Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 37

by Kelly Link

  —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 ’til 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 returning 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 plan 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 b
lock 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, shined 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 left 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.

  Tommy took off for the infirmary.

  There were many kinds of paint down at the carpentry shop, but very little approached red, the last color you’d want on a battlefield.

  When Tommy ran into the infirmary, he found the ex-captain there before him. The man was tearing bandages into foot-long pieces.

  Tommy went to the medicine chest and forced his way into it. Bottles flew and broke.

  —They’ve finally done it!-—said the ex-captain.—They’ve gotten together just long enough to get rid of us. Our scavenging last week must have finally pushed them over into reason.

  Tommy took a foot-long section of bandages and quickly painted three red stripes on it with the dauber on a bottle of mercurochrome. He took one, gave it to the ex-captain, did one for himself.

  —First they’ll do for us—he said.—Next, they’ll be back to killing each other. This is going on up and down the whole Western Front. I never thought they could keep such a plan quiet for so long.

  The ex-captain headed him a British helmet and a New Model Army web-belt.—Got your rifle? Good, try to blend in. Speak English. Good luck.—He was gone out the door.

  Tommy took off the opposite way. He ran toward where he thought the Germans might be.

  The sound of firing grew louder. He realized he might now be a target for Ninieslanders, too. He stepped around a corridor junction and directly in front of a German soldier. The man raised his rifle barrel towards the ceiling.

  “Anglander?” the German asked

  —j— “Yes,” said Tommy. lifting his rifle also.

  “More just behind me,” Tommy added. “Very few of the undergrounders in our way.” The German looked at him in incomprehension. He looked farther back down the corridor Tommy had come from.

  There was the noise of more Germans coming up the other hall. They lifted their rifles, saw his red stripes, lowered them.

  Tommy moved with them as they advanced farther down the corridors, marveling at the construction. There was some excitement as a Ninieslander bolted from a room down the hallway and was killed in a volley from the Germans.

  “Good shooting,” said Tommy.

  Eventually, they heard the sound of English.

  “My people,” said Tommy. He waved to the Germans and walked toward the voices.

  A British captain with drawn pistol stood in front of a group of soldiers. The bodies of two Ninieslanders lay on the floor beside them.

  —And what rat have we forced from his hole?—asked the captain in Esperanto.

  Tommy kept his eyes blank.

  “Is that Hungarian you’re speaking, sir?” he asked, the words strange on his tongue.

  “Your unit?” asked the captain.

  “1st King’s Own Rifles,” said Tommy. “I was separated and with some Germans.”

  “Much action?”

  “A little, most of the corridors are empty. They’re off somewheres, sir.”

  “Fall in with my men ’til we can get you back to your company, when this is over. What kind of stripes you call those? Is that iodine?”

  “Mercurochrome, I believe,” said Tommy. “Supply ran out of the issue. Our stretcher-bearers used field expedients.” He had a hard time searching for the right words.

  Esperanto phrases kept leaping to mind. He would have to be careful, especially around this officer.

  They searched out a few more rooms and hallways, found nothing. From far away, whistles blew.

  “That’s recall,” said the captain. “Let’s go.”

  Other deeper whistles sounded from far away, where the Germans were. It must be over.

  They followed the officer ’til they came to boardings that led outside to No Man’s Land.

  The captain left for a hurried consultation with a group of field-grade officers. He returned in a few minutes.

  “More work to do,” he said. A detail brought cans of petrol and set them down nearby.

  “We’re to burn the first two corridors down. You, you, you,” he said, indicating Tommy last. “Take these cans, spread the petrol around. The sig
nal is three whistle blasts. Get out as soon as you light it off. Everyone got matches? Good.”

  They went back inside, the can heavy in Tommy’s hands. He went up to the corridor turning, began to empty petrol on the duckboard floor.

  He saved a little in the bottom of the can. He idly sloshed it around and around.

  Time enough to build the better world tomorrow. Many, like him, must have made it out, to rejoin their side or get clean away in this chaos.

  After this War is over, we’ll get together, find each other, start building that new humanity on the ashes of this old world.

  The three whistles came. Tommy struck a match, threw it onto the duckboard flooring, and watched the petrol catch with a whooshing sound.

  He threw the can after it, and walked out into the bright day of the new world waiting to be born.

  Afterword to Ninieslando

  This was, up until last year, the major work I did after the hospitalization.

  Once again, for George and Gardner’s Warriors, an anthology of warriors throughout all times and places.

  I’d done research for this before May 2008 (and forgot most of it by the time I wrote this).

  Fresh from the triumph of finishing ANYTHING for Songs of the Dying Earth, and finally back in Austin, I sat at Martha Grenon’s kitchen table in January of 2009 and wrote “Ninieslando” and sent it off to Gardner (“the muscle of the operation”). Once again, they’d been holding the anthology (not for me, this time, but for some mainstream high-tone hotshots).

  I’d first come across the central idea in Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory. (His book first appeared in 1975 and has been in print since. It’s the only book you’ll ever need to read about WWI, because it isn’t about the war, per se, but about all the cultural baggage the combatants brought to it.)

  The central idea of the story is in his chapter “Myth, Ritual and Romance”—that there was a lost group of men (from both sides) living in No Man’s Land off the equipment, food, and bodies of the dead and wounded—like super ghouls. Where the enemy was no longer the enemy, but the War.