by Tom Phelan
“What’s wrong, Canalman?” a voice whispered from the floor of the trench. But I couldn’t answer. I climbed farther up the ladder and stepped out onto the rim of the trench.
“Get down, you fool.”
But there was no way I could get down, because what I was seeing was pulling me up. I stepped away from the rim of our trench and stood there in the sights of every sniper and machine gunner in the German trenches. I wasn’t afraid. It wouldn’t have mattered if I’d been torn apart by a shower of bullets. At that moment, my own life was nothing; I was valueless.
After the terrible noise of the last seven days of nonstop shelling from the thousands of big guns, followed by four hours of the shouting and whistle-blowing and machine-gun twickings and rifle fire, I stood looking across this field of death shimmering beneath the spinning wheels of white silence in the sky. And as I stood there, two hundred yards away a German soldier climbed out of his trench. He stood on the parapet and took off his helmet like a man takes off his hat when he’s faced with a terrible sight, who takes off his hat because he has to do something in the face of the terrible thing he is seeing.
“What’s happening, Canalman?” someone whispered from below.
“Come up and see,” I said, without turning around. More German soldiers came up their trench ladders and stepped out onto the edge of no man’s land. None of them had guns. Some of our lads came up and stood beside me, and I knew they were standing there with their mouths open, that the warm air was drying up the insides of their mouths and their throats just like it was doing to mine. And more Germans came up out of their trenches, and every one of them removed his helmet and stood there with it hanging in his hand at his side. And more of our lads came up and gaped. And whether or not it was because the Germans were doing it, we took off our tin hats too, stood bareheaded there with humps on our backs, gaping at the thousands of dead men lying like sheaves after the passage of a Cyrus McCormick reaper.
Without their helmets on, the soldiers across the way looked just like us, same height, same-coloured skin, same-coloured hair, same age, every bit as dirty. They could have been a crowd of lads from the next village you’d see on a Sunday at a football match. And to them we must have looked like a crowd of chaps from their own towns and villages.
Then we were all surprised by a loud voice rising out of the line of German soldiers: “The stupid bastards!” a man shouted in English.
The words grated like a desecration. “The stupid bastards! Why did they keep coming? Why did they keep coming?” The voice rose up into hysteria, and a German soldier ran out into no man’s land. He began kicking a body. “Why did you keep coming, why did you keep coming?” He ran from body to body, kicking as he went, screaming until he was just a ranting lunatic. Eventually he became entangled in strands of barbed wire, and hysterically, he began to smack at the clinging wire the way a man would hopelessly smack at a swarm of attacking yellow jackets. Two soldiers went after him and pulled him back to the trench. We could hear the sobbing, slobbering cries of the disturbed man as his friends dragged him down onto the ground and held him.
Some of the German soldiers swiped at their noses with their sleeves as if they were being pulled into the vortex that had swallowed up their comrade. But a sharp voice was raised. The men put on their helmets, and following the shouted orders, they disappeared one by one back into the trench. There was only one German left standing looking across at us. I supposed he was the one who had shouted out the orders.
Carrying his helmet in his left hand, he zigzagged slowly through the dead and the dying, stepped around the horrid clumps of wire. He was older, thirty-five perhaps. His uniform was very dirty, and he hadn’t shaved for a long time. His bloodshot eyes were the eyes of an animal who has been waiting every second of every minute of seven days for death to dart in and snatch him.
When he was twenty feet away from us, he stopped. Then, in accented words, he said, “They walked at us like little children going to kindergarten with their schoolbags on their backs.” Then he turned and for a long time stood there as if he were just looking. Slowly, he walked back to his trench, careful of his steps, and disappeared into the ground without looking back once.
We stayed staring at the field of sheaves for minutes or hours or days or years until someone broke the spell.
“I wonder will Haig come to see this.”
“Haig’s in bed thirty miles away, resting after all the months of planning he put into this.”
