by M. J. Cates
“Well, as long as God knows, you’re all right then, aren’t you.”
Quentin felt his cheeks redden; her simplicity embarrassed him.
“When they send you home, you’ll land in Canada first. Promise me you’ll look me up. I’m going to give you my parents’ address in Bracebridge—they’ll know where I am—and you can come and stay with us.”
“They don’t even know me.”
“Quentin, they’ve lost two sons. They will love you. Now take me to the bacchanalia. I want to dance until I faint.”
* * *
—
The benefits of being a scout were many. Foremost among them was the escape from the forward trench, the firing line, and even from the reserve trench. Scouts had their own dugout far behind the reserve line, and only nine men sharing it. This relative comfort and safety allowed them to catch up on their sleep during the day, their highly specialized work of reconnoitring the enemy line being confined almost entirely to the hours of darkness.
They cooked their own meals and kept to themselves, except when the assignment involved snipers or a raiding party. On such occasions they prepared the way by crawling up to the enemy’s forest of barbed wire and snipping an opening through it, before guiding the raiders through the craters and corpses of no man’s land and getting them back again, lobbing the odd grenade by way of support.
Quentin dreaded the prospect of going on a raid. The raiders would breach the enemy parapet, cut the throats of sentries, hurl grenades into any dugout they could see, and murder anyone who made it out alive. Captured raiders could expect no mercy from the enemy, but successful raids could be even worse, because they provoked retaliation—and escalation. This last factor had managed to somewhat cool the high command’s vicarious ardour for raids, and so far Quentin hadn’t had to face one.
His fellow scouts were a congenial lot, definitely a different breed from the random enlistees of the trenches. It wasn’t that they were braver, but that being a scout gave you the sense—almost certainly delusional—that you had some control over your fate, that you were dependent on your own senses, your training, your resourcefulness, not simply upon destiny. And while you never knew what exactly it was you’d be walking into (crawling into, more likely) you knew it wouldn’t be massed machine-gun fire. The scouts seemed a livelier, more intelligent bunch than the pure cannon fodder.
One of them was even a fellow writer, an unpublished though prolific (by his own report, at least) novelist. At thirty-two, Lance-Corporal Stan McClintock was the oldest of them, but he seemed much older, partly owing to his receding hairline and partly to the shrapnel scars around his forearms. He had an old wreck of a typewriter squirrelled away in the dugout, and the peck, peck, peck of Mac’s industry was a source of amusement among his comrades.
Being around Mac makes me want to write, Quentin wrote in his notebook. He makes it seem such a manly occupation. He’s tight-lipped about it. I asked him once what he was working on. “Novel. War.” I told him I planned to write a novel if and when this war might ever end. “Just write the goddam thing. Don’t for Christ’s sake talk about it.” I don’t know how he can write about the war when he’s right in the middle of it—but that’s probably why he’s a novelist and I’m just a talker.
And there was “Ginger” Hayes, who had been in scout training with Quentin at Étaples. They had learned how to crawl together, crawling being the scout’s primary form of locomotion, and an exhausting one at that. No one could have guessed how many different crawling techniques there were, but at camp they had to practise all of them.
Ginger was the same age as Quentin, a delivery driver for a Toronto bakery, with ginger hair, ginger eyebrows, ginger lashes, and even ginger fuzz on the backs of his hands. Mac liked to tease him that ginger men had no souls and were very possibly descendants of an alien race that had crashed on Earth centuries ago. Ginger would just grin and shake his head. “Keep telling those tall tales, Mac. That’s all writers are good for.”
