by
Ken Strauss.
In
1882 Alain Michel Hamilton is born into an Edinburgh family of
distinguished doctors and undistinguished writers.
His mother is a French poet; his father, a Scottish professor of
medicine. Alain becomes a
doctor himself and serves 3 years as a surgeon to the British armies.
But it is neither medicine nor the war which matter, it is the
lyric tenderness of the women whom he meets and loves throughout these
convulsed times.
At
the end of his life, in 1944, Alain writes:
My whole adult life has been
lived in the eye of the greatest cataclysm in human history, its deepest
wound, this vicious slash across the face of man.
One immense war, a chronic war, lasting from 1914 to the present,
with only a tense interlude between its phases.
Beginning with man drunk in the revelry of la belle époque, it now moves to a climax with man reeling,
shell-shocked and psychotic. Against
its horrors, all the world's events for a very long time will be
silhouetted. And to think
that during these years, all I wanted, all that filled my thoughts, were
the women I loved and the tenderness we sought together.
I have no regrets. None.
For I have known the things of greatest beauty.
The
first, at 17, was Annelies.
I
had just woken in a wood, all hidden round by ferns and fallen cones, a
meadow with a stream not far below, awake only enough to catch the scent
of her, and sitting up, I saw her there, undressing in the mist.
And
half upright, but lying low and still, dew in my hair and streaks of
early sunlight through the trees, I saw a loosening and a slipping off,
a patch of earth and her, encircled by her fallen clothes; and, jumping
lightly clear of them and moving towards the water's edge, she looked
serenely round and then stepped in.
After
medical school in Vienna, it is Claire he meets on his first ward at St.
Barts.
Sitting on an elderly man's bed,
legs crossed, Claire took the patient's bony hand in both of hers. 'Today,' she leaned over to him, 'you and I will go for a
walk, a proper promenade, just the two of us.
As if we were going to the opening of a play. And all the others who don’t have tickets will watch us
with envy.’ She spoke
slowly, watching the light in his eyes. ‘We’ll walk in the sun.
I need it more than you do -- I’m so pale lately.
Yes, it will be a proper promenade.’ Her face was one of pure
tenderness. She wanted to
infect him with all that welled within her.
As she spoke she covered the dry
old fingers and squeezed them long and warmly between hers. They sat looking at each other in silence, she smiling at him.
His eyes wet. Unable
to speak. To declare his love. His drooping, paralytic lips, incapable
of uttering a sound, he mouthed the words,
‘A
proper promenade.’
She was healing him.
If
all of us could die like this, I thought.
Dr. Alain Hamilton arrived at the war shortly before the
battle of the Somme.
I imagined it all later as a giant sickle, mowing wheat.
I could see the motion of a single machine-gun in front of me,
its sandbags thrown aside to allow a greater sweep, and instantly the
approaching men fell before it, in a line, neatly, like dominoes; like
mown wheat. I’m sure it
pleased the German sense of tidiness to see the systematic nature of the
slaughter. Its orderliness.
Its completeness. Not a man was left standing in the first wave.
Or in the second. Or the third. The
green summer grass of No-Man’s-Land disappeared.
In its place was only the colour of strewn khaki.
As far as my eye could see, up and down the front, there was the
pivoting and spurting of guns and the sprawling, crawling, clawing and
writhing of British youth on the warm soil of France.
It was only 7:40 by my watch.
Elizabeth was his nurse at Casualty Clearing on the Somme.
She lost her brother and her fiancé on that first day of battle.
Steven and Jonathan fell, only
hours apart, on the first day of the Somme.
At the beginning of the battle
Elizabeth laboured for four days without sleep, always believing they
were still alive but fearing that the next stretcher she uncovered might
bear one of them. Then,
unable to go on, she lay down beside one of the wounded for a moment’s
rest, as she thought. There
she fell deeply asleep and dreamed only of them:
her two young men. When
she awoke, hours had passed and the soldier next to her was dead.
Later that day they told her
about her own two dead.
She slept round the clock after
that, closing off the world. For
days she refused to eat or speak. I
sent her my letter urging her not to grieve alone, but she worked on. There was no other choice.
She grieved alone.
Elizabeth destroyed her clothes one by one, ripping them to
shreds one night. So no-one else shall ever wear them again, she told herself.
Somehow, in that world of grief, it had an urgent necessity, this
rending. Get rid of everything
they ever saw me wear. Her
brother and her lover. Killed
almost within sight of each other, on Hawthorn Ridge at Beaumont Hamel,
that most dreadful morning of any war, 1st July 1916.
Alain began a practice after the Somme which he continued
until the end of the war. Recording
the way his patients died.