Fifty thousand casualties were counted. Fifty thousand young lads dead or near death in the same field; fifty thousand sheaves to be picked up and stooked; fifty thousand doors to be knocked on; fifty thousand “We regret” letters to be handed into trembling hands; fifty thousand mothers and fifty thousand fathers to take the shocks like punches to the chest that would keep them reeling for the rest of their lives.
Matthias Wrenn
In the black water of the shell hole we all came to the surface at the same time, the five of us spluttering and flailing, someone screaming like a wounded horse. I lunged for the side of the hole and dug my fingers into the soft earth, clung there to keep myself from sinking back down into the vile vomit of the gods of war. It was me who was screaming like a wounded horse. Even if I could not see what was in the hole with us, I knew what was there, knew some of it had got past my lips, up my nose. And then I added my own vomit to the swill. Everyone vomited. We wiped our compressed lips with our filthy hands and spat at the same time as we tried to keep anything from getting into us.
Like black and crenulated midnight slugs we stuck to the wall, heads bent back to widen windpipes to drag air into frantic lungs. When the sounds of spitting and coughing and choking and panic died down, the dull booms of the faraway guns reestablished themselves.
“There’s only five of us. Who’s not here?” Professor asked.
“Trossachs got it,” Dave said, with the sounds of breakdown in his voice. “He stepped into wire and they got him.”
“We won’t hear ‘The Birks of Aberfeldy’ with a terrible burr anymore,” Professor said, like he was saying holy words over a coffin.
From their pillbox, the Germans had splattered the mud around us, told us to get off no man’s land because someone in authority on their side was coming. Twick twick the bullets went as they spurted into the soft earth, twicking as fast as a child’s lips making a fart sound.
“The fuckers could have given us a minute,” Dave said, a touch of hysteria in his voice. “Trossachs got it with the second burst. Guts out the back and the wire around his legs like briars.” Devonshire Dave; Trossachs had been his partner.
Even though the water was two feet below the rim of the shell hole, we were submerged to our chins, afraid of a sniper’s bullet as much as the chunky soup lapping against our bottom lips. The sides of the hole were shiny-black like wet coal, and as soft as dough before it’s put in the baker.
“His guts went flying out,” I said. The sight of Trossachs’s guts in the wind was nightmarish in my brain.
“Bird!” Professor commanded, his tone telling me to calm down, to back away from the hysterics. “It’s the usual story. An officer came along and they had to put the shift on us. Their man on the gun could have killed all of us as easily as he killed Trossachs. The gunner is probably taking a tongue-lashing right now for bad shooting, for allowing us out in no man’s in the first place.”
Within this group of stretcher-bearers, I had acquired Bird as a nickname by way of Wrenn. Having a nickname meant you were trusted to do the right thing in every situation. “Brotherly” could not have been used to describe the relationship among the men with nicknames for each other. But without it ever having been said, we knew we could depend on each other for a bullet in the head if that ever became a necessity. It takes something beyond the love of brothers to depend on each other to that extreme—maybe it’s just an emotionless acceptance of reality, maybe it’s just behaviour born of unabating extreme conditions.
Two hours earlier, we had been in another hole, a dry one, waiting for “an isolated spasm of hostilities,” as Professor called it, to run its course.
When the hostilities did stop, we sat for another ten minutes. Then we pushed the three stretchers up over the rim, one man holding a handle each, the canvas stretched taut—our way of asking for German permission to go into no man’s for the wounded. A one-shot signal that didn’t put a hole in a stretcher meant we could come out. But the one-shot signal was not a guarantee that an officer wouldn’t come on the scene and change the situation in an eye blink. That’s what had just happened without any of us having found even one chap who would survive his wounds. The shooter had allowed five of us to jump into the nearest hole, three of us clutching a rolled-up stretcher each—Never leave your stretcher behind you. You’re as useless as tits on a bull if you haven’t your stretcher. Leave your rifle, leave your drawers, leave your balls, leave your wife but never leave your stretcher.
