by Kelly Link
Tommy came awake instantly, the way you do after a few weeks at the Front.
It was morning stand-to, the most unnecessary drill in the army. The thinking behind it was that, at dawn, the sun would be full in the eyes of the soldiers in the British and French trenches, and the Hun could take advantage of it and advance through No Man’s Land and surprise them while they were sun-dazzled. (The same way that the Germans had evening stand-to in case the British made a surprise attack on them out of the setting sun.) Since no attacks were ever made across the churned and wired and mined earth of No-Man’s Land by either side unless preceded by an artillery barrage of a horrendous nature, lasting from a couple, to in one case, twenty-four hours, of constantly falling shells, from the guns of the other side, morning stand-to was a sham perpetrated by long-forgotten need from the early days of this Great War.
The other reason it was unnecessary was that this section of the Line that ran from the English Channel to the Swiss border was on a salient, and so the British faced more northward from true east, so the sun, instead of being their eyes, was a dull glare off the underbrims of their helmets somewhere off to their right. The Hun, if he ever came across the open, would be sidelit and would make excellent targets for them.
But morning stand-to had long been upheld by tradition and the lack of hard thinking when the Great War had gone from one of movement and tactics in the opening days to the one of attrition and stalemate it had become since.
This part of the front had moved less than one hundred yards, one way or the other, since 1915.
Tommy’s older brother, Fred, had died the year before on the first day of the Somme Offensive, the last time there had been any real movement for years. And that had been more than fifty miles up the Front.
Tommy stood on the firing step of the parapet and pointed his rifle at nothing in particular to his front through the firing slit in the sandbags. All up and down the line, others did the same.
Occasionally some Hun would take the opportunity to snipe away at them. The German sandbags were an odd mixture of all types of colors and patterns piled haphazardly all along their parapets. From far away, they formed a broken pattern, and the dark and light shades hid any break, such as a firing slit, from easy discernment. But the British sandbags were uniform, and the firing and observation slits stood out like sore thumbs, something the men were always pointing out to their officers.
As if on cue, there was the sound of smashing glass down the trench and the whine of a ricocheting bullet. A lieutenant threw down the trench periscope as if it were an adder that had bitten him.
“Damn and blast!” he said aloud. Then to his batman “Requisition another periscope from regimental supply.” The smashed periscope lay against the trench wall, its top and the mirror inside shot clean away by some sharp-eyed Hun. The batman left, going off in defile down the diagonal communication trench that led back to the reserve trench.
“Could have been worse,” someone down the trench said quietly. “Could have been his head.” There was a chorus of wheezes and snickers.
Humour was where you found it, weak as it was.
Usually both sides were polite to each other during their respective stand-tos. And afterwards, at breakfast and the evening meal. It wasn’t considered polite to drop a shell on a man who’d just taken a forkful of beans into his mouth. The poor fellow might choke.
Daytime was when you got any rest you were going to get. Of course there might be resupply, or ammunition, or food-toting details, but those came up rarely, and the sergeants were good about remembering who’d gone on the last one, and so didn’t send you too often.
There was mail call, when it came, then the midday meal (when and if it came) and the occasional equipment inspection. Mostly you slept unless something woke you up.
Once a month, your unit was rotated back to the second trench, where you mostly slept as well as you could, and every third week to the reserve trench, far back, in which you could do something besides soldier. Your uniform would be cleaned and deloused, and so would you.
In the reserve trench was the only time your mind could get away from the War and its routine. You could get in some serious reading, instead of the catch-as-catch kind of the first and second trenches. You could get a drink and eat something besides bully beef and hardtack if you could find anybody selling food and drink. You could see a moving picture in one of the rear areas, though that was a long hike, or perhaps a music-hall show, put on by one of the units, with lots of drag humour and raucous laughter at not very subtle material. (Tommy was sure the life of a German soldier was much the same as his.)
It was one of the ironies of these times that in that far-off golden summer of 1914, when “some damn fool thing in the Balkans” was leading to its inevitable climax, Tommy’s brother, Fred, who was then eighteen, had been chosen as a delegate of the Birmingham Working-Men’s Esperanto Association to go as a representative to the 24th Annual Esperanto Conference in Basel, Switzerland. The Esperanto Conference had been to take place in the last days of July and the first days of August. (Fred had been to France before with a gang of school chums and was no stranger to travel.)
The Esperanto Conference was to celebrate the 24th anniversary of Zamenhof’s artificial language, invented to bring better understanding between peoples through the use of an easy-to-learn, totally regular invented language—the thinking being that if all people spoke the same language (recognizing a pre-Babel dream), they would see that they were all one people, with common dreams and goals, and would slowly lose nationalism and religious partisanship through the use of the common tongue.
There had been other artificial languages since—Volapuk had had quite a few adherents around the turn of the century—but none had had the cachet of Esperanto: the first and best of them.
Tommy and Fred had been fascinated by the language for years (Fred could both speak and write it with an ease that Tommy had envied).
