Carlier, Derdeyn, and I crept around the German camp until after five. I made a sketch showing the possible locations of their trenches as precisely as I could. That cost me my last few sheets of smudged drawing paper.
Around sunset, I was sent out on reconnaissance again. The officers distrusted the silence, after the signs of frantic combat that we had found. In the cold evening mist, the mud dried into hard, irregular serrated edges that made crawling difficult. As we were nearing the outskirts of the village to the left of the woods, a gigantic black horse came out of nowhere, charging toward us. As it galloped past, barely missing us, it became aware of our presence, veered away with a loud flapping of its horse lips into the pasture to our left, and bucked wildly, spilling the contents of its saddlebags. We could see from its harness that it belonged to the enemy troops. The animal vanished as suddenly as it had appeared. We heard the fading thud of its hooves on the grass. I immediately crept closer and found a volume of topographic maps, a compass, field glasses, and a notebook. As we returned to our post, walking upright under cover of darkness, we suddenly heard the horse approaching us. When we turned around, we saw its large brown eyes shining brightly in the gloaming. The animal followed us at a walk, obediently, as if it recognized us as its masters. Carlier, a farmer’s son who knew how to handle a horse, took it by the reins. Snorting, it twisted its fierce head back and forth a few times, kicked at the mud with its hind legs, and then meekly followed. We arrived at our trenches with the horse in tow, to the intense interest of the lieutenant, who closely inspected everything we had found. The men looked on, listlessly spooning up what the nuns had given them earlier that day.
Dark gaps formed in the pale sky; stars pierced through them; it soon grew cold. The earth gave off a chill, like an unknown planet of cool soil, and we, absurdly small and shivering, were stuck to it like flies in syrup. That night I dreamed of the smith’s son with his eyes burned white in the fire; he spoke to me, but I could not understand him. Whazzat? I asked him again and again, he sprayed bubbles of saliva in my direction, they seared my face like white-hot iron. When I awoke, I realized that they were raindrops. In the biting morning mist I pulled the hood of my capote over my head, ill-tempered and trembling.
—
Sunday morning. Not a church rang its bells in all the countryside around us; the crows swarmed over the broken poplars and the collapsed houses beyond them. We were each given two army biscuits and a mug of hot coffee. I eagerly grabbed the warm mug and started to drink, but burned my lips. I jerked my head back and was about to blow on the coffee when two bullets, one after another, flew between my mouth and the mug toward the barn door where a sergeant was pouring the coffee. The bullets pipped him in the neck and throat; he died instantly, keeling into the door and crumpling like a puppet. Everybody screamed and ran for the trenches, scrambling for their rifles. Lieutenant De Meester barked commands. He ordered me to run two hundred yards to the right with twenty-four men, lie flat, keep watch, and shoot anything that moved. We slithered through the grass like eels and found ourselves in a potato field—a stroke of luck, because the raised beds gave us cover. When we cautiously rose to our feet, we saw only deserted fields and an empty farmhouse hundreds of yards away. But when I looked through the German field glasses that De Meester had entrusted to me, I saw tufts of grass shifting and quaking, an advancing meadow, noiseless and treacherous. The enemy regiment must have been following us since the day before, determined to catch us unawares and kill us all.
Then the small attic window of the farmhouse swung open with a flash in the rising sun. They’re setting up a machine gun there, I whispered to my men. I ordered all twenty-four of them to fire at the window simultaneously, on my count. The salvo rang out as if from a single rifle. Through my field glasses I saw six or seven men come rushing out of the little house. That very same moment, bullets started flying in all directions through the green of the potato field, but our ridge of earth sheltered us. I could see the meadow shifting toward us, rippling, wriggling, and squirming. My heart skipped two beats. We had wasted a lot of ammunition and only had about ten bullets each. To make matters worse, we were isolated from the body of the regiment. I ordered the twenty-four soldiers to fire a fan of bullets low to the ground, one bullet each. Confusion broke out in the living pasture; no shots were returned for some time. Suddenly we saw projectiles overhead, which hit the ground a few hundred yards behind us. The Germans had guessed that we had reinforcements on the way and were trying to cut them off. For the first time, I felt afraid of dying. A penetrating odor told me that the young soldier next to me had soiled himself. His whole body was shaking, and he had laid down his rifle at his side. Corporal, he said, may I—
Keep your mouth shut, I said, we have bigger problems than your trousers.
