Chapter 28
It was confusing, at first, to see a nurse in the trenches.
Max would notice her walking past his dugout sometimes, lit up by the flash of shells.
Or she’d be there handing out pretzels in the mess, which made no sense because they had no bakery at the front, yet sometimes Max could smell the bread baking.
The nurse wasn’t covered in mud like the rest of them.
Her uniform was blue and white and pristine.
And that made no sense either. She looked a bit like the VAD from Thomas’s cigarette card, even had the same chin-length black hair.
It was as if the miniature painting had come to life.
Once, while he was on watch, he spotted her in no-man’s-land, crouched by the side of a fallen soldier.
She was just right there, out in the open, where any stray bullet could take off a piece of her head.
He shouted out a warning and she looked up, straight at him.
He noticed then that her eyes were different colours—one was blue and the other was green.
His mother would have said that one of them must be a ghost eye or a witch eye, meaning the woman could see into the afterlife, converse with ghosts, glimpse things other people could not.
He blinked and the nurse vanished. Had he imagined her?
Was this how he knew he was losing his mind?
What other explanation could there be? Max didn’t believe in ghosts.
Or angels. Or cigarette card paintings that came to life.
But the more he saw the nurse, the more the trenches were the thing that started to seem unreal.
Sometimes they would fade away altogether and he’d be somewhere else entirely—somewhere clean, and warm, and safe.
The first time the trenches vanished, Max truly thought he must be dead.
But the nurse was still there—the one with the black hair and the different-coloured eyes.
“Are you real?” he finally asked her one day.
“Yes,” she said.
“Is your name really Eve Shaw? That’s what I’ve heard them calling you.”
She nodded.
He couldn’t take his eyes off her. Even now, he didn’t entirely trust that she was a real person.
It seemed far more likely that he had invented her.
“But are you…can you be the same person who sent those parcels to me out at the front? It was you, wasn’t it?
I’m glad I get to thank you in person. The records you sent. They meant a lot to my friend. Thomas.”
Suddenly, Thomas was there, standing outside on the balcony and looking through the window at him with half his head blown away.
Max’s hands began twitching and then that fog came down and the hotel vanished and all around was mud and barbed wire.
It took him the rest of the day to find his way back to the White Octopus.
He fought hard to do it, wandering trench after trench, pushing his way through piles of bones and the buzzing of flies.
It was a path he had to travel over and over again in the days and weeks that followed—one that shifted and twisted like a maze, always trying to trick him into going the wrong way.
Sometimes, if he was lucky, he would stumble across Charlie’s trench garden and stop to rest amongst the flowers for a while.
A sign propped up against the trench wall read: Come into the Garden and Forget the War.
Which was odd because Max remembered that sign being in the conservatory of a nearby hotel where they’d been billeted, but otherwise it was all just as it had been, and there was Charlie, watering his flowers with his petrol can, whistling “Auld Lang Syne.”
One day, another soldier, Jeffries, even came out, just like he had before, and Charlie stopped what he was doing and tried to point out all the work he’d done, so proud and pleased, but Jeffries only sneered a little and said, “Well, Benson, you know it’s all a waste of time, don’t you?”
“What do you mean?” Charlie asked.
“We head north tomorrow.”
He didn’t wait for a reply, but left Charlie looking around his garden. There were tears glimmering in his eyes, and he furiously tried to blink them away as he threw the tin watering can into the mud.
And Max said, “It isn’t a waste.”
“Beg pardon, sir?”
There was a cigarette in his hand, just like there had been before, and he took a drag as he nodded at the garden. “The next fellow will get the benefit.”
Charlie paused for a moment, then nodded. “Yes, sir.”
Max wondered how many times he’d had this same conversation with Charlie, how many times he’d gone around this same loop, and how many more circuits he still had to do before he found his way out. Part of him believed he would be lost in the trenches forever.
But then, somehow, Eve started to find him there and would lead him back to the hotel.
She always seemed to know the way and sometimes, like tonight, the light of her candle shone straight through the trenches, revealing them for the shadows that they were and not reality at all.
He could see a dark room beyond, with other men sleeping in their beds, and the icy glitter of stars on the other side of the windows.
“You’re at the hotel,” Eve was saying. “The White Octopus. You’re safe.”
Max looked down and saw she was holding his hand.
And there was an octopus there as well, a tattoo, only tattoos didn’t move and this octopus was drifting and its tentacles were unfurling until they wrapped around Max’s hand too and he noticed that one of them had a black tip.
