David’s body was finally located in the hospital’s morgue. MacIver happened to be by the phone when this piece of information was reported at the nurse’s station. They said they would bring the body back to the room. It was by now 8:55, and MacIver’s fury was approaching white heat; he insisted that they would not tolerate any further delay (“will not risk our son’s being lost again in an elevator or corridor”), and demanded that they be taken directly to the morgue. Panicky reversal of decision—“No, don’t bring it up; they’re coming down”—and even more clucking from the administrator. Margaret, in her grief, could not restrain her husband.
He had made a mistake, and he realized it. The body was lying on a steel gurney in the appalling, crude room when they came in. The sheet that had been covering him had apparently been bloodstained, and they were in the process of changing it. They were brought to a halt by the spectacle: Margaret gave a little cry and buried her head against MacIver’s coat; her sobs and shuddering were shaking him to the bone. “O my love,” he said, “I am so, so sorry.”
But true to himself, he had to make himself look: the young body, the pathetic, wasted stump of a leg livid in color, with iodine stains along the track of the stitches. His head tilted back, arrested in a distorted, straining position with neck muscles tense (perhaps they had been doing something at the back of his head, or rigor setting in), one day’s growth of boy’s beard shadowing his jaw. His penis rested on the top of his thigh; not much hair on his body. MacIver had no idea what lovers he had had, if any, but caught himself reassuring himself irrelevantly, thinking, “He was a gentle boy; he would be a gentle lover.” The administrator nervously mentioned that he might want to talk to someone about arrangements. MacIver gave him a long look, and then said quietly: “Take care of him. Don’t lose him again. If you give me the right number, I’ll call about arrangements.” He took down the number. Below him, still shaking, Margaret said, “You must take me away; oh, oh—that he should have come home to this.” As they clung to each other through the night, she whispered to him, “What is going to happen to us now?”
CHAPTER 9
Going Down in the Mud (Part 2)
MacIver had in memory conducted his son once more to his death, and was now sure what few further steps he and his story must take to reach a parallel end. The tartan rug wrapped like a sarong twice around his waist on top of the sweatpants, and the faded Wasps rugby cap down low over his eyes for the most focused view of the page, he advanced on his old machine and wrote:
Sergeant Braddis believed himself a lucky man, with an almost religious belief—that is, he had a steady conviction that whatever dark divinity presided over his destiny, it would provide him with the chances to do what he had to do. Right now, he knew he badly needed an offensive. So of course did his general HQ , so we should not assume that one sergeant unilaterally moved the stars in his favor. In fact, the high command on both sides, having maneuvered hundreds of thousands of men and tons of matériel into the thickest gridlock in history, knew they had to make a move now and again, to show their supporters that, if they could not dislodge it, they could still make some progress within it. To this end, thousands of men on both sides were routinely killed for the gain of a hundred yards or less between the lines, the change suddenly perceived from the map to offer crucial strategic advantages—a straighter line of communication and a shorter trench to defend, or a better surveillance point and gun mounting at the northern end of the line; whoever got the Pope’s Nose or Rudy’s Corner would be in a position to make large gains. Often the generals on the two sides saw as one on these matters, so crucial positions might be yielded and taken back more than once in the course of weeks.
The strategic niceties were not for Braddis; what he needed was some immediate action, of any kind at all, and on the day after Callum was given his picture back by Dodds, he got some. The previous afternoon the mysterious rumor mill had been working overtime, with subtly various reports that they would be going over the top for this or that purpose, but nothing developed. Mess kits prepared for the morrow with rations and water bottle in the pack, however, and early bed and Last Post meant they were wrong only about the time. And well before dawn, the great orchestral warm-up began, played only by percussion, as the big guns behind the British trenches started their concerted pounding, and had the men up and readying themselves. Wherever they were going, they would advance, at least in theory, safely behind the steel curtain of large-shelled detonations moving ahead of them, forcing the enemy to keep its head down in its deepest bunkers. From the fire-step you could see the tall white, orange, and black plumes soar up, a seething but shapely instant forest-screen of destruction, compounded of mud, smoke, metal, and explosive chemicals. Pray God, when the time came, the gunners would keep the range and the speed of the advance right, and not bury their own men in the craters they would dig.
Lieutenant Dodds had found out early, when he had been on the receiving end of German artillery, that it did not matter much, for purposes of actual fighting, whether you were hit or not. The fact was, after as much as three hours of a barrage, you were softened into a curious quiescence, as though your spirit recoiled and withdrew its open face on the world to some private place in the center of you; people who had been under heavy shelling for a while offered much less resistance when the enemy actually appeared at their trench ready to fight. Dodds had noticed that Braddis wore earplugs whenever the guns opened up, and had adopted the practice himself, and found that he retained a much higher level of alertness. He hoped the Germans had been slow getting the word on the earplugs, and that their ears were at least as sensitive to loud cacophonous noise as his— they were meant to love music, after all.
