Remembering Passchendaele

A short story

Jason Hill’s nightmares were recurring and revolved around a particular theme: 1917. Passchendaele. Flanders. Mud, hellish trenches, the stench of open latrines, rotting corpses, plagues of rats, death and fear… It filled his nostrils with unspeakable rankness and made him think that Hell was a holiday camp by comparison.

His most recent episode began with cries of, ‘Gas, gas!’ Clouds of yellow-green were rolling towards their positions. A vicious, toxic miasma. Private Sam Johnson (for so he was called in these persistent nightmares) fumbled with his gas mask and got it on in the nick of time. Others were not so lucky: through the devilish yellow-green mist, he watched a couple of men choke as the phosgene entered their lungs and burned them from within. They writhed on the foul ground, frothing at the mouth, their throats gurgling hideously. He turned away; there was nothing he could do for them. Besides they were under attack from enemy infantry who were stealing up behind the poisonous yellow-green clouds.

Later, artillery started up. A shell landed close by. He was deafened and covered in someone’s brains. He could hear screams but he was indifferent and numb to the cauldron of pain and suffering that boiled around him; he concentrated on his own survival: kill or be killed.

He was struck by the horror and sheer absurdity of it all. He had nothing against those German lads, and for all he knew the feeling was mutual, but still, they had to slaughter one another. For what, exactly? To gain a few more yards, only to lose it in the next counterattack. Ridiculous. Rank insanity.

He found himself at a machine gun post raking through Bosch guts. And so the bellicose nightmare continued until he was halted by a bayonet driven deep into his side. He didn’t see the German devil lunging at him from his right until it was too late.

At that point, Jason woke up sweating, flailing around, punching pillows. He would have this nightmare or some frightful variation of it about a dozen times a year. Always World War One, in some vile trench, or going over the top of one into a hail of lead. That’s where the phrase over the top came from. Certainly, there was nothing more over the top than sending young men to their deaths in that senseless fashion. The generals who thought it up must have been psychopaths. It made no kind of military sense to sacrifice so many for so few gains; a generation of young men on all sides was wiped out.

Jason had no idea why he had these recurrent nightmares. He wasn’t obsessed by the Great War and didn’t read any literature or watch any documentaries about the conflict. He had never read, for example, Erich Maria Remarque’s seminal work, All Quiet On The Western Front. He avoided war films. In fact, the whole idea of war horrified and disgusted him. When he saw politicians on TV sabre rattling and talking about taking up arms, he found it repellent. Why did we need to send young men off to die in pointless wars?

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori! The idea that it was an honour to die for one’s country was complete anathema to him, as it was to one Wilfred Owen. He agreed with the doomed English poet, killed on the cusp of the Armistice: Horace’s ancient line was a twisted lie.

Jason Hill was a confirmed pacifist. He would, if it ever came to it, refuse point blank to take up arms. He would rather go to prison. He was prepared to suffer vilification, be called a coward, suffer whatever slings and arrows… He would not be drummed into any man’s army.

He kept these dreams to himself and suffered with them alone. Then, finally, he decided to confide in his good friend Robert Black over a couple of beers one night.

‘They’re the kind of nightmares veterans wake up screaming from,’ Robert said.

‘Yes, but I’m not a veteran,’ Jason replied. ‘I’ve never been in a battle.’

‘Not in this life,’ Robert said mysteriously. Jason waited for him to continue but his friend volunteered nothing.

‘Come off it!’ Jason said at last. ‘That’s a load of rubbish, complete baloney.’

‘Who knows?’ said Robert, lighting a cigarette and taking a swig from his pint. He winked over the rim of the glass. ‘More between heaven and earth and all that.’

‘You’re talking about reincarnation, I suppose?’

‘A lot of people believe in it.’

‘Yes, and a lot of people are soft in the head. I’m not buying it.’

‘Have it your own way, but these recurrent nightmares have been going on for years. You ought to see someone about it and get to the bottom of it.’

‘I’ll think about it.’

Jason did think about it. He had been having these dreadful dreams since he was 22 years old. He was now 25 and sometimes they seemed more like vivid memories than bad dreams. Memories? He dismissed these thoughts as arrant nonsense.

He had had 30 or so similar nightmares but one particular dream stuck out for its even more harrowing nature than usual. It was raining and he and a small group of comrades were moving along duckboards, the only way to traverse the morass of mud churned up by endless artillery and incessant downpours of heavy rain.

The problem was that on those duckboards they were sitting ducks. Jason, or rather Sam, stopped for a few seconds to light a cigarette. It took a while to get it lit and this saved his life, because while he was fumbling with damp matches a shell landed obliterating his comrades. Legs and torsos lay scattered in the mud. One soldier was still alive, blown into a crater. He was sinking in the dun-coloured bog.

‘My legs are gone! I’m going under,’ he screamed. The soldier was too far away from the duckboards to get to. He was sinking rapidly, now up to his chest. His agonised eyes were practically popping out of his head. ‘For Christ’s sake, shoot me!’ the soldier pleaded. ‘Don’t let me drown in this cursed mud.’

Jason raised his rifle but hesitated to shoot one of his own. Couldn’t he himself be shot for such an action? ‘Don’t let me drown in this shite! For God’s sake, shoot man! Shoot me!’ The soldier was now up to his neck.

