Très bien, Marshen. Be careful, Corporal.
À vos ordres, mon commandant.
Bitterly cursing my pals, I crept along the steep bank of the Senne, without any cover, clinging to tufts of grass so I wouldn’t roll into the water. It was growing dark. Each sound—a wood pigeon taking flight, the splash of a water rat—made my anxious heart skip a beat. Something inside me had snapped the moment I saw the “surrendering” Germans dive forward into the grass. The filthy bloody bastards—I felt like killing, stabbing a man to death with my bayonet, my heart thumped in my throat. I heard a sudden rustling behind me, but couldn’t even turn my head in that position and knew for sure my number was up. Then I heard the voice of cross-eyed Rudy from Lossystraat: Martien, buddy, it’s me, just keep moving ahead nice and quiet, and I’ll cover you with my rifle. After a hundred yards, lie down, turn around, and cover me. We’ll take turns. By this method, at great risk to our lives, and after blowing off every German head that dared poke up over the dike, we reached the sappers an hour later, far from where our men were trapped. They were building a temporary bridge. The sound of their hammers was muffled; they’d wrapped them in rags, which kept tearing and had to be replaced. We had left behind our knapsacks and kit in the grass; I left my rifle by the river and crept over to the sappers to inform them of the German position. Now that it was dark, cross-eyed Rudy crawled back on his own to let the others know about the bridge. Half an hour later, they arrived, with Rudy leading the way—a hundred men in all, a long, slow snake slithering through the grass. They all crossed the bridge safely. No one gave me so much as a nod, no one had a word of thanks, no one had picked up my rifle. Muttering a string of curses, I crept a few hundred yards along the grassy bank to retrieve it. After that half-hour delay, I joined the ranks, bringing up the rear.
That early September evening, a frost set in. My mud-soaked greatcoat froze stiff as a board, and I was shivering, my teeth chattering so hard that I thought they would crack in my mouth.
We ate a kind of cold gruel scooped into our dirty, battered mess tins. Since mine leaked, I had to hold my hand under it. My palm was covered with the beastly goo.
Eppegem, that bloody sty, I’ll love it till the day I die, Carlier said, and he slapped me on the back.
Leave me alone, the lot of you, I snapped, and when Carlier said, Touchy, touchy! I moved about ten yards away and turned my back on him. Just before the chilly dawn, in the foul hole of night where every living creature shivers against the bare, dewy ground, I dreamed of my mother. She was standing by my father’s open grave, the rain was streaming down, a large, dark piece of paper was stuck to her back, she laid my father’s brushes beside his coffin in an open pit where the water was rising, and she was crying—my mother, who never cried. I stood behind her, cursing and firing a machine gun at the graves in the cemetery, I who never used to curse. Then I woke up with a start, feeling queasy, and threw up the sour porridge on the grass.
—
Our exhausted and demoralized battalion was granted a few days’ rest. In a light rain, sweating at noon and shivering by sunset, we marched toward a cluster of villages whose inhabitants, we were told, had been forced to run away. Under a sulphur-yellow evening sky, we arrived in a deserted hamlet. The lieutenant and senior officers laid claim to the small village hall; the rest of us were billeted in houses throughout the village, in groups of eight men and a sergeant. I ended up with Carlier, cross-eyed Rudy, Antoine Derdeyn, Daman and Boone, Vinus De Bleser, my cousin René, and a boy from the Vilvoorde area, in a small farmhouse a hundred yards outside the village. The impoverished villagers must have been driven out of their homes by the Germans, who had apparently moved on almost immediately afterward. The cows were grazing behind the vegetable garden; the goats and rabbits were ambling around their pen as if nothing had happened. The little house smelled like damp straw and burnt wood. The portraits on the simple wooden mantelpiece seemed to stare at us disapprovingly; country people with squarish skulls, their fleshy hands in their laps, their eyes expressionless. We took off our heavy leather belts; I gave orders to stow the knapsacks in the attic and leave the rifles in a neat row along the wall in the small entryway. Then I checked the cellar to see if we could take shelter there in a bombardment. To my surprise, I found well over two hundred pounds of potatoes and a barrel of salt pork in lard. Long rows of jars on racks held preserved fruit and vegetables, and there were five open earthenware jugs with a thin layer of salt covering the contents. Derdeyn had followed me downstairs. Ha, ha, the farmer’s secret stash, he said with a snicker. He found a jug of gin, snatched it up, and said, I want to shit on the floor right here and get plastered. Grinning, he squeezed his crotch. Before I knew it, I had punched him in the face. He fell back into the racks of glass jars; the jug shattered on the floor. His nose was bleeding; I had to stop myself from hitting him again.
