Lydia

by Tim Sandlin

  Then I saw his leg was twisted up under him. That wasn’t the way a man should land after a short fall. I leaned down and turned Jacob on his side. He had a hole in his forehead. His eyes were already clouds.

  I jumped away as if from an electric shock. I’d seen killed men before—remember Henry and Hank Miller—but this was different. This was an eighteen-year-old boy with a family. I’d played cards with Jacob. I’d spoken briefly to his loved ones, who would soon be engulfed by a wave of grief. His fiancée didn’t know her beloved was dead. She was still going on with her life, not aware of the pain she would soon be subjected to.

  I looked down at the body of Jacob Wibberley and I made a vow: I swore no matter how awful conditions got in that war, I wasn’t going to die. I swore I would never put Agatha through the torment Jacob’s sweetheart was about to feel. My purpose from that moment forward would be to spare Agatha.

  ***

  Jacob Wibberley was the first death I witnessed on the front. After him came hundreds and probably thousands. I couldn’t of counted the number of boys died before my eyes. The worst consequence of war—to my mind, worse even than ruined families—is how cheap life becomes. This is particularly true in trench warfare. If what had happened to Jacob had happened two months later, I would have gone back to headquarters and reported his death and then proceeded on to breakfast with no more than a happy it wasn’t me.

  Death became casual. Death should never be casual, whether in a trench or in a nursing home or anywheres. There’s nothing casual about a person expiring, any more than there is about a person being born.

  Every so often an arm or a leg would show up, sticking out the side of a dirt pile or along the mud in the track. The men made jokes about it. Constant death inevitably brings out the wags. They’d say, “Give Tommy a hand,” or “Let Tommy take sentry duty. He’s got nothing else on.” Unidentified body parts were always named Tommy. A leg at one trench intersection was used as a turnstile for several days, until rats finally reduced it.

  I can’t read stories or watch movies these days, because the storytellers kill side characters with such abandon. Sometimes even major people pass on for no reason. They made us sit through a movie in the recreation hall last month—Rambo. Irene Dukakis enjoyed it, but I never. If I’d been allowed my way, whenever that Rambo killed, he would have had to write down the name of the person he killed and make a list of all those who loved him. If everyone—real or story—was required to do that there’d be a lot less casual killing in this world.

  ***

  The only thing kept me from falling into the abyss was once every week or so when the call came over—All out for mail.

  We’d rush out of our tents or the mess hall or wherever we were and line up for the precious lifeblood that flowed between us and our former selves. Agatha wrote every day. The letters piled up so sometimes I got ten at once. Bill was jealous no end. She sent him one letter a week, if that.

  He’d stand too close to me and my mail and sneer. “Dad will never turn our fortune over to you. You’d best forget noodling my sister. She doesn’t care for you one bit. She told me the truth.”

  I knew he was lying, but it shook me anyway. Some men received letters from their sweethearts saying they’d stopped waiting. Afterward, those men didn’t have much life expectancy. I used to hide Agatha’s letters and only read one a day, in the order in which she’d written them. When I was reading a letter from Agatha it felt as if she was right there next to me. I could see her lips moving as she wrote and her eyes roving back and forth across the page. Sometimes I concentrated on her fingers. She had slim, long fingers with perfect nails. Agatha was proud of her nails. I knew each one better than I knew my own.

  I cannot fathom how Shad got along without mail. He never received a letter the whole war. Not a one. He didn’t seem to mind, although I couldn’t tell what Shad minded and what he didn’t. He kept taking care of Bill’s needs—heating his coffee, cleaning his boots—even when the other boys teased. He didn’t tell why, and neither did I. Bill liked to believe Shad served him out of loyalty. I never could set him straight.

  ***

  Winter in the trenches had to be the worst home place on the planet, what with mud and cold and rats so hungry they wouldn’t always wait for a man to turn corpse before starting in to eat him. You’d think we looked forward to spring, but if so, you’d think wrong. Spring brought offensives. Bored generals who’d spent the winter in Paris or some such decided it was warm enough to sacrifice ten thousand humans to gain fifty yards of territory.

