by Amanda Dykes
“Come on. What can Jones offer that I can’t? He’s a reporter. If a reporter can go, a chaplain can go. I’ll find the holy wood. Surely you want the pious sort of lumber.”
Steerforth was near fuming.
“Take me,” he said, drawing himself up with a grin that he appeared to believe sparkled with the light of the noonday sun, rather than rotted with trench breath. I stifled a gag. “If Jones gets to go, I get to go. You’ll want George Piccadilly on this troop, mark that.”
Sarge laughed. “Get to? I’ve got half a mind to send you just for that. They’re going into the Argonne.” He named the forest we’d heard tales of. Thick tangles of lumber both living and dead. Terrain that rose as fast as it dropped, ground that would shift from solid to quicksand without warning, sucking men up to their knees in muck. And dark. Not a light to see by, or to trace any Jerries, come night. The Germans were in there, we knew. Somewhere.
“Right,” George said. “And I have extensive forestry experience. Send me in, Sergeant Steerforth.”
Steerforth shook his head, looking at George dubiously. “You, Chaplain?”
George was looking at the sky overhead, hand to his domed helmet as he surveyed something up there.
“Chaplain?”
“Eh?” George looked around, then seemed to register that he was the chaplain being spoken to. “Me?”
“I don’t see any other chaplains about. Might do you some good, get your head out of the clouds.”
George laughed. “You know what they say, mate—”
The sergeant shot him a look, reminding him there was such a thing as rank.
“Pardon me,” George said. “You know what they say, Sergeant.”
“No,” Steerforth said dryly. “Can’t say that I do.”
“Too heavenly minded to be of any earthly good,” George said, tapping his helmet with a finger. “It’s a high calling, but I am here to serve.” He looked back up at the sky, his attention wandering again.
“True,” the Sergeant said. “And you versus the Argonne . . . that’s a battle I’d like to see. Alright. You’ll go. Fetch Jones.”
George disappeared around the corner, stopping to read a plank that had been stenciled with a name. It was one of the things that had struck me as odd when first we came to the trenches. That they had names, just like the streets in a city. Some named for places, to remind the boys of home—Manhattan Lane. Others dubbed with foreboding names, meant as both a warning and a joke, the way men often treated death down here. Death Valley. Suicide Corner. George lifted a hand to slap the sign as he passed it, this one reading Piccadilly Circus. He paused to give a jubilant look and point a thumb at his chest.
Yes, George, I thought. Your name. And a circus, to boot. Very fitting.
“That one’s a little mad, isn’t he?” Sergeant Steerforth watched after George Piccadilly. “Well, madness looks different on every man,” he said, shaking his head. “We’ll all go mad out here, I think. It is not a question of whether, but when. But we carry on best we can.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, trying to reconcile the weight of his words with the casual tone in which he said them.
And then I heard it. The approaching whistle of a shell.
My mind marched orders to my body, shoving back the revolt of bile that came with every explosion now. “Incoming,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“Incoming!” I screamed. My voice had taken on heights I never knew it could, before coming here. Sarge and the men nearby threw themselves on the ground none too soon—and there I stood like a stupid pole. My hand trembling as bits of mud and rock showered down upon us, fireworks of mud and clay.
My vision darted in every direction. Everyone was fine. Everyone was fine. Everyone . . . a man lay with his face turned away, still as a board. I rushed to him, rolled him over. He rubbed his eyes and spat angry words at me. I’d woken him up from the few winks of sleep he would be able to manage before his next two hours on.
“Petticrew.” Sargent Steerforth was at my back, turning me to face him.
“Sorry, Sergeant. I saw him laying there and thought—”
Sarge drew out a patch of gauze. “Your face, Petticrew.” He gestured, and shoved the gauze into my hand.
I lifted it, hating that tremor in my hand and how I could not hide it in this moment. The injuries from Saint-Mihiel had been healing. The medic had relocated my fingers and set them to reinforce. When the splint had come off, this trembling remained—and it went deeper than the bones. Its source further in, like some hidden part of me even I could not unlock to stop, when the shelling came.
