Innocent Heroes

by Sigmund Brouwer

  “Yes, sir,” Jake said.

  Jake nudged Charlie. Jake didn’t like Charlie much, but in Lieutenant Norman’s platoon, all the soldiers worked together. Also, Jake could feel sympathy for any man’s fears in this horrible war.

  “I’ve done this a dozen times,” Jake told Charlie. “I’ll make sure you’re okay out there.”

  The two of them slipped over the top of the trench and into the night to hunt.

  —

  The rat was nearly three years old and weighed as much as a small cat. The darkness around the rat was like a blanket of comfort. Vision didn’t mean much to the rat. In daylight, beyond a few feet everything was blurry anyway, and the rat only looked for large moving objects.

  That’s why it inflicted its reign over the soldiers at night. It crawled along the side of the trench, using its whiskers to brush the sandbags. It navigated by touch.

  Its whiskers bent against a brass casing from a rifle shot. Two whiskers flicked the casing. The direction of the bend of the hair and how much each hair bent was enough for the rat to visualize the object as if it were in bright sunlight.

  The rat froze briefly, lifting its head to try to detect danger. Incredibly, it could also detect sound through its whiskers. Shorter whiskers near its nose vibrated with higher-pitched sounds than the longer whiskers farther back. Its brain could read those vibrations like its ears understood sound.

  Safe.

  Its nose held another and larger scent gland, primarily for the scent of animals, especially other rats. Every few steps, the rat secreted tiny drops of urine to mark its trail, and every few steps it inhaled the smell of the urine of rats that had passed by earlier, knowing the age and identity of those rats, even how stressed each had been.

  He smelled fear in the other rat’s urine. Fear of a predator. What kind of predator? Not human. A rat could easily dodge a human.

  It froze again, listening carefully with ears and whiskers for the slightest indication of that predator. This rat had made it to the age of three because it was cunning and careful.

  It moved forward again. It was not driven by hunger, but by a lust for blood. Human blood.

  Rats developed a taste for fresh human blood, and the only way to get it was to nibble, bite and suck as the soldiers slept. Occasionally, its prey managed to slap the rat away with great violence.

  But that didn’t matter. A rat heard a sound as slight as a human rubbing a thumb against a finger, so it was almost impossible to surprise.

  This rat, like all the other rats in the trenches, was superb at survival, no matter how hard humans tried to exterminate it. And it was superb at inflicting misery on those humans in revenge for their efforts. It was able to slip into the tiniest of holes, and, with its tail for balance, was able to climb nearly anything. No wonder legions of rats could swarm the trenches unharmed.

  Yes. This rat wanted blood. With another wiggle of whiskers, it slipped forward in the night to hunt.

  —

  Crawling among the craters of the battle-scarred mud of No Man’s Land, Jake and Charlie had joined the horrible game that many of the soldiers called “blindfold cat and mouse.”

  Not Jake.

  He always called it “blindfold cat and rat,” knowing he had one enemy in his own trenches that tried to eat him while he slept, and another in the trenches on the other side of No Man’s Land that tried to shoot him as he moved.

  By this time in the war, the trenches had reached a stalemate. In some places, the opposing lines were barely more than a football field apart. Neither army could move forward and neither would retreat.

  But far beneath the mud, thousands of each side’s sappers—these were mine diggers who were also called moles or sewer rats—sent a spiderweb of tunnels toward the opposing side. The goal was to dig beneath the enemy trench and fill the hole with explosives.

  The only defense was to lie on the ground above and listen for the sound of pickaxes below, then report back to command on the location of an enemy’s approaching tunnel.

  Jake and Charlie each wore wristwatches with glowing faces. Twenty minutes was the rotation. With volleys of bullets going overhead, Jake would press his ear to the ground and hold it there, straining to hear any vibrations. It was Charlie’s job to remain crouched and watch for enemy patrols, for at night, safe from snipers, was when patrols moved through No Man’s Land.

