Maclean (5 page)

That day was one of the worst he could remember. Attacks. Counter attacks. Torrents of shells coming down from every direction. Machine guns firing from every direction. And them sitting there in that trench, getting peppered with shrapnel and having the shit scared out of them by high explosives, no one knowing where they were or what the hell was going on.

Half way through the morning, they were ordered up through a maze of communication trenches to the main support trench. The Germans, it turned out, had just taken the forward trench, and the boys who had been in it and weren't already dead were holding out in shell holes and back along the communication trenches. It was their job to join up with them and re-take the forward trench before the Germans had time to consolidate it.

The English general who had come to inspect them, whoever he was—they all looked and talked the same—stood on a little platform with a swagger stick under his arm and shouted at them in a high-pitched voice, “If you lose a trench, there is to be no hesitation, no waiting for orders. The standing order is that it is to be re-taken immediately at the point of the bayonet. The point of the bayonet, you understand.” And he stood up on tiptoes on his little platform and stabbed at the air with his swagger stick.

Captain Bolton gave the order, and over they went, not standing up or any of that craziness, but over and into the first shell hole and then the next one and some of them working along the communication trenches throwing mills bombs. Everybody except the English lieutenant. When the order was given to go over, he gave a shout and climbed over the parapet and went charging ahead waving the cane and the revolver. The Germans were so surprised by this fit of suicidal lunacy that they let him run fifty yards or more before they turned a machine gun on him. The blood flew, and he went ass over teakettle down into a shell hole.

They lost a third of the company, dead and wounded, in the attack. But somewhere down the line, one of the other companies got back into the forward trench, and the Germans in front of their company started trying to get back to their own line before they got cut off. A lot of them were picked off as they tried to make it from shell hole to shell hole, and some of them were hit by their own machine gun fire.

When the boys got back into the forward trench, there weren't any Canadians left alive. Some of the dead men who had been badly wounded had been bayoneted too, and the boys figured that the only way that could have happened was that the Germans had gone around and bayoneted wounded men who couldn't resist. There were three wounded Germans left in the trench, and the boys shot them. One of them, Maclean remembered, had been shot in both legs, and he was half-sitting against one of the angles of a traverse. He had lost his helmet, and you could see that he wasn't more than twenty years old, blond-haired, blue-eyed, as smooth faced and innocent-looking as the English lieutenant back in the shell hole.

“Bitte. Bitte. Bitte,” he kept saying.

Some of the boys felt sorry for him and were for letting him off, but there was a big man named Nelson who had lost one of his pals in the attack, and he said, “Bitte, yourself, you little son of a whore, you bayoneted our boys.”

And he shot him between the eyes and blew the whole back of his head off.

When Captain Bolton came along and asked what the shooting was about, Nelson said, “They resisted, sir.”

Bolton knew well enough what had happened, but he had seen the bayoneted men too, and he said, “All right, but no more.”

Sometimes, if no one was attacking anyone else, the Germans and Canadians let each other get in their wounded, but everyone was too mad this time to do that, so a lot of the wounded in the open had to lie there until dark. Then the boys managed to get in all the ones who were still alive without losing anybody doing it. Their dead men, including the English lieutenant, they shoveled some dirt over and marked with a piece of board in case they wanted to try to get them later. The dead Germans they left. They were going to stink, but there was no sense getting killed over a stink.

Everyone expected another artillery barrage the next morning and another attack. But the next morning nothing happened except a lot of random rifle and machine-gun fire. The day after that they were pulled back for their three days out. In fact, they were out for over a week while they were brought back up to strength. When they got back, the trenches had been fixed up, but the bodies, half-buried Canadians and what the rats had left of the unburied Germans, were still out there between the support trench and the forward trench.

Then one afternoon, a few days after they got back into the line, two English majors and a lieutenant arrived in the support trench along with Captain Bolton and their new lieutenant, named Archie Macleod, one of the best while they had him.

