in pitch darkness because the blast kept blowing the candles out. We were packed in so tight we couldn’t move. And they just went all out to get us. One shell after the other. I lost two sentries. Direct hit on the steps. Couldn’t find a thing.’

‘And you had forty-eight hours of that?’

‘Fifty. The relieving officer wasn’t in a hurry.’

‘And when you came out you went straight to the CCS?’

‘I didn’t go, I was carried.’

A tap on the door. Rivers called out angrily, ‘I’m with a patient.’

A short pause as they listened to footsteps fading down the corridor. Prior said, ‘I met the relieving officer.’

‘In the clearing station?’

‘No, here. He walked past me on the top corridor. Poor bastard left his Lewis guns behind. He was lucky not to be court-martialled.’

‘Did you speak?’

‘We nodded. Look, you might like to think it’s one big happy family out there, but it’s not. They despise each other.’

‘You mean you despise yourself.’

Prior looked pointedly across Rivers’s shoulder. ‘It’s eleven o’clock.’

‘All right. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

‘I thought of going into Edinburgh tomorrow.’

Rivers looked up. ‘At nine.’

‘I can guess what Graves said. What a fine upstanding man I was until I fell among pacifists. Isn’t that right? Russell used me. Russell wrote the Declaration.’

‘No, he didn’t say that.’

‘Good. Because it isn’t true.’

‘You don’t think you were influenced by Russell?’

‘No, not particularly. I think I was influenced by my own experience of the front. I am capable of making up my own mind.’

‘Was this the first time you’d encountered pacifism?’

‘No. Edward Carpenter, before the war.’

‘You read him?’

‘Read him. Wrote to him.’ He smiled slightly. ‘I even made the Great Pilgrimage to Chesterfield.’

‘You must’ve been impressed to do that.’

Sassoon hesitated. ‘Yes, I…’

Watching him, Rivers perceived that he’d led Sassoon unwittingly on to rather intimate territory. He was looking for a way of redirecting the conversation when Sassoon said, ‘I read a book of his. The Intermediate Sex. I don’t know whether you know it?’

‘Yes. I’ve had patients who swore their entire lives had been changed by it.’

‘Mine was. At least I don’t know about “changed”. “Saved”, perhaps.’

‘As bad as that?’

‘At one point, yes. I’d got myself into quite a state.’

Rivers waited.

‘I didn’t seem able to feel… well. Any of the things you’re supposed to feel. It got so bad I used to walk all night sometimes. I used to wait till everybody else was in bed, and then I’d just… get out and walk. The book was a life-saver. Because I suddenly saw that… I wasn’t just a freak. That there was a positive side. Have you read it?’

Rivers clasped his hands behind his head. ‘Yes. A long time ago now.’

‘What did you think?’

‘I found it quite difficult. Obviously you have to admire the man’s courage, and the way he’s… opened up the debate. But I don’t know that the concept of an intermediate sex is as helpful as people think it is when they first encounter it. In the end nobody wants to be neuter. Anyway, the point is Carpenter’s pacifism doesn’t seem to have made much impression?’

‘I don’t know if I was aware of it even. I didn’t think much about politics. The next time I encountered pacifism was Robert Ross. I met him, oh, I suppose two years ago. He’s totally opposed to the war.’

‘And that didn’t influence you either?’

‘No. Obviously it made things easier at a personal level. I mean, frankly, any middle-aged man who Believed in The War would…’Sassoon skidded to a halt. ‘Present company excepted.’

Rivers bowed.

‘I didn’t even bother showing him the Declaration. I knew he wouldn’t go along with it.’

‘Why wouldn’t he? Out of concern for you?’

‘Ye-es. Yes, that certainly, but… Ross was a close friend of Wilde’s. I suppose he’s learnt to keep his head below the parapet.’

‘And you haven’t.’

‘I don’t like holes in the ground.’

Rivers began polishing his glasses on his handkerchief. ‘You know, I realize Ross’s caution probably seems excessive. To you. But I hope you won’t be in too much of a hurry to dismiss it. There’s nothing more despicable than using a man’s private life to discredit his views. But it’s very frequently done, even by people in my profession. People you might think wouldn’t resort to such tactics. I wouldn’t like to see it happen to you.’

‘I thought discrediting my views was what you were about?’

Rivers smiled wryly. ‘Let’s just say I’m fussy about the methods.’

Rivers had kept two hours free of appointments in the late afternoon in order to get on with the backlog of reports. He’d been working for half an hour when Miss Crowe tapped on the door. ‘Mr Prior says could he have a word?’

Rivers pulled a face. ‘I’ve seen him once today. Does he say what’s wrong?’

‘No, this is the father.’

‘I didn’t even know he was coming.’

She started to close the door. ‘I’ll tell him you’re busy, shall I?’