What had surprised Fred, on arriving in Switzerland three years before, was that these representatives of this international conference devoted to better understanding among peoples were as acrimonious about their nations as any bumpkin from a third-rate country run by a tin-pot superstitious chieftain. Almost from the first, war and the talk of war divided the true believers from the lip-service toadies. The days were rife with desertions, as first one country then another announced mobilizations. By foot, by horse, by motor-car and train, and, in one case, aeroplane, the delegates left the conference, to join up in the coming glorious adventure of war that they imagined would be a quick, nasty, splendid little one, over “before the snow flew.”
By the end of the conference, only a few delegates were left, and they had to make hurried plans to return home before the first shots were fired.
His brother, Fred, now dead, on the Somme, had returned to England on August 2, 1914, just in time to see a war no one wanted (but all had hoped for) declared. He, like so many idealists of all classes and nations, had joined up immediately.
Now Tommy, who had been three years younger at the time, was all that was left to his father and mother. He had of course been called up in due time, just before news of his brother’s death had reached him.
And now here he was, in a trench of frozen mud, many miles from home, with night falling, when the sergeant walked by and said, “Fall out for wiring detail.”
Going on a wiring party was about the only time you could be in No Man’s Land with any notion of safety. As you were repairing and thickening your tangle of steel, so were the Germans doing the same to theirs a quarter-mile away.
Concertina wire, so haphazard-appearing from afar, was not there to stop an enemy assault, though it slowed that, too. The wire was there to funnel an enemy into narrower and tighter channels, so the enemy’s course of action would become more and more constricted—and where the assault would finally slow against the impenetrable
lanes of barbed steel was where your defensive machine-gun fire was aimed. Men waiting to go over, under, through, or around the massed wire were cut to ribbons by .303 caliber bullets fired at the rate of five hundred per minute.
Men could not live in such iron weather.
So you kept the wire repaired. At night. In the darkness, the sound of unrolling wire and muffled mauls filled the space between the lines. Quietly cursing men hauled the rolls of barbed wire over the parapets and pushed and pulled them out to where some earlier barrage (which was always supposed to cut all the wire but never did) had snapped some strands or blown away one of the new-type posts (which didn’t have to be hammered in but were screwed into the ground as if the earth itself were one giant champagne cork).
Men carried wire, posts, sledges in the dark, out to the place where the sergeant stood.
“Two new posts here,” he said, pointing at some deeper blackness. Tommy could see nothing, anywhere. He put his coil of wire on the ground, immediately gouging himself on the barbs of an unseen strand at shoulder height. He reached out—felt the wire going left and right.
“Keep it quiet,” said the sergeant. “Don’t want to get a flare up our arses.” Illumination was the true enemy of night work.
Sounds of hammering and work came from the German line. Tommy doubted that anyone would fire off a flare while their own men were out in the open.
He got into the work. Another soldier screwed in a post a few feet away.
“Wire,” said the sergeant. “All decorative-like, as if you’re trimming the Yule tree for Father Christmas. We want Hans and Fritz to admire our work, just before they cut themselves in twain on it.”
Tommy and a few others uncoiled and draped the wire, running it back and forth between the two new posts and crimping it in with the existing strands.
Usually you went out, did the wiring work, and returned to the trench, knowing you’d done your part in the War. Many people had been lost in those times: there were stories of disoriented men making their way in the darkness, not to their own but to the enemy’s trenches, and being killed or spending the rest of the war as a P.O.W.
Sometimes Tommy viewed wiring parties as a break in the routine of stultifying heat, spring and fall rains, and mud, bone-breaking winter freezes. It was the one time you could stand up in relative comfort and safety, and not be walking bent over in a ditch.
There was a sudden rising comet in the night. Someone on Fritz’s side had sent up a flare. Everybody froze—the idea was not to move at all when No Man’s Land was lit up like bright summer daylight. Tommy, unmoving, was surprised to see Germans caught out in the open, still also as statues, in front of their trench, poised in attitudes of labor on their wire.
Then who had fired off the flare?
It was a parachute flare and slowly drifted down while it burned the night to steel-furnace-like brilliance. There were pops and cracks and whines from both trenchlines as snipers on each side took advantage of the surprise bounty of lighted men out in the open.
Dirt jumped up at Tommy’s feet. He resisted the urge to dive for cover, the nearest being a shell crater 20 feet away. Any movement would draw fire, if not to him, to the other men around him. They all stood stock-still; he saw droplets of sweat on his sergeant’s face.
From the German line a trench mortar coughed.
The earth went upwards in frozen dirt and a shower of body parts.
He felt as if he had been kicked in the back.
His right arm was under him. His rifle was gone. The night was coming back in the waning flickering light from the dying flare. He saw as he lay his sergeant and a couple of men crawling away toward their line. He made to follow them. His legs wouldn’t work.
He tried pushing himself up with his free arm; he only rolled over on the frozen earth. He felt something warm on his back quickly going cold.
No, he thought, 1 can’t die like this out in No Man’s Land. He had heard, in months past, the weaker and weaker cries of slowly dying men who’d been caught out here. He couldn’t think of dying that way.