One of the majors was the father of the English lieutenant who had got himself killed in the counter-attack, and he had come to get his son's body. He was a fat little man who didn't look any more like a soldier than Miss Audrey Sweet, and he must have had some kind of staff job somewhere to have enough pull to get permission to do what he was doing. It wasn't a healthy time to be chasing around out there looking for bodies, but Bolton was only a captain and Macleod was only a lieutenant, and they were two majors and English besides.

You wouldn't have lasted ten seconds out there in daylight, so they sat around in Bolton's dugout until it got dark, and it was arranged that Macleod and a couple of the boys who had buried the English lieutenant would go out for him. The English lieutenant who had come along with the father and who looked as if he had never seen a trench before either, wanted to go too, to demonstrate his bravery no doubt, but Bolton refused that at least, saying he didn't know the ground and would be a danger to his men.

So Macleod and the two boys sneaked out of the communication trench through one of the holes that had been blown in it. They took a little lantern covered over with a ground sheet that they could use to make sure they had the right body without showing any light the Germans might see. But the Germans saw something anyway, and ten minutes later there was a great rattle of machine gun fire.

“Them fuckin' pongos are gonna get us all killed,” somebody muttered.

But there wasn't any mortaring, just the machine gun fire, and after a while that let up, and just when it was beginning to look as if Macleod and the others had been caught by the machine guns, the word went along the trench that they were back.

He had been there himself in the little crowd that had gathered just where the communication trench came into the support trench. The two boys came in dragging the body on the ground sheet followed by Macleod. The body had been out there for a week and half by then, and the face was getting rotten, but you could tell who it was all right if you knew him. The Englishmen had never seen any of this before, nor even imagined it—the dirt, the slime, the rubbish, the stink, let alone what a week-and-a-half-old body looked like that had been machine-gunned and left to rot in the mud.

The three of them stood there looking down at it. The lieutenant, the stupid bastard, saluted it. The father just looked. Then he dropped down on his knees on the duckboards and started to cry. “My son, my son, my son.” As a staff officer, he had probably filled the boy full of bullshit about King and Country and the charge of the god-damned Light Brigade. Still you couldn't help feeling sorry for him. It went on and on. He just collapsed. After a while, the other major got him to his feet, and they got the body onto a stretcher, and a couple of the boys went off down the trench with it with the Englishmen shuffling along behind like drunk men. Crazy.

He'd never had the faintest idea what that battle was about, and neither had anybody else he'd ever talked to. When histories of the war began to come out, he found one in the Legion and looked through it, but all he could find out about what was going on around Festubert at the time was a reference to some “brisk” skirmishes. Whatever all the killing had been about that day, it evidently hadn't qualified as history. Maybe somebody had delivered orders to the wrong people, and it only got noticed after a couple of days. Maybe some general on one side or the other had decided that things had been too quiet and that soldiers would lose their edge if more of them weren't getting killed.

He found a bottle, their third bottle, once again in his hand. It had been going back and forth, and he had been drinking without noticing. Now there was left in it only one small swig. He tipped it, and rolled the warm, sweet wine around in his mouth before swallowing it.

All that stuff was a long time ago, and long gone, and he had survived when there had been many times he never thought he would, when he saw himself lying dead out there, no different from the mud he was lying in his mud-coloured uniform.

He lay back against the bank and put his hands under his head and closed his eyes. The waxwings that Buster had scared off blowing up the paper bag had come back to the chokecherry bushes and were fluttering and chirruping behind him. From far away, he could hear the sound of the traffic on the bridge, a mere whisper, like the rustle of leaves, in the intervals of the lazy talk beside him, Bill explaining to Jimmy how to use some old shingles he had found thrown away somewhere to roof his woodshed, Leveret huffing and snuffling like an old dog, now and then treating Ginger to some profundity that had risen to his mind. (“Now this here, Ginger, is Saturday, and tomorrow's going to be Sunday.”) Ginger silent, moving his boots around now and then on the rock, thinking maybe about his wine bottle on its way to the sunlit islands where he would go and never have to load another barrel of potatoes.

With the sunlight falling through the leaves on his face, Maclean drifted into a dreamless sleep.

