Reanimators (17 page)

It was a moment later, as Winchester was ushering me away, that Gogol called out to me and sent me fleeing from the asylum in abject horror. I am sure Winchester did not understand, for Gogol had shouted out a simple rhetorical question, one not so dissimilar to questions asked by students of medicine or theology or philosophy all over the world.

“What kind of God?” called out Gogol, “What kind of God, what kind of creator would make our hands, such beautiful hands, and then mock them with those possessed by Wilbur Whateley?”

To this day I do not know. If Wilbur Whateley was my creation, then what kind of creator, what kind of God am I?

Chapter 16.

THE ATROCITIES OF WAR

It was in June of 1914 that the spark of Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination lit the powder keg of war in Europe. By the end of August the Great War had come upon the world, and although the United States was slow to enter, the people of New England were not. Throughout Arkham, it was not uncommon for me to learn that one of my patients had bid farewell to his family and then made the trip north to Canada to volunteer for military service. By November, the Advertiser estimated that five percent of all the able-bodied men of Arkham had left for the war. There was in those days a great feeling that the men of New England must rise up in aid of their ancestral homes of Great Britain and Europe.

So it came as no surprise when a representative of the Canadian forces came to the August meeting of the Miskatonic Valley Medical Society to discuss the recruitment of qualified medical professionals to the cause. West and his partner were there, as were others, and it seemed obvious that the war would create certain possibilities for those carrying out less than reputable lines of research; and even though I had somewhat abandoned that direction of study, the opportunity which presented itself was intriguing. I will admit that my first and foremost goal was to serve and aid the war effort, but if in doing that I was also able to forward the cause of medical science, so much the better.

It took several weeks to tidy up my affairs and bring Wilson up to speed on my patients. Knowing that Wilson was going to be alone in our office with what amounted to unfettered access to my home, I took the precaution of thoroughly sealing up my secret laboratory so that only the most detailed of inspections would reveal it. Additionally, I drew up documents dealing with the disposition of my estate were I to be killed or incapacitated while overseas. In this I made it clear that the notes and documents which detailed my methods and formula for the reagent, which I had placed in my safety deposit box, were not to be turned over to Wilson, but rather to the individual I thought could most benefit from them, Dr. Herbert West. However, knowing something of the whims of war, I included a clause that delayed distribution of these papers until seven years after I had been declared missing, or in the case of my apparent death, a four-year delay. Given all of these tasks, I did not leave Arkham until the fall of 1914, and did not arrive in England until the spring of 1915.

I will not bore you with a detailed record of my service, but I feel obliged to expound on one event that so impacted me that my experiments in reanimation and life extension were forever altered. It was the summer of 1916, and I found myself attached to a small unit of Americans at Fort Souville near the French town of Verdun. A vast network of tunnels and trenches served both the Germans and the French who had been battling in the area since late February. The frigid winter had given way to a wet spring, and by June the war-torn landscape had become unbearably humid. By the first week of July my infirmary was treating not only bullet and artillery wounds, but also a particularly infectious species of fungus. The creeping grey nodules seemed particularly fond of open wounds, and despite my best efforts to eradicate it, the troops were constantly scraping growths of the stuff off of their equipment, clothing, and bandages.

In my efforts as a doctor I was assisted by two other Americans, soldiers who had for one reason or another been reassigned away from the front. The first of these was a downed pilot, Casey Lee, a dull young man who seemed eager to play the hero. The fact that his return to an airfield had been delayed by the vagaries of war seemed to perturb him to the extreme, and to be honest such an attitude did nothing to help either me or the wounded. The second man was almost completely the opposite. In his early twenties, older than Casey by a good five years, Nick was a dashing young man from a small town in upstate New York called Sycamore Springs. Where Casey was inattentive, Nick was observant; where Casey was brash, Nick was modest. Never in the world could I have seen two more opposing personalities, and I cannot understand why they quickly became inseparable friends. This in itself created problems for me. With Casey always intruding, and Nick acting almost as a kind of camp policeman, my ability to carry out any kind of rigorous experiments on casualties was extremely curtailed. Only when the workload became especially heavy, and my two assistants were forced to leave me alone, was I able to experiment in the administration of my reagent, though admittedly, I was able to carry out some prophylactic work on troops who came to me for minor issues, such as bad teeth and the occasional delousing. All in all, I had inoculated approximately one hundred of the soldiers in the American unit.