He looked up at Eve, trying to work out if she could see it.
“What’s that?” he whispered, flicking his eyes back down to their entwined hands.
“That? Oh, don’t worry about that. It’s just my octopus.”
Max stared. It was hard to tell where the octopus ended and Eve began. It was like they were one and the same.
“It’s beautiful,” he said.
Eve smiled. It was the first time he’d ever seen her do so, and suddenly Max felt a glow, a feeling of having achieved something extraordinary.
It made him want to keep hold of her hand and never let it go, but he knew he would have to return to the front eventually.
There was still a war to be won. Or lost. It hardly mattered at this point; they’d all lost. But in the meantime, he enjoyed the peace and the quiet of the hotel.
He relished the pure air. Sometimes the nurses piled a load of blankets on top of him and sat him out on the balcony to bask in the silence of the mountains and soak up the warmth of the sun.
It was good to feel clean again. It was good to sleep in a bed.
It was good to lay down the burdens of command, just temporarily.
To not have to make decisions that led to whether men lived or died. To not watch friends perish in the mud.
The POWs were all supposed to be sitting out the war in Switzerland.
That was the agreement that Britain had entered into with Germany, but it wasn’t what Max had agreed to.
His chest still ached from the piece of shrapnel that had gone into his lung, but the infection was clearing up now.
Soon he would recover and then he would make his escape—back to the front.
He realised they’d sent the POWs to remote mountain resorts in order to make escape more difficult, but he would find a way somehow.
As soon as he was better and the snow had melted in the spring.
In the meantime, perhaps it was all right to have a rest.
Max didn’t normally chat much with the other officers sharing the large room with him. This morning, though, a couple of them were prattling on again about an armistice and Max couldn’t prevent a scornful snort. The other two men glanced over. “What?” one asked. “You don’t think it will happen?”
Max shook his head. “They’ve spoken of armistice before. It came to nothing then and it’ll come to nothing now.”
He found it impossible to imagine there ever being peace again after all this.
Normal was gone for good, for all of them.
But then one of the nurses switched on the radio and they heard it.
An armistice had been declared. And the war was over.
There would be no escape, no return to the front.
They could hear cheers of jubilation over the airwaves, yet the room inside the White Octopus was strangely silent.
None of the soldiers cheered. Most barely smiled.
Max had thought he’d feel relief and joy if and when the war finally came to an end, but it was too late for that.
How could he feel joy when so many of his friends had lost their lives?
And how could he possibly feel relief when he’d seen for himself how quickly and devastatingly life could unravel?
If it had happened once, it could happen again.
What was he even supposed to do with himself if he couldn’t return to the front?
The thought of going home and trying to pick up where he’d left off was unthinkable.
As the next few hours passed by, it started to sink in for Max that he quite simply had nowhere to go.
“Do you need anything?”
He looked up to see Eve at the foot of his bed, watching him with her steady, calm gaze. Max found himself blurting the words before he had a chance to reconsider. “I need for the war to not be over.”
“Why would you say something like that?” Eve asked.
“Because I’m not finished. I need to make amends.”
“How?”
Max searched his mind for the answer but came up empty and the silence stretched on between them.
The fact was that he would never be able to kill enough Germans or save enough British soldiers.
There was no making amends—not now, or ever.
It didn’t matter whether the war ended or not.
It was hopeless. And now he could feel himself dissolving once again, into that flock of frenzied black birds, the carrion crows that had been all over no-man’s-land.
What was the point? What was the point of any of it now?
There was nothing good left. He didn’t want to be here at the hotel, and he didn’t want to be anywhere else either.
“Maybe there are some things that we can’t make amends for,” Eve said, somewhere through the storm of wings. “Maybe we can only make peace with the past.”
Max said nothing. How could he ever make peace with the things he’d seen and the people he’d lost? The things he’d done?
“You’ve done everything that was asked of you,” Eve said, but he couldn’t see her at all now, through all those birds that had once been pieces of his soul. “It’s over. You deserve to return to a normal life.”
“People don’t often get what they deserve in life, old boy,” said a voice at his elbow. “You know that.”
Max gritted his teeth. He recognised that voice and knew if he looked up, he would see Thomas standing there beside his bed, but Thomas was dead, dead, dead. Max screwed his eyes up tight. And when he opened them and looked around, he was alone.