6

IT WAS THE
birds that woke him, a storm of wings over his head, like the sound of a sudden rain among leaves, followed at once by the rattle and crunch of boots on the clinkers at the top of the path near the tracks.

Leveret whipped the last bottle of port up from the grass behind him and put it inside his coat and lay back against the bank, tucking the bottle between his right arm and his body and putting his good hand in the pocket of his coat to hold the bottle in place in case he had to get up.

They saw the legs first, two pairs of them sliding down the steep path, then from between the bushes and out onto the rock, the two men entire: Willie Campbell and, close behind, Junior Tedley, who in his brainless way had shouted after Maclean on Main Street that morning when he was trying to make it back to his dinner.

Willie Campbell was short, thick-set, big-muscled. Black hair, thick black eyebrows, a three- or four-day growth of black beard, hairy black arms, black everything, including a black heart. He had a little farm across the river, and a skinny, sickly, little wife who was pregnant all the time, and a brood of dirty kids. After he had been drinking for a while, he had a way of turning ugly, and once he started drinking, he never stopped until he ran out or drank himself insensible. It was when he was still on his feet and had nothing left to drink that he was at his ugliest.

Junior Tedley was a clown—tall, thin, except for a little beer-belly and a fat ass, with bug eyes and a great, foolish, turned-down moustache that he kept stroking one side of, the way he had seen some gun-fighter do in a cowboy movie.

They came down so fast that nobody had time to get up, and they were all still half-sitting, half-lying against the bank when Willie emerged from the path to confront them, his eyes going everywhere, looking for a bottle, and also probably sizing up what he might be in for if he made trouble.

“Well,” he said in a voice which always had a snarl at the edge of it. “Looks like quite a little party goin' on here.”

“No, no,” Jimmy said. “Nothin' like that. We just been settin' here soakin' up a little sun and talkin' about the world.”

“Are you makin' fun of me?” Willie said, turning on him.

“No,” Jimmy said, scrambling to his feet. “Just tellin' ya the kind of time we been havin'.”

“Bullshit,” Willie said.

He turned on Leveret.

“I hear ya just about bought out the liquor store down there this afternoon,” he said.

“I don't know about that,” Leveret said. “We got three bottles of port for the five of us here, and we drunk ‘em all up.”

“I don't see no empty bottles,” Willie said.

“One there in the bushes,” Leveret said. “We threw the other two in the river.”

“We put a note in one with my name on it,” Ginger said. “And if somebody finds it, they're maybe gonna write me a letter.”

Willie paid no attention to him and turned on Maclean.

“I hear you insulted my cousin here this mornin',” he said. “Right there on Main Street where everybody could hear.”

He gestured at Junior, who stood beside him stroking his moustache and looking foolish, then made a move towards Maclean.

Maclean got to his feet to stay clear of any boots that might come flying his way, and Leveret and Bill got up too. Only Ginger went on sitting, still thinking about the bottle with the note in it.

“I didn't know Junior was your cousin,” Jimmy said.

“Well, you know it now,” Willie said without looking at him.

“So what have ya got to say?” he asked Maclean.

“Willie,” Maclean said, “don't talk such horseshit. Junior isn't any more your cousin than I am.”

“Are you callin' me a liar?” Willie shouted at him. “Or my cousin here?”

“I said ‘hello' and you told me to fuck off,” Junior said.

“I was in hurry,” Maclean said. “I didn't even look to see who it was.”

“You lyin' bastard,” Willie said.

He put his fists up and shuffled towards Maclean like a boxer moving in for the kill.

Time was when Maclean could have beaten the shit out of Willie Campbell, but that time was long gone. He put one arm up to protect himself and backed away, but there wasn't much space to back to. Watching Willie, not where he was going, he slipped on the damp moss at the edge of the rock, and before he could catch himself fell half sideways down through the bushes. The branches scraped his face as he went down, and he hit the side of his head against something, an old stump or a rock.

In two seconds he was back on his legs and fishing around in his pocket for his jack knife.

“Now, look here,” Leveret said, “there ain't no call for this. We ain't done you no harm.”

