The Thread of Flame

by Basil King

"Ah, well! She didn't want them. When little Bobby went she said she couldn't go through it all a second time, and so— But I'm trying to tell you what happened."

"Well, go on."

I narrated my experiences in the Ambulance Corps in words that have been so often given in print that it is not worth while to repeat them. What has not so frequently been recorded, because not every one has felt it to the same degree, is the racking of spirit, soul, and body by the unrelieved horror of the days and nights. I suppose I must own to being in regard to all this more delicately constituted than the majority of men. There were others like me, but they were relatively not numerous. Of them, too, we hear little, partly because not all of those who survived like to confess the weakness, and few survived. If it were possible to get at the facts I think it would be found that among those who sickened and died a large proportion were predisposed by sheer inability to go on living any longer in this world of men. I could give you the names of not a few in whom the soul was stricken before the body was. They were for the most part sensitively organized fellows, lovers of the beautiful, and they simply couldn't live. Officially their deaths are ascribed to pneumonia or to something else; but the real cause, while right on the surface, was beyond the doctor's diagnosis.

I didn't sicken; and I didn't die; I wasn't even wounded. What happened was that at Bourg-la-Comtesse a shell came down in the midst of a bunch of us who were stretching our limbs and washing up after a night in a stifling dugout ... and some time during the following twenty-four hours I recovered consciousness, lying on my belly in the darkness, with my face buried in the damp grass of a meadow, like a dead man.

I lay for ten or fifteen minutes trying to reconstruct the happenings that had put me there, and to convince myself that I was unhurt. Except for a beast munching not far away, no living thing seemed to be near me. On the left the ruined walls of Bourg-la-Comtesse were barely visible through the starlight, while to my right a jagged row of tree-tops fringed the sky-line. In the velvety blackness in front of me the stars were dimmed by shells hanging over No Man's Land, Verey lights, darting upward, and radiant bursts of shrapnel. I remembered that our section had halted at an abri a little to the west of the village, and dragging myself from the ground forced my chilled limbs to carry me toward the spot where some of my comrades might be left alive.

But whether I mistook the way, or whether they had gone off leaving me for dead, I was unable to explain to Wolf. I only know that I walked and walked, and found no one. The world had been suddenly deserted. Except for an occasional horse or cow, that paused in its grazing to watch me pass, or the scurrying of some small wild thing through a hedge, I seemed the only creature astir. Dead villages, dead châteaux, dead farms, dead gardens, dead forests, dead lorries, dead tanks, dead horses, dead men, and a dead self, or a self that had only partially come back to life, were the features of that lonely tramp through the darkness.

With no other aim than a vague hope of joining up again with my section I plodded on till dawn. Though my watch had run down, and there was no change as yet in the light, I knew when dawn was approaching by a sleepy twitter in a hedge. Another twitter awoke a few yards farther on, and then another and another. Presently the whole countryside was alive, not with song, but with that chirrupy hymn to Light which always precedes the sunrise, and ceases before the sun has risen. Wandering away from the front, by instinct, not on purpose, I was now in a region relatively untouched by calamity, with grapes hard and green in the vineyards and poppies in the ripening wheat-fields.

Between eight and nine I reached a village, where I breakfasted at a wine-shop, explaining myself as an American charged with a mission that was taking me across country. Stray soldiers being common, I had no harder task than to profit by the sympathy accorded to my British-seeming uniform. So I tramped on again, and on, always with a stupefied half-idea of finding my section, but with no real motive in my mind. If I had a real motive it was in a dull, blind, animal instinct to get away from the brutality in which I had been living for the past six months, even though I knew I should be headed off and turned back again.

But I wasn't. In that land of agony I went my way unheeded. I also went my way unheeding. It was the beginning of the more or less pointless pilgrimages I made later in New York. To my anguished nervous system there was a soothing quality in being on the move. So on the move I kept, hardly knowing why, except that it was to get away from what was right behind me.

And yet I had clearly the impression that I was merely enjoying a breathing spell. I didn't mean to run away. I knew I was Billy Harrowby, and that for my very name's sake I must return to my task at the first minute possible. It was only not possible, because as I continued my aimless drifting along the roads I got farther away from my starting-point.