Hero Read online

  The world has been through a ring of fire. Lush meadows have withered. The heavens have darkened to falling steel. But the Baxters’ innocence is intact, only the slight nibble of worry around a vision of pure virtue. For me their soft decency is unbearable—a grotesque practical joke. I have never felt as foul as during the last nine days during which Charles Baxter has been with the division. I have never felt so mocked by memory. “I can’t even imagine,” Charles said, an infinite kindness in his eyes. But the chief of all horrors is that his words now tug me closer to him; they make me almost believe in those days before the war.

  I pick up my own kit and turn to the dugout wall as I strap it on. My fingers are trembling, not in fear, but in a dreadful hope. You’re going to get out of this. This is victory. Can it be? Are we really going to aim a fatal blow this very day, and come out into the light?

  My sinews tighten. I turn to Charles. “You know the drill. Help the men out. Follow through with the last. As soon as we establish channels through the wire, catch me up.”

  Charles nods. “Everything is ready.” He stands as though to attention.

  A soft breeze teases my earlobe. A sparrow rises into the blue above a smoking crater. It flaps its wings, then circles, panicky in the silence.

  “Going to be a walkover, boys, piece of cake,” the warrant officer beneath me mumbles. My feet tremble on the ladder, but not enough for anyone to notice. It’s the faint whiff of freedom that scares me, the spectre of hope.

  My lips pinch the whistle and I glance to the right, watching for the signal. Far down the line, almost on the horizon, a flag waves. A short piercing blast arrives on the breeze. I blow also—a fractured note from me—and clamber over the ridge, head down, still distrusting the calm. Stooping, I haul up the next man. The dull rumble of boots scoops up the rest of the silence. As far as the eye can see, men crawl out of the trenches like overloaded ants. Ahead, in no man’s land, the advance line is already moving. A dull boom and the rattle of machine guns confirm that our cover fire has commenced on schedule.

  Charles is at the next ladder, giving each soldier a haul then a pat on the back as if encouraging him on his way to face a fast bowler. A private adjusts his heavy gear and starts marching forward.

  I turn and follow the line of soldiers and warrant officers, embarrassed to be behind. I catch up at the wire. Two privates—Jarrot and Smith—lower a plank over the mesh. I try to help but my hands feel alien to myself, silent betrayers, as they touch the wood. The mesh springs back at first but is flattened as Jarrot then Smith march through into no man’s land. A sergeant and more privates follow.

  Silent, unnoticed, I go after—an officer ghost.

  Smoke rises ahead. Farther off, just short of the enemy lines, our mortars explode. Great plumes of earth fly into the air and hang against the horizon like the leaves of some monstrously outsized crop. Machine guns rattle and metal pings against stone. One of the men halts and makes a pantomime gesture with his arms, entreating reply from a non-existent audience. He remains for a moment, a scarecrow silhouetted by the smoke. Then he folds in upon himself, sinking to the earth. Another merely drops to the ground as though tripped. Once fallen, he remains—a kit bag and empty coat.

  The machine guns I took to be ours are theirs. Repeat fire echoes like laughter across the battlefield.

  Inside me something coils. Men are falling all around me, stringless puppets in the drifting smoke. Ahead, clumps of soldiers gather at the enemy wire, like a congregation on the church steps, awaiting entry. I notice some are hanging, attached to the wire. Is Charles Baxter one of these? My pace, already slow, slackens. It isn’t working, says the part of me that still thinks like a soldier, but you can’t retreat. You must push forward.

  Go back comes another, more intimate voice. Thick smoke spirals, bitter ashes creeping up my nostrils. Retreat and crawl inside your tunnel, muffle your ears, and shelter your eyes.

  I shrug off the lizard of cowardice and fix my bayonet, my heart drumming an overture to battle. There will be a counter-attack; it is certain. The silence was a trap and our men are exposed. I have hung back disgracefully, but enemy blood upon my bayonet will wash away the shame.

  Something stirs through the smoke, edging this way—I catch the dome of a helmet. The counter has started. I fall to my knees, ready to leap forward. My ankles are like springs, feet sinking into the earth for greater thrust. The man looms before me and I jump into him blade-first.

  Standing now, I take his weight, twist, and pull back my weapon. He gasps, a hand groping my shoulder, then squeezing the joint till it hurts. The first thing I notice is the size of his eyes, whites enlarged like those of a hard-boiled egg.

  Does this mitigate my mistake? The question darts like a swallow through my thoughts. At this moment Charles does not really look like Charles. Like me, he is altered by the war. Will Sarah take this into account when she gets to hear that I have killed her brother?

  “Sorry,” I find myself whispering.

  Don’t talk, a rasping thought tries to correct me. Don’t say anything that will weave this moment deeper into reality. It hasn’t happened. It hasn’t really happened.

  “I was coming to fetch you,” croaks Charles. “I thought you were hurt.”

  His face screws up into a ball of agony, moist eyes still bulging, brow furrows deeper than anything such a young face should allow.

