by P. S. Duffy
Another flare turned the ground red. Dickey arched up and pointed to the German tunic, still hanging on the wire. No! Angus lunged for him, grabbed him, but not fast enough. Dickey rolled out and ran toward the German tunic, a zigzagging figure under yet another Verey light, until he reached the coat and fell to the ground beneath it as machine-gun fire kept at him, twisting him this way and that and making him jump and jump some more. Then the air was alive with bullets screaming past Angus, bouncing off the hardened mud. He covered his head with his arms and somehow made it back to the ditch where Archer was already training the grenade launcher toward the machine-gun nest. “Bastards! Bastards!” he was shouting. Beyond them, Dickey kept jumping as bullets sliced him up. Archer got a bullet in the leg. Angus shoved him aside and slipped the grenade in the launcher and fired it off. They heard the explosion and saw a helmet fly up. The gun across No Man’s Land was silenced, and the air filled with the sound of men screaming. Angus loaded the grenade launcher again and fired off another shot, and another, until the screaming stopped.
“WE’RE OKAYED TO go back. Get your gear and meet me back here,” Conlon said to Angus when he made his report that morning. “Good job with that MG nest. Another body under that tunic. Christ. I’ll find one of the officers with the 35th. They can send someone out to get him—Dickey, was it?—and have them take that blasted tunic down.”
Angus grabbed his pack and stuffed the leather drawing portfolio in it. Clouds roiled overhead, and the wind picked up. The temperature was dropping fast, as Publicover said it would. Publicover . . . he hardly knew him and had known him all his life.
He lifted a shred of paper stuck to his boot—just the head and open beak of the bird on the wire remained. He crumpled it, then lit a cigarette with shaking hands and fixed his eye on the ridge—its slopes no longer a rising wave, but a menacing man-made monster—its teeth, three parallel lines of twisting trenches lined with rifles and bayonets; its intestines, the concrete bunkers, pillboxes and tunnels from which its spike-helmeted minions rose up and trained their mortar and machine guns on the Allied armies below. And on one poor boy Angus should have been able to save. He imagined the Germans biding their time, occasionally mowing down an advancing army. He imagined them lolling on their guns, eating sausages and smiling.
He spat on the ground. Fucking Kraut bastards.
Snow began to fall on his shoulders. He barely noticed. Conlon shadowed up beside him. They said not a word and headed out together.
CONLON TOOK AN offshoot that led to the labyrinthine Grange Tunnel, the underworld engine of war. Electric wires snaked along narrow-gauge tracks, illuminated by a series of bulbs encased in wire cages. Their light was yellow; the air, dank and close. A signpost greeted them, its arrows, like so many arms, pointed toward connecting subways that led to kitchens, an infirmary, storage areas, reserve stations, munitions dumps, officers’ quarters. Their path took them past a giant water cistern, purification pumps plunging, pipes and valves sweating. A ghoulish line of soldiers tramped by, and the sweet notes of “Annie Laurie” floated out from a cave that could easily have held a hundred men but now had only four—two playing cards, one sleeping against his pack, one blowing gently into a mouth organ, eyes closed. “And for bonnie Annie Laurie, I’d lay me down and dee.” Another column of men squeezed by before Conlon finally turned up a set of stairs and out.
They emerged to the relief of an open sky and a sweep of snow-dusted fields. Angus almost fell to his knees. In the distance, perched precariously on the only visible hilltop, was the ruined village of Mont-Saint-Eloi, the sun just catching the jagged-finger remains of its abbey spires. The fanning rays held the new day suspended until seconds later, a blushed dawn broke. Angus breathed in deeply and turned full circle, arms out.
“Not much for tunnels, eh?” Conlon said.
They fell in behind a column of soldiers and mules. In the next village, Conlon cut into an ancient cemetery and wound his way through the headstones, some tilted, some sunk into the ground. “Shortcut,” he said, but then he stopped and took out his canteen. Angus lit a cigarette and looked down at a stone slab. Leprosy-like fingers of lichen had eaten into the name and date. Conlon, canteen in hand, leaned against the pockmarked stone base of a winged angel with a missing nose and chipped cheek. Angus followed the outward sweep of the wing.
