by Don Gillmor
He wasn’t sure how many hours he had been crawling. Beyond the bloated horse he saw shapes moving, maybe two hundred fifty yards away. Three men it looked like, though he couldn’t tell whose they were. A helmet presented a brief profile, the familiar German angles, and Michael waited behind the stinking horse. They were coming toward him, it seemed. He got his rifle ready and sighted it. He was wet through, and shivering through the wool. In the stillness he felt lice inch along his scalp and in his clothes, a constant twitching march. The men were two hundred yards away now, bent at the waist, swaying slightly under the weight of mud, passing a small hillock of corpses, each footstep a separate labour. Michael sighted the one on the left and squeezed the trigger and watched him fall soundlessly. He pulled the rifle over to the second and fired and he too went down. The third vanished, maybe lying in the shelter of a crater.
Michael crawled to his right in a wide arc, hoping to come up below him. It was getting cold and the mud was beginning to stiffen. His elbows were raw and bleeding from rubbing against the wool. The shelling was quiet, distant thuds that must be three miles away. There was only the rasping of his breath and the suck of mud.
He stopped every ten yards to listen. What was the German doing? Was he crawling toward Michael’s original position? The two of them in a crawling dance, a slug’s trail drawn in the mud that would form a perfect circle. Michael crawled for thirty minutes, his head up as far as he dared, his breath visible in the early November chill.
The phosphorescent beauty of another German flare lit the mud, a bloom of sunrise in the land of the dead. In the retreating pallor he saw the face of one of the Germans he had shot, lying less than three yards away. Michael crawled another yard and the man suddenly moved, turning his mudcaked face toward Michael, his mouth a black hole that was screaming something in German, a name and something else. Michael levelled his rifle and fired but no sound came out. (“The Ross rifles they gave us are no good.”) The man began to roll onto his side, a whinnying sound coming with the effort, and Michael crawled after him and then half rose out of the mud and stabbed him through the shoulder. He screamed and Michael wrenched the bayonet out and stabbed him again, this time through the chest.
Michael lay behind the man, whose last breaths came out in a soft wheeze, and scanned the horizon, trying to control his own loud breathing. He looked frantically for the man’s Mauser but couldn’t find it. The other man he’d hit couldn’t be more than twenty yards away, but what direction? He crawled in an expanding spiral that used the dead German as its centre. The shelling was getting closer. Maybe it was approaching dawn and the Germans were planning an offensive. He was exhausted, and to move he had to wrench each side forward and pull the other half of himself even. He found the second man twenty-five yards away, lying face up, a bullet hole in his neck. His rifle was near him and Michael reached for the Mauser, its comforting Aryan precision. A bullet hit two feet away and Michael pointed the Mauser and fired back instinctively, two shots. He looked up but couldn’t see anything. The German must be in a crater. He scanned the horizon, looking for the distinctive helmet. His own helmet was gone, lost in the mud somewhere, and his head was slick with clay. A head appeared and fired two shots and Michael fired back but there was only one bullet left. He felt for his Mills grenades but there was nothing there. Eaten by the mud like everything else. A figure came over the hill, standing, bayonet out, stepping awkwardly, trying to run, moving slowly, as if he was running underwater. The man yelled, a guttural sound, his face obscured by mud, a member of some primitive tribe, his eyes and teeth showing white against the darkness. Michael readied his bayonet and took an unsure step forward to brace himself for the charge. Stumbling forward, the German made a cutting motion, as if scything wheat, and Michael pulled back to miss the sweeping point of the blade and they both fell back. The man was on top of Michael’s legs, struggling to climb up, his rifle flailing. His weight, along with the mud that had formed around Michael like a cocoon, was crushing. Michael writhed and gasped for breath and hammered weakly with his rifle. They lurched awkwardly, and Michael’s boots pedalled the air, trying to find something solid. They were on the slight incline of a crater and tumbled down slowly with Michael twisting around and grabbing at the man’s head. They settled near the bottom in three inches of water, the German face down, Michael’s weight pinning him. He pressed the German’s face into the mud and held it with all his strength, his arms shaking with the effort and the man finally stopped moving. Michael held him for another minute and then collapsed against the German’s back and lost consciousness. Two men welded by mud.
