Damage Read online

  ‘No difference, sir. Flesh makes no judgement.’

  Murmurs of agreement went around the table.

  ‘Pain is pain, Mr Glover,’ said the superintendent.

  No difference; and a world of difference. The Channel is the great divide. Good sailor or bad, it is a fateful passage, this day and every day. On the one side we have injuries, on the other we have wounds. Crossing the dark waters of the Styx, the ferryman Charon took his coin and was insensible to the cause and circumstance of his burden’s demise and to the soul’s fate. Did Elysium lie on the farther shore, with its music, games and revels? Or the Asphodel Fields, where the shades of men linger and languish without purpose? Though the god Hades was fierce and unpredictable, and so the most hated of the Greek deities, his realm was graced by the merciful Queen Persephone; and he was himself the bestower, or at least the custodian, of the gems and metals hidden under the earth. Here too are riches, the silvery shoals beneath the grey Channel waters. The fishermen – the eternal fishermen, bravers of the deep – come scudding homeward into Boulogne with visions of warm dinners and bright hearthsides.

  A good sailor, yes. And also an enjoyer of the railways – Philip Glover is doubly favoured! With crafted straightness the steel parallels fix order on the landscape, courtesy of our forebears in that prodigious age of Victoria. And then the curves. Ahead the locomotive swings into view – an iron horse galloping, lusty as a knight, pennant of smoke billowing – and the carriages snake out behind, and whoever is in the end compartment will get there last! So burbled a schoolboy to his aunt long ago. Now the grown man gazes out placidly and observes field upon heroic field of grass and cattle, turnip and kale and cabbage. France is feeding itself and will do so next year, declare the far expanses of fertile soil. France and our small piece of Belgium.

  At Poperinghe station the air as I stepped down onto the platform had the usual tang of soot, oil and steam, always heavier at a terminus where the engines shunt and cough in an excess of labour. There was a sense of both satisfaction and apprehension, the effect of sudden arrival at one’s destination. This was no longer the serene railway of the countryside but a cauldron of fume and noise and agitation, to be escaped for the calm of the street. Within the walls of Talbot House there would be peace. There would be amicableness in that good place, and leisured ease and comfort, and every decency. Yet a casual visit, to the sure refuge standing tall by the chemist’s in the Rue de L’Hôpital, might be an intrusion. The soft-gloved hand of Chaplain Clayton governs all and requires no help of the merely passing sort. Neither could the appearance on the scene of a less than familiar cleric be counted a whole and certain benefit to the men at their relaxation, at their cards, billiards and beer. One assists with letters home, if wanted, but their officers are ready and skilled in that. And it is not every man-of-the-cloth’s good fortune to possess the common touch.

  ‘Little things are little things,’ Mr Clayton had said. ‘But faithfulness in little things is a very great thing indeed.’ And another time, ‘God is not content with loving people. He positively likes them.’

  We chaplains have our warmth, our camaraderie, but we bring with us a kind of restraint, not imposed, but by our aspect and calling implied. To find a middle way, which is all things to all men, infallibly, may lie beyond human powers. A man takes his path, to suit the nature Providence has given him. At Rouen earlier in the year Bishop Gwynne addressed the meeting of thirty or forty Church of England padres in terms not dissimilar. During the first months of the war, he said to us, the generals complained that we were too much in the trenches, and now we were seen there not enough. A man follows his own course. As the seasons pass he finds himself in tune with the mood and the drift of affairs.

  So I searched the shop windows and purchased tins of salmon to augment the bill of fare at the mess, and squeezed them into the kit-bag alongside the packets of chocolate destined for the ward trollies. Aunt Louisa’s books were in there still, forgotten, tales of derring-do intended for Talbot House. By default they would serve in the hospital’s lesser though worthy library and I added another from the English stock on an obliging greybeard’s stall. At a lamplit corner I signalled a cross-bearing transport, and to low salutations of ‘Evening, sir,’ was hoisted up, bag and all, and swiftly lorried away.

