The Cartographer of No Man's Land: A Novel

by P. S. Duffy

  McNeil grabbed the periscope. At that moment, what looked like a bunch of sausages, fixed to a bayonet, rose high above the German parapet.

  “Fritzie’s showing us his sausages,” McNeil said, still at the periscope.

  “Yeah, you can drop the periscope. We all see them, smart boy,” Kearns said.

  “Sausages? Fucking Kraut bastards! Let’s show him what Canadians have for breakfast!” Keegan, thick-set and agile, lunged into a funk hole and came up with a German helmet. This he balanced on the tip of his rifle, rattling it above the sandbags at the parapet. “How’d you like that, eh, Fritz?” He grinned back at the others, a toothpick between his teeth. The men sniggered.

  Angus yanked his arm down. “Want them to send you a couple of whizbangs for breakfast? Set an example here, Sergeant.” Keegan’s mouth fell open. The helmet bounced on the hardened mud.

  Angus took the periscope from McNeil and had a quick look for other signs from the enemy. The sausages waved about. No other movement in the German trench, but his eye caught something that he couldn’t quite make out further east where No Man’s Land widened out. A German appeared to be hanging on the barbed wire. Angus looked again. No, just a gray tunic, the German no longer in it. A hanging scarecrow. And something else. A bird flitted about its crumpled arms. It fluttered straight up, then darted down, and hopped gamely to the empty neck of the coat. There it tipped its head back and opened up in song. The song filled the air and the men were quiet. The sausages went down.

  “I believe there’s a bird nesting out there on a Kraut jacket,” Angus said.

  “Yes sir. Been there a week,” Wertz replied.

  “The tunic or the bird?”

  “Both.”

  This set off an argument between McNeil and Katz as to whether they had been there a week or a week and a half.

  “And the owner of the uniform?” Angus broke in impatiently.

  “Below, sir.”

  “That’s where I got my helmet,” Keegan offered.

  Angus risked another look with the periscope and saw the slumped form below the coat. Trousers, suspenders. His first German soldier. Saw the bloating. Imagined Ebbin left hanging askew on the wire, his features swollen beyond recognition. Wondered if anyone had found Wickham, pulled him out. “Is that a lark?”

  “Appears so to us, sir. Sounds like it, too. Now, it could be a different species of lark or . . .” Wertz answered.

  “Don’t larks nest on the ground?” Angus demanded, as if the habits of larks had taken on military significance.

  “Exactly. How could it be a lark?” McNeil asked with a trace of triumph.

  “You can see the problem, sir. No grass,” Wertz replied, calmly lighting his pipe.

  IT WAS THIS bird his pen wanted to re-create for the very reasons the soldiers looked for it daily. A grace note. He’d have liked to include the incident in a letter, but it would hardly translate—not without inflicting the unspeakable upon the innocent.

  Angus jerked open the dugout door. To his left, Hanson and Tanner sat solemnly popping lice eggs off their uniforms with lit matches. Two others beyond them were hunched over, staring dumbly at the ground in a waking sleep. Everyone was short on sleep. A medical officer told Angus it was the source of delusions and hallucinations that afflicted men and officers alike in the trenches.

  The slice of sky above was dull gray, but welcome. At night, that same sky pulsed with mortar fire and blinding flares—star shells and Verey lights—as sentries were posted, snipers took aim, engineers laid wire, sappers dug saps, tick-tick-ticking their picks against the chalk earth while ammunition, sacks of tea, jam, bread, bully beef and beans, bags of mail, more sandbags to be filled, more duckboards, tarpaulins, and wire were brought up by men with white eyes in dark faces.

  The pounding seas, the flat calms, the rise and fall of swells. These were the rhythm of his being—not this man-made underworld. Men said that life in the trench was like being buried alive. More like an open grave, Angus decided, where, panting and immobilized, you waited for that first shovel of dirt.

  Far down the line from his section of trench and across No Man’s Land, the seven-mile length of Vimy Ridge loomed, honeycombed with three rows of German bunkers and trenches. With 150,000 French and British troops lost trying to take it for two years, Angus had been prepared for a towering presence. But no. Even from a ground-eye view, it was a gradual grade, maybe a mile to the top—a hulking rogue wave that could suck you into its undertow, bury you beneath its fathoms, and move on.