We had gone into this new hole with our noses pinched between thumbs and fingers, eyes closed, muscles squeezed tight against the bullets with our names on them. But, despite my own fearsome expectation, before the soles of my boots touched the water, I had glimpsed Con and Kitty and myself coming out of the bushes at the Bridge, screaming, and leaping into the water at the perfect angle to drench the courting man and woman who had wandered within range on the far side of the Canal. “You little hures! If I catch you, I’ll pull the balls off you.”
Down into the hole I sank, not afraid at all of drowning; stretcher-bearers did not carry heavy backpacks or rifles when they went looking for the wounded. But I was afraid of what I might bump into in the dark water. Shell holes were places where terrible things dwelt—bits of men, bits of horses, the newly dead and the long dead; ropes of guts, soggy flesh held to bone by thin strings of sinew, bloated rats floating, too fat to climb out of the hole.
I was hysterically afraid of touching waterlogged dead flesh in the dark—the sponginess of it. I wasn’t as repulsed by it in the daylight, had been wading in it for two years; it had even got into my boots sometimes. But in the dark, my fear of touching meat of dead man or animal was paralysing. I imagined rottenness that had once been a horse’s tongue or a man’s liver getting into my mouth, my nose, my eyes, my ears, my hair.
When all the vomiting was over, Professor’s calm voice was a whiff of reassurance, a wafting of emotional smelling salts. Even though he held the same rank as the rest of us, Professor was our leader when there was no officer. Before the War he had stood in large lecture halls and set fire to hundreds of young minds. He had been a conscientious objector, but he did not shrink from doing his duty. “I am a slave to duty, like Frederick, so I became a stretcher-bearer,” he had said once, his hand in the air and his index finger wagging. Professor was tall and thin and no matter how dirty, tired, or bedraggled, he always managed to look as if he just stepped away from a mirror. He had a thin moustache and a long face. He was a likeable and patient man who I couldn’t imagine as a teacher, but maybe university professors hadn’t to be as cross as the teachers of young boys.
And now, Con and Professor swam out into the middle of the hole and retrieved the three floating stretchers. After rolling the canvas around the handles and tying the thongs, they cautiously pushed them over the rim of the hole. “There’s always a sniper, lads, in war or out of it,” was Professor’s warning.
With the stretchers rescued, Professor said, “This is a deep hole, lads. We can’t hold on with our fingers for long. We should find something to stand on, and at the same time, we must be careful of snipers. Anyone got an idea?”
“We could use our knives to carve nitches in the walls,” Owl said, “like the things for statues in churches.” Owl was Welsh, with eyes too big for his face. He could see in the dark and boasted that he’d never been in a coal mine or a church choir. He was a thatcher.
“Niches,” Professor said. “That’s a great idea, Owl.”
For a long time in silence we sat in our niches, the black and lumpy water at our chins: five heads, each wearing its tin helmet despite the plunge. Our five niches took up half the circumference of the hole, our backs to the German trenches. All we had was our lives and our sopping uniforms and whatever was sopping in our sopping pockets—no water, no food, no cigarettes. There was nothing to look at besides each other. We couldn’t sleep. Once, I shouted out, “Jesus Christ!” and splashed away a mat of human hair floating into my space.
“Easy, Bird,” Professor crooned. After a while he said, “We’re here until darkness, lads. We’ll have to talk about something.”
“Trossachs’s guts in the wind!” Lard burst out, and the sound that came out of him was a sob being wrestled to the ground. “His mum, no one’s left for her. Husband was a piper in South Africa.” Lard had been thinking too much. Men disturbed other men when they talked too much about friends dying.
Professor tried to force Lard off the road that led to dark caves for everyone. “Maybe you could write to Trossachs’s mother, Lard,” he said, “tell her about Trossachs, what a good chap he was, how he died.”
“Will you write the letter if I tell you what to say?” Lard asked.
