Alec

by William di Canzio

  All preparations take place in silence.

  V

  SUMMER SOLSTICE

  20

  Along the line of march, at regular intervals: foot inspection. Llewellyn quipped: “Jesus Washes the Feet of the Disciples.” Llewellyn saw the Bible everywhere—except where he saw Arthurian legend or Druidic myth. Sometimes all traditions converged, as he claimed they did in that tiny church near Carnoy—ancient, empty, blasted, scorched, its portal no longer shaded by a dead dogwood. The Chapel Perilous, he called it. Who was its stone saint, they wondered, slender and veiled, in that frenzied, dancing pose? Llewellyn insisted that the inscription, in runelike letters with subscripts, did not say Brigitte but Brigantia, ancient goddess of summer, who (he explained), on raising her veil, revealed the glory of the season’s fullness—which was, somehow, herself. “Long before there was any Sainte Brigitte or Notre Dame or Bon Jesu around here, this place belonged to her.”

  Alec groaned. “And you were her chief warlock, Lulu?”

  “Can’t help myself, Scuppy. My heart’s the dolly shop of Christendom.”

  The gospel story about the foot-washing had struck Alec as funny when he was a schoolboy. The other men of his section, Brooks, Swavely, Talbot, were grinning now too, despite (Second) Lieutenant Hampton’s efforts to impress them with the inspection’s importance. Blisters or even a small cut could lead to trench foot. A limping soldier could disrupt the line of march and become a dangerous obstacle to his brothers, especially at night. Like his men, though, Hampton was aware of the intimate ritual’s humor.

  Strangely pale, even delicate-looking, their feet were, in contrast to the grimy brown uniforms, faces, and hands. The woolen socks kept them so. They wore them no matter the season. In June the wool kept their feet moist, therefore cool, from sweat, even as last February the same wool had kept their feet from freezing outright in the icy bilge, which inspired Alec with new gratitude for sheep. Their lieutenant insisted they take the socks off at least once a day to dry them, best they could, by a fire. No trench foot among Hampton’s lads. They knew he was proud of that.

  How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace and bring tidings of good things … Was it Llewellyn who’d quoted that verse? Maybe not. Maybe Alec remembered it himself. From a hymn, an anthem? Peace, tidings of good things … If Llewellyn’s heart was Christendom’s dolly shop, his own must be its junkyard. They were by no means messengers of peace.

  Ah, the wizardry of language: Alec and his brother Tommies weren’t lice-ridden bumblers; no, they were intrepid warriors defending liberty from tyranny, empire from barbarism, fair Albion from the Powers of Hell, saintly Belgian nuns and their orphans from the rapacious Hun. To Alec, the truth was simpler and had to do with families: Wilhelm, Victoria’s oldest grandson, had pitched a tantrum, kicking and pounding his wee pudgy fists (one of them misshapen from birth) because his uncle, Edward VII, had not taken him seriously as a ruler and because Edward’s wife, deaf Queen Alexandra, openly despised him. Hadn’t Alec witnessed her contempt himself? At the king’s funeral pageant, when Wilhelm leapt from his horse to push her footman aside and open her carriage door himself, hadn’t his auntie, the royal-imperial widow, scowled? Moreover, Edward had been hailed as a hero in Paris, where Wilhelm was unwelcome and newspapers mocked him. France and England, England and France, why was the world infatuated with those two? Paris had draped her streets in black when Edward died, as if that gluttonous whoremonger were her own king! If the French wanted a king, Wilhelm would show them one. He’d teach their newspapers not to laugh at him. He’d take back Alsace and force the English to show their spinelessness. Welcome in Paris? He’d trample the place under thick Prussian boots.

  “Check the head of the hobnail inside near your right heel,” Hampton said to Swavely. “I’m feeling a dent in the callus.”

  “Rub the boo-boo, please, sir,” Swavely said.

  The young lieutenant winked in reply. His hair, parted on the left, fell forward over his right eyebrow when he inclined his head to examine. Maurice’s hair fell just so, Alec recalled. How often had Maurice caressed Alec’s foot, or Alec, his? Cherished, kissed, pressed cheek or prick against it …

  The soldiers were fighting for love. They were trained to believe they fought for no cause or nation, but to protect or avenge their brothers. Ergo, the men fought for love. Alec’s military education led him to this conclusion. He wondered if Second Lieutenant Maurice C. Hall II, wherever he was, also conducted such inspections, and if his men loved him as they loved Hampton. Of course they did.

