The Last Enemy Richard Hillary (17 page)

‘Well, Mr. Hillary,’ she said, ‘quite like old times,’ and went off to see what she could arrange. Somehow she obtained permission to convert one of the consulting rooms further down the hospital into a ward, and my bed was pushed along.

That night McIndoe came in to see me. He was still wearing his operating robes and sat down on the end of the bed. He talked to me for some time of the difficulties of running a unit such as this, of the inevitable trials and setbacks which must somehow be met. He knew, he said, that I had had a tough break, but I must try not to let it get me down. I noticed that he looked tired, dead tired, and remembered that he had been operating all day. I felt a little ashamed. The next day my mother and Denise motored down to see me. I was grey in the face from all the Prontosil that I was taking and they both thought that I was on the way out, though of this they gave no sign. Poor Mother. The crash, the sea, the hospital, the operations—she had weathered them all magnificently. But this last shock was almost too much. She did not look very well.

During the last five months I had gradually built up to my usual weight of twelve stone, but in the next week I sweated my temperature down to normal and my weight down to nine stone. I also began to feel more human, and as the bomb had been removed and the evacuated ones brought back, I returned to the main ward and the regular hospital routine.

If there is one thing I really loathe it is to be awakened an hour earlier than necessary with a cup of cold brown tea. Unfortunately I could not approach Tony’s imperious sarcasm, which was proof against all nurses until nine o’clock, but I finally hit on an idea for stopping this persecution. Nurse Courtney promised that if I made no more remarks about Ireland, she would no longer wake me with tea. I agreed with alacrity, saying that I could easily dispense with both. She at once bristled but was calmed down by Sister.

My God, I thought, who would be a nurse! They must suffer all the inconveniences of convent celibacy without the consolation of that inner glow which I take to be an integral part of the spiritual life.

It was shortly after this that Edmonds was readmitted to the hospital and placed in the bed next to mine. He was the worst-burned pilot in the Air Force to live. Taking off for his first solo in a Hampden at night, he had swung a little at the end of his run and put a wing in. The machine had immediately turned over and burst into flames. He had been trapped inside and fried for several minutes before they dragged him out. When he had first been brought to McIndoe he had been unrecogniszable and had lain for months in a bath of his own suppuration. McIndoe performed two emergency operations and then left it to time and careful dressings to heal him enough for more.

Never once had Edmonds complained. After nine months McIndoe had sent him away to build up his strength. Now he was back. It would take years to build him a new face. He was completely cheerful, and such was his charm that after two minutes one never noticed his disfigurement.

He was first on the list for operation the day after his readmission. Both his top lids and his lower lip were done together and he was brought back to the ward, even-tempered as ever. The man on his other side diverted him for most of the day with endless funny stories of crashes. Sometimes I think it would be very pleasant to be invested with the powers of life and death.

Three days went by and I noticed an ominous dribble down Edmonds’ right cheek from under the dressing across his eyes. That night McIndoe took the dressing down: the right eyelid graft had not taken. He took it off and threw it away: it was the streptococcus at work again, and bitterly ironical that McIndoe’s first eyelid failure should be on Edmonds. He was immediately put on to Prontosil and by the next morning was a greeny blue, with his lower lip jutting out like an African tribeswoman’s.

After lunch some idiotic woman came in and exclaimed at how marvelously well he looked. I held my breath but I need not have worried. Instead of turning his face to the wall or damning her soul, he managed to smile and said:

‘Yes, and I’m feeling much better too.’

I could not but marvel at his self-control and unruffled good manners. I remembered a few of my own recent outbursts and felt rather small.

Here was a twenty-six-year-old South African with no ties in this country, no mere boy with his whole life to make, terribly injured without even the satisfaction of having been in action. Sometimes he behaved as though he had been almost guilty not to have been shot down, as though he were in the hospital under false pretences; but if ever a pilot deserved a medal it was he. He read little, was not musical, yet somehow he carried on. How? What was it that gave not only him but all these men the courage to go on and fight their way back to life? Was it in some way bound up with the consciousness of death? This was a subject which fascinated me and I had discussed it with McIndoe. Did people know when they were about to die? He maintained that they did not, having seen over two hundred go, none of them conscious that their last moment had come.

‘How about Charles the Second’s apology for being such an unconscionable time a-dying?’

He admitted that in some cases people might have a premonition of death, but in cases of terrible physical injury he would say never. Their physical and mental conditions were not on a different plane: the first weakened the second (if I report him accurately), and there was neither consciousness of great pain nor realization of the finality of physical disintegration.

