by J. Thorn
As I watched, they slowly disappeared one by one into the shadows and the mist that gathered down the slope, until there was but one figure left.
He was a tall man. I hadn’t noticed him before, standing motionless and looking up the hill as the dead men walked past him. I was about to go back into the shadows, give them more time to disperse, and hope that soon my fellow soldiers would come storming up the hill, to liberate what we had already liberated, when he walked up the muddy path about halfway, so I could just see his face, glaring almost into my soul, and directly into my eyes, and spoke.
"All will be accounted for," he bellowed, his voice raspy and thick, choking to force the sound out of vocal cords that I really don’t believe were made for that tone.
So it came to it. The thing that has haunted me for so many years in my dreams. That face.
His one good eye was no more human than seeing the night sky staring back down at you, an endless hole of darkness that gave not a speck of light. It was almost as though someone had pushed them back into his head, like they were made of putty, the skin around the sockets dry and black. His skull was twisted somehow and elongated, and a scar that must have been an inch deep, ran straight down the other side of his face. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I saw small sharp pieces of bone jutting out from the crevice, like spines, or even teeth.
He stopped about halfway across the clearing and repeated those same words again - "All will be accounted for," though this time I wasn’t sure if he said the words out loud, or I just heard them in my head. Either way, he didn’t wait around. His face, for a moment, betrayed a look of what I thought might be fear. He had spotted something he didn’t like, spun on his heals, and paced back down the path to disappear into the mist after the throng of dead men.
The second strange figure to come into view appeared before the door, dropping down from the mud verge that my hiding place was burrowed into. His boots made a dull thud as he landed in the mud, his legs bending sharply at the knees, bracing against the impact of the drop.
But this didn’t slow him down. No, he paced across the clearing and followed the direction of the scar-faced man into the mist, and in moments he had also vanished.
Unbelievably, this man was more imposing than the gaunt, alien-looking first one. He was strongly built, his shoulders and arms bulked out from under his dark, worn garments. In his right hand he carried a weapon that I had not seen before, a rifle that looked similar to my own, but was constructed of a black metallic material - no wooden shaft or butt adorned this weapon. The magazine that stuck out from the bottom was bulky and long, maybe ten inches jutted out from the main body, curved forward in a strange arc.
Just before this second stranger disappeared from view into the mist, he took one sharp glance backwards, also looking straight at me. His features were pale, but not scarred, and he looked young, maybe only a few years older than me, but something in that alert glance told me that there were more years of experience in them than I would see in my entire lifetime.
He vanished from view, his long cloak flapping behind him for a moment before following him into the gloom. I sat there stunned, unsure of what I had just witnessed, confused, and scared as hell.
That day in the trenches was to be my last. As I staggered out of the bolt-hole about an hour later to greet the refreshing sight of allied troops heading up the slope, I found the third and last soldier who had lived in the hole. He had been in there with us all along, tucked under the bottom bunk, in a tiny space that a man could barely squeeze, quietly waiting for a time to leave safely. I can only presume that when he followed me out and saw the number of approaching enemy troops he gave up all hopes of escape, and resigned himself to death. But he wasn’t going to go without a fight.
The bullet took me straight between the shoulder blades, and it was by luck alone that it missed every vital part of my body, barely chipping my spine. It exited out the front just below my collar bone, taking with it just a few small pieces of bone and muscle.
Moments before, I had been sitting, gazing down at almost that same spot, as I realised that not just Looky had died in that bolt-hole. The bullet that Winters had taken in the top of his leg must have hit an artery or something, because while I had sat there, guarding the door, he had slowly and quietly bled to death behind me, leaning against the bunk, his arm across the chest of his best friend. Although it saddened me to lose them both, I think it was fitting that they had died together, if they had to die at all. There wasn’t a part of their world that hadn’t involved the other one.
