DOPPELGANGERa play

Merryn Williams,19 The Paddox,

Oxford OX2 7PN(01865 511259)

m.hemp@btinternet.com

copyright Merryn Williams

THE CAST

MAN in British field hospital, about 40, working-class, a Londoner.WOMAN in British field hospital. About 21, middle-class, a VAD.SECOND MAN, a stretcher-bearer.GERRIT ENGELKE, 27. German poet.WILFRED OWEN, 25. British poet.CONAL O’RIORDAN, 46. Irish man of letters. Hunchback, doing voluntary war service at Etaples.

THE TIME, Autumn 1918 and afterwards.

All the named characters were real persons.

THE STAGE is divided in half by a screen and each group of characters is unaware of what is happening on the other side. All GERRIT’s scenes take place on the left-hand side and WILFRED’s on the right. The part of SECOND MAN may be doubled.

SCENE 1: A BRITISH FIELD HOSPITAL NEAR CAMBRAI

HEAVY FIRING IN DISTANCE AND SOUND OF RAIN. TWO MEN CARRY GERRIT, IN A MUDDY AND BLOODSTAINED GREY UNIFORM, ON TO LEFT SIDE OF STAGE AND DUMP HIM ON A BED IN THE BACKGROUND. IN FOREGROUND ARE TWO CHAIRS AND A SMALL TABLE WITH CHEAP-LOOKING MUGS AND TEAPOT. UNION JACK, PORTRAIT OF KING AND OTHER WWI MEMORABILIA. On RIGHT STAGE, WHICH IS EMPTY, A SMALL ROUND TABLE AND TWO CHAIRS. KHAKI UNIFORM DRAPED OVER ONE CHAIR AND ON THE TABLE, A GUN.

FIRST MAN I think this one’s kaput.

SECOND MAN Well, he wasn’t when we picked him up. He must have been lying out in the open all night ever since the assault. In the rain. A big victory; we’re almost there now. There were bodies all over the place - them and us - but he spoke to me a little bit in his own language, nothing I could understand. Here, nurse -

WOMAN ENTERS CARRYING BOWL AND FLANNEL

- can you take a look at the Jerry?

WOMAN (beginning to wash him) He’s very cold, and a bad colour, but he’s still alive.

SECOND MAN Then I’ll be off. There might be a few more that are breathing. You feel a horrible thankfulness when you know the poor sod is dead; you don’t have to carry him, dragging will do. God, that rain! Are you coming, Bert?

FIRST MAN No, I’m not bringing in no more Jerries. I checked; there’s none of ours still out there.

SECOND MAN See you later then.

FIRST MAN See you.

SECOND MAN GOES OUT

WOMAN He’s lost a lot of blood - shrapnel. I’ll clean him up. Hell, these blankets are verminous.

MAN What do they expect, all sorts of comfort and luxury? They started it, didn’t they? I’ll have a cup of tea.

HE SITS AT TABLE

WOMAN I don’t think I’ll ever get used to that smell. He’s drenched to the bone; it was raining heavily each time I woke up. Come on, Jerry, you know this is for your own good.

GERRIT GROANS FAINTLY. GUNFIRE COMES CLOSER, THEN RECEDES

MAN Finished?

WOMAN Yes, that’s about all I can do for the present. He doesn’t stink quite so much now, but he really ought to have a doctor. Poor sod.

MAN Don’t overdo it, my girl, you didn’t see what the bastard was doing before he got wounded. Bayoneting children and that.

WOMAN Well, he won’t be doing it again.

SHE JOINS HIM AT THE TABLE

Any more tea in the pot?

MAN Just a drop.

SHE POURS TEA

WOMAN It’s half cold.

MAN Yeah, nasty stuff. Any more jobs?

WOMAN Not urgent. Let’s relax while we’ve got the chance. Is that Jerry’s wallet?

MAN Yeah, I’m writing down his details for the Red Cross.

WOMAN Show me.

PAUSE

He’s called Gerrit Engelke.

MAN Stupid name.

WOMAN Born 21st October 1890 - age twenty-eight - no, going to be twenty-eight next week if he lives, but he probably won’t.

MAN Here’s a photo of a girl. Fee-ong-say I presume.

WOMAN She’s in black.

GERRIT BEGINS TO SPEAK INDISTINCTLY IN GERMAN

MAN And there’s this notebook.

WOMAN Very grubby, isn’t it? I couldn’t read it anyway; we only did French at school.

SHE FLICKS THROUGH THE PAGES

It’s his diary, or - this bit looks like poetry. You see the short lines -

GERRIT Buch, mein Buch.

WOMAN You want your book?

SHE GETS UP AND WALKS OVER TO THE BED

How are you feeling, Jerry? Anything I can get you? Drink? Trinken?

GERRIT MUTTERS, THEN FALLS SILENT

If Mummy could see me now! She thinks it’s all pouring glasses of water and sponging their fevered brows etcetera. I didn’t know what a naked man looked like before I started this job. One of my friends fainted at her first operation, but you get hardened.

MAN Yeah, get used to anything. Barbarians.

PAUSE

Did you hear about Upper North Street?

WOMAN (soberly) Yes.

