Flanders

by Patricia Anthony

  I woke up filled with a wide deep calm. Boche corpses stank in the walls, but that didn’t matter. Somewhere outside the dugout a machine gun stuttered and then went quiet. A passing sentry laughed. I took the letter out of my tunic pocket and in the dank black cave of the dugout I sniffed the lavender. I think it smelled like her.

  Yours, Travis Lee

  JULY 12, A POSTCARD FROM THE FORWARD TRENCHES

  Dear Bobby,

  Everything’s fine here. The weather’s warm and dry, and all the Tommies are getting sunburned.

  Hope this finds you happy and in good health. Kiss Ma for me and thank her for those angora socks she knitted. They’ll come in handy this winter.

  Love, Travis Lee

  JULY 12, THE FRONT LINE TRENCHES A LETTER FOR ME TO HOLD ONTO

  Dear Bobby,

  Two days ago Riddell called me into his dugout. LeBlanc was there, too. “Major Dunn wants more patrols,” he said. “So tonight the pair of you are going on a stunt, under my command. Remember: ’Eads down, mind each other but don’t lose sight of me, no noise to draw fire. And if the Boche send up star shells, find yourselves a ’ole to ’ide in. Just a bit of a tramp, then, and we’ll come back and have ourselves a cuppa.”

  When we were dismissed, LeBlanc followed me down the trench. “I been with Riddell before. He’s gutless. Let’s have us some real fun, eh? Make sure your sheath knife’s sharp.”

  It was hard to imagine anything with knives being fun.

  “Come on. You’re not a goddamned tit-sucking baby like Riddell and the rest of ’em, are ya? Hey, I tell you, there’s nothing like it—looking somebody straight in the eye while they die. They squirm like bugs, you know?”

  I said, “Uh-huh,” like I’d done that so much I was plumb tired of it.

  “I can trust you, Stanhope. The rest of them are a bunch of wet cunts.”

  Trust me? We were ordered to face No Man’s Land together, and he hadn’t bothered to ask why I was politely trying to get away or even why I’d been ignoring him lately. But then LeBlanc’s not a man after honest answers.

  “Let’s do it, eh? I know right where the forward sap is. Two Boche at the most. One for each of us. We’ll pretend we got lost, that’s all. Riddell’s too stupid to know any different. Shit. Come on. Whaddya say? It’s easy. You sneak up behind ’em, jump on their backs, and shove their faces in the dirt like this—”

  It happened so damned quick. He whirled me around and slammed me against the sandbags. I banged my nose. Air exploded out of my lungs.

  His body was close and hot against mine. In my ear he whispered, “You prick ’em a little.”

  Something stuck me in the side. God, that knife was sharp; like the Bowie we keep to castrate the billies.

  “You slide it and fish around till you hit a lung. That’s so’s they can’t scream. Slice their liver to get ’em bleeding. And when you feel ’em go weak, you just turn ’em over . . .”

  He flipped me so we were face-to-face. His eyes were hectic. “You ever see a dog die of distemper, Stanhope? That’s the way old Fritz shakes under you. At the last minute their eyes get wide and scared ’cause they know what’s happening and they can’t do a thing.”

  The Mad Hatter delight in him.

  “Better than a good fuck,” he said.

  He let me go. I staggered away, wiping at my mouth. He laughed like he’d just told a joke.

  I felt the need for people—maybe a witness or two—so I hurried on down the trench to my dugout. He followed. When we got there, Pickering asked LeBlanc to stay and have a cuppa. “Come and join us, why don’t you? We’ll do it up right, just like home. I’ll play Mother, shall I?” Pickering set out the field cups and an old potted meat tin for LeBlanc.

  I sat as far away from LeBlanc as I could and drank the tepid tea that Pickering fixed on his Tommy cooker. He didn’t really visit, but LeBlanc was still sitting there, wordless and solemn, when the kitchens sent up dixie cans of meatless stew. I couldn’t eat. Pickering watered a biscuit with his ration of Jam Of Uncertain Origin. He added a few currants his wife had sent. He stirred the whole mess in an old tin and passed the mush around.

  A Maxim started up a surly rat-a-tat-tat that ended when the sun set. We lit a candle and played a game of cards. LeBlanc left for God knows where. After the card game, Marrs and Pickering and Foy rolled themselves in their blankets and went to sleep.