Willie turned on him.

“What kind of god-damned man are you,” he said, “wouldn't give a man a drink on a Saturday afternoon? What kind of god-damned man is that?”

He was working himself into a black rage, and Maclean could see that he wanted to fight now more than drink. While he wasn't watching, Maclean opened the main blade of his jack knife, three inches long and well sharpened, and put it back in his pocket out of sight. He had no intention of cutting Willie if he didn't have to, but he could use it to keep him off.

Leveret backed away from Willie, and the neck of the port bottle tilted over and stuck out from the front of his coat.

“You lyin' old fucker,” Willie growled. “So you drunk it all up, did ya?”

He glared straight into Leveret's eyes. Then drew back and hit him across the side of the face with the back of his hand.

He didn't swing very hard, but he drove Leveret's upper lip back against his teeth and a heavy drop of blood oozed out and down onto his chin. His hat went flying, and Jimmy caught up with it just before it went over the edge of the rock into the river.

Ginger watched all this with puzzlement, not sure that it wasn't all just some kind of game, that Willie wasn't just making believe he was angry, that all the name-calling wasn't just rough affection, like saying, “you old son of a bitch, how are ya?” For a second or two, it even looked as if he thought that Leveret's lip getting split was just a rough and tumble accident, the kind of thing that happened sometimes among pals with no harm meant. It was only when he saw Leveret stagger off to one side with his hand up to his face and saw Jimmy chasing after Leveret's precious hat and heard Bill Kayton shout, “You dirty bastard, hitting an old man,” that he realized that Willie had really attacked his idol.

He bellowed and heaved himself to his feet and went after Willie, his big fists, the size of bowling balls, waving around in the air in front of him. In open ground, Willie could have stayed away from him, but there wasn't much room to move around on top of the rock and not go over the side, and Ginger was on top of him before he could even get his fists up.

They wrestled around, Willie trying to keep his feet under him and not go over the side, cursing all the time, spit foaming at the corners of his mouth, Ginger bellowing and grabbing at anything he could get his hands on, intent only on killing Willie even if they did both go over the side.

Willie got a little space between them and drove his knee up into Ginger's balls. Ginger howled and doubled over and let go of Willie, and Willie got a punch in somewhere on Ginger's face. Ginger grabbed his arm with both hands and tried to break it the way you might snap a stick, and they both went down, half into the bushes and half out, Willie cursing, Ginger growling like an enraged bear.

While all this was going on, Junior was prancing around like a ten-year-old. Now he turned on Jimmy and put his fists up. Jimmy skipped out of his way and picked up a rock the size of a baseball.

“You come near me,” Jimmy said, “ and by the whistlin', blue-eyed Jesus, I'll knock your fuckin' brains out.”

Willie had got astride Ginger and was trying to pry Ginger's arms clear of his face to get in another punch. Leveret, hatless, still oozing blood, passed the bottle to Bill and got a big stick of wood from a fallen tree, four feet long and as thick as a man's arm but starting to rot into a brown pulpiness. He lurched over and broke the stick across Willie's shoulders. It was too rotten to hurt him much, but it put him off his guard long enough for Ginger to heave him off and come down on top of him. Ginger put both fists together and brought them down on Willie's forehead and smashed his head back against the rock.

“You better git Ginger off,” Leveret said, “or he's gonna kill him.”

“That's enough, Ginger,” Bill said, taking Ginger by the shoulder.

Ginger didn't want to stop. He hit Willie in the face again with a closed fist, like a man pounding on a table, before Bill got his arm and eased him off.

“Get the hell out of here,” Bill said to Willie, “or he's going to kill you and end up in jail.”

Willie got himself up. He was bleeding out of his mouth now too, bleeding and spitting, with snot running down from his nose into the blood.

“I'll git you fuckers,” he snarled. “Just you wait. You gang up on me, but I'll git you fuckers one by one.”

He lunged forward with one foot towards Maclean, and Maclean drew the open jack knife out of his pocket and waved it in front of him.