There was silence again for a while. It was almost nine o’clock. I suspected the Germans would not venture into the potato field.
We started to breathe again. I gave the panicked boy a reassuring nod. Suddenly, a German officer leaped up less than ten yards away and aimed his pistol at my head, which had poked out just over the greenery. He fired twice. As I ducked, the soil sprayed into my face. I leaped up immediately and shot before he could shoot again; caught by surprise, he fell onto his back and lay motionless.
Now we had five bullets each, and no place to run. Mortar bombs and whizz-bangs dropped a hundred yards behind us; the entire landscape was being plowed up. Ahead of us, an unknown number of Germans were preparing to slaughter our little group of twenty-four. I looked at the lads’ faces. They were tensely squinting through the grass and leaves, expecting another spiked helmet to appear before their noses any second. We didn’t have enough ammunition to scare them off by shooting blindly into the grass.
It occurred to me that the lieutenant had promised to signal with his drawn sword when it was safe for us to crawl back. But not a sound or signal came from Molenheuvel, the hummock by the barn where they had taken cover. Then we’ll return at our own risk, I thought, and I ordered the farthest soldier to jump up and run back. After three strides, he fell down dead. Following another long interval of silence, I again ordered the soldier in front to jump up and run back as fast as possible. He stumbled to the ground after ten yards, riddled with invisible bullets that whizzed low over the potato field. I felt hate burn like acid in my throat, a bitter gall that surged through my body and dizzied me with furious, death-seeking energy. I had two bullets left. I shifted my knapsack to my right side for protection, jumped up, and ran for my life toward the edge of the neighboring field. I could feel the bullets whistling past. The collar of my coat flew off; a hot streak shot across my neck. Right after that, the straps of my knapsack were shot off. I stumbled, tripped over my own rifle, and landed face-first in the soil at the edge of a beet field. My rifle lay three steps behind me. My heart was pounding frantically. I inched backward, belly up, and pulled my rifle closer by the strap. The men looked on, paralyzed with horror. I waved to them to throw me their bullets. Ten bullets landed in the loose soil around me, and I crept over to pick them up, one by one. Once I had them all, I carefully wiped them clean, loaded my rifle, and fired horizontally, just above ground level, whenever anything moved. After the third shot, it stayed quiet for several minutes. I let out a loud cough and ducked behind the ridge between the fields. A bullet promptly flew in my direction. I returned fire. A dark silhouette sprang up, screaming, and fell backward. Then there was silence. I signaled to my men to creep toward me on their bellies, one at a time. After the first hundred yards, we started crawling on our hands and knees, and after another hundred yards we jumped to our feet and ran for our lives, but there was nothing moving anymore.
We sat down by the barn, panting. Nobody said a word. Soldiers were arriving from all directions, some wounded, with dark red bandages round their arms, legs, chests—bandages they had made from strips of their own underwear. Others straggled into camp covered with mud, like zombies, the living dead, their e
yes glittering in their blackened faces. Here and there, not far away, we could hear rasping and wailing in the fields. We didn’t know where it was and would not venture beyond our sheltering wall again. The German horse had already been slaughtered; a few soldiers had skinned it with their bayonets and hung large slabs of meat on a stable door. We could not start a fire to cook the meat, which gave off the nauseating smell of blood. In the evening we went back for my two dead boys, groping blindly through the pitch darkness. Ambulance workers went in search of the wounded men moaning in the fields. My cousin René had fallen in battle less than a hundred yards from the place where we had fought. I didn’t have a chance to see him; the ambulance men had already carried him off. I was assured that he had not suffered and that he had “perished on the field of honor,” an empty formula we heard time and again for all the ghastly deaths around us. Someone else had laid claim to his shoes—the shoes left behind by my cousin René, the pasty-faced swanker who had dreamed of becoming a shoemaker. How would they break it to Evarist, the old smith, that his second son had gone the way of the first?