  He dies. I feel the life leave him, as easy as that. The hand that grips my shoulder is merely a hand, and nothing more. The arms, the neck, the head that I now ease to the ground are all part of a carcass like any from a butcher’s shop—spine, limbs, joints all within a sack of skin; I can smell fresh blood and offal. A moment’s panic as the hand will not cease holding, then I stumble back free, gasping for breath.

  Charles lies contorted at the neck and shoulder, eyes gazing off into blue. Gunfire cackles and I spin around, first towards the enemy lines, the rising smoke and the wire-pinioned bodies, then towards our own trenches, where a smaller number of corpses lie strewn over the pockmarked earth. Smoke drifts and circles and I see one of them, the closest to me, move—an arm rising, index finger stretched as though testing the wind. His trouser legs twist upon themselves as though empty. It’s Smith, one of the privates who crossed the wire before me. I recognize him from those sunken cheeks, like those of a consumptive, I heard one of the officers say. I pull my gun and bayonet close to my chest, aware suddenly of the sticky blood on my fingers. Smith’s forefinger hovers, seems to point in my direction, then his arm falls back into his coat. The hint of a smile plays upon his thin lips.

  My heart pounds like sledgehammer against rock. Did Smith see? Turning again, my fingers tremble and I shield the weapon with my body. My head shakes like that of a dog besieged by fleas, and suddenly I’m off, bounding hard towards the enemy lines, a deafening rush in my ears.

  A tumult of gunfire rises to my embrace.

  CHAPTER 5

  It was the scream they all remembered—a mythic, warrior howl from the avenger whose blade dripped with Hunnish blood. I remembered it too once the fog of dreams began to lift. I had screamed when I reached the enemy trenches. All the terror and fury of suicide was in that desperate release. And, immediately after, I was thrown by an irresistible force. There was a sharp pain in my head, a wrench in my ankles, and I was scooped as though by some gravitational force into a well of darkness. I tried to recall—because they were so certain of my heroism—what I could possibly have accomplished in the second between that yell and my descent. But no one helped me with that. Just a careful pat on my shoulder, as if they feared too firm a touch would shatter my bones, and, “There, there old man. You’ve done everything that could be expected of you. You’re an inspiration.”

  It was the glare of the electric light high above my bed that first hauled me up through many layers of nightmare and dream. Voices came and went like trams. The narrow aisles of the ward were streets, sometimes empty, sometimes bustling with life. I cou
ld not at first tell a human voice from the screech of brake or the rattle of rail. I merely had some odd notion that I lay upon an island the traffic avoided.

  Voices faded into the murk. The light blurred, swelled, and spilled into blackness. Then, after some indeterminate time, it returned a little sharper than before. Pain was all around, pain so thick, so searing, I couldn’t understand how the white-clad men and women could move so easily, how they could walk, bend, and wrap and unwrap bandages like those around my feet and forehead, how they could concentrate on anything but the pain. Then I realized the pain was inside me; I had been wrong to assume that it flooded the corridors and reached with endless wings into the world beyond the hospital.

  Once, quite soon after this revelation, I opened my eyes to see a tall, gaunt man with a moustache looking down at me. I thought I recognized him.

  “Hello, old man,” he said gently, so gently in fact, that I had to wonder for a moment whether this was perhaps my father, whether I was still a child and this was a school sanatorium, not a hospital, whether I had dreamed the war and the years leading up to it. I tried to answer, but my tongue seemed asleep.

  “It’s all right, don’t speak,” he said quickly, colouring around the collar. “I didn’t mean to wake you. I’m Major Pickard from further up the line. You might remember me.” His grey eyes became evasive and moist. He stopped for a moment. “So many lost,” he said quietly. “I’m sure you must have heard.” He took a breath and straightened himself, taking off his gloves. Through the disinfectant that permeated the ward, I caught the faint scent of leather. “I just wanted to say on behalf of the lads in my platoon, and yours,” he said quietly, as though an aura of sadness or disgrace hung about our outfit. I thought of Charles, smelled his blood again. He knows I killed Charles, I thought. It did not occur to me that his gentleness was at odds with this and that he would not have been speaking so softly had he been aware that I had skewered the life out of a fellow lieutenant. But nothing was obvious to me in those days after my first awakening. The world and everything in it was being sewn together afresh. Had I looked out of a window I would not have been surprised to see the blue of sky upon the ground or a rich loam of grass around the sun. “It was a terrific show,” he continued, “a terrific show.”

  His colour became deeper still and he seemed overcome. Is this what happened in wartime? I wondered. Was there some mechanism in the politics of battle that turned things inside out, making soldiers honour actions they might otherwise admonish? I thought of Smith on the ground, his finger trying to point, his lips attempting a smile. Had Smith known something of this inversion?

  “I know it’s not the moment,” said the major, straightening, mouth tight as though preparing to speak before an audience, “but I want you to know, it will not be forgotten.”

  Not…forgotten. Something seeped from my skull and stung the wound beneath my bandage. What could this mean? That I’d be praised now, but that later, at some appointed time, I’d be excluded from the society of men? Dull recollections of ritualized ostracism—white feathers, black billiard balls—came into my mind. Immediately a single anxiety—more vivid by far than anything that had so far emerged from the tangles of my thoughts—formed itself: Does Sarah know I killed Charles?