“You draw a knife on me, you bastard,” Willie shouted.

“He don't mean nothin',” Leveret said. “He's just tryin' to protect himself. Now why don't you go on back to town before there's any more trouble.”

“I still ain't had no drink,” Willie said.

“You're not going to get a drink either,” Bill said. “That's all we got left, and there's five of us.”

“Suppose I just take it,” Willie said.

“You try to take it,” Bill said, “and we'll beat the shit out of you.”

Maclean knew that if Willie got hold of the bottle, they might not get it back, but if that was the price of getting rid of the son of a whore, it might be worth it. Drawing the knife, he was telling himself, had been stupid.

“Well,” Leveret said, “if it's O.K. with the other boys, it's O.K. with me. But just one swig and then you git out of here and leave us alone.”

He looked at Bill.

Bill shrugged.

He passed the bottle to Leveret, and Leveret unscrewed the cap and passed it to Willie. He wiped the blood and snot from his mouth and tipped the bottle back and drank, swallow after swallow without breathing.

“Now, that's enough,” Leveret said, and Bill went over and took the bottle away from him, cautiously, as if he were taking a bone away from a cross dog. It would be like Willie to throw the bottle and what was left in it into the river, but he let Bill take it.

“Junior's gotta have one too,” Willie said.

“One,” Bill said and passed the bottle to Junior.

He tipped the bottle up, and after one swallow, Bill took the bottle away from him. Between the two of them, they had half emptied it.

“O.K.,” Bill said. “Now get out of here.”

“Now don't go orderin' me around,” Willie said, “or I may take it into my head to spend the rest of the afternoon here.”

“Just you go on, now,” Leveret said, “before someone gets hurt again.”

Willie stood long enough to satisfy his honour, then turned.

“Come on, Junior,” he said. “I've had enough of these cheap cocksuckers.”

They started up the path. Ginger would have gone after them, but Leveret stopped him.

Bill looked at the bottle. There was blood and snot on the neck, and Christ knows what else. He passed the bottle to Leveret, and Leveret pulled some leaves off one of the chokecherry bushes and wiped it as clean as he could, then gave it a final polish with his handkerchief.

“There,” he said. “Clean as it came from the store.”

He offered it to Bill, but Bill shook his head.

“Someone should kill that son of a whore,” Bill said.

“I expect some day someone will,” Maclean said.

They sat down, and the bottle went back and forth between the other three until they finished it. Ginger took it out to the tip of the rock and threw it into the river. No one was paying much attention. Ginger watched it bobbing around only a dozen yards from shore. He came back and sat down.

“I expect that bottle with the note in it will just fetch up somewheres,” he said.

They had settled themselves down in a different pattern, Leveret, Ginger, and Jimmy together, Leveret with his hat back on, his cut lip still oozing a little blood, Maclean and Bill a little way off.

“You all right?” Bill asked Maclean. “You look like you got a bump on your head.”

“It ain't nothing,” Maclean said. “Take more than that to kill me.”

“I expect,” Bill said.

But the truth was that he wasn't feeling good at all. His head hurt, his back hurt, his stomach had turned queasy, and there loomed above him the thought that although Willie was gone, there would be more to it some other day. The knife had been stupid.

“The son of a whore,” Bill said.

Maclean looked at him out of the corner of his eye. He was a good-looking man. Thick, brown hair, always combed. Good features. Dress him up in a suit, and he could have been a businessman or a lawyer, a movie actor even. But if you looked close, you could see the skin going slack under the eyes, and the lids a little puffed-up and a little too pink. The booze starting to take its toll. Maclean wondered how old he was. Thirty maybe, maybe a little less. About the age he had been when he lost his last real job and gave up or gave in or whatever.

He felt he ought to say something to Bill. Though he probably didn't know it, Bill was on the edge. Once over, it was tough to climb back. When the war was over, and there were lots of men and not much work the way it was after the Great War, they would be able to get good carpenters who didn't drink, so why should they hire ones like Bill who did? So you would drink because you didn't have a job, and people wouldn't give you a job because you drank, and so it would go around.