  I sat and sharpened my sheath knife. I took all the metal pieces off my uniform. I blackened my face with burnt cork till I looked like a vaudevillian. Then I had a smoke, counting my fingers the amazed way folks do when you come into the world, not the way you’d think you’d do leaving it. When the others started snoring, I snuck me a couple of jiggers of courage.

  Sooner than I expected I heard LeBlanc’s hissed “Stanhope!” at the open door. My stomach flip-flopped. I got up so fast, I nearly fell back down.

  Riddell was waiting outside in the trench. “Ready, then?” he asked.

  I didn’t have enough spit in my mouth when I said, “Sure,” and the word came out cracked in two.

  LeBlanc elbowed me. “A good fuck, eh?”

  Down at the bend of the traverse, Riddell went up the ladder. No whistles. No masks. Over the top in silence this time, and into limitless dark. This was the place, the dark beyond the cypress, and maybe when you fell in you found yourself in LeBlanc’s lunacy. I crawled blind, hearing cloth scrape against dirt, pebbles rattle. Was that LeBlanc ahead of me? I figured that he could see through the thick night—for I knew my dream graveyard, but he was a native here.

  Cold rusty metal pricked my cheek: the barbed wire. So soon? A twang as wire gave under the bite of cutters. Riddell’s whisper to my right, “Through ’ere.”

  By faith I followed his voice. I crawled, my cautious hands fumbling over trash: empty tins with sharp edges, jagged rusting shrapnel, a burst and ruined canteen.

  A fast sputter from the Maxim made me hug the moldy ground. The Maxim’s fire was followed by an answering flurry of shots from our side. Head down, I kept moving through LeBlanc’s nothingness.

  I touched something slimy and wet that gave off an overpowering stench of rot. A corpse. I wondered if the Boche had shuddered when LeBlanc’s knife went in; if he had trembled like a man fucking. No. This thing was too small, too furry. I crawled over the carcass, and left a trail of stinking death down my tunic.

  I heard quiet movement to either side of me. Metal litter snagged my chest, my legs. I would have thought I was dead, if not for that.

  Then Riddell’s disembodied whisper. “Stop ’ere.”

  And LeBlanc’s “Sure. Forward Boche sap’s not far.”

  “Leave it.”

  “Yeah. Right. But I could take ’em.”

  “Leave it.”

  “Let Stanhope and me have a little fun.”

  “I’ll bust yer arse for you, Private.”

  The Maxim barked again. A rising whistle and a quiet pop. Star shells burst above our heads and No Man’s Land shone green.

  Riddell ordered tensely, “Down! Down!”

  The sergeant and I rolled into a nearby crater. Above us gunfire rattled: the Boche’s and ours. The night turned loud.

  “Where’s ’e?” Riddell’s voice was so strong, so normal, that it startled me. “Where’s bloody LeBlanc off to, then?”

  “Don’t know, Sergeant!”

  He grabbed my bandolier and shook me hard. “Where’s ’e off to?”

  The big guns started up—thunder along the horizon. And I thought: The boys in the reserve trenches won’t sleep tonight.

  “I’ll find him.”

  I don’t know if it was the rum or the dark that made me crazy; but I dropped my rifle and wormed my way up and over the lip of that hole. I went scrabbling through the green night, trailed by Riddell’s call of “Stanhope! Come back, yer blockhead!”

  On my belly, elbows first. The flares had dimmed, their glow brightening only the edges of things: the curve of a cast-off co
al-shuttle helmet, the outline of a rotting boot.

  I had to stop LeBlanc, Bobby. I don’t know why, other than war even with all its mess is cleaner. War happens in noise and blasts of fire. It takes you down capricious-like, not caring.

  I heard his chuckle before I saw him. “Stanhope? Stanhope, that you?”

  A rattle to my left, the clink of an old tin can. He’d go for the soft spot between my belly and short ribs—the tickle spot. I stared so hard that my head swam, but still I couldn’t see him. The light from the flares was nearly gone.

  His voice came much too close. “Stanhope?”

  If I didn’t answer, he would stop my words forever. “Yeah.”

  “Grab my hand.”

  I did. There was something wrong with it, a sick kind of wrong. It was too slack-fingered, too flaccid-fleshed. All loose. Jesus God, Bobby. I was holding his hand, and there wasn’t any arm.

