Pat Barker - The Ghost Road

We fell into the trench, Hallet on top of us. I got something damp on my face that wasn't mud, and brushing it away found a gob of Hallet's brain between my fingertips. Because he'd gone quiet on the last stretch I expected to find him unconscious or dead, but he was neither. I gave him a drink of water. I had to press my hand against his face to get it down, because otherwise it slopped out of the hole. And all the time, I was doing it I was thinking, Die can't you? For God's sake, man, just die. But he didn't.

When at last we were ordered to pull back I remember peering up at the sky and seeing the stars sparse and pale through a gauze of greenish light, and thinking, Thank God it's evening, because shells were still coming over, and some of them were falling directly on the road. At least we'd be marching towards the relative safety of night.

The sun hung on the lip of the horizon, filling the sky. I don't know whether it was the angle or the drifting smoke that half obscured it, but it was enormous. The whole scene looked like something that couldn't be happening on earth, partly the sun, partly the utter lifelessness of the land around us, pitted, scarred, pockmarked with stinking craters and scrawls of barbed-wire. Not even birds, not even carrion feeders. Even the crows have given up. And I stumbled along at the head of the company and I waited for the sun to go down. And the sodding thing didn't. IT ROSE. It wasn't just me. I looked round at the others and I saw the same stupefaction on every face. We hadn't slept for four days. Tiredness like that is another world, just like noise, the noise of a bombardment, isn't like other noise. You see people wade through it, lean into it. I honestly think if the war went on for a hundred years another language would evolve, one that was capable of describing the sound of a bombardment or the buzzing of flies on a hot August day on the Somme. There are no words There are no words for what I felt when I saw the setting sun rise.

6 October

We're far enough back now for officers from different companies to mess together again. I sit at a rickety little table censoring letters, for the post has arrived, including one for me from Sarah saying she isn't pregnant. I don't know what I feel exactly. I ought to be delighted and of course I am, but that was not the first reaction. There was a split second of something else, before the relief set in.

Letters arrive for the dead. I check names against the list and write Deceased in a firm bold hand in the top left-hand corner. Casualties were heavy, not so much in the initial attack as in the counter-attacks.

Gregg died of wounds. I remember him showing me a letter from home that had big 'kisses' in red crayon from his little girl.

Of the people who shared the house in Amiens only a month ago, Potts is wounded, but likely to live. Jones (Owen's servant) wounded, likely to live. Hallet's wounds are so bad I don't think he can possibly survive. I see him sometimes lying in the lily pond in the garden with the golden fish darting all around him, and silver lines of bubbles on his thighs. More like a pattern than a picture, no depth to it, no perspective, but brilliantly clear. And Longstaffe's dead.

The Thane of Fife had a wife: where is she now?

I look across at Owen, who's doing casualty reports with a Woodbine — now blessedly plentiful again — stuck to his bottom lip, and his hair, rather lank at the moment, flopping over his forehead. For days after the battle he went round with his tunic stiff with blood, but then I had blood and brains on me. We must have stunk like the drains in a slaughterhouse, but we've long since stopped smelling each other. He looks like one of the boys you see on street corners in the East End. Open to offers. I must say I wouldn't mind. He looks up, feeling himself the subject of scrutiny, smiles and pushes the fags across. I saw him in the attack, caped and masked in blood, seize a machine-gun and turn it on its previous owners at point-blank range. Like killing fish in a bucket. And I wonder if he sees those faces, grey, open-mouthed faces, life draining out of them before the bullets hit, as I see the faces of the men I killed in the counter-attack. I won't ask. He wouldn't answer if I did. I wouldn't dare ask. For the first time it occurs to me that River's job also requires courage.

We don't even mention our own dead. The days pass crowded with meaningless incident, and it's easier to forget. I run the ball of my thumb against the two first fingers of my right hand where a gob of Hallet's brain was, and I don't feel anything very much.

We are Craiglockhart's success stories. Look at us. We don't remember, we don't feel, we don't think — at least not beyond the confines of what's needed to do the job. By any proper civilized standard (but what does that mean now?) we are objects of horror. But our nerves are completely steady. And we are still alive.

SHEER FIGHTING

BOTH SIDES PAY THE PRICE

HUNS WAIT FOR THE BAYONET

Prior would have been in that, Rivers thought. He picked the paper up from his breakfast tray and made a real effort to concentrate. It was clear, even from this gung-ho report, that casualties had been heavy. No point checking the casualty lists yet: individual names took at least a week to come through. But he could probably expect a field postcard in the next few days, if Prior was all right. He'd sounded fine in his last letter, but that was ten days ago.

Reading it, Rivers had felt the stab of envy he always experienced on receiving letters from men serving in France. If the wretched war had to happen he'd rather have spent it with Marshall-of-the-Ten-Wounds than with Telford-of-the-Pickled-Penis. He tried to focus on the details of the engagement, but the print blurred before his eyes. And his boiled egg — though God knows what it had cost Mrs Irving to buy — was going down like lead. He really thought he'd be sick if he forced any more of it down. He took his glasses off, put them on the bedside table and pushed the tray away. He meant only to rest a while before starting again, but his fingers slackened and twitched on the counterpane and, after a few minutes, the newspaper with its headlines shrieking about distant battles slipped sighing to the floor.

* * *

Ngea's skull, jammed into the v of a cleft stick, bleached in the sun. A solitary bluebottle buzzed in and out of the eye sockets and, finding nothing there of interest, sailed away into the blue sky.

On his way down to the beach to bathe, Rivers paused to look at the skull. Only a month ago he'd spoken to this man, had even held his hand briefly on parting. No wonder the islanders wore necklaces of pepeuleaves to guard themselves against tomate gani yambo: the Corpse-eating Spirit.

Later the same day he saw the little boy whom Lembu had brought back from Ysabel squatting listlessly outside Njiru's hut, poking about in the dust with a small stick. He was not crying, but he looked dazed. The story was he'd been bought, but Rivers was not inclined to believe it. In these islands — still, in spite of the abolition of head-hunting, warrior communities — not even the poorest family would willingly part with a son. Abduction was more likely. He watched the child for several minutes, wanting to go to him, and yet knowing the appearance of a strange white man would only terrify him more.

'Are they going to kill him?' Hocart said, lying sleepless in bed that night.

'No, they won't do that — they'd have to kill us too.'

'Perhaps that wouldn't worry them.'

'The Commissioner's response to it would.'