Shot at Dawn

by John Wilson

  I felt no shock, but simply watched what happened with detached interest. I was vaguely sorry that MacTaggart was dead, I had liked him.

  I felt Bob move beside me. He entered my restricted field of vision and knelt beside MacTaggart’s body. That’s stupid, I thought sluggishly, you can’t live without a head and even a hero can’t put one back on once it’s been blown off.

  Bob stood up and turned to me. Very slowly, he removed his gas helmet. I wanted to say stop, or prevent him from doing it, but my mouth couldn’t form words and my body felt as if it were made of lead.

  Bob looked at me. I could see his mouth moving, but I was deaf. He stepped over to me. For a terrifying moment I thought the gas had killed him and he was one of the corpses in my dream come to get me, but he bent down, shook my shoulders and shouted in my ear. He must have shouted but his voice sounded thin and very far away. “It’s all right,” he said. “The gas has gone.”

  Gradually the meaning of the words dawned on me and I fumbled to get my mask off. I felt free. The smell and taste of the gas were still in the air, but the clouds I had seen advancing down the trench had dispersed. Even the fog had thinned. To my surprise, it was full daylight. We must have been huddled in the trench for hours. I grinned, stupidly. Mindless joy swept over me. I had survived.

  “I think it means they’re going to attack.” Bob stood on the fire-step and peered carefully over the edge while I struggled to understand what he had said. Eventually I joined him.

  The barrage had moved back to the Forward Zone, or perhaps it had been there all along while we hid.

  “As long as they keep shelling the front lines,” Bob said, thinking out loud, “they won’t attack. They would never send their men into that.”

  As if the Germans had been listening, the shelling in front of us stopped and explosions began again around us. In an instant my joy evaporated as if it had never existed. It wasn’t fair. I had survived the barrage. The Germans weren’t allowed to shell me again. I felt tears sliding down my cheeks. I had to leave. I couldn’t go through this again.

  Calmly I stepped onto the floor of the trench, carefully placed my rifle against the parapet and began walking away. I heard Bob shouting for me to stop, but I ignored him. The desire to leave, to be anywhere but here, was irresistible.

  I felt Bob grab my shoulders. “Where are you going?” he yelled. I shook him off and kept on. He pushed past me and stood in my way. “You can’t go! It’s desertion!”

  Anger blinded me. What right did Bob have to stop me? Just because he had done something foolish and been given a medal for it didn’t give him the right to prevent me doing what I wanted, and I wanted above anything else in the world to get away from here.

  I swung my fist as hard as I could. I doubt if it was a very well-coordinated blow, but it took Bob completely by surprise. My fist connected with his jaw and he fell backwards with a startled look on his face. Then the sandbags of the parapet to my right bulged out towards me. Something hit me on the side of my head and everything went black.

  Chapter 9

  Escape

  Near Arras, March 21, 1918

  The dream came again, but this time the horrors reached me. I wanted to run, but I couldn’t. A great weight was pressing on my legs. I lay in helpless panic as the deer gnawed at my cheek with its blunt teeth. Around me, men leered with half-blown-away features and pawed at me with shattered hands. I screamed but my mouth filled with dirt. I could move my arms and fought to push the deer away from me.

  I came to, scrabbling at the dirt that covered my face. I turned my head and vomited out the earth that filled my mouth and gasped in a lungful of air. I opened my eyes and saw a startlingly blue strip of sky, streaked with grey tendrils of smoke. I gradually became aware of something close to silence. Shells exploded in the distance and a machine gun clacked somewhere, but the intense barrage had stopped. As my mind reasserted itself, my fear returned. I remembered that I had to escape.

  My legs were buried but I sat up in a cascade of dirt and looked around. The first thing I saw was MacTaggart’s headless body sitting across from me. I twisted to my left, ignoring the sharp pain that seared through my head. A large section of the parapet had collapsed in a confusion of earth, stones and ripped sandbags almost filling the bottom of the trench. I twisted the opposite way and saw even worse destruction. The trench was half filled with rubble and that was what was trapping my legs. Near where I assumed my knees must be, a hand and forearm extended up from the collapse, the fingers curled in supplication.

