by M. J. Cates
“I would have thought you’d seen enough battlefields,” Quentin said.
“Active ones, you bet. These I like.”
Stokely, who had been at both Ypres and Vimy, had changed battalions so many times he’d lost count. He was a stocky, rough-edged little man—the sort you might expect to fix your furnace or mend the road—but he pocketed souvenirs with the avidity of an archaeologist. He had an absolute passion for this, liked to send items back to some little town in Saskatchewan and could not be dissuaded.
“Look at that,” Pratt said, pointing. “We got a poilu, I’d say.”
A skeletonized body sprawled face up in the grassless waste that used to be a field. His uniform was the older French one of dark blue tunic and red trousers. His rifle lay at an angle a few feet away. Stokely bent with his trench knife and sawed off a couple of buttons and badges.
They walked on, the going easy in the current dry weather, where it must have been hellish in the heavy rains of spring. The locals claimed it had never rained like that in France, that the endless storms were the fault of all the shelling, the mines, the grenades. All these ungodly explosions had damaged the natural order of sky and cloud, and broke the rains loose.
Two or three kilometres later they came upon an abandoned trench. Stokely leapt in.
“Come on, ya slowpokes. Dry as a bone.”
“German,” Pratt noted. “They’re always deeper than ours. Better made, too.”
“They had the luxury of time,” Quentin said, admiring the struts, the planking, the corrugated tin holding back the earth. Even the duckwalk and firing steps were intact.
The next bay, however, had suffered a direct hit and was impassable. As they turned back, Stokely said, “I think we’ve got a dugout here.”
“Come on,” Quentin said, “let’s find our dinner.”
“Just a quick peek.” Stokely got down on his knees to clear away dirt and rubble from the opening.
They proceeded slowly down the steps, Stokely and Pratt holding cigarette lighters aloft. The dugout was deep enough to be shell-proof, with a wooden floor and straight wide planking for walls. There were shelves of provisions, tinned meat and fruit, loose tobacco, cigars, and a few books.
And it was occupied.
Two German soldiers, leathery mummies, sat across from one another over a box table, hands folded in front of them, heads lowered as if contemplating hands of cards that had long vanished. Three more soldiers leaned back against a wall, heads tipped back, mouths open as if they had been interrupted while singing a drinking song. They had been big men, all of them, not the kind of men you’d want to meet in hand-to-hand.
“Fuck me,” Pratt said.
“Weird the way they’re still sittin’,” Stokely said. “You think it was gas?”
“You don’t sit still when there’s gas around. They’d be all twisted up, clutching their throats.”
“Probably concussion,” Quentin said. “From the shell next door.”
“But how come they’re sittin’ there playing poker?”
Quentin shrugged. “Local kids? Probably sat ’em up for a joke.” The Germans were still as a museum tableau, but the flames from the lighters made their eye sockets seem to move.
“ ’At’s not right,” Stokely said. “Even if they are German.”
“I’ll see you up top,” Quentin said, and turned to mount the stairs.
The others followed right behind. Back in the light, they climbed out of the trench and Quentin bent forward, clutching his knees and taking in deep lungfuls of air. Stokely knelt in the dirt and made the sign of the cross. Pratt walked off a little way and lit a cigarette.
“Well, that was something,” he said, when Quentin joined him.
“Yeah.”
Pratt called to Stokely. “You praying for Fritz, for Chrissake?”
Stokely stood up and slapped at his knees. “Not the live ones.”
They walked for a long time without saying anything. Quentin had learned to slam shut the many entrances to his heart, and usually he was successful, but some things just caught you off guard. He knew he would long remember the scene, these strong young men brought to nothing.
