The Return of Captain John Emmett

'Did you come by train?' Chilvers asked.

'No. I motored down with a friend.'

'Quite so. Quite so.'

Again Laurence had the feeling that it would have been better to have conformed to expectations.

'You're here about your brother,' Dr Chilvers said in a slightly brisker tone of voice. He put on his spectacles and puled over a sheaf of paper from the right-hand side of his desk. The first page was blank.

'I should tel you at the outset that at present we have no room at al. We take a maximum of eight patients. This permits us to give highly specialised care, adapted—I think I may say with confidence, very finely adapted—to individual patients' needs. However, I would anticipate a vacancy, possibly two, in the very near future. One patient returning home. Very much improved. The other into longer-term convalescent care. We could be looking at—' He reached for a large morocco leather diary, opened it, leafed through a few pages. 'Certainly before New Year. Late December, I would imagine. Would that be suitable?'

Chilvers evidently mistook for something else Laurence's look of alarm at the conversation's swift and specific direction, because he continued, 'Of course we haven't discussed your brother or what we could do to assist his condition, but I feel it is important not to hold out any false hopes for an immediate solution.' His eyes met Laurence's. 'Families come to me, some accustomed through rank or wealth to resolving a problem with some immediacy. But in these cases a swift and satisfactory outcome is not always possible. Despair is not susceptible to the usual processes of society. It is not just those who enter here but their families who may find their circumstances have very much changed. We help them al adapt.'

Chilvers had made this speech before, Laurence was sure. He nodded again, then he found himself saying aloud what he was thinking. 'It sometimes feels as if the fixed points have moved. It's as if we can't be sure how things might fit together any more.'

He spoke quite urgently and stopped, suddenly embarrassed, but Chilvers did not seem to find it odd.

'I think the essential aspects of human nature remain unchanged,' the doctor responded. 'Love, fear, jealousy, indolence, opportunism, hope—even nobility of spirit—but the relationship of one to another may have altered; some aspects may have moved to the fore, others have receded. Of course for every man whose response is to tread carefuly, recalculating those fixed points,' he paused and looked at Laurence, 'others abandon it al and live lives of remarkable recklessness.

'It seems to me,' he continued, 'that one might argue that man has evolved to be a warrior; indeed, few generations have escaped that role. Of course, I was not there,' he gave a respectful nod to Laurence, 'but I judge, from speaking at length to many of the recent war's more invisibly injured, that what was hard for them was a lack of clarity—in orders, aims, even as to whether engagements had been won or lost, and the constant anticipation of random catastrophe. The realisation that the traditional skils of the top-class fighting man—strength, courage, dexterity with his weapon and so on—might not be rewarded, not even by a heroic death, but rather, that a man's fate depended almost entirely on the inequities of fortune. It exploded profound understandings of what it meant to be a soldier.'

Laurence stared out of the window where crimson Virginia creeper blocked a ful view of what was obviously a lawn beyond. After a matter of probably a few seconds but which felt like several minutes, Chilvers seemed to throw him a lifeline:

'Have you read your Homer?'

'At school.' However, he'd known men who had their Homer with them on the battlefield. He'd heard less talk of Homer's inspirational qualities as the war ground on.

' The Iliad gives us an impeccable account of battlefield injuries. No machine-guns, no tanks, no aeroplanes, but the injuries themselves—those ancient and terrible descriptions—and their prognoses, are absolutely accurate. Injuries to the brain, piercing wounds to the liver, known even then to doom the afflicted. But what does Homer not show us?' Laurence knew no answer was expected and Chilvers moved on without pausing for one: 'The casualties die swiftly, if dramaticaly, and at the end of each day the living usualy retrieve their dead, then get back to a campfire and their comrades. No mention of mutilation or lifelong physical disability there.

No shel-shock.'

Laurence finaly found his voice. 'There wasn't much mention of al that in The Times, either.'

Chilvers gave a dry laugh, dispersing the intensity. 'True, but then The Times was for fathers and commanders of earlier wars: the mouthpiece and the vindication of the establishment. The Times was information, The Iliad a celebration. The Iliad was a romance stiffened by historical fact. The Times was fact with fiction as emolient.

'You'd be surprised at how many men I see, men who thought war would be something like Troy. Not the regulars, of course; they were emotionaly better suited to the stresses of conflict, and not so much the conscripted, who were either resigned or resentful. But in the volunteer there is shock, bewilderment, even a sense of betrayal. They couldn't compare their war to the Zulu wars, not that half-naked men with spears didn't have a trick or two to teach them. The Boer War was fought against God-fearing farmers, not a proper army, and, anyway, we won. Their grandfathers could have told them a thing or two about conditions in the Crimea, but many of those old combatants were never able to speak of it at al. So these young men go off with a few weeks of basic training, and three thousand years of Homer in their pockets and, more dangerously, in their heads and, in every sense of the phrase, they come to grief. When they get home, reeling with Homer's deceptions, the Times readers at the breakfast table tel them they've got it al wrong.'

Al those barely contained arguments he'd had with Louise and her parents, Laurence thought, with him trying to control a degree of anger and exhaustion which they didn't deserve. They had no idea. Any of them.

'In this war,' Chilvers said, 'men weren't fighting for the King or for Britain and certainly not for 'little Belgium', but for apple blossom in a Kentish orchard or the smel of caulking ships on the Tyne, or the comradeship of a Rhondda pithead. Men find it easier to risk their lives for provincial loyalties.'

'Or because they have no option,' Laurence said. It was odd, though not unpleasant, to find himself on the receiving end of a wel-honed lecture, but he could hear a note of bitterness in his own voice. 'And they returned to find that the things they thought they were fighting for suddenly seemed hopelessly sentimental and irrelevant.'