  “Bob!” I screamed. Memory flooded back. I had hit him and he had fallen onto the floor of the trench at the instant a shell had collapsed the parapet. It must be him buried there.

  I reached over as far as I could and grasped the hand. It returned my grip. I pulled as hard as I could, but it was solidly embedded. Like a madman, I dug through the dirt around the arm. I reached the elbow, but I couldn’t stretch farther.

  I wildly began digging at my legs, throwing dirt and stones everywhere. Pieces of buried metal cut me, fragments of barbed wire stabbed me and my fingernails broke and tore, but I kept on. Eventually, I reached my knees and kicked the rest of the dirt away. Rolling over, I grabbed Bob’s hand. This time there was no response. I dug like a crazed dog. I uncovered the rest of Bob’s arm, his shoulder and, finally, his face.

  Bob looked as if he were asleep, except for a blueish tinge to his skin. I cleaned as much dirt as I could out of his nose and mouth and shook him gently.

  “Come on, Bob,” I said. “Wake up. I’m sorry I hit you.”

  I was mad then, sitting in a ruined trench in the midst of a battle, talking to Bob as if he were about to make a joke of the whole thing. I suppose insanity was better than acknowledging that I had killed him. If I hadn’t punched him, he wouldn’t have been on the floor of the trench when the parapet collapsed. He would have survived.

  Tears streamed down my face, but whether from crying or the effects of the lingering gas, I had no idea. I was vaguely aware of things going on around me, men rolling out of funk-holes or emerging from dugouts, orders being shouted and scattered rifle and machine-gun fire from all along the line, but it was all happening very far away, to someone else. The only thing that was important to me was sitting and talking to Bob.

  “The attack’s coming now. Get onto the fire-step.” The voice sounded distant but I could feel breath and spit on my ear. I looked round to see the lieutenant crouching over me. I knew him well, but I couldn’t remember his name. “Can you hear me?” he yelled.

  I nodded slowly.

  “Then find a rifle and get up on the fire-step.”

  “I can’t,” I said, forming every word painfully slowly. “I have to talk to Bob.”

  The lieutenant glanced at Bob’s dead face and slapped my cheek hard. The pain brought me back somewhere close to reality.

  “Get a rifle and get onto the fire-step.” The lieutenant moved off barking orders at other stunned men.

  Sluggishly I obeyed, picked up MacTaggart’s discarded rifle and peered out over no man’s land.

  Streams of black smoke drifted across my view and a pall of dust hung above the Forward Zone. Occasional shrapnel shells — whether ours or the Germans’, I had no idea — exploded in the air in peaceful-looking puffs of white. Heavy explosions echoed from far behind us. Our wire was almost completely destroyed and huge craters were everywhere, but grass still grew between them.

  “Look!” someone yelled.

  I tensed and peered hard.

  “It’s a hare.”

  There it was, a large hare, unhurt but disoriented and with eyes wide with fear, hopping back and forth through the torn wire.

  “Look, Bob,” I said under my breath, “a hare. I wonder how it survived.” Then, “Good luck,” I said more loudly.

  “Here they come!” the lieutenant yelled.

  The Germans didn’t come at us in the waves that the old soldiers talked about from the early years of t
he war, but in small groups, darting from shell hole to shell hole. Rifle fire opened up all along the line and I heard the harsh clatter of a Lewis gun.

  Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion and none of it involved me. It was like being in a dream, except it was not nearly as frightening as the dreams I had been having.

  “Well, this is a real battle, Bob,” I said.

  I saw one German soldier in a crouching run. His rifle was slung over his back and he held one of the long-handled German grenades in each hand. Others were stuffed into the tops of his boots. I fired and he disappeared from sight, but I don’t think I hit him. My left hand was shaking too much for a steady aim.

  The first grenade exploded in the trench to my right. I felt its blast pull at my trouser legs and a clod of earth pounded me on the shoulder. Someone screamed. I glanced round to see a crumpled body on the trench floor and the lieutenant sitting on the fire-step, his uniform jacket in tatters and blood pouring down his face.

