Into That Fire

by M. J. Cates

Quentin and Fingal and a couple of others ran along the communication trench. After twenty yards, maybe thirty, it opened into a bay of the German firing line. It was empty except for two dead men and a soldier of about nineteen without a helmet, who was weeping and shaking uncontrollably. Quentin threw back the flap of a dugout and saw light below.

  He yelled “Hände hoch!” once again but it was not necessary. Two of the Germans were in the same condition as the one upstairs, sheets of tears glistening on their faces. Another was huddled in a ball, weeping. Two others, sullen and fearful, stood in silence, hands raised.

  Footsteps sounded on the stairs behind him and he turned to see Lieutenant Pegram.

  “Well done, Goodchild, Fingal. We have our objective at”—he checked his field watch—“five twenty-one. Get the prisoners upstairs and keep an eye on them. I’m going to give this place a good going-over.”

  “Sir, you’re wounded.”

  Pegram touched a hand to his neck and looked at the blood on his hand. “I didn’t even realize.”

  Quentin and Fingal moved the six prisoners up the stairs, herding the shell-shocked ones off to one side. No one, friend or enemy, could bear such weeping for long.

  One of the new prisoners spoke up. “It’s not booby-trapped, you know. The dugout. This one is not booby-trapped. Others, yes.”

  Another prisoner took a wooden match from his pocket and lit it.

  Quentin whirled on him and touched the tip of his bayonet to his chest. “Drop it.”

  The German did so.

  “He doesn’t have cigarettes,” Fingal said. “I checked.”

  “Do that again,” Quentin said to the German, “and you will regret it.”

  He turned back to the other prisoner. “Where are the communication trenches?”

  “Communication?”

  “Don’t pretend you don’t understand—your English is fine. The communication trenches to your reserve line. Where are they—how far?”

  The prisoner pointed past Quentin’s shoulder. “That way. Fifty metres or so.” He pointed in the other direction. “This way, maybe hunnit metres, something.”

  Fingal cracked the other prisoner on the arm with his rifle. “Bastard did it again.”

  The lit match fell to the ground and went out.

  “Get the lieutenant,” Quentin said.

  Fingal disappeared into the dugout.

  “Are you trying to signal?” Quentin said. “Are you really that stupid?”

  The German shifted his gaze as if to reply were beneath him.

  The dugout flap opened and Lieutenant Pegram was there. “Is this the man?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “He lit a match and you warned him?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And he did it again?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The lieutenant unsnapped his holster and raised his sidearm to the prisoner’s forehead. He fired once, and reholstered his weapon.

  * * *

  —

  Quentin and Fingal and several others stayed in the dugout, keeping their heads down as the heavy artillery whooshed over them to the Green Line, the Germans’ support trench. Quentin did not envy the battalion whose job it would be to leapfrog the Blue Line and attack that machine gun–infested pit.

  Daylight had come, but it was a daylight made evening by smoke and clouds of gas. They’d eaten their morning rations and now had to endure the waiting. Although they had not slept for thirty-six hours they were far too keyed up to even attempt it, despite their comfortable German quarters. The four bunks were all taken, Quentin being stretched out on a lower one. Fingal had drawn the short straw and was sitting near the steps with his back to the wall, resting his head against his rolled-up jersey. The usual dugout smells of burlap, earth, and candle wax were all but obliterated by the sinus-searing vestiges of their own chlorine gas.

  Lieutenant Pegram, neck now swathed in a field dressing, was at the table, his face aglow between candles, scratching rapid notes on casualties, prisoners, and captured materiel.

  “Fingal should be up for a medal,” Quentin said, and told him about Fingal grabbing the machine gun and toppling it back onto the Germans.

  “Naw, it just had to be done,” Fingal said. “Lucky I didn’t have time to think about it.”

