He forgot their faces and voices and thought about his body, how it hurt terribly, a piece of steak pulverized with a butcher’s tenderizer the size of a sledgehammer. His head was the worst. It felt like a popped balloon, whatever that might feel like. The talking, the meaningless yammering, made it worse.
Michel lifted his left arm and tried to push away the faces and noise. He grunted. Esmee took the outstretched hand. She held it and stroked it as she would stroke one of Godewyn’s animal patients, talking in a gentle voice with sweet words, soothing and assuring, letting the scared creature know it was among friends.
Shut up! Let me go and shut up!
He was so weak he could not swat the nuisance away, nor form his own words. Something dastardly happened between brain and mouth to deny him speech. He grunted—twice, thrice—and eventually stopped trying.
The Belgians lifted him a little and tipped water into his mouth, which he could barely open. He realized how thirsty he was. He drank clumsily.
They let his head down. His mind, just woken, already felt incredibly tired. It was not long before Michel closed his one good eye and fell asleep.
10
He woke to a dark barely kept at bay by a candle that flickered and burned somewhere beyond his feet. Once again, he tried to see his surrounds, to start to make sense of things.
Everything appeared part of a strange, depthless canvas. He could have been looking through the patina of water. He felt confused. Then he remembered—he had but one eye with which to see.
He heard a meek kind of thunder. Explosions, distant and intermittent. It was the big guns—but not a proper barrage, just a desultory salvo, enough to keep everybody on their toes. He could not tell if they were German or Allied guns. He knew now he was not on the front, but not far from it.
He lay there a while, listening. Thoughts began to come much clearer than before. He figured he should try to get up. First he should test his body. He had memories of the last time he moved.
Michel took a deep breath, feeling his lungs press against ribs and sternum. There was pain in the middle of his chest, worst at his breastbone, but he could breathe, good and deep. A handful of spots on his back felt mighty sore; at worst a rib or two cracked, maybe the same ones he had hurt a month or two before, but nothing had broken off to stab a lung.
He rolled his shoulders. The left was more or less fine, whereas the ache in the right became a severe shooting pain. That set off a sensation like thin wire being run through his right wrist, and further up his hand felt heavy and hot. It was swollen many times its normal size.
He had been kicked in the guts, or hit with something. The area around his kidneys was sore, too, and he felt like he needed to piss, yet the very thought of doing so made his groin ache.
He flexed his legs. More bruising and stiffness, and pain in his knee. Nothing that mattered. All his body seemed to be there. He was not missing anything. All the bits were connected.
It was his head and face that presented the real problem. His jaw was stiff and heavy; sharp pain ran through his gums and teeth every time he swallowed. Michel carefully moved his left hand to his right eye. He thought at first there was a wadded bandage over it, but he soon realized he was feeling his actual face, grossly swollen.
His hand crept up to the cut along his brow, covered by a bandage. The same bandage covered the side of his head. Half his skull and the brain beneath heaved and throbbed in waves of pressure and discomfort. In the middle of the most tender area there was a pinprick that carried a different kind of sensation. He felt for it under the bandage. He found a little flat patch. No, a depression. He had never felt anything like that. Another question to be answered later.
Michel propped with his good arm and pushed his body up. It hurt, as he knew it would. He saw the candle on the table a dozen feet away. A woman with short dark hair slept, slumped in a seat, her head and arms draped across the table.
Michel looked around. He recognised hay, tools, wooden beams and the dirt floor, defined by the light of that single low candle, almost burned to the end of the wick. He was in a barn.
Michel carefully moved his left leg until it pushed over the edge of the mattress. It dropped down, the movement at his knee making him gasp. He closed his one good eye and waited for the pain to subside.
When it diminished, he moved his right leg across and fully sat up, ignoring the discomfort throughout his torso. He sat there without moving. He realized he was exhausted, and from nothing—from waking up, sitting up. Jesus … had he slept fifty years and arisen as an old man?