MAN One of them Gothas dropped a bomb near my house in Poplar, 13th June last year. Broad daylight, a lovely sunny morning, it never crossed our minds they could come during the day. It missed us but it landed on the infant school round the corner and eighteen of the children got killed. Ten boys and eight girls, five or six years old, the same age my kids could have been, if I’d ever had any. I carried the little bodies out of the ruins one by one and I thought, what did any of them ever do? Now you’ve been saying, maybe some of these atrocities was made up –

WOMAN I didn’t say that, Bert. I think that perhaps not all the nuns were raped, but if you give a man a gun, and train him to kill, you can hardly be surprised if he sometimes kills the wrong people –

MAN If a man joins the fighting services, he takes his chance, but what breaks my bloody heart is the children. Those men that fly the Gothas and Zeppelins, they don’t care a twopenny damn who they hit. You used to think that people could sit in their own homes and be safe, but not anymore. I haven’t seen any nuns that got raped but I did see them kids in what was left of Upper North Street. And the mothers, crying and crying. That’s why I hate the swine.

WOMAN Well, this man is not a bomber pilot.

MAN He’s in uniform, isn’t he? Fighting for them. The way I see it, I’m here to look

after our own people, not Jerries. But for my friend that just went out, I’d have let him die choking.

DOOR SLAMS IN THE DISTANCE

Oh, hell, here comes the great man. And he’s probably in a foul temper. I’m off.

HE GOES OUT. THE WOMAN STANDS LOOKING DOWN AT GERRIT’S MOTIONLESS BODY

WOMAN Well, Jerry, you’ve passed out again, and even if you woke up you couldn’t understand a word I say, could you? Here’s your little book. It’s all over, you know. Germany’s lost, though it may still take a few more weeks. You’ve lost but you gave us a terrible time. I didn’t lose a fiancé - never had one - but my sister did. Strangely enough his name was Jerry. A good, brave young man, Jerry, who wouldn’t have hurt a fly, left to himself, but who joined the army because all his friends were joining and everybody said it was the right thing to do. He was hit in the stomach at the Somme on the first of July 1916. They shipped him back to England and he lived for five days in St Thomas’s Hospital, and then - we stood around and watched him die. Before the war it was all so different. We lived quietly in Stratford-on-Avon. My sister and I had a happy life - I haven’t a brother, thank God - though I thought at the time that it was very dull. Tennis parties, boating on the river. She was engaged and I was looking round, taking my time. I don’t think that she’ll ever get married now, nor me either. Where are all the men? Four of the six boys who played tennis with us are dead, and one of the other two - is in a very strange state. Last time he came back on leave he was quite rude to me. He said that we women are pampered, that we encouraged the men to fight and have no idea how awful it is for them. But that’s hardly my fault. I didn’t start it, did I? I haven’t even got a vote.

SHE WALKS ABOUT A LITTLE, THEN COMES BACK AND LOOKS DOWN AGAIN AT GERRIT

If I’d been asked, I might have said that we should have kept out of it. I didn’t particularly care about Belgium and Serbia but I did about all those lovely boys. That’s why I don’t get any pleasure out of seeing you in this state; I’ve seen too many strong young men dying. Oh, yes, Jerry, you’re going to die.

SHE PASSES A FLANNEL OVER HIS FACE

You used to be a good-looking man. Someday soon your mother or that girl in the photograph will get a telegram and there’ll be a lot of weeping and screaming. I don’t cry anymore; I’m used up. All I want is to get through this and then go back to my nice house in Stratford and go to sleep for a very long time. Keep on clinging to that book if it’s any comfort. I wonder what you wrote in it.

SHE GOES OUT

SCENE 2

BOTH SIDES OF THE STAGE ARE DIMLY LIT. LEFT ALONE, GERRIT STANDS UP AND COMES FORWARD TO ADDRESS THE AUDIENCE. HE IS NO LONGER A WOUNDED MAN BUT A DISEMBODIED VOICE. AS HE BEGINS TO SPEAK, WILFRED, IN CIVILIAN CLOTHES, APPEARS ON RIGHT AND WALKS SLOWLY FORWARD, READING FROM A LETTER. EACH IS UNAWARE OF THE OTHER’S PRESENCE AS THEY ARE DIVIDED BY THE SCREEN.

GERRIT In August 1914 I was in Denmark, working on what I thought was going to be the great novel of the twentieth century. Ha, I wonder if I’ll ever look at it again! I had no reason to return to Germany; my parents and sister had emigrated to the United States some years before. My friends were other poets; I worked as a painter and decorator to support myself but I hoped to write something good if I didn’t die young – that was my great fear. When the war started I knew that I ought to go home; I didn’t want the French and Russians invading my country. But I thought perhaps it’ll all be over soon, perhaps I shouldn’t be in a hurry to throw away my life. The man in the street has his reason for living, to be of use to himself and others. If he dies in the war – well, he’s made his impression. But the man of genius is different - and in those days I stupidly thought that I was a genius. The one man in a thousand, that was me. I told myself that I could do more good to my country if I stayed where I was, writing. Inspiring generations to come.

TO DEATH

But spare me, Death.I am still young.My life’s work hasn’t begun.So spare me, Death.

Much later, Death,When the tired heart is wearing away,When I have no more to say,Then take me, Death.