Now, do you remember how I was saying that most of the time folks would just pass you by, ignoring you, stuck in their own little world of problems, yet there were occasionally the odd one or two that were different?
Well, I met one of those folks in a field hospital about ten miles from the trenches, where I went to after that day on the hill. I was so glad to see that hill disappear from view, bu at the same time sad because of those I had left behind.
Between waking up in a field hospital, on a rough bed that I think was just there for me to die on, lying there in pain for a week before I was able to at least breathe without crying out in pain, and being shipped off back to England, conditionally discharged because of injury, I never saw those two old boys again. It’s one of the things, and believe me there are many, that I truly regret in my life. Not knowing where they were laid to rest.
I made a remarkable recovery, the doctors told me. All they had done was clean the wound as well as they could and then stitch up the holes. I guess with that kind of injury, the most they could do was patch me up and hope. The doctors didn’t promise me anything, saying that if I was strong, and rested, I might make it through. Of course, as I already mentioned, the wound was superficial. I didn't have to recover from much, except maybe the shock.
Soon I was bandaged up and hobbling around the sprawl of field tents, running minor errands for the staff. Nothing strenuous, that wasn’t allowed, mostly it was just taking papers and messages backwards and forwards around the various parts of the camp. After a while, when I had gained the trust of many of the doctors in the hospital, they started asking me to take medical supplies.
It was simple. One of the doctors would tell me they needed such and such in one of the tents, which I would duly write down on a little notepad that I had acquired, and then waddle over to the stores shed, give them my list, and take them to wherever they were needed. Sometimes it was a cure, and sometimes it was, well, just something to ease the pain of passing.
That was how I met Joe Dean.
Born Joseph Henry Dean, 1885 in Brady, Texas, a place he claimed was the very heart of that county, and the soul of America. He told me how his fathers were the founders of the town. Well, I’m not sure I believed him, but Joe had a way of telling stories, there was something about his nature that just made you smile.
When I first saw him, he was looking sorry for himself, lying in one of the tents on the northern side of the camp, next to a man dying of tuberculosis. I was taking a bag of medical supplies over to the nurse who was attending that poor man. Don’t ask me what they were, because I just did as I was asked.
Joe had the deepest Texan drawl you’d ever hear. I had met a lot of Americans in the camp, along with many folk of all nationalities, and I had difficulty telling one American accent from the other, but Joe’s voice was so distinct that there was no mistaking where he came from.
I walked in, carrying my satchel full of bags and bottles, took one look around, and headed over to the nurse on the far side of the tent. I made it about halfway across before he spoke.
"Hey pal, you got any water in that schoolbag?"
As it happened I did, and he took it and drank down about a half before I could stop him, a whole lot of it spilling down his front and onto the bed, but he didn’t seem to mind.
"You’re a lifesaver. They don’t look after us so good up here."
The nurse overheard him speaking and w
alked over to meet me.
"You giving this young man a hard time Joseph?" she said, with a look of mock disapproval on her face.
"I was just getting me some water, goddamn it, you see what I mean?"
The nurse was an older woman, maybe in her late forties, and still looking fine for her age. She glanced at me and frowned.
"Are you the man delivering my medicines?"
I nodded.
"Then come along, and don’t you listen to that old soldier, he’s all mouth."
I followed her over to a table on the far side of the tent, listening to Joe cursing all the way.
"Hey I’m a wounded man here, a bit of respect wouldn’t go amiss now."
"Joseph Dean, you shut your chirping up now, there are men here that need more help than you do."
She looked at me, and shook her head as Joe continued to curse over in the corner, albeit a little quieter.
"Just ignore him. He’s harmless enough, but he doesn’t like it when he’s not getting the attention."
After I had handed over my delivery I started to walk back out of the tent, past where Joe was lying, still complaining to himself about his treatment at the hands of his so called persecutors. Anyone else would have looked like a self-pitying fool, but his tone said something different.
"Hey schoolboy, you look a little young to be out here busting your ass, shouldn’t you be in college or something?"