It was in the early hours of the tenth that we began to suspect things were about to turn for the worse. The Germans were pulling back from their positions, quietly abandoning the most forward of their trenches. This act was a common prelude to artillery barrages that were meant to soften the French front before a push forward by the German infantry. On edge, we made preparations to receive the wounded that were sure to soon be flowing into our midst. If only it had been artillery that the Germans had used, perhaps things would have been much different.

It was just after dawn when the first distant thuds of cannon were heard echoing across the landscape. They came in rapid succession: Thud! Thud! Thud! What followed was that awful high-pitched, slow whistling that chilled you down to your bones and made your teeth ache. We waited with bated breath for the impact thump and the nearly instantaneous after-explosion, but when the deadened sound of the shells hitting the soft ground came, there was a moment of still silence instead of the expected cacophony of deadly metallic shards. We looked at each other with questioning eyes, afraid to say anything for fear of being made the fool, even just for an instant. Then the hissing sound began creeping across the no man’s land, and soldiers were screaming in French, and we knew that what had been launched was so much worse than mortar shells.

Green cross gas was so named for the color and symbol that decorated the shells that it was carried in, but I knew it by its true name: trichloromethyl chloroformate, or more commonly diphosgene. Odorless and invisible, you could only tell where it was by how the light seemed to waver slightly, for diphosgene was denser than air and clung to the earth like a blanket of death. More thuds and more screaming shells came down, this time closer to the French side. Soon the right range would be found and the shells would be falling amongst our troops, seeping down into the trenches and fortifications. Military historians will tell you that the shelling went on for hours, and in the end approximately 60,000 shells would have been expended. They will also tell you that the effort was of limited success, for by this time the French had been equipped with the new M2 gas masks which negated the effects of the gas. They will tell you this, because that is what officially happened. I will tell you what I know to be the truth.

The German bombardment of the French positions was an overwhelming success. The gas masks that were supposed to protect the troops were only effective if they were properly worn, and based on my observations less than a third of the troops were able to carry out this simple task. With the majority of the French unprotected to some degree or other, the gas inflicted its damage, driving soldiers into a gasping retreat. Even those whose masks were properly functioning fled the lines, either out of a need to help those afflicted, or from simple fear that at any moment their masks would fail and they too would fall victim to the invisible poison. Some grew so fearful that they blamed the masks themselves and tore them off, leaving a surreal trail of goggled head gear strewn across the battlefield. This is not to say that all the French retreated in panic, but as the bombardment of the lines raged on, the remaining troops were so few that their effectiveness, their ability to mount a defense, was reduced to a deplorable state, which I suppose was the whole point of the attack in the first place.

While the trenches emptied of infantry, and the heavy equipment was pulled further back, Fort Souville came under a barrage of German artillery. Shells whistled through the air, laying waste to the landscape, the fortifications and men who occupied them. Strangely, as the shelling stretched into the night and then the next day, and the next night, it became clear that the effectiveness of the German artillery was somewhat lacking. The vast majority of shells fell well short of their target, or to either side. True, there were shells that impacted on the walls of the fort, and even within its defenses, but these caused minimal damage; some even failed to explode. By dawn on the twelfth, those of us who were still taking refuge within the fort were equally as amused as we were frightened. It was as if somehow the odds had been tilted in favor of those defending Fort Souville, and against any attempt by the Huns to dislodge us. The mood in the bunkers was so calm that many of the men were playing cards or chess. Nick, the dashing young man from New York, dozed through most of the barrage and suggested that it was the best sleep he had had in weeks.