WILFRED France, August 1914. Dear Mother, The news of war today is decidedly bad. We understand that the Germans are over the frontier in North Belgium, and French and English losses are heavy. But I can do no service to anybody by agitating for news or making dole over the slaughter. I feel my own life all the more precious and more dear in the presence of this deflowering of Europe. While it is true that the guns will effect a little useful weeding, I am furious to think that the minds which were to have excelled the civilisation of ten thousand years, are being annihilated, and bodies, the product of aeons of natural selection, melted down to pay for political statues. The world is madder than your own bundle of eccentricity, Wilfred.

GERRIT So I stayed on in Denmark for a few more months. My Danish friends said keep out of it, it’s nothing to do with you. My mother in America said keep out of it, you’re my only son. I tried to write, but – I was very hard up, and my conscience was giving me trouble. I felt that people were looking at me and thinking, why isn’t a

strong young German in uniform? And back home, hundreds of men of my age had already been killed. Men I knew. You struggle for a while, thinking you can control your destiny, only to find that you’re a cog in the machine. So in October 1914 I went home and enlisted. The drill, my God, the drill! I wrote a poem about it called ‘Hysteria’:

HE PULLS OUT A PIECE OF PAPER AND SWIVELS FROM SIDE TO SIDE AS ONE FOLLOWING ORDERS

Left! Right! Left turn! Right turn! And right again!I swivel, thinking no more than I must.I know they’d like to rob me of my wits;they need me as a number, not a man.

And yet, it isn’t difficult to laughand never to be caught. They cannot hearyou snigger through the bashing on the floor.Ha, ha! They’re never going to drive me mad.

So here I go. I’ve got my uniformand killing-gear. I swivel like a cock.Left! Right! Ha, ha! Left, right again. Knock, knock!They’ve dressed me up. Ho, ho! I’m not a man.

That poem - which I didn’t show to anybody - was a protest. Of course, it wasn’t the life I would ever have chosen. I didn’t want to be a killing machine. My instincts were still against the war, and if we hadn’t been acting in self-defence I would have refused, and stayed where the grass grows green.

WILFRED When the war broke out I was in France, teaching English on a tiny income. I confess I was in no hurry to join up. I felt that I’d hardly begun to live, and there was so much that I wanted to do. There was a lady who asked me to go with her to Canada, but - Well, that wouldn’t have been a good idea, but I did have my chance to get out. We were living near the Pyrenees, and in August 1914, when the moon was red, I used to go up at night to a hilltop, and look at Spain. I still do that in dreams. If I’d known all that was going to happen, I could have walked over the mountains into Spain, a neutral country, and been safe. I’m sure I could soon have picked up the language and supported myself by giving English lessons. I was just beginning to write poetry which satisfied me and to meet other poets. Instead, I stayed on in France for another year, writing hard.

HE BEGINS TO PUT ON UNIFORM

But the men of my age were already flocking into the armed services. My brother was in the navy; Rupert Brooke was dead and everyone was reading his patriotic sonnets. I had a growing conviction that to stay out of it all would be wrong. So in the end, I turned my back on the Pyrenees and crossed the channel. October 1915, joined the Artists’ Rifles.

GERRIT For the next three years I saw service in the great battles of the Western

Front - Ypres, the Somme, Verdun. The war struck me almost speechless. I couldn’t write any more poetry, even though thousands of silly ditties were being made up by patriotic ladies and gentlemen in their armchairs. Then my best friend was posted missing, presumed dead. We’d known each other all our lives and shared our books and sandwiches at school. I visited his mother in her poor little house where she waited for him to come home. She kept his room ready; each time there was a rap on the front door she rushed out thinking it was him. Of course when a man is missing his family think he may have lost his memory and still be alive in some hospital or prisoner of war camp. What could I say? - I knew that he was probably drowned in a shell-hole or blown to pieces, unidentifiable. While I was on leave with a slight wound I began to make up a long poem to the memory of my friend. He has no cross, no grave.

WILFRED Before the war, they used to toll the church bells and draw down the blinds when someone died. And now? There just isn’t time, there are just too many dying.

ANTHEM FOR DOOMED YOUTH

What passing bells for these who die as cattle?Only the monstrous anger of the guns.Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattleCan patter out their hasty orisons.No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs -The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?Not in the hands of boys but in their eyesShall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

DARKNESS, EXPLOSIONS AND FLASHES

GERRIT An incessant thunder was dinning in their ears. Shells were whizzing past, close over the attackers’ heads; circles of fire flashed like lightning up above; the whole dark night let out a roar. It was thundering, murderous chaos. Then – Bang! A shell landed right among them – a spattering, screaming fountain of earth, flesh and smoke erupted skywards. I was hurled to the ground by the tremendous blast of air.

HE DISAPPEARS

WILFRED (who is now fully dressed in uniform)

Dear Mother, I can see no excuse for deceiving you about these last 4 days. I have suffered seventh hell.