There had also been that day in Mont Noir, a tiny house: in one cramped room, lit only by a thin wash of light from a filthy window, four women around ninety years old, refugees from some other village. They were cousins, two sets of sisters. A daughter appeared, no youngster herself, and offered to take Quentin’s picture. Every day she walked the road with her camera, offering to take pictures for a few coins—a way to help support the old women. Quentin knew the battalion would be moving before she could develop the film, but he posed for her anyway. He could not recall the daughter’s face, but those old women, with their pinched and ugly features from which all hope had fled, would be with him always.
Also still with him, the Frenchwoman who had been selling pastries to the soldiers when they were bivouacked near her farm. In her early thirties or thereabouts, she had loose brown curls and dark, comma-shaped eyebrows, the kind of face you know is French without being able to say precisely why. As the men were about to move out, a few mortar shells came their way and a stray piece of shrapnel tore one of her breasts almost clean off, the stretcher-bearers trying to hold her together with field dressings until they could get her to a collection point up the line. Quentin had no philosophy into which such an image could comfortably fit; he doubted any such philosophy existed.
Eventually the three soldiers came to a place called Lillers. Although there was much evidence of shelling nearby, the village itself was relatively undamaged. The streets were deserted, locals avoiding the midday heat. A drowsy, sagging dog followed them for a short distance before curling up in a patch of shade. They found a small restaurant, also empty except for the patronne. There was no menu as such, just one plat chalked on a blackboard: pork chop, green beans, and frites, priced at two francs.
In one of those odd dislocations of war, the patronne turned out to be English. She had moved to France with her husband, also English, twenty years ago. He had purchased a brewery with the hope of producing the first decent French beer, a project that turned out to be fraught with peril. “He was naive, you see. Thought if you simply introduced proper English beer to the natives they’d lap it up. But the French simply do not love beer the way we British do.”
“And us Canadians,” Pratt said.
“And when they do want a beer they want a light, thin lager. So Roger had to rethink his principles and produce something suited to the French palate. And eventually he did.”
“Where is he now?” Stokely asked.
“He was naive about that too. When the Germans took Mons he thought they’d be turned back after a month or two. Somehow it’s impossible to conceive of Germans in France, they’re such a different people. I mean, you wouldn’t think they’d want to come. But they came and we had to flee to Paris. When we got back they’d dumped all the beer—might have been poisoned, mightn’t it?—and even worse they’d dismantled all Roger’s lovely new equipment and shipped it back to Germany.”
“See,” Pratt said to Stokely, “that’s why Canada’s in this bloody war. You can’t go stealing a man’s beer.”
Stokely laughed.
“Anyway, that was it for Roger. He packed a bag and headed to the British lines and got himself into the army. He’s somewhere near Avesnes at the moment.”
“That’s likely to heat up,” Quentin said.
“He’ll be all right. He’s too old and nearsighted for the front line, so he’s in the Quartermaster section. His knowledge of the region comes in helpful. Goodness, it’s so good to talk English, I’m being a terrible patronne. Please—what can I bring you?”
They ordered the plat, and it turned out to be the best meal any of them had eaten in France or Flanders. Afterwards they drank many coffees, all three of them agreeing that, even though French beer was pure bat’s piss, French coffee was the best in the world. They th
anked the English lady and left extra francs on the table.
“Oh, no,” she said. “You don’t have to tip a patronne.”
“Supporting the home front,” Quentin said.
When they got back Quentin wrote a letter of farewell to his father—most of the troops did the same thing when facing a major action. Farewell letters would remain at the company’s HQ and only those from men who actually perished would be sent on to their families.
“I know we have sometimes been at odds,” Quentin wrote, “and I’m sorry for any disappointment I caused you over the years. Please remember that I’ve always loved and admired you, and feel a deep gratitude for the happy childhood and adolescence you and Mother gave me. I hope soon to see you again, but if fate decides otherwise, please know these words come from my heart.”
He also wrote a separate letter to Jack, asking him, if he was killed in battle, to tell Imogen that she had always been his one true love and always would be.
