by George R. R.
Tommy saw that the figure was a Chinaman. What was a Chinaman doing here in No-Man’s Land?
Perhaps, Tommy thought, coughing, he speaks English. Maybe I can talk to him in Esperanto? That’s what the language was invented for.
He said, in Esperanto, the first sentence he had ever learned in the language.
—Could you direct me to the house of the family Lodge?—
The Chinaman stopped. His face broke into a quizzical look in the light of the falling flare. Then he smiled, reached down to his belt, and brought up a club. He came over and hit Tommy on the head with it.
* * * *
He woke in a clean bed, in clean sheets, in clean underwear, with a hurt shoulder and a headache. He was under the glare of electric lights, somewhere in a clean and spacious corridor.
He assumed he was far back of the lines in a regimental hospital. How he had gotten here, he did not know.
A man came to the foot of the bed. He wore a stethoscope.
—Ah—he said. —You have awakened.— He was speaking Esperanto.
“Am I in the division hospital?” asked Tommy in English.
The man looked at him uncomprehendingly.
He asked the same again, in Esperanto, searching for the words as he went.
—Far from it.— said the man. —You are in our hospital, where you needn’t ever worry about the war you have known again. All will be explained later.—
—Have I been taken to Switzerland in my sleep?— asked Tommy. —Am I in some other neutral country?—
—Oh, you’re in some neutral country, all right. But you’re only a few feet from where you were found. And I take it you were under the impression it was a Chinese who rescued you. He’s no Chinese—he would be offended to be called such—but Annamese, from French Indo-China. He was brought over here in one of the first levees early in the War. Many of them died that first winter, a fact the survivors never forgot. How is it you speak our language?—
—I was in the Esperanto Union from childhood on. I and my brother, who’s now dead. He both wrote and spoke it much better than I.—
—It was bound to happen.— said the man. —You can imagine Ngyen’s surprise when you spoke so, dressed in a British uniform. When you spoke, you marked yourself as one of us; he thought to bring you back the most expedient way possible, which was unconscious.
—The doctor tended your wounds—very nasty ones from which you probably would have perished had not you been brought here.—
—Where is here?— asked Tommy.
—Here— said the man —is a few feet below No-Man’s Land—I’m sure the ex-captain will explain it all to you. It’s been a while since someone in your circumstances joined us. Most of us came in the early days of the War, as soon as the Lines were drawn, or were found, half-mad or wounded between the lines, and had to be brought back to health and sanity. You appear to us, wounded all the same, but already speaking the language. You’ll fit right in.—
—Are you British? French? German?— asked Tommy.
The man laughed. —Here— he said —none of us are of any nationality any longer. Here, we are all Men.—
He left. Eventually, the doctor came in and changed the dressing on his shoulder and gave him a pill.
* * * *
The ex-captain came to see him. He was a small man, dressed in a faded uniform, with darker fabric at the collar in the shape of captain’s bars.
—Welcome to Ninieslando.— he said.
—It’s very clean.— said Tommy —I’m not used to that.—
—It’s the least we can do.— he said, sweeping his hand around, indicating All That Out There.
—You’ll learn your way around.— he continued.—You have the great advantage of already speaking our language, so you won’t have to be going to classes. We’ll have you on light duties till your wounds heal.—
—I’m very rusty.— Tommy said.—I’m out of practice. My brother was the scholar; he spoke it till the day he was killed on the Somme.—
—We could certainly have used him here.— said the ex-captain.
—Where we are— he continued, going into lecture-mode —is several feet below No-Man’s Land. We came here slowly, one by one, in the course of the War. The lost, the wounded, the abandoned, and, unfortunately, the slightly mad. We have dug our rooms and tunnels, tapped into the combatant’s field-phones and electrical lines, diverted their water to our own uses. Here we are building a society of Men, to take over the Earth after this War finally ends. Right now our goal is to survive the War—to do that we have to live off their food, water, lights, their clothing and equipment, captured at night on scavenging parties. We go into their trench lines and take what we need. We have better uses for it than killing other men.
—There are 5,600 of us in this sector. Along the whole four-hundred-mile Western Front, there are half a million of us, waiting our time to come out and start the New World of brotherhood. We are the first examples of it; former combatants living in harmony with a common language and common goals, undeterred by the War itself, a viable alternative to nationalism and bigotry. You can imagine the day when we walk out of here.—
Tommy held out his hand. The ex-captain shook it. —It’s good to finally meet a real idealist.— said Tommy.—So many aren’t.—
—You’ll see— said the ex-captain —there’s much work to be done while we wait, and it’s easy to lose sight of the larger goals while you’re scrounging for a can of beans. The War has provided for us, only to the wrong people. People still combatants, who still believe in the War.