That, then, would account for my calmness when in the sea. I knew well enough, meanwhile, that sheer anger had pulled me through my mastoid complication. But what of the men who, after the first instinctive fight to live, after surviving the original physical shock, went on fighting to live, cheerfully aware that for them there was only a half-life? The blind and the utterly maimed—what of them? Their mental state could not remain in the same dazed condition after their bodies began to heal. Where did they get the courage to go on?

It worried me all day. Finally I decided that the will to live must be entirely instinctive and in no way related to courage.

This nicely resolved any suspicion that I might recently have behaved rather worse than any of the others, might have caused unnecessary trouble and confusion. Delighted with my analysis of the problem, I settled myself to sleep.

The following day my ear surgeon told me that I might go back to the convalescent home in a week, McIndoe told me that he would not operate on me again for three months, and my mother came down from town and told me that Noel Agazarian had been killed.

At first I did not believe it. Not Noel. It couldn’t happen to him. Then I realized it must be true. That left only me—the last of the long-haired boys. I was horrified to find that I felt no emotion at all.

9

‘I see they got you too’

I WAS back at the convalescent home when the letter came. I was very comfortable, but I had a flat, let-down feeling. I suppose it was natural enough after the mastoid; but I knew it went deeper than that. The last few months in the hospital had most certainly been an experience. I had asked no more than that of the war. I was by no means regretting it, but it was still too near in time for me to focus it clearly. I had, I thought, observed the people around me disinterestedly. Their suffering and pain had in no way affected my attitude to the war. I had come through it without falling a victim to the cloying emotions of false pity. I could congratulate myself that I was self-centred enough to have survived any attack on my position as an egocentric. I had a fleeting suspicion that that might be because the others had been so much an integral part of my own experience that I could consider them only in relation to myself; but I dismissed the idea. And yet something was wrong. My thoughts were no longer tuned to Peter: there was no contact, not even through Denise. All this was now as nothing. I was back where I had started. It had been a mere passing emotional disturbance, occasioned by my weakened condition. With the passage of time, as I had foreseen, the whole relationship took on its normal proportions. Indeed I was a little irritated with Denise. What had seemed sensibility now seemed sentimentality: life was not all giving and selflessness, and no projection of the imagination could make it so. The realization that I had felt so deeply the need for the ghostly awareness of Peter now angered me. Still, I had not expected it to last. Why, then, this absurd feeling of futility?

I was suddenly tired. The first intimation of spring was in the air and I went for walks in the garden. Crocuses were bursting out of the ground, the trembling livingness of the earth seemed urgent through the soles of one’s shoes; it was the time of poetry and the first glance of love; yet I turned from it. It seemed to me that my mind was dry bone. I had an idea for a play to be called Dispersal Point, a study in Air Force mentality more or less on the lines of Journey’s End, but the idea was stillborn. I was cold and emptied of feeling. It was as though I were again at school, at school and for Sunday lunch: the bars on the windows, the cracked plaster above the empty grate, the housemaster surreptitiously picking his teeth with a penknife, and the boys, their long-tailed coats drooping over the hardwood benches, crouched dispiritedly above sickening plates of cold trifle. And then one morning, the letter.

It was from David Rutter: he had read the notice about Noel in the paper and asked if I could come to see him. David Rutter, a man with, in a different way, as great an integrity as Peter’s; David and the awful sincerity of his pacificism, rationalized at Oxford by talk of the Middle Ages, field-boots under the surplice, a different war for the unemployed labourer and the Duke of Westminster; but with an instinctive, deep-rooted hatred of killing which no argument could touch.

I had not seen him since that day more than a year before when Noel and I had got our commissions. We were in the bar of a London club, celebrating. David Rutter had come in. His first appeal as a conscientious objector had been turned down by the board that morning. We told him our news.

‘You always were the lucky bastard, Richard,’ he said, and laughed. He had a drink with us and left. And now he was working on the land. I was eager to see if and how he had changed. I remembered our conversation at Oxford: I wasn’t going to get hurt; I should get killed or win some putty medals while he went to jail. Well, I had to admit it hadn’t worked out quite like that.

The letter came as a relief. I was eager to go, was sure that something would come of the visit. I thought I might go to London for the night afterwards: it would be a change. I applied for two days’ leave and caught a train to Norfolk.