Fat embolus:
The Welshman asked to hold the letters that he’d saved
from Raywen. In the other
hand he gripped the harmonica. He
tried, at first, to dictate a letter but only managed the first few phrases.
‘Dearest Raywen, I
got it in the leg…but something happened, and I can’t catch my wind.
I do so wish to see you again…but fear I may be done for…be
brave please…and do take care of Mom and Dad...’ and this is
where he stopped. After
that it was like watching a drowning.
Gas gangrene:
First, we amputated just below the knee, then at mid-thigh;
finally we dis-articulated the entire left leg...
After he died, I found the thing
he’d written hidden under his bed, a short poem.
It solved the mystery of his bullet wound.
I never sent it for publication but gave it to his best friend, a
soldier from Derby, on condition that he never show it to the family.
I learned later that in the last year of the war tattered copies
of it were being passed amongst the men in the front lines.
Drop
Dead Night
We
took back Drop Dead Corner in a fight
Of
raging, cursing, blasting through the night
Then
left our wounded moaning on the field
When
orders came, ‘Retreat! Turn
on the heel!’
And
back we scrambled, scarcely just in time
To
see the fearsome crumps destroy that line
And
one by one our wounded to blast out
Cut
Bill into eight pieces, what a rout!
There
were two wounded who came staggering back
Who
urged us on with ‘Go now! Press
the attack!’
But
all our officers had gone to ground
And
self-preserving vied with duty bound
I
shook, I cried, I feared to soil myself
I
stripped my belt of all the Mills bombs left
Threw
down my gun and turned to leave and flee
And
saw behind that others followed me
I
ran half-crazed down corpse-infested trench
New
dead, half dead, old dead--My God! the stench!
And
broke into the fields beyond the line
But
never slacked the pace to look behind
Until
a drowsy sentry called me halt
I
tried to mouth the password that he sought
But
not before a shot from him rang out
And
put my dreams of living out of doubt.
3rd November, 1917
Today Doctor told me I would die.
Traumatic stroke
The Colonel was carried in three
days ago with a large dressing over his head and left eye.
With his right eye he looked calmly at me and with steady voice
(for the lower part of his face was still intact) said,
‘Awful out there today.
Worst I’ve seen in a while.’
It was spoken with the same earnest but casual tone that one
might use when commenting on a rain-lashed hunt or an especially
blustery sailing day.
I lifted off the dressing and
saw, to my horror, that the top of his forehead was gone.
The meninges were exposed all the way back to the parietal bone
on the left, the left ear was entirely shorn off and his left eye socket
was empty, with only the stub of the optic nerve remaining.
Alain proposes a picnic to
Elizabeth. They escape to
pass an afternoon away from the war.
The nights and days before the
picnic passed uneventfully except for the stream of blood that flowed
continuously through our unit. Near
midnight of the last night another one of
the penetrating chests died.… It is impossible to describe what those
moments meant to us; what dreams they could
later evoke. When I need to
remember the greatest tenderness of all the war, or of my whole life,
indeed, it is to that moment that my mind returns.
France, 1917; Elizabeth and our picnic.
The lettuce fresh, vinaigrette dripping from leaf to leaf,
tomatoes bursting; cave-ripened cheese.
Casualty Clearing is moved to a
Château.
The Château du
Jardin had a French
garden in the front with gravelled alleyways tracing out the château’s
armourie. This garden
was punctuated at regular intervals with sculpted bushes, each trimmed
into the shape of a flattened pyramid.
Every time I saw them from the top floor I thought of Napoleon as
he gazed down from the hills of Waterloo onto the carrés
which the Duke of
Wellington had arrayed for him.
There was, on the opposite side, an English rose garden.
My favourite! Much of it had a wild, untended look. Flowers were scattered about with wonderful capriciousness.
There was bittersweet, pimpernel in scarlet, bryony, trefoil,
bird’s-foot, speedwell, bugle and stonecrop -- the names as primitive
and exotic as the flowers. Only
the roses, which tolerate no competitors, stood neatly apart.
A wood lay adjacent to the château.
There were dozens of different species of tree, all grand and old.
Urns on columns sat at the crossing of
the paths. There was
a small statue of the Virgin sitting in the alcove of a granite stone,
surrounded by blue firs. Mater
purissima, moss-covered on the granite.
Myrtle and ivy covered the forest floor and in the spring there
was a perfusion of purple buttercups, violets, pink and yellow rattle,
forget-me-nots and white lilies. Tulips
of every colour and shape surrounded the pond on the edge of the wood.
