The Polo Player returned last night. That, at least, is familiar: while he might occasionally take a sabbatical to ride through some other man's nightmares, he always comes back to me, like a bad penny or a blood red moon, to remind me of my greatest aspiration. My greatest failure.
I arrived in Afghanistan in 1878, fresh from medical school, with the formalin stench of the dissection theater still clinging to my coat. Wrapped in a blanket of youthful idealism, I had turned my back on the seedy politics of the hospital and the blustering prestige of the university, choosing instead to dedicate my art and skill to nothing less than the advancement of mankind.
To my starry young eyes, the outbreak of hostilities in Afghanistan was a shining opportunity for a grand crusade. What better way, I imagined, to carry the torch of civilization than by seeing to the needs of her Majesty's soldiers as they fought the depredations and perversion of the Emir of Afghanistan? Instead of an angel's flaming sword, I would wield my scalpels and saws, anaesthetics and cauterizing irons. I would show the infidel the carrot of civilization, even as Britannia's armies dispensed a stick to punish their barbarism.
What dreams I had! What hubris!
My first battle was Charasiab. I prepared my field hospital with the zeal of a true believer. The morning of the battle, our rudimentary clinic was stocked with gleaming rows of white rolled bandages and polished instruments. The stretchers were assembled and waiting to be deployed, the cauterizing irons cleaned and ready to be heated. When time permitted, I watched the battle in the distance, anticipating my part in the great drama.
At first, it was an orderly affair: General Roberts' Kabul Field Force was arranged in precise ranks. Boots polished, rifles gleaming, bayonets set.
Within an hour, the field was bedlam.
Roberts' forces attacked the Afghans from both flanks. A peculiar rattling gunfire, which I later learned was Gatling guns, decimated the enemy's ranks. But soon the Afghans moved too close for the guns, and infantrymen from both sides engaged in close quarters, trading blows and kicks, bayonet strikes and saber slashes. Soldiers in English red coats clubbed their opponents with rifles, like prehistoric troglodytes squabbling over some scrap of meat. Everywhere I looked, there was stabbing, gouging, rolling in the dirt. Gleaming uniforms reduced to dust-covered rags and men reduced to monsters.
Then the Polo Player came.
Watching him wade into the melee on horseback, my breath caught. Red coat aflame in the sunlight. Gold buttons gleaming. Man and beast fused in matchless, fluid form. Astride his steed, pith helmet in place, he appeared almost a vision, the platonic ideal of the English soldier.
He raised his saber like a polo mallet, swooping it down in a perfect off-side swing. And the ball flew down the field.
I stood for a moment, stock still. Then I vomited.
*
According to official reports, casualties were light at Charasiab, but in the surgery the difference between light and heavy casualties was academic. My boots slid across the blood-soaked floor as I rushed from table to table, extracting bullets, suturing wounds, clamping vessels, sawing bones. Later, after Maiwand and Kandahar, I realized just how easy was my entry into this new world. But that day, I imagined myself born again in a wave of blood and feces, tattered flesh and shredded bandages.
My soul recoiled at this bloody new world, but something within me thrived there. A cool, pragmatic force took charge—efficient, skilled, and lacking in any measure of empathy.
We say "I shall never do this," or "I couldn't do that." But then one finds oneself sawing through the femur of a screaming man, or choosing one soldier to live and another to die. And you realize that you can do things you never imagined possible, make choices that you hoped you would never have to make.
And then it becomes easier.
I'd had glimpses of this side of myself before. In medical school, I was routinely required to demonstrate my nascent surgical skills upon cadavers. Usually, this was easy—most of our subjects were of advanced age or had lived hard lives, and it was easy to ignore the divine hand that had crafted these bodies. One day, however, I removed the shroud on my table to reveal the body of a comely young lass, rather than the world-worn and shriveled former horseman whose cadaver I had faced the day before.
I had been proud of the surgical detachment that I had shown in the operating theater, the jaded eye that ignored bodies and saw only wounds and diseases, organs and bones. But now it was gone.
My breath caught.
Archibald Bell, my anatomy professor was standing at my side. "Young women, aged approximately 20 years. Death by strangulation," he stated, as if he was reciting the day's specials at the tavern across the street.
My eyes traveled the length and breadth of her body. Her young breasts, firm and pale. Her smooth flesh. Her colorless lips.
"Well, get to it, lad," Bell ordered.
My blade hovered above her sternum. I took a breath and closed my eyes. I felt something shift. When I opened them, I was no longer gazing at some paragon of God's divine artistry. It was a body, nothing more. I made the first incision and began my autopsy.
In Afghanistan, that detachment seized hold of me for ever-increasing periods, a process about which I felt a certain ambivalence. The rank and file, however, didn't share my concern. Where I saw myself becoming something less than a man, they grew convinced that I was an angel of mercy—a position that was reinforced during Maiwand, when I worked for three days without respite, burying my doubts and confusion in the bloody, sticky work of the surgery as the cold, efficient butcher inside me took charge.
But could an angel of mercy close his ears to the screams of the wounded as he sawed through their bones or held cauterizing irons to their oozing flesh? Could an angel ignore the entreaties that he give just one more dose of morphine? Could an angel walk blithely past the limbs stacked outside the hospital? The corpses piled like cordwood?
How many times did I save a young man, only to deliver him to a future that was brutally diminished? No, if I was an angel, I was an angel of death. If I was a doctor, I was an obstetrician, attending the birth of new lives that would be measured in shortened horizons and dashed dreams.
If I was a man, I was half a man, no longer capable of human emotions.
9 August 1893
Hyde is hiding.
It has been 11 days since last he haunted my dreams. Has he gone away, or is he just biding his time?
Last night, Collins visited me in my sleep.
He was an infantryman who lost his legs at the siege of the Sherpur Cantonment. He begged me for death; when I refused, he tried to remove the stitches I had sewn into his stumps. Three times, I thwarted him, until I was forced to tie his arms to his bed to forestall further attempts at sabotage. Exhausted, he finally gave in, allowing his body to begin the laborious process of healing as he quietly sobbed for his mother.
Two days later, he appeared to have regained his senses. While somewhat apathetic toward his circumstances, he seemed lucid, and was even willing to discuss his future after his return to Britain. Convinced that he had resigned himself to his convalescence, I untied his arms, letting him regain the use of his hands. That afternoon, I found him in his hospital bed, his skin gray. His arms, opened by the scalpel that had fallen to the floor after he used it.
Exhausted and numb, I closed my mind to the horror and cleaned the scalpel.
The religion of my youth tells me that Collins was a suicide, forever denied entry to the gates of heaven. What punishment must then accrue to me, the man who forced that decision upon him? Was I an angel for Collins?
14 August 1893
Hyde has left no further missives in my journal. I am thankful for the silence, but also suspicious. I imagine him lying in wait, anticipating my next move. I feel his eyes upon me.
Lanyon continues to distance herself from me. I can only imagine the horror she faces, the confusion and hopelessness as she is torn between her dedication to our marriage and her fear of Hyde's assaults upon her body. How betrayed she must feel! How terrorized by the fiend in my flesh who relentlessly torments her.
She watches me every night, always ensuring that I go to bed before her. Is she trying to protect herself? Does she hope that, with her husband asleep, she will be safe from Hyde?
17 August 1893
I dream:
The boy is young. Thin. Clad in dirty rags.
I try to turn away, but I can't.
He is crying.
Screaming.
