From the trenches, we see a swathe of blue sky with tall white clouds drifting like a dream, we alternate guard duty in squalls of drizzly rain, we creep more than a mile through the dark for a jug of milk, we stomp through the clingy clumps of clay in our leaden boots, slipping constantly and watching as our mess tins are trampled by careless feet. Those who are good with their hands kill time by cutting small brass women’s rings out of bullet cartridges with the blades of their bayonets, sharpened on bomb shards, and try to sell their creations—the going rate is about five cigarettes. Once a week a newspaper vendor comes from goodness knows where all the way to the rear dugouts, hawking Le vingtième siècle and De Legerbode.
I’ve had it up to here with the vingtième siècle, merde alors, keep your newspaper, grumbles Kimpe, mon bloody oeil.
I try to maintain discipline as well as I can. Sometimes when I order a few men out on patrol, the response is a spiteful Do it yourself, Sergeant Shithole. I snap at them to keep their mouths shut; one time I give the incorrigible Maigeret from Liège a punch in the face. That restores order and discipline; there’s no other way. A thought sometimes flashes through my head: How far I have strayed from what I once hoped to become.
—
The season of the first cherries has begun. Sometimes a farm girl comes all the way to our positions, saying she has fruit to sell, but no one has a penny here, so they push and pull till all of the protesting girl’s merchandise has been knocked out of her hands. One day when a few of the lads are feeling under her skirts and rubbing up against her coat and she starts to scream, I threaten them with punishment and smack them on the head. To my surprise, they instantly turn meek and back off. My heart goes out to the lads, who have nothing to occupy their minds here, while I often sit and read the few French books that the newspaper vendor has brought for me. Occasionally an officer gives me something to read as a token of gratitude for my unit’s discipline. In the gloaming, when nostalgia strikes, we sing the songs we remember sotto voce; the infantryman Laurent Mordin from Charleroi, who studied music, teaches us to sing notes that go together in chords. It sounds so lovely; he says that after the war we’ll start a big choir, and everybody takes him at his word. Until the next patrol, when we have to leave yet another tenor voice behind in the barbed wire, shrieking. We sneak out at night to drag the victim into a shallow pit like an animal, glad that at least we can bury him, but not until we have stripped him down to his underwear, taking everything that might still come in handy. We turn tough and get sentimental; we laugh as we cry; our life’s a waking slumber, a slumberous wake; we quarrel with our arms around each other; we lash out at each other while shrugging our shoulders; no part of our bodies or minds remains intact; we breathe as long as we live, and live merely because we are breathing, as long as it lasts.
—
Hicketick, a soldier from Antwerp who has served since the start of the war, used to be a cook in an officers’ mess; now he lies here grousing about the filthy crap we eat. Sometimes he slips away and returns with a wood pigeon, a stray chicken, or a pheasant. Then he scrapes the lard off a couple of slices of bread, builds a fire behind an earthen wall far behind our trench in the dusk, and fries the chunks of meat in the lid of his pan, until we go wild with craving and beg for a bite. After we chew and swallow, the flavor lingers like a nagging hunger for more; we munch on our bread and drink the weak beer that the supply base now sends us at irregular intervals.
—
I feel a powerful urge to write everything down, but I don’t have time. Sometimes I daydream about how we could possibly get out of this, or I sketch with the charred tip of a dry twig. Drawing soothes me. The lads keep their distance then, showing a kind of reverence. So I tend to go off on my own toward nightfall, which comes early to the dispirited landscape. I draw the bare tree stumps where once the lanes were overhung with green; the protruding shaft of a covered wagon in a crater; the remains of a roof, which looks like a sagging wigwam; a ruined wall, overgrown with grass and stinging nettles. Clods of turf hang from a tile batten jutting out from a collapsed roof, looking like impaled heads in the twilight. I shudder and commit the scene to paper. A flock of partridges passes overhead, filling the air with their staccato cries of “roof-roof.” Somebody shoots one out of the sky; a few seconds later, the artillery lets loose an ear-splitting volley; we duck as earth flies everywhere; inane laughter spreads through our ranks, foolish chortling and giggling because we’ve squeaked by yet again. Look, Hicketick says, there are two partridges on that wall. Martien, who’s going to shoot them, you or me? You have to hit both with one shot or you’ll lose them. I aim and fire; the birds seem to dive away; a salvo comes screeching in my direction; I lie flat till it’s over. The Germans are getting tired of this game too; they fire distractedly, as if out of habit. Hicketick curses; I creep through the half-light to find them; one partridge is dead, the other still twitching. I pull off their heads and crawl back. Hicketick tells me we can’t cook them straight away. It takes a couple of days for the meat to soften. I shrug and stuff the birds into a dead pal’s mess tin.