Ginger was a prolific writer himself—to his parents, his sisters and brother, to his many cousins, to his friends at the bakery, and most of all to his fiancée, Winona. It took two weeks to get a letter to Canada, and another two weeks to get a reply. Ginger had stormed into the dugout in a state of high indignation one day when he had learned that British Tommies could receive a letter two days after it was posted in London or Liverpool, though why this should have surprised him was mysterious. Whenever he had a letter from Winona, he would read it slowly, line by line, moving his lips as he savoured each word. Then, when it was done and he had folded it again and slipped it inside his tunic, he would curl up on his cot and face the wall and not say anything for a while. At such times Quentin would think what a letter from Imogen might have meant to him. What it would have meant to have her waiting for him to come home. What it might have meant to have her love to look forward to. He wrote wry, chatty letters to Margaret a couple of times but received no reply; he had no way of knowing where she’d been posted. He felt a definite attraction, and considered there might be a future with her. Perhaps one day it would even be love. He definitely planned to look her up in Toronto.
Later Ginger would come out of his reverie and leave his cot and be his usual chipper, resolute self. He seemed a man possessed of a secret source of self-confidence, perhaps a man with a deep, abiding faith in his Saviour. Ginger was definitely the squad favourite, right up until the moment one late afternoon when a shelling frenzy caught him in a communication trench. His armless torso, blown free of his clothes, was found naked twenty yards behind the parados. One of his legs dangled from a splintered tree, and his head, minus the lower jaw, lay upside down a few feet away.
After the British tanks smashed through Cambrai, the scouts had less work than before. Not because the brass wasn’t hungry for information but for the simple reason that the moon insisted on being full and bright. Quentin’s battalion completed an afternoon’s march, crossing a canal and taking up billets in the barns around Escaudoeuvres. A good night’s sleep in a hay pile and a hot breakfast set them up pretty well the next morning.
“They won’t need us,” Nate Gormley said. He was a religious twenty-year-old from Ontario with a tendency to unjustified optimism. “They’ll just send the tanks in again.”
“No, they won’t,” Mac said. He was threading laces into his boots.
“They’ve got to. They’ll roll right over the wire.”
“I got news for you, Gormley. The only place those tanks are rolling is north. They’re probably in Flanders already. And in case you haven’t looked up, we’ve got heavy cloud coming in.”
“Well, gosh all fish-hooks. Just when I was getting used to our vacation.”
Lieutenant Bagnal, head of the so-called specialist unit, of which the scouts were a part, appeared at their barn door with a clipboard, always a bad sign.
The scouts got to their feet and saluted.
“All right, men. I trust we’ve sharpened our clippers?” he said, and went on without waiting for an answer, now and then glancing at his clipboard as he spoke. “The division objective is to retake the château at Avesnes-le-Sec, and the battalion objective is the surrounding high ground. The enemy have not been there long, so it should not be the most difficult task in the world. Indeed, if we take the high ground, the château must follow.
“We’ve got a short march at 1600 across the Erclin river to a sunken road running southeast from Iwuy. When we get there…” He raised an arm and pointed to the right. “Battalion headquarters is the mill known as Moulin de Pierre, Pete’s Windmill. Here’s where you come in: There’s a wood on the east side of the château. This wood does not appear on any map and so has not been taken into consideration in the planning. Field glasses show a couple of machine-gun nests but they may not be the whole story. Any questions so far?”
“I have one,” Mac said.
“Go ahead.”
“What high ground?”
“Good poi
nt. The surrounding geography was at one time dead flat, but is now cratered with shell holes. We need to know what kind of cover they will afford. Obviously any part of that field is high ground compared to our sunken road, but closer to the château there is a slight rise with a copse of trees—enough to give you a view of the whole field. Your main job tonight is to get right up to that wood and that slight rise and find out exactly what we’re facing. It’s asking a lot, I know. HQ is well aware of the risk, but we know you can do it because you’ve done it before. Everything you learn will save lives in our assault tomorrow, so if it should cross your mind to ask why the hell you’re risking your neck like this, that’s why. Saving lives is what scouts are all about, right?”
“Yes, sir!”
“Come on, lads, that was pathetic. Let’s hear it again.”
This time they shouted. “Yes, sir!”
