The Communist's Daughter (8 page)

“It'll get worse, don't worry about that,” I said.

“Maybe it will,” he said.

That evening at mess, I sat two men down from him and ate my supper without drawing attention to myself. I watched him. He ate with his head hanging over his plate, a horse feeding at a trough. He had no interest in the men around him. He ignored their taunts and rough jokes. But all around us were boys committed like him to their silence in the hope that it would speed their time there and maintain the peace of mind they'd brought over with them. He was determined, eating with fear and concentration. He would fill his belly and sleep and complete whatever duties he was assigned. He was a farmer allotted a single furrow and would not stray outside its narrow rut, I could tell. I was intrigued by this connection to home. I had no free time, not even for letters to my family. My concentration was fiercely set on the adventure ahead.

The presence of Robert Pearce was strangely comforting to me, though. He was a link back to something I knew, and though we'd fought, he was the one who had helped me establish myself in that town. It was through him that I had become the sheriff and the bully and the enforcer with a higher purpose. Something had happened that afternoon, something exceptional in my life, by equal measures shameful and ennobling, something beyond the bullying that I felt still. I wanted to know what that was. I studied him over the following days and weeks. But his sad eyes told me something had changed in him since we'd stood face to face.

I didn't know if it was his being there that pulled him low, or if my knocking him down years before had reduced the bully he once had been to a meek and soft man, lonely for his people and his town and the simple tasks he'd grown used to over his short life. He was maybe twenty-four, my age. He caused no trouble. He marched in a straight line like the rest of us, performed his physical exercises and his rifle work proficiently and not a whit better than was expected. It was as though he was always thinking of something else, and for the weeks I watched him I believed it was the miserable town of Edgely he was dreaming about, caught up in his idyllic boyhood.

The early morning of the day we sailed for Belgium I told him who I was. He smiled softly and said, “It was a fair fight so I don't hold nothing against you.” We sat for a moment in silence as the ferry pulled out from the docks. The rumble rattled our bones. The lumps of porridge gurgled in our guts. A low murmur of voices filled the hollows of the ship.

“What are you thinking?” I said.

“I'm thinking I'll die over there.”

“We all might,” I said. “But there's no knowing.”

“I know it,” he said.

I said, “Keep your head down, Robert. That's all you can do.”

The Channel whipped up, and the crossing took close to two hours.

“This is a sign,” he said. “Turn back,' it's saying.”

“I don't think so, Robert, it's just weather.”

We went above deck and watched England recede through the hundreds of Jacob's ladders that descended from above in gleaming columns. Though the farm lad Robert was full of dread, I felt a sense of history fill my heart and hold me in the good favour of my ancestors. I'd never been so close to war before but had heard all my father's stories of links by blood to the noble past. I knew of the Highland Scot named Angus of Combust, the Jacobite who fell in the battle of Culloden in 1745 and then dragged his wounded body to safety and, through toil and the grace of God, was able to make his way to the Isle of Skye, where he met and married Christina Campbell of the Isle of Harris who bore him a son, my great-great-grandfather John. This man, John Bethune, arrived to North Carolina as a result of the Clearances. There, as a chaplain, he fought with the Royal Highland Immigrants to put down the American rebellion, and then, with the Royal 84th Regiment, he helped defend the Citadel of Quebec against the American invaders in the winter of 1775–76. From these histories and others, I took no small measure of pride and strength in knowing I was of fighting stock, and fight I would when the time came. You see how little I knew then? How flush with romantic dreams I was! This Bethune blood had on many occasions been spilled in earlier times, and if my blood were destined to stain the soil of France and Belgium this year or the next, so be it, I thought, it would run again in the veins of future generations of great-nephews and their sons. But I did not say this. I simply said, “Robert, it's just weather.”