I head off with five of my men to keep watch at the most forward post; twenty-four hours of vigilant observation, noting any changes in the German positions. We are lying so close together that we can hit each other with pebbles. Even when we see a spiked helmet surface above the wall, we don’t shoot. There’s no point in provoking serious combat here; it would only cost us all our heads. But toward nightfall, when a German unexpectedly throws a grenade that goes off close to our dugout, I lose my temper. I grab one of our grenades, pull out the pin, and throw it furiously in their direction. We stop up our ears and wait for the explosion. Nothing. And then—nothing. We wait in disbelief; the grenade must have landed right next to their forward post without going off. Once darkness falls, I send one of the lads out to have a look. A moment later, we hear a boom, followed by a furious blast of rifle fire, screams and cries from the other side and our own, shells flying back and forth. We run for our lives, away from the German trenches. After ten minutes, everything is quiet again. An owl cries in the tilting trunk of a willow beside a drainage ditch that gleams in the vague moonlight. The boy I sent ahead did not return; his death is on my conscience. I order my men to reoccupy the forward post as quietly as they can, while I crawl over to the dead soldier’s body. I am so close I can hear the Germans talking. My heart pounds in my throat. I try to drag the boy back through the mud, but it proves impossible. His whole chest has been shot open; he is lying on his back. I cautiously take his rifle and ammunition and make the sign of the cross on his forehead.
Gobbleskipya, I hear in my head. Gobbleskipya, pal, God damn it.
I return to my place among the men in the dugout. Their disapproval takes the form of a crushing silence. Stiff with cold and damp, we are relieved ten hours later.
Back in the trench, I see Hicketick again. He asks me where the partridges are. I open the mess kit and out comes a sharp stench. Twenty-four bloody hours and they’re already rotten, he says. Maggots writhe in their sunken eyes.
“I’ll stew them up for the officers, with a whole bottle of red wine,” he says with a wink, and then he’s gone.
It is May 1915. Le vingtième siècle writes, Still quiet on the Belgian front.
5
Time rolls on into bland duration, duration loses direction, direction gives way to stasis and boredom, boredom makes us sluggish and apathetic, the days creep through our fingers. There are, in fact, whole weeks when nothing happens, weeks when the commanders try to distract their men with petty projects, like building a better dugout for the officers or putting on a “war circus” behind the front lines, where one summer evening we witness an absurd spectacle: an infantryman, Jef Brebants, stumbles across the flimsy stage like a grotesque ballerina, dressed in a tutu, with puffy skirts over his knobbly knees and thick plaid slippers on his flat feet. Two wads of rolled-up socks swell like lumpy breasts under the straitjacket he wears as a bodice
; soon, one sinks to his belly and the other rolls out in front of his feet. As a couple of soldiers sing a dirty song, he loses sight of the edge of the stage and falls off in the middle of his dance like a seasoned slapstick artist, his white legs in the air and his filthy underwear visible to all. The men roar with laughter, slap their thighs, whoop, and toss their louse-infested caps into the air. An explosion of pent-up mirth, a liberation from the stifling apathy of time. But as we return to our trench, the bungling Jef Brebants, who is over the moon after his successful performance, is pipped in the right eye by an enemy bullet. Half his face is blown away, he lets out a bestial death rattle, shits himself, pukes, and falls over. Somebody shoots him again to put him out of his misery, because his brains are hanging out of his head. We all lie flat on the ground and crawl the last hundred yards till we can roll into the trench.
