Keeping Things Whole (13 page)

His first real crime was
stealing a gun. Stealing a gun during a war: the man had to keep things whole.

Legally, Grandpa Bill had bullets for all of three days. Half a day, tops, within fifty kilometres of a German. The only soldiers the modern English Army has exempted from basic training were the Great War tunnellers. Bill and the other moles went from Major Norton-Griffiths's Manchester office to the front in just three days, and at several times a normal soldier's pay grade. As a private contractor, Norton-Griffiths (aka “Empire Jack”) had laid off most of these same men, Bill included, when he abandoned a Manchester sewer contract to try to create his new army unit of tunnellers. A War Office handshake had made their major, and a few lies about age and experience made his former sewer diggers into the 170
th
Tunnelling Company. Drive a truck in a twentieth-century army and you still had to go through basic. March. Salute. Get insulted and drenched in spittle. Compete with the guy beside you, help the guy beside you. If you so much as typed at the Front, you first learned how to bayonet. Load and fire. Hurry up and wait. Carriage return. Not Bill.

Up top, the opposing trenches were often just one hundred metres apart, close enough they could smell each other's cooking. Belle Isle and many an abandoned Detroit parking lot were six times that distance, and I could hit them with a trebuchet as a teenager. No way the untrained were to be given kill sticks that close to the enemy. A muddy sergeant greeted each newly arrived mole with a callused hand outstretched to relieve him of his bullets. No worries: Bill wouldn't have gone rogue with his Lee-Enfield. My bet is he didn't hate the Germans. Underground, sure, he'd have killed a man coming at him, but not with the infantryman's hell-furnace hate. How can I know a man I never met? Scraps. History. Possible genes. A library of phrases handed down from Gran. Second-hand war stories are still war stories. (If you've read this far, you might agree.) Long before history books did, she told me that the rifle and bullets Bill was required to carry when boarding a troop train out of Chatham was reduced to just a rifle upon arrival in France. Rifles, not bullets, are visible from a distance. Bill wasn't to think he was lethally armed, but the Germans were. His rifle was my Detroit skyline: only impressive from a distance. The diggers weren't over a week before they'd dubbed their obligatory but idle rifles “walking sticks” or “Kitchener's walking stick.” Where's my bloody Kitchener? The small-mouthed, spear-like grafting shovels and push-picks were their weapons. Birthright, vocation and curse. Gran: “For nearly four years, he held that shovel in his hands like a second spine.”

A shovel, his legs and his ears. Lungs that could take it damp and dirty. Like the less safe half of Windsor's Safe Sisters, Bill earned his above-average wages on his back. The blast tunnels for Messines were just three feet high and two feet wide. The moles' speed came, simply, from shovelling with the legs more than the arms. An angled wooden frame, “the cross,” allowed them to drive with the legs all shift long. This plank cross was a low, wooden beach chair crossbred with an ab-cruncher of the future. Fold and unfold your legs. Stronger than Jerry's arms, that.

In the tunnels, everything was sound. They had to knock their support timbers together by hand lest a hammer blow summon the German
mineures.
Tunnels of sound and touch. Underground, they devolved. Crawled more than they walked, heard more than they saw. For the rest of his (short) life, Bill whispered when very upset. Whisper-screamed. Whisper-swore. Theirs was a war of listening. To maintain silence, they communicated more with gestures than words. Mom and I trained Voodoo with as many hand cues as verbal commands, while Bill and the lads had to use gestures to stay alive.
Stop. Softer. Check the
[air-quality]
mouse. Shutter the lantern. Flooding ahead
. That last one crossed the Atlantic with him. In Windsor, when he or Gran were in mixed company and wanted to let the other know that some windbag was about to flood the conversation and room with bullshit they'd worm one hand and wrist up and down to mime waves then point forward. Eventually, that became family code for
rowing to Cuba
. Here's someone who's going to need to row out of his own flood of bullshit. More than sixty years after the war, Gloria the progressive parent taught baby-me some sign language before I could speak. Tap the fingers of both hands together if you want more. Show Mommy what kind of animal you see. Three fingers pressed to the cheek for a cat. She taught me to speak with my hands before I could with my mouth. Twelve years later, Gran taught a version of those same hands to swear with that worming tunnellers' wave. Phrases, gestures, the values embedded in a joke: family lingers. Look at your fingers scrolling through this and think of how many different templates they're built from.