“What’s the point?” Conlon sighed.
“The point?” Angus repeated dully.
“Of this.” Conlon waved his canteen toward the graves. “Headstones, markers. Trying to wrest permanence out of fleeting existence. Crumbling to nothing, eh? Can’t even read the names.” He pulled out a cigarette and said, “Don’t bury me under a stone. Please. Burn my remains and take them back to the old country, then scatter them to the four winds.”
“Where exactly in the old country?”
“County Armagh, where right now McCuskers and Conlons are no doubt plotting against the Brits over their pints. And here I am fighting for them. Come to think of it, you might have to scatter my remains in secret.”
Angus gave a fleeting smile, but said nothing. Dickey, jumping forever like a puppet on a string, Wickham’s boots forever slipping into a sink hole—he wanted them lowered slowly, placed gently. Wanted that pause when the universe sensed their leaving.
“We’ll bury ours out here after the big show,” Conlon said. “The Empire already has an agreement with France for the land. We’ll have our cemeteries. Do already, for some battles.”
“You don’t find that comforting?”
Conlon looked up at the gray angel. “The poets, they’re the ones who remember what we can’t speak of.”
“Ah yes, the glory that was Troy. But it’s heroes and heroic events that the poets write about. What about the common foot soldier? They need to be remembered. Have a grave, a marker.”
“The living need the marker.”
“Fair enough.”
“And you’re wrong. Each man is there in the poem. Communal remembering of communal actions. That’s the point. Otherwise what is the point?” Conlon held the canteen near his mouth. “So, tell me, are you a believer?” He took a long swallow. “From Publicover’s telling, you had the men wondering if you were an officer or a man of the cloth. Said the men call you ‘Padre.’ ”
“Padre? Because of Orland? It was nothing. Just a piece of the burial service to send him on—to help his brother accept it.” Angus turned to go.
Conlon didn’t move. “You just happen to know the burial service by heart.” He capped the canteen and crossed his arms. “Been to your fair share of funerals, have you?”
“Two years of Anglican seminary,” Angus sighed. “Never graduated. That bit remains in my head. Maybe I was meant to bury people.”
“Seminary,” Conlon repeated.
“My father’s idea.” Angus crushed out his cigarette. “Padre. I don’t like it.”
“Well,” Conlon sighed, “they called the last lieutenant, name of Benniton, ‘Bunny.’ As I heard it, ‘soft on the men and soft in the head,’ so you’re one up there.”
“What do they call Publicover?”
“Fearless.”
“Of course. Cocky enough to make that fit.”
“Trust me, it does. So what happened in seminary, Padre? Lose the faith?”
Angus winced. “I wouldn’t say that. Lost interest in professing it. Or professing it in other people’s terms.”
“How about here? Faith holding up?” Conlon smiled, then squinted up again at the angel, patted her once more and said, “We can joke, but faith is about all you’ve got here. So you’d better hold on to it—whether in God or the cause or the dream that you’ll come home in one piece. We didn’t know that boy.”
“Dickey?” Angus steeled himself for the dressing down he deserved. It was high time Conlon acknowledged what they both knew—he wasn’t cut out to be a soldier, let alone an officer.
“That’s right. I know what you’re thinking,” Conlon said. “Who kn
ew he’d fall apart? Who knows when anyone will? No one’s to blame, not even Dickey. Shoulder responsibility, fine, but don’t let guilt cripple you.”
“Yes sir.”
“Drop the sir. We’re having a conversation here. I’m the one picked him. You followed orders.” Conlon put his hands on his hips, head down. “You had a crew under you on that boat, made choices, some good, some bad, I’d guess. Risked men’s lives. Whatever it took to move on then, call on it now.”
Angus took a deep breath and looked beyond the graves. “They kept at it, you know, long after he was gone. Kept him dancing, strafing him with bullets. Death should be . . .” Sacred, holy, he wanted to say.
