Good Hope Road: A Novel (21 page)

Gaillard and I cleared the debris, using the mess kit that had belonged to one of the men to scrape his brains from the clay walls.

Eyes forward, fixed on the boots just ahead. Now clearly visible, every creased, hobnailed detail in this striated light of the stars. Now but a silhouette in the dark. Now a man stands, flush with thought and word and memory, and just like that, he is gone, and what is left of him fits tidily into his spoon.

We press forward, along these roads of muffled sound. Just another patrol, on another night-trodden way. Somewhere a mirror must lie tilted, pitching us into this underbelly, nightmare world. Where the sun still rises and sets, and the moon steps out pale and gleaming, but nothing else remains the same. Storm clouds of dust and earth, spliced by the lightning flashes of the guns. Shrapnel like steel-winged birds, and then the rain, a terrible rain of shredded uniforms and glowing metal, of cartridge casings and wet, human flesh. On the horizon, the blackened silhouettes of tree stumps stand in mute and damning judgment.

What valour in this? What glory, what rationality to sitting about in trenches at the mercy of the shells, firing blindly at an enemy we cannot see?

The patrols are almost a relief. Almost.

We went on one yesterday, through the countryside that adjoins our sector. Inching across unknown ground, through what grass and cover we can find, nerves on fire from the peculiar strain of listening for the slightest rasp, the smallest of movements that would give away a Boche patrol, similarly advancing from the other side of the wire. We hear a rustling up ahead and freeze mid-crawl. I press my chin closer into the earth, trying desperately to see ahead. I kick myself for not using more of the charcoal that was passed around before we left, Obadaiah grinning as I administered it to neck and pasty face.

‘Lord, but I thank mah mammy and pappy,’ he said, exaggerating both diction and piousness, ‘for this here coloured skin.’

Jackass. I start to smile at the memory, but it is a small and temporary rictus, my mind jerking back to the present, every ounce of concentration on the soft but unmistakable rustling of something moving towards us. My hands are slippery; I wipe them on the grass.

Gaillard appears to my right, crawling carefully backwards. ‘Wait for the signal,’ he whispers, and is gone, inching towards the next man.

The sound grows louder. I lift my head and now I see them, can actually make out shapes moving through the darkness towards us. ‘Why aren’t they taking cover—’ but before I can fully formulate the thought, ‘
Feu a volonté
!’ It’s the signal we’re waiting for. A surge of adrenaline as brute instinct takes over. Fire at will, and I squeeze off shot after shot, everything seeming to melt away until the only thing left is the rage pulsing through every inch of my skin, get the enemy, get them, get that bastard Boche before he can get me.

The shapes scatter, and now I hear it, a bewildered crying.

‘Stop your firing, stop. Halt!’

The sound, I recognise it, it isn’t crying, but
lowing
. I crawl towards a shape lying crumpled on the ground, a darker black than the shadows around it. I know already, even before I reach it: it’s a cow. Only a damn cow, part of some small, abandoned herd that has wandered in between the lines.

Hark, glorious warrior. Hail, valiant soldier. I thought I had felled a man, but instead have shot up a cow. I don’t know whether to feel relief, or disgust, or marvel at the absurdity.

Gaillard wants to haul the carcass back to the trenches – it’s petite enough he says that he can manage it. For an instant I almost think he can, Brother Strong Heart Mighty Oak, but we’re ordered to return at once – machine gunfire has started to come our way, and it won’t be long before this spot becomes a hellhole.

All the way, the memory sticks in my throat, sharp and bitter, of the killing rage that took a hold as I squeezed the trigger, the cold-blooded satisfaction as my bullets struck home.

We make it back to our trenches. ‘We could’ve feasted on steak frites tomorrow,’ Gaillard says bitterly. ‘Imagine – fresh beef for once, not from a can.’

The clouds lift. The road glints, white as bone. Eyes forward, itchy finger, trigger-happy. Shadow, mirror-image world, where in one instant a man stands whole and in the next, a grease of pink mist is all that remains.

In the end, perhaps this is all there is, the thin, dark spaces between tendon and sinew, this emptiness through which we march as if in a dream. The tread of our boots rousing the beast, luring it from its lair. Sprung from the madness that lies within each of us, it waits beyond an unseen corner, swinging its steel-tipped tail. We march forward, along these ghosted roads, like ants along the gleaming white of its ribs.

November 1914

e been sittin’ in cold water so long, my buttocks been turned to ice. Still, it do some good. The cold seems to slow down the cooties, or maybe it just that my skin so ashy and frozen, they can’t get none of their devil-spawn teeth into it. My legs feel heavy as iron. I stretch, tryin’ to ease the kinks from them, and my shiftin’ ’bout in the slush make a cracklin’ sound, like a spoon breakin’ through a snowball cone. James jerks awake. The white of an eye as he stare at the parapet but ain’t nothin’ more to hear or see and he relax once more. A few others cuss sleepily at being woken. Karan pull that dressin’ robe of his tighter ’bout hisself, fussin’ with the ties.

A right grand thing, that robe – all reds and golds, sunset-coloured. Come in a care package for him from London. Karan, he gone and found a bunch of rich old ladies in the newspapers, the sort who been placin’ advertisements ever since the war begun, ’bout wantin’ to sponsor a soldier. They were a little alarmed at first to find he ain’t a Christian, never mind English or French, but they find an excitement in it, writin’ to this dark-skinned foreigner so bravely fightin’ in France. Karan, he send them long letters ’bout life in the Legion, ’bout tiger hunts and the rains back home in India. He ask after their health, how their rose bushes are doin’ and the latest gossip from their parish. They reply with fat care packages, filled with chocolate and sherry and such, that he then share with us all.