I have not been at the front. I have been in front of it. I held an advanced post, that is, a ‘dug-out’, in the middle of No Man’s Land. The ground was not mud, not sloppy mud, but an octopus of sucking clay, 3, 4 and 5 feet deep, relieved only by craters full of water. Men have been known to drown in them. High explosives were dropping all around, but it was so dark that even the German flares did not reveal us. Three-quarters dead, I mean each of us ¾ dead, we reached the dug-out. My dug-out held 25 men tight packed. Water filled it to a depth of 1 or 2 feet, leaving say 4 feet of air. Those fifty hours were the agony of my happy life. I nearly broke down and let myself drown in the water that was now slowly rising over my knees. In the platoon on my left the sentries over the dug-out were blown to nothing. I kept my own sentries halfway down the stairs during the more terrific bombardment. In spite of this one lad was blown down and, I am afraid, blinded.

THE SENTRY

We’d found an old Boche dug-out, and he knew,And gave us hell; for shell on frantic shellLit full on top, but never quite burst through.Rain, guttering down in waterfalls of slime,Kept slush waist-high and rising hour by hour,And choked the steps too thick with clay to climb.What murk of air remained stank old, and sourWith fumes from whizz-bangs, and the smell of menWho’d lived there years, and left their curse in the den,If not their corpses …. There we herded from the blastOf whizz-bangs; but one found our door at last –Buffeting eyes and breath, snuffing the candles,And thud! flump! thud! down the steep steps came thumpingAnd sploshing in the flood, deluging muck,The sentry’s body; then his rifle, handlesOf old Boche bombs, and mud in ruck on ruck.We dredged it up, for dead, until he whined,‘O sir – my eyes – I’m blind – I’m blind – I’m blind’.Coaxing, I held a flame against his lidsAnd said if he could see the least blurred lightHe was not blind; in time he’d get all right.‘I can’t’, he sobbed. Eyeballs, huge-bulged like squids’,Watch my dreams still – yet I forgot him thereIn posting Next for duty, and sending a scoutTo beg a stretcher somewhere, and floundering aboutTo other posts under the shrieking air.

Those other wretches, how they bled and spewed,And one who would have drowned himself for good –I try not to remember these things now.Let Dread hark back for one word only: how,Half-listening to that sentry’s moans and jumps,

And the wild chattering of his shivered teeth,Renewed most horribly whenever crumpsPummelled the roof and slogged the air beneath –Through the dense din, I say, we heard him shout‘I see your lights!’ – But ours had long gone out.

DARKNESS

SCENE 3

LEFT, GERRIT LIES MOTIONLESS ON BED. RIGHT, THE YMCA REST HUT AT ETAPLES RAILWAY STATION. SOUND OF TRAINS IN BACKGROUND. CONAL O’RIORDAN SITS READING AT THE TABLE. WILFRED APPEARS AT DOOR. HE IS NOW SPEAKING WITH A SLIGHT STAMMER.

WILFRED Excuse me, is this the YMCA hut?

O’RIORDAN It is.

WILFRED And you’re Mr O’Riordan?

O’RIORDAN Right again. Just crossed over from England, have you?

WILFRED Yes.

O’RIORDAN And your name is - ?

WILFRED Owen. Wilfred Owen.

O’RIORDAN Well, come in, young man, you’re very welcome to - shall I say my little palace? Well, my little hut. Just a shack, but we’re fixed up with tea and biscuits, vin ordinaire and Irish whisky. Can I offer you a glass?

WILFRED Thank you.

WINE IS POURED AND THEY SIT OPPOSITE EACH OTHER

I was particularly keen to meet you because I understand that you write plays and novels, although I can’t get hold of many books, of course, out here.

O’RIORDAN Ah, yes. I used to work at the Abbey Theatre.

WILFRED So you must know Mr Yeats. Our greatest living poet.

O’RIORDAN He’s a friend, yes. He’s too old to fight and thinks it better – to keep his mouth shut at present. These are not poetic times, I fear. The rose of the world and the wild swans and the wandering minstrels – they seem very trivial just now, do they

not?

WILFRED Yes, but I wonder if – perhaps a different kind of poetry –

AN AWKWARD PAUSE

O’RIORDAN Now tell me, why is it a good thing for a man to be middle-aged and a hunchback?

WILFRED Because no one is going to give him a white feather?

O’RIORDAN Precisely. Long long ago I did dream of becoming a soldier, but I had a riding accident as a boy which did nasty things to my spine. But if I’m not allowed to fight, I can at least make myself useful to those who are doing it for me. So I look after this hut, let the young men get a few hours’ sleep and wake them up when it’s time to catch their trains -

VOICES BRIEFLY LOST AS A TRAIN HOOTS AND PASSES

I’ve seen so many of them leaving Etaples.

WILFRED And not returning.

O’RIORDAN There are far more who come back than who don’t. So are you a literary man yourself, Mr Owen?

WILFRED Well, not really, although I would like to be; I -

O’RIORDAN Had anything published?

WILFRED Only three or four poems in little magazines. You wouldn’t have seen them.

O’RIORDAN I imagine, at least, that the war has been good for your poetry.

WILFRED At first, I couldn’t cope at all. I’ve been writing poetry since I was about twelve, it was very important to me, but this - there didn’t seem to be any words -

O’RIORDAN When did you first see action?

WILFRED Eighteen months ago. Men were freezing to death in the open. Nothing I’d ever read in the newspapers had prepared me for what it was like. I saw a man gassed, I saw a man blinded and I didn’t know how to write about it. Then - well, I was sent back to England, and I’ve been out of the front line for more than a year.