Michael awoke and rolled off. There was a small patch of clear sky and a few stars were visible. He looked at the German’s face, an inch away. It was hard to tell how old he was beneath the mud. His hair was grey. He might be fifty.
—What were you? he asked the dead man.
—I cleaned the streets of Magdeburg.
—You liked the work?
—I liked the result.
—You had a wife?
—Marthe. Homely and loyal. I loved her.
—Children?
—Our great tragedy. She was barren.
He drifted back into sleep.
Something shook him and Michael woke with a shudder and looked at Corporal Taylor, his thin officious face.
“Mountain Horse. Back with the living.”
Michael looked around. He was lying down. A medic was looking in his kit. The sun was high.
“You were out there three days, Mountain Horse.”
“Three days,” he repeated blankly. He was thirsty, his throat burning. “Water,” he said. Taylor handed him a canteen and he gulped the water.
“Patrol found you. Lucky thing. Damn near missed you. Covered in mud with the dead.” Taylor stood up. “They’ll take you back behind lines, get cleaned up. Few days rest. You must be hungry. Mess is over there.”
Michael stood up, unsteady on his feet. He went to the mess table and got a plate of stew and some crusty bread that was soft inside. He ate quickly and drank more water.
An hour later, with a dozen men led by Taylor, Michael marched heavily toward a small farm near a village five miles away. There was an outbuilding that may have held hogs or chickens and inside were four wooden feed troughs that had been converted to bathtubs. The men stripped and gave their clothes to a French woman, who gathered them onto a cart and disappeared, unfazed by the dozen naked bodies. Michael scrubbed uselessly at the lice. After they were clean, they sprinted across the cold earth to a blazing bonfire. In the November air they stood telling stories and jokes as their clothes dried on makeshift racks by the fire.
“Mountain Horse, what the hell was so interesting out there you wanted to spend three days?” asked Poynter, laughing. He was a big man, heavy and meaty, his white skin chafed red in places. He looked like a farm animal. He was holding his testicles and shifting his weight from one foot to the other, swaying in and out of the heat.
Michael smiled. He moved with the flame, tempting it, moving back, feeling the cold air on his back, and repeating the dance.
“Christ must love you. Looked like two hundred pounds of mud when they brought you in.”
“Who brought me in?”
“Soldier from the 31st. Don’t know how he dragged you that far on his own.”
“What did he look like?”
“Like you,” Poynter said, laughing again. “Covered in bloody mud.”
The men joked while Michael pondered this. Could it have been Stanford? If it had been someone else, they would have stayed, wouldn’t they? Rested, been escorted back to their unit. But Stanford couldn’t stay. He was alive, then. If it was him.
When their clothes were dry the men dressed and went to an estaminet where they drank wine and sang lewd songs half-heartedly. They were billeted in a barn at the farm where they’d bathed, and as they walked back uncertainly in the dark, Poynter listed the words that rhymed with Fritz. “Shits, fits, wits
, sits, pits, hits, flits.” Poynter took a long drunken breath. “Fritz shits in his mitts.”
5
FRANCE, 1918
The winter was quiet, cold days in the trench, grey time that moved slowly. The two sides were at a stalemate, lined up against one another, sending shells, small raids that yielded little. In the hopeful sun of April, Taylor took Michael aside. “Mountain Horse. You can ride, I gather. Horses. You’re a rider.”
“Yes.”
“There’s going to be a cavalry run. Rather big. Royal Canadian Dragoons are looking for men. I suggested you.”
“Of course, sir.”
“Grew up with them, I imagine.”
“Yes.”
“Fine. I’ll tell them you’re on board.”