  *

  If the people of the Middle Ages built their churches high in order to reach upward to the divine and the spiritual, as can hardly be doubted, we may surmise they also wished the peasant out in the fields to look up and see the signature of his village, a spire in the distance marking the centre about which his daily exertions revolved. There it was that his produce went, that he satisfied his wants. If the shapes on his skyline were large he had himself a goodly town; and if the shapes were massive, and many, there stood a handsome city. Such a city had been medieval Ypres, noble Ieper. The great belfry of the Lakenhalle, the fine towers of the Sint Maartenskathedraal and the Sint Pieterskerk: tramping the Flanders plain in the early summer of 1914 I had seen them rise up shimmering, at once human and celestial. They were monuments to the old merchants and their trade, their trade with grassy England. And now English goods are here again, not soft wool but hard metal. Now we trade blows with Ypres’ enemies. Two days of continuous bombardment in mid-April of 1915 erased a quarter of the city. It was rumoured the Kaiser had visited the sector and urged his troops that Ypres be taken at any cost or be reduced to a desert. A desert it had duly become, over the weeks and the months. Soon I could no longer bear the pain of a visit – for what purpose? – and must give body and soul utterly to the work of ministering, by black silk stole and by white linen bandage, to the men.

  After notifying Senior-Chaplain Peel of my return to duty, and getting his bluff unfailing welcome, I dropped off the salmon at the mess, placed the chocolate on the desk of the charge-sister, and stowed my kit-bag at the billet where I penned a quick postcard for Aunt Louisa in Somerset and a short letter for my brother Cyril and family at Malmesbury. When I rejoined Mr Peel at the chaplains’ office he was conversing over a glass of wine with Father Hemeryck, incumbent at the village of Hoogbeke and an occasional presence at the hospital as duties took our Catholic colleague away. The elderly priest was a man for whom grim-visaged fate had been a frequent companion. Lodged at a Lille seminary, he had witnessed the hordes of German infantry arrive at the town’s centre by railway. A fearful sight, ugly, his sojourn was dashed to an abrupt end. The purpose of the steam machines is to convey small children to the seaside at Oostende, he said. I had agreed and told him of our summer holidays spent in Cornwall, at St Ives, a picturesque little fishing port, the protective bay curving round, the lighthouse just across the water keeping safe watch over us, as we supposed. Now he recalled those long-ago days for me, generously, and enquired after my leave. I said that Somerset for the adult suited very well.

  ‘The greatest joy, Mr Glover, to read the children a Gospel story. “Ye must become as a little child.” Luke means innocence and freshness. We must keep close to childhood. Great as they are, the other religions fail in that. It is difficult, innocence, for you Army chaplains, always among men. Hardened men.’

  He was quiet of manner though not stolid. In repose his venerable cassock seemed never to fall quite in place, but must be touched and smoothed by the minute.

  ‘Also, your flock changes. In the village I have the same people, month upon month. Those who came to us from the town, from Ieper, very soon belonged. But your men here in the hospital pass through. The face that you speak to today may be gone tomorrow. To see into the soul…’

  Mr Peel allowed that connecting with the men was not a plain, not a simple, matter. Neither did it always become easier over time. Some of the long-stayers could develop a keen appetite for theology. An engineers officer with a fair knowledge of the Gospels contended the parables were right in their place, each one, but were guidance, not hard and fast blueprints for the good life. And had the Father encountered Sergeant Hoadley of the
Connaught Rangers, who hated above all things padres and policemen?

  ‘Looking into the souls of men who do not believe that they have one? My village has such. Did not Thomas doubt? We talk of the weather and beet. In the Army you do not have so easy a path.’

  I assured him that means there always were, by which to commune with the soldier, at the bedside or in the waste of the battlefield, the wilderness. Men have comrades and they have family. The God of Newton and the spheres, of the natural order, is also a personal God and is near and goes with us. Yes, in the wilderness most of all.

  Father Hemeryck drew a fragment of stone from a pocket.

  ‘The wilderness? I was there today, the transports are quick, you know, from here to Ieper. A memento, for my sister’s grandchildren.’ He set the stone plinth-like, by its remaining inch or two of flatness, on the table.