The plan for the day was on a larger scale than recent ones had been. At the northern end of this sector, the trench system moved forward more than seventy meters to include a small grove (Sammy’s Copse) on raised ground, long since denuded of any trees, but with a good vantage point on the tormented fields below. The orders were that they should advance the whole front line the requisite eighty meters to incorporate the copse fully into a flush system with trenches around the base of the knoll, and allow for the addition of various other angled fire-bays, so that any advance against the line would then be subject to fire from different directions. Both companies of the Norfolks and all their platoons were to be involved in the work. They would secure the terrain, they would dig in, and by nightfall they would be firmly if not cosily settled, eighty meters closer to their enemy.
“It’s meant to be an upgraded, rational system,” said Dodds.
“It’s a fuckin’ lot of work, is what it is, beggin’ your pardon, sir,” said Braddis.
“It’s certainly that.”
“And will the Germans come out and eat their sandwiches and watch us dig, and offer a few tips on our construction? Very tidy bunker-builders, they are, the Germans.”
“Perhaps if we take some beer along for them.”
“Oh, yes, sir, please, sir. They’ll love that. Very matey it’ll be for all of us.”
The Norfolks moved over the top at 0620, the sun long up on a warm spring day. Lieutenant Dodds led Section 2 of his platoon in the center, with Sergeant Braddis off to his right leading Section 1, and Private Charles Alston in charge of Section 3 on the left, the senior private taking over for Corporal Nicholson, who had been hit by a sniper in the shoulder two weeks before and invalided home. From the start it was clear it would not be the proverbial walk in the park; two men were down before they had gone thirty yards. You cannot send as noisy an advertisement as a morning’s barrage without alerting many people that something else may be about to happen. The Germans were out and about, apparently in at least as large numbers as the Norfolks, probably having calculated that they would be safer on the far side of the heavy shelling, mixing it with the English infantry and their small arms, than waiting at home to be buried by repeated rounds of 250 pounds of explosive designed to excavate deeper than you
r house.
In the confusion that developed, Dodds had to attend to the deployment of his section, but as always on these advances, the corner of his eye was constantly being caught by the athletic figure of Braddis in motion off to the right, light on his feet, landing always in balance on the levelest, firmest, driest patch of ground among the loosely connected web of declivities, puddles, potholes, and depthless craters of the drowned landscape of noman’s-land. A flick of the finger to his waiting section to join him, having shown them the way. They would scurry across to him as to their only pillar of salvation. And Dodds saw it was not just fast and balanced feet, but quickness of eye, and an uncanny kind of three-dimensional awareness of where he stood in the terrain, that made the man a prince of Braddis Land. Traversing the inside of a crater, using its rim for cover, he never lost speed, but as the uneven rim rose and dipped above him, without calculation he would adjust his bend of knee and waist so he was never exposed; and when a German head suddenly appeared over the top of the crater, looking down on this nest of Englanders, Braddis was looking to the right place and blew it away, a cartridge always in the breech, as though he were in an arcade shooting gallery, before the man could bring his gun up.
Dodds was always in wonderment at these displays of the skills of war. Once when they were on the firing range at their training depot outside Norwich, he remembered watching Braddis taking the men through their paces—the particular exercise, snap shooting with regular ammunition from the sandbags at eighty yards, ten shots in ten seconds. He was a known quantity in this department, recognized as one of the top ten marksmen in the British army, silver cups won at Bisley and so on. Some of the men labored, especially two or three lefthanders who had to handle the bolt on the right side (“What’s the matter with you?” Braddis yelled with his boot resting on the backside of a prone rifleman, who still had two shots to go after the bell; and hearing the reason, added witheringly, “The army doesn’t cater for freaks!”). Others were quite good, especially Charles Alston, the gamekeeper, as you would expect; not fast, but accurate, eight bulls out of ten. Then Braddis himself took his own lovingly maintained rifle, settled at the sandbag, and ran off a swift procession of bulls in about half the permitted time, the wooden pointer down at the target barely keeping up with each immaculate shot. And after he had completed his ten in a row, he had an eleventh cartridge ready for the pointer itself, and exploded it as it reached towards the red circle in the center. And Dodds remembered having noted to himself with astonishment: This is a man who is never fully himself unless he’s at war. (Yes, MacIver thought: we still meet his kind, and often we admire him. God help me, sometimes I admire him, not his general so often, but the expert fighting man himself. Three thousand years and more after the Trojan War, it’s still possible to show an Achilles at home guiding his reluctant men through his own private Hades.)
By the afternoon, it was clear that the Norfolks could not keep the sliver of land they had “taken,” or rather advanced over: it was no-man’s-land after all, less than eighty yards of it, and three dead of thirty and another six wounded was the cost of their passage. Other platoons, especially in the other company, had fared worse, it turned out, and by 1300 hours there were runners passing between the various sectors of engagement, taking the pulse of a failing effort by counting the casualties. If they were too thinly spread to dig in, then why were they still there? The authors of the plan, of course, were reluctant to abort it— the fault could not be in the plan—and it was only after each company commander in turn had pointed out that if the numbers were further whittled away, it might well entail the loss not just of the narrow slice of land they had “gained” in the morning but of the trenches from which they had started. A little egg on your face is not as bad as the whole omelette in your face. They were on the verge of inviting their enemy to sit down at their table with them.
