13 NOVEMBER ’18
What rest I have is disturbed by a nightmare as lurid as any of Singer’s. I am awake before dawn, and it is icy cold in my room; I warm my hands under the electric lamp and try to recall the dream.
I am surrounded by men’s faces in a muddy trench, wanting to assure them that their emotions are no cause for shame; that they can shed tears and still be men-the things I tell hardened troops on the wards, to their surprise. Then I realise they are all dead, and in different stages of decomposition. The trench walls are made of corpses, heaps of them. I look over the top and see a soldier coming. I can’t make him out at first because he is veiled in a green mist-mustard gas. He scrambles down over the bodies towards me, pointing his rifle with bayonet fixed. He speaks to me. His words are ‘Voca me cum benedictus.’ I pick up a bayonet from the hands of a corpse, lunge forwards, and plunge it into the soldier’s eye with all my strength. With that, I wake.
To analyse it: the first part is simple. Its source is the conflict in my own role: between my duty to heal the men and send them back to the Front, in most cases to their deaths. For that, duty does not absolve me.
The figure emerging from the mustard gas is more complex, but it was that which brought the feelings of dread and fear, not the corpses. Of course it was Patient H. Those Latin words, from the requiem mass for the dead- ‘ Call me among the blessed.’
The animus driving H’s cure was his belief that he was chosen in some way, that Providence was calling him to a purpose. And I was the medium of his awakening. But it is more than that.
‘Call me among the blessed…’
Whom have I called?
It occurs to me that of all my cases, Patient H is my only complete success. And I gave him more than sight. For surely, a man who believes that through his own will he has cured himself of blindness will believe he can achieve anything on the face of this earth.
And in the dream I had to kill him. Because he is one who should not have survived.