After Z-Hour Read online

  My nose began to bleed, a trickle of blood from both nostrils which spattered, steaming, onto the floor. I pinched my nose and lifted my head. Blood gushed down my throat and I gagged, spat—Ellen and Jill jumped back. One of them told me not to move, said it would soon stop, but it was bleeding violently with no sign of stopping.

  I was helped to my feet and they started to half carry me back downstairs. The warm bodies flanking mine seemed ulterior and unimportant, rather than reassuring, just two human props prompting my own body to walk me away somewhere safe. But I walked away carrying what attacked me and was still attacking me as I retreated, falling back from a voice—strained, babbling—full of desperate grief and reckless energy, past all consoling, cajoling or hushing. It was trying to say everything at once: prayers, pleas, terrors, injuries, ideas—an impelled speaker, sound pursued by silence. The voice burrowed back and forth through my thoughts like a ricocheting bullet, till I was mentally scrabbling to retrieve and mend the torn scraps of my own thoughts and identity—as if I had been tied to a chair for fifteen hours with lights in my face and the torturers talking. It went on until I felt that I was still a child, battered by the bigger feelings of bigger people, and that all my subsequent life had been an illusion. Everything was taking flight while I weakly tried to decide what I must seize hold of. How could I repossess myself? A star thrown into space. How would I know myself if I did?

  Before me was a misted window. On this small image I concentrated—putting out a hand, clearing a circle on the glass and looking out.

  Mark

  The pitching ship, its every deck packed. Sleeping on deck in the tropics. No longer on parade, out of the eyes of civilians, tired of the itchy wool. Poorly equipped, but wasn’t to know. Not put off by the casualty lists. Led on by patriotic verses, to take the place of brothers who were slain. Scared the war could end without a share in the glory, and privileges like medals and mouthfuls of slang and song.

  It wasn’t odd for seventeen-year-olds to enlist. Not enough to be done on the farm. Schooling over and the world shelved, all those books about great deeds and distant places. Only Emma and the shepherds at home with four horses and eighty miles to a city.

  Befriended. Andy, with his shoe shop in Ashburton. Alan, laughing at the children in Menil-la-Tour, coming clacking over the cobbles in hand-carved pattens. And when the column paused on the road, walking over to the stone wall to listen to a cuckoo calling clear and dark amid the blue shadows of a beech wood.

  The chateaux shut up behind their high stone walls, their fountains silent and walks abandoned by mademoiselles in striped silks, carrying frilled parasols.

  The front thundering far away over the wheat fields.

  Aid stations, jangling ambulances, ragged columns of wounded.

  Nightfall in the trenches, the long graves with road names. At home in small timber, sandbag and earth caverns.

  First things first: the friendliness, most important to be good to each other. Anzac: no nonsense and suffering in silence. The day after the night we took the machine gun post, congratulations came down the line to the Tommies beside us. The silent exchange of guilty and bitter glances, our ‘no nonsense’ all to their credit.

  Death all around and the smell of death. Figures in the mud between their trenches and ours, hanging heavy in the wire. Swelling up and then falling in on themselves, flesh folding around the ribs like wet, shrinking leather. Bodies resurfacing, blown out of quicklime graves.

  Noise, whining shells, raining dirt and hot metal, hour after hour. Crouching under fire holding our hats, because the major was a muddler whom we couldn’t understand. ‘I say, the fire’s pretty hot.’ (Oh yes, pass that vital message down the line.)

  ‘Can you spare some men?’ All hands to pass on the stretchers. Alan’s leg smashed, his grey face wet and shining. Home for sure, for him.

  Morning, mud, the puddles mucus-green, charred signpost trees, white sky and pustular sun. No landscapes in the Kiwi and Koala cartoons, just ourselves—game buggers —invaded by strange energy on the orders, ‘Fix bayonets! Rapid fire!’ We were soldiers, but not an army (no drill in these cramped conditions, Major).

  Over the top: They proved their steel and earned the name of heroes / In their baptismal fire … Wind of bullets, shells bursting, slithering scampering advance over a stinking half acre.