Go upstairs and see if there are enough plates and cutlery to lay the table for nine, I snapped at him. He staggered back upstairs, and when I followed, I was just in time to see him turning the portraits of the farmer and his family to face the chimney.
Vinus came in from the garden and asked Derdeyn what he thought about slaughtering and cleaning the rabbits before the Germans came back for them. Ask Urbain, Derdeyn said, he’s the boss. I looked into his sly, evasive, subservient eyes.
Fine, I said, we’ll have potatoes and rabbit tonight, and there’s plenty of fallen fruit for applesauce in the garden. The boy from Vilvoorde said his aunt lived nearby and asked if he could spend the night there. He said he would bring us fresh bread for breakfast. I gave him permission to go and ordered him to return by eight the next morning. Daman and Derdeyn were outside, searching the sky for the source of the rumbling sound that seemed to be approaching. Then a wall of deafening thunder rolled over the village and the pastures, making the walls shake. Immediately afterward, we heard two loud explosions. One shell hit the nave of the village church; the other landed in a field. A few moments later, a third came down right next to the little farm where we were staying. The window panes in the front room tinkled and burst into shards; a few rows of roof tiles slipped off and shattered on the paving stones in front of the house.
For an instant there was silence. Then we heard a voice call out, There’s a wine cellar over here! One of the shells had hit a bourgeois house; the gaping hole at street level revealed a large collection of costly vintages in stone niches. Daman and Derdeyn were off in a flash, but a lieutenant beat them to it and barred the way. He bellowed in French that there was one bottle for every soldier, and whoever was caught with two would be punished.
Daman and Derdeyn returned with their bottles; Vinus, Boone, and cross-eyed Rudy went to fetch theirs. That’s plenty for nine men, I said to Carlier, who was peeling potatoes by the back door. He shrugged. A moment later, we heard the booming voice of the lieutenant. He had knocked Geert the fish vendor and Peutie the dog thief to the ground; the bottles hidden under their jackets had broken and dyed their uniforms purple. Lumpy Segers had forced his way into the small village bakery and now emerged triumphantly with a large, shallow basket of rolls and pastries. He held them high above his head and shouted that everyone could grab one without looking. He was soon knocked off his feet by the onslaught of young soldiers, and the basket fell onto the cobblestones. Everyone grabbed what he could, laughing, kicking, swearing, and whooping. The commanders did nothing to stop them.
By ten o’clock, the chimneys of the occupied village were smoking peacefully, far from the tumult of war. The smell of stewed meat filled the streets; we dined on rabbit with brown gravy. The wine flowed; here and there, you could hear singing. We sang too, and toasted and feasted and laughed as if at a village festival.
After the meal, I sat outside on a stool just behind the cowsheds and, for the first time in a long while, felt almost at peace. The sky was clear; Venus hung low over the orchard, casting a penetrating light; the Great Bear shuffled across the night sky with his old w
heelbarrow; the grass smelled fresh and made me a little light-headed. My thoughts wandered back to my home, where my mother was now on her own with my two sisters. My other two brothers were still too young to be conscripted; I didn’t even know where they were staying. I saw my dead father huddled beside the stove, the black-rimmed fingernails of his slender hands, his pale eyebrows. I was just thinking I should be able to draw his face from memory, when a few seconds later pandemonium broke out. A machine-gun strafe from a low-flying airplane was accompanied by running groups of Germans firing in all directions. We had never seen anything like it. It was raining bullets from all sides. Daman, who had been smoking by the front door, lay dead in the hall an instant later, his blood pooling on the tiles. His throat looked as if it had been torn to shreds, and only a few thin strands still connected his head to his body. At the same time, we heard mortar fire. A bomb hit the cowsheds I’d just run away from, and I heard the cattle lowing and rasping in agony. I charged into the house. The men were cowering in the cellar; their rifles lay in a heap by the front door. I scooped up the guns from the floor, threw them down the hatch at the top of the stairs, and shouted to the lads to come out at once.
We heard shouts and cries in the darkness all around us; in the heart of the village, orange smoke was rising over the low roofs. A new explosion set what remained of the church ablaze, moans of fear and agony filled the air, flocks of starlings burst into flight just over our heads, somewhere a well had been hit, doors and house fronts were spattered with sludge, not one windowpane remained whole. I got my men to creep behind the farmhouse, single file, toward the center of the village, and I took up the rear. We saw about twenty Germans ahead, dark against the blazing pyres, and ran through the gardens till we reached the village square, where we had a clear view of them. They were about to storm the village hall where the officers and the lieutenant had barricaded themselves. I leaped forward and signaled to my men that they should all fire at once. The volley hit the Germans in the back; they fell before they even had time to be surprised. Two of them managed to turn around; Vinus dropped to the earth, screaming in pain; we all fired again; the last Germans toppled to the pavement. The pandemonium died down. Suddenly all we could hear was the flapping of wood pigeons and the crackle of the fires. Somewhere in the distance, a dog howled like a wolf. The Milky Way twinkled, endlessly far away from the black hole where this stupid planet was spinning. We edged along the house fronts with our rifles at the ready and our bayonets fixed, suspecting an ambush, but it was all over. An officer peeked through a window on the upper floor of the village hall. Next to him, I saw the machine gunner who was always at his side. I waved to him and shouted that it was safe.