‘No, no, I’ll see him.’

Mr Prior came in. He was a big, thick-set man with a ruddy complexion, dark hair sleeked back, and a luxuriant, drooping, reddish-brown moustache. ‘I’m sorry to drop on you like this,’ he said. ‘I thought our Billy had told you we were coming.’

‘I think he probably mentioned it. If he did, I’m afraid it slipped my mind.’

Mr Prior looked him shrewdly up and down. ‘Nab. Wasn’t your mind it slipped.’

‘Well, sit down. How did you find him?’

‘Difficult to tell when they won’t talk, isn’t it?’

‘Isn’t he talking? He was this morning.’

‘Well, he’s not now.’

‘It does come and go.’

‘Oh, I’m sure. Comes when it’s convenient and goes when it isn’t. What’s supposed to be the matter?’

‘Physically, nothing.’ Two l’s, Rivers thought. ‘I think perhaps there’s something he’s afraid to talk about, so he solves the problem by making it impossible for himself to speak. This is… beneath the surface. He doesn’t know what he’s doing.’

‘If he doesn’t, it’ll be the first time.’

Rivers tried a different tack. ‘I believe he volunteered, didn’t he? The first week of the war.’

‘He did. Against my advice, not that that’s ever counted for much.’

‘You didn’t want him to go?’

‘No I did not. I told him, time enough to do summat for the Empire when the Empire’s done summat for you.’

‘It is natural for the young to be idealistic.’

‘Ideals had nowt to do with it. He was desperate to get out of his job.’

‘I think I remember him saying he didn’t like it. He was a clerk in a shipping office.’

‘That’s right, and getting nowhere. Twenty years wearing the arse of your breeches out and then, if you’re a good boy and lick all the right places, you get to be supervisor and then you sit on a bigger stool and watch other people wear their breeches out. Didn’t suit our Billy. He’s ambitious, you know, you mightn’t think it to look at him, but he is. His mam drilled that into him. Schooled him in it. She was determined he was going to get on.’

Rather unexpectedly, Rivers found himself wanting to leap to Billy Prior’s defence. ‘She seems to have succeeded.’

Mr Prior snorted. ‘She’s made a stool-arsed jack on him, if that’s what you mean.’

‘You make it sound as if you had no say.’

‘I didn’t. All the years that lad was growing up there was only one time I put my oar in, and that was when there was this lad at school picking on him. He was forever coming in crying. And one day I thought, well, I’ve had enough of this. So the next time he come in blubbing I give him a backhander and shoved him out the door. There he was, all tears and snot, yelling his bloody head off. He says, he’s waiting for us, our Dad. I says, go on, then. You’ve got to toughen ’em up, you know, in our neighbourhood. If you lie down there’s plenty to walk over you.’

‘What happened?’

‘Got the shit beat out of him. And the next day. And the next. But — and this is our Billy — when he did finally take a tumble to himself and hit the little sod he didn’t just hit him, he half bloody murdered him. I had his father coming round, and all sorts. Not but what be got short shrift.’

He seemed to have no feeling for his son at all, except contempt. ‘You must be proud of his being an officer?’

‘Must I? I’m not proud. He should’ve stuck with his own. Except he can’t, can he? That’s what she’s done to him. He’s neither fish nor fowl, and she’s too bloody daft to see it. But I tell you one person who does see it.’ He pointed to the ceiling. ‘Oh it’s all very lovey-dovey on the surface but underneath he doesn’t thank her for it.’ He stood up. ‘Anyway I’d best be getting back. His nibs’ll have a fit, when he knows I’ve seen you. Wheezing badly, isn’t he?’ He caught Rivers’s expression. ‘Oh, I see, he wasn’t wheezing either? Not what you could call a successful visit.’

‘I’m sure it’s done him a lot of good. We often find they don’t settle till they’ve seen their families.’

Mr Prior nodded, accepting the reassurance without believing it. ‘Any idea how long he’ll be here?’

‘Twelve weeks. Initially.’

‘Hm. He’d get a damn sight more sympathy from me if he had a bullet up his arse. Anyway…’ He held out his hand. ‘It’s been nice meeting you. I don’t know when we’ll be up again.’

Rivers had completed two reports when Miss Crowe put her head round the door again. ‘Mrs Prior.’

They exchanged glances. Rivers threw down his pen, and said, ‘Show her in.’

Mrs Prior was a small upright woman, neatly dressed in a dark suit and mauve blouse. ‘I won’t stay long,’ she said, sitting nervously on the edge of the chair. She was playing with her wedding ring, pulling and pushing it over the swollen knuckle. ‘I’d like to apologize for my husband. I thought he was just stepping outside for a smoke, otherwise I’d’ve stopped him.’