  Used to play soldier out in the home paddock, lying face down among the thistles. Emma in the gun’s sights, walking sedately in her white apron, seeking out the eggs of the ranging hens. It was a carved wooden gun, nuggeted black and filthy to hold.

  One night at the foot of a hill with a wooded crest—living, un-smashed land—Andy said, ‘There’s nothing on this hillside but us and them.’ It wasn’t true. The Major said, ‘Dig in.’ Gunfire coming. Over the ridge two Germans were talking; ‘Jabbering,’ Andy said, but they were talking about a saddler in Konigsburg.

  Alan, a one-legged man, drowned in cold salt water and burning oil, when his hospital ship was torpedoed on its way home. Rose never believed it, left the light on for her straying soldier, burning through the clustering trees, the windbreak around her father’s house. Come home.

  ‘D’ya need a hand, cobber?’ Cold hands fumbling with the helmet’s strap. Blue fog drifting through the trees. There, under one tree, in the crook of its roots, a white speck. Do you see it? A white flaw in a portrait of a bare, dark wood. A star, a flower, a tiny white winter violet, promising the scent of icy rivers and fresh faraway gardens. For that it is worth standing up out of the mud in a wind of bullets.

  Alan, his grey face glossy, his cheeks slack, screaming, ‘God help me! Help me, help me—’ But I am not God.

  Aber Gott und ich sind tod. Yet I was safe. Here. Home.

  When they wheeled me out onto the grass at Oatlands the sun came out from behind the clouds and warmed my body, healing it by immersion in a balm of brightness. No lover, mother, or nurse has a touch like the sun. I had no more blisters, blindness or breathlessness. Green came walking over the lawn, his arm in a sling. He said, ‘It swelled up, all nasty with pus. They removed a two-inch piece of shrapnel. It’s on the mend.’ Then, ‘Now tell me, Thornton, did you hear what happened to Given?’

  (The hour has come, the hour which freezes me, which asks and asks and asks.)

  They would hand out paper headed Chaplain’s Office, New Zealand Expeditionary Forces. I’d take three sheets and think of Captain Green and Lieutenant Given, a table between them in the dugout, reading. Given’s face intent and serious, Green viciously scribbling out with a dark, greasy pencil, envy bounding out from behind his duty. And I’d wonder: ‘What can I write that will be read and won’t provoke him? I don’t want him to come along tomorrow evening and say “Kitchener wants” me to stand sentry duty for the third night in a row, or worse still, go out with the wiring party. What can I write that won’t worry Emma? Shall I say that after all this, the world will be better, because everyone will try harder? It’s true, but I’m still anxious about these deep furrows and strange seeds.’

  (What happened was that a bullet caught him across the face, broke his nose and tore out his eyes.)

  When the blisters were gone they told me to write a letter, gave me a page with the hospital letterhead. I picked up the book beside my bed and leafed through it. Taking these words from the text I wrote: ‘All the visions and consolations of my youth are dead. We know little and are bad learners: so we have to lie. Ice is around me, my hand is burned with ice. Weariness has at last to lie down and sleep, even on the snow.’

  August 1916

  Dear Emma,

  My Dear, this country is beautiful. So quiet, full of leafy woods lying in little valleys, roads flanked by stone walls and small shrines surrounded by trees. The roads are all straight, often lined with elms and poplars. The closer one gets to the front the fewer women and children there are to be seen, eventually only old men working the fields within the sound of the guns.

  A while back Alan a
nd I interviewed some men offloaded from a Red Cross train at Le Havre. They were waiting patiently, a few smoking, scarcely moving, conserving their strength. There were we, so full of vim, thinking we’d be able to make a difference as soon as we went up the line, and there were they, having seen action, a good deal wiser than we! Puffing out our chests we swaggered over to ask questions, as was our right. They were Canadians, not little chaps like the Tommies, but tall and slow-spoken. ‘Well, what is it like?’ we wanted to know. ‘Not bad,’ one fellow said, then let us inspect a German helmet he had as a souvenir. Talking to these cheerful men I became sure: We are not going to lose this war. The chap with the helmet told us we could finish it for them.