  Lorry teams of shells and batteries came slogging up the mud ruts. New divisions arrived. They swapped our useless tin helmets for steel, and in doing so, saved a number of lives. Ladders came pouring into the lines for climbing quickly out when the whistle blew. Engineers had us dig pits for our gas shells. It’s true. A year back, we’d thought gas was the coward’s way, and now we were setting them up ourselves.

  Our company dropped back a couple of miles, to catch up on sleep and fix broken equipment. That’s how we knew we were chosen as first across. They liked cannon fodder to have momentum going before we popped over the top.

  Then one night—I think it was a Friday—they formed us up and we advanced in half platoons, back through the communication trench. I remember looking about at the faces—Shad, Bill, some who had been with us in Calgary, many who hadn’t—and wondering what in blazes those boys were thinking. No one seemed nerve racked or bloodthirsty. Jaws weren’t set like before a football game. They joked a bit more than usual. Otherwise we could have been young men starting off to our daily work in Billings, Montana.

  As we reached the front, our artillery commenced to lob a wall of fireballs in the Boche first line. I thought I’d witnessed barrages before, but I’d never seen anything to compare with the flaming hell that rained down on their trench.

  Shad stood next to me on the line to watch.

  He said, “Nobody could survive that.”

  I made a joke. “They’ll be no greeting committee when we arrive.”

  “I don’t like the wind,” Shad said.

  “What wind?”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  And here’s where I learned all I needed to know about the British. They’d planned to lay down gas at dawn on a certain morning, and by God, they were going to lay down gas at dawn on that morning. They didn’t give a bloody damn that there wasn’t no breeze carrying from us to them. They fired the shells anyway.

  The canisters hit this side of the German trench, and the gas just sat there like a lime green fog.

  “I’m not passing through that,” Bill said.

  Our captain heard him and pulled out his handgun. “I have orders to shoot any soldier refuses to leave our trench.”

  “You wouldn’t shoot your own men,” I said.

  He licked his lower lip and cut his eyes up and down the assembled troops. He raised his voice for all to hear. “Those are the orders and they’ll execute me if I don’t obey, so don’t test me.”

  “Bill here was only joshing,” I said. “When the time comes, he will answer the call.”

  Bill himself didn’t look so certain.

  Down the line, a whistle blew, then another up line, and over we went.

  ***

  The artillery barrage stopped all of a sudden. We could see beyond the gas fires licking whatever was left over there. I tried to crouch and run, but over the winter no-man’s-land had been chewed to bits. Running through the mud was like dancing over melted tires.

  Our wire-cutter patrols had been out all night snipping trails for us. We passed a couple of their bodies, hung on wire like clothes on a clothesline. Nobody screamed their wrath the way they do in motion pictures. Other than machine-gun fire and artillery off a ways, it was practically quiet. Or maybe my ears were clogged by fear. I don’t know. I remember that morn
ing’s advance as quiet.

  They hadn’t let us carry gas masks, and ours were no good anyway, so we held our breath as best we could and ran through the fog and jumped into the German first line. A couple of boys got sick and crawled along, but most of us made it into the line. I couldn’t see anyone or thing alive. Not even a rat. Lots of bodies in mangled positions. Lots of abandoned equipment. Our artillery had wiped the enemy out.

  Bill wanted to collect souvenirs. I was too superstitious to steal from dead people, and Shad didn’t care. Shad found a dugout. We couldn’t tell if it held Boche or not, and we weren’t of a mind to waltz down and see, so we each popped a grenade down the hole and moved along. I don’t know if I killed anyone or I didn’t.

  The captain who’d threatened Bill earlier told us to push on to their second line.

  “The artillery hasn’t softened them yet,” I said.

  “It’ll strike before we get there. Don’t concern yourself.”

  And sure enough, the inferno started up again, a couple hundred yards on farther east.