Jason swore. Oh the horror! He gritted his teeth, aimed and shot the sinking man between the eyes. He watched the dead soldier’s head disappear in the sucking mud. He stared at the bubbles, sick to his stomach. Shaking, he lit another cigarette and trudged on, utterly exhausted in body and spirit. As he dragged himself along, he muttered to himself, ‘My generation has been damned to hell!’

Jason took the plunge. On Robert Black’s advice, he booked a session with a Ms. L. Heliotrope who specialized in what was known as regression hypnosis. He arrived at a Victorian villa in a quiet South London street. He stood there for a moment gazing at the three-storey redbrick property. The morning sun flashed in the windows. Typical of the area, it was an ordinary looking house and gave no indication of the rather extraordinary things that apparently took place in there.

He felt sceptical and somewhat nervous, but as Robert had said, if it could shed any light on his recurring nightmares, it was worth a go.

He went through a wooden gate and walked with hesitant steps up a short gravel path to the front door. It was painted a handsome dark green. There was no plaque or anything to suggest the exotic service the person who lived there offered. Just a brass knocker in the shape of a lion’s head with a heavy ring through its mouth.

Ms. Heliotrope turned out to be a rather attractive lady of about 35. She was quite tall and wore her ash-blonde hair in a chignon. She was dressed casually, in faded blue jeans and a lilac-coloured cashmere sweater. Jason didn’t know why but he had expected someone more official-looking. She smiled at him, not with her mouth as such, but with large blue-grey eyes, almost feverish in their hypnotic intensity.

‘Mr. Hill, do come in!’

‘Call me Jason, please,’ he said, as she led him down a corridor towards a room at the back of the house. ‘Then you must call me Lucy,’ rejoined the alluring hypnotist in a soft yet penetrating contralto voice.

She took him into a good-sized room with a large bay window that looked out on a garden boasting an immaculate lawn bounded by lush shrubbery and clusters of blooming hydrangeas. All very English and as normal as a teapot.

The room itself was uncluttered, if not to say minimalist, although it had an oddly cosy feel. A bookcase along one wall, an armchair, a small table upon which stood an incense burner, and a couch were the sum total of the furniture. Blue smoke spiralled from the incense holder and the scent of lavender pervaded the room.

‘Is that for the patient?’ Jason asked, pointing at the couch, which was upholstered in plush dark green velvet.

Lucy Heliotrope smiled with her eyes again. ‘Well, I don’t call my clients patients,’ she said. ‘But yes, that’s where you park yourself. It’s a very comfy and relaxing couch. So go on, make yourself at home.’

Lucy sat in the armchair and crossed her legs. It was indeed a comfortable couch. Jason lay there listening to the hypnotist talking. Her voice was calming and had a soporific effect.

‘So, I understand you have recurring nightmares: it’s always 1917 and in these ‘’dreams’’ you are a British soldier fighting in the Great War.’ She made a quote sign with the middle and index fingers of both hands when she said the word ‘dreams’.

‘Yes. In most dreams I am usually mortally wounded by a bayonet before I wake up.’

‘Where does the bayonet strike you?’

‘Through my right side.’

‘Do you have a birthmark there by any chance?’

‘As a matter of fact, I do.’

‘Interesting!’

Ms. Heliotrope uncrossed her long legs. She placed her hands on her thighs and looked at him with her deeply penetrating blue-grey eyes. ‘What do you think about during these dreams?’ she asked.

‘Think about?’ Jason had the odd sensation that reality was tearing at the edges like a piece of rice paper. Lucy Heliotrope’s intense gaze and dreamy voice seemed to have paralysed him, as though she were spinning a narcotic web around him; but he didn’t feel frightened or threatened. He had the odd thought that he would shortly sink into those blue-grey eyes and disappear. ‘What do I think about?’ he repeated.

After a short pause, in which Lucy appeared to do something he couldn’t quite grasp, she said, ‘Yes, what do you think about during these so-called dreams?’

Jason gathered his scattered wits for a moment. ‘I think about how stupid and futile it all is,’ he said finally.

‘Yes. And?’

‘And I worry about getting hit. If it must happen, I want it to be quick. I don’t want to lie there in the mud dying slowly in agony, screaming my head off.’

‘How long have these nightmares been persisting?’

‘I had just turned 22 when they started. I have no idea why they began then. I had had a pleasant enough birthday, nothing at all traumatic happened.’

‘And do you know, by any chance, how old you are during these episodes?’

‘Funnily enough, yes. Sam Johnson, the person I am in my nightmares, was born in 1895.’

‘Meaning he was 22 in 1917.’

‘Correct.’

‘And you say you were 22 when these “nightmares” started?’ Again, Lucy put the word in quotes.

‘Yes, I recall exactly when they started: on the night of my 22^nd birthday. They’re horrendously vivid, and I bloody well wish they would stop.’

‘I believe they are not dreams, Jason, but memories.’

‘If you say so,’ he said.

‘Yes, you must put this life behind you and move on.’ The hypnotist continued talking. Her voice was like a sedative. She invited him to close his eyes and return to Flanders in 1917. In the somnambulant atmosphere, Jason’s eyes felt heavy and his eyelids fell like metal shutters. Lucy Heliotrope’s voice seemed to come from somewhere high above him, clear as a bell, but from a great distance. He was, as they say, under.

He found himself moving through a grey mist. When it cleared, he was standing in a familiar scene of churned mud, barbed wire, bloated corpses... Big guns thudded in the distance. He heard the rat-tat-tat of machine guns. He took cover in a shallow fox-hole and lay there contemplating the drizzle falling over the Ypres Salient.