Alec

by William di Canzio

  You can just picture the seen, or maybe you can’t. Suffice it to say she spoke hardly another word for me during the entyre crossing, only that she woud not even set foot on shore in Buenos Ayres. But wily Jane met us at the dock with little Rita and that proved too much to resist. Ma agrees to stay for six months. She makes me swear to send her back then. O she still skowls and snits at me with such lady-like disdain!

  Now, more than a year later, Aderyn remained in Argentina, to Alec’s relief. Fred was using the threat of German submarines to postpone the promised return.

  Meanwhile, rebellion had broken out throughout the nations, it seemed. In Ireland, the English rulers squelched it quickly with the full brutality of war; then in Russia, where the citizens forced the czar from his throne. Their army claimed they couldn’t win the war against the Kaiser under a Romanov monarch with German forebears (and therefore treasonous sympathies), so they mutinied. Alec remembered Ted’s lessons about Russia: at Millthorpe he’d told his young guests that some of their thinkers took Christianity at its word and believed that the enemy was no foreigner, but rather the “beast within.” After a second revolt in 1917, Russia withdrew from the international scene and sued Germany for peace. Were the Russians looking within, Alec wondered, searching their national soul, or was the beast merely practicing some sleight of hand?

  Then the French army also mutinied. Their government had been trying to hide the number of fatalities, but honest arithmetic showed that nearly a million French soldiers had already died at the Western Front. Yet their generals kept ordering men forward, disregarding their exhaustion, their families’ hardship, and the pricelessness of their lives. The mutineers protested that they were neither cowards nor weaklings; rather, they wanted to be treated as fellow citizens by their leaders, all brothers in the republic. They were heard. Deployments to the front line were shortened, leaves lengthened. Thirty-four hundred soldiers were nonetheless court-martialed for treason; five hundred of those tried were sentenced to die, though finally all but forty-three of the condemned were spared.

  No mutiny among English soldiers. (“Too downtrodden from the cradle,” Swavely griped.) But on the home front defiance was growing. Women united the cause of peace with that of suffrage. Writers spoke out in papers and pamphlets. Bertrand Russell was fined and fired from teaching at Trinity College, Cambridge, for voicing opposition. In Alec’s own Welsh Fusiliers, a young officer named Sassoon publicly questioned his nation’s motives for prolonging the war, asserting that soldiers were being made to suffer and die for “political errors and insincerities.” Since this declaration came from a man wounded in battle and decorated for valor, he could not be labeled a coward. To avoid the scandal of trying a hero for treason, the government quietly committed him to a psychiatric hospital.

  Despite the protests, things worsened for the military. England was now dispatching underage boys into battle, kids from the slums so needy they would lie about their birth dates for the sake of a meal and some clothes. And the army pretended to believe them. One of them approached Alec: “Mr. Scudda?”

  “No need for ‘Mister,’ I’m a soldier just like you.” The boy accepted the cigarette Alec offered.

  “But that’s ’ow we knew ya back then. We always called ya Mr. Scudda, and the gent was Mr. ’All.”

  “Whazzat—?”

  “Foo’ball, sir, of a Saturday afternoon, in the city, a’ the mission ’ouse.”

  Alec searched the boy’s features. “Not Billy Wrenn?”

  He grinned. His teeth had green streaks; still, the smile lighted his face. “Ya remember, then? Good fun, wa’n’t it? Yer a fuckin’ disaster a’ foo’ball.”

  Alec laughed. “True enough! But Billy, how could it be? That was but five years ago—the lot of you seemed no more than tykes to me then. You can’t be old enough—”

  He winked and said, “Sshh!”

  Alec judged him sixteen at most, likely younger. He smoked and spat and blustered and swore and gulped his tot of rum, but he had no need to shave, and he struggled under the weight of rifle and gear. Alec wondered how he would ever manage to wield a bayonet, should it come to hand-to-hand fighting. He tried to watch out for the boy.

  One chilly night in October they found themselves neighbors in the trench, positioned a few yards apart. Alec was wrapped in his blanket on his sleep-shelf, about three feet above the duckboards, just wide enough to lie down on. He was neither fully awake nor asleep, which was how nights passed in the trenches. At the sound of boots on the boards, he sat up suddenly, rifle aimed.

