by Justin Go
Mireille shakes her head. —The letters you told me about. Can I read them?
I get my notebook and flip it to Ashley’s letters, handing it to her.
—Hopefully you can read my handwriting. Some of the letters are pretty grim, I don’t know what you’ll think—
—It’s fine, she reassures me. I love old letters.
She drapes her coat over her legs and begins to read. I spread open the newspaper, but as the train pulls away from Paris I lose interest in the articles. Outside the window the city gives way to suburbs and finally farmland, fields and trees swept by a gentle wind. I study a set of gray thunderheads over the horizon, but I can’t tell if they are getting closer or farther away. I fold up the newspaper and watch the scenery.
BOOK TWO
EMPRESS REDOUBT
I have made fellowships—
Untold of happy lovers in old song.
For love is not the binding of fair lips
With the soft silk of eyes that look and long,
By Joy, whose ribbon slips,—
But wound with war’s hard wire whose stakes are strong;
Bound with the bandage of the arm that drips;
Knit in the welding of the rifle-thong.
—Wilfred Owen, “Apologia Pro Poemate Meo”
5 October 1916
Resolve Trench
Somme, France
There are a thousand kinds of weapons here and Ashley has seen them all. When they are in a museum one day, he thinks, they will know how we went back to the Middle Ages. But Ashley had seen medieval weapons in the Tower of London and even the poorest had been finer and cleaner tools than some in this war.
Ashley lifts a whisky bottle from the dugout’s crude shelf, no more than a plank hammered into the clay wall. He studies the bottle’s label. Strathisla, a good single malt. He wonders where it has come from and why it is not yet empty. He pulls the cork out, letting the aroma drift up the bottle’s neck. Peat and oak, a faint scent of honey. Ashley recorks the bottle and puts it back on the shelf.
The dugout is lit by a single candle set in an empty wine bottle on the table. Beside the table are a pair of upturned crates serving as stools. A few pictures have been tacked to the dugout walls, photographs of actresses torn from the illustrated papers. Ashley rinses his mouth with his canteen and takes his pistol from its leather holster, the oily black barrel still warm to the touch. He sets the pistol on the table, but he does not reload it.
Fully clothed, Ashley lies down on one of the makeshift bunks, two nets of chicken wire hung on a wooden frame. A muddy blanket lies beneath him. The bunk is short and his boots are propped upon the bed frame at the far end. He pulls an overcoat across his body and tries to sleep.
As a boy he had loved the Tower and best of all he had loved the weapons. He remembers when he was barely tall enough to see the hilts of the swords arrayed in long rows along the stone walls of the armory. He remembers the elegant Toledo rapiers, the massive German Zweihänders, the gilded French maces, the flails, the war hammers, the morning stars.
Then there was this war. The German patrols had favored knives from the beginning; the British had thought this crude, until they turned to cruder weapons of their own. On a night raid a knife was a clean and silent instrument. To have your throat slit was not the worst death.
The British favor clubs and there are dozens of kinds. There are coshes, wooden sticks loaded with a lead core; there are truncheons and blackjacks tied to leather lanyards. One could attach anything to a handle to give it heft: an emptied hand grenade, an enormous cog. The regimental carpenters fashioned such weapons, or wooden maces studded with iron nails, a weapon a farmer might have carried into the field in 1525. Centuries ago they had turned to maces because plate armor had become too hard to pierce.
And we have turned to maces, Ashley thinks, because we fight like vermin in a gutter.
There are brass knuckles, and knives with brass knuckles set into the handle, and knives with brass knuckles studded with spikes. Ashley has seen faces gored with such weapons and the result was very bad. There are also spades, trench shovels sharpened to a fine edge, and the Germans favor these. Ashley had seen one of his men cleaved by such a spade. He was a delicate private from Newbury, sixteen and covered in freckles and grime; he had lied about his age to the recruiting sergeant, but once the platoon had reached France he bragged openly about being born in the new century, claiming the round number was good fortune. The private was so innocent that the ceaseless swearing of his platoon had scandalized him and he had even complained to Ashley. A few weeks later a huge German cleaved the boy with a sharpened spade, the blade coming down on his shoulder and splitting his torso nearly to the belly button. The private had lived on for nearly an hour, blubbering on about nothing. One of the older men held his hand and waited for him for die.