  “Let’s move,” the captain said.

  “What about the whistle?” I asked.

  “Move.”

  So we jumped over the top. Again.

  Now, there were bodies everywhere and craters so deep a horse could break legs falling in one. Some craters contained live Germans who wanted to surrender, and some, live Germans who wanted to fight. Gunfire broke out up and down the line along with screams of passion and pain. In noise terms, this push was opposite of the earlier one. A machine gun opened up on us. I don’t know how many fell. When you’re running across open ground, you have no idea what’s happening five yards to either side or behind. You keep moving.

  The wall of fire we were running toward started moving toward us. Someone in artillery must have decided they were firing long and they should back it up. I didn’t notice at first, till I felt Shad’s hand pull me up short. I looked at him and he nodded toward the exploding bombs marching our direction. Slow and sure as a summer squall in Montana, the wall of flames came more quickly than a man could run.

  Shad signaled me and Bill to jump into a crater off to our right. The crater must have been the result of a good-sized bomb, because it was three feet deep and more or less circular. There were four Germans already in it. Two dead—one of them dead for days, by his looks, the other fresh—and two live. The live Germans tried to surrender, but Bill shot them.

  I said, “Did you have to do that?”

  Bill said, “You’re next.” His eyes glittered and snapped like a horse stuck on barbwire. I don’t think Bill knew who I was and he might have shot me if Shad hadn’t started throwing up a breastwork of corpses. Bill didn’t help, but his attention left me. He sat against the far ledge, staring at his hands, both front and back.

  The firewall boomed toward us, the smoke so black you couldn’t see five feet any direction. All you could do was hear raining bombs. Those seven-nines was called Jack Johnsons, after the Negro boxer, on account of how black a smoke they put out. A huge blast sounded off and a body came flying over, missing my head by the width of a nose and hitting Bill full-on. The body was burnt black and naked, so you couldn’t tell what army it had belonged in. It doesn’t matter.

  Bill lay there with the naked, burnt cadaver on him, and he started to whimper.

  “Are you hurt?” I shouted over the din.

  Bill didn’t answer. He just kept making frightened hound dog sounds.

  Shad changed his mind about building a wall of bodies and pulled them back into the crater. Me and Shad each took two dead Germans and pitched them over our bodies like a pup tent or a blanket, while Bill whimpered under his. They weren’t worth anything in a direct hit, but they could absorb spent shrapnel if it fell down on us. Which it did.

  Bill was weeping and Shad and I yelling nonsense syllables at each other and God. If anything, the bombardment picked up a notch. It was too loud and continuous to hear individual bombs, unless they landed close. I’m not ashamed to say I wet myself. Bill soiled himself even worse. Amongst all the noise and smoke I couldn’t help but feel rage that it was our own artillery pounding us. There’s a certain raw nobility in being killed by the enemy, but getting blown to smithereens by your own side is nothing but stupid.

  That’s the moment—through the smoke and fire and chaos—I saw Agatha. She stood on the lip of our crater, young and fresh as the day the boiler blew me onto her daddy’s porch. I could see her and see through her, like looking into running water. Her face was lit by a little smile, the smile she kept only for me, and she was pointing.

  She said, “Come out this side.”

  Shad yelled, “We can’t stay put.” He tried to move Bill, but Bill would have none of it. He’d stopped the weeping and turned to stone. Shad hit him in the face with his rifle, but Bill didn’t so much as flinch.

  Shad shouted, “Come on, you filthy bastard.”

  “I’m going,” I yelled. I threw off the dead Germans, grabbed my rifle, and jumped the direction Agatha pointed. I ran ten or fifteen steps toward the first line, when a bomb exploded at my back. The concussion blew me some yards in the air before I came down on my face. Amazingly enough, I still had my rifle.

  I figured then that Shad and Bill were dead, but I must be truthful in saying I didn’t much care. I expected the same for me. All I felt was disappointment that I wasn’t going to keep my vow to Agatha.