  Billy Wrenn jumped back: “It’s me, Mr. Scudda.”

  “Jeezus! What’s wrong?”

  “Nothin’. Had to piss.”

  “Sshh. Get back to your post.”

  “Just movin’ my legs. Fuckin’ cold, ain’t it?”

  “You’ll catch hell from the corporal.”

  “But I’m all stiff.”

  “Wrap up in your blanket—that’ll help. Lie down.”

  “Wha’ for? Can’t sleep.”

  “Just lie down and rest while you can.”

  “Awright.” He hesitated. “Got a smoke?”

  “Ya know we can’t smoke, he’d see the light.”

  “Yah, right. Bloody idjit, that’s me.”

  Alec was sure he heard the boy’s teeth chattering. He made room on his shelf. Billy Wrenn sat next to him. Alec covered both their shoulders with his blanket. He kept shivering. Alec put an arm around him to warm him, and the boy was asleep immediately. Rather than wake him, Alec managed to lie back down on the shelf on his side with his back to the damp wall and to spoon Billy Wrenn beside him, both under the one blanket. He held the sleeping boy close to keep him from slipping off.

  How very small he felt. Alec realized the baggy uniform made the boy’s figure appear bigger than it was, because he felt like a child. He kept watch for them both. The gunfire had been diminishing for a week; orders were to return shot for shot, but not to initiate. Who knew how long the relative quiet would last? The sky was clear tonight, hence the frost. The harvest moon on the wane cast highlights and shadows along the length of the trench as far as Alec could see.

  He recalled the forest at Penge, before the war, when hunters would shoot by the light of October’s full moon, and November’s, and he would guide them. How lovely the woods had been then, the crisp smell and showering leaves in the otherworldly light. The frost would set his skin atingle … The youngster beside him stirred in his sleep and was still again.

  Alec had lived for more than two years now with no word of Maurice. At HQ, he would read the lists of the dead, wounded, and missing, always with heart pounding and panic in his gut. Then he would put himself through the ordeal of reading again, lest in his desire to find no news, he had willfully overlooked it. But there was nothing.

  When the moon set, he tried to wake Billy Wrenn, but the boy clung to the safety of his sleep in Alec’s embrace. So he carried Billy in his arms a few yards to his own sleep-shelf, lay him there, and covered him.

  27

  The maps kept tantalizing him with how close they were to England, to safety. They were stationed near the town of Romeries in the Nord, only about a hundred miles from Calais, thence just a short jump across the Channel to Dover. Swavely said he would hike it in one stretch, if they’d let him go. They wondered if poor Jackson had such a hike in mind when he’d bolted. He pleaded at the court-martial that there was madness in his family, but this was the second time he’d been caught running away. Alec feared they might not be able to find six volunteers for the firing squad and he’d be made to join, but six did volunteer and so he was spared being forced to shoot a comrade for doing what they all had thought of doing.

  That was November 7, 1918. On the same day, word got around that a German delegation under a white flag had formally requested a cease-fire, but that Foch sent them away empty-handed. Egged on by the American generals, recently arrived, eager for glory, he said he wanted the enemy on their
knees. Meantime, men kept dying.

  On the morning of November 10, a dozen Welsh Fusiliers were dispatched from Romeries to the town of Escarmain for what was called a cleanup operation. Germans had been caught there, most captured or killed. But a few were left, said the report, and these stragglers were to be overtaken. On entering the town, the Brits found a German soldier lying blood-spattered on the roadside. He did not resist capture. He told them that he was the last alive of his company and that they would find the bodies of the rest by the church nearby. He pointed toward its shattered square tower. When they approached the church, two machine guns opened fire on them from behind a low wall, each discharging three hundred shots per minute. All died on both sides in the ambush.

