The Discovery Of Slowness (14 page)

For ten whole years he relegated the most important decision, the decision concerning his life, to his sea-chest. That time became almost too long.

I
n the mud, beside the broken gun-mount, someone woke up. He raised his head, moved his fingers, then turned his hands on their wrists, his arms on his shoulders. Gingerly he began to touch all over his body. In the middle of his forehead he found a bleeding hole, and another in the back of his head. His ribs and one shoulder, too, throbbed fiercely with pain. He couldn't move his legs.

For a while he just sat there, staring at his boots, watching them lie so incredibly still. Then he pulled himself up on the wreckage of the gun-mount, just a little, and tried to look around.

Just a short distance away in the trampled-down swamp lay a dead Englishman, a few steps on an American and then another Englishman. All their faces were contorted by exertion and rage; the American in his last effort had raised his sabre in his fist high over his head.

At first the lame man attempted to clamber up the small embankment so somebody could see him. But the thin, grassy shrubs broke off too easily; they gave no support. He took a breath and looked at the sky. Above round little puffs – possibly still the remnants of gun smoke – appeared sharply edged grey patches of clouds. The sun remained hidden.

All around him he heard the moans of the few who were still alive. Nobody answered his call. The soil was powdery on top of the knoll, trampled loose by the boots of the attacking English who were now lying there and of the Americans in their counterattack.

The noise of battle could still be heard a few miles off. The lame man began to scoop out holes with his hands to pull himself up
the slope. He soon noticed that there was no point in holding on to corpses. They gave way and slithered down, taking the climber with them. It was cold and seemed to grow colder. Mid-January; then, too, the loss of blood. Something was on fire nearby; now and then his breathing was throttled by a fat, sooty cloud.

Far away, a man was walking, tall and slightly bent. For one long moment it seemed he was dressed in white. His movements were clumsy and groping. He stumbled again and again over debris and dead bodies, even trod painfully upon a wounded man's chest.

Now his voice could be heard. ‘Blind!' he shouted. ‘I'm blind! Can anybody hear me?'

‘Come here!' shouted the lame man.

It took a long time for the blind man to come close. His mouth was smiling, but the top half of his face looked red, as if paint had been slapped on it. He said, ‘Can you lead me out of here?'

‘I can't move very well. My legs. But at least I can see.'

‘Then I'll carry you. Just give me directions.'

‘Too much honour,' said the lame man. The blind man heaved him on his back.

‘Two points to port. More. Now straighten. Steady as she goes. Right.'

This new form of locomotion had to be practised. As a first step they fell off the slope the lame man had spent an hour climbing. There they lay.

‘I didn't see that peg.'

The blind man's mouth smiled, even though it pointed in the wrong direction. ‘The blind carrying the lame – what do you expect?'

That's what war on land is made of: arduous lying and crawling on damp ground, constant getting down and getting up again in various positions, none of which allowed a wider perspective. It was a situation without any freedom. Sailors in a land war – what misery! On that the lame man and the blind man agreed. They had had enough. There had been that explosion in the ammunition wagon. Or the way the American schooner on the
Mississippi had sneaked up on the British camp and shot it up, and how the
Carolina
itself was then blasted into the sky. ‘I saw a burning glove flying in the air. I'm afraid it was the hand itself.' They had helped to dig the canal between the Bayou Calatan and the Mississippi, had commanded the open boats with which they tried to attack the American gunships. They had rowed thirty-six miles against the current by night, only to arrive in daylight – a fine target for the marksmen on the other side. Why had he got through all that without a scratch, and what for? Today they had moved on New Orleans. The battle was lost. Anyone who might still be alive wouldn't be for long.

It didn't matter which one of these two had endured worse horrors. To find a way into the open land was the name of the game, even if it was the desert itself. There was still more life there than here. To find some rest meant remaining in one place, anywhere, and never returning. Neither to help nor to be helped – just to get away from here as best as one could.

The lame man gazed over the top of the blind man's head into the swaying, bouncing landscape and began to talk about himself. ‘I'm twenty-nine years old. Ten years of that I spent in war service. The Netherlands, Brazil, the West Indies. I've done everything wrong. At the same time, I knew better. But it'll be different. There's still time.'

They were now on a passable road. The blind man marched along and said nothing. He didn't even give his name. But he seemed to want to listen.

‘As early as Trafalgar I was losing sight of myself, and then more and more. Yet all I wanted was to get rid of that trembling. I didn't want to appear cowardly or stupid any more – never again! That was wrong.'

No answer.

‘A head can mislead the person who belongs to it. It can be a traitor head and so spoil everything for a long time. But I believe one can survive even long-term mistakes. – More to starboard. Always stem against the turn or you'll go in circles.'

The blind man kept silent, corrected his course, and strode on.

‘I now speak of seeing; forgive me. But it all hangs together because of that. There are two kinds: an eye for details, which discovers new things, and a fixed look that follows only a ready-made plan and speeds it up for the moment. If you don't understand me, I can't say it any other way. Even these sentences gave me a lot of trouble.'

The blind man didn't say a word, but he seemed to think.

‘In battle only the fixed look is possible – nothing else. It assaults, and it's set like a trap for three or four possibilities. It works only when one must harm others in order to save oneself. If it becomes a habit, one's rhythm gets lost, one's own style of walking is gone.'

For some time now the lame man had been leaning against a tree stump while the blind man rested.

‘I've become addicted, addicted to war. Did you say anything, blind man? Did you say “slave”?'

The blind man crouched down and remained silent. The lame one continued, ‘I'm getting confused. I see a column rising from the sea, a tower of water. I see black before me. We loved Nelson. He forced us out of our ordinary pace and increased our rate of fire. We would have never won––'

‘Where are we?' he heard the blind man ask.