O’RIORDAN Wounded?

WILFRED No.

O’RIORDAN Shell-shocked?

WILFRED I don’t know if such a thing as shell-shock exists, or if it was just cowardice. I fell into a hole, a black hole, probably a cellar, and hit my head. I think I was there for an entire day and night. And after that I was blown into the air and wasn’t much good. Anyway, I ended up at the hospital for nervous diseases in Edinburgh, and there I met a real poet, Siegfried Sassoon. Perhaps you’ve heard of him?

O’RIORDAN I’ve never had much time for any man who calls another man a coward. Who are we to say what goes on in his mind and spirit? I have heard of Mr Sassoon. A gallant officer - am I right? - won the Military Cross and then had a nervous breakdown which affected his reasoning.

WILFRED He’s as sane as you or I. Well, I met him, quite by chance, and showed him my poems. I soon realised that everything I’d written up to that time was - just scribbling. He taught me how to write, I mean really write, about what I’d seen.

O’RIORDAN Have you got your poems with you?

WILFRED No, they’re in my desk at home. My mother knows what to do with them.

O’RIORDAN Can you recite them from memory?

PAUSE

Come on, we’ll drain another glass of vin blanc and you shall recite to me.

POURS WINE

WILFRED I have some lines in this notebook, but I’m not sure about them yet.

O’RIORDAN Carry on, young man.

WILFRED Well, there was an air raid in London. I was trapped in the Underground below Liverpool Street for about three hours. Total darkness and you could hear the muffled guns in the distance. There were other figures moving about and I was dimly aware of them but couldn’t see their faces, that’s what gave me the idea.

O’RIORDAN I see.

WILFRED The poem is called ‘Strange Meeting’:

It seemed that out of battle I escaped Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped Through granites which titanic wars had groined. Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned, Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred. Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared With piteous recognition in fixed eyes, Lifting distressful hands as if to bless.

And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall, By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell.

O’RIORDAN Hell, is it?

PAUSE

Is there any more?

WILFRED It’s not finished.

O’RIORDAN So you escape from battle, as you think, but in actual fact you are -

WILFRED Dead.

O’RIORDAN And you meet up with another man, who is also dead. Is he your double? Your doppelganger?

WILFRED He’s a German.

O’RIORDAN Ah!

WILFRED I suppose, in a way, he is my double, but I don’t know him. How could I know him? It’s quite rare to catch a glimpse of the enemy, and when you do it’s just a distant figure in grey, not a man with a face or a name. You fire your bullets or throw your bombs into a void and usually have no idea whether or not you’ve killed anyone.

O’RIORDAN Killing another man couldn’t be easy. But in certain circumstances it might be necessary.

WILFRED I have - very bad dreams - where I’m killing another man. With a bayonet. Or sometimes my hands grow cold, I can’t go on driving the blade into his stomach, and then he kills me. You see - I began to have the gravest doubts about the war when I was on sick leave. I don’t believe in it any more. I really think that the Allies are no better than Germany. Of course most people would think I was mad or a coward or - Well, obviously I could tell hardly anyone how I felt.

O’RIORDAN You’re telling me.

WILFRED Yes. It’s all coming out. I began to take German lessons in Edinburgh, though I didn’t get very far, because, after the war, we’re going to have to talk to each other. I wondered if there was another man, in the trenches opposite, who felt as I did. Perhaps a poet. Anyway a man that I could have liked, if we could have met in some other time and place.

O’RIORDAN You’re wrong, young man - it’s understandable, after what you’ve been through, and I have no right to comment on that, but I fear that like a lot of good people you’re letting your heart rule your head. Now I’m an Irishman, as you may have observed, so I have no especial reason to love England, but I decided to support the war effort because I believe, I passionately believe in the rights of small countries.

Prussian militarism is a crazy beast which, I’m afraid, we have to fight. Remember how we all felt in August 1914. Remember how they invaded a peaceful country, violating nuns and chopping off little children’s hands. Remember the murder of Nurse Cavell.

WILFRED I know, I know. But I see young boys, practically children, torn away from their mothers and forced into khaki – they don’t have any choice -

O’RIORDAN We none of us have any choice. If we don’t stop them in Europe, sooner or later we shall have to fight them in our own islands. You’ve seen for yourself what the bombers did to London. You heard about Upper North Street.

WILFRED Yes, I was out of my head at the time but I heard about it. A school was bombed and some children were killed. I wish it had been the newspaper editors or the war profiteers.

O’RIORDAN Ah, those gentlemen invariably find a safe place to hide.

WILFRED So you think that they’re all monsters dripping blood - ?

O’RIORDAN The ordinary German is just like you or me, but that’s not the question. No doubt they’ve been told and really believe that they’re fighting for their homeland and their religion. No, the war has been caused by just one evil man, the Kaiser, and there can be no peace while that man remains in power. The cold fact is that he has soaked Europe in blood and he cannot be allowed to get away with it. Otherwise he’ll go into one country after another and in twenty years’ time your son, if you have one –

WILFRED Oh, I doubt I’ll ever have a son.

O’RIORDAN - might be asked to do what you’re doing now. It doesn’t give me any pleasure, Mr Owen; I see the hospital trains bringing back men with no limbs and I see the growing number of graves in Etaples cemetery. But it is worthwhile, if this war is going to put an end to all wars.