  I have even seen some Russians; they made tea for us at the bivouac on the way up. They are really very friendly and hearty. I can’t think what they are doing behind our lines.

  I hope you are not still angry at me for volunteering. It was a matter of self-preservation, because, if I hadn’t, I would have been ashamed. And without my self-respect I would have no power to act. Being ‘heroic’ is really the simplest option …

  September 1916

  … When Andy and I were on sentry duty last night, nestled down behind the parapet, the Lieutenant brought us the remainder of a tin of peaches. Wonderful! The officers have a mess cart which carries all sorts of goodies, including wine—while we have to make do with boiled beef, biscuits and the inevitable plum and apple jam. Though sometimes we live out of our haversacks, often we are cooked for: potatoes, boiled beef, onions et cetera—with occasionally something savoury scrounged. For a while it was asparagus, which grows wild over much of the countryside. However, that’s now all gone to seed.

  By the time this letter reaches you it will be winter here. There is no sense of exchange, or continuity, or even of contact in our letters. I write to you in far-away future time. A fellow from Suffolk was telling me it takes for one of his letters to reach his wife. The letters between them are like a conversation.

  Recently we were up near an old chateau. I spent the night lying on the stone floor of an ancient barn, looking up at some coloured flares and the moon floating in a streak of cloud, ruins against the dark sky, fallen masonry, and the twisted ironwork of some ornamental gates.

  The next morning the countryside looked so strange, we could see a merry little wood just beyond where the strafing was, the field directly before it a mess of jumbled earth. In the distance the guns were lazily thumping away.

  Emma, I don’t think you should keep going on about how I was all fired up, as though that is bad in itself, or bad in me. Certainly the war is a ‘common concern’, but that doesn’t mean I need not have gone. Firstly, it is unfair to quote at me the pompous things I used to say when I fancied myself the next Keats. Secondly, because they are common property, our feelings will always be used to fuel the fires of common concern. In some cases the most we can ever hope for is to choose which particular blaze we are to be thrown into! Maybe it was wrong I was fired up, but I hope to be just as combustible at seventy as I was at seventeen …

  October 1916

  … It is quiet here now; we are standing by sitting on our packs where we have stopped. Some aeroplanes just droned over and I watched little black clouds flowering among them—Archie shells.

  Later: They are strafing now. Doug and I had been sent off with a whole collection of rattling canteens to a well on the hillside. Then it started, our guns hammering their infantry, the barrage gaining strength, the guns setting each other off like a pack of howling dogs.

  The noise of a battery is terrible. When it first sounds it tears you in half. It is unbearable, it shakes the brains out of your head.

  We could see the land below: cloven trees and dry trenches, clouds of dust where the shells were falling, aeroplane shadows crossing no-man’s-land, and one blimp gliding over it all, like a small whale.

  We filled up and hurried back down. Now they are answering our fire. Crumping. Not at all an apt word …

  November 1916

  … I wish I knew what we were expected to do next. It has been a bad week. The weather is becoming wintry. It has been pouring with rain and we have been, half the time, hip-deep in mud. It’s a bloody nuisance being expected to pump out the trench for days while water slowly drains back into it. Then it rains again.

  Doug was killed yesterday during a strafe. A shell landed in the trench, buried itself in the mud, spinning and hissing, and exploded. One killed, one seriously wounded, four slightly wounded. I picked myself up, scattering a few fragments of shrapnel—my coat is scorched where they fell …

  July 1917

  … it doesn’t matter what I think or what I do. I still haven’t learned, and maybe will never learn, to separate what I love and have hope for, from what I cannot afford to love or have hope for. I don’t see how I can be expected to go on saying, on one hand, ‘I can’t countenance this,’ and on the other, ‘but I can’t help it.’ One half of my heart in a sermon, and the other in the drill.