  That evening, bearers brought the bodies of the Fusiliers back to Romeries for burial. When Alec saw how the sprays of dumdum bullets had slashed and torn the childlike body of Billy Wrenn, he collapsed to his knees and doubled over, forehead to the ground. Swavely tried to lift him. Alec would not be raised; rather, he keened from such a depth of grief that those who witnessed shook their heads. When two others then tried to lift him, he shut in on himself more tightly and sobbed till he had no more breath. Finally he rolled over onto his side in the dirt, his face a silent openmouthed mask of anguish.

  Next morning Swavely tried to cheer him: “’E’s in a better place, Scuppy.”

  “Uh-huh…”

  “Listen, I know it: ’e’s ’appy now—told me so ’imself. I seen ’im last night.”

  “Had a dream about him, did ya?”

  “Not a dream, no, I seen ’im, swear I did—”

  “Get out—”

  “It’s true. Seen ’is face in the sky.”

  “Yer daft.”

  “Entirely. I felt ’im beside me too, like you here with me now. ’Appens to me sometimes, get it from me mam. She claimed ’twas a fairy gift for seein’ the dead.”

  “Wha—?”

  “She called it ’er sense of presence.”

  At that moment, rumor interrupted their talk: It Was Finished. Foch had signed the cease-fire agreement before dawn. Men cheered, then shut their mouths when they heard that they were to keep fighting till 11:00. Eleventh day, eleventh month, eleventh hour, that’s when it would end, not before. They were ordered to advance. Swavely shouted: “What’s this shit, now? ‘Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour’? It’s no bloody fuckin’ mellerdrama, it’s the life and death of us men! Why not just stay put till eleven?” A noncom grabbed him, and he pushed back: “Fuck off, Sarge—”

  “Obey the goddamn order, ya lowlife cunt, or I’ll shove your own bayonet up your arse.”

  They obeyed the order, advancing over the top of the reinforcement trench toward the first line. At 9:00, at 10:00, the firing kept up; at 10:30 it intensified, as if both sides wanted to enjoy the fun before their legal killing would become murder. Alec’s speed with his rifle had improved with years of practice: today he was firing twenty-five shots per minute toward the unseen enemy firing at him. It was reflexive action because his mind had been numbed by Swavely’s words. Sense of presence. A gift for seeing the dead. Had that fortune-teller seen Maurice beside him in London, the way Swavely had seen Billy Wrenn? And that day on Bernard Street, had Alec felt Maurice beside him, as Swavely had Billy? Maurice … dead for more than two years?

  At 11:00 the gunfire ceased. Soldiers on both sides peeked above the trench wall. The sight of their helmets provoked more fire, now illegal, by their enemies. Then both sides started tossing hand grenades, unaimed, for no reason it seemed but to have less to carry away. One of these exploded near Swavely. His legs shattered below both knees, exposing splintered bones and torn sinews. He wept and screamed, “Ain’t it over? They said it was fuckin’ over!” Alec used his own belt for a tourniquet, which he pulled so tightly around the stumps that the strap tore into the flesh. Did he think he could thus contain his friend’s life? In his panic Swavely panted and pleaded, “Get me home!”

  “We’ll get ya home, I promise.”

  Alec braced him under the arms and tried to lift him, but the movement made the man wail in agony. Alec waved and shouted; when the stretcher arrived, Swavely was dead. The bearers left him to seek after wounded survivors. Alec sat in the blood-streaked mud by the corpse. He squinted up at the sun approaching its zenith in the glorious autumn sky.

  * * *

  Among Swavely’s belongings, Alec found an English version of Marx’s pamphlet, which did not surprise him, and a copy of Pilgrim’s Progress, which did. Then he remembered that Llewellyn had given it to his friend. He packed the things to be returned to Swavely’s family, who would receive an official letter to the effect that their son and brother had died honorably in battle of a single bullet wound, quickly and without suffering. Alec’s final order before dismissal was to widen the mass grave where Billy Wrenn was buried to make room for those who died on November 11.

