I woke when a medical officer bustled into the aid station, shaking the sleet from his coat. He asked if we were keeping warm enough. The question was just for polite’s sake, for he didn’t listen to our answers. He went to the boy’s bed and flipped back the blankets.
“Needs amputating.” He ignored the boy’s appalled wail. “Yes. And quickly. Best take him along to hospital. There’s the good chaps. Do get back as soon as you can. We’ll have need of you.”
The medical officer never explained why we would be needed. I didn’t tell my litter chums, either. We put the boy on the litter, wrapped him in three goatskins, his greatcoat, and four blankets. We struggled through the sleet and the knee-deep muck to the rear hospital. The four of us were too cold and exhausted to talk to each other, too tired to comfort the soldier. The boy cried the whole way there.
Travis Lee
DECEMBER 1, POSTCARD FROM THE RESERVE TRENCHES
Dear Bobby,
This morning I was thinking of you and Ma and that Nativity scene she always puts up, the one where she made the straw dolls of Joseph and Mary, and Pa carved the camels. They were good camels. Too bad he never was no good at people.
Well, merry early Christmas. If anyone asks after me, tell them I’m happy enough. Whatever happens, Bobby, always remember this: I was happy enough.
Travis Lee
DECEMBER 4, THE RESERVE TRENCHES
Dear Bobby,
They shouldn’t have ordered us forward in December. In England, families are getting ready for Christmas. They’re buying presents, wrapping them, hiding them away. Mothers and wives will send gifts soon. No way to stop it. No way to get the word back quick enough. Gifts will arrive here to this desolate place, all wrapped in pretty paper.
Mugs and Turnhill and Uncle Tim and me made it back in time to move up with the company to the front lines. The sleet had ended. Granular drifts of it shone in the morning like snow. It nestled in the crannies of shell holes. It smoothed the angular scars of the soil.
Wading our way to the front, over our puttees in mud, a Boche Aviatik buzzed us. The bastard strafed us, too. It was more a scare and a nuisance, for the gunner had poor aim. But every time he came thundering along our line, a cry went up: “Have a bloody care!” and “Not cricket!” Finally, to the cheers of the company, a trio of BEs came flying out of the clouds and chased the Aviatik away.
We slogged on. At dusk we reached the front trenches. The Boche had put up an observation balloon, but the BEs returned to shoot it down. I saw them darting like bright wasps around a bulbous gray mushroom, saw the balloon shudder with the shots, watched it collapse in on itself and fall slow.
All the rest of that day the officers went up and down the trenches, ordering men to blacken their faces, ordering jangling metal to be taken off uniforms. Shocked complaint raced down the trench like water down a flash-flooded creek. “Raid, is it? Senseless command!” and “They’ll bloody kill us!”
We were going, anyway. The British artillery started pounding the Boche around dinner time. Mugs and me loaded up with extra field dressings. When the medical officer wasn’t looking, Turnhill packed a scalpel. Uncle Tim rounded up sutures just in case we’d need to leave part of the soldier behind.
The sleet had started again by the time our company went over the top. The four of us watched them slip away. When we climbed the bags after them, we saw that the night was dark but for mortar flashes. They lit No Man’s Land in pulses of light. Scenes were arrested in snap photographs: the tightness of Mug’s jaw; Turnhill’s slack exhaustion; a crowd of soldiers moving far ahead.
We went, the four of us sinking through the thin crust of ice and into the soft ground below. We slipped. We fell. Sleet blinded me. It rattled against my helmet. The dark horizon came alive in a sparkle of machine-gun fire—a loud and deadly chatter. Ahead of us, soldiers started to scream.
Near me, a loud grunt. The litter lurched. A mortar flashed, and I saw Turnhill on the ground.
“Take him!” Uncle Tim cried.
Mugs was already bending over. “Done for!” he shouted back.
I knelt. Shells ripped the air over our heads. The ground quaked. Flares burst, lit No Man’s Land in lime-green light. I looked up, saw three bright stars above me illuminating the powdery fall of sleet. Below me, Turnhill was dying, his chest seeping darkness, his lips bubbling black.
“Bloody hell! Take him!” Uncle Tim shouted.