  I pushed myself up onto my elbows and the question gathered on my breath.

  “No, old man, don’t try to talk yet.”

  “Sarah…” I managed to say. “Charles…” The thought was ready in my brain, coherent with subject, object, and verb in the right places, but the clarity had gone astray as it travelled the connections towards my mouth. I could only manage one word at a time.

  “I know, old man, I know,” he said, laying his warm hand on my shoulder. His manner had reverted to the infinite gentleness of before, hardly a trace of officer about him, save for the uniform and the neat leather gloves folded in one hand. “Young Baxter is gone. I’m terribly sorry.”

  I stuttered, hot blood rushing towards my head. We were further along—much further along—in understanding than this. We both knew I killed him; I wanted to know what Sarah knew already, and what she would know in future. If the words had only formed in time I could have shown him my frustration. I know he’s gone, I would have told him. I know he’s gone, you fool, because I killed him!

  But it was hopeless. He gave me a last kind, encouraging smile and backed away. A nurse took his place and Major Pickard strode away, head held meditatively to one side, a mannerism I had seen in priests and other men of vocation.

  “Now, you must rest,” said the nurse, pulling the thin blankets tight around my shoulders. “You can do nothing more until you are well again.”

  This was the first time I had come across myself, the hero. Just as the electric light hanging far above my bed had sharpened to a constant shape before my eyes, so did Major Pickard’s story—his “terrific show”—clarify itself in all its essentials. Over and over, and with little variation, my gallantry came to my ears until they burned not only with shame but also, perversely, with a sense of pride for the man they all believed me to be. In the shuffling chaos of the ward, a hero took shape and became real. It wasn’t me, but I was his devoted representative.

  From officers, sergeants, and even nurses, I heard how my lion-hearted roar shattered the smoky air, how with glistening bayonet I charged into the German lines. The blind self-sacrifice was branded, it seemed, on the hearts of tired and weary men of our platoon. Even though the mortar struck me down—or perhaps because it struck me down—the sight of me inspired the few bloodied souls of our outfit, reinforced by some of Pickard’s men, to fight over a section of German trench, a small gain made all the more golden because the cost had been so high and outright victory remained so far from reach.

  The story had hungry roots and fast-growing branches. In succeeding days I learned how I had shouted oaths at the Hun, dared him to come at me, even baring my chest—this last variation from an impressionable young nurse who hadn’t stopped to weigh the many impracticalities of such an action from an officer burdened with rifle, pack, and buckled uniform.

  What about the blood on my bayonet? Apparently it had come from one of the German snipers who had been hiding in the craters of no man’s land before the day had dawned, or else runners sent out by the enemy command to view and report back on the state of the battle. Luckily no one asked the rank or the dress of the foe I had slain, an omission that fed a lingering suspicion that, beneath the talk of heroes, they knew it was dangerous to question events too closely.

  I heard one startling elaboration from Flo, an insomniac nurse older than the rest. When she was off-duty, Flo liked to sit on the ward knitting, “keeping guard,” she used to say, over the sleeping soldiers. This night she had taken up a position in the aisle, quite close to my bed. When I awoke after a short sleep I could hear the rustle of wool and the rhythmic click of the needles. The noise, comforting to some, made me restless. I turned in the dim bluish haze to see her gazing at me, furrows on her brow, an odd concern in her heavy eyes. I stared back through the fuzzy half-light.

  Flo had something of Sarah’s mother about her, something of the same shape as she sat slightly round-shouldered, fingers working, a face that was at once aged, yet softened by age.

  These were the lines of concern, not of anger. Where men became stern and thin-lipped over years, some women, it seemed, mellowed into a wistful, worried version of who they had once been. But Flo’s wistfulness merely alarmed me. Why was she staring?

  A dozen anxieties sprang to life. Had I talked in my sleep? Had she overheard the story of how I had murdered the son of a woman like herself? Or had she heard something from one of the other patients, something that brought everything else into question, made her realize I was not really a hero at all? I was a coward and a murderer.

  I must have seemed startled because she rose, laid her knitting on her chair, and came towards me. Her hand reached for my head and I shrank violently into the bed.

&nbs
p; “It’s all right, all right,” she said softly. Her cold palm touched down upon my damp forehead, and I moaned like a child. I couldn’t help it. “Do you know who I am? Simon, do you know me?”

  Her use of my Christian name terrified me, as did her question. Nobody here called me Simon. Her eyes, already edged by grief and worry, seemed to take on another emotion. Mrs. Baxter’s spirit had possessed her and she was accusing me. I moaned again and stretched away from her hand, twisting my neck until part of my face sank into the pillow. “It’s all right, Simon, you’re only dreaming.”

  These words calmed me a little. I knew I wasn’t dreaming. I could pinpoint every aspect of the moment I was in—the mild, soap-like scent of the motherly nurse, the prickle of coarse linen against my cheek as I pushed myself as deep into the bed as I could. But the question brought me back to how fear and guilt had almost undone me with Major Pickard. Guilt had a life of its own, I remembered. No conclusion could be trusted that was reached under its influence.