Then he noticed it—the dog, sitting on its haunches, staring at him from six feet away. A spaniel, maybe a spaniel crossed with another breed. Medium size. Its silky black hair made a fine coat, not as long or curly as some. Its eyes were full of energy. Nothing about the animal seemed aggressive, more attentive and curious. Nevertheless, there was something strange, and it took Michel a moment to realize the dog had only one front leg. He had never seen such a thing. He wondered how it moved.
Probably better than me …
He decided he had to try to stand. He gripped the edge of the bed with his good hand and told his legs to lift. He rose slowly, like an airship. As he straightened, the blood surged to his legs; his vision washed into colored foam and his head felt light. He suddenly felt confused and unbalanced. He put his arm out and then a leg.
Too late. He slumped back. The side of his ass hit the bed with a loud clang. The weight pulled the bed over and both Michel and trundle hit the dirt floor.
All the pain surged at once through every tender spot of his body, and Michel cried out. The dog yipped. At the table, Axe’s head sprang up. She looked across at the overturned bed and Michel sprawled in the dirt. She ran to his side.
“Michel, Michel, het is goed, ik ben hier, ik ben hier.”
More meaningless Dutch words.
Axe turned the bed onto its legs and helped Michel up. He sat on the edge, shaking, his body aflame. As the worst of it began to subside, it occurred to him that the woman had spoken his name. He looked at her worried face.
Who are you?
All that came out was a mumbled sound. His jaw would not open properly, and his tongue and lips were swollen.
Damn it!
Everything was impossible.
“Begrijp jij mij? Heb je Nederlands begrijpen?” said the woman. She leant in close. “Nee? Ik spreek geen Frans. Hoe zit het duits? Sprechen si Deutsch? Nein?” The woman shook her head, the gesture itself a question.
The mere noises that pounded into Michel’s brain suddenly took on form and meaning. The last ones—German words. He nodded with a small movement of his head.
“Ja? Ja? Sprechen si Deutsch?” she said, the mouth that sounded out the words turning upwards in a triumphant smile. Axe continued in German, and Michel understood.
“Huh! We can understand one another! Then understand you are going to be all right, Michel. You just need rest. A doctor—a kind of doctor—came and helped you. Godewyn. And Esmee. Good people, my neighbors. You can trust them. And me. I will help you, I promise. I swear on my life. I know you are French. A friend. You were in uniform when I found you. You are a soldier?”
Michel nodded slowly.
“And I know about the German soldiers. It is ok. I know what you did. What you had to do.”
What German soldiers? What have I done?
“All that matters is that you are safe. Rest now. I will get you tea and soup. Then we can talk.”
11
East of Mesen in occupied Belgium, a lone German staff car sped along a narrow unpaved road. Colonel Wolfgang Kranz peered from the window, watching fields disappear into a straight line of forest. His gaze settled upon the fence delineating the two.
He was in a wistful mood and found himself thinking about how the layers of stone, encased in sod and covered by thick tangles of weeds, were all that separated wild from cultivated. He contemplated the strangeness of such fences. How t
hey were little different to nature’s own random quarries except for the meaning invested by those who toiled to place one particular stone atop another. Until they stood back and declared their pile of stones no such thing at all—their stones were a fence and a fence was sacrosanct.
It was just one of humanity’s many delusions, for when it came to piles of stone that men called fences, seeds and spores cared naught, roots cared naught, animals that climbed or slunk or flew or hopped cared naught, the sun cared naught, the wind and water that carved entire landscapes cared naught.
Only men cared. They cared about the illusion of a reality that existed only so long as they recreated that reality second by second, moment by moment. A fence—a man’s pile of stones that held the world at bay—in fact stopped nothing. It only represented intent.
It was men themselves who stopped things, or let them be free. Men who stopped the field of beets and allowed forest to exist, for both had a purpose.
That purpose was to feed the troops.
That purpose was to conceal him, Kranz, and his work.
It was work that could be delayed no longer. Already so much time had been wasted while he waited in that French prison camp behind fences he could have penetrated at any time of his choosing—waited and wondered if or when the German generals would realize they needed him.
