Flanders (46 page)

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DECEMBER 1, THE RESERVE TRENCHES

Dear Bobby,

This morning we woke to ice. Frost bloomed in crystal fronds across elephant sheets, across canteens. The air was sharp as cut glass. Icicles hung from sandbags. Cold had stiffened everything. Voices rang in the brittle air. The walls had frozen too hard to collapse.

The Boche artillery was quiet. The morning broke chill and blue, the sun tiny and incredibly bright. The rime at the edges of the shell holes glared so intense that it made my eyes water. In that cold, hard, blinding world, Mugs and Uncle Tim made tea. About noon, high clouds rolled in and I watched the sun’s dazzle filter and go hazy. By dinner, it had started to sleet-angry pellets that stung faces, that rattled against frozen ground.

We lit the brazier and set it in the door of the aid station. Turnhill piled more blankets on our only patient—a boy fighting trench-foot. I dozed sitting up, my angora vest, my greatcoat, and a couple of blankets around me.

The graveyard was empty and the sun was inching lower. In the cobalt shadows the edges of leaves were starting to sparkle. They winked slow and calm, the way lights shimmer far across the prairie or a long ways across the ocean. In the pink last of the sunlight, leaves dropped from the trees, slow as blossoms.

All up and down the steps, the graves were empty and waiting, the flowers in them piled soft and deep. At the end of the path, the calico girl was standing sentry. And right then I knew that nothing, not even the cold, would stop the coming raid. And I knew that the raid would kill us.

I regretted that I had pissed my life away. That I’d hurt Ma, hurt you. That I’d been cruel to people. That I’d cheated and lied.

“It’s love,” she said, and she took my hand. Her power felt like velvet, as easy to fall into as those graves—drowsy and safe.

I woke when a medical officer bustled into the aid station, shaking the sleet from his coat. He asked if we were keeping warm enough. The question was just for polite’s sake, for he didn’t listen to our answers. He went to the boy’s bed and flipped back the blankets.

“Needs amputating.” He ignored the boy’s appalled wail. “Yes. And quickly. Best take him along to hospital. There’s the good chaps. Do get back as soon as you can. We’ll have need of you.”

The medical officer never explained why we would be needed. I didn’t tell my litter chums, either. We put the boy on the litter, wrapped him in three goatskins, his greatcoat, and four blankets. We struggled through the sleet and the knee-deep muck to the rear hospital. The four of us were too cold and exhausted to talk to each other, too tired to comfort the soldier. The boy cried the whole way there.

Travis Lee

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DECEMBER 1, POSTCARD FROM THE RESERVE TRENCHES

Dear Bobby,

This morning I was thinking of you and Ma and that Nativity scene she always puts up, the one where she made the straw dolls of Joseph and Mary, and Pa carved the camels. They were good camels. Too bad he never was no good at people.

Well, merry early Christmas. If anyone asks after me, tell them I’m happy enough. Whatever happens, Bobby, always remember this: I was happy enough.

Travis Lee

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DECEMBER 4, THE RESERVE TRENCHES

Dear Bobby,

They shouldn’t have ordered us forward in December. In England, families are getting ready for Christmas. They’re buying presents, wrapping them, hiding them away. Mothers and wives will send gifts soon. No way to stop it. No way to get the word back quick enough. Gifts will arrive here to this desolate place, all wrapped in pretty paper.

Mugs and Turnhill and Uncle Tim and me made it back in time to move up with the company to the front lines. The sleet had ended. Granular drifts of it shone in the morning like snow. It nestled in the crannies of shell holes. It smoothed the angular scars of the soil.

Wading our way to the front, over our puttees in mud, a Boche Aviatik buzzed us. The bastard strafed us, too. It was more a scare and a nuisance, for the gunner had poor aim. But every time he came thundering along our line, a cry went up: “Have a bloody care!” and “Not cricket!” Finally, to the cheers of the company, a trio of BEs came flying out of the clouds and chased the Aviatik away.