  ‘Ruins, yes, Father. A wilderness, surely not.’ Mr Peel was emphatic and also had something of the conjectural tone of the earnest student. ‘A ruined town is man’s sorry work. A wilderness may be purposed by God, formed as a part of creation. Matthew has John the Baptist preaching in the wilderness. It’s a place for something to happen – “the kingdom of God is at hand.” A chapter later we are shown the temptations of Christ, out there–’

  ‘Where the Devil is in residence–’

  ‘Ah, not in command, Father! His powers are denied. The wilderness is a stage, a setting. Rock and hillside, perhaps a fig tree. They look on, as the Christ ministry begins.’

  By a warm smile the good priest accepted Mr Peel’s exegesis. But he had known the town, he said. ‘Shops. Gossip. Laughter. Yes, we Flemings laughed!’

  I said that recent theologians had posited a wilderness that lies within, not a piece of geography but a state of the heart and spirit, an absence of the holy. They demurred, each of my fellow churchmen. They were men of the Book and eschewed such niceties as being the province of psychology. So we talked and pondered, until the frail Father must be conducted out across the dimness of the cobbled yard, to the stables that now served a British hospital as once they had served a Flemish château. We shook firm hands and aided him into his cart, and he spoke kind words to his pony and sank back beneath the hood. All about us the night was assailed by the enemy’s constant ally, the Flanders rain.

  *

  But we can be sure that the governors of the weather are neutral, or at the least as remote and unconcerned as Olympian Zeus himself. My light remark had been taken up, last summer, by a young major who very soon had me ticketed ‘the Graeco-Christian’ on my arrival behind the Front.

  ‘There are no whole truths,’ he had asserted during those days of August as the rains descended, cruelly early, and turned every zone and sector of the Salient into a quagmire. ‘There are only half-truths. Yes, the mud impedes our advance. It also stymies the German counter-attacks. We shall make ground.’

  The major was one of our bold Alexanders – did ever an army lack them and triumph? As he quitted our tent, Sister Grahame cast an eye with me over the lengthening list of names on the desk.

  ‘Poor Sir Douglas,’ she said in her dispassionate way. ‘It has been so every time. One thing and another.’

  ‘Not a lucky general,’ I agreed.

  Since the Push began on the Monday the deluge had continued day and night. An engineer blamed the dust from our huge underground explosions at Messines, the particles blown into the air induced precipitation – ‘Weeks later?’ doubted another. I had visited a party of Welshmen at their work, alongside the Australians, and engaged them in mining talk, recalling the iron-ore tunnels from my Somerset rambles.

  ‘Good digging, sir, after our coal and shale. And we couldn’t let Lloyd George down, could we now.’

  If they were sparing of stature they were big-hearted; one easily imagined them in full-throated song.

  Over at the acute ward tents there was already little space as the men were carried in from theatre surgery; likewise the moribund and the German wards. I joined the nurses and orderlies at their re-bandaging and provisioning. Perhaps my early wish to learn the elements of medical science had owed its force to the reputation of the Catholic padres, whose need to give absolution to the dying took them to the very edge of battle. A Protestant chaplain will minister less formally and so in conscience must ease both the spirit, with words of solace, and the body, with skill and knowledge. Nor is every man the same, lying bloodied in the field, cries and murmurings to be stilled by priestly observances, or not. And in the extreme – in the direst wasteland – we are not merely chaplain and soldier but man and man. The German I came upon lying in woods near Hill 60 was mouthing, ‘Gott – Gott.’ I gripped his shoulder above the dark sludge of arm and chest, and I said, ‘Gott mit uns – alles.’ That day I saw a file of Bavarians peaceably brought in. A random occurrence, yet such happenings may signify if only for oneself.

  I was asked to join a detachment seeking out a position for a dressing unit, by our incisive major. ‘The men cannot advance. The men advance.’ His confident, unpompous turn of speech compelled action. We were strong on bearers at a dozen, adequate on nursing auxiliaries at eight, and for officers had the major in command and a first-lieutenant; no captain, excepting myself. In support were sergeant and two corporal’d sections of a rifle platoon – two score of bayonets, clipped the lieutenant – and four crewed machine-guns. Loping ahead through the dawn mist, field-glasses poised, map scrutinized, by turns, our commander located a piece of rising ground – ‘Rain with any sense will have run off!’ A solid bounce of mallet on peg confirmed we had a good bit of earth and we threw up the canvas. My glances about were not fearless; the gunfire was close. ‘Six hundred yards to the front line, Mr. Glover. Thanks for coming!’