  Until witnessing Fingal in action, Quentin had been skeptical of medals; they seemed to be given out too freely for too little. After Vimy, the list of awards and commendations had been endless. Well, perhaps it made sense. Just to survive the mud and the rain qualified as some kind of heroic feat. Hundreds of men had suffered horribly from trench foot. The skin, wet for days on end, eventually breaks down and bacteria seep into the flesh causing an infection so virulent that, if left untreated, it renders a man unable to walk in a matter of days.

  Luckily Lens was dry, which also made rats less of a problem. The slaughter at Vimy had proved a feast for rodents in their thousands. Killing them took up more troop time than killing Germans. A plump brown rat tearing the lower lip from a dead man’s face—that was another of those indelible sights lodged in Quentin’s memory, now along with Lieutenant Pegram’s putting a bullet between the eyes of a prisoner. The thought ran through Quentin’s head, again and again: How can I have seen such things and still be alive?

  A strange noise made them turn their heads toward the steps. The lieutenant looked up from his paperwork, pen in hand, as an unexploded shell, an eighteen-pounder, clattered down the steps and slithered onto Fingal’s lap.

  “Fuck me,” he said, staring at the thing.

  Pegram half-rose from the box he was sitting on.

  “One of ours,” someone said.

  Nobody moved.

  “Goodchild,” the lieutenant said without taking his eyes off the shell, “remove that thing at once. Carefully.”

  Quentin got off his bunk and crossed the dugout to Fingal. He squatted and reached for the shell, then stood up, cradling it against his chest. It surprised him that it was not scorching hot, only warm. “I’m not actually much good at shot put,” he said, but the joke fell flat.

  “You don’t throw it, Goodchild. You place it. Gently. Somewhere it will do the least harm.”

  Quentin carried it up the steps, treading in a stately fashion, as if he had been drawn into an unfamiliar but crucial ceremony. He was reminded of his youth as an altar boy, carrying book or candle at High Mass. He turned left in the trench and threaded his way to the nearest damaged area—a collapsed dugout thirty yards away. A soldier awaiting his turn on the firing step looked him up and down. “You don’t have to deliver them to Fritz personally, you know.”

  He sat in the dirt where the top step of the dugout had been and hooched down through the debris until he could go no farther. He lodged the shell, with the utmost tenderness, into some loose soil, then covered it with sandbags. Some men, he reflected, fall in love with their trench. It’s their cover, their mother, their saviour—the only thing between them and death or mutilation. But he knew, once this operation was over, his mission in life would be to extricate himself from the trenches and get himself assigned to other work.

  * * *

  —

  The immediate project of the men on the Blue Line was consolidation. They reinforced strong points against the counterattacks that were sure to come. They humped sandbags, fixed firing slits, created tool and ammunition dumps. Quentin’s section was already quite sound, and the men took great satisfaction in turning the Germans’ own thoroughness against them.

  When the next wave of Canadians came roaring across no man’s land, file upon relentless file, men in the Blue Line cheered them from the trench as if they were observing a field day event. Come on, boys! Show ‘em how it’s done! Give it to ‘em good! Kill the bastards! But Quentin could not bring himself to cheer.

  In the event, it went quickly. Canadian scouts had secured crucial information on enemy emplacements and the artillery had neutralized most of them. Even so, the machine guns did
their work, and the screams of the wounded soon put an end to all cheering.

  The Red Line and in its turn the Green Line at the crest of the hill were taken and consolidated. Many prisoners and much materiel were funnelled back to the rear. Stretcher-bearers—to Quentin’s mind the bravest people of the war—carried the wounded away to dressing stations. German bearers, taken prisoner, were now tending to Canadian wounded, and their skill and dedication in this enterprise were much remarked on.

  The taste of these victories was soured by the knowledge of what was to come. The Germans wanted their hill back—without it they could neither control the area nor make use of the rail lines. One of their airplanes made a lazy back-and-forth survey of the hill, and within an hour their artillery set up a gut-shrivelling bombardment, unleashing thousands of gas shells. The Canadian troops were well protected against phosgene but the mustard gas was a different matter. Frustrated by their mask-induced blindness, many men removed the mask just for a moment in order to lay a sight, set a fuse, or tend to a wound. When the gas touched their skin even for an instant it caused terrible blisters as if the flesh had been boiled in oil. Their shrieks were unbearable, their disfigurements terrifying.