A carefully genteel voice. Fading prettiness. Billy Prior had got his build and features from her rather than the father. ‘No, I was pleased to see him. How did you find Billy?’

‘Wheezing. I’ve not seen his chest as tight as that since he was a child.’

‘I didn’t even know he was asthmatic.’

‘No, well, it doesn’t bother him much. Usually. As a child it was terrible. I used to have to boil kettles in his room. You know, for the steam?’

‘You must be very proud of him.’

Her face softened. ‘I am. Because I know how hard it’s been. I can truthfully say he never sat an exam without he was bad with his asthma.’

‘Did he like the shipping office?’

Her mouth shaped itself to say ‘yes’, then, ‘No. It was the same docks as his father and I think that was the mistake. You know, his father was earning more as a ganger than Billy was as a clerk, and I think myself there was a little bit of… You see the trouble with my husband, the block had to chip. Do you know what I mean? He’s never been able to accept that Billy was different. And I think there might have been a little bit of jealousy as well, because he has, he’s had a hard life. I don’t deny that. A lot harder than it need have been, because his mother sent him to work when he was ten. And no need for it either, she had two sons working, but there it is. What can you say? He worships her’ She was silent for a moment, brooding. ‘You know sometimes I think the less you do for them, the better you’re thought of.’

‘Would you say Billy and his father were close?’

‘No! And yet, you see, the funny thing is our Billy’s…’ She sought for a way of erasing the tell-tale ‘our’ from the sentence and, not finding one, gave a little deprecatory laugh. ‘All for “the common people”, as he calls them. I said, “You mean your father?”’ She laughed again. ‘Oh, no, he didn’t mean his father. I said, “But you know nothing about the common people. You’ve had nothing to do with them.” Do you know what he turned round and said? “Whose fault is that?”

Miss Crowe tapped on the door. ‘Your husband says he’s going now, Mrs Prior.’

‘Yes, well, I’ll have to go. You’ll take care of him, won’t you?’

She was close to tears. Rivers said, ‘We’ll do our best.’

‘I’d be grateful if you wouldn’t mention I’ve been to see you. He’s upset enough about his father.’

After she’d gone, Rivers turned to Miss Crowe. ‘That was amazing. Do you know, I think they’d have said anything?’

‘You get married couples like that, sir. One sympathetic word and you’re there till midnight. Captain Broadbent’s waiting to see you.’

Rivers looked at the pile of papers on his desk and sighed. ‘All right, show him in.’ The frustration boiled over. ‘And do please try not to call him “captain”. He’s no more a captain than I am.’

‘You are a captain, Captain Rivers.’

Miss Crowe paused at the door to savour the small moment of triumph. Rivers smiled and said, ‘All right. But at least try not to address him as “captain”. It really doesn’t help him to have his fantasies confirmed.’

‘I’ll do my best, sir. Though as long as he’s allowed to walk round the hospital with three stars on his sleeve, I don’t see that my remembering to call him “mister” is going to make a great deal of difference.’ She smiled sweetly and withdrew. A moment later she reappeared. ‘Mister Broadbent, sir.’

‘Come in, Mr Broadbent. Sit down.’

It wasn’t just the stars. There was also the little matter of the medals, including the Serbian equivalent of the VC awarded to a foreigner for the first and only time in its long and glorious history. And then there were the honorary degrees, though at least he hadn’t yet taken to wearing those on his tunic. However, he was doing very good work with the hospital chamber orchestra. ‘Well, Broadbent, what can I do for you?’

‘I’ve had some bad news, Dr Rivers,’ Broadbent said in his confiding, insinuating way. ‘My mother’s been taken ill.’

Rivers didn’t believe Broadbent’s mother was ill. He didn’t believe Broadbent had a mother. He thought it entirely possible that Broadbent had been hatched. ‘Oh, I am sorry.’

‘I was hoping for some leave.’

‘You’ll have to ask the CO about that.’

‘I was hoping you might put a word in for me. You see, I don’t think Major Bryce likes me very much.’

People who’d heard of Broadbent’s exploits, but not met him, were apt to picture a rather florid, swashbuckling, larger-than-life figure. In reality, Broadbent was a limp, etiolated youth, with a pallid complexion and a notably damp handshake, whose constant and bizarre infringements of the hospital rules took up far far too much time. He was quite right in thinking Bryce didn’t like him.

‘It’s not a question of liking or not liking,’ Rivers said. ‘Is your mother very ill?’

‘I’m afraid so, Dr Rivers.’

‘Then I’m sure Major Bryce will be sympathetic. But it is his decision. Not mine.’

‘I just thought…’ Suddenly Broadbent’s voice hardened. ‘This is extremely bad for my nerves. You know what happens.’

‘I hope it doesn’t happen this time. Because last time, if you remember, you had to be locked up. Why don’t you go to see Major Bryce now?’

