Michel’s head slowly turned. Henry bulged his eyes and tilted his head ever so slightly. That seemed to do it. Michel blinked a few times and swallowed. His head turned forward and he took a chest of air. His shoulders lifted and his arm executed a series of perfect angles in salute.
Michel spun on his heel and marched from the tent. It was the last time he would be marching anywhere.
3
27 APRIL 1917, BELGIUM
Axe crouched next to the dog and draped a hand over the animal’s head. “Good girl, Monster, good girl,” she said.
Monster nuzzled her face upwards to force the hand lower, and Axe responded by scratching behind the dog’s ears. The animal dropped to her haunches, and the two of them stared at the unmoving figure.
“Goddamn. Goddamn.”
It was a man, that much she could tell, but anything beyond that was guesswork. He was covered head to toe in a thick layer of lumpy black mud. The only color that showed through was red, pooled next to the man’s head.
“Is he dead?” Axe said to herself. She picked up a twig and prodded the body. It did not move. The face was turned away from her, half buried. She stood and examined the marks that led from the filthy canal—gouges in the deep mud where hands had fought to find purchase, body dragging behind. He had been alive at some stage.
She circled around, hoping to see the man’s face, but there was no face to speak of, just a black mess with a little hole where the mouth hung open. Axe watched the man’s back; if he was alive and breathing, the back should rise and fall in step with the lungs. There was no movement as far as she could tell. She moved closer, knelt, put her ear next to the mouth and waited. There was a very fine breeze that morning, and the birds in the little wood were calling. Axe was about to give up when she felt it. A faint breath that carried a hint of warmth.
“Huh! He’s alive!” she said, and looked to her dog as she might have looked to a fellow human, but the animal was not there.
“Monster? Monster?”
The dog’s barking started again, coming from further down the canal. Axe stood and looked, for Monster was not the sort of dog to bark without reason. She glanced at the body—no, the man, the man who was somehow barely alive—then back along the canal.
She sprinted off toward Monster’s barking, stomping through mud, trying to find patches of grass that had not been forced by hard and heavy boots beneath the soil, where it began to rot and stink. About one hundred yards along the canal she saw Monster, and saw why it was she barked.
Monster dropped to her haunches. She fell silent and looked to her master, but Axe only had eyes for the body with a knife sunk deep into its chest.
He was like the first man, covered in mud, except there was no hiding the death throes on this man’s face. His eyes were agape and his expression was horribly contorted from the pain and shock of being sent violently from the world so much sooner than a man had reason to expect. His mouth hung open, a shallow well of red blood.
Axe noticed his teeth, how they were smashed to pieces, some snapped across the middle and others having vanished down his throat, drowned by blood. And his hands—his fingers, bent and crooked. Snapped. He had fought hard and been beaten harder.
A little patch of the tunic collar showed through where Axe could see the red trim of a uniform. She knew then that the dead man was a soldier. A German soldier.
Something caught her eye. She glanced left, into the canal, and was shocked to see another body, face down in the water, also wearing a German uniform.
“Goddamn, goddamn,” she muttered.
Axe looked around. Though a small army had already moved through the area once, with their combination of boots, hooves and wheels turning pasture to mud, she still recognised the lay of the land. Her land—with two fresh German corpses on it.
She looked again at the knife sticking from the first corpse’s chest. Soldiers did not kill with knives. Soldiers killed with bullets, bombs and bayonets. Panic began to fill her, for the resistance killed with knives. Civilians killed with knives.
If the Germans found these bodies on her land, with a knife sticking from the chest of one, they would think she had killed them. The German occupiers of Belgium did not ask questions. They made assumptions and acted. She would probably be hung or shot without trial.
She did not hesitate. Axe dropped her rifle and jumped into the canal, instantly sinking to her knees. She grabbed a fistful of tunic and fought her way forward with the body, wading and splashing through the mud and water that smelled like a dozen types of bodily waste and rotted meat. She only had to go one hundred feet until she met a junction that joined another canal. The surface of the water carried a tiny series of ripples. A flow—slow, but maybe enough.
She pushed the corpse down the canal and let go, then went back and slid the other corpse into the water. She jumped in and stopped, stared, then with both hands she worked the knife from the soldier’s chest. An audible puff of air expelled from the lung. It stank like fresh viscera. Axe bent over and dry retched. She was thankful there was no food in her gut to bring up.
She straightened and looked at the knife. It was fashioned from multiple pieces of wood and steel, and was heavy in a good way. Clearly expensive craftsmanship. An engraving obscured by mud ran the length of the handle. She dipped it in dirty water. She brought the handle close to her face and with the first word she knew that the knife belonged to a Frenchman.
Axe looked toward the spot where Monster had found the first man. The one still alive, if barely. The one who must own the knife. She read the inscription in a hushed breath.
“Michel Poincaré, avec amour de votre père.”
Her knowledge of French was poor, though good enough to recognize such a simple phrase: “with love from your father”. The precise words did not matter. All that mattered was that it was French; that there was a dying Frenchman on her land, who had killed two German soldiers.