Afterwards he stood outside with Stokely and watched half a dozen enemy aircraft go after four Royal Flying Corps machines. The Germans had always had the upper hand, with faster aircraft and longer pilot training, but this time the Brits chased them off, one of them spinning to earth, spewing smoke. The Germans got their own back two hours later by blasting away at a Canadian observation balloon. In an instant the fabric sausage turned into a flapping sheet of flame, the sole occupant parachuting to safety and Quentin hoped an extra shot of rum.
The order to move up the line came that evening.
* * *
—
Zero hour was 4:25 a.m. Assembly was three hours earlier along a straight line through the intersection of trenches with the homely names of “Yonge Street” and “Dundas.” All through the night, the Royal Engineers had been hurling drums of burning oil that soaked the enemy lines in smoke and flame. To these they now added thousands upon thousands of gas shells, and the Germans responded with a gas attack of their own. The four companies were forced to assemble amid rolling lethal clouds of the stuff, stumbling in their goggles and hoods, respirators dangling on their chests. The extra ammunition they carried was heavy, not to mention the two grenades clipped to their belts. Quentin was glad he had set his rifle sight earlier, because you couldn’t see through the goggles to do it.
Often before a battle, the men horsed around, play-fighting or hurling friendly insults at one another—anything to keep fear at bay. But the masks and respirators made this impossible. And the noise was shattering. The German whiz-bangs were bad enough, the whiz being just long enough to let you know it was coming, the bang a hammer blow to the eardrums. Then came the thin singing whine of shrapnel looking for limbs to maim, throats to slice. Heavier artillery roared over their heads, each shell loud as a locomotive. Through all of this, bullets thudded into sandbags, pinged off stone.
Nausea crept into Quentin’s belly. He clutched his rifle and imagined his father getting his letter. He was angry at the gas, angry at his own trembling, angry at the Germans for forcing him into his own mind this way. You could not be in your own mind and go over the top.
At twenty minutes to zero hour the big guns opened up behind them and put a stop to the bullets. The ground shook, and if it got any louder Quentin knew he would shit himself. He had developed a deep fear of barbed wire, and both sides were protected with hedges of the stuff as much as fifteen feet deep. The engineers’ job was to blast holes in it. Lack of success in this would mean catastrophe. Quentin had been out with work parties, struggling under the most murderous conditions, to clip gateways through their own barbed defences wide enough to allow hundreds of men to pour through. Despite the work gloves, his hands had been blistered from clipping. There had been ghastly instances in other battles where the job had not been complete. The troops jammed up and were machine-gunned into writhing mounds of dead and wounded.
Zero hour came and he tried to transmute fear into rage. There was an agonizing delay—one minute, two minutes—and then came the order to attack. They went over the top and immediately the enemy filled the sky with red flares. All along the lines the trenches jumped and shook in the flash of shellfire.
Quentin took cover in the nearest shell hole, five or six men piling in behind him. Their first objective was the Germans’ firing line—the Blue Line. Two hundred yards of torn and cratered earth stood between them and it. Quentin peered over the lip and fired at what he thought was a German helmet, though it seemed impossible any enemy could be standing up under the barrage. The night was a smear of blacks and reds, intermittently blanched with silver. Sometimes the explosions were so close together that it was almost light as day. Two shell holes over he saw Lieutenant Pegram urging men on with the pitching motion of his forearm. He was yelling but there was no hearing him.
Quentin fired again and ran for the next shell hole. The earth shuddered. The engineers would stop any minute and set their guns for the next line. The idea was to get to the Blue Line before the enemy had a chance to gather his wits and point his rifle at you.
The soldier who landed next to him was named Fingal—a mousy little man who kept to himself and always walked with his head down as if he’d just been castigated for some misdeed. He took his gas mask off and yelled something Quentin couldn’t hear. When Quentin shook his head, Fingal grabbed his sleeve and pointed off to the right and shrieked in his ear, “Good hole that way! Mine crater!”