‘Yes, all right.’ Broadbent stood up, reluctantly, and spat, ‘Thank you, sir.’

At least he didn’t offer to shake hands.

After dinner a Charlie Chaplin film was shown in the cinema on the first floor. The whole of the ground floor was deserted. Rivers, taking his completed reports along to the office to be typed, saw that a lamp had been left burning in the patients’ common room and went in to switch it off.

Prior was sitting beneath the windows at the far end of the room, looking out over the tennis courts, his face and hands bluish in the dim light. Rivers was tempted to withdraw immediately, but then something about the isolation of the small figure under the huge windows made him pause. ‘Don’t you want to see the film?’

‘I couldn’t stand the smoke.’

He was wheezing very badly. Rivers went across to the window and sat beside him. Housemartins were weaving to and fro above the tennis courts, feeding on the myriads of tiny insects that were just visible as a golden haze. He watched them cut, wheel, dive— how skilful they were at avoiding collision — and for a moment, under the spell of the flickering birds, the day’s work and responsibility fell away. But he couldn’t ignore Prior’s breathing, or the whiteness of the knuckles where his left hand gripped the chair. He turned and looked at him, noting the drawn, anxious face. ‘It’s bad, isn’t it?’

‘Bit tight.’

Prior was bent forward to help the expansion of his lungs. Looking at him now, Rivers could see the straightness of the shoulders, the surprising breadth of chest in a delicately built man. Once you knew it was obvious. But why nothing on the file?

‘I gather you met my father,’ Prior gasped. ‘Quite a character.’

‘He seemed to be a man of strong views.’

Prior’s mouth twisted. ‘He’s a bar-room socialist, if that’s what you mean. Beer and revolution go in, piss comes out.’ He attempted a laugh. ‘My mother was quite concerned. “He’ll be down there effing and blinding,” she said. “Showing us all up.”’

‘I liked him.’

‘Oh, yes, he’s very likeable. Outside the house. I’ve seen him use my mother as a football.’ The next breath screeched. ‘When I was too little to do anything about it.’

‘You know, I think I ought to have a look at that chest.’

Prior managed a ghostly imitation of his usual manner. ‘Your room or mine?’

‘The sick bay.’

The walk along the corridor to the lift was painfully slow.

‘I didn’t want you to meet him,’ Prior said, as Rivers pressed the button for the second floor.

‘No, I know you didn’t. I could hardly refuse.’

‘I’m not blaming you.’

‘Is it a question of blame?’

While the nurses made up the bed, Rivers examined Prior. He’d expected Prior to be impossible, but in the event he became strictly impersonal, gazing over Rivers’s shoulder as the stethoscope moved across his chest. ‘All right, put your jacket on.’ Rivers folded the stethoscope. ‘I’m surprised you got to France at all with that.’

‘They couldn’t afford to be fussy.’ Prior started the long climb into the bed. ‘I won’t be moved to another hospital, will I?’

‘No, I shouldn’t think so. Four doctors, thirty nurses. I think we might manage.’

‘Only I don’t want to be moved.’

Rivers helped him to pull up the sheets. ‘I thought you didn’t like it here?’

‘Yes, well, you can get used to anything, can’t you? Do you think I could have a towel tied to the bed?’

‘Yes, of course. Anything you want.’

‘Only it helps, you see. Having something to pull on.’

‘What was it like in France? The asthma.’

‘Better than at home.’

A shout of laughter from below. Charlie Chaplin in full swing. Rivers, following Prior’s gaze, saw the single lamp and the deep shadows, and sensed, with a premonitory tightening of his diaphragm, the breath-by-breath agony of the coming night. ‘I’ll see about the towel,’ he said.

He saw Prior settled down for the night. ‘I’ll be along in the morning,’ he said. Then he went to Sister’s room next door and left orders he was to be woken at once if Prior got worse.

7

Sassoon woke to the sound of screams and running footsteps. The screams stopped and then a moment or two later started again. He peered at his watch and made out that it was ten past four.

Because of the rubber underlay, a pool of sweat had gathered in the small of his back. The rubbery smell lingered on his skin, a clinical smell that made his body unfamiliar to him. In the next bed Campbell snored, a cacophony of grunts, snorts and whistles. No screams ever woke him. On the other hand he himself never screamed, and Sassoon had been at Craiglockhart long enough now to realize how valuable a room-mate that made him.

Fully awake now, he dragged himself to the bottom of the bed, lifted the thin curtain and peered out of the window. Wester Hill, blunt-nosed and brooding, loomed out of the mist. And yesterday, he thought, shivering a little, his statement had been read in the House of Commons. He wondered what would happen next. Whether anything would happen. In any event there was a kind of consolation in knowing it was out of his hands.