—For make no mistake— he said —the Hun is not the enemy. The British are not the enemy. Neither your former officers nor the General Staff are the enemy. The War is the enemy. It runs itself on the fears of the combatants. It is a machine into which men are put and turned into memories.
—Every illness, self-inflicted wound or accident is referred to by both sides as “wastage”—perdajo—meaning that the death did not contribute in any way to a single enemy soldier’s death.
—A man being in the War, to War’s way of thinking, was wasted. The idea has taken over planning. The War is thinking for the General Staff. They have not had a single idea that was not the War’s in these three years.
—So we take advantage. A flare fired off in the night when no one expects it brings the same result as if we had a regimental battery of Krupp howitzers. The War provides the howitzers to us as well as to the combatants.
—I need not tell you this.— he said. —I’m going on like Wells’s wandering artilleryman in War of the Worlds. Everyone here has to quit thinking like a combatant and begin to think like a citizen of Ninieslando. What can we do to take War out of the driver’s seat? How do we plan for the better world while War is making that world cut its own throat? We are put here to bring some sense to it: to stay War’s hand. Once mankind knows that War is the enemy, he will be able to join us in that bright future. Zamenhof was right; Esperanto will lead the way!
—Good luck— he said, making ready to leave—new citizen of Ninieslando.—
* * * *
Their job today, some weeks after the ex-captain’s visit, was to go to a French supply point, load up, and bring rations back by secret ways to Ninieslando, where their cooks would turn it into something much more palatable than the French ever thought of making. They had on parts of French uniforms; nobody paid much attention this late in the day and the War, if the colors were right. Tommy had a French helmet tied by its chin strap to his belt in the manner of a jaunty French workingman.
They took their place in a long line of soldiers waiting. They moved up minute by minute till it was their turn to be loaded up.
“No turnips,” said the sergeant with them, who had been at Verdun.
“Ah, but of course,” said the supply sergeant. “As you request.” He made an impolite gesture.
They took their crates and sacks and followed the staggering line of burdened men returnin
g to the trenches before them. The connecting trench started as a path at ground level and slowly sank as the walls of the ditch rose up around them as they stepped onto the duckboards. Ahead of them the clump-clump-clump of many feet echoed. The same sounds rose behind them.
Somewhere in the diagonal trench between the second and Front Line, they simply disappeared with the food at a blind turn in the connecting trench.
They delivered the food to the brightly lit electric kitchens below the front line.
—Ah, good.— said a cook, looking into a sack.—Turnips!—
* * * *
He waited at a listening post with an ex-German lieutenant.
—Lots a chatter tonight.— he said to Tommy. —They won’t notice much when we talk with other sectors later.—
—Of course.— said Tommy.—The combatants are tapped into each other’s lines, trying to get information. They hear not only their enemies, but us.—
—And what do they do about it?— asked the ex-German.
—They try to figure out what language is being spoken. Our side was puzzled.—
—They usually think it some Balkan tongue.— said the ex-German. —Our side thought it could be Welsh or Basque. Did you ever hear it?—
—No, only officers listened.—
—You would have recognized it immediately. But War has taught the officers that enlisted men are lazy illiterate swine, only interested in avoiding work and getting drunk. What language knowledge could they have? Otherwise, they would be officers. Is it not true?—
—-Very true.— said Tommy.
* * * *
A week later, Tommy was in the brightly lit library, looking over the esoteric selection of reading matter filched from each side. Field manuals, cheap novels, anthologies of poetry, plays in a dozen languages. There were some books in Esperanto, most published before the turn of the century. Esperanto had had a great vogue then, before the nations determined it was all a dream and went back to their armaments races and their “places in the sun.” There were, of course, a few novels translated into Esperanto.
There was also the most complete set of topographical maps of the Front imaginable. He looked up this sector; saw the gland of Ninieslando’s tunnels and corridors, saw that even the British listening post had the designation “fake plaster horse.” He could follow the routes of Ninieslando from the Swiss border to the English Channel (except in those places where the Front Line trenches were only yards apart; there was hardly room for excavation there without calling the attention of both sides to your presence.) Here, Ninieslando was down to a single tunnel no wider than a communications trench up on the surface to allow exchanges between sectors.
Either side up above would give a thousand men in return for any map of the set.
That meant that the work of Ninieslando went on day and night, listening and mapping out the smallest changes in the topography. The map atop each pile in the drawer was the latest, dated most recently. You could go through the pile and watch the War backwards to—in some cases—late 1914, when the Germans had determined where the Front would be by pulling back to the higher ground, even if only a foot or two more in elevation. Ninieslando had been founded then, as the War became a stalemate.
