Soldier of the Horse (29 page)

A nurse came and administered an injection. Romeo muttered to himself from inside his bulky dressings and dozed off.

A few days later, Tom was awakened from a troubled sleep by Clara. “You have a visitor.”

It was Bruce Johanson. Tom had last seen him in the charge, way off to the right, close to the wood itself. He had to blink back tears at the sight of his comrade.

“How you doing, Tommy? They say you got a lot of holes in you.”

“Yes. I do, for sure. I'm still fighting infection. They scrape it out of one place and it pops up in another. What about you, Cowboy?”

“Well, I got through the charge in one piece. I swerved into the bush. No sooner got there than Fritz popped up from behind a log and shot me clean through the left hand.” Bruce held up his hand for Tom to see. It was misshapen, the skin scarred and puckered, but he wiggled his fingers. “It got infected and I've just been cleared to go back. Not too bad. Say—have you heard about Seely?”

“No. Nothing.”

“He's out of it. Got gassed. And the regiment has been moved into reserve again.” He leaned closer to Tom. “Word is there'll be a major breakout soon.”

“There's always going to be a major breakout.”

“Yes, but this time they figure Fritz has shot his bolt. Maybe there really
is
an end in sight.”

“I'll believe it when I see it. What about the other boys?” Tom asked.

Bruce frowned. “Right after the charge I was sent off with the other wounded, too, so I'm not totally up to date. But what was left of the regiment attacked Rifle Wood, just a couple of miles from Moreuil. They were awful battered and shorthanded, as you can imagine. They went in dismounted, along with the Fort Garrys. Quartermain was somewhere out in front when he caught some shrapnel. They say he'll survive.”

Tom hesitated. He didn't want to ask. “Ferguson?”

“You won't believe it! Fritz got an artillery piece into play during our charge, and they fired off a couple of rounds in the midst of the confusion until they were put out of action by rifle fire from our boys in the wood. One of their shells hit somebody bang on, right next to Ferguson. Blew Fergie right out of his saddle. They found him later, unconscious. Not a mark on him. One boot torn off and his uniform burned black in spots. He didn't know what had happened.”

Relief flooded Tom. Better than a shot of morphine after a bad night. “Where is he now?”

“He said he was sick and tired of being shot at, so he volunteered for the machine gun brigade. He's there now, riding around on a truck with a Vickers machine gun, doing the shooting!”

“Hard to picture him in a truck and not on a horse. What's next for you, Bruce?”

“I'm back to the regiment tomorrow. I'll say hello to the boys for you.”

“Speaking of boys, did Simpson make it?”

“He was real lucky. Took a piece of shrapnel in the ribs. He was knocked off his horse and would have died except that one of the 2nd Troop, Lieutenant Harvey's bunch, dragged him into the woods in spite of the German fire and stopped the bleeding. He's somewhere in England in hospital, too.”

Damn few of the troop left, but Tom didn't pursue the issue. He had heard earlier that Reynolds, who had been wounded in the listening post, had been invalided back to Canada. He tried to avoid thinking about the carnage in specific detail, and he knew Johanson didn't need reminding about numbers killed or wounded. He'd be back in that brutal reality within days or even hours.

Bruce looked sombre, then brightened. “Hell, I'll get another crack at the Boche. Damn glad I don't have to hang around here and play pinochle like some people. I've got to go. My train awaits me.” He smiled, clapping his cap on at a jaunty angle and sticking out his good hand. Tom shook it with both of his. Bruce swallowed and nodded once, turned on his heel and left without another word.

I wonder if I'll see him again. Maybe Bruce was thinking the same thing. For a moment Tom felt a pang of guilt, lying in a bed in England while the regiment's survivors carried on the war.

Nurse Duncan bustled into the ward and pulled back the blanket. “Dressing change!” she announced, and Tom watched as she peeled off the sticky bandages. He still had a few battles of his own to fight.

♦  ♦  ♦

Tom's wounds slowly improved. The smaller ones healed over, and his skin grafts finally took hold. Day by day the gangrene and the nightmare of surgeries with no anaesthetic faded from conscious thought, although he still had great raw gashes below his right hip, on his calves and left thigh. My very own craters, he thought. The same shape as the ones that dotted France, eighty-metre-wide holes that marked where tunnellers had blown up enemy dugouts, trenches, and soldiers.