  “Brown,” I said. “That’s the lieutenant’s name, Bob. Lieutenant Brown. I’d forgotten. Why didn’t you tell me? I think he’s from Orillia.”

  “They’re in the trench!” someone yelled.

  A German soldier appeared around the corner of our fire bay, pulling a grenade from his boot. He was a small man and his coal-scuttle helmet looked ridiculously large on his head. He was wearing thick spectacles with round lenses.

  I turned towards him, aimed my rifle and fired. Nothing happened. I’d forgotten to work the bolt and eject the old cartridge after I’d shot at the man attacking across no man’s land.

  The German soldier stared at me, the grenade held above his head. His eyes were huge through his spectacles. He must have been in shock, thinking he was about to die. Before he could recover or I could work the rifle bolt, the lieutenant rose from the fire-step and forced his bayonet up hard into the man’s stomach and under his ribs.

  A look of surprise crossed the soldier’s face and he coughed, almost politely. A trickle of blood ran down his chin and he sagged to the floor of the trench like a sack of discarded rags. The grenade fell out of his hand, bounced in the dirt and came to rest beside Bob’s head.

  The lieutenant looked at me and smiled. The grenade exploded.

  The blast hurled me backwards and forced the breath out of my chest. I lay, gasping like a stranded fish, struggling to suck air into my lungs. My helmet had been blown off and something had hit me on the temple. My head hurt unbearably and something warm was trickling down the side of my face.

  The lieutenant’s body lay on the trench floor, the dead German across his legs, but I ignored everything. The only thing I had to do was see if Bob was all right. I stood up. Pain pounded through my head and I had to close my eyes and lean against the trench wall. Carefully I opened my eyes and worked my way over to where Bob’s face still stared out of the collapsed parapet.

  “I’ll go and get help,” I said. “There’s Germans all around, so lie still and keep quiet. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  I patted Bob’s cheek. It felt oddly cold and clammy. “Try and keep warm,” I said, and then I just walked away.

  I was fixated on the idea of getting help for Bob, but somehow I was convinced that I had to go to Canada to get that help. I had no plan but was positive that all I had to do was walk and soon I would be back in the Nicola Valley. Then I would find Ken and together we would come back and rescue Bob.

  I walked along the ruined trench. There were bodies scattered everywhere, British, Canadian and German. At one point a wounded man called out to me for help, but I ignored him. He wasn’t Bob.

  Eventually, I came to a point where the trench was completely blown in by a large shell. I simply climbed out into the open and kept walking. Scenes of torn ground littered with ragged bodies and groups of running men appeared and disappeared through the swirling smoke, like the fragmented images from a broken moving-picture show. A heavily armed German soldier appeared out of the smoke and almost bowled me over. He glanced at my tattered uniform and bloodstained face, shouted something I didn’t understand and pointed back the way he had come. Other Germans appeared and disappeared, heading for the battle, as well as scattered, unarmed and stunned British soldiers stumbling along in the opposite direction. Obviously, the Germans had been told to ignore surrendering soldiers, wave them back and not allow them to slow the advance.

  I don’t know how long I walked for, but it must have been several days because I remember walking in both daylight and darkness. I had no idea what direction I was headed in. I was just confident that whatever direction I chose would be the right one.

  My memories of those days are confused and not at all coherent. They’re a bunch of vivid images, but all unconnected, and set in a sea of tiredness and walking. When I was tired, I lay down and slept wherever I was — in a ditch, a field or a wood, it made no difference. Once a French woman took me into a barn and let me sleep on some bales of hay. Another time someone else, or the same woman, gave me a steaming hot bowl of stew. I ate it so fast I burned my mouth.

  At some point I crossed back into British territory, but no one paid any attention to me there either. The roads were jammed either with long columns of exhausted retreating men or supply columns trying to get to the Front.

  Once I was sleeping in a wood with a group of other men when we were awoken by a man shouting, “The Germans have broken through. They’ll be here within the hour.” My companions panicked and rushed away. I got up and kept walking.