An hour after dawn the rate of fire picked up, and the men became nervous. Helmets were inspected and adjusted, guns were cleaned and reloaded, ammunition stores were dusted off and restocked. For my part, I prepared as best I could for the influx of casualties that were sure to soon be flowing into my surgery. The bombardment was ending; the increase in activity was an attempt to soften up whatever forces remained before the assault by German artillery was replaced with German infantry. It was all down to timing now. Once the shelling ended, could the invaders overtake the fortifications before the defenders could reset their defenses? I looked around at the men with whom I had been serving and I knew that today might be their last day. There were barely three hundred men in the fort, and we likely faced an onslaught of thousands. That I had exposed a hundred of them to my reagent seemed too little of an advantage to make a difference. All around me men were whispering short prayers, and again I wished that I could find solace in such acts.

Then without any real notice, the whistling sound of shells that had filled the air for the last two days suddenly ceased. The distant sound of artillery had grown silent, and in its place was the unmistakable sound of men by the thousands marching across the fields that formed the vast no man’s land between the two opposing forces. This sound was quickly rejoined by that of my own troops scrambling up stairs and ladders, carrying machine guns and ammunition into the fortified positions along the top of the wall. Those first few to the top, armed with rifles and pistols, found themselves in the unenviable position of having to defend those who followed from the weapons fire of the assaulting forces, without the support of the yet to be installed heavy machine guns and grenades. Soon after the scramble had begun, the first of the casualties made it back to me, and I knew that the battle had truly begun.

The first of the injured to arrive presented the most common of war wounds, and I was soon patching up hands and shoulders that had forgotten to move out of the way of the bullets of the enemy. The enemy forces were still too far away to inflict serious injuries; their shots at this distance were meant to hamper the installation of our defenses so that we could be overrun, not to kill or maim, but with each passing minute they trudged forward and soon the forces would engage, the feints would end, and the battle would be to the death. There was no doubt in my mind of the outcome.

Sheltered as best I could be in the depths of the fort, I was not witness to it, but somehow the remaining French and American troops were able to install their guns and begin a full-fledged defense. The single shot retorts of rifles and pistols were suddenly replaced by the horrible droning of machine guns, and the tinkling fall of wasted shells. A minute or so of this and I was shocked to hear the strangest of sounds, for within the walls of our position a sudden and unexpected roar of excitement rose up. Distracted, I dashed to the wall and climbed the ladder to a small break in the upper wall through which I could see the fields of war below. Suddenly my death was not so assured and I, like all the others around me, saw more than just a glimmer of hope.

The enemy had reached our trenches, but the thousands of shells they had rained down upon these dirt fortifications had made them all but impassable. The thousands of troops streaming across the land were suddenly forced into a choke point maybe a hundred yards wide and nearly dead center in front of the fort itself. As the enemy troops forced their way through the gap, they found themselves at the mercy of two machine guns and supporting riflemen. The Germans were being cut down by the dozens each minute. I smiled, not out of joy for the death of so many of the enemy, but rather out of pride, for the soldiers who were manning those guns were the men of my own unit, American soldiers whom I had treated and worked with for so many months now. I was proud of them, for they had given me a taste of what they had given the world: hope.

Then, in an instant that seemed to last longer than it had any right to, things suddenly changed. There was a pause in the rattling scream of the machine gun to my left, and I saw the men scrambling to wrench a miss-fed tangle of ammunition out of the smoking weapon. The other gun sped up, trying to compensate for the temporary loss, spraying metallic death across the front of the oncoming enemy. In an instant three German troops slipped past the now-deficient crossfire, and into one of the cross trenches that still remained. A tick of the clock later, all three rose up out of the trench, and in a coordinated effort fired at the still-incapacitated machine gun. The gunner, a Texan named Rick Williams, and his assistant, a boy called Hammond, tumbled backwards out of the tower nest and plummeted down the side of the wall to the ground below.

There was no time to mourn their passing. Instead there was yet another mad dash by brave men to occupy that position and get that gun going again. Three more men were shot from the wall trying to make it to the tower before Nick found his way into the position. The gun cleared in an instant and soon was chattering away once more. As the gun kept them pinned, a pair of hand grenades were lobbed into the occupied trenches and the trio of enemy snipers were silenced.