He knew he was shivering more with fear than cold, though it was difficult to name the fear. The place, perhaps. The haunted faces, the stammers, the stumbling walks, that indefinable look of being ‘mental’. Craiglockhart frightened him more than the front had ever done.

Upstairs whoever-it-was screamed again. He heard women’s voices and then, a few minutes afterwards, a man’s voice. Rivers, he thought, but he couldn’t be sure. Quaking and comfortless, he propped himself up against the iron bedhead and waited for the dawn.

∗

Prior hauled himself further up the bed as Rivers came in. He closed the book he’d been reading and put it down on his bedside table. ‘I thought it was you,’ he said. ‘I can tell your footsteps.’

Rivers got a chair and sat down by the bed. ‘Did you manage to get back to sleep?’

‘Yes. Did you?’

Silence.

‘I wasn’t being awkward,’ Prior said. ‘That was concern.’

‘I didn’t, but it doesn’t matter. I don’t sleep much after four anyway.’ He caught the flicker of interest. How quickly Prior pounced on any item of personal information.

‘Thanks for showing up.’

‘You hated it.’

Prior looked slightly disconcerted, then smiled. ‘I don’t suppose anybody’d choose to be seen in such a state. I don’t really see why they had to call you.’

‘They were afraid the fear might bring on another attack. Though in fact you seem to be breathing more easily.’

Prior took a trial deep breath. ‘Yes, I think I am. Do you know I detect something in myself. I…’ He stopped. ‘No, I don’t think I want to tell you what I detect.’

‘Oh, go on. Professional curiosity. I want to see if I’ve detected it.’

Prior smiled faintly. ‘No, you won’t have detected this. I find myself wanting to impress you. Pathetic, isn’t it?’

‘I don’t think it’s pathetic. We all care what the people around us think, whether we admit it or not.’ He paused. ‘Though I’m a bit surprised my opinion matters. I mean, to be quite honest, I didn’t think you liked me very much.’

‘There’s a limit to how warm you can feel about wallpaper.’

‘Oh, we’re back to that again, are we?’

Prior turned away, hunching his shoulders. ‘No-o.’

Rivers watched him for a while. ‘Why do you think it has to be like that?’

‘So that I… I’m sorry. So that the patient can fantasize freely. So that the patient can turn you into whoever he wants you to be. Well, all right. I just think you might consider the possibility that this patient might want you to be you.’

‘All right.’

‘All right, what?’

‘All right, I’ll consider it.’

‘I suppose most of them turn you into Daddy, don’t they? Well, I’m a bit too old to be sitting on Daddy’s knee.’

‘Kicking him on the shins every time you meet him isn’t generally considered more mature.’

‘I see. A negative transference. Is that what you think we’ve got?’

‘I hope not.’ Rivers couldn’t altogether conceal his surprise. ‘Where did you learn that term?’

‘I can read.’

‘Well, yes, I know, but its —’

‘Not popular science? No, but then neither is this.’

He reached for the book beside his bed and held it out to Rivers. Rivers found himself holding a copy of The Todas. He stared for a moment at his own name on the spine. He told himself there was no reason why Prior shouldn’t read one of his books, or all of them for that matter. There was no rational reason for him to feel uneasy. He handed the book back. ‘Wouldn’t you prefer something lighter? You are ill, after all.’

Prior leant back against his pillows, his eyes gleaming with amusement. ‘Do you know, I knew you were going to say that. Now how did I know that?’

‘I didn’t realize you were interested in anthropology.’

‘Why shouldn’t I be?’

‘No reason.’

Really, Rivers thought, Prior was cuckoo-backed to the point where normal conversation became almost impossible. He was flicking through the book, obviously looking for something in particular. After a minute or so he held it out again, open at the section on sexual morality. ‘Do they really go on like that?’

Rivers said, as austerely as he knew how, ‘Their sexual lives are conducted along rather different lines from ours.’

‘I’ll say. They must be bloody knackered. I couldn’t keep it up, could you?’

‘I think my age and your asthma might effectively prevent either of us setting any records.’

‘Ah, yes, but I’m only asthmatic part of the time.’

‘You have to win, don’t you?’

Prior stared intently at him. ‘You know, you do a wonderful imitation of a stuffed shirt. And you’re not like that at all, really, are you?’

Rivers took his glasses off and swept his hand across his eyes. ‘Mister Prior.’

‘I know, I know, “Tell me about France.” All right, what do you want to know? And please don’t say, “Whatever you want to tell me.”’

‘All right. How did you fit in?’

Prior’s face shut tight. ‘You mean, did I encounter any snobbery?’

‘Yes.’

‘Not more than I have here.’

Their eyes locked. Rivers said, ‘But you did encounter it?’

