Shadowland

    ''Carry me to the HQ,' he pleaded. His eyes rolled, and the whites were so red that they looked about to explode. 'It's only another three miles. God. Carry me there.'

    ''I can't,' I said. 'You'd die if I moved you. You're three-fourths dead now.'

    ''I'm falling out!' he screeched. His intestines were slipping out of his hands, bulging nearly to the frozen ground. He almost passed out, and I wished that he had. I recall that he had perfect, very white teeth which seemed already to belong to someone else — those teeth should have adorned another body.

    'A piece of the snowy field shifted, and I jumped about a foot — I was in shock, and I thought a dead man was standing up out there in that terrible mess. Then it shifted again, and I saw that it was a great white bird. A huge white owl. I was to see it once more, in France during the war, but then I thought I was hallucinating. The owl beat its wings — four feet from tip to tip, it looked — and came toward us over the landscape of broken men.

    'Vendouris saw it too, and began to rave. 'It's my soul, it's my soul,' he screamed. Blood boiled out of him. The huge bird sat on a coil of wire and looked crazily at both of us. What with my shock and Vendouris' ravings, I almost thought I could hear it speak.

    'Shoot him, it was saying. It is the only way.

'I touched the revolver in its holster on my hip.

    'Vendouris understood the gesture. 'Oh, God, God, God, please, no,' he pleaded. So I put my hands under his shoulders and tried to lift him.

    'He screeched more horribly than any sound I had ever heard in my life, and in the field I thought I heard the owl screech too, just as if it really were his soul. 'If I lift you up,' I said, 'half of you is going to stay here. It's not possible.'

    ''Then get someone.' His head fell back, but he was still alive. Those perfect teeth which should have graced a tooth-powder advertisement shone in his gray face. 'You can't shoot me. I haven't even been here a month.'

    'That weird rationality, an excuse like that of a third-grader. I could feel the presence of that perhaps halluci­natory bird behind me, and it was all of a piece with the stink of burned flesh I could suddenly catch from my own face, the smell of shit and intestinal gas coming from Vendouris — all of this was thrown into an odd relief by Vendouris' strange childish plea. Something in my mind moved: I was in the war, and the war referred only to itself.

    ''It's not possible,' Vendouris said, and I knew he meant that it was not possible that this had happened to him. He was still a civilian mentally.

    'Now, think of my choices. I could pick him up, as he wished, and kill him — give him an agonizing death. I could stay by him and let him die. He may have had another half-hour, or however long it took him to really understand his condition. In that half-hour he would have suffered every agony possible for man to know. Killing him by lifting him would have been more merciful. His pain was already burrowing through his shock. I could have left him, gone the three miles to the hospital, and left him to die alone.

    'He began to breathe in sharp little pants, like an overheated dog.

    'There was really only one solution. I took my revolver out of the holster. He saw me do it and his eyes widened, and for a second he was sane again. He tried to crawl back, and most of his insides cascaded out of him.

    'Maybe he died then. But I do not think so. I think what killed him was the bullet I put into his forehead.

    'A sink of odors surrounded me: my own burned flesh and sweat; Vendouris' horrible stinks of dying, blood; cordite. I picked up my things and walked along the edge of the road in the direction of the artillery fire. I should have been afraid. I should have felt like running back to the port and stowing away in the next ship for America. But instead I felt as though I were walking toward my destiny, for which poor William Vendouris and four other men had already given their lives.

