Pat Barker - The Ghost Road

He saw Njiru at the water's edge, draped in a white cloth, with a staff in his hand, looking out over the bay.

A canoe was heading in, quickly, paddled by Lembu, and in the stern was a bundle of some kind. He was too far away to see what it was, but an ah went up from the crowd, and suddenly, the women and girls began running into the sea, prancing like horses until they reached a depth where they could cast themselves forward and swim. Clinging to the canoe's side, they escorted it into the shallow water, and Lembu got out, everything about him shining, teeth, hair, eyes, skin, and hauled the canoe up the beach. He walked back to the stern, unwrapped the bundle, and dragged the contents out on to the sand. A small boy about four years old.

Rivers walked down to the canoe, since nobody seemed to care whether he saw this or not. The child's face was tear-stained, streaked with dirt and snot. He was not actually crying now, though irregular hiccups shook his thin chest. As people surged towards him and stared, he moved closer to his captor, resting one grubby hand on Lembu's naked thigh.

Rivers went up to Njiru. 'Is that your head?' he asked, unaware that he spoke English, not pidgin.

'Yes,' Njiru said steadily.

He took the child from Lembu and, surrounded by excited, smiling people, carried him up the beach path to the village. Rivers followed, but kept well back as the crowd gathered outside Ngea's hall. Lembu blew the conch as they entered the village, and again inside the hall. After a while Emele emerged, hobbling, resting her arms on the shoulders of Taru and Nali. Lembu and Njiru followed her out, and there was general rejoicing, except from the small boy, who stood alone at the centre of the throng, his eyes like black bubbles that at any moment might burst.

4 October 1918

What can one say? And yet I've got to write something because however little I remember now I'll remember less in years to come. And it's not true to say one remembers nothing. A lot of it you know you'll never forget, and a few things you'll pray to forget and not be able to. But the connections go. Bubbles break on the surface like they do on the flooded craters round here — the ones that've been here years and have God knows what underneath.

The night of I think the 1st (dates go too) we lay all night in a trench one foot deep — the reward of success because this was a German trench. Another reward of success was that we had no British troops on our left, we'd raced ahead of them all. I think I'm right in saying we were the only units that broke through the Hindenburg line and maintained the position. It was dark, early evening, deep black, and we expected a counter-attack at dawn. Until then there was nothing to do but wait, both intolerably cramped and intolerably exposed, enfilading machine-gun fire on three sides. 'Cramped' isn't a figure of speech either. The trench was hardly more than a scraping in the earth. Any careless movement and you'd had it. And for a lot of the time we wore gas masks, because there'd been a very heavy gas barrage put down by our side and it lingered. The whole area smelled like a failed suicide attempt, and I kept hearing Sarah's voice saying about Johnny, It was our own gas, our own bloody gas. In spite of all the drills some of the men were slow to put their masks on, one or two had bad reactions, and then Oakshott decided to have a panic attack. I crawled along to him, not past people, over them, one eel wriggling across the others in the tank, and tried to calm him down. I remember at one point I burst out laughing, can't remember why, but it did me good. There's a kind of angry laughter that gets you back to the centre of yourself. I shared a bar of chocolate with Longstaffe and we huddled together under my greatcoat and tried to keep warm. And then the counter-attack came.

Two bubbles break here. Longstaffe sliding back into the trench with a red hole in his forehead and an expression of mild surprise on his face. And the bayonet work. Which I will not remember. Rivers would say, remember now —any suppressed memory stores up trouble for the future. Well, too bad. Refusing to think's the only way I can survive and anyway what future?

The whole thing was breakdown territory, as defined by Rivers. Confined space, immobility, helplessness, passivity, constant danger that you can do nothing to avert. But my nerves seem to be all right. Or at least no worse than anybody else's. All our minds are in flight, each man tries to reach his own accommodation with what he saw. What he did. But on the surface it's all jollity. We're marching back , through the same desolation, but towards safety. Another battalion has leap-frogged us into the line. And every time my right foot hits the ground I say, over, over, over. Because the war's coming to an end, and we all know it, and it's coming to an end partly because of what we did. We broke through. We held the position.

5 October

I think the worst time was after the counter-attack, when we lay in that trench all day surrounded by the dead. I still had Longstaffe by my side, though his expression changed after death. The look of surprise faded. And we listened to the wounded groaning outside. Two stretcher-bearers volunteered to go out and were hit as soon as they stood up. Another tried later. After that I said, No more, everybody keep down. By nightfall most of the groaning had stopped. A few of the more lightly wounded crawled in under cover of darkness and we patched them up as best we could. But one man kept on and on, it didn't sound like a human being, or even like an animal, a sort of guttural gurgling like a blocked drain.

I decided I ought to try myself, and took Lucas with me. Not like going over the top used to be, climbing out of the bloody trench. Just a through the wire, barbs snagging the sleeves, and into the mud. I felt the coldness on my cheek, and the immense space above, that sense you always get when lying on the ground in the open of the earth as a ball turning in space. There was time to feel this, in spite of the bullets — which anyway frightened me less than the thought of having to see what was making that sound.

The gurgling led us to him. He was lying half way down the side of a flooded crater and the smell of gas was stronger here, as it always is near water. As we started down, bullets peppered the surface, plop, plop, plop , an innocent sound like when you skim a flat stone across a river, and bullets flicked the rim where we'd been a second before and sent cascades of loose earth down after us. The gurgling changed as we got closer so he knew something different was happening. I don't think he could have known more than that. I got right up to his feet, and started checking his legs for wounds, nothing, but then I didn't expect it. That sound only comes from a head wound. What made it marginally worse was that the side of the head nearest me was untouched. His whole frame was shaking, his skin blue in the starlight as our skins were too, but his was the deep blue of shock. I said 'Hallet' and for a second the gurgling stopped. I gestured to Lucas and he helped me turn him further over on to his back, and we saw the wound. Brain exposed, a lot of blood, a lot of stuff not blood down the side of the neck. One eye gone. A hole — I was going to say in his left cheek — where his left cheek had been. Something was burning, casting an orange light into the sky which reflected down on us. The farm that had been one of our reference points. The underside of the clouds was stained orange by the flames.

We got a rope underneath him and started hauling him round the crater, up the other side, towards our trench and all the time I was thinking, What's the use? He's going to die anyway. I think I thought about killing him. At one point he screamed and I saw the fillings in his back teeth and his mouth filled with blood. After that he was quiet, and it was easier but then a flare went up and everything paled in the trembling light. Bastards, bastards, bastards, I thought. I heard a movement and there on the rim of the crater was a white face looking down. Carter, who, I later discovered, had come out entirely on his own initiative. That was just right. More than three and we'd have been getting in each other's way. We managed to drag him back through fire that was, if anything, lighter than before, though not intentionally I think. Too little mercy had been shown by either side that day for gestures of that sort to be possible.