He lay for a long time, too tired and hurt to try to move. Gradually his hearing came back; there had only been a loud whine in his ears after the mortar shell had exploded.
He made out low talk from his own trench, twenty or so yards away. He could imagine the discussion now. Should we go out and try to get the wounded or dead? Does Fritz have the place zeroed in? Where’s Tommy? He must have bought a packet.
Surprisingly, he could also hear sounds which must be from the German line—quiet footsteps, the stealthy movement from shell-hole to crater across No Man’s Land. The Germans must have sent out searching parties. How long had he lain here? Had there been return fire into the German work parties caught in the open by the flare? Were the British searching for their own wounded? Footsteps came nearer to him. Why weren’t the sentries in his own trench challenging them? Or firing? Were they afraid that it was their own men making their ways back?
The footsteps stopped a few yards away. Tommy’s eyes had adjusted to the darkness after the explosion. He saw vague dark shapes all around him. Through them moved a lighter man-shape. It moved with quick efficiency, pausing to turn over what Tommy saw now was a body near him.
It was at that moment that another weaker flare bloomed in the sky from the German trench, a red signal flare of some kind. In its light, Tommy saw the figure near him continue to rifle the body that lay there.
Tommy saw that the figure was a Chinaman. What was a Chinaman doing here in No Man’ s Land?
Perhaps, Tommy thought, coughing, he speaks English. Maybe I can talk to him in Esperanto? That’s what the language was invented for.
He said, in Esperanto, the first sentence he had ever learned in the language.
—Could you direct me to the house of the family Lodge?
The Chinaman stopped. His face broke into a quizzical look in the light of the falling flare. Then he smiled, reached down to his belt, and brought up a club. He came over and hit Tommy on the head with it.
He woke in a clean bed, in clean sheets, in clean underwear, with a hurt shoulder and a headache. He was under the glare of electric lights, somewhere in a clean and spacious corridor.
He assumed he was far back of the Lines in a regimental hospital. How he had gotten here he did not know.
A man came to the foot of the bed. He wore a stethoscope.
—Ah,—he said.—You have awakened.—He was speaking Esperanto.
“Am I in the division hospital?” asked Tommy in English.
The man looked at him uncomprehendingly.
He asked the same again, in Esperanto, searching for the words as he went.
—Far from it.—said the man.—You are in our hospital, where you needn’t ever worry about the war you have known again. All will be explained later.
—Have I been taken to Switzerland in my sleep?—asked Tommy. —Am I in some other neutral country?
—Oh , you’re in some neutral country all right. But you’re only a few feet from where you were found. And I take it you were under the impression it was a Chinese who rescued you. He’s no Chinese—he would be offended to be called such—but Annamese, from French Indo-China. He was brought over here in one of the first levees early in the War. Many of them died that first winter, a fact the survivors never forgot. How is it you speak our language?
—I was in the Esperanto Union from childhood on. I and my brother, who’s now dead. He both wrote and spoke it much better than I.
—It was bound to happen—said the man.—You can imagine Ngyen’s surprise when you spoke so, dressed in a British uniform. When you spoke, you marked yourself as one of us; he thought to bring you back the most expedient way possible, which was unconscious.
—The doctor tended your wounds—very nasty ones from which you probably would have perished had not y
ou been brought here..
—Where is here?—asked Tommy.
—Here—said the man—is a few feet below No Man’s Land—I’m sure the ex-captain will explain it all to you. It’s been a while since someone in your circumstances joined us. Most of us came in the early days of the war, as soon as the lines were drawn, or were found, half-mad or wounded between the lines, and had to be brought back to health and sanity. You appear to us, wounded all the same, but already speaking the language. You’ll fit right in.
—Are you British? French? German?—asked Tommy.
The man laughed. —Here—he said—none of us are of any nationality any longer. Here, we are all Men.
He left. Eventually, the doctor came in and changed the dressing on his shoulder and gave him a pill.
The ex-captain came to see him. He was a small man, dressed in a faded uniform, with darker fabric at the collar in the shape of captain’s bars.
—Welcome to Ninieslando—he said.
—It’s very clean—said Tommy—I’m not used to that.
—It’s the least we can do—he said, sweeping his hand around, indicating All That Out There.
—You’ll learn your way around—he continued.—You have the great advantage of already speaking our language, so you won’t have to be going to classes. We’ll have you on light duties till your wounds heal.
—I’m very rusty—Tommy said.—I’m out of practice. My brother was the scholar, he spoke it ’til the day he was killed on the Somme.
—We could certainly have used him here-—said the ex-captain.
—Where we are—he continued, going into lecture-mode—is several feet below No Man’s Land. We came here slowly, one by one, in the course of the War. The lost, the wounded, the abandoned, and, unfortunately, the slightly mad. We have dug our rooms and tunnels, tapped into the combatant’s field-phones and electrical lines, diverted their water to our own uses. Here we are building a society of Men to take over the Earth after this War finally ends. Right now our goal is to survive the War—to do that we have to live off their food, water, lights, their clothing and equipment, captured at night on scavenging parties. We go into their trench lines and take what we need. We have better uses for it than killing other men.