For one raid the battalion had grafted meat cleavers onto the ends of broomsticks. Ashley had been astonished to see the men marching these weapons down the trench, the shafts perched smartly on their shoulders. They might as well have requisitioned arms from the Tower.
There are a thousand ways to die, Ashley knows, and some are better than others. To be honorably wounded is the best a brave man can hope for. Not even fools believe they will survive unscathed. To lose a limb is a small thing weighed against surviving the war.
There is artillery fire and there are dozens of kinds. There are shells and mortars and canisters with shrapnel balls that lodge into supple flesh. You can get shrapnel in the face, the groin, anywhere, or your legs or arms blown off, or all at once. You can have your guts shredded, your arms cradling steaming intestines as they writhe out into the mud.
There are the machine gun and the rifle, but one doesn’t flinch at the sound of these, because they are felt before they are heard. This makes some men less anxious, but when Ashley is being shot at his whole body sings with terrible sensitivity, waiting for the searing lead slug. As deaths go, many hope for a bullet in the head, and when mothers or sisters or lovers write to you to ask how their man died, you tell them he died this way. They might believe you because they wish to.
There is the searing gas that blisters skin and turns eyes into vacant clouded orbs, all the while scouring your lungs into bleeding mush. You might take weeks to perish, mutely suffocating in bed.
There are the elemental ways to die—burying, drowning, burning. A dugout can collapse under shelling and bury you alive, or drown you as it slowly fills with water. The two sometimes come in tandem, so that it is hard to tell which will prevail. Burning happens many ways, but the most feared is from a flamethrower. All the soldiers know how bad it is because the victims scream horribly and look worse afterward. The smell of burning skin and fat is sickening. Flamethrower operators are always killed with relish, even those who surrender.
There is the sucking mud that takes waders and guns and horses and love letters, and flailing men you leave behind under retreat, knowing they will never be dug out.
Cruelest of all are human hands and the weapons they wield. Hands that drive bayonets into seizing heart or flooding lungs; hands that smash your skull or slit your throat from ear to ear, hack muscle or crack bone as best they can. Before he reached France, Ashley had often traced the course of flesh, from loving conception to mother’s swaddling arms, fed and bathed and kissed; instructed by teachers, treated by doctors, and caressed by lovers, until the day that men who had no cause to hate you tore you sinew from bloody sinew. It was absurd from any perspective. But since the Somme he thought no more of this.
On balance Ashley wishes to be shot in the head, the most prosaic of deaths. He fears a stomach wound most, or anything that takes hours of agony, stranded in some godforsaken shellhole. If he has to get a wound like that, he hopes to bleed and die fast enough, or be able and willing to use his revolver. But he is not sure he could do that, no matter his wounds, and it troubles him. Ashley worries about moaning in front of the men, for he has seen the t
oughest of officers whine like children. Terrifically wounded soldiers of any rank are a danger, for if they cry out within earshot of the trenches, brave men might go out for them and get themselves killed. The best thing is to quickly bleed to death, or if you can to bite down on something and wait for nightfall.
Three days ago the Berkshires had launched an attack in this sector, but the Germans repelled them with intense artillery and machine-gun fire. The Germans had rallied in a counterattack that had ended with desperate hand-to-hand fighting here at Resolve Trench. Since then there have been many wounded stranded in the shattered forest of no-man’s-land, just beyond the British wire. By now most of these had died or been brought in, but there remained one wounded German who had been weeping and raving all the while. He was still alive. He lay less than twenty yards from the British front-line trench.
Ashley was the only man in the company who understood German. He had been listening to the wounded man for three days.