  My stomach understood before my brain did. Pickering’s tea came gushing up my throat.

  LeBlanc snickered. His voice came from a couple of yards away. “You coming, Stanhope?”

  All the way back to the trench I’d get to thinking about the feel of that Boche’s severed hand, and I’d have to stop and vomit again. LeBlanc got a kick out of me.

  We were lucky. The Boche sniper must have been asleep that night, or the dark that LeBlanc brought with him was too murky for the Boche to see through. Nobody shot at us. When we got back to our side, Riddell marched us straight into Miller’s new quarters. The dugout wasn’t as plush as in the old trench. No Grecian columns, no vines. Just a cot and a scarred table and a chair where Miller sat, looking out of sorts and sleepy.

  “Disobeyed orders, sir,” Riddell said. “The bof of ’em. Private LeBlanc ’ere worst.”

  Miller looked LeBlanc up and down. He studied him a long time. “You’re in a bit of disarray, Private.”

  The front of LeBlanc’s uniform was soaked with blood. Gore splattered his face, his hands. There was blood on my palm too, and quick as I could, I wiped it on my pants.

  LeBlanc said, “Sir. Got me a forward sapper, sir.”

  “Um.”

  Riddell said, “Told him not to go mucking things up like that.”

  Miller raised an eyebrow.

  “Well, it’s a custom, like, ain’t it, sir. I mean, the Boche is ordered up No Man’s Land, and us, too. We listens to each other, and then we goes back. A gentlemanly thing, that. But ’ere LeBlanc goes sneaking up after ’em, and with a sheath knife, what’s worse. They’ll be thinking we’re savages or sommit.”

  “I see. What have you to say for yourself, Private?”

  “Should have been two sappers on duty. I don’t know where the other bastard went, sir. I looked for him.”

  “Well. Right you are. A week’s cut in pay should do. See to it, will you, Sergeant? And Stanhope? What is your latest infraction?”

  Riddell said, “Went after ’im, sir, after ’e plain as day was told not to.”

  “Yes, well. I see. A week’s pay for the pair. I would think that puts the situation firmly in hand. You’re dismissed. Ah, Stanhope? A moment, please. Thank you, Sergeant. That will be all. Close the door on your way out, will you?”

  The Boche guns had long ago stopped. The night outside was quiet now, so quiet that I could hear the cautious thump of the door closing.

  “Father O’Shaughnessy tells me that you’ve been avoiding him.”

  “Sir, I ain’t seen him lately.”

  “He says that when you do, you walk the other way.”

  “That ain’t so.”

  “O’Shaughnessy says it is.”

  “Sir? Why do you take O’Shaughnessy’s word for everything? Okay, he’s a reverend and all, but that’s not to say he don’t lie. Why, we had us a Holy Roller preacher down to Fredricksberg who fucked all his church ladies. When he come, he’d even go to yelling in tongues, ‘Ollie ollie ollie,’ like they do. Now I’m going to tell you again, sir: O’Shaughnessy may have seen me, but I ain’t seen him. Why can’t you believe that?”

  “Because,” he said, “you are an untrustworthy sot.”

  Plain walls, but he had put a picture up. The lady in the photo had the smooth good looks of the wealthy.

  “And you’re a goddamned liar, sir.”

  The girl in the photo looked at me so sad. She had Miller’s dark eyes. His sister?

  “Either that or you’re stupid,” I told him. “And with all due respect, if you think what I did tonight is worth the same fine as LeBlanc, well, then you’re so dumb you can’t find your pecker with both hands and a road map.” I cleared my throat and added, “Sir.”

  “What did you do tonight, Private?”

  “Hell, sir. That boy’s flat crazy. He got up close and cut the hand off that Boche sapper. Give the damned thing to me.”

  Miller contemplated me, his gaze as steady as that girl’s on the wall. “You have not yet answered my question. For one thing, you and LeBlanc both disobeyed orders. I believe you disregarded them because you had been drinking, which is why—”

  “No, sir! Not drinking one bit, sir!”

  “But LeBlanc went out and killed an enemy. Why should I fine him and not you?”

  “I didn’t touch a drop. Not one drop. And, well, I know my conscience is clean. All I did was go out and try to stop that boy.”

  He sat back so fast in the chair that it squeaked. “Did I not order you to stay away from LeBlanc?”