  I belly-crawled a ways, then made it to my feet and started walking. Just then, Shad passed me by. He had his rifle in his left hand and Bill thrown over this right shoulder. I took Bill for dead, but he wasn’t. He wasn’t even scratched.

  Our barrage line ended fairly soon, and we emerged from the fire not fifty yards from the German first line, now occupied by our boys. Possibly the most unlikely piece of luck we had that whole day was no one from our side shot us when we walked out of the smoke. Agatha stayed beside me all the way to the trench.

  Looking back now, I realize it wasn’t truly Agatha, not even in the spiritual sense. It was my mind saving me the only way it knew how, by going insane.

  ***

  That night, the Cameronians relieved us, and we dropped back behind the lines. Over the decades, there’s been vicious talk about the British throwing Canadians, Australians, Irish, and other non-British troops into first waves. I’m not certain if these complaints are true or whining, but I do know the Cameronians died in greater droves than the rest of us. Almost every push began with a Cameronian slaughter, so it was a surprise for them to relieve us instead of the other way round.

  When what little was left of our company gathered in a bombed-out village, I decided the time had come to tell Bill what I thought.

  “Shad’s debt is paid,” I said. “He no longer has to wipe your bottom.”

  Bill was heating coffee water over a campfire he’d made from scrap lumber and books. He had recovered his composure—by that I mean he’d reverted to the shallow braggart of his youth.

  “There wasn’t no terms of calling off the debt,” he said. “Shad knows the rules.”

  I looked over to Shad, who sat with his legs out and his back against the wall of a house. I think it was a house. The wall was all was left.

  “Don’t you consider that you’ve paid the debt?” I asked.

  Shad shrugged. He was too worn to talk. I was still operating at a heightened sense of alarm. It takes me longer to come down off a battle than it did others.

  “He saved your hide out there,” I said to Bill. “Can’t you show appreciation?”

  “One has nothing to do with the other,” Bill said.

  “You won’t think that next time you’ve froze up in a crater.”

  Bill’s laugh was semi-hysterical. “There’s never going to be a next time—not for me.”

  “How you plan to manage that?” I asked.

 
; Shad spoke with closed eyes. I think he was more beat down by the experience than we’d supposed. “We did not die this time. There will always be a next time, until we do.”

  “Not for me.” Bill stirred coffee into boiling water, cowboy-style. “A man would be crazy to go over the top into that firestorm. I’m no coward, but neither am I crazy.”

  Shad and I considered this statement. Of course you had to be suicidal to go over, but enlisted men had no choice. If we obeyed orders, the Boche killed us, and if we didn’t obey orders, our own army killed us. There was no middle ground.

  “How you planning to decline the next attack?” I asked.

  Shad opened his eyes to look at Bill in the firelight. I think he was genuinely curious to hear the answer. If a man could choose to no longer go into battle, we both were interested in how it was pulled off.

  “I don’t know the answer yet,” Bill said. “I only know I’m done with charging hell.”

  Just then, a little bowlegged lieutenant from Toronto showed up and gave me a letter. “This came right before the push. I had no time to find you. Figured now would be soon enough if you survived.”

  I recognized the handwriting. “It’s from my Agatha.”

  “She ain’t your Agatha,” Bill said. “She’s my sister.”

  I tore open the letter and read by firelight the words which I will now recite from memory:

  Oleander—You must be expecting this letter, so here it is. You know how disappointed I am that you would rather run off to France than be with me. You have broken my heart by your callousness. I can no longer plan my future around us. I must pick up the pieces of my life.

  Thusly, I have married Frank Lesley. He is in training to assume the presidency of Daddy’s bank. You were my first choice but you abandoned me and I cannot forgive you that. I trust you will have the good manners never to return to Billings. Agatha Ann Lesley.

  There was a P.S.

  P.S. Bill informed me of your dalliance with the red woman of ill repute. You can go back to her when you tire of your European vacation.

  I screamed like an animal. “You told her about Swamp Fox.”