Here and there we heard the groans of the wounded.
The officers came outside one by one, and the men began to emerge from the houses too, some still blotto. We had lost about twenty lads. The officer swore under his breath, posted sentries on both sides of the main street in extended order, and stationed machine gunners on the upper floors of two houses, one on each side.
The others must sleep now, he said. Tomorrow is another day.
To me he said, Marshen, I’ll see to it you receive a promotion for this.
I saluted and returned to the house with my men.
Boone lay by the front door, wailing and praying for death. His uniform had been blown open at chest level, and his organs were bulging out between the gleaming buttons of his jacket. He had thrown up all over his face. I wiped it off with my dirty handkerchief, cursing Derdeyn for a fool because he had smashed the jug of gin in the cellar earlier that day. Boone’s misery didn’t last long. Blood came welling out of his nose and mouth, gurgling and sloshing, his eyes rolled vacantly, a moment later he was unconscious, and a few minutes later he was dead. I shut his eyes and told the men to dig a hole in the backyard. We laid Boone and Daman side by side and covered them with a layer of straw before we filled the hole. Theo Carlier made a primitive cross out of a couple of boards and carved their names into the wood with his knife. The night was well under way, the grass, leaves, and branches wet with dew. The world was silent and inexplicable. The rising moon appeared, gleaming, timeless and vast as in a dream, like a yellow wheel of cheese behind a line of rustling poplars. I prayed to Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows, I asked her why she had turned her face from our world. I inhaled the earthy odor of the autumn night, still laced with a faint whiff of gun smoke. We went inside; I slept on some straw in the cellar. Cross-eyed Rudy, Carlier, and Derdeyn settled down on the floor. One by one, we fell into a bottomless sleep, sleep like the slow extinction of a light, a large and distant light that stabbed through the small cellar window again just a few hours later, while the birds sang like maniacs in the old apple trees and a cockerel crowed on the dung heap by the bombed-out barn.
—
We milked the two cows in the courtyard before we moved on. I took Boone’s canteen out of his knapsack and filled it to the brim. After Daman’s death, I had taken his mess tin, which was still in perfect condition. We moved on in marching order, with heavy heads from the wine the night before, still bearing west toward Humbeek. After a few miles, the plugs popped out of a few canteens; some soldiers had filled theirs with the leftover wine, and as the liquid sloshed back and forth in the rising heat, it started to foam. Wine gushed out past their collars and into their hair, dripping down onto their necks and jackets. To the hilarity of the other soldiers, they walked the rest of the way in purple-stained uniforms that reeked of sour alcohol.
That afternoon it drizzled, and the morale of the hungover troops dropped by the minute. We struggled to keep our footing on the greasy clay of the country roads and the mud-slicked, uneven paving stones of the shot-up streets. A few nuns came rushing out of a boys’ school partly demolished by a shell. They had heard we were coming and prepared huge quantities of soup. They also handed out tins of beef and sardines. The officers bellowed that we had no time to lose. We all filled our knapsacks and marched on, grumbling. The rain was chilly by this time and pelted our faces. Behind a sandbank somewhere along the route, we found traces of earlier fighting. Shutters and doors had been removed from abandoned houses and lain across canals and pits. Beyond them were deserted trenches, partly covered with boards and scrap metal. In the boggy ground we saw footprints, wheel marks, and hastily dug ditches. The last company to pass this way must have left no more than an hour and a half earlier. We were ordered to drag all the boards, doors, and shutters along with us and then use them in digging a trench a few hundred yards further on. We had no idea what the point of this exhausting labor was, until we saw energetic movement in the bushes several hundred yards away. The order came for everyone to crouch, immediately, and work on all fours. In this awkward position, we continued digging the shallow pits. Sweat and rain trickled down our necks and over our backs. Since I had done well on the banks of the Senne, I was sent on another hands-and-knees patrol, this time as far as the next canal, on the other side of the pastures. I knew the lieutenant now in command, Laurens de Meester, from the military school in Kortrijk; he respected me, and showed it without a lot of pother by giving me assignments like this one.
War and Turpentine Page 17