Pressing the gauze beneath my eye where Sarge gestured, I drew away and saw it soaked in blood.
“Go on,” Sarge said, his face serious as he studied me. I could well imagine his thoughts. Fool wakes up a soldier, doesn’t even know he’s the one hurt.
But he spoke different words. “You, Jones, and the Brit.” He wasn’t the only one who’d taken to forgoing George Piccadilly’s name. “Get to the forest. It’ll do you good. Take the night. And take care. The Boche get over there sometimes and try and take us from behind our own lines. Those woods are like the promised land to them.” I could picture it, silhouetted German soldiers crouched behind the trees we were to bring back. I gulped.
“But, uh . . .” he hesitated. “It’s quieter there,” he said, looking at my hand. “Might be good.”
He gave the rest of our instructions and we were off. We snaked our way through the maze of trenches, soggy footprints sliding to a stop in the muck.
It was strange work, the felling of trees only to bury them again in the ground from whence they came. I imagined their roots reaching out for them, searching, finding them in their new home where they held back soil and sludge and allowed men to live.
To reach them, we passed men digging holes. I tried to tell myself they were trenches, but I knew the truth. We all did. They were graves. I looked away from the empty graves, and then I hated myself for it, and looked back. This—the seeing of the sacrifice—was the very least they deserve, the souls who’d left the bodies soon to be placed within. We all knew, though none of us spoke it, that it could be us next.
The tree line rose above us like a fortress—but it was impossible to say which side it kept safe. We stood, the three of us side by side, looking up at the black silhouettes of the trees against the dark night.
“Jolly lot, aren’t they?” George finally said.
“Jolly or not, guess we’d better get in there,” Jones said dryly. He stopped to scribble something on a notepad, then put it back in his jacket pocket. He was a journalist, I knew, but I wondered what tale there could be here.
We entered. The air cooled, wetter and heavier than on the outside. Blindly we strained to see and feel for trees large enough to give strength but small enough to cut through quickly. It was easy at first, until the supply grew thin and we ventured farther in.
Hank Jones and George Piccadilly set to sawing a thick one down, each of them taking an end of a saw. The metal began to protest as it wobbled and bent.
“You ever even used a saw before?” Jones asked.
“Use one?” George said. “I was raised by one.”
Jones stopped sawing. Even in the dark, I could hear the look he gave George. “What does that mean?”
“Nanny Matilda,” George said. “She saw everything!”
Jones’s silence stretched, and I could picture him giving a deadpan stare.
George thwapped him in the chest with the back of his hand. “Come on, mate, only trying to lighten things up.”
Jones folded his arms over his chest and stepped back, nodding at the saw embedded in the thick trunk. “Be my guest,” he said.
They were well matched, George’s nonsense with Jones’s dry-humored ways. He’d grown up on a farm, Jones had, if I remembered right. He knew his way around a toolbox. Their bickering went on and I didn’t know what was louder—their back-and-forth, th
e saw’s grating, or my hissed attempts to shush them. It was a hopeless prospect, attempting to sow peace between a bull and a pillar. I took myself away to find another tree, each footfall carrying me farther from the splintering of air, deeper into darkness.
At some point—and I cannot pinpoint precisely when—I entered another world. There was no mark of it—no creaking of hinges, no fall into a rabbit hole, no flight unto a second star to the right. More of a gradual mist of quiet, where the pleasant smell of decomposing leaves and pine washed away the smell of decomposing flesh. Where the air rose clear and high, and did not hang in a veil of sulphur.
Even the trees seemed to take on a different sort of life here, one of them growing up and over, into the form of an arch. Another, farther on, dipped to the right at middle height, giving the impression that it had grown into the form of a bench for passersby, or a swing, suspended in wood, before continuing its upward climb. And on, near a steep incline, grew a great thick beast of a tree, towerlike. Its trunk hollowed out into a gaping entrance that made it appear it was a deep yawn. I had half a mind to crawl inside and see if it might hold the secret to sleep—the rest-filled sort of sleep, not the nightmarish trap that snapped at me whenever I let myself drift off in the trenches.