    'Now we move ahead a couple of months. The Field Hospital was desperately understaffed, the more so that Vendouris was dead, and two other doctors and I slept three hours out of every twelve, taking shifts on a camp bed in a little tent a few yards from the larger tent which was our operating theater. Which is to say that we breathed war, drank war and slept war every day. Our work was packing wounds, closing aspirating chest wounds, and controlling hemorrhages on soldiers brought in from the battlefields and trenches by the Norton-Harjes and Red Cross ambulances. When we had taken off a leg or put a Thomas splint on a fracture, the wounded were sent off to hospitals for more extensive treatment. The loss of the truck I had been on meant not only the absence of another doctor but also of three months' worth of morphia and other supplies due for the hospital — so most of our operations were done with little or no anesthetic. Often we worked under torches just like those you see in the woods out there, moving with the comings and going of the war in Les Islettes, Cheppy and Verennes. The troops we worked with were mainly men from New York, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut, boys of nineteen and twenty who'd wake up on the table and reach for their groins with the first movement of consciousness, just to make sure everything was there. It had not been a week before all of the medical staff and many of the troops knew about what happened to Vendouris. The other doctors, a tall red-headed Georgian named Withers and a smart, haggard, bald New Yorker named Leach, seemed to approve of what I had done, and so did most of the troops.

    'But they gave me a nickname. Can you guess? They called me the Collector. That act of mercy toward a fatally injured man set me apart, even in conditions as cramped and abnormal as prevailed in Field Hospital 84. Sometimes when I walked into the mess, I could hear men whispering the name. And once when I was operating on a poor little rifleman from the Pennsylvania detachment, trying to put his stomach back in place, he opened his eyes — two orderlies were holding him down — and looked at me and gasped, 'The Col. . . ' and died.

    'Leach told me, 'Don't worry about it. If I'm ever in that spot, I hope you'll do me the same favor Most of the boys are so addled by war they no longer think right.'

    'There was another reason for the name. For a time I made quite a bit of money playing cards with the line officers and other doctors. I assure you, I did not cheat. I just knew much more about the behavior of cards than they. But after a time I was no longer welcome in the games — I suppose I had won about a quarter of the regiment's money, most of it from Withers, who was a rich man. Withers had come to dislike and distrust me: after initially taking my side in the Vendouris business, he had begun to think that there was something fishy in it. By the time they had got around to bringing in the bodies, there was no money in Vendouris' pockets. And of course, being what he was, Withers distrusted all North­erners on principle. He hated Negroes the same way. And it is true that the work and the hours and the almost constant shelling had affected me too. I had lost forty pounds. When I was not on duty, I drank to put myself to sleep. And while I was still welcomed in card games, I played feverishly, recklessly — often I took large sums from Withers on the strength of a bluff.

    'But after three or four months of those terrible conditions, I gave in to the strain. I began to imagine that I was poor William Vendouris. My destiny, which had seemed mysteriously near on the day I walked toward the front, had vanished with an equal mysteriousness. Unless Vendouris was my destiny. One day I saw him lying on a stretcher just taken from one of the Norton-Harjes ambulances — grinning in pain with his perfect teeth, holding in his purple guts with both hands. He looked toward me and said, 'My soul, Collector, my soul.' I staggered, and Leach saw me do it and took over my job.

    'The next day it was clear to me: I was Vendouris. I had simply been given the wrong papers. I explained this to Leach and to Withers, and they sat me down and got the colonel. I explained to him too that my name was not Nightingale but Vendouris, and that Nightingale had been killed on his first day in France. When I looked into the mirror, I saw William Vendouris' face. When I dressed, I put on Vendouris' clothes. I asked the colonel if he could get me the address back home of my wife and family, because the war had driven it out of my mind.

    'The colonel arranged for me to be sent to the Neurological Hospital at Tours, and after a week there I was evacuated to Base Hospital 117 at La Fauche, where I wasted my time with carpentry and woodcarving — they could have sent me home or sent me back to work, and they sent me back to work. To Ste. Nazaire.

    'It was in Ste. Nazaire that my destiny and I finally came face to face. And it was my destiny that sent me there, for the day after I left, Field Hospital 84 got a direct hit from a German shell, and Dr. Leach and all the men there but one were killed on the spot. Only Withers, who was in the camp bed jn the separate tent and who hated me, survived. And he was a part of my destiny too.'