I could not answer him, even if I had understood what he had said. My breath bubbled in my chest. I felt as if I were drowning. Drowning on dry land. My burst lungs were filling with blood and the pain of those breaths was abominable. But I clung tenaciously, frantically, to life.
The next thing I remember was being placed into a low bed in a hospital ward. The ward was inside a church and French nuns were administering pain relief in the form of soup and prayers.
It was obviously just somewhere they had found to let the dying expire quietly, providing them with the illusion that they were actually being treated for their injuries. It stank like a butcher’s shop. The whole place was lit by candles and gas lamps, while Jesus glared down at me from his cross high above. I stared at the wooden figure and felt his suffering. I knew I would die in that church. I knew I would not see another morning.
A low moaning sound was rising and falling around me like an aural tide as the hideously ruptured men breathed their last in the gloom. Some of them whimpered pathetically, some of them hissed as they stoically kept their enormous pain to themselves. Some of them wept and screamed and called out for their mothers as they felt the cold fingers of eternity touch them. They were boys. Just boys.
I couldn’t make a sound, even though pain thumped throughout me, keeping time with my weakening heartbeat.
And in the middle of the night, ignored by the nuns and unseen by most of the patients—they were by now almost all dead—the Medic came to me.
I couldn’t move by then. My blood had seeped through the useless bandages and into the thin mattress beneath me and the pain was, thankfully but ominously, lessening.
I was suddenly aware of his presence as he leant over me. I stared up at him, my face no doubt ashen. I was icy cold, yet perversely hot. My head felt as if it were going to burst and my body seemed to be disappearing into the sodden mattress. I was sinking fast and could feel almost nothing. Only that hot ice and the thumping in my brain.
His candlelit face hovered in the blackness above me, his dark eyes stared down at me.
He placed a hand on my chest.
He was smiling.
*
I woke with a start, panting, the dream fading but the memory of those black, smiling eyes still there in my vision.
I sat and wiped a hand across my brow and let out a long, wavering sigh, slowly getting my breath back.
At last I stood and moved over to the small washbasin in the corner of the room, cupping the cold water over my face and head. I looked at myself in the mirror.
I still wore my trousers, but I had stripped off my jacket and shirt before falling asleep the night before. I stared at the three small scars on my chest. They were puckered, white. I knew there were similar, slightly larger, marks on my back where the Maxim had spat its bullets through me. They had torn away huge chunks of muscle and bone and ribs as well as decimating my lungs, and yet all that remained were those small scars. My breathing was untroubled, I felt no pain. Not for the first time since that July morning two years before, I wondered how I had healed so quickly and so completely.
I stood there for a while longer, hands either side of the bowl, then I pushed the thoughts away and shaved. I dressed, went down to my poor breakfast, paid my bill, and walked to the train station.
My rapidly decreasing funds bought me a ticket back to London, where I spent a lonely Christmas day. From there I caught a service to Winchester. The place I wanted was called Longwood Manor, just outside Owelsbury, wherever that was. I had no income, no prospects, and no future. My family was gone and so was my career in the army. I had little choice but to see if my erstwhile captain had told the truth.
I would go and work for Jonathon Greene.
III
The years I spent as Greene’s gamekeeper were some of the best of my life. Not the happiest by any means, but some of the best. Upon finding Longwood and introducing myself, I was shown into a huge library by a servant: an old retainer named Brewis, who looked like he’d been part of the household for decades. I mooched idly around the room as I waited for Brewis to get Greene, glancing at the books lining the walls. A lot of them were written in a language I didn’t understand (I later found out it was Latin), and there were leather chairs either side of a warming fire.
I stood before the bay windows and looked out onto a rather overgrown but very substantial lawn, with a forest beyond it. Rain had started again, spitting in a desultory manner against the panes. It was very quiet. I paced the room as a log cracked and shifted in the fireplace.
An ancient dog wandered into the room, wagged its tail at me, and allowed itself to be petted for a minute or two before wandering out again. A clock in the hallway outside chimed a resonant note. I stood, staring down into the fire, thinking of my sister.
‘Rob!’ shouted a happy-sounding voice behind me, and I automatically whirled and drew myself to attention. Greene chuckled.
He was dressed in expensive-looking, perfectly creased trousers, but his shirt was crumpled and oily and his sleeves were rolled-up exposing equally oily arms. He strode across the room, extending his dirty hand towards me.
‘At ease, Sergeant.’
Another chuckle.
‘It’s good to see you, Rob. Good to see you.’
I nodded.
‘Thank you, sir. You too.’
It was now early January 1919. Only a couple of months since Greene and myself had talked in that Belgian village, but already a lifetime away. I could see he had changed.
He had grown a little more padding around his frame, although he was still quite spare. But this was not the real change. He now seemed much more at ease with himself, as if being back in his house had rejuvenated him, made him whole again, and had started to erase the thin, tension-filled individual he had been in the trenches. He seemed better.
‘Sit down, sit down,’ he urged and gestured at one of the chairs. He sat in the one opposite and grinned at me.
‘So, I’m hoping the reason you’re here is to take up my offer?’
I nodded.
‘If it’s still available, sir. I’d be very grateful.’
Greene waved this away.
‘Of course it is. I wouldn’t have offered you the post if I hadn’t meant it. I take it you went home to see your family. They’re well?’
He must have seen the sudden look in my eyes, because he leaned forward, his dirty arms on his knees.
‘They are well, aren’t they?’ he asked, concerned.
I told him what had happened to my sister and her family and he sighed in sympathy. He rang a bell and when the butler came in he ordered a couple of whiskeys. Before long the warming glow of the liquor was in my stomach.
‘I’m so sorry, Rob,’ Greene said. ‘I’ve heard about the Spanish flu. Deadly stuff. Awful.’
His gaze turned to the fire and he suddenly looked once more like the haunted young man I’d known in the trenches.
‘I sometimes wonder what else God has in store for us,’ he murmured, almost to himself. ‘I sometimes think the war was such an abomination that He has decided humanity must just go. Disappear. What must He think of us?’
He turned to me, looking for answers I was in no position to provide.
‘One goes through all that,’ he continued. ‘One does one’s duty. One survives. Then innocents like your family are taken away because of a disease.’ He shook his head. ‘I’m so sorry, Rob,’ he repeated.