Chapter Thirty
Thirty
In the pages of the journal I’ve pressed a newspaper headline.
GREAT brITISH OFFENSIVE. MANY PRISONERS TAKEN.
OUR CASUALTIES NOT HEAVY. It was from the beginning of that bloody time and I’m trying to think why I kept it.
The lie, I think. The clipping is marked with fingerprints; they are dull and could be dirt, but I know they’re not.
We thought it would never end, but it did. Everything does. Bad and good.
‘They’ve run out of men,’ I overheard a debutante say.
‘Must have,’ her friend replied.
I didn’t know how many had died at the Somme, not then.
And I didn’t know how many more had lost a part of themselves, but I knew it had been too many and I thought perhaps the deb was right.
I was coming off a long shift at 24 General, which had followed a long shift on the German ward, which had followed months of long shifts at 24 General and the German ward and occasionally St John’s.
I seriously considered that the war might end because there was no one left to fight it.
It was a strange moment of relief, as if the idea of running out of men was not ridiculous or horrendous and we would all soon go home.
Then a column of soldiers marched up Isolation Road. They were pale and pimply and they marched out of step. Not one could fill his uniform and I knew there’d be some among them whose voices would still be breaking.
‘Told you,’ said one of the debs, ‘not a man left in England.’
The battle is over, I wrote later. And the papers insist the Allies have won.
They’ve gained ground – seven miles, more or less.
It’s the distance between the German ward and the officers’ beach at Le Touquet, or a stroll along the Oxford Canal.
I laughed when I read it. Seven miles. So many dead and yet it is a win. Such an odd kind of accounting.