It had taken three years of war. It had taken stalemate and quagmire and desperation. Now, they told him he may be their best hope to win the war.
Mustard gas. That was his work. That was what he had waited all these years for. To build a weapon no fence could contain.
12
“All right. I suppose you’re wondering why each of you is holding a sock. We’ll get to that. First, does anyone know what the biggest killer is down there?” said Sergeant Lynch, and pointed.
Henry and the other seven privates who were lined up in the trench looked across to the entrance of the mine. It was not as grand as Henry had imagined. He thought there would be a great cavern carved from the side of a hill, massive piles of massive boulders and all sorts of fancy workings going on—big pulleys and rails and steel, lots of steel.
There was no steel. Had Henry not known better, he would have considered the mine little more than a hole. A big hole, but a hole just the same, its straight sides lined with hundreds of sandbags neatly piled atop one another. At one end, the hole dropped away toward timber framing around what could have been a slightly undersized door frame—sans door—that led to a dark hallway.
But it was not a hole and not a door frame and not a hallway. It was a long and expertly built mine that tunneled beneath German trenches.
A soldier coughed to announce himself. It was Private Horton, a tiny man who made the other small men look big. The army did not take soldiers shorter than 5 feet 3 inches, in which case Horton must have been standing on the tips of his toes when they took his measurements.
Sergeant Lynch inclined his head and entreated Horton with a hummed, “Mmm?”
“Would it be gas, sarge?” said Horton in a voice far bigger than his body.
“No, but bloody good guess. You’ll find that it’s not all clay down there. There are pockets of carbon monoxide and methane, other gases, too. They’ll kill you, quick smart.”
“Sir,” said Henry.
“Yes?”
“What about the canaries? Don’t they smell the gas?”
The sergeant was in his forties. He sported a thick moustache of coarse black and grey hair, around which his smile now curved. “Do you see any canaries here?”
Henry looked around. “No, sir.”
“No. You chaps are the canaries. And if you smell gas, you’d better bloody well sing. But you won’t smell it. The trick is to listen for the hiss, catch it early. Means you’ve broken through to a pocket of something. If that happens, you leave your tools and get the hell out. And remember, no open flames down there. I don’t give a damn how badly you want a fag, you wait. Before anyone asks, the lanterns can’t ignite the gas pockets. The mesh around the flame disperses the heat, keeps it too cool to light the gas. Right, any other ideas what the biggest killer is?”
“Cave-in, sarge?” said another soldier.
“We have them. All the time. Won’t find a sapper who hasn’t seen at least one cave-in, more like a dozen. Less deadly than you might think, unless it’s on your head. All you men need to know is that we look after our own. If a tunnel collapses, we move heaven and earth to get you out. Which just leaves the sock. The sock, seeing as nobody has guessed, is for Jerry.”
Sergeant Lynch looked from man to man. Each of them wore a confused look, as he had intended.
“That’s right. Our biggest killer in the tunnels of late has been Jerry. That’s why you are to don socks on anything metallic, especially while carting picks and shovels. So that Jerry doesn’t hear us.”
“Sir,” said Henry.
“You again. What’s your name, private?”
“Biggelow, sir.”
“Go on, then, Biggelow.”
“How can the Germans hear us all the way up in their trenches, sir? My understanding was we don’t tunnel up to the trenches when we get there, we just stay down deep and set off the explosives in the ground.”
Sergeant Lynch squinted. “Christ, Biggelow, you mean to tell me you haven’t worked it out? You think we’re the only ones tunneling?”
The sergeant pointed to the soil beneath his feet. “There could be twenty Germans fifty feet down setting thousands of pounds of explosives, right this moment. And the only way we would know, short of their sending us all sky high, is by listening. By shutting your mouths, putting your socks on your tools, and listening. Just like they will be.
