by Ryan Byrnes
“Forget the fire,” another man said. “The Huns will see. I’d light a cigarette, but I don’t have any left.”
“Here, have one of mine.”
“I’ll trade you for it. What do you want?”
“Nothing. I’m passing ’em around.”
“That's awful decent of you.”
The soldier took the cigarette, lit it, and passed it to the right. Each man inhaled one puff of warmth to bring feeling back to their lips and then passed it to the right again. “I wish I could see my wife right now,” one said.
“Hmm.”
“You have a sweetheart, Rodney?”
“In my mind. Not theirs.”
A few chuckles. “Who? Your mum? Come on, now.”
“I don't talk about women in that way,” was all he said.
They quieted down as a clean uniform walked by. This man wore gloves and a loop around his shoulder: Captain Blanding. He glared down at them and Rodney, along with a few others, leapt up and snapped a rigid salute. One man, huddled further down the trench—a bearded man with mud smeared on his face and with bags under the bags under his eyes—stayed curled up on ground, speaking to no one. Looking at no one.
Captain Blanding passed Rodney’s group and stood over the silent man. The man didn’t look up. The officer pulled off his gloves. No movement. “Soldier!”
No movement. “Soldier! Do you hear me?”
“Maybe he’s dead,” someone whispered.
“Blasted infantrymen!” the captain huffed. “I’d write you up if I weren’t in such a hurry.” He turned back to address Rodney’s group and others down the line. “We’re expecting a dozen new machine guns tomorrow along with reinforcements. You two,” he pointed at two minding their own business, “come with me to stake out nests for the machine guns. The shelling will begin again at dawn, so the rest of you better be ready.”
The two designated soldiers sighed and left the warmth of the circle after Captain Blanding. They would spend the next eight hours of darkness shoveling, hammering in posts, laying wire, and heaving forty-pound sandbags into place. Then, when dawn came, they would haul in the new guns and crates of ammunition and spend the rest of the following day picking off Germans who had their backs turned. Those who remained in the circle continued passing the cigarette until it burned out.
“These officers can burn in hell.”
“Don’t talk that way.”
“Why, what are they going to do? Punish me? It’s just, so—God.”
“Look! The silent one is alive after all,” someone said.
Rodney turned and saw the bearded man with mud on his face. He’d uncurled himself and was now on his knees with his hands in the mud.
“Hey you,” Rodney called. “Why didn’t you salute earlier? Better watch the captain. He has a temper.”
No response.
“Hello? What’s your name?”
No response.
Rodney pulled himself to his feet and sloshed through the mud until he squatted down beside the man. “Hey, you okay?”
No response.
Rodney reached out and pulled the man’s dangling dog tags out so he could read them. He dropped the dogtags with a gasp.
Mother and Father,
I have been fighting for three straight weeks now without much rest. We managed to cross the Marne River and chase the Germans back, and now the Aisne River. I have trudged through water and mud for many days. I am well. I hope you are well. William Moore and Stephen Wilkins got caught in the open. Their parents will need to be comforted back at home.
Even though I had experience in India, I was terrified at first by the fighting, but now it does not bother me. If they call for shelling, my body jumps for cover of its own accord. I have become part animal. The new instincts I have gained have helped me more than any amount of training. Combat passes quickly, like a bad dream. Even if the combat lasts for several days or even weeks, without sleep, I still feel like only a day has passed, and my stomach becomes hungry for supper. I feel like I am ice skating over the top of life and watching it from the above. By the time I get a chance for rest in the billets, my feelings come back to me and I realize how barren and unfeeling and indifferent I have become. I am resigned in the face of fate. I will do what I can, but when my time comes, there will be nothing anyone can do. You must be ready for this.
The younger recruits do not understand this. They are terrified and are wide-eyed. Some of them hide in the bunker with locked joints, and nobody can persuade them to move. Others, led by fear, charge wildly and are gunned down by the hundreds. I have tried to help some of them, and it is rather pitiful. It is not uncommon for them to lose control of their bowels during combat. Several of them have lost their legs and killed themselves with grenades.