  Lieutenant Hampton checked Alec’s soles and toes with a light touch. When he looked up, he let himself smile. He squeezed Alec’s calf and said, “Back to the ball, Cinderella.”

  Hampton’s touch, the sight of his hair and his smile, made Alec hard. His mind ran to nakedness and lips and the sweet friction of youthful stubble in tender places, lying side by side with Maurice, an arm about each other, tongues lightly touching, a leisurely wank by the brook, on a July afternoon at Millthorpe. But “Licky” wanted his way even here, in this land of wasted mud, where the trees themselves were unreal, props from the camouflage factory of Amiens; even now when his own body, once love’s sweet vessel, disgusted him with lice and dirt. At night, the warmth rising to his face from under the blanket reminded him of coasting between slumber and waking in Maurice’s arms—only briefly, though, because, always worn out, he’d soon sleep, in spite of gunfire and snoring. Hadn’t he even slept once standing up? Yes, he was certain, when they stopped because of the pit in the road. On the night march that had brought them here, to journey’s end. This would be Alec’s first battle.

  They heard the distant rumble and shriek. “Taranis bestrides the heavens,” Llewellyn said.

  “Whazzat?” Swavely said.

  “Celtic thunder god.”

  They looked up at the bright sky of late June. Swavely said, “Not a storm cloud in sight, not even a cotton ball…” Then the shot exploded. “I’d say ol’ Taranis was cuttin’ a fart, not fuckin’ treadin’ the heavens.”

  Much later, after night had fallen, Alec, Llewellyn, and Swavely lay side by side under their laced-together groundsheets, sucking butterscotch candies that the corporal had tossed their way. Hundreds of other bundles lay likewise on the hillside with them. The meager light of the moon, waned to its palest quarter, could not have kept them awake; nonetheless, no one slept. Too many comings and goings, too much asking and guessing, too much fear. The guns insisted on fear. Heavy battery, howitzers, nine-inchers—no, nine-point-twos—out of sight beyond the ridge, blasted at intervals of minutes now, causing the earth to tremble under their tarps. But he, Jerry, kept the tempo slightly irregular so they could not prepare to hear the next round, always fired just seconds before they braced themselves or after they’d relaxed. The sound had three parts. First the thud of the firing: BOOM, basso profundo, its blowback so strong they imagined it knocked down the gunners themselves. Then the shell’s traveling, in reality somewhat like water dripping into a metallic bucket, but to those who heard, it was the flight of a banshee on a vendetta, because it climaxed in disaster, the third part, the explosion that brought home the wallop. Any part of this threefold sound, heard anywhere only once, would have set infants wailing, dogs barking, horses a-panic, cows beshitting themselves. But tonight the guns delivered their doses of terror by the score, without end, a countdown to End-time. The men were camped beyond their reach. Fear was the guns’ only mission tonight.

  Side by side under their groundsheets, Alec, Llewellyn, and Swavely shook, like the earth, with each new round of fire. They said nothing of their terror. In the distance, from under the ridge, where by day they’d seen chalky striations of gouged earth and bramble masking barbed wire, nine tongues of flame now rose precisely in sync again and again. “Quite a show,” Swavely said, as if he were watching the fireworks of a royal birthday over the Houses of Parliament with his girl by the Thames, not shuddering in f
ear of death near the banks of the Somme. But at last, because they were lying down, because they were weary, because they were close together and thus somehow protecting each other, one by one they slept.

  21

  Bivouacked together on the hillside, they slept through the short summer night, as did their thousand comrades destined to march into battle. The drivers, however, did not lie down; they spent the night walking beside their supply wagons (to lighten the loads on the final gradient); nor did the gunners, sweating over graph paper to map the counterbattery; nor the signalers, plotting their wires. At dawn, Swavely was summoned to headquarters, where they wanted him for another runner. His two mates tried to talk him out of taking his groundsheet with him, thus wrecking their makeshift shelter.

  “You won’t need it. Likely they’re hoarding whole stashes at HQ,” Llewellyn said to him. But Swavely insisted he must show up right and proper with all his equipment or lose the job and get jailed. His mates called him a mouse. They grudgingly unlaced their sheets.