She snapped the knife shut, put it in her pocket and started dragging the body. It was hard and slow work. After a few minutes she reached the junction. The other corpse had already drifted twenty feet further. That was good. She gave the second body a shove then turned back.
A few minutes later she scrambled from the canal and retrieved her rifle. Axe stood, catching her breath as she scraped mud from her rifle. It was small bore: .22, big enough to shoot rabbit or duck, about the only decent food she could hope for in these times of artificial want. The Germans requisitioned all their food and ate with the appetite of a conquering horde, while the people whose land and country it was nearly starved.
She noticed the breeze. It would have been pleasant, except the water and mud were cold and she felt chilled to the bone. In a few minutes the sun would be above the trees; that would warm her. It would also warm the Germans, and once they were warm they would surely begin their random patrols. If they came along now …
Axe moved quickly and was soon beside the unconscious man. She already knew so much about him, without having exchanged a single word. His name, Michel Poincaré. The fact he was French. The fact he was where he should not be and the fact he was a killer who had murdered two soldiers.
Except it was not really murder. Whatever he had done, no matter how cold-blooded or brutal, it could not be murder. They were soldiers and it was war—a war the Germans had brought to Belgium. Until every last one of them left, there was no such thing as murder, the wrongful taking of life. Only killing. It was a horrible thought. Axe did not shy from it.
Monster hopped close and sniffed Michel’s face. He did not stir. Axe knew she could so easily roll his body into the canal, let him die of his own accord, then drag him to the junction. He would float away, become someone else’s problem. Maybe, with a little luck, all three bodies would reach the canals that passed Elmo Uffe’s property. She knew Elmo would happily do the same for her, and much worse.
But she would not abandon Michel to die in a ditch. The soldiers he had killed were the sam
e ones who had, one way or another, caused the death of her mother and father.
Now, she would risk everything. She had to. This man—Michel—had fought against the enemy, their enemy, and needed help. She reached down, took a handful of his mud-covered jacket and started dragging him toward the trees.
4
At the treeline, Axe stopped and doubled over, her forearms resting against her thighs as she gasped for air. The Frenchman was too big and cumbersome and the distance too far to drag him all the way to the barn. She needed a better system, a stretcher of some sort that she could drag.
She thought through possibilities of things she could construct, then realized she already had something that would do the job with much less effort: the wheelbarrow. His body would spill over the sides, but anything with a wheel would be better than the brute force required to drag dead weight.
Axe ran to the canal and collected her rifle. Monster was still on her haunches staring at the body when she returned.
“Stay and watch over him, Monster. Good girl. Stay,” Axe said, and set off at a jog.
It was a few hundred yards as the crow flew, but there was no such thing as a straight path on a Belgian farm, let alone a neglected Belgian farm torn up by war. She circled ponds and crossed canals; carefully wended her way over boards where the deep mud was like quicksand and refused to dry out, even though it had been months without the boots of troops churning it up; climbed over the trunks of trees that had been knocked flat by stray artillery shells; and navigated brambles where weeds and blackberry were taking over now that the grazing animals that kept them under control were all dead, some rotting in the mud, most in the bellies of German soldiers.
The only decent patch of land was the lawn that surrounded the site of the old house, made all the more stark by the fact the field next to it was dominated by a massive crater, which she had started using as a dump for rubbish. The crater was a strange thing, deep and pointy at the bottom like a funnel, and there was no sign among the surrounding land of any of the disgorged dirt. No lip on the crater like a dam, no great clods of soil that had landed in piles.
Perhaps that is why the lawn thrived—the black soil filled with ancient humus had been turned into an airborne powder that eventually settled as a dusting of fertilizer. It might have been the only surviving lawn in all of contested Belgium. Everywhere else had been relentlessly trampled—troops advancing and retreating, advancing and retreating—until, when combined with the winter then spring rains, it became the consistency of industrial sludge. The handsome lawn stood out as some sort of beacon of normality amid utter madness.
Such sanguine things could not be said of the stone building that sat in the middle of the lawn. What had once been a solid house was rubble. Big and small pieces of grey rock, expertly assembled like pieces of a jigsaw to form thick and handsome walls that should have stood for centuries, even millennia, were once again stones in piles. Long beams of splintered oak thrust from the mounds, with pieces of black and silver slate sprinkled throughout.
Axe sprinted past her family home and made straight for the barn, a large structure, double story, built of wood. The pitched roof made a sharp ninety-degree angle, and was covered in slate. On each of the barn’s four sides was a small window, and another high window on each end to let light into the loft. The doors on the front were massive, held by equally massive hinges. Axe lent her rifle against the wall. She grabbed a handle and yanked. She had to lean away from the door with all her weight, and even then it came slowly.
She ran inside, found the wheelbarrow among the corner reserved for tools and was straight back out. She tried to run with it, but the wheel turned of its own accord, dragging the barrow’s nose into the grass. Axe stumbled and fell. She got up and walked the barrow back as fast as she could.
Monster had not moved, nor Michel. Axe set the barrow down next to him and looked at his body, considering how best to load him. She was not a big woman, whereas he was a big man. A little taller and a little broader than average. Even his head appeared big. Huge, in fact.
