Seven
November. 1925. I sit in the sterile blank which is my room and gaze dully out of the window. It’s hard to see properly because of the bars, but through the gap I can just make out the garden, damp and misty on this autumn afternoon, and beyond that the fields of Sussex. I’m lucky, the nurse tells me, to have this room, this view. A room with a view. Like a hotel, the regulars get preferential treatment. Unlike a hotel, some people have been here ten years. Some people will still be here in ten years time. Not me. I have plans.
Fields… I don’t like fields… Battlefields… When I close my eyes, the arable fields of Sussex blend into the battlefields of Flanders, and I see before me a green and swirling mist, a poisoned mist, which penetrates everything, penetrates everyone. The mist engulfs me, blinding me, but I still have my ears and I can’t block out the coughing, the choking, the rattling death cries. When it clears, I’m standing alone in a field of grey and motionless bodies. Bodies wearing British uniforms. There are 128 bodies if you count them, which I don’t any more, because it is always the same. And I killed them. All 128 of them. Personally. An impressive war record. Every day and every night, 128 ghosts haunt me. You can’t blame me for being mad. Being haunted by one ghost would finish off all but the sanest person. I see corpses everywhere. They suddenly appear: in my bath, on the dining table, across my doorway. Then I scream, I become hysterical, and they sedate me. They don’t think ghosts exist. Do numbers have ghosts? Or do ghosts have numbers? Sometimes I’m haunted by the number seven too. A hateful number, cold and malicious. It mocks me.
I wasn’t always mad. I had a life before the sight of a number seven made me physically cold and sick. But then we all had lives, before the war. The irony is that I wasn’t even a proper soldier. Not really. I was merely an adjutant, which suited me, because bayonets weren’t my style. People told me I was lucky. Well, I had an accident in my Cambridge days. Came of a horse during the Boxing Day Hunt and broke my leg; the bone was sticking out. Somehow, it never healed properly and I’ve always limped, so active service wasn’t for me. I never used a gun. I killed 128 people with a piece of paper and an Ordnance Survey map. And the number seven, damn it! Have you ever killed someone with the number seven? Fearfully effective weapon. If only I’d used it against the Boche rather than my own side, I’d have a medal by now. Yet I wonder if German ghosts would haunt me as vividly…
November. 1915. I sit in the squalid trench which is my office, and gaze dully at the mountain of paper before me. I’m censoring the men’s’ letters. A mind-numbingly boring task, because there are so many of them, all saying the same thing. Sometimes I amuse myself by correcting their spelling, but today I’m bored even of that.
A figure appears in the doorway. The Commanding Officer. I stand to attention, perplexed. What does he want?
“Afternoon Timmins,” he says. “Hard at it, I see.”
“Yes sir,” I reply tentatively.
“Bad news I’m afraid. They’ve killed Lambeth”.
“Oh no sir! That’s a frightful shame! Lambeth was a good chap”.
“It’s a frightful nuisance more like!” barks the CO. “Most irresponsible of him to go and get himself killed. Leaves me with the most awful staffing problems. But chaps never think about that when they die”.
I wonder briefly if this was a joke. It transpires it was not. There follows an awkward pause, in which I shift from leg to leg uncomfortably.
“Hear you speak German, Timmins?”
Damn him! Where did he hear that? Since the outbreak of hostilities, I had been trying to keep my stint at a German university under wraps.
“I’ve got a job for you,” continues the CO. “Acquired a couple of POWs but the brutes don’t speak English. Need them interviewed. Names, regiments, last known positions, anything else useful.”
“Yes sir. Understood sir.” It didn’t sound too bad actually, an afternoon away from censoring letters. I accepted the task quite willingly, and so it was a few hours later that I found myself in a different dugout further down the line, staring into the eyes of a Hun.
It had grey eyes, cold and hard. A trifle disconcerting really. The expression was truculent, he looked like a man who was annoyed to be here and not one who was about to cooperate. I took a deep breath. “Guten Tag!” I said.
A flicker of surprise flashed across his face. “Tag”, he replied, involuntarily it seemed.
“How are you?” I continued tentatively, in my best German.