I knew what he meant to say, though, and wasn't inclined to look down on him for his anxiety and sadness. He was a man connected to his fear. It was the simple truth. In some ways he was more truthful about the matter than I was. I would never call that cowardice, not then and especially not now. He had every right to fear the coming days. Europe was already a graveyard. He had no ancestry or lineage to warm his breast. He had only a plot in Ontario to look forward to, nothing more than hay and beans and superstitious, nonsensical ideas of poetic weather.

I wished for his sake that suddenly a great fish would leap from the water or a sunny sign would break through the clouds, but the sea was chopped by winds alone and the sky grew only darker as the lovely columns of light streaming down were choked off by great fists of cloud. When we landed at Flanders we organized ourselves and then began filing down the gangplanks loaded down with our packs. The clouds at once disgorged sheets of rain over the Channel behind us and Belgium before us, nothing but rain and more rain. Poor Robert took no heart in what he saw waiting, and later I thought he somehow had known what was coming.

It was as cold as England, and maybe as cold as northern Ontario, where the trees were white with snow now, and suddenly we were much closer to the war.

If you had been unable to imagine the fighting thoroughly enough before coming over, you saw it in the country once you arrived. The landscape was a torn carcass stretched before us like nothing I'd ever seen. Limbs hung from tree branches. Barbed wire stitched across open wounds in the earth. An arm reached out from the mud like a pathetic shrub.

I remember on our left flank we had the French 87th Territorial and the 45th Algerian Division. On our right we had the Brits. They looked as if they'd suffered ordeals a thousand times worse than our basic training. There were already ghosts in their eyes. It was quiet the first night I arrived, though, and I had occasion to pretend the worst was over. I was racked with fear and excitement, quietly hunched in a ball in an underground bunker with forty or fifty men. Its dirt walls were supported by thick lumber. A cloaked man brushed past me, looked down, and my eyes met his. It was as if he couldn't see me, not with those haunted eyes. But he
had
seen something he would never forget, I thought. Perhaps now he saw only cadavers in the uniforms around him. He had seen and smelled the unimaginable, and it would not let him go. The eyes offered a story but it was a coded, silent mystery I could make no sense of. He scurried off in the dark. To help me pass the hours that first night I recalled my father's stories of France in her glory days and our family's life there before they migrated to Scotland. On that cold first night in Belgium, the family legends provided a curious mixture of strength of purpose and impermanence. On the transport ship over, I had been buoyed by thoughts of genealogy as destiny, but as the black night deepened these family histories no longer held me in such thrall. I felt more akin to Robert the farmer than to any distant nobility.

*

It is late September. We have arrived without incident to the base of the Wu-t'ai Mountains at Sung-yen K'ou. How many villages have I slept in since arriving, how many abandoned huts have hosted my restless sleep? I am told this area of Shansi Province holds some significant religious aura. You will not be surprised that I cannot myself attest to its spiritual power, but I can tell you that it is a remarkably beautiful place. There are Buddhist temples on every hill and cliff here, it seems. I suppose I can imagine some god smiling down upon this landscape in some previous century. But be that as it may, the Eighth Route Army can use as many solid structures as they can find, and these temples of stone and mortar were built to serve the most eternal of spirits.

We have found a hospital here in thorough disarray but are whipping it into shape. I take it you know by now that in north China “hospital” signifies nothing more than a ramshackle and incomplete assortment of medical supplies and poorly trained doctors gathered together under the nearest roof. This is what we have here, of course. I have taken to giving daily lectures on sanitation and other basics as well as tending to the wounded. I expect to stay here through the month before moving on. Twenty men of my training here would still not be enough. I have been provided a hut not far from the hospital, and Ho is hard at work turning it into something that resembles a home. He's even found a desk for the Remington. More than I can ask, really, considering.

*

The truth is that Robert Pearce was just one man among the mass of brown-uniformed men moving through snaking gorges cut into the mud and earth. I sought him out and spent time with him when I could. We met at chow on the narrow stretch between the trenches and the Regimental Aid Station. He was not a man given to words, though his eyes told me he was thinking all the time. He had impressed me with his gracious acceptance of defeat, so I tried to engage him. He was a familiar face, I suppose. Initially that is what drew me to him. I took pity on him, too, as perhaps he did on me. He was as lost as the rest of us and maybe more so, but he made no secret of it.