  Another time I stumbled into a headquarters unit. Men were busy shoving documents into roaring fires and staff officers were piling into fancy automobiles. One officer stayed behind and tried to organize us to dig in at the edge of the wood, but as soon as he was out of sight I simply walked away.

  After a while I left the crowded roads and headed across country. I met fewer soldiers and more French people. They were all women and children, working the farms as best they could with their husbands and older sons either serving in the army or already dead. For the most part they helped me, offering food and somewhere to sleep, but some chased me away, waving brooms and yelling curses I couldn’t understand.

  The country gradually became more heavily wooded and I began to think that I must be getting close to Ontario, where I had seen vast forests from the train windows on my journey to Halifax.

  One morning I was woken up by a hand roughly shaking my shoulder. Two men stood over me. One was wearing a faded British uniform and the other a French coat.

  “Who’re you?” the Englishman asked in a broad accent.

  “My name’s Allan McBride,” I answered.

  “And what’re you doin’ ’ere?”

  “I’m going to Canada,” I said. “I have to get help for my friend Bob.”

  “Oh God!” the Englishman exclaimed. “Another loony. That’s all we need. “’Arry’ll be thrilled.”

  He put his hand under my arm and helped me to my feet. “Come on, son. Let’s go and meet the rest of the blokes.”

  “I have to go to Canada,” I repeated.

  “That’s okay. It’s on the way.”

  Arm in arm we walked through the forest. Walking to Canada on my own had been very difficult. I felt ridiculously happy to have someone to help me.

  Chapter 10

  Deserter

  North of Béthune, Spring 1918

  “Is this Ontario?” I asked when we arrived at a clearing in the woods.

  “Yeah,” my escort replied. “This is Ontario. Now you just wait ’ere while I fetch ’Arry.”

  As the soldier walked away, I looked around with interest. I had only ever seen Ontario from a train, so I figured it was good to be able to spend some time there.

  The camp was a rough copy of an army camp. Several army-issue tents were spread between the trees. Rations, ammunition boxes, weapons and equipment were scattered about. Over to one side sat a Triumph Model H Roadster motorcycle and sidecar with a set of army-issue goggles
slung carelessly over the handlebars. Everything was military issue, but the camp had none of the order and tidiness of a regular camp. About a dozen men either stood around smoking or sat by small fires. Most wore some semblance of a British uniform, but I spotted two Frenchmen and one German. This was a bit confusing. I knew that the Frenchmen were probably from the neighbouring province of Quebec, but the German? Then I remembered that there were a lot of German immigrants in Ontario. Hadn’t I read somewhere that a town near Toronto had changed its name from Berlin to Kitchener? I felt pleased that I had worked the problem out.

  As I stood, looking about, a man approached. He was dressed in the uniform of a full major, but his tunic buttons were undone and a cigarette hung from his mouth. He looked familiar. Instinctively, I straightened and saluted. Instead of returning my salute, the man smiled.

  “We don’t salute here,” he said. “Don’t you remember me?”

  I struggled to place the face and voice but had no luck. I shook my head helplessly.

  “Last fall,” the man said. “At Etaples. The mutiny.”

  Then it came to me. Harry Sommerfield. I stepped back. “You’re the coward that started the riot,” I said.

  Sommerfield laughed. “I didn’t start anything, although I did try to finish it.”

  “You were a private soldier,” I said, staring at his uniform. “They made you an officer?”

  “I made myself what I am,” Sommerfield replied. “What’s your name?”

  “Allan McBride.”

  “Well, Allan, do you have any idea where you are and what’s going on here?”

  “I’m in Ontario,” I said, a little uncertainly, “and this is — ” I hesitated “ — a training camp?”

  “Okay, we’ll call it Ontario to keep it simple, but this isn’t a training camp. This here — ” Sommerfield swung his arm wide to encompass the camp “ — is a group of sane men who’ve decided that they’ve had enough of this war’s insanity.”

  “Deserters!” I said in sudden realization. I turned away. “I have to go. I’m almost home and I have to get help for Bob.”