Tom wrote to his parents. He passed on what the doctors told him: that he'd be wheelchair bound for years, perhaps walk again but maybe not. His father wrote back to say he had given up the option the family had obtained for a fresh start on a farm in the Peace River country. He no longer had the stomach for new ventures if his eldest son could not be at his side. Tom's mother was not well, but she was coping. There was no mention of Ellen.

“Hey, trooper. It can't be that bad.” It was Clara, a smile on her face. The hospital staff put on cheerful countenances for the patients and Tom sometimes wondered what it cost them, given the dire condition of many of their charges. Patients like poor armless Sergeant Grey in the Winnipeg hospital, so long ago. A painful memory of Ellen, putting on a brave face as she ministered to him, came flooding back.

“No, it's not that bad,” said Tom, “especially when I think of some of these other poor buggers.”

“Well, whatever it is, my guess is it could be helped by a pint of bitters. Are you up to it?”

“Do bears have claws?”

“I'll be back at shift change. Get ready for some excitement, soldier. We're off to the local. I'll be here with your chariot.”

An orderly, Herbert, appeared right after supper was cleared away. “I hear you have an appointment. Let's get at it then.” He hauled Tom's greatcoat out of the storage locker.

“I'm not going out in this,” said Tom, pulling at his gown. “Get me some trousers and a shirt.”

“You're crazy, Canuck. Doctor would not approve.”

“Doctor's not here. Get me some trousers.”

Herbert came back with an oversized pair of khaki trousers and a checked shirt he had found somewhere. Tom wrestled his gown off. When he glanced down he was appalled at the sight of his emaciated body—his muscles atrophied, flesh sagging; he looked like his bloody grandfather.

Tom put on the shirt. Herbert helped ease his legs off the bed and with much headshaking and tut-tutting, guided the pants on. Tom hoisted his buttocks up off the bed by pushing down with his hands, and Herbert slid the trousers under him and up to his waist. As Tom did up his buttons sweat broke out on his forehead.

Romeo, now with some of his bandages removed, boosted himself upright in the next bed and cackled through his wired jaw, “Hey, Tommy-boy, you better behave yourself with our Clara.”

Herbert brought the wheelchair alongside the bed and once again took part of the weight as Tom shifted to the chair from the edge of the bed.

Someone from down the row of beds yelled, “I've got seniority here. I saw her first, you Red River bastard.”

“Maybe, but I'm going to be on my feet first.”

“Now why would you want to be on your feet?”

Raucous laughter broke out and came to an abrupt halt as Clara walked into the ward, wearing a green civilian coat over a long brown skirt.

“What's the joke, boys?” she asked.

“Just enjoying the camaraderie of the common soldier, Nurse,” Romeo replied.

“Mind your manners, Mr. Romeo,” said Clara. “Perhaps you too will get out of your bed and off to the pub one of these days.”

There were whistles and barely heard comments from the ward as Clara wheeled Tom toward the door, and he gave a wave over his shoulder to the catcalls of the remaining patients. All except Sykes, who never looked up.

Tom wheeled himself, with a lot of help from Clara, to the steps outside the public bar of the Iron Duke. It had been a rough ride for Tom and a hard push for Clara, bouncing along the cobblestones of the High Street.

“Hang on, love. Shan't be long.” She went in through the door and was back a moment later with two older men.

“This him, then?” asked one. “Ready for a lift, Canada?”

Clara held the door open while the men each took a side of the chair and lifted Tom up the stairs. He wheeled himself in through the door to breathe deeply of the marvellous, pungent aromas of pipe tobacco and freshly drawn beer.

Clara pulled a chair out of the way so Tom could manoeuvre his wheelchair alongside a battered oak table, yellow with age, and then went to the bar while he looked around. The pub was dark, the windows few and small, its walls decorated with bits of harness and paintings of horses. Tom's mind flashed to the horses lost to the war, hundreds of thousands of them. He felt a sadness and a bitter edge that was new to him. A few men stood at the bar, and six or seven others were seated at tables nursing their pints. All the men were middle-aged or older.