  As the men began to be walked and stretchered in, I was suddenly uncertain – no readier than at the Ancre, the Quadrilateral, a year ago. One thinks of two states of the soldier. There is the fighting man, whole, strong and fit, and there is the wounded man, no longer a warrior, out of the fray. Here at the line of conflict there is a middle state. The blood here is fresh and scarlet and warm. The soldier here is adrift in a fog of apprehension – Hit? Bad? Where? Not spoken, no. It is in the eyes, or a tremor. Some of them have never before suffered a wound; they are new. A man may pass his daily existence scarcely conscious he has bones, a skull. Most are from the towns, never saw a beast slaughtered, never saw inside a country church where stone skeletons stare out from niches. Now they see and are numbed.

  The major – he bore a patrician name, his great-grandfather had ‘assisted at a small village seventy miles to the east’ – functioned at a steady pitch. In order that stricken men may be brought in there must be treated men sent back, wounds staunched and bandaged, to the doctors in the rear. No stretcher lay idle for long. Nor could the major neglect our footing, though we might believe ourselves secure within the arc of deployed bayonets and Vickers. From a mound of rubble he scanned ahead and to the flanks, and on the hour took the report of his ranging lieutenant. Around mid-day we acquired the crew of a tank; they had abandoned their machine to the mud and were glad of ‘gainful employment’, their young officer grinned. His six men were promptly divided, two to the infantry and four to the bearers, some of whom were beginning to weaken and falter. Himself a full lieutenant, like most of the masters of the land-ships, he was a welcome addition to our strength and was pushed forward as another pair of eyes.

  In the evening I performed a short service beside the tent, for medical staff and our wounded only, any convergence of the fighting unit the major forbade. He disappeared into the darkness and soon returned with his two junior officers. Things were quieter. The Front was moving on. A sip of rum was taken.

  ‘To shell or not to shell,’ said our commander from the comfort of his ammunition box. ‘How could your behemoths hope to move across such ground, Tyce, shell-hole after shell-hole? The Germans invented gas so as to keep the ground intact, you know, for their troops’ ease of adva
nce. Something of the sort. Their weather people forgot, the prevailing wind is westerly, favours us.’

  ‘Our tanks did well at Arras, sir, and Neuville-St-Vaast. Dry chalk–’

  ‘And snow? The tanks are big and stand out. The German guns like them.’

  Despite his blunt words the major was in good humour. A pair of fresh-faced lieutenants, and a chaplain not averse to martial discourse, made a fair audience.

  ‘We held Mount Kemmel for two years. Now we follow the Ridges, east and north – Wytschaete–Hollebeke–Zonnebeke. We must wrestle the high ground from them. Give Crown Prince Rupprecht a hiding! The Messines explosions were a fine start. We dug deeper – yes, Padre, into the firm clay, like the London tube railway. Safe for the miners. Big spaces for tons of ammonal. No tunnelling in Thucydides? All limestone rock – Attica, the Peloponnese?’

  ‘Good for statues, Major.’

  ‘And Parthenons, sir!’

  ‘And city walls!’

  No doubt we elevate the humanism and intellect of the old Greeks to a height that approaches fantasy, as also the zeal and spirituality of the old Hebrews. Yet we northerners must always be peering out from our mists and our mire toward the lands of blue sky and white stone. And is not Christianity, given revelation, a coming-together of the two great rivers of wisdom?

  Next morning we were roused early and informed that a deserted blockhouse had been identified in trees well forward. All in the hour we had upped sticks, and marched and halted before the curious structure, which I promptly styled an excrescence on the landscape.

  ‘A masterwork of concrete and steel rails,’ the major corrected. ‘A shell striking the walls will give a soft crunch – see our old marks.’

  ‘Only shrapnel I think, sir,’ said the mature sergeant frowning. ‘Or field guns.’