Kanata (29 page)

“But Amiens
will
be the last. There's a breaking point in every war and Amiens will be that point. Wars aren't won by generals or strategy. They are lost by troops. There is a moment when the troops simply can't take any more. They have killed too many, seen too many killed, been exhausted beyond endurance, been fearful for weeks at a time, liceridden, their nerves are gone. A kind of unnameable despair sets in. That's where we are now.”

Dawkins's mouth was full of stew. “I felt that way two years ago,” he said through his food. “The problem with your theory, Walters, is that there isn't any bottom to despair. That's the beauty of it. You're sitting in no man's land, frozen, haven't eaten in two days, lice eating you, nice case of trench foot, scared as hell. Your horse bloating beside you. Can't get much worse, can it. But then it
does
. Shell lands. Blows three fingers off. Shit. Girls in Paris aren't going to like that development. Well, hit bottom now, haven't we. No, another shell, shrapnel takes your eyes. Fucking blind. Well that's it, then. No, wait, fucking wait for it. Get back to the trench, don't bloody know how, Corporal Turdbrain reads a letter from home: Your girl just married Dick from down the way. Couldn't wait. Knows you'll understand. It can always get worse, Walters. And it always
does
.”

Walters stared toward the flap on the mess tent. Michael guessed that they had had this conversation a hundred times. It was a sort of sport, a way of passing the time, of keeping madness at bay.

“It's mathematical,” Walters said, “war. You have despair on one side of the ledger, purpose on the other. Where you have little purpose, when you've, say,
misplaced
purpose … let's give it a value of four. On the other side, people are dying, hourly, despair is creeping up. It's at sixteen …”

“Where would Flowerdew fit in?” Dawkins turned to Michael. “I expect you've heard of Flowerdew.”

Michael shook his head.

“Gordon Muriel Flowerdew. Let's take a look at an actual case history. Last month, his objective is Bois de Moreuil, six miles from here. Lord Strathcona Horse, whole squadron. Flowerdew leads the charge against the German line, cut down by machine-gun fire. They keep going, go
through
the line. Keep riding, galloping like Jesus on fire, two hundred yards to the second line, open field. More machine-gun fire. They go through
it
, turn around, firing their revolvers, sabres out, hacking away. The Germans flee. A victory? Well, Flowerdew is dead. Seventy percent of his men killed or wounded. Eleven horses survive out of almost nine hundred. Is this purpose or despair?”

Walters stared up to the ceiling of the tent, as if calculating. “Purpose.”

“Seventy percent. Eleven horses.”

“An objective was accomplished. That is purpose. Also, bravery is good for morale. Purpose.”

“The Germans lost fewer men than we did. Despair.”

Walters turned to Michael. “What is your view? What is your name?”

“Mountain Horse.”

“Perfect,” Walters said. “Which is it, Mountain Horse?”

Michael sat for a moment. “Both.”

“Both. Well that's war, isn't it.”

The three of them ate in silence.

O
ver the next few weeks Michael spent more time in their company, Dawkins and Walters talking endlessly, irreverently, a verbal sparring that began in the morning and continued into the night. Michael was young and quiet, the perfect audience. Dawkins and Walters had known one another slightly at McGill University in Montreal, and now each day brought fresh debate.

“Is it reasonable,” Dawkins said one morning as they groomed the horses, “for French villagers to retrieve dead horses from the field of battle and then eat them?”

Walters, as he often did, looked up before answering. “Is the meat being sold to the cavalry?”

“It is,” Dawkins said. “But it is sold as beef. Used in stew. The men don't know.”

“But they
are
eating the very thing that they ride into battle on. They are eating a fellow soldier.”

“Unwittingly.”

“Meat is scarce.”

“Unheard of.”

“It is war. The trick is to survive with honour. Unwittingly eating horse doesn't betray that.”

“Your own horse.”

Walters paused. “Serve it to the infantry. They don't have the same attachment. There are no moral grounds to refuse.”

“Thank you, King Solomon.”

T
he way that men talked had changed, Michael noticed. When he first arrived, there was a shouldering of the wheel. The men in the trenches joked grimly, but they held to the same purpose. Now there was a sharpness. German deserters joined them every week. Canadians were taken behind the lines and shot for cowardice by their own men, or they deserted and were found in French towns and shot. The French had narrowly avoided mutiny. The Brits were fed up, both at home and on the front. Two weeks after he arrived—almost two years ago now—a man named Hapman lost his mind in the trench, thrashing and screaming and sobbing. He was taken away and the men held him in silent contempt. A month ago Liddle took an eerily similar turn. His thrashings were identical, the short run before being tackled. His face contorted by the same mixture of fear and anger,
screaming for the same things, his home, his mother. But the response was different this time. Now they knew he was sane.

T
he morning broke clear and the early June heat was welcome. Michael enjoyed the drills, trotting in formation, lances out. There was a beauty to those focused lines, the horses' gentle nervous steps. Michael polished his saddle, groomed his horse, cleaned his gun, and then read the book that Dawkins gave him.

“Ludendorff lobbed one into Paris last night,” Dawkins said at mess.

“What?”

“Just heard. Shell made it to northern part of the city. Some poor bastard is eating his baguette, bomb comes through the bloody roof.”

Walters looked up. “Is this sound, aggressive military strategy, or the desperate act of a dying man?”

Michael told them about the Germans in the trench. One in his forties, the other maybe fifteen. And the man in the mud. Fifty.

“I've heard as young as thirteen,” Walters said. “They're running out of people. I suppose everyone is.”

“Who will be left to run the world?” Dawkins said. “The frail, the defective, the cowardly, the flawed, the rich. The invalids. The shell-shocked.”

