The Horizon (1993) (22 page)

It was strange how each stop seemed like the one before. Usually crowded with khaki figures, clinging to their loved ones for those final precious seconds, when before there had been nothing to say. Red-eyed women with cheerful soldiers, the new recruits going off to join their first active-service units. And the others in stained khaki, their eyes empty, expressionless.
Going back
.

This station had a little cottage attached and there were colourful paper-chains across one window, for it was not yet Twelfth Night in this new year of 1917.

He let his head loll against the cushion and tried not to look at the two women who had shared the compartment with him all the way from Southampton. One young, the other older, obviously mother and daughter, pale-faced, and somehow lost in their drab black clothing. They had most likely been to one of the many military hospitals which ringed the great port where daily the white-painted ships unloaded their wounded. For many it was only a brief moment of refuge.

There had been another passenger who had sat opposite him peering at each station: eager, fearful, despairing, it had all been there. An infantry lieutenant from the Hampshires, an arm missing and one side of his face cruelly scarred. At a guess he was about twenty, but like most of them, he looked much older.

Where had 1916 gone? Jonathan often tried to piece the last months together even as his mind fought against the memories. The long and painful voyage from Egypt in the hospital ship . . . it had all nearly ended after only a few days outward bound. He had shared a small ward with several other wounded officers, a group who managed to smile at one another on each morning call. The survivors. Then one morning a cot had been empty. He had heard the ship’s engines stop often enough to know that another sea burial was imminent.

But the memory that still chilled him was that of a routine night, when his particular doctor had come to inspect the dressings. This had become less painful, and Jonathan had wondered, and wondered still, how close he had been to death on that terrible day on the peninsula.

A nurse had entered, not even glancing at his
nakedness as he lay face-down in the cot. Like the others, she had done and seen everything. In response to her whispers the doctor had said irritably, ‘Very well, I’ll come – but if he’s playing up again I’ll forget my calling for a few minutes!’ He had patted Jonathan’s bare shoulder and murmured, ‘Back in a tick, old chap.’

He had lain there, feeling the engines pulsing through his body, listening to the occasional rattle of bottles and jars as the ship had altered course. Malta tomorrow; after that Gibraltar, and then the Atlantic, and England.

His companions had either been asleep or taken along the upper deck to exercise and he was alone, and he recalled that the doctor had removed his white coat and gone out displaying his full rank, no doubt to quash the patient who was ‘playing up’. He had obviously not fastened the bulkhead cupboard and when the ship had rolled very gently the door had fallen open. On the inside there was a full-length mirror, something of which Jonathan had been deprived throughout the long months in hospital.

Gasping with stiffness and the pain of exerting muscles he had forgotten how to use, he had clambered down from the cot, and waiting for the ship to dip into a slight swell he had let the momentum carry him across the deck to the open cupboard.

He had stared at himself as though at a total stranger, but with some relief: he was thinner, but no worse than the others who had been at the Dardanelles. With great care he had manoeuvred himself around, clinging to the shelves and dangling white coats, hating his weakness but determined to see the cause of all these months of suffering.

Even today he hardly knew what he had been expecting. Scars, blemished skin, but not this. The sight of his back had filled him with nausea and horror. At least six jagged wounds from his left shoulder to his buttocks, stamped deep into his body like crudely made stars. How could anyone, even a nurse, bear to see them?

The rest had been a blur, and he had hit the deck heavily. He had heard voices, urgent or angry. ‘Why was this man left alone?’ And there had been blood too, from one of the wounds breaking open.

He shifted his body now against the seat and saw the women glancing at him. Did they blame him for being alive when their own man had lost the fight?

His back was still painful, and he was conscious of walking very straightly as if that would prevent its return. He recalled one of the doctors had laughed when he had taken his first lengthy stroll at Plymouth. ‘You look as if you’re ready for the barracks square!’

A whistle shrilled and he saw the guard waving his green flag. The beast gave a jerk and then began to glide out of the station, and the air was very cold suddenly; he guessed that every window had been lowered for that final handclasp, the brave smile that might have to last a lifetime. He closed his eyes again.