Countless other things have happened as well.
I am well and strong. Do not worry.
Rod
P.S. Do you know how to get rid of lice? I now understand where the word “lousy” comes from.
P.P.S. The officers say another battle will begin any day now. By the time you receive this letter, I will probably be deep in combat.
~ RODNEY STOKER ~
For a moment, I fancied myself back in Leamington on that Easter day when I was a boy and saw Luther standing over me in that old lady’s garden, his chubby, expressionless face shadowed by the sun. I shivered and touched the back of my head, where I felt that scar through my hair. All the dreams came back, all the blokes I’d fought until I felt that high point where I wasn’t afraid anymore. Yes, I was afraid … of Luther. Or should I say, I wasn’t afraid, but my body was. It was a tricky thing, really. I didn’t know why, but when I was a boy and saw him walking down the street, I’d flinch. Now, here I was, a grown man, a soldier, and I couldn’t escape him.
Luther stuck out his hand, and I drew back. He was offering me a little ball of mud.
“Thanks, mate.”
It was soft and malleable, and for some reason, I felt the need to maintain that shape and not squish it by accident.
“I don’t suppose you remember me?” He didn’t answer; he didn’t even look up at me. “Luther?”
“Why do you know my name?”
“I used to be your neighbor.”
“No you didn’t.”
“Yeah, my name’s Rodney Stoker. I used to play with Jim all the time.”
“I don’t remember you.”
“You gave me a nasty scar when you were nine, remember?”
“Mum told me not to talk about that.”
“But you know what I’m talking about, though?”
“Everyone here stinks,” he said, and he dropped another ball of mud in my palm as if we had previously agreed on it.
I glanced back at the others, who were now trying to find someplace comfortable to sleep. They didn’t care enough about the man in the mud to inquire further. Luther would probably die during tomorrow’s assault, anyway. They had their own lives to worry about.
“So, how much have you seen?” I asked.
No response.
“Luther?”
“Hmm.”
“How much have you seen?”
“You’re not talking clearly.”
“What?” I said.
“What do you mean what have I seen?”
“The fighting. Done much of it?”
“Just got here yesterday.”
Yesterday? But we’d been fighting here since September. He must’ve come as a reinforcement or something after we crossed the river. I wondered how long he'd been at the front.
“Who are we fighting?” he asked.
“What?”
“Who are we fighting?”
“Germany, who else? Why, how could you not … what kind of question—”
“I have to pee. Where’s the loo?”
What the hell? I mouthed to Gordon, who was grinning at me from across the circle.
“We have a latrine a ways back, but it’s putrid. Just go f
ind an empty section of trench to pee in, where you won’t bother anyone.”
Luther nodded and stood up. He was a big man now, taller than the trench.
“Oye!” I dove for Luther’s legs. We splashed in the bilge, and the crack of sniper fire sent a shower of splinters flying above our heads. One of the officers called out from afar. “Mind your heads over there!”
“Good God,” I shook my head at Luther.
He had curled into a ball, his hands clasped over his ears, shaking all over.
“Luther?”
I touched his shoulder, but he didn’t react. He just kept rocking. My pals gathered around and looked down at him. They had no room for jokes; they all knew he didn’t stand a chance out here. “It’s just damn sick they’ll let someone like this into the army,” my pal Tom muttered. “Damn sick.” The others nodded but didn’t say anything. I thought that they were being a bit hard on the government.
After the sniper fire, we thought it was a good idea to move to a different part of the trench, so my pals and I migrated down the way and found a cave someone had dug in the mud, where we all gathered into and tried grabbing some sleep. I tried to get Luther to come with us, but he refused. I don’t know where he passed the rest the night.
Soon, the pale hours crept back, and the cycle started all over again. Day eleven of living in a trench where I could touch both walls whenever I stretched out my arms. I wondered if I would ever be able to walk in an open field without thinking some sniper was watching me. I finally knew what all those veterans who used to sit in the shade down by the river and reminisce about wars long past were talking about.