In most cases, the lines had not changed since then, except to become more churned up, muddier, nastier. Occasionally, they would shift a few feet, or a hundred yards, due to some small advance by one side or the other. Meanwhile, Ninieslando became more complex and healthier as more and more men joined.
As the ex-captain had said: —The War made us the best engineers, machinists, and soldiers ever known. A shame to waste all that training. So we used it to build a better world, underground.—
Tommy looked around the bright shiny library. He could spend his life here, building a better world indeed.
* * * *
For three nights, each side had sent out raiding parties to the other’s Line. There had been fierce fighting as men all through the sector stomped or clubbed each other to death.
It had been a bonanza for Ninieslando’s scavenging teams. They had looted bodies and the wounded of everything usable: books, food, equipment, clothing. They had done their work efficiently and thoroughly, leaving naked bodies all through No-Man’s Land. The moans of the dying followed them as they made their way back down through the hidden entrances to Ninieslando.
Tommy, whose shoulder wound had healed nicely, lay in his clean bunk after dropping off his spoils from the scavenging at the sector depot. The pile of goods had grown higher than ever—more for Ninieslando. He had a copy of The Oxford Book of English Verse open on his chest. The language was becoming lost to him, he had not spoken it in so long. He was now thinking, and even dreaming, in Esperanto. As well it should be. National languages were a drag and a stumbling block to the human race. He read a few poems, then closed the book. For another day, he thought, when we look back with a sort of nostalgia on a time when national languages kept men separated. He imagined the pastoral poems of the future, written in Esperanto, with shepherds and nymphs recalling lines of English each to each, as if it were a lost tongue like Greek or Latin. He yearned for a world where such things could be.
* * * *
The field phones had been strangely silent for a day or so. But it was noticed that couriers went backwards and forwards from trench to observation post to headquarters. On both sides. Obviously, something was up. A courier was waylaid in the daylight, a dangerous undertaking, but there were no paper orders on him. The kidnapping team drew the line at torture, so reported that the orders must be verbal. Perhaps, by coincidence, both sides were planning assaults at the same time to break the stalemate. It would be a conflagration devoutly to be desired by Ninieslando.
Of course, the War had made it so both sides would lose the element of surprise when the batteries of both sides opened in barrages at the same time, or nearly so. Ninieslando waited—whatever happened, No-Man’s Land would be littered with the dead and dying, ripe for the picking.
—Too quiet.— said someone in the corridor.
—They’ve never gone this long off the telephones.— said another.
* * * *
Tommy walked the clean corridor. He marveled that only a few feet overhead was a world of ekskremento and malpurajo fought over by men for three years. Here was a shinier, cleaner world than anything man had achieved on the surface.
It was just about then that the first shells of the expected barrage began to fall above his head. Dust drifted down from the ceiling. Parts of the wall buckled and shook.
Tommy realized that he was under the middle of No-Man’s Land. Unless their aim was very bad indeed, the artillerymen of neither side should be making their shells land here. They should be aiming for the Front trench of the other side.
Ninieslando shook and reeled from the barrage. The lights went out as shells cut a line somewhere.
Tommy struck a match, found the electric torch in its niche at the corridor crossing. He turned it on and made his way to the library.
Then it got ominously quiet. The barrage ceased after a very short while. Who was firing a five-minute barrage in the wrong place? Had they all gone crazy up there?
He entered the library, shone his torch around. A few books had fallen from the shelves; mostly it was untouched.
He sat at a table. There was some noise in the corridor at the far end. A bloodied man ran in, his eyes wild, screaming. —Tri rugo bendos!—Three red bands!— Was he speaking metaphorically? Three Marxist gangs? Or like Sherlock Holmes, literally, as in “The Speckled Band”? What did he mean? Tommy went to grab him, but he was gone, out of the library, still yelling.
Tommy went down the hall and up a series of steps to an observation post with two viewing slits, one looking northeast, the other southwest.
What he saw looking northeast was astounding. In broad daylight, German soldiers, rifles up, bayonets fixed, were advancing. They probed the ground and debris as they came on. On the l
eft sleeve of every soldier were three red stripes on a white background.
Tommy turned to the other slit, wondering why there was no rifle or machine gun fire mowing down the line of Germans.
What he saw made his blood freeze. From the other direction, British and French soldiers also advanced in the open. On their right arms were pinned three red stripes on a white background. As he watched, several soldiers disappeared down an embankment. There was the sound of firing. A Ninieslandoja, with no stripes on his sleeve, staggered out and died in the dirt. The firing continued, getting fainter.
The sound of firing began again, far off down the corridor below.