As his recovery had progressed he had found to his surprise that he was able to interest himself in that other war beyond his own desperate fight for survival. There had been a great naval battle off Jutland, in which the leviathans of the Grand Fleet and the German High Seas Fleet had grappled bloodily for the first time: the news had been vague when it had reached the hospital in
Plymouth. British losses had been greater, but the Germans had not lingered to suffer probable destruction. It was not until much later that Harry Payne had told him that one of the vessels lost had been the old battle-cruiser
Impulsive
. Like others of her class, she had blown up in one huge fireball after being straddled by the German gunners. There had been no survivors, and Jonathan wondered if Captain Soutter’s friend Vidal had still been in command.

One thing had become starkly clear: the nature of the war had completely changed while he had been away on his mindless journey. When he had left for the Dardanelles he had seen it as a contest fought by amateurs, with a set of outdated rules for guidance, but in a matter of months the war on land and sea had become one of barbaric savagery. U-Boat warfare had become a sink-on-sight affair, with no thought given to crews or passengers when the torpedoes had turned the ships into infernos. U-Boat commanders who had previously shown mercy no longer took the chance of being caught on the surface while they allowed apparently stricken sailors to get away in their lifeboats; too often the ‘victim’ had been an armed Q-ship with a separate crew to man her guns behind mock deckhouses, waiting for the submarine to draw nearer for a kill.

The war in France and Belgium was beyond belief in its unprecedented ferocity and horror. Casualty lists on the Western Front, even allowing for strict censorship, were appalling. It was nothing to gain an advance of a mile, or not even that, and pay for it with twenty thousand lives. As the armies grappled in wire and mud,
under bombardments and air attack, a new dimension was added: phosgene gas, which left men coughing out their lungs or completely blinded. Flame-throwers, too, made life at the front into hell itself.

The main armies had taken to wearing steel helmets, from the German coal-scuttle shape to the Tommies’ soup-dish, which would not have looked out of place at Agincourt. There had been so many head injuries that it should have come much earlier. And after endless delays the government had at last introduced conscription, in a desperate attempt to fill the growing gaps, the steadily mounting losses. There had never been a shortage of volunteers, youngsters inspired by patriotism or bravado to join the regulars in the front line; but now so many of the latter had already fallen in battle when they might have been usefully employed to train the conscripts, if only the act had been passed in time.

Jonathan remembered as if it had been yesterday being taken out in a car for the first time by a medical officer making his rounds, visiting some of the smaller, makeshift hospitals and dressing stations. Passing through a typical West Country market town, with its flintstone church and broad market square, he had noticed a crowd of people gathered by the church wall peering at a bulletin board. The doctor had watched him thoughtfully.

‘Casualty lists.’ It was all he had said.

‘But how can they get all these names distributed around the counties?’

The doctor had driven on, his face like stone. The Royal Marine major with the serious features had still
been a long way from complete recovery, but he had happened to believe that it had been worth the struggle to keep him alive and sane. It would have done his morale little good to explain to him that the long list of dead and missing had all been from this one sleepy little town.

But Jonathan knew now. He had returned to light duties at Plymouth, helping an elderly lieutenant-colonel who had been given the task of working new recruits into companies and battalions. He had been glad not to be ordered back to Portsmouth, not yet anyway. Too many missing faces, too many curious stares. And then had come the news: he was to be awarded the Distinguished Service Order for his behaviour at Gallipoli. His father would have been proud of it; but out there every man in the line had deserved a medal of some kind.

Another familiar station passed, and he thought suddenly of Harry Payne, his constant companion, his crutch. Payne would have been getting off this train at Winchester in time to spend the last of the holiday with his parents and family, but he had already gone. A week or so ago he had got the news: his youngest brother had been reported missing, presumed killed, in Flanders. Jonathan had found him packing his kit in his quarters, bitter and angry and smelling strongly of drink.

He had stared at Jonathan wretchedly. ‘Don’t like leaving you in the lurch, sir.’ He had almost broken down again as he had attempted to explain. ‘Young Titch thought the world of me, you see. I blame myself. He only joined up because of me. And now he’s gone, poor little bugger, just like all the others!’