He was sitting up now, leaning against the back of the bunk, and smoking a cigarette that smelled like it was made of dried grass. Grey smoke wafted around and swirled in a plume towards the open entrance.
I stood for a moment, puzzled by his comment. There were enough young men in the camp, and there had been a lot more of them in the trenches than I had expected, but no one had thought to comment on it.
"What’s up boy? You slow or something?"
He smiled, a lopsided, cheeky grin that was infectious.
"No sir, I’m not slow, I just hadn’t thought about being too young to be here."
Joe sat up, grimacing a little with the pain, and holding his leg, which, from the bandages wrapped around it, I presumed was the reason for him being in the tent.
"How old are you boy? You can’t be above seventeen at the most."
I nodded. "Sixteen, sir. But my papers say I’m twenty one."
"How’s that come to be? You change your papers so you could come out to this hell hole?"
"No sir," I said, shaking my head.
"No I didn’t think so. That must make you a damn criminal."
"I was caught stealing sir, just some food and a newspaper though."
"Just? Stealing is stealing boy. I guess after this place you won’t be doing that again anytime soon?"
"No sir."
He didn’t look convinced, but that was okay with me. I started to head toward the exit but he called me back over.
"Hey, wait up, no need to be heading off so quickly now, is there?"
"I suppose not sir, but I do have my duties to attend to."
"You know folks around here don’t you? I’ve been here a week and all I’ve had to read is a half torn comic book some dead guy left behind. If you could find me a newspaper or something it would be damn good of you."
I shrugged.
"I don’t know if I can find one sir, I’m not supposed to take stuff. Stealing is stealing."
He smiled at that.
"Oh come on, there must be a few lying around in the officers' quarters, or one of those doctors must have one. It doesn’t have to be the latest. Anything will do just to take my mind off this place and the moaning."
He indicated the bed next to him, where the dying man lay mumbling and coughing.
"He ain’t the most interesting of company."
Joe reached back behind him and into his jacket pocket, taking out what looked like a half full packet of tobacco, and then waved it in my direction.
"I’ll make it worth your while."
"I don’t know, sir, I’ll see what I can do."
"You do that son, and I’ll have a few smokes here waiting for you when you come back. And maybe you might want this damn comic book while you're at it."
That sealed the deal. I knew exactly where there was a pile of newspapers. The surgeons in the south of the camp used old ones to soak up the blood from the floor of the operating tent, when they didn’t have any hay or sawdust to throw down. I unloaded a stack of them from the back of the supply wagons at least once a week. It seemed that even though we were stuck in this hell and there weren’t always enough medical supplies to go around, the folks back home still saw fit to be able to send the latest news spread.
Two days later, when the supply wagon came in, I asked the driver if it would be okay to borrow a copy. He was a friendly old guy, and was more than happy with an extra packet of field rations. Joe was as pleased as anything, and I walked away with half of a comic book, and a few smokes in my pocket. Quite a trade I’ll say.
The next week I spotted a single copy of the Washington Post tucked in that pile, and earned myself not just a few smokes, but a bar of genuine American candy to go with it. I left the tent with a smile on my face, and I could still hear Joe’s voice fifty yards away proclaiming his annoyance at whatever he had just read. Even so, the smile on his face when I showed him that paper was enough to make me smile right back at him.
The following weeks turned up copies of the New York Times, and more frequently Stars and Stripes, some military press thing that Joe found interesting. I never found him anything from his home state, but I think that just being able to read about what was going on back in America was enough for him.
I always found it strange, how we learn to adapt to our surroundings so easily. When you got used to the cries of the wounded and the dying, the field hospital wasn’t so bad. My wound was healing up nicely, almost too quickly I thought, dreading the likelihood of going back to the front line when I was fit enough, and I had gotten to know a lot of the folks in the camp. Most of the doctors called me by my first name now, and even the surgeon general said hello to me if our paths crossed.
