Hare was no Tartar. In truth, after a winter in Tapio’s company, I was more than a little unmanned by the administrator’s earnest, open nature. And in a stroke of good fortune, Eberhard took to Hare immediately, and Hare to him. Eberhard did not grant license freely or liberally. He had somehow already contrived to bite the finger of a miner who dangled a piece of meat in a rude manner, and to chew through Mr. Grundle’s leather braces. The dog might have been destined for the soup pot, with nothing I could do to save him, if he hadn’t swiftly ingratiated himself with Hare and been granted total amnesty.
So it was that I found myself engaged in such odd tasks as mending Hare’s clothing, and conveying his dinner wishes to Gibblet, who always claimed to have known them already, and serving private meals, and making sure the claret and brandy and sherry and small beer and gin were stocked, inventoried, and secure, and drawing baths, and preparing his shaving utensils, and, though he preferred to shave himself, periodically shaving him when his hands were convulsed in violent tremor. At those times he wished to remain unseen, but he ushered me into his confidence nonetheless.
Most of the camp had seen Hare’s tremors at one time or another. They came too frequently to stay hidden. But with the assistance of Samuel Gibblet, a fiction was successfully perpetuated that Hare drank too much. He certainly did drink, and everyone knew it, but rarely to any visible effect, and never before the completion of the workday. He felt too keenly his responsibility for the miners’ lives. That he might be called upon at any second to act in a quick and decisive manner was something he approached with gravity.
The reality was that Lt. Matthew Hare had suffered, or continued to suffer, from neurasthenia, or “shell shock,” as they used to call it. I did not hear the full story until later that summer, but bits and pieces began to emerge after only three weeks in his employ. It always came out very casually.
He first mentioned his war experience, coming to it by a circuitous route, while I was shaving him. I knew that Gibblet had occasionally shaved him—probably even when Travers was still with us—because Gibblet told me himself. He said it was due to the “Leftenant” having taken more than his share of grog the night previous. This was his usual line. But Gibblet was busy with his new responsibilities now, and the direct result, with Hare shaving himself, was that the lieutenant’s face bore a constellation of gashes and rents. The men whispered about it, but always good-naturedly, empathizing as they did with Hare’s apparent weakness for alcohol.
One morning I was looking away, doing other things and attempting to conceal my concern—I didn’t have it in me to be the scolding hen that so many stewards become—when Hare caught my eye in the mirror. His hand held the razor, vibrating like a bird’s wing under his lathered chin. He seemed to reach a conclusion of some kind, and returned the razor to its aluminum tray with a light clang. His reflection offered a rueful smile—part embarrassed, part amused.
“Ormson,” he said. “I don’t suppose you would be a good chap and, well—” He mimed shaving with his unruly hand.
“Of course, sir,” I said, and hurried over.
But when I picked up the razor I was seized with great trepidation. The tortured moonscape of my own face had kept me from a proper grooming regimen. I could not draw a blade over the scar tissue without a painful, nauseous sensation, so I’d let my beard grow haphazardly, hoping in vain that the patches of wiry black would eventually become so wild and woolen that they might cover the misshapen undulations of skin where hair would never grow again. This had the effect of making me look even less appealing, and in subsequent days I learned to employ a small pair of scissors.
“Sir,” I said, “I must warn you that mine is not the most practiced hand.”
Hare laughed. “It cannot be worse than mine, Ormson.”
So I scraped away with deliberation in what was likely a disgrace to proper stewards everywhere, but I did not cut him once, and from then on, whenever his nerves were jittery, I was called upon to repeat the endeavor.
After several mornings like this, Hare began to relax and grow thoughtful while he lay under the knife. I recall that I was shaving his upper lip—his mouth was pulled down in that unmistakable Munchian leer that men make in order to tighten the skin—when he asked me whether I knew Siegfried Sassoon.
“A German, sir? I don’t think so. Was he in Longyear?”
Hare toned amusement in his chest but kept himself very still. “No, Ormson, not a German. A poet. An English poet.”
“Ah, I’m afraid not. I know little of poets, English or otherwise.”
“Yes, well, I doubt his fame has spread far outside the confines of our humble empire.”
“Is he very famous among the English, then?”
“Among most men, no, I should say not. But among soldiers—thinking soldiers, that is—his name is spoken with some reverence.”
“He writes of war?”
“Indeed. He was a soldier himself. A highly decorated one at that. Renowned for his bravery in the field. Until he grew disillusioned with the motivation and administration of the whole bloody enterprise, and had the dreadful nerve to say so.”
“Is it so very wrong to say so?”
Hare looked up at me skeptically, searching my face. “Well, yes, Ormson. Traditionally soldiers who don’t wish to fight are killed on the spot, or else court-martialed, in which case they may be killed later. It’s much the same. I suppose I shouldn’t be amazed to find you so ignorant of war, but then Swedes are a peculiar lot—often declaring themselves neutral and then sneaking around to help the enemy. You understand, Ormson, that I cast no personal aspersion?”
“No offense is taken, sir. So you mean to say that this Bassoon is dead? Shot for his honorable resistance to the meaningless expenditure of life?”
“On the contrary, Ormson. Siegfried Sassoon is very much alive. But it was a close shave, if you’ll forgive me. His tract, called ‘Finished with the War: A Soldier’s Declaration,’ was read aloud in the House of Commons last summer and published throughout England. I have it by heart: ‘I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust. I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.’ How do you like that, Ormson? What forthrightness! What courage!”
At this point—I had finished shaving and toweling his face—Hare stood and began to pace the dirt floor of Clara Ville with a wild energy.
I stood uncertainly by the mirror. “So the English government forgave him on the basis of his gentlemanly qualities?”
“No, indeed! They would have court-martialed him were it not for his friend Robert Graves, another great war poet—I don’t suppose you know him, either? I thought not—who campaigned on his behalf and had him declared mentally ill.”
“I’m not so sure that signifies friendship,” I observed.
“Oh, but it was,” Hare said. “Death, or a short stay at Craiglockhart. Which would you choose?”
“I don’t know of Craiglockhart.”
“Right you are. It is a psychiatric facility, in Edinburgh, for those whose battle scars are not so, shall we say, immediately evident. Those who find that all the senseless carnage has lodged itself in their minds, and they cannot remove it no matter how hard they try, unless with a bullet.” Hare’s mood shifted with a dizzying abruptness and he sat down. A cloud seemed to pass before him and he looked at nothing in the room. He went on: “It is also none other than the place where I myself was committed, nearly two years before Sassoon’s internment. Yes, old Craiglockhart. A comfortable enough place to go quietly mad.”
I attempted to steer the narrative away from more painful subjects. “So you were still there when this Sassoon arrived?”
“No, no.” He shook his head, chuckling slightly. “I was here, meeting you, the trapper’s apprentice. Remember?”