The Huns are always close by; those filthy brutes are always lurking, and they seize any opportunity to demoralize us. This sometimes provokes outbursts of blind hatred; one of us charges forward with his rifle in a fit of rage, only to fall seconds later, riddled with bullets, somewhere in the marshy field out ahead. After dark we risk our own lives to find the daredevil and accord him at least the dignity of a hole in the ground, so that his name can be added to the roll of those who “perished on the field of honor.”
—
I write letters for the others, as my mother once did in my childhood. Most of them are for the wartime godmothers who hosted them during their convalescence. I do the best I can, in French and in English, learning new words every day from the two small dictionaries I’ve been given, and as I leaf through their pages or write rough drafts, the lads pass by, slap me on the back, and jokingly ask me, Marshen, ça va bien?
I also draw posters for theater and music performances organized for our entertainment in “gaffs” far behind the lines. Sometimes my portraits of clowns and actors, sketched on cardboard or rendered in watercolor, are posted here and there on the trees, with the names of the performers listed at the bottom. Then the lads josh me, asking me where I found a mirror so I could draw such a silly face. The ensemble performs arias from Cavalleria Rusticana, Mendelssohn’s “Spring Song,” Handel’s “Largo,” and pieces from Bizet’s L’Arlésienne. Three bars of music are all it takes to make some boys start crying their eyes out.
—
Sometimes we have to stand guard right after a strafe, without a pause. For three days and nights, the bullets whistle past our ears—grim days, when all of us think in silence: When will it be my turn to die like an animal? During roll-call, some men shout out, Mort pour la Patrie! or Choked on straw! Bitter laughter and murmurs, the commanders shake their heads and grin, but bellow less and less. I look on in silence as the lads around me sink into fatalism. Most are younger than I am—sturdy lads, meant for worthwhile occupations, with their hearts in the right place, lads with degrees who should be establishing households and having children—and here they lie, their scabrous bodies reeking in the tepid rain, with no hope of any change, mired in cynicism and death-lust, numbed by the stupid jokes told by the regimental idiots, scratching like apes and crying like babies, shivering with stomach cramps and the fear of a fatal infection, or living in dread of a stray bullet, of the shaft of a rickety cart accidentally snapping, of long nights filled with the snorting of horses dying slowly.
—
Around mid-August, the time comes again: we stand in a circle in the dark, summoned by a French-speaking officer.
A brave volunteer! Une fois, deux fois…
Nobody.
The officer coughs, looks flustered, repeats his question.
Someone scrapes his shoe against the ground.
The stars are twinkling above us; the moon is rising, still low in the sky. An owl cries in the distance.
Again, I lose my patience with my own men.
Yellow-bellies, I murmur. I step forward and salute.
À vos ordres, mon commandant.
My orders are to build a fortified advance post to end the stalemate that has dragged on for months. In the submerged fields ahead of us, we are instructed to string four lines of barbed wire in a semicircle extending below the surface of the water. The water is muddy and stinks; the slightest careless move sends you sprawling into the layers of slime dredged up by the shells.
—
The job will take about twenty nights, for me and eight men I’m told to pick myself. I go to sleep and wait till the next morning to choose my men. It’s not easy to persuade them to join me; they are only too aware of the risks of the operation. By the time they have given up quibbling and protesting, it’s late afternoon, and the eight of them follow me to the rear of the front lines to pick up the first loads of boards, pickets, hammers, pliers, nails, and rolls of barbed wire. We are issued with work gloves, thicker uniforms, waders. We pick up tickets for emergency care at the dressing station.
The first night, we start building a floating platform; at the first cautious taps of our hammers, a spray of bullets zings past our heads. In the darkness, we load all the boards and beams back onto a cart, drag it two hundred yards back, and, sheltered by a dike some distance behind the front line, spend the next day rapidly putting the platform together with hammers wrapped in rags. By noon we are about to collapse with fatigue. We are granted a few hours’ rest in a small farmhouse behind the lines, where they bring us a pot of soup. We return to the trench, where men are playing cards and smoking. They stare at us in silence, with a blend of mockery and admiration.