—
We went on to Zaventem. I spent a long time in the church there, kneeling before the side altar with the painting of my patron saint. The lieutenant gave us extra rations and congratulated us on our courage and cold-bloodedness. For me, he had a friendly clap on the shoulder.
“You did your best, Marshen. Don’t dwell on it.”
When I lay down to sleep that night, I bawled like a baby, with my rosary clutched in my fist. I prayed in utter turmoil, to drown out the deafening screams that had risen like a storm in my reeling head, and it was as if my prayers were swept away in that unbearable inner bedlam. After an hour of compulsive prayer, I heard it again—the distant drone of the organ—and fell asleep.
3
Battle of the Yser, October 1914
From a fast-moving army of one hundred and twenty thousand troops in constant military action, we had been reduced to a ragtag band of soldiers, surviving as best we could. We had escaped death countless times and become hardened to the sores, blisters, diseases, and wounds we picked up from the crude equipment that we lugged through miry fields and past deserted villages. In the first week of October—weary in body and soul, with rifles that still went bang but had no precision left in their worn-out barrels—we made a forced march to the besieged dikes near the southern coast of Flanders. We passed Jabbeke after three days, tramped on to Ostend a day later, and split up in Middelkerke. We were billeted in empty houses; we devoured our sandwiches and hot coffee and went to sleep on the thin layer of straw scattered over the wooden floor. A couple of hours later, we woke to the sound of the battalion’s buglers and drummers. To perk up our dazed, debilitated group, we were given mugs of coffee and a couple of dry biscuits, which we gulped down in doleful silence. Right after that, we were sent on another forced march—destination unknown. A messenger told us the fall of Ghent was near; fear gripped my heart when I thought of my mother. There were whispers that Middelkerke was a death trap; with our backs to the sea, there would be no escaping the advancing German troops. The officers growled at us to shut our big mouths and keep marching.
My feet were in shreds; the clotted blood in my coarse socks kept rubbing against the wounds and reopening them, wider than ever. Every step of the way, I was limping in pain. I heard that British and French relief troops might be coming. But what did we know? A scruffy, hobbling pack, we had long ago cast off, shot to pieces, or trampled our tall shako helmets and replaced them with looted hats or policemen’s forage caps, our tangled hair poking out below. We wore boots found on farms, the shoes of dead Germans, knapsacks of knotted rags. We were a mud-spattered bunch of battle-numbed saps, groaning and grousing our way to the unthinkable, plodding down mucky roads under the low clouds of our rain-lashed country.
Just after noon, we arrived in Ichtegem, where we had to await orders from the general staff. After more than an hour of deliberation, the brass hats decided to send us back the way we’d come. The men’s protests swelled to such a point that the officers drew their swords and shouted themselves hoarse, ordering the mob of emaciated ghouls to simmer down. The lads swore and stamped; some flung themselves into the grass, pulled the shoes off their wounded feet, and shouted that they would not go another step. A couple of Walloon boys started bleating like sheep: Armée bête, armée bête. The officers were clearly taken aback. I stepped forward, feeling resentful because I’d just heard that my mother and sister Clarisse had come to Jabbeke the day before and been denied permission even to say hello to me. I told Lieutenant De Meester that the men needed a couple of hours’ rest first. Request denied; our orders had arrived. I said it might be a good idea to let us know what those orders were, so we would at least see the point of all this.
De Meester said, Martien, don’t you get uppity, now.
Furious, we gathered our courage, and our regiment marched past Mannekensvere and crossed its one bridge to the other side of the Yser, where we were finally ordered to halt at the Tervaete Loop. The officers had relented a bit along the way and permitted us a couple of stops to rest. By the side of a brook, we rinsed out our dirty, bloodied socks and lingered for several minutes, dangling our feet in the cool water as long as we could, sharing talcum powder and puttees. At the end of the long march, we collapsed in exhaustion on the banks of the Yser.
The soft cries of the wood pigeons in the evening echoed from the smooth surface of the moving water. In the mud, I saw the fresh prints of women’s shoes and children’s feet. But the area seemed utterly deserted. The empty fields were dotted with lost-looking cows and horses.