“How do you think?” he shot back at me.
He had a point. No more niceties then. “I’ve come here to interview you,” I explained. “We need to establish a few details. Your identity and so on”.
“Wie heissen Sie?” I began. What is your name?
“Wie heissen Sie?” he replied challengingly.
“Timmins,” I said. “Lieutenant Timmins. And you?”
You could see him pondering, choosing his response. “What happens if I don’t answer?” he inquired.
“I’ll have to call you Fritz”.
He shrugged nonchalantly. “Perhaps my name really is Fritz”.
“Okay, Fritz. Where are you from?”
“Germany”.
If I wasn’t the one charged with interviewing him, that might have been funny. As it was, I tried to remain patient. “Whereabouts in Germany? Where do you live?”
“In a flat. In an apartment block. In a street. In a town. In Germany”.
And so it continued, for an hour. He refused to answer a single one of my questions. I wrote in my report, “prisoner uncooperative” and promptly forgot the whole affair.
Still November. Still 1915. A few days later. Same hole, same pile of letters, same sod of a CO in the doorway.
“Timmins”, he said, “I need you to interview that Boche again!”
This time, to my surprise, they took me to a clearing station, a makeshift military hospital to deal with the less serious cases. They took me to a ward, a ward full of German POWs, and to a bed, where lay a creature who scarcely resembled the Fritz of the previous week. His face was grey and haggard, black hollows under the eyes. He appeared to be in a considerable amount of pain, but whatever his injury was, it was decently concealed by a military blanket, the same shade of grey as his face.
“Was ist Ihnen passiert?” I asked astonished. What happened to you?
He swore crudely. “Your army happened to me”, he said. “You told them I was an uncooperative prisoner.”
“You were,” I said.
“Now I’m a cooperative one,” he smiled bitterly.
I didn’t ask him who or when or where. I didn’t want to know. I suppose I was aware we tortured our prisoners until they spoke, but the reality of it had never hit me until now.
His name was Klaus Troeger and he was 29, an engineer from Düsseldorf, happily married with a wife and kid. He gave me his regiment, the names of his commanding officers, their last known position, everything. I took my report back to the CO, but he wasn’t satisfied. He wanted to know about future battle plans, where his Company was going to attack next and so on. I visited Troeger for about a week, trying to drag the information out of him. First he pretended he didn’t know, later he admitted he did but refused to share it. Each time I saw him, he looked worse than before. Someone was really turning the screws. The last day I saw him, I had a grim message for him. If he didn’t cooperate, we would shoot him. Think of your wife, I told him. Think of your kid. Troeger thought. He thought and thought and thought. Then he smiled wryly. Victory is yours, he said. I’ll tell you.
It was distasteful work, threatening a man so badly frightened. He seemed paranoid that day, scared for his life. As he recounted to me his various orders, possible military strategies and the like, he was looking round furtively as if someone might be listening. He was a man scared of his own shadow, speaking in a whisper so low I struggled to catch all his words. I had one final question for him, one on which the CO had placed a great deal of importance.
“Where is your regiment now?” I asked.
Troeger hesitated. He glanced round the ward suspiciously. “Do you have a map?” he breathed. I gave him one and he pored over it.
“Well?” I said impatiently. He sighed and indicated that he wanted my notebook. I passed it to him, he scribbled some numbers on it and handed it back to me. 077677.
“Vielen Dank”, I said. “Auf Wiedersehen!” I wasn’t expecting a Wiedersehen, but we were indeed destined to meet one more time in this life. I gave the grid reference to my CO and promptly forgot about it. Weeks passed.
December. 1915. Same old, same old. The CO is standing in the doorway. He looks livid, his face is scarlet, his eyes bulging. “Timmins!” he yells.
“Sir?” I respond with no small amount of trepidation.
“Remember that Boche, Timmins? The one who you interviewed? Gave you a grid reference.”
“Yes sir, I remember. A sergeant from Düsseldorf.”
“That’s as may be,” said the CO in a dire tone of voice. “But the reference he gave you was a fake. Pack of lies!”
“Oh dear, sir. That’s very regrettable, I’m sure”.