And every evening the nightingales and countless other birds sang
madly.
The gas arrives:
The boy was brought in simply
without skin. No, that’s
not right. He had a patch
remaining beneath the Bible that had been pressed to his breast.
There was as well the outline of his shoulder straps and belt.
But that he was entirely without a voice no-one will dispute –which
meant his shallow gasps for breath were silent.
As was his cough. As was the oozing from the orbits which once housed his eyes….
And every silent cough is simply an ejaculation of lung.
Purple and frothy and very warm.
He writhed so much that we could not hold him down.
Morphia could find no veins to enter.
She wrung her hands, Elizabeth, and told herself she would never
nurse again.
Elizabeth receives transfer
orders for Alexandria and is then lost.
Message received from Admiralty
3rd January, 1918.
Elizabeth
Faraday, RAMC, lost at sea following torpedoing of ‘Aragon’.
Presumed dead.
And so, as on the day of our
picnic, I walked away; left everything, and simply walked.
Away from the war, from mending broken boys, from Emily and
Margaret, from Alice sleeping forever; from Annelies, pink at seventeen
but who answered no letters now, from Claire, distant, tall and perfect
but now gone; from England and the rest.
From Elizabeth floating out of
memory.
Arriving in the Alps after a
month walking, Alain cannot sleep.I see a railway
junction and a wounded soldier with a compound femur.
It is splinted with his own rifle.
The man lies behind a stack of pilings, forgotten there, missed
during the rush of last night’s transport.
He is too weak to cry and no longer has a dressing.
He has not eaten for four days.
Yellow water, scummy with mustard gas, lies in a nearby puddle.
His head turns slowly towards it and laps.
I see a man shot through the
open mouth just as he begins a yawn.
His hand starts moving towards his mouth.
There was no pain. He
thinks of nothing at the moment of his end.
His eyes opens slightly in surprise as he falls back.
I see young men playing soldier,
still boys except for the stooping posture.
They use knives to shave mud off
their uniforms and then lean haggardly against an estaminet. One lights a
cigarette, passes it to the other, then lights his own.
Four hours ago they bent over the open mouth.
It had lit cigarettes for them.
His brain had liquefied and dripped; it was now drying on their
boots. They do not think of
him at all.
And because I cannot sleep, I
write. I remember just
enough to write and then I forget.
I see a shell-shock ward at
Camiers. Men pitiful with
shrieks and tremors. Some
semi-conscious. All with
anguished faces. An Indian
corporal jerks about every second or so as if being convulsed by
electric shocks. A shell falls 300 yards away and all cringe in unison.
I see a Belgian soldier
crucified at St. Julien. I
see a German nail him upside down, then three others raise up the cross.
The forest floor is purple with wild flowers. It is early May and the beauty is beyond bearing.
Wild buttercups and dwarf daisies push through the leaves and
grass. Red poppies blow on
slender stems throughout the nearby fields.
His cross is in a copse of stately elms.
They are massive, twisting upwards on sinuously muscular trunks.
Lilies cover the valley beyond the copse. Narcissi are there as well, and lilacs, hawthorn and gorse in
wild bloom. Wisteria
clings to a farmhouse wall.
He only wants to die without a
sound.
I see the cross dug up by his
friends and gently lifted out. They
pry the nails out with their entrenching tools. He was crucified to
death near St. Julien. Upside
down like a saint. They vow
revenge and spit. That
night a German officer is taken prisoner near Langemarck.
They walk him back. At
Bulow Farm they stop. He
asks for a cigarette. A
private hands him one. I
see the private leaning forward to light it for him.
The cigarette lit, he drives a bayonet through the officer's
groin, up towards his sternum and into his heart.
The cigarette falls. The
German dies as well without a sound.
I see these things for nearly a
year and a half, and write them down, and finally I can sleep.
At the end of 1919, when it was
all over, I decided to write my last story of the war.
"Monique and Ulrich",
the love story of a French girl and a German soldier concerned only with
human closeness, ends a book of nearly unbearable poignancy.
For it is only tenderness that
will matter after all else is gone,
After all of us are gone, and
telegrams announcing our passing have yellowed or been lost, and after
all the trees from which they made our coffins have rotted in the ground,
and after all the ugly monuments have been built, have cracked and
have moss growing over names and dates, and after schoolchildren have
forgotten why they have a holiday to celebrate this war…after all of
this, hearts will harden and minds will go feeble and empty ceremony
will be passed to another generation of forgetters.
The scars will die with the bodies and the folds of the land will
unfold and refold, like bread dough, erasing all its former self.
All
photographs copyrighted KS, 2000, unless otherwise specified.