We slogged on. At dusk we reached the front trenches. The Boche had put up an observation balloon, but the BEs returned to shoot it down. I saw them darting like bright wasps around a bulbous gray mushroom, saw the balloon shudder with the shots, watched it collapse in on itself and fall slow.

All the rest of that day the officers went up and down the trenches, ordering men to blacken their faces, ordering jangling metal to be taken off uniforms. Shocked complaint raced down the trench like water down a flash-flooded creek. “Raid, is it? Senseless command!” and “They’ll bloody kill us!”

We were going, anyway. The British artillery started pounding the Boche around dinner time. Mugs and me loaded up with extra field dressings. When the medical officer wasn’t looking, Turnhill packed a scalpel. Uncle Tim rounded up sutures just in case we’d need to leave part of the soldier behind.

The sleet had started again by the time our company went over the top. The four of us watched them slip away. When we climbed the bags after them, we saw that the night was dark but for mortar flashes. They lit No Man’s Land in pulses of light. Scenes were arrested in snap photographs: the tightness of Mug’s jaw; Turnhill’s slack exhaustion; a crowd of soldiers moving far ahead.

We went, the four of us sinking through the thin crust of ice and into the soft ground below. We slipped. We fell. Sleet blinded me. It rattled against my helmet. The dark horizon came alive in a sparkle of machine-gun fire-a loud and deadly chatter. Ahead of us, soldiers started to scream.

Near me, a loud grunt. The litter lurched. A mortar flashed, and I saw Turnhill on the ground.

“Take him!” Uncle Tim cried.

Mugs was already bending over. “Done for!” he shouted back.

I knelt. Shells ripped the air over our heads. The ground quaked. Flares burst, lit No Man’s Land in lime-green light. I looked up, saw three bright stars above me illuminating the powdery fall of sleet. Below me, Turnhill was dying, his chest seeping darkness, his lips bubbling black.

“Bloody hell! Take him!” Uncle Tim shouted.

We had rolled him onto the litter and were carrying him away when the litter jerked fiercely. It nearly tore itself out of my grip.

Mugs said in a tight voice, “Fains I!” and I saw that he’d been shot in the leg.

Somewhere in the green night machine guns rattled. Uncle Tim grabbed Mugs by his coat and dragged him into a nearby shell hole. I took hold of Turnhill and pulled him down with me, too.

Mugs was cussing without rhyme nor reason. His foot was turned the wrong way and his face was rigid with pain. “Bastards,” he was saying. “Bloody, flaming, ruddy alleymen. The lot of ’em can kiss me bum.”

Uncle Tim crawled to me. “I needs to get him back.” He nodded in the direction the assault had stalled. “A balls, innit.”

“Yeah,” I said, Turnhill motionless and bleeding in my arms.

Uncle Tim unbuttoned Turnhill’s greatcoat. Below, his goatskin and shirt were soaked with blood. “Belly or liver,” Uncle Tim said.

The hole in his belly was pumping, but slowly. Turnhill’s eyes were closed, his face so restful that I hardly recognized him. He stank of bile. A froth of blood and vomit ran down his mouth to his chin. A dark bubble hung from one nostril.

“Can’t carry both,” Uncle Tim pointed out. Behind him, Mugs’s cussing had wound down into tired groans. “Leave him here?”

“I’m afraid he’ll wake up. Afraid he’ll roll down into the water and drown. I don’t think I could take worrying about that.”

Uncle Tim shrugged, gazed dully out over No Man’s Land, toward the crumps of mortar fire and the company’s shouts for help. “No bloody use, is there?”

Not two men to carry over two hundred. “No goddamned use.”

So Uncle Tim grabbed Mugs and dragged him over the lip of the shell hole. I could hear them for a while as they cussed their way though the green-cast dark.

I cradled Turnhill and rocked him while the sleet stung my face, while mortars pounded, while far over No Man’s Land my company died. More flares went up. They were burning bright when Turnhill’s back knotted.