We had rolled him onto the litter and were carrying him away when the litter jerked fiercely. It nearly tore itself out of my grip.
Mugs said in a tight voice, “Fains I!” and I saw that he’d been shot in the leg.
Somewhere in the green night machine guns rattled. Uncle Tim grabbed Mugs by his coat and dragged him into a nearby shell hole. I took hold of Turnhill and pulled him down with me, too.
Mugs was cussing without rhyme nor reason. His foot was turned the wrong way and his face was rigid with pain. “Bastards,” he was saying. “Bloody, flaming, ruddy alleymen. The lot of ’em can kiss me bum.”
Uncle Tim crawled to me. “I needs to get him back.” He nodded in the direction the assault had stalled. “A balls, innit.”
“Yeah,” I said, Turnhill motionless and bleeding in my arms.
Uncle Tim unbuttoned Turnhill’s greatcoat. Below, his goatskin and shirt were soaked with blood. “Belly or liver,” Uncle Tim said.
The hole in his belly was pumping, but slowly. Turnhill’s eyes were closed, his face so restful that I hardly recognized him. He stank of bile. A froth of blood and vomit ran down his mouth to his chin. A dark bubble hung from one nostril.
“Can’t carry both,” Uncle Tim pointed out. Behind him, Mugs’s cussing had wound down into tired groans. “Leave him here?”
“I’m afraid he’ll wake up. Afraid he’ll roll down into the water and drown. I don’t think I could take worrying about that.”
Uncle Tim shrugged, gazed dully out over No Man’s Land, toward the crumps of mortar fire and the company’s shouts for help. “No bloody use, is there?”
Not two men to carry over two hundred. “No goddamned use.”
So Uncle Tim grabbed Mugs and dragged him over the lip of the shell hole. I could hear them for a while as they cussed their way though the green-cast dark.
I cradled Turnhill and rocked him while the sleet stung my face, while mortars pounded, while far over No Man’s Land my company died. More flares went up. They were burning bright when Turnhill’s back knotted.
“It’s all right,” I told him.
Head against my shoulder, he stared, gaze furious with terror. The tendons in his neck stood out. His jaw snapped shut, again, again, as if he was biting back at his pain. I pictured how the calico girl might soothe him, and I tried to do the same. Alone there in the shell hole, I took off his helmet. I wiped the blood and the muck from his face.
“They’re coming for you,” I told him. “I know it.” I could feel the calm of their presence, all of them: Dunleavy and Smoot, McPhearson and Furbush.
“See them yet, Turnhill?”
A shudder ran though him, head to toe. His back arched, tense and rigid. Dark spume oozed from his open lips. With my thumb, I cleaned it away. “You go on now,” I ordered, my voice quiet.
Amid the din of battle, the unearthly peace of that shell hole. A long, tired sigh came up from his depths. When he went, he went beautiful, Bobby—like he was falling to sleep in my arms.
Way over No Man’s Land, soldiers were calling for help. I put Turnhill down and crawled, dodging the muddy spurts of the mortar rounds, skirting shell holes. I found a body with its head and shoulders blown off. Found one of the company’s football players lying in two pieces, his chest still linked to his waist by the pale strings of his guts.
I came across five men retreating. We tumbled into a rank-smelling crater together.
“Order’s to withdraw,” Halcomb said. “ ’Eard it meself. And the man what says no is a liar.”
“Yo
u seen Miller?” I asked him.
They looked at me, wide-eyed as owls. “Seen an officer. ’E’s what told us. Best get your arse back to trenches, too.”
The Boche machine gun paused its hammering rhythm. The five were suddenly up over the lip of the shell hole and away. I kept going, came across Goodson and Hutchins dragging Kennebrew behind them. He was face-up and unconscious. Behind him trailed a heavy wake of mud. They’d taken his greatcoat off so that they could manage his sodden weight. Kennebrew was dying of cold, I figured. His belly wound wasn’t bleeding much anymore.
The two waved me on, yelling, “Withdraw! Orders to withdraw!”
“Are there more wounded?”
“Raid’s all phut! Done what we could, but san fairy ann!” They dragged the dying Kennebrew with them.
Driggers came running fast as he could through the muck. I grabbed the lieutenant by his gun belt as he tried to get past. “Are there wounded?”