The German passed between periods of lucidity and great delirium. At times he seemed to be dictating a letter to his wife, telling her that he was ready to die. At times he addressed the British directly, describing his wounds in detail, describing the shellhole he lay in, saying that he was running out of water but could survive if only they would bring him in. He explained that he had no quarrel with the English, that they were all brothers in God’s kingdom. Except for the word Kameraden, which the German repeated over and again, the British understood none of this.
The men nicknamed the wounded German “Kameraden.” One of the oldest men in the platoon, a soft-spoken postman called Stewart, had actually gone over the top at night to bring in Kameraden, but the Germans had seen him in the moonlight and begun strafing him with machine-gun fire. Stewart crawled back to the trench without ever seeing Kameraden.
Against all expectations Kameraden lived on, moaning all the while. He quoted popular songs or nursery rhymes or folk ballads. But mostly he recited poetry. Kameraden knew prodigious amounts of poetry, and Ashley wondered if he was a schoolmaster or a professor or even a poet himself, though he doubted the last. The German quoted whole long epics he knew by heart, and even the denser men could tell these were poems from the rhythm of the words or the patterns of rhymes. Ashley recognized only a few: Goethe’s “Mignons Gesang,” some verses by Heinrich Heine. One morning at dawn stand-to, Ashley was astonished to hear what he believed to be a German translation of Byron’s “She Walks in Beauty,” but the man fell into weeping before it was completed.
Late last night as Ashley was on watch, Kameraden’s moaning reached a fevered crescendo. The men sleeping on the trench floor complained of the noise. A few of them yelled at the German to shut up, but this brought out further cries of protest from the other Berkshires along the line.
—Wish the bugger would get it over with.
—Wish you’d get it over with. What if it was you out there, three days bleeding in the mud?
—I’d get it over with.
Ashley told the men to go back to sleep. He found Bradley, the platoon sergeant, and told him he was going into no-man’s-land to see Kameraden.
—It’s hopeless, sir. You can’t save him. The Huns might see you—
—I know, Ashley said. But I can’t stand it any longer.
Ashley pulled a pair of thick toeless stockings over his knees and elbows, then checked the cartridges in his revolver’s cylinder. He traveled north along the trench to get closer to Kameraden, stepping over men sleeping in niches in the wall or wrapped in capes on the muddy trench floor. They groaned in half-sleep and rolled in the mud. Ashley trudged up to the forward sap nearest Kameraden, really only a fortified shellhole holding a sentry and a few flares. The sentry jerked to the side when he saw Ashley, swiveling his rifle and then lowering it.
—Thought you was a German, sir. Can’t hear nothing over that blubbering.
—Certainly not.
—You understand German, don’t you sir? What’s he moaning on about now?
—He wants us to kill him.
Ashley saw the outline of the sentry’s helmet move from side to side as he shook his head. His face was sheathed in blackness.
—He never said that before, did he sir?
—No. I’m going over. Don’t fire unless they open on me, and only then well to the left. Eleven o’clock at the farthest, do you hear? I shan’t be far off.
Ashley rinsed his mouth from his canteen and spat into the mud. He stepped on the crude fire step, peering above the rim of the parapet. It was quiet and he guessed there was little wind, but the shattered trees had no leaves by which to judge.
Ashley climbed over the parapet. On elbows and knees he zigzagged through the British wire into the morass of no-man’s-land. His chin trailed in the mud. It took twenty minutes to go thirty yards. The stench was rich and sweet, decaying corpses and chloride of lime. He ascended the rim of a huge shell crater and floundered over. Inside there was a mound of dead Highland soldiers in muddied kilts and kneesocks. Ashley rested here and studied the terrain. The German was still wailing away, his voice hoarse. The sound was coming from the right.
Ashley crawled farther until the sound was very close. He flopped into another large shellhole. He saw Kameraden’s murky silhouette a few yards away, but Ashley was afraid the German might have a weapon, so he lay in silence waiting. After a few minutes a flare went up over no-man’s-land and the scene was illuminated.