The next night, we drag the platform to the forward post and tie it to the trunk of a tree. Then it’s time to start driving the pickets into the ground. Again, it takes only two hammer blows to set off a volley of machine-gun fire from the other side. Ducks take to the air, quacking and flapping their wings, and bullets whistle past our ears. We lower ourselves into the water; again, blind volleys burst forth. The waxing moon rises over the broken landscape, a faithless, silent moon that could cost us our lives. We can’t stand around all night without working, so we go in search of stones that we wrap in rags, moving as carefully as we can so as not to startle the waterfowl. The pointy noses of swimming rats puncture the pale mirror of the water’s surface; we look like zombies performing nonsensical acts in slow motion.
After two nights, fear has a firm grip on us. The Germans seem to suspect that something is going on; sometimes they send a few flares soaring over our heads. Then we stand perfectly still, blinded, our hearts thumping. Any movement means certain death, I’ve taught my men: don’t panic, think lightning-fast, and make as little noise as possible. Like a flock of spooked sheep, we huddle close together behind a few fallen trees every time they open fire. Then I give them permission to drink lukewarm coffee and eat a hunk of hard, sour bread. We sit side by side, chewing and swallowing, the smell of mud mixed with the smell of summer night as the shell-smoke clears. A bullet whistles just past Bonne’s head as he’s rising to his feet; goaded to exhaustion, he shouts, Kiss my ass, you filthy Hun!—and returns fire. Another salvo immediately follows, Bonne falls bullet-riddled into the shallow water, whizz-bangs go off all around us, the shooting continues for more than a quarter of an hour.
Now all our work has been for nothing, I say to the trembling men.
They want to go back to the trench; I raise my pistol and say, I shall personally shoot down the first man who leaves. They stay on their bellies, grumbling, and tell me they’ll pay me back if we ever get out of this alive. Make all the empty threats you please, I say. It’s madness, I agree, but it wasn’t my idea.
Morning comes, and we collapse into exhausted sleep in the field, roused from time to time by orders shouted in the distance, a cart rattling down the ruined road, the endless swarms of mosquitoes buzzing and whining around our heads in the afternoon heat, until we are out of our minds from slapping our own cheeks again and again.
It takes us more than a week and a half to put up the barbed wire, four rows thick.
<
br /> On a night with a waning moon, while resting after a few hours of work, we see something wondrous: thousands of little eels wriggling through the grass in the silvery light, twisting and glistening, an opaline army in the vast silence of the night. They must be coming from spawning grounds in the submerged polders, with their ungodly stench of brackish water. They form one great current as far as the eye can see, a primordial ritual unfolding in perfect silence. The legion of eels glides through the grass in waves, as if on command, exuding a slimy odor; more and more follow; the wondrous ritual goes on for over an hour. The lads watch, their mouths agape, and one begins to pray. The moon sinks below the horizon, the last eels glide past the sleepy soldiers, we think we’re dreaming. We wake up hours later with sunlight in our eyes and wonder whether we all had the same dream.
—
After three weeks, we’ve completed our forward post. Our hands are torn, our backs are broken, the mud has seeped into our bones, and our breath has a boggy, bilious smell. The last morning, after a night of feverish toil to finish the job, I am standing next to the post with my back to the enemy, checking whether all the barbed wire is taut, when I hear a sudden bang. An electric shock runs down my spine, my whole body is tingling, fat drops of sweat come running off my forehead and into my gasping mouth. Close one, eh, Martien? someone says next to me. From a hole near the top of my right wader, blood is gushing. Here I go again, I mumble, and pitch forward into the water, flat on my face. A volley bursts out, I know I shall choke to death there in the mud. Images flash through my mind. I raise my head out of the water, roll onto my back, throw up, nearly choke on it, somebody rolls me onto my belly, pulls my head up by the hair and pushes it down, I heave and sob and retch and pant for air. Then everything goes black.
War and Turpentine Page 21