Clara returned with a pint of dark ale for Tom and a small lager for herself. She sat and raised her glass. “Here's to a quick recovery,” she said, clinking her glass against his.

Tom sipped the dark liquid, his first alcohol since Blanshard had given him a shot of rum just before the charge. A familiar feeling of warmth flooded through him. Maybe he
was
on the road to recovery.

He slowly became aware that he was the centre of attention in the pub. The last time he had been in an English pub, he and his mates had also been the centre of attention. They were big and boisterous, loud and confident. Somewhat exotic. Colonials, the Brits called them. He didn't feel boisterous now, or exotic.

Clara looked at him, touched his hand where it clutched his glass. Tom saw a figure approaching, and glanced up to see the “governor,” the owner of the pub, out from behind the bar, a pint in his hand.

“Compliments of the squire.” The governor nodded toward the saloon bar in the adjoining room where the gentry and their ladies sat and were served. As he put the pint on the table, Tom saw an elderly man in a tie and tweed jacket, who raised his glass and nodded.

Tom lifted his glass in return, and drank.

“That's Squire Barkley. He owns half the town,” said Clara.

“That's decent of him.”

“He lost his only son in France. He'd likely buy for anyone in uniform, but your Canada badges help, I expect. Coming to the rescue of the Old Country and all.”

A painting of the Duke of Wellington on horseback hung over the bar. The duke gazed, stern-faced, at a field where a square of red-coated British infantry was surrounded by the blue and grey of a Napoleonic horde. How times have changed, Tom thought. Ranks of infantrymen firing muskets at each other from ranges of fifty or seventy-five yards had given way to the five-hundred-round-a-minute machine guns of the Great War. Artillery killed and maimed at impossible ranges, but at times the fighting still came down to crazed men, face to face. Stabbing and clubbing, blood flowing.

Clara sipped at her half-pint. “Tell me what you did before you enlisted.”

Tom pulled his mind back to the present. “I was on my way to a career in the law, until it caught up with me.”

“Now what does that mean?”

“Just that there was a mixup, and I came out of it on the wrong end.”

“Will you go back to practising law?”

“Not for all the tea in China. I don't know what I'll do, but I won't do that.” The words slipped out before he even thought about them. When he had dared consider his future, and the possibility of surviving the war, the question of his career had hovered at the edge of his consciousness. For a long time he had not been sure but now, suddenly, he was, and he felt as though he had floated free from a weight that was dragging him down. As far as he was concerned the law was arbitrary and lawyers were untrustworthy. He was done with it.

“So what will you do?”

“Depends on how long it takes for me to get out of this chair. How did you end up as a nurse? Are you from around here?”

“No. I was raised in Devon down on the south coast.” Clara looked around the room, then back at Tom. “I was engaged to be married. He enlisted. Jeremy and I—we all thought it would be over by Christmas. He used to write something every week. Now he writes once a month, if at all. It's too depressing.” She tossed her head as if to dispel her mood. She had let her hair down from the tight bun she wore at the hospital and it was a blonde cascade that swept her shoulders, much lighter than it looked when it was confined.

Clara and Tom talked about the men in Tom's ward, keeping the conversation breezy. Tom breathed in her faint perfume, which somehow hung in the air, lingering and cutting through the thickening smoke in the room. She had taken her coat off, and he basked in the presence of a woman, the tension in his body and mind easing. He was reminded of his lunch with Ellen in the Royal Alex back in Winnipeg. Would they do that again?

Later, Clara trundled him through the quiet village in the direction of the hospital.

“Don't spare the horses,” Tom said, out of the blue.

“What?”

“These cobbles are awful hard on my condition.”

“Condition?”

“Condition. I drank a lot of beer and stayed stuck in this bloody chair. I appreciate the effort, but I've got to get back and find Herbert to give me a hand, quick.”

“Oh, you poor man,” Clara laughed, and pushed faster.

She summoned Herbert as soon as she got Tom up the ramp and into the lobby and Tom, to his intense relief, was wheeled into a washroom and assisted out of the chair. Hell of an end to the evening, he thought, his head spinning from the effects of the unaccustomed beer.