Kameraden was a plump corporal from a Jäger regiment, known as forest hunters and expert riflemen. He was on his back, his tunic soaked with black blood where shrapnel had perforated his chest. His eyes were open but his face was turned up to the sky, watching the flare sink through the darkness. He was holding a water bottle in one hand and clutching his wounds with the other.
Ashley crawled up beside Kameraden and spoke softly in German. At first the man barely seemed to notice, perhaps mistaking him for a hallucination. He breathed in a terrible sucking wheeze. Suddenly the German’s head bolted and turned. He begged for water. He said his canteen was empty and he had already drunk all the water in the shellhole. Ashley took his water bottle from his waist and poured it onto Kameraden’s cracked lips. The liquid ran over his face and stained beard. Kameraden gulped feverishly, muttering something indecipherable.
Ashley heaved the German onto his back and began carrying him toward the British line, crouching as low as he could. Kameraden whined in pain. He was very heavy. Ashley could feel the man’s blood dripping down his neck into his shirt and it was hard to crouch with the weight of the body upon him. The mud sucked back at every step. Ashley lost his balance and dropped Kameraden. The German moaned as Ashley lifted him again. It took ten minutes just to get out of the crater.
A machine gun burst open on the German side. The British returned a few sharp rifle rounds, then a Lewis gun began rattling to Ashley’s right. He would never get Kameraden all the way to Resolve Trench. He went on forward anyway, the German raving with the pain of movement. It took twenty minutes to reach the shellhole full of dead Highlanders. They went over the lip and Kameraden slipped from Ashley’s grasp and rolled to the bottom. Ashley pulled Kameraden’s face out of the mud and propped him up. The man was in delirium again. He was talking to his wife, the mud trickling down his face. Ashley cursed and drew his revolver.
He stepped back and tried to level his pistol at the German’s bare head. He pulled the trigger but his hand was shaking. The bullet clipped the man’s scalp, tearing off a chunk. He moaned and whimpered, raising his hands above his face as if the soft flesh of his palms were any protection. Ashley moved closer and fired again. The bullet tore through Kameraden’s finger and went into his eye. There was much blood. Kameraden slumped over.
Ashley crouched in the shellhole and watched another flare go up. The German machine gun was traversing the horizon wildly. A few grenades went off in the distance. Ashley bent over the mud and vomited his supper. It had been biscuits and bully anyway, and he was damne
d sick of biscuits and bully. Ashley spat and drained his canteen with a long drink. He wiped his face on his tunic sleeve.
Ashley waited half an hour until the guns went quiet. He crawled slowly back to the forward sap and tumbled in beside the sentry.
In the dugout Ashley shifts onto his side in his bunk. He takes the letter from his tunic pocket. He knows the words by now, but it pleases him to see the handwriting, the arcing shapes on the page.
1 October 1916
Dearest –
I write from the pebbles of Selsey Beach. Without you London is an empty shell – I have only the Sussex Downs & the seashore to make me whole again. There is a sound here that is not the roar of the ocean, nor any signature of God’s labour – they say it is the thud of guns in France, a hundred miles away – but the distance renders it soothing.
Is it selfish to note that I’ve had no letters from you for three days? Probably the post is to blame, but if you haven’t sent word, please do. My heart keeps vigil in two places – whatever piece of France you lay your head upon at night, and the patch of road between the Post Office and the house.
I have assembled 3/4 of the requested items – but I doubt there remains in all of England such a torch as you describe. The man at the Army & Navy Stores gave me second best, and you shall see the result yourself. I managed the wire-cutters, at least. I go back to London on Saturday to gather a last few surprises & I shall post the parcel then. Beside it every F & M hamper that ever was shall be emerald with envy.
Ashley, I don’t allow myself to miss you. For I am terribly wise & patient & every other fine thing – as you make me over again through your love. Nor do I wait for you – not wanting to count the hours & days we lose apart. The day you left I pulled the stem on my watch and put it in my jewel-box. The hands stand sentry at half-seven in the morning – the Universe, and I, your modest love, slumber peaceful until your return.