Crime can be vicious or greedy or wonked through some bad fucking psychology, but it can also make perfect sense. Army rules said Bill wasn't allowed bullets, let alone a pistol, but every step he took in France occurred because rules were being bent from Kitchener's office on down. The moles were a Windsor rowing club if ever there were one. Untrained, well paid, and drenched in rum. When I finally had Detroit's Earthly Paradise Café up and running and went travelling, I once spent days in London's Imperial War Museum sifting through archival photos. Many of the initial volunteers for the first tunnelling company were over fifty. Army regs shunned any man over forty. The same day these laid-off sewer diggers successfully haggled a self-made millionaire for high pay, they smiled for a group photo. Nearly to a man, they smile with their lips closed. In 1915, almost all the moles who signed on as thirty-four-year-olds were actually old enough to have already lost most of their teeth. Only one man in the 170th, the youngest, shows any pearl. No archivist's pencil labels him William Williams. The photo was catalogued by company and general, but the men have been lost to dust. Still, I elected Mr. Pearl as Bill. Why not? Even if the one blazing smile is his, I'll never know if he was really my great-grandfather. The genes are a mystery, but the emotions aren't. With you, the opposite might be true.
Here (maybe) is smiling Bill
.

All families row a little, plenty a lot. As for armies, well, Churchill wasn't wrong. The first casualty of war is indeed the truth. Bill wanted a pistol for life underground, and he had to lie, cheat, and barter to get it. In the cramped tunnels, the obligatory rifles were more hindrance than protection. To a man, the 170th transferred their bayonets to shortened shovel handles. By the end of the war, special knives were being forged for tunnellers. Evolutionary biologists argue that an animal is a model of its environment. No trench or tunnel soldier would disagree. The wet, pestilent infantrymen who lived in the trenches were a modelled response to the new environment of the land-sweeping machine gun. Gran described knives I'd later see in photographs and sketches at the library: a studded finger guard and pointed butt turned every available end and surface into a point of attack for fighting in the cramped tunnels. Even still, only officers or special patrols were allowed pistols. The tunnellers were one big special patrol. Trench soldiers weren't allowed to hide in the tunnel entrances during shelling but could be conscripted at any time to carry sandbags, dump spoils, or ply the bellows of manual pumps. Still the tunnellers were, officially at least, denied small arms.

Even a couple is an economy. Every meeting with someone else is a bit of a bazaar. My desires, your stock. And vice versa. (Ask Windsor, city of vice.) Bill's demand for a pistol occurred within a very healthy supply. The trenchies lived around every gun manufacturers were making. To be without their rifle was an offence punishable by a dock in pay, a beating, or, when stakes and/or officer whim were high enough, a pistol shot through the head at dawn. Hierarchy was a key reason the tunnellers were denied pistols. Infantrymen shat with their rifles across their knees, while officers had batmen oil their (costlier and privately owned) sidearms. Military law didn't want a pistol in Bill's hands, but he had chaos on his side. In WW I, the leash on the dogs of war kept getting severed by machine gun fire. A raiding party or night patrol out on a recce might go out with four pistols but leave three corpses in the Nome. When everything is wet, muddy death, when your days at the front divide into wet and wetter, shelled and shelled harder, some can still keep their wits about them long enough to hide a verboten pistol in one of a dozen olive pockets. What could be worth an officer's beating or a week of latrine duty? Rum.

Canada's brief dalliance with (alcohol) prohibition only happened while Bill was underground. Like so much that matters in this ragtag country, it happened provincially, not federally. Quebec can also
se souvient
its unthreatened thirst, while Ontario prohibition was sold as “war austerity.” The fight-and-fuck juice suddenly became unworthy when our farm boys were drowning in the blood-soaked mud and introducing the world to the maple leaf. Thing is, those boys were paid, in part, with rum. England conquered the world with technology, discipline, racism, and rum. Centuries of English sailors got their daily tot and so too did the trench lads. In the race to tunnel and blow up someone who was racing to blow him up, each tunneller was allotted more rum than the other soldiers. As always, scarcity=value. One clay-kicker couldn't drink all his daily rum and wound up washing his feet with it (a surprisingly smart move in a war that had more foot disease than bullet injuries).