“The old,” Walters said. “The female of the species. The lucky.” He looked at Michael. “It'll be up to you, Mountain Horse.”

“Did you finish that book I gave you?” Dawkins asked.

A novel written by a Russian. “I did.”

“Good, good. If you're going to run the world, you should read a book first.”

R
iding toward Amiens, a gentle trot, a real army, the sun behind them, they came up Valley Road and the people of Domart and Hangard waved and cheered. The faces of the villagers were carved by grief and hunger. Old women held their hands up to them, empty, offering something unseen. This was something they could understand; three thousand men on horses with swords.

They crossed the Luce River flanked by Whippet tanks, the iron impostors waiting to inherit the language of death. The horses galloped past the Whippets, spreading out and picking up speed, forming their lines, pennons flying now, lances out. Ahead of them was Beaucourt-en-Santerre, heavily fortified, the Germans dug in, waiting for them. Dawkins was to the side, Walters farther down the line. They were flying. The German guns fired and formations began to fray. Michael concentrated on the familiar movements of his horse, the syncopation of the hooves landing on hard ground, and that split second when all four were aloft and they were briefly suspended, in flight. In Michael's mouth there was an unfamiliar taste, hard and metallic. He rode into the bullets without fear.

Two thousand horses were cut down in a few confusing minutes, sprawling, collapsing, skidding and trying to get up, failing. Men were thrown and pinned and lay broken among the animals. Michael raised his revolver and aimed where flashes of machine-gun fire appeared. Ahead, their commanding officer pulled up, his sabre raised. He turned in his saddle and yelled something, then dismounted and
took cover. Michael galloped past him, and when his horse was shot he was thrown forward into the ground. He lay in the dust for a few seconds then scrambled to the cover of his dying horse. He assessed his injuries, his shoulder bruised, his knee swelling and cut, hands scraped, wrist jammed. His horse was still breathing. He could feel the damaged bellows of its lungs as he lay against it. Its forelegs were broken and a pink froth of blood and saliva pooled at its mouth. Michael lay against the horse and felt its laboured breathing beneath the warm coat. They breathed in tandem for short periods, a shared misery. He looked back across the battlefield. Could all the horses be down? Those magnificent targets. He couldn't see Dawkins or Walters. He found his pistol and shot his horse in the head to end its suffering.

After an hour, he heard changes in the gunfire. New guns had entered the battle. Men yelled and moved toward the village. He got up with effort and followed them. He stumbled over Chambers from Calgary, his thin moustache and easy charm, his pink brains drying on the earth.

The Fort Garry Horse had approached from the other side and routed the Germans. The Dragoons came up on foot and helped secure the village. At dusk, the 4th Division relieved them, and they walked, tired, horseless, back to their camp.

“C
ould that have been the actual last cavalry charge?” Dawkins inquired rhetorically at mess the next night. “After a thousand years, is this the last time men will attack one another with swords on horseback?” One of his arms was in a sling, and there were cuts along his forehead. “What commander could give that order now? How many horses survived? Fifty? Ten? Was that the final slaughter?”

“The tanks didn't do much better,” Walters said. “We started with more than four hundred. Six are still working, I'm told. Horses don't work, tanks don't work. What does this mean?”

“It means we're living in the present,” Dawkins said. “One of those rare moments in history where you know exactly where you are, right while it's happening. The horses are part of the past, officially relegated to history. But the tanks, they're still in the future. They don't work yet. But they will. It means that this”—he gestured around him—“this collection of death and sentiment and bad food and poor decisions, this is inescapably, undeniably, the present.” Dawkins took a bite from a square of bitter chocolate, then offered some to Michael and Walters. They ate the chocolate and watched the sun glow red in the west.

D
uring the autumn, the Allies advanced: Bourlon, Bourlon Wood, Pilgrim's Rest, Haynecourt, Canal du Nord, Cambrai. Sweating through bogs, laying corduroy roads under the afternoon sun, walking through abandoned villages of ghostly stone, seeing vague shapes in the fog that settled over skeletal trees the colour of bone. The smell of gas sitting lightly on the breeze, the hundred-year-old faces collapsing around bully beef as they ate in silence. They could sense the end. The Germans were in flight. Walters was vaporized by a shell outside Cambrai, a direct hit that left a pink spray that settled lightly on the earth. Tanks were angled on the horizon, rusting in farmers' fields. The Germans were inching eastward, going home.

Walking through the shattered streets of Cambrai, the dust rising in a grey mist out of the rubble, buildings cleaved
and looming jagged and black against the pleasant French sun. A mad German sniper who was left behind to die fired his Mauser from a window and was then blown to pieces. A hundred men knelt in front of wooden chairs in the half-ruin of a cathedral, the heavy candelabra intact and hanging in a shaft of sunlight that came through the bombed dome. Valenciennes, Marly, the buckled streets, huge splinters lying across the stone, charred beams that the people carefully stepped over as they came forward with flowers and tears, embracing Michael, kissing him, holding his face like a chalice.

6

S
TANFORD
M
OUNTAIN
H
ORSE,
F
RANCE,
1918

In a cave in the chalk hills, beside the oversized chess set, Stanford pressed the cloth lightly against his wound and watched the red stain spread. Sunlight came in the vertical window, bisecting the space, illuminating the muddy rations scavenged from the battlefield that sat on the wooden table beside the tobacco. There was a revolver in a leather holster and a bone-handled knife. Two rifles, an Enfield and a Mauser, stood in the corner. On the floor, a collection of helmets. Stanford was slumped in the wooden chair and he reached for the dented canteen and took a long drink, and then breathed in sharply. Was his spirit getting ready to leave? A soft light that hovered, waiting to drift skyward
like a feather on the wind. A warm breath dispersed in the cool of morning.