Quentin took off his own mask. Through the stench of high explosives and burning oil ran the sweet smell of leftover gas. “All right,” he said. “Let’s run like hell.” Quentin was first out. A bullet whizzed by his neck, but he made it to the crater and jumped in, Fingal right behind him. Quentin could tell by the feel under his boots that he had just landed on the back of a dead man. He looked down as a flash of shellfire lit up the pale features, which were almost unscathed, just one of the eyes obliterated. Presumably the dead man had thought this was a good crater too. It was at least thirty feet deep, a pool of water shining in the bottom.
Bullets fizzed and smacked into the earth around them.
They slid deeper into the hole, their backs to the objective.
“Coupla Huns in a listening post over that way.” Fingal jerked his thumb in the direction of Lens. “We’ve gotta take ’em out.”
“No. We have to stick to the objective.”
“They’ve got a clean shot!”
“It’s more important to reach the objective before they can regroup.”
“We’ll never make it with those bastards there. We gotta raid ’em.”
“Fingal, no. You take a shot and run for the Blue Line. I’ll take a shot and be right behind you.”
“Fuck, man, they’re gonna kill us.”
“The barrage is about to stop. You want to face a whole line of Fritzes? Let’s move it.”
Fingal took his shot and was about to run when Quentin grabbed his belt and hauled him back.
“What the hell you doing, man? You told me to run!”
“Take a look. They’ve got some forward positions our spotters must’ve missed. I just saw a line of helmets heading for one straight ahead.”
They waited for the next shell burst and peered over the rim of the hole. They could make out the bipod of a machine gun being set into place.
“No, sir,” Fingal declared. “That is not going to happen.”
Before Quentin could stop him Fingal was out of the hole and running straight for the emplacement, bellowing. Quentin charged after him. This would be it. He’d get one in the face, or right through the chest. It was the reason he had signed up, the fate he had sought, and now it had come. Which did nothing to calm the terror raging in his chest, or still the urge to curl himself into a ball, shrieking and weeping, until it was all over.
Off to his right, he could dimly make out the Germans who’d been potting at them from the direction of Lens. Were their rifles jammed? Were they dead? Why had they not shot him yet? And these helmets in the hole ahead, why ha
d they not popped up like mechanical ducks in a midway gallery?
The Germans’ machine gun was a belt-feed and the man feeding it was having trouble staying in position. The barrage had stopped. They had a minute, maybe two to get to the Blue Line. Well, it was irrelevant, now, Quentin considered, his boots pounding the ground. He wanted to cry out Shoot me, for Christ sake, get it over with. I’m right here. Let’s get it over with because I’m just too fucking terrified to live.
And then Fingal was grabbing hold of the machine gun, tipping it back into the hole and screaming at the Germans. Quentin was there too, rifle pointing at the white face of an officer who held his hands up, yelling, “Peace! Peace! We like you! Canadians—please, we want to go with you!”
Quentin screamed at them to drop their weapons but they already had. There were eight of them, all with their hands up and smiling and yelling about how happy they were to be captured. “Please, we go with you! We like you!”
Quentin and Fingal were down in the hole with them now. Another three Canadians joined them.
“Hände hoch!” Quentin yelled. “Keep your hands up!”
“Look,” the German officer said, “you can go this way.” He indicated the communication trench. It was barely two feet wide but it was deep enough.
Quentin was just a private with no authority over the other Canadians in the hole. He turned to a corporal who seemed to be looking to him for direction. “We can send them back as soon as we take the Blue Line. You want to look after them until then, or shall I?”
The corporal seemed to collect himself. “We’ll look after this bunch. You go ahead. Jesus, the barrage has stopped. I can hear myself.”
“You only need two men for this,” Quentin said. “The rest should come with me.”
Nobody wanted to come. The Germans were handing out cigarettes and other tokens and grinning like fools.
“You believe these people?” the corporal said. “Kinda hard to stay mad at them.”
“I think that’s the idea.”