No man is a criminal island. Bill had never held a firearm until Kitchener's Lee-Enfield was thrust into his hands for the midnight crossing to Calais. He wasn't on the ground an hour in France before this firearms virgin wanted a pistol for close quarters. He couldn't get a pistol alone or hide it from the bagging partner literally breathing over his shoulder. Their digging race usually had them stripped down to just pants. Fine then, two birds with one bullet. Pool the rum, save our hides.

The tunnellers never lacked for containers. The vertical access shafts, forward-marching tunnels, and the narrower arteries of listening posts or mines couldn't have existed without canvas sacks to carry out the spoils or, come game day, pack in the Ammonal. Water jugs were hauled in and, eyes averted, urine cans hauled out. In the early, crude days before geophones and listening posts, soldiers in January 1915 would dunk their already freezing ears into decapitated, water-filled petrol tanks embedded in the trench floors. Is that Jerry digging through or just the pounding of your own terrified heart?

Prisons have economies. Ships have economies. Go into space, and you'd swap tubes of puréed ham for tubes of puréed squash. The trenchmen traded all the time. Cigarettes were the daily hello. Much more expensive, French postcards had curves that weren't barbed wire. Until the tunnellers floated along on their higher rum rations, every non-abstemious soldier thought all day long of how to get more rum out of the quartermaster. In a life of constant fear, deprivation, and discomfort, a rum diet was, Bill gambled, the second-last proposal the 170th wanted to hear. Surrender the drug that soothes your fear of death. Brothers, let us forego our amber succour. But take the fear of death straight up for a week, and we can better fight death. Together, our rum can buy us odds. Fuck death.

You've heard of white noise. Even my little stint underground made me nearly forget that noise could be anything but threatening. Underground, the noise is red, ochre, shadowy. The tunnels were woolly with the breath of the diggers yet saw-toothed with the constancy of their kick-shovelling. All that work with the constant threats of a cave-in or counter-explosion made them thirsty. For all my green money, I'd rather be drunk than high in a tiny, multiply lethal tunnel. Thanks to Bill's other international tunnel, I too eventually learned that there's paranoia enough underground.

I've read many of the names of his war dead, but I'll never know the name of the guy who snatched him a warm Luger that first winter. Bill's war was international lunacy, and few wars are anything but officially excused mass murder. Still, I have helpless respect for the room in Parliament with a list of Canada's fallen. Every day, a state employee in white cotton gloves turns over an enormous page in our ledger of the dead. Show the record. Front the names. What, though, of private history? Without this message in a world-wide-Web bottle, this story—mine and maybe even some of yours—wouldn't exist. Your name alone keeps plenty alive.

Click
here
and you'll see Sun Tzu's
The Art of War
and its early claim, “all war is based on deception.” True for the war on (some) drugs and true for Bill underground. The canvas sacks they filled with spoils hardly came out clean, yet their mud scars were often a little darker than the trench mud. Lucky infantrymen got to “wash” the surfacing bags in the nearest puddle. Other than the mud provenance, the moles had no trouble hiding the fruit of their excavation. The trenches were constantly collapsing from artillery fire or wet, insistent gravity. Sandbag here, sandbag there. For prison tunnellers, hiding the spoils can require as much labour as digging them. Then again, they tunnel to escape, not to kill.

Imperial War Museum folders, their edges softened with wear, still hold neatly labelled schematics for fake digging equipment. Pickaxes were mounted on axels and frames so some temporary conscript could sit in the tunnel entrance tugging a cord tied to the pick handle. Other pulleys and cords knocked dummy timbers together. Hear this, Jerry, while we actually tunnel two metres below you. Digging to Cuba. Across my river, Barry Gordy had his Motown musicians rehearse and record in a room dubbed the Snake Pit. Bill's decoy tunnels were much more lethal.

How, in all that, was he to accept not being allowed a pistol? The war was all guns all day long, but not this one, not here. Not you. Laws are borders, and some of us slip them. A week of co-operatively pooled rum stored in tin water canisters bought them a foraged Luger off a thirsty Welshman. More than eighty years later I would creep along a damp, international tunnel thinking of that bartered Luger. Would I find it rattling in a skeleton's hand? Was Windsorite Bill killed defending himself or killed with his own gun? Fresh muscle would still distinguish if he'd been shot in the back or the front, but a desiccated skeleton wouldn't. Had Bill dug his own grave with his tunnel to Detroit, or someone else's?