The Last Enemy Richard Hillary (18 page)
I turned and looked on a heap of bricks and mortar, wooden beams and doors, and one framed picture, unbroken. It was the first time that I had seen a building newly blasted. Often had I left the flat in the morning and walked up Piccadilly, aware vaguely of the ominously tidy gap between two houses, but further my mind had not gone.
We dug, or rather we pushed, pulled, heaved, and strained, I somewhat ineffectually because of my hands; I don’t know for how long, but I suppose for a short enough while. And yet it seemed endless. From time to time I was aware of figures round me: an A.R.P. warden, his face expressionless under a steel helmet; once a soldier swearing savagely in a quiet monotone; and the taxi-driver, his face pouring sweat.
And so we came to the woman. It was her feet that we saw first, and whereas before we had worked doggedly, now we worked with a sort of frenzy, like prospectors at the first glint of gold. She was not quite buried, and through the gap between two beams we could see that she was still alive. We got the child out first. It was passed back carefully and with an odd sort of reverence by the warden, but it was dead. She must have been holding it to her in the bed when the bomb came.
Finally we made a gap wide enough for the bed to be drawn out. The woman who lay there looked middle-aged. She lay on her back and her eyes were closed. Her face, through the dirt and streaked blood, was the face of a thousand working women; her body under the cotton nightdress was heavy. The nightdress was drawn up to her knees and one leg was twisted under her. There was no dignity about that figure.
Around me I heard voices. ‘Where’s the ambulance?’ ‘For Christ’s sake don’t move her!’ ‘Let her have some air!’
I was at the head of the bed, and looking down into that tired, blood-streaked, work-worn face I had a sense of complete unreality. I took the brandy flask from my hip pocket and held it to her lips. Most of it ran down her chin but a little flowed between those clenched teeth. She opened her eyes and reached out her arms instinctively for the child. Then she started to weep. Quite soundlessly, and with no sobbing, the tears were running down her cheeks when she lifted her eyes to mine.
‘Thank you, sir,’ she said, and took my hand in hers. And then, looking at me again, she said after a pause, ‘I see they got you too.’
Very carefully I screwed the top on to the brandy flask, unscrewed it once and screwed it on again, for I had caught it on the wrong thread. I put the flask into my hip pocket and did up the button. I pulled across the buckle on my greatcoat and noticed that I was dripping with sweat. I pulled the cap down over my eyes and walked out into the street.
Someone caught me by the arm, I think it was the soldier with the girl, and said: ‘You’d better take some of that brandy yourself. You don’t look too good’; but I shook him off. With difficulty I kept my pace to a walk, forcing myself not to run. For I wanted to run, to run anywhere away from that scene, from myself, from the terror that was inside me, the terror of something that was about to happen and which I had not the power to stop.
It started small, small but insistent deep inside of me, sharp as a needle, then welling up uncontrollable, spurting, flowing over, choking me. I was drowning, helpless in a rage that caught and twisted and hurled me on, mouthing in a blind unthinking frenzy. I heard myself cursing, the words pouring out, shrill, meaningless, and as my mind cleared a little I knew that it was the woman I cursed. Yes, the woman that I reviled, hating her that she should die like that for me to see, loathing that silly bloody twisted face that had said those words: ‘I see they got you too.’ That she should have spoken to me, why, oh Christ, to me? Could she not have died the next night, ten minutes later, or in the next street? Could she not have died without speaking, without raising those cow eyes to mine?
‘I see they got you too.’ All humanity had been in those few words, and I had cursed her. Slowly the frenzy died in me, the rage oozed out of me, leaving me cold, shivering, and bitterly ashamed. I had cursed her, cursed her, I realized as I grew calmer, for she had been the one thing that my rage surging uncontrollably had had to fasten on, the one thing to which my mind, overwhelmed by the sense of something so huge and beyond the range of thought, could cling. Her death was unjust, a crime, an outrage, a sin against mankind—weak inadequate words which even as they passed through my mind mocked me with their futility.
That that woman should so die was an enormity so great that it was terrifying in its implications, in its lifting of the veil on possibilities of thought so far beyond the grasp of the human mind. It was not just the German bombs, or the German Air Force, or even the German mentality, but a feeling of the very essence of anti-life that no words could convey. This was what I had been cursing—in part, for I had recognized in that moment what it was that Peter and the others had instantly recognized as evil and to be destroyed utterly. I saw now that it was not crime; it was Evil itself—something of which until then I had not even sensed the existence. And it was in the end, at bottom, myself against which I had raged, myself I had cursed. With awful clarity I saw myself suddenly as I was. Great God, that I could have been so arrogant!
How long I had been walking I don’t know, but the drone of aircraft had ceased, so the All Clear must have sounded. I had a horror of thinking, of allowing my mind to look back armed with this new consciousness, but memories of faces, scenes, conversations flooded in, each a shock greater than the last. I was again in the train with Peter, on the way to Edinburgh, sitting forward on the seat, ridiculing his belief with glib patronizing assurance. Once again I was drawing from him his hopes and fears, his aspirations for a better life, extracting them painfully one by one, and then triumphant, holding them up to the light, turning them this way and that, playing with them for a moment only to puncture them with ridicule and, delighted with my own wit, to throw them carelessly aside. Once again Peter was sitting opposite me, unruffled and tolerant, saying that I was not quite unfeeling, predicting that some shock of anger or of pity would serve to shake me from the complacency of my ivory tower, Peter quoting Tolstoi to me:
Man, man, you cannot live entirely without pity!
words which I had taken it upon myself to dismiss as the sentimental gub of an old man in his dotage.