“Regrettable?!” The word exploded across the room. “It’s bloody regrettable all right. Turned out to be the headquarters of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, D Company.”
“Oh well, no harm done. Is there sir?”. My voice rose slightly hysterically to form the question. Even before he said it, I knew what was coming.
“No,” said the CO in a voice which was suddenly devoid of all expression. “No harm done, unless you count 127 dead Welsh Fusiliers. We dropped poison gas on them.”
“You did what?!” In my horror, I forgot the “sir”.
“That was the point,” said the CO sadly. “New gas. Developed in Glasgow. Damned effective on rats but never been tried on me, so we shipped it out here for a trial. Didn’t want to risk using it in a proper combat situation, so we thought we’d just drop it on some random Boche and see what happened. Damned effective on men too, as it turns out. That’s one consolation. But they weren’t Boche and I’ll have to answer to the General over this!”
“But sir..” The news was so horrific I could hardly speak. “But sir, surely someone checked the location before they dropped it?!”
“Don’t you know there’s a war on?! exclaimed the CO irritably. “I’ve not got time to be checking paperwork! It’s all the fault of that blasted Hun. I’m having him shot at dawn tomorrow.”
Shot at dawn. I thought about Troeger, how he had deceived me. I felt the anger boiling inside me. Shooting was too good for the rat. And yet even then, I was confused, something didn’t feel quite right. He had given me the grid reference to save his life. But surely he knew once we found it was false, we’d shoot him anyway?!
“Sir,” I said, “would you mind if I spoke to him before he died?” The CO shrugged.
Eight pm, a dreary cell in a military prison. A man huddled in the corner, face against the wall. He flinches as I come in, and cries out something in an anguished German.
“Stand up!” I say authoritatively. “I’m not here to hurt you”.
He stands. There is a peculiar look in his steely eyes as he recognises me.
“Warum haben Sie es getan?” I ask him. Why did you do it?
He starts to shout, to scream. He didn’t do anything, he gave me the grid reference in good faith, he knew it was the right location. He has a wife, a kid, please can I ask them to spare him. Please!
I remain cool and aloof. “I have the piece of paper here”, I say with calm assurance. “The one you wrote on. Zero seven seven, six seven seven”.
Troeger stares at me. His jaw has dropped.
“Say it again,” he whispers.
I say it again. I am humouring a condemned man.
“But that wasn’t what I wrote!” he said finally.
Imbecile, I thought. It’s here on the page, your handwriting.
Troeger came over. He grabbed the paper. Pointing to the figures, he read in high pitched, hysterical voice.
“Null eins eins. Sechs eins eins”. Zero one one, six one one.
They were ones, not sevens.
Ones, not sevens.
He had written ones, I had read them as sevens.
I had forgotten that on the continent, one always crosses the seven so as to avoid confusion with the elaborate strokes of the ones.
Troeger hadn’t made a mistake. I had made a mistake.
Troeger hadn’t killed people. I had killed people.
Troeger shouldn’t be shot tomorrow. I should be shot tomorrow.
The same realisation hit the Hun. He pleaded with me, begged me to explain to the authorities. He begged me to save his life.
I had a choice then; him or me. I chose me. Before the blood red sun rose again over the Flanders trenches, Troeger had gone to meet his Maker.
An innocent man, sent to his death. I have his blood on my hands; his blood, and also the blood of 127 Welsh Fusiliers. Fathers, brothers, husbands…
I can’t remember how long afterwards I had by nervous breakdown. No one could understand it. I was just an adjutant, I wasn’t supposed to see the horrors of war. Eventually I ended up here, in this institution. It’s been a dreadful life, these past ten years; haunted by the corpses, haunted by their reproaching voices. Seeing them, hearing them everywhere I go. Too scared to sleep, too ill to eat. Now I’m going to end it, once and for all.
Before I go, I wanted to leave my confession. I wanted to clear the name of Troeger and proclaim the truth to the world.
It’s night now, and the sky is inky black. The mist has cleared, and a sliver of moon is visible between the clouds. The faint light shines in through my barred window, casting shadowy slashes across my writing desk, across my page.
The blade of my knife glints enticingly.