“You lot came here thinking you’d be digging tunnels for explosives. For some of you, that’s true. There’s a few extensions we’re digging to hit their secondary lines in the event of their retreat. For the most part, though, the mines are dug and our explosives have been laid. That means our job now is to defend what we’ve got while we wait for the order to set them off. When that is, Christ knows.
“This last week alone we had two breakthroughs, one of theirs into ours and one of ours into theirs. They got a charge off and killed eight of our men. You wouldn’t have heard about that because we sappers keep our mouths shut. We don’t blab about our work, even if it is a damn sight more important than what everybody else is doing. We stay mum. Is that clear?”
The men nodded and chorused their assent. The sergeant let the gravity of his words sink in.
“Sergeant Lynch?” said Henry, breaking the silence.
“Go on.”
“Well, you said there were two. They broke into ours and we broke into theirs. Did we blow theirs up like they did ours?”
Sergeant Lynch looked past Henry. He ran his hand along his moustache. “No. No we didn’t. Weren’t so lucky. Busted through like a pack of bumbling idiots, then it was on for young and old.
“I’ll tell you lot right now. You think it’s hairy up top, fighting in the trenches. That’s nothing compared to doing it in a mine, barely wide enough for two men to squeeze by. Picks and shovels at ten paces while you hope someone at the rear has a pistol, and if they do that they don’t shoot you in the back of the head by accident. We want to avoid all that. Don’t we, boys?”
The men nodded their heads.
“So be careful. Do your jobs. Do what the other sappers with more experience tell you to do. And make sure you wear those socks on your tools so Jerry with his microphones can’t hear us. Questions?”
Sergeant Lynch paused for the briefest moment, not nearly long enough for Henry or any of the others to ask a dozen questions they harbored about what they had been signed up for—unwitting volunteers, all of them.
“Very well. Welcome to the Royal Engineers. Lieutenant Selwood wants to address you this morning, then I’ll take you through a few more of the basics. First thing tomorrow”—and the sergeant whistled a canary-like whistle, usin
g his lower palate and teeth and tongue while barely moving his lips—“down you go. I hope you can all swim, because around here we don’t have time for any sort of gently–gently caper. In at the deep end, swim fast or bloody well sink.”
Henry wondered what the sergeant meant by deep end. He knew they were digging holes in the ground to try to find the German holes in the ground, but none of them went straight down. The mines began at a steep decline, cutting through sand until they were in clay. Then they tunneled horizontal, anywhere from thirty to eighty feet beneath the surface.
What then? Was there a deep end? Was there water? Henry would have asked, but the sergeant was already walking away.
Henry looked up from the mine’s entrance and out across the horizon, at the wide blue sky beneath which sat a stagnant desert of mud. Somewhere amid that desert lay the German trenches. It would have to be a very long hole.
Henry sighed and felt his jaw. It was still sore from where Michel backhanded him. Henry resolved that he would pop him one right on the nose—he deserved that and more—when he saw him again. But that seemed less and less likely. It had been two days, and he was still missing.
13
Michel stopped trying to speak. His jaw was either broken or dislocated from the socket. Axe explained that Godewyn would know more once the swelling reduced.
He could not chew, but he could open his mouth a little into a grimace and swallow with difficulty. Axe gave him tea with milk and butter. She reheated a salty broth that contained oil, sheep fat and fresh herbs. Michel slurped it down as best he could, his hunger seeming to grow with every awkward mouthful.
The sustenance made a quick difference. He soon felt more coherent, and began to think through what he knew, for surely he had done enough wallowing; he needed to get on with his part in the war.
The Belgian woman called herself Axe. Michel liked that. She had explained all that she could. How her dog found him in the mud on the north-west corner of her farm, a farm located just behind enemy lines between the towns of Mesen and Sint-Elooi. How she dragged him back to the barn. How Godewyn came and they drilled through his skull, which, with her explanation, sounded almost sensible, until she showed him the drill, a common piece of farm equipment. He would have laughed if he could.
Michel And Axe Bury The Hatchet (The French Bastard Book 2) Page 5