  In heaving seas and flying foam, Angus had somehow always managed to find the slot—the physical slot between wind and water that kept the boat afloat and the mental slot between anger at God and the hope He would save you—the point at which outward displays of courage transformed to courage itself. He knew that slot, but didn’t know if he could find it here.

  “What’s our quarrel with Germany? Empire be damned!” his father had said when Angus told him he’d joined up. “Men on both sides turned to cannon fodder. Without them, the high and mighty would find another way to settle differences.” To which Angus had countered, “You call a bald-faced grab for Europe, for England, a matter of differences?”

  His father’s white sleeves had glowed against the dark wool vest in the fading light. His white hair, too. His short, muscular frame barely contained his fury. He’d leaned over his desk, and said, “You can’t be serious about this. You’re my son. We’re pacifists, for Chrissake!” And Angus had shot back, “You’re the pacifist!” He’d refused to repeat that he’d be behind the lines. His father’s response had triggered a foolish desire to be in the thick of it.

  And now he was.

  Besides dodging whizbangs, his role at the Front had been limited to keeping morale up and his head down, with a lot of supervisory tasks in between. He’d gotten to know his men, not just by their letters, but by their feet as he inspected them for oozing blisters and applied cold whale oil to them. His silent ministrations gave him the chance to check for the dreaded trench foot, which could turn feet to necrotic, misshapen blobs from the damp, from constriction and cold. Afterwards, as needed, he’d hand out clean wool socks sent over by women’s groups at home. The men took them without making eye contact, probably figuring that Angus, like the other lieutenants, would be dead and gone long before the battle took place. Except for Boudrey, who always stuck his feet straight out and said, “Thank you, sir.”

  The battle for Vimy was months away. Everyone knew it, including the Germans. In the endless stagnation, the demoralizing term “war of attrition” had been bandied about. “Attrition?” Publicover said. “Heck, I don’t even know what that word means. Don’t care if I do. All I know is we’re getting ready for the big show, and when it comes, oh mother, oh brother, then there’ll be action! Plenty of it!” And so they waited. And across No Man’s Land, soldiers just like them blew on their hands in the cold.

  Angus drew a breath, put pen to the page, and in minutes produced a remarkably detailed sketch of the lark, five-inch barbs to either side of it, mouth opened in song. He placed it in his case just as Publicover bounded in. “I just passed Hiller. Pathetic,” he said, and started packing his kit.

  “He’s a worry,” Angus agreed. He’d found Hiller that morning, hands in his armpits, crouched in a funk hole. Angus had to shake him to get his attention, and when he stood, the tremors started up again.

  “Hiller should worry you. A coward pushing for sick leave is what he is.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “Because I know one when I see one. He wants out.”

  “A reasonable response.”

  “Exactly. Faking it. Either way, he’s a danger. Believe me, when one of your own is a coward, you’ll wish him dead when the bullets fly.”

  “I’m sending him to a camp doctor when we’re back of the line.” Angus reached for the photo envelope lying next to his writing tablet and ran his hand over the soft leather cover of it. On one sid
e, Hettie Ellen—her high cheekbones, a slight upward turn of her chin, her lips softly parted as if distracted by something offstage. On the other side, Young Fred in short pants looked sternly at the camera. Simon Peter, arm around him, struck a happy-go-lucky pose. “Don’t go,” Young Fred said solemnly to Angus at the station in Chester the day he left. Angus had taken Simon aside, away from old Athol McLaren, who was strolling the platform, wheezing out send-off tunes on the pipes as best he could. Angus had put his hands on Simon’s shoulders and looked him in the eye, intending to say something profound. But all he could manage was, “You’re the best boy in the whole wide world. Not one boy better. You know that, don’t you?” Then he pulled him in tight as the train pulled into the station. Through the clouds of steam he saw Hettie. Her hat blew up in the breeze.

  What Angus remembered since was not their words so much as the spaces between them, the unspoken certainty of their decision that he should go and the heart-stopping reality that he was. What he remembered, too, was the feel of his hands around her slim frame, the slight arch of her back as she handed Young Fred off to Ida. He knew that arch, the vulnerable small of her back, her head thrown back. Even there on the platform, it seemed a long-ago dream.