  I have been on burial detail for part of the week. It’s not too bad—lashings of quicklime. Funny thing is that, after a while, bodies become quite boring and routine. Not horrible, just unpleasant. Death is the same. Someone dies to whom you talked over mess, and it is difficult to make it mean anything. A slightly sad change of circumstances, that’s all …

  November 1917

  … November. The sleet has given way to frost and freezing mist, and through it all a little shrunken sun.

  Sorry I can’t write properly, it is very cold and my fingers are fat, puce-coloured sausages. But the post goes and this goes with it.

  I got your letter of 24.8.17. I can understand you feeling that it is ridiculous that I am here and in danger, that I could die and you might not know about it for months. Perhaps it wouldn’t seem so ridiculous if you were surrounded by streets full of neighbours with sons, brothers, husbands and fathers over here with everyone around you as anxious as you are, your anxiety would seem less important. Yet since you seldom see anyone, but the Michaelsons and the Harpers, who can’t quite feel as you do, you cannot accept my being over here as the sad necessity it is.

  And still Emma, I’ll tell you this: right now my being here seems silly and useless to me. I keep thinking back to the old chap in Christchurch telling me, ‘It’s young men like you who are going to save the Empire.’ The boy who heard that was all aglow with self-importance, thinking he could make a difference. Because we come to the world fresh we foolishly suppose that with our new lives new possibilities are born. It isn’t true. The short range of possibilities is already worked out. We can change nothing, we can expect nothing. However long it takes the world will teach us our places, by preaching itself against ourselves …

  December 1917

  … I think I’m growing up. I wish this page were cleaner and fresher when it reaches you. I wish I could be sure it will reach you. This word, and this. Of course they must censor them.

  I hope I haven’t been too much of a bother to you since mother died. I suppose I was a typical younger brother and played on your forbearance. You are my family, the farm is my family too. If I came home tomorrow I’d let you be Ralph instead of Peterkin. D’Artagnan died in the Low Countries, but I’d rather come home. I long to see the trees in full flood and the wind whitely streaking the hillside.

  Winter in the trenches, what a prospect. Andy consoles me by saying he hopes it will be our last. It will certainly be the last for some of us.

  With best wishes,

  I remain,

  Your affectionate brother,

  Mark

  The third night. First the mud froze, the wreckage of earth, trees, men, and machines hardened, the field healing itself under a glittering skin, a cosmetic frost. Four of us peered over the parapet, Alf and Bill holding reels of wire, Calvin and me with pliers. Everything was quiet, the crescent moon behind the clouds.

  Calvin scrambled over the top and we followed, heading toward
s the crumbling abandoned trench a quarter of a mile ahead of our lines. It was hard going. The ground was a mass of shell holes, lying edge to edge. From time to time one of us would slip into a hole and have to be hauled out by the others.

  ‘It’s a damn shame the way the Captain always shoves you in it, Mark,’ Alf said.

  ‘Never mind.’

  ‘Well, you’re no shirker.’

  ‘I love a good wiring-party.’ I touched his arm.

  Calvin stopped and looked anxiously around. ‘I think it’s a bit further over to our left.’

  ‘I reckon you’re right.’

  We squelched along a little way, then Alf exclaimed, ‘Here it is!’ He jumped in. ‘Righto Bill, give me a hand—’

  Side by side they began to lay a double strand entanglement. Calvin went ahead of them; I kept low, duck-walking along the edge of the trench.

  ‘Blast, this handle’s sticky with ice!’

  ‘Frost doth as actively burn as fire—’

  ‘Shut up, Mark!’

  I could see only shadows, a haze of breath, the vague gleam of the wire.

  ‘Hang on—I think I smell gas.’ We stopped, snuffling the air, then simultaneously unclipped our masks and pulled them on. Once my head was muffled I became nervous and impatient to get this stunt over with.

  Alf and Bill were shambling over a heap of earth where the trench wall had collapsed, emerging into what faint light there was, two giant spiders spinning out wire web. Ahead of them Calvin came to the beginning of what remained of the trench, paused, then jumped down into it. Something exploded. A golden wall billowed out at me, flinging me back into our entanglement, the pressure of the blow centred at the base of my throat.