‘You should try it,’ he tell me, seein’, I guess, that I been ’bout the only
jeune
here who never get no mail.

Seein’ that robe, the notion sure did cross my mind for a minute, but only a minute – I ain’t got it in me to be writin’ no long, word-filled letters to nobody.

James, he gone right back to sleepin’, if it can be called that, this half-sittin’, half-dozin’ thing we got goin’ on here in the freeze. It ’bout all a body can get around here, and it ain’t never enough. There’s a draught tonight, ripplin’ the water that be lyin’ always at the bottom of the trenches. I hold my jaws tight so my teeth don’t go chatterin’. The
anciens
, they don’t take none too kindly to no snorin’ or chatterin’ teeth. Gaillard be roarin’ with laughter as he tell how plenty
jeunes
been cured of that habit. The snorer’s lips be gently coated with varnish as he sleep, and his mouth closed shut. Come mornin’, when he open his mouth to yawn, his lips part, tearin’ off paper-thin bits of skin and flesh. Happen once or twice, every snorer be proper cured, even if – Gaillard grin broadly, pointin’ at the bandana around his chin – even if a man got to bind his jaws shut hisself every night since.

The barracks and trenches of the Legion lie mostly silent as a result, causin’ my stretchin’ to sound powerful loud in my ears. I’m surprised there ain’t no response from the Boche. No grenade tossed from their trenches, no quick burst of rifle fire, none of the how-dee-dos they be sendin’ our way at the smallest movement. We be doin’ the same. It’s the way of the Front – just sort of remindin’ the other side that you here, awake and listenin’.

The more I think on it, the more it start to nag and niggle at me just why they been so quiet tonight. I got half a mind to get on the fire step and take a look across No Man’s Land, but damn, it cold.

Karan’s bathrobe catches my eye again. Its colours are of fire. When he first pulled it on, how we laughed. The sight of him, hunched over in that great woollen thing!

‘This robe,’ he say then cheerfully, ‘is the one civilised thing I have on me. It brings to mind my favourite chair, of sitting before the fire at Cambridge, a bottle of port by my side and a decent pipe in my mouth. Here I am now instead, camped in this goddamned mud like an animal. I’m putting on my robe, and you can all go to hell.’ That robe ’bout the only thing that Karan refuse to share. Fallen in love with it he has, and taken to wearin’ it all nights now, wrapped over his uniform.

Lookin’ at him now, I disremember why we found it funny. Karan in his fire-coloured robe seem to me no more strange than this crazy-makin’, upside-down war. Shootin’ at the enemy from holes in the ground, livin’ among rats and toadfrogs, with the stink of the dead comin’ from above our heads, not buried six feet below. If anythin’, that warm robe, it look real good to me right now. I eye it with wantin’, picturin’ it over my own shoulders, easin’ some of the stiffness from them.

This devil-spawn cold. When was the last time I got a decent night’s sleep? What I’d give to lie in a proper bed. To lie down flat, with enough room to stretch in any direction I want. Pull these boots from my feet, remove the pack, all the gear, till there ain’t nothin’ on my skin but the hair the good Lord given. Lyin’ naked as a newborn babe, in clean white sheets, soft as can be, and scented of perfumed soap.

I’m goin’ to get myself a bed, I decide. First thing I do, soon as I’m out of here. A real special one, brass, the sort that so high most folks be needin’ a foot stool to get in it. With pillows that plump up nice, and covers soft as butter, and one of those
ciel-de-lit
things draped over the top, like I seen in the window of an antique shop back home once. All white and blue silk, like starin’ into clouds when you lie down.

And the cher I’m goin’ to have in there with me! Eyes so brown and lips like candy. Buttocks that spill from my hands. I wait a moment, but ain’t no pleasure in the thought. Bubbies real firm, with nipples like . . . Ain’t no use. It so cold ain’t nothin’ stirrin’ inside me tonight, not so much as a hair liftin’ at the notion.

I ain’t lettin’ nobody in that big, soft bed, I decide. Nobody next to me, nobody in the same room, or the next room even, not like here where day or night, a man ain’t never by hisself.

Not like here
. That snap my attention right back to the Boche. Why is it so quiet? I imagine a party of Boche, crawlin’ quiet as can be across No Man’s Land. Obadaiah, you a fool, is what. Dreamin’ ’bout beds and such when a night raid might be just minutes away. The moon, she sail above our lines, turnin’ the water we sittin’ in to ink. There’s a line of frost along the lip of the trench, and it shine.

There’s men out there, I’m sure of it, men with bayonets and grenades, crawlin’ closer every second. Never mind no bed, ain’t goin’ to be so much as a coffin to bury me in, just this foul and stinkin’ mud by the time they done with us.

Cold as it is, the sweat break out on my head.

I tighten my fingers ’bout my rifle. ‘James,’ I hiss.

He groan as he open his eyes. ‘The Boche . . .’ I begin. He shake his head, cuttin’ me off as he point a finger at the sky, and then damned if the Yankee don’t go right back to sleep.

I look up, confused. Ain’t no clouds, not a single one, just the moon, hangin’ low and fat as a cantaloupe.

The moon.

The
moon
.

I’m a fool, is what. With the moon that big, ain’t no chance of cover. Lookout sentries goin’ to be seein’ from here to Paris and Berlin, the light so damn bright. Ain’t goin’ to be no raids, not tonight. I feel so relieved and so foolish both at once, ’bout all I can do not to laugh out loud.

My teeth start to chatter. I hold my jaw tight, but I feel them still, buckin’ ’bout inside. I try to find the rhythm in it, but it just too cold. I rub my hands together, tuck them under my armpits to find what warmth they can. Leanin’ my head against the wet walls of the trench, I try and get some sleep.