Jonathan had found himself reluctant to go straight to
Hawks Hill. There would be nothing there to draw him or keep him, just another place full of broken men. He had spent Christmas at a house on the edge of the New Forest with the family of an old friend in the Corps.

He could not recall ever drinking so much, and his head still throbbed savagely. When the surgeon had warned him that the pills did not allow for too much alcohol he had been right.

A ticket collector was coming through the carriage, a red-faced man with a walrus moustache who resembled Sergeant-Major McCann.

‘Winchester in a few minutes, Major Blackwood.’ He beamed. ‘So pleased about the D.S.O., sir.’ He glared around challengingly as several civilians turned to stare. Pity more don’t join the Colours!’

His round Hampshire accent reminded Jonathan again of Payne. How many there must be like him. A name on a notice board like the thousands up and down the country.

‘Someone meeting you, sir?’

Jonathan shivered. He seemed to feel the cold so much more than before.

‘Not sure.’

‘Nice to be home anyway, sir.’ He ambled away, warning some of the passengers that their journey was almost over.

Nice to be home
. He stared at his misty reflection as it raced past bleak, bare trees and great spans of open fields. Where was home now? Left back there on the peninsula, or in the barracks with its constant reminders: stamping boots, the maniac screams of drill-sergeants,
the mess dinners and the maudlin sentimentality that usually emerged after the second round of port.

There were a few little cottages now, a child with a dog at a level crossing waving up at the train. The place where Jonathan had been born and which he barely knew would not be far away.

He stared at his hands as they began to shake, then thrust them into his greatcoat pockets. Tonight, would he lie in peace or would the nightmares reach him even here? Like the one in which the dugout was brightly lit by artillery fire and then in total darkness, and all the time Beaky Waring sat there laughing at him. Sometimes headless, sometimes alive as he remembered him. The boats with the bottom-boards covered in blood, the dying midshipman holding his captain’s hand, and the marines stabbing at the writhing Turkish sniper. Would it never leave him?

‘
Winchester!
Winchester!
’

Doors were banging open and people were rushing this way and that searching for the welcoming face, the first grateful hug. He looked around. The compartment was empty. And all at once, he knew he was afraid.

‘Major Blackwood, sir?’

He turned and saw a smart, burly corporal in leather gauntlets throwing up a salute.

‘I’ve got a motor car, sir.’ Without waiting he picked up Jonathan’s cases and added, ‘We telephoned the R.T.O. at Southampton to make sure you was comin’.’

Jonathan fell into step with him and wondered why someone had taken the trouble to arrange transport. It
was only ten miles to Hawks Hill. Surely he would have managed to get a lift from some trader or carrier.

The car was a large, impressive one, painted khaki with a red cross on the door and R.A.M.C. underneath. It was strange to think of the Royal Army Medical Corps being at the old estate. He remembered how the soldiers in France had joked about it, telling him the letters stood for ‘rob-all-my-comrades’.

‘Ready, sir?’ The corporal had a tentative air, as if he were more used to dealing with difficult or abnormal men. Jonathan wondered which he was. He glanced around at the shifting groups of soldiers and busy porters, officers with their girls, a policeman giving directions to an old lady. Even the friendly bustle of Winchester railway station unnerved him: being surrounded by strangers, away from the only world he knew.

The corporal held the door and he climbed stiffly into the car. ‘Be a bit strange for you, I expect, sir?’

‘Strange?’ It came out too sharply. ‘Sorry. I think I know what you mean.’

The corporal relaxed and put the car into gear, driving with great care around the many obstacles and across the old cobbles of the station approach. He had noted the way his passenger held himself, and was not surprised. His own commanding officer had told him about Jonathan Blackwood when he had checked with the R.T.O. at Southampton, and certainly the whole countryside around the Hawks Hill estate seemed to know of the decoration he was about to receive. He glanced at Jonathan’s profile. So that was what a hero looked like,
he thought, a man on the edge. It seemed to run in the family, though: he had heard about the two Blackwood V.C.’s when he had been posted to the place, almost before he had unpacked his kit. He particularly liked the story about the old general; bit of a lad to all accounts. A groom had told him that the general had left a few brats behind when he had died, and quite a pile of debts as well.