“That’s the spirit. One point, weather looks to be perfect for a night out, so be wary of enemy patrols and work parties—or indeed enemy scouts. They know we’re here. Corporal McClintock, I’ll leave this with you.” He removed a sheet from his clipboard and handed it to Mac. “Right then. Godspeed.”
When he was gone, Mac looked up from the order paper. “Jesus. It’s twelve hundred yards between us and them. Could be a long night.”
They duly made the march to the sunken road. The enemy was aware of troop movements, though not their precise co-ordinates, and shelled the area for hours. These sunken roads were a peculiar feature of Europe that Quentin had never heard of before. They had started out as wagon tracks. The surrounding forestation had largely been cleared for farmland, leaving only a strip of trees running along the sides of the road as a windbreak. Under the pressure of decades—perhaps centuries—of traffic, the road had sunk until it was much lower than surrounding terrain. Treetops had long ago met overhead so that the overall effect was of a long green tunnel that could be charming on a sunny day. Although they provided good cover, a hard rain of any duration turned these roads into rivers of mud. And if the enemy sensed movement along them they were shelled relentlessly, often with gas, which would linger long after the shells had stopped.
* * *
—
Crawling is not an efficient way to get anywhere. It is also extremely tiring, calling upon muscles—deltoids, lats, and intercostals—that are not required for heavy work in everyday life. The weeks of practice at Étaples were proving invaluable.
When they had set out at 2200, the night had been moonless, starless, misty. They had removed all the pips, badges, and bars from their uniforms and blackened their faces with burnt cork. They wore gloves for clipping wire, but still blackened their hands in case they had to remove the gloves for other tasks. All shiny objects were their enemies. They would not even be wearing helmets, which tended to ring like Big Ben if they were struck with the smallest pebble. Bayonets were the only things they took that might gleam, and these they kept fixed but sheathed. In addition they each carried a dagger, an entrenching tool, and a revolver.
It was a rule of thumb in the army that major things went wrong with every operation. You could never be sure which thing, but at least one major foul-up was inevitable. Mac had requested that the battalion wiring parties be ordered to create an exit so the scouts would not be required to clip their own wire as well as the enemy’s. Somehow the request was not conveyed. It took Mac, Quentin, and Gormley three hours to clip their way out of the sunken road before they could even get to no man’s land.
There was almost no shooting. Every now and then a sniper let fly at a stray glint of light—perhaps the lens of a trench periscope—and there might be a brief exchange. This happened twice in the first half-hour of their venture, way off to the right of the line. That in itself was information. The enemy could be restricting their fire in order to avoid their own scouts who might be at work between the lines.
The night was so dark they had agreed to walk rather than crawl for the first four hundred yards. Unless the moon came out, or someone launched a Verey light overhead, there was no chance of the enemy spotting them. Eventually they got down and started to crawl. This too provided information. The formerly flat terrain was now gouged with holes and craters that would provide some cover for advancing troops but made the scouts’ progress slow. They crawled ten yards or so apart from each other, within hailing distance via a sudden psst!
Quentin’s face was inches from the earth, the smell of which had been soured with explosives. Now and then as he crawled he gripped the dirt in his hands. The earth, from which they had come and to which so many of them had all too swiftly returned, was home to a soldier when the shooting started. He clung to it as to the maternal bosom, wept into it, cried out into it, again and again, even though the loudest cries were inaudible beneath the hiss and shriek of steel.
A second thing went wrong. The art of weather prediction being imprecise at best, the moon remained hidden but a few stars came out. You could not see any great distance, but as Quentin was crawling over the lip of a mid-size crater he heard movement just ahead. A gleam of light on a German boot. And then another. He gripped the dirt.
He looked to his left and right. He was not sure if the others had stopped too. In truth, coming into the vicinity of an enemy work party was not the worst thing that could happen. The German line would be expecting the return of their men, and the scouts could slither along, undetected, in their wake. He hoped Mac and Gormley would make the same calculation but he couldn’t see them.