Dodds would wait till the order to withdraw was given, but he would not endanger his men further, constantly in movement in search of some mythical defensible line. He had his section hunker down along the wall of a crater, conveniently crenellated by previous fighting, but offering both some protection and a view of the approaches from the German lines. He had Braddis and Alston join him. “We can’t dig in here. We’re out of touch with the other platoons, not to mention the other company and whoever else is trying to mark off their section of this new trench line. It might work if we had an armistice and someone with a very long tape and a big megaphone making it all straight. But as it is, with those we’ve lost already, we certainly can’t both hold a line and afford the trenchers to do their work at the same time. We should quickly find the safest protected stretch of terrain to allow us to keep all three sections in touch with each other, and hold it until we get the order to move back.”
“Correct decision, sir, if you’ll allow me,” said Braddis. “An isolated pocket of trenches built as a monument to a mess of bodies of its diggers is not going to help anyone. You seem to be pretty well settled here, sir, and Section 1 can do as well just off to the right over there.”
“How about you, Charles?” said Dodds.
“Section 3 will certainly welcome the decision, sir,” Alston said. “We’ve sent two back killed and another four wounded besides already. But we’re quite nicely placed where we are now, and can hold on a while.”
The order to withdraw came an hour and a half later: “Immediate orderly withdrawal to front positions. Platoon commanders report to battalion HQ at 1700 hours.” They heard afterwards that close to Sammy’s Copse, militarily perhaps the one desirable feature in this otherwise featureless terrain, the line had buckled quite early, and reinforcements had to be rushed forward to shore it up. There had been no question of a forward extension from the start. But once settled, Dodds’s platoon on the neglected south end of the line had little trouble holding their ground over the interval. The Germans had brought up a light machine gun on their far right, which could have spelled havoc, but before they could even get its legs firmly bedded, Braddis, moving low and smartly to the right, had lobbed a grenade precisely among them and finished their effort. The German resolve had seemed to falter at that point; they ebbed away, perhaps even recalled back to their lines in a more timely fashion than the No. 3 Platoon of the Company A of the Norfolks.
Dodds saw that the decision to retire brought huge relief to his platoon; there was even some standing up and mutual congratulations, as though they had risen from their seats and were collecting their belongings after a particularly riveting performance in the theater. They had to be brought back to order. Dodds thought sadly once more about what an unformidable group this small collection of decent men entrusted to him actually made in the aggregate. Always excepting Braddis—but where would they all be without Braddis? They were dutiful and unshirking and had mastered the basic skills expected of them as best they could. But mostly what they were, Dodds saw, was long-suffering. Several small men of poor physique from inadequate nutrition in their childhood were now accustomed to carrying loads too heavy for them on long, pointless marches without complaint. He had seen them in the baths, with their feet peeling, blistered, cracked, and rotting from standing guard in trenches for weeks in eight inches of water, and then the tearing itch of body lice and the pink and white leprous flesh of their inner thighs and underarms—crotch rot, as they called it—from the abrasions of dirty sodden serge uniforms, carefully marinated in a mixture of rain and sweat, a recipe yielding a balance of maddening itch and discomfort close to pain.
So now they would go home, back to their familiar trench. They should do it watchfully, Lieutenant Dodds emphasized, in single file at wide intervals. Private Alston would lead off with Section 3, covering their backs and directing their progress from point to point; they should move low to the ground all the way, and at each separate staging area they should lie down promptly and cover those coming on behind them. They should not move from any position until Private Alston gave the word. There was no rush: the p
oint was to get everyone back safely—they had suffered too many casualties already.
Section 3 moved out without incident, and eventually turned a corner out of sight on the far side of a large mound excavated by a previous howitzer shell; Private Alston moved to join them. Sergeant Braddis, meanwhile, had been ranging from left to right behind him, Dodds noticed, and fired off two rounds at separate targets, before rejoining his section just in time to send it off. Dodds caught his eye and jerked his head in the direction of the shooting, by way of inquiry. Braddis nodded and joined him. “My practice over this stage of the game, sir, is to shoot at anything that moves. I’ve seen too many good men shot down in the home stretch by an enemy sniper or straggler looking for the last scalp of the day. All our men are accounted for, so anything moving out there, I assume, is not likely to be one of our wellwishers.”
“Fair enough, Sergeant.”
“A frustrating day’s work, sir. I reckon we’re lucky to be out of it at all, not that nine casualties out of thirty overall can be considered cheap.”
“No. I think you’re right on both counts.” And the thought struck him that the letters he would have to write to the three dead men’s families would bring his total to eleven, inside one year at the front.
Braddis had headed off to join his section, and Dodds’s own men were now quietly filing one by one towards the safe haven of their mates in their own trench. Dodds himself was still lying facing out to the field covering Section 2’s withdrawal, when he heard another shot coming from their direction, but, as he lay, off to the left. Probably Braddis again, but what enemy could be moving this close to their lines? He peered off in the direction of the shot, in case the person had been flushed out and was withdrawing towards him. Nothing. But it was time he rejoined his men anyway.
Rules for Old Men Waiting Page 12