Michael reported to the Dragoons, who were outside Amiens. Corporal Hensley, efficient and annoying, took him to his horse, a chestnut about seventeen hands high that reminded him of the one he rode down Eighth Avenue. Michael spent some time with the horse, talking in a low musical voice, patting its neck. There were hundreds of horses, moving regally in the large corral, sleek anachronisms. The war was about machines that delivered shells from a mile away, spreading gore, seeding the soil with guts. The cavalry arrived to find they were in the wrong century. But the tanks broke down, defeated by the terrain and abandoned in the muddy sea. And the horses were there, the beautiful relics.
There would be drills in the morning, Hensley told him, and then pointed out the mess tent. Michael got a plate of thin stew and sat at a table with two men. One of them was named Walters, with bristled hair and startled eyes. The other was Dawkins, a rounded, dark-haired man. Both were in their thirties and they had the thousand-yard stare of those who had been here since the beginning.
“Amiens. That’s what they’re after,” Walters said. “The last battle.”
“The Somme was the last battle,” Dawkins said. “Vimy was the last. Passchendaele, that was the last. All of them are the last, Walters.”
“But Amiens will be the last. There’s a breaking point in every war and Amiens will be that point. Wars aren’t won by generals or strategy. They are lost by troops. There is a moment when the troops simply can’t take any more. They have killed too many, seen too many killed, been exhausted beyond endurance, been fearful for weeks at a time, liceridden, their nerves are gone. A kind of unnameable despair sets in. That’s where we are now.”
Dawkins’s mouth was full of stew. “I felt that way two years ago,” he said through his food. “The problem with your theory, Walters, is that there isn’t any bottom to despair. That’s the beauty of it. You’re sitting in no man’s land, frozen, haven’t eaten in two days, lice eating you, nice case of trench foot, scared as hell. Your horse bloating beside you. Can’t get much worse, can it. But then it does. Shell lands. Blows three fingers off. Shit. Girls in Paris aren’t going to like that development. Well, hit bottom now, haven’t we. No, another shell, shrapnel takes your eyes. Fucking blind. Well that’s it, then. No, wait, fucking wait for it. Get back to the trench, don’t bloody know how, Corporal Turdbrain reads a letter from home: Your girl just married Dick from down the way. Couldn’t wait. Knows you’ll understand. It can always get worse, Walters. And it always does.”
Walters stared toward the flap on the mess tent. Michael guessed that they had had this conversation a hundred times. It was a sort of sport, a way of passing the time, of keeping madness at bay.
“It’s mathematical,” Walters said, “war. You have despair on one side of the ledger, purpose on the other. Where you have little purpose, when you’ve, say, misplaced purpose … let’s give it a value of four. On the other side, people are dying, hourly, despair is creeping up. It’s at sixteen …”
“Where would Flowerdew fit in?” Dawkins turned to Michael. “I expect you’ve heard of Flowerdew.”
Michael shook his head.
“Gordon Muriel Flowerdew. Let’s take a look at an actual case history. Last month, his objective is Bois de Moreuil, six miles from here. Lord Strathcona Horse, whole squadron. Flowerdew leads the charge against the German line, cut down by machine-gun fire. They keep going, go through the line. Keep riding, galloping like Jesus on fire, two hundred yards to the second line, open field. More machine-gun fire. They go through it, turn around, firing their revolvers, sabres out, hacking away. The Germans flee. A victory? Well, Flowerdew is dead. Seventy percent of his men killed or wounded. Eleven horses survive out of almost nine hundred. Is this purpose or despair?”
Walters stared up to the ceiling of the tent, as if calculating. “Purpose.”
“Seventy percent. Eleven horses.”
“An objective was accomplished. That is purpose. Also, bravery is good for morale. Purpose.”
“The Germans lost fewer men than we did. Despair.”
Walters turned to Michael. “What is your view? What is your name?”
“Mountain Horse.”
“Perfect,” Walters said. “Which is it, Mountain Horse?”
Michael sat for a moment. “Both.”
“Both. Well that’s war, isn’t it.”
The three of them ate in silence.