Biscuits were handed out again—large aluminium tins of Biscuits Parein, tins we fought over even when they were empty, because they were so convenient for storing all sorts of little things. That night, instead of sleeping, we worked at a feverish pace. With the blunt saws given to us, we had to cut down a row of willow trees, sawing through the trunks just above ground level. The fallen trees and their branches were supposed to protect us from the wind and rain. The thickest logs were sawn in two lengthwise, so that we could use them to cover some of the trenches. The officers gave orders to dig ditches that could be defended from attackers on both sides. I asked what the point of that was, and was told that because this stretch of river snaked back and forth, if the Germans crossed the Yser, we would immediately be surrounded. In a farmhouse, coffee was brewed for us; we slurped it greedily from our iron mugs. It was six in the morning, and all of us were longing for a couple of hours’ sleep. Just as Segers and Lievens came out of the house with yet another canteen full of coffee, all hell broke loose again. A howitzer shell hit the ground next to them and blew one of them to bits. We couldn’t even find his body; the other man died instantly too. As if to show off their accuracy, the Germans immediately followed up with a few well-aimed bombs that landed right on the horses and cows in the pasture behind our backs. We saw the limbs of the animals sticking up out of the craters into the sky, the swirls of blue shell-smoke dispersing over them. The enemy had managed to build a pontoon bridge across the river. Panic broke out; there was close combat in some places with bayonets. Then the shells started shrieking over us. In less than no time, the farmhouse and the barn next to it were razed to the ground. By ten o’clock, nothing was left of the charming countryside. In the mass of rubble and upturned earth surrounding us, there was no sign of life. We fired back with machine guns in the direction of the battery fire. A large-caliber shell struck our machine-gun nest. We saw our friends’ bodies soar into the air; severed limbs went flying over our heads.
—
The days wore on, and we were tossed back and forth between sudden alarm and long hours of quiet when everything seemed just fine. Most of our artillery never showed up, and there was no point in opening fire anyway; the barrels had worn out in the heat, and our light guns didn’t have a long enough range. Some days we couldn’t see a thing through the icy fog.
A
raft came drifting silently down the river one night, laden with large crates of fresh munitions. We had no idea how it had reached us.
But what we saw the next morning staggered us all: a mass of dogs, cats, polecats, weasels, rats, and rabbits, swimming across the river like an otherworldly army, their snouts just above water, trailing countless triangles in the smooth black surface. The locks had been opened in Nieuwpoort, and the countryside was gradually flooding, as far inland as Diksmuide and Tervaete. It slowly dawned on us that this might halt the enemy advance. We watched with pounding hearts. We had strict orders not to shoot at the fleeing animals, because that would betray our position. So we looked on as those sharp-nosed messengers from a doomed world, fleeing an unimaginable Armageddon, came on land, shook the water out of their pelts, and rushed past our trenches without a glance, fleeing blindly like lemmings. No one grabbed at the animals; as hungry as we were, no one wanted to kill and eat one. Like disguised angels of judgment, the bedraggled ghosts passed out of sight again, bounding over the slick black fields of mud in the drab morning light. We gaped at the ripples they’d left on the river’s dark surface. In the distance, we saw the pale glow of water rushing through the fields in our direction. The commanders passed through the ranks, repeating that provisioning would be difficult and we would have to pull through for many days on our own, without reinforcements from the area behind us. The only food they gave us was tins of sardines and damp biscuits. The men cursed and gagged at the flavor of the salty sardines after the coffee they had just drunk. We were forbidden to leave the trenches to “heed nature’s call.” Plenty of soldiers had been heeding the call right where they sat for the past week, some even pissing their pants for a moment of warmth in the blasted morning fog. In the corners of our trenches, the mountains of feces grew by the day. We tried to forget they were there. Sometimes one of us would scoop a little soil on top, but the penetrating odor was already in our heads, our breath, our bones. We’re more primitive than cavemen in this bloody place, Carlier said, and he spat into the mud.
War and Turpentine Page 18