‘Yes. It’s made perfectly clear when you arrive that some people are more welcome than others. It helps if you’ve been to the right school. It helps if you hunt, it helps if your shirts are the right colour. Which is a deep shade of khaki, by the way.’

In spite of himself Rivers looked down at his shirt.

‘Borderline,’ said Prior.

‘And yours?’

‘Not borderline. Nowhere near. Oh, and then there’s the seat. The Seat. You know, they sent me on a course once. You have to ride round and round this bloody ring with your hands clasped behind your head. No saddle. No stirrups. It was amazing. Do you know, for the first time I realized that somewhere at the back of their… tiny tiny minds they really do believe the whole thing’s going to end in one big glorious cavalry charge. “Stormed at with shot and shell,/Boldly they rode and well,/Into the jaws of death,/Into the mouth of hell…” And all. That. Rubbish.’

Rivers noticed that Prior’s face lit up as he quoted the poem. ‘Is it rubbish?’

‘Yes. Oh, all right, I was in love with it once. Shall I tell you something about that charge? Just as it was about to start an officer saw three men smoking. He thought that was a bit too casual, so he confiscated their sabres and sent them into the charge unarmed. Two of them were killed. The one who survived was flogged the following day. The military mind doesn’t change much, does it? The same mind now orders men to be punished by tying them to a limber.’ Prior stretched his arms out. ‘Like this. Field punishment No. 1. “Crucifixion.” Even at the propaganda level can you imagine anybody being stupid enough to order this?’

Either the position, or his anger, constricted his breathing. He brought his arms down sharply and rounded his shoulders. Rivers waited for the spasm to pass. ‘How was your seat?’

‘Sticky. No, that’s good. It means you don’t come off.’

A short silence. Prior said, ‘You mustn’t make too much of it, you know, the snobbery. I didn’t. The only thing that really makes me angry is when people at home say there are no class distinctions at the front. Ball-ocks. What you wear, what you eat. Where you sleep. What you carry. The men are pack animals.’ He hesitated. ‘You know the worst thing? What seemed to me the worst thing? I used to go to this café in Amiens and just across the road there was a brothel. The men used to queue out on to the street.’ He looked at Rivers. ‘They get two minutes.’

‘And officers?’

‘I don’t know. Longer than that.’ He looked up. ‘I don’t pay.’

Prior was talking so freely Rivers decided to risk applying pressure. ‘What were you dreaming about last night?’

‘I don’t remember.’

Rivers said gently, ‘You know, one of the distinguishing characteristics of nightmares is that they are always remembered.’

‘Can’t’ve been a nightmare, then, can it?’

‘When I arrived you were on the floor over there. Trying to get through the wall.’

‘I’m sure it’s true, if you say so, but I don’t remember. The first thing I remember is you listening to my chest.’

Rivers got up, replaced his chair against the wall and came back to the bed. ‘I can’t force you to accept treatment if you don’t want it. You do remember the nightmares. You remember them enough to walk the floor till two or three o’clock every morning rather than go to sleep.’

‘I wish the night staff didn’t feel obliged to act as spies.’

‘Now that’s just childish, isn’t it? You know it’s their job.’

Prior refused to look at him.

‘All right. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

‘It isn’t fair to say I don’t want treatment. I’ve asked for treatment and you’ve refused to give it me.’

Rivers looked blank. ‘Oh, I see. The hypnosis. I didn’t think you were serious.’

‘Why shouldn’t I be serious? It is used to recover lost memory, isn’t it?’

‘Ye-es.’

‘So why won’t you do it?’

Rivers started to speak, and stopped.

‘I can understand, you know. I’m not stupid.’

‘No, I know you’re not stupid. It’s just that there’s… there’s a certain amount of technical jargon involved. I was just trying to avoid it. Basically, people who’ve dealt with a horrible experience by splitting it off from the rest of their consciousness sometimes have a general tendency to deal with any kind of unpleasantness in that way, and if they have, the tendency is likely to be reinforced by hypnosis. In other words you might be removing one particular symptom — loss of memory — and making the underlying condition worse.’

‘But you do do it?’

‘If everything else has failed, yes.’

Prior lay back. ‘That’s all I wanted to know.’

‘In your case not everything else has failed or even been tried. For example, I’d want to write to your CO. We need a clear picture of the last few days.’ Rivers watched Prior’s expression carefully, but he was giving nothing away. ‘But I’d have to go to the CO with a precise question. You understand that, don’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘There’s no point bothering him with a vague inquiry about an unspecified period of time.’

‘No, all right’

‘So we still need you to remember as much as possible by conventional means. But we can leave it till you’re feeling better.’

‘No, I want to get on with it.’

‘We’ll see how you feel tomorrow.’