  After five minutes, Jake shook from the wet, cold mud. He had no choice but to remain on his belly until Charlie tapped his shoulder at the end of the twenty-minute shift.

  Charlie slid onto his belly. Jack knelt in a crouch to watch for patrols. Then no more bullets overhead. Silence.

  “Finally,” Charlie whispered. “They’ve stopped shoot—”

  He didn’t get out another sound. Jake had slammed a hand against Charlie’s mouth.

  Jake leaned in close, putting his lips against Charlie’s ear and murmuring in a tone that could barely be heard.

  “When they stop shooting,” Jake said, “it’s because they’ve sent out their own patrol.”

  Then Jake heard it. Boots in the mud. At least twenty soldiers. They loomed out of the darkness, barely yards away.

  —

  Unlike a dog, a cat is a cautious creature, measuring its odds in any fight. Dogs charge headlong at a larger opponent, drawing admiration for heart. Cats avoid fights they will lose, drawing admiration for intelligence.

  Boomer, however, had a remarkable combination of heart and intelligence. Boomer loved to attack rats, despite their large size and ferocious fighting abilities.

  Boomer was a warrior. Skill for skill, he matched the large rat that had so recently scurried along the trench wall to seek soldiers’ blood.

  As Boomer hunted, each of his paws came down so silently and so softly that it was impossible for a rat’s keen hearing to detect his approach, either by sound or vibration. Boomer never straightened his legs completely but moved in a graceful prowl, even at full speed. His body was a machine capable of leaping five times his body height from a standstill.

  With each crouching step forward, Boomer swiveled his outer ear flaps. Like an incredible piece of engineering, the thirty-two ear muscles allowed Boomer to twist his ears in a half circle, similar to a radar dish scanning for vibrations. Boomer’s inner ear had a special organ to control balance, so finely tuned that he could instantly spin and land on his feet from even the shortest of drops.

  Yet Boomer did not depend on hearing to locate the rat. At least not from a distance.

  He used his nose, which contained 200 million nerve cells, compared to a human’s 5 million. As Boomer took each stealthy step, he curled back his upper lip, drawing in smells that mapped out the trench in the dark. To him, the fresh tiny drops of rat urine were like flashing lights on a dark runway, guiding him closer and closer to the skulking rat.

  Each slight air current told Boomer something new. His whiskers could match a rat’s whiskers for sensitivity, twelve whiskers like probing antennae on each side of his face.

  As Boomer followed the trail left behind by the rat, he moved into the current, knowing that the air would take his scent behind him and not alert the rat in front of him.

  Closer and closer Boomer moved, but so silently the rat had no idea of approaching danger.

  Boomer’s greatest advantage over the rat was vision. Boomer could open the pupils of his eyes three times more than a human, and as a result only needed one-sixth of the light that a human did to be able to see with the same clarity.

  That’s how—when he was within pouncing distance of his prey—Boomer saw the rat where it was perched at the feet of a sleeping solider, ready to crawl up the man’s pant leg.

  The rat was huge.

  Yet Boomer, true soldier that he was, prepared for battle and dropped into a crouch of attack anyway.

  —

  Jake remained frozen in a half crouch. He held his rifle at waist height, focused on the movement of the patrol. He was grateful for
the mud that caked his uniform; it made him invisible.

  Lifting one hand from his rifle, Jake made a motion for Charlie to stay down on his belly.

  Jake would fight if needed, but the odds were against them. Gunfire would alert the enemy back in the trenches to their location, and the mission would be a failure.

  He moved his hand back to his rifle. Jake didn’t dare click off the safety. The soldiers of the patrol were too close. They would hear it.

  Jake felt the rush of blood in his veins, thinking that it must be as loud to the enemy as it was to him. He expected one of them to turn and point and shout a command to shoot.

  One of the soldiers stopped and did a half turn, as if he could sense Jake nearby in the dark. Jake stopped breathing. He willed himself to remain a statue.

  Seconds ticked by. Finally the enemy soldier moved away, and all of them began to disappear into the darkness.

