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?’