A pang of guilt shot through her. Of course his head seemed huge; it was caked with mud. She had not even cleaned the black canal gloop from his face, as if he was just an object and not a human. She crouched down and scraped the mud from Michel’s eyes, cheeks and lips, then from his ears and forehead, until he was recognizably a man. She leant close, her cheek almost touching his lips.
Still breathing. It would do for the time being.
She tipped the barrow on its side, rolled Michel over, got behind his bulk and pushed until his back was hard against the steel. She wriggled her fingers beneath him and then beneath the lip of the barrow, brought her legs up and heaved, grunting and squealing with the effort.
Monster responded with a funny yodeling sound, the sound she normally made when she wanted to play, though if this was a game it was certainly a strange one. She hopped around and took a sniff of Michel’s freshly revealed face.
Axe folded Michel’s arms onto his chest and took the barrow’s handles, used all her might to lift and she pushed. The barrow moved mere inches before Axe dropped it down. Too heavy.
She paused and looked. She realized it would be easier and more stable if she pulled backwards. She pivoted the wheelbarrow and dragged, both the barrow’s and Michel’s legs scraping intermittently along the ground. Michel’s head bobbed up and down with each jerk of movement, bashing against the steel lip. Nothing could be done about that. Besides, a few more bumps on the head were the least of his worries. And hers—if they did not get back to the barn soon.
For the better part of half an hour, Axe dragged and pulled the barrow across the impossible terrain. She passed the big crater and could see the barn; it was teasing her, just as she felt she could go no further. Her arms and legs burned, her heaving chest was acid and her back promised to break in two if she did not stop. Monster kept hopping ahead, looking back and waiting, calling out with a faltering, high-pitched growl. Axe figured it was dog for “why are you taking so long?”
“Shut up, Monster. I know. I know.”
She stretched out her limbs. She would get Michel to the barn. No amount of pain would stop her. Then she noticed that Monster had become quiet. She looked across and saw her standing to attention on all three legs, her head and nose high and the tip of her ears twisting a little.
Monster darted off at a gallop, quickly picking up pace. Her limp lessened the faster she moved, the awkward hopping gait transformed into the recognizable bound of a dog. Monster did not run fast in canine terms, but it was impressive for a creature that had recently learned to walk again.
Axe’s empty gut churned. It could be anything, probably nothing. Ducks, pigeons, Elmo’s stupid goat, a gust of wind—any number of things piqued Monster’s interest. The dog disappeared behind the barn, then began barking.
“Ah, Monster, good doggy. Where is your mommy?” said a voice in German.
Axe froze, while Monster kept barking. Both of them knew that voice all too well. It was Yetzel Dudendorff, a Captain in the German Army and kommandanturen of Mesen. He was always showing up unannounced, ostensibly for a few fresh-laid chicken eggs, which he made a point of paying for, always a little more than the price they would have fetched in town. And Axe always gave them to him, even though it left little other food to subsist on. But she knew his real motive, as any woman would.
Yetzel wanted her confidence and her gratitude, and when he had those things he would want the rest. Her affection, her submission and finally her body. He wanted to turn her into another moffenhoer. Another cheap whore to the German invaders. Once he had his fill he would discard her with the rest of the shamed and broken Belgian women who littered the towns wherever the Germans had been.
So far, she had easily resisted his gentle if none-too-subtle approaches, and Yetzel had not exercised his considerable influence to pressure her. He was playing the gentleman. When she was in town, Axe made a point of casually mentioning
to anybody who would listen that her Dutch fiancée, Sven Valentijn, was finalizing urgent business in Rotterdam. As soon as everything was arranged he would join her on the farm.
Oh, how she missed him. Oh, how she looked forward to his imminent arrival. Any day now, surely any day now …
Even invading German soldiers had some level of respect for marriage, though she could tell Yetzel was suspicious. Before long he would figure out she was lying. While Sven and the engagement had been real enough, she did not know where that now stood.
She had been in Rotterdam when a letter from Godewyn Faas arrived. Godewyn was a neighbor and dear family friend. It had fallen to him to write and inform her that her parents had been killed by a stray artillery shell that landed on their home before dawn on the morning of the twelfth of April. They were in their beds. It was small consolation to know they almost certainly died instantly.
Monster survived, for she slept outside in her kennel. Flying debris had smashed her right leg. Godewyn, a retired veterinarian, had managed to save her by amputating to the shoulder. He should have put her down, but could not bring himself to do so—not after the horrors he had seen that morning.
He promised he would look after the dog, and counselled against returning from the safety of Rotterdam: it was simply too dangerous, with intermittent fighting up and down the Ypres salient, the front that stretched from Passchendaele in the north to Ypres then Mesen and continued into France. The sad truth was that her family was dead and buried and most the people she had known and grown up with were also dead or gone. There was nothing and nobody to return to.
But a second letter from Godewyn arrived just three days later. More bad news. Elmo Uffe, their strange and increasingly unpleasant neighbor, was claiming title to her family’s land.
Michel And Axe Bury The Hatchet (The French Bastard Book 2) Page 2