Here, in this world I’d entered . . . was life. And signs of life, too. Snapped off at intervals were boughs of pine, their freshly exposed tree flesh bright against the dark. Someone—or something—had done this. At nearly the same height, never more than a branch from any given tree, until I traced its path to a smallish clearing.
I lingered long there. Near a clustered stand whose thin trunks held round knots that made them look like members of a choir, mid-song, I found a lone tree a stone’s throw away and timed my ax-falls to coincide with the distant explosion of shells. I could not believe any enemies traversed this ground—it was so peaceful here. But then again, hadn’t all of Belgium, the idyllic land of creaking windmills and fields bursting into flower, thought the same until Germany ravaged them?
A footfall sounded. Not close, but close enough.
I froze. Senses alert. But nothing came. “George,” I whispered. “Jones?”
Only silence. I resumed my work, wincing a prayer that the tree, when it finally fell, would not bring a company of Germans upon me.
I repeated the work, felling three more trees, getting lost in time until I realized my night-seeing eyes could no longer see anything, not even the hand in front of me. Something had passed over the moon above, blocking out light. Closing me in.
And that’s when it came.
Slow, at first. A voice, distant. Soft and breathy in a low, constant tone that tiptoed up, and up, and down, and down. A melody—burrowing through the underbrush in minor notes, emerging from the bracken to lift its fair head into the air with major notes.
It was—it was a woman. The effect of the forest was such that I could not place the direction of the voice’s source, with branches snatching pieces of the song and trunks echoing them back. But oh, did I strain to find it. Turning this way and that. Eyes upward to that dark sky. Hearing the rustling of leaves above, twigs clattering to carry that tune to the heights.
A lullaby.
My very being stood at attention with every lift and drop of that voice. The words were soft, but when I could catch them, they came in French. Whatever their meaning, their theme was clear: Peace.
It stopped, or rather faded as it journeyed away from me. I remained there, unmoving, for too long. Willing the sound back. But it took itself away and left me only with a hollow feeling at my back that I had entered some haunted land.
“Nihtgale. Old English. It means ‘night songstress,’” Celia had once told me from a book she was reading. “It sings in the dark, when all the other birds have gone to sleep.”
Was that what I’d heard?
I shook my head. This was . . . something more. Human, light as air, somber but sweet. She didn’t sing when all the others had gone to sleep; she sang when all the others had gone to war.
I had imagined it, surely. There were no birds here. They were long flown, driven by the things that occupy a war-torn sky. There were no women here. Not for miles and miles and miles.
“We will all go mad. It is not a question of whether, but when.” And suddenly, I saw something more in Sargent Steerforth’s face as he told me to get lumber. It was a mission of mercy, I understood now. To get me away from the trenches, even if only for a night. He recognized it in me, madness encroaching, and sent me away to find my grounding.
But if madness sounded like what I’d just heard . . . I wasn’t sure I wanted to find my grounding. It was a deal kinder, that sound, than the incessant yelling, shelling, shredding of my eardrums back in the trenches.
But that was reality. And what I’d just heard—it had to be imagined. I would not let myself slip into a dreamland, only to escape the things my compatriots were now facing.
Lashing the felled trees together and harnessing them to myself like an ox with his cart, I dragged them out of the depths of that place and back to where I’d left George and Henry, expecting to step right back into their war of insults.
But they sat side by side on a log, silent.
“You fellas okay?”
They just looked at me. Looked askance at each other, then each of them fixated on something in the opposite directions. They looked like I felt.
“Did you . . .” I began.
If I finished that question—hear a siren singing in the middle of the woods—they’d know what I’d heard. They’d have to report me, surely. And aside from hearing things, I was certain I could still perform my duty.