“Dickey was gone with the first bullet. Gone before that, apparently. And I’m not saying forget Dickey. I’m saying remember him. Don’t let his death be a waste. Dickey doesn’t need a stone marker. He needs you.” He leaned back against the angel with his cigarette between his thumb and forefinger, squinting at the curl of smoke. “So do I. You’re a good man, MacGrath. You lost Dickey and took out a slew of Germans. That many less to kill our boys.” With that he flicked his cigarette away and shoved off.
Angus picked up his gear and followed. In all his focus on Dickey, he’d forgotten the Germans, their silenced screams. He’d moved beyond them just as any “good” soldier would.
“How close do you think that 5.9 was to the men last night?” he asked when he caught up to Conlon.
“I’m doing my best not to think about it,” Conlon answered.
“I hope to God Publicover is as lucky as he says he is.”
“We can hope. Speaking of which, this brother-in-law of yours . . . what’s his name?” Conlon turned down an alley between the church and a row of brick houses.
“Hant, Ebbin Hant.” The sound of Ebbin’s name reverberated against the abandoned houses, empty barns and granaries. “Got word from home that he’s been officially declared missing.”
“Progress . . . might make some more when we get to Arras. Check the records, now that it’s official.”
“Pretty idiotic to think I’d find him here,” Angus said, to counter hope.
“Not necessarily.” Conlon glanced up at the sky. “But you’re maybe better off not searching too hard, if he’s what’s keeping you going.”
A rooster clucked under a limber as they came out of the alley. A sergeant behind a group of privates barked orders and insults. The rooster strutted through the line and back again. From the loft of an abandoned stone house with startlingly blue shutters, a large wardrobe tipped forward and disgorged a banner of fabric in the exact same blue, fluttering up and away against the pale sky. French blue, Angus decided. He lusted after it, the purity of that blue.
He fell into step with Conlon, who said they’d better hurry if they were to make the briefing he’d failed to mention to Angus. But he just kept on at his same steady pace. They made it, just barely, as officers filed in and took their seats in the great hall of the château that was HQ. Angus and Conlon searched the crowd for Publicover.
“Sir!” a voice behind them said. Publicover saluted and clicked his heels with exaggerated formality and gave a short bow. Conlon gripped his shoulder. Angus slapped him on the back.
“Yessiree, I made it. And all the boys, too. Even Boudrey. I had them moving along so smartly that the 5.9 fell behind us. Been off the line for sixteen hours now, and no one’s got killed. Not by mortar, not by their own hand. Amazing, eh?” He kept right on talking as they found their seats. “Me and Grafton spent the night in a barn with the men. They’ll be in tents today. Supposed to be more Nissen huts erected. My guess? They’ll be ready when the war’s over. Got some cozy little digs for us ’til our quarters are ready, MacGrath. Good from the outside anyway. Haven’t been inside yet. Met the proprietor—proprietess, I should say. Skinny woman, sour, too, from what I saw. So,” he looked at them both, “whatchya been up to without me?”
“MacGrath here went on patrol. To Vicar’s Crater,” Conlon said. “Took out a machine-gun nest.”
“One of ours?” Publicover grinned.
The room fell quiet and the men snapped to attention as high-ranking officers and their aides strode in from a side door. “Major Rushford, there, the spindly one, and that’s Colonel Stokes, brigade commander,” Publicover whispered to Angus. “This is it,” Publicover whispered. “The whole brigade. They got something to say.”
“Doubtful,” Conlon replied.
A silver-haired spitfire of a man, Stokes hopped nimbly up on the raised platform. Career army, not to be trifled with, Conlon had said earlier. Behind him, Rushford stood a head taller. Rushford’s polished leather belt cinched a narrow waist. His tapered nose twitched above a neatly trimmed reddish mustache. He was prim, almost prissy. It was his adjunct who’d sent Angus up with Wickham that first night.
Stokes clasped his hands behind his back and scanned the officers for a long minute. There were a few errant coughs and then silence. “At ease!” he barked. “Take your seats.” Behind him hung a map of the entire Artois Sector. He thwacked his crop against the town of Arras. “I’m here to speak about the Battle of Arras. About a month ago, General Byng got word that the Canadians are to take this Ridge. Vimy. You know that.”
“Told you,” Conlon whispered. “This is all show.”