Oh, God, that memory might be blotted out; but it was remorseless. Peter’s death lived by me in all its vivid intensity, offering me yet again the full life by all its implications, but rejected by me later to Denise. Rejected brutally, ‘Let the dead bury their dead,’ close the door on the past, be grateful for the experience, use it, but understand that there is no communication, no message, no spiritual guidance, no bridge between life and death. Go on, do not look back, there is nothing there, nothing; it is all over. Denise, who had not been angry, who was now working day and night with Peter beside her, who had shown me the way, who with patience and understanding had let me look into her heart that I might learn. And I who, having looked, closed my eyes and turned away not wishing to believe, turned away irritated. Something there to be absorbed perhaps, an experience which might be useful; very interesting emotionally of course, but nothing more. No, decidedly not. Dangerous morbid introspection; must get away.
Noel, Peter Howes, Bubble, and the others—their deaths. Not felt quite as fully as one had expected perhaps, but then there was a war on, people dying every minute, one must harden one’s heart. They were gone; good friends all of them, but there it was, nothing there for me, no responsibility, no answering to them for my actions before or after.
And the hospital. I saw myself again that first day in Sussex, standing in the doorway and looking down Ward Three. Once again I saw Joan in the bed by the saline bath, saw her hairless head, her thin emaciated face, and heard that voice like a child of seven’s whimpering, saw myself register it vaguely and pass on to look with interest at the others. The blind man learning Braille, utterly dependent on his wife; bad that, should be helping himself. Joseph the Czech and his nose growing from his forehead; his hands messy stumps and his eyes stupidly trusting. The one with practically no face at all, just a pair of eyes; unable to talk of course, but interesting, oh yes, particularly interesting: Yorkey Law the bombardier, later to be invalided out, but quite fascinating with all those bacon strips off his legs gradually forming a face. And the others; one after another I remembered them until finally Edmonds—Edmonds and his year of pain and disfigurement and my nice comfortable little theory on his will to live.
I remembered them all, remembered how at first they had interested me in their different ways, and then how they had irritated me with their dumb acceptance of the hospital conditions, their gratitude for what was being done for them, and above all their silent, uncomplaining endurance. It had baffled me. I had felt their suffering a little, had seen it, but through a glass darkly. They were too close to me, too much a part of my own suffering for me to focus it like this thing tonight.
Tonight. Had it really been such a short time ago, had it been today that I had talked to David Rutter?
Again memory dragged me back. It had been this very day who had sat back smoking cigarettes while David had poured out his heart, while his wife had watched me, taut, hoping. But I had failed. I had been disturbed a little, yes, but when he was finished I had said nothing, given no sign, offered no assurance that he was now right. I saw it so clearly.
‘Do you think I should join up?’ On my answer had depended many things, his self-respect, his confidence for the future, his final good-bye to the past. And I had said nothing, shying away from the question, even then not seeing. In the train I had crossed my legs and sat back, amused, God help me, by the irony of it all. They had given so much and were dead. I had given so little and was alive. Ah, well!
I was very grateful for the night and my solitude. I who had always repeated the maxim ‘Know thyself’ was seeing now what it meant to live by that maxim. ‘Le sentiment d’?tre tout et l’?vidence de n’?tre rien.’ That was me. The feeling that I was everything and the evidence that I was nothing.
So Peter had been right. It was impossible to look only to oneself, to take from life and not to give except by accident, deliberately to look at humanity and then pass by on the other side. No longer could one say ‘The world’s my oyster and the hell with the rest.’ What was it Denise had said? ‘Yes, you can realize yourself, but not by leading the egocentric life. By feeling deeply the deaths of the others you are conferring value on life.’
For a moment I had had it, had that feeling, but I had let it go, had encouraged it to go, distrusting it, and now, and now… was it, then, too late?
I stopped and looked up into the night. They were there somewhere, all of them around me; dead perhaps, but not gone. Through Peter they had spoken to me, not once but often. I had heard and shrugged my shoulders; I had gone my way unheeding, not bitter, either on their account or mine, but in some curious way suspended, blind, lifeless, as they could never be.
Not so the others. Not so the Berrys, the Stapletons, the Carburys. Again instinct had served. They hadn’t had even the need of a Peter. They had felt their universe, not rationalized it. Each time they climbed into their machines and took off into combat, they were paying instinctive tribute to their comrades who were dead. Not so those men in hospital. They too knew, knew that no price was too dear to achieve this victory, knew that their discomforts, their suffering, were as nothing if they could but get back, and should they never get back they knew that silence was their role.
But I! What had I done? What could I do now?
I wanted to seize a gun and fire it, hit somebody, break a window, anything. I saw the months ahead of me, hospital, hospital, hospital, operation after operation, and I was in despair. Somehow I got myself home, undressed, and into bed and fell into a troubled sleep. But I did not rest; when I awoke the problem was still within me. Surely there must be something.
Then after a while it came to me.
I could write. Later there would be other things, but now I could write. I had talked about it long enough, I was to be a writer, just like that. I was to be a writer, but in a vacuum. Well, here was my chance. To write I needed two things, a subject and a public. Now I knew well enough my subject. I would write of these men, of Peter and of the others. I would write for them and would write with them. They would be at my side. And to whom would I address this book, to whom would I be speaking when I spoke of these men? And that, too, I knew. To Humanity, for Humanity must be the public of any book. Yes, that despised Humanity which I had so scorned and ridiculed to Peter.
If I could do this thing, could tell a little of the lives of these men, I would have justified, at least in some measure, my right to fellowship with my dead, and to the friendship of those with courage and steadfastness who were still living and who would go on fighting until the ideals for which their comrades had died were stamped for ever on the future of civilization.
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