WILFRED If.

O’RIORDAN So when you meet your German poet after the war, you can shake his hand, but at the moment, you have to do your best to kill him. It can’t go on for many more weeks.

WILFRED No, that’s one consolation.

O’RIORDAN I liked your poem, young man. Your fragment of a poem. After this is over you must come to Dublin and I’ll introduce you to some writers, and we’ll paint the town red. This is the last push. Hang on to that.

WILFRED Yes.

SCENE 4: THE BRITISH FIELD HOSPITAL

DISTANT GUNFIRE, HEAVY RAIN. WILFRED AND HIS COMPANION HAVE DISAPPEARED. GERRIT IS STILL LYING UNCONSCIOUS ON THE BED. THE MAN IS SITTING AT THE TABLE, TAKING NOTES. THE WOMAN COMES IN.

WOMAN Those damn guns kept me awake all night; I’ve got a splitting headache. And the puddles are deep enough to drown in; I think my last decent pair of stockings has just gone kaput. How’s Jerry, or Gerrit?

MAN Hasn’t moved or spoke since you went off duty.

WOMAN His eyes are open, fluttering.

MAN Waste of resources, if you ask me. Looking after him when our own boys require attention.

WOMAN Well, we couldn’t have left him lying out in that rain.

MAN Rain, mud, I hate this bleeding country.

HE SNEEZES SEVERAL TIMES

WOMAN Don’t go and get Spanish flu.

MAN I bleeding hope not.

WOMAN I hear people are dropping like flies back in England; the men on both sides, too. Perhaps when we’re all too weak to fight, they’ll make an end of it.

GERRIT A -aaahh!

MAN I just hope it’s going to be over by Christmas, like they say. I’ve had enough. I been doing this for four years, so nobody can call me unpatriotic, and my two brothers got killed.

WOMAN No, really? That’s bad luck.

MAN Yeah, I’m the only one left. I got a mother of seventy in a bad way. So don’t ask me to feel sorry for that swine.

GERRIT MUTTERS INCOMPREHENSIBLY

WOMAN Well, whatever he may have done, it’s my job to look after him.

MAN Waking up, is he? I never thought he’d last this long.

HE SNEEZES AGAIN

WOMAN He’s groping for something. I think it’s his book.

MAN On the floor.

WOMAN There are dried bloodstains on it. Do you know, I can make out this line - it’s in capitals - AN DIE SOLDATEN DES GROSSEN KRIEGES.

MAN What’s it mean?

WOMAN ‘Soldaten’ is ‘soldiers’, presumably. ‘Grossen’ is ‘great’, ‘Krieg’ is ‘war’.

GERRIT Nein -

HIS VOICE TRAILS AWAY

WOMAN Here you are, Jerry. Don’t want to lose it, do you? Lie still, I’ll get you some quinine.

MAN And I’ll take a leak.

THEY GO OUT. GERRIT SLOWLY STANDS UP AND ADVANCES INTO THE SPOTLIGHT

GERRIT ‘TO THE SOLDIERS OF THE GREAT WAR’:

Rise up! Out of trenches, muddy holes, bunkers, quarries!Up out of mud and fire, chalk dust, stench of bodies!Off with your steel helmets! Throw your rifles away!Enough of this murderous enmity!

Do you love a woman? So do I.And have you a mother? A mother bore me.What about your child? I too love children.And the houses reek of cursing, praying, weeping.

I realised, when it was too late, that I was trapped. No people hates the other - it is the men of money with no conscience who manage the war. In future, our children will read about what we did and think we were all mad. For four years I survived some of the worst battles. I swam over a flooded river and won the Iron Cross. I met someone - her husband had been killed - and we became engaged. Shouldn’t I have known that there would never be time to get married? In the last few months, when I was on sick leave, I discovered that I could finally write about what was happening. I was a freak, of course. I would have been torn to pieces by my own countrymen had I got up in the market places of Germany and said, it’s madness, stop the war. But if the men on both sides could just stand up in their trenches, throw down their rifles and walk across No Man’s Land towards each other - what then? I’ve heard that it happened at Christmas 1914, and if it were to happen all over the Western Front, it would be

impossible to make them start fighting again. I had never seen the French or the Britishers clearly. They were just distant figures in blue or khaki, doing their best to kill us. But I couldn’t believe that they were fundamentally different from me and my friends. In their separate languages, they were probably saying the same things - wishing that it was all over, grieving for their dead. I imagined that, in the trenches opposite, there might even be another poet, a man who thought very much as I did and who could have been my friend. If I could speak English, if he could speak German. The long poem I began to write, ‘To the Soldiers of the Great War’, was addressed to that man I did not know:

Were you at ruined Ypres? I was there too.At stricken Mihiel? I was opposite you.I was there at Dixmuide, surrounded by floods,At hellish Verdun, in the smoke and the crowds;Freezing, demoralised, in the snow,At the corpse-ridden Somme I was opposite you.I was opposite you everywhere, but you did not know it!Body is piled on body. Poet kills poet.

