The Walking Dead

27 July 1938

I have been shot by a sniper.

I knew nothing.

I felt a weight hit me. A hammer blow. I was lifted up, then thrown down. There was no pain, not at first, only numbness.

Our officer had warned of the sniper three days ago. Then the sniper shot and killed a boy from Wolverhampton. He was not a friend — I have none left — but a good lad, and had been a factory machinist before he came to join the International Brigade volunteers, was always cheerful. He was going back to the latrine from the front-line trench when he was hit in the back of his head. But the sniper had not fired for three days. I had forgotten him. I was sent back to the rear to bring forward food, and there was a place where the parapet was lower, where I should have ducked to my knees, but then it would have been hard to carry all the food for our platoon. I did not duck.

I was hit in the chest.

Dear Enid, other men — some I have never spoken to, all to whom I have given no love — risked their own lives to come and carry me back to the second and third trenches, and safety.

I have been taken to a field hospital. At first, I was carried by two men, one holding my arms and one my legs. That was when the pain came.

Further back, I was put on to a cart that a donkey pulled. If I had been an officer, or a commissar, I would have been brought to the field hospital by lorry. I went all the way, several miles, on the cart.

This is a charnel house, it is a place of Hades. I think it was a place like this where Ralph died.

I must be thankful that I am able to write.

I am waiting to be examined. The doctors, one is Austrian and another is Polish, have a process that is called triage. Ralph told me about triage when the wounded were taken back from Suicide Hill. When the doctors come to me they will make an assessment of my condition. They decide, in triage. if I will live, or might live, or not. The priority goes to those who will live, and if they have the time and opportunity they will treat those who might live, and they put a black spot of dye on the forehead of those who will not live. There are many casualties here, and I believe it will be a long time before they reach me. A nurse — I think she was French — has put a new field dressing on my wound.

It is difficult to write. I am weaker, and breathing is harder. The effort of moving the pencil on the page is almost beyond me.

I think of the sniper. He did not choose me. It was an opportunity, my chest visible for two or three seconds where the parapet was low. I chose him, presented myself. But for those two or three seconds he would have seen my face, magnified in the lens of his rifle sight. When he saw me go down, did he rejoice? Or was shooting me meaningless to him? I do not know.

I cannot hate him.

He is a soldier, as am I. I do not think that, with my rifle, I have ever harmed an enemy, but I have tried.

I have thought of him…Perhaps he is a good man, perhaps he has a family, perhaps he has no hate for me…Perhaps, already, he has forgotten the image of my face.

Our officer said — when the boy from Wolverhampton was hit. — that the sniper was likely to be German. I think of him as being as far from home as lam.

For now, dear Enid, I cannot write more.