He looked at me, incredulous. He tried to slap my hands away. “Idiot. Of course there’s wounded.”
“Where?” I shook him.
Emma Gee chattered. The two of us hit the ground, crawled to a nearby corpse for shelter. In the waning light of the flares, I checked, saw that the dead man was Sergeant Norwood.
“Blast this mud!” Driggers was shouting. “Can’t go forward, can’t bloody go back. Done for from the very beginning!” A few rounds slammed into Norwood’s corpse, made it shiver as if he was feeling the cold.
“Where are they?”
He pointed left. “Three men down in a shell hole. One of our padres, too.” The machine gun quieted, and Driggers was gone.
I left the shelter of Norwood’s corpse, came across a boy whose name I didn’t know. He was bleeding from the arm, but still moving fine. “You seen three men in a shell hole with a padre?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“Was it O’Shaughnessy?”
He waved me off with his good hand and kept going. I crawled on toward the Boche trenches. Some of our company had nearly made it there. They hung along the Boche wire where they had fallen, like coyote carcasses on a fence.
I came across a shell hole, saw Runyon lying at the edge of the stinking half-frozen water. Sleet coated his face but for the cross that had been stroked on his forehead. Further away, two heads stuck above the slime—Tower and Vining—their faces glassy, both wearing the intent blank stares of corpses. Not far from them, a reaching hand.
I inched down the slippery incline, down to where the mud had been plowed by clawing fingers. I took hold of the wrist and pulled. O’Shaughnessy surfaced, his face shattering the pool’s varnish of ice. Rusty water spilled from his open mouth. His purple stole lay, stained and limp, over his shoulders.
I pulled him to me, closed his eyes, for that’s what they say to do. I held him, whispered in his ear what the calico girl had taught me: “It’s love.”
Looking up, I saw that the sun was rising. Day was coming on, gray and chill. I heard the machine guns go quiet, the mortars fall silent, until the only noise left was the fragile moans of the wounded.
I closed my eyes and slept, O’Shaughnessy lying close at my side. Instead of walking the graveyard, I walked the corridor of home. Pa was sitting on Ma’s bed, holding the toy in his hands. The silvery afternoon was so still, I could hear the tap of the sash against the window frame and the flap of the lace curtains blowing. I stood in the doorway and watched him a long time, forgiveness plucking at me. I didn’t go in; and when I woke up I saw that the sun was high.
I left O’Shaughnessy, went out to find the wounded, darting shell hole to shell hole, the way I did when I was sharpshooting. I took the first wounded boy I found, a soldier I didn’t know. His collarbone was splintered. One sleeve of his coat had been blasted off him. The bone and gristle of his shoulder joint was poking through.
I seized him by the lapels and pulled him along, ignoring his shrieks, pulled him past boys wounded and crawling, past dying friends begging. I left him only once, even though he pleaded for me not to. I went down in a shell hole and caught Lefleur and Morgan before they drowned.
Morgan was still conscious. He clung to my sleeve. “Crikey, Stanhope. Didn’t think nobody would come.”
Both his legs had been shattered by a shell, so pulverized that he wasn’t even bleeding much. I tied two tourniquets around him, anyway, and settled him higher in the hole. I propped his haversack between him and the waiting water. Then I said, “Somebody’ll be back.”
“Can’t leave me!”
I pried his fingers off, but he seized me again. “Somebody’ll come real soon,” I said.
He clung to me, crying. “Oh, oh, sweet Mother Mary, don’t. You can’t leave me here.”
I tore myself free and left him sobbing. At the top of the hole, I took hold of the boy with the broken collarbone. We went on. It was late afternoon by the time I rested. In the chorus of the wounded, I opened my iron rations and shared it with the soldier I’d chosen to save.
“You’re new, aren’t you? I’ve seen you around. What’s your name?” I asked him.
“Oakes.” Exhaustion had taken him beyond pain to dull-eyed lethargy. “You’re that old soldier Yank. Everyone knows you.”
He ate a little corned beef when I spooned it into his mouth, but he turned his head away when I offered more. There was a grayness to his lips that I hadn’t noticed that morning. Internal bleeding. He’d never make it back.
