Pat Barker: Regeneration

‘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.

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?’