  The Canadians made an attempt to push into Lens but it was not much more than a diversionary manoeuvre, far more murderous for the men who mounted it than for the securely emplaced Germans. Over the course of the next three days the Germans staged no fewer than twenty-one counterattacks, each following so swiftly upon the last that Quentin experienced the separate clashes as a single titanic struggle.

  He had stuffed his ears with cotton but even so the shells seemed to explode inside his skull. One landed a dozen yards from the trench, burying half of it in a torrent of dirt. Pratt, who had been closest, dropped to his knees and scrabbled through the debris for something—for what? Ammunition? Water? A personal keepsake? Some time later—an hour, three, there was no telling how long—another shell landed in almost exactly the same spot. This time Pratt himself was completely buried. Quentin, Stokely, and another man dug frantically through the dirt and debris.

  “Oh, Christ,” Stokely said. “He’s had it this time. He was right here.”

  “There’s nothing left of him,” the younger soldier said. “They goddam vaporized him.”

  A voice behind them said, “What are you looking for?”

  It was Pratt, just emerging from the dugout.

  They all burst out laughing and started punching Pratt playfully and calling him every insult they could think of. Pratt, with the goofiest of expressions on his face, got in a few taps and bear hugs of his own. It was a cheerful moment that made it all the harder to take when, only a few days later, Pratt went out on a work party that came under heavy fire and did not return.

  “The silly bastard,” Stokely said. “He’ll turn up again.”

  No, he won’t, Quentin thought. And on subsequent nights huddled under his greatcoat he thought of Pratt and all the others who were dying by the hour, emptying another body’s worth of blood into the bottomless lake of Hill 70, a place that wasn’t even a place, a battle that in all probability would not even be remembered, except by those who fought it.

  * * *

  —

  From his vantage point on the firing step it seemed to Quentin that this battle, this hill, would cost the enemy, at a minimum, tens of thousands of lives. The machine guns were scything them down by the hundreds. Then the stretcher-bearers and the burial parties would emerge under white flags and the Canadians would leave them alone for an hour to bury their dead. The Germans killed plenty of Canadians, too, including Stokely who caught a round in his throat and drowned in his own blood.

  Quentin wondered if the Germans had any more feeling for each other than he had for Stokely. It disturbed him, how little he had. Perhaps he was still shut down after Pratt. Or maybe it was war-induced numbness that would wear off, enabling him to shed a few tears for his fallen friend. Not that they had been friends exactly. He and Stokely would never have been pals outside of these unusual circumstances. Still, it bothered him that he didn’t feel more.

  As a private in the trench he was not privy to what was in the minds of officers. If the object of the enterprise had been to take Lens, then it had failed. If it had merely been a diversion from some bigger offensive—a gigantic push on the Hindenburg Line, say—then it might have value. But in the trench it felt like just another stalemate: the Germans would keep Lens, the Canadians would keep the hill, and they would lob ordnance at each other until the war was over.

  He wrote letters to his father and to Jack, telling them about taking their objective, careful to leave out any identifying geographical details. A couple of days later he received a letter from Jack.

  Dear Quentin,

  I will keep this short because I have written this letter a hundred times and a hundred times consigned it to the flames. If I go on at any length, this one too will end up in the fire. But with you over there facing death every minute, every hour, I feel I simply must come clean before it is too late.

  I love you, Quentin—and not in the way one friend, even a very close friend, loves another. I love you in the way you loved—and I know you still love—Imogen Lang. I love you with an unquenchable longing. I think about you all the time and yearn every minute of the day to have you near. I want no one else’s company but yours. I long to hold you in the morning, the evening, and all through the night for the rest of our lives. I long to kiss you.