“I can't say I'm having a good time here, Beth,” he said one day, when I saw him standing off by himself.

We all went by nicknames. Beth was the one I answered to.

“Farmer,” I said, “it's not what they told us to expect, is it?”

“I believe you like it here, Beth. You're that type. It's not a world I care for.”

“I like it here less than you,” I said. “Do you read the Bible?” He shook his head. “Good,” I said. “What do you think about?”

“I think about home. I think about trees. Here it's only mud.”

“Trees,” I said.

“Climbing. Sitting under. Building with. Pissing against. Blooming. Falling. Colourful leaves. Trees in all their shapes and uses. I dream of a roof of leaves over my head.”

Three days later, in the evening, the Germans released poison gas from their positions. It crawled toward us like slow-moving green worms, hugging every pore of earth, cowardly in its advance. Heavier than the air we breathed, it sought low ground and was pushed forward by obliging winds.

The Algerians and Moroccans got the worst of it. When they rose in choking desperation from the gas, the artillery began—a tactic no one had seen before. If they stayed low, the poison got them; if they ran, the shells or bullets did. It was a brilliant and merciless attack. Equipped with respirators, the enemy walked among the dead and blind and breathless as an army of exterminators. This was like nothing we knew. Our communications were down but news spread along the line for miles that the Hun had changed the rules of war. Runners brought word that we were to contain the salient at all costs, despite this new weapon.

We were ordered to prepare a counter-attack. As dark fell, fifteen hundred men collected in a nearby field. It was a grim sea of mud-splattered faces. These men would move against the enemy in eight waves. We would follow behind, the members of my Field Ambulance Unit, tending to the fallen, then carrying them back to safety. It was a night of terrible anticipation. Silence was the rule, and in this silent gloom each man attempted to master his fear in his own way, and accept his coming death. Just before midnight the whistle blew and the first wave went over, then the next and the next, like a pulsing, raging heartbeat running down to its last, until No Man's Land was overrun by the living and the dead.

We began our work then, searching in teams of six in the darkness and listening for calls, groans or weeping, the organic noises of the fallen. It was not possible to run in mud as deep as that, and the shells and screaming and gunfire deafened anyone who tried, leaving him disoriented and useless to those whom he had come out in search of. Sometimes you stumbled over one of your men even before you knew what he was, not just a stump. That first night we went out more times than I could count. It was by far the dirtiest day my life had yet seen. All night long I saw things I had never imagined possible. In the ghostly green lightning of bursting shells men glowed and flickered as their flesh dropped away from them in pieces. Those men you could not help and their screams faded as the burning grew brighter.

I listened for the cries of the living, not the dying. These led down into dark holes, like a string pulling you by the guts to your own death, in hopes that you might load a man on a stretcher, all six of you committed to this one simple, near-impossible task. It felt nothing less than superhuman. Back and forth we trudged, often more than an hour for every man. We worked like machines in the mud with no time to think or feel pity. There were occasions of nausea at the sight of exploded bodies. Again and again the night lit up with cannon and flares to illuminate the sight of one of our men doubled over retching. We moved forward, avoiding a single building in the distance that was said to house a machine-gun nest. We'd advanced and taken the forward trench of the enemy with bayonet and hand-to-hand fighting, and following the capture of that ditch we stretcher-bearers descended into the pure dark to find what we could. We ignored the enemy's pleas to staunch the flow of their wounds. There was much leg- and boot-work on the dying. This was how we'd been taught to dislodge a stuck bayonet—the full force of the body, foot against shoulder to pull mightily if the blade had wedged into the chest plate or single rib. If it was stuck deep into the spinal column there was no hope for the boy, and sometimes a man came out of nowhere, without a word, and helped him die quickly, but I was not forced to do so, not yet, though I had already heard the necessity for it in inhuman groans closer to death than to life.