“Do us a favor,” he said. His voice was weak and seemed to come from a great distance, as if he was already going away. “You take a pinch of that tea and put it on my tongue?”
I did. He sucked the leaves, smiling into the glowering sky. “Sweet,” he said, and I knew that he was dying.
“Sweet,” I agreed.
His eyes were shut but he was still breathing when I had to leave him. The day darkened, and I couldn’t tell if rain was coming or if the sun was going down. I passed Lieutenant Jonathan Call’s body, barely a mark on it, horror in his eyes. I passed a knot of three men together, their splintered bones and mangled limbs joined. A few yards later, I came upon Fowler. He’d been dragging himself home. Something—either a bullet or shrapnel or a flying shard of bone—had struck one cheek and exited the other. Most of his teeth were gone. He tried to smile when he saw me.
“Stick your tongue out,” I told him. When he did, I told him his tongue was torn to hell, but it was still attached. “You’ll be all right. Got yourself a Blighty.”
Cheerful, he nodded. Blood ran his jaw, trickled his neck. I helped him along until I came to Wren. A small boy; and he’d been sprayed by shrapnel. His back was soaked with blood. I told Fowler that he’d have to manage. I was about to grab Wren when I saw Pickering. He was lying in the open several yards away. His eyes were closed, his face blue-white.
I crawled in a panicked frenzy to him, touched his face. “Pickering!”
He looked up at me, blinked.
“It’s me: Stanhope.”
His voice was faint. “Made that part out.”
Light was fading but we were exposed. Any minute the Boche sniper would start shooting. I grabbed him by the shoulders of his coat and started dragging him to safety. His first scream shocked me. His second scream went on and on.
When we were safe in a shell hole I shushed him. “It’s okay. It’s okay. I’m taking you home now.”
He sighed, closed his eyes, and for a second I thought he was slipping. I wanted to grab him, hold him back. “Rather long walk,” he whispered, “England.”
I opened his coat, saw a plate-sized badge of frozen blood on the front of his hip. I poked my head above the lip of the shell hole, saw Wren sinking into the mud. Another few hours and he’d drown there. Fowler, in his snail’s crawl, was hauling himself inexorably closer to the trenches. I looked down at Pickering. “You’re freezing. We got to get back quick. I’m going to have to drag you.”
His long, droll face twisted. “Stanhope?”
&
nbsp; “What is it?”
“It hurts unreasonably, you know.”
I took hold of his coat and pulled. He grunted with pain, squeezed his eyes shut. I told him, “Go ahead and yell, Pickering. Everybody does.”
He was too proud right then, maybe too breathless. Still, by twilight he was openly sobbing. My arms and legs were so tired they trembled. When I came to a good hole, I fell to my knees. We drank from our canteens. I cut open his iron rations and offered him some corned beef.
He wiped his tears away with his sleeve. “That bloody monkey meat?”
“Have the biscuit, then.” I held it to him.
“Attempting to kill me.”
I sucked on an edge of the bread, working some moisture into it. I flipped his coat open, checked his wound again. “Looks like a bullet,” I told him. “Good that it’s frozen.”
“Oh, yes. So effing, flaming lucky.”
“I think you got a Blighty.” A Blighty. That was all.
I made him eat, and was encouraged when he didn’t vomit. We sat in the shell hole and watched dark come on. After the sleet the air smelled fresh, but the mud didn’t gleam. No corpses glowed. The voices in the field fell silent as the dying slipped, one by one, away. I felt liberated, Bobby. Strange, isn’t it? Battle was over. So many dead. Too many wounded to carry. But Pickering and me were alive.
We drank some more from our canteens. He complained that I’d picked the wrong time to dry out. “Could do with a bit of rum, actually,” he told me. “And I’m so dashed tired of the pain. Can’t get the litter here?” His tone was pathetic; his voice faint.
I told him to put his arms around my neck. When I stood up, I staggered. I wasn’t strong enough to carry him. I sank to my knees in the mud, thought for a minute that I’d never be able to pull my feet free, that I’d never again be able to take a step. Still, I struggled out of the shell hole and kept going, weaving like a drunk under the burden. I went, sliding, cussing, sensing our trenches so strong that it was like a searchlight in my face.
In my ear, I heard Pickering’s plaintive “Hurts.”
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