I stared at him. I opened my mouth to say something but, at that moment, Major Graves wandered along and told us to get ready to march.
We were going home.
II
The soil was black, darkened by the drizzle that seeped in dreary sheets from the lowering sky. It reminded me of the trenches. The rain dripped from my nose and soaked my new suit. Six feet below the newly turned soil lay my sister, brother-in-law, and nephew: protected forever from the elements. The graves were still fresh.
A few days beforehand, my men and I had been loaded onto an old tug in Boulogne and, after a short journey across choppy waters, had disembarked at Folkstone, where a train waited to take us to London.
The soon-to-be ex-soldiers, still carrying filthy packs and wearing their ragged uniforms, had stumbled onto the platform to be greeted by flags and trestle tables and old ladies who poured us mugs of tea and gave us sausage rolls. We marched through the streets in watery sunshine, past crowds who cheered us, to a town hall where our uniforms were taken from us to be replaced by trousers, shirts and coats.
When we emerged the rain had started, the crowds had dispersed, and we were civilians once again.
I watched as war comrades bade each other farewell. Nobody spoke to me; it was as if they knew there was something wrong with me. I wandered around the corner and found a pub, where I bought a pint of ale and stared into the mirror behind the bar.
I saw a tall, broad-shouldered man with sandy hair and blue eyes. Young in years, yet strangely old. The face that looked back at me seemed too mature for someone only twenty-two.
The war had done it. It had aged me in strange ways: given me a guarded, enigmatic aspect, an inner reticence. I looked like a man with secrets and, glancing around the bar, I could easily spot the men who had been to war and those who hadn’t, for the veterans had the same look about them. They caught my glance and nodded solemnly back at me. They could see it in me, too.
I caught a train to sooty old Newcastle, where I found a landlady who took me in for the night. The next day I caught another service further north to Morpeth, a small market town in South East Northumberland. By the time I got to Rothbury, Mu and her family were dead and buried.
It was the grippe. I had seen it in the trenches over the last few months. It had swept through the filth, striking men down in swathes: although at the beginning some of them had recovered after a few days. I had not succumbed, but many had. They were not calling it grippe now, however, for it had changed and it was deadly. It had a new name: Spanish flu.
It was early December and the flu had already killed more people around the world in four months than the war had managed in four years. Of course nobody knew that at the time as the wartime censors were still keeping a lid on reality. Only triumphant news was allowed.
Almost a quarter-of-a-million people were dead or dying from it in Britain alone. My sister and her family were just three more statistics to add to the legions killed from conflict and disease.
I had loved my sister dearly, but I didn’t weep for her at her graveside. I couldn’t. At the time I believed this was because I was immured by my experiences in the trenches, that I could not reach inside myself and let the grief out because of the war. That I was simply a burned-out, used-up shell of a man. All this was true. But later in my life I discovered another reason for my stoicism.
What was the point of it all? I had fought for four-and-a-half years in a war that had done nothing except kill and maim millions of innocents. There were no victors, whatever the newspapers trumpeted. Instead the population of Europe had simply been reduced, randomly and horrifically, to become nothing more than a continent of shattered survivors. Instead of anguish, I just felt a cold, stony anger, a sense of unfairness. The belief that nothing—nothing—I or anyone else did made any difference to anything. The deaths of the last of my blood kin left me as I’d been for years: morose.
I eventually went back to the cottage where my sister had lived and found it already occupied by new tenants, just like my parents’ house. The ragged people in those poor dwellings stared at me suspiciously until I moved on. They too had probably lost more than they could comprehend in the war. Like everyone from all of the countries that had fought, they were stained and defeated by conflict.
I didn’t go to the house of Sally Robson, the girl I had spoken of with Captain Greene. I had no wish to find out what had become of her. In all honesty, I didn’t care.
I wandered around my home village for the rest of that day, past the shops on the small high street still only half-full of victuals. I sat in the pub for a while, nursing a beer. One or two people recognised me, but they kept their distance. They looked upon me with distaste; they had probably lost sons or brothers or fathers and begrudged my survival.
Eventually, I went down to the river and sat on a bench in the rain, watching the water flow by.
What would I do now?
I had nothing. I had left Rothbury as an immature boy and my adult life had consisted of nothing but battle and fear and noise and filth. The war had changed me and shaped me, forged me into something no longer suited for civilian life. But I needed to do something; anything. I needed a job, and I needed time to come to terms with my survival.
For the first time in my life, I was alone. Before the war I’d had my family, and during the war I’d had my comrades in arms, at least up until the Somme. But now my family was gone, and the men I’d shared the trenches with wouldn’t give me the time of day: they knew there was something wrong with me.
The rain turned to sleet and, as night fell, I made my way to the railway station and caught the last train back to Newcastle. I had a little money in my pockets and spent a chunk of it on a cheap room near the railway station.
Sat on the edge of a hard bed in the cold, bare room, I pulled out the letter Captain Greene had given me back in Belgium. He had said a job awaited me if I wanted it.
My family were gone, and I was homeless and almost penniless. It seemed I had little choice.
I dreamed that night, as I sometimes still do, of the Medic. That’s how I thought of him, whenever I thought of him at all: the Medic.
*
He had black hair and dark eyes. His nose had been broken at some point in the past and he had a ragged scar on his right cheek. He was aged about thirty.
In my dreams he wandered slowly down the ranks of shredded meat that had once been men. Staring, staring.
The three bullets that had torn into me had ruptured my lungs. The bullets had gone through me but had caused massive damage, and there was little hope of me surviving the night. I had been found and collected by medics on that body-strewn battlefield and they had dumped me onto a hand-pulled cart along with several other men with wounds equal to or worse than mine. One of the men who slumped opposite me on the rickety, bouncing cart stared at me for the whole journey, grinning at me horribly. It was only when a fly landed on his eye that I realised he had been dead the whole time and his grin was the rictus grimace of death.
The cart was unloaded at a field hospital, where I was bandaged and then left to die on a stretcher on the grass, while the men who had a chance of surviving were treated first. As the light began to fade, a man walked through the dead and dying and knelt beside me.
He muttered something to me in French, a question I think, and then sighed. He was a young, blonde man. He looked very tired and his white shirt was black with stiff, dried blood.