  For now, the danger had ended.

  Just as Jake relaxed, he heard a splash. Then the low rumble of cursing.

  Jake froze, then swallowed a laugh as he realized what had happened. Some of the enemy soldiers had fallen into the water at the bottom of a shell crater. Maybe later, if he lived long enough, he’d tell Thomas and the rest of the platoon. But only after they completed their mission.

  Jake knelt and murmured again into Charlie’s ear.

  “They’re gone. Keep listening for sappers,” Jake whispered. “The platoon is depending on us.”

  —

  The rat moved forward, excited by the overwhelming smells that came from the body of its living human prey. It had lived long and well because of its skills and stealth, and now it wanted another reward for venturing down the trench.

  Behind the rat, however, Boomer was crouched, with a twitching tail. Boomer let his muscles ripple beneath his fur, warming those muscles to unleash power like a racehorse out of the gate.

  The rat took one step onto the sleeping soldier’s leg. Its final step.

  Boomer launched with the precision of an arrow and drove into the rat’s body.

  It didn’t even have time to squeal.

  —

  At dawn, back in the trench, Jake and Charlie stretched their cold muscles as the rest of the platoon woke to the call of “Stand To.”

  “Good work out there,” Lieutenant Norman told Jake and Charlie. “After inspection, find a place to sleep. You deserve it.”

  “I need a hot bath,” Charlie said.

  “That’s what I like in a soldier,” Lieutenant Norman said. “A sense of humor.”

  Lieutenant Norman walked away.

  “I wasn’t joking,” Charlie told Jake. “I hate this.”

  “Then doing it makes you a good soldier,” Jake said, thinking of how Charlie had been crying in the dark. “It’s too easy to do things you like. And brave to do something when you’re afraid.”

  By the look on Charlie’s face, Jake realized he had just made himself an enemy.

  “I’m never afraid,” Charlie said, scowling. “And I’ll fight you if you go around telling that to others.”

  Before Jake could say anything, Lieutenant Norman turned back to them and interrupted the conversation.

  “Oh, by the way,” Lieutenant Norman said to Jake. “You might want to save some of your breakfast as a reward for Boomer. You just won the bet. Twenty-three rats last night. Word has it that’s a record for any platoon.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Jake said.

  Jake wanted to talk to Charlie more about bravery, but Charlie followed Lieutenant Norman down the trench.

  That was too bad. Jake wanted Charlie to know that he was always afraid out there too.

  A soldier in the Belgian army named Lieutenant Lekeux adopted an orphan kitten and named it Pitouchi. As the kitten grew, it followed Lekeux everywhere.

  Months later, Lekeux was near the German lines and saw the enemy soldiers digging a new trench. He hid nearby and began to make drawings. He was so intent on his work that he didn’t see German soldiers approach until it was too late.

  He tried to hide by lying as still as possible, but they had spotted his movement. As they were about to shoot, Pitouchi jumped out and startled the soldiers, who shot at the cat and missed. The soldiers joked that they had mistaken a cat for a man and walked away, leaving Lieutenant Lekeux safe.

  Credit 7

  Credit 8

  Boomer’s amazing hunting abilities and determination are based on the 500,000 cats the British Army had in the trenches to keep the rats at bay. One particularly heroic cat named Simon performed the same duty on a ship. He survived a bombing attack that shredded his face, back and left side with shrapnel and burned his eyebrows and whiskers away. While he was recovering, rats infested the ship, invading food supplies and living quarters. As soon as Simon recovered, however, it took him only a matter of days to clear the ship, all except for one monster rat. This rat was smart enough to avoid all the traps the soldiers set, but in the end, Simon overcame this formidable foe.

  Simon received three medals for bravery: the Animal Victoria Cross, the Dickin Medal and the Blue Cross Medal.