I was a soldier. I did my job.Thirsty, sick, yawning, on the march or on guard,Surrounded by death and missing home -And you - were your feelings so far from mine?Tear open your tunic! Let’s see your bare skin;I know that old scar from 1915,And there on your forehead the stitched-up gash.But so you won’t think my pain is less,I open my shirt, here’s my discoloured arm!Aren’t we proud of our wounds, your wounds and mine?

You did not give better blood or greater force,And the same churned-up sand drank our vital juice.Did your brother die in the blast of that shell?Did your uncle or your classmate fall?Does not your bearded father lie in his grave?Hermann and Fritz, my cousins, bled to death.And my young, fair-haired friend, always helpful and kind,His room is still waiting, and his bed.His mother has waited since 1916,Where is his cross and his grave? Frenchmen,Whether from Bordeaux, Brest, Garonne;Ukrainian, Turk, Serb, Austrian;I appeal to all soldiers of the Great War -American, Russian, Britisher -You were brave men. Now throw away national pride.The green sea is rising. Just take my hand.

THE LIGHTS GO OUT. WHEN THEY COME BACK GERRIT IS AGAIN LYING ON THE BED, MOTIONLESS.

SCENE 5

WILFRED WALKS FORWARD ON RIGHT SIDE OF STAGE, READING FROM A LETTER

WILFRED October, 1918. My darling Mother, As you must have known both by my silence and from the newspapers, I have been in action for some days. I can find no word to qualify my experiences except the word SHEER. If I started into detail I should disturb the censor and my own rest. I captured a German machine gun and scores of prisoners; I’ll tell you exactly how another time. My senses are charred. I shall feel again as soon as I dare, but now I must not. I don’t take the cigarette out of my mouth when I write Deceased over their letters. But one day I will write Deceased over many books. I’m glad I’ve been recommended for the Military Cross, and hope I get it, for the confidence it may give me at home. Tonight I am to read out this General Order, ‘Peace talk in any form is to cease in the Fourth Army. All ranks are warned against the disturbing influence of dangerous peace talk’. And so on. It is all over for a long time. We are marching steadily back. Moreover - The war is nearing an end - Still - Wilfred and more than Wilfred.

SECOND MAN COMES IN BRIEFLY WITH MAILBAG. WILFRED CLOSES ENVELOPE AND GIVES HIM THE LETTER.

Well - I couldn’t tell my mother everything, and I may indeed have to go into action again. I didn’t finish reading my poem to O’Riordan. I didn’t want to tell him how it ends. For a long time I’ve been haunted by the thought that I might end up killing another man - a man with the same beliefs as myself. He couldn’t blame me; he would have done the same. I seem to see that man opposite me, in his grey uniform, quite clearly in my mind’s eye. This is what I wrote about him in ‘Strange Meeting’:

With a thousand pains that vision’s face was grained,Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground.And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan.‘Strange friend’, I said, ‘here is no cause to mourn’.‘None’, said the other, ‘save the undone years,The hopelessness. Whatever hope was yours,Was my life also’.

If I go down into the underworld a second time, perhaps I shall meet him there. The poem is in my desk, and my mother knows where to send it if I don’t survive.

SCENE 6: THE BRITISH FIELD HOSPITAL

RAIN IN BACKGROUND. THE MAN IS BENDING OVER GERRIT. THE WOMAN COMES IN.

MAN No doubt about it, our boys done a first-class job. The bastards are falling back all along the line. Maybe they weren’t even trying very hard; nobody wants to be the last man to die.

WOMAN I can’t wait to get home. Hot water and clean sheets, and the maid bringing you tea in bed.

MAN That ain’t a customary part of my life. He’s dead now.

WOMAN Yes, I knew he couldn’t live. He tried quite hard, really - he lasted for two whole days after he was hit - but he’d lost too much blood.

MAN That’s it then.

HE PULLS THE SHEET OVER GERRIT’S FACE Got a letter from my wife today, our little house in Poplar is still standing.

WOMAN Good.

MAN Not that they didn’t try to blow us all to kingdom come. I’m not one of them that say civilians get a cushy life; it’s quite bad for them too.

WOMAN I think, back in dear old Stratford-on-Avon, they’re still fairly comfortable.

MAN Yeah, but all over London, you know, people’s nerves are in shreds. Of course them that can afford have already moved out but the rest of us just have to take it. I’ve seen women getting hysterical when there’s a clear night, shaking their fists at the moon. They crowd down into the Underground, or they walk or bus miles out into the country and camp in a field till the morning. Terrified to go to bed; the children have to be let catch up their sleep in school.

WOMAN Well, it’s almost over.

MAN Yeah. We smashed them so they can never come back. I haven’t got any kids, as I told you, but if I had I’d like them to grow up in a world where there’s peace. The war to end war, like old moustaches said. So I think that the sacrifice was worth it.

WOMAN It must never happen again.

MAN God be thanked.

HE GOES OUT

WOMAN (bending over the shrouded form of GERRIT) Well, Jerry, we weren’t acquainted for very long, were we? I’ll take your wallet and the little book for the Red Cross. We did what we could for you, which wasn’t much. After the war, I think we’re going to have to forgive each other, although my friend who just walked out wouldn’t agree. And now, I suppose, I’ll go home and look for a job. Teaching in a girls’ school, perhaps, telling children who are too young to remember these years that it was a victory of right over might. I’ll be one of the spinster ladies who meet up for knitting parties and drink tea and play innocent games of cards and talk about the men we lost. You’ll never go home, Jerry; your book will go home but your bones will lie here in the country you invaded, just six feet of earth in a little corner of France.