After leaving Prior, Rivers walked up the back staircase to the tower and stood for a few moments, his hands on the balustrade, looking out across the hills. Prior worried him. The whole business of the demand for hypnosis worried him. At times he felt almost a sense of foreboding in relation to the case, though he wasn’t inclined to give it much credence. In his experience, premonitions of disaster were almost invariably proved false, and the road to Calvary entered on with the very lightest of hearts.

MR MACPHERSON With regard to the case of Second Lieutenant Sassoon, immediately he heard of it, he consulted his military advisers, and in response to their inquiries he received the following telegram: A breach of discipline has been committed, but no disciplinary action has been taken, since Second Lieutenant Sassoon has been reported by the Medical Board as not being responsible for his action, as he was suffering from nervous breakdown. When the military authorities saw the letter referred to, they felt that there must be something wrong with an extremely gallant officer who had done excellent work at the front. He hoped hon. members would hesitate long before they made use of a document written by a young man in such a state of mind, nor did he think their action would be appreciated by the friends of the officer. (

Cheers.

)

Rivers folded The Times and smiled. ‘Really, Siegfried, what did you expect?’

‘I don’t know. Meanwhile…’ Sassoon leant across and pointed to the front page.

Rivers read. ‘“Platts. Killed in action on the 28th April, dearly loved younger son, etc., aged seventeen years and ten months.”’ He looked up and found Sassoon watching him.

‘He wasn’t old enough to enlist. And nobody gives a damn.’

‘Of course they do.’

‘Oh, come on, it doesn’t even put them off their sausages! Have you ever sat in a club room and watched people read the casualty list?’

‘You could say that about the breakfast room here. Sensitivity t-to what’s going on in France is not best shown by b-bursting into t-tears over the c-casualty list.’ He saw Sassoon noticing the stammer and made an effort to speak more calmly. ‘The thing for you to do now is face the fact that you’re here, and here for at least another eleven weeks. Have you thought what you’re going to do?’

‘Not really. I’m still out of breath from getting here. Go for walks. Read.’

‘Will you be able to write, do you think?’

‘Oh, yes. I’ll write if I have to sit on the roof to do it.’

‘There’s no prospect of a room of your own.’

‘No, I know that.’

Rivers chose his words carefully. ‘Captain Campbell is an extremely nice man.’

‘Yes, I’ve noticed. What’s more, his battle plans are saner than Haig’s.’

Rivers ignored that. ‘One thing I could do is put you up for my club, the Conservative Club. I don’t know whether you’d like that? It’d give you an alternative base at least.’

‘I would, very much. Thank you.’

‘Though I hope you won’t exclude the possibility of making friends here.’

Sassoon looked down at the backs of his hands. ‘I thought I might send for my golf clubs. There seem to be one or two keen golfers about.’

‘Good idea. I’ll see you three times a week. It’d better be evenings rather than mornings, I think — especially if you’re going to play golf. Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays?’

‘Fine.’ He smiled faintly. ‘I’ve got nothing else on.’

‘Eight thirty, shall we say? Immediately after dinner.’

Sassoon nodded. ‘It’s very kind of you.’

‘Oh, I don’t know about that.’ He closed his appointments book and pulled a sheet of paper towards him. ‘Now I need to ask a few questions about your physical health. Childhood illnesses, that sort of thing.’

‘All right. Why?’

‘For the admission report.’

‘Oh, I see.’

‘I don’t usually include any… intimate details.’

‘Probably just as well. My intimate details disqualify me from military service.’

Rivers looked up and smiled. ‘I know.’

After Sassoon had gone, Rivers got a case sheet from the stack on his side table, paused for a few moments to collect his thoughts, and began to write:

Patient joined ranks of the Sussex Yeomanry on Aug. 3rd, 1914. Three months later he had a bad smash while schooling a horse and was laid up for several months. In May 1915 he received a commission in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. He was in France from Nov. 1915 until Aug. 1916, when he was sent home with trench fever. He had received the Military Cross in June 1916. He was on three months’ sick leave and returned to France in Feb. 1917. On April 16th, 1917, he was wounded in the right shoulder and was in the surgical wards of the 4th London for four weeks and then at Lady Brassey’s Convalescent Home for three weeks. He then understood that he was to be sent to Cambridge to instruct cadets.

From an early stage of his service in France, he had been horrified by the slaughter and had come to doubt whether the continuance of the War was justifiable. When on sick leave in 1916 he was in communication with Bertrand Russell and other pacifists. He had never previously approved of pacifism and does not think he was influenced by this communication. During his second visit to France, his doubts about the justifiability of the War were accentuated; he became perhaps even more doubtful about the way in which the war was being conducted from a military point of view. When he became fit to return to duty, in July of this year, he felt he was unable to do so, and that it was his duty to make some kind of protest. He drew up a statement which he himself regarded as an act of wilful defiance of military authority (see

The Times,

July 31st, 1917). In consequence of this statement he was ordered to attend a Medical Board at Chester about July 16th, but failed to attend. It was arranged that a second Board should be held at Liverpool on July 20th, which he attended, and he was recommended for admission to Craiglockhart War Hospital for special treatment for three months.

