The Shadow Of The Mole

Chapter 6

Chapter Six

The regiment stood to attention in the freezing cold, listening to Captain Réviron’s pep talk in front of the recaptured field hospital. The Captain outlined in great detail how les Garibaldiens, the Italian volunteers who fought along with the French forces, had ultimately pushed the advancing Germans back. Listening with half an ear, Lieutenant Denis drifted away into a childhood memory. At nine, he had suffered an attack of diphtheria. It had been a snarling winter like this one. For several weeks, he lay in his bed, looking through the window at the lonely expanse of snow, cut into pieces by black grassland fences, the sky hardly distinguishable from the earth. It was a winter landscape that whispered many things just outside the range of hearing. The disease sharpened his ears, but dulled his reason. If he stared long enough, he saw things moving in that strange, lifeless landscape that seemed glued to the windowpane: things that crept stealthily toward a dead tree in the middle of the pastures, a long way from the woods at his right, as a curtain hiding the faery world he longed for. The stealthy things were furious, but he knew they wouldn’t harm him. His sickness protected him.

When he recovered, young Denis made it his habit not to look out of his window.

Now he stared at the back of a man in the row before him. In the past week, while the French forces were regrouping to fight their way back to the medical compound, The Mole – everyone called him that now – had been ordered to help in the field kitchens and the transport of the wounded. He obeyed every order without speaking, and he was useful enough: his broad, thick-limbed body could tolerate the cold and strenuous efforts. His face remained, as it had been since he was found, an Egyptian death mask. The French non-combatants had been ordered to hide in the few remaining houses of le village de Boureuilles until they could return to the field hospital in Bois de Bolante. As soon as possible, The Mole was to be handed over to the military or civil authorities. He had never given any trouble, but the men exchanged disgruntled glances behind his back. The story of his disinterment had been passed round in whispers, and the unnatural impassivity of his features led to theories which grew wilder by the day.

Was The Mole really suffering from shell shock? Denis had asked himself the question over and over. Was he faking it, hoping to evade a court-martial? Or was it a mild form of catatonia? An infection of the brain or a disorder like epilepsy could cause catatonia in various degrees. Denis knew that untreated catatonia could develop into stupor or dementia praecox. As a medical student, he had seen a patient lying in bed with his head poised inches above the cushion instead of on it. The man held that impossible position for weeks. No wonder that in Medieval times, catatonics were regarded as possessed by the devil. Denis had studied all kinds of ‘alternative’ medicine not included in the university curriculum. It was in his nature to search for holistic cures. He read the Organon of the German physician Hahnemann, a controversial figure who called his art of healing ‘homeopathy’, and was struck by Hahnemann’s conviction that insanity was a result of earlier physical diseases that had to be treated before one could cure the insanity. Denis had asked The Mole if he remembered any physical discomfort and had received a vague answer: there was a pain in his heart region. It felt like he had been stabbed there. However, the skin showed no stabbing wounds. Denis had briefly wondered why The Mole diagnosed the pain as a result of a stabbing, but the demands of repairing the compound were consuming his time and energy, so he hadn’t pursued this train of thought. Even Captain Réviron, who now dismissed the troops, seemed to have forgotten that only a week ago he had deemed it important to establish The Mole’s identity.

The man must have felt that someone was looking at him. He turned his head in that peculiar way of his, like a bolt being moved by a screwdriver. He looked straight at Denis. For one heart-stopping moment, the physician saw the eyes of the one-legged soldier he had lost to the hole in the ice.