SHE GOES OUT, CARRYING THE BOOK

VOICE OF SECOND MAN Gerrit Engelke died in a British field hospital on 13th October 1918, one week before his twenty-eighth birthday and one month before the end of the war. He is buried in the German section of Etaples cemetery.

SCENE 7

LEFT SIDE OF STAGE IS IN DARKNESS. RIGHT, WILFRED SITS AT TABLE WITH A GUN AND A HEAP OF PAPERS IN FRONT OF HIM, WRITING AND OCCASIONALLY PAUSING.

WILFRED Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense consolatory. They may be to the next.

PAUSE

I keep thinking of the children I taught for a short time in Edinburgh, trying to get the international idea into their little heads. They were so impressed when I turned up in uniform! I hope they’ll be spared another war; it would be terrible if the same thing happened to those little boys when they’re old enough to fight. Shall I see it? I ought to be safe; everybody says it can’t last many more weeks. All over by Christmas. But now I must get this letter off.

HE STARTS WRITING

Dear Mother, Here is the Preface to my book, which I know you will look after. You already have all the poems which I think worth preserving. As I told you, I am unlikely to be sent into action again, but in case –

PAUSE

I don’t know how she’s going to stand it.

HE WRITES AGAIN

- please send copies to my friend Siegfried Sassoon if he survives the war, to

Captain Robert Graves, ditto, to Professor Edith Morley at Reading University – how surprised you were to hear about a woman professor! – to Mr Conal O’Riordan –

PAUSE

Oh, God, I can’t remember!

HE CONTINUES WRITING

- but please get the book published if at all possible; my poetry won’t do any good to anyone if it lies unread in a drawer.

ENTER SECOND MAN, CARRYING MAILBAG

SECOND MAN Anything for the post?

WILFRED Just a minute.

HE STUFFS THE PAPER INTO AN ENVELOPE AND SCRAWLS THE ADDRESS

To Mrs Owen, 71 Monkmoor Road, Shrewsbury. Thank you.

SECOND MAN PUTS LETTER IN BAG, AND EXIT

That’s it then, famous last words! I always wanted to be a poet who was still being read in a hundred years’ time. Shall we have destroyed ourselves, I wonder, by the year 2018? How strange it seems, that date - unreal! Or shall we have somehow learned to live together? Whether or not I survive the next few weeks, I shan’t be here to see. If the book survives, who knows, it may speak to the next generation and the one after that. The book must go on.

HE PICKS UP HIS GUN, AND GOES OUT.

SCENE 8

VOICE OF SECOND MAN On the fourth of November 1918, a misty Monday morning, Wilfred Owen went into action on the Oise and Sambre canal.

GUNS AND HEAVY SHELLING

On the eleventh of November 1918, at eleven o’clock in the morning, the guns ceased to fire.

CHURCH BELLS, THEN A BICYCLE BELL AND THEN A KNOCK. WOMAN APPEARS LEFT, WITH A BLACK CLOAK THROWN OVER HER UNIFORM, READING FROM A TELEGRAM

WOMAN The War Office regrets to inform you that Second Lieutenant Wilfred Edward Salter Owen, M.C. -

CLASHING BELLS DROWN HER VOICE

- The King and Queen send their sympathy.

VOICE OF SECOND MAN Wilfred Owen was killed on the fourth of November 1918, aged twenty-five. He is buried in the English section of Ors cemetery.

SCENE 9: ETAPLES, THE WAR CEMETERY

RIGHT, A BACKGROUND PICTURE OF WAR GRAVES. CONAL O’RIORDAN APPEARS WITH AN OPEN BOOK IN ONE HAND. SOUND OF TRAINS.

O’RIORDAN It was many years ago, and I’m getting on, but of all the hundreds of young men I waved off on those trains there’s none I remember more clearly than Wilfred Owen. I can see so clearly his charming face, a child’s, despite the tiny moustache, smiling at me in the sunlight or under the rays of the swinging lamp he would light for me when I drew the curtains at evenfall. He’s getting quite a name now for his poem, ‘Strange Meeting’. It was bitter bad luck that he should be killed in the very last week of the war. All around Etaples there’s a sea of graves, lines and lines of little white stones with the rose bushes growing nearby and the Cross of Sacrifice. Wilfred isn’t here; he was buried far to the east, near the Sambre Canal. But there are a number of German dead at Etaples, in their own corner. Here’s one of them - Gerrit Engelke, a young man, I see, of about the same age.

HE GOES OUT. GERRIT APPEARS ON LEFT SIDE OF STAGE

GERRIT Aren’t we proud of our wounds, your wounds and mine?

WILFRED WALKS FORWARD ON RIGHT SIDE OF STAGE. THERE IS STILL A BARRIER BETWEEN THEM.

WILFRED I would have poured my spirit without stint, But not through wounds, not on the cess of war. Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.

GERRIT I was opposite you everywhere, but you did not know it.

WILFRED I am the enemy you killed, my friend. I knew you in this dark, for so you frowned Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed. I parried; but my hands were loath and cold. Let us sleep now .....

END