  How I tremble to commit these words to paper! (Burn this at once.) I am homosexual, Quentin. My gorge rises as I write the word, and tears burn my eyes. It is not a passing thing. I have never felt the slightest desire to kiss or hold a girl. My “infatuation” with “Emma Gilbert”? Pure fiction. I made it up so I could be like you, so that I could tell you about my feelings—oh, it was a thrill to do so—without your knowing I was really talking about you.

  Do you remember the time we went for that midnight swim in Mirror Lake? The sight of your dripping body, shining in the moonlight! That whole night I lay awake tormented by desire, imagining climbing into bed with you, your arms opening to hold me close. Dear God, how I love you.

  Forgive me for telling you. I know you don’t want to know, but the truth is I can no longer live without telling you. Please forgive me the discomfort this will cause you, and know that I will always remain, until the day I die,

  Your faithful friend,

  Jack

  For a moment, as he read, Quentin thought Jack must be joking, it couldn’t be true. But the anguished honesty of the words was undeniable. He was shocked, completely taken by surprise, and yet slowly he began to feel utterly stupid. How had he not known? He remembered a remark Imogen made long ago, after an afternoon the three of them had spent together at the art museum. She’d said, “It’s almost like he’s in love with you.” Ridiculous, Quentin had scoffed—he’s dying of love for Emma Gilbert. “Haven’t you noticed,” Imogen said, “how he’s always looking at you? Defers to you? He even rushes ahead to open doors for you.” Quentin hadn’t noticed any of this.

  The only thought he’d ever entertained about men’s bodies (other than their fragility before the onslaught of fire and steel) was to wonder how women could stand to look at them, let alone touch them—the squat, hairy creatures he shared barracks with repelled him with their apish gaits, their furry chests and backs and cracks, and the appalling genitals that ranged in appearance from turkey necks to a bunch of grapes in a dark revolting nest. Jack, how could you?

  Quentin waited two days before replying, writing in the dugout on a blue aerogramme. He told Jack he was sorry he had been suffering so, but that under the circumstances he did not see how they could continue as friends; he could never return his “love.”

  I don’t think less of you morally, but I shall if you do not seek treatment. It’s clear from your letter that you do not want to be like this. Let that motivation stand you in good stead as you seek to change. If you do m
anage to change—really change—then I shall be glad to resume our friendship. But until that time you and I must part. This letter will be painful for you to read; it is painful to write. I hope, Jack, that you will become once again the man I have known and admired. Until such time I must remain,

  Your former friend,

  Quentin

  As he folded the blue paper, a sob of self-pity escaped him. Jack was as gone from his life as Stokely and Pratt. As Imogen.

  * * *

  —

  Quentin’s object now was to survive at least until the battalion was relieved, without turning into too much of a thing. He prided himself on little when it came to fighting. He was not a great shot, he had a terror of ever having to use the bayonet, and he had no remarkable leadership skills. But he had become good at surviving. He could now tell how close a machine-gunner was and whether he was a threat. He could tell by the pitch of a shell’s whine whether he was in immediate danger or not. His reflexes had even proved sharp enough, at least so far, to save him from the whiz-bangs. When they were on the move he knew whom to follow, where to march, to minimize the danger to himself. He knew to get to the front of a marching line. When there was a lengthy halt, and there were plenty, the front men were quick to move. If you were at the rear—a mistake many men made—you had an interminable wait before you started moving again. Tiny accomplishments, perhaps, but a lot of the other men seemed to have no instinct for survival at all.

  One of the most important skills—and here he had to give credit to the staff officers and the training manuals—was keeping filth at bay. Those officers, the sticklers who had no experience of the trenches anyway, might have been thinking of appearances and their effect on morale. If troops stopped looking sharp, they started to look defeated, and this was not good for anyone except the enemy. Far more important to Quentin was that dirt and dishevelment very quickly made him crazy. A few bits of hay inside the collar, the itch of ground-in grime, could make the difference between an acceptable level of discomfort and weeping misery.