“What?” George said, standing. Looking at me accusingly. “Did we what? Do our work? Jolly if we didn’t. Look at that. What do you call that?” He pointed at a pile of saplings, as if revealing lost treasure.
I nodded. The sound still haunting me, still at my back. Hank Jones narrowed his eyes, staring at me. “You heard it, too.”
I gulped. Stiffened. “I’ve heard a lot of things.”
George shot to his feet, pointing at me with far too much joy on his face. “Ha! See?” He whacked Jones in the chest with the back of his hand. “Told you we hadn’t lost our marbles. You heard her. You heard her.”
“Her . . .” It was the first time any of us had spoken of the voice in human terms.
George shook his head, mouth open, as if I were stupid. “The Angel of Argonne.”
I stared at them, then back at the woods. Feeling I’d lost something, in this knowledge that they had heard the voice, too. I turned and started the march back to the trenches. “Let’s go,” I said.
George ran to catch up, his rifle slinging against his side, while Jones dragged the saplings lashed together behind him. “Come on,” he said, his voice jostling the words. “Admit it. You heard her, and you’re all in a knot that it’s true.”
I clamped my mouth shut over any response, hoping against hope that George, geyser-like as Old Faithful, might see fit to cease talking.
Back behind our lines, we passed the graves once more. Filled in, now, and quiet. Even the two bickerers fell into a reverent silence. And just as we were about to pass them, I saw something that made me stop in my tracks. I squinted, sure the pale light of dawn was fooling me. But there, on each of the graves, was laid a wreath. Boughs of pine so fresh I smelled them, threading through the cloud of sulphur, dust, and stench. The same spiced smell that had lured me into the woods, into the place where branches had been snapped off of trees for some unknown purpose.
The hands that had taken them, it seemed, had known just what they were for.
Back in the trenches, it was hard to believe any of it had happened. The three of us ate an early breakfast of canned corned beef, cooked over a fire so small it would not give off enough smoke to tell the Germans where to aim.
Hank Jones reached into his pocket and pulled out what looked to be a newspaper clipping. Giving it a disgusted glan
ce, he crumpled it up and added it to the dying fire.
“What?” George said, around mouthfuls of beef. “Looks like your story!”
“Yeah, you’d think,” Hank said. “One or two of the words are mine, I guess.” He looked at it burning and seemed satisfied. George shrugged, jabbing his fork into Hank’s can, who jerked it away promptly.
George wolfed the rest of his fare down and spoke around his last mouthful. “I’ll tell you who it was. It was the Angel. Some fellows up the line spoke of her, said that she came some nights to sing. That many have heard her, but none have seen her.”
“Sounds like trench tales to me,” I said. The men were known to pass hours by making up all manner of fables. Often they’d involve some sort of woman. Thousands of weary men in these trenches, pining for mothers and sweethearts and wives.
Hank Jones pulled a pencil out from behind his ear and a notebook from his pocket, scratching words down. “What else did they say about her?”
George contorted his face. The act of mental exercise appeared to be an excruciating one for him. “They said . . . she walks the front with bare feet, leaving tokens for fallen soldiers and song for those who live. She is the mother to a thousand lost boys, these men who would give anything for a home-cooked meal in the safety of their own mothers’ kitchens.”
“Like Wendy,” I said.
“Right-ho!” George raised a finger in agreement. We’d all grown up on Peter Pan, all envisioned ourselves adventurers to take on a mighty foe when we’d brought the brand-new book home from shiny bookstore windows or library counters. We’d just never figured that adventure would look like this.
I shook my head. “It’s made-up,” I said. Partly not believing it myself, but mostly not wanting to acknowledge that others had heard a song that had felt so distinctly personal to me. It was selfish, but I could be a selfish guy. “Besides. If no one has seen her, how do they know she comes barefoot?”
George gawked at me. Jones scribbled some more. “Have you seen this place? Mud!”
“Footprints?” I said. “And why has no one followed the footprints, then?”