David met me at the station. A lock of hair hung over his forehead and he wore an old tweed jacket and corduroy trousers: he looked very fit. He seemed glad to see me, and as we climbed into his small car he told me shyly that he was married. I said little while we drove. I was uncertain what approach to take and felt it safer to let him make the first move. He was uneasy and I felt guilty: I had such an unfair advantage. We drew up outside a square brick bungalow and got out.

‘Well, here we are,’ said David with an attempt at a smile. ‘Come and meet Mary.’

His wife greeted me politely but defensively. She was a large, good-looking girl, blond hair hanging loosely forward over her shoulders. She began at once to talk—about birds and their use as an alarm clock. She resented my face. I was amused and relieved, for the usual feminine opening of ‘Poor boy, how you must have suffered’ embarrassed me; embarrassed me not because it was tactless, but because I could not immediately disabuse my sympathizers of their misplaced pity without appearing mock-modest or slightly insane. And so I remained an impostor. They would say, ‘I hope someone got the swine who got you: how you must hate those devils!’ and I would say weakly, ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ and leave it at that. I could not explain that I had not been injured in their war, that no thoughts of ‘our island fortress’ or of ‘making the world safe for democracy’ had bolstered me up when going into combat. I could not explain that what I had suffered I in no way regretted; that I had welcomed it; and that now that it was over I was in a sense grateful for it and certain that in time it would help me along the road of my own private development.

Well, here at least I need not worry.

Mary was still talking, this time about books, in an aggressive monologue which I was pretty certain masked a rawly sensitive nature.

But David cut in.

‘It’s all right, Mary,’ he said in a tired voice, ‘Richard’s not belligerent.’ He turned to me apologetically: ‘I’m afraid I don’t see many of my old friends any more and when I do there’s usually a scene, so Mary’s a bit on the defensive.’

We talked for a while on safe subjects—his work on the land, the district, and his evening visits to the local pub to gossip with the villagers. David was restless, pacing continuously up and down the room and rubbing a nervous hand over his hair. His wife followed his every movement; her eyes never left him. I realized that she was a very unhappy woman. It was not that she had no faith in David, for she was desperately loyal; it was that he no longer had any faith in himself.

I wanted to start him off, so I asked him what the C.O. boards had been like.

‘Oh, moronic but well-meaning,’ he said. ‘Yes, they were certainly moronic; but they were right. That’s the hell of it.’

He sat down and stared moodily into the fire.

Then: ‘I’m sorry about Noel,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I said.

For a moment he sat in silence. Then he lay back in his chair and began to talk. From time to time he would glance up at my face, and as he talked I realized that while I might carry my scars for a few years, the scars of his action would be with him always. For he was a broken man. In the last year he had stood by and watched his ideals shattered, one by one. As country after country had fallen to Hitler his carefully reasoned arguments had been split wide open: it was as much the war of the unemployed labourer as of the Duke of Westminster. Never in the course of history had there been a struggle in which the issues were so clearly defined. Although our peculiar form of education would never allow him to admit it, he knew well enough that it had become a crusade. All this he could have borne. It was the painful death of his passionate fundamental belief that he should raise his hand against no man which finally brought his world crumbling about his ears.

It started as a suspicion, at first faint, then insistent, and finally a dominant conviction, that in this too, this in which he believed above all things, he had been wrong.

‘After much heart-searching,’ he said, ‘I finally decided that with the outbreak of war I had failed in my own particular struggle. I had not now the right to refuse to fight: it was no longer a question for personal conscience but for the conscience of civilization. Civilization had decided, and it would be intolerable arrogance for me to question that decision.’

He gave me a wry smile.

‘It is to be regretted,’ he said, ‘that it has taken me more than a year to see this. Now I suppose I shall join up. Do you think I should?’

I started: the question had caught me unawares. I looked at David’s set face and the taut expectant figure of his wife, and sitting there smugly with the ‘honourable’ scars of a battle that was not mine I felt of a sudden very small.

‘I don’t know, David,’ I said. ‘That’s a question which only you can decide.’

When I rose to leave it was already dark. I said good-bye to his wife, and David drove me to my train up to London. As we got out of the car the searchlights were making a crisscross pattern of light in the sky: all around us was the steady roar of anti-aircraft fire.

David held out his hand.

‘Good-bye, Richard,’ he said. ‘You always were the lucky bastard.’

And this time he meant it.