When the sun broke over the German artillery, the daily shelling began, and we retreated to the concrete pillbox that had once belonged to the Germans who’d built the trench we now occupied. It was the usual routine. The ground shook, dust fell, and the light bulb flickered out. When the war first started, it made me queasy that I could be blown out of my boots at any moment, but after three months, I’d accepted that there wasn’t anything I could do about it. It was a daily part of life.
We heard a knocking on the door.
Tom went to open it, and there was Captain Blanding, holding a pair of binoculars in his gloved hands.
“Good morning, neighbor,” Tom said. “Need to borrow some flour?”
“It’s been cancelled, Private Wright,” he said. “New orders. We’re needed down in Plugstreet. Prepare to leave. And you’re sentenced to two days in jail once we get there.”
Tom smiled.
“Don’t get too excited, Wright,” Blanding said. “There’s a big offensive planned for us next week. Plugstreet will be a battle, alright.”
Just like that, we put our hands in our pockets and marched back down the ridge, across the pontoon bridge sitting on the river, back to where we started in early October. But before we said goodbye to our trench, I looked for Luther, but couldn’t find him. There was nothing I could do about that, so I trudged toward Plugstreet with the rest of the unit.
For once, it wasn’t raining. Given, the mud was still a few inches deep, and our part of the trench had flooded around lunch time. The engineers finally decided to mark the “dam” as a lost cause. Yes, a dam. They’d scrounged a few meters of board from some of the abandoned barns, lashed them together with wire, and painted the seams with tar. They jammed the resulting wall in the River Avon, our name for the ditch next to the machine-gun post the boys called Stratford. It didn’t work. I don’t know how, but the water just seeped through, around, underneath, whatever which way. As if the dam was a sieve made of cheesecloth.
Eventually, the boards became so soft and saturated that Tom used them for bait in the elaborate mousetrap he’d been working on. That one actually did work—but I don’t think because of Tom’s genius. So many rats lived in the trenches, getting fat off of us when we weren’t looking, that you could close your eyes and shoot and you’d have got one. They’d swim around in the ankle-deep water with chunks of I-didn’t-know-what in tow—I hoped it was food, but I didn’t want to make any assumptions, so I just tried not to imagine. All of my pals were of the same opinion, and we’d take joy in engineering marvelous ways to hunt the rats. Once, Tom used his own hand as bait. He played dead and lay in the corner until dark, when the rats came out for their nibble. Then, we all jumped out and used the boards of our “dam” to pen them in. They had it coming, the bastards.
We passed the rest of the night in shifts; Tom manned the gun for the first shift while I got some shut-eye. I must’ve gotten a few hours in, surprisingly, because when Tom nudged my shoulder and I looked up, the sky was full of stars. Breathing out steam and cracking my knuckles, I stepped over the River Avon and into the gun nest. It was a little fortress of shot-up sandbags tucked between two mounds of dirt. It smelled like tobacco and rotten food, only it wasn’t food that was rotting. Two other fellows—Appleby and Wallace—met up with me, and we set up the nest for our shift without speaking. Appleby pulled out his binoculars from the box, and Wallace grabbed the ammo. Together, we all leaned on our bellies in the mud and squinted through the dark at the opposing trench.
“See anything, Appleby?” I asked.
I looked at him, and his mustache wiggled up and down.
“Louder, I can’t hear you.”
His mustache wiggled again; all I could hear was a ringing in my ears. Aaaah, damn explosions—I’ll be deaf before this war is over. I pointed at my ear, and he handed me the binoculars, and said so I could hear him. “Just a couple Germans walking around.”
The grey light of the moon and some lit cigarettes were all I had to see by, but I was able to make out the German line. I saw the pointed tips of their helmets hobbling past the sandbags, up and down, up and down.
Some shrill noise sounded, and we all ducked for cover, breathing fast. The noise sounded again.
Wallace chuckled.
“Just a bird. Shells don’t scare us, but birds do.”
I was willing to argue that point, but I said nothing and returned to the binoculars.