The patient is a healthy looking man of good physique. There are no physical signs of any disorder of the Nervous System. He discusses his recent actions and their motives in a perfectly intelligent and rational way, and there is no evidence of any excitement or depression. He recognizes that his view of warfare is tinged by his feelings about the death of friends and of the men who were under his command in France. At the present time he lays special stress on the hopelessness of any decision in the War as it is now being conducted, but he left out any reference to this aspect of his opinions in the statement which he sent to his Commanding Officer and which was read in the House of Commons. His view differs from that of the ordinary pacifist in that he would no longer object to the continuance of the War if he saw any reasonable prospect of a rapid decision.

He had an attack of double pneumonia when 11 years old, and again at 14. He was at Marlborough College, where he strained his heart at football. He was for four terms at Clare College, Cambridge, where he read first Law and then History, but did not care for either subject. He left Cambridge and spent the following years living in the country, devoting his time chiefly to hunting and cricket. He took no interest in Politics. From boyhood he has written verses at different times, and during his convalescence from his riding accident in 1914 he wrote a poem called ‘The Old Huntsman’, which has recently been published with other poen under that title.

‘I gave Broadbent leave,’ Bryce said. ‘With some trepidation.’

‘Yes, he told me he was going to ask you.’

‘You know what he’s done? Gone off with his room-mate’s new breeches. Marsden’s furious.’

Ruggles said, ‘You mean this guy’s running round the hospital bare-assed frightening the VADs?’

‘No, he’s wearing his other breeches. And your idea of what might frighten a VAD is —’

‘Chivalrous,’ said Ruggles.

‘Naive,’ said Bryce. ‘In the extreme.’

‘Why is it always your patients, Rivers?’ asked Brock.

The MOs were sitting round a table in Bryce’s room over coffee, as they did twice a week after dinner. These gatherings were kept deliberately informal, but they served some of the same purposes as a case conference. Since everybody had now read The Times report, Bryce had asked Rivers to say a few words about Sassoon.

Rivers kept it as brief and uncontroversial as possible. While he was speaking, he noticed that Brock was balancing a pencil between the tips of his extremely long bluish fingers. Never a good sign. Rivers liked Brock, but they didn’t invariably see eye to eye.

A moment’s silence, after Rivers had finished speaking. Then Ruggles asked Bryce if the press had shown any interest. While Bryce was summarizing a conversation he’d had with the Daily Mail, Rivers watched Brock, who sat, arms folded across his chest, looking down his long pinched nose at the table. Brock always looked frozen. Even his voice, high, thin and reedy, seemed to echo across arctic wastes. When Bryce had finished, Brock turned to Rivers and said, ‘What are you thinking of doing with him?’

‘Well, I have been seeing him every day. I’m going to drop that now to three times a week.’

‘Isn’t that rather a lot? For someone who — according to you — has nothing wrong with him?’

‘I shan’t be able to persuade him to go back in less than that.’

‘Isn’t there a case for leaving him alone?’

‘No.’

‘I mean, simply by being here he’s discredited. Discredited, disgraced, apparently lied to by his best friend? I’d’ve thought there was a case for letting him be.’

‘No, there’s no case,’ Rivers said. ‘He’s a mentally and physically healthy man. It’s his duty to go back, and it’s my duty to see he does.’

‘And you’ve no doubts about that at all?’

‘I don’t see the problem. I’m not going to give him electric shocks, or or subcutaneous injections of ether. I’m simply asking him to defend his position. Which he admits was reached largely on emotional grounds.’

‘Grief at the death of his friends. Horror at the slaughter of everybody else’s friends. It isn’t clear to me why such emotions have to be ignored.’

‘I’m not saying they should be ignored. Only that they mustn’t be allowed to dominate.’

‘The protopathic must know its place?’

Rivers looked taken aback. ‘I wouldn’t’ve put it quite like that.’

‘Why not? It’s your word. And Sassoon does seem to be a remarkably protopathic young man. Doesn’t he? I mean from what you say, it’s “all or nothing” all the time. Happy warrior one minute. Bitter pacifist the next.’

‘Precisely. He’s completely inconsistent. And that’s all the more reason to get him to argue the position —’

‘Epicritically.’

‘Rationally.’

Brock raised his hands and sat back in his chair. ‘I hope you don’t mind my playing devil’s advocate?’

‘Good heavens, no. The whole point of these meetings is to protect the patient.’

Brock smiled, one of his rare, thin, unexpectedly charming smiles. ‘Is that what I was doing? I thought I was protecting you.’