There was a heavy raid on and the train crawled interminably, only the dull-blue light in the ceiling and the occasional glow of a cigarette revealing the presence of the passengers. David by now would be home again, pacing the floor, up and down, up and down, while Mary sat by helpless. David, so lost and without purpose; I had never expected to find him like that. I thought of Noel, of the two Peters, of the others in the Squadron, all dead; and how the David that I had known was dead too. They had all, in their different ways, given so much: it was ironical that I who had given least should alone have survived.

Liverpool Street Station was a dull-grey blur of noise and movement. I managed somehow to get hold of a taxi and make a start across London, but my driver seemed doubtful whether we should be able to go very far. Some machine dropped a flare, and in the sudden brightness before it was put out I saw that the street was empty. ‘What cars there were, were parked along the kerb and deserted.

‘I’m afraid we’ll be stopped soon, sir,’ said the taxi-driver. At that moment there was a heavy cramp unpleasantly close and glass flew across the street.

‘See if you can find a pub and we’ll stop there,’ I shouted. A few yards further on he drew into the kerb and we got out and ran to a door under a dimly lit sign of ‘The George and Dragon.’ Inside there was a welcoming glow of bright lights and beery breaths, and we soon had our faces deep in a couple of mugs of mild and bitter.

In one corner on a circular bench that ran round a stained wooden table sat a private in battle-dress and a girl, the girl drinking Scotch. She had light-brown hair and quite good features. I suppose if one had taken her outside and washed her face under a pump she would have had a rather mousy look, but she would still have been pretty. She was pretty now in spite of the efforts that she had made to improve on nature, had made and continued to make, for every few minutes she would take out a vanity case, pull a face into the mirror, lick her lower lip and dash her lipstick in a petulant streak of scarlet across her mouth. She was also talking very loud and laughing immoderately. I caught the barmaid’s eye. She gave me a conspiratorial wink and shook her head knowingly; ah yes, we understood, we two. But she was wrong: the girl was not drunk, she was very, very frightened; and, I thought, with good reason. For though at the Masonic I had dozed off regularly to the lullaby of the German night offensive, I had never before heard anything like this. The volume of noise shut out all thought, there was no lull, no second in which to breathe and follow carefully the note of an oncoming bomber. It was an orchestra of madmen playing in a cupboard. I thought, ‘God! what a stupid waste if I were to die now.’ I wished with all my heart that I was down a shelter.

‘We’d be better off underground tonight, sir, and no mistake.’ It was my taxi-driver speaking.

‘Nonsense,’ I said. ‘We couldn’t be drinking this down there,’ and I took a long pull at my beer.

I was pushing the glass across the counter for a refill when we heard it coming. The girl in the corner was still laughing and for the first time I heard her soldier speak. ‘Shut up!’ he said, and the laugh was cut off like the sound track in a movie. Then everyone was diving for the floor. The barmaid (she was of considerable bulk) sank from view with a desperate slowness behind the counter and I flung myself tight up against the other side, my taxi-driver beside me. He still had his glass in his hand and the beer shot across the floor, making a dark stain and setting the sawdust afloat. The soldier too had made for the bar counter and wedged the girl on his inside. One of her shoes had nearly come off. It was an inch from my nose: she had a ladder in her stocking.

My hands were tight-pressed over my ears but the detonation deafened me. The floor rose up and smashed against my face, the swing-door tore off its hinges and crashed over a table, glass splinters flew across the room, and behind the bar every bottle in the place seemed to be breaking. The lights went out, but there was no darkness. An orange glow from across the street shone through the wall and threw everything into a strong relief.

I scrambled unsteadily to my feet and was leaning over the bar to see what had happened to the unfortunate barmaid when a voice said, ‘Anyone hurt?’ and there was an A.F.S. man shining a torch. At that everyone began to move, but slowly and reluctantly as though coming out of a dream. The girl stood white and shaken in a corner, her arm about her companion, but she was unhurt and had stopped talking. Only the barmaid failed to get up.

‘I think there is someone hurt behind the bar,’ I said. The fireman nodded and went out, to return almost immediately with two stretcher-bearers who made a cursory inspection and discovered that she had escaped with no more than a severe cut on the head. They got her on to the stretcher and disappeared.

Together with the man in the A.F.S., the taxi-driver and I found our way out into the street. He turned to us almost apologetically. ‘If you have nothing very urgent on hand,’ he said, ‘I wonder if you’d help here for a bit. You see it was the house next to you that was hit and there’s someone buried in there.’