  “No, sir. To my recollection, you just suggested that, sir. And I took your suggestion to heart and treated it like a real order, sir, I really did. But goddamn. We were out on patrol together. What the hell else did you expect?”

  “Well, if you have a problem with comprehension, Private, I shall give you plain and simple commands. First, you are to meet with Father O’Shaughnessy at his earliest convenience. You are valuable to me, and I will not lose you to your own follies. Further, you will avoid Private LeBlanc unless specifically ordered otherwise.”

  “Look, sir. When I joined this unit, Sergeant Riddell kept throwing LeBlanc and me together.”

  “Sergeant Riddell has not been made fully aware of Private LeBlanc’s situation.”

  “Goddamn it, sir. You’re smarter than this. LeBlanc went out there and plain cut that German boy up. What about us, sir? What about the rest of the goddamned platoon? What if he gets mad at somebody? How quick do you think he’d be to take that knife of his and—”

  “That is quite enough!” Miller slapped the table. He shot to his feet. “You will speak of this no more; neither to me, nor to anyone in your platoon. Further, you will never attempt to subvert Private LeBlanc’s activities in any way. The man is the battalion’s most decorated soldier. He has the M.C. and Bar, for God’s sake. As he is a true soldier and you most decidedly are not, I will not have you interfering with him. I will certainly not have the rest of his fellows distrusting him. Is that understood?”

  I stood straighter. “Yes, sir. I guess. You need him out there making a name for the you and the company, and I understand that, sir.”

  “Blast and damn! You insubordinate . . .” He couldn’t come up with a fitting noun, I guess, for he went to sputtering, like Dunn does when he’s mad. “I put up with your impudence because you demonstrate your lack of manners and common sense merely in private; but do not push the boundaries of my good will. Is that clearly understood?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Dismissed. Bloody hell. Get out.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  As I turned to go, the woman on the wall eyed me. Miller’s tired voice made me pause.

  “Stanhope? Never again come between LeBlanc and his prey.”

  Odd choice of words. A perfect choice, really. Miller may have his faults, but he sees through the bullshit. I’ve known bad dogs like LeBlanc, and probably Miller has, too. Well, he may think that dog of his is trained, but turn your back and that thing’ll pure-D kill you.

  Travis Lee

 
JULY 13, THE RESERVE TRENCHES

  Dear Bobby,

  So Pa found Jesus. The preacher called, the choir sang “Just As I Am,” and Pa picked up that cross and walked down that aisle. Don’t you believe a word of it. Pa’s full of love stories, full of you’re-my-boys and let’s-just-you-and-me-go-fishings. He’ll cry and hug on you when he’s sober, and he’ll beat on you when he’s drunk.

  You want to know why he left us? I guess you’re old enough for some truth. Back when you were about three years old I got to figuring I’d have to kill him. For twelve years I’d seen how life worked, and by then I knew there wasn’t no way we could all survive together. So I got the 30.06 and followed him one night, tracked him all the way from our house to Odette Johnson’s. See Bobby, Pa was sleeping around.

  Poor Odette. She used to be a good-looker. And I never figured it was her fault. It wasn’t nothing personal—not that she was messing around with him, and not even that she was a colored gal. I just needed a place to ambush him, Bobby, a place where he would have his guard down. A place to kill him where his blood wouldn’t dirty Ma.

  I found me a cedar outside Odette’s door, and I hid there for a while. I can still remember the clean smell of that cedar tree, the oily smell of that gun. When the moon rose, I cradled the rifle and walked careful as I could up her wood steps. I tiptoed past her kids—all tucked into the same feather bed. I went down the dark hall and found her on the four-poster with Pa. The coal oil lamp was burning low, and they were sleeping. On the nightstand was one of them little wood animals Pa liked to carve, when he wasn’t taking a belt buckle and carving on Ma’s face. It was a cat, and he had took and darkened the wood with walnut juice, so the color came near to Odette’s. The face was like hers, too: that pointy chin, those wide eyes. A pretty thing, that cat. I guess he must have liked her.

  They were sleeping so peaceful, not curled up together, but peaceful and apart all the same. When I cocked that rifle, Pa’s eyes flew open. Odette sat up quick, blankets falling. I remember her white rimmed eyes, the shock of seeing her naked. I’d never in my life seen anything as soft-looking as Odette’s velvet brown nipples.