  Then a day of waiting. Alec and Llewellyn expected to be moved to the line, but instead there was tea and mess, and the usual cleaning of rifles (kept cleaner than they could keep themselves). They even found that rarest of hours to sit on the grass and talk, about their people at home, about the duration, about Welshmen and Cockneys, the virtues and vices of the French, about Lloyd George and Churchill, the poems of Rupert Brooke (who’d died on the way to Gallipoli, where, Alec had last heard, Maurice had been deployed). They talked about the stories of Stevenson that they’d read as boys; they planned how they might meet up in London, after. But while they spoke, each friend’s eyes were drawn away from the other’s face to the farther picture, where the road switched back tightly near the top of the hill and the mules, forelegs splayed for the incline, wobbled in fear under their loads. Or opposite, where puffs of smoke grew smaller and smaller, receding, signposting a withdrawal of German guns—or a ruse. And each wondered if his friend was as wretched as himself, nervous and crushed and wobbly as those mules on the road. But then it was time for god-awful tea again, and for mess, for the gentle and long summer sunset.

  They watched the shadow of the hill of their encampment climb by grades up the opposite slope, where light still shone. In the distance, shrapnel burst and blazed and fizzled. Alec saw an owl take flight on her nocturnal hunt. Other cawing birds circled about. Some men had already settled down, even slept. Alec was anticipating another night of fear, but then the platoon commanders came, and sergeants, corporals, runners, all with one message: “All bivouacs come down.” He and Llewellyn untied their groundsheets. Then each withdrew into himself, packed his own things, minded his own troubles, and made room for the two extra grenades they’d just been required to carry.

  When the numerals on Alec’s standard-issue wristwatch glowed 9:39, the great movement began: all four companies, fifty yards between platoons, with guns rolling on both sides of them down the hillside. How loud it was! A thousand men marching, plus the battery, the wagons, the animals—and over it all, the pounding of enemy cannonade. Alec didn’t speak, no one did. If he’d wanted to say something to Llewellyn, who was marching beside him, he would have needed to yell into his ear.

  The clear sky, at the cusp of evening transparence and nighttime infinity, went suddenly flat. Rain soaked them, doubling the weight of clothing and gear. They were stalled, and no one could say where. They sat. Some tried to dig foxholes; others just lay down on the ground and risked the exposure. Hour by hour, the mortar fire grew more massive, oppressive, enervating. When the morning broke into full light, they were ordered to withdraw across open terrain. “He’ll pick us off like quail flushed out of the bushes,” Alec said to Llewellyn. But he did not attack.

  So they advanced. They stepped into a world of his ingenuity, recently abandoned. When the rain stopped and the noon sun struck fully, the chalky walls of the German trenches sweated and stank. But the earthwork itself! Everything nicely finished, with regular electric lights and switches. And utensils and tools and widgets and gizmos left behind, all up-to-date, manufactured and stamped by his hands. Comfort, convenience, efficiency. Nothing like the scruffy lives the British Expeditionary Force had been living. The sergeant said, “Careful the place ain’t booby-trapped. He’d do that, ya know, lure us down here and fuckin’ blow us to blazes.”

  Llewellyn said to Alec, “Who’s his god, do you think? A vengeful one who’ll punish us for trespassing among the dwellings of the chosen race?”

  Then they went deeper into the swath of land he’d withdrawn from: the hilltop village, ruined, its church and graveyard exploded, granite monuments toppled, shallow new graves hastily marked with white-painted slats of wood lettered in black.

  The mules died, many at once. It was as if on reaching the line, their destination, the animals chose death rather than be forced to go farther. They dropped where they stood. When the men were unpacking their carcasses, some wept to see how the straps of their burdens had flayed the beasts’ hides. The best they could do for them was to shove them to the side of the road.

  Another night in bivouac. Alec asked Llewellyn, lying next to him, “What does it mean, ‘D.E.R.’? Today, in the churchyard, the new graves, with just the wood crosses, I seen it writ upon several.”

  “I’d guess Dona Eis Requiem.”

  “Ah, that must be it. ‘Grant them peace…’”

  “Yeah. Seeing that church today in the village, I thought about other churches just like it—before it was smithereened, I mean—in Bavaria, where mamas and aunties and sweethearts and sisters are praying their rosaries night and day on their knees, so holy Mary will turn our own weapons back against us and bring home safe their dear young Hans. They never let up, those women at prayer, pounding heaven with their novenas as regular as this fucking battery fire.”