The doctor that I liked the best was an old, crooked-backed man called Major Elsmoor. He was in charge of the sicknesses on the camp: cholera, tuberculosis, foot-rot - we had pretty much every ailment you could imagine passing through the place on a daily basis. Unlike the modern hospitals of today, that field camp just couldn’t provide a cure for a lot of things, so most of the sufferers would be drugged and left to die as peacefully as possible. I’m sure that if there had been a way to get them back to England they might have stood a chance, but the reality was that a lot of them would just die on the way.
Major Elsmoor was a strange man, but his constant chattering made me laugh. Quite often, when I delivered something to him, I would find him sitting in the corner of one of the tents chattering to himself. I know it sounds strange, but I warmed to the man. As soon as he saw me, he would snap out of his blathering and a smile would brighten up his face. He always seemed pleased to see me, and asked how I was.
It’s odd that such a quirky and seemingly harmless old man could have been responsible for all those deaths.
My walking papers arrived not long before the end of the war. It seemed that some administration problem had happened back home, and someone, somewhere had discovered that a prison in London had been sending out young men far below the call-up age, just to free up space. Apparently they had been hunting down all of the underage conscripts for months, unfortunately discovering that most of them were now dead. I heard from the officer who spoke to me, though, that some had been sent back home, and that I was one of the last to be found. They had trouble finding me because I'd been away from the front and unofficially placed for the last few months as a helper in the field hospital. Apparently, so many of the men at the hill had died, and been unidentified, that most of the names of those men serving in that assault had been written off.
They'd lost me.
&nbs
p; The officer seemed almost saddened to see me go. I don’t know whether that was because they were short of hands in the place, or whether he was a little embarrassed to be giving a boy his ticket home, knowing that I should never have been there in the first place.
I was to leave on the next convoy out, along with a handful of patients who were fit enough to travel back to England, but not healthy enough that they could ever be sent back to the front line.
When I climbed into the back of the truck, my sack of meagre belongings over my shoulder, and three bars of chocolate and a packet of tobacco stuffed into my pockets that were a gift from some of the staff there, I was sad, sad to be leaving a place where I felt I was of use, only to be heading back to homelessness in that damn city. But I was also exuberant to be getting out of the war. It’s the strangest thing, having mixed emotions.
I soon forgot all about that though, because as I pulled up the shutter on the back of the truck and sat down, I noticed a familiar face sitting opposite me.
"Well, well. Ain’t that a thing," I heard in that deep Texan drawl. "Looks like I’m not the only one who got their walking papers." Joe Dean smiled from the seat opposite me.
I looked back at him, smiled, and glanced down at his left leg, still wrapped up tight, with a fresh bloodstain creeping through.
"Not so much walking from what I see."
"Yeah, boy, is that chocolate you got there?"
I laughed.
We talked about Major Elsmoor for a long time on that journey, which seemed to last for ever. We went back over the events that had led up to Joe’s close scrape with death, and the unavoidable outcome. We both found it puzzling that a man like the Major, who was a doctor of amazing talent, could turn like that, even if he was quite an eccentric fellow.
It started two weeks before I left the camp to head back to England on the convoy. One day he was his normal chirpy self, jigging around the camp like he was in Sunday school, rather than a sprawl of dirty tents filled with the dying, then the next morning, when I went to his surgery tent, which was a small, barely standing square canopy that was open on two sides for most of the day, he was a little too quiet. I handed over the crate, which contained a new supply of some drug that he used a lot. I don’t remember its name. I also took him a new set of surgical knives, which under most circumstances he would have been joyous about. That morning he just nodded at me, and continued reading from a small clutch of papers. They looked like they were a letter of some kind, but I didn’t pry. Elsmoor liked his privacy. I’m not sure what was in the letter, but it can’t have been anything good, because I’d never seen him so withdrawn first thing in the morning.
