“I was like a wounded animal...”
The worst pain I ever felt was a broken arm. It happened between matches at a tennis tournament. We were on a nearby college campus, and so, as you might expect, the tennis courts were but a minor part of a large and impressive athletic landscape. Near the courts was a football field, and on the field—the margins of the field, really—were various pieces of practice equipment. One of them, a set of tackle dummies, had drawn a group of idle tennis players to it. It was a large sled-like contraption, with padded silhouettes of linebackers leaning out at one end. In its proper use, the footballers would launch themselves at the dummies, and drive them back, just as they hoped, when the chips were down, to drive back the opposing team. Upon attack the whole tackle-dummy system would slide backward on black metal sleds. Well. In keeping with the rule that teenagers must use a thing for every purpose except its design, our inventive group devised the following activity. One of us would stand on the sled-irons, while others would jump on the backs of the tackle-dummies, thus turning the whole machine into a makeshift catapult. The dummies, being insulted from the wrong direction, would bow down penitentially and kiss the grassy field; the fulcrum would turn; and the sleds would lift and then launch the standing player into the air, for a brief bit of zero-g fun.
As I remember, I was an observer, not a participant, in all this, until, through the inevitable and irresistible exercise of peer pressure, I was coaxed into standing on the sled-irons for my “turn.” I don’t have any real memory of any of this. I do remember a brief and exquisite moment of freedom. But I had flown the “wrong way” upon launch—no instructions from the experienced had been given, as to the proper and safe way to orient one’s body—and I landed backward with my arms behind me. After a beat, I held my right forearm up for examination, and noticed that it had taken on the shape of a dog-leg, where it ought to make a straight line. It was only then—this is the strangest thing—it was only then, after I saw that the bones were broken, that I noticed the searing pain, and began to scream.
All of which is to say, that I lack the experience necessary to adequately imagine or understand the horror, pain, and desperation that British soldiers experienced in France at the outbreak of World War II, or during their retreat to and evacuation from Dunkirk. This, despite having recently read Forgotten Voices of Dunkirk, an oral history of those events, which is frank in its reports of that suffering, and indeed often eloquent in the brutal plainness of its language:
I realised that I’d been hit…My left leg was absolutely numb, my back was numb from the waist down, I couldn’t move my legs, and all I saw was blood all over the floor. Two others ran across to me, one said, ‘Bloody hell, Ernie! You’ve had it!’ I later found out that a piece of shrapnel about three and a half inches long and an inch and a half wide…had gone straight through me…I thought I’d had it. I thought of my home and my family, and what they were going to do when they heard the news of my death.
They dragged me out, and carried me downstairs to the railway line. I was still numb, and they’d taken my trousers off, and all I had one was a rough old pair of paints. I couldn’t walk. All I could do was crawl….I crawled and crawled, and they were bombing from above, and I was being covered with earth. As I was crawling, I was pulling myself along, and I became conscious that my fingernails were being worn down and my hands were bleeding. I was like a wounded animal, determined to get away.
These stories are not meant to draw attention to their style, in fact it’s unseemly to do so, but I’ll risk one remark: that sentence, “I crawled and crawled, and they were bombing from above, and I was being covered with earth,” is as good as anything Hemingway wrote.
There are a few lighter moments in the book, mostly toward the beginning, before the full reality of that war had set in, when some people were still trying to go about their daily lives. One British Captain was ordered to hold a position against a German advance. The area to be defended included “a small chateau,” which was, at that moment, hosting a garden party. The Captain tells how the woman of the house “was horrified when I told her that we were going to dig trenches in and around her garden”; she replied,
As long as you don’t upset the rose bushes, and interfere with the rhododendrons, I suppose I can’t stop you.
The worst events recounted in the book did not happen on the beaches of Dunkirk, where waiting soldiers were sitting ducks for German dive bombers. The worst were two massacres conducted by the SS. One occurred in the French Village of Wormhout. SS troops rounded up British POWs in a barn and began killing them. At one point the Germans pulled five soldiers out of the barn and shot them one by one. One soldier, Brian Fahey, who had been wounded before his capture, felt “that this was so unfair, so futile, and all so hopeless,” so he decided “I would be one of the next five.” He succeeded in this goal, and was shot in the back:
It was like a punch, like a severe blow, and it knocked me over.
He lost consciousness. But, amazingly, the shot did not kill him.
When he woke, he, in a refutation of Descartes’ philosophy, first noticed “this bubbling in my lung,” and then “realized that I wasn’t dead.” He “could only use my left elbow and right knee,” but he managed to crawl back to the barn:
Most were dead and some were dying…I lay there with my head on someone’s body, and we talked…we lay there all day Wednesday and all day Thursday…the time passed very quickly. I think we all actually wanted to die....One thing I will never forget was one chap who was sitting up, propped against the side of the barn. He’d found a clip of rifle bullets in his pocket, and he was holding one against his head, trying to detonate it with another.
Fahey says he put these events behind him after the war, and that he did not “[make] a career out of being a victim of a massacre.” “In fact,” he said,
this massacre changed my attitude to life for the better….Most of what I do—most of what us do—pales into insignificance besides that. Nothing else like that is going to happen to me again. It couldn’t possibly.
See also: Pain is Underrated; Interviews With Vampires.
American Independence in Verse, now available to order.