  As Angus stepped onto the train, she clutched his arm. Don’t, he thought. Don’t have doubts now.

  “Promise you’ll be safe,” she said.

  “You know I will. It’s London! I’ll be completely safe,” he’d said as the wheels started to roll and her hand slipped away. “I’ll find him,” he said. “You’re the man of the house now, Simon Peter!” he called out to the boy, whose face was crumpling. “Proud of you already.”

  “Must miss her terribly, eh?” Publicover opened the tin of matches. “She’s a peach from that picture you carry. Lucky for me I left no sweetheart behind. Maybe find one in Paris when the war’s over. Course by then I’ll be too old for romance.” He flashed a grin and sat down. He had a beautiful smile, full of grace and happy expectation, as if the world had nothing but good things to offer. He struck a match on his thumbnail, watched it burn out, then struck another.

  “You intending to use up all those matches?”

  “That’s my plan . . .”

  Angus screwed the cap on his pen and held out his hand. Publicover reluctantly handed over the jar of matches. It was not the first time they’d been through this. Angus put them on the shelf, then glanced at the picture of Hettie once more before putting the envelope in his breast pocket. She was a beauty, alright. Spitting image of her mother, it was said—the wild and beautiful Ellen Langston, from Alberta. Buried out there when Ebbin and Hettie were barely out of the cradle. Angus had seen Amos Hant, with a few drinks in him, shake uncontrollably at the sight of Hettie entering a room. Trying to comfort him only made it worse, Hettie said.

  Publicover leaned back on his bunk, arms behind his head. “Here’s my plan, when we’re off the line. Hot bath, first off, then a long, uninterrupted sleep. The Princess Pats can’t get here soon enough for my money. I know a couple of those boys. Good lot, mostly, but I’ll be happy to say, ‘see ya boys,’ as we pass in the night. Or wait, did I say the Pats? It’s not them. It’s some McBride’s Kilties taking our places. Anyway, hot bath. Down pillow. Mother, mother, mother, pin a rose on me. How about you?”

  “Me? Billets aboveground will do—a place that you don’t burn down. Then, sleep without rats and your snoring. Then see if I can find out more on Ebbin.”

  “So, ‘missing in action’ isn’t good enough . . .”

  “No. Plus a friend at home thought he saw him around Courcelette.”

  “Yeah. Wouldn’t be enough for me either, if he was my brother or pal or whatever he was—is, I mean.”

  “Brother-in-law. You have a brother?”

  “Nope. Tons of sisters. I told you before. Back home baking pies.”

  “Pies?”

  “Apple pies. Apple butter. Apple jack. Don’t you listen? The apple orchard in the Annapolis Valley—a place called Paradise?”

  “Ah yes, Paradise.”

  “Born and raised there.”

  “Lucky you.”

  “Lucky me—long as I end up there.” Publicover swung his legs onto the floor and leaned forward with his head down. “Not everyone is, you know. Lucky. Can’t always find the tags. It’s not always bodies, it’s bits. Hate to say it, but you know it’s the truth. The 12th went through it. We all did.” He looked up slowly.

  Angus held his gaze and without warning found himself flung across the dugout. A few feet away, Publicover hunched on the shuddering ground. In the thunderous boom of the explosions and stuttering confusion, a crate rattled toward Angus. The shriek of a shell filled the air, and then another. Angus gasped for a breath, just one breath to get his lungs going. Breath came when he saw a timber falling. He lunged for Publicover and yanked him out from under just in time.

  “Hit the line!” Publicover coughed out as he got to his feet. “Something blew. Underground maybe. A mine or—”

  THE SHELLS HADN’T hit the line. They hit part of the communication trench just behind the line, wiping out eleven of the Kilties and wounding three of their officers. As for the explosion, Publicover was right. Mills bombs, stored in a tunnel, had gone off. God only knew how many dead there, Conlon said. He told them he and some handpicked officers would stay on an extra night to settle the Kilties while their own boys marched back. Publicover and Grafton, a lieutenant Angus had met only in passing, were to accompany them. Angus was to stay on the line with Conlon and help sort things out.