‘At home at the shore,' he heard himself reply. ‘Behind Skegness on the German Sea. Gibraltar Point.' He closed his eyes and slid to the ground.

He still heard the blind man saying something, but he could no longer make it out.

‘He's much better now,' said the surgeon of the
Bedford
. He was satisfied. ‘I've never seen anything this crazy. A hole in front and a hole at the back. Yet the bullet didn't pass through his head, only under the skin along the skull, clear all round. It's something for science. You were presumed dead, Mr Franklin.'

The wounded man opened his mouth. Whether he had understood was hard to determine. But that didn't matter to the doctor.

‘They were about to bury you. We're only puzzled by one
thing: how you got to the shore in the first place – and so far away from the landing-dock …?'

John Franklin whispered something: ‘A blind man …'

‘What did you say?'

‘You haven't found a blind man?'

‘I don't understand you, sir.'

‘A man dressed in white who was blind?'

The surgeon was startled and looked worried. ‘There was no body near you, not even a dead one. It's been a few days, of course. Perhaps you have only—'

‘Then I'm not paralysed, either?'

‘Paralysed? You moved your legs in your fever as if you wanted to cross an entire continent. We had to tie you down.'

‘What ship are we on?'

‘Your own.'

Franklin was silent.

‘The
Bedford
, Mr Franklin. You're second lieutenant here. You are Mr Franklin!'

The wounded man turned to him with large eyes.

‘I know who I am. Only the name was a little strange to me.'

Then he fell asleep again. The doctor went above to report to the captain.

Peace. Only the medal for bravery still remained as a reminder of the failed attack on New Orleans. And daily work … for that was now more arduous. So many were missing.

The battle, they said, had been superfluous. Unfortunately, the news of a long-since-concluded peace had arrived too late. But what did ‘too late' mean? They hadn't waited for it long enough. That's what it meant.

The ship was now on her way to England. During the first weeks they still talked about their defeat. Five and a half thousand British against four thousand Americans. But in blindly running against them, the British lost two thousand men at the start, while the Americans, thanks to their secure fortifications, lost only thirteen, and those only because they broke out and wanted to become heroes.

What Franklin had to say about this was amply expressed by his silence. To talk about the senselessness of a battle was to attribute sense to war itself. Then, too, he was still very weak. ‘A few hidden deserters and some contraband,' one of them said, ‘were not worth a war with the Americans.' That person could actually imagine aims which might have been worth it.

‘We shouldn't have set Washington and Baltimore on fire. The Americans are relatives, after all.' War was good, only not against relatives.

‘If only Pakenham, that raving-mad general, hadn't been there!'

‘If the Americans hadn't been such good shots! How did they come by that, actually?'

‘They shouldn't have been given their independence.'

Franklin groaned and turned to the wall.

‘He's still weak,' he heard them say.

Three weeks later he was on duty again. Now he was what he had once been, only even more distinctly. He breathed differently; his body was at rest; his mind was no longer out to cover up, to betray, or to impose its will.

‘He's become different again,' they said, and watched him closely. And John himself thought, I'm not afraid any more. Can I be affected at all? That question almost called up a new fear.

The captain was a Scotsman named Walker, a warrior through and through, emaciated, nervous, but always in a grimly happy mood when events began to tumble over one another. He and Pasley, the first officer, were models of brevity and precision. They lived on quickness the way others lived on tea, rum, tobacco, or good words. Their manner to John was outwardly correct yet merciless. In vain he had tried his best. In any event, he had learned a great deal at this price. When they spoke to him it was always either a message or an order. It never contained the slightest commentary. When asked to repeat, they kept the original wording to prevent confusion. But though they already saved much time with their brevity, they tried to save still more with their quick tongues. John had been their favourite victim.
They set traps for him every day with their rapid sentences and incomplete messages – big and small traps. The least of them had been to let him do things that had long since been taken care of. ‘But I told you that, Mr Franklin.' And they harassed him with their impatience when he asked them to repeat what they had just said.

But that was over now. All at once John was strong enough to bear the impatience of others, and with that the game was at an end. He moved at his own pace. He gave orders the way a carpenter drives nails, each straight and deep until it held. He paused where he wanted to, and not where others interrupted him. He renounced the fixed look and the snarl, even when things got tight.

It was not a comfortable voyage home. Many times breezes turned into storms, and just before they got to the Azores the shout went up, ‘Fire in the stern!' Each time, John Franklin was the officer on watch.

He had long since realised that there were better officers than he, for he knew his profession intimately. He lacked the capacity for fast action, and without quick, alert friends he got into difficulties. But suddenly he had these friends.

‘Check if the watch is complete, Mr Warren. You can do that faster.' John was satisfied that Midshipman Warren did what he was told at the required speed. He depended on others and carefully selected whom to rely on for what occasion.

‘Things aren't any easier for him than before,' Captain Walker said through his teeth, ‘but suddenly he has pulled himself together. He knows what he can and what he can't do. That's half the job.'

‘But he's lucky, too,' remarked Pasley. Then they ceased to make comments for several weeks. And looked for other victims.

Peace lay ahead, but it also meant poverty. For unemployed officers there was only half-pay, not to speak of now non-existent prize money. For petty officers and crews there wasn't a penny. And in England there was want.

‘We don't have a chance,' grumbled the paymaster.

A pause; a thoughtful silence. ‘Then we should take it,' joked another.

‘We ourselves are the chance.' The listeners turned their heads: Franklin. Not that they had understood him. But if anybody considered carefully what he said, it was Franklin. So they still thought about it for a little while. He always had the courage to look stupid long enough to be smart – you would do well to copy that. In other respects, too, he had a tough skull. No bullet could get through it. God surely still had plans for Franklin. They helped him where they could.