“It’s all right,” I told him.

Head against my shoulder, he stared, gaze furious with terror. The tendons in his neck stood out. His jaw snapped shut, again, again, as if he was biting back at his pain. I pictured how the calico girl might soothe him, and I tried to do the same. Alone there in the shell hole, I took off his helmet. I wiped the blood and the muck from his face.

“They’re coming for you,” I told him. “I know it.” I could feel the calm of their presence, all of them: Dunleavy and Smoot, McPhearson and Furbush.

“See them yet, Turnhill?”

A shudder ran though him, head to toe. His back arched, tense and rigid. Dark spume oozed from his open lips. With my thumb, I cleaned it away. “You go on now,” I ordered, my voice quiet.

Amid the din of battle, the unearthly peace of that shell hole. A long, tired sigh came up from his depths. When he went, he went beautiful, Bobby—like he was falling to sleep in my arms.

Way over No Man’s Land, soldiers were calling for help. I put Turnhill down and crawled, dodging the muddy spurts of the mortar rounds, skirting shell holes. I found a body with its head and shoulders blown off. Found one of the company’s football players lying in two pieces, his chest still linked to his waist by the pale strings of his guts.

I came across five men retreating. We tumbled into a rank-smelling crater together.

“Order’s to withdraw,” Halcomb said. “ ’Eard it meself. And the man what says no is a liar.”

“You seen Miller?” I asked him.

They looked at me, wide-eyed as owls. “Seen an officer. ’E’s what told us. Best get your arse back to trenches, too.”

The Boche machine gun paused its hammering rhythm. The five were suddenly up over the lip of the shell hole and away. I kept going, came across Goodson and Hutchins dragging Kennebrew behind them. He was face-up and unconscious. Behind him trailed a heavy wake of mud. They’d taken his greatcoat off so that they could manage his sodden weight. Kennebrew was dying of cold, I figured. His belly wound wasn’t bleeding much anymore.

The two waved me on, yelling, “Withdraw! Orders to withdraw!”

“Are there more wounded?”

“Raid’s all phut! Done what we could, but san fairy ann!” They dragged the dying Kennebrew with them.

Driggers came running fast as he could through the muck. I grabbed the lieutenant by his gun belt as he tried to get past. “Are there wounded?”

He looked at me, incredulous. He tried to slap my hands away. “Idiot. Of course there’s wounded.”

“Where?” I shook him.

Emma Gee chattered. The two of us hit the ground, crawled to a nearby corpse for shelter. In the waning light of the flares, I checked, saw that the dead man was Sergeant Norwood.

“Blast this mud!” Driggers was shouting. “Can’t go forward, can’t bloody go back. Done for from the very beginning!” A few rounds slammed into Norwood’s corpse, made it shiver as if he was feeling the cold.

“Where are they?”

He pointed left. “Three men down in a shell hole. One of our padres, too.” The machine gun quieted, and Driggers was gone.

I left the shelter of Norwood’s corpse, came across a boy whose name I didn’t know. He was bleeding from the arm, but still moving fine. “You seen three men in a shell hole with a padre?” I asked.

He shook his head.

“Was it O’Shaughnessy?”

He waved me off with his good hand and kept going. I crawled on toward the Boche trenches. Some of our company had nearly made it there. They hung along the Boche wire where they had fallen, like coyote carcasses on a fence.

I came across a shell hole, saw Runyon lying at the edge of the stinking half-frozen water. Sleet coated his face but for the cross that had been stroked on his forehead. Further away, two heads stuck above the slime—Tower and Vining—their faces glassy, both wearing the intent blank stares of corpses. Not far from them, a reaching hand.

I inched down the slippery incline, down to where the mud had been plowed by clawing fingers. I took hold of the wrist and pulled. O’Shaughnessy surfaced, his face shattering the pool’s varnish of ice. Rusty water spilled from his open mouth. His purple stole lay, stained and limp, over his shoulders.