Another fifteen minutes of crawling and his triceps were screaming. The wooded area was up ahead. He heard Germans begin muttering to each other as they got closer to “home.” Quentin had only a few words of German, but they would no doubt be anticipating a rum ration and a smoke.
He could hear other voices now, most likely from enemy machine-gun nests.
A German shouted something—a sentry challenging the work party. A guttural exchange and then the brief glow of a cigarette. Another bark and the cigarette tumbled to the ground. This was a superb piece of luck, to have found the enemy’s entrance through fifteen yards of barbed wire. Quentin lay on his back in a shallow crater and tried to fix his position. He could just make out the steeple of the Iwuy cathedral and beyond it what must be the Escaudoeuvres cathedral. He would be able to lead attacking troops to the spot in daylight.
He lay on his back, listening. Up close, the murmur of men in another machine-gun unit in very close proximity. Attacking troops would face withering fire. He could hear the slap of ammunition belts, the slosh of water filling the Vickers cooling tanks. Farther off, the rumble of transport and the tramp of carrying parties. It sounded like a lot of trucks. He could hear no horse sounds, but the animals would be picketed at a distance.
He crawled to the edge of the wire and clipped a six-inch section and put it in his pack. Overhead, the clouds were thinning; the moon was a faint smudge. He cinched his pack tighter to his shoulders, and crawled away from the wire. He fixed his mind on the ration of rum he would get when he returned to the line, imagining the trail of flame it would make down his throat, the sweet detonation of warmth in the pit of his stomach, the way it would calm his quivering hands.
His elbows and knees were scraped and sore and his breath was coming in gasps. He told himself to slow down; it was always a temptation to move fast on the way back, homing in on the illusion of safety ahead. Five hundred yards stretched between him and the sunken road. He could not see his fellow scouts, and that was good. If he couldn’t see them…
A gunshot split the night, and a flare arced into the sky. Bullets thudded into the earth around him. He rolled into a crater—a deep one with a foot of water in the bottom. Harsh light carved sharp, swinging shadows into the gloom as a flare drifted down on its parachute. There was no way to know if the Germans had spotted him or one of the other scouts. He clutched his rifle close and held his breath, listening for cries of pain, but he could hear none above the chatter of machine guns.
Again the flare sank to earth and expired. The moon chose that moment to emerge; if he ran, they would see him. He sank back against the dirt and waited.
Then came a rustling sound and a stabbing pain in his leg as someone landed on top of him. Quentin rolled him off and kicked away from him. A German. Quentin had his Enfield trained on him; the German’s rifle lay a few feet away. The two sat staring at each other across the crater with wild eyes.
The German was little more than a boy, eighteen at the most. An entrenching tool was strapped to his back; he must have got separated from his work party. He started to reach for his rifle, but Quentin jerked his own and shook his head. The German sat back.
Better to shoot him right now, Quentin thought. Those machine-gunners would hear it, but they were in a crater, the muzzle flash would not be seen. His finger tightened on the trigger.
The boy raised his hands and shook his head, eyes pleading. He looked like any new recruit, he could have been anything—a bakery driver like Ginger, a student, a poet. He spoke in a low, frightened voice, still with his hands up. “Prisoner, yes?” He nodded vigorously. “Prisoner?”
Keeping his rifle trained on the boy, Quentin stretched out the toe of his boot and hooked the German rifle by the strap. He pulled it toward him and laid it against the side of the crater.
“Please,” the boy said. “I am good prisoner—will be good prisoner.”
The Germans always seemed to have some English. Sometimes quite a lot.
Quentin told him to shut up. He was wishing he had fired at once. He didn’t want a prisoner, even though battalion HQ would certainly love the opportunity to interrogate the boy. The two of them would have to traverse four hundred yards of no man’s land, and it offered a thousand opportunities for chaos. But if he let him go, he would reach the German line before Quentin could get clear. No, no, the proper thing would have been to bayonet him at once, straight through the throat, preventing any cries.