Angus fixated on the map. The world had come down to a ten-mile stretch of land from the Souchez River in the north to the remains of Arras in the south.
“For us the Battle of Arras will be the Battle of Vimy Ridge,” Stokes said. “Now . . .” On cue, his aide flipped the map back, revealing a detailed view of the Vimy Sector. Stokes slowly drew his crop from top to bottom. “This, right here, is our chance to prove ourselves—we’ve been in this war from the start, but now, for the first time, the Canadian Expeditionary Force is gathered into one great army, all four divisions lined up—the only force in the Empire, outside of the Imperials themselves, to stand as an army unto itself. For what it’s worth, we have Sam Hughes, former minister of militia, to thank for that.”
Officers near Angus rolled their eyes. They had Sam Hughes to thank for a great many things—the inferior, Canadian-made Ross rifle, entrenching tools that broke off in the hand, boots that fell apart . . . he’d created a superb army from untested volunteers, but he’d so often raged like a madman over imagined offenses, promoted the incompetent and taken kickbacks, that he’d finally been replaced. Still, it was his hubris and contempt for the Brits that now had the Canadians, flying high with national pride, the only Dominion force held together as one, not bled into Imperial forces. The rage of a madman had its advantages.
“And our day of reckoning will be this ridge,” Stokes was saying as he lashed the map. When he turned around, his eyes bore through the men. Angus sat back, as if watching a set piece—the fiery leader, the exhortation, the rousing cheer to come—as if by refusing to play his part, he could stave off the inevitable, leave the theater and toss his program. Beside him Publicover cracked his knuckles.
“Here,” Stokes said. “ ‘Veemy,’ the French call it. But we call it ‘Vimmy.’ And we’ll still call it ‘Vimmy’ after we take it. Seven miles long, four hundred and seventy feet high at its highest point. Two years of fighting, 150,000 casualties later, those slopes remain in German hands. And behind them? The industry and mining of Lille and the Plain of Douai. I need not explain their importance. The French were so desperate to take back this ridge, they opened fire on their own for refusing to try hard enough. The British took their place and got no further. Now,” he thwacked the map to the north, “the Brits will have one division, and here,” he thwacked it again to the far south, “a second division. And our four divisions will be here in the middle sector. Facing us? Crack Prussian troops and Bavarians, according to our intelligence. All the better. I’ll enjoy taking out their best men. When’s the battle? Months away.”
Publicover let out an audible sigh of irritation.
“Unless the Hun forces
our hand.” Stokes faked a smile. “Which they won’t. Why should they? They’ve beaten back everything that’s come their way just by hunkering down and staying put.” He strode back and forth to let that settle in. Then said, “We’ve learned a few things—at Ypres, Mont Sorrel, and especially the Somme—Beaumont-Hamel, Courcelette, Thiepval . . .” The names of the battles rolled out with their own resonance, as Stokes knew they would. Pounding the table with two fingers, he said, “The CEF does not intend to repeat previous errors.” He paused. “We’ve gathered the best military and scientific minds to ensure it. New methods of range-spotting—we know where their big guns are. And new tactics. I’m going to let Major Rushford fill you in on those.”
Rushford and Stokes exchanged places. Rushford cleared his throat and closed his eyes as if searching for the right words. The right words turned out to be, “Preparation. Preparation. Preparation,” delivered in a reed-like voice. He consulted a card in his hand and coughed.
“Jesus. Put that man behind a desk,” Publicover whispered.
“What does this mean?” Rushford asked the far wall. “Precise timing between the artillery barrage and its attendant smokescreen and forward movement of the men on the ground. The barrage will be down to the split second so we blow up the enemy, not our own—not to imply that we’ve ever blown up our own men. Not often, that is.” He sniffed several times and smoothed his mustache. His voice had a sort of trumpeting effect as it gained and lost volume, so it was difficult to follow his explanation of how they’d train the men to proper pacing on practice ground and how colored tapes would mark each division’s objective—red lines, black lines, blue and brown.
When Rushford finally finished, Stokes strode to the center of the stage. “And here’s another change. We all know frontal assaults are our only recourse in trench warfare. And what stands in the way? That’s right—the wire.”