  SAPPERS

  During the Great War, tunnel warfare was a large and mostly unseen part of battle. It began on December 21, 1914, when German forces dug a tunnel beneath No Man’s Land—the landscape between opposing trenches that had been blasted clear of trees and bush—to a spot beneath the British trenches and left behind ten bombs, causing tremendous damage.

  Credit 9

  The British soon formed tunneling units, and by the middle of 1916, the British Army had 25,000 men, many of them from coal-mining communities, trained in digging a network of tunnels. It required nearly 50,000 soldiers to support the men in the tunnels.

  Conditions were extremely dangerous. The tunnels were small and often flooded with water. Tunnels could collapse at any time. Sappers from one side would sometimes break into a tunnel of sappers from the other side, resulting in savage underground battles. Some gases emitted from the soil were explosive—dangerous because sappers worked by candlelight. Carbon monoxide gas was a silent killer. Animals were innocent heroes in tunnels too: sappers brought down mice and small birds, such as canaries, to help detect the gases.

  On the surface, soldiers would listen for enemy sappers in a variety of ways. Some would drive a stick in the ground and hold it in their teeth to feel for vibrations. Others used medical stethoscopes.

  The stakes were high. At Vimy Ridge, the Germans had an extensive network of mines and deep tunnels in place to attack French positions, and it was important to neutralize this threat before the final battle in April 1917.

  RATS

  Rats can survive drops of fifteen meters (50 ft.), tread water for three days and live through being flushed down a toilet. Rats are also difficult to poison, as they are intelligent enough to try new foods in small doses. One pair of rats can produce up to two thousand descendants in a single year; there were an estimated 10 million rats in the trenches during World War One.

  And these rats found plenty to eat. Soldiers heaved their empty food cans over the tops of the trenches—thousands per day. Rats were so bold they would steal food that had been set down for just a second. Given their toughness and ability to reproduce, rats thrived in the trenches, sometimes growing to the size of a cat.

  Rats do like human blood. A 1945 study concluded that rats can develop a real craving for fresh human blood. Another study showed that rats most often attack humans between midnight and eight a.m., chewing on faces or hands to seek that blood.

  With soldiers so exhausted in the trenches, rats made the problem worse by either waking soldiers up constantly or taking advantage of those too tired to wake up.

  Credit 10

  Credit 11

  Soldiers were not allowed to shoot at rats because it was a waste of ammunition. So, without the cats and ratting dogs to help protect the soldiers, trench conditions would have been far, far worse.

  LIFE IN THE TRENCHE
S

  The long, narrow trenches were dug into the ground and lined with sandbags to keep the walls from falling in, and more sandbags were added along the top to add height.

  The dangerous and busy hours were at night, when soldiers dug new trenches under the cover of darkness or climbed out of the trenches to repair barbed wire in No Man’s Land. Night was also the time to listen for enemy miners. Later in the war, Canadian troops became experts at nighttime raids of the enemy’s trenches.

  During the day, much of a soldier’s life in the trench was a routine of work and rest. Dawn was the usual time for an enemy attack, so the first matter of the day was “Stand To,” when soldiers woke to guard the trenches. If no enemy attack came, soldiers faced inspections and breakfast.

  Breakfast was followed by tedious chores like cleaning latrines (outdoor bathrooms) or filling and replacing sandbags. Soldiers needed to be constantly on guard for enemy snipers, gas attacks and incoming shells. In a unit of eight hundred soldiers, each month it was expected that eighty of them would not survive, so replacements were constantly arriving and learning trench life.

  Credit 12

  Aside from constant attack by rats and lice, the weather made life miserable for soldiers; they were always cold and wet. Many soldiers developed trench foot: a condition in which constant dampness made feet numb and led to blisters, open sores and fungal infections. If trench foot went untreated, soldiers’ feet would have to be amputated. To prevent it, soldiers would form pairs to inspect and apply whale oil to each other’s feet.

  Credit 13

  EARLY SEPTEMBER, 1916

  COURCELETTE, FRANCE

  “Hear that?” Jake said to Thomas. “The horses. Reminds me of the farm.”