“Of course, Lard,” Professor said. “Every mum wants to know how her son died, else her imagination will torment her forever. It’s best if she hears from someone who was with him. That way she won’t be hoping till she dies that the army letter was wrong, that someday he’s going to walk in the front door and say, ‘Hello, Mum.’”
“For a second before he fell, his guts was blowing in the breeze,” Lard said. “At first I thought he had ribbons caught on the back of his coat, but I won’t say that to his mum.” Lard was Dave from Devonshire who got his nickname by way of a Devonshire “delicacy,” as he called it. After hearing about pasty once too often, Professor said the “delicacy” had more lard than anything else in it.
The big guns were still drumming in the far distance.
“Fucking Belgium,” Owl said. “Who’d have thought this is how a war would be fought—guts shooting out your back when you’re helping your mates? I never thought war would be sitting in a hole full of black water with bits of dead men and horses making a soup of it, and we pissing in it in our trousers and shitting in it too, if we don’t get out of here soon.”
“This won’t be a good war story to tell if we ever get home again,” Con said. “‘Tell us about what you did in the War?’ the people will ask. ‘We sat in a water hole keeping bits of rotting man-meat and horse-meat out of our mouths,’ is all we’ll be able to say.” His hand came up out of the water and, careful not to create a wake and make matters worse for himself, he slowly pushed a lump of grey something away.
“I can say I saw Trossachs’s guts blowing in the wind through a hole in his back while he was still standing,” Lard said, “and everyone will think I’m mad.”
“Lads,” said Professor, “when you joined up you thought you would fight the War running across daisied and buttercupped and sun-bright fields shooting at Gerry, while all the bullets and shells that Gerry threw at you missed. In between times, you’d cavort with French maidens in the grass while they served you wine and bounteous views of their suntanned bosoms.”
“Cavort?” Con asked.
“Oh, Vanderbilt,” Professor said. Con got his nickname by way of Cornelius. “You know—play around with the maidens while accidentally touching them in the places maidens like to be accidentally touched in. But stop! I will not be led down that track. Our notion of war changed the minute we landed in France, if only because it was raining. War is hell, is what an American general said after three years of civil war.”
“You’re right there, Professor,” Con said. “Just look at us. It’s not as if we’re sitting in a bathtub of warm soapy water. We’re in a devil’s bathtub.”
“At least we’re alive,” Lard said. “Trossachs will never say Burns again for us. I never thought I’d see a man’s gut
s blowing in the wind and the man still alive, standing.”
Professor moved in again to push the dark thoughts out of the shell hole.
“Lads,” he said, “exactly five hundred years ago today, on the twenty-fifth of October, 1415, a famous battle was fought very near where we are right now. On this very day, Saint Crispian’s day. And there was another great battle fought near here on the eighteenth of June in 1815, just one hundred years ago.”
“And now we’re fighting here,” Owl said. “What I want to know is why in the name of the good Christ would anyone fight over this shitty place? What does Fucking Belgium have that’s worth fighting for, besides muck and shite?”
“It’s not a question of what Fucking Belgium has, Owl, as much as where Fucking Belgium happens to be,” Professor said. “If you have a big army, the easiest way to get from Germany to France is through Fucking Belgium. That’s exactly why we’re in Fucking Belgium.”
“They should put up a sign: You Can’t Get to France This Way,” Con said. “Who fought here in 1415?”
“The English and the French, but it was just over the border in France, about fifty miles from here in a place called Agincourt, and the wrong side won. That’s why it’s so famous. The French had six times more soldiers, but the English won. Henry, the English king, was a religious fanatic and he firmly believed he was doing God’s work. That helped him to win.”
“Isn’t that what every side in every war ever said?” Owl said. “God’s on our side.”
“But Henry hadn’t to depend too much on God for help. In those days war was the most dangerous sport of all, and kings liked to show how good they were at it. The kings and princes were the generals in those days, and they wanted to be out in front so they could win all the honour. They wanted to be the ones to kill or capture the important people on the other side. Henry was every bit as interested in honour as he was in taking over large areas of France.”