Over the next few weeks Michael spent more time in their company, Dawkins and Walters talking endlessly, irreverently, a verbal sparring that began in the morning and continued into the night. Michael was young and quiet, the perfect audience. Dawkins and Walters had known one another slightly at McGill University in Montreal, and now each day brought fresh debate.
“Is it reasonable,” Dawkins said one morning as they groomed the horses, “for French villagers to retrieve dead horses from the field of battle and then eat them?”
Walters, as he often did, looked up before answering. “Is the meat being sold to the cavalry?”
“It is,” Dawkins said. “But it is sold as beef. Used in stew. The men don’t know.”
“But they are eating the very thing that they ride into battle on. They are eating a fellow soldier.”
“Unwittingly.”
“Meat is scarce.”
“Unheard of.”
“It is war. The trick is to survive with honour. Unwittingly eating horse doesn’t betray that.”
“Your own horse.”
Walters paused. “Serve it to the infantry. They don’t have the same attachment. There are no moral grounds to refuse.”
“Thank you, King Solomon.”
The way that men talked had changed, Michael noticed. When he first arrived, there was a shouldering of the wheel. The men in the trenches joked grimly, but they held to the same purpose. Now there was a sharpness. German deserters joined them every week. Canadians were taken behind the lines and shot for cowardice by their own men, or they deserted and were found in French towns and shot. The French had narrowly avoided mutiny. The Brits were fed up, both at home and on the front. Two weeks after he arrived—almost two years ago now—a man named Hapman lost his mind in the trench, thrashing and screaming and sobbing. He was taken away and the men held him in silent contempt. A month ago Liddle took an eerily similar turn. His thrashings were identical, the short run before being tackled. His face contorted by the same mixture of fear and anger, screaming for the same things, his home, his mother. But the response was different this time. Now they knew he was sane.
The morning broke clear and the early June heat was welcome. Michael enjoyed the drills, trotting in formation, lances out. There was a beauty to those focused lines, the horses’ gentle nervous steps. Michael polished his saddle, groomed his horse, cleaned his gun, and then read the book that Dawkins gave him.
“Ludendorff lobbed one into Paris last night,” Dawkins said at mess.
“What?”
“Just heard. Shell made it to northern part of the city. Some poor bastard is eating his baguette, bomb comes through the bloody roof.”
Walters looked up. “Is this sound, aggressive military strategy, or the desperate act of a dying man?”
Michael told them about the Germ
ans in the trench. One in his forties, the other maybe fifteen. And the man in the mud. Fifty.
“I’ve heard as young as thirteen,” Walters said. “They’re running out of people. I suppose everyone is.”
“Who will be left to run the world?” Dawkins said. “The frail, the defective, the cowardly, the flawed, the rich. The invalids. The shell-shocked.”
“The old,” Walters said. “The female of the species. The lucky.” He looked at Michael. “It’ll be up to you, Mountain Horse.”
“Did you finish that book I gave you?” Dawkins asked.
A novel written by a Russian. “I did.”
“Good, good. If you’re going to run the world, you should read a book first.”
Riding toward Amiens, a gentle trot, a real army, the sun behind them, they came up Valley Road and the people of Domart and Hangard waved and cheered. The faces of the villagers were carved by grief and hunger. Old women held their hands up to them, empty, offering something unseen. This was something they could understand; three thousand men on horses with swords.
They crossed the Luce River flanked by Whippet tanks, the iron impostors waiting to inherit the language of death. The horses galloped past the Whippets, spreading out and picking up speed, forming their lines, pennons flying now, lances out. Ahead of them was Beaucourt-en-Santerre, heavily fortified, the Germans dug in, waiting for them. Dawkins was to the side, Walters farther down the line. They were flying. The German guns fired and formations began to fray. Michael concentrated on the familiar movements of his horse, the syncopation of the hooves landing on hard ground, and that split second when all four were aloft and they were briefly suspended, in flight. In Michael’s mouth there was an unfamiliar taste, hard and metallic. He rode into the bullets without fear.