Germans marched in the two circles of the magnifying lenses. I turned my head and shivered to see another machine-gun post, almost identical to ours. A gunner sat in it—I couldn’t make out his face, just his figure—staring right back at us through his binoculars. There were two others with him. Like looking in a mirror. I told the others.
“Should we shoot at them?” Wallace whispered.
Appleby and I shook our heads. “Nah,” Appleby yawned, “I don’t really feel like it. They’ll just shoot back, and we’d be dead before dawn.”
“But he’s looking right at us,” Wallace whispered. “He could kill us at any moment.”
“He won’t, trust me. He’s just as tired of this as we are.”
“What about your duty to Britain?”
Then, Appleby told Wallace to piss off. Only, he didn’t say piss. I frowned, thinking that was a rather unpatriotic thing to say. But I didn’t argue; we were all tired to the point where we said whatever we felt.
Towards the end of the night, a little feather of blue seeped into the sky, just above the German guns. Behind us, privates slowly started filing out of their dugouts, awakened by officers. They filed into the trenches, where they all pulled out their guns and screwed on the bayonets. We were anticipating a German offensive this morning, the one that had been postponed a few weeks prior. It was easier to defend than to attack, and I think most people had figured that out by now. From the nest, I had a nice view of the whole spectacle. I saw the boys writing letters, shaking, sniffling, and praying as they usually did before going over the edge. I caught sight of Tom, who pulled a flask out of his coat—I didn’t know how he snuck it in there—and took a swig, which made me frown. I saw Luther, too. He sat alone, trying to lay low I supposed.
Crack! Somewhere out there, a German had pulled the trigger on his Mauser, and the sound echoed over the cratered, frosted turnip farm between us.
“Man down
! Medic!” someone called.
They rushed a man off on a stretcher, down to auxiliary trenches, where an ambulance would be waiting to take him to the hospital in Hazebrouck.
“Was that Tom?” Appleby clutched his helmet.
We all squinted but couldn’t tell because the man was too far away by then.
“I saw him drinking earlier,” I said after he disappeared. “Suppose he was preparing himself?”
“Wouldn’t surprise me,” Wallace muttered, “Tom’s a coward.”
“One more word, Wallace, I swear.” Appleby was red in the face.
Him and Tom had been best pals when they were boys in Warwick. I patted Appleby on the back. “This isn’t the time to think about that, Appleby,” I said, “or else we’ll all end up like Tom.”
“’Course.” He gave me a fake smile, and we returned our focus to the German line, hands on the gun.
I half expected one of our boys to fire back after that shot, which would’ve escalated into a little skirmish, a not-quite battle leaving ten or twelve of us dead. But nobody fired back this time.
“Stoker, Wallace, Appleby!”
We all jumped to see Blanding behind us.
“You just let one of our boys get shot. Retaliate, or the Huns will walk all over us.”
Appleby opened his mouth to say something but then closed it.
“Yes, sir,” I said, training my eyes on the machine gun with the officer breathing down my neck.
I looked down the sight to see the little pointed helmets moving up and down with the Germans’ breathing. I coughed awkwardly, grabbed the two handles and nudged the gun, so gently that Captain Blanding wouldn’t notice. Aiming at the dirt just in front of the trench, I pulled the trigger. The gun burst to life, the muzzle flashing white like a firecracker as the ammunition fed into it, the little cartridges clinking to the ground while the smoke curled off in ribbons. The gun rattled with every shot, several times a second, and I felt the vibration in my bones. We did a bang-up job shooting that dirt, and by the time the gun overheated, we’d left probably a hundred, two hundred bullets lying in the field. We’d probably riddled a couple unlucky turnips, but that was it. Blanding had already moved on. Across No Man’s Land, I heard the Germans call out to each other in surprise, while down in our own trench, the infantrymen prepared for the defensive, each of them set up at their posts. Suddenly, the ground in front of us lit up, and Wallace swore. All three of us ducked low behind the sandbags, but soon we realized that the Germans were only shooting at the dirt, just as we had.