  The Kilties straggled up. Shadowy forms on the way out cursed forms on the way up as rifles struck packs and picks struck helmets and men tripped over cables and missed their step on the duckboards. Eventually, their own boys formed up, Publicover in the lead, followed by Angus’s platoon—Hiller, in a trance, then Wertz, older than the rest, helping Boudrey get his footing, then Eisner and Bremner, both burly Lunenburgers, the ever-steady Hanson, and then Zwicker, a thick-set man with a high-pitched laugh. Then came McNeil and Katz, the scribbler. Ostler, shadowy and brooding, shoved Tanner onward. Then came the baby-faced LaPointe and the quick-tempered Kearns, a good man to have when the line was the Front and the Krauts the ones crossing it. Oxner must have been up ahead. Sergeant Keegan, a fast-moving troglodyte, brought up the rear. Ghost figures all of them. Then they were gone.

  The Kilties were given a ration of rum. Mules coming up had been scattered to the winds when the shells hit, and with them went small-arms ammunition, adding to the light show behind the line. It was pretty clear the Germans knew the exact location of the communication trench.

  As if in confirmation, another mortar sailed overhead directly toward it. A 5.9 by the roils of black smoke. Publicover. His men. Angus gripped the timbered wall for support. A white-faced Conlon pointed to two privates and told Angus to take them out to Vicar’s Crater. His hand was shaking, but his voice never wavered—routine patrol, he said, just like every other night at Vicar’s.

  Vicar’s was a crater into which a padre was rumored to have vanished, a myth no stranger than any other in the trenches—the Angels of Mons, hovering ghost soldiers in the sky, witnessed by hundreds up and down the line in 1915; the Crucified Canadian, a soldier said to have been spread-eagled by the Germans on a tree with bayonets for nails. The Front was as rife with omens and visions as long voyages at sea. And who knew? Maybe in this bleak world of extremes, a padre could vanish and the dead could return. Angus felt himself nearly vanishing. He steadied himself as the privates stuffed extra flares, flare guns, and Mills bombs into their packs. There was a grenade launcher at the site. Conlon narrowed his eyes at Angus. “Focus on the Hun across that crater. Any movement, any sound, take the bastards out,” he said.

  Angus took a deep breath and eased himself over the parapet. The privates followed. Archer was an “original”—in the war from the start, that much Angus knew. Another, Andrew Dickey, a fresh recruit who looked about twelve with eyes round
as saucers, had stammered out that his sergeant was wounded in the explosion as they came up. That he was screaming and couldn’t move. Was he still out there? he asked Angus. Angus had considered replacing him, but with whom? He didn’t know the Kilties. Besides, there wasn’t time.

  Now they were inching on their elbows along the shallow ditch that would take them up a slope to the crater rim, too wide in the darkness to make out the German patrol that was surely on the other side. The going was slow as they cleared debris out of their way, desperate to keep from making a sound. Finally, near the edge of the crater, they slid into a low ditch next to the grenade launcher. Angus ordered Archer to take up the left post and Dickey to take up the right. A curtain of silence hung in the air.

  Dickey crept into position, but kept looking back at Angus. An hour went by. Suddenly, a Verey light shot up and blossomed into arcing stars. Under its thumping silver-white light, everything below stuttered like a flickering film. Angus saw Dickey, head down on his arms. Tiny points of red light darted about. Rat eyes. The light died out, and sparks showered down like fading fireworks at a county fair.

  Then things were still again. Except for a low moaning that turned into a wail and kept up and kept up, faded, and started up again. Dickey looked back anxiously at Angus. Angus shook his head. The boy turned around, but kept craning his neck toward the source of the cries so Angus elbowed over and stretched out beside him. He could feel Dickey shudder down the length of his body. Dickey lifted a finger from his rifle in the direction of the cries, then dropped his rifle and covered his ears. Angus carefully removed the rifle. “Might be one of ours on patrol,” Dickey whispered. “Why doesn’t anyone help him?”

  Angus clamped a hand over the boy’s mouth, the lips continuing to move against his palm, the eyes pleading. Angus wanted to strangle him. He could not risk explaining that the cries were probably fake, a way of luring them over, or that, even if it was one of theirs, a separate party would have to go out. He shook his head no, no, no. He’d have to get the kid back to the ditch.