  * * *

  That was when he stopped eating, or rather started forgetting to eat. He didn’t feel hungry. He did feel sleepy all the time, though, and cold. He joined the transport to Paris. Thence he could have gone to Calais and home to England with everyone else. Instead he lingered in Paris. His father was dead, and his mother and his brother were living in Argentina. Why was he going to England? Confused by the question, he’d stop in midstep, unsure of where to go. Others, who knew where they were going and wanted to get there fast, would brush past or shoulder him aside. Then he’d remember that Maurice was why he was going to England. But the fortune-teller had seen Maurice among the dead. Those who glanced at him at that moment would see his face contorted, silent but openmouthed, into a mask of anguish, like when he had mourned Billy Wrenn. They would turn their faces and hurry on.

  For a couple of days he wandered Paris. He spent what he had on cigarettes; smoking kept him awake, also seemed to warm him. Then he’d sleep wherever he happened to sit down, sometimes so very deeply that he’d fall over to his side on a bench and the police would wake him. The weather was raw, drizzly; he stayed close to train terminals because they afforded some shelter. That’s when he had the idea that he should take a train to the port of Marseille, where he might make the passage to Buenos Aires. It would be springtime there, and warm; he would find his brother and his mother. He thought he must be thinking clearly again because he remembered the seasons were opposite in Argentina.

  Late on the rainy afternoon of November 15, 1918, he boarded an express at the Gare de Lyon, bound south-southeast to the Gare Saint-Charles in Marseille. In the overheated second-class compartment, in the darkness, he felt safe. He was going somewhere: that gave him a reprieve from needing to think about what he would do when he got there.

  Hours later, when the train was approaching his destination, he felt the familiar overwhelming need to sleep, so when he surrendered his ticket to the conductor, he asked the man in broken French and with gestures to be sure to wake him in Marseille. And then he did fall asleep, deeply, beyond care or memory or knowledge of time or place.

  VIII

  THE WHITE ROCKS

  28

  At the Gare Saint-Charles, the train changed crew as well as direction. In the hubbub the conductor forgot to wake Alec. What woke him was the whistle and jolt of the train pulling out of the station, now eastbound, now local, just as the new conductor came along to punch tickets. Alec had none, having surrendered his to the first. The new conductor might have relished chiding such an English imbecile, but since he was still in uniform (his only clothes) and looked thinner and more haggard than anyone so young ought to look, he treated him kindly, this soldier who’d fought a war he himself had been too old to join. He managed, in broken English and with gestures, to make Alec understand that he would do best to get off at the next stop, a little town not many miles down the track. If he’d wait there till morning, he could catch the westbound local back to Marseille, a very short trip. He issued a return ticket, no charge. That’s how Alec came to be lying awake on a bench,
his head on his old canvas bag, on the platform that served as the station of the town of Cassis on the Mediterranean coast of France, shortly after a midnight in mid-November 1918.

  Ain’t it over? They said it was fuckin’ over! At the very moment when Alec’s tears were salting Swavely’s blood, people were cheering, dancing, drinking in Piccadilly, Times Square, on the Champs-Élysées. He hated them. There were only two kinds now, those who had fought and those who had not, and he hated those who had not.

  Memories like Swavely’s agony, the most recent in a scrapbook of four years’ making, kept him awake at night and weary all day: Billy Wrenn’s body savaged by machine guns; Llewellyn’s heart, pierced by the bayonet’s blade; the dead unburied; the maimed hopeless; men’s severed limbs mixed with mud; carcasses of pack animals and horses, their stench mingled with the smell of bacon frying in the mornings. These memories could sicken him in no figurative way, because if he dwelled on them, he would heave up whatever was in his guts.

  Still, his invisible wound hurt worse than any memory; its pain would strike so deeply that at the same time he’d sweat and shiver, gasp for breath and pant like a runner, burn as if stung with shrapnel. It caused him to cry out aloud on the empty platform, startling the birds into silence: “Maurice…” He keened, rocking and sobbing, the heels of his palms pressed into his eye sockets. When at last he was quiet again, the birds resumed their predawn songs.

  He struck a match to read the schedules on the kiosk: hours yet till the next local would stop here. Though he didn’t feel hungry—these days he never felt hungry—he figured he ought to eat something because he couldn’t recall the last time he’d done so. The light was just beginning to show the road, an alley of packed earth between rows of trees, and he followed it.