  “We don’t stand much chance against that, do we, now?”

  “Who knows? Maybe God will send an angel to stop the slaughter.”

  “Whose god? His?”

  “Anybody’s will do. And the angel will say unto Commander Abraham, ‘Put down thy knife, thou crazy old coot! Kill not thy son! Why would God want some lad’s bloody corpse?’”

  Next day in the afternoon rain, Alec saw from where he stood on a hill divisions of BEF infantry move forward to the assault.

  That night, there was no bivouac at all. During the darkness, he and his comrades were guided into battle positions: by four in the morning, they were in place, spread wide in a single line across the slope. They reclined there till light should reveal him to them, and them, of course, to him. Despite the salvos of the big guns—throbbing, monstrous—Alec could hear the chatter of birds, waking above, busy with more important matters than war. Meanwhile, some of the men lay on the ground, seeming at peace; others tossed like prisoners on the eve of execution. All were silent, except Cohen, who lay to Alec’s right, calling softly for Rachel, the bride he’d married on leave. Behind Alec’s head, two senior officers met, exchanging hearty greetings and reminiscences about Mrs. Stewart-Ryder’s Indian cooking. Then a salvo of guns. Someone screamed in panic. The officers shut their mouths and left separately.

  Alec looked at his watch. Seven minutes to go. He wished he could turn off the pain in his gut. He’d emptied his bowels twice during the night. He hoped that was enough, that he wouldn’t need to shit again when they moved forward, which would be shameful. He sat up. He held his head in his hands. Please would somebody shut off this dripping faucet of terror inside? His hearing had grown sharper in the darkness; he could hear voices within the artillery din, but could not make out the words. Sometimes his mind went to reverie, like to that day of the footrace at Brenford, and the joy of running freely as a colt, of music and dancing and food and kids in their paper wings zigzagging like dragonflies. Then the guns would insist that such a peaceable world had never been, that life was always a terror.

  Now came the order to align with the next company lower down on the slope, s
till closer to where his machine-gun fire was blasting white powder from the chalky terrain. The men of this lower-down company were already covered with dust, like an army of ghosts so leprous that even their clothes were diseased. When Alec stood to advance, he found his limbs had suddenly grown heavy. And his rifle—why did it weigh five times more now? How would he be able to shoot it?

  The corporal shouted into his ear: “Two minutes to go.” Two minutes left to run away. Too late to run now, the screw of fear had been overtightened, the gauge itself burst. Rays of the rising sun struck the top of a thousand saucer-shaped helmets. In the brightening light, his aim grew sharper. Alec saw the first hit: Williams’s messtin was stung by a fierce metal wasp that burrowed and drove through the tunic into his skin. Yet he hardly paused, keeping his face down and helmet correctly angled. Had Alec not seen the strike, he would not have guessed it. Not so with Hammersmith. Shot in the leg, he jumped, yelled he was dead, and fell down, relieved, to wait for the bearers. All the while the guns drummed louder, faster, sounding the coming apocalypse: “Divisional synchronization,” the corporal called. Zero hour.

  Alec marched face down, helmet tipped against the enemy, in line with the others, rifle in the high-port position, diagonally across the chest. The sunlight played tricks with the gun smoke: sometimes the cloud was dense, hiding the way forward, sometimes translucent, like morning mist. He felt he was walking above the world, not on solid ground. Then he glanced right and left and saw no one. He panicked. Had he strayed from his section? Lieutenant Hampton, as if sensing Alec’s terror, called softly a few yards away, “I’m here, Scudder.” In reply, five shots savaged the air. Hampton sank down first on one knee, then the other before he fell. The firing betrayed the gunner’s place among the trees. Alec threw himself on the ground and fired ten shots back. No more from the gunner. He crawled to Hampton. The buckle of the young officer’s helmet strap was caught under his chin, and the top was jammed over his face, blocking whatever last breath he might have tried to draw. Alec loosened the strap and removed the helmet. As he did so, that silky hair spilled downward. He was about to smooth it back when a corporal materialized from the mist. “Leave him for the bearers,” he ordered. “No time for a funeral. Advance now, at the double.” Alec obeyed.